Actually, on average they’re about 300 km apart and visits to a given square of ocean can be months apart. That’s like filming with a stationary GoPro under the water at Mission Bay to count all the swimmers along 500 metres of the beach.
We’ve been approached by a Christchurch reader, sceptical of the prevailing global warming narrative, who would like to make contact with a climate sceptic. Continue Reading →
The Green Virus is on a rising curve in the Anglo-Sphere.
Boris, Biden, Kerry, Trudeau, Arden and Australia’s Morrison are all competing to be the first to destroy all industries reliant on coal, cattle, petrol and diesel. Continue Reading →
After all the endless tables about obscure trace gases and detailed physics, with its decorative, useless graphs and meaningless degrees of relative certainty, the AR5 could only say weakly: Continue Reading →
The Herald’s false headline, decorated by a bushfire. But the weather does not light fires. Fires are caused by arson or lightning.
The NZ Herald reports on a new paper that claims to see a “growing hand-print of climate change” on the New Zealand climate since 1871, calling it a “150-year climate transformation.”
However, doubts have been raised. The paper claims our “wider region” has warmed by 0.66 °C from 1871 to 2019. But that is wrong, because records from 1850 show they recorded exactly the same temperatures as today: the country has NOT warmed.
The records are in Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand of 1868, held in the National Library in Wellington (image below, right). Today’s temperatures are the same as they were in the 1850s and ’60s.
6th December 2020
Wandering recently through an arcade popular with the green smoothie set, I saw a sign boasting: “Plant Based Meat”.
Someone should advise those nutritional dunderheads that all real meat is plant-based. Real beef and lamb are built from live plants like grasses, lucerne and mulga, plus salt, minerals and clay; the best chicken is built mostly on seeds and shoots of wheat, corn and grasses plus a few worms, insects and gizzard-grit; and when I was a kid our bacon was built by porkers from pollard, whey and vegetable scraps. Continue Reading →
Today, the NZ Herald published a letter from one Hylton Le Grice, of Remuera, revealing a financial arrangement with the United Nations I was not aware of and that I’m fairly sure I would have remembered our government consulting us over.
In case this facsimile arrives illegible, here’s what it says:
New Zealand produces just 0.17 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. China, the worst polluter with an appalling 28.5 per cent emissions is however presently building no less than 583 coal-fired power stations, with another five countries creating 529 similar units. Despite these extraordinary figures, New Zealand has unbelievably committed for 10 years to pay an astonishing annual $1.4 billion in taxpayers’ money to the UN Climate Accord Fund, which China does not have to subscribe to until 2030. Some of this UN money is then distributed to the same six so-called undeveloped countries that are building these 1012 coal-powered stations. With the huge economic problems that New Zealand now faces because of Covid-19, this annual payment seems to be totally unacceptable.
By David Wojick October 26th, 2020
Precision research by physicists William Happer and William van Wijngaarden has determined that the present levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor are almost completely saturated. In radiation physics the technical term “saturated” implies that adding more molecules will not cause more warming.
In plain language this means that from now on our emissions from burning fossil fuels could have little or no further impact on global warming. There would be no climate emergency. No threat at all. We could emit as much CO2 as we like; with no effect. Continue Reading →
Censorship of knowledge and ideas is now expanding from campus to schoolroom
Knowledge; Robert Reid, 1896
Bad ideas owe their advance into mainstream thinking not just to bad people but also to otherwise decent people going along with such notions out of cowardice or other weakness.
The censorship of any thinking which conflicts with the orthodoxies of identity politics is increasingly destroying the western university as the crucible of reason, along with its core purpose to advance knowledge through the free play of evidence, ideas and argument. Continue Reading →
Left-wing green ambitions are increasingly exposed as hollow, and with NZ firmly ruled by Labour, we stand to lose our society to those destructive dreams. Dairy farms are already being replaced by trees. Michael Kelly has analysed green energy goals in New Zealand and the UK. Now Paul Driessen, senior policy advisor with CFACT, explains how the Green New Deal (GND) will harm America. And doing all this by 2050? FORGET IT! His email to us says:
As more details emerge about Hunter Biden’s emails and Biden Family connections to China, Russia, Ukraine and other countries that would provide most of the metals and minerals America would need under any Green New Deal, we should contemplate how much some families, companies and countries would be enriched by the GND — while others would lose their jobs, see their energy prices skyrocket, and watch their favourite scenic vistas and wildlife habitats get blanketed by wind turbines, solar panels and biofuel plantations. We would also observe mining, processing, manufacturing, fossil fuel use and child labour soar to their highest levels in human history in faraway places that would be ripping up their own backyards, processing those materials, and making all those GND turbines, panels and batteries. I lay it out in this article. Thank you very much for posting it, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.
Best regards,
Paul
Some will profit, while most people’s lives, living standards and environment take a big hit
Paul Driessen
October 2020
Some 90% of all US wells are now hydraulically fractured. Fracked wells in shale formations open up vast supplies of oil, natural gas and petroleum liquids that previously were locked up and inaccessible. Fracking conventional wells expands and prolongs production, leaving less energy in the ground. Continue Reading →
A big thank you to all our visitors for pushing up our traffic numbers. We’re delighted to see so many people (in New Zealand and overseas) curious about climate and policy. Continue Reading →
Our atmosphere and climate 2020 (pdf, 8.74 MB)
The latest climate report from the Ministry for the Environment is quickly distracted. The first page includes Maori creation myths that dismiss normal science. For a climate report, it’s preoccupied by spiritual speculations from unknown poets who laboured to describe the world with their eyes shut.
We know this sort of philosophical song-writing from the English tradition, though Christian stories make them more accessible than this. The waffle is deeply opaque when crafted in Maori that’s unintelligible to most of us, as surveys clearly show few speak it well. Continue Reading →
Just a few days before the election, and here’s a copy of the latest Green Party newsletter ramping up the attack on our farming communities. New Zealand farming is productive, virtuous and widely admired, but you’d never hear that from the Greens. Continue Reading →
Thomas Sowell explains in a video:
Slavery is a very big subject. I have in my home an entire bookcase of nothing but books about slavery in various parts of the world and various times in history. Continue Reading →
Barry Brill, lawyer, former cabinet minister, captain of industry, formidable student of public policy and chairman of the NZCSC, thought back in March the impact of the Level-4 lock-down cure would be about 30 times worse than the disease itself. Real data now shows it was 190 times worse. It prevented perhaps 1000 deaths at a cost of $NZ8.5m for each year of life saved, which was a startling increase in the usually accepted value of $NZ45,000 for a Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY).
The Australian BUSINESS REVIEW reports:
New Zealand’s hard lockdown policy is thought to have prevented the deaths of 1000 people at a cost of $NZ8.5m ($7.8m) for each year of life saved, according to a new analysis casting doubt on the effectiveness of Victoria’s extended shutdown.
Our daughter and her two boys have been stuck for five months living with us, since they were visiting from Burma (Myanmar) when the NZ lockdown began on 26 March. Her partner has been trying to get out of Burma, where they’ve lived for a few years, and now hopes to connect with a direct NZ flight due to depart Seoul next month. Continue Reading →
James Shaw, Minister for Climate Change, says the Green Party’s clean energy plan would run New Zealand on the energy nature provides. Continue Reading →
New Zealanders are more satisfied with the Government’s efforts to combat climate change than they were a year ago, but fewer than half actually rate the effort as good.
Last month’s IAG poll didn’t ask people what they might pay to fix climate change — and shame on them, for previous surveys show very low willingness. Families must be fed, so there’s little sense of climate change urgency. Thirty-one percent were more concerned about the effects of climate change on them than about any influence they might have on climate change.
Continue Reading →
Reposted from Electroverse
Chilled-out Greenland polar bear. A good, cold summer and the best fur coat money can buy.
It’s mid-summer over there, but yesterday’s deluge more than doubles the previous August record. Continue Reading →
Tread lightly.
My tolerance is finished.
I never inquired whether you were LGBTQ, or whatever acronym you call yourself, until you started shoving it down my throat and teaching it to my children. Continue Reading →
Three things stand out about the climate crisis. The climate crisis is:
Apart from that, it’s all perfectly reasonable [sarcasm alert]. Continue Reading →
For decades, scientists have published papers knocking pieces off the IPCC climate narrative. By now there are thousands of contrary papers, and the irony is that many of them pay homage to the distorted IPCC climate narrative before knocking a hole in it. Continue Reading →
I received a reply a month ago. See below the horizontal line.
Our letter to Dr Rod Carr, Chairman, Climate Change Commission Secretariat.
Dr Michael Kelly likens New Zealand’s Zero Carbon project to digging a hole while someone else fills it in.
Say the government has decided it’s an important national project, so they assign a platoon of 50 strong men and play trumpet fanfares so they’ll give it their maximum effort. But we discover China has amassed several battalions, totalling over 6000 men, to fill the trench faster than we can dig it. Continue Reading →
Turn the coal, oil and gas right back on, Mr Shaw.
The Green Party’s Clean Energy Plan released yesterday announces they want to save the world by eliminating crude oil from our lives. They haven’t asked whether we want this, but surely James Shaw’s heart is in the right place because he says they want to “create a truly sustainable Aotearoa that runs on the energy nature provides.”
I can only agree. “Yes, Mother Nature provides fossil fuels. We should use them. James Shaw for king.” Continue Reading →
Originally published by NZCPR on 5 July 2020.
Republished with permission.
On 3 June, Prime Minister Ardern told the House: “I have proudly made Captain’s Calls all the way through and it is one of the reasons, alongside our Team of Five Million, we are the envy of the world.”
Is New Zealand’s Covid-19 track record really the envy of the world? And did Ms Ardern’s Captain’s Calls improve or worsen the outcome? Continue Reading →
They say the Almighty has moved to New Zealand. Continue Reading →
Yes, it’s about the science, so study science. But only so we can crush the enemy. Continue Reading →
Adelie penguins wondering whether it’s safe to swim.
On Dec 29, 2007, ZeeNews reported that Adélie penguins faced extinction within five to ten years due to climate change. They quickly changed that to “locally extinct”, which means not extinct, extant.
But never mind — melting ice is making it easier for the darling Adélies to find food. Hurrah! Continue Reading →
A few days ago, Zion Lights (yes, her real name, from birth) dumped Extinction Rebellion in favour of Environmental Progress to promote nuclear power. Can’t get more contrast than that. Continue Reading →
Michael Shellenberger apologised for participating in the climate scare. Among the sites posting his lengthy apology was Forbes. Continue Reading →
They have no evidence.
The Internet is now loud with doubt about man-made global warming. You can find articles all over the place sceptical of the idea, where once there was widespread accord on the UN climate narrative that accuses humanity of dangerous interference with the climate.
Thirty years since the first Assessment Report, science has certainly advanced. As it should, we’ve spent plenty on it: the 2015 Paris Agreement alone, according to Bjorn Lomborg, will increase global spending on climate change to one or two trillion US dollars a year by 2030.
We’ve learned more about the climate system and human emissions. For all their lack of skill, the inscrutable climate models have greatly improved. They have been adjusted downwards after every Assessment Report to avoid persistently high temperatures, but over 97% of them (111 of 114 models) still run too hot. Continue Reading →
Jarrod Gilbert, NZ Herald, 22 January, says:
Based on all of the information available to us, there is no sound argument against the existence of anthropogenic climate change, only ignorance of the scientific consensus and an arrogance to argue against it – often by people armed only with an elementary education and an internet connection.
When you have highly educated scientists amassed on one side, it’s prudent to stick with their assessment of matters relating to science. If you want to understand how to be a complete twonk, seek notes from those peddling the other side. But for science, definitely stick with the scientists.
It’s a bit early for arguments against its existence. Continue Reading →
Published by permission. First published in The Critic July/August 2020
The vast sums spent in the UK and globally on climate change mitigation have never been subject to a rigorous cost-benefit analysis. To date they have had no measurable impact on the climate, let alone climate change and have thus been a colossal waste of money. Recent events have shown us that climate change is just one of many challenges facing our world today, so it is sensible to ask for every pound spent on climate change, how much money should be set aside to prepare us for other threats: Carrington events (solar electromagnetic storms), pandemics, global financial collapse, volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis and more? What is the appropriate level of global insurance, and where is the insurance for poorer countries? Continue Reading →
Todd Muller supports a socialist wrecker — is that wise?
Some National Party strategists think Todd Muller can hardly say he supports the Zero Carbon Act then do nothing about it. Sooner or later you must accept that National has agreed to the Zero Carbon Bill as a matter of policy and therefore has to show some acceptance of its obligations.
But the implied condition of support for any proposal is that the assumptions behind it remain true. If it emerges that the basis of a policy is wrong, it then becomes the height of reason to withdraw your support. The new honourable path is to abandon it.
Our good friend Bryan Leyland wrote this hard-hitting article describing correspondence he had with the newly-formed NZ Climate Change Commission. [Download the correspondence file here (pdf, 536 KB).] He’s been engaged on a dogged search for evidence that human activity dangerously heats the earth. Everyone says the evidence is “overwhelming” but when you ask them nobody actually has any, which strikes us as a confidence trick. He offers us the article in hopes of the widest possible distribution, because everyone’s asking: “What is the evidence?”
NOTE ON THE COMING ELECTION: If you think setting up this commission and hiking the ETS carbon price is bad, wait for the next three years of government by these backward-looking, anti-farming, communist wreckers.
— by Bryan Leyland, Consulting Engineer
Member, NZ Climate Science Coalition
The Climate Commission claims, “We provide independent, evidence-based advice to Government to help Aotearoa New Zealand transition to a low-emissions and climate-resilient economy.”
Spending huge amounts of money on a low-emissions economy is only justified if proof exists that man-made greenhouse gases cause dangerous global warming. If there’s no evidence there’s no need for the transition. Continue Reading →
It is futile if we can’t afford it. The UK can’t afford it, so don’t try to convert these costs, just think “we can’t afford it either.” It might take your mind off the sheer futility of this Zero Carbon agony.
Waterproof engineering analysis from Professor Michael Kelly
– first published at CapX
How powerful this myth of causing climate change has become — or rather, how the powerful have made this myth to flourish.
The world of superfast computing and miraculous hand-held devices that most of us now take for granted did not appear by accident. It was the product of a very clear roadmap, agreed across the electronics industry from 1970 to 2015. An equally clear and widely agreed roadmap will be essential to achieving the target of a net-zero emission global economy in 2050.
Intel founder Gordon Moore’s empirical observation that the transistor count on chips was doubling every two years, while the chips stayed the same size, morphed into an industry-wide target that held for nearly 50 years. By the mid-1980s, a Technology Roadmap became a feature of the whole industry. Continue Reading →
(All right, all right! Leave off with the double negative put-downs already!)
Reader:
Looking at the recent geological (let’s say prehistoric) record then the exogenous inputs (mainly from volcanism) seem to have been low relative to historic exogenous inputs (mainly from agricultural soil organic matter breakdown and fossil fuel burning), which means that the two eras are not comparable and so conclusions drawn from one cannot be applied to the other.
Yet the IPCC does exactly that. They rip an isolated fact from its primeval context and claim it applies today. But it flies in the face of copious evidence and asserts that the global mean surface temperature (GMST) is determined by only a single factor: the trace gas carbon dioxide. For instance, on p. 50, the AR5 Technical Summary harks back 52 million years to inform us: Continue Reading →
We might call it the Barcelona Effect (see below), though the Bible puts it differently. The essence of religious belief was given elegant form for all religions over 1900 years ago in the book of Hebrews (11, 1):
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (King James Bible, Hebrews 11:1).
This compassionate assurance has lent solace to countless generations in pain, soothed quaking hearts and granted peace to restless minds, yet such an evidence-free belief is repugnant to science, to which we readily turn for answers in all other matters. The scientist, whether religious or atheistic, possesses an indelible faith in tangible evidence, mathematics and logic. A deficit in any of those absolutely prohibits acceptance of a thesis. Continue Reading →
Reposted from NZCPR Newsletter. Emphasis added.
In a speech in November 2000, the former Labour Party Prime Minister David Lange warned that if governments attempted to accommodate the increasingly audacious demands for sovereignty by the Maori tribal elite, they would end up threatening democracy itself.
“Democratic government can accommodate Maori political aspiration in many ways. It can allocate resources in ways which reflect the particular interests of Maori people. It can delegate authority, and allow the exercise of degrees of Maori autonomy. What it cannot do is acknowledge the existence of a separate sovereignty. As soon as it does that, it isn’t a democracy. We can have a democratic form of government or we can have indigenous sovereignty. They can’t coexist and we can’t have them both.” Continue Reading →
Click to enlarge
This 1912 newspaper article (right) shows that a century ago the worthy citizens of Warkworth were followers of Svante Arrhenius’s new theory that global warming would be caused by mankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases.
Forty years earlier Tyndall had identified CO2 as a greenhouse gas. Arrhenius followed up with newly available data in 1896 and calculated that doubling CO2 would increase temperatures by 5°C or 6°C. In 1906 he reduced it to 4.0°C.
Arrhenius is frequently cited by warmsters chiding sceptics for their lack of belief, telling them, “Science has known about dangerous warming for 120 years.” But science knew nothing of dangerous warming, because Arrhenius showed none. He was free of the modern pathological aversion to carbon dioxide (the gas of life) because he saw no reason to object to it. Continue Reading →
A recent article on Stuff looks at the effects of high levels of carbon dioxide on brain function and suggests that the minuscule annual increases of one or two parts per million in CO2 levels will make it harder to reason. But it’s highly improbable because atmospheric levels are nowhere near those required to disrupt our thinking.
“High concentrations of carbon dioxide reduces [sic] oxygen to the brain and dulls our thinking – so what happens if we continue to burn fossil fuels indiscriminately?”
“FATAL FLAWS”
As the new abortion laws were being rushed through Parliament in the week before we went into Lockdown 4, and while most of the world was focused on COVID-19 and how we could save lives, one of the things that the Government did very well (aided by a predominantly pro-abortion media) was to mask the true intent and effect of the law change, and to shut down any debate (including oral submissions) and amendments which would have made it slightly less extreme.
And because Continue Reading →
Did you notice? Four days ago our civil rights were unceremoniously rescinded. Jacinda the Rescinder (openly communist) accomplished it without consultation, without advance notice, without apology and rammed through the House in a week.
She even told us she was doing us a favour, saving us from COVID-19, in the best tradition of power-grabbers everywhere. Continue Reading →
Ever wondered what’s inside the famous Tesla battery? More batteries. Thousands.
— by Dr Michael Kelly,
University of Cambridge, UK.
May, 2020.
Next time you stand for 90 seconds filling your petrol tank, you might think of the enormous energy flow. Chemical energy is entering your tank at typically 17 million joules per second, or a gigantic 17 megawatts.
That’s equivalent to the energy given off by 17,000 one-bar electric heaters (imagine 6 tennis courts covered in them) or 24 hours of average power consumption (24 kWh) for 700 New Zealand households. A full tank (about 1,500 megawatts) would run those 700 houses for three full months. Continue Reading →
Professor S. Fred Singer has died, aged 95. Continue Reading →
Associate Professor Janet Stephenson says a few thoughtful things on Newsroom. Here’s one.
When it comes to re-starting New Zealand’s economy, we can’t afford to have a mind-set of ‘we’ll do whatever it takes’. That would just lock us back into those train tracks that head to a future in which everyone loses.
Dear Professor Stephenson,
You said on Newsroom yesterday that our economy “threatens life on this planet.”
Perhaps you’ve made a careful examination and you’ve actually found reasons to justify that alarming statement. I should assume that’s the case, though about half the country appears to disagree with you, which to my mind suggests you explain exactly why we’re so dangerous. Regrettably, your article overlooked that part. Continue Reading →
By Mike Hosking, 22 April, 2020. Reposted with gratitude.
Mike — common sense for all.
About the most futile of all the futile nonsense that has gone on during this mess is the seemingly never-ending and yet ultimately wasteful attempt by the climate change obsessives to convince us this is all good.
How many stories have we had of how the air quality has improved? As if to show or tell us what? If you do nothing, if you lock everyone away and close an economy you can improve the environment? Do you suspect anyone above the age of six could not have worked that out? Is having a pollution disappear because we are all indoors really a victory? Continue Reading →
Associate Professor Janet Stephenson, University of Otago, made a remarkable statement today in Newsroom.
The current nationwide pause as a result of Covid-19 is an extraordinary opportunity, and probably the only one we will get, to redesign our economy so that it no longer threatens life on this planet.
We could agree there’s a nationwide pause in the Covid-19 crisis as our leaders consider our options. Continue Reading →