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By Jo Nova
They must have been disappointed
Psychologists have finally run a massive test of climate communication strategies, — and they all fail.
A new megastudy of more than 13,000 Americans tested the ten most cited climate-messaging strategies drawn from 157 previous papers. Twenty-four co-authors from five countries were involved. They wanted to find the paragraph — the killer framing — that would change beliefs, shift behaviour, or, ideally, persuade people to part with some cash. They didn’t find it.
Probably the most newsworthy finding is that there is a vast pool of grant money available to study rehashed minutiae of how to sell weather-changing sorcery to the jaded public. It’s a full time Blob Psy-Op machine to “nudge” the voters. If only they spent some of this money checking the science before they fine tuned the fear campaign?
This is a Psy-Op machine in search of a slogan
They call this research “science” but it’s more like corporate message-testing in advertising. And it’s done for free at universities to help the industry. The goal here is not to understand the human condition, it’s to sell a carbon tax or a solar panel.
The study […]
AI image by Sonja Ritter.
By Jo Nova
They wanted to “cut the juice to the ruling class”
Saving the world now means committing arson, and cutting off grandma’s electricity for days in midwinter Germany.
The attack burned through a cable connected to one of Berlin’s gas plants. The so-called Vulkangruppe (Volcano Group) claimed responsibility and published their manifesto online in German.
Leftwing militants claim responsibility for arson attack on Berlin power grid
Deborah Cole, The Guardian
German leftwing militants protesting over the climate crisis and AI have claimed responsibility for an arson attack that cut power to tens of thousands of households in Berlin.
As state security authorities opened an investigation into the cause of the blaze near the Lichterfelde heat and power station that damaged several high-voltage cables, the Vulkangruppe (Volcano Group) said it had deliberately targeted some of the city’s wealthiest districts.
In a 2,500-word pamphlet seen by the Guardian which a police spokesperson called “credible”, the group said it had aimed to “cut the juice to the ruling class”.
This is what happens when one side of a debate is silenced. The voices […]
By Jo Nova
Congratulations World!
Roger Pielke Jnr celebrates another great year where humanity had a near record low in deaths due to climate disasters.
He reminds us of a paper from a few years ago showing that the richer we all are, the less likely we are to die from floods, cold, drought and wind.
When we adjust against GDP per capita we find that GDP itself is the big protector of humanity.
The best thing we can do to help Africans defeat climate hazards is not to send them solar panels, but to help them get filthy rich.
And anyone who cares about vulnerable people will be protesting at the reckless destruction of what was a cheap, efficient electricity grid. We will surely kill more people by reducing our GDP with unreliable generators, than we will ever save with solar panels.
Once income is accounted for, the apparent relationship between climate hazards and mortality largely disappears. In other words, economic development—not renewable energy—dominates human survival outcomes.
Follow the Science, girls and boys,
If man-made emissions do anything at all, the more we emit the lower the death rates are. We can see that as man […]
By Jo Nova
In the renewable frenzy of the early 2020s Ÿnsect raised €600 million to “Reinvent the food chain” and pioneer alternative foods that “respect the planet’s boundaries”. Some $200 million of their funding came from hapless taxpayers somewhere. But in record time, seemingly before it began, it has already gone. Bankrupted. And not because people don’t want to eat mealworms (which they don’t) but because there wasn’t much market in making animal feed either. It turns out that farm owners didn’t want to spend 2 to 10 times as much on “sustainable” cattle fodder. So the company shifted focus to high end pet food, where besotted owners have money to spare, but that crashed too.
h/t Tom Nelson
How reality crushed Ÿnsect, the French startup that had raised over $600M for insect farming
By Anna Heim, TechCrunch
The company’s demise is hardly a surprise, as Ÿnsect had been embattled for months. Still, there is plenty to unpack about how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.
Ultimately, Ÿnsect failed to fulfill its ambition to “revolutionize the […]
By Jo Nova
No wonder the climate experts are not that interested in the historic data.
You might think that if the world was going to hell in a handbasket, that climate scientists would want to get all the data they could and pore all over it carefully.
Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone has found a study of 60 million temperature readings. It shows the world was warming faster in the first half of the 20th century even though there was 8 times less man-made CO2 around.
Man-made CO2 (black) can apparently cause big warming, big cooling, or anything it wants (orange).
You can’t look at the graph above and say: CO2 is Earth’s control knob.
And the table lays out the trends, and the cumulative CO2 emissions. It’s the simplest thing, and all the old data was there all along. Anyone could have done most of this in 1995, and saved us from wasting a few trillion dollars.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5395197
Critics will counter that these temperatures are only on land, and mostly in Europe and the United States.
However, it’s a global emergency you know and this is the best data we have. Shouldn’t the experts, at least, […]
Image by Nikolett Emmert from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Remember how biodegradable plastic was going to make the world a healthier place? It would save us all from the horrible plastic landfill that lasts 1000 years, and it would protect the dolphins. Well, let’s just hope the dolphins don’t eat the bags.
Despite the rush to put biodegradable bags in every shopping centre, no one had bothered to study whether it had an effect on our health, and we still don’t know, but we can say that the mice on that compost heap with these biodegradable bags will be more likely to have diabetes, smaller ovaries, and liver damage. Degradable plastic affected their gut flora. The authors say: “Prolonged exposure to environmentally relevant doses of Starch-based microplastics can have widespread health effects.”
How many native mice will die that could have been saved, and do the Greens care?
This study came out in April:
Mouse study suggests that starch-based microplastics may harm health
Victoria Atkinson, c&en
While many studies have examined the health implications of ingesting petroleum-derived microplastics, none have looked at the long-term health effects on a living organism ingesting starch-based […]
By Jo Nova
History books will be written about this week. “This is not good” says Elon Musk.
This week the world woke up to realize that silver is a critical mineral for the high tech, AI, solar panels, and renewables. In four days time, China, which supplies more than half of the processed silver on Earth, effectively blocks their exports of silver.
Meanwhile it turns out JP Morgan, which has been aggressively shorting the silver market for 15 years — was accumulating it all along. The entire COMEX silver market in New York has 30 million ounces of silver that is ‘immediately deliverable’. But JP Morgan is widely reported to control or custody up to ~700–800 million ounces of silver across vaulting, ETFs and proprietary holdings. It is de facto, the US strategic reserve, but controlled by a private bank, not by the Treasury.
The phase change is in progress. I’m not trying to cover all the details, just to let people know that something very big is unfolding.
Kitco Silver Price
The largest single use of silver has become “industrial applications”:
Silver, it turns out, is the best electrical and thermal conductor of all the […]
Image by Vilius Kukanauskas from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
It’s a cult science
To the devotee, CO2 is the magical control knob of global weather. So a team at UC-Riverside wondered why, 600 million years ago, when CO2 was extremely high, Earth ended up frozen over in a Snowball Earth horror show. I mean, how could that be when CO2 ‘boils the oceans’? Normal people would say this shows CO2 is irrelevant — but the cult scientists went hunting with their broken computer models until they found “a new feedback” excuse that can explain this puzzling anomaly.
In their new vision, CO2 warms the world, but under the right conditions, it sets off a ghastly negative spiral where more warming causes more phytoplankton, which suck the CO2 out of the sky in a feeding frenzy and then sink and die at the bottom of the ocean, taking the CO2 down with them. As the CO2 drains out of the sky, we lose its warming glow, and the world sinks into a frozen oblivion.
Though unlike actual scientific advancements it doesn’t explain any of the other thousand anomalies, and is falsified by most of the last 500 million years […]
For a few days new posts will appear below this one. Thank you to everyone and Merry Christmas!
From Jo Nova
Thanks to the wonderful souls who helps me cover the bills, so I can roast those who abuse science for profit and power.
This year saw the Net Zero mythology take a mortal blow. Electricity prices hit a bleeding point just as the Trump hammer fell, and the insatiable AI race spooked the Blob, which suddenly realized there actually was a global energy contest and we are the losers. But despite these wins, the bankers that created the bubble took the profit and ran (for Prime Minister of Canada), the witchdoctor-scientists still give terrible advice, and billions are still being poured into glorified rain-dances.
We still have to win the science war. The modern shaman tell us batteries will change the jet streams, save koalas, stop domestic violence and end wars. Then the ARC gives them another grant. And the ABC gives them free advertising. And we pay for all of it: the CSIRO-bad-science, the subsidies, and the ABC-BBC-CBC blob.
Then there is the free speech war. The Ministry of Misinformation will return. The government wants to stop us […]
By Jo Nova
The EV bubble, or what’s left of it, popped this week
After carmakers invested billions into EV designs, and the EU and UK vowed to ban internal combustion engines, it’s all come undone. Donald Trump pulled the pin on subsidies for EVs and eased the strict emissions rules that punished petrol and diesel cars. US sales of electric cars promptly fell 40% in November. Ford’s fell by nearly 60%.
In response, Ford has killed off several electric cars, and will swallow a bitter pill of a $19.5 billion US dollar write down. That’s a lot of cars it will have to sell to make that money back. Gone is the fully electric F-150, the next generation electric truck, and any plan to make electric commercial vans. Instead Ford says it will shift into gas and hybrid models.
General Motors laid off 3,300 workers at EV plants in the US.
On the other side of the Pacific, shares of Korean battery makers “slumped across the board” this week after the news.
The day after the Ford announcement the European Commission let the world know it would wind back the total ban on internal combustion engines which was […]
By Jo Nova
Despite the government plans to cover the country in wind turbines, the wind industry fell in a very big hole in 2025
Things in Renewable-Land must be worse than they seem. Giles Parkinson at RenewEconomy has been reduced to celebrating that *one* sole wind plant in Australia (one!) finally got a green light to proceed. This was “a first for 2025”. Ouch. Which is another way of saying that the economics of wind turbines are so awful, no one else in Australia wanted to build one this year.
“The investment drought is breaking,” says CEO hails first Australia wind project to reach financial close in 2025
Giles Parkinson, RenewEconomy
Auaetralia’s year-long wind energy investment drought has finally been broken after Tilt Renewables gave the green light to the 108 megawatt (MW) Waddi wind project in Western Australia.
The Waddi wind farm, located in the state’s wheatbelt about 150 kms north of Perth, is the first wind project to reach financial close in 2025 in Australia, and will begin construction in 2026 and reach full operations in 2028.
“This will be the first wind farm to reach a Final […]
By Jo Nova
It’s a High-Voltage Wealth Transfer Disguised as Climate Policy
The big new “cheaper battery scheme” was so badly designed it accidentally burned through $2.3 billion in just 6 months. We could have built two new gas plants… instead we blessed a few wealthy homes with batteries bigger than they can use, which will probably sit around doing nothing most of the time. The scheme is so bad, the government has already promised to add another $5b to the pyre.
And since most homeowners are not opting to share their battery in a virtual power plant with the voracious retailers, this extra battery power will probably just sit there unused in homes around the country, hopefully not catching fire too often. It’s just another Soviet-style failure of communist midwits.
The government keeps bragging about the rampant success of the program but it is a globalist lemon from end to end. The Cheaper Battery Scheme was supposed to save homeowners $4,000 on a new 10kWh home battery, but the rebate was offered “per kilowatt hour” not per battery. (Does Chris Bowen does even know what a kilowatt hour is?).
The design meant solar installers had every incentive to […]
By Jo Nova
If man made CO2 emissions have any effect at all on extinctions — it stops them happening
New research looked at 500 years worth of extinctions and concludes that species loss peaked about a century ago. Far from the rate accelerating as we pour carbon dioxide into the sky, fewer species are disappearing now than forty or fifty years ago.
Kristen Saban and John Wiens considered data on as many as two million species. They specifically analyzed some 912 plants and animals that became extinct in the last 500 years.
Many of the doom and gloom forecasts took extinction rates from long ago and extrapolated them mindlessly forward, as climate modelers are want to do.
Extinction rates have slowed across many plant and animal groups, study shows
EurekaAlert
“To our surprise, past extinctions are weak and unreliable predictors of the current risk that any given group of animals or plants is facing,” said lead author Saban, who recently graduated from the U of A and is currently a doctoral student at Harvard University.
Humans have wiped out species, but mostly by bringing in rats, pigs and goats to isolated islands:
December 13th, 2025 | Tags: Biodiversity, Biology, Evidence, Extinction | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
….
By Jo Nova
It was never about The Science
And so we find that the global consensus quietly dispersed, there were no press releases, no ceremonies, just the dawning realization that nearly everyone had left the party without saying goodbye. And they didn’t wait for the UN to say “the science” was fine. The herd is on the move regardless…
One of the top majordomos at BHP delivers the bad news to Anthony Albanese. Everywhere on Earth is more attractive to a miner than Australia is. The world has changed, and everyone wants cheap energy, critical minerals, and lower taxes and other countries are giving it to them. Even Canada (ferrgoodnesssake!) is “walking back policies that the country can’t afford”. While Australia is the last nation on Earth steaming ahead to Renewable-nirvana.
Brandon Craig specifically mentions problems with climate targets, competitively priced energy, and Net Zero.
In the nicest possible way he’s telling our PM that his Net Zero plan is a dog.
Mining giant’s rising star Brandon Craig warns even green policy stalwarts like Canada are moving to protect their economies
By Brad Thompson, The Australian
BHP rising star Brandon Craig has […]
By Jo Nova
Panic-stations in Renewable Utopia
Even the AEMO, our green grid operators, have realized Australia is not ready to shut down the last coal plants by 2037 which was the plan up until five minutes ago.
Things must be desperate. After 20 years of telling us how wind power was absolutely, definitely cheaper — for the first time, an official admitted the blasphemy — “wind is becoming too expensive”.
Now they tell us.
Reality for ALP as coal will be needed until 2049, says AEMO
By Colin Packham and Richard Ferguson, The Australian
Coal will be needed to stabilise the energy grid until 2049 under an extraordinary 12-year extension of the fossil fuel that threatens Labor’s net-zero target, as the green-energy revolution leads to a 100 per cent explosion in power transmission costs.
In a 115-page document that mentions “net zero” just once, the Australian Energy Market Operator has warned that wind is increasingly becoming too expensive and there is a risk the nation is overbuilding transmission lines through rural and regional Australia.
So, “Net Zero” has vanished from the pages, and what appears in its place is a 100% explosion in transmission […]
By Jo Nova
Europe is starting to drill for oil and gas again
Europe has always been the most pious climate ideologues, but there is a growing realization that they need their own supplies of oil and gas. Greece and the UK are reopening offshore oil and gas platforms and Italy is thinking about it.
Australia looks set to be the last place on Earth where people are still playing climate-vanity games.
Last month Greece issued its first gas exploration license in 40 years. The UK loosened its ban on new exploration in the North Sea and the Freech Energie Giant said it would spend $6b USD to buy 50% stakes in natural gas fired plants across Europe. Meanwhile Germany, the home of thousands of wind turbines, is building 10 GW of gas powered plants.
Even the New York Times admits Europe is taking an increasingly pragmatic approach to energy and climate change:
By Stanley Reed:
The world has changed since the Paris agreement was adopted decade ago with ambitious goals to tackle climate change. It has become increasingly apparent that the agreement’s targets to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions […]
By Jo Nova
Donald Trump wants to bring free speech, fertility, hard borders and patriotism back to Europe too
Other people have pointed out the dire state of Europe, but the continent can’t ignore the US President.
He has vowed to “cultivate resistance” to Europe’s current trajectory — and raises grave concerns at the subversion of democratic processes, and the loss of European culture saying “should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less“. The US is officially putting the topic-that-must-not-be-discussed on the table — mass immigration, and blaming the decay of Europe on transnational bodies like the European Union.
Trump warns Europe faces ‘civilizational erasure’ in explosive new document
By Laura Kayali, Politico
U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration blame the EU and migration for what they say is imminent, total cultural unraveling in Europe.
The explosive claim is made in the U.S. National Security Strategy, which notes Europe has economic problems, but says they are “eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure” within the next 20 years.
“The larger issues facing Europe include activities of the European Union and […]
By Jo Nova
What’s most interesting about this is that this paper was ever published at all, given how awful it was.
In April last year Nature released the Kotz study which said that climate change would cause a mind-blowingly shocking 62% reduction in economic output by 2,100AD. Now, we know it’s wrong because the climate models are useless, but it turned out that one outlier country singlehandedly trashed the world economic forecasts, and that was Uzbekistan. Instead of a 62% reduction, without Uzbekistan, the global drop was “only 23%”.
So much for “peer review” then? This paper’s conclusion was wildly worse than the consensus of doomer papers, but the peer reviewers didn’t figure out why its result was so skewed, so Nature, supposedly the most esteemed repository of science, published the outlier anyway.
Even the uber left The New York Times is saying they should have been more skeptical:
Top Journal Retracts Study Predicting Catastrophic Climate Toll
By Lydia DePillis, The New York Times
Of course, erasing more than 20 percent of the world’s economic activity would still be a devastating blow to human welfare. The paper’s detractors emphasize that climate change is a […]
By Jo Nova
The The Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC) has made up some fantasy figures suggesting a teensy weensy price rise is on the way in five years time unless we buy more unreliable generators, add more batteries and install giant high voltage lines. Somehow, miraculously, electricity prices will fall slightly in the next five years while we spend the hundreds of billions of dollars adding all that infrastructure. Sure.
The AEMC report feels like it was created to fill a very specific political advertising campaign. Don’t scare the horses with big price rises, but just scare them enough to justify us spending a kiloton of money on our crony renewable friends and Chinese pals, OK?
Households face sharp electricity price rise without urgent action, key agency warns
By Colin Packham, The Australian
Households could face a 13 per cent jump in electricity prices early next decade unless the rollouts of renewable energy, battery storage and transmission are accelerated, the country’s energy market rule maker has warned.
And if the “decline” in prices doesn’t happen, will the AEMC staff pay Victorians the difference from their own salaries, or is there no cost at all for […]
By Jo Nova
The world really is waking up to the terrible truth about the forced “green transition”. The Wall Street Journal (finally) speaks the blasphemy out loud — countries with a lot of renewables are “hemorrhaging industry”, they face right-wing revolts in elections, they can’t keep up in the AI race, and the system wide costs of renewable electricity are crippling.
The pagan quest to do rain-dances with electrical generators has become an existential threat. If AI is the next revolution, then the lands of green fantasia have already lost the race. There’s a global contest to create the first world dominating AI before anyone else does. This is not an exponential curve we can afford to lose. The first nation to crack adversaries encryption codes, hack their defenses, design the killer bioweapon, or build a self replicating drone army — potentially takes it all.
The contest is, above all, an energy competition. Ponder that gram for gram, each day the human brain uses ten times the energy than muscle does, yet despite that stupendous cost, it conquered the world.
For twenty years some rich countries became mired in corruption and virtuous beauty contests. They toyed 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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