Welcome to Sott.net
Tue, 26 Sep 2023
The World for People who Think

Drought


No Entry

Drought causes severe backlog at Panama Canal, shipments delayed by WEEKS, cost of goods in US may spike

Panama Canal

The large vessels, thought to be carrying millions of dollars worth of goods, are locked in a traffic jam with some waiting for weeks to cross
More than 200 ships are stuck on both sides of the Panama Canal after authorities capped the number of crossings because of a serious drought.

The large vessels, thought to be carrying millions of dollars worth of goods, are locked in a traffic jam with some waiting for weeks to cross.

Vessel-tracking data highlights the extent of the issue with hundreds of ships, mainly bulk cargo or gas carriers, seen waiting near entrances to the canal on the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

The number of daily transits through the canal has been capped at 32 by water authorities in a bid to conserve water.

Panama is set to lose $200million in revenue from the delays and it could cause a spike in US grocery and parcel prices as extra fees are hiked on to shipping costs.

Comment: And this is at a time when people are already struggling to get by due to record inflation. Further, once again we see just how vulnerable the supply chain is:


Attention

Cobalt carnage, child labor and ecological destruction

Horrific for cell phones, worse for electric vehicles, calamitous under Net Zero.
Child Labor
© Watts Up with That
Global cobalt demand soared with the advent of cell phones and laptop computers. It exploded with the arrival of electric vehicles and now is skyrocketing in tandem with government EV mandates and subsidies. Cobalt improves battery performance, extends driving range and reduces fire risks.

Demand will reach stratospheric heights if governments remain obsessed with climate change and Net Zero. States and nations would have to switch to electric cars, trucks, buses and tractors; end coal and gas electricity generation; convert gas furnaces, water heaters and stoves to electricity; and provide alternative power for windless, sunless periods. Electricity generation would triple or quadruple.

Weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels would require billions of battery modules, to stabilize power grids and avoid blackouts every time wind and sunshine don't cooperate.

All that Net Zero transformation equipment - plus transmission lines, substations and transformers - will require billions of tons of cobalt, lithium, copper, nickel, graphite, iron, aluminum, rare earths and other raw materials at scales unprecedented in human history. That will necessitate mining, ore processing, manufacturing, land disruption and pollution at equally unprecedented levels.

Just President Biden's first tranche of US offshore wind turbines (30,000 megawatts by 2030) will require some 110,000 tons of copper, for the turbines alone. Transmission lines, transformers and batteries are extra. Based on average global ore concentrations, getting that copper would require extracting 40,000,000 tons of surface rock (overburden) and 25,000,000 tons of copper ore.

But those 2,500 12-megawatt 800-foot-tall turbines would provide barely enough electricity to power New York state on a hot summer day, if the wind is blowing, and before its Net Zero mandates kick in.

Fish

Thousands of dead fish wash ashore in drought-hit Iraq

Fishermen stand in a boat as they inspect thousands of dead fish floating by the bank of the Amshan river, which draws its water from the Tigris, in Iraq's southeastern Maysan governorate.
© AFP
Fishermen stand in a boat as they inspect thousands of dead fish floating by the bank of the Amshan river, which draws its water from the Tigris, in Iraq's southeastern Maysan governorate.
In a staggering scene, thousands of fish floated in the Al-Ezz River in the southeastern Iraqi governorate of Maysan due to water scarcity and the high level of salinity.

Social media activists shared videos of fish deaths with angry comments about the situation in their areas because of water scarcity.

The local authorities in Maysan announced on Saturday that they had monitored the deaths of fish in the Al-Ezz River, warning of serious diseases at the same time.


Sun

Temperature extremes: April records fall as Spain heads for 100F

mmmmmmm
April records in Spain are beginning to fall. As temperatures rise into the 30s Celsius and heat across southern Iberia continues to intensify, local records are being passed. AEMET, the Spanish Met. Service has highlighted 38C for Cordoba and Seville with heat advisories on Thursday. Exceeding that value at this time of year would be "something absolutely unusual, very outstanding."

Seville has already seen 33C, Madrid's April record is 30.1C and forecast to see 31 even 32 by Friday. Jerez Airport in the south looks to have exceeded its monthly record too. They are toppling and there are more days of heat to come. This is more like a summer setup and around 10 degrees warmer than usual.


Comment: Meanwhile towards the southeastern end of the Eurasia landmass at roughly the same latitudes as southern Iberia:


Attention

The War on Life

What the climate emergency narrative tells us about the death cult's psychology.
Ancient Yi Wasteland,
© Luye Zhang
Ancient Yi Wasteland.
The imminent destruction of the Earth's climate at human hands has been a constant theme throughout my life. The exact form of it has evolved somewhat over time. When I was a kid in the 80s it was the disappearing ozone layer. In the 90s it was global warming. In the naughts it morphed into climate change. Most recently the branding got racheted up to the more emphatic Climate Emergency.

It doesn't matter that none of the dire predictions of the past have manifested. Back around the turn of the millenium Al Gore rode a crane up the side of the infamous and long-discredited hockeystick graph, and confidently proclaimed that snow would soon be a thing of the past. Meanwhile, here in 2022, the Greenland ice sheet just added more mass in one day that at any other summer day in recorded history. That's just one example; there are others, more meaningful, such as the continuous failure of climate models to match actual global temperature changes, with the models consistently predicting far higher temperatures than have actually been experienced; the infamous emails between climatologists, arguing about how best to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures; the numerous instances of data having been manipulated to try and turn flat temperatures into slight increases, to smooth out previous warm or cool eras in order to emphasize recent supposed trends; and so on.

The failures of the models don't matter. Just as with the COVID mask formation, the goldfish memories of the educated portion of the tax cattle extend just as far as the most recent iteration of the ongoing psyops campaign. All the failed predictions are forgotten just as soon as they look at the latest blood-red weather map, in which temperatures that a mere decade past would have been depicted with happy smiling cartoon suns are painted in the colour scheme of a murder scene.

I'm not going to ajudicate whether anthropogenic global warming driven by carbon dioxide emissions has any basis in fact. It doesn't, and if you're in the group that thinks it does, well, you're probably fully boosted and looking forward to consooming next booster, so I don't really know what to tell you. I'm also not going to speculate on why so many people keep falling for it - it's for the same reason, ultimately, that they fell for the coronavirus psyop, the same reason they put pronouns in their email signatures, the same reason they loudly agree that white supremacist patriarchy is the real power structure in society, and the same reason they think the Rangz of Powah is a masterpiece of mythopoetic cinematography. Weak humans have low pain tolerance, and when you're a loyal citizen of the Empire of Lies the Truth Hurts like carbolic acid applied directly to the nerve endings.

What I'm interested in here is, why global warming, precisely? Why is the parasite class so obsessed with pushing this specific narrative?

Arrow Down

UK government's green energy policy is a 'national disaster'

Wind wash!
© Facebook
Net Zero Watch has condemned the Government's green energy policies as "a national disaster."

This follows the announcement that a major offshore windfarm will not activate an agreement to sell power at a much lower cost to the grid.

The Times has reported that the Hornsea 2 windfarm, which had a contract to sell power at £73 per megawatt hour, will instead sell in the open market, where prices have averaged £200 per megawatt hour this year, and reached £508 last week.

Britain's struggling energy consumers are likely to end up paying a billion pounds extra for Hornsea's electricity over the next 12 months.

The new Prime Minister should urgently look into the legal options for cancelling or revoking these poorly written contracts, the spirit of which are being grotesquely abused to the huge disadvantage to British consumers.

Info

Global financial system at risk from flawed climate models

A team of Australian scientists, financiers and economists have issued a stark warning over the use of "flawed" climate models to predict financial risk.
Global Atmospheric Temperature
© Univeristy of Alabama / John Christy
Writing in the journal Environmental Research they say building future strategies on information that is not understood and potentially misleading is likely to expose the global financial system to systemic risks of its own making.

Politicians and policy-makers are increasingly seeking to assess the potential risks to the financial system associated with climate change. They typically use a combination of databases for the global mean temperature in conjunction with so-called coupled climate models to determine regional and more local changes such as the effect on cities. According to this new study however this approach is flawed and ineffective. "We show that global mean temperature provides little insight on how acute risks likely material to the financial sector will change at a city-scale, say the researchers.

They investigate how good using estimates of global mean temperature are at predicting changes in the annual extremes of temperature and rainfall, as well as heatwaves and drought, and extreme rain and strong winds. They also ask whether such climate attribution studies can provide any insight into the changes in temperature and rainfall over the next 20-, 50- and 100-years. Their conclusion; "these approaches are likely to be flawed," they say because of the unappreciated uncertainties.

Cow Skull

Drought drying up the Yangtze river, China loses hydropower

drought Yangtze River 2022
© Zhong Guilin/VCG via Getty Images
A drought in China is drying up the Yangtze River
No rain and a 70-day heat wave spur crop failures, power cuts, and dangerously-low reservoirs across parts of China.

A historic drought in the southwest of China is drying up rivers, intensifying forest fires, damaging crops, and severely curtailing electricity in a region highly dependent on hydropower.

The Yangtze River, the third largest in the world, has dropped to half its average water levels, affecting shipping routes, limiting drinking water supplies, causing rolling blackouts, and even exposing long-submerged Buddhist statues. Some 66 rivers across 34 counties in Chongqing were dried up as of last week, Reuters reported. Also last week, the province of Sichuan, which gets more than 80 percent of its energy from hydropower, cut or limited electricity to thousands of factories in an effort to "leave power for the people." Poyang Lake, the largest freshwater lake in China, is just a quarter of its normal size for this time of year.

Comment:




Cow Skull

EU drought assessed at 'worst in 500 years'

europe drought lake serre-poncon water levels
© AFP / Joel Saget
Water levels at Lac Serre-Poncon in the French Alps decreased 14 meters due to drought, August 21, 2022
A rainfall deficit will badly impact farming yields, the European Commission has warned

Europe is experiencing what appears to be the worst drought in five centuries, the European Commission warned on Tuesday, citing a new analysis released by the EU's Joint Research Center (JRC).

The August report highlighted the continued impact of extreme weather on farming. Almost half of the EU, or 47%, remains under warning conditions due to a shortage of moisture in the soil, while 17% of the EU is on alert due to the negative effects the weather has on crops. Together, they constitute 64% of the EU, the statement pointed out.

Arrow Down

Germany plans 'climate lockdown'...Forbidden to leave doors open...Washcloths instead of showers!

Climate Emergency
© The Hill
The future in Germany is lockdown after lockdown. After the COVID lockdown, Germany now moving to impose a climate lockdown, says German Editor in Chief.

Germany's Bild TV YouTube site here looks at the latest Socialist-Green government's initiatives to combat the country's deepening energy crisis.

The latest initiatives have been drawn up by Economics Minister Robert Habeck (Green Party). Among the new rules, according to BILD TV: Shops are no longer allowed to keep the entrances continuously open (in order to prevent energy from being wasted by excess heating or air conditioning).

In the video, BILD TV asks its Editor in Chief, Claus Strunz, what's behind the new regulation, commenting that essentially what we have is a government that is increasingly encroaching ever deeper into our private lives. "Something that nutty could only be conjured up by some crazy bureaucrats," Strunz comments. "That's precisely what we don't want: the government ruling the area of retail."