The CCP’s use of Uyghur and Kazakh slaves allows China to manufacture the world’s cheapest solar panels and the first world to feel smug about using them.

You know, that holier-than-thou grin worn by the faux ‘green’ who reckons he’s done his fair share to save the planet by pinning a few kilowatts worth of panels on his roof, that deliver a trickle of power for five or six hours a day. Albeit with the help of mandated targets and a mass of taxpayer and/or power consumer funded subsidies, including outrageously generous Feed in Tariffs.

But, in an effort to prick their sanctimonious sense of self-righteousness, an Australian Senator, Rex Patrick is determined to lift the lid on what is an outrageous abuse of human rights, all directed at providing cheap and nasty solar panels to the well-to-do in the West.

The CCP – hardly renowned for its compassion – has rounded up something in the order of 2.6 million of its minorities and enslaved them as “surplus labour”, hundreds of thousands of them have been directed into dozens of China’s large-scale solar manufacturing plants; coerced with a mix of mass incarceration (aka “re-education camps”), threats to the victim’s families and actual violence -in so-called “labour transfer” programs.

As Senator Patrick has found, the solar fans and their political apologists are either ignorant of, or immune to, the genocide that’s being perpetrated in order to provide them with shiny, and very visible signs of their purported ‘green’ virtue. So much so that his Bill to stop Australians relying upon products produced by the CCP’s slaves has found little support in the Federal Parliament. [Note to Rex: thou dare not speak ill of wonderful solar power, lest you be branded a ‘climate denier’]. Here’s Rex Patrick being interviewed by Andrew Bolt on what can only be described as an outrageous abuse of human rights, all in the name of ‘green’ virtue.

‘Human rights issue’: Solar panels made using Uyghur slave labour
Sky News
Andrew Bolt and Rex Patrick
16 November 2021

South Australian Senator Rex Patrick says solar panels made using Uyghur slave labour is a “human rights issue”.

“Australia needs to take a very strong, positive stand to make sure people understand that genocide is not acceptable,” Mr Patrick told Sky News host Andrew Bolt.

The independent senator from South Australia has introduced a bill, which went through the Senate in August, that banned the import of any goods that were made from slave labour from any jurisdiction.

“Unfortunately, that bill has now languished in the House,” Mr Patrick said.

“That bill would stop anything that came to Australia, where Border Force could identify something in its supply chain that was made using slave labour.”

Transcript

Andrew Bolt: Last night, I showed you some really disgusting videos. U.S. President, Joe Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry. Last week saying that it wasn’t his job to go and ask China whether it was using slave labour, to make the solar panels of China, selling to the world. His job was just to get more of them, or to be more accurate, to get a global warming deal with China. The world’s biggest emitter.

Speaker: How in the several months of meetings, behind the scenes with China, did you bring up some of those very contentious issues? Such as the use of forced labour and Xinjiang for building solar panels. How did you address it? And how did you overcome that in reaching this final…?

John Kerry: Well, we’re honest about the differences and we certainly know what they are and we’ve articulated them. But that’s not my lane here. My job is to be the climate guy.

Andrew Bolt: Moral zero, but some politicians here, they don’t think this is something you can ignore, pretend that it’s not in your lane. China actually makes the vast majority of the solar panels that we put on our roofs. Many made in part with slave labour, by some of the million or so Muslim Uyghurs that China’s, reportedly put into prison camps, for instance. In fact, professor Laura Murphy, of the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice, says nearly everyone in the world is buying solar panels, is likely to be buying products made with forced labour. Now, Rex Patrick is an Independent Senator for South Australia. He’s now trying to get parliament to pass a law against this sort of thing. He joined me earlier and I asked him, what is it that he’s trying to achieve?

Rex Patrick: Look, I’ve got a bill that went through the Senate in August that banned the import of any goods that were made using slave labour from any jurisdiction. Unfortunately, that bill has now languished in the House. That bill would stop anything that came to Australia where Border Force could identify something, in its supply chain, that was made using slave labour.

Andrew Bolt: Now, one of the prime examples of that would be forced labour by Muslim Uighurs in China. Particularly on things like solar panels. What is it that offends you so much? Why should we make a big stand on that?

Rex Patrick: Well, this is a human rights issue. And of course, in the case of the Uighurs in Western China, it also intersects with genocide, which is occurring there in Australia. Australia really needs to take a very strong, positive stand to make sure that people understand that genocide is not acceptable. So whilst I’m very, very comfortable that the Senate passed a bill that dealt with all jurisdictions. It’s particularly important in relation to the Uyghurs in Western China.

Andrew Bolt: And the Chinese Government says, “No, no, no, that’s not forced labour. It’s not slave labour.” You don’t believe them?

Rex Patrick: Oh, look, there’s been plenty of international studies in relation to what is happening in Xinjiang. And indeed the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has examined this issue in great detail. There’s no doubt in my mind as to what is going on there. And unfortunately the Chinese aren’t exactly opening doors and letting people in to see what is happening there.

Andrew Bolt: Now, you’ve had the support obviously of enough Senators in the Senate to get this through. As you say, it’s not going through the lower house, where the government and its allies have the numbers. Why has the Morrison Government so far refused to support you?

Rex Patrick: Look, I can’t understand why there hasn’t been support from the Morrison Government. I know there are some Liberal Senators that have indicated to me, behind the scenes, that they’re very concerned about it. This does a few things. My bill, it helps reduce the incentive for people to employ or utilise slave labour. It also allows Australia to stand tall in the international community in pointing out that this is wrong. But it finally harms Australian businesses.

Solar panels are a good example of a product that could be made here in Australia. But Australian businesses have no way of competing against mass production in areas where they are using slave labour and in effect, having no labour costs. So it harms Australian businesses as well. I just don’t understand why the Morrison Government won’t take a strong moral and ethical standard. It’s not like we are going to offend China anymore than they have already been offended or they’ve chosen to play games in relation to Australian trade. They don’t pick up the phone to our Ministers. They have imposed duties inappropriately and we are now battling that out in the Hague. There’s nothing to fear for the Australian Government to support this bill and to support making sure that we are working to eliminate slave labour in Xinjiang and around the world.

Andrew Bolt: Rex Patrick, thank you so much for your time and good luck to you.

Rex Patrick: Thank you.

Sky News

New analysis integrating data from satellites, river gauges and hydrologic models reveals Arctic rivers are discharging much more water than previously thought.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST

AMHERST, Mass. — A civil and environmental engineering researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has, for the first time, assimilated satellite information into on-site river measurements and hydrologic models to calculate the past 35 years of river discharge in the entire pan-Arctic region. The research reveals, with unprecedented accuracy, that the acceleration of water pouring into the Arctic Ocean could be three times higher than previously thought.

The publicly available study, published recently in Nature Communications, is the result of three years of intensive work by research assistant professor Dongmei Feng, the first and corresponding author on the paper. The unprecedented research assimilates 9.18 million river discharge estimates made from 155,710 orbital satellite images into hydrologic model simulations of 486,493 Arctic river reaches from 1984-2018. The project and the paper are called RADR (Remotely-sensed Arctic Discharge Reanalysis) and was funded by NASA and National Science Foundation programs for early career researchers.

“We recreated the river discharge information all over the pan-Arctic region. Previous studies didn’t do this,” Feng says. “They only used some gauge data and only for certain rivers, not all of them, to calculate how much water is pouring into the Arctic Ocean.”

“This is a new, publicly available daily record of flow across the global North,” adds Colin Gleason, civil and environmental engineering professor and principal investigator on the study. “No one has ever tried to do it at this scale: teaching the models what the satellites saw daily in half a million rivers from millions of satellite observations. It’s a very sophisticated data assimilation, which is the process of merging models and data.”

River discharge integrates all hydrologic processes of upstream watersheds and defines a river’s carrying capacity. It is considered the single most important measurement needed to understand a river, yet the availability of this information is limited due to a lack of reliable, comprehensive, publicly available data, Feng says.

Physically gauging rivers – the “gold standard” for gaining discharge information – is expensive and labor intensive to install and maintain because gauges need to be physically recalibrated several times a year. Also, rough terrain around some rivers can make gauge installation very difficult. This makes it more practical for studies in this region to focus on larger rivers that empty into the Arctic Ocean, so many small rivers are not gauged at all. Also, some countries don’t make their gauge information publicly available. That leaves hydrologists and environmental scientists in the dark about a tremendous number of rivers, Feng says.

“This is one major contribution of our work, because we can provide river discharge information everywhere, especially for the Eurasia region,” says Feng. “Satellites are like a gauge in space. If we don’t have a gauge in place on the rivers, we can use the satellite to improve the data we have now.”

Traditional studies have had to rely on limited gauge information or on simulations based on a representative sample of rivers. Feng’s work focuses on all Arctic rivers that eventually drain into the Arctic Ocean, Bering Strait, and the Hudson, James and Ungava bays. It excludes the Greenland Ice Sheet.

One of RADR’s major findings is that the acceleration in pan-Arctic river discharge over the past 35 years is 1.2 to 3.3 times larger than previously estimated.

“This is the new reality that we’ve actually experienced, rather than a projection of what might happen. RADR looks into the past and shows that up to 17% more water than previously thought has already gone into the Arctic Ocean,” Gleason says of RADR’s findings.

The increase in water discharge was not homogenous, however.

“We found very significant regional differences,” Feng says. “Some places showed an increase, but others showed a decrease. We also found that North America and Eurasia show different patterns.”

“For example, Mongolia is actually getting drier, as are parts of the interior Mackenzie River,” Gleason says.

As more satellites launch, the data provided by RADR will only become more accurate. “We can improve even more significantly, because we have built up this method and with this framework, we can very easily assimilate more satellite data, and with more data we can for sure improve more,” Feng says. “This is an exciting and also promising direction.”

Feng is making the system open access in the hopes that those studying other aspects of the Arctic, such as climate change, will use it to obtain new calculations of factors like river sediment, rainfall, and carbon emissions.

“I’m really excited that not only did we do this, but that we’re making it public and just putting it out there and anyone can download it and use it,” Gleason says. “I’m hoping this becomes a standard global data set for anyone who studies the Arctic across any of the natural sciences.”

“This is a really huge amount of information we can use for a lot of applications, like water resource management, hydropower, or other infrastructure impacted by rivers,” Feng says. “We can also improve the global river discharge simulation’s accuracy significantly.”

But the work has implications far beyond the Arctic, she adds.

“Because we show satellites can help us improve the accuracy of [measurements of] river discharge, we can use it to improve the data for river discharge all over the world,” she says.

The RADR framework “is a vector-based product, so it looks like a river network, and it’s going to be publicly available flow in literally half a million rivers, as narrow as three meters,” Gleason says.

Now that RADR has shown that previous predictions of river discharge are inaccurate, models using the new findings will have to be created.

“Now that we know this about the past, how does that change our future predictions? That’s where we’re going next,” Gleason says. “Climate change, ecology, pollution and sediment — those are the big things that will dramatically change.”

The paper, “Recent Changes to Arctic River Discharge,” can be found at doi 10.1038/s41467-021-27228-1

---

JOURNAL

Nature Communications

DOI

doi 10.1038/s41467-021-27228-1 

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Recent changes to Arctic river discharge

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Nov-2021

From EurekAlert!

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