pmccarthy

The big batteries smooth the peak, they can’t store enough to feed the grid.

I read the news today, oh boy

I have guidelines too. Ignore anything with INSANE or YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE in the title. Ignore anything with an AI picture in the title.

Sea level is rising, has been rising, will continue to rise since the last ice age.

I dream of Jeannie

I eat meat. But when I am walking, if I can avoid stepping on an ant, I avoid it.

Government greenlight Meadow Creek Solar Farm Meadow Creek Solar Farm

Elderly man dies after being pulled unconscious.

This morning's story on the King Valley (Vic) solar farm is most upsetting. Suffice to say the Victorian government has overridden the planning approvals process and ignored environmental assessments to destroy a beautiful part of Australia. The best analogy is the way the USSR destroyed the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan back in the day, in the name of what they saw as progress. We in Victoria are living in a frightening authoritarian state led by what is effectively a dictatorship.

Hope you enjoy the Halloween story!

European witch hunts of the 15th to 17th centuries targeted witches that were thought to be responsible for epidemics and crop failures related to declining temperatures of the Little Ice Age. A belief that evil humans were negatively affecting the climate and weather patterns was the “consensus” opinion of that time. How eerily similar is that notion to the current oft-repeated mantra that Man’s actions are controlling the climate and leading to catastrophic consequences? The first extensive European witch hunts coincided with plunging temperatures as the continent transitioned away from the beneficial warmth of the Medieval Warm Period (850 to 1250 AD). Increasing cold that began in the 13th century ushered in nearly five centuries of advancing mountain glaciers and prolonged periods of rainy or cool weather. This time of naturally driven climate change was accompanied by crop failure, hunger, rising prices, epidemics and mass depopulation. Large systematic witch hunts began in the 1430s and were advanced later in the century by an Alsatian Dominican friar and papal Inquisitor named Heinrich Kramer. At Kramer’s urging, Pope Innocence VIII issued an encyclical enshrining the persecution and eradication of weather-changing witches through this papal edict. The worst of the Inquisition’s abuses and later systemic witch hunts were, in part, empowered by this decree. This initial period of cooler temperatures and failing crops continued through the first couple of decades of the 16th century, when a slight warming was accompanied by improvements in harvests. Clearly, the pogrom against the weather-changing witches had been successful! Unfortunately for the people of the Late Middle Ages, the 40 years or so of slight warming gave ground to a more severe bout of cooling. The summer of 1560 brought a return of coldness and wetness that led to severe decline in harvest, crop failure and increases in infant mortality and epidemics. Bear in mind that this was an agrarian subsistence culture, nearly totally dependent on the yearly harvest to survive. One bad harvest could be tolerated, but back-to-back failures would cause horrific consequences and, indeed, they did. Of course, the people’s misfortunes were attributed to weather-changing witches who had triggered the death-dealing weather, most often in the form of cold, rain, frost and devastating hailstorms. Horrific atrocities were alleged of the witches, including Franconian witches who “confessed” to flying through the air to spread an ointment made of children’s fat in order to cause a killing frost. Across the continent of Europe, from the 15th to the 17th centuries there were likely many tens of thousands of supposed witches burned at the stake, many of these old women living without husbands on the margins of society. The worst of the witch hunts occurred during the bitter cold from 1560 to about 1680. The frenzy of killing culminated in the killing of 63 witches in the German territory of Wiesensteig in the year 1563 alone. Across Europe, though, the numbers of witches continued to increase and peaked at more than 500 per year in the mid-1600s. Most were burned at the stake; others were hung. The end of the witch hunts and killings tie closely to the beginning of our current warming trend at the close of the 17th century. That warming trend started more than 300 years ago and continues in fits and starts to this day. Source: A Very Convenient Warming: How modest warming and more CO2 are benefiting humanity, by Gregory Wrightstone, executive director, CO2 Coalition. References: Pfister (2007) Witch Hunts: Strategies of European Societies in Coping with Exogenous Shocks in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries Behringer (1999) Climatic change and witch-hunting: the impact of the Little Ice Age on mentalities.

I think I’ve seen you in a movie, do you look like Bennie Hill?

That applies to me in the mornings.

Cowboys and indians

My wife nearly died on a train trip from London to Maidenhead years ago, busting for a loo. I didn't know, she didn't say. After we got off she ran for the loo. When she got back, I said there was one on the train, right behind you.