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THE SEARCH FOR flight MH370 has been boosted by the arrival of a British nuclear submarine in the Indian Ocean, but Malaysian police warned the cause of the jet’s mysterious disappearance may never be known.
Despite extensive scouring of the remote waters southwest of Perth where Malaysia believes the jet went down, ships and planes have so far found nothing that would indicate a crash site.
Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said a three-week-old criminal investigation into what caused the flight to veer far from its intended route between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing had so far been inconclusive.
In a sober assessment likely to disappoint anxious family members of the missing passengers, he said police have taken more than 170 statements so far but still need to interview more people.
“Give us more time,” he told reporters in Kuala Lumpur, according to Dow Jones Newswires. “We may not even know the real cause of this incident.”
Ten planes and nine ships resumed the hunt today although authorities warned broken cloud, sea fog and isolated thunderstorms would reduce visibility.
But in a boost to the search effort, Britain’s Royal Navy said the first submarine in the operation, HMS Tireless, has arrived in the area and “with her advanced underwater search capability will be able to contribute to the attempts to locate the missing plane”.
Britain’s HMS Echo is also due in the search zone shortly to assist Australia’s Ocean Shield naval vessel, which is fitted with a US-supplied “black box” detector and is expected to arrive on Friday.
Black box deadline looms
Malaysian police are probing the backgrounds of all 239 people on board the Malaysia Airlines jet, including the 12 crew members, as well as ground crew and flight engineers.
Their investigation has focused on the possibility of a hijacking, sabotage or psychological problems among passengers or crew.
Other authorities have warned that unless the wreckage and the black box are found it may never be known what caused the plane to lose contact on 8 March.
The battery-powered signal from MH370′s black box, which records flight data and cockpit voice communications that could indicate what happened, usually lasts only about 30 days, with time fast running out to find it.
Australia has warned against expectations of quick success in the difficult task of recovering the black box from the deep and vast seas.
Retired Australian air chief marshal Angus Houston, who is heading a new coordination centre in Perth, reiterated that the odds were stacked against them.
“The reality is it’s the most complex and challenging search and recovery operation I’ve ever seen,” he told national radio.“We have to keep searching and searching with vigour, because what’s really vital here is to find some wreckage, some debris on the surface of the ocean.”
“It’s only through that that we’ll hopefully lead to where the aircraft is on the bottom of the ocean.”
The personal jet of Oscar-winning New Zealand movie director Peter Jackson is also now reportedly being used in the multinational hunt for the plane.
Jackson, the director of the “Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” movies, has personally approved the use of his Gulfstream G650 in the search, Radio New Zealand said.
His spokesman reportedly said the company which operates the long-range aircraft had chartered it to Australian authorities.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib is also due in Perth this eveing, where he will tour the air base being used as a staging post and meet with his Australian counterpart Tony Abbott.
Malaysia’s handling of the crisis, marked by piecemeal and occasionally contradictory information, has been widely questioned, especially by distraught relatives of the 153 Chinese nationals aboard.
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This is why we need to leave the EU!!
@Simp Cuckington: quite the opposite, in fact.
Thankfully we only have a few vocal cranks who don’t believe in the scientific facts. A pity social media gives them a voice.
@Fozz: it would be nice if we could silence sheople like yourself
@Simp Cuckington: the world and the EU does not revolve around the UK and Brexit. Delighted to see that the European Council only spent ten minutes on Brexit. Everyone is fed up with the angst of Boris and his Tory party chums who claimed that they held all the cards.
@Simp Cuckington: The anti science tin hat brigade is out in full force. Tin hats believe anything made by some guy in his bedroom on YouTube is fact. so gullible
@Simp Cuckington: isn’t amazing that the only people constantly trotting out the same lines are the same ones that accuse others of being sheeple, or some other ridiculous derivative?
@Leitrim303: Now is your opportunity to enlighten us tinfoil hats with some science, I am sure these guys would love to hear from you
https://clintel.org/
p.s. they don’t operate from their bedrooms
@John Kennedy: https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/letter-signed-by-500-scientists-relies-on-inaccurate-claims-about-climate-science/
According to Dutch broadcaster Pointer (KRO_NCRV), the 800 “scientists, scholars, and professionals” that support CLINTEL have “conducted little to no climate research”. DeSmog analysis has found that the list of signatories includes a commercial fisherman, a retired chemist, a cardiologist, and an air-conditioning engineer, alongside a number of retired geologists.
The Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL) is a Netherlands-based climate science denial group founded in 2019 by retired professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and journalist Marcel Crok.
Additionally, research by Follow the Money and the Platform Authentic Journalism, two Dutch investigative journalism sites, and data-journalism broadcaster Pointer (KRO-NCRV), found that oil money built up from the 1990s has filtered its way into the foundations of CLINTEL. [16]
An article on Follow the Money’s site explains that Guus Berkhout founded the Delphi Consortium, a company that develops geo-imaging technology for the oil and gas industry, in 1982. Over 30 fossil fuel organisations were committed to paying €30,000 to €55,000 per year to have access to Delphi’s research, including Shell, BP and Chevron.”
https://www.desmogblog.com/climate-intelligence-foundation-clintel
@Oisín Callan: I find no evidence in the quoted article to dispute the claim by Clintel, perhaps you could point it out to me, incidentally any comment from anyone associated with the Climate Research Unit should be taken with a large pinch of salt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy
Desmogblog… yup, a truly reliable source
@John Kennedy: Literally the first link in my comment is to a systematic debunking of every unsourced talking point in the clintel declaration by actual climate scientists, not cardiologists and fishermen. I’ll post it again in case you missed it:
https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/letter-signed-by-500-scientists-relies-on-inaccurate-claims-about-climate-science/
If you’re going to try post wikipedia articles as some kind of “gotcha”, try actually reading them first.
“Fact-checkers confirmed that climate change deniers misrepresented the contents of the emails.”
“Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct.”
“Desmogblog… yup, a truly reliable source”
More reliable than a think-tank funded by the oil industry. They even listed their sources at the bottom of the article so you don’t have to take their word for it.
@John Kennedy: hahahahaha actually read that wikipedia article and the whole way down you will see that it repeatedly shows that climate deniers misrepresented what was contained in the emails and took sentences out of context to give them meanings they never had. If anything you have just cited evidence of the credibility of the Clinate Research Unit, a large scale hack and 8 subsequent investigations uncovered no actual evidence of scientific misconduct
@John Kennedy: Here’s a good video which looks at the CRU email quotes in context:
https://youtu.be/7nnVQ2fROOg
@Oisín Callan: Watch this prof take apart the co2 argument in front of congress using facts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofXQdl1FDGk
The Great Reset
@Mike Burry: the great flying tinfoil monster
@DJ François: how can it be a conspiracy if the world economic Forum aka the davos summit and the UN are actively promoting it.
@Mícheál Seán Mac Conmhaic: Actively promoting the “great reset”?
@DJ François: The World Economic Forum have a podcast talking all about the Great Reset, its on Spotify you should give it a listen (seriously)
There is no tax on airline fuel
@Pete Lee: hopefully flying for business meetings will be a thing of the past now and commuting will be permanently reduced. People do need protein though so they shouldn’t come down so hard on meat and dairy which are essential for our health, while cars, which have enormous emissions during manufacture and use and are mostly unnecessary get a free pass because the EU is controlled by Germany. There’s a reason they built roads not more efficient rail for us.
@SC: we had loads of rail and we got rid of it
@Pete Lee: can’t tax airline fuel they couldn’t compete with oil rich nations where the stuff is consumed like its fresh air because it’s so cheap
Growing imimirgrant population all striving to gets jobs driving to pay for energy to heat their dwellings in a cooler climate, guess we’ll have to go nuclear for the future
@Gerard Heery: The energy cost of individuals is negligible compared with that of industry. That is why it is important for society to act as a whole in terms of energy efficiency
As for nuclear power we should at least be able to debate the possibility. The technology has come a long way since the likes of Sellafield
@David: then why is it a us negligible individual s pay for it the most
@Gerard Heery: Do you mean as tax payers? Businesses pay taxes too. While as a percentage of there income its significantly less overall businesses tax returns account for the vast majority of the finances available to a country
The idea of companies or the rich paying more is a different debate though tax rates do not fluctuate a lot from country to country.
But personally I think cleaner air and a cleaner environment benefits everyone
Install solar panels on every roof of every home built…. or in desert areas for alternative power supply…investment is essential.
@Eddie Michael: You really don’t know anything about solar panels. do you?, in 2019 in the EU28 solar panels operated at 12.7% efficiency
Source https://edmhdotme.wordpress.com/the-excess-costs-of-weather-dependent-renewable-power-generation-in-the-eu28w/
based on data from https://www.eurobserv-er.org/
@Eddie Michael: Great idea! And not that expensive, I also think local turbine areas and hydro energy converters that provide power to whole towns would be a great shout, provide a lot of jobs in places they’re sparce and hopefully get more people out into the country
@John Kennedy: Fossil fuel plants are about 33%-37% with out factoring the energy spent in extracting and transporting them not to mention the cost of cleanup including the removal of waste etc.
@John Kennedy: 12.7 % of the sun’s energy is a lot…
@SC: No, that would be 12.7% of their rated output.
@Francis Devenney: No, conventional power plants (fossil fuel) operate at 90% rated capacity.
@John Kennedy: We’re talking about efficiency (Your OP) not capacity. A 100 watt incandescent light bulb runs a nearly full capacity but is less than 10% efficient as most of the input is lost in heat rather than light. In fossil fuel plants about 70% of the input is wasted, as in not converted into energy output.
This is really brilliant news on paper and I’d be really excited about it but I have a feeling our government is gonna use this to tax the pollox off us.. I hope they realise they can’t actually tax us out of our emissions, they gotta make green options much cheaper and WIDELY available if they really wanna take this off the ground. I think we should invest heavily in green energy, if we’re smart enough we could provide clean power the whole island with some left over to sell and share with the rest of the world, our little island nation has a lot of potential to be a real world player in the next 10 years if we make the right moves sooner rather than later
@Dylan Byrne: of course it is. The EU wants to buy more weapons and build up its armies. There are no policies in place to tackle wasteful use of resources (personal cars, excessive consumption, planned obsolescence) and distinguish them from essential activities like farming. It just means EU corporations will ship their manufacturing to poor countries and raise taxes on normal people. Overall global climate will be unaffected.
@SC: gulp
Let’s hope the greens are gone. More carbon taxes on the way.
As someone who has tried organizing a group “do” at a restaurant, I applaud 27 people agreeing on anything.
But while 55% sounds decent on the surface, using 1990 as the benchmark is bitterly disappointing.
@Amiga Ireland: and it seems that they use the 1990 baseline because that been agreed on the Kyoto-Protocol and they are using it since then. Makes sense to have everyone measuring against the same baseline. But they should update it.
@Amiga Ireland: it is the benchmark universally used.
have your say