The lazy days of summer serve a useful purpose. A few weeks away from everything clears the head, if one can escape the global cacophony. It works. Try it if you can; declutter the mind, step out of the fray. Upon returning, it seems possible to see the forest instead of the trees, to rejoin the info flow gradually from a disconnected, higher level.
Personally, it also helps to get disconnected from the energy world as well, and to travel to places far removed from the energy epicentre to take the pulse of people that have nothing to do with it.
Having said that, it can be a shock to realize how poorly energy is understood. It shouldn’t really be a shock, of course; it is a vast and complicated topic that almost no one understands in its entirety.
It’s not unreasonable though to ask that our leaders have a better grasp, but it is frightening to realize that they do not. We see senior policy makers and geopolitically-significant people/organizations/policy makers enacting suicidal energy policies (the examples are in the hundreds, but look at Germany’s decision to shut down much-needed nuclear power plants as the poster child).
The reason leaders are so eager to throw common sense out the window and embrace energy-ignorant policies is illuminated quite clearly when speaking with the average citizen about what everyone always talks about – the weather. Maybe it’s a Canadian thing but it’s a topic that can’t be avoided, and right there, right away, the wheels come off. Climate messaging has been so resoundingly successful that, in the public’s eye, any weather deviation whatsoever is proof of man-made climate change. The news cycle ramps this phenomenon up to a fever pitch. It’s so freaking draining; getting sidetracked in a weather conversation ruins my zen and I run away.
The attitude is so pervasive it is as though everyone has forgotten that heat waves/droughts/floods existed since time immemorial, and many ancient ones were far more severe than today’s events. But as we all know, once pop culture drills something into someone’s head long enough and loud enough, it becomes a truth (former Trudeau government bigwig Catherine McKenna, climate alarmist extraordinaire, was famously recorded explaining to an acquaintance in a bar ow this works: “Just keep saying the same thing louder and louder and eventually they believe it.” (A not-dumb eastern Canadian lawyer explained to me that climate change was now so bad that the earth was actually heating up from the inside, which was her explanation for why the soil was dry some 6 feet down on her property. That kind of boldly asserted absurdity is not easily pounded into heads, but once it’s there, dynamite won’t get it out.)
It’s easy to point the finger at the general population and declare “they’re all stupid,” I hear that a lot, but it’s a bit unfair. They are energy ignorant, as are most, and when it come to alarmist messaging, well, when the government itself engages in scare tactics at the highest level, such as when federal leaders hint in their crazy way that extreme weather is something they can ultimately control through government policy, a lot of people kind of just sigh and accept it, they go with the flow.
The media machine, starved for attention, loves chaos and fear and flash. It encourages us to hate by zeroing in on the inflammatory. It encourages us to rage by taking positions, and draping itself in mock-innocence – “What? Us? Biased? Outrageous. We even have fact checkers!”
Yeah…about that… CBS News reports on the ‘no tax on tips’ idea. In June 2024, Trump proposed the idea of eliminating taxes payable on tip income. CBS news ran with the story on Twitter thusly: “Former President Donald Trump’s vow to stop taxing tips would cost the federal government up to $250 billion over 10 years, according to a nonpartisan watchdog group.”
In August 2024, two months later, Kamala Harris somehow came up with the exact same policy, and CBS News covered her theft thusly: “Vice President Kamala Harris is rolling out a new policy position, saying she’ll fight to end taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”
They don’t even care any more. There is no shame, or self-reflection, no hesitancy. It’s pure peacock feathers.
And while there are crazies on either side of the spectrum, the difference is that right wing crazies are right wing crazies, and CBS News is CBS News.
While it is a generational thing to think that times have never been more crazy, it is hard to put today’s weirdness into any sort of historical context. “The News” is a relatively recent phenomenon in the big scheme of things, hardly more than a century or two old, and thus it is a living object, morphing over time as communications capabiities change, and as we become more interconnected at light speed. Fifty years ago we either waited for a daily or weekly newspaper to find out what was happening in the world, or tuned in to a nightly television program that chose the stories for us and read them aloud in some soothing voice.
We were told what the news was to the extent the news organizations could unearth or cover it, in a time when the ability to cover bigger events on the other side of the world was almost nonexistent. Crack reporters did great work speaking to people who either witnessed or participated in events, and politics covered what was known about what politicians were up to, and not much may have been known at all. In fact those politicians were acting in huge information vacuums as well.
Today, it’s wide open. We see everything. At least we do in the west, not so much in totalitarian states, but even there we can observe a lot. We have eyes on everything including live flight trackers doing their thing every minute of the day on social media, we can see a graphic of every trip Taylor Swift’s jets made over then course of a year (yes, she has two, apparently, another bit of trivia I have no justification or enthusiasm for knowing).
We also see an infinite assessment of government policy, how it comes to be, how it’s enacted, how it’s enforced, how it is playing out, like we never have before in history. The feedback loops are constant and detailed, and while the information is sometimes distorted for ideological purposes, the preponderance of analysis does tend to zero in on what is actually happening, shorn of much of the spin.
We can see the genesis of much of today’s craziness. One gets the feeling, from a high-enough thought plane, that some well-educated and well-funded people decided to make some very big tectonic moves that would put the world on a better path. Being God’s gift to central planning, this global who’s who fully embraced radical – and I do mean radical – change as a prerequisite for human survival. (The IPCC for example said that, to achieve climate targets, there would need to be an unprecedented rewiring and rebuilding of pretty much the entire world, quickly. They offered no advice, just “do it or you all perish” and that was enough for the WEF crowd to pool their billions and buy the best politicians they could.)
Our western leaders, full of oats, delusions of grandeur, and a blank checkbook/chequebook – because they don’t understand the cold hard realities of how to run a successful economic enterprise – went for broke, looking to go down in history as visionaries that bent the trajectory of modern life as we know it. They burned bridges – no going back, no second guessing (any second-guessing is now deemed ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’).
What we see all around us is the detritus of their failure, on so many levels, and we don’t really know what to do about it. We’ve been conditioned to accept that the ‘experts’ know what they are doing, and that capable hands will guide us through whatever fate throws at us. We turn to the simplistic world of pop culture for explanations because the stone cold reality of things is just too hard to wrap our heads around, and we don’t want to spend our days trying to figure it all out.
We are still people, and it is dumb to expect a solid grounding of complex topics that the media distorts mercilessly to pander to the fear.
And yes there are of course flat out fools, across the political spectrum and beyond. Feel free to discount them entirely. Luckily, let’s be honest, no matter our political persuasion, they’re generally not hard to spot, which is why attempting to limit free speech is such a fool’s game.
On the other hand, it appears the world’s attention is going to be dominated by the upcoming US election, and it is going to be so freaking far out and insane that it will be hard to reach December without PTSD.
Some words to keep in mind when things become so crazy it seems like it isn’t real (if you think that’s hyperbole, consider that Russia’s war against Ukraine, a bonafide war with tanks and bombs and death and endless heartache, often sadly doesn’t even make the front page, pushed aside by madness in the US, UK, Middle East, Africa…).
We are in a period of turmoil where people don’t know where to turn. Most have been led to believe that they are fundamentally bad, either through their consumption choices or their preference for “what was good before” or if their belief system doesn’t line up exactly with the mainstream narrative.
As a wise friend recently pointed out, in times of trouble people seek out “messiahs”, they look for a jolt from an outsider, because the “inside”, the swamp, has let them down and left them disoriented. Remember that Trump is a symptom, not a cause. Many, many people, perhaps a majority, are willing to overlook his bombastic antics because he represents a hope that can only come from the outside. As proof of this notion, consider this quote from an astonishing source – John Lydon of the band Public Image Ltd., formerly Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, the ultimate punk of all punks, speaking of Trump: “He’s a thoroughly unpleasant fellow, no doubt about it. But he’s not a politician and I hate politicians! Screw the lot of ‘em. I’d rather have a maniac…a real estate land shark. There will be no world carrying on as long as we keep enforcing dogmas.”
No matter what happens over the next year or two, we will find a new equilibrium just as the world did post WWII. What it will look like is a good question, but there will be some sort of stability.29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
Probably. What the hell do I know. Good luck.
Because you’re reading this on an energy website and might be curious from that aspect, rest assured that the future of energy providers is as strong as it ever has been, no matter what you hear on the airwaves. Energy will be the last industry standing, no matter what happens.
What the world desperately needs – energy clarity. And a few laughs. Pick up The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity, available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
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“The Climate Crisis” is a text book example of “The Big Lie”
There are so many from which to choose. “Science” says you have to accept this dude’s delusion.
I see Catherine McKenna understands the George Creel / George Goebbels approach to government PR.
“the earth was actually heating up from the inside”
Strangely, I heard this assertion yesterday for the first time, from ‘a not dumb’ Chartered Accountant.
“Do you know where the Earth’s heat comes from?” I was asked.
“The Sun?” I said.
“No. Nuclear decay in the Earth’s core.”
“That kind of boldly asserted absurdity is not easily pounded into heads, but once it’s there, dynamite won’t get it out
Google this: “why is the earth’s core hot”
On that note, U-235 said, “I’m going to split.”
David Case,
I am confused by your comment.
Original energy is from radioactive decay of natural radioisotopes mainly in the decay series of Uranium 238, Uranium 235 and Thorium 232 that have half lives similar to the (estimates) of the age of the Earth. We can sample and measure and calculate the properties of these with accuracy and confidence. What is more difficult is finding the location and concentration of these isotopes at various distances below the surface of the Earth. We can only access a tiny depth from drilling, now about 14 km, before increasing heat causes soft rocks that defeat the drill. The vast bulk of the heat from decay is modelled from sparse measurement and much assumption that is untested.
The secondary source of heat comes from radiation from the sun. This is also measured, but it remains a challenge to current technology to measure this energy and its variation over time accurately. Right now, the net flux, energy radiated out minus in, is an important number but unfortunately is a prime target for just the type of interference by unscientific groups that Terry Team describes. Who knows the right answer? Despite justified uncertainty, political decisions like type of electricity generation have been made but involve trillions of future dollars, so there is good reason for sceptical protest about “making stuff up”. Geoff S
Now I’m confused.
The discussion with my friend was about climate change and surface temperatures, not the Earth’s core.
Does the Earth’s molten core heat the surface?
Earth’s internal heat budget – Wikipedia
“Earth’s interior heat contributes only 0.03% of Earth’s total energy budget at the surface”
How is this relevant to any discussion of AGW?
David,
It is relevant because proper understanding requires estimation of all of the energy processes that are involved.
I have been down deep mines where the energy required to pump air conditioning cold air down sets an economic limit on the mine depth. It would be logical to assume that most heat comes from deeper down, that is, it mostly comes from radioactive decay. This is because the deeper you go, the hotter it gets. Search “geothermal gradient”. It varies from place to place as the thermal conductivity of various rock types changes as in granite surroundings being different to sandstone, etc.
There is a theoretical possibility that some more deep heat comes from chemical reactions between rocks and minerals when the reaction is exothermic i.e. generates heat. It is hard to study this if it happens too deep down for samples to be taken, so like many aspects of deep rock studies there is a lot of assumption and little scope for proof. In this example it might be assumed that deep rocks are so old that all of the mixing has happened and left no more scope for exothermic
reactions. Geoff S
Total energy indeed but seemingly below the measurement threshold in almost all places when considerations are about surface or atmospheric temperature.
I would say yes it has too, go down in a deep mine and it is hot, and think of the lava.
Earth’s crust is up to about 80 kms thick in many places, and less than 1km in other places before you get down to the 2,900 kms thick mantle zone.
So mines in most areas would be hard-pressed to be affected by heat from the core?
Maybe heat felt in mines is retained from build-up of permeating warmth from the sun baking the landscape?
It does, in a second hand sort of way, with the eruption of flood basalts at spreading centers.
David P,
Yes, the most accepted mechanism involves normal mathematics of heat flow from the hotter body (the core) to the colder body (the surface). The math show the sun contributing more heating than the core to the very surface but that continuous heat from the core escapes to space eventually. Apologies if I misread your words. Geoff S
To put the heat in perspective, the geothermal flux is estimated at 0.1 W/m2 (when I was younger, it was 0.07 W/m2), averaged over the Earth’s surface. The solar heat is measured – not estimated – at about 340 W/m2, averaged over Earth’s surface.
About 0.03 percent of the Earth’s surface heat comes from internal nuclear decay.
Al Gore said the Earth’s core was “millions of degrees”.
I never heard him explain how Man’s CO2 did that.
(Maybe that’s where Carbon -14 goes to die?)
no wonder the oceans are boiling! 🙂
There is an interesting question here. Venus is almost the same size as Earth but is all rock. Not enough heart to maintain a molten core yet closer to the sun and a very warm atmosphere compared with Australia. So why did its nuclear reactor shut down so much sooner than Earth?
On the same point, Mars is much smaller than both Earth and Venus but has a molten core. Why is its nuclear reactor still going?
Rick,
Interesting questions. I do not know the answers.
Some of The Establishment scientists lean towards strange science like post-normal that allows making stuff up to fit the preferred picture and concealing stuff that conflicts with belief. I do not know if the numbers you have are reliable, so I do not use them. Geoff S
Terry,
Neat article thank you.
To describe the “opposition” body to sceptical articles and actions I have taken to using “The Establishment” with capitals for both words. Saves extra descriptions when writing. Do you think it OK or do you have a better description that might catch on? Geoff S
“Mainstream Narrative”
I’ve always been a bit suspicious about the accuracy of global temperature records, but today I have even more reason. I’ve shared this first plot before, though this time I’m using NOAA temperature data to be consistent. It shows my simple model for predicting global temperature from sunspot data (see my github page for more info). I’ve assumed that the model failed prior to 1900 because of sunspot accuracy problems before 1800.
Well, today I was looking at sea surface temperature reconstructions and I noticed that they all show an elevated temperature before 1900. So I wrote a program to extract the average global SST from NOAA’s ERSSTv5 dataset (psl.noaa.gov/), and this is what I’ve found:
It’s hard to understand how NOAA’s data for SST, which covers ~70% of the earth can match global temperature everywhere except before 1900.
I’m reminded of a flight I was on once where the plane had been stuck on the tarmac for several hours. The pilot made some kind of announcement and I heard a gentleman in the next row say, in his slow southern drawl, “They’re not done lying to us yet”.
I’ve put the python program to extract extract and plot SST on my github site. It’s called getSSTdata.py. The file it downloads from NOAA is 114Mb.
Also, I may not have accurately quoted the other airline passenger. We were in Texas and I think he actually said “They ain’t done lying to us yet“. He was right.
“… it is hard to put today’s weirdness into any sort of historical context. “
Try this for context:
“Witch trials in the early modern period” – – Search for this on Wikipedia and note similarities to the modern anti-“carbon” {aka Carbon Dioxide} activities. I can’t do the comparison justice in a short comment. The reasoning and justification in killing Carbon Dioxide and “witches” is the same and by similar people.
There are $US trillions in profits to be made from spending on CO2 reductions.
The MSM fails to look at where the $$$ is going.
Mind you, one can be sure that the MSM gets its cut.
… and by similar people.
_____________________________
So far they don’t have their coveted one party rule.
witch & ‘carbon’ as common types of hysteria.
it’s is good (for the old, ugly, or alone) that there was not easy money to made from the former, or we would still have witches roaming the countryside.
To balance this, The NetZero fantasy will continue as long as China can burn enough coal to make the stuff that underpins the fantasy. That has a future in decades rather than centuries.
The western world is losing capacity to make stuff and it will be challenging to rebuild that capacity. The remaining aluminium smelters in Australia are on government life support.
Rick,
I weep when I see the deliberate destruction and decay of the intellectual base of our lovely country. When I joined RAAF Academy in 1959, Australia was up there with global leaders in aviation and contributing valuable products like the black box flight recorder, so being a test pilot seemed exciting. We saw local aircraft designed and built. My company bought 2 N22 Nomads that performed quite OK. Now we make the odd bits and pieces for aircraft designed and built elsewhere. As you know, auto design and manufacture went down the gurgler similarly. We have a proud history in design of agricultural machinery and in the generation of cheap and reliable electricity that attracted those alumina refineries and aluminium smelters that you note.
Apologists and quislings claim that we had to go that downhill way because our cost of labour became uncompetitive with places like China. So we end up with our main “industries” now being in sport, entertainment, tourism and hospitality. Even our baristas need to be competitive with China’s if you argue economics.
It is easy to argue that our downhill slide is deliberate because the people making new policies have minds that are too small for the task and are flavoured by education in Marxist politics when free enterprise is obviously superior.
I have no cure for this sorry degradation. All I can do is call it out when I see it, but our indoctrinated younger set no longer see such criticism as credible.
The next phase, I predict, is increasing civil violence as in unhappy kids with machetes and little idea about how to become leaders of the recovery that they need to catalyse. Geoff S
Not stupid, no. Just mentally too lazy to think even the most important issues through for themselves. Man can truly soar (Newton/Bach/Da Vinci …) but, goodness, it is rare!