In which the Caterist, Killer and the Major reveal there deepest nightmares ... well, the deepest for this week. Fresh nightmares are sure to follow ...

 

Warning. The google bot thinks that there's a blogger community and that this blog is part of it. This blog is not part of a community, this blog is full of dangerous reptile content. Proceed at your peril.

And with that dire warning in place the pond can proceed to unfold a catalogue of reptile fears, phobias and nightmares.

First up is the Caterist, handsomely rewarded with federal cash in the paw, and leading a handsome urban life (save for unseemly defamation settlements), but desperately afraid of urban 'leets ...

Terrifying. The pond wonders what's more upsetting. That snap of KK dragged up from the ancient past to evoke memories of SloMo ...

Some routines never get old ... they just need freshening up every now and then ...

No, it was that terrifying snap of protestors in the streets, and in Comrade Dan's town of all places. Isn't comrade Dan a repressive authoritarian dictator? What's he doing allowing protestors to roam the streets?

Meanwhile, back to the Caterist, a reformed climate science denialist, desperate to save the planet in his own terribly unique way ...

Ah the wit of a former climate science denialist, who only discovered climate science denialism was out of fashion much later this century.

Then came a snap so terrifying and huge that perforce the pond downsized it ...

Still as a recorder of reptile behaviour - while it lasts, before the pond must head off to substack or Wordpress - the snaps should be noted, while sharing the fears of reformed climate science denialists ...

At this point the reptiles put in another shot designed to startle stray readers. Draconian comrade Dan was still not doing the right thing and showing his authoritarian colours, and there was a flash of red placed before reptile reader eyes ...

It's a tough job, keeping those terrifying images in check, but someone has to do it, and the pond is up to the task ...

Decarbonising the economy? Demands? What on earth is he thinking? What's gone wrong with the man? He hasn't turned into some kind of Gyro Gearloose? What's this?

Some things never get old, and don't even need freshening up, and the pond finds the old Caterist more amusing than the new one feigning indignation and with plans to decarbonise the economy because of an alleged existential crisis, in his own special 'quarry floodwater whisperer' way ...

Meanwhile, there was another terrifying image which had to be downsized ...

And so at last to a final gobbet and a final plea ...

Indeed, indeed, better to leave it to the urban elites with government cash in the paw, and a wondrous capacity to predict the movement of floodwaters in quarries and a magical ability to move from climate science denialism to displaying an astounding ability to fix what ails the planet ...

And so on to the next reptile fear, and as it comes from Killer, herpetology students will immediately know the cause of the anxiety and fear. It's not from another global plague or even antimicrobial resistance ... it's masks ... or perhaps extremely long headers ...

Trust the Killer to be ever alert for infections, albeit of the bureaucratic kind ... and so Orwellian totalitarian nightmares must get yet another run ... with a snap on Melbourne plods on the street, because comrade Dan is so draconian, except when he isn't ...

Indeed, indeed, Covid was just a bad cold, except for the millions who caught death from it ... but never mind, Killer's heart is in the right anti-vax, anti-mask place ...

They did to tweets what they did to the pond? Dire warnings of the perils of masks removed? What could be more alarming?

You guessed it, a snap of sheeple lines up to be given a shot which the unsuspecting fools don't realise will implant them with a chip that will put them under the control of Bill Gates, via 5G. Or was that George Soros by the power line?

Yeah, yeah, and sure a few oldies must die so that Killer can run wild and free and unfettered, but really his ghastly global totalitarianism is nothing up against the Major's fear of China ...

How could the pond leave out this fear in its catalogue of reptile fears?

Say what? The Major gives a toss about emissions? Is this the same Major who was was named by academic Clive Hamilton as one of Australia's "Dirty Dozen", a list people he believed to be "doing the most to block action on climate change in Australia". He featured in editions of the list published in 2006, 2009 and 2014. (The Major has his own wiki here).

Is this the same Major who was proudly featured in the Graudian back in 2022 here?

...In the Australian, former editor Chris Mitchell sought to play down the climate crisis, preaching “It’s time journalists reported what is really happening”, under a headline that reporters were “blind to facts”.

So how did some of Mitchell’s own “facts” stand up?

In an apparent effort to undermine the nature of global temperature rise, Mitchell wrote: “Evidence suggests temperatures were higher during the medieval warming and the Roman warming.”

Actually, evidence does not suggest this. The latest United Nations assessment of climate studies says the world is warmer now than at any time over at least the past 100,000 years.

The medieval warming period (MWP) occurred roughly between 950AD and 1,250AD – although there’s slight disagreement on the start and end dates. The Roman warming period covered the first few centuries AD. Both were regional, not global.

A 2019 study in Nature of temperatures in these periods, the authors wrote, “provides further evidence of the unprecedented nature of anthropogenic global warming in the context of the past 2,000 years”.

Mitchell wrote: “Global temperature sits about 1.2C above the pre-industrial era, which also coincided with a little ice age.”

Prof Nerilie Abram, an expert in ancient climates at the Australian National University, said the little ice age lasted a few centuries, but was considered over by 1850 – the start of the 50-year period that scientists use to refer to “pre-industrial”....

... Mitchell also claimed “latest research” suggested the world’s climate was less sensitive to CO2 “than previously thought”, but Sherwood said this was “off base”.

“The most recent IPCC report moved the sensitivity significantly higher than past reports and no research since then has changed that – a few papers have pushed it up or down but there’s no consensus.”

Meanwhile, the deviant, devious Chinese are playing on weak-kneed minds who actually think there might be something to climate science, as opposed to the Major's interpretation of it ...

Foolish devotees of EVs. And for what? Remember, there's no need to fuss and get excited. “Evidence suggests temperatures were higher during the medieval warming and the Roman warming.”

Yes, there was the Major, way back when ...

And here's the Major today ...

What's remarkable is how the Major manages to maintain his vision ...

That ancient column went on ... (and here the pond reverts to text to avoid giant snaps of News Corp refugees, ads, etc) ... and on ... and on ...

..But there’s a better reason for scepticism about “loss and damage”. The Daily Telegraph in London the same day reported: “China has emitted more carbon dioxide over the past eight years than the UK has since the start of the industrial revolution. Between 1750 and 2020 the UK emitted 78 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide … compared with China’s emissions of 80 billion tonnes since 2013.”

This newspaper’s environment editor Graham Lloyd described the real UN climate agenda in 2011 when reporting that year’s COP17 in Durban, South Africa, ignominiously dubbed “Flop 17”. Lloyd wrote that much of the Durban conference looked like “an exercise in extravagant foreplay with a very messy ending”, until the situation was rescued by a commitment from developed countries for a $US100bn a year fund “to finance mitigation and adaptation in the developing world”.

Nothing much has come of that; hence the focus in Egypt. Most journalists, especially those at the ABC and Guardian Australia, refuse to call all this out for the diplomatic pantomime it is. Yet the general public is starting to understand fossil fuels are not being abandoned in most countries and the UN’s preferred power sources – wind and solar power – are not proving cheap or reliable.

RN Breakfast host Patricia Karvelas seemed surprised by the point former Energy Security Board chair Kerry Schott made during an on-air interview last Monday morning. Karvelas wanted to discuss Schott’s proposed appointment by Grok Ventures’ Mike Cannon-Brookes to the board of AGL, which Cannon-Brookes hopes to wean off fossil fuels earlier than present management plans.

Asked by Karvelas to comment on a warning the previous week by AGL chair Patricia McKenzie that closing all the company’s generators early would destroy the reliability of the electricity grid because replacement capacity cannot be built in time, Schott said: “Well I think it may not be possible but I think we’ve got to try.”

This column, looking at Cannon-Brookes’s bid for AGL at the time, interviewed Schott last February. She said intermittent wind and solar could only be firmed by building thousands of kilometres of new poles and wires across the continent so power could be fed to major population centres from wherever the sun was shining and the wind blowing. That network infrastructure would need to be backed up by billions of dollars of new pumped hydro projects because batteries only harmonise the network and cannot yet store power for long periods.

It’s time journalists reported what is really happening. Copenhagen Consensus president Bjorn Lomborg in this newspaper on October 1 wrote: “Even the Biden administration expects the world in 2050 to be dependent on fossil fuels for 70 per cent of energy.

“Rich countries are showcasing the policies to avoid. Germany is on track to spend more than $US500bn ($A770bn) on climate policies (per year) by 2025, yet has managed to reduce fossil fuel dependency from 84 per cent in 2000 to only 77 per cent today.”

Wind and solar account for about 10 per cent of global power supply despite global investment of about $US1 trillion in such renewables every year.

So what does the future hold for the climate and for the business of climate reporting? In the digital age it is a business strategy aimed at securing clicks from vulnerable young media consumers who have not seen and read all the doomsday scenarios for 30 years and understood they never arrive.

For the real climate, warming oceans will increase evaporation and rainfall, but the IPCC is clear no single weather event can be attributed directly to climate change. Tropical storm data shows cyclones and hurricanes are becoming less frequent in the Pacific and Atlantic. Some evidence suggests such storms may be becoming more powerful.

Weather patterns such as this country’s east coast La Nina since 2020 will come occasionally but always have done. The La Nina events from 1954-56 and 2010-12 killed more in floods than this La Nina.

Global temperature sits about 1.2C above the pre-industrial era, which also coincided with a little ice age.

Evidence suggests temperatures were higher during the Medieval Warming and the Roman Warming. Latest research suggests climate is less sensitive to CO2 than previously thought. Media consumers seldom see these facts.

The world will need to build for resilience, but no serious scientist expects a climate emergency by 2030: the IPCC has essentially abandoned the scam RCP8.5 warming scenario upon which that scare campaign was based.

Coal and gas will continue to be burned in advanced countries, we will continue to export both because our fuels are cleaner than those extracted elsewhere but Australia will lose almost all of its domestic manufacturing industry, which will move to countries with lower emissions standards as we drive towards more renewable, less reliable power.

The political right here will be disappointed because Australia will never go down the nuclear path, even though it should.

But Australia will continue to export uranium to countries that see the obvious benefits of clean, emissions-free, baseload power.

Finally, while Australia will most likely pay climate bribes to Pacific Islands, the public will eventually find out what the ABC Fact Check unit confirmed in December 2018: most island nations in the Pacific are growing rather than shrinking. Don’t expect ABC reporters to admit that or to challenge Pacific Island leaders complaining about CO2 but taking Chinese money when China is the biggest contributor to global emissions.

Just hit the short-cut key, and it can all roll out again ...

As for the planet? Oh never mind, with the cunning Chinese and the deviant reptiles in play, nothing will get done ... 

Instead here's the immortal Rowe of the day ...