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.
Wake up call for anyone who thought Hybrids are safer than EVs?
House fire that started in Toyota RAV4 destroys family’s home in southwest Sydney
Published 06 September 2025
Neighbours rushed to help after hearing a loud bang come from the hybrid car as flames engulfed the front of the house.
An out-of-control blaze believed to have been sparked by a hybrid electric car has left a family home a smoking mess with neighbours rushing to help as loud explosions woke the street.
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Firefighters were able to contain the fire, but not before two cars were completely gutted and the front of the property was scorched.
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The fire is believed to have originated from a hybrid Toyota RAV4 that Soto purchased a year ago.
The Toyota RAV4 has a 18.1KWh battery according to online specifications – significantly less than full battery EVs, but significantly more than the 0.5 – 0.8KWh of a normal automobile battery. In addition that 18.1KWh is a lithium battery, while most automobile batteries still use far safer lead acid battery technology.
Obviously, this is breaking news, investigation might discover the fire was not caused by the lithium battery. But even if the battery didn’t start the fire, a battery a quarter the size of a pure electric vehicle battery would likely have added to the intensity of the fire.
I’m not an expert on vehicle fires, but I once owned a gasoline vehicle which caught fire with a full tank. My vehicle fire didn’t look like the vehicle in the picture. The back of my vehicle burned, after the rear fuel tank ruptured, but the front of the vehicle was almost untouched.
The question I’m sure we’re all asking, how long will insurance companies continue to put up with this risk? Because it wouldn’t surprise me if hybrids with such large batteries are actually more dangerous than EVs. If the gasoline portion of the vehicle has the normal risk profile of a gasoline engine, and the large EV scale battery carries the normal risk of an EV, then surely the risk such a hybrid vehicle will spontaneously explode is the sum of both sets of risks.
If this heightened combined risk profile for hybrids is correct, and nobody was warned, hybrid vehicle makers could face the mother of all class action lawsuits from people who lost their homes or the lives of their loved ones.
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They forgot to say “Evacuate everyone south of that line…”. Apparently the green electricity of the future will be too unreliable to depend on air conditioning.
Essay by Eric Worrall
They forgot to say “Evacuate everyone south of that line…”. Apparently the green electricity of the future will be too unreliable to depend on air conditioning.
When homes already hit 40°C inside, it’s better to draw on residents’ local know-howthan plan for climate change from above
Published: February 23, 2024 10.18am AEDT
Abby Mellick Lopes Associate Professor, Design Studies, Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney Cameron Tonkinwise Professor, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney Stephen Healy Associate Professor, Human Geography and Urban Studies School of Social Sciences/ Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
Weather extremes driven by climate change hit low-income communities harder. The reasons include poor housing and lack of access to safe and comfortable public spaces. This makes “climate readiness” a pressing issue for governments, city planners and emergency services in fast-growing areas such as Western Sydney.
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Last summer was relatively mild, but we recorded temperatures as high as 40°C inside some homes. Recalling a heatwave in 2019, one resident said: “The clay had cracks in the grass that you could almost twist your ankles.”
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Official responses to climate extremes typically rely on a retreat indoors. These “last resort” shelters depend in most cases on a reliable electricity supply, which can be cut during heatwaves.
There have been efforts, but not in Australia, to establish a “passive survivability” building code. The aim is to ensure homes remain tolerably cool during a heatwave (or warm during a cold snap) even if power is cut for a number of days.
Too bad the professors didn’t push for reliable nuclear power, or for replacing or upgrading Australia’s fleet of aging fossil fuel electricity plants. A big surplus of reliable electricity located close to the city would massively reduce the risk of blackouts.
700 miles closer to the equator, we Queenslanders are already living this predicted 104F Sydney climate apocalypse. I’m happy to share the life saving strategies we have developed. When the temperature hits 104F, we find some convenient shade and drink an ice cold beer. If the first beer doesn’t work, we drink a second beer. After this we go for a swim, or maybe fire up the BBQ.
Blaze broke out at Croydon building Friday morning, with firefighters highlighting risks from lithium batte
Blaze broke out at Croydon building Friday morning, with firefighters highlighting risks from lithium batteries
An e-bike workshop has been destroyed in an early morning fire in Sydney’s inner west, causing road closures along the suburb’s shopping strip.
Residents were woken just before 5am on Friday after the fire broke out at the building on Elizabeth Street in Croydon. The Guardian has the story.
The building – which houses a business that sells, rents and repairs e-bikes – was destroyed in the blaze, with insurers and structural engineers called in to assess the possibility of collapse.
The cause of the fire had yet to be determined, Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) said.
“Whilst this property was an e-bike-scooter outlet and assembly business, there is no indication that charging batteries caused the fire,” a spokesperson said. “There is an inherent danger to these batteries once they are involved in or exposed to fire.”
The council-run Ashfield aquatic centre, located less than 200 metres from the warehouse, was unaffected by the blaze, with classes running as normal from 6am.
At a local cafe, the morning rush remained in full swing, unaffected by road closures along Elizabeth Street.
Supt Joshua Turner of FRNSW said the warehouse fire and thick smoke immediately increased the alert level for crews responding to the incident.
“When [fire crews] made access, they found it actually was an e-bike repair centre,” he said.
Global Authoritarian Revolution? “… young people may realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status of today’s politics may provide opportunity …”
Global Authoritarian Revolution? “… young people may realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status of today’s politics may provide opportunity …”
World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis, scientists say
Disastrous events included flash flooding in Africa and wildfires in Europe and North America
The hottest year in recorded history casts doubts on humanity’s ability to deal with a climate crisis of its own making, senior scientists have said.
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“When our children and grandchildren look back at the history of human-made climate change, this year and next will be seen as the turning point at which the futility of governments in dealing with climate change was finally exposed,” he said. “Not only did governments fail to stem global warming, the rate of global warming actually accelerated.”
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Now director of the climate programme at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York, Hansen said the best hope was for a generational shift of leadership. “The bright side of this clear dichotomy is that young people may realise that they must take charge of their future. The turbulent status of today’s politics may provide opportunity,” he said.
James Hansen has a track record when it comes to talking up authoritarianism – who can forget Hansen’s absurd praise of the Chinese system in 2015, for the alleged advantage of Chinese Communism over Western democracies and republics, when it comes to addressing climate challenges?
“I think we will get there because China is rational,” Hansen says. “Their leaders are mostly trained in engineering and such things, they don’t deny climate change and they have a huge incentive, which is air pollution. It’s so bad in their cities they need to move to clean energies. They realise it’s not a hoax. But they will need co-operation.”Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/12/james-hansen-climate-change-paris-talks-fraud
Not that I’m denying this has been an interesting weather year in Australia.
This is likely just random chance – Australia is famed for its extreme weather, and weather forecasting in Australia is just as big a joke as most other places.
But what if the unusual El Nino rainfall in Australia is because of global warming? What if the “new normal” is fewer prolonged droughts, more chaotic weather with shorter dry spells, and more rain, including in the parched interior of Australia?
In that case we would all be better off cancelling useless solar panels and wind turbines, and investing in flood and water management project, to mitigate the harm when a small ocean drops on our heads. And people could mitigate their own personal risks, by avoiding purchasing in dubious housing estates which look suspiciously like filled in river valleys, ditching the EVs and useless town automobiles, and instead buying long range diesel 4WD vehicles to better handle Australia’s increasingly neglected and flood prone roads, and increasingly unreliable, power cut prone fuel supplies.
Purchasing a 4WD diesel in Australia is becoming more a necessity than a choice, especially if you plan to do any rural driving. My recent Aussie driving holiday, I saw some truly appalling roads. A recent Grattan Institute Report found roads in Australia are full of potholes, in a poor state of repair. On my holiday there were lots of towns with no fuel, because of recent road or electricity disruptions.
Don’t get me wrong, most of the towns I saw were friendly, we have good memories of visiting the Australian outback. But there was an exception. At one particularly remote toilet stop in far Western NSW I saw someone repairing an EV charger, in a boarded up town with lots of drunk aboriginals. I’ve since learned the town features in reports about places with intractable drug and alcohol issues. They didn’t seem overtly hostile, but during the 5 minutes we stopped for a quick toilet break, two teenage boys did separate walk by reconnaissance of my 4WD. I can take a hint, they weren’t very subtle about what they were doing. But if an EV driver attempted my route, with all the big distances between outback towns, there aren’t a lot of other options for a recharge in places that remote.
The EV charger repair guy was happy. He was making a fortune being paid to repair that one EV charging station on a regular basis, he told me the kids kept vandalising it. He kept the back of his van locked while he was doing his repair. I did actually see one EV on my trip, heading in the opposite direction towards that town. Lets hope they got lucky.
Even in Sydney road quality seems to be deteriorating. I witnessed a respectable Darwin Award entry, council workers waste deep in rushing floodwaters in Sydney trying to clear the grating of a large blocked drain with a pry bar, during the middle of a deluge. The drains I saw exposed above the flood didn’t look well maintained, and more than one drain had blown out its grating and was gushing water, because the downstream pipe was blocked. I bet those workers I saw bashing the drain grating in the middle of a flood wished their council had spent more money on drain maintenance before it started raining, instead of squeezing the road maintenance budgets so they could blow taxpayer cash on climate posturing, or whatever other nonsense caught the attention of incompetent local politicians.
I think James Hansen got one thing right, 2023 will be looked back on as a turning point, but it won’t be the year of children leading the global authoritarian climate revolution James Hansen seems to want. Instead, especially if we actually did breach 1.5C for much of this year. 2023 will be looked back on as the year the wild exaggerations of climate alarmists were exposed, the year people realised they should just go about their daily lives, do what is right for their families, buy a rugged automobile which can handle our poorly maintained roads, vote for politicians who get the basics right, like road maintenance, and ignore the perennially wrong climate prophets of doom.
If you think I’m exaggerating about the state of Australia’s roads, the following is a video I shot earlier this year on the Fraser Coast. Do any of these roads look EV ready?
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