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Memorial Service for Viv Forbes NEXT Friday at 9am EST time. (Apologies for getting the Fridays mixed up!) Address: at Centenary Memorial Gardens, 353 Wacol Station Road, Sumner, Qld 4074. There will be a live stream of this event at that time. PIN for access is 5918. Live steam link in case it does not come through: https://cmgcc.com.au/live-streaming/client?nid=08556218-2e27-45e2-9f85-6b8a128def77 Behind the scenes in the world of skeptics and libertarians, Viv was a source of wisdom, and tenaciously productive. He will be missed. — Thank you Viv! From his family: Viv lived a remarkable life — born in Warwick in 1939, he became a geologist, economist, farmer, writer, and above all, a man of principle. He was devoted to his family, passionate about learning, and unwavering in his commitment to libertarian ideals. He also dedicated much of his later life to climate science, challenging conventional wisdom with rigorous study and advocating for honest debate grounded in evidence. Viv was a Dux, Geologist, Economist, Intellectual, Libertarian, Writer, Poet, Political Commentator, Coal Miner, Sheep Farmer, Grandfather, Carbon Sense Coalition Founder and tireless campaigner for freedom. He will be remembered not only for his achievements but for the values he instilled in us and the legacy he leaves behind. Memorial details will follow in due course.
Sadly, last week we lost the extraordinary Viv Forbes, of the Carbon Sense Coalition. A very smart and politically savvy man who will be sorely missed. There will be a service tomorrow morning. “A fearless Champion of Liberty”. There’s no one quite like him. Memorial Service for Viv Forbes. FRIDAY 5 DECEMBER 2025, 9AM (AEST – Australian Eastern Standard Time) In addition, there will be a live stream of this event at that time. For access, use the PIN 5918. Live steam link in case it does not come through: https://cmgcc.com.au/live-streaming/client?nid=08556218-2e27-45e2-9f85-6b8a128def77
![]() 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 kilometers of industrial infrastructure to catch the sun and breezes would be so complicated? Federal opposition demands halt to new wind turbines as asbestos scare spreadsBy Christine Middap, The Australian It comes as opposition industrial relations and employment spokesman Tim Wilson urged Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen to order a national safety review and temporary moratorium on new turbine installations, warning of the operational and reputational risks the issue posed to the country’s clean energy transition. “The importation of asbestos-containing goods into Australia has been banned since 2003, yet this incident suggests that components containing asbestos may have been distributed widely within the renewable energy sector,’’ he said. We might not want to be 100% dependent on China to make us all the widgets we want: Australian Workers Union national secretary Paul Farrow said the asbestos cases highlighted the risk of relying entirely on overseas supply chains for Australia’s renewables transition. “Right now we are building these massive infrastructure projects with nearly zero per cent Australian content. That is unacceptable and unsafe,’’ he said. We’d love to revive Australian manufacturing, but we’re buying it all from China because it’s all we can afford. If we make the brakepads and widgets ourselves, it’ll make renewable energy even more expensive than it already is. Let’s not forget — things cost less in China because they’re burning our coal, they treat their workers badly, the quality assurance is poor, and the environmental standards are terrible. That is not a race that we want to win. How many people should we kill today to save one spotted quoll in 2095? Where are those sums? Still, it could have been worse. At least we didn’t put the Chinese-made brake pads in preschools across the country and then have to close 70 schools while we clean the carpet in hazmat suits.
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 a “sidestep” around fossil fuels . They cover up for the UN-Blob with every edit. It’s not like it’s a sign that the world is backing away from renewables and self-immolating Net Zero targets, is it? “The talks did not actually collapse”The Guardian (of The Blob) puts the best spin on the situation that it can, which was that the talks did not disintegrate entirely. “Multilateralism held”. The big success in Brazil was that everyone held hands and agreed to promise nothing — but they did it together. The world is not winning the fight against the climate crisis but it is still in that fight, the UN climate chief has said in Belém, Brazil, after a bitterly contested Cop30 reached a deal. Countries at Cop30 failed to bring the curtain down on the fossil fuel age amid opposition from some countries led by Saudi Arabia, and they underdelivered on a flagship hope – at a conference held in the Amazon – to chart an end to deforestation. But in a fractious era of nationalism, war and distrust, the talks did not collapse as was feared. Multilateralism held – just. Expectations are so incredibly low now. They used to pretend to save the world, now they just want to save the COP junket: A Decade After Paris, Climate Diplomacy Is About Saving ItselfBloomberg COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago laid out the stakes before delegates traveled to Belém, telling a Bloomberg Green event: “We have to convince people it’s worthwhile to continue to negotiate.” In the end, the holdouts found enough reason to back a deal — if largely to send a signal that countries can still unite behind the climate cause. “There was a will to make sure this agreement didn’t fall,” said Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy secretary. “Nobody in that room really wanted to be the people who brought the thing down.” Instead, he added, “there was actually a will to keep the show on the road.” Perhaps the UN shouldn’t have picked Brazil for the cute forestry photos — because there were bigger forces at work: … a large faction of countries, egged on by Brazil President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in his role as host, had made a renewed push against fossil fuels, turning it into the proving ground for both climate cooperation and the very idea of multilateralism in a rapidly fracturing world. But Brazilian diplomats leading the summit, under pressure from Arab states and Russia, didn’t embrace the proposal. The whole point of holding it in far flung Belem, Brazil was to help get a historic forest-protection slush fund started. They wanted $125 billion dollar pot of influence called the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, but in the end, they didn’t even get the words “deforestation” in the final deal. “A lot of parties were quite surprised,” Wyns told SBS News, adding that references to deforestation were also removed.
A roadmap to the halting of deforestation was dropped from the final deal, a bitter disappointment for nature advocates at this “rainforest Cop” held in Belém, near the mouth of the Amazon River.
Remember when the historic COP28 meeting was the beginning of the end of fossil fuels?The Hail Mary line they managed to weave into the ‘COP 30 deal’ is pure fantasy wish list. Presumably a few people will quote this line smugly at pubs to skeptics as if it proves something:
“The global transition towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development is irreversible and the trend of the future.” He argued: “This is a political and market signal that cannot be ignored.” The political and market signal that can’t be ignored is the one where skeptics are winning elections, or dominating the polls, and sustainable investors are fleeing from references of climate change.
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 costPaul 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 backlash was so bad, the BOM promised to bring back the old rain radar system. David Littleproud tore strips of the BoM: ‘It is unbelievable a private consultancy was paid $78million to redesign the website, but then security and system testing meant that Australian taxpayers actually paid $96 million,’ Mr Littleproud said. ‘The seriousness of this cannot be understated. This isn’t just about a clunky website, the changes actually put lives and safety at risk. It’s hard to believe they did a 15 month beta trial and the community “loved it”. Presumably they tested it on their own kids, and their friends at the ABC, but not on the people who’s lives depend upon the weather reports — the farmers, firefighters and fishermen? In the spirit of the best Soviet production, the new site reeks of condescension, panders to woke ideology, treats everyone like they are in primary school and destroyed 10 million hours of productivity across the country by forcing millions of people who already knew the site to have to learn an entirely new architecture. All the knowledge Australians had built up on how to navigate the BOM data was tossed to the wind. The BoM treats Australians as though their time is worthless and their money is infinite. The only good thing about the new site is that the old site is still there. See reg.bom.gov.au. Commenters at the Daily Mail were aghast that the BOM could spend so much on software. FlowerPower says: $100 million just thrown away into some greedy corporation’s pockets. This was taxpayers money. Who approach fee? Even more so when the original budget was only $4 million. I bet this has the Labor Party behind it somewhere? Ready to steal the glory…. The New Zealand upgrade to their Metservice cost $1.7 million dollars. Perhaps it wasn’t as awful? Kiwis may like to comment. As I said then, bring back the old site…. ht Jon Rattin, David E., and apologies to another commenter who left the first tip about the cost blowout. I can’t find that comment! UN climate conference drops “fossil fuels” from the draft deal. Activists say “We have nothing left”By Jo Nova It is as if Satan disappeared from the BibleThe 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 dealBy 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. An earlier text included three possible routes to achieve this, but that language has now been dropped after opposition from oil-producing nations. French Environment Minister Monique Barbut said the deal is being blocked by “oil-producing countries – Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, but joined by many emerging countries.” She suggested that small island nations may agree to a weaker deal on fossil fuels if they secured more finance to adapt to the changes in their countries caused by rising temperatures. It was always about the moneyThe big question here (if this sticks) is why the oil block didn’t do this years ago? The even bigger question is whether the oil block have found a way to circumvent The UN Blob? If they are paying the small countries off directly behind the scenes, the UN will miss out on collecting its share of the cash flow. The travesty! The irony is that if “man-made climate change” was really a crisis, it makes more sense for the oil giants to pay the islands to build sea-walls — instead of rearranging the global economy to try to control the clouds and the ocean. But this unthinkable sacrilege cuts out the middlemen Blob-o-crats and stops the whole totalitarian power game. The UN will not give up its aim to be the One World Government so easily. The French Environment Minister was not happy: On France’s position she said:”At this point, even if we don’t have the roadmap, but at least a mention of the fossil fuels, I think we would accept it. But as it stands now, we have nothing left.” Expect The Blob to fight this all the way. There will be wrangling and then possibly “euphoric joy” about a “historic agreement” ready for cameras on the nine o’clock news. Image by Vilius Kukanauskas from Pixabay
By Jo Nova A new day dawns DownunderFor 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 talk with some conviction about the awful costs, the poverty, the national productivity loss, the decline in standards of living, and the smelters that are closing. In a rare moment of functional governance, the Opposition promises to force the grid manager (the AEMO) to put cheap electricity ahead of weather voodoo. So, lucky Australians can still have hope, that one day our power stations might even be directed to make cheap reliable power rather than change the jet streams over Antarctica. But the Opposition are camouflaging themselves in the talisman of climate virtue, as if chanting the spells of the Paris Agreement will protect them from the Global Bullies. To ward off the bad spirits, and BlackRock bankers, they still say they’re committed to the Paris agreement, while promising to consider building coal plants, which sounds a lot like the Chinese “net-zero plan”. Smile and say ‘Yes‘ while doing whatever you were going to do anyway. Apart from burning the token Parisian incense, its heartening to hear some of the messages we’ve been saying for years, even if we feel like beating our head on the wall: Australians desperately need reset on energy for more affordable powerBy Dan Tehan, Opposition Spokesman for Energy in The Australian Australia is in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. This is undeniable. We have suffered the steepest declines in living standards of the developed world. Real disposable income has fallen by 8.5 per cent since 2022. More than a million Australians now work multiple jobs simply to get by. Under Labor, poverty has risen from 12.4 per cent (one in eight) to 14.2 per cent (one in seven). That is 3.7 million Australians, including 757,000 children, are living below the poverty line. Our industries are collapsing under this strain. Closures in Whyalla, Port Pirie and Mount Isa are costing thousands of jobs. These are real livelihoods of real people that are being lost. Rio Tinto, who owns the Tomago Aluminium Smelter, directly attributes its imminent closure to soaring electricity prices. ASIC data shows 14,722 companies entered external administration in the 12 months to June 2025. Under the Coalition in 2021, that number was just 4,235. And the clincher: All of this pain has achieved nothing. When the Coalition left office, emissions were 28 per cent below 2005 levels. Today they are just 28.7 per cent below 2005 levels. Labor talks tough on climate but has delivered virtually no emissions reductions and higher costs. This is abject policy failure. Here comes the incantation: We remain committed to the Paris Agreement and to responding to climate change responsibly and affordably. We will reduce emissions on average year-on-year, and in line with comparable countries, moving as fast as technology allows rather than pursuing arbitrary, unachievable targets. To that end, we will use the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and ARENA to support scalable, breakthrough low-emissions technologies, including carbon capture and storage and advanced nuclear technologies that enable whole-of-economy decarbonisation. The Blob rewards the Blob players?Did anyone think any Australians would feel warm and gooey inside just because “an aussie” starred in a field of UN Blob-o-crats? Chris Bowen to serve as COP31 president after Australia cedes hosting rights to TurkeyChris Bowen will become Australia’s “part-time” Energy Minister as he takes on “all the powers” to lead global climate negotiations for the next 12 months, after the Albanese government ceded the right to host next year’s UN climate change summit to Turkey. Many are wondering if Chris Bowen can be a part time Minister when our electricity grid and gas supply are in a crisis. Sussan Ley challenged the decision, saying “Australians simply cannot afford to have a part-time minister in charge of energy policy”. “Families deserve an Energy Minister who is focused on their bills, not on chasing headlines overseas,” the Opposition Leader told The Australian. But I say, if Turkey wants him, they should keep him. The further he is from the Australian electricity grid, the better.
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 TurkeyBy 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 Canberra and Ankara would see the 2026 COP default to the German city of Bonn, as required by UN rules. Amazing how fast political certainty can flip, isn’t it? One moment Anthony Albanese was hoping to stand beside Antonio Guterres on the glorious world stage and brag about how many solar panels Australia has, but now he probably wants a quiet exit. It doesn’t help that the current COP30 is a flop where Russia, China, India and the US didn’t turn up and most countries didn’t update their plan. If the Australian opposition find their feet and wage a climate war, COP31 in Adelaide will be a sitting duck, radiating upper-class green out-of-touch vibes while voters struggle to pay their electricity bills. It would be a gift to political opponents. Two thousand million dollars is a lot to burn on a lame UN event. The Opposition may have just saved Australia $2 billion dollars. Or maybe COP30 did.
The internet broke for the last couple of hours as Cloudflare crashed, taking X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Facebook, Telegram, this site, and even (the irony) DownDetector. Lots of people on X are asking why the internet is so big, yet so hopelessly concentrated. (e.g. AWS, Cloudflare, Google Cloud). This augurs well for Digital ID…
Below, an explanation from a guy that might work at Cloudflare:
I won’t mince words: earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in @Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused. Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours. In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack. That issue, impact it caused, and time to resolution is unacceptable. Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today. The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back.
@chaeynz_ tweeted: “in retrospect of the cloudflare outage, let us celebrate this meme once more“
![]() … By Jo Nova Look out. Climate Denialism is a “security threat” nowAs 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.” 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 difficult questions. The UN must be feeling fragile because the term “denialism” is decidedly unscientific — it is the language of political and religious struggle, not of atmospheric physics. Perhaps they’re afraid the world might recognize that the UN is a superfluous, bloodsucking freeloader? To make themselves useful, the UN are providing an excuse for sympathetic (socialist) governments to launch information integrity commissions, or to fund “research” into misinformation online. The new key phrase is “Information Integrity”![]() The Greens are the Bankers and the Bureaucrats best friend. They couldn’t call it the Ministry of Truth again, so the new catchword of censorship is “information integrity”. The question the UN hopes you won’t ask is “who defines integrity?” for they be the Kings. Strangely the Australian Greens were already speaking this lingo five months ago. The new Global Initiative for Information Integrity sounds spookily similar to The Select Committee on Information Integrity that the Australian Greens set up in August. It’s almost like the UN phoned up the Greens in July and told them what to do? Google Trends shows that there was a sudden mysterious global interest in “information integrity” from July this year. Keep reading → |
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