Exploring practical methods for preparing for the end times, including analysis of end time scripture and prophecy, current events, prepping and self-defense.
"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just published the next generation of climate scenarios," science policy analyst Roger Pielke Jr wrote late last week, and in what he called "big news," the new framework "eliminated the most extreme scenarios that have dominated climate research over much of the past several decades."
So the oceans aren't about to boil off or freeze over or whatever the current scare story is?
Exactly: "The IPCC and broader research community has now admitted that the scenarios that have dominated climate research, assessment and policy during the past two cycles of the IPCC assessment process are implausible. They describe impossible futures."
Oz Geographic has a lot of videos on large meteor impacts and their consequences. There are more common than most people think, and the primary reason that not much is known of the majority is because the impact craters are hidden in the oceans or, in this case, beneath thousands of feet of ice.
This particular video is of the 31-kilometre wide Hiawatha impact crater found under the Hiawatha glacier in northwest Greenland. Because of the condition of the crater, scientist initially believed it was a young crater and it was even proposed to have been the crater from the Younger Dryas Impact Event. However, better dating indicates that the crater was formed about 58 million years ago. The impact was during one of the many periods when Greenland was ice-free (in fact, the current ice sheets did not appear until about 3 million years ago when we entered the current ice age--we are currently in a relatively warm inter-glacial period).
The data relied upon in the research comes from tree ring records. But the video below notes that when you know what to look for, you see independent confirmation of the cooler weather and poor crops in other places. (Although I would note that scientists that study the Black Plague have been well aware that cooler weather and poor crops had preceded the plague outbreak in Europe, arguing that this made Europeans--sickened and weakened by weather and poor diet--more susceptible to the plague).
The more interesting issue is why there was a major plague outbreak in Central Asia on the western edge of China that spread a devastating plague across half the world to Europe.
This was not a one-off. A large volcanic eruption in 536 AD (probably in Iceland) also resulted in a significant and disastrous decline in temperatures in Europe with resultant famines. As an article from the University of Melbourne describes it:
This triggered the coldest decade on record going back two thousand years, causing crop failures from Ireland all the way to China.
It also provided perfect conditions for the spread of a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague
Believed to have originated in China and passed through India, the so-called ‘Plague of Justinian’ arrived in Constantinople in 542 through grain ships from Egypt before engulfing the rest of the Mediterranean, Europe and the Persian Empire.
By 549, this killer pandemic had destroyed at least a quarter of the population of the Byzantine Empire – perhaps as many as 10 million people.
Two plagues, nearly 800 years apart, caused by sudden volcanic cooling, originating in western China, and spreading across the known world causing unprecedented numbers of death.
Spy thrillers and superhero movies alike rely on an endless stream of supervillains with grandiose schemes to kill off half the world (or half the universe, if you are Marvel). Something like this: "The Strange and Totally Real Plan to Blot Out the Sun and Reverse Global Warming" from Politico. This is seriously scary stuff: an Israeli company backed by some of the wealthiest people in the world want to release particles into the atmosphere that would block out sunlight to reduce global temperatures. And they have developed the technology to do it. What could go wrong? We don't have to guess because we have several historical accounts of volcanic explosions that forced enough gases or particles into the upper atmosphere to do the same thing, leading to widespread droughts in some areas and heavy rains in others, devastating drops in crop production, and outbreaks of deadly pandemics, things like cholera and aggressive forms of bubonic plague.
The Politico article begins:
Janos Pasztor was conflicted. Sitting in his home office in a village just outside Geneva, he stared into the screen of his computer, where a bizarre Zoom call was taking place. It was Jan. 31, 2024. The chief executive of an Israeli-U.S. startup, to whom Pasztor had only just been introduced, was telling him the company had developed a special reflective particle and the technology to release millions of tons of it high into the atmosphere. The intended effect: to dim the light of the sun across the world and throw global warming into reverse. The CEO wanted Pasztor, a former senior United Nations climate official, to help. The company called itself Stardust Solutions.
Pasztor, a deliberate and self-assured Hungarian with thick, arched eyebrows that give him the appearance of a mildly perturbed owl, was stunned by the seriousness of Stardust’s operation. He had long been expecting that some company would try this. But the emergence of a well-financed, highly credentialed group represented a shocking acceleration for a technology still largely confined to research papers, backyard debates and science fiction novels.
The Stardust CEO, Yanai Yedvab, was a nuclear physicist who was once deputy chief scientist at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, and he jumped straight to the point. He wanted Pasztor to advise him on how to build public credibility, which would be necessary to land the government contracts for sunlight reflection that the company and its investors were banking on. The CEO appeared keenly aware that Stardust had the potential for the kind of public image problems normally reserved for James Bond villains. Those challenges were likely not made easier by picking a company name that echoed Star Wars’ “Project Stardust” — the codename the bad guys in the Galactic Empire used for the Death Star, a weapon designed to destroy entire worlds.
Pasztor initially helped the Company because he had drank the global warming Kool-Aid, but he is now troubled: "Apart from a link to his report on Stardust’s homepage, there was little public indication that they were taking his recommendations for transparency seriously. The company had not published a code of conduct it had agreed on with Pasztor and had told him it would release." The Company has secured tens of millions in funds from investors: Silicon Valley luminaries and an Italian industrial dynasty. But it remains secretive.
Here is what the article says about the project:
Stardust claims to have developed a system that can replicate and maintain the global cooling effects of a volcanic eruption, without all the lava and sulfur. The mechanics would be quite simple. Stardust envisages a fleet of around 100 planes — to begin with — flying into the stratosphere to deliver payloads of their particles, landing to reload, then immediately taking off again to repeat, continuously, every flight a tiny volcanic cough. Researchers, including Visioni, found last year that the most efficient way to achieve a steady, uniform decline in the global temperature would be to spread the particles from the regions just north and south of the tropics. That means launching from at least two places, for example Florida and southern Brazil. The particles would then spread around the globe producing a gradual, uniform decline in the global temperature, before eventually dropping out of the sky after around a year, according to Stardust, and needing to be replaced. The particles would reflect a very small proportion of sunlight back into space, but enough to cool the Earth.
The Politico article is not completely ignorant of what such a cooling project could entail. It relates:
In June 1783, a 16-mile volcanic fissure blew open the southern side of Iceland. “First the ground swelled up with tremendous howling, then suddenly a cry shattered it into pieces ... exposing [the Earth’s] guts, like an animal tearing apart its prey,” recalled Jón Steingrímsson, a local pastor. He survived the ordeal to write an account that was published long after his death. It remains one of his country’s earliest and most important autobiographical works.
For the next eight months, lava spewed from the earth. The sun was hidden by ash and smoke. One in five Icelanders died in the aftermath. Steingrímsson himself only escaped by good luck — or perhaps something more divine. One terrible day, a great wave of lava swept toward his church and village. The pastor gathered his congregation and delivered a sermon of such mighty power and devotion that, it was said, God himself diverted the course of the fire.
As the eruption went on, sunlight grew dimmer far beyond Iceland’s shores. The Laki eruption, as it would come to be known, had sent 122 million metric tons of sulfur into the sky. Much of it would reach the stratosphere, the placid layer of the atmosphere that begins between 4 and 12 miles above the Earth’s surface. Those particles drifted on barometric currents around the Northern Hemisphere, wreaking havoc on the world’s weather. China and Egypt were hit by drought, then famine. In North America and Europe, winter was exceptionally brutal. In February, the Mississippi River froze down to New Orleans. Ice floes were seen bobbing into the subtropical waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
But the Laki eruption is a best case scenario involving only the cooling of the Northern Hemisphere. What about global cooling? The 1815 Mount Tambora eruption, although in the Southern Hemisphere, caused extreme cooling in the Northern Hemisphere producing what was called "the year without a summer." I've written about the Tambora eruption before and its ecological consequences. Quoting from the Wikipedia article at the time:
The 1815 eruption released sulfur into the stratosphere, causing a global climate anomaly. Different methods have estimated the ejected sulfur mass during the eruption: the petrological method; an optical depth measurement based on anatomical observations; and the polar ice core sulfate concentration method, using cores from Greenland and Antarctica. The figures vary depending on the method, ranging from 10E6 to 120E6 tonnes (11,000,000 to 130,000,000 short tons).
In the spring and summer of 1815, a persistent dry fog was observed in the northeastern United States. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. Neither wind nor rainfall dispersed the "fog". It was identified as a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil. In summer 1816, countries in the Northern Hemisphere suffered extreme weather conditions, dubbed the Year Without a Summer. Average global temperatures decreased about 0.4–0.7 °C (0.7–1.3 °F), enough to cause significant agricultural problems around the globe. On 4 June 1816, frosts were reported in Connecticut, and by the following day, most of New England was gripped by the cold front. On 6 June 1816, snow fell in Albany, New York, and Dennysville, Maine. Such conditions occurred for at least three months and ruined most agricultural crops in North America. Canada experienced extreme cold during that summer. Snow 30 cm (12 in) deep accumulated near Quebec City from 6 to 10 June 1816.
1816 was the second coldest year in the northern hemisphere since 1400 CE, after 1601 following the 1600 Huaynaputina eruption in Peru. The 1810s are the coldest decade on record, a result of Tambora's 1815 eruption and other suspected eruptions somewhere between 1809 and 1810 (see sulfate concentration figure from ice core data). The surface temperature anomalies during the summer of 1816, 1817 and 1818 were −0.51 °C (−0.918 °F), −0.44 °C (−0.792 °F) and −0.29 °C (−0.522 °F), respectively. As well as a cooler summer, parts of Europe experienced a stormier winter.
This pattern of climate anomaly has been blamed for the severity of typhus epidemic in southeast Europe and the eastern Mediterranean between 1816 and 1819. The climate changes disrupted Indian monsoons causing three failed harvests and famine contributing to worldwide spread of a new strain of cholera originating in Bengal in 1816. Much livestock died in New England during the winter of 1816–1817. Cool temperatures and heavy rains resulted in failed harvests in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Families in Wales traveled long distances as refugees, begging for food. Famine was prevalent in north and southwest Ireland, following the failure of wheat, oat and potato harvests. The crisis was severe in Germany, where food prices rose sharply. Due to the unknown cause of the problems, demonstrations in front of grain markets and bakeries, followed by riots, arson and looting, took place in many European cities. It was the worst famine of the 19th century.
In "The Deadliest Volcanic Eruption in History," the author mentions that roughly 100,000 people died in the immediate aftermath of the explosion--basically the people that were close enough to be directly impacted by the blast and ash fall. But the climatic impact killed millions more.
But far more died over the next several years, due to secondary effects that spread all over the globe, says Gillen D’Arcy Wood, author of Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World.
“What happened after Tambora is that there was three years of climate change,” he says. “The world got colder, and the weather systems changed completely for three years. And so you had widespread crop failure and starvation all from Asia to the United States to Europe.”
[snip]
It’s difficult to know how many people died because of starvation conditions, but “the death toll is probably about a million people, at least, in the years afterwards,” Wood says. “If you want to include the fact that Tambora unleashed a global pandemic of cholera … then the death toll goes into tens of millions.”
Cholera already existed before the eruption, but the colder temperatures caused by Tambora’s eruption led to the development of a new strain in the Bay of Bengal. Fewer people had immunity to this new strain of cholera, which then spread throughout the world.
Keep the disease aspect in mind, because we will see this as a recurrent theme.
What exactly did the first 18 months of darkness look like? The Byzantine historian Procopius wrote that “the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during this whole year.” He also wrote that it seemed like the sun was constantly in eclipse; and that during this time, “men were free neither from war nor pestilence nor any other thing leading to death.”
Accounts like these weren’t taken very seriously until the 1990s, says Michael McCormick, a history professor at Harvard University and co-author of the Antiquity paper. That decade, researchers examined tree rings in Ireland and found that something weird did happen around 536. Summers in Europe and Asia became 35°F to 37°F colder, with China even reporting summer snow. This Late Antique Little Ice Age, as it’s known, came about when volcanic ash blocked out the sun.
“It was a pretty drastic change; it happened overnight,” McCormick says. “The ancient witnesses really were onto something. They were not being hysterical or imagining the end of the world.”
With this realization, accounts of 536 become newly horrifying. “We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon,” wrote Cassiodorus, a Roman politician. He also wrote that the sun had a “bluish” color, the moon had lost its luster and the “seasons seem to be all jumbled up together.”
The effects of the 536 eruption were compounded by eruptions in 540 and 547, and it took a long time for the Northern Hemisphere to recover. “The Late Antique Little Ice Age that began in the spring of 536 lasted in western Europe until about 660, and it lasted until about 680 in Central Asia,” McCormick says.
"It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," McCormick told Science.
This period of cold and starvation caused economic stagnation in Europe that intensified in 541 when the first bubonic plague broke out. The plague killed between one-third and one-half of the population in the Byzantine Empire, or Eastern Roman Empire.
If the Eruption of Krakatoa was in 535 AD, then the first ever appearance of the Bubonic Plague in Europe in 542 AD is believed to be directly related to it.
The Monk Evagrius wrote a chronicle of the occurrence in Constantinople of an awful, until then unknown disease which over a frighteningly short period of time killed over 250,000 of the city’s inhabitants, until alas one stopped counting the dead.
It was the arrival of a disease which should wreak havoc on Europe for centuries to come. Evagrius believed the illness to have come from Ethiopia. Modern scientists believe this a distinct possibility, as such illnesses incubate in the area of the great lakes of Africa.
The inclination to seek new sources for fresh blood of the flea which spreads the disease increase enormously once the temperature drops below a certain point (the flea’s gut gets blocked and it desperately seeks blood as its own intestines starve it to death).
It is therefore believed that once Krakatoa erupted, the Plague spread at phenomenal speed in the area of the great lakes in Africa.
The plague did not just stop with the Eastern Roman Empire but spread along all its trade routes including eventually to Western England where it devastated the Celts who were struggling against an Anglo-Saxon invasion.
There were other knock on effects. The tribal horse warriors known as the Avars dominated the steps of Mongolia. But the cooler weather reduced the food available to the horses on which they depended. Consequently, they Turkish peoples they had long dominated were able to deliver a resounding defeat against the Avars who fled westward toward Europe where they would eventually stop in Hungary and take up raids against the Byzantine Empire, including ruinous yearly tributes of gold to not carry their raids. And it is believed that the weakening of city states in southern Yemen set the stage for Medina to rise in power and influence and, ultimately, to spawn Islam. For a more detailed look at all of this, watch the video at the bottom of this post.
So when people like Stardust CEO, Yanai Yedvab, and his investors suggest lowering global temperature, keep in mind that they aren't just calling for declining temperature but also the devastating famines, diseases, social and political upheaval that will follow.
In early November, Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian warned: “If it doesn’t rain in Tehran by late November, we’ll have to ration water. And if it still doesn’t rain, we’ll have to evacuate Tehran.”
Typically, rain should start falling in Iran in autumn, following Iran’s hot summer. But the September to November period just gone is the driest the country has seen in half a century, the National Weather Forecasting Centre has reported. Rainfall has been 89 per cent below the long-term average.
Mr Pezeshkian described the situation as “extremely critical”, citing reports that Tehran’s dam reservoirs have fallen to their lowest level in 60 years, some as low as 10 per cent of capacity. Officials say that in the east of Tehran, the Latyan Dam – one of five key reservoirs – is only about 9 per cent full. The Karaj dam, which supplies a quarter of Tehran’s drinking water, is 8 per cent full.
And if they are like U.S. cities, that remaining water is for important things like golf courses.
From Legal Insurrection: "Norway Pauses Use of Fart-Reducing Cattle Feed in Wake of Danish Cow-Tastrophe." Europe is under some delusion that (a) there is man made global warming and (b) it is caused by flatulent cows. (If animals farts could have caused global warming there would have never been ice ages). Authorities have tried various measures to reduce cow farts, including getting rid of farmers and their cattle. But apparently their latest effort was to force farmers to use feed containing a methane-reducing additive called Bovaer. But in Denmark, where the feed is mandated, "[s]ome farmers claim their cattle experienced severe symptoms after eating the additive-infused feed, including collapse, lethargy, reduced feed intake, fever, diarrhea, miscarriages, and significant drops in milk production." The issues have caused farmers in Norway to stop using the additive. And Danish farmers "who have stopped using the additive-infused feed have noticed an improvement in their animals."
First up is this article by Matt Taibi entitled "Bill Gates Says We'll Survive Climate Change, World Furious." As you may have heard, Bill Gates, whose Gates Foundation had committed (whatever that means) $1.4 billion to climate change research, released an essay earlier this week on "Three tough truths about climate" including: "Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise." His justification for a shift from focusing on climate change was that we needed to instead focus on fighting poverty and disease in third world countries. (And I'm sure that his foundation will gladly take your tax dollars to "solve" those problems).
As Taibi relates:
Reaction was swift and furious. In the words of the immortal Greta Thunberg, “HOW DARE YOU!” The New York Times rushed a piece out titled, “Bill Gates Says Climate Change ‘Will Not Lead To Humanity’s Demise.’” The paper linked to Gates’s net worth on the Bloomberg Billionaires’ Index, to his prior comments about irreversible ecological damage, and to the Gates Foundation’s $1.4 billion commitment to climate change research. It didn’t link to Gates’s new essay, though, instead quoting the editor of Inside Philanthropy, who said “one could imagine” this was Gates’s way of “not wanting to be a target of the Trump administration.” Social media is still burning with theories about Gates betraying the climate cause to get out from under an investigation into his foundation’s alleged funding of Chinese entities. The imminent extinction dream is dying hard.
But if Taibi had any thoughts on the why of Gates' sudden shift, he wasn't sharing them.
And that brings me to the second article, "California's Retirement Fund Lost 71% Of $468M Investment In Clean Energy And Won't Say How." As evident when you read the article, the losses weren't due to an economic downturn as the Fund's overall returns were well above 10%. CalPERS won't release information about what specific investments were made, but the article generally discusses the collapse of "green" based industries, including solar panel manufacturing.
The reality is that "green" industries are only "green" in the sense that they suck up lots of money: they rely on government (i.e., taxpayer) funding, subsidies, and mandates to be profitable, but that government largesse has been drying up. Ditto for the climate NGOs. The climate-industrial complex has had a 60 year run of doom scaring, but after 60 years of failed predictions and the economic havoc its policies have had, its days are numbered.
My take is that Bill Gates has realized this and is getting out of the global warming business--reducing his exposure, you might say--before the public subsidies completely dry up.
Camp Century, also known as 'the city under the ice,' was a US military base built in 1959. It consists of of 21 tunnels drilled just below the surface of the ice sheet, spanning a total length of 9,800 feet.
It was used as a front for Project Iceworm, which aimed to install a vast network of nuclear missile launch sites that could target the Soviet Union.
But due to the instability of the ice sheet, the project - and Camp Century - was ultimately abandoned in 1967, gradually becoming buried in snow and ice.
Although ground penetrating radar had previously detected the base, scientist studying the thinning of the ice sheet were using a different imaging technology--NASA's Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR)--which was able to map the structure and layout of the base.
What caught my attention is that the base is now 100 feet below the surface of the ice. Although the article indicated that the base consisted of "tunnels drilled just below the surface of the ice sheet," that is not correct. The Wikipedia page concerning the base indicated that the base was actually constructed by digging trenches which where then roofed over, and even has photographs from the construction showing that type of construction. And it wasn't "instability" in the ice sheet that forced the closure of the base, but a variety of factors the most significant being issues with the sewage system and the fact that compression and spread of the trenches was requiring too much upkeep to keep them within specifications.
So while we are being told that the ice sheet is thinning, we have this incongruous data point that suggest that there has been 80 to 90 feet additional snow and ice accumulation over this base since it was first constructed in 1959.
Their study points to the passing of a star, which they claim came close enough to change planetary orbits in the solar system. The change in temperature came during the period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.
Kaib said: "It has already been proposed that Earth's orbital eccentricity was notably high during this event but our results show that passing stars make detailed predictions of Earth's past orbital evolution at this time highly uncertain, and a broader spectrum of orbital behavior is possible than previously thought."
Kaib added: "One reason this is important is because the geologic record shows that changes in the Earth's orbital eccentricity accompany fluctuations in the Earth's climate,"
Stars passing close enough to potentially alter orbits are relatively rare occurrences, but their impacts can be huge. It’s estimated that a star passes within 50,000 astronomical units (one astronomical unit being roughly the distance between the Earth and the Sun) around once every million years, while one is thought to come as close as 10,000 astronomical units to Earth around every 20 million years.
By way of comparison, climate scientists claim that Earth's temperatures will increase 2-4 degrees Celsius (3.6-7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.
But it is hard to take climate scientists seriously when they adjust the data to fit their models. As the video below points out, climate scientists have "adjusted" historical temperatures downward while modern temperature readings are "adjusted" upward which, of course, results in "global warming". This after the fact "adjustment" of data is very common and, suspiciously, always is adjusted in a way that favors the desired outcome--i.e., that temperatures are increasing.
The Gulf Stream is part of a much wider system of currents, officially called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC.
Described as 'the conveyor belt of the ocean', it transports warm water near the ocean's surface northwards – from the tropics up to the northern hemisphere.
When the warm water reaches the North Atlantic (around Europe and the UK, and the US east coast), it releases the heat and freezes.
As this ice forms, salt is left behind in the ocean water.
Due to the large amount of salt in the water, it becomes denser, sinks , and is carried southwards in the depths below.
Eventually, the water gets pulled back up towards the surface and warms up in a process called upwelling, completing the cycle.
Scientists think AMOC brings enough warmth to the northern hemisphere that without it, large parts of Europe could enter a deep freeze.
Prior studies have already shown that due to climate change, the AMOC is slowing down.
The engine of this conveyor belt is off the coast of Greenland, where, as more ice melts from climate change, more freshwater flows into the North Atlantic and slows everything down.
The new study forecasts that an abrupt shutdown of the AMOC could happen in the next few decades, rather than the next few centuries as previously thought.
According to the article, if the AMOC collapsed, "the European climate will cool by about 1.8°F (1°C) per decade, and some regions will even experience over 5.4°F (3°C) cooling per decade – much faster than today’s global warming of about 0.36 F (0.2 C) per decade."
Second, you will note that contrary to all the cries about a runaway greenhouse effect as certain propogandists have been crying about, the real impact will be colder temperatures and, consequently, less food. The sea levels will not rise; more likely, they will fall slightly. But, in any event, is explains why the wealthy are still buying up beach front property but adding bunkers and fences to keep the great unwashed masses away.
Sabine Hossenfelder became disgusted over media articles hysterically claiming that anthropogenic global warming would lead to a runaway greenhouse effect and turn Earth into something like Venus. She explains in the video below why Venus suffered from a runaway greenhouse and assures us that no matter how much oil and gas we burn, it will not move the Earth close enough to the Sun to cause a runaway greenhouse effect.
Although global warming cultists predicted over 20 years ago that snow would soon be a thing of the past, those of us living in the real world are still living with it--and in spades the past several days.
An Artic freeze encased Michigan's historic lighthouses in ice after extreme temperatures lest seven dead and over 5,000 flights cancelled and delayed.
Mesmerizing images of the lighthouses on the shores of Lake Michigan in Barrien County emerged on Tuesday as brutal weather brought record-low temperatures across much of the nation, with snow and freezing rain present from the South to the Northeast, with over 140million under wind chill advisories or warnings.
New York City had its first significant snowfall in two years on Monday night, and it's only going to get colder on Tuesday, posing a threat to airlines and power grids, according to forecasts.
New York's LaGuardia airport saw the most disruptions on Tuesday, with 14 percent of its flight cancelled and 57 percent delayed. Houston's Bush International and DC's Reagan National airport have also seen significant disruptions.
Wind chills could push the temperature below minus 30 in the South and into the Mississippi Valley, with nearly 80 percent of the country experiencing below-freezing temperatures over the next week.
More than 120,000 U.S. homes and businesses were without power early Tuesday, most of them in Oregon, Texas and Louisiana, after widespread outages that started Saturday.
Albertans were asked for the second evening in a row on Saturday to limit their electricity usage to essential needs only. According to an alert issued by the Alberta Emergency Management Agency to all cell phones shortly before 7 p.m., a high demand for power during the extreme cold placed the province at a "high risk" of rotating power outages.
"On top of high demand of our own energy generation, Alberta's grid receives electricity from neighbouring provinces. Extreme weather in Saskatchewan and British Columbia is impacting electricity sharing, which is also a contributing factor to tonight's grid alert," Nathan Neudorf, the province's utilities minister, said in a statement.
"The Alberta Electric System Operator has activated its emergency grid management plan to work with local distribution utilities to avoid potential rolling brownouts."
The article was strangely silent on why Alberta was short of power. To learn why, we must turn to this article from the Western Standard: "When magical thinking meets a polar vortex cold, hard reality follows" by Michelle Sterling. As that article relates, it all comes from Alberta switching to renewables instead of using fossil fuels.
January 12, 2024, is the day decarbonization died in Alberta.
People with EVs were caught out as the cars couldn’t hold a charge and could only get half the range, as Global News reported.
As Brian Zinchuk of Pipeline Online reported, wind farms in Alberta quietly all went to sleep as temperatures hit minus 30C the night before. Why? Because in extremely cold weather, infrastructure like wind turbines with exposed blades and internal mechanics way up high face the risk of embrittlement and… shattering. Even though there was some wind, the risk was too great to continue operations, meaning that almost all of Alberta 4481 MW of wind power became useless. About that same time, the sun went down. Meaning that all of Alberta’s 1650 MW of solar power vanished for the night.
Meanwhile, the remaining coal-fired power plants, which have 820 MW maximum capability, have been running flat-out, presently at 817 MW as I write this at 12:14 on Saturday January 13, 2024 — another frosty day in polar vortex deep freeze, with temperatures across the province ranging from minus 40 to minus 50 degrees Celsius.
* * *
When you look at the AESO’s list of maximum capability of all sources of power generation, you will find that the maximum capability is 20,777 MW. Yet Alberta topped its previous peak demand record on Thurs. Jan. 11, 2024, about 6 p.m. at 12,384 megawatts. By Friday evening we faced a grid alert. Why? Where were those other 8,000 MW? The answer is that 6131 MW are the unreliable renewables, the 4481 MW wind and the 1680 solar, both of which took a vacation at a critical time.
There is 900 MW pending from the Cascade gas plants which are not fully operational. And hydro almost never can be run at maximum capability in winter due to obvious icy reasons.
Our friendly neighbours and the inter-ties were the stop gap that saved us, despite our neighbours facing the same weather extremes, meaning that we got lucky.
Imagine the deadly outcome if we were to go along with the climate plans to entirely phase-out fossil fuels and rely on renewables.
Imagine the grid demand if every house and heavy industry in Alberta was legislated to be heated only by electricity, not natural gas.
Imagine the collapse of medical facilities if the province faced days or weeks of such a cold snap — which is possible. ...
Mountains around the park are occasionally dusted with powder, but snow on the valley floor is exceedingly rare.
The last time any measurable amount fell was in January 1922, when half an inch was measured at a weather station at Greenland Ranch, according to the National Weather Service.
Only trace amounts have been recorded since then, mostly recently in 1974. But the park could see up to four inches of snow on January 17 and 18, according to a forecast by weather modelling service WXCharts.
I came across this 2012 article recently: "4,000 years ago, climate change caused massive civilization collapse." The researches cited in the article contend that the collapse of the Indus Valley (Harrapan) civilization was due to climate change. From the article (underline added):
Initially, the monsoon-drenched rivers the researchers identified were prone to devastating floods. Over time, monsoons weakened, enabling agriculture and civilization to flourish along flood-fed riverbanks for nearly 2,000 years.
"The insolation — the solar energy received by the Earth from the sun — varies in cycles, which can impact monsoons," Giosan said. "In the last 10,000 years, the Northern Hemisphere had the highest insolation from 7,000 to 5,000 years ago, and since then insolation there decreased. All climate on Earth is driven by the sun, and so the monsoons were affected by the lower insolation, decreasing in force. This meant less rain got into continental regions affected by monsoons over time."
Eventually, these monsoon-based rivers held too little water and dried, making them unfavorable for civilization.
"The Harappans were an enterprising people taking advantage of a window of opportunity — a kind of "Goldilocks civilization," Giosan said.
Eventually, over the course of centuries, Harappans apparently fled along an escape route to the east toward the Ganges basin, where monsoon rains remained reliable.
"We can envision that this eastern shift involved a change to more localized forms of economy — smaller communities supported by local rain-fed farming and dwindling streams," Fuller said. "This may have produced smaller surpluses, and would not have supported large cities, but would have been reliable."
This change would have spelled disaster for the cities of the Indus, which were built on the large surpluses seen during the earlier, wetter era. The dispersal of the population to the east would have meant there was no longer a concentrated workforce to support urbanism.
"Cities collapsed, but smaller agricultural communities were sustainable and flourished," Fuller said. "Many of the urban arts, such as writing, faded away, but agriculture continued and actually diversified."
These findings could help guide future archaeological explorations of the Indus civilization. Researchers can now better guess which settlements might have been more significant, based on their relationships with rivers, Giosan said.
Can you imagine a Christmas―or a lifetime without snowfall? You might think this is a bit of a stretch and unrealistic. But in some parts of the world, this is a reality that’s slowly unfolding. And unfortunately, this fragment of reality has the potential dangers of worsening into something not quite many are prepared. In Britain, an environmental shift is taking people by surprise, which results in warmer or even snow-free winters. Yes, what you’ve heard in the news is no hearsay. Neither will what you’re about to read below. We’ll show you why so you’ll have an open mind of the latest environmental happenings. It’s better to stay current and be informed.
Further into the article, it states:
... As it has been known, global warming is much apparent in less cold winters as opposed to hotter summers.
* * *
Are you mentally prepared for the time when you will have to spend Christmas without snow? Or experience winter rather warmly? No longer will a snowflake lightly fall on your shoulder. No longer will you wrap yourself cozily in many layers while buying Christmas goods. What more, no longer will you be able to mess around with snowballs or build a gigantic snowman.
* * *
As the words of the senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, Dr. David Viner, winter snowfall will soon become “a very rare and exciting event.” He added that “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” From becoming an ‘infrequent’ occurrence, it may even accelerate its status to ‘unknown’.
Of course the snow never disappeared. It was actually quite the joke for a while that global warming conferences kept experiencing record cold temperatures, and several expeditions to polar regions to investigate ice free waters had their ships become stuck in ice.
A potent winter storm has caused major travel disruptions and at least one major German city to stop in its tracks on Saturday.
The storm system which has pivoted from northern Italy toward Poland, western Russia and Ukraine, brought unusually early and deep snow to the region, especially in southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
After initially announcing a halt in air traffic until noon on Saturday, all flights were grounded at Munich's airport until 6 a.m. Sunday. Other airports in the region, including in the Swiss financial capital, Zurich, also announced weather-related delays and cancellations.
This is reportedly the largest December snowstorm on record for Munich, with it receiving 17 inches of snow.
Trains to and from Munich’s central station were also halted, Germany’s national railway said, advising passengers to delay or reroute their journeys. The news agency dpa reported that some passengers in Munich and the nearby city of Ulm spent Friday night on trains due to the halt.
In Munich, no buses or trams were operating as of Saturday afternoon, the local transit authority said. Some subway and regional train lines were also affected by the weather.
Downed trees left “many thousands” of people without power across the state of Bavaria, the utility company Bayernwerk told dpa.
The article goes on to describe the snow related disruptions in Austria, Switzerland, and the Czech Republic.
In late September, with hundreds of journalists watching, Covering Climate Now co-founder Mark Hertsgaard began a two-day media conference with a call to arms.
Climate change, he told attendees at Columbia Journalism School, isn't just a "problem" or "crisis." It's an emergency—one that requires breathless, around-the-clock coverage. Think COVID, Hertsgaard said, except it's the planet that's sick.
"We know how to cover emergencies—we cover them a lot. … We saw that during COVID, right?" Hertsgaard said in a session titled, "The State of Climate Journalism: Issuing a Call to Action."
It’s an interesting comparison. During COVID, the press, at the direction of various "experts," ruthlessly policed its own coverage. The possibility that the virus leaked from a lab, now considered the most likely scenario for its emergence, was roundly derided as a conspiracy theory. Those who questioned the utility of paper masks and the costs of remote learning were scorned. And in a cautionary tale about the mainstream media’s approach to "the science," the University of Pennsylvania scientist who pioneered mRNA vaccines spent years in the scientific wilderness, enduring sneers and abuse from the scientific establishment. She just won the Nobel Prize in medicine.
For most people, this isn’t a story of journalistic triumph. For Hertsgaard, a journalist and the author of Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, it is a template, and he now spends his time telling other journalists exactly how to cover global warming. Some might say that is not very journalistic, but nobody seems to be complaining.
Goebbels would be envious, I think, of how compliant are modern journalists.
As reported by EPA, only 19% of all weather stations report an increase in the number of hot days since 1948!
Below is an important chart that somehow slipped by EPA’s “consensus” censorship squad. It is a map of all 1,066 weather stations across the United States. The change in the number of hot days for that station are ID’d as increasing (red), stayed the same (blank) or decreasing (blue).
A total of 863 stations, or 81%, reported either a decrease or no change in the number of hot days!
This global warming is not very global in its warming. In fact, one could argue that even those that showed increases were primarily due to the weather stations being in "heat islands"--near sources of heat that artificially raise the recorded temperatures--a common problem.
Brown claimed in an article for The Free Press that editors at Nature and Science - two of the most prestigious scientific journals - select 'climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives' and favor 'distorted' research which hypes up dangers.
The reality is that the climate change you hear about in the media, from the government, and from powerful NGOs is not science. It is, instead, a form of scaremongering intended to frighten the public into accepting higher taxes, increased regulations, and a lower standard of living which would otherwise be unacceptable (and note that it never involves sacrifice by the wealthy--who just become wealthier from investments in government subsidized "green" industries). Rather, as discussed by Anthony Watts in "New WUWT Global Temperature Feature: Anomaly vs. Real-World Temperature,"
But in the real-world, people don’t experience climate as yearly or monthly temperature anomalies, they experience weather on a day to day basis, where one day may be abnormally warm, and another might be abnormally cold. Sometimes new records are set on such days. This is normal, but such records are often portrayed by the media as being evidence of “climate change” when if fact it is nothing more than natural variations of Earth’s atmosphere and weather systems. In fact, is doubtful humans would even notice the mild warming we’ve had in the last century at all, given that the human body often can’t tell the difference between 57°F and 58°F in any given moment, much less over a long term.
Essentially, what we know as climate change is nothing more than a man-made statistical construct. You can’t go outside and hold an instrument in the air and say “I’m measuring the climate.” Climate is always about averages of temperature over time. It’s a spreadsheet of data where daily high and low temperatures are turned into monthly averages, and monthly averages are turned into yearly averages, and yearly averages are turned into graphs spanning a century.
But, such graphs used in press releases to the media and broadcast to the public don’t really tell the story of the data honestly. They omit a huge amount of background information, such as the fact that in the last 40 years, we’ve had a series of El Niño weather events that have warmed the Earth; for example, 1983, 1998 and in 2016. The two biggest El Niño events are shown coinciding with temperature increases in Figure 3.
These graphs also don’t tell you the fact that much of the global surface temperature measurements are highly polluted with Urban Heat Island (UHI) and local heat-sink related siting effects that bias temperatures upward, such as the wholesale corruption of climate monitoring stations I documented in 2022, where 96% of the stations surveyed don’t even meet published standards for accurate climate observations. In essence – garbage in, garbage out.
But, all that aside, the main issue is how the data is portrayed in the media, such as The Guardian example shown in Figure 2.
To that end, I have prepared a new regular feature on WUWT, that will be on the right sidebar, combined with the long-running monthly temperature graphs from the state of the art (not polluted or corrupted) NOAA operated U. S. Climate Reference Network and the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH) satellite derived temperature global record.
I’m utilizing the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies GISTEMP global dataset. The difference is simply this – I show both the absolute (measured) and the anomaly (statistically magnified) versions of the global temperature. This is accomplished by doing the reverse procedure as outlined in UCAR’s How to Measure Global Average Temperature in Five Easy Steps.
In this calculation, the “normal” temperature of the Earth is assumed to be 57.2°F. and that is simply added to the anomaly temperature reported by NASA GISS to obtain the absolute temperature. The basis of this number comes from NASA GISS itself, from their FAQ page as seen in August 2016 as captured by the Wayback Machine.
Of course GISS removed it from that page as seen today, because they don’t want people doing exactly what I’m doing now – providing the absolute temperature data, in a non-scary graphical presentation, done in the scale of how humans experience Earth’s temperature where they live. ...
The consequence is that the "global warming" over the past 140 years is less than the day-to-day variance in temperature.
Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) identified over 2,000 earthquakes rumbling throughout the Long Valley Caldera in recent years.
The team conducted a new investigation to see if the seismic activity was a sign of impending doom or that the risk of a massive eruption was decreasing.
Caltech researchers created detailed underground images of the caldera, finding that the recent seismic activity results from fluids and gases released as the area cools off and settles down.
The study author Zhongwen Zhan said: 'We don't think the region is gearing up for another supervolcanic eruption, but the cooling process may release enough gas and liquid to cause earthquakes and small eruptions.
'For example, in May 1980, there were four magnitude 6 earthquakes in the region alone.'
The article also adds that "[t]he long-dormant volcano was the site of a super explosion 767,000 years ago, releasing 140 miles of volcanic material into the atmosphere and devastating the land."
While it may seem that volcanic eruptions or volcanic activity is increasing, that is an illusion. Rather, we are increasingly more aware of volcanic activity. See:
In fact, using the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI), we haven't had a volcanic explosion above VEI 6 since the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815. (See, "The 12 biggest volcanic eruptions in recorded history"--Live Science). It is also notable that atmospheric loading of aerosols and dust due to volcanic activity has actually been quite low over the past century compared to prior periods, according to the graph below:
The researchers detected 238 eruptions from the past 2,500 years, they report today in Nature. About half were in the mid- to high-latitudes in the northern hemisphere, while 81 were in the tropics. (Because of the rotation of the Earth, material from tropical volcanoes ends up in both Greenland and Antarctica, while material from northern volcanoes tends to stay in the north.) The exact sources of most of the eruptions are as yet unknown, but the team was able to match their effects on climate to the tree ring records.
The analysis not only reinforces evidence that volcanoes can have long-lasting global effects, but it also fleshes out historical accounts, including what happened in the sixth-century Roman Empire. The first eruption, in late 535 or early 536, injected large amounts of sulfate and ash into the atmosphere. According to historical accounts, the atmosphere had dimmed by March 536, and it stayed that way for another 18 months.
Tree rings, and people of the time, recorded cold temperatures in North America, Asia and Europe, where summer temperatures dropped by 2.9 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit below the average of the previous 30 years. Then, in 539 or 540, another volcano erupted. It spewed 10 percent more aerosols into the atmosphere than the huge eruption of Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, which caused the infamous “year without a summer”. More misery ensued, including the famines and pandemics. The same eruptions may have even contributed to a decline in the Maya empire, the authors say.
“We were amazed at the close correspondence and the consistency of the climate response to volcanic sulfate forcing during the entire 2,500-year period,” says coauthor Joe McConnell of the Desert Research Institute. “This clearly shows the marked impact that volcanic eruptions have on our climate and, in some cases, on human health, economics and so history.”
Weather and temperatures vary in ways that are difficult to explain and predict precisely. In this article we review data on temperature variations in the past as well possible reasons for these variations. Subsequently, we review key properties of global climate models and statistical analyses conducted by others on the ability of the global climate models to track historical temperatures. These tests show that standard climate models are rejected by time series data on global temperatures. Finally, we update and extend previous statistical analysis of temperature data (Dagsvik et al., 2020). Using theoretical arguments and statistical tests we find, as in Dagsvik et al. (2020), that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years.
