Tag: Disaster

The Ghoulish Race to Turn Nepal’s Flood Victims Into a ‘Climate Crisis’ Talking Point

The political talking point ignores tens of millions of years of plate tectonics and its consequences and completely dismisses well-established mountain-weather dynamics.

Reports of the devastation in Nepal following a massive landslide now indicate that the death toll from Wednesday’s devastating flash floods in Nepal and China has risen to 800, with around 3,000 people still missing.

From Watts Up With That?

The political talking point ignores tens of millions of years of plate tectonics and its consequences and completely dismisses well-established mountain-weather dynamics.

From Legal Insurrection

Posted by Leslie Eastman

Reports of the devastation in Nepal following a massive landslide now indicate that the death toll from Wednesday’s devastating flash floods in Nepal and China has risen to 800, with around 3,000 people still missing.

Nepal’s disaster agency said Sunday the death toll had climbed to 788 with 2,502 missing, while Chinese authorities reported 16 deaths and 546 missing on the Chinese side of the border.

Poor weather and challenging terrain have hampered aerial rescue operations.

In Nuwakot, one of the Nepali districts devastated by the floods, helicopters resumed operations before noon Saturday after poor weather temporarily obstructed their activities. Some helicopters were loaded with boxes and bags of aid, including clothes, instant noodles, crackers and rice. Others returned from the flood-hit areas carrying survivors.

…More than 3,700 people have been rescued in Nepal so far, according to authorities there. Hundreds of the missing are foreigners who were in the area to work, trek or make a pilgrimage to a sacred peak on the Tibet side of the border.

Nepal’s deadly Himalayan flash flood this week has predictably produced a familiar ritual: before rescue crews had finished counting bodies, climate cultists and their political acolytes were already racing to slot the disaster into their favorite narrative. Outlets from the New York Times to CNN to Forbes rushed out pieces insisting that “climate change” primed the catastrophe.

Suddenly everyone became an expert on the Himalayan climate.

Three clear-eyed voices on X pushed back: Dr. Matthew Wielicki (Director – United States Global Change Research Program), meteorologist Chris Martz, and Jim Steele (ecologist and author of Landscapes & Cycles). They deserve amplification, not the usual media silence.

So, let’s take a deep dive into Himalayan geology and geography with them.

What actually happened in Nepal

The disaster began when an enormous chunk of a glacier on Langtang Lirung, high in the Himalayas, sheared off and slammed into the valley below with such force that it registered as a magnitude 5.2 seismic event, according to the US Geological Survey. The ice and rock mass blocked the Lhende Khola river, and when the makeshift dam gave way, it unleashed a wall of water, mud, and boulders the size of cars that buried villages downstream. Even the outlets pushing the climate narrative admit the actual trigger is still “under investigation” and that no formal attribution study has been done.

That inconvenient detail didn’t stop the parade of quotes about “what climate change looks like.” One geologist told CNN, “Whether this particular event can be tied to climate change or not, this is what we expect.” This is not science, but a talking point dressed up as science.

The mountains have been doing this for millions of years.

Meteorologist Chris Martz cut through the noise by noting that landslides and avalanches in Nepal have occurred for tens of millions of years, long before humans existed, let alone burned fossil fuels. As he noted, the V-shaped valleys carved through the region were carved by exactly these landslide-flood events at pre-industrial carbon dioxide levels, a geologic fact that climate cultists conveniently skip.

Geologist Dr. Matthew Wielicki, who has done fieldwork sitting above the Himalaya’s “enormous, deeply incised” river systems in Tibet, made the same point: This landscape is robustly geologically active on its own, independent of anything happening in the atmosphere.

Both men are pointing to something the peer-reviewed record supports. The Himalaya is a young, still-rising mountain range, formed by the Indian plate colliding with Eurasia roughly 40 to 65 million years ago, and it remains one of the most tectonically active zones on Earth.

Research into the region’s landslide history documents “giant rock slope failures” tied to the North Himalayan Fault system going back tens of thousands of years, driven by the constant interplay between tectonic and glacial activity… not modern emissions.

In fact, Wielicki wrote a paper noting that southern Tibet rapidly eroded and exposed rock from about 17–16 million to 12–11 million years ago, probably because tectonic uplift and steep rivers drove intense erosion. Around 10 million years ago, enhanced uplift in the Himalayas (likely driven by crustal thickening and fault-related rock stacking) shifted drainage divides southward and diverted rivers away from southern Tibet. This tectonic restructuring strengthened the Himalayan rain barrier, dried southern Tibet, reduced river power, and largely shut down erosion there even as the mountain belt continued to develop.

In other words, this event is an example of Earth-caused climate change.

Rain, snow, and mountains that manufacture their own weather.

Another detail missing from the climate-panic coverage is that the Himalaya doesn’t just sit there passively, waiting to be affected by global climate. The mountains are so large that they actively create their own extreme weather.

Keep in mind that the Great Himalaya’s average high crest is about 3.8 miles high, with the iconic Mount Everest reaching roughly 5.5 miles.

The sheer height of these peaks forces monsoon moisture upward, and the precipitation released drives erosion and landslides for eons. Add seasonal snowmelt and near-vertical topography, and you have a landscape engineered by nature to periodically fail catastrophically, regardless of the level of carbon dioxide and with or without an added tenth of a degree of global average temperature.

Geothermal heat melts ice from below.

Where there is a collision of 2 tectonic plates, there is a great deal of geothermal heat that arises FROM THE SURFACE, not THE ATMOSPHERE. SUVs are not responsible for this heat. Furthermore, glacial forces themselves can elevate temperature.

The following analysis is from Jim Steele:

However, on Langtang Lirung, at the 5200 meter elevation where the rock-ice block first separated to start the 2026 avalanche, the average summer temperature is still below freezing at -6°C to -8°C (21°F to 17°F). During the warmest summer period, mid-day averages reach 2°C to 6°C (36°F to 43°F) but night temperatures stay near -2°C to -5°C (28°F to 23°F). Furthermore, science suggests air temperatures are not affecting the surface ice.

The top few meters of a glacier, rapidly respond to air temperature, sunshine, and seasons. Nonetheless winter cold and summer warmth only penetrate about 10–20 m from the glaciers’ surface. Thus, changes in atmospheric temperature are unlikely to provide “lubricating” melt water in 200-meter thick glaciers. Below the shallow “seasonal layer,” temperature is steady and often close to the local mean annual air temperature, which again averages summer temperature below freezing at -6°C to -8°C (21°F to 17°F).

Still studies show the glacier-ground interface is almost always warmer than the ice above it for 3 main reasons: 1) Because ice is such a good insulator, the geothermal heat rising from Earth’s interior accumulates at the glacier’s bottom. 2) frictional heat from ice sliding over rock adds to the temperature. 3) Under thick ice, the melting point is lower due to pressure effects. So even if the surface is –30 °C or colder, the bed of a 2–3 km ice sheet can sit at or very near 0 °C. Global warming is not a factor.

Parting thoughts

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), the regional scientific body actually based in Kathmandu, remarked that it’s simply “too early to determine what role climate change played in this specific event”. That’s the honest scientific position.

Everything past that point is ghoulish narrative laundering that uses dead villagers as a backdrop for a political talking point and ignores tens of millions of years of plate tectonics and its consequences, and completely dismisses well-established mountain-weather dynamics.

Masses Fightback: Germans Mobilize Against €Trillion Wind & Solar ‘Transition’ Disaster

You can fool some of the people, some of the time. But Germany’s wind and sun cult are struggling to fool all of the people, for all time.

From STOP THESE THINGS

You can fool some of the people, some of the time. But Germany’s wind and sun cult are struggling to fool all of the people, for all time.

Slowly but surely, the average German is working out that they have been played for fools. As Charles MacKay observed: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.” And so it goes in Germany.

The economic and social costs of Germany’s grand wind and solar transition – aka the ‘Energiewende’ – have already taken their toll, with much worse to come. As Charles Rotter details in the first piece below.

However, in the second, Pierre Gosselin reports on the growing tide of anger and resentment being displayed by ordinary Germans who recognise that they’ve been taken for a ride.

Remarkably this mass movement is being led by a German noble, Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, once dubbed the ‘Punk Princess’ but who, now, is calling the grand green transition for what it is: an expensive failure.

Germany’s Costly Energy Conundrum: Poor Planning and Bad Choices, 1 Trillion Dollars Needed
Watts Up With That?
Charles Rotter
14 June 2023

Germany finds itself facing an astronomical challenge of plugging a massive power gap, one according to BloombergNEF that could cost the country over $1 trillion by 2030 . The urgency to address this energy crisis stems from a combination of factors, including the aftermath of the war in Ukraine and the dubious choice to transition away from nuclear and coal power plants. However, the predicament Germany now faces is largely a consequence of poor planning and inadequate foresight in the energy sector. As the nation scrambles to find solutions, it becomes evident that crucial opportunities were missed, poor decisions were made, and the costs of this oversight are now mounting.

Underestimating the Scope of the Challenge
One of the fundamental failures in Germany’s planning was underestimating the scale of the energy transition required. The political decision to phase out nuclear and coal power plants, coupled with increased demand from electric vehicles, heating systems, and economically suicidal climate commitments, has created an overwhelming demand for new generation and upgraded power grids. The sheer magnitude of the undertaking, requiring the installation of solar panels equivalent to 43 soccer fields and 1,600 heat pumps daily, indicates a severe lack of anticipation and preparedness.

Germany has set aside more than €260 billion ($275 billion) to deal with the immediate risks of an energy crisis triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine, but the ultimate fix will be much costlier — if the country can pull it off at all.

https://www.tbsnews.net/bloomberg-special/germany-faces-1-trillion-challenge-plug-massive-power-gap-590590

BASF SE‘s plans to cut 2,600 jobs as it faces strains from the energy crisis is a sign of the urgency. The chemical giant’s operations in Germany swung to a loss during the second half, and it’s now closing a number of energy-intensive factories, including two ammonia plants and related fertilizer facilities, resulting in 700 job cuts at its main Ludwigshafen site.

https://www.tbsnews.net/bloomberg-special/germany-faces-1-trillion-challenge-plug-massive-power-gap-590590

Lack of Clarity in Replacing Energy Sources
Germany’s dilemma is exacerbated by its unclear path for replacing phased-out energy sources. With nuclear and coal off the table, the country is heavily reliant on importing liquefied natural gas, which comes at a higher cost. The transition to electric cars, heat pumps, and hydrogen production further adds to the energy demand. Yet, there is a lack of concrete plans for generating electricity during periods of low renewable production. The reliance on future gas plants running on hydrogen faces significant hurdles, including a lack of willing investors, the reliance on nonexistent and potentially never existent technology, and the high costs involved, if those problems were to ever be solved.

Insufficient Investment and Unclear Regulations
The lack of funding and investment in the energy sector can be attributed to high market uncertainty and unclear regulations and, of course, the dubious prospects of profitability of intermittent wind and solar without major subsidies. These issues hamper the development of necessary infrastructure. Investors remain hesitant to commit to costly projects, leaving Germany in a state of flux. The need for clear regulations and financial incentives is essential to attract private sector participation at all.

Conclusion
Germany’s $1 trillion energy challenge serves as a stark reminder of the consequences that poor planning can have on a nation’s energy future. The failure to accurately anticipate the scope of the transition and the absence of a clear path to replace phased-out energy sources have created a significant hurdle. Addressing this crisis requires a comprehensive reassessment of energy policies, including rethinking some of the politically motivated retirement of nuclear power, enhanced investment in research and development, and the establishment of clear regulations and financial incentives. Germany must learn from its past oversights and rectify them swiftly to ensure a resilient energy future for the country. Time is of the essence.
Watts Up With That?

Ulrike von Waitz, Mitglied der Gruppe Mothers for Nuclear vor dem Gelaende des ehemaligen Versuchsatomkraftwerk Kahl

German Princess Gloria On Green New Deal: “Going To Be Worse Than Communist East Germany”!
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
18 June 2023

Normally I don’t put much stock in European royalty and what they have to say. But when it comes to Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis of Germany, she has the unique ability to say what millions of people are thinking.

Germans rising up, turning out in masses to protest government’s outrageous energy proposals and policies

Recently she was interviewed as a guest on Youtube channel “Achtung, Reichelt!” where she spoke about the demonstration that had taken place in Erding last weekend (see image above). An estimated 13,000  people protested to protest the government’s heat pump madness. Normally when it comes to climate, getting even a hundred people to show up to protest against government policies would be quite a feat. But now as the economic pain sets in, there are real signs that the masses are finally beginning to wake up.

Princess Gloria told Achtung Reichelt: “Berlin is making policies against us citizens. But politicians are there for the people, not the other way around. Her verdict: “The transition to green energies has failed, failed, failed!”

Germans realizing they’ve been taken for a ride
When asked why the people are just now turning out to demonstrate, Gloria von Thurn und Taxis says they are being driven firstly by the fact that “everything has gotten more expensive” and that the people have realized they “have been taken for a ride.”

“Worse than communist East Germany”
“But climate change is a huge swindle. It’s a method of extracting money out of the people’s pockets, and they are supposed to feel good about it. The feeling good now ends at the end of the month when they see there’s no longer any buying power, when the restaurants close, when the airline trips can no longer be booked,” says Princess Gloria. “And what’s good is that the Greens have come out and been very open about this agenda: We may no longer travel, we should eat only certain things, we may not heat. It’s going to be worse than [communist] East Germany.”

“Before this is really put into place, we the people have the chance to rise up and to protest together, and foremost – very important – to go out and vote,” she adds.
No Tricks Zone

Smart meters are a trial run for an even greater heat pump disaster to come–Simon Heffer

We should be used by now to one crackpot environmentalist idea after another being imposed upon us, but they retain the power to create outrage.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Philip Bratby

Simon Heffer has been rather quiet about Net Zero lately, so it’s good to see him join the fray:

We should be used by now to one crackpot environmentalist idea after another being imposed upon us, but they retain the power to create outrage. We learned last week that a tenth of smart meters in British homes, or around three million of them, are faulty. Technology is not, it seems, as wonderful as those who inflict it on us – in this case, politicians virtue-signalling to cranks oblivious to the economic realities that keep families, businesses and the country solvent – like to pretend.

And as with many green fantasies, there is incompetence. The Government is way behind its target of getting these malfunctioning meters into 80 per cent of homes by 2025, not least because of a shortage of installers. And those who do install are accused of prioritising quantity over quality, hence so many going haywire.

My objection to such things is not based on born-again luddism, but on repeated evidence of supposedly planet-saving ideas being profoundly economically destructive: and smart meters are only a small foretaste of the horror to come. On Friday, we reported that because of the Government’s unthinking obsession with banning all new oil boilers, people in rural households – those of us living nowhere near the gas grid – would, if forced instead to use heat pumps, suffer a 70 per cent rise in their energy bills.

At a time when many people are struggling to feed their families thanks to the huge rise in inflation, caused partly by the insane pumping of money into the economy during the pandemic and a too-slow rise in interest rates after it, the idea of the cost of keeping warm rocketing by more than two-thirds should, if you will forgive the expression, chill the blood.

But grinding poverty is, so far as ministers are concerned, a price worth paying for the cult of net zero. Few independent experts pretend that either solar power or wind power are remotely adequate for the needs of heating and powering a country of approaching 70 million people. We are facing this serious crisis because of the demented opposition to nuclear power that has taken root in the last 20 years – a bacillus that entered the Conservative Party’s bloodstream with the leadership of Dave Cameron – and a chronic determination to make promises about improving our environmental record that would undermine the economy of any advanced country that relies on the generation of electricity, the heating of buildings and water and, of course, on moving people and goods around from A to B.

Perhaps some time in the 2030s ministers will be deputed not only to tell us to brush our teeth in the dark – as the late Patrick Jenkin famously did in the 1973-74 energy crisis – but to put on an extra jumper or two, and to snuggle up with other humans or, failing that, domestic pets as hot water bottles. We could collect brushwood for camp fires to do our cooking and around which to huddle to keep warm, at least until the carbon-emissions fascists catch up with us.

The fetish of net zero, and the growing deference to environmental activist groups (who have now moved on from gluing themselves to roads and climbing up motorway gantries to protesting in the luxury of Glyndebourne, where they unleashed a presumably biodegradable confetti bomb during a Poulenc opera on Thursday), seems to have paralysed our rulers into inaction.

This has to stop, because otherwise there will be mounting public outrage and economic collapse as we give up even attempting to compete with, among others, the rampantly-polluting Chinese.

The Government plans to introduce 600,000 heat pumps a year – for the moment by consent – but has no plans of what to do in households where this is entirely impractical. As Sir Bill Wiggin, the MP for North Herefordshire, has pointed out, it’s not just detachment from the gas grid that requires many rural households to be heated by oil, but the fact that numerous properties in such areas are listed buildings. Without destroying part of their protected fabric, these often cannot accommodate these pumps.

And above all there is the expense: the average oil boiler costs £2,500, the average heat pump £13,000, according to the Energy and Utilities Alliance. In a depressing continuation of the Government’s desire to intervene and spend money recklessly, it offers grants of between £5,000 and £6,000 to those wishing to install such pumps – though the public are so uninterested in this pointless scheme that millions set aside for subsidies are being handed back to the Treasury. Will ministers offer, in perpetuity, grants to cushion the running costs too? What would that do to Britain’s already suffocating tax burden?

Rishi Sunak has in other respects shown himself willing to depart from the ill-considered policies of his predecessors, and as a matter of urgency he should think again about his environmental policy. The boiler ban after 2026 must go: it is an outrageous interference in domestic life, and when thousands of voters in the Tory heartland find they are forced to buy ruinously expensive heat pumps, they will revolt accordingly.

And, for similar reasons, Mr Sunak should delay indefinitely the ban from 2030 on selling new non-electric cars, whose economic and practical damage he cannot go on ignoring – whether because of the lack of enough electricity to run them, the slowness of charging them, the destruction caused by lithium mining or even the potential collapse of multi-storey car parks under the vast weight of electric cars. God knows, his party needs a re-launch and to cheer up people who think it inhabits a parallel universe. What better place to start than by ditching all this absurdity, and announcing a new nuclear programme? 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/06/17/smart-meters-are-a-trial-run-for-an-even-greater-heat-pump/

The Tories are dead and buried at the next election with the way things stand at the moment.

They may have a glimmer of a chance if Rishi Sunak used his new premiership to change course on Net Zero with two specific promises:

1) Conventional oil and gas boilers will not be banned until there is an alternative available which is as cheap to instal and run, and which heats the home properly.

2) Petrol and diesel cars will not be banned either until EVs prices are competitive and every driver has full and easy access to rapid chargers in the same way they do to petrol stations.

Brad Pitt, Mikhail Gorbachev, And the Hurricane Katrina Eco-Homes Disaster

Mikhail Gorbachev founded Green Cross International in 1993, and along with Diane Meyer-Simon went on to found the US affiliate, Global Green – the organisation which Hollywood Reporter claims faces a contempt of court hearing in October. Gorbachev was a busy man after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he worked hard to advance the green movement.

From Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Brad Pitt. Georges Biard [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Who is going to pay? Hurricane Katrina victims are still suffering the consequences of Brad Pitt’s catastrophic attempt to turn the rebuild into a showpiece for eco-friendly construction.

Charity that agreed to bail out Brad Pitt’s foundation for $20.5million owed to Hurricane Katrina victims STILL hasn’t paid up after new homes backed by the actor fell into ruins

  • Global Green has been ordered to secure $10million in two months after it agreed to pay $20.5million in August 2022 to bail out Brad Pitt’s foundation
  • Pitt’s foundation Make It Right built more than 100 homes for Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans that were allegedly poorly built after falling into disrepair
  • Global Green agreed to pay for the repairs without having the money and blamed Pitt’s troubled past as reason why it struggled to come up with the sum 

By ALYSSA GUZMAN FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 04:04 AEST, 14 April 2023 | UPDATED: 04:44 AEST, 14 April 2023

The nonprofit that bailed out Brad Pitt‘s foundation for more than $20million owed to Hurricane Katrina victims still hasn’t paid up after new homes backed by the actor fell into ruins. 

The 59-year-old actor’s organization Make It Right built more than 100 homes in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But the victims sued, alleging that the homes were poorly built after giving way to rot, mold and structural defects. 

Global Green, who previously worked with Pitt, agreed to pay $20.5million in an August 2022 settlement with the Bullet Train actor’s foundation. However, CEO Bill Bridges claimed the nonprofit was told it would not have to follow the tight 10-day deadline. 

When Global Green was unable to come up with funds, it attempted to back out of the agreement, blaming Pitt’s ex-wife Angelina Jolie‘s abuse lawsuit against him as reason why it was unable to raise funds. However, the company was unsuccessful and has been ordered to pay back $10million in two months and the other $10.5million will be re-evaluated. 

Global Green also faces a contempt hearing on October 2 after the judge lost confidence in the organization’s intervention, according to the Hollywood Reporter

…Read more: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11969835/Charity-agreed-bail-Brad-Pitts-foundation-20-5M-paid.html

A key point to note, these eco-homes were subsidised, but they weren’t gifts. Poor people whose homes were devastated still had to borrow substantial sums of money and help pay for construction. But the price of accepting that charitable help, the homes apparently had to be eco-homes.

From Hollywood Reporter;

… “I just saw what needed to be done,” Pitt told Architectural Digest in 2009, two years after Make It Right began, “and I said, ‘Why not?’ ” Pitt, who broke ground on the project alongside former President Bill Clinton, enlisted a roster of Pritzker Prize-winning architects, including Frank Gehry, Shigeru Ban and Thom Mayne.

In time, though, Make It Right’s beneficence encountered stark reality, both for the new homeowners — these weren’t gifts; the residents had taken out mortgages — as well as for Pitt. “We went into it incredibly naive,” he explained to New Orleans paper The Times-Picayune in 2015. “Just thinking we can build homes — how hard is that? — and not understanding forgivable loan structures and family financial counseling and getting the rights to lots and HUD grants and so on and so forth. So it’s been a big learning curve.” …Read more: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/brad-pitt-charity-mess-katrina-victims-stranded-1235371222/

Perhaps if the focus had been on building good homes rather than building eco-friendly homes, Katrina victims who bought into the scheme would have had a happier outcome.

Where does Mikhail Gorbachev, the last dictator of the Soviet Union, fit into this mess?

Mikhail Gorbachev founded Green Cross International in 1993, and along with Diane Meyer-Simon went on to found the US affiliate, Global Green – the organisation which Hollywood Reporter claims faces a contempt of court hearing in October. Gorbachev was a busy man after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he worked hard to advance the green movement.

I hope Katrina victims find a speedy resolution, they have certainly been waiting long enough. Who knows, maybe the parent charity Gorbachev founded can help make good the Global Green shortfall, by locating some of the 2-3000 metric tons of gold which allegedly went missing in the wake of the Soviet collapse.