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By Jo Nova
It’s hard to keep up with the bad news
Is Australia finally waking up to the ugly truth about unreliable electricity?
Last week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics dropped the bomb that electricity costs were up 37%, foiling hopes of an interest rate cut. They tempered it by saying it was due to the government stopping the rebates, as if that made it understandable instead of being a national disaster. The government promptly promised to make electricity cheaper by giving up plans to change the the polar vortex with our power plants. No, wait, — of course, they promised to think about paying rebates again…
The coal is dead, long live the coal
And so we reach the point of where headlines fill our main newspapers this week with warnings that blackouts are coming if one particular coal plant closes and prices are destroying businesses just like we said they would years ago. The old coal plant that was supposed to close in August now looks unlikely to close in 2027, because of blackout fears. Eraring supplies about 20% of the energy to our largest state grid. Suddenly newspapers are explaining what system inertia means and talking […]
Image by Vilius Kukanauskas from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The phase change in the Climate Apocalypse Trade rolls on, and the US leads the way
Already some US ‘grassroots’ organizations are having an existential crisis. Actually, the Sierra Club has been struggling for three years, but no one wanted to mention that.
Francis Menton at the Manhattan Contrarian points out the extraordinary collapse of the largest US environmental group, the Sierra Club:
The Sierra Club is in the middle of what might well be called an implosion. The New York Times reported the story on November 7. Excerpt:
The Sierra Club calls itself the “largest and most influential grass roots environmental organization in the country.” But it is in the middle of an implosion — left weakened, distracted and divided just as environmental protections are under assault by the Trump administration. The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit. . . . [T]his year, as the Trump administration returned […]
Image by gugacurado from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
We now know that when AI is trained on AI generated content, its output degrades. The more artificial the training material is, the more it hallucinates and becomes delusional. But humans are a sort of large-language-model and we are running that same experiment on us. We are gradually raising children on more and more artificial content and less real experience. There are adult children who have never grown and harvested a single piece of food, who live online, watch anime, and know that electricity comes from wall sockets, and food comes from Coles. We thought they were just detached from reality, but what it it’s something much deeper? What if AI shows us a universal truth of a neurological network?
This is the thesis of The Copernican: Urban Bugmen and AI Model Collapse: A Unified Theory
Model collapse is a serious limit to AI systems; a failure mode that occurs when AI is trained on AI-generated data…
In reviewing model collapse, the symptoms bear a striking resemblance to certain non-digital cultural failings. Neural networks collapse, hallucinate, and become delusional when trained only on data produced by […]
Photo Steve Nowakowski
By Jo Nova
Just another day trapped in the impossibility paradox — trying to change the troposphere on the cheap…
Asbestos has been found in GoldWind turbines, and now in Vestas turbines too. Both were using brake pads supplied by 3S Industry, a company based in China. The brake-pads are small, and contained within the lifts inside the towers, so at the moment, not likely to be spraying asbestos fibres across forests and farms. But no one will be sending unprotected workers up any of those wind turbines until those pads are replaced.
However as Rachel Williamson says at Renew Economy, it’s likely this is just the “tips of the iceberg”:
“Several sources confirmed to Renew Economy that 3S supplies the brake pads to almost every turbine OEM [Original Equipment Manufacturer] supplying Australia. “
The opposition has called for a halt on new turbines as the asbestos scare spreads. Both companies are quarantining an undisclosed number of turbines. So at best, even if the health risk is small, it’s just another nasty surprise, another delay, and another cost for the Renewable Crash Test Dummy.
Who would have thought that building thousands of square […]
The Guardian
By JoNova
Unlike nearly every UN gathering, COP30 in Brazil got no last minute ‘landmark deal’
They didn’t even get something mildly positive that they could call spin into success. Even friends of The Blob are using words like “unhappy“, “losing” and “disappointing”. Only two years ago at COP28 everyone was quivering with the thrill of a ‘historic’ deal to phase out fossil fuels. Nearly 200 countries had agreed ‘for the first time ever’ to ” transition away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and energy efficiency. ” It was the first time the UN deal had specifically mentioned “fossil fuels”. And thus it was beginning of the end of coal, gas and oil, they told us.
Then Donald Trump won, and two years later even the UN admits they are losing the climate battle. This time, instead of 200 countries endorsing the end of fossil fuels, according to Bloomberg, only about 80 “had united behind the push — a significant number, but short of the supermajority that forced the landmark pledge to transition away from fossil fuels in Dubai two years ago.”
The ABC spun this crushing loss (from 200 down to 80) as just […]
By Jo Nova
Just when you think they can’t possibly squander money more extravagantly…
We were told it was $4 million but the truth is that the BoM spent $96 million dollars of our money to make their workable website truly awful. They just forgot to mention the private consultation by Accenture Australia for seventy eight million dollars.
It could have happened to anyone, right? Wrong.
The staggering TRUTH about the weather bureau’s disastrous website redesign – as boss finally admits the eye-watering real cost
Paul Shapiro, The Daily Mail
Now, the federal government’s weather agency is again on the back foot after it was revealed the loathed app cost taxpayers $96million to redesign and launch.
New bureau chief Dr Stuart Minchin has admitted that the total cost of the redesign, completed under his predecessor Dr Andrew Johnson, was much higher.
‘I’ve looked into it. The total cost, when you add the Accenture work, the security testing and everything else, it’s about $96million,’ he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
The new website changed the way the rain radars measured rainfall, and was dropped on Australians facing serious storms. The […]
By Jo Nova
It is as if Satan disappeared from the Bible
The sacred fabric of the climate religion is unravelling by the day. The COP30 deal is being hammered out in Brazil — but in the draft any mention of “fossil fuels” has been dropped.
Apparently the rich oil nations have formed a block that objects to a sentence committing countries to stronger, faster, action to reduce their use of fossil fuels. The UK, France and a few other nations have rejected this but the same small island nations that are frightened of drowning have joined the oil block.
Apparently they were offered more money to adapt to climate change.
UN climate summit drops mention of fossil fuels from draft deal
By Georgina Rannard, BBC
All mention of fossil fuels, by far the largest contributor to climate change, has been dropped from the draft deal under negotiation as the COP30 UN climate talks in Belém, Brazil enter their final stretch.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and some countries including the UK want the summit to commit countries to stronger, faster action to reduce their use of fossil fuels.
[…]
By Jo Nova
A new day dawns Downunder
For the first time in years, the Opposition doesn’t sound like a school girl (well, not all the time). And, suddenly the government has realized they shouldn’t go burning $2 billion on a COP31 UN-love-fest while voters can’t afford electricity — their political opponents could turn it into a stinging election campaign. Instead, as a consolation prize, they will fly Chris Bowen, the Minister for Weather Fiddling, to Turkey to preside over the COP meeting there and star in the bureaucratic beauty contest.
Giving up on the COP Cabaret will save billions, not just in hotel rooms in Adelaide, but in all the tokenistic daft climate projects the government might have started to impress the UN powerlords. As it is, the PM radically increased our Net Zero target in September — was that to earn favor with the UN to cinch the deal — if it was, the UN won. The fantasy target certainly wasn’t done to impress voters, because the Labor Party hid it from them during the election. Who was ‘Albo’ trying to impress?
Freed from the shackles of the Net Zero straight-jacket, the Opposition’s Energy spokesman can finally […]
UN: The Paris Agreement COP 2015
By Jo Nova
Just after the Coalition announced they would put cheaper energy ahead of global weather control, Anthony Albanese has been struck with cold feet about hosting the Climate COP31 giant junket in Adelaide.
After campaigning for this for three years like it was the Olympics, Anthony Albanese is now suddenly worried about Germany. If Australia and Turkey don’t sort this out between them, the climate circus will default to the poor Germans who will have to host COP31 — something they’ve said they don’t want to do.
Albanese puts COP31 truce on the table after blast from Turkey
By Ben Packham, The Australian
Anthony Albanese has signalled his government is prepared to cede the hosting of next year’s UN climate conference to Turkey but says he wants to salvage some benefits for Pacific Island countries.
The Prime Minister was yet to withdraw Australia’s bid but said on Tuesday that if Turkey was preferred by delegates at this year’s COP (Conference of the Parties) then Australia would not challenge the decision.
He said there was “considerable concern” in the international community that the impasse between […]
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By Jo Nova
Look out. Climate Denialism is a “security threat” now
As the Net Zero fantasy crumbles and the political tide shifts, the Blob has up’d the ante and pressed the red hot “security threat” button. Climate deniers are now such a mortal threat (to the sinecures of the Blobcrats) they must be contained.
As David Archibald says “When they have lost the argument, they change the rules.”
Countries seal landmark declaration at COP30—marking first time information integrity is prioritized at UN Climate Conference
Drafted in collaboration with civil society members of the Global Initiative Advisory Group, the Declaration has been endorsed by ten countries so far – Brazil, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Uruguay.
“Climate change is no longer a threat of the future; it is a tragedy of the present,” said President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Belém. “We live in an era in which obscurantists reject scientific evidence and attack institutions. It is time to deliver yet another defeat to denialism.”
Oh, the horrible obscurantists! Humanity will be saved, but only if governments can rule without having to answer […]
By Jo Nova
What looks smells and acts like One World Government?
The UN, which we fund for some reason, is telling us we can’t drill for gas on our land and are being very naughty. They’ve sent a Special Rapporteur, Astrid Puentes Riano, to join three cases in Federal Courts in an amicus curiae role. She is here to cast a spell and see if she gets lucky and scores some shake-down-money in reparations.
It was only a few months ago the International Court of Climate Justice (ICJ) declared that nice weather was a “human right”, thus supposedly allowing the whole world to sue everyone else, ad infinitum for bad weather.
The case was originally launched by Australian Conservation Foundation and another group called Friends of Australian Rock Art in the Federal Court challenging the Ministers decision to extend the Woodside gas project out to 2070. So the UN is sending a performance artist to tell us we are “in breach of international laws.” If she succeeds, it’s a foot in the door, a precedent for more.
UN rapporteur intervenes in Federal Court case over Woodside’s gas project
By Paul Garvey, The Australian
Her […]
By Jo Nova
The unwashed masses drag the Liberals back closer to reality
After spending six months wallowing in the pain of indecision, the Liberal Party has done the obvious and only thing they could do and stepped back from Global Weather Control. Party members in nearly every state had been pleading for this. The polls show it has been a buried goldmine for votes in Australian politics for more than a decade (Tony Abbott won a 90 seat landslide in 2013). Minor right wing parties were stealing the conservative base out from under their feet. The Nationals, their partner party, had leapt off the Net Zero Zeppelin while tied with a military-grade kevlar-lead to the Liberals. Shadow Ministers had resigned in protest, and competitors were circling the leaders position.
Could Sussan Ley have left it even another day?
We are scraping the bottom of the barrel of Australian democracy. When asked who would be better to manage the cost-of-living-crisis, last week more than half of Australia voters aged 35 to 49 didn’t say Liberal or Labor. They said “neither“. In August, eighty three percent of Australians didn’t want the higher emissions targets the Labor Party forced on the […]
Energyco
By Jo Nova
It’s the worst kind of surprise for the Renewable fantasy
The billion-dollar “shock absorber” for NSW’s renewables grid has effectively short-circuited before it even ramped up to full power.*
One of the world’s most powerful battery storage projects has suffered a crippling failure just a couple of months before it was supposed to be ready for full operation. The problem with one, and possibly two of its three transformers is so bad, it’s the kind of glitch that affects the whole national transition. This battery was supposed to provide stability for the grid as coal power stations were forced out by the renewable subsidies. But suddenly generators all over NSW are recalculating maintenance schedules and closure dates.
The company is saying it will be six months to a year-long delay, but, given the waiting times for transformers in the US have blown out to an astounding 120 weeks, and up to 210 weeks or 2 to 4 years, it seems wildly optimistic to hope this can be back in action next year. Currently the AEMO officially describes this fault as continuing until May 3rd, 2026.
This highlights the fragility of the whole transition which […]
Image by taiga_valley_media from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The unwashed masses know Net Zero is bad science
Plumbers, taxi drivers, boiler makers, tradies — they don’t believe the Professors of Climate Science (just ask them).
Climate change has been pushed too hard for so long, that nobody needs a PhD in atmospheric physics to know it’s a scam. Climate change causes everything that’s bad and nothing that’s good. It’s just like long form infomercial for a weather pill. 100% guaranteed to make your Wedding Day sunny in 2096 or your money back. *Terms and conditions apply.
CO2 will cause the sixth mass extinction — but the people who say they worry about that, don’t worry so much they want to use nuclear power. If you thought the oceans were going to boil, and you could stop that with a nuclear plant, wouldn’t you? It’s a fifty year old technology with a great record. If we’d started building the plants 15 years ago, we’d be done now. Instead, they were so worried, they insisted we use a totally new technology and invent the answers, and the batteries for it, on the way. Sure, in an emergency, break glass, discover […]
Image by ThankYouFantasyPictures from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The stench of failure is written all over Cop30 in Brazil
The USA, China and India are not attending. The UN has said the 1.5 degrees target is no longer possible. And the OECD admits “policy commitments have fallen from 10% annual growth to just 1%.
The Consensus is not only dead, but no one can hide the body under the rug any longer. Things are decomposing so fast, even Keir Starmer has flown all the way to the COP conference in Brazil to say “the consensus is gone”.
Keir Starmer didn’t even want to go to COP30 lest he look like he’s in the palm of the globalist Blob which would feed his nemesis – Nigel Farage. So he’s put in a last minute appearance and gone out of his way to avoid the usual fire and brimstone devotion by uttering a blasphemy. The consensus, after all, was the holy grail. It was the reason “to believe” and a reason to act even if we didn’t believe. The Blob always said: “We don’t want to fall behind” like moving with the herd was a benefit in and of itself.
[…]
Image by Filmbetrachter from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The Experts thought PET plastic was impossible to degrade naturally
WWF tell us it will take 450 years for a plastic bottle to break down. The US EPA says it will take up to 1,000 years. And the UN says “plastic is forever”. But now that we’ve banned plastic straws and picnic spoons, and changed our shopping bags and spent hours sorted our rubbish, it turns out bacteria have already evolved to capture the energy left in the plastic. And furthermore, they weren’t just in one shallow bay, they found them spread throughout the world’s oceans.
Presumably there will be some microbes working on our landfill that we don’t know about. If not now, then soon.
How much of our recycling is just a waste of time and money?
Life on Earth was never going to leave a free meal sitting around
In 2016 researchers found one sort of bacterium in a Japanese recycling plant was able to live off the plastic waste. Now we know that the enzyme PETase breaks down plastic, and that it is found in marine bacteria too. Researchers looked at 400 sites around the world […]
Solar Panels, Perth Australia
By Jo Nova
The government plays Santa Claus, but poor people paid for the “free” electricity a long time ago
It’s a very socialist solution to a socialist problem. Having screwed the free market, the government has to take desperate measures to limit the damage being done by the solar death spiral. The more solar panels we install, the more expensive electricity gets, which forces more people to install solar panels, etc and so on until “poof” we turn into Zimbabwe.
Last year, Jeff Dimery, the head of Alinta claimed that the “the rooftop solar glut” was so bad, the renewables transition itself had stalled. The solar surge in Australia has destroyed the profit margin for reliable generators. But it also killed the business case for new solar installations, and wind turbine parks too. With the national market bleeding negative prices at lunchtime, most generators would have to pay real money if they generate at lunchtime, but the household solar owners don’t. This created the perverse incentive where the only escape for households from rising electricity prices was to put solar panels on the roof. We’re reached the point where two thirds of […]
Corals in the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia. (Courtesy of Jessica Hankins)
By Jo Nova
Everyone was sure that corals would be degraded by our “increasingly acidic oceans” (a political-activist-term for “slightly less alkaline”). But when a team took cores from 200 year old corals in the ocean — instead of studying them for a few months in a laboratory — they discovered some corals have adjusted to the pace of “acidification” much more effectively than anyone thought. The corals actively manage the chemistry of the thin layer of fluid next to the skeleton as the ocean chemistry shifts.
Who would have thought that corals would have the ability to cope with rapid changes in the climate?
In the last 4 million years, corals have only survived 90 or more ice-age cycles.
L. E. Lisiecki and M. E. Raymo (2005)
If only someone had thought to test actual corals at sea before they spent twenty years scaring little children at school?
Thanks to Oldbrew at Tallboke’s.
From the Press Release: Corals are “More resilient than previously thought”
Corals, the foundation of […]
By Jo Nova
This is the state of national energy debate in Australia — preschooler taunts
The Nationals have finally decided to dump the Net Zero target (an excellent step*). In reply, Chris Bowen, the Minister of Electricity and Weather, could have reeled off all the countries with unreliable energy that are building aluminum smelters, except there aren’t any. He could have dazzled us with talk of terrawatt-hours, or fantasy hydrogen tankers that are just around the corner, but no one believes that any more — so he just went for dinosaur joke he heard in Grade two.
Mr Smug, Chris Bowen:
“The old National Party — deciding whether the Earth is flat, and whether the Earth rotates around the sun, or visa versa in 2025. Like get with the program…”
Effectively the Energy Minister has nothing at all, so he’s calling the National Party stupid like a rock. He hopes you don’t notice. It’s a cheap childish trick, but hey, it fooled the ABC. They were so impressed with his sneering condescension, they played it on the nightly news on Saturday night and introduced this wit as “standing firm on policy”, as if he […]
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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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