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 →
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 →
How did God’s Own Country miss out on so many interesting terrifying creatures? Seems Australia got them all.
PM Morrison warns of health risks from China’s wet markets. He should also check Wuhan virus labs and cull fruit bats in Australia. Continue Reading →
Have an election today and the government would bolt in, primarily because of Jacinda’s star power induced by the media’s obsession with her. But the election is six months away and then, I’m picking a change of government. Continue Reading →
By
“Gatebreaker” is a word I use to describe a special kind of document that until recently has been few and far between. It is a one or two-page non-technical refutation of a specific alarmist argument. It is something a student or citizen can use to confront an alarmist gatekeeper, hence the name gatebreaker. I wrote about the need for gatebreakers several years ago.
The Heartland Institute has just published a whopping 22 gatebreakers, with more promised. This is a true wealth of important skeptical material, unlike anything we have seen before. My dream is coming true. Continue Reading →
The Supermarket Social Distancing aid — a two-metre hula hoop.
so you don’t have to
In our supermarket visits, fellow shoppers constantly infringe on our two social metres of separation, so I’ve devised a simple, inexpensive and easily-procured solution.
Sitting comfortably on the head and waist bands, the Keep-Off Social Distancer leaves your hands free to select the items you need.
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If Hone Harawira can do it, we can all do it.
When will the police ask Harawira what authority he has to set up “checkpoints” on our public roads?
He claims he is somehow authorised to demand our reasons for travel and if those reasons don’t meet his approval, he’ll close the road. Continue Reading →
Letter to the Editor
17 March 2020
Planes parked up, cruise ships anchored, airports deserted, tourists not touring, supermarket shelves bare, Disneyland shut, borders closing, motor races cancelled, no fans in the stands, smelters and factories closing, travel banned, oil and coal prices crashing, stock markets plunging, businesses closing, bankruptcies rising, hotels and motels unoccupied, politicians panicking, barbies cold — looks like zero emissions is almost here.
Viv Forbes
Washpool Qld Australia
Matt Ridley gives practical advice so we in New Zealand might appreciate a detached analysis in what has quickly but unjustifiably become a maelstrom. – RT
In the 19th century Ignaz Semmelweis was vilified and ostracised when he tried to make doctors wash their hands after doing autopsies on women who had died from childbirth fever before going straight upstairs to deliver more babies. We have come a long way since then in public health, but we can go much further still. Continue Reading →
The Labour-Green Coalition Government published the discussion document Our Climate Your Say (“the Consultation Document”) in 2018 to pave the way for the Zero Carbon Bill that received Royal assent on 13 November, 2019. Robin Grieve, of Whangarei, studied the document and was disturbed to discover scientific errors, political bias and propaganda. He raised his complaints with Vicky Robertson, Secretary for the Environment. She replied but didn’t take her department’s ethical breaches seriously.
When it comes to accuracy, political neutrality and inspiring the nation to save the planet, just how badly must a public servant behave to earn a manager’s rebuke? By normal standards, addressing the parade of fiction in the Zero Carbon campaign should never have waited on a complaint from outside the organisation. It should have been dealt with firmly in-house.
Robin escalated the matter to the State Services Commissioner, Peter Hughes, who has instigated an investigation of the Consultation Document with reference to state services integrity, ethics and standards. Continue Reading →
Does Greenpeace expect us to accept their numbers without demur? To accept the cause they suggest? When can we question the researchers? A few inquiries raise serious questions about the study’s credibility. This is how the story begins on the Greenpeace website, with the headline shown in the screen grab:
February 10, 2020 – Scientists surveying chinstrap penguin colonies in the Antarctic have found drastic reductions in many colonies, with some declining by as much as 77 percent since they were last surveyed almost 50 years ago.
The independent researchers, on a Greenpeace expedition to the region, found that every single colony surveyed on Elephant Island, an important habitat northeast of the Antarctic Peninsula, had declined. The number of chinstrap penguins on Elephant Island has dropped almost 60 percent since the last survey in 1971, with a total count of only 52,786 breeding pairs of chinstrap penguins, plummeting from previous survey estimates of around 122,550 pairs. Continue Reading →
My last communication to James Renwick was July last year. I said this:
Eventfinda are advertising your presentation in Nelson in August called “Climate Emergency”. What does it mean? What data does it rest on? What makes it an emergency? If you’re not too busy I hope you can help.
Here is a letter I sent this evening to Dame Anne Salmond, anthropologist and historian, Professor in Maori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland, and 2013 New Zealander of the Year. An opinion piece she wrote on climate change in Stuff today considers climate sceptics beneath an honest anthropologist’s contempt.
Dear Dame Anne,
You expressed pride in a letter you signed ten years ago describing climate sceptics as “climate deniers”, even though ‘sceptical’ has long been a deeply admired virtue of all good scientists. Continue Reading →
A brain-dead editorial, a fresh view of CO2, an amazing letter, the kitten and the blue whale.
An editorial in Tuesday’s Herald ($) begins:
Amazing that he somehow knows what is discussed not only in “most households” but in “other social gatherings,” though it sounds to me like projection. The editorial goes on to conflate our discoloured sky, the scale of the bush fire outbreaks and the heat at the Melbourne cricket as reasons we ought not doubt we’re causing dangerous warming. It says we not only saw but felt the heat of the bush fires in New Zealand (which, 1200 km away, pushes the barrow a mite far). Preposterously, it ends: “The sun was so sizzling it became a wonder anything combustible was not catching fire.” But maybe Auntie Herald was trying to crack a funny. Continue Reading →
Click to read the letters.
The Herald printed these letters on Saturday. Here is the letter (now slightly altered) I sent them that day, still unpublished as far as I know. The word count had to be under 200 words.
One cannot say much in just 200 words, but newspapers make it harder by not allowing multiple replies to multiple letters. Hence my achievement in replying to four letters, with extreme brevity, in the presence of the enemy and under fire from letter-writers on the one hand and journalists on the other, surely all but deserves the VC. Though some will demur. Continue Reading →
Once a year the BBC invites guest editors onto Radio 4 to assemble the Today programme. The latest batch includes Greta Thunberg, the child climate activist, and Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher biographer and former Telegraph editor.
Professor Michael Kelly
Moore gave a spot on the programme to our friend Michael Kelly, Cambridge Professor of Engineering, Fellow of the Royal Society, Prince Philip Professor of Technology, former chief scientific advisor to the Department for Communities and Local Government, and member of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Introducing Kelly’s segment [at 32:22], Charles Moore observes wryly:
One of the subjects that’s very difficult to air on the BBC if you don’t share the prevailing view is climate change.
The Power of the Torch
There can be few if any races who for so long were able to practice the delights of incendiarism.
Geoffrey Blainey “Triumph of the Nomads – A History of Ancient Australia.” (Macmillan 1975)
The fire-lighter was the most powerful tool that early humans brought to Australia.
Fires lit by aboriginal men and women created the landscape of Australia. They used fire to create and fertilise fresh new grass for the grazing animals that they hunted, to trap and roast grass-dwelling reptiles and rodents, to fight enemies, to send smoke signals, to fell dead trees for camp fires, to ward off frosts and biting insects, and for religious and cultural ceremonies. Their fires created and maintained grasslands and open forests and extinguished all flora and fauna unable to cope with frequent burn-offs. Continue Reading →
James Shaw, Minister for Climate Change, appoints new Climate Lords to the NZ Climate Change Commission. The NZ Climate Science Coalition says it contravenes the legislation that spawned the Commission. This is the NZCSC press release.
From the desk of Chairman, Barry Brill, OBE
Email: barry.brill@gmail.com
Climate Change Commission ”Fatally Undermined” by Appointment of Careerists and Campaigners
The potential credibility and standing of the Climate Change Commission announced by Minister James Shaw has been fatally undermined by the inclusion of four full-time climate change careerists and campaigners, according to the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.
Continue Reading →
A few days ago Drs Roy Spencer and John Christy published updated graphs they first presented to a Heartland conference in July. Roy says:
I keep getting asked about our charts comparing the CMIP5 models to observations, old versions of which are still circulating, so it could be I have not been proactive enough at providing updates to those. Since I presented some charts at the Heartland conference in D.C. in July summarizing the latest results we had as of that time, I thought I would reproduce those here. Continue Reading →
