Perhaps one of the most significant statements of 2023 made by one of our rulers came from the universally-respected United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres. In 2022 he warned us it was‘code red for humanity’ due to supposed anthropogenic global warming:
Then this year climate expert, Mr Guterres, upped the rhetoric when he claimed: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”
This summer we’ve been told that July was the hottest on record and we’ve been deluged with reports of ‘apocalyptic’ wildfires in the Mediterranean, the U.S., Hawaii and Canada. So, perhaps Mr Guterres and the climate catastrophists are right? Perhaps we are all destined to die in a planetary fireball caused by our selfish use of CO2-emitting fossil fuels?
However, being a person of a slightly cynical disposition, I googled “2023 record cold”. Here are just some of the results:
An astonishing -62.4°C was recorded in Tongulakh, Siberia on January 14th. In addition to becoming Earth’s coldest temperature recorded in 2023, the all-time station record was broken in Tongulakh
On Feb 4, 2023, the Halifax airport in Nova Scotia saw its coldest wind chills ever recorded, with temperature plummeted to -43°C (-45.4°F). This tops its previous record of -41°C that was set on 13 February 1967 for wind chill. Many other places across Canada also set new daily records, with temperatures lower than -40°C. On Feb 19, temperatures in Shepherd Bay, Nunavut dropped to -49.6°C (-57.3°F)
The United Kingdom on Tuesday, March 7, braved its coldest night of the year 2023 with the temperatures dropping to below -15 Celsius in several regions. According to Independent, a UK news portal, the British Met Office revealed that the temperature at Kinbrace in the Scottish Highlands was recorded at -15.2 celsius, making it the coldest March in the country since 2010
The summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire reported a wind-chill low of minus 78 Celsius (minus 108 Fahrenheit) — the coldest temperature ever recorded in the United States. Meanwhile, the National Weather Service (NWS) in Caribou, Maine, said it received reports of “frostquakes.” “Just like earthquakes, [they] generate tremors, thundering sensations. These are caused by sudden cracks in frozen soil or underground water when it’s very cold,“
In Boston, where officials closed down the public school system on Friday due to the impending freeze, the low temperature hit -23C (-10 F), shattering the day’s record set more than a century ago, the National Weather Service (NWS) said. In Providence, Rhode Island, the mercury dropped to -23C (-9F), well below the previous all-time low of -19C (-2F), set in 1918. The arctic blast flowing into the US from eastern Canada also brought record lows to Albany, New York; Augusta, Maine; Rochester, New York; and Worcester, Massachusetts, among other places
Sydney experienced its coldest June morning on record on Monday, with a minimum temperature of 1.8C at Olympic Park, according to Miriam Bradbury, a senior meteorologist at the Bureau of Meteorology. If you thought the temperatures this month were a little chillier than normal, your feelings are spot on. May 2023 was, as meteorologists might say, really cold. In fact, more than 100 weather stations across Australia have registered their coldest May minimum temperatures on record – with regular frosts, snowfall, and below-average rainfall to boot
Thursday 1 June saw potentially the lowest June temperature on record in Finland. A weather station in Lapland, Enontekiö Kilpisjärvi Saana, reached -7.7C. This may not seem that cold for northern Finland, where winter temperatures reach as low as -51.5C, but the last time Lapland saw a minimum temperature of -7C in June was on 3 June 1962
Extreme cold has arrived abnormally early in Antarctica, with temperatures dropping to below -75°C from the beginning of May. Following the onset of polar night, winter has started at the South Pole, and with it glacial cold at the Russian research station of Vostok. As early as May 5th a low of -75°C was recorded, while just days ago this fell further to -76.4°C. This marks a new record for the early winter, daily highs are also plummeting, often just below -70°C on the Earth’s coldest continent
A sudden and unexpected surge of cold Arctic air has engulfed several regions of South America, shattering numerous cold records in its wake. Although it is currently summer in the southern hemisphere, including parts of South America such as Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and parts of Brazil, some areas have experienced a drastic and rapid shift in weather, going from a heat wave to frost in less than a week. On February 18, 2023, most of the cities in Paraguay experienced a sharp drop in temperature, breaking their previous records for minimum temperatures. The temperatures ranged between 7 and 16°C (44.6 – 60.8°F) across the country, with the lowest readings recorded in the southeast. The lowest temperature was 7.7 °C (45.9 °F), which is just 0.7 °C (1.2 °F) from the national record low for the month of February. The extreme cold weather caused at least 30 cities in Argentina to break their monthly cold records on the same day
I think that covers most of the Earth’s continents. In fact, I suspect that whichever weather phenomenon you chose – hot or cold, wet or dry – I imagine that if you googled that weather condition and the words ‘2023 record’, you’d find several places on our planet which had record levels in 2023.
I must be getting old and my memory must be failing. While I get the impression we have been bombarded with horror stories about wildfires and an overheating Earth, I can’t remember the BBC or C4 News or any other parts of the mainstream media spending as much time and effort reporting these record cold temperatures as they have spent hyperventilating over their many stories of supposed ‘record hot temperatures’ and ‘Earth on fire’ supposedly caused by man-made global warming.
Could our net-zero-obsessed rulers and their sycophantically-obedient mainstream media be trying to manipulate us into cravenly accepting our own supposedly ‘climate-saving’ impoverishment? Surely, not!
In my last blog, I featured a chart from Bjørn Lomborg, author of several books including THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST, showing that despite decreasing areas of the planet being burnt by wildfires, the number of times wildfires were mentioned by the mainstream media was increasing. This rather suggests a media-fueled scare campaign which has nothing to do with the actual prevalence of wildfires:
I have just noticed that this chart has been supposedly ‘factchecked’ and found to be ‘misleading’:
Here’s part of the explanation given by the supposed ‘factcheckers’: ‘While true that the world as a whole is seeing fewer burned areas, this is not true for all regions. In places like the United States, the extent of wildfires is increasing. More and more forest is being lost, and as inhabited areas are expanding into the wild, risks of ignition and the harms connected with wildfires are increasing. Meanwhile, climate change is exerting upward pressure on fire globally by increasing the frequency and intensity of weather conditions fit for fires to happen. The posts on social media do not take any of this into account. Therefore, we have marked this claim as misleading’.
Do I need to explain the stupidity of this ‘factcheck’?
Firstly the ‘factcheck’ admits ‘that the world as a whole is seeing fewer burned areas’
The ‘factcheck’ then says ‘this is not true for all regions’. OK, but if some regions have more burnt area and the total burnt area is decreasing as the ‘factcheck’ admits, then some areas must be having significantly less burnt area
The ‘factcheck’ claims ‘In places like the United States, the extent of wildfires is increasing’. This may be true of the last few years, but the area burnt in the U.S. is tiny compared to the area burnt in the boiling hot 1920s and 1930s when atmospheric CO2 levels were around 100 ppm (parts per million) lower than they are today:
The ‘factcheck’ admits ‘as inhabited areas are expanding into the wild, risks of ignition and the harms connected with wildfires are increasing’. OK, this means that many of the wildfires are due to extended human habitation and nothing to do with supposed climate change
The ‘factcheck’ ends by claiming ‘climate change is exerting upward pressure on fire globally by increasing the frequency and intensity of weather conditions fit for fires to happen. If that’s true, then why does the ‘factcheck’ admit ‘the world as a whole is seeing fewer burned areas’?
I admire the climate catastrophists’ increasingly complicated mental contortions as they try to turn everything into proof that we are facing climate Armageddon when the facts suggest that the opposite is true.
The West’s predicted civilisational decline
And while we’re on the subject of mass stupidity, here’s a simple model of civilisational rise and fall:
Sir John Glubb warned us
I’m now going to repeat the description of civilisational collapse I used in a blog last year.
In his analysis of past civilisations – FATE OF EMPIRES, military commander and historian Sir John Glubb described the final phase of each civilisation as follows:
“Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanatics and other negative behaviours and attitudes suffuse the population. Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust. A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizens, fostering a fatal opposition of interests between haves and have-nots. The majority lives for bread and circuses (panem et circusem); they worship celebrities instead of divinities…. throw off social and moral restraints — especially sexuality; shirk duties but insist on entitlements.”
Although this was written almost fifty years ago, I think you’ll agree that every single word of the above accurately describes the West today:
Point 1:“Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanatics and other negative behaviours and attitudes suffuse the population
Absolutely correct. Of the above list, I’d like to highlight ‘narcissism’ as I suggest that the whole woke nonsense of climate-catastrophism and multiple genders and micro-aggressions, critical race theory and much else, which is tearing our countries apart, is just a form of fanatical, virtue-signalling, nihilistic narcissism.
Point 2: Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust.
Absolutely correct – just look at the bunch of lying, incompetent, scheming, self-enriching cowards running the UK. Or the senile basket-case of a US president. Or the rotten corrupt, self-serving EU. Or the totally corrupt international organisations like the United Nations or the World Health Organisation.
Point 3:A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizens, fostering a fatal opposition of interests between haves and have-nots.
During Covid, the world’s billionaires have become massively richer while the rest of us have been burdened with huge rises in national debts the repayment of which we and our children and their children will be taxed for generations to come. Moreover, the elites are forcing their ludicrous ‘net zero’ greeny agenda on the rest of us, impoverishing our lives while they enjoy the privilege of jetting around the world to lecture on us on why we should be happy giving up many of those very things which make life worth living
Point 4:The majority lives for bread and circuses (panem et circusem); they worship celebrities instead of divinities
You only need to look at the endless stream of z-list supposed celebs on cooking or dancing or reality TV shows and see how many millions follow the inane twitterings of their social media heroes.
Point 5:The majority shirk duties but insist on entitlements.
With one in five Brits claiming they are disabled, with hundreds of thousands of Third-Worlders flooding into European countries with the most generous welfare systems and over two million crossing into the US since cognitively-challenged Joe Biden was wheeled into the White House unaware of where he was, why he was there and what day of the week it was, I hardly need to comment on this. Though I’ll mention Milton Friedman who famously once said something like, “you cannot simultaneously have open borders and a welfare state” (1999). This is something our open-borders-loving rulers don’t seem to understand.
Well, hopefully that will cheer you all up this weekend. As for me, I’ll be watching the women’s world cup as I was surprised at how entertaining the Australia vs England clash was.
UN Secretary-General, Antonio ‘the clown’ Guterres, helpfully informed us in 2022 that due to climate change it was ‘code red for humanity’. Then this year, the (IMHO) useless clod upped the rhetoric claiming that we’re now in the era of ‘global boiling‘. I imagine we’re all waiting with baited breath to find out what this idiot will be saying next year – perhaps ‘global scorching’ or maybe ‘earth on fire’ or possibly (the biblical reference) ‘global burning fiery furnace’? Who knows?
However, two areas of the Earth which don’t seem to have got the memo from Gormless Guterres are the two main ice caps. The Arctic sea ice at 19,20o km³ only represents about 0.06% of the Earth’s ice volume. The most significant accumulations of ice are the Antarctic with about 85% of the Earth’s ice and Greenland with around 13% of the planet’s ice. If all the ice in the Antarctic were to melt as the planet boils, that could raise sea levels by an impressive 58 metres. If Greenland’s ice were to melt as the planet boils, that would raise sea levels by about 8 metres. Given the catastrophic effect a major ice melt would have on our world, it might be worth checking what is actually happening to the two main ice accumulations in our ‘boiling’ world.
Antarctic still pretty cold
In 2004, the UK government’s former chief scientific adviser, Professor Sir David King, was quoted as having suggested that by the endo of this century – in just 77 years – the Antarctic would be the only habitable continent:
However, satellite data suggests that Professor Sir David may have been a little premature in his predictions because the trend for Antarctic ice suggests a gradual increase over the last 42 years of around 5,000 km³ per year in the winter and 3,000 km³ per year in the summer:
(left-click on image, then left-click again to see more clearly)
There does seem to have been a dip in Antarctic ice extent around 2017 to 2019. But this followed an above-average quantity in the period from 2012 to 2015, so cannot be seen as a trend. Astonishingly, as our planet supposedly boils, the planet’s largest ice mass keeps increasing.
Greenland not getting any greener
Meanwhile, up north in Greenland, the Petermann Glacier has advanced 13.4 km since August 2012. Here’s how it looked in 2012:
And here’s a more recent image with a line added to show the increase in the last 10-11 years:
Overall, the quantity of ice in Greenland this year seems to be above the exceptionally low year 2019 and also slightly above 2020, 2021 and the mean for 1981-2010:
But it’s below 2017, 2018 and 2022. which suggests that as the planet has moved from ‘code red for humanity’ to ‘global boiling’, Greenland’s ice cover hasn’t really changed that much. If anything, there may be a slight increase, especially compared to the 1981-2010 mean.
This is all very confusing. Perhaps the inimitable Björn Lomborg best summed up the discrepancy between what our rulers and their sycophantic media tell us and what’s really happening when he showed the difference between the area of the Earth consumed by wildfires compared to the number of times wildfires were mentioned in the mainstream media:
It may seem that the less evidence there is of global warming, the more hyperbolic our hyperventilating elites and media become.
In the Sunday Times this weekend there was an article about illegal migrants. The journalists wrote: ‘Preventing people from arriving in the first place was the rationale behind Britain moving border controls to France in the early 2000s. This decision helped reduce asylum applications from a peak of 103,000 in 2002, to 28,000 in 2006’.
Oh dear. How easy it seems to be to fool (IMHO) numerically-challenged Sunday Times journalists. Here’s a simple chart from page 101 of my 2008 book SQUANDERED: How Gordon Brown is wasting over one trillion pounds of our money:
(left-click on image, then left-click again to see more clearly)
Assuming you’re not an innumerate Sunday Times journalist, you’ll see that asylum applications did fall between 2002 and 2006 as the journalists write. But you’ll also see that UK citizenships granted shot up between 2002 and 2006 from around 80,000 a year to about 160,000 a year. Basically Blair fooled us all by instructing useless Home Office officials to shower illegal migrants with British citizenships providing they didn’t register as asylum seekers. This sleight of hand made it look like asylum-seeker numbers were falling when, in fact, they were just being hidden by huge numbers of migrants being given citizenship.
It’s a bit disappointing that 15 years after I exposed Blair’s deceit, supposedly serious journalists from a supposedly serious newspaper are still taken in by Tony’s tricks.
‘Horse dewormer’ not so bad after all
While we’re on the subject of our rulers lying to us, here’s a story you won’t see in any of the mainstream media. Doctors are now free to prescribe ivermectin to treat COVID-19, a lawyer representing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said this week.
You might not remember Ivermectin. So let me remind you. At the start of the Chinese lab-leaked plague, several doctors recommended Ivermectin as a potentially effective treatment. Immediately there was a mysteriously widespread campaign in the mainstream media lambasting Ivermectin as a ‘horse dewormer’. In an October 2021 blog I wrote: Merck already signed a deal with the US Government back in June for $1.2bn for 1,700,000 courses of Molnupiravir. So Merck had quite a lot of cash riding on Molnupiravir’s success. Analysts believe that Merck could earn over $7bn from Molnupiravir and that it could be one of the most lucrative drugs ever produced (apart from heroine and cocaine, of course).
I added: There have been well-publicised stories of some Americans taking veterinary Ivermectin and being seriously ill or even dying. What these shock, horror stories tend not to mention is that Ivermectin is an approved drug for humans: “Ivermectin is approved for human use to treat infections caused by some parasitic worms and head lice and skin conditions like rosacea”. Moreover, when shrieking about the dangers of taking Ivermectin, the media tend to not mention that over 3.7 billion doses have been safely administered to humans over the last 40 or so years.
Furthermore I warned: Ivermectin is out of patent and only costs around $1 to $2 for a course of treatment whereas Molnupiravir is supposedly a new drug and is therefore protected by patent and costs about $700 for a course of treatment.
Here are (I believe) the chemical formulas for the two antivirals:
Molnupiravir C13H19N3O7
Ivermectin C47H72O14
I haven’t studied chemistry so I cannot comment on whether these two drugs are substantially different. But cynics might be tempted to suspect that with Molnupiravir, Merck have merely fiddled around with Ivermectin to produce something that was rather similar but yet sufficiently different to justify Molnupiravir being classed as a new (and therefore patentable and much more profitable) medicine.
I would never sink to the level of conspiracy theorists who might suggest that cynical pharma companies (especially Merck) have colluded with the FDA and the media to discredit the incredibly cheap, out-of-patent Ivermectin so that we could be sold the much more expensive, in-patent Molnupiravir plus other similar and similarly expensive new antiviral drugs which other big pharma companies were developing.
To suggest this would be to suggest that many of the 7 million who have been slaughtered by the Wuhan plague may have died unnecessarily as there was always a cheap and effective treatment (Ivermectin) available.
And now that Merck have made their billions and that the latest versions of the Wuhan plague aren’t nearly as pathogenic as the original variant, we’re told that the ‘horse dewormer’ – Ivermectin – was OK after all.
I’ve had a quote in my head for a couple of weeks – “Give a man a stick – eventually he’ll beat you with it”. I don’t know where I got it from. Professor Google doesn’t seem to know. Though I did find this when looking for the source of the quote:
I had no idea who Sadavir Errinwright is or was. But Professor Google informs me that he is a fictional character in a science fiction film set in the 24th century. I suspect the quote above was inspired by the opening scene of the 1968 film “2001 A Space Odyssey”:
So, what does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
This phrase “give a man a stick – eventually he will beat you with it” – may be one way of picturing our relationship with our ruling elites – politicians, public-sector employees (please note I don’t call them ‘civil servants’), journalists and business leaders. For most of our lifetimes, these people – politicians, public-sector employees, journalists and business leaders – have felt the need to pretend that they were acting in our best interests and we have mostly believed them. That was our supposed ‘western democratic freedom’. But our craven submission to the lies and ludicrous excesses of the Chinese lab-leaked plague lockdowns has shown these people how easy it is to manipulate us. So our relationship with them has changed. We have given them the stick – power over us – and they are using it to beat us.
As we have seen with the Covid lockdowns and accompanying destruction of our economy and are now seeing with climate change and transgenderism and open-borders immigration and woke-ism and much else, our ruling elites no longer feel the need to even pretend they are acting in our best interests. Instead they claim that they know what is best for us and intend to impose this on us whether we like it or not. The list of unpopular policies being forced on us grows by the day:
Banning the sale of gas boilers when heat pumps are totally useless for most homes
Banning the sale of petrol cars when electric milk floats pretending to be cars are totally useless for most drivers
Destroying cheap and reliable energy sources – coal, oil and gas – when supposed ‘renewables’ are unreliable and ludicrously expensive
Wrecking our economy and destroying jobs by imposing some of the world’s highest energy prices on us
Dissuading us from eating meat
Pushing into 15-minute city ghettoes
Restricting and penalising our use of the ultimate symbol of freedom – our cars
Dissuading us from travel on planes while they fly around the world lecturing us on the need to save the planet
Trying to force farmers to stop farming
Forcing females to share hospital wards, changing rooms, toilets and prisons with men who still have meat and two veg but pretend to be women
Forcing female athletes to compete against men pretending to be female
Sacking thousands of low-paid hotel workers so that hotels can be filled up with illegal, benefits-scrounging migrants
Wrecking communities by flooding them with Third-World invaders
Debanking any customer who dares to have opinions which aren’t in line with those of our increasingly B-Corp financial industry
and much much more
Maybe we idealise the past?
But perhaps our ruling elites have always beaten us with the stick we have given them. Yet the way history is written has obscured this. For example, British Empire losses in combat theaters from 1914–1918 were 876,084, which included 418,361 killed, 167,172 died of wounds, 113,173 died of disease or injury, 161,046 missing and presumed dead and 16,332 prisoner of war deaths. Yet there was probably absolutely no need for Britain to enter WWI in the first place. After all, who gives a stuff about Belgium or even France? Yet it was supposedly to protect Belgian neutrality and France that Britain went to war. We should have just let the Frogs and Krauts beat each other to a pulp and then Britain would have emerged as Europe’s richest, greatest power instead of being crippled and bankrupted by involvement in a totally unnecessary war. Nevertheless millions of young men were nudged, browbeaten and coerced into possibly sacrificing themselves in a completely unnecessary war:
Then there was WWII, in which over 384,000 British died and the British economy was wrecked yet again. This was really just a continuation of WWI. After all, it was the French Field Marshall Foch who warned at the end of WWI that the end of the war was “not a peace, it is an armistice for twenty years”. And he was only out by a couple of months.
Maybe our ruling elites have always made catastrophic mistakes which have impoverished and ruined their people while the elites got ever richer at our expense?
As I have written previously, I suggest that the period from 1945 to around 2010 was an historical anomaly – a period during which most people thought that the ruling elites acted in the best interests of the majority. But that has changed. Our ruling elites are back to their old habits of making catastrophic mistakes – believing in the nonsense of man-made climate change, that women can have penises and men can get pregnant, that multi-culturalism enriches a society, the only evil westerners practised slavery, that all colonialism was bad and that there is only one correct way of thinking about any issue.
And even though all these are complete and obvious nonsense, our ruling elites are using the stick we have given them – power over our lives – to impose their misguided, self-serving bilge on us.
First, apologies that my website disappeared for a while. It seems the company hosting my website had a complete breakdown. And as I guess most of its engineers were probably skiving at home, it took a while to fix the problem.
Is the Earth really boiling?
Last year we were told that the world was burning and the (IMHO) idiot UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, warned us that it was ‘code red for humanity’:
This year it’s apparently even worse as we supposedly experience the hottest July ‘since records began’ (though we’re never told what that actually means) and Guterres upped the ante by declaring that we’re now in the era of ‘global boiling’:
Our ever truthful, ever helpful BBC have changed the colour of their weather maps to reflect the fiery Armageddon facing us, from this:
To this:
And now, on snouts-in-the-trough, I’m pleased to bring you for the first time the latest BBC weather map:
But then I thought it might be worth checking the facts rather than the usual BBC and mainstream-media climate-catastrophist nonsense.
Here’s the latest chart based on NASA satellite data showing how much of the Earth’s land was burnt each year from 2001 to 2022:
And here’s a comparison of the burned amount (on the left chart) and the number of times wildfires get mentioned in the media (on the right chart):
Have you ever thought we’re being manipulated by our rulers and the compliant click-bait-hungry mainstream media as they soften us up for and nudge/coerce us to accept their 15-minute cities, individual carbon budgets and car-free, insect-eating, cold and miserable ‘climate-lockdowns’ future?
As you all know, in order to avoid an imaginary, totally non-existent climate catastrophe, we’re all being encouraged to buy EVs (electric vehicles). In fact, from 2030 car manufacturers will be prohibited from selling ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) cars in Britain.
I believe that the useless, eco-fanaticist BBC did a programme recently on the benefits and disadvantages of EVs presented by the BBC’s globe-trotting, jet-setting climate catastrophist-in-chief, Justin Rowlatt. But as I can’t stand Rowlatt’s (IMHO) self-satisfied, virtue-signalling, smug face, I didn’t watch the programme. However, I thought I might use this blog to do my bit fighting supposed climate change by suggesting some of the main advantages and drawbacks of EVs.
Advantages of EVs compared to ICE or hybrid cars:
um, er, can I get back to you on that?
Drawbacks of EVs compared to ICE or hybrid cars:
The rare earth metals needed for the batteries are mostly produced by child slave labour and the mining is environmentally catastrophic
They are least twice as heavy as ICE or hybrid cars, so much more energy is used to move them
Being so heavy, it’s believed that many multi-storey car parks will collapse if too many EVs are parked in them
Being so heavy, they cause much more road damage (pot-holes) than ICE or hybrid cars
Being so heavy, they will require their tyres to be replaced at least twice as often as tyres on ICE or hybrid cars
They may be more polluting than ICE or hybrid cars as particulates from their tyres are toxic and carcinogenic and their tyres will shed more toxic particulates than those of ICE or hybrid cars
They are much more expensive than ICE or hybrid cars
Replacing the battery can cost up to £10,000 or more, so the second-hand value of EVs is pathetically small compared to second-hand ICE or hybrid cars
The power grid can’t carry the electricity necessary to feed EV chargers. The boss of one motorway service station group recently claimed he was installing a few chargers, but couldn’t switch them on as there was insufficient power from the electricity grid
If you can actually find a charger which is both switched on and (more rarely?) actually works, it takes ten to twenty times as long to charge an EV as filling a petrol tank on a ICE or hybrid car
If you live in a flat or even a house which doesn’t have off-street parking, charging your beloved, environment-saving EV might be more than a slight problem
Their high voltage electrical systems mean there’s a risk of electrocution, which is why mechanics must undergo specialist training to work on an EV
Exploding batteries?
But perhaps the greatest drawback of EVs is the fragility of their batteries;
This means that even a small accident will probably lead to an EV being declared a write-off as a slightly damaged battery is a rather dangerous thing. So, either EVs will be much more expensive to insure or our rulers will prevent insurance companies from charging more for EVs so we’ll all have to pay more for our motor insurance to cover the increased cost of damaged EVs.
If you have a few idle moments, you might consider going to YouTube and doing a search for something like ‘electric vehicle fires’ or ‘electric vehicle explosions’. The results are pretty impressive. Especially some of the films from exploding EVs in China. Unfortunately for eco-fanatics, some EV batteries spontaneously combust even when not being driven or not being charged. Though such fires are rare, when they occur they can be catastrophic. For example, they can require a tremendous amount of effort from emergency personnel to extinguish the blaze. A chain reaction inside the batteries—sometimes called ‘thermal runaway’ — can occur when the battery generates more heat than it can dissipate. Lithium-ion batteries also burn hotter and can last much longer than petrol fires, which tend to burn out quickly. Lithium-ion battery fires can take tens of thousands of gallons of water to extinguish. The U.S. National Fire Protection Association notes one EV fire in Texas required more than 30,000 gallons of water after a crash. Fire departments aren’t always equipped with trucks and other gear to deal with that. Emergency responders and firefighters must follow different response guides than for gasoline fires, and need training to properly extinguish the blaze.
Here’s a short video. It concerns a lady in the U.S. who sent her ICE Mercedes in for a service. The garage gave her a loan car – an electric Mercedes. While parked in her garage, the battery experienced ‘thermal runaway’, caught fire, completely wrecked the car and caused about $1m damage to her home:
Below (in blue) is an article I’ve written for a South Korean newspaper. It doesn’t really say anything new. It’s more like a summary of the current situation:
June and July 2023 were entertaining months for anyone who is interested in whether human activity is causing catastrophic and irreversible changes to the Earth’s climate. On 27 July 2023, UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres warned us that: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.” However, just a few days later, Professor Jim Skea, the newly elected head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warned that apocalyptic messaging merely “paralyses” the public and fails to motivate them to protect the planet.Furthermore, he said that the world warming 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, to which the 2015 Paris Agreement pledged to limit global temperature rises, was “not an existential threat to humanity”. But during a conference in South Korea on 26 June 2023, the 2022 Nobel prizewinner for Physics, Dr. John Clauser, criticized the IPCC for spreading misinformation and stated, “I don’t believe there is a climate crisis”,“in my opinion the IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation” and added that the world is “literally awash, saturated, with pseudoscience, with bad science, with scientific misinformation and disinformation”.
Clearly, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Professor Jim Skea and Professor John Clauser can’t all be right. So, what is really happening? Are we headed for Antonio Guterres’s climate apocalypse as the earth boils? Are human activities causing changes to our climate to which we can adapt as suggested by Professor Jim Skea? Or can we relax as changes to our climate are just part of the natural cycle of warming and cooling which has gone on ever since the Earth existed and will continue for millions more years as proposed by Professor John Clauser?
There are some things we know. For example, analysis of ice cores and studies of geology and sea bed sediments have shown that for at least the last 400,000 years, the Earth has experienced four major ice ages and thus four much warmer interglacial periods:
(left-click on images, then left-click again to see more clearly)
Furthermore, there is strong evidence that these ice ages and interglacials are driven by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun – which have been called ‘Milankovitch Cycles’ after Mulan Milankovitch the Serbian mathematician, astronomer, climatologist and geologist who is credited with discovering them:
We also know that atmospheric CO2 levels have risen over the last 100 or so years from around 300 parts per million (ppm) to about 415 ppm. Climate catastrophists like to warn us that these increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 are heating the planet. But atmospheric CO2 levels have been as high as 7,000 ppm around 550,000 years ago and the planet’s temperature was about 12°C higher than today,:
Yet the Earth didn’t boil and life continued to evolve and thrive. Moreover, many farmers growing crops in greenhouses instal CO2 generators to bring CO2 levels up to around 1,000 ppm as that is considered optimal for plant growth. Moreover, studies by NASA satellites have shown that increasing CO2 levels are causing a greening of the Earth. Furthermore, we know that were CO2 levels to fall to below 250 ppm, this would devastate agriculture and lead to mass starvation.
As for Antonio Guterres’s claim that “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived”. We only have reliable measurements of the Earth’s temperature since the end of the 1970s when satellites measuring temperatures were first launched. Before then, there were only reliable temperatures measurements in the USA, Northern Europe and Australia. Estimates of global temperatures before the era of satellites are mostly based on computer models. However, we do know from contemporary newspaper reports that the 1920s and 1930s were exceptionally hot in the United States and in some other countries even though atmospheric CO2 levels were only around 310 ppm. These temperatures were so high that the world’s leading climate scientists predicted at the time that the polar ice caps would melt and many coastal cities and areas of low-lying farmland would be flooded:
These dire predictions didn’t actually happen because in the 1960s and 1970s, the Earth cooled so much, even though atmospheric CO2 levels were still rising, that the world’s leading climate scientists predicted the start of a new ice age:
This new ice age would lead to crop failures, starvation and wars as countries fought over diminishing food stocks. The situation was so serious, that 42 climatologists wrote a letter to the then U.S. President, Richard Nixon, warning of the coming disaster:
and the CIA was even commissioned to write a report on the likely consequences of the coming ice age:
This didn’t happen either as by the 1980s the Earth’s temperature had started to warm again till about 2002. Then there was a pause from about 2002 to 2014 and since 2014, there has probably been some warming. Though this warming since the start of the 1980s shouldn’t be surprising as the end of the 1970s was the coldest the Earth has been for the last 120 years.
If we look at just 2023, it’s true that there has been a heatwave in the Southern U.S. States, in Mediterranean countries and in parts of China which is perhaps why Mr Guterres started talking about ‘global boiling’. However, the U.S. heatwave followed more than 260 days of below average temperatures. Moreover, at the same time as some countries experienced a heatwave, record cold spells hit Northern Europe, parts of Eastern Australia and South Africa where unusually it snowed. In addition, there were record levels of rainfall in South Korea and parts of China. As for the heatwave affecting the Southern United States and the Mediterranean, this seems to have been caused by a shift in the jetstream linked to a weather phenomenon called El Niño and not by any increase in atmospheric CO2 levels due to human activity.
Perhaps, there are just a few more details to add. The climate catastrophists warn that a climate crisis will cause massive loss of life. Yet the number of people dying in climate-related disasters has fallen from around 480,000 per year in the 1930s to fewer than 25,000 a year by the 2020s:
The climate catastrophists warn that a warming Earth will devastate agriculture, yet yields per hectare of crops like potatoes, bananas, maize, rice, wheat, soybeans and cassava have risen almost every year for the last more than 60 years:
The climate catastrophists warn that climate change will plunge millions into poverty, yet the percentage of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has fallen from about 80 percent a hundred years ago to below 20 percent now:
The climate catastrophists warn that changing climate will lead to earlier deaths, yet the average life expectancy has shot up from less than 40 years a hundred years ago to over 70 years now:
Furthermore, the 1920S and 1930S warming, the 1960s and 1970s cooling, the 1980s and 1990s warming, the 2002 to 2014 pause and then the subsequent last ten years of warming in spite of 120 years of rising atmospheric CO2 levels suggest that there is no real link between atmospheric CO2 levels and the Earth’s temperature.
That brings us back to the question about who was right about our climate – UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the IPCC’s new boss Professor Jim Skea or 2022’s Nobel Prize-winner Professor John Clauser? At the moment, it looks like if you want reliable information about the Earth’s climate, it’s Professor John Clauser whom you should consult.
Following BBC ace business reporter Simon ‘Jackass’ Jack’s totally inaccurate report that Nigel Farage’s Coutts bank account was closed due to not having sufficient funds in it, I made a complaint to our useless, UK-hating, illegal-migrant-loving, Labour-supporting, EU-adoring, Pfizer-propagandising, climate-fanaticist, perpetually-biased BBC. In my complaint, I proposed that, as the BBC considered it appropriate to publish details of where Nigel Farage had his bank accounts and give indications of how much money was in Farage’s Coutts bank account, then the BBC should have no problem telling me where Simon Jack does his banking and roughly how much money he has in his bank account.
This was the reply I got from the BBC:
Reference CAS-7594974-R8F2Q2
Dear Mr Craig,
Thanks for getting in touch about BBC News.
We understand you’re seeking information about Simon Jack’s bank account.
The information you’re looking for is private and something we wouldn’t disclose.
We do value your feedback about this. All complaints are sent to senior management and we’ve included your points in our overnight report. These reports are among the most widely read sources of feedback in the company and ensures that your concerns have been seen by the right people quickly
If only they could make the BBC dependent on advertising and/or subscriptions, then the arrogant, over-paid, over-pensioned parasites at the worthless BBC could see how much they really are appreciated.
Dystopian novels and our rulers’ plans for us
On Tuesday, I had an article on the wonderful The Conservative Woman website which I highly recommend. The article was also recommended on the order-order.com website. Sadly for me, none of the thousands of people who saw the article had sufficient motivation or enough money to show some support for my efforts by buying a copy of my latest book THERE IS NO CLIMATE CRISIS.
The best bit is not my article but some of the 300+ readers’ comments:
Coutts Bank apears to be a highly disreputable bank which discriminates against millionaires in favour of multimillionaires and seems to be happy to take money from any passing kleptocrat or fraudster. Being associated with Coutts could be damaging to Nigel Farage’s reputation.
Coutts’s Wikipedia page reports of enormous financial malpractice by Coutts, which was fined £8.75m for breaches of money laundering rules. The FSA reviewed a sample of 103 high-risk customer files, and identified appalling deficiencies in 73 of them. The FSA’s acting director of enforcement and financial crime, Tracey McDermott, said that “Coutts’s failings were significant, widespread and unacceptable. Its conduct fell well below the standards we expect and the size of the financial penalty demonstrates how seriously we view its failures”.
In November 2011 the Financial Services Authority (FSA) fined Coutts £6.3m for mis-selling the American International Group (AIG) Enhanced Variable Rate Fund. In 2021, a sovereign wealth fund, 1MDB, sued Coutts & Co. for $1.03 billion claiming, “negligence, breach of contract, conspiracy to defraud/injure, and/or dishonest assistance”. Also Swiss markets watchdog FINMA ordered Coutts & Co to pay 6.5 million Swiss francs for breaching money-laundering regulations in its business linked to 1MDB.
David Craig, on August 23rd, 2023
