Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
As Australians face a maelstrom of interconnected disasters, the climate catastrophe has become just one of many things to doomscroll about
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An even bigger challenge for those of us seeking more decisive climate action could be the increasing competition among the phalanx of existential risks – pandemic, nuclear warfare, sentient AI and unparalleled inequality.
Kemp argues that these are not standalone challenges. They create a poly-crisis where each feeds the other; climate collapse drives displacement, AI guzzles energy while powering inequality, 10,000 nuclear warheads are stockpiled as the temperature rises.
“These threats are not unavoidable,” he writes, “they are consciously created by powerful groups who profit handsomely from the endeavour. Global catastrophic risk is the product of the worldwide system of extraction: the Global Goliath.”
A final poll question illustrates how the climate crisis has been subsumed by this maelstrom of interconnected disasters; not so much ignored but now one of many things to doomscroll about.
How concerned are you about the following existential threats?
TOTAL: Concerned
TOTAL: Not concerned
Very concerned
Quite concerned
Unsure
Not that concerned
Not concerned at all
The development of AI that is self-aware
67%
24%
35%
33%
9%
18%
6%
Social upheaval through rising inequality
62%
28%
25%
37%
10%
21%
7%
Catastrophic impacts of climate change
59%
33%
28%
32%
8%
20%
13%
Nuclear warfare
57%
35%
28%
30%
8%
25%
10%
Another global pandemic
57%
35%
23%
34%
7%
26%
9%
A meteor strike
29%
60%
13%
15%
11%
28%
32%
…
Projecting the trajectory of existential risk beyond the life of current horizons, say 100 years, one of two things must happen: the Goliaths self-terminate or we find a way to work together and slay the giant.
Kemp’s prognosis is that we recognise that governments have been captured by the Goliaths and organise ourselves into an army of Davids, redistributing power through open democracy and citizen juries.
I find it hilarious greens are complaining about other doomsday narratives distracting people from their fake doomsday narratives. 59% concerned about climate change is still a lot of concern, but clearly a lot of people are moving on.
As for the “Army of Davids” citizen jury / citizen assembly idea, that appears to be the political methodology of choice for sham democracies. Fake citizen assemblies are helping to keep the Venezuelan dictator in power. It turns out when the selection of politicians is by any means other than a popular vote, the process is open to even more manipulation.
The big question – how long will global governments bother to continue to hold COP climate conferences? Reading the rest of the Guardian article, even among the climate concerned, faith that COP will deliver anything useful has collapsed. Only 6% of survey respondents were “very confident” that COP30 would achieve anything meaningful.
Holding big international summits on how to manage the threat of malevolent AI would attract far more public interest than COP. The UN might even convince US delegates to attend if they started holding interesting conferences.
On the 16th anniversary of Climategate, an editorial from 2010 by the late Patrick J. Michaels, is as timely as ever. Michaels, the most trenchant climate scientist against the alarmist consensus, would be pleased with the demise of the Paris Agreement and ‘Net Zero’ at this year’s COP30. His editorial published in the Wall Street Journal (July 12, 2010) follows.
“It’s impossible to find anything wrong if you really aren’t looking…. [Sir Muir Russell’s committee] only interviewed CRU people, not the people whom they had trashed.” (Patrick Michaels, below)
On the 16th anniversary of Climategate, an editorial from 2010 by the late Patrick J. Michaels, is as timely as ever. Michaels, the most trenchant climate scientist against the alarmist consensus, would be pleased with the demise of the Paris Agreement and ‘Net Zero’ at this year’s COP30. His editorial published in the Wall Street Journal (July 12, 2010) follows.
Global warming alarmists claim vindication after last year’s data manipulation scandal. Don’t believe the ‘independent’ reviews.
Last November there was a world-wide outcry when a trove of emails were released suggesting some of the world’s leading climate scientists engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Keith Briffa called “a nice, tidy story” of climate history. The scandal became known as Climategate.
Now a supposedly independent review of the evidence says, in effect, “nothing to see here.” Last week “The Independent Climate Change E‑mails Review,” commissioned and paid for by the University of East Anglia, exonerated the University of East Anglia. The review committee was chaired by Sir Muir Russell, former vice chancellor at the University of Glasgow.
Mr. Russell took pains to present his committee, which consisted of four other academics, as independent. He told the Times of London that “Given the nature of the allegations it is right that someone who has no links to either the university or the climate science community looks at the evidence and makes recommendations based on what they find.”
No links? One of the panel’s four members, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, was on the faculty of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences for 18 years. At the beginning of his tenure, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) — the source of the Climategate emails — was established in Mr. Boulton’s school at East Anglia. Last December, Mr. Boulton signed a petition declaring that the scientists who established the global climate records at East Anglia “adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity.”
This purportedly independent review comes on the heels of two others — one by the University of East Anglia itself and the other by Penn State University, both completed in the spring, concerning its own employee, Prof. Michael Mann. Mr. Mann was one of the Climategate principals who proposed a plan, which was clearly laid out in emails whose veracity Mr. Mann has not challenged, to destroy a scientific journal that dared to publish three papers with which he and his East Anglia friends disagreed. These two reviews also saw no evil. For example, Penn State “determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the academic community.”
Readers of both earlier reports need to know that both institutions receive tens of millions in federal global warming research funding (which can be confirmed by perusing the grant histories of Messrs. Jones or Mann, compiled from public sources, that are available online at freerepublic.com). Any admission of substantial scientific misbehavior would likely result in a significant loss of funding.
It’s impossible to find anything wrong if you really aren’t looking. In a famous email of May 29, 2008, Phil Jones, director of East Anglia’s CRU, wrote to Mr. Mann, under the subject line “IPCC & FOI,” “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re AR4 [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report]? Keith will do likewise … can you also email Gene [Wahl, an employee of the U.S. Department of Commerce] to do the same … We will be getting Caspar [Amman, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research] to do likewise.”
Mr. Jones emailed later that he had “deleted loads of emails” so that anyone who might bring a Freedom of Information Act request would get very little. According to New Scientist writer Fred Pearce, “Russell and his team never asked Jones or his colleagues whether they had actually done this.”
The Russell report states that “On the allegation of withholding temperature data, we find that the CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data.” Really? Here’s what CRU director Jones wrote to Australian scientist Warrick Hughes in February 2005: “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it[?]”
Then there’s the problem of interference with peer review in the scientific literature. Here too Mr. Russell could find no wrong: “On the allegations that there was subversion of the peer review or editorial process, we find no evidence to substantiate this.”
Really? Mr. Mann claims that temperatures roughly 800 years ago, in what has been referred to as the Medieval Warm Period, were not as warm as those measured recently. This is important because if modern temperatures are not unusual, it casts doubt on the fear that global warming is a serious threat. In 2003, Willie Soon of the Smithsonian Institution and Sallie Baliunas of Harvard published a paper in the journal Climate Research that took exception to Mr. Mann’s work, work which also was at variance with a large number of independent studies of paleoclimate. So it would seem the Soon-Baliunas paper was just part of the normal to-and-fro of science.
But Mr. Jones wrote Mr. Mann on March 11, 2003, that “I’ll be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor,” Chris de Freitas of the University of Auckland. Mr. Mann responded to Mr. Jones on the same day: “I think we should stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues … to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”
Mr. Mann ultimately wrote to Mr. Jones on July 11, 2003, that “I think the community should … terminate its involvement with this journal at all levels … and leave it to wither away into oblivion and disrepute.”
Climate Research and several other journals have stopped accepting anything that substantially challenges the received wisdom on global warming perpetuated by the CRU. I have had four perfectly good manuscripts rejected out of hand since the CRU shenanigans, and I’m hardly the only one. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, has noted that it’s becoming nearly impossible to publish anything on global warming that’s nonalarmist in peer-reviewed journals.
Of course, Mr. Russell didn’t look to see if the ugly pressure tactics discussed in the Climategate emails had any consequences. That’s because they only interviewed CRU people, not the people whom they had trashed.
Decades of consensus around so-called climate catastrophe are now running into new economic, technological, and geopolitical realities.
Mix in AI and its unprecedented demand for large-scale electricity generation, and we have a global climate conversation that demands to be reckoned with. Victor Davis Hanson breaks down how the foundations of decades of “green orthodoxy” are shifting on today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.”
“The people who have been the avatars of climate change, never suffer the consequences of their own ideology. Barack Obama said the planet would be inundated pretty soon, if we didn’t address global climate change. Why would he buy a seaside estate at Martha’s Vineyard or one on the beach of Hawaii if he really did believe that the oceans would rise and flood his multimillion-dollar investment?
“The inconsistency of the global warming narrative, the self-interest in the people who promote it, and the logic that they have not presented, empirically, the evidence that would convince us that we have to radically transform our economies on the wishes of a few elites that do not have the evidence, but do have a lot of hypocrisy in the process.”
According to reporter Will de Freitas, climate delegates need to suffer personal hardship to interest people in what they are saying.
Cop30 saw important developments amid huge disappointment
Published: November 28, 2025 4.13am AEDT Will de Freitas Environment + Energy Editor, UK edition
This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage was first published in our award-winning weekly climate action newsletter, Imagine.
Cop30 was never just another UN climate summit. Its setting in Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon, was a reminder that negotiations now unfold within the crisis they are meant to solve.
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“Without the distraction of the US attempting to ‘burn the house down’ … the conference was able to get on with the business at hand: negotiating texts and agreements that will limit global warming.”
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Meanwhile, Belém’s oppressive heat and humidity was noticeable even in the negotiating rooms: “This catalysed an official complaint from UN climate chief Simon Stiell about the climate conditions in the Cop venue, asking for ‘a clear delivery plan on how temperatures will be brought down within the next 24 hours’. The parallels to the goals of the wider negotiation process were hard to miss.
Stories cut through the noise
The image of climate diplomats wiping sweat from their brows as they struggle to focus in a stuffy room is compelling. And it’s this sort of stuff that often gets people interested.
Until the final few days of Cop30, the biggest stories to emerge from the summit all had a human angle: the floods, an indigenous protest, a fire that briefly evacuated the negotiations.
Sadly the UN has gone soft and opted out of the COP conference suffering delegates theme.
COP31 will be in the comfortable resort town Antalya. In winter in the Turkish seaside resort of Antalya, with mild late Fall average maximum temperatures in the low 70s, the most delegates will have to endure is rain and greedy taxi drivers. And of course, there is the excitement of being a high value target located at a beachside resort which is an easy fast boat day trip from the coast of Syria.
If there was one thing that characterised the year 2020, it was not a global pandemic, it was not forced lockdowns and the loss of liberties and freedoms, but the stark unravelling of a hidden world and the realisation that nothing is as it seems. Governments lie, scientists misinform, and we must always look for an ulterior motive in everything.
If there was one thing that characterised the year 2020, it was not a global pandemic, it was not forced lockdowns and the loss of liberties and freedoms, but the stark unravelling of a hidden world and the realisation that nothing is as it seems. Governments lie, scientists misinform, and we must always look for an ulterior motive in everything.
Until 2020, I personally believed that climate science, while imperfect, was carried out by well-meaning people who sought objective truth, and that climate lobby groups acted in our best interests and were there to hold governments and corporations to account. I saw through the pandemic, and this realisation that the government could leverage such scale of deception changed for ever the way I looked at the world.
In 2006, I graduated from the University of Glamorgan with a PhD in social policy. Breaking into the labour market can be difficult for new graduates. Going outside my intellectual comfort zone became the experience when I was successfully interviewed for a research fellowship in the University of Surrey’s Centre for Environmental Strategy. Created by Professor Roland Clift in 1992, this department was housed in the university’s School of Engineering as part of the shift into interdisciplinary research.
Climate change, we are told, is a ‘wicked problem’ which requires collaborative thinking, i.e. involving as many different disciplines and stakeholders as possible.
When I arrived, the Centre for Environmental Strategy was comprised of working alliances between the economics, sociology, psychology, the environmental sciences and the engineering departments. I was employed to work on a five-year project known as RESOLVE – Research Group on Lifestyles, Values and Environment. It was led by Professor Tim Jackson and was aimed at capitalising on his extensive track record and burgeoning profile in the area of ‘sustainable consumption’.
The aim of RESOLVE was to explore various pathways in which the role of the citizen consumer might be integrated more directly into the UK government’s expanding environmental policy suite. Successive energy White Papers, particularly since 2003’s Our Energy future:Creating a Low Carbon Economy, had already signposted acquiescence with UN climate and sustainability goals. It was envisioned that RESOLVE would transcend supply side i.e. production facing measures to curtail fossil fuels, to shed light on the micro-economics of energy in housing, mobility, and the ‘embedded carbon’ in products, services, and individual purchasing choices.
I had relatively little knowledge of climate change when I started work at Surrey, but what immediately became apparent was the clear absence of any discussion on counter-narratives or dissenting views on the science of climate change itself. All research was based upon solving problems within this carefully constructed paradigm, one which largely referenced Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ iconic representation of rising carbon emissions since the 1960s, and 350.org’s argument that we are already well past the threshold of GHG emissions in our environment. One has only to consider the draconian measures of our current Net Zero policies to understand the longer-term implications of these arguments.
In the first few months of my tenure at Surrey, Channel 4 showed ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’.
In their book Cults, Baker, McLaughlin and Rojak have argued that such groups are characterised by a religious fervour which encourages a distinct ingroup-outgroup dynamic. Within my department, there were many who were keen to demonstrate their loyalty and prove their devotion to ‘the cause’ by virtue signalling their life choices to everyone else. Those who cycled, walked or used public transport for example, were often quick to criticise or look down on those who travelled to work by car. In fact, I never mentioned to anyone that I drove into work! Those who flew were often mocked or guilt-tripped for their choices by some in the department. This rule was applied differently to those in higher positions and air miles were seen as an acceptable trade-off in ‘furthering the cause’, particularly if you held an esteemed position at the university.
Fitting Morin’s description of the ‘charismatic leader’, Professor Jackson seemed to be someone who could justifiably take a few liberties when flying all over the world to promote his book Prosperity without Growth. Most were prepared to overlook this as Professor Jackson was held in reverence by many, due to his knowledge and reputation in the field of sustainability (and particularly by the university for his research grant record and media profile). Indeed, Professor Jackson was seen as something of a rebel against the establishment.
Prosperity without Growth began life as a report written for the Sustainable Development Commission. It appeared ahead of a G7 Summit in 2009, and Professor Jackson was taken to task by the UK Treasury – required to defend its message of ‘de-growth’ by the economist Dieter Helm and some of his peers.
At COP15 in 2009, which I attended, Professor Jackson and a few renegade climate lobbyists did not talk at the main meeting but at the Klimaforum09, a ‘grassroots’ event that was supposed to represent the people. He spoke alongside such luminaries as Vandana Shiva, Naomi Klein and George Monbiot. While the intention of this event was to challenge the corporate culture of orthodox UN policy, the primary message remained the same: manmade climate change – the Anthropocene – remains the paradigm within which we all must think and act.
Perhaps the main difference is that these players were calling for more urgent changes than governments were prepared to engage in at that point. These activities offered Professor Jackson a remarkable level of kudos and credibility.
The Mark Steyn v Michael Mann case in the US last year is a perfect demonstration of how the ideology of climate change legitimates itself through the dynamics of a cult membership, reinforces the bounded realities of ‘groupthink’, and works to discredit all dissenters and counter narratives.
Universities provide a unique vantage point for understanding the pervasive influence of manmade climate change on our world. They are increasingly dependent on research funding rather than student numbers, and a vast amount of money has been made available for climate research over the last three decades.
This has meant that a whole culture has emerged around the manmade climate change agenda, suggesting that much of this research serves to reinforce ideological purposes rather than the true pursuit of scientific truth.
A new study, Corrupted Climate Stations: The Official U.S. Surface Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed, finds approximately 96 percent of U.S. temperature stations used to measure climate change fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be “acceptable” and uncorrupted placement by its own published standards.
Official NOAA temperature stations produce corrupted data due to purposeful placement in man-made hot spots
Nationwide study follows up widespread corruption and heat biases found at NOAA stations in 2009, and the heat-bias distortion problem is even worse now
The report, published by The Heartland Institute, was compiled via satellite and in-person survey visits to NOAA weather stations that contribute to the “official” land temperature data in the United States. The research shows that 96% of these stations are corrupted by localized effects of urbanization – producing heat-bias because of their close proximity to asphalt, machinery, and other heat-producing, heat-trapping, or heat-accentuating objects. Placing temperature stations in such locations violates NOAA’s own published standards (see section 3.1 at this link) and strongly undermines the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States.
“With a 96 percent warm-bias in U.S. temperature measurements, it is impossible to use any statistical methods to derive an accurate climate trend for the U.S.” said Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Watts, the director of the study. “Data from the stations that have not been corrupted by faulty placement show a rate of warming in the United States reduced by almost half compared to all stations.”
NOAA’s “Requirements and Standards for [National Weather Service] Climate Observations” instructs that temperature data instruments must be “over level terrain (earth or sod) typical of the area around the station and at least 100 feet from any extensive concrete or paved surface.” And that “all attempts will be made to avoid areas where rough terrain or air drainage are proven to result in non-representative temperature data.” This new report shows that instruction is regularly violated.
This new report is a follow up to a March 2009 study, titled “Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?” which highlighted a subset of over 1,000 surveyed stations and found 89 percent of stations had heat-bias issues. In April and May 2022, The Heartland Institute’s team of researchers visited many of the same temperature stations as in 2009, plus many not visited before. The new survey sampled 128 NOAA stations, and found the problem of heat-bias has only gotten worse.
“The original 2009 surface stations project demonstrated conclusively that the federal government’s surface temperature monitoring system was broken, with the vast majority of stations not meeting NOAA’s own standards for trustworthiness and quality. Investigations by government watchdogs OIG and GAO confirmed the 2009 report findings,” said H. Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environment Policy at The Heartland Institute who surveyed NOAA surface stations himself this spring. “This new study is evidence of two things. First, the government is either inept or stubbornly refuses to learn from its mistakes for political reasons. Second, the government’s official temperature record can’t be trusted. It reflects a clear urban heat bias effect, not national temperature trends.”
An example of the bias problem
The chart below, found on page 17 of the report, shows 30 years of data from NOAA temperature stations in the Continental United States (CONUS). The blue lines show recorded temperatures and the trend from stations that comply with NOAA’s published standards. The yellow lines are temperatures taken from stations that are not compliant with those standards (i.e. near artificial hot spots). The red lines are the “official” adjusted temperature released by NOAA.
“If you look at the unperturbed stations that adhere to NOAA’s published standard – ones that are correctly located and free of localized urban heat biases – they display about half the rate of warming compared to perturbed stations that have such biases,” Watts said. “Yet, NOAA continues to use the data from their warm-biased century-old surface temperature networks to produce monthly and yearly reports to the U.S. public on the state of the climate.”
“The issue of localized heat-bias with these stations has been proven in a real-world experiment conducted by NOAA’s laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and published in a peer reviewed science journal.” Watts added.
“By contrast, NOAA operates a state-of-the-art surface temperature network called the U.S. Climate Reference Network,” Watts said. “It is free of localized heat biases by design, but the data it produces is never mentioned in monthly or yearly climate reports published by NOAA for public consumption.
The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank founded in 1984, is one of the world’s leading organizations promoting the work of scientists who are skeptical that human activity is causing a climate crisis.
The Heartland Institute is one of the world’s leading free-market think tanks. It is a national nonprofit research and education organization based in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.
The biggest annual drop in Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions outside the COVID-19 pandemic has been driven by record output from renewable energy that is squeezing more coal and gas out of the power grid.
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Bowen said the biggest drivers of emission cuts came from growing supplies of renewables, coupled with limits on big polluting factories and mines under the government’s safeguard mechanism policy.
“We are on track to bring down energy bills and meet our climate targets if we stay the course and continue to lift our efforts,” Bowen said.
The government might be boasting about coming electricity price cuts, but the chairman of the federal climate change authority is not so sure of when the promised price cuts will occur.
Climate Change Authority chair Matt Kean unable to say when power prices will stop rising in tense grilling
Climate Change Authority chair Matt Kean has been unable to provide a firm deadline on when power prices will stop rising for Australians after being grilled on energy costs.
Matt Hampson Digital Reporter November 25, 2025 – 7:30PM
Climate Change Authority chair Matt Kean has claimed power prices will stop rising when Labor’s renewable energy plan is rolled out, but could not say when that would be.
The sector which is bearing the brunt of these energy price games is Australian Manufacturing, or what is left of it;
Research Note: Hard times in Australian manufacturing
The last twelve months have been a very difficult time to be in Australian manufacturing. After two years of healthy growth following the pandemic, business conditions took a sudden turn for the worse. The industry entered recession around the middle of 2024, and contracted 2.6% over the last year. While weak economic conditions in Australia have proven difficult for most industries, manufacturing has declined faster and further than any of its peers.
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Manufacturing falls into recession after a post-pandemic boom
Australian manufacturing has experienced very volatile conditions in the past five years. Like many industrial sectors, it was badly impacted by the public health restrictions of the COVID period. But following the pandemic, a strong rebound in Australia’s economy coupled with supply chain disruptions greatly increased the demand for manufactured goods. Manufacturing output surged by around 10% in 2022 to meet this demand, while employment expanded by 7% – its first proper workforce growth in over twenty years.
However, in 2024 conditions in manufacturing rapidly deteriorated. The sluggish Australian economy weighed heavily on local demand, while the restoration of global supply chains saw imports return and put downward pressure on prices. The industry fell into recession during the middle of 2024, and has contracted by 2.6% over the last year. Most branches of manufacturing have been affected, with only the food and beverage subindustry managing to eke out a weak 1.0% growth rate.
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Industrial inflation – particularly gas prices – weigh heavily on balance sheets
One of the major pressures has been industrial inflation, with manufacturing experiencing some of the highest impacts of any industry in Australia.
In the five years since the pandemic, manufacturer input prices have risen by an astonishing 37.5%. This outpaced both the growth in Australian industrial prices (20.0%) and consumer prices (22.2%) across the same time.
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These problems are particularly acute in the ‘heavy’ branches of manufacturing – particularly metals and petrochemicals – which rely on gas. These manufacturers consume around half of Australia’s domestic gas supply, and their need for heat and chemical feedstocks cannot be substituted for lower cost electricity supply. Surging energy costs must often be borne on the balance sheet, greatly reducing the profitability of energy-intensive branches of manufacturing.
The manufacturing research document notes a buoyant gas export market is putting pressure on domestic supplies, but why aren’t domestic supplies responding to upward price pressure?
Ideologically driven closure of coal plants is also putting pressure on domestic gas supplies. Despite green outrage, gas is perceived as the least evil fossil fuel by politicians who know they get the blame if the power grid fails, gas is a “transition fuel”.
While it would be wrong to blame everything on Net Zero policies – the mining industry research note quoted above lists other significant issues such as skills shortages – it seems likely that the emissions cuts Australia’s Net Zero obsessed leaders are celebrating are largely being achieved by burning down what is left of Australia’s manufacturing industry.
Not that anyone in Australia notices, other than people directly affected by the manufacturing cutbacks. All this pain achieves exactly nothing. Whatever manufacturing capacity we lose is rapidly replaced by overseas factories powered in many cases by Aussie coal.
Offshore wind farms (OWPs) are considered a cornerstone of Germany’s transition to renewable energies. We are told that they supply clean energy and slow down climate change.
Offshore wind farms (OWPs) are considered a cornerstone of Germany’s transition to renewable energies. We are told that they supply clean energy and slow down climate change.
However, a recent study by Hyodae Seo sheds light on unexpected and profound side effects: Offshore wind farms warm the atmosphere and the sea surface more significantly than previously assumed and cause complex ecological damage.
The mechanism of warming
How can wind turbines warm the climate? The secret lies in the vortices and the altered air circulation.
The rotors extract energy from the wind. This creates vortex structures that spread over wide areas.
These vortices weaken the natural mixing of the lower air layers and the surface water.
The natural cooling capacity of the sea surface is thereby reduced. Heat cannot be dissipated as easily, which intensifies the temperature increase at the sea surface. This additional heat rises into the atmosphere.
Measurements confirm this effect: there are slight but constant temperature increases near the ground. In densely concentrated wind farms, these effects can reinforce each other.
Moreover, the impacts are not just local; analyses show that the effects of the vortices extend over more than 100 kilometers and cause measurable temperature increases up to 200 meters in altitude.
Ecological damage, microplastic threat
The climatic changes are only one side of the coin. Marine ecosystems are stressed in various other ways. There are high strike rates for birds and bats.
Also sediment stirring harms the habitats of many marine organisms. The current vortices alter the mixing of the water column, affecting the distribution of plankton and thus the foundation of the marine food chain.
Another particularly severe finding is the abrasion of the rotor blades. During operation, they release microplastic particles, which are ingested by marine animals like mussels and oysters. The warming of the water also accelerates the decay of materials, causing the plastic to spread over increasingly larger areas and interfere deeply with biological cycles.
The silent health hazard: Infrasound
An often-underestimated factor is the low-frequency infrasound generated by the rotors. Although it is inaudible to humans, the pressure fluctuations can trigger physical reactions.
Residents near the coast often report symptoms such as sleep disturbances or persistent inner restlessness. Animals are also sensitive, as even small fluctuations affect their orientation. The local warming of the surrounding air also changes sound propagation, which can intensify some of these effects.
Conclusion
The study demonstrates that offshore wind farms set in motion a complex network of turbulence, warming, microplastics, and infrasound. The combination of these factors shifts climatic and ecological processes, shaping both the atmosphere and the marine environment. The results signal that these far-reaching technical interventions can no longer be viewed as isolated or negligible fringe phenomena. In the future planning and expansion of offshore wind energy, these profound repercussions on the regional climate and sensitive ecosystems must be taken into account much more seriously.
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