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9.3 out of 10 based on 9 ratings
By Jo Nova
 … Dear Australians, people are sneaking into your house and stealing your money every year. You may have no idea because the theft comes in one thousand little instances, hidden within labels like “electricity bill”, “peas” and “soccer fees”. It’s also hidden in your income tax. Pagan fantasy plans to stop storms and hold back the tide are being funded by you, whether you like it or not.
Solar panel installations are partly paid for by their neighbors who don’t have solar panels, it’s hidden in their electricity bills. When a wind farm is built out past the Black Stump, shareholders of the wind farm don’t pay for the high voltage line to connect themselves to the grid, you do. When the new unreliable generators wipe out the midday profits from the old reliable plants, the old essential plants still have to pay their capital costs, insurance and staff. So they just have to charge more for the hours they do run. The new vandal plants make the old reliable ones more expensive than they would have been. (See Stacy and Taylor) You pay that bill too.
When the soccer club pays higher electricity charges for the night lights they pass that on to your eight year olds club fees. And so on and so forth for the peas, the cheese, the ham and everything that’s heated or cooled or moved in the supermarket.
If a government official knocked on your front door and demanded the “Climate-changing-cash” in a single payment, there would be hell to pay. Alan Moran has added up the numbers and it works out to $15.6 billion a year in Australia, and that’s about $600 per man, woman, and child.
So lets have a referendum on whether we should be trying to change the weather. Let’s ask the people if they would rather have cheap electricity and a trip to Bali, or knock 0.0 degrees C off global temperatures in 2100AD? Would they rather buy a new fridge or pretend they can reduce the floods coming in one hundred years time?
We know 98% of the public say they “believe” in climate change, but we also know the renewables industry will never ever campaign for a referendum to ask what the people want. They know, we know, and the politicians know — the people don’t want to buy “the transition”.
Burglar image by Sammy-Sander from Pixabay | Thieves online image by Hyperslower from Pixabay
10 out of 10 based on 106 ratings
9.1 out of 10 based on 13 ratings
By Jo Nova
There is such a glut in solar panels, the Financial Times reported that people in Germany and the Netherlands are using them as cheap garden fencing, even though the angle is not good for catching the sun. Though given that there is also a glut of solar power at lunchtime this is probably a “good” thing.
Great time for the Australian Government to spend a billion dollars setting up a giant solar panel production industry, eh?
With exquisite timing the Australian Labor government has just announced a Solar Sunshot for Our Regions. It our Prime Ministers ambition for us to be a “Renewable Energy Superpower” twenty years too late. One third of homes in Australia already have solar panels, but only 1% were made here. The NSW State government will also lob $275 million to support the embryonic industry and workers, most of whom will presumably be doorknocking to give away the panels with lamingtons. After we finish building garden fences, we might be using them to build sheds and cubby houses.
The big solar rush is over…
The global frenzy to install solar panels has suddenly flattened out last year when it was supposed to be launching for orbit. The IEA estimated the world now has about 800 GW of solar panel plants. But demand for solar panels this year is only expected to be 402GW. The glut is so bad, the whole global solar panel industry could take half the year off to play golf and no one would notice.
In the media, everyone is saying “China has flooded the market”, but for some reason, no one wants to mention that the demand curve has suddenly slowed. The CCP has bet big on renewables sales and was probably expecting that rapidly rising curve to take off. Instead as interest rate rises clamped down on “luxury” spending people ditched their plans to install solar PV.
The glut should be no surprise to any investor. The over supply has been recognised since January. And any serious investor in solar PV would know that solar stocks around the world were down 40% in the first three quarters of last year. The Australian Prime Minister has a whole team of researchers and Ministers and none of them have even hired a high schooler to google the news on the solar industry?
Huileng Tan, Business Insider
China’s manufacturers are pumping out so many solar panels that the resulting global glut has caused prices to tank.
Solar panels are typically installed on rooftops, where they can capture the most sunlight — but there’s so much excess supply that some people are putting them on fences. This also saves on pricey labor and scaffolding costs required for roof installations, FT reported.
Fences covered in solar panels are also starting to take off in the UK, North America, and Australia.
Solar-panel supply globally is forecast to reach 1,100 gigawatts by the end of this year — three times more than demand, the International Energy Agency wrote in a report released in January.
If China makes 80% of the worlds solar panels, and if solar energy is so cheap and efficient, why doesn’t China just keep those panels and use them itself?
10 out of 10 based on 97 ratings
8.9 out of 10 based on 15 ratings
8.4 out of 10 based on 27 ratings
8.5 out of 10 based on 28 ratings
 I have heard ADH TV has permission to show Climate: The Movie in full at 9pm (Sydney time) tonight. This is a rare chance to send the link to friends and introduce them both to alternative media outlets as well as a rare professional old fashioned documentary done with class. As I said, this is perfect for the curious, matter-of-fact mind. It’s not angry or activist, so it’s easy to share.
You can help in the information war…
UPDATE: The specific link to Climate: The Movie
9.8 out of 10 based on 84 ratings
By Jo Nova
This tells us everything we need to know about modern Western civilization. A blimp with wings.
These pufferfish of the sky could be the ugliest, most absurd planes to take to the troposphere.
They are emblematic of the era we live in. Wind turbines destined to rot in the ocean are so big now they can’t even fit on a truck, so someone is planning a plane specially for them. It will be 100 feet longer than a Jumbo jet but carry no tourists, except the fibreglass kind that torment whales, deafen porpoises and vandalize fine electricity grids. The whole point of these machines is a quest to appease the weather Gods one hundred years from now.
Presumably these will run on fairy dust or fermented tofu.
The Flying white elephants could “hit the sky” in four years
To be clear, all that was announced two weeks ago was that Radia has “plans” to make these aircraft and wants $300 million dollars. Presumably the photos here were made by ChatGPT or equivalent.
by Rizwan Choudry, Interesting Engineering
The WindRunner’s colossal dimensions dwarf even the most iconic commercial aircraft. Measuring an astounding 356 feet long, with a height of 79 feet and a wingspan of 261 feet, it outstrips the Boeing 747-8’s length by 106 feet. To put things in perspective, the Windrunner is almost as long as an NFL football field. Its exceptional size translates to a vast carrying capacity of up to 80 tons – twelve times that of the Boeing 747.
Correction: The Business Insider says:
Radia’s plane has a cargo bay volume of 272,000 cubic feet — 12 times that of a Boeing 747-400F …
Let’s not forget the sole aim and purpose of the plane, the factories that make it, and the entire load it carries is to reduce human fossil fuel use.
 … According to Olivia Murray of American Thinker, it will supposedly run on renewable fuel:
Radia promises that this plane will run on “sustainable aviation fuel” instead of traditional jet fuel—but what is SAF exactly? Well, SAF is just a type of “biofuel” that has apparently met certain criteria to be legally-labeled as “sustainable.” So, just as long as you ignore all the cleared forests and prairies to make way for the taxpayer-subsidized corn and soy enterprises to grow the product to make the “fuel,” and you ignore the devastation caused by corporate (mono)agriculture, then maybe you can delude yourself into believing this is a more environmentally-friendly option.
SAF is “sustainable” in the same way that wind turbines are sustainable—you have to ignore the impact on migratory birds, the petroleum-based resins used to manufacture the fiberglass blades, the toxic refrigerants in the turbine house, the petroleum-based lubricants for the machinery, etc., if you’re to believe the lie.
They could always run it on solar power and electric batteries if they don’t mind replacing the battery every three weeks (or maybe every time it flies).
 The Windrunner is 127 feet longer than a 747. The plane will apparently need 6,000 foot runways to take off and land.
Radia hope that onshore turbines will also be delivered to far flung and remote sites where it is hard to deliver wind turbine parts now. (Since those sites are often mountainous and lacking in long international airport runways, who knows, perhaps the blades can be air-dropped?)
UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal says they will have to build a new dirt runway for each project.
 … Having waited seven years to reveal their plans they may have missed the renewable bubble by six months. Bad luck eh?
Investors are fleeing after Siemens discovered that instead of being more efficient, the bigger blades were a maintenance nightmare. Even insurance companies are balking at paying for all the cable breaks.
h/t Bally
9.8 out of 10 based on 77 ratings
9.4 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
By Jo Nova
Strange sightings of Batman and Robin have been occurring in London
Thousands of ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone) cameras have been installed to record numberplates of offending older cars so their owners can be charged £12.50 for daring to drive a non-compliant car in London. This usually means any diesel car made before 2014 or a petrol car made before 2006, so the fines especially hurt low paid workers, students and retirees.
The two masked crusaders have been seen helping the local bat population by installing homes for them in front of ULEZ cameras. Since bats are a protected species (unlike motorists) once the bat boxes are installed they can not be tampered with nor disturbed by law. Batman and Robin helpfully also place legal notices on the poles so workers coming to fix the cameras know they risk a six month jail sentence or an “unlimited” fine if they so much as touch the bat box.
The bat boxes cost £10.
Bat roosts have legal protection:
By Adam Toms and Rom Preston-Ellis, The Mirror
The £10 animal homes have been spotted attached to ULEZ devices in Chessington, Kingston upon Thames and North Cheam. ULEZ opponents say they are “positively contributing to London’s biodiversity and ecosystem”. One said: ”I’m sure whoever is behind it is extremely grateful to TfL for providing the poles to house this protected species.”
Photos in the collage come from this twitter report, and the one above.
h/t Bally
10 out of 10 based on 91 ratings
Youtube link
By Jo Nova
Tony Thomas has uncovered a plot in Tasmania to turn our schools into leftist activist assembly lines (more than they already are). Luckily it appears to be so boring, no one is watching. (OK, that’s hardly luck, just a fact of life. Beating people up with propaganda is, by definition, and especially after 30 years, not that exciting.) But Curious Climate Schools is still harming children and teachers too, and wasting the taxes of bus drivers, builders and bakers.
In the end, publicly funded academics are shamelessly exploiting eight year olds. They work on their youthful anxiety and naivete (and their dreadful science education) to create political lobby groups which will help academics get more funding. Vote for Big Government! Vote for Climate Change Grants! Write letters to the M.P. you are too young to vote for! It is disgustingly self serving, though all the Doctors of Climate Trauma would be mortified to hear that. They are saving the world, after all. They are the saints who collect salaries. The prophets on academic pay scales.
It’s just Big Government advertising itself, but disguised as “education”:
The program might be called Curious Climate Schools, but the one emotion no one seems to feel about establishment climate lectures is curious. Video views to watch scientists answering children’s questions on climate change, with no comments allowed, are sometimes as high as… five. (But that last linked video’s only been on Youtube for a year. Maybe next year will be bigger?) Their channel has 197 videos and only 25 subscribers. Gems like “How can we get people to care about climate change” have amassed all of nine views. Looks like they don’t have the answer.
Over the years Tony Thomas has investigated the worst of the crony worst, but this program was so bad it caught him off guard:
…nothing I’ve previously seen can match the onslaught on those from seven upwards by the University of Tasmania (UTas), which helped it gain World No 1 ranking for climate activism.
The brainwashing is evident in Tassie kids’ questions like “How long do we have until the earth becomes uninhabitable?” and “How long before climate change will destroy the earth?”
Its agenda, as I see it, is to turn nervous kids into activists, climate-strikers and future Teal and Greens voters. About 40 per cent of classes’ top ten questions have assumed the need for greater climate “action” for “climate social justice”. Teachers are told to encourage kids to join “different groups working to make the climate safer”. I assume they include the likes of Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil.
When a child asks ” “How do we stop pollution of [by] factories?”” an environmental law professor says “…the only way we could stop their pollution is to actually shut them down. ” It’s Marxism 101.
The damage to children’s mental health is appalling, as a study of their questions showed:
…and thanks to greenist “educators”, kids were fixated (27 per cent) on imaginary “existential” climate threats. Study author Dr Chloe Lucas wrote, “Some 5 per cent of questions implied a doomed planet or doomed humanity—e.g., ‘How long will we be able to survive on our planet if we do nothing to try to slow down/reverse climate change’?’’
The page “What can I do” effectively coaches babies to be political activists, telling them to contact politicians, brands, and businesses, and make climate action plans:
Talk about climate change! This helps to make climate change discussions and actions a normal part of life, and helps shift the ‘social norm’ so that climate change issues become more prominent in our society.
Find your tribe and use your voices! Get together with friends and other students who care about climate action. You could join a group like the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. Collective events such as the school strikes for climate raise awareness
… could you and your schoolmates become Climate Warriors together?
In the search box I asked the most basic of questions: “what percentage of CO2 is made by mankind” and got a page about how to become an activist, a post called “feelings about climate change” and an advert for the UN COP meeting of 18 months ago. Bravo, educators.
Ultimately propaganda and lies are hard to sell
No matter how hard they try, their videos can’t “go viral” because there are no surprises, there’s no rebellion, no risk, no conflict and so there’s no drama and no jokes. There is only the permitted line. If they weren’t pushing a container load of lies — levitating on bluster, they could create drama and interest by interviewing skeptics or even allowing comments. Obviously, they can’t do that.
When you’re selling pagan witchcraft and promising to control the storms as if it were a science, the last thing you can do is let an actual scientist who can talk about their predictions on the show.
They might point out that data is the only thing that matters in science, and the many ways they got it wrong.
My list of failures continues: the hot spot is still missing, the climate models can’t predict the climate on a local, regional, or continental scale, they don’t know why global warming slowed for years, They can’t explain the pause, the cause or the long term historic climate movements either. Measurements of satellites, clouds, 3,000 ocean buoys, 6,000 boreholes, a thousand tide gauges, and 28 million weather balloons can’t find the warming that the models predict. In the oceans, the warming isn’t statistically significant, sea-levels started rising too early, aren’t rising fast enough, aren’t accelerating, nor are warming anywhere near as much as they predicted. Antarctica was supposed to be warming faster than almost anywhere but they were totally wrong. The vast Southern Ocean is cooling not warming. And the only part of Antarctica that’s warming sits on top of a volcano chain they prefer not to tell you about.
No wonder expert climate modelers don’t want their own pensions bet on climate models.
The academics fool themselves with lies
Just for starters, in order to believe that solar panels stop floods, and EV’s reduce droughts, somehow academics must pretend that the climate hasn’t had worse floods, droughts, fires, hotter weather, and bigger blizzards and ice ages since time began. History be damned! They need to forget that CO2 is the molecule of life, used by every scavenging cell on the planet, and desired by every leaf, diatom, and cyanobacterium. The truth is that we don’t know where all our emissions go, (carbon accounting is a joke) but we know biology spent the last half billion years figuring out how to capture our CO2 emissions. The demon molecule, carbon dioxide, is actually a good thing, and life on Earth can’t get enough. God’s joke on climate modelers is that phytoplankton probably plays a much bigger role than vainglorious climate prophets realize.
And more than all that – somehow the professors of climate dystopia have to believe warm blooded mammals don’t like warmth. Global warming saves 166,000 lives a year. Cold kills ten times as many people as heat does, even in cities where people are protected from the elements, and across the world it kills 20 times as many people as the heat does. This is the catastrophe the ivory tower parasites want to save us from?
Read it all at Quadrant: Trust us, Kids, We’re Climate ‘Educators’
Putting this program out of its misery yesterday would still be three years too late.
10 out of 10 based on 107 ratings
10 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
By Jo Nova
As Western grids are teetering, people are suddenly realizing demand for electricity is about to skyrocket
Unstoppable demands are about to meet immovable rocks. A year ago the grid managers thought they had their five year plans figured out, but now the same experts think we are going to need to add twice as much generation as they did then. The watt-hogs have arrived to chew on some gigawatt hours.
The usual slow grid planning processes are getting upended. Take the US State of Georgia for example. They have scored lots of new electric vehicle and battery factories, a few large “clean energy” manufacturing projects, and have attracted a bunch of energy-sucking data centers, but all of these things add massive loads to the grid.
In the last 22 years demand for electricity hasn’t growth much, so in 2022 Georgia Power were expecting to close their coal fired plants pretty soon, and not even put forward a new plan til 2025. Instead Georgia Power are knocking on the state regulators door to let it expand generation. They’re now expecting winter demand will grow 17 times faster than their previous plan, and summer use will explode to 28 times more*. In 2022 they thought the system might be OK until 2030. Now they think the “shortfalls” start by 2025. And 70% of the capacity they want to add is fossil fuel based.
It could be the worst possible time, say, for politicians to force cars and trucks to run off the grid too…
The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal
Artificial-intelligence data centers and climate rules are pushing the power grid to what could become a breaking point.
AEP Ohio says new data centers and Intel’s $20 billion planned chip plant will increase strain on the grid. Chip factories and data centers can consume 100 times more power than a typical industrial business. … A new Micron chip factory in upstate New York is expected to require as much power by the 2040s as the states of New Hampshire and Vermont combined.
Electricity demand to power data centers is projected to increase by 13% to 15% compounded annually through 2030.
The shortage of power is already slowing the building of new data centres by up to six years. It’s so bad, Amazon just bought a 1,200 acre data warehouse right next to a nuclear plant so it can live off nuclear energy. The data center may use up to 960 MW of power, which would be nearly 40% of all the power provided by the nuclear plant.
It’s almost like the CCP is in charge of our electricity grids?
The green subsidies make the unreliable generators happy, but more unreliables in turn destroys the market for the reliable guys. There’s not much point running major capital infrastructure as a back up for a second rate generators. Not surprisingly, many of the essential generators are about to go off to grid-heaven forever and the new replacements are, as the bureaucrats say “not clearly identified” yet.
PJM Interconnection runs the wholesale power market on 13 US States. They latest report signals trouble coming according to the WSJ:
About 20 gigawatts of fossil-fuel power are scheduled to retire over the next two years—enough to power 15 million homes—including a large natural-gas plant in Massachusetts that serves as a crucial source of electricity in cold snaps. PJM’s external market monitor last week warned that up to 30% of the region’s installed capacity is at risk of retiring by 2030.
Meantime, the Inflation Reduction Act’s huge renewable subsidies make it harder for fossil-fuel and nuclear plants to compete in wholesale power markets. The cost of producing power from solar and wind is roughly the same as from natural gas. But IRA tax credits can offset up to 50% of the cost of renewable operators.
All the artificial intelligence arriving appears to be shining a light onto human stupidity.
Who could have guessed that if we subsidize unreliable generators we would get an unreliable grid?
______________________________
*If you follow that link, beware, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article was supported by a partnership with Green South Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners. See at ajc.com/donate/climate/.
10 out of 10 based on 105 ratings
9.1 out of 10 based on 14 ratings
By Jo Nova
Sometime a few years ago the Carbonistas stopped trying to pretend it was science, climate change has morphed into a ecclesiastical piñata instead. (If they whack it hard enough, grants fall out).
Instead of talking about 30 year trends (because they were wrong), the experts started coloring weather maps blood red and hyperventilating with every warm weekend. So it makes perfect sense they need the ritual reminders of holy mythology, and this is one of those stories. It’s the weekly nod for the awestruck fanatics that the world really does revolve around “climate change”. They can nod solemnly, and pat each others solar panels.
The theory is that because our showers are too long or our beef steaks are too big (don’t you feel important?), the poles are melting and some ice near the poles has dribbled out to the equator, slowing the planet’s spin. Since the Earth is a rotating ball of rock 10,000 kilometers across, the movements of a few millimeters of water on the surface are somewhat minor. But nevermind. So the dire news, such as it isn’t, is that the Earth’s clocks might have to be wound back by one whole second in 2026.
Someone will do a cost-benefit analysis soon on whether spending a quadrillion dollars can prevent this.
The drama here is that this is something has never been done before, at least since clocks were invented, five minutes ago in Earth’s geological history. The ice has, of course come and gone many times all of its own accord, and clocks have leapt forward one second 27 times since the 1970s, but this is the epochal moment that you can tell your grandchildren about — the day the Earth started slowing, and you were there! (Nobody mention that dinosaurs only had 23 hours in a day, no wonder they went extinct. Let’s obsess about a second, instead!)
In a not-so-great moment in modern science communication the BBC manages to say everything and nothing all at once:
Accelerating melt from Greenland and Antarctica is adding extra water to the world’s seas, redistributing mass.
That is very slightly slowing the Earth’s rotation. But the planet is still spinning faster than it used to.
The effect is that global timekeepers may need to subtract a second from our clocks later than would otherwise have been the case.
Got that? So climate change is delaying the great negative leap second. Wait?
And it’s unprecedented, of course:
“Things are happening that are unprecedented.” The negative leap second has never been used before and, according to the study, its use “will pose an unprecedented problem” for computer systems across the world.
The world may have adjusted its day-length 100,000 times, but this is the first time a sentient species with optical strontium clocks and a Windows 11 quagmire will try to go back in time by one second.
“This has never happened before, and poses a major challenge to making sure that all parts of the global timing infrastructure show the same time,” Mr Agnew, who is a researcher at the University of California, San Diego told AFP news agency.
It’s like Y2K all over again but with sermons and hymns.
When all the world is a climate-change-grant, everything on Earth is climate change problem.
REFERENCE (for those wondering if this is an April 1 trick)
Duncan Carr Agnew (2024) A global timekeeping problem postponed by global warming, Nature, 4334. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07170-0
9.9 out of 10 based on 94 ratings
8.6 out of 10 based on 18 ratings
By Jo Nova
There are so many holes in the Holy Carbonista Bible it’s easy to find one to surprise a BBC interviewer with.
Now that Guyana has discovered the joys of major oil deposits, the President came prepared. But because the BBC is so robotically predictable, Irfaan Ali knew exactly what they would ask, but host Stephen Sackur, seemingly had no idea what was coming. If only the BBC had interviewed a few skeptics in the last thirty years…
…
“Let me stop you right there,” he said. “Did you know that Guyana has a forest that is the size of England and Scotland combined, a forest that stores 19.5 gigatons of carbon, a forest that we have kept alive?”
“I’m going to lecture you on climate change. Because we have kept this forest alive that you enjoy that the world enjoys, that you don’t pay us for, that you don’t value.
“Guess what? We have the lowest deforestation rate in the world. And guess what? Even with the greatest exploration of oil and gas we will still be net zero.”
— The Telegraph
9.9 out of 10 based on 120 ratings
Celebrate Easter with Joy
9.1 out of 10 based on 31 ratings
9 out of 10 based on 16 ratings
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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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