Refusal to index is also a form of censorship

As far as I can tell, none of my blogs is indexed by Google. If you do a Google search for something that I have written on one of my blogs, you will not find it. Bing.com indexes some of my blogs but even they will not touch "Greenie Watch"

The surprising thing is that the files for all Blogspot blogs are held on Google's servers. They have my writings in their files but refuse to mention them in response to a search. I am "search blocked"

In the circumstances, it is a bit of a surprise that on some occasions they go to the trouble to wipe some of my posts off their servers completely. Even if you come to one of my blogs as a regular reader rather than via a search you will still not see what I have written. They are clearly very motivated to suppress conservative ideas. It's ironical that a very succesful private enterprise is so protective of government

Fortunately a search on duckduckgo.com or yahoo.com does find my writings

Addtionally, I gather that anybody trying to link to "Greenie Warch" gets a warning that it is "unsafe"

I would not be surprised if all my Blogspot blogs vanished into thin air one day. I long ago took precautions against that by keeping two backups of everything I write. You can access that via jonjayray.com or johnjayray.com

You can't keep a good skeptic down!

-- JR

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Eastern Antarctica’s Ice Growth: The Story You Haven’t Heard

This is another example of the mainstream media (MSM) skewing scientific reporting to serve the interests of the climate-industrial complex.

This bias often manifests in selective coverage, where sensationalist narratives about climate change are given prominence, while contradictory or nuanced findings are ignored… If it bleeds, it leads. Check out my 7-part series examining the most newsworthy climate papers in the last decade and if any of the predictions have come true… Spoiler alert, not many.

A prime example is the recent study highlighting significant ice growth in Eastern Antarctica, which has received little to no media attention compared to the constant alarmist coverage of the Thwaites Glacier and Western Antarctica.

A recent study published in Nature Communications reveals substantial ice growth in Eastern Antarctica.

The researchers found that contrary to popular belief and media portrayal, parts of Eastern Antarctica have been gaining ice mass. This finding challenges the dominant narrative that Antarctic ice is melting due to global warming from rising anthropogenic GHG concentrations.

The study utilized satellite altimetry data from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 mission and laser altimetry data from NASA’s ICESat-2 mission to measure changes in ice thickness.

The study uses robust historical data combined with modern satellite measurements, providing a detailed and accurate picture of glacier dynamics in Eastern Antarctica.

These findings are crucial for a balanced understanding of Antarctic ice behavior, emphasizing the need to consider regional variations rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all narrative driven by the climate-industrial complex.

The study states…

“Our results demonstrate that the stability and growth in ice elevations observed in terrestrial basins over the past few decades are part of a trend spanning at least a century, and highlight the importance of understanding long-term changes when interpreting current dynamics.”

However, this study has been largely ignored by mainstream media outlets, which prefer to focus on more sensationalist stories of melting ice and rising sea levels.

In stark contrast, the Thwaites Glacier in Western Antarctica has been the subject of extensive media coverage. Dubbed the “Doomsday Glacier,” it is often portrayed as a ticking time bomb that could lead to catastrophic sea level rise.

While the potential instability of the Thwaites Glacier is indeed concerning, recent research challenges the sensationalized portrayal of Thwaites Glacier in media outlets.

A recent search in Google for news articles, over the last month, reveals a stark contrast in media coverage between the ice growth in Eastern Antarctica and the Thwaites Glacier in Western Antarctica. The study published in Nature Communications highlighting significant ice growth in Eastern Antarctica has received virtually no media attention.

In contrast, a simple search for “Thwaites Glacier” yields many alarmist articles, emphasizing its potential to cause catastrophic sea level rise. Titles such as “New research on Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier could reshape sea-level rise predictions” and “Warm ocean water is rushing beneath Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier,’ making its collapse more likely” dominate the headlines, perpetuating a narrative of imminent disaster.

https://principia-scientific.com/eastern-antarcticas-ice-growth-the-story-you-havent-heard/

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The Western world seems destined to founder in its mad rush to offset climate change ‘driven by CO2 emissions’

The fact that climate always changes, and it’s mainly driven by natural cyclical forces beyond our control, is overlooked by political leaders pushing the green dream of ‘renewable energy’ focused on the unreliable intermittent sources of solar and wind power.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris ‘Blackout’ Bowen and Prime Minister Anthony ‘Each Way’ Albanese would like to see an EV, electric scooter, or bike in every Australian garage which would certainly keep our firefighters busy, but it won’t change the weather.

As former chief scientist Alan Finkel admitted to a Senate hearing several years ago, if Australia cut all its CO2 emissions immediately, its impact on world climate would be negligible.

But in the unlikely event that EV sales do surge way beyond the current rate of just 8 per cent of total vehicle sales, it would place increasing demands on a power system already at risk of major blackouts. In its latest 10-year forecast, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) warned that millions of Australians faced the risk of electricity blackouts without the ‘urgent’ delivery of greater energy and transmission infrastructure.

Well, that alone might not tip us into the dystopian Mad Max future, but combined with a seemingly insatiable power demand created by a villain masked as mankind’s new hero, it just might. I’m referring to Artificial Intelligence or AI – the charmless i-bot that answers almost all government and major business phone calls, the source behind our internet searches and algorithms, the brain behind the helpful tools that do a student’s assignments or write a novel (badly) or create nude images of anybody from a normal photograph … get the picture?

And now massive data centres are pouring AI chips into the mix as fast as manufacturing plants can build them. As one researcher notes, adding AI to Google ‘search’ boosts the energy use per search tenfold. And that’s only the first, perhaps the least, significant of the many possible applications for AI.

An article in City Journal claims that the huge energy demand will make the type of energy transition our hapless leaders are trying to foist on us impossible.

It claims that Nvidia, a leading AI chip manufacturer, has shipped about 5 million high-power chips over the past three years and each chip uses roughly as much electricity each year as three electric vehicles. And while the market appetite for electric vehicles is sagging and ultimately limited, the appetite for AI chips is ‘explosive and essentially unlimited’.

‘To see what the future holds, we must take a deep dive into the arcana of today’s ‘cloud,’ the loosely defined term denoting the constellation of data centres, hardware, and communications systems.

‘Each data centre – and tens of thousands of them exist – has an energy appetite often greater than skyscrapers the size of the Empire State Building. And the nearly 1,000 so-called hyperscale data centres each consume more energy than a steel mill (and this is before counting the impacts of piling on AI chips)…’

I find that both scary and mind-boggling, to the extent that new mathematical measurement terminology has been developed to try to keep pace with the burgeoning energy demand all this is creating. Forget billions, trillions, or zillions, that’s old hat and doesn’t go anywhere near the AI power horizon:

‘…one way to guess the future magnitude of data traffic – and derivatively the energy implications – is in the names of the numbers we’ve had to create to describe quantities of data. We count food and mineral production in millions of tons; people and their devices in billions of units; airway and highway usage in trillions of air- or road miles; electricity and natural gas in trillions of kilowatt-hours or cubic feet; and our economies in trillions of dollars. But, at a rate of a trillion per year of anything, it takes a billion years to total one ‘zetta’ – i.e., the name of the number that describes the scale of today’s digital traffic.

‘The numerical prefixes created to describe huge quantities track the progress of society’s technologies and needs. The ‘kilo’ prefix dates back to 1795. The ‘mega’ prefix was coined in 1873, to name 1,000 kilos. The ‘giga’ prefix for 1 billion (1,000 million) and ‘tera’ (a trillion, or 1,000 billion) were both adopted in 1960. In 1975, we saw the official creation of the prefixes ‘peta’ (1,000 giga) and ‘exa’ (1,000 peta), and then the ‘zetta’ (1,000 exa) in 1991. Today’s cloud traffic is estimated to be roughly 50 zettabytes a year.

‘It’s impossible to visualise such a number without context. A zetta-stack of dollar bills would reach from the earth to the sun (93 million miles away) and back – 700,000 times…’

What the…? Are you grasping any of this, Albo and Bowen? Do you really think covering an area bigger than Tasmania including productive farmland and natural forests with limited-life solar and wind farms and 28,000 km of new transmission lines, all backed by billions in subsidies, will solve our energy needs into the future?

You will need to do a lot more to prevent the dystopian future referred to in the Mad Max movies unless AI becomes intelligent enough to realise it is rapidly progressing towards its own demise. It needs to convince closed minds like yours that the only way to try to keep pace is to embrace clean, long-lasting, safe, modern nuclear energy as promoted by enterprising young Brisbane teenager Will Shackel, the founder of Nuclear for Australia, and Opposition leader Peter Dutton.

It’s a no-brainer, and many overseas states and nations are already on-board. Civilisation could depend on it.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/beyond-mad-max-with-dystopian-ai/

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The renewable green energy disaster off the northeastern US is getting worse Less than one per cent of the way to the Biden 2030 target

A slow-motion collapse in the offshore wind industry continues to grow as sticky inflation and supply chain challenges force developers to delay or cancel major projects. In particular, progress towards the Biden administration’s goal of building large amounts of floating wind off the northeastern US coast is just about stalled.

Shell, which invested in a series of offshore wind projects in recent years, including offshore the northeastern United States, announced last week it would lay off much of its offshore wind business staff as the oil giant advances its program of refocusing on its core oil and gas business.

“We are concentrating on select markets and segments to deliver the most value for our investors and customers,” a Shell spokesperson told Bloomberg. “Shell is looking at how it can continue to compete for offshore wind projects in priority markets while maintaining our focus on performance, discipline and simplification.”

Wind turbine maker Siemens Gamesa announced even bigger layoffs, saying it would cut 15 per cent of its global staff to adjust to a slowing market. The announcement comes after the company reported a €4.6 billion loss for 2023, a losing trend that has continued over the first half of 2024.

“Our current situation demands adjustments that go beyond organizational changes. We have to adapt to lower business volumes, reduced activity in non-core markets, and a streamlined portfolio,” said outgoing CEO Jochen Eickholt in a letter to staff.

On May 29 came survey results compiled by London-based energy consultancy Westwood indicating the global floating offshore wind industry is likely to deliver less than 3 gigawatts (GW) of new floating generation capacity by 2030, and a total of roughly 10 GW by 2040. Westwood cites lack of standardization of floating technology (55 per cent), manufacturing capability and capacity (51 per cent) and port infrastructure (50 per cent) as the primary impediments.

In light of the industry’s gloomy outlook, Westwood notes that “calls are ringing out for governments to provide more specific policy and regulatory support for technology development in addition to cost reduction and investment in port infrastructure to accelerate adoption.”

This is completely predictable, since the voracious rent-seeking wind business invariably calls for more government largesse in response to any challenge that arises. Unfortunately, the call is too often answered by policymakers who have made big political bets on being able to show off arrays of mammoth windmills floating atop various oceans and seas, intermittently producing some electricity – generally 25-30 per cent of nominal plant capacity over time.

This latest bad news for offshore wind could become especially troublesome for US President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, since he has invested so much of his personal political capital in pushing a major buildout of floating offshore wind in the Atlantic northeast. A 2023 Department of Energy fact sheet sets the administration’s goal of installing 30 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030 for the US alone, exceeding Westwood’s just estimated potential for global new capacity by that year by a factor of 10 times over.

To date, regulators under Biden have approved permits for 6 major offshore projects, several of which have already been delayed or cancelled by developers in response to tougher economic factors. In late 2023, major Danish wind developer Orsted cancelled two projects off the Atlantic coast, and Shell divested its 50 per cent stake in another in March of this year. Equinor and BP announced in January they were cancelling plans for their Empire Wind 2 project, citing similar economic concerns.

One US offshore project, Vineyard Wind 1, was able to begin delivering its intermittent 25-30 per cent of 68 megawatts (MW) to Massachusetts residents in January with the activation of 5 offshore turbines. The South Fork Wind Project was also able to commence first deliveries into New York in March, with 12 turbines capable of generating some proportion of 130 MW.

But this is less than one per cent of the Biden goal of 30 GW, with just five and a half years remaining until 2030. Given the wind industry’s insatiable appetite for ever-increasing subsidies and constantly rising utility charges, it’s an open question how many more billions of dollars the federal government will be allowed to print to keep projects alive before the voters start to rebel at the cost.

It’s a rebellion that could commence as soon as this coming November.

https://stephenheins.substack.com/p/the-renewable-green-energy-disaster

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Travellers reluctant to pay for greener flights despite desire for sustainability

Travellers are proving reluctant passengers of the airline industry’s sustainability drive with those opting to offset flights actually falling in recent years.

After exceeding 10 per cent pre Covid, Qantas was now seeing around 6 or 7 per cent of guests choosing to offset, while Webjet had noticed that customers “talk the talk” but don’t necessarily “walk the walk”.

“When we originally looked at a program around sustainability for our travellers we surveyed our quite significant database of 2 million people and circa 30 to 40 per cent said they would regularly use the offset,” said Webjet managing director John Guscic.

“But in practical application, it’s less than 10 per cent ticking the box.”

Inflationary pressures were considered a factor in the drop off recorded by Qantas according to chief sustainability officer Andrew Parker who said there was still much passion for the decarbonisation journey.

“In terms of consumers there is still a lot to do,” Mr Parker told the Australian on the sidelines of the International Air Transport Association in Dubai.

“We can’t just be asking for customers to pay for sustainable aviation fuel, pay for offsets, we want to look at a model where you have a range of options.”

Despite the cool response from customers to date, airlines remained convinced that sustainability was extremely important to travellers.

International Air Transport Association director general Willie Walsh said the idea people want to fly in an “unsustainable fashion” was simply not correct.

“All the research that we do says that people want the airline industry to address its environmental footprint and we have to,” Mr Walsh said.

“And anybody who thinks you can transition to net zero in any industry without cost is misguided or misleading people. There’s going to be a cost and there’s going to be a consumer cost.”

It has been estimated that cost could push up airfares significantly, particularly in the early stages due to low levels of sustainable aviation fuel production.

Considered the only realistic path for airlines towards net zero at this stage, SAF (Sustainable aviation fuel) production in 2024 will amount to a mere 0.53 per cent of the industry’s fuel needs, or 1.9 billion litres.

To help drive production in Australia — which was rich in feedstock but yet to make any SAF — Qantas was investing in a north Queensland-based refinery using alcohol-to-jet technology.

Mr Parker said it was unusual for airlines to become investors in the production of fuel but they felt they had to.

“We need big fuel companies producing (SAF) albeit at a price that is digestible but we want small to medium-sized producers as well so we’ve got a competitive industry,” he said.

“We think Australia can produce SAF and a lot of it, which is one of the reasons Qantas has set a target of 10 per cent SAF usage by 2030.”

At the same time, Qantas was firmly in favour of the federal government imposing a mandate of 5 per cent SAF for airlines operating within and into Australia.

Virgin Australia recognised the potential role a SAF mandate could play but warned of economic consequences, particularly for “value carriers” like themselves.

“Increases in fuel prices would likely result in airlines having to raise airfares, with value carriers being less effective at doing so due to the price sensitivity of their customer base,” said Virgin Australia’s submission to the aviation green paper.

“This has the potential to reduce or limit competition.”

In the meantime it was indisputable that the cost of air travel would climb as more countries imposed SAF mandates on airlines as high as 10 per cent by 2030.

“Some consumers felt this could be done at no cost but there is a cost associated in the same way as when oil prices go up, ticket prices go up,” said Mr Walsh.

“The idea the airlines can absorb that additional cost given the net margins of 3 per cent in the industry, it’s just not going to be possible.”

Mr Parker said it was the only way forward for an industry that was so critical to Australia.

“We don’t have a train to Singapore, so you have to maximise the opportunity to protect aviation and give it a strong future,” he said.

“You don’t want the European flight shaming to impact aviation in our part of the world so that means SAF is the majority of the answer.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/aviation/travellers-reluctant-to-pay-for-greener-flights-despite-desire-for-sustainability/news-story/a8d1b04004e1a3c9f83466efdde05fdd

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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