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By Jo Nova
That which must not be spoken
Every news outlet today is saying how good it is that “relations” with China have thawed, like it was just a bad patch of weather, and now the clouds have cleared they’ve allowed us to sell them wine again. But there is a kind of collective amnesia about why relations froze in the first place.
Just to recap, through incompetence or “otherwise” naughty-citizen China leaked a likely lab experiment, lied about it, and destroyed the evidence. They stopped it spreading at home but sent it on planes to infect the rest of the world. Then when Scott Morrison, Australian Prime Minister, dared ask for an investigation in April 2020, within a week China threatened boycotts, and followed up with severe anti-dumping duties on Australian barley. After which the CCP discovered “inconsistencies in labelling” on Australian beef imports, and added bans or tariffs on Australian wine, wheat, wool, sugar, copper, lobsters, timber and grapes. Then they told their importers not to bring in Australian coal, cotton or LNG either. The only industry they didn’t attack was iron ore, probably because they couldn’t get it anywhere else. In toto, the punishment destroyed […]
By Jo Nova
Our news is filled with fatuous lies every single day.
Mr Bowen, Minister for Changing the Weather, wants to force efficiency standards on Australian cars so we “have more choices”, he says. Mysteriously, it seems there are companies overseas making cheap, clean, wonderful cars who selfishly refuse to sell them to us. Crazy eh?
Would that be because:
Car salesmen want to save the world? There’s no market for efficient cars here. Australians prefer cars that burn up and waste fuel! It costs more to sell to nations with no efficiency standards since they have to install the Fuel Worse-ifier?
Or could it be they know Australians won’t buy their damn cars unless the government bans the cheaper ones first?
Mr Bowen, now says they never had a target. Of course! And people are mobbing him in the street wanting to buy expensive European EV’s:
Chris Bowen ditches doomed EV sales target
By Jess Malcolm, The Australian
Energy and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen has walked away from Labor’s target to have 89 per cent of new car sales electric by 2030, casting doubt on the government’s green agenda.
By Jo Nova
Imagine the outcry if a coal plant was obliterated by hail?
A few days ago, a 3,300 acre solar power plant in Texas suffered major hail damage. This was a plant so new it was still under construction. The Fighting Jays solar project started generating in 2022, but was not expected to be fully complete until the end of 2024. In theory it was supposed to last for 35 years.
It is so large they boasted that it covers 2,499 football fields (like that is a good thing). Despite the vast footprint, it was rated at only 350 MW. At noon at peak production it could generate about half of what one forty year old coal fired turbine makes all day every day, and every night too.
Collecting low density energy is more expensive than the wish-fairies might think.
BREAKING: Hail storm in Damon texas on 3/24/24 destroys 1,000’s of acres of solar farms.
Who pays to fix this green energy? @StateFarm? @FarmBureau? @Allstate?
Or you the taxpayer? pic.twitter.com/GpNSaopObZ
— Corey Thompson (@Roughneck2real) March 25, 2024
At an average construction price of $1 million per megawatt the project likely cost about $350 million dollars. […]
By Jo Nova
The “Misinformation Industry” has been caught with its pants down — accidentally finding, then burying, the information that nearly everyone in their own industry “leans left”.
This is a field that generated headlines about how conservatives are more susceptible to believing misinformation, and conservatives consume more Facebook disinformation. It would be awkward then if the whole field turned out to be leftist academics, and they tried to hide that, which is exactly what just happened.
The leading “journal” on misinformation surveyed 150 of its own academic experts, then forgot to mention that one of the most striking and significant results from their own survey was that being a “Misinformation Expert” was a left wing phenomena.
Bjorn Lomborg noticed the statistics on their self-admitted political leanings buried in an appendix, and graphed it himself. He writes: “Misinformation experts are perhaps not quite unbiased”.
There was barely a conservative among them:
@BjornLomborg
Speaking of misinformation, it’s a little misleading, don’t you think, to pretend this doesn’t matter in a field “devoted” to researching political misinformation?
It seems The Misinformation Review has been misinforming its readers.
The Misinformation Industry looks, acts and smells like a leftist invention […]
By Jo Nova
Ponder how far we have come when more than half of the US sees the media, not just as self-serving, biased hacks, but as The Enemy itself.
“Fake News” is annoying, but active lies and suppression are a campaign to steal something from you — or everything: your money, your health, your vote and your children. There is no “town square” anymore, no common forum where ideas are batted back and forth until both sides agree. There is only entrenched polarization. A house divided, and no shared meals. Fomenting civil war.
Rasmussen Reports asked 1,114 likely US voters whether the media are “truly the enemy of the people”, and an amazing 60% agreed.
By Nicole Wells, NewsMax
According to the survey, of the 60% majority who agree with Trump’s 2019 assessment that the media are “the enemy of the people,” 30% strongly agree with the presumptive GOP presidential nominee; 36% disagree with the statement, including 21% who strongly disagree.
It’s much more widespread across the political spectrum than you might think:
On whether the media are “truly the enemy of the people,” 79% of Republicans, 60% of […]
By Jo Nova
Martin Durkin’s work will be studied one day like Thucydides as a record of a bizarre moment in human history. It is so quintessentially British. I thought I’d seen it all in the climate debate, but this is so well done, perfect for a curious, matter-of-fact mind. It pulls you along, with timeless nostalgic footage in a classic English delivery, calmly unravelling mythology. It will resonate with people who remember cities, cars and great documentaries of long ago.
Because it’s not angry or activist it’s a gift you can send to friends who are science nerds, or history buffs, or who remember the sixties. Send it to people with teenagers who have no idea the curriculum hides a half a billion years of history. Send it to green friends, who have no idea a third of the food made in Africa rots before it can be eaten without fossil fuels and plastic to preserve and transport it.
Imagine the effect if this was shown at schools.
It’s the story of how an activist movement became a big industry, they say. But I can’t help thinking it was a big industry that grew an activist movement…
The […]
By Jo Nova
Nobody mentioned the nausea
The planet-saving cars that are being forced upon us have another catch — they might make you vomit. Apparently, motion sickness is “a thing” for EV’s, not that our public broadcaster would mention it in the regular adverts they run to tell us how wonderful EV’s are “with ridiculous savings!”. Apparently the silent sudden acceleration of an EV is leaving some stomachs in a lurch — and some adults, kids and even dogs are throwing up.
‘I need a solution fast’: Electric car owners complain of motion sickness
Zane Dobie, Drive
Another user said: “I drive in an electric vehicle a lot, and I’ve found that regenerative braking absolutely makes me motion sick. I’m not always driving, so I don’t always have control of how it’s being driven, so other people’s driving really makes me sick… I really need to find a solution fast”.
Some drivers also reported their electric cars making their pets sick too. “Since [buying] the Tesla, [my dog] throws up in it almost every time…”
The theory is that EV’s are too quiet, too fast, and have too few cues to warn our insides to […]
By Jo Nova
The clean energy revolution is failing, and everyone knows it
In a radical move, the CEO of an oil giant actually defended oil. For a brief moment the space-time continuum opened a worm hole to reality, and leaders of some of the world’s largest corporations briefly said sensible things.
The energy transition is falling apart so fast, even the prime targets of hate, the Big Oil Men themselves, are now openly pointing out what a waste of time and money solar and wind power are. BP was trying to cut oil production 40% until very recently when it flipped to increasing it. But now we have a whole conference of Big Oil.
Saudi Aramco CEO says energy transition is failing, world should abandon ‘fantasy’ of phasing out oil
By Spencer Kimball, CNBC
HOUSTON — Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser said Monday that the energy transition is failing and policymakers should abandon the “fantasy” of phasing out oil and gas, as demand for fossil fuels is expected to continue to grow in the coming years.
“In the real world, the current transition strategy is visibly failing on most fronts as it collides […]
By Jo Nova
Winning? For the moment the UN has quietly packed away plans to tell everyone to give up meat to stop bad weather
Back in November the UN was all set to boss the citizens of wealthy nations around. The plan was to badger them into giving up meat so their grandchildren would have slightly nicer weather.
Possibly, after thousands of farmers stormed across the EU in their tractors this winter, the idea has lost its appeal. Not that the UN has the honesty to explain why they changed their minds, or even to admit they did. But the first installment of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) food systems roadmap has left the activists reeling.
The omission of meat-eating reduction from proposals in a UN roadmap to tackle the climate crisis and end hunger is “bewildering”, according to academic experts.
The group also criticised the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s report for “dismissing” the potential of alternative proteins, such as plant-based meat, to reduce the impact of livestock on the environment.
For the first time ever, some activists even called for “transparency”:
In […]
By Jo Nova
Brave researchers have decided to save the world by pumping seawater onto ice sheets in the depths of winter. They are struggling through -30C windy conditions somewhere off the top end of Canada. Their plan is to thicken the ice so it will survive longer in summer, thus presumably raising the albedo of Earth.
For some reason the dedicated team at the BBC don’t mention what energy source drives the pump. I wonder where that cord goes?
Could the cord go to a diesel gen, sitting on arctic ice, snipped out of the photo?
If it was a solar panel, we know they would have told us.
Even the BBC calls the plan “insane” — though we sense they mean it in the same way a fourteen year old might describe a diamond encrusted skate park.
Perched on sea-ice off Canada’s northern coast, parka-clad scientists watch saltwater pump out over the frozen ocean.
Their goal? To slow global warming.
But a small number of advocates claim their approaches could give the planet a helping hand while humanity cleans up its act.
The ultimate goal of […]
By Jo Nova
By golly. 1948. Some will remember a time when smart people got things done.
The three minute piece describes the awesome value of Yallourn Coal Power Plant — “converting brown coal to light and power”. This one plant supplied two-thirds of all the electricity the state of Victoria needed at the time.
Most of those turbines built from 1928 to 1961 have since been shut down, but the last one, built in the 1970s, keeps on running today. Yallourn W is rated at 1,450 MW and supplies one fifth of Victoria’s energy still.
H/t to David Maddison who says: “Sir John Monash (d. 1931) who built Victoria’s electricity supply back in the day would be appalled at what the Unipary has done to his creation.”
9.9 out of 10 based on 112 ratings
By Jo Nova
The Sydney Morning Herald goes full Coral Reef Seer — predicting not just the end of the vast Great Barrier Reef, but the complete loss of the entire world’s coral reefs. That’s a quarter to a half million square kilometers of reef, gone, pfft, destructo, just like that.
The basis for the prophesy is a set of photos taken last week from one point at the southern edge of the Great Barrier Reef. Apparently, like tea leaves and chicken entrails, this spot has magical forecasting abilities.
Prophesy by Mike Foley, SMH
The photos that show nothing so far has saved the Great Barrier Reef
Australia’s climate targets must be bolstered to meet the global action needed to prevent the complete loss of the world’s coral reefs, experts warn, after the fifth mass bleaching event off Queensland’s coast since 2016.
So last year for the second year in a row, the Great Barrier Reef was recorded as having more coral cover than has ever been recorded since data started being collected in 1986.
People who actually dive on the reef to research it find it recovers from mass bleaching in as little as 18 months.
[…]
A little free advert for a good cause. I’m looking forward to meeting people!
Tickets here
Join Me at the Triple Conference in Albury, 15-17 March 2024 – Last Chance to Register!
9.3 out of 10 based on 23 ratings […]
By Jo Nova
High quality fuel produces high quality lifestyles.
Diffuse, unreliable fuels produce chaos and vulnerability. As humans slip back down the energy density ladder, they lose the power to create order. To build, to fly, to repair, and to eat pineapples from Costa Rica.
Entropy is coming to break your fridge and give you wrinkles.
A great video by NetZeroWatch
..
9.9 out of 10 based on 71 ratings
By Jo Nova Just another spot of climate porn for the industry
Like a bad B-grade movie, nearly every science news story also doubles as an advert for a cult and a carbon tax. Last August three people (three!) died from infections of Vibrio vunificus in New York.
The horror-show microbes are advancing up the East Coast of the US “thanks to climate change”. And they’re racing at the breakneck speed of 30 miles a year. Quick, put up some solar panels!
Some 3,464,228 people died of other causes last year in the USA, but nevermind about that. Let’s remodel the economy anyway.
Warming waters entice ‘flesh-eating bacteria’ further north
Olivia Geiger, ScienceLine
Who needs satellites to measure temperatures, we can measure climate change with flesh eating bugs:
A “microbial barometer of climate change”
From 1988 to 2018, infections on the East Coast have increased from 10 to 80 cases a year, according to Archer’s research. The bacteria’s range has moved nearly 30 miles north per year and will continue to do so, even if the climate warms relatively slowly. By 2040, Vibrio vulnificus is likely to be at home in the […]
By Jo Nova
There are lots of ways to screw up, delay, distort and blur a medical study
And the Principle Trial did all of them.
So here we are, years too late, getting another nanomole of truth squeezed through the distortion field. The Principle Trial gave people ivermectin far too late, and told them not to take it with food, both of which stop it being useful — yet despite that, ivermectin still saved lives and produced a statistically significant benefit. So the researchers sat on the results for a year and a half, then wrote it up with the opposite conclusion. Welcome to modern industrial medicine where the experiments are just a theatre performance. The government pretends to care and set up a big study, while they design it to fail and then hide and twist the results.
The point of doing experiments is not to find the truth but to kill it. If the crowd is baying for answers, what better way to silence them than to say you are doing a long indepth “glorious” study that takes years to complete?
It was naked sabotage…
Viruses multiply exponentially at the start of an infection, so […]
By Jo Nova
The climate hypnotists tell you every kind of weather is climate change
100 years from now university students will write exam essays on the mass psychosis that overcame climate scientists in the early part of the century.
Here, for example are experts telling us with a straight face that winter cold snaps are also a sign of man-made climate change.
True seers can see climate change everywhere:
Global warming may be behind an increase in the frequency and intensity of cold spells
Beatriz Monge-Sanz , The Conversion*
One less obvious consequence of global warming is also getting growing attention from scientists: a potential increase in the intensity and frequency of winter cold snaps in the northern hemisphere.
Naturally, this “potential” increase was expected, even though they didn’t think to mention it. Even if they told us our children won’t know what snow is.
Some of the mechanisms that lead to their occurrence are strengthened by global warming. Key climate mechanisms, like exchanges of energy and air masses between different altitude ranges in the atmosphere, are evolving in ways expected to cause an increase in both the intensity and duration of […]
By Jo Nova
It’s like the West has forgotten how to build things…
The nuclear debate in Australia is 100 years behind the rest of Western Civilization. Like children, we banned nuclear power before we even built one. We could afford to strut in our anti-nuke super-cape because we were swimming in 300 years worth of coal. (Now we want to ban that too.)
Somehow, despite the burden of all that coal, the idea of nuclear has grown legs, but the rest of the world must be laughing at us. The US built the first reactor way back in 1957, and 50 years ago the French built 56 reactors in just 15 years and most of the reactors were built in 6-8 years.
But our experts in the CSIRO think it will take us 14 years to even build a small one.
Even if the nuclear ban was lifted tomorrow and a decision immediately taken to commission a nuclear reactor, CSIRO estimates the first SMR would not be in full operation before 2038, ruling it out of “any major role” in reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
Today we have computer aided design and supercomputers with AI, but […]
…
By Jo Nova
I’m looking forward to spending three days at the Triple Conference in Albury from March 15 -17th. Topics include looking at ways to get the Government out of our lives, get cheap energy, returning manufacturing, rule of law, management of the Murray Darling, I’ll be speaking and so will David Burton of the Inigo Jones long term weather forecasting and the failures of the BOM. Other speakers include three Senators: Malcolm Roberts, Ralph Babet, and Alex Antic, plus two sitting MPs, many former MP’s like Gary Johns, Warren Mundine, plus also Augusto Zimmerman — it’s big!
The Gala Dinner on Saturday is called Nyet Zero.
It’s being organised by Topher Field of AussieWire.
This is the first time the three conferences have been combined: Big Ideas for A Better Australia, the Friedman Conference for libertarians, and the Church and State conference.
The conference itself is under $300, the Conference plus Gala Dinner is about $550, and there is a VIP option too. Tickets here.
9.9 out of 10 based on 62 ratings
By Jo Nova
Next step: sustainable human steak?
They don’t mention the “sustainable” word, but you know they want to. Right from the start they’re selling it to us:
Ethically, cannibalism poses fewer issues than you might imagine. If a body can be bequeathed with consent to medical science, why can’t it be left to feed the hungry?
Why can’t we feed our bodies to the homeless indeed, apart from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, prions, parasites, heavy metals? And if cannibalism pops up on the menu often enough, who knows what other problem will pop up on the radar? Things at the top of the food chain (and we are at the top) tend to accumulate all kinds of unwanted chemicals, like lead, PCBs, and pollutants.
Not to mention the spiritual questions and the mental health issues. Who knows? Relatives might feel a bit miffed if Aunty Betty was carved up for canapes and offered up to the crowd at the local alcoholics shelter.
Welcome to dystopia. We can devalue human lives, but think of the cows we’ll save!
And the CultureWar continues
Tut. Tut. Tut. New Scientist gently chides us for being the sort of modern prejudiced people […]
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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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