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By Jo Nova
Does anyone care? 600 million Africans don’t have electricity
They burn wood for power. Forests are razed and no one even notices. As Geoff Hill says, they warm their homes and cook their food the only way they can — by chopping down forests and converting wood to charcoal, a fuel used by the Greeks and Romans. If they had coal fired power or gas plants they wouldn’t need to cut down 400 year old trees.
An area the size of Switzerland is being denuded every year, 70% of Africa’s forests are gone, but it’s as if the rest of the world barely registers it.
Solar panels don’t work under thick cloud, and can blow away in cyclones, hydro plants won’t work in droughts, but fossil fuel plants survive bad weather. Do the Greens really care about the environment, or the poor — does the ABC, CBC or the BBC?
His advice: don’t let them get away with propaganda that keeps people in poverty
When you see a newspaper article claiming that sandstorms and creeping desert are solely down to climate change, write a letter to the editor – even just a few lines […]
Image by Hoeneisen from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Perhaps Africa could use some global warming?
Thanks and credit to Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone:
New Study Finds The Early-Mid Holocene Sahara Had Lakes With Depths Of ‘At Least 300 Meters’
During the hottest part of the Holocene, for thousands of years, there were deep lakes filled with water in the middle of the Sahara Desert. From 9,500 years ago to 6,000 years ago the monsoons rained on the Sahara, freshwater plankton frolicked in the lakes, and greenery grew far and wide. The wetter conditions made it possible for “widespread human occupation and the development of agriculture across North Africa”. Amazingly, that last quote comes from Kuper and Kropelin fully seventeen years ago. Strangely the UN experts don’t mention very often that in the warmer world not that long ago, the hyperarid Sahara desert was rich, green and filled with water? We wouldn’t want people to start wondering if climate change might mean Chad and Libya could be nicer places for Africans to live? Instead we’re told that global warming will turn into our whole world into the Saharan desert, only to find out that in a warmer world […]
By JoNova
Spare a thought for our friends in South Africa where the most advanced economy in Africa has quietly notched up 200 days of load shedding in 2022 and things are about to get worse. They have had power shortages for the last 15 years, but nothing like this. The country was at level six load shedding last week in a system where level 8 is the worst. Two thirds of the customers are losing power for 6 to 8 long hours a day. It’s wreaking havoc with small business. How is a bakery supposed to bake?
This is a sorry tale of a civilization unraveling on every edge. On December 16, the grid shifted from Stage Four to Six after eight (8!) power generating units “broke” down in one night. After that, the Army was called in to protect the coal plants from sabotage, theft and vandalism.
There is corruption at every level. The poor were stealing electricity with hot-wired connections, while the middle income rent-seekers were sabotaging infrastructure so they could be paid more to fix the damage. At the high income end, auditors are finding fraud, while evidence is being set on fire. International courts are […]
Just an update on South Africa: Blackouts continue, and the people are not happy:
These are being describes as the worst blackouts since the ANC came into power in 1994.
Residents block roads in Tembisa in South Africa against rising prices, high living costs and water and electricity cuts.#SouthAfrica #Tembisa #Protest #BreakingNews pic.twitter.com/GknLuNtGR8
— We Are Protestors (@WeAreProtestors) July 20, 2022
Some are so desperate for electricity they are rewiring substations and ending up in hospital:
Mini substation blows up in face of man trying to illegally reconnect it
Reeshni Chaslyn Chetty, The South African
A Johannesburg man who tried to illegally reconnect electricity faced injuries after he allegedly opened an electricity substation and it blew up in his face.
The spokesperson revealed that there is a ‘serious problem’ of vandalism of infrastructure in the City. This includes incidents where residents attempt to illegally operate the electricity network – they are often aided by unqualified electricians and try to reconnect or make illegal connections.
We hope he is OK.
These are eight hour regular rolling blackouts. People have Apps on the phone to tell them when their next blackout starts. People […]
This is Fall of Rome type stuff — everything is coming undone
National rolling blackouts have been occurring for days in South Africa and are forecast to continue for another week at least. One engineer warns they are just a step away from a total blackout and says it will be very difficult to reawaken the entire system. Traffic lights are failing, trains are stopping, and mobiles phones, ATMs and fuel pumps may not work. With unemployment at a shocking 35% already, the million dollar losses from blackouts make for a dark feedback loop.
The immediate cause is strikes for wage claims and terrible maintenance leading to major power outages lasting as long as nine hours. But Green targets and activism only makes it worse because there’s no interest in maintaining plants properly which are planned for closure. South Africa runs mostly on old coal plants, and one of the largest plants is closing (supposedly) as soon as September. And the wind and solar power they have often isn’t helping with the peak loads either.
There is vandalism from every direction. At the bottom end, apparently up to half the people in Soweto are not even paying for electricity […]
The short: Get excited but not too excited yet.
Omicron is not putting as many people in the ICU as Delta did (so far) which is very promising, but it’s still early days, and in South Africa 60% of urban adults have already had Covid so carry the best kind of protection there is. In the UK, only 20% of the population carry these antibodies. In Australia, which has some of the most extensive testing in the world, only 0.8% of the whole population has tested positive.
Omicron appears to be fiercely contagious, which may turn out to be a good thing because it will replace the Delta strain at lightning speed. The spread is just extraordinary. Up to 4,000 Britons are catching Omicron each day, about 10% of Covid cases in the UK are already Omicron, and many of those are children. Projections are that Omicron may have completely displaced Delta by New Year in the UK. But even if hospitalizations are a third as likely, it could still overwhelm hospitals.
Hospitalizations are up 80% in South Africa in the last week. But cases in the original Gauteng region have leveled off, and are already starting to fall.
I’m […]
In the next ten years, Australia will close a couple of coal plants, while Africa will build 1250.
Africa is going to double its energy and almost all the increase is coming from fossil fuels. This is hard to explain, given that renewables are “free” and Africa is poor. But at the end of the decade unreliable renewables will still make less than 10% of the energy in Africa.
Thanks to the GWPF:
Fossil fuels to dominate Africa’s energy mix this decade – report
Power Engineering International
A new study into Africa’s energy generation landscape uses a state-of-the-art machine-learning technique to analyse the pipeline of more than 2,500 planned power plants and their chances of successful commission.
African power generation, 2030, graph.
The study predicts that in 2030, fossil fuels will account for two-thirds of all generated electricity across Africa. While an additional 18% of generation is set to come from hydro-energy projects. These have their own challenges, such as being vulnerable to an increasing number of droughts caused by climate change.
This is only the start. Most countries in Africa are not even in the race yet:
South […]
The Red Brigade uniforms are mass produced and the same all over the world.
Big finds in Mozambique, Saudi trouble, and the anti coal movement are helping African oil and gas:
Why Africa’s Oil & Gas Sector Is Exploding
By Tsvetana Paraskova – Nov 05, 2019, OilPrice
Major oil and gas discoveries and subsequent investments in infrastructure projects are set to help the oil and gas industry in Africa to grow, also helped by improved governance and regulation, PwC said in its newly released Africa oil & gas review 2019.
“One of the most dramatic finds in Africa over the past decade is Mozambique’s natural gas estimated at over 180 tcf, which has already unlocked the first three large-scale LNG projects,” according to PwC.
These projects and additional exploration could make Mozambique the world’s third-largest LNG producer after Qatar and Australia by 2030, PwC says.
So seven XR groupies turn up outside an African oil and gas conference to show just how arrogant they are:
Extinction Rebellion calls Africa Oil Week delegates “climate criminals”
By Madison Yauger, GroundUp
In a media statement, the group said: […]
MIT researchers think they have solved a bit of a mystery regarding Sahara dust, but if they’re right it means the Sahara Desert has already come and gone 3 – 5 times since humans walked the Earth. The Sahara is the largest desert on Earth, and this would be the largest and longest drought “ever” on the planet (as far as we know).
UPDATED: Commenter Javier points out these drying cycles were known years ago. (See below)
This would rather redefine the whole idea of “climate change” — 3.5 million square miles of Green Sahara turns into Dust-bowl Sahara — and it’s all thanks to sunlight. The drought doesn’t just last 7 years, but more like 7,000. And it’s happening over 9 million square kilometers, an area larger than Australia. The major climate models leaned towards the monsoonal cycle, rather than the longer ice age one. So this theory may have resolved one of the 495 contradictions in climate models. Or not. But the bigger message here is that the sun causes climate change and on a massive scale.
h/t to Roger Tallbloke.
The Sahara is the largest dust bowl in the world, dumping 10 million trucks of dust across […]
Climate change causes war (maybe) and meaningless statistics (definitely)
One day when you grow up, children, you too can be a research scientist who writes papers that tells the world something banally obvious — like, say, that natural disasters make conflict more likely.
Who, exactly, thought natural disasters brought peace?
I don’t think the journalist who wrote this next paragraph asked himself what it means (if anything):
Globally, there was a nine per cent coincidence rate between the outbreak of armed conflicts and natural disasters like droughts and heatwaves. But, in countries that were deeply divided along ethnic lines, this rose to about 23 per cent.
I suspect it means not much (define “coincident”), but if it did, it implies that globally, 91% of wars don’t coincide with natural disasters.
If there is a real message here, it appears to be that ethnic divisions cause wars:
Dr Jonathan Donges, who co-wrote the paper about the study, said: “We’ve been surprised by the extent that results for ethnic fractionalised countries stick out, compared to other country features such as conflict history, poverty, or inequality.
9.3 out of 10 based on 48 ratings […]
Great news for Australians, Scandinavias, Greenlanders, Poms, and New Zealanders: all the headlines about how your home will be the hardest hit were wrong. Instead, your real estate will be the most valuable on Earth and everyone will want to visit you.
Thank The Guardian for its restrained headline: Countries most and least likely to survive the effects of climate change . Study source: Diply
…
I expect you will all be relieved. Especially after the fear you felt reading “hardest hit” headlines like these:
“Rural Australians hardest hit by climate change”
“Sydney’s urban areas to be hit hardest by global warming”
“Predictions Australia will be hardest hit by climate change”
Greenland hardest hit by climate change
“…climate change is likely to have the strongest impact on Scandinavian countries such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden.”
“Climate change is faster and more severe in the Arctic than in most of the rest of the world”
— Thanks to ClimateChangePredictions and Tom Nelson’s hardest hit list.
The original map on Diply also has a “least at risk” category, helpfully colored black and applied to no […]
Matt Ridley: Africa Needs To Be Rich – Rather Than Green Some people pretend to care about the worlds poor and how they will be affected by a hypothetical climate shift decades in the future. But African’s don’t want climate action as much as they probably want food, fridges and free markets. No electricity means indoor smog and real pollution coming to your kitchen. How many dead Africans is enough to appease the climate Gods? It’s good to see Australia and Japan may help build some coal fired plants in Africa.
The Times UK (see also Matt Ridley’s Blog)
A survey of more than two million Africans finds that climate change comes dead last of 16 concerns they were asked about.
OK, It’s an internet survey. But who would take cold meals and cholera now so their great grandchildren live in a world a tenth of a degree cooler?
Just to get sub-Saharan electricity consumption up to the levels of South Africa or Bulgaria would mean adding about 1,000 gigawatts of capacity, the installation of which would cost at least £1 trillion. Yet the greens want Africans to hold back on the cheapest form […]
Niger, Africa, is considering building a new small coal fired power station. Greenpeace have protested before at coal power stations in Africa. But how compassionate are those who don’t want Africa to use cheap coal fired power (like, say, professors at western universities?) TonyfromOz puts the issue in perspective. I knew much of Africa was very very poor, but this rather lays the dismal extent out before us. Mali, a nation of 15 million people produces the same amount of electricity as the small town of Dubbo, NSW. Niger, with 17 million, produces even less. All up, there are 23 nations in Africa that each produce less electricity than Dubbo. If we combine them, the 142 million people in those 23 nations are using the same amount of electricity as Adelaide in Australia (which has about 1.1 million people). Stark.
Perhaps we could ask Niger if they’d like to help reduce global temperatures by 0.0 degrees, or if they would rather save money and have electricity that works at night instead? — Jo
Guest Post – TonyfromOz
Niger, Africa
Recently, a new coal fired power plant was proposed for the country of Niger in Africa. […]
The mystery: We know when we drive through a city that temperatures warm from the fringe to the middle. We know UHI is real, but how much does it affect the official records? Is a 2010 city 0.3 K hotter than a 1960 city? How would we know?
Frank Lansner has come up with a way that might approximate the UHI effect — very roughly. It’s well known that UHI gets bigger as cities grow, but the devil is in the detail. Frank argues that it’s not just the size of the city that matters, but it’s growth rate.
The USA is full of large cities, but there is not much difference between the trend in satellites and ground stations there. Frank’s approach could explain this — most of the growth in human population has come in regions like Africa, not the USA.
He figured that if we compare satellite records to ground stations and see if there is a divergence, we might be able to see an indicator of UHI. The info coming out of satellites ought not be affected as populations expand, but the ground stations are often near population centres and they gradually get surrounded with […]
Image thanks to Navy’s Solant Amity I Cruise 1960
All that wilderness, and where did they put the temperature sensors? Near a concrete slab. These guys aren’t even trying to be serious.
Talk about a gorgeous view. This jaw-dropping wilderness is also the site of one of the 20 GAWS (Global Atmosphere Watch Station, for the WMO) which tracks stuff like CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. There’s a temperature station there too, and Tim Wood helpfully sent me up-to-date pictures.
You might wonder, at such an important site and among the wilderness, how could anyone find a place to put a temperature sensor that wasn’t a Class I, top notch siting? It was all too easy. By the looks of this photo (below), it might just qualify as a Class 4, since there a large brick or concrete and metal structure… less than 10 meters away. (For info on classifications: Surface Stations Project*, NOAA Site information here.)
Tim W writes:
“As you can see from the pictures, if this is what passes for a world class station then….
Note the gazillion undeveloped hectares in the background that would be more suitable. But that […]
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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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