By Jo Nova

EV manufacturers are backing away slowly from the Great EV Debacle

The government commanded the EV bubble, but even with billions in subsidies, schemes and advertising the chemistry didn’t obey. Somehow, even with legislation, the right discoveries didn’t discover themselves on cue.

VW has decided to use one third of its EV development money to develop a better fuel car instead.

Hey, it’s only 60,000 million Euro.

By: Adrian Padeanu, Motor1.com

Of the €180 billion ($196 billion) set aside in 2023 primarily for next-generation EVs, the German brand will now use one-third to continue the development of combustion engines. The announcement comes from Arno Antlitz, the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer at the Volkswagen Group. The company intends to spend roughly €60 billion ($65 billion) to “keep our combustion cars competitive.”

It’s a stark departure from the previous plan announced in late 2022 to build and sell only electric cars in Europe from 2033.

Only a year ago Volkswagon was confident it could build a cheaper EV. But a month ago they reported a 20 percent fall in first quarter profits.

Meanwhile Australia joins the EU with footage of “EV Graveyards” collecting at Port Melbourne

Australia remains  far behind the rest of the developed world in EV sales but is obviously catching up on the latest trends quickly. Sales have fallen 44%:

And, apparently even those with money to waste don’t want to waste it on an “electric supercar”:

By: Adrian Padeanu, Motor1.com

Speaking with Automotive News Europe, Lamborghini’s head honcho Stephan Winkelmann argued electric supercars are “not something that is selling so far.” He went on to mention this genre might never catch on

Supercars are for rich folk but Rimac CEO Mate Rimac recently admitted that high-end buyers don’t want electric supercars. It’s why the Nevera is still for sale, despite the hype around it and the limited production run of only 150 cars. The electric hypercar developed in Croatia set no fewer than 23 records last year, but it looks as though wealthy people weren’t impressed enough to sign their names on the dotted line.

There is talk now of all kinds of variations of sustainable fuel to run combustion engines on. The CEO of Bugatti has even floated the idea of selling their bespoke customers their very own fuel station as well, so they can generate and fill their sustainable cars at home. Possibly the brag-able-value of owning a sustainable biofuel car that “charges at home” using some wildly expensive combination of solar panels and batteries won’t seem so brag-worthy in a few years time. Who wants to look like the loser who got car advice from a teenage girl?

Essay by Eric Worrall

An AAP Factcheck, a few wild claims, and an Andrew Doyle interview with British environmentalist Jim Dale which appears to have taken on a life of its own.

Climate change deniers not at risk of WEF arrest

William Summers  June 7, 2024

AAP FACTCHECK – A website with a history of spreading misinformation claims the World Economic Forum (WEF) has ordered governments to arrest all climate change deniers.

The claim is false. The man said to have issued the “order” is a British meteorology consultant who told AAP FactCheck he has no links with the WEF, a global economic forum and think tank.

He also didn’t make any order or call for the arrest of all climate change deniers.

What he did say is that it should be illegal to promote climate denial in the media.

The false claim appears in an article published by The People’s Voice, a prolific publisher of viral misinformation and fake clickbait news stories.

…

The article in question is headlined: “WEF Orders Govt’s To Arrest Citizens Who Oppose Man-Made Climate Change Narrative.” 

It describes how environmentalist Jim Dale said it should be illegal for people to “promote” climate change denialism during a TV segment aired on GB News on May 12.

Mr Dale tells AAP FactCheck that the claim he spoke on behalf of the WEF is “totally false”. 

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Read more: https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/climate-change-deniers-not-at-risk-of-wef-arrest/

I tracked down the People’s Voice article. It appears to quote a WUWT article I wrote, though they added a few of their own interpretations.

WEF Orders Govt’s To Arrest Citizens Who Oppose Man-Made Climate Change Narrative

Fact checked by The People’s Voice Community

May 21, 2024 Sean Adl-Tabatabai

The World Economic Forum has ordered government’s to begin arresting citizens who oppose the man-made climate change narrative in a bid to persuade the masses that ‘global boiling‘ is a real danger. 

Young Global Leader and British far-left environmentalist Jim Dale says all ‘climate deniers’ must be sent to jail in order to shut them up from convincing others that man-made global warming is fake.

…

Dale did not specify what types of sanctions would apply to people who are still allowed to live outside of prison despite holding what he believes to be errant beliefs, but he did indicate that it would be up to politicians like Labour Party leader Keir Starmer.

…

According to Watts Up With That, Earth is actually in a process of cooling right now, not warming. In fact, the climate is always changing up and down depending not only on the season but also the age.

If there were periods of extreme heat and extreme cold way back before there was even industrialization, then how can people like Dale claim that human activity is responsible for the temperature “extremes” that he claims are now taking place?

“Given the geological evidence is that we are living in a significant period of extreme cold, how can today’s temperatures possibly qualify as a global warming emergency?” Watts Up With That asked.

“Yet an opinion such as I just provided, a simple statement of fact, would likely be illegal under Jim Dale’s climate denial rules. Under Dale’s proposed rules, myself or anyone who retweets this article could go to jail or lose their house, merely for suggesting that people living in the middle of an ice age should be more concerned about glaciers than beach weather.”

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Read more: https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/wef-orders-govts-to-arrest-citizens-who-oppose-man-made-climate-change-narrative/

We are in the Quaternary Ice Age, and it is warmer than a few hundred years ago – though whether the world is cooling or warming very much depends on your choice of timescale and starting point.

I believe the referenced article was “Jail the Deniers? British Environmentalist Demands Criminal Sanctions”. As far as I can tell I didn’t mention the WEF in that article.

Environmentalist Jim Dale didn’t actually say “Jail the deniers” in the interview above, what he said is deniers should face criminal sanctions. But how can you have criminal sanctions without a threat of jail time? Jim Dale refused to be pinned down on exactly what criminal sanctions deniers should face, instead suggesting British opposition leader Keir Starmer should make that call.

Did the WEF order governments to begin arresting climate deniers?

I don’t believe the evidence People’s Voice presented in the article AAP Factchecked supports this claim, though if I missed anything I’m happy to add a correction.

I don’t recall Jim ever claiming to be a WEF spokesman, if he had I would have mentioned it. Frankly Jim seemed a little slow, he really struggled with simple questions, not the kind of person the WEF would normally pick as a representative.

We live in dangerous times. I accept People’s Voice’s suggestion that the disturbingly authoritarian hate speech laws which are being used to arrest people in Britain one day might be applied to climate denial. I also accept that the UN and WEF may be behind the push for international recognition of the crime of Ecocide, which could be used as a pretext to arrest climate skeptics. But these are all future possibilities. As far as I know, right now, today, nobody is being arrested for climate denial, and I have seen no evidence anyone has been ordered to arrest deniers.

Several people have emailed me an article from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, with claims that some startups can provided more accurate rainfall forecasts than the Bureau – using artificial intelligence (AI).  The Bureau’s counter claim, repeated in the same article, is but, AI is not good for long-term forecasts.

It is not news that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology is not very good at seasonal weather forecasting.

They mostly keep forecasting below average rainfall, or drought, and then we get another flood.   That is what happened last summer, for northeastern Australia – and it happens over and over with their forecasts for the Murray Darling Basin.

As I have written over and over, the Bureau don’t bother to benchmark how bad they are – though I have.  In a series of technical papers published in international climate science journals with John Abbot, beginning in 2012 and ending for me in 2017, we documented an alternative and better technique using artificial intelligence (AI).  In the first of these papers* we compared output from the Bureau’s simulation model with our AI-based statistical model for 17 locations in Queensland.

It was no small task getting the Bureau to provide the data allowing the comparison to be made – that was achieved in August 2011.   In the same meeting at the Bureau’s headquarters in Melbourne, I outlined to the then head of their long-range weather forecasting unit the possible benefits of work with Abbot and I, to further develop the technique.

We were the first to demonstrate the value of AI for rainfall forecasting in Australia.

I hope that the start-ups that are now focused on short term forecasts have more commercial success than we did.   AI has so much application for weather forecasting – short, medium, season and long range.

There is something about the history of my work with Abbot in the most recent issue of the IPA Review, CLICK HERE.   This article includes comment:

Locations along the east coast of Australia, including Cairns and Lismore, are very affected by changing sea surface temperatures and pressures across the South Pacific that have been measured since the late 1800s.

The official temperature database for Australia, known as The Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) is used to generate an average Australian temperature, and this database only begins in 1910.

This record only begins in 1910 because many weather stations did not record temperature in what is known as a Stevenson screen (basically a white louvred box) until about 1910. Before 1910 the mercury thermometers used to measure maximum temperatures were not necessarily kept in a standard housing, and this could result in higher temperatures for the same weather.

A Stevenson screen did not become the official housing for the thermometers at the Bureau’s official weather station in Sydney until 1910. In Melbourne a Stevenson screen was not installed until 1908, and in Brisbane a Stevenson screen was installed earlier in 1896.

Darwin has the longest record, with an official temperature record from a mercury thermometer in a Stevenson screen starting in March 1894. This is all documented in the online archive for Darwin at the Bureau’s website, and I have found photographs of different shelters and other instruments in the Darwin public library including a photograph taken in January 1890 of a Stevenson screen in the post office’s yard.

Charles Todd is the person to thank for Darwin’s exceptionally long, continuous, and reliable early temperature record. He was an avid meteorologist, astronomer, and electrical engineer who oversaw the construction of the Overland Telegraph line connecting Darwin with Adelaide that was completed in 1870. That was the same year Todd became Australia’s first Postmaster-General.

After the completion of the Overland Telegraph, telegraphic officers in South Australia and the Northern Territory were required to report temperatures, barometric pressure, and rainfall on a daily basis to his West Terrace Observatory in Adelaide.

Perhaps as unexpected as the exceptionally long continuous and reliable temperature record for Darwin, Darwin also has the earliest reliable atmospheric pressure measurements. So, the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) is still measured as the pressure gradient difference—not between Brisbane and Tahiti or Sydney and Tahiti—but between Darwin and Tahiti. These SOI values (expressed as an index) are still derived from the 1887–1989 base period, with the first 10 years of measurements part of the network established by Charles Todd, and still, to this day, updated daily by the BoM.

Changing daily patterns in the SOI were incorporated into the statistical models that John Abbot and I used to forecast monthly rainfall for locations on Australia’s east coast.

There will obviously be problems if rainfall has not been accurately recorded for the location of interest—if the historical record has been corrupted—because the AI will be considering the rainfall total, relative to pressure and temperature gradients and pressures across the Pacific, including at Tahiti.

AI is only as good as the data inputted; AI forecasts are only as good as the data provided for model building, and then for training the model that will be used to make the forecast. Training essentially involves running segments of data to give the model some idea of what to expect. In this regard, AI is like human intelligence: it can get better at anticipating what will happen next, if it is given some practice and good data (reliable information).

 

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

*Abbot J., & J. Marohasy, 2012. Application of artificial neural networks to rainfall forecasting in Queensland, Australia. Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, Volume 29, Number 4, Pages 717-730. doi: 10.1007/s00376-012-1259-9

The feature photograph (top of this post) was taken on 22^nd August 2014, for a front-page (if I remember correctly) article in The Australian newspaper by Graham Lloyd detailing our technique using AI for forecasting monthly rainfall up to 18 months in advance.