- Meanwhile, we are all going to die from climate change, alas. Including the bit where it fills our cucumbers with salmonella. No, really. CTV reports (at timecode 6:09) “A recent wave of produce recalls traced back to salmonella or E coli have food safety experts on alert. And there are growing concerns we could see a rise in food-borne illnesses in the near future climate change being a major contributing factor” blah blah blah cucumbers of climate death blah blah blah.
- Also the plankton of death from the Washington Post: “Plankton are the backbone of the ocean — and may struggle with what’s coming/ A pair of papers in the journal Nature shows how plankton are struggling to survive in warming seas.” And of course “Plankton are hardly the only marine creatures at risk. Over 40 percent of reef-building corals are at risk of going extinct, according to a report also released Wednesday by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.” We are all going to die. Or not because, having Google on our computers, we checked and “There are two major groups of phytoplankton, Cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) – which evolved 3.5 billion years ago, invented oxygenic photosynthesis, and gave rise to all land plants – and Microalgae.” Do we have to make the point again about species that flourished for hundreds of millions or, in this case, billions of years of much warmer conditions being able to survive warmth? They even triggered the ecological convulsion of an oxygen-rich environment (aka “the Great Oxidation Event and the "rusting of the Earth" during the early Proterozoic, dramatically changing the composition of life forms on Earth”) and then rode it to planetary dominance. To be fair, microalgae date back a mere 470 million years, and their appearance merely “marks one of the important evolutions of time, adapted all the photic zones of Earth, and paved way for the evolution of other life”. So pretty fragile, obviously. Death at 11. Who writes this stuff?
- Environment Canada covers its winter forecast bets with a hazy prediction that while anything could happen, climate change is behind it all: “Experts predict close to or above normal temperatures across the north and east. In the west, a warm start to the season is expected to be followed by normal to below normal temperatures. This year we are shifting into a La Niña winter, which often brings distinct weather conditions to Canada…. The cooling effect of La Niña in Canada can cause: * Below-seasonal temperatures * A more active storm track over the Great Lakes and Atlantic provinces, leading to increased snowfall * Drier atmosphere in the southern parts of Canada, due to reduced moisture flow/ As winters trend warmer due to climate change, this year’s La Niña is expected to be weaker and less pronounced. However, the cooling effect of La Niña will still be felt in western and northwestern Canada where it is reinforced by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation—a long-term fluctuation in Pacific Ocean temperatures that strengthens La Niña’s cooling impact.” So there you have it.
- The same report adds: “Canada is warming at roughly double the global rate, and even more in the north, which leads to more frequent and intense extreme weather events.” You know they’re just making up stuff to try to scare you when, (i) they throw in an unsupported connection between warming and non-specific extreme weather, and (ii) they invoke the “warming twice as fast” line which, as we have pointed out, even the IPCC quietly admits applies to every country because all countries are on land.
- CTV turned that one into “Warm, wet winter expected in much of Canada, say forecasters”. But actually even their story coughed up eventually that “In the latter half of the season, forecasters expect temperatures to cool to normal or even below-normal levels.” And at time of writing, the city of Ottawa is buried in frozen snow and it’s -8°C in mid-afternoon, while earlier in the week parts of its province of Ontario were in a state of emergency “after intense snow squalls battered parts of the province over the weekend.” Just saying.
- It seems the window is closing on climate change. Yeah yeah, you say, old news. But we’re referring to a Canary Media hype piece that “These high-tech windows fight climate change – and will save you money”. And we could point out here that if it saves you money to insulate your house better, which it might well do, then there’s no need for subsidies or regulations; the invisible hand will reach out and close the window. (Or dad will shout “Are you air-conditioning the whole neighbourhood”. Either way.) Instead we want to observe that if the fate of the planet really hangs on whether you lose a few bucks a month to escaping heat, then once again the place is either too fragile to be saved by anything we try, or the problem is so trivial the panic is inexplicable. Either way.
- From the “one born every minute” file, Heatmap tells us “These Battery Startups Think They Can Succeed Where Northvolt Failed”. And fools and subsidies rush in…
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11 Dec 2024 | News Roundup
Given that the start-ups are actual private businesses, they aren’t fools. They know that they’ll be able to pay themselves very good salaries for a few years before the whole scheme collapses. The fools are the taxpayers who voted for the ones giving them the money, and those investors and large pension funds that are dumb enough to buy the shares and hold them (the smart ones buy at the initial start up and sell once the government funding arrives on the wave of optimism that raises the share value temporarily before it collapses to zero).