By Jo Nova

That which must not be spoken

Every news outlet today is saying how good it is that “relations” with China have thawed, like it was just a bad patch of weather, and they’ve allowed us to sell them wine again.

But there is a kind of collective amnesia about why relations froze in the first place.

Just to recap, through incompetence or “otherwise” naughty-citizen China leaked a likely lab experiment, lied about it, and destroyed the evidence. They stopped it spreading at home but sent it on planes to infect the rest of the world. Then when Scott Morrison, Australian Prime Minister, dared ask for an investigation in April 2020, within a week China threatened boycotts, and followed up with severe anti-dumping duties on Australian barley. After which the CCP attacked Australian beef imports, and added bans or tariffs on Australian wine, wheat, wool, sugar, copper, lobsters, timber and grapes. Then they told their importers not to bring in Australian coal, cotton or LNG. The only industry they didn’t attack was iron ore, probably because they couldn’t get it anywhere else. In toto, the punishment destroyed about $20 billion dollars in trade, and everyone, even CNN, knew this was political retribution and a message to the world.

As Jeffrey Wilson, Foreign Policy, described it in November 2021

… its massive onslaught against Australia was like nothing before. Whereas China usually sanctions minor products as a warning shot—Norwegian salmon, Taiwanese pineapples—Australia was the first country to be subjected to an economywide assault.

But perhaps the communist party had nothing to hide?

Not to put a fine point on it, but on January 14th, 2020, China told the world they had “found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission “. A Chinese CDC expert said “If no new patients appear in the next week, it might be over.” They didn’t mention that things were already so bad in Wuhan in December 2019, that even doctors one thousand kilometers away in Taiwan suspected it was spreading human to human. Taiwan demanded answers from the WHO on December 31. The next day, Jan 1st 2020 the CCP destroyed all the virus samples, information about them, and related papers.  But perhaps it was just an innocent bat-pangolin thing, yeah?

So after four years of pain in order to stand bravely against the bully, what concessions, exactly, did our current leadership win? There’s no investigation, no answers, no apology, no nothing and no reason to think it won’t happen again.

In fact to smooth the wheels, Australia dropped the WTO cases against China for their bad behaviour with barley and wine. But the negotiation geniuses didn’t insist that China drop its WTO case against us (which was instigated two days after the Australian cases). And so it comes to pass that this week China won the WTO steel case against us.

  *   *   *

Lest we forget:

Ten years ago China said it was worried about race based genetic bioweapons — Who, exactly, had a biotech cold war on their minds? In 2015 Chinese military scientists ominously predicted the Third World War would be fought with biological weapons.  Meanwhile the Chinese military were helping out with the Wuhan viral research projects, and if one virus wasn’t enough, they still have another 1,640 other viruses to play with. The multicultural melting pot of stupid ideas is glowing like lava on all sides of the Pacific. The US Defence Department also sent money to the Wuhan lab to counter “Weapons of Mass Destruction” which apparently helped to create one. And the CSIRO, and Australian universities had worked with the Wuhan Virology Lab too (which they forgot to mention for 18 months?)

Meanwhile in related news in the last three years, the Biden family gained $31m in deals with high level CCP operatives. There’s a shadow war in space “every day”. And Net Zero remains a security threat, yet the West claps along.

Lions Photo by Serg Balak on Unsplash

 

From the Cliff Mass Weather Blog

Cliff Mass

It is more than a little disturbing when a major regional newspaper (the Seattle Times) provides demonstrably inaccurate and deceptive weather and climate information.

But yesterday, the infamous Seattle Times ClimateLab did it again.

The first lines of the article describe the past year in apocalyptic terms:

Virtually every aspect of life in Washington suffered during last year’s drought. 

Groundwater wells ran dry, fields produced fewer crops, trees died in greater numbers, fish faced disease and famine

And the next paragraph paints a very dark picture of our future:

Now those sectors are bracing for yet another poor water year as El Nino conditions, compounded by climate change, produced well below normal snowpack. The state also has recently hit record-high temperatures for this time of year.

The state’s water woes will continue, even worsen, in the decades ahead.

Has the state been in a terrible drought that has seriously impacted agriculture, causing fish to face famine, and causing regional water shortages?  And are other claims of this article true, such as high temperatures causing terrible losses in the State’s cherry crops?

Most of the claims are factually wrong.

The article was accompanied by a picture of a Rattlesnake Lake, which looked like a scene from the moon.   They did not mention that this is an artificial lake controlled by Seattle Public Utilities.

So are we in some terrible drought that caused state agriculture to fail?

Absolutely not.  The 2023 state apple crop was huge under near-perfect conditions (28% above 2022).  Apples are the state’s number one crop.

The number two WA crop is milk and 2023 tied the record-breaking amounts in 2022.

The number three WA crop is potatoes, which had a 9.5% increase over 2022.

Doesn’t sound like agriculture took too much of a hit from the Seattle Times’s drought.

But what about the cherry crop you ask?  The Seattle Times states:

sudden melt-off (of snow in May 2023) sent the state’s sweet cherry growers into an early harvest, causing perhaps $100 million in losses.

It turns out the truth was a bit different.  The Washington State cherry crop was very large and high quality.  The problem was the cool, wet weather resulted in a bumper, late crop in California that suppressed prices.  

So low that Washington cherry farmers left a lot of the crop on the trees. So it was the OPPOSITE of drought in California that caused problems for Washington State farmers.  Lots of snow and rain in the “Golden State”

The Seattle Times describes famine times for fish, but salmon returns were UP for all areas of Washington State.

So are we in a drought right now?

The accumulated precipitation at Seattle for the past year is nearly normal (green is this  year, brown is normal):

Portland was wetter than normal.

What about Yakima on the eastern Cascades slopes?  Near normal.

Doesn’t look like much of a drought. Yes, the snowpack is less this year because temperatures were warmer than normal for a while (due to El Nino, NOT climate change).  

But the amount of water falling from the sky was near normal and many reservoirs stored more water than usual.

Seattle’s reservoirs are above normal (see below)

And the same is true for Everett’s large Spada Lake reservoir:

Surely, if the Seattle Times is correct, river levels would be at very low “drought” levels.

Maybe not.  The streams on the “dry” eastern slopes of the Cascades are running high (see below).  Nearly normal streamflow conditions on the western slopes of the Cascades.  The only streams running low are around the South Sound area.

In summary, Seattle Times ClimateLab articles are not doing anyone a favor by telling tall tales about drought and climate change.  El Nino conditions are evident right now, with low snowpack but near normal precipitation.   Agriculture is not collapsing.  Precipitation is near normal.  

Truth matters.  Or at least it should.

H/T  bru92