GREENIE WATCH -- by Dr. John Ray

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

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30 April, 2018

A Hawaiian island got about 50 inches of rain in 24 hours. Scientists warn it's a sign of the future (?)

Utter rubbish. The Green/Left seem to think a thing becomes true because they say it is. No proof needed. Meteorologist Anthony Watts comments:

"Kauai is home to the largest annual rainfall record, ever, so this isn’t any surprise. One of the wettest spots on earth, with an annual average rainfall of 460 inches (1,200 cm), is located on the east side of Mount Wai?ale?ale. During a storm on January 24–25, 1956, a rain gauge at Kaua?i’s former Kilauea Sugar Plantation recorded a record 12 in (300 mm) of precipitation in just 60 minutes. The 12 in (300 mm) value for one hour is an underestimate, since the rain gauge overflowed, which may have resulted in an error by as much as an inch. At that rate, 24 hour rainfall would have been 288 in. S this isn’t all that special"

TonyHeller has more

Since the 1940s, the Hawaiian island of Kauai has endured two tsunamis and two hurricanes, but locals say they have never experienced anything like the thunderstorm that drenched the island this month.

"The rain gauge in Hanalei broke at 28 inches within 24 hours," said state Rep. Nadine Nakamura of the North Shore community. "In a neighboring valley, their rain gauge showed 44 inches within 24 hours. It's off the charts."

Actually, it was even worse. This week the National Weather Service said nearly 50 inches of rain fell in 24 hours.

Now, as Kauai continues to recover, scientists warn that this deluge on April 14 and 15 was something new — the first major storm in Hawaii linked to climate change.

"The flooding on Kauai is consistent with an extreme rainfall that comes with a warmer atmosphere," said Chip Fletcher, a leading expert on the impact of climate change on Pacific island communities.

He noted that the intense rainfall not only triggered landslides, it also caused the Hanalei River to flood and carve a new path through Hanalei. Homes, cars and animals were swept away in raging waters, but no residents or visitors died. Some were airlifted to safety or rescued by boat.

Members of a bison herd were displaced or carried off by floodwaters, and some were rescued from the ocean after swimming for their lives. "Poor buffalo," said Sue Kanoho, executive director of the Kauai Visitors Bureau, who saw video and photos of the animals roaming around businesses and neighborhoods.

The picturesque North Shore communities of Wainiha and Haena are considered the hardest-hit because the only road that leads to them, Kuhio Highway, is now blocked by landslides. Officials say it may not fully reopen for months.

So what can we expect in the future?

"Just recognize that we're moving into a new climate, and our communities are scaled and built for a climate that no longer exists," said Fletcher, a professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Kawika Winter, a natural resource manager, put the storm in perspective.

"This is the most severe rain event [in Hawaii] that we know about since records started being kept in 1905," Winter said as he was about to catch a boat from Hanalei to join recovery efforts in Haena. "We're the most remote community on the North Shore, which is why being cut off is extremely devastating."

Winter is involved in research on climate change and community resilience — the ways places recover from unexpected and catastrophic events.

"In the Pacific Islands, we don't have the luxury of debating whether climate change is real," he said. "Climate change is affecting us, and has been for some time. There are striking similarities with the flooding that we experienced on Kauai and the recent flooding in California. The warmer atmosphere is holding more moisture and that builds up until it meets with cold dry air, creating this massive unstable system, which causes what some meteorologists are now referring to as a 'rain bomb.'"

SOURCE

America's Next Energy Crisis

Some disasters arise unexpectedly, like an earthquake or massive storm. Others seem inevitable. Who didn’t see the 2008 financial crisis coming? In hindsight, most of us.

In reality, most crises that seem inevitable after the fact often catch nearly all of us by surprise when they occur. The factors were obvious enough, but few people saw them coming together.

There's a potential crisis that will seem predictable, after the fact. It's better to take thoughtful consideration and positive action now and not say "I told you so" later.

Our electrical grid is being stretched to the brink. The U.S. is making itself less resilient against catastrophic failure from a major weather event or terror attack every day. Our infrastructure increasingly depends on much less secure, resilient and reliable sources of energy, like wind, solar or even natural gas. These sources do not provide the dependable availability of nuclear or coal.

During the polar vortex in 2014, coal and nuclear power plants in the Midwest and Northeast had to run at full capacity to ensure tens of millions of Americans didn’t lose power or heat. The output was a testament to a system that included the resilience of those power plants.

What's worrying is that many of those coal and nuclear plants are no longer operating. Many more will be phased out soon. These closures are the result in part of a regulatory framework that imposes much higher burdens on these pillars of our electrical-power grid than the less secure sources to which we're now calling "our future." We anticipate growing by subtracting resilient energy sources, and the math doesn’t work.

Most Americans don’t think much about electricity. It charges our phones and turns the lights on when we flick a switch. When it works, there isn’t much reason to think about it. We have been lucky to avoid a major catastrophe, but we're mixing in more and more ingredients for an outage that could disrupt life for millions, particularly in the Northeast or Midwest.

Not thinking about it creates a dangerous blind spot. Because most of us take electricity for granted, very few Americans understand our electricity supply is steaming toward this crisis. And, like most crises, we will be wishing we had done something earlier to prevent it.

Thankfully, the Department of Energy under Secretary Rick Perry is examining the problem. The department is expected to release a report later this month that details these concerns with the existing power grid and the value of so-called “baseload power” – coal, nuclear and hydro-electricity.

As a former assistant secretary of energy for fossil energy during Barack Obama’s presidency, I am encouraged by the department’s review, particularly its focus on the reliability and resilience of the electricity grid and the benefits of coal and nuclear power.

Coal and nuclear plants are unmatched in their ability to generate reliable energy under all circumstances, but these plants are being retired at an alarming rate because of a combination of punitive regulations, low natural gas prices, and government subsidies and mandates for renewables.

Perhaps the bigger concern is the "magical thinking" behind some analysis trying to wish our electricity system into resiliency and reliability without these traditional base-load power plants. It can be uncomfortable to face facts honestly.

There is no reliable way to store meaningful amounts of electricity today. It must be produced when it is needed. That is a big problem for renewable energy sources, like wind and solar, that only produce power under the right circumstances – when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Even natural gas is less secure than coal and nuclear power because it relies on pipeline supply of fuel on demand.

A base-load power plant typically stores in excess of a 30-day supply of coal on site, enough to outlast potential disruptions. Natural gas plants require a constant on-demand supply of gas to continue producing electricity. Under normal circumstances, that is a predictable process. But a weather shock, pipeline repair, unforeseen human mistake or a terror attack can quickly disrupt operations at those plants. One 500-megawatt plant generates enough electricity to power roughly 350,000 homes. Would the electrical grid be able to adapt, if three, four, or more plants on that same gas line went down at once? Unlikely.

Diversifying our energy supply also means keeping plants that generate the most consistent power. Our inability to do so as a country has put us at risk of disaster. We are at a crisis point. We can’t predict when a sudden circumstance will test our ability to adapt, but we can act now to strengthen the ability of our electrical grid to adapt and recover rapidly.

Our economic and national security depend on it.

SOURCE

The BBC has withdrawn Human Planet from distribution after admitting that the series faked scenes of an Indonesian hunter harpooning a whale. In all, there have been four fakery stories surrounding the series.

The natural history programme is currently available on Netflix but will be withdrawn within 24 hours while the corporation conducts an “editorial review”.

It is the second Human Planet fakery story this month. It emerged that film-makers had staged scenes of a rainforest tribe supposedly living in a treehouse 140 feet from the ground.

The opening episode of the 2011 series visited the Indonesian island of Lembata and focused on a young man named Benjamin Blikololong. He was shown jumping into the sea during a sperm whale hunt, and viewers were told he had succeeded in harpooning it.

A voiceover from John Hurt said: “Benjamin’s moment has arrived.” After he leapt into the water brandishing the weapon, Hurt said: “He’s got it.” Viewers are then Blikololong received a larger share of the whale meat because he “struck the decisive blow”.

But a journalist writing a book on the whale hunters, who live on the tiny island of Lembata, met Blikololong and heard that he had not harpooned the whale. He then contacted the BBC.

In a statement, the corporation said: “The BBC has been alerted to a further editorial breach in the Human Planet series from 2011.

“In Episode 1, Oceans, a Lamaleran whale hunter named Benjamin Blikololong is shown supposedly harpooning a whale. On review, the BBC does not consider that the portrayal of his role was accurate, although the sequence does reflect how they hunt whales.

“The BBC has decided to withdraw Human Planet from distribution for a full editorial review.”

In all, there have been four fakery stories surrounding the series.

SOURCE

Beware the lure of solar battery stores

Like a murder of crows encircling roadkill, government subsidies are always going to attract some fairly disreputable attention. Businesses big and small, and individuals rich or wannabe rich, will flock to even the hint of a free lunch. It’s just easier than making an honest living.

Solar feed-in-tariffs are a case in point. In just one of the absurd and damaging steps taken to combat global warming, Gordon Brown’s government decided, in its dying years, to encourage householders to install solar panels on their roofs. With the economics of solar panels wildly against such a move, the only way to make it happen was to offer absurd prices for the power generated. It worked, and in the space of a few years a new industry came into being, but one only sustained by government diktat. What’s more, it represented a huge bung to the middle and upper classes, since only the comparatively wealthy could afford to pay for a photovoltaic system.

Worse still, there was never even the slightest chance that rooftop solar would ever make a meaningful difference to the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions. As the late David Mackay pointed out in his widely respected book Renewable Energy Without the Hot Air, there are simply not enough south-facing rooftops or enough light in our northerly climes for rooftop solar to ever be anything more than an empty gesture. From the start, the whole industry represented an embarrassing exercise in virtue signalling.

Eventually, a semblance of sanity was restored when the parlous state of the public finances forced a reverse, and the resulting 2015 reduction in tariff levels led to a dramatic fall in installations. However, there are still a lot of rooftop solar installations around, and with those who signed up before 2015 still receiving the absurd original tariff level, there are a lot of middle-class homeowners with solar money burning holes in their pockets. The crows have noticed, and are gathering again.

The rooftop solar field is currently being circled – perhaps somewhat surprisingly — by the big motor manufacturers. The auto industry — benefiting from another stream of government subsidies — has been working away at another uneconomic technology, namely electric vehicles. Along the way, they have developed considerable expertise in cutting-edge battery technology, and they are now realising that there is a potentially valuable cross-selling opportunity. They just need to convince homeowners that a battery store alongside their solar panels would make their homes even “greener” and thus more worthy of mention at suburban dinner parties.

At the front of the queue of businesses looking to enter the field is Elon Musk’s Tesla. It is perhaps not surprising that a business built on government subsidy would be the first to spot another state teat to which it could attach itself. However, BMW and other more commercial household names are also said to be watching the market closely.

Once again, though, it is the economics that are problematic, and homeowners should beware. The costs and benefits of installing a battery store alongside a rooftop solar system do not stack up. Although government policies have pushed the typical electricity bill up to £500 per year, a battery can still only save a fraction of that amount.

Meanwhile, large battery stores do not come cheap and, moreover, they wear out too quickly. Once you start weighing up the costs and benefits, the picture looks bleak. In fact, battery costs would have to fall by half just to break even over their lifetimes. They would have to fall even further to provide any sort of a return.

Still, the cynic in me wonders whether Whitehall’s green blob will not see this apparently knotty problem as being relatively straightforward to solve. It simply requires a new stream of subsidies. Worse still, government ministers, in their present mood, are probably quite happy to go along with the idea.

SOURCE

Lawmaker Torches Macron On Paris Deal

Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy noted one obvious problem Thursday with French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent clarion call for the U.S. to stay connected to the Paris Climate agreement.

Exempting China and India from abiding to the non-binding deal is one of the main reasons why greenhouse gas emission are pitching upward, Cassidy said in an interview with Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade. Environmental rules in the U.S. are causing companies to shift production to countries not tethered to the accord’s strict provisions.

“Paris climate accord leaves out China and India until 2030, and they’re the major polluter,” Cassidy said of the move allowing both countries to opt out of the international agreement until 2030. “It has no teeth,” he added, “and no one is going to achieve their goals except maybe the U.S.”

Major manufacturers have wagered China is the path of least resistance. “It’s cheaper to produce there because of regulations in the U.S. and the E.U.” said Cassidy, who became a Republican in 2006 after several decades as a Democrat. “And now we have more global greenhouse gas emissions, but the loss of American jobs.”

Carbon emissions rose in 2017 after stalling for three years in a row, according to a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA). IEA’s report mirrors findings published in the Global Carbon Project in 2017, predicting global emissions would rise two percent.

CO2 emissions rose because of a 2.1 percent increase in global energy demand — 70 percent of which was met by fossil fuels, especially natural gas and coal-fired electricity. China’s six percent jump in electricity demand was met by coal, IEA reported.

The rise in emissions came as the world economy grew 3.7 percent in 2017. Higher economic growth means more emissions, despite claims economic growth had begun to “decouple” from greenhouse gas emissions. Much of that economic output is a result of American and European companies shifting manufacturing to places where labor costs are lower.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

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29 April, 2018

Environmental activists ignore energy security realities

Ignoring reality is what the Green/Left are good at. Comment below from New Hampshire

The willingness of environmental activists and their elected and appointed allies to ignore the drumbeat of bad news about the security and costs of the region’s energy supplies is a stunning abdication of responsibility for sound public policies to protect both the environment and the economy.

While responsible environmental policies are necessary, to assume that somehow New Hampshire and New England can quickly move from natural gas to 100 percent renewable energy, while avoiding any new transmission to deliver renewable energy, is naïve and dangerous.

This assumption ignores the fact that New Hampshire’s electricity rates are consistently 50 percent to 60 percent above the national average, year-round, making us one of the most expensive states for electricity in the country. This has forced employers to explore options outside New Hampshire and New England to obtain lower electricity prices.

To ignore the concerns voiced repeatedly over several years about the lack of natural gas capacity into the region, along with the value of new electric transmission through New Hampshire linking New England with Canadian hydropower, is short-sighted and jeopardizes the electricity supply of a region that depends on nearly 100 percent reliability.

Many recent events are being ignored by activists who are focused on absolute outcomes rather than a prudent transition. For example:

In just 13 days in late December and early January New England nearly ran out of power, spent nearly $1 billion in additional cost to turn on shuttered oil plants for power (adding 1 million tons of the greenhouse gases it is trying to avoid into the atmosphere) and was forced to import liquefied natural gas from a sanctioned Russian company.

In mid-January ISO-New England, responsible for the region’s electric power reliability, warned that by the winter of 2024-25 the region could face “rolling blackouts.”

We should not forget the more than $7 billion in higher energy costs incurred in New England over the three previous winters and the $1 billion of additional cost borne by ratepayers during the 13-day cold spell earlier this year. Those costs are the equivalent of a tax increase – $800 million for New Hampshire – with no benefit to energy consumers.

Despite these high costs, an appeal in Massachusetts effectively blocked regulatory authority to approve funding for natural gas pipeline plans that would have improved reliability and lowered costs. Efforts underway here in New Hampshire to do the same should be soundly rejected.

Not to be overlooked is the recent action taken by the New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee when it rejected, in a moment of irresponsible spontaneity, the proposed Northern Pass transmission line. This decision should be reversed immediately.

The impact of these reckless decisions undermines the case environmentalists make for a clean energy future. California, Texas and Oregon have dependable natural gas capacity and access to large hydroelectric projects that avoid the dramatic and dangerous price spikes that New England has experienced and will likely continue to experience.

To be clear, natural gas power plants and electric transmission lines do not compete with renewables, but instead work in concert with solar and wind. When the sun goes down and the wind stops, natural gas generation fills the gap. Someday, batteries or other storage technology may supplant natural gas generation, but it will not happen overnight.

Notably, the electric power generation sector in New England has made great progress in reducing emissions. Sulfur dioxide emissions are down 96 percent with nitrous oxides down 54 percent and carbon dioxide emissions down nearly 40 percent. Natural gas, along with wind and hydroelectric power delivered over transmission lines, are the driving factors behind this success.

For perspective, the electric power sector accounts for 20 percent of greenhouse gases while transportation and buildings account for 80 percent. Policymakers and influencers should focus more on the real causes of greenhouse gases and accept the glaring fact that unless New Hampshire finds a path forward to expand natural gas and electric transmission capacity they are jeopardizing the region’s economic vitality.

Those same policy makers and influencers would do well to listen to Dr. Ernest Moniz, former U.S. energy secretary and MIT Energy Initiative co-founder. Dr. Moniz noted recently that “natural gas has shown itself to be an important bridge to a clean energy future.”

They should also consider the experience of another major employer that supports Northern Pass, BAE Systems. They saw their energy costs in New Hampshire grow 24 percent from 2014 to 2016. A company representative stated, “There is no dispute that the best way to definitively lower electricity costs is to bring more reliable, affordable electricity into the New England power market.”

SOURCE

Climate Change Not The Key Driver Of Human Conflict And Displacement In East Africa

Over the last 50 years climate change has not been the key driver of the human displacement or conflict in East Africa, rather it is politics and poverty, according to new research by UCL.
Human displacement refers to the total number of forcibly displaced people, and includes internally displaced people — the largest group represented — and refugees, those forced to across international borders.

“Terms such as climate migrants and climate wars have increasingly been used to describe displacement and conflict, however these terms imply that climate change is the main cause. Our research suggests that socio-political factors are the primary cause while climate change is a threat multiplier,” said Professor Mark Maslin (UCL Geography).

The study, published in Palgrave Communications, found that climate variations such as regional drought and global temperature played little part in the causation of conflict and displacement of people in East Africa over the last 50 years.

The major driving forces on conflict were rapid population growth, reduced or negative economic growth and instability of political regimes. While the total number of displaced people is linked to rapid population growth and low or stagnating economic growth.

However the study found that variations in refugee numbers, people forced to cross international borders, are significantly linked to the incidence of severe regional droughts as well as political instability, rapid population growth and low economic growth.

The UN Refugee Agency report there were over 20 million displaced people in Africa in 2016 — a third of the world’s total. There has been considerable debate as to whether climate change will exacerbate this situation in the future by increasing conflict and triggering displacement of people.

This new study suggests that stable effective governance, sustained economic growth and reduced population growth are essential if conflict and forced displacement of people are to be reduced in Africa, which will be severally affected by climate change.

A new composite conflict and displacement database was used to identify major episodes of political violence and number of displaced people at country level, for the last 50 years. These were compared to past global temperatures, the Palmer Drought Index, and data for the 10 East African countries represented in the study on population size, population growth, GDP per capita, rate of change of GDP per capita, life expectancy and political stability.

The data were then analysed together using optimisation regression modelling to identify whether climate change between 1963 and 2014 impacted the risk of conflict and displacement of people in East Africa.

The findings suggest that about 80% of conflict throughout the period can be explained by population growth that occurred 10 years ago, political stability that occurred three years ago and economic growth within the same year.

For total displacement of people, the modelling suggests that 70% can be predicted by population growth and economic growth from 10 years before.

While for refugees, 90% can be explained by severe droughts that occurred one year ago, population growth that occurred 10 years ago, economic growth one year ago, and political stability two years ago. This correlates with an increase in refugees in the 1980s during a period of major droughts across East Africa.

“The question remains as to whether drought would have exacerbated the refugee situation in East Africa had there been slower expansion of population, positive economic growth and more stable political regimes in the region,” said Erin Owain, first author of the study.

“Our research suggests that the fundamental cause of conflict and displacement of large numbers of people is the failure of political systems to support and protect their people,” concluded Professor Maslin.

SOURCE

Embattled but defiant, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt tells Congress he has 'nothing to hide'

Embattled EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt defiantly told lawmakers he has "nothing to hide" amid a flurry of probes into ethical and mismanagement allegations that he said were based on "half-truths."

In a contentious Capitol Hill hearing Thursday that lasted more than three and a half hours, Pruitt characterized the relentless criticism — some of it from his own party — as a politically motivated assault by individuals and groups unhappy with his work to aggressively undo regulations President Trump has said obstruct economic growth.

"I have nothing to hide as it relates to how I've run the agency the past 16 months," Pruitt told members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Those attacking him, he said "want to derail (the deregulatory agenda) ... I'm simply not going to let that happen."

Pruitt also testified before members of the House Appropriations Committee Thursday afternoon.

As the Democratic drumbeat intensifies for his ouster, the EPA Administrator faced questions on a litany ofalleged ethical and spending missteps, including the awarding of pay raises to top aides, luxury travel accommodations, his below-market rental agreement with the wife of an energy lobbyist, and the installation of a secure phone booth.

But if Pruitt's critics were hoping the hearing would demonstrate broad, bipartisan disgust with the EPA administrator's conduct — and louder calls for his firing — they were disappointed.

Questioning at the hearing ping-ponged between Democrats who pressed him on specific allegations and broadly condemned the rollbacks of environmental protections and Republicans who said Pruitt was being pilloried by groups who want to stop deregulation.

"You have failed as a steward of taxpayer dollars and of America's environment," Rep. Paul Tonko, D-N.Y., who chairs the Environment Subcommittee where Pruitt testified Thursday morning, told the administrator. "You were never fit for this job.”

Rep. David McKInley, R-W.Va., called the criticisms "a massive display of innuendo and McCarthyism."

Most Republicans on the committee applauded Pruitt for his agency's direction, though a couple — Ryan Costello of Pennsylvania and Leonard Lance of New Jersey — said they were troubled by some of the allegations and pressed him for explanations.

Two weeks ago, Pruitt's former deputy chief of staff came forward with allegations that his ex-boss overspent his office allowance, demanded security measures that weren't warranted, and insisted on exorbitant travel arrangements — including the rental of a $100,000-per-month private jet.

Last week, the Government Accountability Office — Congress' watchdog agency — concluded the EPA broke the spending laws when it failed to tell lawmakers that it was allocating more than $43,000 to install the soundproof phone booth in Pruitt's office last year.

Pruitt acknowledged that there have been "very troubling media reports" over the past few weeks.

"I promise you that I more than anyone want to establish the hard facts and provide answers to questions surrounding these reports," he said, dismissing many of he allegations as false. But "facts are facts and fiction is fiction. And a lie doesn’t become true just because it appears on the front page page of a newspaper."

Pruitt went on to tell lawmakers that responsibility for what happens at the EPA "rests with me and no one else."

But "let’s have no illusions about what is really going on here: those who attack the EPA and attack me are doing so because they want to attack and derail the president’s agenda and undermine this administration's progress," he said.

Pruitt has kept his job in the face of withering criticism from most Democrats and a small but growing number of Republicans because President Trump continues to have confidence in him and his attempts to aggressively dismantle Obama-era environmental rules that industry leaders say hamper economic growth.

Pruitt and his aides have refuted some of the allegations and downplayed others, often saying previous administrations spent similar amounts, especially when it came to travel. The high costs of protecting Pruitt were due mainly to the unprecedented level and volume of threats against him, they said.

On Thursday Pruitt responded to some of the allegations:

— On the installation of a secure phone booth costing more than $43,000 that was found to violate congressional spending laws thatrequire he inform appropriations committees.

Pruitt said he installed the secure line for confidential calls with President Trump and other high-ranking officials on sensitive topics. He said he was not aware of the price tag and his agency has since complied with the law by informing congressional committees of the expense.

"If I'd known about it, I would have refused it," he said.

— On whether he approved large raises for two top aides over White House objections:

"I was not aware at any time of the amount or the process that was used," he told members of the Appropriations Committee during a hearing Thursday afternoon. He said he has since rescinded the raises.

— On the upgrade of his official vehicle to a luxury SUV:

He said the purchase "was something in process prior" to his arrival. He said he did not ask for the vehicle and did not offer "direction" to buy it.

— On whether he retaliated against employees who questioned his spending or conduct, including a former top aide who was placed on unpaid administrative leave after he refused to retroactively approve first-class airfare for a senior Pruitt aide on a return flight from Morocco in December.

Pruitt repeatedly denied ever punishing punished aides who may have challenged his decisions regarding travel or other conduct.

— On flying first class.

Pruitt said he did so at the recommendation of his security detail. He said he has since returned to flying coach because "from an optics and perception standpoint (his first-class travel) was creating a distraction."

Despite Pruitt's explanations, White House officials indicated the volume of alleged missteps is trying their patience.

"We're evaluating these concerns, and we expect the EPA Administrator to answer for them," White House Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said during a briefing Wednesday when asked about Pruitt.

Environmentalists from the start have been against Pruitt, the former Oklahoma Attorney General who sued the EPA 14 times to undo a myriad of regulations.

His efforts to roll back rules limiting carbon emissions, regulating bodies of water, and auto emissions have earned him the enmity of environmental groups and public health advocates.

On Tuesday, Pruitt announced a proposed rule that would limit the scope of scientific studies the agency uses as the foundation underpinning many of its regulations. The move that could fundamentally reshape the way science supports environmental protections.

SOURCE

EPA removes 'international priorities' page from site

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) removed an "international priorities" page from its website in December, according to a report released this week by the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI).

The page had listed climate change, clean air, clean water, e-waste, toxic chemicals, and strong environmental institutions among its international priorities.

EDGI also reports the agency removed its “International Grants and Cooperative Agreements” and “International Cooperation” pages.

The "International Cooperation" page said the EPA sought to "promote sustainable development, protect vulnerable populations, facilitate commerce, and engage diplomatically around the world” with “global and bilateral partners.”

An EPA spokesperson told Think Progress that the agency continually updates its website to reflect new initiatives.

“Of course the site will be reflective of the current administration’s priorities – with that said, all the content from the previous administration is still easily accessible and publicly available through the banner across the top of the main page of the site,” the spokesperson said.

This is not the first time the agency has removed references from its website, with the EPA under the Trump administration removing various references to climate change from its website in the past.

SOURCE

Scott Pruitt’s Effort to Expose ‘Secret Science’ Has Environmentalists Scared Stiff

A proposed rule announced Tuesday by Scott Pruitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is intended to bring much-needed transparency to agency rule-making.

The environmental lobby is positively apoplectic about the proposal (naturally), even though it aligns perfectly with its long-held commitment to the public’s “right to know” principle.

The proposed regulation would require the EPA to ensure that the scientific data and research models “pivotal” to significant regulation are “publicly available in a manner sufficient for validation and analysis.”

Despite existing rules on government use of scientific research, federal agencies routinely mask politically driven regulations as scientifically-based imperatives. The supposed science underlying these rules is often hidden from the general public and unavailable for vetting by experts. But credible science and transparency are necessary elements of sound policy.

The opposition from greens and much of the media greeting Pruitt’s announcement is, frankly, hypocritical in the extreme. Opponents claim that the EPA’s regulatory power would be unduly restricted if the agency is forced to reveal the scientific data and research methodologies used in rule-making.

But that is precisely the point. The EPA should no longer enjoy free rein to impose major regulations based on studies that are unavailable for public scrutiny.

Their claim that research subjects’ privacy would be violated is groundless. Researchers routinely scrub identifying information when aggregating data for analysis. Nor is personal information even relevant in agency rule-making.

Meanwhile, the EPA and other federal agencies are duty-bound to protect proprietary information.

Transparency in rule-making is vital to evaluating whether regulation is justified and effective. It is also essential to testing the “reproducibility” of research findings, which is a bedrock principle of the scientific method.

It takes real chutzpah for the champions of environmental “right-to-know” laws to now claim that the EPA should not be required to make public the scientific material on which regulations are based.

The public’s “right to know” was their rallying cry in lobbying for a variety of public disclosure requirements on the private sector as well as state and local governments, including informational labeling; emissions reporting; workplace safety warnings; beach advisories; environmental liabilities; and pending enforcement actions, to name a few.

The proposed rule is hardly radical. It aligns with the Data Access Act, which requires federal agencies to ensure that data produced under grants to (and agreements with) universities, hospitals, and nonprofit organizations is available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act.

However, the implementation guidance from the Office of Management and Budget has unduly restricted application of the law.

Moreover, the Information Quality Act requires the Office of Management and Budget “to promulgate guidance to agencies ensuring the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information (including statistical information) disseminated by federal agencies.”

However, the law’s effectiveness has been limited by a lack of agency accountability. Courts have ruled that it does not permit judicial review of an agency’s compliance with its provisions. The proposed rule is also consistent with the Office of Management and Budget’s Information Quality Bulletin for Peer Review.

The proposal also mirrors legislation passed by the House last year to prohibit the EPA from “proposing, finalizing, or disseminating a covered action unless all scientific and technical information relied on to support such action is the best available science, specifically identified, and publicly available in a manner sufficient for independent analysis and substantial reproduction of research results.”

A Senate companion measure failed to advance to a vote.

The EPA regulation has expanded exponentially every decade since the 1970s at tremendous expense to the nation. Secret science underlies some of the most expansive regulatory initiatives.

President Donald Trump has focused significant attention on re-establishing the constitutional and statutory boundaries routinely breached by the agency. The special interests that thrive on gloom and ever-increasing government powers are attempting to block the administration’s reforms at every turn.

But their opposition to the proposed transparency rule sets a new low for abject hypocrisy.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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27 April, 2018

More medical madness

A long-time correspondent writes as follows:

As a retired anesthesiologist I am embarrassed to say that my own colleagues have joined the greenie bandwagon.

Some of them want to "capture” nitrous oxide, a widely used anesthetic gas, to “save the earth".

The amounts of gas escaping are trivial, and the process would increase already inflated medical costs.

MADNESS

Global Warming Likely to Be 30 to 45 Percent Lower Than Climate Models Project: Study

Climate researchers have spent decades trying to pin down the planet's equilibrium climate sensitivity. Also known by the initials ECS, that figure represents how much it would ultimately increase global average temperatures if the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles above the pre-industrial level.

Figuring out the ECS has huge implications for policy. If future warming is at the low end, humanity has more time to adapt and to shift energy production away from the fossil fuels that are loading up the atmosphere with extra carbon dioxide. If at the high end, efforts to adapt and shift energy production to low-carbon sources would need to be speeded up. The current assessment of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that ECS is likely to be in the range of 1.5°C to 4.5°C, extremely unlikely to be less than 1°C, and very unlikely to be greater than 6°C.

But a new study in the Journal of Climate suggests that the IPCC's estimates are much too high. In calculating their rival figures, authors Nicholas Lewis and Judith Curry take into account historical atmospheric and ocean temperature trends since the mid-19th century. Their estimates also draw on new findings since 1990 of how atmospheric ozone and aerosols are likely to affect global temperature trends. (They also address other researchers' concerns about an earlier ECS study that they published in 2015.)

"Our results imply that, for any future emissions scenario, future warming is likely to be substantially lower than the central computer model-simulated level projected by the IPCC, and highly unlikely to exceed that level," Lewis says in a press release from the Global Warming Policy Forum.

How much lower? Their median ECS estimate of 1.66°C (5–95% uncertainty range: 1.15–2.7°C) is derived using globally complete temperature data. The comparable estimate for 31 current generation computer climate simulation models cited by the IPCC is 3.1°C. In other words, the models are running almost two times hotter than the analysis of historical data suggests that future temperatures will be.

In addition, the high-end estimate of Lewis and Curry's uncertainty range is 1.8°C below the IPCC's high-end estimate.

Lewis and Curry's estimates are in line with the similarly low estimates reported by climatologists Thorsten Mauritsen of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and Robert Pincus of the University of Colorado in the July 2017 issue of Nature Climate Change. Using historical temperature data, those two researchers calculated an ECS of 1.5°C (0.9–3.6°C, 5th–95th percentile).

If these two studies turn out to be right, that will be good news for humanity.

SOURCE

If Solar And Wind Are So Cheap, Why Are They Making Electricity So Expensive?

Renewables are only cheap relative to their maximum output. But their normal output is only a small fraction of that

Over the last year, the media have published story after story after story about the declining price of solar panels and wind turbines.

People who read these stories are understandably left with the impression that the more solar and wind energy we produce, the lower electricity prices will become.

And yet that’s not what’s happening. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Between 2009 and 2017, the price of solar panels per watt declined by 75 percent while the price of wind turbines per watt declined by 50 percent.

And yet — during the same period — the price of electricity in places that deployed significant quantities of renewables increased dramatically.

Electricity prices increased by:

51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy from 2006 to 2016;

24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017;

over 100 percent in Denmark since 1995 when it began deploying renewables (mostly wind) in earnest.

What gives? If solar panels and wind turbines became so much cheaper, why did the price of electricity rise instead of decline?

One hypothesis might be that while electricity from solar and wind became cheaper, other energy sources like coal, nuclear, and natural gas became more expensive, eliminating any savings, and raising the overall price of electricity.

But, again, that’s not what happened.

The price of natural gas declined by 72 percent in the U.S. between 2009 and 2016 due to the fracking revolution. In Europe, natural gas prices dropped by a little less than half over the same period.

The price of nuclear and coal in those place during the same period was mostly flat.

Another hypothesis might be that the closure of nuclear plants resulted in higher energy prices.

Evidence for this hypothesis comes from the fact that nuclear energy leaders Illinois, France, Sweden and South Korea enjoy some of the cheapest electricity in the world.

Since 2010, California closed one nuclear plant (2,140 MW installed capacity) while Germany closed 5 nuclear plants and 4 other reactors at currently-operating plants (10,980 MW in total).

Electricity in Illinois is 42 percent cheaper than electricity in California while electricity in France is 45 percent cheaper than electricity in Germany.

But this hypothesis is undermined by the fact that the price of the main replacement fuels, natural gas and coal, remained low, despite increased demand for those two fuels in California and Germany.

That leaves us with solar and wind as the key suspects behind higher electricity prices. But why would cheaper solar panels and wind turbines make electricity more expensive?

The main reason appears to have been predicted by a young German economist in 2013. In a paper for Energy Policy, Leon Hirth estimated that the economic value of wind and solar would decline significantly as they become a larger part of electricity supply.

The reason? Their fundamentally unreliable nature. Both solar and wind produce too much energy when societies don’t need it, and not enough when they do.

Solar and wind thus require that natural gas plants, hydro-electric dams, batteries or some other form of reliable power be ready at a moment’s notice to start churning out electricity when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining.

And unreliability requires solar- and/or wind-heavy places like Germany, California and Denmark to pay neighboring nations or states to take their solar and wind energy when they are producing too much of it.

Hirth predicted that the economic value of wind on the European grid would decline 40 percent once it becomes 30 percent of electricity while the value of solar would drop by 50 percent when it got to just 15 percent.

In 2017, the share of electricity coming from wind and solar was 53 percent in Denmark, 26 percent in Germany, and 23 percent in California. Denmark and Germany have the first and second most expensive electricity in Europe.

By reporting on the declining costs of solar panels and wind turbines but not on how they increase electricity prices, journalists are — intentionally or unintentionally — misleading policymakers and the public about those two technologies.

The Los Angeles Times last year reported that California’s electricity prices were rising, but failed to connect the price rise to renewables, provoking a sharp rebuttal from UC Berkeley economist James Bushnell.

“The story of how California’s electric system got to its current state is a long and gory one,” Bushnell wrote, but “the dominant policy driver in the electricity sector has unquestionably been a focus on developing renewable sources of electricity generation.”

Part of the problem is that many reporters don’t understand electricity. They think of electricity as a commodity when it is, in fact, a service — like eating at a restaurant.

The price we pay for the luxury of eating out isn’t just the cost of the ingredients most of which which, like solar panels and wind turbines, have declined for decades.

Rather, the price of services like eating out and electricity reflect the cost not only of a few ingredients but also their preparation and delivery.

This is a problem of bias, not just energy illiteracy. Normally skeptical journalists routinely give renewables a pass. The reason isn’t because they don’t know how to report critically on energy — they do regularly when it comes to non-renewable energy sources — but rather because they don’t want to.

That could — and should — change. Reporters have an obligation to report accurately and fairly on all issues they cover, especially ones as important as energy and the environment.

A good start would be for them to investigate why, if solar and wind are so cheap, they are making electricity so expensive.

SOURCE

Germany’s Wind Energy Mess: As Subsidies Expire, Thousands Of Turbines To Shut Down…Environmental Nightmare!

As older turbines see subsidies expire, thousands are expected to be taken offline due to lack of profitability. Green nightmare: Wind park operators eye shipping thousands of tons of wind turbine litter to third world countries – and leaving their concrete rubbish in the ground.

The Swiss national daily Baseler Zeitung here recently reported how Germany’s wind industry is facing a potential “abandonment”.

Approvals tougher to get

This is yet another blow to Germany’s Energiewende (transition to green energies). A few days ago I reported here how the German solar industry had seen a monumental jobs-bloodbath and investments had been slashed to a tiny fraction of what they once had been.

Over the years Germany has made approvals for new wind parks more difficult as the country reels from an unstable power grid and growing protests against the blighted landscapes and health hazards.

Now that the wind energy boom has ended, the Baseler Zeitung reports that “the shutdown of numerous wind turbines could soon lead to a drop in production” after having seen years of ruddy growth.

Subsidies for old turbines run out

Today a large number of Germany’s 29,000 total turbines nationwide are approaching 20 years old and for the most part they are outdated.

Worse: the generous subsidies granted at the time of their installation are slated to expire soon and thus make them unprofitable. After 2020, thousands of these turbines will lose their subsidies with each passing year, which means they will be taken offline and mothballed.

The Baseler Zeitung writes:

In many cases the earnings will not be able to cover the continued operation costs of the turbines. After 20 years of operation, the turbines require more maintenance and some expensive repairs.”

The Baseler Zeitung adds that some 5700 turbines with an installed capacity of 45 MW will see their subsidies run out by 2020. The Swiss daily reports further:

The German Windenergie federal association estimates that approximately 14,000 megawatts of installed capacity will lose their subsidies by 2023, which is more than a quarter of the German wind energy capacity.”

So with new turbines coming online only slowly, it’s entirely possible that wind energy output in Germany will recede in the coming years, thus making the country appear even less serious about climate protection.

Wind turbine dump in Africa?

So what happens to the old turbines that will get taken offline?

Windpark owners hope to send their scrapped wind turbine clunkers to third world buyers, Africa for example. But if these buyers instead opt for new energy systems, then German wind park operators will be forced to dismantle and recycle them – a costly endeavor, the Baseler Zeitung reports.

Impossible to recycle composite materials

The problem here are the large blades, which are made of fiberglass composite materials and whose components cannot be separated from each other. Burning the blades is extremely difficult, toxic and energy-intensive. So naturally there’s a huge incentive for German wind park operators to dump the old contraptions onto third world countries, and to let them deal later with the garbage.

Sweeping garbage under the rug

Next the Baseler Zeitung brings up the disposal of the massive 3000-tonne reinforced concrete turbine base, which according to German law must be removed.

Some of these concrete bases reach depths of 20 meters and penetrate multiple ground layers, the Baseler Zeitung reports, adding:

The complete removal of the concrete base can quickly run up to several hundreds of thousands of euros. Many wind park operators have not made the corresponding provisions for this expense.”

Already wind park operators are circumventing this huge expense by only removing the top two meters of the concrete and steel base, and then hiding the rest with a layer of soil, the Baseler writes.

In the end most of the concrete base will remain as garbage buried in the ground, and the above-ground turbine litter will likely get shipped to third world countries.

That’s Germany’s Energiewende and contribution to protecting the environment and climate!

SOURCE

Australia Set To Have Its Coldest Winter On Record

While we've all been freezing our arses off in the Northern hemisphere over the past few months, folk in Australia have been busy enjoying the summer sun and sticking shrimp on the barbie.

Well, Aussies, it's probably time to invest in some thermals - the land down under is set to be hit by its coldest winter on record, an amateur weather forecaster has confirmed.

David Taylor, who runs the East Coast Weather Facebook page, has said that temperatures and snowfall may be worse than previous years and impact huge swathes of the country, the Daily Mail has reported.

"It will be slightly cooler than normal in the north but the real cold will be in the southern states and southeast Queensland," Taylor told the Cairns Post. "I wouldn't be surprised if there is snow in places where it hasn't snowed for a long time."

Taylor makes his forecast using a formula which considers changes in sunspot activity, Global Forecast System modelling, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast.

If you're wondering why you should listen to the advice of some bloke off Facebook, Taylor has been right about meteorlogical events in the recent past - putting his success down to his sunspot tracking.

Taylor was the only person to correctly predict the massive weather event that hit Townsville last week which saw the north-east coast hit with 600m of rain on 28 February.

He also predicted that this week a 'decent cyclone' will cross the Queensland coast between Cairns and Gladstone, backing his assertion up by pointing to other forecasters who are saying the same thing. "It's looking pretty scary," he said.

Europe and America have already endured a hard winter this year with huge parts of the world seeing historic amounts of snowfall and freezing temperatures.

Back in January, Storm Grayson battered the eastern coast of the United States, sending temperatures in some areas plummeting to an unfathomable -69C.

The arrival of the 'bomb cyclone' brought with it a massive blizzard, freezing lakes and rivers across the north-east of the US and making -39C temperatures feel twice as cold due to icy winds.

The weather was so cold that it even temporarily froze Niagara Falls, turning the famous waterfalls into giant icicles.

Over the past few weeks Europe's been bearing the brunt of the weather too thanks to the arrival of Storm Emma and the Beast from the East.

The weather was so bad in the UK that the Met Office were forced to announce red severe weather warnings for snow, high winds and ice in some areas - the first time that's happened since 2013.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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26 April, 2018

A global warming manifesto in a medical journal

Under the heading "Health, Faith, and Science on a Warming Planet" the manifesto below appeared in JAMA for no apparent reason. It appears to be authored by an Hispanic Catholic, an American Jew and a South Indian -- so maybe that is meant to be an impressive "consensus".

It is basically a religious document. It makes no mention of any scientific fact that would indicate global warming but relies entirely on appeals to authority -- in this case the opinions promulgated by various scientific societies.

With solid brass hypocrisy, however they declare that "disciplined, critical thinking, and an unfailing commitment to distinguish what is verifiable from what is not" characterizes the way they work. But they show no sign of it.

What for instance do their critical faculties make of the long hiatus from 1945 to 1975 (where temperatures flatlined -- showed no upwards trend) precisely at the time they should have been soaring -- when CO2 levels were soaring as an outcome of post-WW2 industrialization. Clearly such a spectacular departure -- 30 years is no "blip" -- from what Global Warming theory predicts does not bother them. They pay lip-service to scholarship and science but in practice ignore it. They are intellectual pygmies. Platitudes are the best they can do

Global change presents humanity with unprecedented challenges. Climate change, altered natural cycles, and pollution of air, water, and biota threaten the very conditions on which human civilization has depended for the last 12?000 years. While human health is better now than ever before in human history, climate change is undermining many public health advances of the last century and ultimately may be associated with the unprecedented extinction of species. The increasing gap between the wealthy and poor—already unconscionable, and the cause of profound preventable morbidity and mortality—amplifies the effects of climate change on health and deepens health disparities.

These challenges call for global collaboration. Innovative partnerships are essential. The emerging alignment of health professionals, climate scientists, and the faith community is one such partnership. This alignment is based on a great deal of common ground.

First, there are certain truths. This is a time when many people are questioning even established facts. Untruths are promulgated with disturbing frequency and are disseminated efficiently through social media. But disciplined, critical thinking, and an unfailing commitment to distinguish what is verifiable from what is not, characterize the best of the health, science, and faith communities.

Second, scientific evidence is a primary basis for distinguishing what is verifiable from what is not. Science is both an epistemology (ie, a way to establish truth) and a set of institutional arrangements, including universities and research institutes, science academies, expert committees, and government science advisors. Scientific evidence provides invaluable policy guidance to political leaders, to members of the public, and to religious leaders. In the United States, for example, the National Academies have provided extensive guidance on climate science and on the influence of climate change on human health and well-being.1 The Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican, which was founded in 1936 by Pope Pius XI but which traces its origins to the much older Accademia dei Lincei (established in 1603 and led by Galileo Galilei), has a similar important role. For example, the Academy provided scientific support to the 2015 Papal encyclical, Laudato Si’, which laid out a global approach to environmental stewardship. Laudato Si’ identified climate change as “one of the principal challenges facing humanity,” recognized the grave implications for health and equity, and grounded this assessment in “the scientific consensus that changes in the climate are largely man-made.”2

Third, “with unchecked climate change and air pollution, the very fabric of life on Earth, including that of humans, is at grave risk.”3(p5) Data collected in recent years have revealed that worldwide warming can expose billions of people to deadly heat waves, floods, droughts, and fires. The pollutants released by the burning of fossil fuels and nonrenewable biomass that lead to climate change are associated with an estimated 7 million premature deaths each year.4 In response, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences convened a group of political and faith leaders, climate scientists, and public health experts in 2017, to review data on health effects of climate change. The group affirmed the seriousness of the threat. It proposed scalable solutions such as transitioning to a decarbonized energy system, providing financial support to poor nations for climate adaptation, and ending deforestation. The group also recommended an alliance of scientists, policy makers, private donors, and faith leaders to implement these solutions.

Fourth, there is a role for reverence and awe. These responses may come more easily to religious than to scientific thought, but in truth they are common to both domains. “You must have experienced it, too,” Werner Heisenberg wrote to Albert Einstein, “One is almost frightened in front of the simplicity and compactness of the interconnections that nature all of a sudden spreads before him and for which he was not in the least prepared.”5(p108) The impulse to address climate change, to protect people, and to seek justice is not only a response to danger. It also reflects profound appreciation for the sanctity of individuals, the beauty of community, the gift of health, and the majesty of the natural world.

Fifth, there is a moral obligation to safeguard the earth for future generations. Scientists, health professionals, and people of faith all understand that contemporary actions have future consequences. Climate scientists model and forecast these consequences. Health professionals understand them through the lenses of genetics and epigenetic effects. Religious traditions are grounded in the intergenerational transmission of faith and values. Together, these perspectives support a robust moral claim that each generation has a responsibility to the generations that follow.6

Sixth, there is a moral obligation to care for the most vulnerable. Health professionals recognize that social inequities are among the strongest predictors of poor health. The world’s major religious traditions, even if they interpret God in different ways, must share a commitment to human dignity, the pursuit of justice and peace, and the exercise of charity, and must act together accordingly. Pope Francis’s reminder that “there is an inseparable bond between our faith and the poor”7 is as clear and compelling, in its domain, as are the health data in their domain. All people are vulnerable to the effects of climate change, but the poor and disenfranchised are especially vulnerable.8 Strategies for climate mitigation and adaptation, for health promotion and disease prevention, and for economic and social development, must center on serving these populations.

These 6 areas of common ground represent a broad and deep foundation, and a powerful opportunity. They establish a path to innovative and productive partnerships among health professionals, scientists, and the faith community as they work together safeguarding both the global environment and human health—and leveraging their moral authority, expertise, and influence—to address climate change urgently, effectively, and equitably.

SOURCE

American Ingenuity Defies Carbon Emissions Orthodoxy

"No major industrial economy on Earth has made as much progress as the U.S." in reducing emissions

A few months ago The Washington Post begrudgingly reported, “Countries made only modest climate-change promises in Paris. They’re falling short anyway.” As we noted at the time, there’s absolutely nothing surprising about the report because the entire Paris Climate Accords façade was predicated on a pipe dream. That’s why President Donald Trump dumped it.

In a free market like the one upon which America was built, innovation, not reckless government mandates, must be the policy centerpiece of the economy. Maintaining a clean environment is important, no doubt, but statist decrees will inevitably do more harm than good.

The benefits of natural human innovation are far too often taken for granted. That’s a shame because much heartache could otherwise be avoided — including when it comes to emissions control. According to Investor’s Business Daily, “The latest report from the Environmental Protection Agency shows that the emission of so-called greenhouse gases declined by 2% in 2016 from 2015 and 11% from 2005. No major industrial economy on Earth has made as much progress as the U.S. And no, we’re not claiming this as a victory for Donald Trump or anyone else in government. It’s due to fracking and the replacement of high-CO2 fuels like coal with far-cleaner natural gas.”

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt succinctly responded, “This report confirms the president’s critics are wrong again: One-size-fits-all regulations like the Clean Power Plan or misguided international agreements like the Paris Accords are not the solution. The U.S. has reduced greenhouse gas emissions more than any country on Earth over the last decade.”

Moreover, he proclaimed, “American ingenuity and technological breakthroughs, not top-down government mandates, have made the U.S. the world leader in achieving energy dominance while reducing emissions — one of the great environmental successes of our time.”

For the record, foreign nations are actually purchasing U.S. coal at increasing rates, with nearly 100 million short tons of it being shipped from the U.S. in 2017. However, this is a mutually beneficial arrangement — it bolsters the U.S. economy while helping foreign nations meet their energy needs, which, ironically, underscores just how flawed the Paris accord is; these foreign nations’ energy problems were mostly created by their reliance on renewables.

But it gets even better: These countries’ embrace of U.S. coal in the meantime will hopefully put them on a path toward finding their own innovative solutions to carbon emissions like we are here in the U.S. As Investor’s adds, “American companies are reducing our greenhouse gas output without being ordered to do so by dictatorial green bureaucrats. That’s a lesson the rest of the world could learn from.” The results speak for themselves.

SOURCE

An Earth Day Meditation for Millennials

April 22 marks Earth Day and millennials might think it goes back at least 100 years, or maybe all the way to the nation’s founding. Actually, Earth Day started only 48 years ago in 1970, but it was an occasion of significance. As Randy Simmons, Ryan M. Yonk and Kenneth J. Sim showed in Nature Unbound: Bureaucracy versus the Environment, Earth Day launched the modern environmental movement. The core belief of this movement was that human beings were a kind of invasive species and that if humans are not around, nature returns to a pristine state of harmony and balance. As the authors show, disturbance and change, not balance and harmony, best describe nature.

Earth Day prompted legislators to pass the Clean Water Act (1972), the Clean Air Act (1973), the Endangered Species Act (1973) and to create bureaucracies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, with a current budget of $6.1 billion. This Earth Day, millennials might ponder how in 2015 the EPA spilled three million gallons of toxic wastewater in southern Colorado’s Animas River, polluting an entire river system and creating a certified ecological disaster. Millennials might wonder why EPA boss Gina McCarthy did not get fired. That is because, whatever damage they may cause to the environment, federal agencies are essentially a no-fire zone, with little if any accountability. So powerful bureaucracies and their unelected bosses are not exactly worthy of celebration.

All age groups might think of Earth Day as a religious holiday because it hails a kind of fundamentalist pantheism. In effect, it immanentizes the eschaton with a secular version of Biblical prophecies. This new religion also issues commandments that have little to do with empirical inquiry and marshals considerable hostility to human rights, especially property rights.

As Nature Unbound shows, human beings are part of nature. The environment does better when public policy respects that reality and protects property rights instead of violating them. When Earth Day recognizes that reality, it will truly be worthy of celebration.

SOURCE

Geophysical, archaeological, and historical evidence support a solar-output model for climate change

Charles A. Perry and Kenneth J. Hsu

Abstract

Although the processes of climate change are not completely understood, an important causal candidate is variation in total solar output. Reported cycles in various climate-proxy data show a tendency to emulate a fundamental harmonic sequence of a basic solar-cycle length (11 years) multiplied by 2N (where N equals a positive or negative integer). A simple additive model for total solar-output variations was developed by superimposing a progression of fundamental harmonic cycles with slightly increasing amplitudes. The timeline of the model was calibrated to the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary at 9,000 years before present. The calibrated model was compared with geophysical, archaeological, and historical evidence of warm or cold climates during the Holocene. The evidence of periods of several centuries of cooler climates worldwide called “little ice ages,” similar to the period anno Domini (A.D.) 1280–1860 and reoccurring approximately every 1,300 years, corresponds well with fluctuations in modeled solar output. A more detailed examination of the climate sensitive history of the last 1,000 years further supports the model. Extrapolation of the model into the future suggests a gradual cooling during the next few centuries with intermittent minor warmups and a return to near little-ice-age conditions within the next 500 years. This cool period then may be followed approximately 1,500 years from now by a return to altithermal conditions similar to the previous Holocene Maximum.

The debate on the cause and the amount of global warming and its effect on global climates and economics continues. As world population continues its exponential growth, the potential for catastrophic effects from climate change increases. One previously neglected key to understanding global climate change may be found in examining events of world history and their connection to climate fluctuations.

Climate fluctuations have long been noted as being cyclical in nature, and many papers have been published on this topic (1). These fluctuations also can be quite abrupt (2) when climate displays a surprisingly fast transition from one state to another. Possible causes of the cyclic variations and abrupt transitions at different time intervals have been theorized. These theories include internal drivers such as CO2 concentrations (3), ocean temperature and salinity properties (4), as well as volcanism and atmospheric-transmissivity variations (5). External drivers include astronomical factors such as the Milankovitch orbital parameters (6), which recently have been challenged (7), and variations in the Sun's energy output (8–10).

The most direct mechanism for climate change would be a decrease or increase in the total amount of radiant energy reaching the Earth. Because only the orbital eccentricity aspect of the Milankovitch theory can account for a change in the total global energy and this change is of the order of only a maximum of 0.1% (11), one must look to the Sun as a possible source of larger energy fluctuations. Earth-satellite measurements in the last two decades have revealed that the total energy reaching the Earth varies by at least 0.1% over the 10- to 11-year solar cycle (12). Evidence of larger and longer term variations in solar output can be deduced from geophysical data (13–17).

In an extensive search of the literature pertaining to geophysical and astronomical cycles ranging from seconds to millions of years, Perry (18) demonstrated that the reported cycles fell into a recognizable pattern when standardized according to fundamental harmonics. An analysis of the distribution of 256 reported cycles, when standardized by dividing the length of each cycle, in years, by 2N (where N is a positive or negative integer) until the cycle length fell into a range of 7.5 to 15 years, showed a central tendency of 11.1 years. The average sunspot-cycle length for the period 1700 to 1969 is also 11.1 years (19). In fact, the distribution of the sunspot cycles is very nearly the same as the distribution of the fundamental cycles of other geophysical and astronomical cycles. Aperiodicity of the cycles was evident in two side modes of 9.9 and 12.2 years for the geophysical and astronomical cycles and 10.0 and 12.1 years for the sunspot cycle. The coincidence of these two patterns suggests that solar-activity cycles and their fundamental harmonics may be the underlying cause of many climatic cycles that are preserved in the geophysical record. Gauthier (20) noted a similar unified structure in Quaternary climate data that also followed a fundamental harmonic progression (progressive doubling of cycle length) from the 11-year sunspot data to the major 90,000-year glacial cycle.

More HERE

Wind turbines delivering next to nothing to Australian grid despite hysteria

Are we completely insane? Well, almost our entire political class and the overwhelming majority of – self-believing – “clever people” seemingly certainly are.

As I write this Wednesday evening, all those wonderful “clean” wind turbines across Victoria and South Australia are pumping out all of 30MW of electricity.

They are supposed to have the capacity to produce more than 3400MW – that’s 1½ Hazelwoods. They were operating at less than 1 per cent of capacity.

How many times do you have to say and write “when the wind don’t blow (and the sun don’t shine) the power don’t flow” to break through the thick skulls of “clever people” from PMs and premiers, through company chairman and CEOs being paid salaries in the millions and all the way down to academics and media idiots?

If the wind doesn’t blow then no power is generated.

Oh wait, sorry; all those turbines across SA and Victoria have now kicked up to producing 74MW. That’s a much more impressive 2 per cent of capacity.

Supply – more accurately, non supply – of electricity is one aspect of the insanity. The other is price. The wholesale price in SA was running at over $130 a MW hour. Victorians were doing a little better at around $108 a MW hour.

As the wind picked up, the SA price plummeted to $126 a MWh and Victoria’s to $106.

In the “bad old days” – all the way back to around 2000 – when we had wicked old, coal-fired power stations chugging away reliably pumping out electricity, irrespective of wind and sun, we paid $20-$30 a MWh, day in and day out.

It was so terribly boring – there’s so much more excitement, indeed real frisson, when prices can change by as much as that in a matter of minutes, as the wind chooses to blow or not.

And of course back then Gaia was crying tears of blood.

Never mind, as the AFR’s renewables (and Tesla) fanboy Ben Potter breathlessly informed us this week, a mammoth 9691 megawatts of new wind and solar capacity would be added to the national energy market by the early 2020s.

One can assume that Potter is as mathematically challenged as energy minister Josh Frydenberg; that like most of our 2018 “clever people” they’ve never had explained to them that any number multiplying zero still gives you zero.

We now have 3400MW of installed – OK, I’ll go along with the joke and call it – “capacity” – wind in Victoria and SA. As I wrote, that was producing all of 30MW, according to the market operator AEMO.

You can add that mammoth 9691MW, but if the wind is blowing as the same gentle zephyr, you’ll kick the relative output up to all of 115 MW.

Pity, that Victoria and SA alone need around 7500MW pretty much every hour, all day. Although, true, presumably the two states will need less by the early 2020s as more and more factories are shuttered as a consequence of crippling power prices.

To emphasise for Josh and Ben and all the others “clever people”/idiots: if you’ve got 3400MW of wind “capacity” and the wind don’t blow you will get zero or close to zero electricity.

You can have 13,000 MW of wind “capacity” and if the wind don’t blow you will still get zero or close to zero electricity.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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25 April, 2018

It's no small irony that Nelson founded "Earth Day" on the centenary of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's birthday

Today is Earth Day, the ecofascists’ favorite day of the year. Here are some excerpts from Mark Alexander’s 2010 essay on the real origin and use of this socialist celebration.

It’s that time of year again — that time when the northern hemisphere will be warming, as it has for millions of years, except during ice ages.

Since most of the world’s industrial capacity and economic wealth is located north of the equator, this means that the now-perennial onset of global warming hysteria is about to sprout into full bloom.

On 22 April 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) founded “Earth Day” in order to launch an annual “teach in” about conservation and environmental concerns.

Of course, conservation is not a bad word — it even shares the same root word as “conservative.” Indeed, our family makes every effort to use energy and resources wisely. The “waste not, want not” principle is good economic practice.

However, the Left’s motives for “Earth Day” don’t stop at educating folks about conservation and environmental preservation. Those objectives provide cover for a much more sinister purpose — using ecological concern to justify all manner of government regulation and intervention.

It’s no small irony that Nelson founded “Earth Day” on the centenary of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s birthday, as it was the impetus for creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

Nelson modeled his anti-capitalist protests after anti-Vietnam War demonstrations of that era, and the so-called “environmental movement” he helped spawn has devolved from a pack of unwashed adolescent peaceniks and malcontents into a slick, influential and well funded cadre of Lefty politicos. (This would be the same movement that protested against nuclear energy, which yields no carbon dioxide as a byproduct of energy production.)

Nelson’s cadre has managed, by way of the EPA, to implement an enormous hidden tax burden on the American people — more than a trillion dollars last year — in the form of runaway environmental regulations, which surreptitiously increase the prices of products and services.

And as far as climate change?

Bottom line: Human activity does affect the climate. Every time you exhale CO2, you increase the concentration of that minuscule greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, but if you want to make a positive impact upon the environment, don’t hold your breath. Roll up your sleeves and promote liberty and free enterprise, because, per capita, it is the free nations of the world that have the cleanest environments, and those with Socialist governments that have the worst.

SOURCE

The Connection Between Russia and 2 Green Groups Fighting Fracking in US

New Yorkers who are missing out on the natural gas revolution could be victims of Russian spy operations that fund popular environmental groups, current and former U.S. government officials and experts on Russia worry.

Natural gas development of the celebrated Marcellus Shale deposits has spurred jobs and other economic growth in neighboring Pennsylvania. But not in New York, which nearly 10 years ago banned the process of hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, to produce natural gas.

Two environmental advocacy groups that successfully lobbied against fracking in New York each received more than $10 million in grants from a foundation in California that got financial support from a Bermuda company congressional investigators linked to the Russians, public documents show.

The environmental groups Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club Foundation received millions of dollars in grants from the San Francisco-based Sea Change Foundation.

“Follow the money trail, and this [New York] ban on fracking could be viewed as an example of successful Russian espionage,” Ken Stiles, a CIA veteran of 29 years who now teaches at Virginia Tech, told The Daily Signal.

To Stiles and other knowledgeable observers, this looks like an actual case of knowing or unknowing collusion with Russia.

Both Natural Resources Defense Council and Sierra Club Foundation also accepted tens of millions from the Energy Foundation, the top recipient of grants from Sea Change, according to foundation and tax records.

When New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, renewed his state’s ban on fracking three years ago, the Natural Resources Defense Council issued a statement supporting the ban. So did the Sierra Club, the primary recipient of grants from its sister organization, the Sierra Club Foundation.

Environmental activists associated with the groups receiving Sea Change Foundation grants continued to pressure Cuomo and other public officials to maintain and expand New York’s fracking ban.

Most recently, the two environmental groups scored another victory when the Delaware River Basin Commission, an interstate regulatory agency that includes the governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, proposed a ban on fracking within the Delaware River Basin cutting across all four states.

The Sierra Club and the Natural Resource Defense Council have pressed the regional commission to impose the ban, issuing statements (here and here) calling for restrictions that are tighter than what the commission proposed.

PennEast Pipeline Co. is set to begin construction on a 120-mile-long pipeline to transport natural gas from the Marcellus Shale across Eastern Pennsylvania into New Jersey. In a new public relations campaign, PennEast asks New Jersey residents if they would rather obtain their energy from Pennsylvania or Russia.

PennEast cites media reports describing how anti-pipeline policies in Massachusetts forced the state into a position where it had to rely on Russian imports of liquified natural gas during peak cold periods this past winter.

More HERE

Hit climate target or we will ditch your shares: LGIM's threat to dirty companies

Good for private investors who get cheaper shares. No concern to a company who holds it's shares

One of Europe’s biggest investment managers is preparing to name and shame companies which behave unsustainably – and to ditch billions of pounds of investment in their shares.

Legal and General Investment Management (LGIM), which manages assets worth almost £1 trillion, has stepped up efforts to push the firms in which it invests to clean up their act with a "climate change pledge".

Those who have done well will be "named and famed" next month, said Helena Morrissey, LGIM's head of personal investing. But those who have not listened to the investor will be named and shamed. On top of that, some LGIM funds will dump their shares.

“We work with 90 or so of the world’s largest companies across six sectors whose actions we think will have the biggest implications for climate change in the future,” she told the City Week conference.

“Next month we will be naming and faming, and naming and shaming. The reason we are shaming [the worst performers] is that we gave them a number of years and they did not take any notice.

“There comes a time when we should vote with our feet. We will be divesting from those companies.”

LGIM will initially apply the policy to its entire "future fund" range. It comes as part of a growing campaign to improve corporate behaviour.

Last week LGIM said it would vote against the chairman of any company in the FTSE 350 if female directors make up less than 25pc of the board – bringing personal pressure on the top names at the biggest companies in the country.

Ms Morrissey said the aim is to be both profitable and socially effective.

“Climate change risk is a financial risk – in the last six years, coal companies have lost 75pc of their value,” she said.

She cited the example of HSBC UK which moved its default defined contribution pension scheme to LGIM on the basis that it could simultaneously get strong returns while meeting environmental, social and governance (ESG) targets in its investments.

LGIM is not alone in moving in this direction. Last week Deutsche Bank published a major report showing that investors who use ESG criteria outperform those who invest in companies which fail to meet those non-financial goals.

Earlier this year a UBS study found that investors backing companies with a strong female presence at senior levels will outperform those who do not.

Meanwhile Lord Blackwell, the chairman of Lloyds Banking Group, told the conference that access to EU markets is “not life and death” for Britain’s financial services sector, and that the UK should avoid becoming a rule-taker from an EU which is “less friendly” towards finance.

While trading across the Channel “is important”, it represents just 20pc of the City’s work, the veteran financier said, with domestic business and global non-EU trade both being substantially more important.

In retail and small business banking, Lord Blackwell said the UK may well want to diverge from EU rules – which should not overly concern Brussels as it relates almost entirely to domestic industry.

Corporate and investment banking is a more international business, but even here the Lloyds’ chairman believes the UK would not be sunk without a Brexit deal, as major European companies can use their British operations to access the City.

He did, however, warn of “very significant costs” to the UK and EU if no deal is reached on financial infrastructure for clearing houses and settlement operations.

“The UK will need to be wary of seeking equivalence under a regime that makes the UK adopt all the EU’s directives, as the EU without the UK may have a less friendly attitude towards market activities,” he said.

“The UK’s primary objective must be to preserve its global competitiveness, even if that means some loss of activity in Europe in the long-term.”

SOURCE

Solar panels could be a source of GenX and other perflourinated contaminants

A scientist at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency confirmed Friday that certain perfluorinated compounds are used in the production of solar panels. In response to a request from the North State Journal, EPA physical scientist Dr. Mark J. Strynar provided 39 records from the SciFinder database used by the EPA to identify applications of PFAS (perfluorinated alkylated substances) with solar panels.

“It appears PFAS are included in solar panel production and thus have the capacity to be sources of PFAS,” Strynar said, via e-mail, after reviewing the records.

Strynar and colleague Andy Lindstrom started research five years ago that first identified GenX contamination in the Cape Fear area downstream from a DuPont chemical plant that operated from the 1970s until 2015. The discovery sparked public outrage in the Wilmington area, resulted in multiple lawsuits over GenX contamination, and the N.C. General Assembly passed a bill to address GenX contamination.

When asked if solar panels contain GenX, Strynar explained that GenX technically is not a chemical but rather a chemical process. The GenX process produces two PFAS compounds commonly referred to as FRD903 and FRD902. Stryman also confirmed that the GenX chemicals are included in the broad classification of PFAS compounds.

According to the EPA, PFASs (which include GenX precursers PFOA and PFOS and the GenX chemical) are a class of man-made chemicals not found naturally in the environment. PFOA and PFOS have been the most extensively produced and studied of these chemicals. Both chemicals are very persistent in the environment and in the human body when exposure occurs. Because the chemicals help reduce friction, they are also used by a variety of industries such as aerospace, automotive, construction and electronics factories or businesses. The long-term health effect of chemicals related to the GenX process in humans is unknown, but studies submitted to the EPA by DuPont from 2006 to 2013 show that it caused tumors and reproductive problems in lab animals.

According to a report provided by the EPA, the GenX chemicals are used as processing aids in the manufacture of Teflon PTFE and Teflon FEP by Chemours. DuPont markets Teflon films for photovoltaic modules that contain Teflon PTFE and Teflon FEP. Chemours was founded in July 2015 as a spinoff from DuPont.

Strynar could not confirm the exact types of PFAS chemicals used in N.C. or U.S. solar panels. Strynar also said he could not confirm whether the EPA or state agencies were investigating solar panel installations as a potential source of PFAS contamination.

“I sure have not heard anything on solar panels.” said Linda Culpepper, interim director of the Division of Water Resources at the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality. “There is a lot of research going on, we are looking at ambient monitoring right now that we started in Jordan Lake the first week of January. Some of the water utilities are looking around.” Culpepper added that there is speculation that some of the PFAS contamination is coming from municipal waste water due to washing clothes that contain PFAS.

The Environmental Working Group released an interactive map showing 11 counties in N.C. with levels of PFAS from EPA monitoring programs, and several are not near the Cape Fear region or the old DuPont facility.

SOURCE

Australia: Wind turbines delivering next to nothing to grid despite hysteria

Are we completely insane? Well, almost our entire political class and the overwhelming majority of – self-believing – “clever people” seemingly certainly are.

As I write this Wednesday evening, all those wonderful “clean” wind turbines across Victoria and South Australia are pumping out all of 30MW of electricity.

They are supposed to have the capacity to produce more than 3400MW – that’s 1½ Hazelwoods. They were operating at less than 1 per cent of capacity.

How many times do you have to say and write “when the wind don’t blow (and the sun don’t shine) the power don’t flow” to break through the thick skulls of “clever people” from PMs and premiers, through company chairman and CEOs being paid salaries in the millions and all the way down to academics and media idiots?

If the wind doesn’t blow then no power is generated.

Oh wait, sorry; all those turbines across SA and Victoria have now kicked up to producing 74MW. That’s a much more impressive 2 per cent of capacity.

Supply – more accurately, non supply – of electricity is one aspect of the insanity. The other is price. The wholesale price in SA was running at over $130 a MW hour. Victorians were doing a little better at around $108 a MW hour.

As the wind picked up, the SA price plummeted to $126 a MWh and Victoria’s to $106.

In the “bad old days” – all the way back to around 2000 – when we had wicked old, coal-fired power stations chugging away reliably pumping out electricity, irrespective of wind and sun, we paid $20-$30 a MWh, day in and day out.

It was so terribly boring – there’s so much more excitement, indeed real frisson, when prices can change by as much as that in a matter of minutes, as the wind chooses to blow or not.

And of course back then Gaia was crying tears of blood.

Never mind, as the AFR’s renewables (and Tesla) fanboy Ben Potter breathlessly informed us this week, a mammoth 9691 megawatts of new wind and solar capacity would be added to the national energy market by the early 2020s.

One can assume that Potter is as mathematically challenged as energy minister Josh Frydenberg; that like most of our 2018 “clever people” they’ve never had explained to them that any number multiplying zero still gives you zero.

We now have 3400MW of installed – OK, I’ll go along with the joke and call it – “capacity” – wind in Victoria and SA. As I wrote, that was producing all of 30MW, according to the market operator AEMO.

You can add that mammoth 9691MW, but if the wind is blowing as the same gentle zephyr, you’ll kick the relative output up to all of 115 MW.

Pity, that Victoria and SA alone need around 7500MW pretty much every hour, all day. Although, true, presumably the two states will need less by the early 2020s as more and more factories are shuttered as a consequence of crippling power prices.

To emphasise for Josh and Ben and all the others “clever people”/idiots: if you’ve got 3400MW of wind “capacity” and the wind don’t blow you will get zero or close to zero electricity.

You can have 13,000 MW of wind “capacity” and if the wind don’t blow you will still get zero or close to zero electricity.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

24 April, 2018

More childish reasoning from the NYT

They have up an article headed: "We Are Conservatives and We Believe Climate Change Is Real". And everything they say in that connection is perfectly correct -- but irrelevant.

Their modus operandi is to find one conservative in a number of countries who does believe in climate change and put up a whole series of short videos in which these selected people rom different countries affirm their belief in climate change.

But it is an unutterably childish exercise. If they had asked me whether I believed in climate change I too would have said "Yes". So it is not the answer that is wrong but the question. If they had asked me "Do you believe that climate change is caused by humans?", I would have said "No".

So they only looked like they had addressed what is at issue in the climate debate. They have in fact completely slip-slided away from it.

They also say that climate change is controversial in America only. I could introduce them to a lot of Australian Federal politicians who think climate change panic is all hokum. Australia once had a carbon tax -- introduced by a Leftist government. The next government was a conservative one -- who made it their first order of business to abolish the carbon tax. So pretending that climate skepticism is unique to the USA is quite simply a lie.

In any case the whole exercise falls foul of Logic 101. It is an argument by example. And you can prove anything by example. If, for instance, there were only one conservative in a country who believed in climate change, you could could interview him and him only and create the impression that many or most conservatives in the country believed in climate change -- a conclusion which would be grossly erroneous. Isolated examples cannot be used to prove a generality.

But Leftists have to use such invalid arguments. Science, logic and the facts are not kind to them -- JR.

In an hilarious example of Green/Left logic, New England built a lot of natural-gas fired electricity generators but then blocked contruction of the pipelines needed to supply them all with gas!

Pipelines are evil!

Mass.: COMING SOON to your electric bill: a pipeline tax.

When members of the Legislature, egged on by Attorney General Maura Healey, blocked financing for a new natural gas pipeline into New England in 2016, they claimed to be saving money for ratepayers and helping the environment.

But nearly the opposite has happened instead. And now the damage — environmental and financial — is starting to pile up.

The environmental toll this year has been eye-popping: Greenhouse gas pollution exploded during this winter’s cold snap, leading generators to burn 2 million barrels of oil, forcing the region to rely on imported Russian gas, and sparking a mini-revival for the region’s moribund coal industry. In January New Hampshire burned more coal than New York, according to federal statistics.

All that extra pollution was also expensive. Energy cost totaled more than $700 million compared with the same period last year; if past cold winters are any guide, that premium will trickle down to consumers’ electric bills next winter.

Now, in a potential additional cost, a power plant and liquefied natural gas importer in Everett is demanding extra financial support to stay in business — a foretaste of what’s likely to come as long as Massachusetts continues to block regional efforts to relieve pipeline shortages.

The costs to the region’s consumers, and the needless environmental damage, are the direct result of Massachusetts elected officials’ decisions. And those costs should lead the Legislature to rethink its stance and join efforts by other New England states to expand the region’s pipelines — before federal regulators and the region’s grid operator start taking decisions into their own hands.

THE PROBLEM STEMS from a success story: Massachusetts, and the rest of New England, built a fleet of cleaner gas-burning plants over the last two decades, which have lowered electricity prices, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and made renewables like solar and wind more viable by providing an on-demand, dispatchable fallback on days when it’s not sunny or windy. Emissions from the power sector have plummeted, outpacing reductions from cars and houses.

But when there’s not enough natural gas available, those newer plants don’t operate — and suddenly 1999’s energy grid wheezes back to life. On cold days, including the extended frigid period this winter, the region snaps back to dirtier coal- and oil-burning power plants.

Many of those coal and oil plants are financially marginal and overdue for retirement. Yet by keeping pipeline constraints in place, Massachusetts has ensured that New England still needs those dinosaurs. That has forced the region’s electricity grid operator, ISO New England, to look for ways to cajole them into staying in business.

That’s what just happened in Everett. In late March, the owner of the money-losing Mystic Generating Station announced that in 2022 it would mothball the 2,000 megawatt plant, which runs off oil and liquefied natural gas imported by ship, both of which are unaffected by pipeline constraints — unless it got a rescue commitment. “We’re not in a position to continue to suffer losses while we wait for a long-term fix,” Joe Dominguez, an executive vice president of the owner, Chicago-based Exelon, told the Globe.

ISO quickly stepped in and said it would rescue the plant — with ratepayers footing any costs. Mystic is the Commonwealth’s single biggest generating facility. Losing it in 2022, said Vamsi Chadalavada, the grid’s chief operating officer, would pose “an unacceptable fuel security risk to the region during the winter months.”

The costs of that intervention are unclear, and will depend partially on the weather. The difference between what the company bid in the last capacity auction — the annual process whereby power plants name the minimum price they would need to stay in business — and the actual market-based price would amount to about $15 million annually.

But there’s a wildcard: Exelon also just announced it would buy the liquefied natural gas import terminal in Everett from the French energy giant Engie, and Dominguez said Exelon would also seek to recover the costs of operating the terminal, since they’re part of the cost of fueling the plant. (Exelon, he said, had nothing to gain, since any revenues would also be passed back to ratepayers. “We’ll have no incremental profit opportunity. We’re in a pure treading water standpoint,” Dominguez said.)

By itself, any additional costs to keep the Mystic plant operating might be a drop in the bucket. But a cost-recovery arrangement there could give other generators in New England ideas. And the long-term fix in the works may leave lawmakers wishing they’d okayed the pipeline.

THE LONG-TERM fix is a market reform ISO New England is expected to consider this year that would provide new incentives for generators that offer “fuel security” to the electric grid. That’s a hazily defined term that generally means generators either keep their fuel on site or have firm arrangements to get it on demand. By definition, intermittent renewables like solar and wind don’t qualify, since there’s no way they can promise the wind will be blowing or sun will be shining at the moment they’re needed. Instead, under most definitions of “fuel security,” coal, nuclear, and oil generators would cash in.

Potentially, such reforms could also provide an incentive for those new gas-fired power plants to contract for pipeline capacity, so that they’d be considered secure. Right now, almost all those generators just buy whatever is left over from the interstate pipelines that already serve New England. That’s why their supplies get so precarious during cold snaps: Gas utilities have first dibs on pipeline gas, and use almost all of it when homeowners crank up their thermostats. Algonquin, one of the major pipelines serving New England, said last year that less than 4 percent of the natural gas supplied to gas-fired electric generators in New England came under firm contracts.

But many gas-fired generating plants also have the ability to burn oil, and the ISO’s rules are fuel neutral; generators might also just take any incentives for greater fuel security as a cue to stock up on oil.

The better strategy would be for Beacon Hill to do what it failed to do in 2016: Join with Connecticut and Rhode Island, which have already authorized pipeline financing, to ensure that the region’s fuel security problem is solved in ways that mitigate the environmental damage as much as possible. Until battery storage capacity becomes viable on a much bigger scale, that means natural gas. A ratepayer-financed pipeline would cost money, but would also result in lower energy costs; even opponents like Healey concluded that ratepayers would come out ahead.

Opponents of the ratepayer-financed pipeline plan have argued that it would both lock the region’s electric grid into fossil fuels deep into the future and become stranded assets. Both criticisms can’t be valid, and neither need be. The state’s electric utilities are legally required to obtain an increasing share of electricity from renewables, new pipeline or not; state-sponsored projects like the ongoing hydro and offshore wind procurements would be unaffected.

And if demand for natural gas for electricity generation declines in the future, any capacity that’s freed up could still be put to good use: About a third of homes in New England, and about a quarter in Massachusetts, still heat with oil, and states across the region want to switch homeowners from oil to gas as part of their climate mitigation plans. Unlike emissions from electricity, which are way below 1990 levels, emissions from buildings have barely budged.

Blocking pipelines was pure symbolism. But the resulting emissions — and the resulting costs that Massachusetts legislators imposed on their constituents and the rest of New England — are all too real.

SOURCE

Correcting Falsely “Recovered” and Wrongly Listed Species and Increasing Accountability and Transparency in the Endangered Species Program

SUMMARY Numerous administrative actions should be taken to correct the record of species that are falsely claimed to have “recovered” and that have been declared endangered under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) using erroneous data. It is crucial to improve implementation, accountability, and transparency in the administration of the ESA. The recommendations and information here will help correct the record, provide guidance as to some of the species that may be suitable for delisting on the grounds of data error or extinction, improve the likelihood that future delistings are appropriately categorized, eliminate unnecessary regulations and further waste, and ensure scarce conservation dollars are better spent.

KEY TAKEAWAYSIn 45 years, only 40 U.S. species have graduated from the Endangered Species Act as “recovered.” However, 18 of them were really never endangered. If somehow species recovered at 10 times that inflated rate, it would take nearly two centuries to work through the current list, which is still growing. The ESA is so ineffective that taxpayer dollars are used to fabricate successes—and many species now listed should be removed from the list as mistakes or extinct

Introduction

In five years the Endangered Species Act (ESA) will reach the half-century milestone—and yet only 40 U.S. species have graduated from the program as “recovered,” slightly less than one species per year. If not one more bird, beetle, or bear were added to the list of federally endangered animals and plants and somehow species recovered at 10 times that rate, it would take well over a century-and-a-half to work through the current list.1
For brevity, “endangered” as opposed to “threatened and endangered” is used in some instances. In many respects, the Service has eliminated much of the distinction between endangered and threatened species through regulation. See Robert Gordon, “Take It Back: Extending the Endangered Species Act’s ‘Take’ Prohibition to All Threatened Animals Is Bad for Conservation,” Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 3267, December 7, 2017, https://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/report/take-it-back-extending-the-endangered-species-acts-take-prohibition.

There is, however, no indication that the list of regulated species will stop growing.

Even worse, almost half of the “recovered” species—18 of 40—are federally funded fiction. They were never really endangered; like many species that remain on the endangered list, they were mistakes. With all the ESA’s costs and burdens, it should perhaps come as no surprise that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (hereafter “Service”) is fabricating success stories to cover up this unsustainable mess and substituting fluff for statutorily required reporting regarding the recovery program.

The ESA was ostensibly designed to conserve species threatened or endangered with extinction.2+

The term “species” is used here and in some other instances in a legal, not a biological, sense. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 incorporates “sub-species” and the non-taxonomic unit “distinct population segment” within the term “species.” See Endangered Species Act, “Definitions,” Section 3(16), https://www.fws.gov/endangered/esa-library/pdf/ESAall.pdf (accessed January 24, 2018).

Additionally, the Department of Commerce’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) also uses the term evolutionarily significant unit (ESU), which is not found within the ESA. See National Marine Fisheries Service, “Policy on Applying the Definition of Species Under the Endangered Species Act to Pacific Salmon,” Federal Register, Vol. 56, No. 224 (November 20, 1991), pp. 58612–58618, http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/pdfs/fr/fr56-58612.pdf (accessed September 20, 2017).

Authority for implementation of the ESA resides with the Secretary of the Department of the Interior and the Secretary of Commerce, who have, respectively, delegated the FWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Marine Fisheries Service the tasks of administering the ESA. (NMFS is now more commonly referred to as NOAA Fisheries.) The agencies divvy up authority for different species based on taxonomic and geographical characteristics established in a memorandum of understanding.

When a species has been recovered that species is supposed to be removed from the list of federally threatened and endangered species (“list”) by a regulation citing “recovery” as the grounds for removal of the species (delisting). Species may also be delisted if it is determined that they are extinct or that the original data used to justify listing the species were in error.

The Service routinely falsely declares that a species that should have been delisted because of original data error has “recovered.” This deceitful practice portrays mistakes as successes, distorting the most important measure of the program. It also triggers other mandatory actions further wasting taxpayer dollars, serves as a justification for the adoption of more restrictive land management practices by other agencies, obscures significant problems with the data used to justify listing species, and erodes the overall credibility of both the Service and the program.

The Secretary of the Interior should administratively correct these false successes, appropriately identify the primary grounds for delisting these species as original data error, prioritize the delisting of wrongly listed and extinct species, and ensure that future delistings are attributed to the appropriate grounds. Any post-delisting monitoring efforts implemented for falsely recovered species should be terminated, and post-delisting special management regimes implemented by agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and U.S. Forest Service (USFS) for such species should be terminated as well.

Ultimately, measures need to be taken to raise the standards for data used in the designation of “threatened” and “endangered” species. Some actions that can be accomplished administratively are identified here. Additionally, the Secretary should return to incorporating meaningful data on the “status” of listed species into the biannual report to Congress that prior administrations stopped providing. Little meaningful data are now available for congressional oversight of recovery under the ESA. These and several other administrative reporting requirements could significantly improve accountability and transparency.

Much More HERE

Ore. Paper Credits ‘Clean-Energy Skeptic Donald Trump’ with Saving 350 Solar Jobs

“Credit clean-energy skeptic Donald Trump with rescuing a Hillsboro solar energy factory,” the first line of an article in The Oregonian declares.

“SolarWorld's sale saves hundreds of Hillsboro jobs,” the Wednesday headline read. On Wednesday, SunPower, which currently manufacturers its solar panels in the Philippines and Malaysia, announced the purchase of the financially-failing SolarWorld facility in Hillsboro, Oregon.

SunPower purchased SolarWorld and its manufacturing plant in order to escape President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imported solar panels, thus saving about 350 jobs at the Oregon facility, which had already laid off half its staff:

"The catalyst for this was the solar tariffs and the direction the current administration was going in terms of domestic solar manufacturing," SunPower chief executive Tom Werner said in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive.”

While Trump is a “clean-energy skeptic,” his solar panel tariffs have been applauded by staunch climate alarmists like former Vice President Al Gore, The Oregonian says:

“Trump has derided the widely accepted science underpinning climate change. He imposed the tariffs in January at the behest of SolarWorld and another bankrupt American solar manufacturer, both of which argued that Chinese manufacturers were undercutting U.S. producers by dumping solar panels on the domestic market.

“While Trump's solar tariffs alarmed some in the environmental community, others, including former Vice President Al Gore, defended the decision. U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, had long advocated for tariffs to protect domestic solar manufacturers.”

SOURCE

New air pollution report: "Green" California is the worst. So, don’t come here

The American Lung Association has released its annual report on ozone pollution. And would you believe, eight of the worst places in the country for ozone pollution are in California?

So, you definitely wouldn’t want to move here from outside the state. No, sir.

In fact, if you’re already among the 39.5 million folks who try to exist here, you probably want to load up both cars, get on I-15 or I-10 and head out for cleaner air. Get out of here while the getting is good.

Word is, according to the new report, you can find the cleanest air in Casper, Wyoming if you can find it. Or Wilmington, N.C., Bellingham, Wash. or Melbourne, Florida. Burlington, Vermont is a possibility too, though they talk funny there. Grand places all. Less traffic, cheaper housing, cleaner air.

Oh, sure, you won’t have as much time to read in traffic. Fewer freeway police chases monitored from dueling news choppers. And you will have to do without California’s one party state rule and 10 percent sales tax. But the sacrifices are worth it.

Also on the plus side, the snow is free up north. And the air, oh, the air is not to die for.

Of course, the association warns that the city you will most want to flee or avoid is Los Angeles, where I happen to drive. I agree. LA traffic is so bad that half the drivers are trying to get somewhere, while the other half have given up and are trying to get home.

Not one additional person should want to come here. Also Bakersfield, Fresno, Sacramento and San Diego. Terrible places for ozone. So, stay the hell out, people.

California is known for its strict environmental laws and regulations. It’s killing off coal power plants, clamping down on exhaust emissions and supporting the smog-check industry by requiring one every year. Wait, so if California is so strict about the environment, how come it’s the worst place for air pollution?

The association says, well, yes, that’s kinda true. But, see, it would be so much worse without all the government rules.

So, there’s really only one answer to air pollution: More government.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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23 April, 2018

Ozone Depletion, Not Greenhouse Gases Cause for Global Warming, Says Researcher

I don't have access to the facts and dastasets behind this theory but it can't be a worse fit to reality than that of the Greenhouse theory

Chlorofluorocarbon gases (CFCs) became widely utilized in the mid-1960s—as refrigerants such as Freon, as fire retardants such as Halon, as spray-can propellants, as solvents, and as foam-blowing agents. CFCs were far more stable, far more chemically inert than alternatives and were, therefore, much safer to use. Unfortunately, they are so stable that they are likely to last in the atmosphere for more than 100 years.

Within three to five years, the time we now know it takes for CFCs to reach the stratosphere, annual average global temperatures began rising. By 1973, James Lovelock, using his new electron capture detector, found significant amounts of CFC-11 in all 50 air samples collected pole to pole. Stimulated by Lovelock’s work, Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland discovered in 1974 that when CFCs reach the stratosphere, they can be broken down by solar ultraviolet radiation ultimately freeing atoms of chlorine. One atom of chlorine can destroy 100,000 molecules of ozone by catalytic processes that are particularly effective in polar stratospheric clouds.

Ozone is created when solar ultraviolet-C radiation dissociates an oxygen molecule into two oxygen atoms, which then combine with oxygen molecules to form ozone (O3). Ultraviolet-B solar radiation then dissociates ozone back into an oxygen atom and an oxygen molecule. This ozone-oxygen cycle, known as the Chapman cycle, is continuous so that a molecule of ozone only lasts, on average, about 8.3 days. The ozone layer, 12 to 19 miles above Earth, is the region of the atmosphere where the physical-chemical conditions are most favorable for the ozone-oxygen cycle.

When a molecule such as oxygen or ozone is dissociated, the molecular pieces fly apart at high velocity, instantly converting all the bond energy into kinetic energy of translation. Average kinetic energy of translation of all atoms and molecules making up a gas is, according to the kinetic theory of gases, directly proportional to the temperature of a gas. Thus, high concentrations of ozone show regions of localized warming that were first observed to affect weather and climate by Gordon Dobson in the 1920s.

When ozone is depleted, less ultraviolet-B is absorbed within the ozone layer, cooling the ozone layer, as observed from 1970 to 1998. More ultraviolet-B is then observed to reach Earth, where it penetrates tens of yards into oceans and is thus absorbed very efficiently. Increased ultraviolet-B also dissociates ground-level ozone pollution, warming air in industrial regions. This explains why global warming from 1970 to 1998 was twice as great in the northern hemisphere, containing 90% of world population, than in the southern hemisphere. Ozone depletion is greatest in polar regions during the winter, explaining why the greatest warming observed from 1970 to 1998 was of minimum temperatures in polar regions, a phenomenon known as polar amplification.

In 1985, Joe Farman, Brian Gardiner, and Jon Shanklin discovered depletion of the ozone layer over Antarctica by as much as 70% in austral spring. Scientists suddenly realized that ozone depletion was a much bigger problem than had been thought. Within two years, scientists and political leaders developed the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer mandating cutbacks in CFC production beginning January 1989.

By 1993, increases of CFCs in the atmosphere stopped. By 1995, increases in ozone depletion stopped. By 1998, increases in average global temperatures stopped. The ozone layer remains depleted, the ocean continues to warm, ice continues to melt, and sea-level continues to rise, but global temperatures did not change significantly from 1998 through 2013. They also had not changed much from 1945 to 1970. Thus, humans appear to have accidently caused the warming starting around 1970 by manufacturing large amounts of CFCs and to have accidently stopped the warming of air in 1998 while trying to limit ozone depletion.

Meanwhile, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide rose linearly, but at ever-increasing rates, showing no direct relationship to the details of observed global warming. Dozens of peer-reviewed scientific papers by leading atmospheric scientists have tried to explain, based on greenhouse-warming theory, why global temperatures did not change much from 1998 through 2013, a phenomenon dubbed the global warming hiatus. While they suggest many interesting ideas, there has been little agreement.

In 2014, the volcano Bárðarbunga, in central Iceland, extruded basaltic lava covering 33 square miles of terrain in six months, the largest basaltic lava flow since 1783. These types of lava flows, covering tens to millions of square miles, have been contemporaneous with periods of greatest global warming, ocean acidification, and mass extinctions throughout all of geologic time. For example, 251 million years ago, the Siberian basalts covered an area of 2.7 million square miles, the size of the continental United States less Montana and Texas. Imagine basaltic lava extending from New York to San Francisco—from Seattle to Miami. Eruption of these basalts warmed the ocean to hot tub temperatures, killing 95% of all species living at the time. Basalts emit prodigious amounts of chlorine and bromine that seem to cause ozone depletion, although the precise chemical path has yet to be deciphered. The eruption of Bárðarbunga appears to have caused very rapid global warming from 2014 to 2016, which began to decrease in 2017 and should return to 2013 values within a decade.

In the 1980s, many leading scientists were convinced that greenhouse gases were the cause of global warming, that Earth was in danger of overheating during the 21st century as emissions of greenhouse gases increase, and that scientists must demonstrate consensus in order to convince political leaders to take the expensive steps necessary to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Through the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, they helped form the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. The IPCC has involved thousands of climate scientists writing tens of thousands of pages of thoughtful science supporting greenhouse-warming theory. The IPCC never did question the widespread assumption, however, that greenhouse gases were the primary cause of global warming. In December 2015, this effort reached fruition with the Paris Agreement where leaders of nearly all countries agreed to work together to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

Science, however, is not done by popular vote. Science is not done by consensus. Consensus is the stuff of politics; debate is the stuff of science. Science is never settled. As Michael Crichton put it at Caltech in 2003: “In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.”

IPCC scientists are so convinced by their consensus and so tired of arguing with climate skeptics, that they refuse to even think about ozone depletion. Their models calculate that greenhouse gases absorb a lot more terrestrial infrared radiation than the small amount of solar ultraviolet-B radiation reaching Earth when ozone is depleted. Yet what they fail to realize is that the energy in thermal radiation is not a function of amount; it is a function of frequency. Ultraviolet-B radiation has 48 times the frequency of infrared radiation absorbed most strongly by carbon dioxide, 48 times the energy—has the potential to make the temperature of the absorbing body 48 times hotter. Ultraviolet-B radiation has enough energy to cause sunburn, skin cancer, and cataracts, something no amount of infrared energy can do. After all, you get much warmer standing in sunlight than standing outside at night with terrestrial infrared radiation welling up around you. I can now show that greenhouse gases do not absorb enough heat to be the primary cause of observed global warming.

Climate models based on greenhouse-warming theory have not predicted temperatures correctly since 1998. The major warming they predict later this century is highly unlikely to occur. As political leaders try to find ways to reduce greenhouse-gas concentrations with anticipated costs running in the trillions of dollars, they need to understand that this may have zero effect on reducing global warming.

Meanwhile, as long as ozone remains depleted relative to 1970 levels, the ocean will continue to warm. Recovery of the ozone layer is being slowed by a considerable black market in CFCs because people in poorer countries cannot afford to replace their refrigerators and air conditioners that depend on CFCs. Plus, shorter-lived substances such as dichloromethanes are having more of a negative effect on ozone levels than previously realized. If we really want to reduce our negative effect on climate, we need to focus on reducing ozone depletion. We also need to start thinking about our options when large flows of basaltic lavas start forming.

SOURCE

Climate adaptation, reparation and restoration

Boulder, CO wants oil companies to restore snowy winters of an idyllic past – and pay it billions

Paul Driessen

This Earth Day (April 22) we need to ask whether environmentalism has gone completely bonkers.

Back in the 1970s, I skied Colorado’s cross-country and downhill slopes pretty regularly. Some years were incredible: many feet of snow as glorious to behold as to ski on. Other years, like 1977, I’d come around a bend on my XC skis, see nothing but rock in front of me, and just ditch.

Who knew the industry I worked for in the later 70s was causing these climate and weather mood swings – even then, long before carbon dioxide levels hit the cataclysmic 400 ppm mark? Who knew profit-hungry oil companies were already preventing the Centennial State from having endless seasons of perfect ski conditions, followed by ample spring meltwater for cities, agriculture and trout streams?

I ask this because the People’s Republic of Boulder, CO has joined Oakland, San Francisco, New York and other liberal enclaves in suing for “climate relief.” Boulder doesn’t share the CA/NY worries about rising seas. Even Al Gore doesn’t claim the Pacific Ocean will reach the Mile High City anytime soon.

Boulderites want the courts to force ExxonMobil and Suncor to pay treble damages for causing too much snow and thus floods in some years, too little snow and thus droughts and poor ski conditions in other years; multiple heat waves in some years, bitter cold in others. They seek unspecified cash for climate adaptation, repair and reparation expenses – and restoration of idyllic conditions of selected past years.

Their 106-page, 478-paragraph complaint (with scores of sub-paragraphs) alleges that oil companies have committed public and private nuisance, trespass, continued sales of “huge amounts of fossil fuels,” and willful concealment of known harm from those sales – all to the great detriment of Boulder citizens.

These are the same fuels that saved whales from imminent extinction and gave Boulder and humanity prosperity, technology, health and longevity no one could even imagine when Colorado became a state in 1876. But now they’re suing the companies that have provided reliable, affordable fuels and raw materials that have brought them lights, heat, livelihoods, living standards, and countless products from paints, plastics, pharmaceuticals and fertilizers to skis, ski parkas, and vehicle fuel and asphalt roads to ski areas.

No wonder Para. 476 pointedly says “plaintiffs do not seek to enjoin any oil and gas operations or sales in Colorado.” To paraphrase Para. 453: plaintiffs received immense benefits from defendants’ products and actions, and it would be unconscionable and contrary to equity for plaintiffs to retain those benefits. Before collecting a dime, plaintiffs should reject future benefits and pay Exxon for past benefits received.

As to alleged fossil fuel damages in the form of wildfires and beetle kills, perhaps Boulder and its Sierra Club allies could employ better forest management – such as thinning trees, removing dead and diseased trees, and spraying to control pine bark beetles. It would be equally salubrious if they would stop abusing gullible children – by having little Sequoia berate Exxon for causing floods, fires and less snow.

As to the allegation that Exxon and Suncor have deprived Boulder of its once-snowy climate, the area’s annual snowfall records demonstrate how ludicrous the claim is.

Its heaviest calendar year snow was 159 inches in 1997; the worst was 36 inches in 1904. It had over 100 inches 20 times since 1897, including 11 times since 1970 and four times over 125 inches since 1985. It had under 50 inches 11 times since 1897: six times 1904 to1943, just three since 1970, and none under 61 inches since 1982. Anyone who sees a rising CO2/lower snowfall connection is smoking too much ganja.

So where does Boulder get the evidence to back up its allegations? As Alfonso Bedoya might have told Humphrey Bogart in a climate change version of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, “We don’t have to show you any stinking evidence!” Instead of evidence, the city has assertions, a phony 97% consensus that fossil fuels are causing dangerous manmade climate change, a report saying Boulder will have more heat waves and less snow by 2050, and computer models that supposedly back up the report.

In the real world, the 20-year temperature “pause” is back, the sun’s “quiet phase” may be reaching a “grand solar minimum,” and actual temperature, hurricane and other data contradict climate model predictions and scenarios. In fact, the models are little more than high-tech circular reasoning.

Since they are based on the assertion that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels drive global warming, Garbage In-Garbage Out models will always generate the calamities that alarmist researchers and Boulder lawyers are blaming on Big Oil. Where reality contradicts models, reality must be wrong – and actual temperature measurements must be adjusted to reflect model outputs and dominant climate theory.

When did the sun and other natural forces cease being a factor? What caused the ice ages, interglacial periods, Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and Anasazi drought? Questions like these are off limits.

Indeed, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and dominant, government-funded climate research have gone from seeking to identify human influences on Earth’s climate … to decreeing that only human influences matter, natural forces no longer play a meaningful role, and humans can control climate and weather by eliminating fossil fuels and regulating atmospheric greenhouse gas levels.

Those assertions now have the unwavering support of an entire industry – the $1.5-trillion-per-year Climate Industrial Complex: politicians, regulators, researchers, industrialists and activists, who protect and advance alarmist claims, promote allegedly “renewable” energy, resist examination and reform, and denounce anyone who questions climate chaos orthodoxy as “planet-threatening climate change deniers.”

Arrayed against the contingency fee seeking Boulder legal team is an oil industry whose spokesmen offer timid tripe: “Lawsuits like this do not solve the global problem of climate change.” It should be up to “appropriate regulatory agencies,” instead of judges, to decide how much CO2 a company may emit. Oil companies “should not be subject to liability for engaging in acts of commerce while adhering to our already stringent state and federal laws.” Can’t we have a more robust defense on the merits?

Boulder and its allied cities and counties have little reason to worry that their absurd assertions will be challenged on the merits in court. But they don’t even care about winning their case. They just hope Exxon and Suncor will pay them a few hundred million bucks – and pave the way for more lawsuits.

In fact, a 2016 “Lawyers for Better Business” report said climate lawsuits will soon “dwarf all other litigation in terms of the number of plaintiffs and the timeframe in which it can happen.” It’s likely to become a global industry, “with much bigger damages than seen with tobacco and asbestos.”

How else will profligate progressive politicians pay for all the welfare programs that keep them in power?

Such is the sorry state of US and international politics, education, science and jurisprudence.

What alternatives do these litigants and activists offer for the fossil fuel, nuclear and hydroelectric energy they want to ban? They seem to think the billions of tons of lithium, cobalt, iron, copper, manganese, rare earth metals, concrete and other raw materials needed for millions of wind turbines and solar panels are somehow “renewable” – and blanketing the planet with wind and solar installations is eco-friendly.

They seem convinced that it’s better for Planet Earth to ban drilling, and instead convert another billion acres of crop and habitat land into gigantic biofuel plantations. In fact, this year’s Earth Day organizers want future plastics to come from non-hydrocarbon sources – which would mean plowing under hundreds of millions more acres to grow crops for petrochemical feed stocks.

This is sheer lunacy. It’s the product of the fear, loathing, despair, intolerance and groupthink that pervade Big Green environmentalism today.

Will the Scott Pruitt EPA finally reverse the ridiculous Endangerment Finding that is yet another foundation for this climate nonsense? Will Neil Gorsuch be the deciding vote that brings a modicum of sanity back to our Supreme Court and legal system? Only time will tell.

Via email

Trial Lawyers Still Don't Have a Winning Case Against Monsanto

Trial lawyers hoping to take a big bite out of food producer Monsanto’s bottom line with a lawsuit over its most popular weed-killer have run into a problem – the judge who they need to convince their arguments are valid is not buying it.

In 2015, the International Agency for Research and Cancer, based in Lyon, France, declared glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, the world’s most popular weed-killer, a “probably human carcinogen.”

No other scientific body has reached that conclusion. Indeed, the Environmental Protection Agency says glyphosate is safe for humans when used in accordance with label directions, the National Institute of Health has concluded it is not a carcinogen and, as a Monsanto official pointed out, more than 800 scientific, medical, peer-reviewed articles have been published saying there is no association whatsoever between glyphosate and any form of cancer.

But armed with the finding of the body in France, trial lawyers have filed 2,400 lawsuits in American courts – about 2,000 at the state level – that allege their clients have contracted non-Hodgkins lymphoma from exposure to Roundup.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria began to assess the expert witnesses plaintiffs plan to call at trial in the more than 300 federal cases, involving more than 700 farmers, landscapers and gardeners, that have been combined in his court to determine if their findings were supported by sufficient science to be permitted to testify. He was not impressed.

A dozen expert witnesses for the plaintiffs – including toxicologists, statisticians, an oncologist and a couple of epidemiologists, who study how humans contract disease – labeled the evidence glyphosate causes cancer “shaky” and indicated he was unlikely to permit more than one of the witnesses to testify.

“I do have a difficult time understanding how an epidemiologist in the face of all the evidence that we saw and heard last week” can conclude that glyphosate “is in fact causing” non-Hodgkins lymphoma,” the judge said. “… The evidence that glyphosate is currently causing NHL in human beings” at current exposure levels is “pretty sparse.”

Judge Chhabra said his objective in the weeklong series of presentations by scientists for the plaintiffs was not to determine whether glyphosate causes cancer but rather whether the testimony they would offer is within the “range of reasonableness.”

It was not reasonable, he said, to conclude glyphosate causes cancer based only on the findings of the body in France. It relied on a study that showed cancer incidence increased in mice exposed to glyphosate, but the judge pointed out not everything that causes cancer in mice causes it in humans as well. Therefore, he indicated, all the witnesses that relied on their IARC findings for their testimony will be rejected.

Chhabra said he may allow one witness – Beate Ritz, a public health professor at UCLA – to testify because she conducted her own research, based on a study of the literature. But he said even her testimony is “dubious,” pronounced her entire field “loosey goosey” and “highly subjective,” and indicated he would permit her testimony only because he suspects Ritz is “operating within the mainstream of the field” and “maybe that means it’s up to the jury to decide if they buy her presentation.”

This is not good for the plaintiffs. “It’s game over … if they can’t get over this hurdle,” David Levine, an expert in federal court procedure at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, told the New York Daily News.

Their lawyers say the judge should not reject out of hand those who rely on the report from the group in France and should instead “dissect” and consider a “subset of opinions.” They say the science strongly supports their conclusions, their experts have used valid methodologies and “ultimately, we think courts will agree.”

But so far what they have are 12 witnesses, only one of whom, at most, seems likely to be declared qualified to testify. And the judge thinks that one person’s field is loosey goosey and her findings dubious and can’t help but have noticed that another federal judge, in Sacramento, has ruled California cannot force Monsanto to put cancer warnings on Roundup labels because the state can’t prove glyphosate causes cancer.

That’s always been the problem for those who sought to bring down Monsanto and Roundup. They simply have not been able to scientifically make the case in U.S. courts glyphosate causes cancer. The new strategy – relying on a study from a French group aligned with the World Health Organization – does not appear to be working either.

Maybe it’s time to give up.

SOURCE

President Trump Can Counter OPEC and Achieve Energy Dominance

President Trump, in a recent tweet, has drawn attention to a pernicious threat against American interests that has persisted for decades: The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its alliance with other petrostates as they seek to control the price and supply of oil.

With its stated goal of reducing the world’s oil glut in sight, the cartel and its unofficial members should have spent their meeting in Jeddah discussing an exit plan for this pact. However, with oil at three-year highs and rising, the group has moved the goalpost yet again, with discussions on extending the cuts even further as well as indefinite coordination on oil production with Russia.

Let’s be clear: OPEC has wrapped its actions in rhetoric about stabilizing oil prices to help the global economy. Now that they’ve institutionalized their cooperation with Russia and other states—expanding the group’s market share to include countries that represent 55 percent of daily supply—and whittled down excess oil inventories, they can go about their real agenda: Juicing the books for Saudi Aramco’s pending IPO, and inflating government revenues to support everything from military spending to lavish lifestyles for their ruling elites. Is this how American motorists want to spend their money?

President Trump is right to say this market manipulation is unacceptable. Gasoline prices are also now at their highestin three years, and analysts see them wiping out the benefits of the president’s historic tax cuts as U.S. households will spend $400 moreon average at the pump in 2018 alone. Endemic instability in key oil-producing regions—particularly the Middle East and Venezuela—combined with the reduction of global crude oil inventories from 400 to 43 million barrels mean that there is little to insulate Americans from an oil price spike.

Oil dependence is a global problem, but Americans are disproportionately affected. Every year, the United States spends $67.5 billion to ensure the worldwide free flow of oil, as we assume the burden of patrolling oil supply lines and engaging in unstable oil producing regions. Even though this commodity is the lifeblood of the world economy, it is priced on an unfree global market subject to OPEC’s collusion. No matter how much oil we drill at home, we will always be vulnerable to the price spikes and slumps brought about through the actions of countries that don’t share our democratic or free-market principles. As we know, an oil supply disruption anywhere impacts prices everywhere.

In addition to these geopolitical challenges, OPEC’s actions have a very real impact on household budgets. The last time Americans received tax cuts, the benefits were wiped out by oil price spikes. The cumulative impact of the Bush-era tax cuts from 2001 to 2008 increased household income by $1,900, yet household spending on gasoline increased by $2,000 in the same period. Similarly, in 2011, record gasoline prices cost American households an additional $104 billion compared to 2010, offsetting the $108 billion in additional take-home pay from the Obama-era payroll tax cut.

Will we let this happen again?Policy solutions are available, and President Trump can take clear and concrete steps to achieve his goal of energy dominance and mitigate our exposure to OPEC’s behavior. First, we must continue to develop more of our oil resources here at home—the President has already taken steps to achieve this objective. Second, Trump’s EPA must maintain strong fuel economy standards, and use the current rulemaking period to strengthen and modernize fuel efficiency rules that have been effective in saving consumers money for decades. Third, we must encourage the adoption of alternative fuel vehicles running on diverse sources of domestic energy, including electricity, natural gas, and hydrogen. Finally, we must have an honest assessment of our ability to respond to OPEC’s actions to influence oil prices. President Trump can establish an OPEC commission that will investigate how the cartel’s actions undermine American interests and propose solutions to counter their influence.

Following these steps lays a clear path towards the energy dominance that Americans deserve.

SOURCE

The Lack of Integrity in Science and What to Do About It

Many scientific studies are not reproducible, which misleads the public and yields bad policy

Anything that begins with the line, “Current research reveals that…” sounds authoritative, indisputable and true. But what if it’s not?

The newest report by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), “The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science,” released Tuesday, reveals a systemic integrity problem within modern science. When scientists are unable to reproduce their results, it means that those results may have been a fluke, manipulated or even fabricated for a specific outcome.

Yet those results are often advertised as “clinical research proves…” or “the latest study confirms that…” — which not only misleads the public but also dilutes the place of scientific research in society at large. This use and abuse of statistics affects not just the sciences but the entire culture’s perception of reality.

Consider a 2012 study that sought to reproduce the results of 53 landmark studies in hematology and oncology but could only reproduce six (11%). Or the “groundbreaking” research in microplastics performed by postdoc Oona Lönnstadt and her supervisor Peter Eklöv of Uppsala University in Sweden. The research, published in the June 2016 issue of Science claimed that microplastic particles in the ocean were endangering fish. In reality, Lonnstadt fabricated her data and was later reprimanded by the university. But by this time, it didn’t matter. She was an environmental crusader, researcher and celebrity.

And scientific journalism isn’t helping. In 2004, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) released information that 400,000 Americans die from obesity every year, which the media thoroughly publicized. Later, a 2005 study by the CDC revealed that the number may be closer to 112,000. But by that time no one cared to thoroughly publish the retraction.

The integrity issue in the sciences can be found both on the supply (researcher) side and the demand (media and research institutions) side. Positive, groundbreaking and glamorous research gains publication in scientific journals, magazines and other media. Publication means greater clout within your discipline, pay raises, tenure at a university, and the ability to secure grants for further projects. Replicating old research to see if the results still stand isn’t going to land you on the front page of Science magazine or get you an interview on NPR.

The lack of accountability and unbridled researcher freedom means that the researcher can change his or her hypothesis midcourse, leave out data or manipulate the outcome. When researchers do not face accountability, they are more apt to manipulate results to make their hypothesis correct. NAS notes that a “survey of more than 2,000 psychologists found that 38% admitted to ‘deciding whether to exclude data after looking at the impact of doing so on the results.’” Additionally, in this same survey, “36% of those surveyed ‘stopped data collection after achieving desired results,’” rather than completing the data sets.

Further, academic groupthink adheres to an ideology and ignores or ostracizes research that contradicts it. For example, climatologist Judith Curry’s 2017 testimony before Congress revealed the systemic of problem of groupthink in her field:

The politicization of climate science has contaminated academic climate research and the institutions that support climate research, so that individual scientists and institutions have become activists and advocates for emissions reductions policies. Scientists with a perspective that is not consistent with the consensus are at best marginalized (difficult to obtain funding and get papers published by “gatekeeping” journal editors) or at worst ostracized by labels of “denier” or “heretic.”

In history, scientific groupthink resulted in incorrect but “widely accepted” beliefs. Most notable among these was the acceptance of the world as flat and the ignoring of Ignaz Semmelweis’ advice that doctors and birth attendants should wash their hands before delivering a baby. Could the same ignorance be the fate of the modern scientific community as a result of their own groupthink? Science ought to be objective and data-based, not repurposed to conform to a particular ideology.

In spite of the crisis, several trends are shaping the future of science in a positive way. New journals emphasizing the publishing of negative results include The All Results Journal, the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, the Journal of Pharmaceutical Negative Results, the International Journal for Re-Views in Empirical Economics, and others. That means contrary studies receive a hearing.

In addition, the World Health Organization has called for more data openness and the publishing of negative results, saying, “Researchers have a duty to make publicly available the results of their research. … Negative and inconclusive as well as positive results must be published or otherwise made publicly available.”

As society seeks to make the integrity of science a priority, we must reform the incentive structure within academia as well as scientific journalism that rewards “creative” and politicized science with media coverage. Ultimately, a commitment by the scientific community to truth, rather than manipulated statistical models, restores the integrity of the sciences and its beneficial place in society.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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22 April, 2018

Hurricanes slowing down in just about every ocean on Earth

Just a 10 percent slowdown doubles volume of local rainfall, a study shows

We have been told by Greenies for years now that global warming causes or magnifies hurricanes and other big wind events. But the research below says that tropical cyclones are slowing down. So that must indicate global cooling! Can you have your cake and eat it too? Greenies can!

A new study shows tropical cyclones are slowing down, a development that could carry huge implications for future flooding.

That research was presented for the first time Wednesday at the 33rd annual Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology held in Ponte Vedra.

Research shows slower storms in recent years have produced heavier rainfall, according to the presentation by James Kossin of NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information.

Hurricane Harvey, for instance, dumped record rain in Texas and underscores why speed matters when tropical systems see their pace slow to a crawl.

In fact, just a 10 percent slowdown results in double the local rain impacts. That could make flooding potentially catastrophic since storms typically slow by 20 percent over land.

Even though Harvey occurred after the study was completed, Dr. Kossin said the hurricane falls in line with the study's trend. Over 67 years of research, there was a clear slowing trend.

That trend coincides with the planet warming nearly 1 degree, and it supports growing evidence that a warming planet triggered the slowdown.

Climate change is weakening the planet's atmospheric circulation pattern, which is the mechanism that guides storm systems across oceans.

The pattern is also modifying hurricanes rain distribution. Observations indicate the heaviest rain no longer centers around the eyewall, but rather it is spread throughout the storm structure.

Slower storms have turned up in every ocean basin, except the North Indian Ocean. North of Australia has seen the greatest decrease in storm speed slowing 30%.

The implications this trend holds for future tropical rainfall are staggering. According to Dr. Kossin's calculations, rainfall becomes 20 percent heavier for nearly each degree Fahrenheit the planet warms.

As hurricanes get wetter and the overall tracks migrate poleward, hurricane flood exposure could expand to areas outside of traditionally hurricane-prone regions.

SOURCE

The Truth Behind Frack Off

I was at the Mall last weekend and came across this local anti-fracking group holding some sort of a workshop.

One wonders if they realize where the energy they use every day comes from?

I am pretty sure the residents of Eckington would not want a nuclear plant built next door, nor have their local forests chopped down for pellets.

And regardless of the hype and wishful thinking, there is simply no way that renewable energy will substantially change the picture in the foreseeable future.

Of course, they may be quite happy to rely on imported oil and gas from the Middle East and Russia, to keep them in their comfortable lifestyles. If so, they might get a shock to learn about the Frack Off Extreme Energy Action Network, of which they appear to be a part.

Frack Off is the UK wide group set up in 2011 to campaign against fracking, including demonstrations, blockades, and trespass. The Telegraph reported in 2013 how it was set up by Dr. Edward Lloyd-Davies, an astrophysicist who became a full-time protester after his academic funding ran out, and how the group tries to keep secret the identities of its leaders.

Frack Off’s website still refuses to publish any details about its leaders or funding. But they do not attempt to hide their worldview.

As would be expected, they believe that there is already a climate crisis, and their battle against fracking is merely a side issue as far as they are concerned.

But what are their proposals?

While they want to immediately cut back the use of fossil fuels worldwide, they are not keen on some of the alternatives:

According to their website, for instance, they are none too keen on bio-energy:

"Bio-Energy is a broad category which includes all energy generated from burning materials produced (recently) by the biosphere. While humans have obtained energy from such sources throughout their history, the amounts of energy that industrial society now demands cannot possibly be sourced in a sustainable way. Every year we burn a number of fossil fuels which it would take the biosphere 400 years to produce. Bio-Energy includes liquid biofuels (or agrofuels) such as palm oil as well as biomass such as wood pellets. The growth in Bio-Energy is devastating large areas of the globe and leading to hunger and poverty for many. Bio-Energy requires a colossal quantity of feedstock and huge areas of growing land. This land must either be land that was previously used to grow food or land that was previously forests etc. Either way, the results are not good."

They also regard nuclear power as part of the extreme energy sector, which they claim is destroying the world.

Even CCS does not meet their objectives:

"Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a technology aimed at reducing the climate-destabilizing impact of burning fossil fuels by capturing the carbon dioxide (a ‘greenhouse gas‘) and storing it somewhere, usually underground. Despite CCS being an unproven technology, it is used worldwide by energy companies and governments to justify new fossil fuel projects.

There’s no time to wait for a technology that may or may not work. The Department of Energy and Climate Change say that CSS will not be ready to deploy commercially until at least the early 2020’s. We need to stop using fossil fuels now. Cuts of 6% a year in emissions are needed to have a chance of not destabilising the climate, starting now and resulting in over a 90% cut over the next few decades."

Indeed, Frack Off’s revealed their true beliefs in this blog in 2012:

"Despite this, there is a massive push to make CCS the alternative to having to worry about the actual cutting of emissions. At both the EU and UK government levels, CCS trials are being encouraged with the offer of large grants to energy companies. A government funding competition initiated four years ago to fund a large-scale trial of CCS ended in a shambles in October after a consortium led by ScottishPower pulled out of plans to build facilities to capture a sixth of the carbon dioxide emitted by Longannet, the UK’s second-largest coal power station.

The reason given was that the £1 billion grant on offer was insufficient to ensure that the project would be economically viable. This has added to a string of recent cancellations of CCS projects worldwide, including the recent cancellation of a $1.4 billion pilot project in Canada because it was not economically viable. In the UK the government’s response has been to announce a new competition to try to resurrect CCS trials. Whether this one will have any more success than the last remains to be seen.

However to see CCS in these terms is to miss the whole point. Whether it ever gets off the ground or not is irrelevant. CCS is about psychology, not engineering. As long as there is the promise of CCS dangled before them it will allow those people who cannot face abandoning the current system an excuse for not facing up to the change that needs to happen. CCS could be considered as part of a category of “Extreme Greenwash” along with similar ideas like geoengineering.

Put simply, Frack Off are virulently anti-fossil fuels, for all sorts of reasons. Emissions of CO2 are only part of the problem, as far as they are concerned.

"Introducing CCS will not only allow fossil fuels to continue to be extracted but, as it is an energy-intensive process, will actually serve to increase demand for them."

For them, fossil fuels are not only destroying the climate, they are also destroying the environment, the economy, and global well-being.

So, given all of this, you would think that Frack Off would be determined to push renewable energy as hard as possible. Yet I cannot find one single mention of wind and solar power on their website.

So, what is their solution? Simple – we are all using far too much energy. Again, this is what their website says:

"The Massive Increase In Global Human Energy Consumption By Source Over The Last 200 Years

The most obvious insight that can be gained from viewing extreme energy as a process is that the dominant factor driving that process is energy consumption. Extreme energy has always existed but due to the huge amounts of energy used by the present system, it is proceeding at a much faster rate. The higher the rate of energy consumption, the faster that resources are depleted and the more rapidly the process of energy extraction becomes more extreme. The insistence that present levels of energy consumption must be maintained, and even increased, makes this process inevitable.

On the other hand, reducing energy consumption would slow this progression towards more extreme extraction techniques. The present system seems unlikely to adopt such a course, however. The intensity of extraction effort needed translate pretty directly into the fraction of the world economy that must be devoted to energy extraction and therefore dictates the fraction that is left over for the rest of society. If allowed to continue unchecked extreme energy will result in massive, though very poorly understood, changes in the world we live in.

To summarise the process definition is: Extreme Energy is the process whereby energy extraction methods grow more intense over time, as easier to extract resources are depleted. The process is driven by unsustainable energy consumption and is important because extraction effort is strongly correlated with damage to both society and the environment."

I doubt whether the mixture of NIMBYs and gullible do-gooders who are fighting fracking in Eckington will be happy cutting their energy consumption to the bone, along with their standard of living.

Indeed it might just occur to them that the massive increase in energy consumption in the last 200 years correlates pretty closely with a similar increase in living standards, quality of life, standards of health and so on.

Frack Off’s role is to encourage and assist the formation of local groups, and provide support with materials, advice, information and advertising.

As far as those local groups are concerned, it’s a bit like inviting the devil into your parlour for a game of cards!

SOURCE

Jerry Brown: 3 Billion Will Die from Global Warming

He's still governor moonbeam

California Gov. Jerry Brown predicted that if carbon emissions aren’t reduced, billions of people will die from “heat events,” and one billion will be subjected to vector diseases.

“When you pick up the paper or turn on cable news, you’d think it’s another planet. It’s all about the nonsense of Washington, and carbon emissions are growing, and we’ve got to radically turn that around, or the migrations you’re seeing now are going to be child’s play,” Brown told reporters Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

“We’re going to have widespread disruption, more conflicts, more terrorism, more insecurity because of climate disruption. The prospect is 3 billion people on this planet will be subject to fatal lethal heat events – 3 billion – and 1 billion will be subjected to vector diseases that they’re not now subject to now,” he said. “This is a horror.”

Brown was among a number of governors who established an alliance to reduce climate change in response to President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.

When asked what states can reasonably do about climate change, Brown said, “California has adopted an extension of this cap and trade program, which will give us 20 percent of our greenhouse gas reduction. That’s a very important measure that would have gone out of existence in 2020, and that measure was voted by Republicans. It wouldn’t have passed without Republican support.”

“So we’ve done that. We’re revising our building standards. We have a scoping plan for our entire greenhouse gas emission strategy that’s going forward. Other states, I think New Jersey is considering significant changes, so there’s a lot of possibilities going on in different states and different provinces around the world,” he said.

“We have an Under Two Coalition – keep the temperature under two degrees Centigrade from growing, and we have over 200 signatories that represent more than a third of the world’s wealth. Is it enough? No. Is the world on the right track? No. Does disaster loom? Yes, and I’m doing what I can to motivate people. People are asleep,” Brown said.

“This is a horror, and that’s why I spend so much time working on climate change even though it is not a big, hot political issue – not in California, certainly not in Washington, and unfortunately, not in a number of other countries, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a big problem. It’s a huge problem, and there’s just two big topics,” the governor said.

“I don’t see any evidence in the paper. One is the risk of nuclear destruction or incident. William Perry wrote a book, ‘My Journey at the Nuclear Brink,’ which I reviewed. He said we’re more in danger now than we were at the height of the Cold War. That’s been repeated by other people. That’s a serious matter, and yet we have very little discussion going on with Russia with climate change – a serious matter, what’s going on,” he said.

SOURCE

Scott Pruitt’s ‘Time 100’ Profile Written By Ex-EPA Chief Who Hates Him

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt’s TIME 100 profile is very different from most featured on the website. Not only is it negative, it was written by a vocal critic.

Pruitt’s profile was written by former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman. Whitman wrote that “under the administration of Scott Pruitt, the agency is experiencing a new wave of policymaking—or rather, policy dismantling.”

“If his actions continue in the same direction, during Pruitt’s term at the EPA the environment will be threatened instead of protected, and human health endangered instead of preserved, all with no long-term benefit to the economy,” Whitman wrote.

Whitman served as EPA administrator in the Bush administration and as New Jersey’s governor before that. She’s a vocal opponent of the Trump administration and even endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

Whitman opposed Pruitt’s nomination to head the EPA back in late 2016, chiding his “seeming disdain for the people at the agency, for science.”

“He is very definitely a denier of climate change, something that scientists, by and large, overwhelmingly, say is occurring and that humans have a role to play in that,” Whitman told NPR in December 2016.

“He also seems to be someone who doesn’t believe in regulation. And that’s a time where you want to say regulations are prevention. They’re trying to protect us,” she said.

Whitman made similar remarks in an interview with TIME given a few weeks later, saying she was “nervous” about Pruitt taking the reins at EPA.

What made Pruitt’s TIME 100 profile interesting is that other prominent Republicans, including President Donald Trump himself, had theirs written by friends or allies. Pruitt’s was written by a vocal critic.

For example, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz wrote Trump’s TIME 100 profile, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wrote Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ profile. Fox News host Sean Hannity’s profile was written by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a regular guest on his show.

On the other side of the aisle, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards wrote a glowing TIME 100 profile for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat.

Richards wrote that Pelosi is “a voice for the people who are counting on government to be there for them.” Planned Parenthood has donated to Pelosi’s congressional campaigns.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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20 April, 2018

Great Barrier grief: Coral 'cooked to death' in scorching summer heatwave

This is just an academic republication of some claims made in 2016, which were shown at the time to be greatly exaggerated. And note below that global sea surface temperatures actually FELL during late 2016.

So if there was a big warming event in North Queensland waters at the time it was a LOCAL event, not a global one. So any coral damage was not caused by global warming.

The BOM does record high temperatures in the reef area in 2016 but admits that there were several factors contributing to that. I quote:

"The 2015–16 El Niño suppressed and delayed the monsoon, leading to reduced cloud cover and weakened winds this summer. Additionally, a relatively low number of summer storms occurred over the Reef. These factors led to increased surface heating and reduced mixing, resulting in substantially warmer ocean temperatures around northern Australia from December to March 2016."

And note that the BOM places the warming in early 2016, not late 2016. Pesky!

Something else that happened in 2016 was a regional sea-level fall --which really is detrimental to coral and could alone explain any damage.

And note the announcement from late last year that bleached corals are already recovering nicely. So no fear for them is warranted.

It's just propaganda below -- propaganda in a scholarly disguise. I actually wonder whether they did all the surveys they claim to have done? A little bit of interpolation here and there, perhaps? JCU has a record of dubious integrity. Ask Peter Ridd about that

Millions of corals on the Great Barrier Reef were 'cooked' during a scorching summer in the northern region, according to scientists.

The underwater heatwave eliminated a huge number of different species of coral during a process which expelled algae after the polyps were stressed.

'When corals bleach from a heatwave, they can either survive and regain their colour slowly as the temperature drops, or they can die.

'Averaged across the whole Great Barrier Reef, we lost 30 per cent of the corals in the nine-month period between March and November 2016,' said Professor Terry Hughes from James Cook University said.

Prof Hughes who acts as the Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at JCU said his team was very surprised to see a quarter of the corals die in just two to three weeks during the March heatwave.

Scientists researched the entire reef by analysing water surveys at various locations along its 2,300-kilometre distance, and combined insight with aerial data and satellite monitoring.

Results showed 29 per cent of the 3,863 reefs which make up the world's largest reef system lost 'two-thirds or more of their corals', which dramatically impacts the ability of the reefs to maintain full ecological abilities.

'The Great Barrier Reef is certainly threatened by climate change, but it is not doomed if we deal very quickly with greenhouse gas emissions.

'Our study shows that coral reefs are already shifting radically in response to unprecedented heatwaves,' said Prof Hughes.

The team warn that if changes are not made to consider climate change it will have a huge effect on tropical reef ecosystems and, therefore, a detrimental impact on the benefits those environments provide to populations of poor nations.

SOURCE

"The Science"

Sixty years ago, the USS Skate surfaced at the ice-free North Pole

So nothing has changed over the last 60 years, except that the ice is a lot thicker now

SOURCE

Thirty Years Of The James Hansen Clown Show

It has been thirty years since CO2 hit 350 PPM and NASA’s James Hansen warned that the Midwest was going to burn up and dry up.

Since Hansen predicted heat and drought for the Midwest 30 years ago, they have had above normal precipitation almost every year.

SOURCE

Australia May Replicate US Shale Revolution

Australia’s Northern Territory has lifted a moratorium on fracking, the process of extracting gas from shale rock, to replicate the US shale revolution in a vast region with massive mineral resources.

The decision on Tuesday was welcomed by the oil and gas industry, which is promising to invest billions of dollars in exploration and create thousands of jobs in an underpopulated region roughly six times the size of the UK.

Australian energy companies Origin Energy and Santos have identified the Northern Territory as a potential source of gas to meet a shortage of the fossil fuel in Australia, which has led to surging energy prices and prompted Canberra to implement export controls on liquefied natural gas — one of the country’s most valuable exports.

“Member companies stand ready to invest billions of dollars in new projects in the territory,” said Malcolm Roberts, chief executive of the oil and gas industry lobby group Appea, after the territory’s government’s decision to lift the moratorium.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

19 April, 2018

How can this be? What has happened to “Global Warming?”

Runners racing the Boston Marathon 2018 faced grueling conditions as heavy rain poured and wind gusts hit more than 25 miles per hour in the coldest temperatures for the race in three decades. With temperatures in the 30sF, runners faced a brutal race day.

Just as a comparison, look at these past conditions:

1905: The temperature was reported to have reached the 100-degree mark

1909: The temperature soared to 97 degrees

1915: Reports of “intense heat”

1927: With the temperature reaching 84 degrees, a newly surfaced but uncured road melted under the runners’ shoes

1931: Reports of “terrific heat” that “spelled ruin to the hopes of countless ambitious runners”

1952: The temperature rose to the upper 80s, with a high of 88 degrees

1958: The temperature climbed to 84 degrees

1976: For much of the first half of the race, the temperature along the course was reported to be 96 degrees

1987: The temperature was in the mid/upper 80s and the humidity was more than 95 percent

2004: The hottest Marathon since 1976 (86 degrees at the finish) caused a record number of heat-related illnesses

H/t Bill Shuster

Clearly, this is one of many local redords that are at variance with the stats released by NOAA -- confirming that the NOAA stats are fudged and that we are now probably into a cooling period

The double standards industry

Concerns over impacts from energy projects disappear where “green” energy is involved

Paul Driessen

It’s a good thing environmentalists have double standards – or they wouldn’t have any standards at all.

Empire State legislators worry that anything above the current 0.0001% methane in Earth’s atmosphere will cause catastrophic climate change, and that pipelines will disturb wildlife habitats. So they oppose fracking for natural gas in New York and pipelines that would import the clean fuel from Pennsylvania.

But then they bribe or force rural and vacation area communities to accept dozens of towering wind turbines that impact thousands of acres, destroy scenic views, kill thousands of birds and bats annually, and affect the sleep and health of local residents – to generate pricey intermittent electricity that is sent on high voltage transmission lines to Albany, Manhattan and other distant cities.

Meanwhile, developers are building a 600-mile pipeline to bring natural gas from West Virginia to North Carolina, to power generating plants that provide low-cost electricity almost 24/7/365. A portion of the 100-foot-wide pipeline right-of-way must go through forested areas, necessitating tree removal.

To protect migratory birds and endangered bats, state and federal officials generally require that tree cutting be prohibited between mid-March and mid-October. Because the Atlantic Coast Pipeline is behind schedule, the companies sought approval to continue felling trees until May 15, to avoid further delays that could increase costs by $150-350 million. The request was denied.

Not surprisingly, the pipeline, logging and request to cut during migratory and mating season continue to put the developers, regulators and environmentalists at loggerheads. A 16-mile long segment through Virginia’s George Washington National Forest has garnered particular attention.

Although the short segment would affect just 200 of the GWNF’s 1.1 million acres, the Virginia Wilderness Committee claimed any tree cutting in the area would create an “industrial zone” and “severely degrade some of the best remaining natural landscapes” in the Eastern USA. The Southern Environmental Law Center called the entire project “risky” and “unnecessary.” They and allied groups prefer to “keep fossil fuels in the ground” and force a rapid transition to solar and wind energy.

One has to wonder how they would react to the far greater environmental impacts their “green” energy future would bring. Will they be true to their convictions, or continue applying double standards?

For example, using sun power to replace just the electricity from Virginia’s nearly 24/7/365 Lake Anna Nuclear Generating Station would require nearly 20,000 acres of solar panels (twice the size of Washington, DC) that would provide power just 20-30% of the time. The rest of the time, the commonwealth would need fossil fuel or battery backup power – or homes, businesses, hospitals and schools would have to be happy with electricity when it’s available, instead of when they need it.

That’s 100 times more land than needed for the pipeline, which will be underground and mostly invisible, whereas the highly visible solar panels would blanket former crop and habitat land for decades.

Natural gas and coal generate about 55 million megawatt-hours of Virginia’s annual electricity. Replacing that with wind power would require thousands of gigantic turbines, sprawling across a half-million acres of forest, farm and other lands. Expensive backup battery arrays and transmission lines from wind farms to distant urban areas would require thousands of additional acres.

(This rough calculation recognizes that many turbines would have to be located in poor wind areas and would thus generate electricity only 15-20% of the time. It also assumes that two-thirds of windy day generation would charge batteries for seven straight windless days, and that each turbine requires 15 acres for blade sweep, operational airspace and access roads.)

The turbines, transmission lines and batteries would require millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, neodymium, lithium, cobalt, petroleum-based composites and other raw materials; removing billions of tons of earth and rock to mine the ores; and burning prodigious amounts of fossil fuels in enormous smelters and factories to turn ores into finished components.

Most of that work will take place in Africa, China and other distant locations – out of sight, and out of mind for most Virginians, Americans and environmentalists. But as we are often admonished, we should act locally, think globally, and consider the horrendous environmental and health and safety conditions under which all these activities take place in those faraway lands.

Many turbines will be located on mountain ridges, where the winds blow best and most often. Ridge tops will be deforested, scenic vistas will be ruined, and turbines will slice and dice migratory birds, raptors and bats by the tens of thousands every year. Those that aren’t yet threatened or endangered soon will be.

The wind industry and many regulators and environmentalists consider those death tolls “incidental takings,” “acceptable” losses of “expendable” wildlife, essential for achieving the “climate-protecting” elimination of fossil fuels. The deaths are certainly not deliberate – so the December 2018 Interior Department decision to end the possibility of criminal prosecutions for them, under the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, makes sense.

However, when regulators allow industrial wind facilities in and near migratory routes, nesting areas and other places – where large numbers of eagles, hawks, falcons, migratory birds and bats congregate – the number of deaths soars beyond “incidental” or “acceptable.” And as the number of US onshore wind turbines climbs from 40,000 a few years ago, to 52,000 today, to potentially millions under “keep oil, gas and coal in the ground” demands, the threat of decimation or extinction across wide areas skyrockets.

Some say we should install future turbines offshore, in our coastal areas. Truly monstrous 3.5-megawatt turbines would certainly reduce the total number needed to replace substantial quantities of fossil fuel electricity. However, they would destroy scenic ocean vistas, decimate sea and shore bird populations (with carcasses conveniently sinking from sight), impair porpoise and whale sonar, interfere with radar and air traffic control, and create significant hazards for submarines and surface ships.

Even worse, as wildlife biologist Jim Wiegand and other experts have noted, the wind industry has gone to great lengths to hide the actual death tolls. For example, they look only right under towers and blades (when carcasses and maimed birds can be catapulted hundreds of yards by blades that move at nearly 200 mph at their tips), canvass areas only once every few weeks (ensuring that scavengers eat the evidence), and make wind farms off limits to independent investigators.

The bird and bat killings may not be criminal, but the fraud and cover-ups certainly are.

The attitudes, regulations and penalties associated with wind turbines also stand in stark contrast to the inflexible, heavy-handed approach that environmentalists, regulators and courts typically apply to permit applications for drilling, pipelines, grazing and other activities where sage grouse and lesser prairie chickens are involved – or requests to cut trees until May 15, to finish a Virginia pipeline.

The Fish & Wildlife Service, Center for Biological Diversity and Audubon Society go apoplectic in those circumstances. (Audubon was outraged that Interior decriminalized accidental deaths of birds in oilfield waste pits.) But their silence over the growing bird and bat slaughter by wind turbines has been deafening.

These attitudes and policies scream “double standards!” Indeed, consistent bird and bat protection policies would fairly and logically mean banning turbines in and near habitats, refuges and flyways – or shutting them down during mating, nesting and migratory seasons.

It’s time to rethink all these policies. Abundant, reliable, affordable energy makes our jobs, health, living standards and civilization possible. The way we’re going, environmentalists, regulators and judges will block oil, gas and coal today … nuclear and hydroelectric tomorrow … and wind and solar facilities the following week – sending us backward a century or more. It’s time to say, Enough!

Via email

Arctic Freezamageddon…Sea Ice Volume Surges 3 TRILLION Cubic Meters Since Early March!

Using a comparison, Japanese skeptic blogger Kirye at KiryeNet drives home how “the real Arctic sea ice volume is much higher than in 2008.”

Source of images: DMI: http://ocean.dmi.dk

Using images and data from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), Kirye put together and posted a comparator showing the immense early April volume increase the Arctic has seen since 2008.

It totally defies the panicky claims of a “melting” Arctic, she tweeted.

You can see the animation comparator Kirye put together in action here on Twitter.

Arctic sea ice volume surges a whopping 3000 cubic kilometers since March 1st. Chart: DMI.

Kirye comments that although we have not once seen alarmists’ climate predictions come true, they continue to threaten us with sea ice doom.

Amid rapidly growing Arctic sea ice volume, they continue to cling to the claim it’s melting. That’s irrational.

Media hyperbole

Yesterday Anthony Watts posted here on the Arctic, remarking that the media claims of earlier this year of an unprecedented Arctic warmth had much more to do with hyperbole than with reality.

Lately, the Arctic has been a generous source of fake news from the global mainstream media giants, all claiming something that is not real or making something that’s happened many times before look “unprecedented”.

Warm 12°C temperature spikes more than 70 times!

Back in January 2016, I wrote here how “the Washington Post screamed bloody murder that the North Pole was in meltdown as temperatures at that singular location rose some “50 degrees above normal,” making it sound like this event had been an unprecedented phenomenon.

For that post, I had gone back and examined DMI data Arctic temperatures above 80°N latitude going back some 58 years. Here’s what I found: "And examining all the years since 1958 we see that a temperature spike of some 12°K or more in a matter of a few days (during the November to March deep winter period) occurred more than 70 times! And over 100 times for spikes of 10°K and more.”

SOURCE

Scott Pruitt, Warrior for Science

Democrats and liberal journalists attack the EPA head for insisting on transparency, shared research, and rigorous peer review

John Tierney

Imagine if the head of a federal agency announced a new policy for its scientific research: from now on, the agency would no longer allow its studies to be reviewed and challenged by independent scientists, and its researchers would not share the data on which their conclusions were based. The response from scientists and journalists would be outrage. By refusing peer review from outsiders, the agency would be rejecting a fundamental scientific tradition. By not sharing data with other researchers, it would be violating a standard transparency requirement at leading scientific journals. If a Republican official did such a thing, you’d expect to hear denunciations of this latest offensive in the “Republican war on science.”

That’s the accusation being hurled at Scott Pruitt, the Republican who heads the Environmental Protection Agency. But Pruitt hasn’t done anything to discourage peer review. In fact, he’s done the opposite: he has called for the use of more independent experts to review the EPA’s research and has just announced that the agency would rely only on studies for which data are available to be shared. Yet Democratic officials and liberal journalists have denounced these moves as an “attack on science,” and Democrats have cited them (along with accusations of ethical violations) in their campaign to force Pruitt out of his job.

How could “the party of science,” as Democrats like to call themselves, be opposed to transparency and peer review? Because better scientific oversight would make it tougher for the EPA to justify its costly regulations. To environmentalists, rigorous scientific protocols are fine in theory, but not in practice if they interfere with the green political agenda. As usual, the real war on science is the one waged from the left.

The EPA has been plagued by politicized science since its inception in 1970. One of its first tasks was to evaluate the claim, popularized in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, that the use of DDT pesticide was causing an epidemic of cancer. The agency held extensive hearings that led to the conclusion that DDT was not a carcinogen, a finding that subsequent research would confirm. Yet the EPA administrator, William Ruckelshaus, reportedly never even bothered to read the scientific testimony. Ignoring the thousands of pages of evidence, he declared DDT a potential carcinogen and banned most uses of it.

Since then, the agency has repeatedly been criticized for relying on weak or cherry-picked evidence to promote needless alarms justifying the expansion of its authority (and budget). Its warnings about BPA, a chemical used in plastics, were called unscientific by leading researchers in the field. Its conclusion that secondhand smoke was killing thousands of people annually was ruled by a judge to be in violation of “scientific procedure and norms”—and was firmly debunked by later research.

To justify the costs of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan restricting coal-burning power plants, the EPA relied on a controversial claim that a particular form of air pollution (from small particulates) was responsible for large numbers of premature deaths. To reach that conclusion, the agency ignored contradictory evidence and chose to rely on 1990s research whose methodology and conclusions were open to question. The EPA’s advisory committee on air pollution, a group of outside scientists, was sufficiently concerned at the time to ask to see the supporting data. But the researchers and the EPA refused to share the data, citing the confidentiality of the medical records involved, and they have continued refusing demands from Congress and other researchers to share it, as Steve Milloy recounts in his book, Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA.

Pruitt’s new policy will force the EPA to rely on studies for which data is available to other researchers, ensuring the transparency that enables findings to be tested and confirmed. So why is he being attacked? His critics argue that some worthwhile research will be ignored because it is based on confidential records that are impractical to share. They say that it would cost the EPA several hundred million dollars to redact personal medical information in the air-pollution studies used to justify the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. But even if that estimate is correct—it seems awfully high—it’s a pittance compared with the costs of the EPA’s regulations. The Obama EPA estimated the annual cost of its Clean Power Plan at $8 billion; others estimated it at more than $30 billion. Before saddling utility customers with those higher bills year after year, the EPA could at least pay for reliable research.

Pruitt’s critics have also excoriated him for insisting that the EPA’s advisory boards consist of independent scientists, ending the practice of including researchers who receive grants from the agency—exactly the sort of conflict of interest that progressives object to when researchers receive money from private industry. He has also proposed an analysis of climate change using a “red-team/blue-team” exercise, an innovative technique that has been used to draw up plans at the Defense Department and the CIA and by private industry for industrial operations and projects such as designing spacecraft. A group of outside experts, the red team, is brought in to critique the work of the in-house blue team, which then responds, and the teams keep going back and forth, under the supervision of a moderator. It’s an enhanced form of peer review, forcing researchers and bureaucrats to defend or reconsider their ideas, and ideally leading to sounder conclusions and better plans. A version of this exercise has already been used to bolster the case for man-made global warming, as noted by Joseph Majkut of the Niskanen Institute.

Given the high stakes and the many uncertainties related to climate change—the dozens of computer climate models, the widely varying estimates of costs and benefits of mitigation strategies—who could object to studying the problem carefully? Yet Pruitt’s proposal has been denounced by Democrats as well as liberal Republicans like Christine Whitman, the former New Jersey governor, who argued that the facts are so well-established that further examination is unnecessary. As a former head of the EPA, Whitman no doubt appreciates how much easier it is to make regulations without the nuisance of debate. But what’s good for bureaucrats is not good for science.

SOURCE

FINALLY! Pruitt’s EPA Kills Obama’s CAFE Standards And Resurrects Consumer Freedom

In early April, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt announced the agency will roll back the previous administration’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which would have peaked at 54.5 miles per gallon in 2025. Part of the explanation Pruitt gave for why EPA is pulling back from the Obama-era determination is that it “made assumptions about the standard that didn’t comport with reality.”

Reality would have included a serious price increase for pickups and SUVs, about $3,000 for the price of a new vehicle, according to the National Auto Dealers Association. To the many coastal, urban, and suburban liberals who populated the previous administration, that would have been fine. The whole purpose of regulations like CAFE is to increase the price of goods they think are undesirable, like gas-guzzling pickups and SUVs, and to nudge consumers into purchasing the products and services they think are desirable, such as hybrid or electric sedans with great gas mileage. But fantastic gas mileage isn’t the end-all, be-all of utility in an automobile.

One of the problems with the progressive worldview is its insularity. If a liberal can’t see why a tool isn’t useful for him, he at the same time can’t understand how that tool could be useful to anybody else. “If there is no utility in this for me, then there is no utility in this.” Too many of these urban, coastal liberals see pickups, as Kevin D. Williamson cheekily put it, as nothing more than “pollution-belching penis-supplements for toothless red-state Bubbas.” As such, they feel these purposeless vehicles should be nudged out of existence.

Certainly, owning a pickup or an SUV is not conducive to the urban lifestyle these liberals lead. Not too many people living in Park Slope or Russian Hill or Georgetown or Wicker Park will ever find the need for one. Whenever they do, for moving furniture or something of that nature, they can simply contract out for one. But the unfortunate problem for these liberals is not everyone lives their lifestyle, nor lives in neighborhoods like theirs.

I live in South Florida, where pickups are everywhere, mostly because of their utilitarian value to their owners. Lots of people fish here (I live off the coast of the “Sailfish Capital of the World” for God’s sake), and to do any serious fishing you need to own a boat. But if you don’t have the necessary scratch to rent or buy a slip, then you’re going to have to tow your boat back and forth to a ramp, and you aren’t going to be able to do that with a Nissan Leaf.

Cattle ranching, a billion-dollar industry in the Sunshine State, has been taking place in Florida since those heretical Brownist Puritans who landed at Plymouth Rock were still in their short pants. Nearly half the agricultural land here is used for ranching. You go 20 miles inland—anywhere in the state, from the northern tip of the Everglades to the Georgia border—and you’re bound to run into one of the 18,000 ranches in operation here. A rural, labor-intensive industry where you’re going to be off-road a good chunk of the time (and when you are on-road, that road is probably going to be a dirt one), it isn’t ideally suited for a Toyota Prius.

Friends of mine with necks of a more crimson hue like to hunt feral hogs, which are something of a pestilence down here. Some hunt boar using a pack of hunting dogs to track and bay up the animal. These dogs are transported in separate cages, which you can’t fit in the trunk or backseat of your Tesla Model S. Neither can the hog, for that matter.

Lots of Floridians and millions of people around the country, too, find these vehicles useful. It is no secret that the top three selling automobiles in the United States—the Ford F-150, Chevy Silverado, and Dodge Ram—are all pickups. That should be instructive.

I won’t get into the other economic and environmental problems with CAFE standards (Mario Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and my Heartland colleague Arianna Wilkerson have done a fine job of that on their own), but the main one is they intentionally raise the price on vehicles some people find undesirable.

If someone wants to buy a small, “eco-friendly” sedan, then good for them. If someone else wants to buy a big, “gas-guzzling” truck, then good for them. To each his own. Bureaucrats in Washington, DC have no business nudging people toward one or against the other. That is what CAFE standards do, and that is why they need to go.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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18 April, 2018

Extraterrestrial Forcing of Surface Temperature and Climate Change: A Parody

Jamal Munshi mocks Warmist statistics, showing they prove nothing

Abstract

It is proposed that visitation by extraterrestrial spacecraft (UFO) alters the electromagnetic properties of the earth, its atmosphere, and its oceans and that these changes can cause global warming leading to climate change and thence to the catastrophic consequences of floods, droughts, severe storms, and sea level rise. An empirical test of this theory is presented with data for UFO sightings and surface temperature reconstructions for the study period 1910-2015. The results show strong evidence of proportionality between surface temperature and cumulative UFO sightings. We conclude that the observed warming since the Industrial Revolution are due to an electromagnetic perturbation of the climate system by UFO extraterrestrial spacecraft.

SOURCE

Study: Battery Storage Far Too Costly For Practical Use

Exorbitant battery storage costs prevent rooftop solar installations from paying for themselves in the long run, making home energy storage an impractical use for average consumers in the foreseeable future, a new study determined.

As the renewable energy industry continues to draw more interest from environmentally conscious consumers, battery storage technology is becoming more sought after as a means to harness energy for future consumption. For example, solar panel batteries can store excess energy captured during the daytime and use that energy to keep the lights on after the sun goes down. Consumers are encouraged to purchase solar panels with promises that, in the long run, they will save money on monthly electrical bills.

However, a study released Monday by the Global Warming Policy Foundation revealed that battery storage is simply too costly to provide long-term financial benefit.

“The price of batteries is relatively high, but the possible savings from adding them to a rooftop solar installation are quite limited, particularly as a fraction of the typical electricity bill. When you add up the costs and benefits, it is quite clear that they are a waste of money,” Capell Aris, a former reactor physics specialist and a fellow at the Institute of Engineering and Technology, wrote Monday.

The study Aris conducted took into consideration typical solar panel installations and basic electricity consumption over the course of one day and a year in the United Kingdom. The variables he considered were comprehensive, factoring in weather patterns and the degradation of solar panel efficiency over time. The factors were repeated to cover a 20-year period.

The results: Solar rooftop installations are a far cry away from keeping pace with household energy consumption in the U.K. Their use would result in long-term savings for users if costs were to drop dramatically, but that does not appear to be happening anytime soon.

“There is no doubt that battery prices are falling, but even if we make some fairly optimistic assumptions about performance, prices would have to fall by another 50 percent just to break even. They would need to come down even further than that to give a financial return,” Aris said. “It’s hard to see this happening any time soon. Battery storage for rooftop solar is simply not an economic prospect, and will likely remain that way.”

The study follows mounting questions about the true cost of solar panel installation in the United States. Widespread residential and commercial use of solar panel technology would not be feasible without a flood of subsidies from the government.

Upon a study of their net metering program, Montana revealed earlier this month that their largest utility company was over compensating net metering customers three times the market value for their energy. An investigative report Friday by America Rising Squared detailed the billions of dollars the federal government shelled out in 2016 alone to prop up otherwise unprofitable renewable energy programs.

SOURCE

Starving for Accurate Information on Polar Bears

A viral video of a starving polar bear blamed climate change, but that's yet another lie

At this time of year, we’re accustomed to seeing polar bears as a holiday mascot for a certain soft drink. But you can rest assured that thousands of real live polar bears are anything but cute and cuddly as they hunt down and devour Arctic seals and assorted other prey.

Sadly, there’s one unnamed polar bear that most likely didn’t live to enjoy this time of plenty. In late August, the photography team of Paul Nicklen and Christina Mittermeier happened upon an emaciated member of the species that was down to its last brief bursts of energy, desperately rummaging through garbage heaps in a vain search for nourishment. “This is what a starving polar bear looks like,” wrote Mittermeier. “Weak muscles, atrophied by extended starvation could barely hold him up.”

Laying it on even thicker, Nicklen added, “We stood there crying — filming with tears rolling down our cheeks.” They added that there was nothing they could do to help, because feeding wild animals is illegal and “it’s not like we travel around with 200-300 pounds of seal meat.” And while they conceded that they couldn’t completely pin down the cause of the bear’s imminent demise, they presumed global warming was the culprit. “This is the face of climate change,” Mittermeier asserted. Paul Amstrup of Polar Bears International added, “Despite uncertainties about how this bear got into this starving condition, we can be absolutely certain if we allow the world to continue to warm, there will be ever greater numbers of such events as survival rates decline over more and more of the polar bear range.”

But not so fast, say the skeptics. First off, they counter, it’s not unusual to see starving polar bears in late August as that’s near the end of their dormant period. “That bear is starving, but it’s not starving because the ice suddenly disappeared and it could no longer hunt seals,” wrote Arctic wildlife biologist Jeff Higdon. Population-wise, polar bears are certainly not in immediate danger of extinction. In fact, some regions of the polar north have a significant polar bear presence.

Research — based on years’ worth of observations — tells us that, if anything, Arctic sea ice arrived on time, or even a bit early this winter — so healthy bears were easily able to swim out to their hunting grounds and floes of ice. Polar bear scientist Susan Crockford made the case that things were just fine. For her trouble, Crockford had her reputation sullied in the worst way. Terence Corcoran recounts:

As a starting point, we look to a story published December 1st on Vice News’s tech site. Motherboard, that included an interview with U.S. polar bear scientist/activist Stephen Amstrup. In the article, Amstrup accuses Canadian polar bear scientist Susan Crockford of filling her bear research with extreme allegations. Climate activists have targeted Crockford, a zoologist and adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria, because her research inconveniently finds that, despite their claims, polar bears are not at risk. ‘You don’t have to read far in her material to see that it is full of unsubstantiated statements and personal attacks on scientists, using names like eco-terrorists, fraudsters, green terrorists and scammers,’ Amstrup claimed.

A few days later, Motherboard published a slithery retraction. After Crockford complained that Amstrup’s comments about her were “a lie” and that she has never used such terms, Amstrup “clarified” his comments. He said that when he accused Crockford of calling scientists fraudsters, he really meant to accuse “climate deniers as a whole, rather than Crockford in particular.”

Life is often made more difficult for those who don’t worship at the altar of climate change, and Crockford’s sin is that of being an oft-cited skeptic to the “polar bears are going extinct” narrative. Polar bears do indeed make for cute and cuddly symbols of the far north, and for now they aren’t going anywhere fast — despite what some with an agenda would lead us to believe.

SOURCE

Short-term versus long-term changes in the temperature record of North Rhine-Westphalia

In pre-industrial times, significant climatic fluctuations occurred in North Rhine-Westphalia and elsewhere, some of which even exceeded the modern temperature level. Common climate models can not reproduce the preindustrial climate history -- Translated from the German of Sebastian Lüning

In the course of global industrialization and the use of fossil fuels, the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has risen to its highest level in 800,000 years. At the same time, the temperature of the earth has increased by almost one degree in the last 150 years. However, the exact quantitative proportion of man-made and natural climatic factors in this warming is still unclear and is due to the inaccurately known climate impact of CO 2 , the so-called CO 2Coupled with climate sensitivity.

In order to better understand the natural contribution to current climate change, a preoccupation with the preindustrial climate history is necessary. Only when the natural climate dynamics of the last millennia have been correctly recorded and the corresponding drives understood, can today's overall climate system consisting of natural and anthropogenic drives be fully understood and quantified.

Great importance is given to earlier natural heat episodes that occurred locally to globally every 1000-2000 years and whose exact causes are still under investigation. Unfortunately, many accounts of climate change lack such a climate-historical vision. Thus, the consideration in the climate status reports on North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) begins only in 1880 (LANUV, 2010, 2016). The publisher of the reports, the State Office for Nature, Environment and Consumer Protection of North Rhine-Westphalia (LANUV), blatantly fails to classify the current climatic changes in a longer-term context. The year 1880 corresponds to the end of the so-called Little Ice Age (15th-19th century), one of the coldest episodes in the history of climate in the past 10,000 years.

Thus, the LANUV refers all considerations to a special climatic phase. This is unusual, since it differs from the usual scientific practice to compare the events with long-term average values, the so-called baseline (Lüning and Vahrenholt, 2017). For example, the average temperature of the past 2000 or 10,000 years would have been more suitable, with several natural cold / warm phases included. Only the classification into the longer-term climatic context makes it possible to decide to what extent the current climatic changes have already left the range of the natural fluctuation range.

In the following, therefore, the temperature development of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and neighboring regions will be explained by way of example. In addition, the current state of discussion on the validation of climate models and CO 2 climate sensitivity is summarized.

The record:

Last 100 years

The mean annual mean temperature in North Rhine-Westphalia has increased by about one and a half degrees over the last 135 years based on data from the German Weather Service (DWD) (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: Development of the average annual temperature in North Rhine-Westphalia during the past 135 years. Source: DWD

Last 1000 years

The Modern Heat Phase is not the only warming period in post-glacial climate history. Already in the Middle Ages 1000 years ago, a warm phase occurred, which is particularly well-known from the North Atlantic region, but was also pronounced in many regions of the rest of the world, eg in Africa (Lüning et al., 2017). Thus, the Medieval Warming Period (MWP) and Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) were also described from the NRW neighboring state of Rhineland-Palatinate (RP). Moschen et al. (2011) reconstructed the temperature history based on carbon isotopes in a peat core from the Dürren Maar. They found a warming of more than 5 ° C in the transition of the cold period of the Migration Period (500-700 AD) to MWP ( Figure 2). In this context, there appeared to be strong warming bursts, with temperatures naturally skyrocketing by several degrees within a few decades. In this respect neither the current temperature level nor the current rate of warming in the NRW-RP area seems to be unprecedented in the historical context.

Fig. 2: Temperature evolution of the Dürren Maar (Eifel) during the last 2000 years based on a temperature reconstruction based on cellulose carbon isotopes of a peat core. Zero point of the temperature anomaly scale is slightly above the temperature average of the last 2,000 years (Little Ice Age is missing). Left curve: Unsmoothed data. Right curve: moving average over 60 years. Data digitized by Moschen et al. (2011)

Last 10,000 years

Extending the reference period to the last 10,000 years, it becomes clear that there were a whole series of warm and cold phases in pre-industrial times. In science, it is referred to as climatic millennium cycles, since the changes occurred at intervals of 1000-2000 years. The cycles have been described from all parts of the world (Lüning and Vahrenholt, 2016) and could derive at least part of their drive from fluctuating solar activity (Bond et al., 2001). Other researchers assume an internal climate pulse.

Such a millennium cycle was also described in the Sauerland Bunker Cave by Fohlmeister et al. (2012). Rhythmic changes in the oxygen isotope stalactites have shown continuous natural climate change over the past 11,000 years, with the system varying between warm / humid and cold / dry (Figure 3). The change between the cold phase of the migration period, MWP and modern heat period is clearly visible in the cave reconstruction.

Fig. 3: Natural climatic fluctuations in the Sauerland over the past 11,000 years, reconstructed on the basis of oxygen isotope fluctuations ( ? 18 O) from dripstones of the bunker. Unit in per thousand of oxygen isotopes. CWP = Modern Warm Period, MWP = Medieval Warm Period, DACP = Cold Ages Cold Period, RWP = Roman Warm Period. Age scale shows years before 1950 (Years BP, before, present '= 1950). Data from Fohlmeister et al. (2012) , downloaded from https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/study/20589

A particularly warm phase was the so-called Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM), which occurred in the period 8000-5500 years before today. Kühl and Moschen (2012) reconstructed the temperature of this climate episode for the drought Maar using pollen. It was found that the temperatures in the Eifel at that time were more than a degree above the current level of heat (1990-2017, Fig. 1), or almost two degrees, if one takes the cooler reference interval 1961-1990 as a benchmark. The July temperatures of the Eifel during the HTM were 18.0-18.5 ° C, whereas at the nearest weather station Manderscheid in the DWD reference interval 1961-1990 a July average of 16.3 ° C was measured (Kühl and Moschen , 2012).

The field of paleoclimatology has made great advances in the last 15 years, and a multitude of new local temperature reconstructions have been made throughout the world. However, the regional and supraregional synthesis of these data lags somewhat behind. So far there is still no robust global temperature reconstruction for the past 10,000 years, in which both land and sea temperatures are integrated. The much-cited curve of Marcott et al. (2013) relies almost exclusively on sea temperatures, but the temperature change is much less severe than on land due to the thermal inertia of the oceans. A global temperature reconstruction for the past 2,000 years by the PAGES 2k Consortium (2013) found that in the period 1-600 AD. Apparently already several times at least as warm as today.

However, changes are still to be expected here, as the reconstruction relies heavily on tree ring data, which in many cases comes from unpublished and unexamined sources. In addition, other inappropriate data appear to have been included in the averages (eg, Africa: Lüning et al., 2017)

In this respect, the focus here should first be placed on more reliable local temperature series such as the Bunker Cave and the Drought Maar, and hopefully soon improved global temperature curves will become available in the future.

SOURCE

"The Guardian" is disappointed by the polls

See below

Gallup released its annual survey on American perceptions about global warming last week, and the results were a bit discouraging. While 85–90% of Democrats are worried about global warming, realize humans are causing it, and are aware that most scientists agree on this, independents and Republicans are a different story. Only 35% of Republicans and 62% of independents realize humans are causing global warming (down from 40% and 70% last year, respectively), a similar number are worried about it, and only 42% of Republicans and 65% of independents are aware of the scientific consensus – also significantly down from last year’s Gallup poll.

The Trump administration’s polarizing stance on climate change is probably the main contributor to this decline in conservative acceptance of climate change realities. A recent study found evidence that “Americans may have formed their attitudes [on climate change] by using party elite cues” delivered via the media. In particular, the study found that Fox News “is consistently more partisan than other [news] outlets” and has incorporated politicians into the majority of its climate segments.

Nevertheless, public awareness about climate change realities has improved over the long-term. For example, about two-thirds of Americans now realize that most scientists agree global warming is occurring, up from less than half in 1997.

There’s also a strong correlation between awareness of the expert consensus, that humans are causing global warming, and concern about the issue. This suggests that when people are aware that experts agree, they accept the consensus and realize we need to address the problem. This is consistent with research finding that the expert consensus is a ‘gateway belief’ leading to public support for climate action.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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17 April, 2018

Lost amid all the 'noise' over Scott Pruitt is the very real damage Obama's EPA did to rural communities

The far left will stop at nothing in their efforts to derail the presidency of Donald Trump. Still bitter about the outcome of 2016, the left claims much of their outrage toward the president is driven by his unpredictable personality, but ideological opposition to his administration’s reform-minded agenda is the real root of their anger.

Nowhere is this more evident than the furor surrounding Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Trump’s opponents have seized on a number of recent unflattering news stories involving Pruitt and his agency. While admittedly not the best public relations for Pruitt, his “real sin is that he is one of Mr. Trump’s most aggressive reformers,” as the Wall Street Journal editorialized last week. President Trump expressed a similar sentiment over the weekend when he tweeted praise for his EPA chief’s “bold actions” and “record clean Air & Water while saving USA Billions of Dollars.”

Since taking office last year, Pruitt has boldly carried out the president’s campaign promises. In October, he moved to repeal Obama’s Clean Power Plan regulations, ending the War On Coal and providing a shot in the arm for coal country that had been decimated.

Pruitt and Trump issued an executive order doing away with the Obama-era Waters Of The United States (WOTUS) that sought to impose new regulations on every miniscule body of water in this country. And Pruitt encouraged Trump to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, an accord which the UN itself admitted last year was largely symbolic, but whose damage to American businesses would have been real.

Environmental protection remains a priority: under Pruitt’s leadership, $100 million dollars have been awarded to Flint, Michigan, to upgrade the drinking water and to clean up sites contaminated with hazardous substances and pollutants – known as “Superfunds” – has been prioritized.

Pruitt’s “scandals” are exaggerated for political expediency: never mind that the Obama EPA spent just as much, if not more, than Pruitt’s team, according to a recent Fox News report. Or that Lisa Jackson, Obama’s EPA chief, was caught using the email alias “Richard Windsor” to communicate with people outside the government. Or that one Obama-era EPA employee was caught downloading and watching pornography on the job. These issues prompted no outrage from Hill offices, and one questions if Congressional inquiry could possibly be politically motivated, or if left-wing outrage is a one-way street.

These millions of Americans who lost their jobs, their towns, and their livelihood voted to undo the EPA’s destruction, and Scott Pruitt is doing just that.

The left also knows that opposing Trump and Pruitt will curry favor with Tom Steyer, the San Francisco billionaire taking a bigger and bigger role in the public policy debate. Already having pledged $30 million dollars of his vast fortune to help elect identically ideological environmentalists, Steyer has now embarked on a publicity stunt to impeach the president, spending millions on television and digital ads.

Lost amid all the noise is the extreme damage the previous EPA did to rural communities. My work takes me to small, energy-rich towns around the country. These are the places where America gets its power, where multiple generations of energy workers live and worship and raise their families. Places where the champions of the eco-left would not deign to visit. These towns survived dot.com bubbles and housing crashes because the majority had steady, good paying jobs in coal mines or oil fields.

These proud towns went from prosperity to poverty during eight years of EPA regulatory action as unemployment became rampant, and with it, myriad hardships: shuttered stores on main street, depleted education funds, increased opioid use. Families broke apart as moms and dads moved from their beloved hometowns looking for work. The very fabric of their communities – neighbors, schools, churches, little league, diners, town squares – destroyed in less than a decade.

The ideologues of the previous EPA believed they were punishing “the fat cats” as Obama liked to call rich people who didn’t vote for him, or “millionaires and billionaires” in Bernie Sanders lexicon, or “big oil” according to the eco-left. But who they really punished were the forgotten men and women in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, New Mexico, Alaska, and Louisiana, among others. These millions of Americans who lost their jobs, their towns, and their livelihood voted to undo the EPA’s destruction, and Scott Pruitt is doing just that. His punishment will be severe: the eco-left, in conjunction with their elected patrons in Congress and media allies, will persecute him relentlessly.

Our message to Administrator Pruitt: American energy workers who are going back to work thank you. The American economy thanks you. And please remember these wise words: if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

SOURCE

Tomorrow’s Grim, Global, Green Dictatorship

Viv Forbes

Greens hate individual freedom and private property. They dream of a centralised unelected global government, financed by taxes on developed nations and controlled by all the tentacles of the UN.

No longer is real pollution of our environment the main Green concern. The key slogan of the Green religion is “sustainable development”, with them defining what is sustainable.

Greens hate miners. They use nationalised parks, heritage areas, flora/fauna reserves, green bans, locked gates and land rights (for some) to close as much land as possible to explorers and miners – apparently resources should be locked away for some lucky distant future generation. And if some persistent explorer manages to prove a mineral deposit, greens will then strangle it in the approvals process using “death by delay”.

Greens hate farmers with their ploughs, fertilisers, crops and grazing animals. They want Aussie grazing land turned back to kangaroos and woody weeds. They plan to expel farmers and graziers from most land areas, with food produced in concentrated feedlots, factory farms, communal gardens and hydroponics.

Greens hate professional fishermen with their nets, lines and harpoons. Using the Great Barrier Reef as their poster-child, they plan to control the Coral Sea using marine parks, fishing quotas, bans and licences, leaving us to get seafood from foreign seas and factory fish farms.

Greens hate foresters and grass-farmers. They want every tree protected, even woody weeds taking over ancient treeless grasslands. Red meat and forest timber are “unsustainable”. Apparently they want us to live in houses made of recycled cardboard and plastic and eating fake steak and protein powder made from methane generated from decomposing rubbish dumps.

Greens despise the suburbs with their SUV’s, lawns, pools, rose gardens, manicured parks, ponies and golf courses. They prefer concentrated accommodation with people stacked-and-packed in high-rise cubic apartments, with state-controlled kindies in the basement, and with ring-roads of electric trams and driverless cars connecting apartments, schools, offices and shops.

Greens hate reliable grid power from coal, nuclear, oil, gas or hydro generators. Their “sustainable” option is part-time power from wind and solar with the inevitable blackouts and shortages needing more rules and rationing.

Greens lead the war on fracking and pipelines. The victims are energy consumers. The beneficiaries are Russian gas and Middle-east oil.

Greens think it is “sustainable” to uglify scenic hills with whining wind towers, power poles, transmission lines and access roads, and to clutter pleasant estuaries and shallow seas with more bird-slicing turbines. They think it is “sustainable” to keep smothering sunny flatlands under solar panels and filling the suburbs with extra power lines and batteries of toxic metals.

Greens think it is “sustainable” to clear forests for bio-mass to feed large wood-fired power stations, or for establishing biofuel plantations. They think it is “sustainable” to keep converting croplands from producing food for humans to producing ethanol for cars.

Greens hate free markets where prices are used to signal changing supply and demand. There is no room for fun, frills or luxuries in their “sustainable” world. They want to limit demand by imposing rationing on us wastrels – carbon ration cards, electricity rationing meters, water rationing, meat free days, diet cops and bans on fast foods and fizzy-drinks.

They also favour compulsory recycling of everything, no matter what that process costs in energy or resources. Surveillance cameras will keep watch on our “wasteful” habits.

None of this vast green religious agenda is compatible with individual freedom, constitutional rights or private property - and none of it makes any economic or climate sense.

The Despotic Green New World is coming. Climate alarm is the stalking horse, “sustainable development” is the war cry, and global government is the goal.

SOURCE

Japan just found a 'semi-infinite' deposit of rare-earth minerals -- and it could be a 'game-changer' in competition with China

Now no fear of shortages

Because China has tightly controlled the world’s supply of these minerals – which are used in everything from smartphones to electric car batteries – the discovery could be a “game-changer” for Japan, according to an analyst.

The study, published in the journal Nature on Tuesday, says the deposit contains 16 million tons of the valuable metals.

Rare-earth minerals are used in everything from smartphone batteries to electric vehicles. By definition, these minerals contain one or more of 17 metallic rare-earth elements (for those familiar with the periodic table, those are on the second row from the bottom).

These elements are actually plentiful in layers of the Earth’s crust, but are typically widely dispersed. Because of that, it is rare to find any substantial amount of the elements clumped together as extractable minerals, according to the USGS. Currently, there are only a few economically viable areas where they can be mined and they’re generally expensive to extract.

China has tightly controlled much of the world’s supply of these minerals for decades. That has forced Japan – a major electronics manufacturer – to rely on prices dictated by their neighbour.

The newly discovered deposit is enough to “supply these metals on a semi-infinite basis to the world,” the study’s authors wrote in the study.

There’s enough yttrium to meet the global demand for 780 years, dysprosium for 730 years, europium for 620 years, and terbium for 420 years.

The cache lies off of Minamitori Island, about 1,150 miles southeast of Tokyo. It’s within Japan’s exclusive economic zone, so the island nation has the sole rights to the resources there.

“This is a game changer for Japan,” Jack Lifton, a founding principal of a market-research firm called Technology Metals Research, told The Wall Street Journal. “The race to develop these resources is well underway.”

Japan started seeking its own rare-earth mineral deposits after China withheld shipments of the substances amid a dispute over islands that both countries claim as their own, Reuters reported in 2014.

Previously, China reduced its export quotas of rare earth minerals in 2010, pushing prices up as much as 10%, The Journal reports. China was forced to start exporting more of the minerals again after the dispute was taken up at the World Trade Organisation.

Rare-earth minerals can be formed by volcanic activity, but many of the minerals on our planet were formed initially by supernova explosions before Earth came into existence. When Earth was formed, the minerals were incorporated into the deepest portions of the planet’s mantle, a layer of rock beneath the crust.

As tectonic activity has moved portions of the mantle around, rare earth minerals have found their way closer to the surface. The process of weathering – in which rocks break down into sediment over millions of years – spread these rare minerals all over the planet.

The only thing holding Japan back from using its newly found deposit to dominate the global market for rare-earth minerals is the challenge involved in extracting them. The process is expensive, so more research needs to be done to determine the cheapest methods, Yutaro Takaya, the study’s lead author, told The Journal.

Rare-earth minerals are likely to remain part the backbone of some the fastest-growing sectors of the global tech economy. Japan now has the opportunity to control a huge chunk of the global supply, forcing countries that manufacture electronics, like China and the US, to purchase the minerals on Japan’s terms.

SOURCE

Science is Not Truth

Richard Harris has written a startling book about the state of medical research. The preface to "Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions" includes a warning about scientific naivety:

Most of science is built on inference rather than direct observation…Science progresses by testing ideas indirectly, throwing out the ones that seem wrong…Gradually, scientists build stories that do a better job of approximating the truth. But at any given moment, there are parallel narratives, sometimes sharply at odds with one another. Scientists rely on their own individual judgments to decide which stories come closer to the truth…Some stories that seem on the fringe today will become the accepted narrative some years from now. (italics added)

During the years I’ve spent examining the climate debate, I’ve tried to communicate precisely these ideas. Millions of people think there’s a climate crisis because ‘science says.’ But in addition to being hazy and incomplete, that science relies on indirect reasoning and judgment calls.

Scientists, being human, are susceptible to bias, group-think, self-interest, and tribalism. We often hear that 97% of scientists think climate change is caused primarily by human beings. This, let us be clear, is an opinion.

Ideas championed by the greatest minds of one era are frequently tossed into the dustbin by the next. Google eugenics. Or continental drift. Or germ theory. Or stomach ulcers.

For decades, Pluto was a planet. Then it wasn’t. As a non-scientist, I once thought such matters were straightforward. I was naive.

TOP TAKEAWAY: In Harris’ words, scientists “are groping around at the edges of knowledge.” This means we need to be careful, indeed, when basing laws and government policies on scientific findings.

SOURCE

A SETBACK FOR THE GLOBAL WARMING CROWD

Canadian hockey analyst, Don Cherry, called out global warming alarmists as cuckooloos and like most liberals they demanded he be fired.

The Great Lakes Region a couple of years ago had Arctic like conditions for several months. This year has been a little more erratic. Cleveland had historic snow one week and then a fairly standard winter. Canadian hockey analyst, Don Cherry, called out global warming alarmists as cuckooloos and like most liberals they demanded he be fired. Cherry was expressing Ontario was having a very cold winter. Angry liberals couldn’t just change the channel. Maybe they were even more embittered in the cold.

Six years ago I lived through a 10 day heat wave in the Tidewater region. Newspaper columnists with no more science background than the rest of us blamed man-made climate change, except. It had been terribly chilly through most of June and after the heat wave the rest of the summer was cooler than average. Heat waves happen and have always happened.

Growing up I remember many late springs. Journalists claim trees now bloom sooner but a scientist told me buds appear when the length of daily sunlight grows. Temperature isn’t a factor but don’t let that interfere with a liberal narrative.

Climate and weather aren’t the same, although. Climate is a series of weather events. When the forecast one week out rarely is accurate then how can we foresee climate in a century? When a judge at a trial of America’s oil companies accused of warming the planet asked a simple question the environmentalists were dumbfounded. “What caused the last ice age?” he queried. The lefties were at a loss for words.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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16 April, 2018

Two CO2 climate change myths

CO2 does not “trap heat” in the atmosphere and the increase in CO2 is not a buildup of our emissions. In fact these are two pseudoscientific myths that appear frequently in alarmist press reports and teaching materials. Neither one is true.

The science is quite different. It is actually pretty complex, which is why the climate change science is so widely debated.

No heat is trapped by CO2 in the air

CO2 both adds heat to the atmosphere and removes it, so it certainly does not trap it there. CO2 is a secondary greenhouse gas (GHG), with water vapor being the primary GHG. What being a GHG means is two different things, as GHGs both add and remove heat in the atmosphere.

It all begins when the sun’s incoming energy heats the surface of the Earth. Some of that energy is then given off as infrared light, which is usually called “long wave radiation” or LWR. A lot of this LWR simply passes through the atmosphere and goes out into space, where it is gone forever. But some of it is intercepted and absorbed by GHG molecules.

These energized molecules then give off this absorbed LWR energy to the rest of the air as heat. (Heat is not a substance; rather it is just molecular motion.) So at this point we can say that the CO2 has heated the air and this is as far as the alarmists go. What they do not mention is that when this heat energizes other GHG molecules, they give off LWR, thereby removing the heat.

So the energy comes into the air as LWR and becomes heat, then it goes out again as LWR, and is gone. No heat is trapped in this process. There is always some heat in the air as this process goes on, but it is like people coming into a store, then standing in line waiting to be served, then leaving. No one is trapped.

Once we see that no heat is trapped, we can ask whether adding CO2 necessarily increases the amount of heat (and the temperature) in the air. Thanks to the complexity of the climate system, the answer turns out to be not necessarily. Moreover, satellite observations tell us that there has been no CO2 warming since records began about 40 years ago.

The CO2 buildup is not made up of our CO2 emissions

It is pretty well established that the amount of CO2 in the air is increasing. It is usually said that this is because we are dumping a lot of CO2 into the air and a lot of it is staying there, building up year after year. This is more or less the standard concept of pollution, which the alarmists constantly invoke, but that is nothing like what is happening with the CO2 increase.

What the alarmists consistently fail to mention is that our emissions of CO2 are tiny compared to those that occur naturally. In fact natural processes both emit and absorb something like 25 times what we emit (the actual amount is not measured). This vast natural flow of CO2 into and out of the air is called the “carbon flux.” It is part of the carbon cycle that sustains all life on Earth.

The point here is that given this huge carbon flux, pretty much any CO2 that we emit is gone in just a few years. Something like 25% of the CO2 in the air is absorbed every year by natural processes, including the CO2 that we put there.

What this means is that the CO2 increase in the air is not made up of our CO2 building up. Our CO2 may or may not be causing the increase, someway or another, but it does not make up the increase. Let me say this again simply, the CO2 increase is not our CO2.

In sum, when you see articles complaining about heat trapping CO2 pollution filling the air, none of it is true. The increase in CO2 is not a buildup of human emissions and it is not causing the atmosphere to heat up.

SOURCE

Global warming effects: Taps may dry up in India, claims study

A stupid prophecy if ever there was one. Global warming would cause the oceans to evaporate off MORE, leading to MORE rain. Shrinking rainfall indicates COOLING

New Delhi: A new early warning satellite system has revealed that India along with Spain, Morocco and Iraq faces the risk of shrinking reservoirs that can lead to taps going dry.

It has highlighted poor rains in 2017 to show the shrinking of the Indira Sagar dam in Madhya Pradesh and the Sardar Sarovar reservoir in Gujarat that supplies drinking water to millions.

Shrinking reservoirs could spark the next "day zero" water crisis, according to the developers of a satellite early warning system for the world's 500,000 dams, the Guardian reported on Thursday.

Cape Town grabbed headlines on "day zero". It launched a countdown to the day when taps would be cut off to millions of residents as a result of a three-year drought. Drastic conservation measures have forestalled that moment in South Africa.

However, dozens of other countries face similar risks from rising demand, mismanagement and climate change, said the World Resources Institute (WRI).

The US-based environmental organisation is working with Deltares, the Dutch government and other partners to build a water and security early warning system that aims to anticipate social instability, economic damage and cross-border migration.

A prototype is due to be rolled out later in 2018, but a snapshot was unveiled on Wednesday that highlighted four of the worst-affected dams and the potential knock-on risks.

Tensions have been apparent in India over the water allocations for two reservoirs connected by the Narmada river. Poor rains last year left the upstream Indira Sagar dam a third below its seasonal average.

When some of this shortfall was passed on to the downstream Sardar Sarovar reservoir, it caused an uproar because the latter is a drinking supply for 30 million people. Last month, the Gujarat government halted irrigation and appealed to farmers not to sow crops.

Spain has suffered a severe drought that has contributed to a 60 per cent shrinking of the surface area of the Buendia dam over the last five years, the Guardian report said.

All the dams are in the mid-latitudes, the geographic bands on either side of the tropics where climate change is expected to make droughts more frequent and protracted. As more reservoirs are scanned, the WRI expects more cases to emerge.

"These four could be a harbinger of things to come," said Charles Iceland of the WRI. "There are lots of potential Cape Towns in the making. Things will only get worse globally, as water demands increase and the effects of climate change begin to be felt."

Gennadii Donchyts, senior researcher for Deltares, said the reservoir-monitoring service will steadily grow in size as information is added from Nasa and European Space Agency satellites that provide resolutions of between 10 and 30 metres on a daily basis.

SOURCE

'Longest winter of my life': Edmonton breaks record with historic cold stretch

It’s the never-ending winter. Or at least it feels like that in Edmonton.

The city’s winter-weary residents may be forgiven for griping about the lingering chill this year after they broke their record for most consecutive days of temperatures at or below freezing.

On unlucky Friday, April 13, the temperatures dipped to a low of -2 C with a wind chill of -6 C, according to Environment Canada. It marked the 167th consecutive day of minimum temperatures at or below 0 C, which means Edmonton hasn’t seen an overnight temperature above the freezing mark since Oct. 29, nearly six months ago.

Edmontonians have endured 167 consecutive days with minimum temperatures at or below 0 C.

That’s according to weather historian Rolf Campbell who shared a chart on Twitter with historical data from the city’s coldest stretches. The previous record was set in 1974 to 1975 when Edmonton endured 166 consecutive days of temperatures at or below the freezing mark.

Resident Adam Morris wasn’t alive back then, so for him, this winter’s stubborn cold is unprecedented.

“This is the longest winter of my life,” he told CTV Edmonton on Friday.

Despite the weather, Morris attempted to get into the spring spirit by hitting some balls at the Victoria Driving Range in the city’s River Valley.

“It felt great getting out to swing some clubs,” he said.

Kevin Hogan, the head golf professional at the range, said the business chose Friday as its opening date two weeks ago.

“Bring toques and mitts and when you start hitting some balls you’ll warm up pretty quick,” he recommended.

Other residents tried to find spring indoors at a local garden centre filled with flowers.

“We came today to feel the life, to see all the flowers and spring’s on its way,” one visitor said.

Despite the optimism, it could be a while yet before seasonal temperatures return to Edmonton with Environment Canada predicting a continuation of chilly overnight lows for the coming week.

SOURCE

Famed US lawyer burns himself alive to protest global warming

Obviously a nut but it does show how Warmist screams of doom can be harmful for people with marginal psychological functioning

High-profile US gay rights lawyer and environmental advocate David Buckel, 60, has self-immolated in a public park in a grisly protest against humanity’s destruction of the planet.

His charred remains were found just after sunrise on Saturday (Sunday Australian time) in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York City.

Hours before his death, Mr Buckel emailed a copy of his suicide note to several media outlets. In it he urged the world’s residents to protect the planet, The New York Times reported.

“Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather,” he wrote. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result — my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”

Mr Buckel also insisted in the email he was in “good health to the final moment”.

In a handwritten note left near his body, Mr Buckel said his suicide was a “protest” and added: “I apologise to you for the mess.”

Mr Buckel was the lead attorney in a case involving Brandon Teena, a transgender man murdered in the US state of Nebraska. He won the lawsuit, resulting in a county sheriff being held liable for failing to protect Mr Teena. Hilary Swank won an Academy Award for her portrayal of the transgender man in the 1999 movie Boys Don’t Cry.

He was also the strategist behind same-sex marriage cases in New Jersey and Iowa, and helped set a precedent that US schools have a duty to prevent anti-gay bullying.

After his lengthy legal career, Mr Buckel became deeply involved in environmental causes.

In several online videos from 2014, he spoke passionately about techniques for turning garbage into compost in inner cities.

Camilla Taylor, acting legal director at Lambda Legal, Mr Buckel’s former employer, described him as a “brilliant legal visionary”.

“This is a tremendous loss for our Lambda Legal family, but also for the entire movement for social justice,” she said in a statement.

“David was an indefatigable attorney and advocate, and also a dedicated and loving friend to so many. He will be remembered for his kindness, devotion, and vision for justice.”

Mr Buckel wanted his death to lead to increased action, according to the suicide note.

SOURCE

Can The U.S. Break Russia’s Gas Monopoly In Europe?

In a statement that is sure to provoke Russian backlash, while also sending a strong message to both Moscow and European energy markets, Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Rick Perry said on Thursday before the Senate Armed Services committee that moving U.S. energy supplies into Eastern Europe is one of the more powerful ways to contain Russian influence.

He also agreed that Russian cyberattacks on the U.S. energy sector were "an act of war.” His comments come just a week after the U.S. Treasury Department revealed that so-called Russian government actors targeted "multiple U.S. critical infrastructure sectors, including the energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation, and critical manufacturing sectors" with cyberattacks at least since March 2016.

A report in UPI last week said that a ransomware cyberattack from the Petya or NotPetya bug targeted thousands of government and private corporate servers across the globe in 2017. The attack demanded a ransom paid in Bitcoin to release the encryption imposed by the virus that prevents users from accessing their devices. The U.S. Treasury claims the NotPetya attack was attributed to the Russian military.

"An energy policy where we can deliver energy to Eastern Europe, where we are a partner with people around the globe, where they know that we will supply them energy and there are no strings attached is one of the most powerful messages that we can send to Russia," Perry added in his remarks on Thursday.

Gas as a geopolitical weapon

The National Defense Authorization Act has said that U.S. efforts should promote energy security in Europe, stating Russia uses energy "as a weapon to coerce, intimidate and influence" countries in the region.
Related: What Trump’s Tariffs Mean For Global Oil And Gas

Perry’s comments also come as ties between Washington and Moscow reach post-Cold War lows over numerous issues ranging from Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, its continued involvement in the Ukraine, and Syria, and its purported nerve agent poisoning of what is being referred to as a Russian double agent and his daughter on British soil.

However, Perry’s message may not be as welcome as he would like in Europe. Though EU members, including an increasingly alarmed Germany, appear to be waking up to Russian influence and blatant geopolitical maneuvering, many in the EU are still equally as cautious over American motives to export its liquefied natural gas (LNG) to European markets.

Additionally, challenging Russia’s dominance in European gas markets is no small feat – even for the U.S. which by the end of the decade will have as many as five major LNG exports projects operational, thus becoming the third largest LNG exporter after Qatar and Australia.

Russia's gas exports to Europe rose 8.1 percent last year to a record level of 193.9 billion cubic metres (bcm), despite rising competition and concerns about the country’s dominance of supply, the London-based Financial Times recently reported.

The report added that Russian state-run gas giant Gazprom, the world’s largest natural gas producer, has a monopoly over Russia’s network of pipelines to Europe and supplies nearly 40 percent of Europe’s gas. However, Gazprom has been forced to lower its prices in recent years to protect its market share in the face of moves by EU member states to buy more gas from the U.S., Qatar and other producers.
Related: The Battle For China’s Growing Gas Demand

Additionally, Nordstream 2, Russia’s ambitious but controversial natural gas pipeline project, is set to be completed next year. This route will further secure Russia’s grip on European gas market share, and its accompanying geopolitical influence will be a hard task for the U.S. to dislodge.

Economic factors also come into play. As discussed last week, American LNG is at a cost disadvantage compared to Russian piped gas. Using a Henry Hub gas price of $2.85/MMBtu as a base, Gazprom recently estimated that adding processing and transportation costs, the price of U.S.-sourced LNG in Europe would reach $6/MMBtu or higher – a steep markup.

Henry Hub gas prices are currently trading at $2.657/MMBtu. Over the last 52-week period U.S. gas has traded between $2.602/MMBtu and $3.82/MMBtu. Russian gas sells for around $5/MMBtu in European markets and could even trade at lower prices in the future as Gazprom removes the commodity’s oil price indexation.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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15 April, 2018

Climate change is taking beaches away?

To prophecy that global warming will raise sea levels at some time in the future would be consistent with Warmist theory. But the article below says that we are ALREADY losing beaches due to climate change. Evidence? They offer none. They note that some South-East Asian beaches have been closed but admit that this is due to overuse and pollution by tourists. Their claim is completely empty propaganda and nothing more. Thailand's beach management is not a climate thing. And climate change is not a human activity thing

Climate change is taking beaches away from humans — in a physical way, as rising seas erode them, and in the way humans interact with them, as several governments have closed beaches to visitors to limit further damage.

Just this week, the Thai government announced that it was closing one of its most famous beaches for four months out of the year. Its rationale? To allow nearby coral reefs to recover from the effect of millions of visitors, which range from pollution to physical destruction from boats and human hands. And as the ocean grows warmer, stressed coral ecosystems like these recover more slowly from these intrusions.

Several other Southeast Asian islands have done the same, closing off beaches to allow their marine inhabitants to recover with some peace and quiet.

Thailand's Maya Bay, a white sand beach with turquoise water ringed by mountains. This is one of many beaches being closed thanks to climate change.

I know: this sucks. And that’s fair — many people think of beaches as a universal public right. But beaches are also bigger than you and your summer plans.

Organisms in, above, and next to the water dwell there, even if you don’t see (or eat) them. Without beaches, most of these animals would lose their homes, risking extinction.

If you live near the ocean, you can thank beaches for keeping your water drinkable and keeping your house where it is. Beaches and sand dune ecosystems are a vital barrier between the powerful seawater and shore-based ecosystems. They also stop salty ocean water from leaching into fresh groundwater.

Protective closures like the ones in Southeast Asia also mean tens of thousands of jobs could be lost, many in developing countries that rely on tourism to survive, as The Outline reports.

Southeast Asia may seem far away, but the problem is global, and happening faster than you might expect. Without human intervention, up to two thirds of beaches in Southern California will disappear from erosion within the next century, a 2017 U.S. Geologic Survey study found.

By 2100, sea levels may rise between 0.2 and 2 meters (0.66 to 6.6 feet), depending on how much the Earth warms. That could swallow the majority of beaches worldwide.

Banning beaches is disappointing for humans. But it might be worth giving up a chill place to sunbathe and sip out of coconuts to save an ecosystem.

SOURCE

70+ Papers: Holocene Sea Levels 2 Meters Higher – Today’s Sea Level Change Indistinguishable From Noise

More than 70 recent scientific publications show that there is absolutely nothing unusual about the magnitude and rapidity of today’s sea level changes. These academically peer-reviewed papers show that sea levels were on average 2 meters higher earlier in the Holocene than they are today.

Before the advent of the industrial revolution in the late 18th to early 19th centuries, carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations hovered between 260 to 280 parts per million (ppm).

Within the last century, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have risen dramatically. Just recently they eclipsed 400 ppm.

Scientists like Dr. James Hansen have concluded that pre-industrial CO2 levels were climatically ideal. Though less optimal, atmospheric CO2 concentrations up to 350 ppm have been characterized as climatically “safe”. However, CO2 concentrations above 350 ppm are thought to be dangerous to the Earth system. It is believed that such “high” concentrations could lead to rapid warming, glacier and ice sheet melt, and a harrowing sea level rise of 10 feet within 50 years.

To reach those catastrophic levels (10 feet within 50 years) predicted by proponents of sea level rise alarmism, the current “anthropogenic” change rate of +0.14 of a centimeter per year (since 1958) will need to immediately explode into +6.1 centimeters per year. The likelihood of this happening is remote, especially considering Greenland and Antarctica combined only contributed a grand total of 1.54 cm since 1958 (Frederiske et al., 2018).

Are Modern ‘Anthropogenic’ Sea Levels Rising At An Unprecedented Rate? No.

Despite the surge in CO2 concentrations since 1900, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded that global sea levels only rose by an average of 1.7 mm/yr during the entire 1901-2010 period, which is a rate of just 0.17 of a meter per century.

During the 1958 to 2014 period, when CO2 emissions rose dramatically, a recent analysis revealed that the rate of sea level rise slowed to between 1.3 mm/yr to 1.5 mm/yr, or just 0.14 of a meter per century.

Much more HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)

Easter Island Is Eroding – The New York Times

NICKNAMED “The Gray Lady“, The New York Times has long been regarded within the industry as a national “newspaper of record”.

IN March the paper launched a series called Warming Planet, Vanishing Heritage which examines “how climate change is erasing cultural identity around the world.” The series based on a UN “World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate“ report, designed to push the fashionable theme that your lifestyle is causing imminent danger to ancient monuments by dangerous sea-level rise and other climatic horrors.

Nicholas Casey, a New York Times correspondent based in Colombia, and Josh Haner, a Times photographer, traveled 2,200 miles to Easter Island in, I assume, a glider powered by trained albatrosses, to see how the “ocean is erasing the island’s monuments”.

BEING the “newspaper of record”, the rest of the sycophant mainstream media and activist affiliates followed suit and covered the story…

THE New York Times’ motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print”, appears in the upper left-hand corner of the front page. However, it seems the actual “science” related to Easter Islands rate of sea-level rise wasn’t “fit to print”!

NOT hard to see why…

NOAA has 40 years of SLR data from 1970-2010 showing an indistinguishable sea-level rise of 0.33 millimetres/year. Equivalent to a change of 1.32 inches in 100 years:

Sea Level Trends – Easter Island E, Chile – NOAA Tides & Currents

THE islands monuments and coastline may be suffering from that natural thing called ‘erosion’ which happens when waves pound a coastline over eons. But, a sea-level rise rate of 1.32 inches over 100 years cannot possibly be causing anything other than inconvenient data for the fake news media to omit at all costs.

ASTONISHING and ultimately deceptive that not a single reporter in any of these articles bothered to check this most basic determinant of the islands “imminent danger” to the oceans – the rate of sea level rise at Easter Island.

ANOTHER classic case of “Omission Bias”. The most insidious form of propaganda, in my opinion.

HOW many other stories on “climate change” are manipulated to give you only the side that fits the catastrophic man-made climate change narrative?

SADLY, the mainstream media has become a costly megaphone for the extreme eco-activist movement, further damaging the reputation of “science”. This example another classic reason why the climate-theory obsessed mainstream media cannot be trusted on anything climate change. Even if they did want to report the truth with actual “science” and real-world data, they would struggle, as too many jobs and reputations are now at stake.

WHO are the real science “deniers”?

SOURCE

Steyerville: New Website Blames Tom Steyer for Killing Towns of American Heartland

A new website aims to add “Steyerville” to the political lexicon as a term for once thriving communities that had their livelihoods stripped away thanks to efforts of environmentalist groups backed by liberal billionaire Tom Steyer.

The website, Steyerville.com, was launched on Thursday by Power the Future, a nonprofit dedicated to giving a voice to men and women working in the energy industry who it says are often drowned out by loud activist voices backed by Steyer’s billions.

It labels places such as Boone County in West Virginia, where unemployment has doubled and 10 percent of the population moved away in just six years, as the home of Steyervilles.

The story laid out by the group is that Boone County was thriving because of the coal industry, which in 2010 employed 3,894 of its residents.

Then came the Sierra Club, an environmentalist group backed by Steyer’s millions, which targeted the county’s coal mines with environmental lawsuits and pushed them toward bankruptcy.

Not only were coal jobs lost—by 2015 coal employment in the county was down from 3,894 to 1,492—but budget cuts were made because of lost revenue. In 2016, Boone County announced that three elementary schools were closing permanently and 60 teachers were being laid off. “What was once a thriving community became a Steyerville,” the site explains.

Daniel Turner, the group’s executive director, says the goal of the site is to hold Steyer accountable for what he is doing to these towns.

“We started Steyerville to demonstrate the danger the eco-left poses to rural communities,” Turner explained. “These were great small towns, but their industry was offensive to Steyer’s politics.”

“Steyer’s activism has consequences, and it’s visible in these towns,” Turner said. “Every shuttered store, every closed school, every multigenerational family that separates because mom and dad lost their job: This is all on his hands. We will make him own it.”

The group argues that it is easy for Steyer to ignore the impact his activism has on these communities because he will likely never visit them or even be able to locate them on a map. “It’s easy to show indifference to a community you’ve never met,” the site explains.

“Steyerville is not in the Hamptons, not in South Beach, not in Aspen. Steyerville is in states people don’t often visit, in locations that don’t attract the rich and powerful outside of campaign season. And because they are out of sight, they are out of mind.”

“We made Steyerville to put these communities—literally and figuratively—on the map,” it says. “The site is well researched and documented, and will continue to grow to highlight the damage Tom Steyer is doing to rural America.”

Steyerville currently highlights communities in West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, but it plans to expand the map.

“We are starting in these three states, but plan to expand nationwide,” Turner explained. “New York, New Mexico, Texas, Wyoming, Louisiana all have Steyervilles: towns where Steyer pays activists to prevent the energy industry from operating.”

Turner also said the group plans to geo-target areas Steyer visits with ads for the Steyerville site.

“As Steyer goes around the country to expand his political reach, we plan on running ads warning the locals: Don’t listen to him,” he said. “Looks at what he’s done to communities when he gets his way.”

Steyer has announced a series of events across the country as he pushes to make willingness to impeach President Donald Trump an issue in Democratic primaries.

SOURCE

Polar Bears And The Sleazy New York Times

SPOTLIGHT: Journalistic professionalism evaporates in front of our eyes.

BIG PICTURE: When historians document the demise of the mainstream media, an article published this week by the New York Times will make an excellent case study.

Titled “Climate Change Denialists Say Polar Bears Are Fine. Scientists Are Pushing Back,” it’s written by Erica Goode who isn’t just any journalist. She’s a former Environment Editor of the Times.

In 2009, she “founded and led a cluster of reporters dedicated to environmental reporting.” Currently, she’s a visiting professor at Syracuse University.

Out here in the real world, a debate exists about polar bears. Will they be adversely affected by climate change or will they continue to adapt as they have historically?

Since the future hasn’t yet arrived, it’s impossible to know whose opinions will turn out to be correct. But rather than presenting a range of perspectives to her readers, Goode takes sides.

Apparently clairvoyant, she knows that experts concerned about the long-term prospects of polar bears are correct. She knows that dissenting voices are wrong. No other possibility is conceivable within the confines of her exceedingly narrow mind.

She doesn’t tell us that researchers with significant academic records and decades of experience can be found on both sides of this question. Instead, in the first sentence of her article, Goode negates all possibility that a legitimate debate might be in progress.

Climate “denialists,” she declares, are “capitalizing” on the iconic status of polar bears “to spread doubts about the threat of global warming.”

Goode knows the dissenters are playing politics. She knows their motives are profane. With a wave of her hand, she thus relieves herself of the obligation to take seriously these alternative viewpoints.

People who think polar bears are currently doing well – a separate question from how they might fare in the future – are similarly labeled “climate denialists” by Goode in paragraph four.

Individuals on the other side of the fence, meanwhile, are portrayed as “real experts” and “mainstream scientists.”

Last November, a shocking paper was published online. It has now appeared in the print edition of the journal BioScience. Titled “Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate Change Denial by Proxy,” the PDF version fills five pages of text, followed by two pages of references. This is an assault by a gang of 14 authors on an individual scholar.

The target is Susan Crockford, a Canadian zoologist and adjunct professor with more than 35 years experience in her field. As the author of PolarBearScience.com, Crockford performs a public service.

She encourages us to look past activist spin and media hype. Not everything we’re told about polar bears, she says, rests on a solid foundation.

While it’s appropriate for these 14 people to challenge Crockford’s assertions, their tone is anything but scholarly. This is five pages of name-calling. PolarBearScience.com is labeled a “denier blog” at the outset.

So are online venues that cite Crockford’s work. The term ‘denial’ is used 9 times. ‘Denier’ 18 times. ‘Deniers’ 12 times.

The entire exercise is brazenly political. This paper sends a message to everyone else: think twice before departing from the polar bear party line. Our ugly gang of bullies will come looking for you next.

How does Goode present these events? Is 14 against one viewed as a tad unsporting? Does anyone in her article express astonishment that a naked political screed somehow got published in a peer-reviewed academic journal? Is free inquiry lauded? The importance of vigorous scientific debate championed?

I’m afraid not. She’s an extension of the gang, you see. Smugly certain that Crockford is a ‘climate denier,’ Goode considers this female scholar in a male-dominated field unworthy not only of a hearing but of empathy, as well.

According to Goode, the 14 are mere “scientists banding together against climate change denial.” She quotes Michael Oppenheimer: “Some climate scientists basically have had enough of being punching bags.” Voilà, the victim is transformed into an aggressor who deserves what she got.

Goode tells us Oppenheimer is “a professor of geoscience and international affairs” at Princeton. She fails to mention that he spent two decades cashing paycheques at the overtly activist Environmental Defense Fund. This man isn’t impartial. He has a flashing neon sign of an agenda.

In the world inhabited by Goode, polar bear dissenters are dismissed out-of-hand because she knows they’re politically motivated. But orchestrated political behavior by a gang of 14 is OK. And scientists affiliated with organizations that lobby for political change aren’t reliable commentators.

Rather than inform its readers in a fair-handed manner, the Times this week became a mouthpiece for one side in a scientific debate. Erica Goode chose to be the prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner in the case of Susan Crockford.

She sided not with the brave dissident, but with the numerous and the powerful. Crockford wasn’t merely assaulted in BioScience, her assault was justified and amplified in the pages of the Times. By another woman.

TOP TAKEAWAY: Environmental reporting at the New York Times is a disgrace.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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13 April, 2018

Hypocritical pipeline horror in Massachusetts

To build the new $27 billion gas export plant on the Arctic Ocean that now keeps the lights on in Massachusetts, Russian firms bored wells into fragile permafrost; blasted a new international airport into a pristine landscape of reindeer, polar bears, and walrus; dredged the spawning grounds of the endangered Siberian sturgeon in the Gulf of Ob to accommodate large ships; and commissioned a fleet of 1,000-foot icebreaking tankers likely to kill seals and disrupt whale habitat as they shuttle cargoes of super-cooled gas bound for Asia, Europe, and Everett.

On the plus side, though, they didn’t offend Pittsfield or Winthrop, Danvers or Groton, with even an inch of pipeline.

This winter’s unprecedented imports of Russian liquefied natural gas have already come under fire from Greater Boston’s Ukrainian-American community, because the majority shareholder of the firm that extracted the fuel has been sanctioned by the US government for its links to the war in eastern Ukraine and Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. Last week, in response to the outcry, a group of Massachusetts lawmakers, led by Senator Ed Markey, blasted the shipments and called on the federal government to stop them.

But apart from its geopolitical impact, Massachusetts’ reliance on imported gas from one of the world’s most threatened places is also a severe indictment of the state’s inward-looking environmental and climate policies. Public officials, including Attorney General Maura Healey and leading state senators, have leaned heavily on righteous-sounding stands against local fossil fuel projects, with scant consideration of the global impacts of their actions and a tacit expectation that some other country will build the infrastructure that we’re too good for.

As a result, to a greater extent than anywhere else in the United States, the Commonwealth now expects people in places like Russia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Yemen to shoulder the environmental burdens of providing natural gas that state policy makers have showily rejected here. The old environmentalist slogan — think globally and act locally — has been turned inside out in Massachusetts.

But more than just traditional NIMBYism is at work in the state’s resistance to natural gas infrastructure. There’s also the $1 million the parent company of the Everett terminal spent lobbying Beacon Hill from 2013 to 2017, amid a push to keep out the domestic competition that’s ended LNG imports in most of the rest of the United States.

And there’s a trendy, but scientifically unfounded, national fixation on pipelines that state policy makers have chosen to accommodate. Climate advocates, understandably frustrated by slow progress at the federal level, have put short-term tactical victories against fossil fuel infrastructure ahead of strategic progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and so has Beacon Hill. They’ve obsessed over stopping domestic pipelines, no matter where those pipes go, what they carry, what fuels they displace, and how the ripple effects of those decisions may raise overall global greenhouse gas emissions.

The environmental movement needs a reset, and so does Massachusetts policy. The real-world result of pipeline absolutism in Massachusetts this winter has been to steer energy customers to dirtier fuels like coal and oil, increasing greenhouse gas emissions. And the state is now in the indefensible position of blocking infrastructure here, while its public policies create demand for overseas fossil fuel infrastructure like the Yamal LNG plant — a project likely to inflict far greater near and long-term harm to the planet.

Though more powerful vessels and melting ice have enabled more human activity in the Arctic, the area around Yamal, an indigenous name meaning “edge of the world,” remains a refuge. An estimated 2,700 to 3,500 polar bears live in the Kara Sea region, along with the ring seals that form a crucial part of their diet.

Opening a gas export facility in such a harsh environment required overcoming both political obstacles — the US sanctions delayed financing — and staggering triumphs of industrial engineering by a workforce that reportedly reached 15,000 people. Dredgers scooped away 1.4 billion cubic feet of seabed to make room for the ships and built a giant LNG facility on supports driven into the permafrost, all in temperatures that can plunge to less than minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

The oil and gas industry poses serious threats, especially in an area like the Arctic that recovers slowly from damage, and in 2016 the Russian branch of the World Wildlife Fund issued a report warning of Yamal LNG’s potential dangers. White toothed whales, a near-threatened species, breed in the vicinity of the facility, and the noise from shipping and the presence of more giant vessels “may force toothed whales to leave this habitat, which is crucial for their living, feeding, and reproduction.”

The giant “Yamalmax” icebreaking tankers, longer than three football fields and designed to mow through ice up to six feet deep, are also “extremely bad news for any ice-associated mammals that should be in the vicinity of their path,” said Sue Wilson, who leads an international research group based at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. The group has recently published a paper in the journal Biological Conservation on the impact of icebreakers on seal mothers and pups in the Caspian Sea and is currently studying shipping impacts in the Arctic.

“The captain is unlikely to notice — or even be able to see — seals in the vessel’s path ahead,” she said. “Even if the captain does notice, the fact that the ship is designed to proceed at a steady pace means that it is unlikely to attempt to stop for seals or maneuver around them, even if the ship can be slowed or stopped in time.”

Advocates also worry that increased Arctic production and shipping will hurt indigenous people; sever reindeer migration routes ; import invasive species to an environment ill-equipped to deal with them; and introduce the very remote, but potentially cataclysmic, danger of an LNG explosion.

Finally, the gas pumped there will contribute to global climate change. In some parts of the world, especially China, LNG may provide climate benefits by displacing dirtier coal. If LNG displaces gas carried by pipeline, however, the math works out differently: Liquefied natural gas generally creates more emissions, since the process of cooling it to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit and then shipping and regasifying it requires more energy than pumping natural gas through all but the longest and leakiest pipelines.

“The bottom line is that because of the nature of the liquefaction process, LNG is fairly carbon intensive,” said Gavin Law, the head of gas, LNG, and carbon consulting for the energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie. The exact difference depends on factors like how much pipelines leak, carbon impurities in the gas, age of equipment, and distance shipped, but generally LNG produces 5 to 10 percent more emissions over its whole life cycle from start to finish, he said.

From a planetary perspective, it doesn’t matter where those emissions occur: Whether from the plant in Yamal, or the power plant in Everett, they have the same impact. The science should make the state’s decisions straightforward.

“Natural gas has shown itself to be an important bridge to a clean energy future,” said Ernest J. Moniz, the former secretary of energy in the Obama administration. “For New England, expanding the pipeline capacity from the Marcellus” — the area of shale gas production in Pennsylvania — “makes the most sense.”

“Life cycle emissions for LNG imports to Boston certainly are higher than they would be for more Marcellus gas,” he said.

But the upstream emissions typically don’t show up on the books of states like Massachusetts, which judge the success of their climate efforts based only on how much greenhouse gas they emit within their own borders.

That’s an accounting fiction. But it’s a convenient one for lawmakers who’ve bowed to pressure to legislate based on what’s visible inside the Commonwealth’s own borders.

FROM MASHPEE TO SPRINGFIELD, Taunton to Sudbury, the message was clear: To fight climate change, the state shouldn’t allow more fossil fuel pipelines or other infrastructure in Massachusetts.

That’s what state senators Marc Pacheco and Jamie Eldridge, the heads of the state Senate’s Committee on Global Warming and Climate Change, heard when they conducted a listening tour of the state — whose results they released on the same day the Russian gas was unloading in Everett — to help prepare a new energy bill.

The resulting legislation was introduced this Monday. It contained many fine ideas, including boosting the state’s renewable energy requirements. But it also would raise obstacles to pipelines that would lock in the state’s reliance on foreign gas, with its higher carbon footprint.

In an interview, Pacheco said “Obviously any fossil fuel investments are problematic,” no matter where they occur, but that “we have no control over what happens in Russia or anywhere else in the world.” Eldridge said, “I think this bill takes a big step to preventing pipelines,” and also expressed concern about the LNG the state imports instead. “I think activists need to think about where a large amount of this gas is coming from, and that could be something the Legislature could take a look at” in the future, he said.

Theirs isn’t the first analysis to miss the larger picture.

In 2015, the Conservation Law Foundation, a prominent environmental advocacy group in Boston, released a report dismissing the need for new pipeline capacity in New England, and called on the region to rely on a “winter-only LNG ‘pipeline,’ ” including imported gas, to meet its winter energy needs instead.

After the first shipload of Russian gas arrived, David Ismay, a lawyer with the group, stood by the recommendation and shrugged off the purchase of Russian gas from the Arctic as simply the nature of buying on the worldwide market. “I think it’s important to understand that LNG is a globally traded commodity,” he said in an interview with the Globe.

The foundation, he said, hadn’t compared the overall greenhouse gas emissions from LNG to pipeline gas from the Marcellus to determine which was worse for the climate, nor had it factored the impact on the Arctic of gas production into its policy recommendations.

But a state policy that doesn’t ask any questions about its fuel until the day the tanker floats into the Harbor abdicates the state’s responsibility to own up to all consequences of its energy use — and mitigate the ones that it can.

SOURCE

German research on health effects of windmills

The wind energy euphoria is still continuing in politics and industry, but local residents find this energy generation highly controversial.

Landscaping is one aspect, but also the harmfulness of inaudible infrasound. And here there is more and more support from research. For example, a working group of the Department of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery of Unimedicine caused a stir at the congress of the professional society with their research on the impairment of the heart muscle by infrasound. We spoke with the initiator of the work, HTG Director Professor Christian-Friedrich Vahl.

Professor Vahl, how did you come up to this topic?

A friend of mine, the artist Cyrus Overbeck, had a house in Ostfriesland near a large wind farm. And he increasingly complained of difficulty concentrating and sleeping – symptoms that are described all over the world in the vicinity of wind turbines.

And the connection between sound and heart disease?

The impact of audible sound is indeed being researched by the working group around Professor Münzel in an exemplary way. I myself examined the effects of high-frequency vibrations on the development of muscle strength in physiology Hamburg. The assumption that even inaudible sound, ie infrasound, has an effect on vessels is not new either.

What kind are these effects?

When the aortic valve, which regulates the flow of blood from the heart to the body, is calcified and constricted, the bloodstream and thus the flow noise changes. For example, it is being discussed whether this altered sound is involved in the formation of dangerous sagging after constrictions.

What is infrasound and how does it work?

The audible sound ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hertz, below 20 Hz it is no longer audible, but it is physically perceptible at high sound pressure – possibly with corresponding consequences. Wind turbines convert 40 percent into energy and 60 percent into infrasound.

But there is noise protection …

Infrasound has a long range and is not dampened by windows or masonry. It would take 30 meters high and eight meters thick walls to protect against the usual infrasonic frequencies. And with ever-increasing wind turbines of up to 200 meters and rising power, naturally, the infrasound load will be higher.

What question did you ask yourself about infrasound?

We simply wanted to know qualitatively whether the direct application of infrasound to the heart muscle tissue has an effect on the development of strength.

And how was that measured?

To test whether infrasound has a direct effect on force development, we’ve connected a speaker to a heart muscle piece. The loudspeaker is a special industrial vibrator that transmits the smallest monophosphere vibrations in the infrasound range to the specimen. But also the preparation itself was prepared.

In what way?

We have used an established but complicated technique to eliminate all membrane-bound processes and measure them only on the isolated contractile apparatus. This ensures the contraction of the heart muscle.

How big can you imagine the preparation?

It is about three millimeters long, 0.2 millimeters wide and is fixed between speaker and force gauge. The preparation was activated, then the loudspeaker was switched on.

And what effect did the infrasound have?

At the given time it is safe to say that infrasound under the conditions of measurement reduces the force developed by isolated heart muscle, under certain conditions up to 20 percent is lost. The fundamental question of whether the infrasound can affect the heart muscle is answered.

What’s next?

The next step, of course, are measurements on the living specimen.

What conclusion do you draw from the previous results?

We are at the very beginning, but we can imagine that long-term impact of infrasound causes health problems. The silent noise of infrasound acts like a jammer for the heart.

SOURCE

Green Brexit unlikely despite British government claims, report concludes

Environmental standards are at risk across the board, from wildlife and habitats to water and air quality, a risk assessment shows

Government promises of a green Brexit have been cast into doubt by a new study that warns of declining protections for water, birds and habitats once Britain leaves the European Union.

The risk assessment – commissioned by Friends of the Earth – found standards are likely to weaken in every sector of environment policy, from chemicals and food safety to air pollution and climate, though the extent of deterioration will depend on the departure deal.

The environment secretary, Michael Gove – a fervent Brexiter – insists the UK will be a global “champion” of green policies after the split on 29 March 2019, but many fear a bonfire of regulations that would result in lower government spending on air and water quality, allowing businesses to cut corners. To avoid a race to the bottom, the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, has insisted on a “non-regression” clause in any future trade deal, tying the UK to the bloc’s high standards after Brexit.

The new study underscores the need for caution. Academics from Sheffield University, Queen’s University Belfast and the University of East Anglia assessed the post-Brexit risk of governance gaps, coordination problems between Westminster and devolved nations (Scotland, Wales and North Ireland) and the differing levels of protection between strong EU regulations and weaker international commitments by the UK.

The researchers considered 15 environment policies under five different scenarios, ranging from a Norwegian-style arrangement that would keep the UK close to the EU, to a chaotic no-deal scenario that would mark a total separation.

In every case, they predicted a “very high risk” to birds and habitats. Current EU rules – notably Natura 2000 and the habitats directive – oblige member states to set aside conservation areas for wild species. Before these directives, protected sites in the UK were being lost at a rate of 15% a year, but this declined to just 1% a year afterwards, according to the RSPB. Current farming minister George Eustice, however, has . The authors of the risk assessment also cite comments by Gove and foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, calling for the directives to be reformed, rescinded or weakened.

Water standards are also threatened. In compliance with EU rules, many UK rivers have recovered, serious pollution spills have gone down and natural bathing areas are cleaner. But in all but the Norwegian scenario, the study considers there to be a “high risk” to the water framework and regulations on urban wastewater and groundwater after Brexit. Even if these and other EU rules are kept on the UK statute book, the researchers say they would be “zombified” unless a mechanism is put in place to keep them in force.

Similar worries about policy gaps are evident in every other area including waste disposal, nitrates, fisheries and agriculture. The report says it is not enough to fall back on international environment commitments, which are mostly far laxer than EU standards.

The government claims its recently announced 25-year plan for the environment gives Britain some of the most progressive policies in the world, but the study’s authors say it replaces concrete regulations with vague aspirations.

“The 25-year plan was depressing and concerning,” said Prof Charlotte Burns at Sheffield University. “If the government is not tied down to strict standards, we will see waning investment in the environment and less capacity for NGOs to challenge what they do in the courts.”

She said there was still time for Brexit to produce some positive changes – particularly on fisheries and agricultural policy – but that current policies and ministerial statements gave far more cause for concern than optimism.

Friends of the Earth and other conservation groups have called on the UK government to establish a new environment watchdog, though this has yet to materialise. Campaigners also support calls for a non-regression clause.

“We were promised that Brexit wouldn’t harm our environment – but this analysis shows that under all scenarios currently on the table, this promise will be broken,” said Kierra Box of Friends of the Earth. “We hope this report will spur parliament to make much needed changes to the withdrawal bill currently in the process of going through parliament, to lock in guarantees for our environment that the report authors have found lacking so far.”

SOURCE

Alarmists Resurrect ‘Day After Tomorrow’ Scenario For Global Warming

Scientists relied on climate models, not direct measurements, to claim in a new study man-made global warming caused a slowdown in the Gulf Stream ocean current.

It’s the very same scenario posed in disaster movie “The Day After Tomorrow,” where a slowdown in the Gulf Stream turned North America into a frozen wasteland. A catastrophic scenario could be decades away, some scientists are saying.

“We know somewhere out there is a tipping point where this current system is likely to break down,” Potsdam Institute climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf, a co-author of one of the studies, said in a statement.

“We still don’t know how far away or close to this tipping point we might be,” Rahmstorf warned. “This is uncharted territory.”

Rahmstorf’s study was one of two that garnered alarming media headlines, but experts are skeptical because of the scant observational evidence. Indeed, scientists have only been taking direct measurements of the Gulf Stream for a little over a decade.

“Climate model reconstructions are not the same as observed data or evidence,” libertarian Cato Institute’s Dr. and Atmospheric Scientist Ryan Maue told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“We should be very wary of grandiose claims of ‘A Day After Tomorrow’ based upon very limited direct measurements,” Maue said.

The Gulf Stream, or Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), brings warm water from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Atlantic, and in turn, cold northern water is brought southward.

Polar ice melt and enhanced rainfall put an increasing amount of cold, fresh water into the North Atlantic, reducing salinity, some scientists say. Less saline has a harder time sinking, throwing off the AMOC.

Climate models generally show a weaker AMOC as a result of warming, but observational evidence has been scant. Anomalous cooling south of Greenland is evidence of a weakened AMOC, some scientists say.

The weak AMOC is explicitly tied to “increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations” and “temperature trends observed since the late nineteenth century,” according to the study, Rahmstorf co-authored.

However, the “Labrador Sea deep convection and the AMOC have been anomalously weak over the past 150 years or so … compared with the preceding 1,500 years,” a second study published in the same journal found.

In other words, the AMOC began weakening before human activities could play a role.

“The specific trend pattern we found in measurements looks exactly like what is predicted by computer simulations as a result of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream System, and I see no other plausible explanation for it,” Rahmstorf, whose study relied on proxy-data from ocean sediment and calcareous shells, said.

But again, there’s limited observational evidence. Several scientists besides Maue were skeptical of Rahmstorf’s study.

Rahmstorf’s “assertions of weakening are conceivable but unsupported by any data,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Carl Wunsch told The Associated Press.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Kevin Trenberth “said his recent work faults regular cycles in the atmosphere more than the ocean” and the “study doesn’t explain year to year variability, while atmospheric cycles do,” the AP reported.

“Essentially, what view you take of the results depends on how good you believe the models used are and likewise how well the chosen proxies represent the AMOC over the time scales of interest,” National Oceanography Center oceanographer Meric Srokosz told The Washington Post.

SOURCE

New use for Australia's abundant brown coal

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has unveiled a $50 million pilot project to convert Victoria's brown coal into hydrogen for export to Japan.

Australian Associated PressAPRIL 12, 201812:14PM
Victoria's brown coal will be converted into hydrogen and exported to Japan, under a major project unveiled by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

The Commonwealth will pledge $50 million towards the hydrogen energy supply chain pilot in Victoria's La Trobe Valley, Mr Turnbull said during a visit to the region on Thursday.

The multi-billion dollar project will produce liquefied hydrogen from brown coal in the Latrobe Valley for export to Japan.

Construction is expected to start from 2019, with the Victorian government also pledging $50 million.

"It is amazing to think that brown coal here in Victoria will be keeping the lights on in Japan," Mr Turnbull told reporters.

"Our strategic support for this fuel of the future, hydrogen, opens up new possibilities for innovation and energy.

"It will see brown coal from here in the Latrobe Valley converted to hydrogen, liquefied, and then exported to Japan."

The project will create 400 local jobs for Latrobe Valley workers.

Mr Turnbull said it is in line with government efforts to invest in energy sources of the future and meet emission reduction commitments.

"We are focused on creating the investment environment to drive projects like this one to create new industries and more jobs," he said.

"It is the technological brilliance, the investment confidence, the optimism of Australians and Japanese working together that will ensure there is a very ancient resource brown coal produces one of the critically important fuels of the future."

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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12 April, 2018

Nonsense in a leading medical journal

The article below, by Frumkin & Patz, appeared in the latest issue of JAMA. the authors seem to be in more Greenie organizations than you can poke a stick at so a low intellectual level has to be expected in their writings. And that expection is fulfilled. They regurgitate some common Warmist talking points but overlook a lot of basics.

Their mention of methane is for instance naive. Methane does intercept certain wavelengths of solar radiation in the laboratory but in the actual atmosphere the much more abundant water vapor absorbs the same wavelengths (among others), leaving little or nothing for methane to affect. So, even accepting global warming theory in full, it is clear that adding methane to the atmosphere can have no effect on warming

And their claim that warming is dangerous to your health is a deliberate lie. Medical men of all people should know that winter is the season for dying, not summer. So it follows that warming is actually GOOD for your health overall.

And they end up by showing what extremists they are. They want all fossil fuels to be left in the grounds henceforth.

Why these brainless fanatics were given a platform in a respected medical journal rather escapes me.

SOURCE

The Conquest of Climate

How bad will climate change be? Not very.

No, this isn’t a denialist screed. Human greenhouse emissions will warm the planet, raise the seas and derange the weather, and the resulting heat, flood and drought will be cataclysmic.

Cataclysmic—but not apocalyptic. While the climate upheaval will be large, the consequences for human well-being will be small. Looked at in the broader context of economic development, climate change will barely slow our progress in the effort to raise living standards.

To see why, consider a 2016 Newsweek headline that announced “Climate change could cause half a million deaths in 2050 due to reduced food availability.” The story described a Lancet study, “Global and regional health effects of future food production under climate change,” [1] that made dire forecasts: by 2050 the effects of climate change on agriculture will shrink the amount of food people eat, especially fruits and vegetables, enough to cause 529,000 deaths each year from malnutrition and related diseases. The report added grim specifics to the familiar picture of a world made hot, hungry, and barren by the coming greenhouse apocalypse.

But buried beneath the gloomy headlines was a curious detail: the study also predicts that in 2050 the world will be better fed than ever before. The “reduced food availability” is only relative to a 2050 baseline when food will be more abundant than now thanks to advances in agricultural productivity that will dwarf the effects of climate change. Those advances on their own will raise per-capita food availability to 3,107 kilocalories per day; climate change could shave that to 3,008 kilocalories, but that’s still substantially higher than the benchmarked 2010 level of 2,817 kilocalories—and for a much larger global population. Per-capita fruit and vegetable consumption, the study estimated, will rise by 6.1 percent and meat consumption by 5.4 percent. The poorest countries will benefit most, with food availability rising 14 percent in Africa and Southeast Asia. Even after subtracting the 529,000 lives theoretically lost to climate change, the study estimates that improved diets will save a net 1,348,000 lives per year in 2050.

A headline like “Despite climate change, rising food production will save millions of lives” isn’t great click-bait, but it would give a truer picture of a future under global warming as envisioned in the Lancet study. That picture is typical of the scientific literature on the impacts of climate change on human welfare. Global warming won’t wipe us out or even stall our progress, it will just marginally slow ordinary economic development that will still outpace the negative effects of warming and make life steadily better in the future, under every climate scenario. What the doomsday prognostications of drought and flood, heat-stroke and famine, migration and war miss is that climate change is not the only thing going on in the world, or even the most important thing.

It’s not even a new thing. Throughout history humans not only weathered climate crises but deliberately flung ourselves into them as we migrated away from our African homeland into deserts, mountains, floodplains and taiga. Global warming pales beside the climatic challenge surmounted by the Inuit when they settled the Arctic with igloos and kayaks, revolutionary technologies that improved their ability to travel and hunt. Theirs is just one example of the human capacity for finding better ways to get food, shelter, energy and resources from the hostile environments we embrace. “Adaptation” is not quite the right word for that process, which is so ubiquitous—and so fundamental to progress—that it is the essence of development.

This latest episode in humanity’s ongoing conquest of extreme climates will likewise amount to just another problem in economic and technological development, and a middling-scale one at that. Although clean energy will play a significant role by slowing and perhaps moderating global warming (as well as reducing pollution and easing resource constraints), contrary to the decarbonize-or-die doomsayers our main response to climate change will be other kinds of development that make climate change irrelevant. We will grow more food, harness more water, cool ourselves more vigorously, move to new lands and build—and-rebuild—new cities. We will exploit technological breakthroughs, but mostly we will improve familiar technologies and deploy them more widely. We will do all this not because of global warming but because of more pressing challenges like population growth and the demand for higher living standards. The means by which we will overcome specific problems posed by climate change look less like the pristine “sustainable development” envisioned by greens and more like the ordinary development that has always sustained us.

The conquest of drought

Environmentalists cite the 2006-10 drought in Syria, often credited with sparking the civil war there, as an omen of the crises climate change will bring. [2] But the drought also hit Israel, and the effect there was altogether different. Shortages forced Israel to tighten its already stringent water conservation and recycling standards. More importantly, they prompted breakthroughs in reverse-osmosis desalination technology, cutting by half the energy needed to extract fresh water from the sea and dramatically lowering the cost to just 58 cents per cubic meter (1,000 liters) of drinkable water. [3] As a result, Israel’s water situation U-turned from worsening scarcity to sufficiency. The arid country now desalinates 600 million cubic meters of water annually, easing the pressure on natural freshwater sources like the Sea of Galilee. More desal plants are being built. By 2020 Israel will get at least 40 percent of its water, including irrigation water, from desalination. [4]

The implications of cheap desalination are profound. By tapping limitless sea-water resources it could drought-proof agriculture and thus eliminate the greatest threat posed by climate change. The recent mega-drought in California prompted much climate alarmism, but at the low prices achieved in Israel the state could generate its entire annual water consumption of 40 million acre-feet from desal plants for $30 billion a year, just 1.2 percent of the state’s GDP. [5] It won’t come to that: freshwater sources will never completely dry up and desal at $715 per acre-foot would still be several times more expensive than natural water in California (though not during droughts, when auction prices for irrigation water can spike as high as $2,200 per acre-foot). [6] Still, if Californians had to rely on desal they could do it without breaking a sweat. Contrary to the Blade Runner franchise, Californians in 2049 will live off of well-watered produce fields, not desiccated grub farms.

The world’s driest regions will increasingly rely on desalinated water for drinking and farming, but less splashy technologies will dominate water supply. Efficiency measures like drip irrigation (invented in Israel) and recycling (86 percent of the water Israeli households use gets recycled for irrigation) [7] will stretch existing water sources much further. Efficiency has already let the developed world turn the corner on water consumption: America’s total water withdrawals in 2015 were 13 percent below the 1980 peak, for a much larger population and economy. [8]

Simply moving water where it’s needed will continue as the mainstay of water management. Here California is the leader. The California Aqueduct, running 400 miles up and down mountain ranges to take water from the wetter north to the drier south, is just part of a colossal irrigation system that has made the state’s arid landscape an agricultural powerhouse. Since ancient Sumeria’s hey-day water infrastructure has been humanity’s most important development strategy and climate technology; we will continue to expand it, on continental scales, to even out erratic rainfall and conjure fertile fields from bone-dry weather.

The examples of Israel and California show that developed countries will never face serious water shortages in a warming climate. Spreading water security to the rest of the world will thus depend not on decarbonization but on development of a very basic kind: dams, canals and pipelines; sewage treatment and recycling plants; low-flow shower heads and irrigation sprinklers; a backstop of desalination plants. Investments in these technologies and infrastructures, new and old, will resolve problems of drought and aridity that have bedeviled us since civilization began—and eliminate the worst risk of climate change in passing.

The conquest of hunger

Steadily improving water supplies will shore up our food supply, but other advances—from genetically modified seeds to innovative tilling to better storage facilities—will have a huge impact too, ensuring that farm productivity soars on a warmer planet.

Warming by itself will likely have only modest effects on farm productivity, according to projections from the International Panel on Climate Change. [9] The IPCC assessed changes in the yields of the major grain crops under warming of up to 5 degrees Celsius—a worst-case scenario, far beyond the 2-degree threshold of doom cited by policy-makers—and the results are decidedly un-alarming. In temperate regions climate change would cause yields of corn and wheat to decline by about 10 percent and rice yields by 15 percent. However, all these declines could be reversed by adaptations like earlier planting dates: with adaptation temperate-zone corn and rice yields would not decline at all and wheat yields would rise 9 percent. Tropical areas could see corn yields decline about 15 percent and rice yields 7 percent, but with adaptation tropical rice yields would instead rise 12 percent. Tropical-zone wheat yields would suffer a serious decline of over 30 percent even with adaptation, but farmers don’t grow much wheat in the tropics so the effect on global supply would be small.

These limited and mostly reversible effects of climate change barely register beside the real challenge facing agriculture—the steeply rising demand for food. By 2050 an extra 2 billion mouths to feed and meat-heavier diets will make global food consumption swell by 50 to 100 percent over the 2006 level. [10] Compared to population growth, richer diets and the imperative to reduce hunger in impoverished nations, global warming will be a minor burden; decarbonizing the energy supply would thus do little to reduce the stress on food supplies. Some decarbonization measures, like the diversion of food crops to produce low-carbon biofuels, will actually worsen the food crisis. One study estimates that by 2050 biofuel production will consume up to 363 million tons of crops, the equivalent of 14 percent of 2017’s global cereal-grain harvest. [11] If we simply drop biofuels from clean-energy policy, that alone would erase most of the projected food deficit caused by climate change.

Meanwhile, countervailing developments that increase yields will outrun the effects of climate change and dramatically raise farm output. They’re already working; in the past ten years the global grain harvest grew 23 percent, half again as much as the 15 percent growth in population. [12] Productivity will keep rising. A recent report from the International Food Policy Research Institute spotlighted a range of innovations that will boost yields: better weed treatments can raise corn, rice and wheat yields by 6 to 12 percent; heat-tolerant crop varieties can raise corn yields by 31 to 37 percent and wheat yields by 16 to 28 percent; no-till cultivation can raise corn yields 20 to 67 percent and wheat yields 19 to 57 percent. [13] Advanced technologies like genetically engineered seeds will play a role, but basic inputs will be more important: a recent study in Nature estimated that simply using more irrigation and fertilizer could raise yields 45 to 70 percent. [14]

Developing countries will see the greatest productivity gains—Africa could more than double its grain harvest by bringing yields up to the current global average [15]—but Western agribusiness will continue to improve as well. Comparing three-year averages in the U. S. in 2014-2016 with the 2004-2006 period, corn yields grew 12 percent over the decade, wheat yields 13 percent and soybean yields 15 percent. [16] There’s still plenty of room for improvement by adopting best practices: winners of the 2016 National Wheat Yield Contest beat their counties’ average yields by anywhere from 37 to 377 percent. [17] Farmers will also expand production by cultivating new land in vast northern regions where warming will improve the climate. In Canada rising temperatures could boost corn yields 60 percent and wheat yields 70 percent. [18]

We will also get more food by not wasting it. The world currently wastes about one third of the food it produces. [19] In developed countries much of it is rejected by finicky retailers and shoppers or left to molder in the fridge, but in poor countries it is mostly lost in pre-marketing stages—rotting in fields or spoiling after harvest before it reaches market. Africa could recover about 11 percent of its food supply by reducing losses in production, storage and distribution to European levels. The technology is banal: machinery that can harvest fields quickly when destructive weather threatens; plastic bags and metal silos to keep insects out of grain; roads and trucks to take produce quickly to market, plastic crates to keep it from getting crushed en route, refrigerated warehouses to keep it fresh and canneries to preserve it. [20]

Global warming won’t crimp the world’s food supply much and decarbonization won’t safeguard it. Preserving and expanding the food supply to meet rising demand will rely on hum-drum investment in growing and processing food—doing what we do now, only more and better. Unfortunately, misplaced environmental priorities may undermine that program by demonizing important technologies like GMOs and championing organic farming and other low-input, low-yield models as replacements for industrial agriculture. To feed the world we will have to question that vision of sustainability.

The conquest of heat

The most lurid climate change scenario is the wet-bulb apocalypse: the combination of rising temperatures with humidity so saturating that sweat cannot evaporate from the skin to cool the body. In a recent climate jeremiad in New York Magazine David Wallace-Wells claims that global warming will make such steam-bath weather so commonplace that outdoor work would become impossible in many places. Eventually, he warns, “more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat.” [21]

But contrary to Wallace-Wells’s panic, extreme heat is becoming quite livable thanks to another banal technology: air conditioning. Just as people in the past used fire and clothing to settle in lethally cold climates, today we are using cheap cooling technology to expand into lethally hot climates with no harm to our health. Thanks to air conditioning the Florida-to-Nevada swelter-belt has seen a population boom—disproportionately of heat-vulnerable retirees—at the same time as annual heat-related deaths in the U. S. have plunged 80 percent. [22] Mechanical cooling made the furnace-city of Dubai, where average high temperatures top 100 degrees Fahrenheit six months a year, into an international business hub as its population exploded from 40,000 to 2.5 million. [23]

Mass cooling is gathering steam in developing countries, where air conditioners are now one of the first electric appliances people buy. Urban Chinese have installed 200 million room air conditioners in the last 15 years, and there is now one air conditioner for every Chinese home. [24] A recent study estimated that the world will install another 700 million new AC units by 2030, and a further 900 million between 2030 and 2050. [25] Soon the world will consider an air-conditioned home to be as rudimentary an aspect of human comfort as a warm hearth on a cold night.

In time the cooling bubble will become portable enough for heavy outdoor labor. American farmers already work their fields in the comfort of air-conditioned combine cabs; less mechanized farms could set up battery-powered tents with AC and cold water to cool over-heated laborers. Qatar is experimenting with solar-powered hats that waft cool air over construction workers. [26] The ultimate response to unhealthy working temperatures may be to automate outdoor work. Farm robots can already pick apples and strawberries, thin lettuce seedlings, milk cows and grow barley from plowing through harvest. [27] The idea that we have to moderate the climate to make manual field labor more bearable gets development priorities backwards; the worse failure will be if, a hundred years from now, humans still do that back-breaking work.

For billions of people life is already too hot, so the artificial cooling of humanity will proceed regardless of climate change or decarbonization goals. A key part of that will be supplying electricity to run (and build) air conditioners; India’s soaring AC demand will necessitate some 300 new power plants over the next two decades. [28] Here too there’s a tension between necessary development and green sustainability doctrine, with its emphasis on reducing energy use and relying on intermittent wind and solar generators. Cooling requires a lot of electricity that is reliably available when demand is greatest; given the limitations of wind and solar, much of that electricity will have to come from new nuclear and, for now, fossil-fueled plants. High-quality power will take precedence over intermittent energy austerity as a strategy for beating the heat.

Rising seas

Sea-level rise is the most unsettling aspect of global warming. Major coastal areas and many large cities will be inundated; some of that is already baked into current carbon dioxide levels, with the only question being how many centuries it will take. The prospect threatens the loss of homes, of unique urban and regional cultures, and of our sense of the permanence and meaning of our world.

But as apocalyptic as it seems, sea-rise poses little risk to human well-being. The destruction will be real, and wrenching, but not overwhelming or even unusual. It will necessitate abandonment and migration and rebuilding—but such upheavals are so deeply woven into modern life, on such a grand scale, that the increment caused by climate change will hardly break our stride.

As with agriculture, climate change ranks far down the list of challenges to our built environment, infrastructure and living space. Serious problems will emerge towards the end of this century, when waters could rise up to 2 meters [29] and require major investments in sea-walls and flood-control infrastructure. More flooding will ensue, with estimates putting the number of people who could ultimately be displaced at anywhere from 72 million to 750 million over several centuries. [30] By any measure, involuntary migration of hundreds of millions of people to higher ground ranks as a cataclysm. But it’s nowhere near as cataclysmic as ordinary population growth, which will force the world to find room, homes and infrastructure for an extra two billion people by 2050.

To see what that much larger non-climatic upheaval will be like over the next 33 years we need only look at the last 33 years, during which the world gained almost three billion extra inhabitants. Those decades were a time not only of colossal population growth but of epic migrations, primarily internal migrations that often go unremarked. In China, 170 million peasants left their villages and moved dozens to hundreds of miles into cities after 1979, [31] while in India there are currently 450 million internal migrants. [32] The tidal wave of population growth and migration necessitated a frenzy of city-building. China’s Shenzhen takes the prize for growth, with its population exploding from 30,000 in 1979 to over 10 million today. Comparable growth took place in megacities the world over, from the Indian technology hub of Bangalore, which added over five million people after 1981, to metropolitan Phoenix, where migrant-driven urbanization tripled the population to 4.6 million. [33] Yet despite the strain of new people and vast relocations, far exceeding anything that climate change will cause, the period since 1980 has been a golden age of development that lifted billions of people out of deep poverty.

Break-neck construction to keep up with giant dislocations isn’t a rupture with modern life but the essence of modern life, and modernity has navigated far more extreme episodes than climate change promises. Germany and Japan emerged from World War II destitute and with their cities destroyed, but within a few decades they had rebuilt themselves from the ground up better than before. Slowly rising seas won’t pose anything like a comparable task of reconstruction.

And while the sheer waste of abandoning the wealth and labor embodied in coastal cities feels appalling, it seems less so when we reflect on just how new, provisional and even disposable our material civilization really is. In 1820 New York held just 152,000 people crammed into a tiny footprint. [34] Almost everything in the city of 8 million—tenements, skyscrapers, bridges, subways, docks, airports, the Bronx—was built in 200 years, and much of it demolished and rebuilt several times over in search of higher rents. The task of constructing a New New York somewhere inland over the next 200 years as the old one drowns seems gargantuan, but that was exactly the project the city embarked on in 1820 under horse-power and candle-light.

Rebuilding is an aspect of economic development that humans do quite well. We built the whole world in the last two centuries—much of it in the last two generations—and rebuilding a waterlogged fraction of it over the next two centuries, with the help of incomparably better technology, will hardly tax us.

SOURCE

Undoing American Climate Diplomacy

A wail from a Warmist below

Mike Pompeo, as a Kansas congressman from 2011 to 2017, was one of the largest recipients of oil and gas money in the House of Representatives. He voted against amendments to bills that declared that climate change was real and caused by humans; railed against international climate treaties and greenhouse gas regulations; and in a 2014 speech to the Kansas Independent Oil and Gas Association, called climate science “a religion out there that is advocating on behalf of making sure CO? doesn’t escape.” He is now Donald Trump’s pick to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, and if confirmed by the Senate, he’d be the first top American diplomat to publicly reject the realities of climate science.

The United States has, historically, been responsible for the creation of most of the greenhouse gas emissions released into the Earth’s atmosphere. (China leads the way now.) As a result, other countries have long expected the secretary of state to take a leadership role on climate issues. Former Secretary Colin Powell, for example, said he was hampered by President George W. Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, an earlier global warming treaty. “Everything the American president does has international repercussions,” he told The New York Times in 2002. Those repercussions took more than a decade to resolve. It wasn’t until twelve years later, in 2014, that Barack Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, was able to help persuade almost 200 nations to attend the talks in Lima, Peru, that eventually led to the Paris climate agreement.

Tillerson—who, despite working for ExxonMobil for four decades, has repeatedly said that climate change is real and harmful—allowed career employees at State to continue their work on climate issues. “I didn’t see any evidence of interference from the secretary’s office to the positions taken by the negotiators,” said Andrew Light, a former State Department climate adviser. Last November, officials from the Office of Global Change—a State Department division created under President Ronald Reagan in 1988 to oversee the country’s international environmental policy—were allowed to attend a series of negotiating sessions over the Paris agreement in Bonn, Germany, where they worked on finalizing policies to ensure transparency and accountability from countries that have promised to reduce carbon emissions. (The United States is still party to the Paris agreement; despite Trump’s pledge last summer to withdraw, he can’t until 2020.) They are also working on the language in two major, upcoming scientific reports—one from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the impacts of mild global warming, and another from the U.S. National Climate Assessment on expected climate impacts in America.

Pompeo’s tenure suggests that a change in American negotiating posture could be forthcoming. It seems unlikely that any secretary of state under Donald Trump was going to advocate for a strong climate agenda, but at least Tillerson could be expected to find common ground with other countries, according to James Connaughton, a former environment adviser to President George W. Bush. He cited Tillerson’s willingness to address unfair competition from China’s manufacturing sector and to promote clean energy development abroad. “Tillerson was uniquely positioned to address that part of diplomacy,” he said.

Trump has said he wants to withdraw from the Paris agreement and renegotiate its terms. But the administration has now lost almost everyone capable of that work: A top international environmental policy adviser, George David Banks, resigned in February. Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic adviser, who negotiated directly with climate ministers from other countries, resigned in March. “Those are big losses that will take you a while to come back from,” said Connaughton.

Restaffing won’t be easy. “There aren’t a whole lot of Republicans who can represent the president’s perspective on climate while at the same time be able to navigate complicated climate diplomacy,” Banks said. Achieving that would require a political will on the subject that neither Trump nor Pompeo appears to have. “I guarantee you climate policy had zero influence on Trump’s decision to hire Pompeo,” Banks added.

The erosion of American engagement in climate diplomacy has allowed China to become the de facto world leader on global environmental policy.

The erosion of American engagement in climate diplomacy has already allowed China to become the de facto world leader on global environmental policy. China has become more assertive about climate leadership, with President Xi Jinping pledging last year to make the country the “torch-bearer in the global endeavor for ecological civilization.” European powers, too, have begun turning to China, not the United States, for partnerships on climate issues. And with Pompeo in charge, America’s standing could erode still further. “Even if we’re still continuing to send capable negotiators to climate conferences, the real loss is our political influence, which is being scooped up by the Chinese left and right,” Light said. “Are the Chinese doing it because they’re planetary good guys? No—they see this appropriately as an issue of international influence and leverage.”

Fortunately, there’s a structural limit to how much damage Trump and Pompeo can do. The Paris agreement was written to withstand assaults from a hostile administration, said Paul Bodnar, who led the negotiations as Barack Obama’s senior director for energy and climate. “We designed the agreement in a way that was robust to shocks,” he said. “We knew that the U.S. is like the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of climate. When we’re the good Dr. Jekyll, we have to make sure the rest of the world can withstand us when we turn into Mr. Hyde.”

It is possible that Pompeo, when confronted with the gravity of representing his country abroad, will realize the importance of preserving America’s credibility on this issue and stop the United States from formally withdrawing from Paris. But it’s hard to see an isolationist and climate-denying United States retaining its traditional leadership role. And if that happens, the still-fragile agreements and international coalitions created in Paris to stop climate change will be at risk.

SOURCE

Australian Green Party trying to disgorge far-Leftist

In a classical example of entryism, long-term Trotsky-ite Rhiannon, who could get nowhere on her own, decided she was a Greenie and got into parliament under their banner. The Greenies have been trying to dislodge her for some time now, as her priorities are clearly far-Leftist rather than Green -- far enough Leftist to alienate some Green voters. IMHO she is just a poisonous old bag, though she is undoubtedly clever in pursuing her own advantage

NSW Greens senator Lee Rhiannon is facing an internal push to vacate her seat before the next election, to clear the path for her successor Mehreen Faruqi.

In a campaign designed to force her from office, NSW Greens members have circulated a memo to the party’s membership titled “thanking Senator Lee Rhiannon”, which calls on her to hand over the reins.

The proposal, co-sponsored by five NSW Greens branches, requested Senator Rhiannon to “work with the standing campaign committee and Mehreen Faruqi on a transition plan to maximise the Greens chances of winning a seat at the next federal election”.

The demand represents a further deterioration in relations between the NSW Greens' warring factions, and is timed to coincide with the party’s preselections for the NSW upper house, which are expected to see a showdown between the party’s radical left faction and its moderate flank.

The proposal was circulated to the party’s 4000-strong membership via the party’s internal website last week. Senator Rhiannon did not respond to the Herald’s request for comment.

However, in comments posted to the party's internal forum, which have been obtained by the Herald, she slammed the proposal for exacerbating disunity in the party and called for it to be withdrawn.

"I am concerned and offended by this proposal and the actions associated with it," Senator Rhiannon wrote in response. "I am committed to Mehreen being elected to the Senate, despite insinuations to the contrary."

Dr Faruqi, who is a member of the NSW Legislative Council, defeated Senator Rhiannon in a preselection battle for the party’s top Senate ticket spot in November, in a significant blow to the radical left faction, known as Left Renewal or the eastern bloc.

Five months on, it is understood Senator Rhiannon is yet to inform Dr Faruqi of her intended departure date. Dr Faruqi declined to comment on the proposal when approached by the Herald.

But in a response posted on the party's internal website, Dr Faruqi said it would be "really useful for the party to have a timeline for transition".

"There is no question incumbency does provide an advantage in terms of visibility and profile, in addition to the resources individual senators can use for their own re-election."

The proposal claimed the party would be out of pocket by as much as $300,000 if Dr Faruqi was denied the benefit of incumbency – which would give her access to an office budget and four staff members – and argued this would have a "flow-on effect" to the party’s NSW election budget.

The proposal cited several party precedents of Greens MPs resigning to allow lead candidates to contest elections as sitting members, including former party leader Bob Brown, who resigned to make way for Peter Wish-Wilson in 2013. Christine Milne also departed the Senate early to allow Nick McKim to assume the seat.

In her comments to the party’s online forum, Senator Rhiannon indicated she would not discuss the issue until after the party had concluded its upper house preselections, including the appointment of Dr Faruqi’s replacement. Voting will begin next week, with results due by early May.

Dr Faruqi plans to remain in the NSW Parliament until she can move to the Senate, meaning both she and her replacement will have to wait for Senator Rhiannon’s resignation before they can assume their seats.

The preselections are expected to be a litmus test for the hard left faction. Their lead candidate, David Shoebridge, is expected to face a tough battle against moderate Jeremy Buckingham, which could see him relegated to the precarious third spot on the party’s NSW upper house ticket.

The fight for Dr Faruqi’s state seat has already been marked by a bitter preselection dispute, which escalated to the NSW Supreme Court.

Cate Faehrmann, the recently departed chief of staff to Greens leader Richard Di Natale, was forced to seek a court order confirming her validity to nominate for preselection after the party’s bureaucracy attempted to block her candidacy on the grounds her membership was “provisional”.

SOURCE

Australia is a big energy exporter -- coal and natural gas

Australia’s resource and energy export earnings are forecast to reach a record $230 billion in 2017-18, driven by higher iron ore and coal prices and rapidly growing LNG export volumes.

However, the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science expects export earnings to decline slightly from current levels, before levelling out at about $212 billion to $216 billion a year from 2019-20 onwards.

Department chief economist Mark Cully said this compared with average annual export earnings of $72 billion in the decade before the onset of the resources boom, validating the long-held view than the mining boom would continue to reap dividends long after the price peak in 2011.

Mr Cully said, in the Resources and Energy Quarterly report released today, over the next few years, the prices of iron ore and metallurgical coal would be weighed down by increasing supply and declining steel production in China.

However, according to the report, the price of Australian LNG, set by the oil price, is expected to increase modesty, constrained by price-sensitive shale oil production in the US, and sluggish growth in world oil consumption.

The ramp up in export volumes, driven by the mining investment boom, is expected to have run its course by the turn of the decade.

“The last of Australia’s LNG projects is scheduled for completion by the end of the year, while growth in iron ore export volumes will slow from 2018-19,” Mr Cully said.

“The story is similar for other key resource and energy export commodities, including coal, gold and several base metals.

“In this sense, 2020 will mark the end of the remarkable growth phase of the Australian resources and energy sector.”

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

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11 April, 2018

British Government cools energy efficiency ambition

The Government’s effort to bring down the cost of energy by upgrading Britain’s draughtiest homes is under attack after it emerged that cuts to the scheme mean it would take 400 years to complete.

Under new plans ministers intend to slash the pace at which the least efficient households will receive insulation upgrades. Better heat conservation can knock hundreds of pounds off a year of electricity and gas bills.

The blow to energy efficiency has raised eyebrows among energy bosses who are braced for Government plans to intervene in energy supply prices for the first time since privatisation, in a controversial move which may result in only a fraction of the savings.

The new energy efficiency proposals were published over the Easter weekend and set a target of insulating just 17,000 solid walled homes a year.

It means it would take over 400 years to upgrade the 7 million remaining solid wall homes in Britain, according to energy policy researchers at the University of Exeter.

By contrast the efforts made during the coalition Government secured efficiency upgrades for 1.8 million homes since January 2013, an average rate of 360,000 homes a year.

As many as 2.2 million homes could have received upgrades through the energy companies obligation (ECO) programme, but the plans were watered down by former Prime Minister David Cameron who reportedly called for officials to “cut the green crap”.

Richard Lowes, a researcher at the university, branded Government’s decision to level the latest efficiency blow on the Good Friday bank holiday “a deeply cynical tactic to hide what is clearly bad news” and “at odds with their public commitment to deliver a fair and sustainable energy system”.

“Meanwhile it is the UK citizens who live in some of the least efficient homes in Europe, with highest levels of energy unaffordability in Europe who suffer with cold, damp, drafty and expensive homes,” he added.

A spokesman for E.On UK, the big six energy supplier, said: “Overall, as a country we need to bring the energy efficiency of homes up to the level that is right for the 21st century, and which could save many hundreds of pounds off the annual energy bill.”

The cost of insulating drafty homes is paid for by energy companies which then smear the costs across their customer base. By cutting the ECO programme ministers saved around £30 to £35 on each average annual energy bill, but lost the chance to save hundreds of pounds for the most vulnerable energy users in society.

The UK Energy Research Centre estimates that energy efficiency has meant that the average annual dual fuel bill is £490 lower than it would have been without reducing energy use.

“This is a far more sustainable policy which politicians should consider embracing as opposed to implementing a temporary market wide price cap,” the spokesman said.

SOURCE

Polar Bear Numbers Are For Kids, Says Specialist Andrew Derocher

Polar bear specialists made global population numbers the focus of the world’s attention when they predicted a dramatic decline and possible extinction of the species.

But now that the numbers have increased slightly rather than declined, the same scientists say global numbers are meaningless: the public should give those figures no credence and anyone who cites global population numbers should be mocked.

MUCH more HERE

Conservative Leaders, GOP Lawmakers Voice Support for Scott Pruitt

A growing number of conservative leaders and GOP lawmakers are voicing their support for Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt amid some calls for him to resign.

The Conservative Action Project released a letter Friday with 113 signatures of conservative leaders calling on President Donald Trump to keep Pruitt in the administration.

“Conservatives stand behind Scott Pruitt as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency … and thank him for the significant actions he has taken to implement President Trump’s deregulatory agenda,” the letter read. “President Trump campaigned on reducing Washington’s bureaucracy, and Administrator Pruitt has been instrumental to that effort.”

Signatories included American Legislative Exchange Council CEO Lisa Nelson, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, former Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, former Virginia Attorney General and Senate Conservatives Fund President Ken Cuccinelli, and Citizens United President David Bossie.

Another group, CNP Action, sent a letter directly to Trump on Friday, praising Pruitt’s actions at the EPA.

“We write to thank you for your ongoing support of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and to add our names to a growing list of people who recognize him as a capable administrator who is finally reining in the EPA and restoring its core mission,” CNP Action’s letter read.

The letter was signed by CNP Action Chairman William L. Walton, former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, Heritage Action for America CEO Michael A. Needham, FreedomWorks President Adam Brandon, Media Research Center President L. Brent Bozell III, Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund Chairman Jenny Beth Martin, former U.S. Rep. Bob McEwen of Ohio, Club for Growth President David McIntosh, and former Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, chairman of the Constitutional Congress Inc. (Walton is a Heritage Foundation trustee and Meese is the think tank’s Ronald Reagan distinguished fellow emeritus.)

Most of the letter’s signatories added their names to the Conservative Action Project letter as well.

The Congressional Western Caucus also released a statement in support of Pruitt with remarks from Congressional Western Caucus Chairman Paul A. Gosar, R-Ariz.; House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas; House Committee on Appropriations subcommittee on interior, environment, and related agencies Chairman Ken Calvert, R-Calif.; and Western Caucus members Reps. Doug LaMalfa, R-Calif.; Louie Gohmert, R-Texas; and Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla.

“EPA Administrator Pruitt has proven himself one of the most effective Cabinet members in the Trump administration,” Gosar said in a statement. “His track record on energy, the environment, deregulation, the rule of law and science-based decision-making is exceptional. Because he is an important part of the ‘Make America Great Again’ agenda, it should come as no surprise that a lynch mob of opportunistic politicians and certain members of the media are doing everything they can to attempt to remove him from office.”

The outpouring of support came amid new calls on Pruitt to step down from his post. The EPA chief has faced criticism for his first-class travel, Washington living arrangements, and staff salaries. Pruitt, in interviews with The Daily Signal and Fox News this week, defended his actions and said he is taking steps to correct problems at the agency.

For some lawmakers, including three Republican members, that’s not enough. This week, Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York, and Carlos Curbelo and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida called on Pruitt to step down.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced Friday that she also wants Pruitt to resign, claiming he has brought a “culture of corruption, cronyism and incompetence” to the EPA.

Trump has continued to support Pruitt, tweeting Friday that the EPA administrator “is doing a great job.”

SOURCE

Greens in British Columbia are blocking an important pipeline

The $7.4-billion Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion may be scrapped entirely unless agreements can be reached by May 31 to resolve “uncertainty” created by the opposition of the B.C. government

The Alberta government is prepared to buy a stake of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion to ensure it gets built, Premier Rachel Notley said Sunday.

In a rare show of being on the same page, United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney agrees.

The $7.4-billion Kinder Morgan project may be scrapped entirely unless agreements can be reached by May 31 to resolve uncertainty created by British Columbian government opposition to the project, the company announced Sunday.

In a news release, Kinder Morgan said without an agreement in place, “it is difficult to conceive of any scenario in which we would proceed with the project.”

Notley came out swinging late Sunday afternoon, her comments aimed squarely at B.C. Premier John Horgan.

It wasn’t wrath — she’s not even angry, she said, just calmly trying to get on with the job at hand — but it was a direct message.

Horgan may think he can harass the project without economic consequences for his province, Notley said, “but he is wrong.”

Her government will introduce legislation to turn off the taps to B.C. in the coming days, she said, giving Alberta the power to impose serious economic consequences on the province should it continue on its present course.

And if Horgan thinks he can mess with the project via legal means, Notley says, he’s wrong again. “Let me be absolutely clear — they cannot mess with Alberta,” she said, adding her government is prepared to invest public money in the pipeline project.

“If we take that step, we will be a significantly more determined investor than British Columbia has dealt with up to this point,” Notley warned. “Never count Alberta out. This pipeline will be built.”

Non-essential pipeline spending halted

For now, the company said all non-essential spending on the expansion project has been suspended to protect shareholder interests while consultations are held to provide clarity on the firm’s ability to construct through British Columbia.

The company needs to protect its value, chairman and chief executive officer Steve Kean said, rather than risk billions of dollars on an outcome outside of its control.

“A company cannot resolve differences between governments. While we have succeeded in all legal challenges to date, a company cannot litigate its way to an in-service pipeline amidst jurisdictional differences between governments,” the release said.

Kinder Morgan’s move is the latest development among myriad political and legal wrangling over the Trans Mountain project, which was approved in 2016 by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Notley and Kenney both want Trudeau to step up and take concrete actions to support the pipeline, echoing sentiments they have thrown at Ottawa for months.

“We are calling on the federal government to work in the defence of Alberta and working people in Western Canada in the way they have in the past for other parts of this country,” Notley said Sunday, pointing to the assistance Ottawa provided Ontario during the auto crisis, and to Quebec when aerospace needed a bailout.

“Federal approval of a project must we worth more than the paper it’s written on.”

The federal government approved the Trans Mountain project using its constitutional authority, he said, but that government has “stood by passively uttering meaningless bromides for the past nine months.”

“Now is the time for federal action. It is time for the federal government to act like a federal government, for our prime minister to lead like a prime minister should — in the national interest,” Kenney said.

As for buying into the pipeline expansion, Kenney is on board if Ottawa also comes to the table.

“I am philosophically opposed to corporate welfare, but when there is a major market failure … there is a compelling case for the state to come forward, using its credit, its financial leverage, to ensure economic progress. I believe this is such an instance,” he said.

Horgan denies project harassment

Trudeau said during a recent trip to Fort McMurray that the pipeline would get built. On Sunday, federal Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr issued a statement saying the project is in Canada’s national interests.

Carr also called on Horgan to end all threats of delay to the Trans Mountain expansion.

“His government’s actions stand to harm the entire Canadian economy,” Carr stated. “Our government stands behind this project and has the jurisdiction in this matter.”

Although the project has the support of the Alberta and Saskatchewan governments, Horgan — who took power last spring with backing from the province’s Green party — has vowed to use every tool at his disposal to block it.

At a news conference Sunday, Horgan said the interests of Texas boardrooms are not the interests of British Columbians.

He denied his government has been harassing the project, adding he has told Trudeau that he doesn’t think the pipeline expansion is in the national interest.

“It’s been said we are somehow compromising the climate action plan for the country and I profoundly disagree with that,” Horgan said.

“I reject the notion that somehow our opposition to risk to our coast and our economy is somehow tied to the national climate plan.”

He also dismissed any suggestion that his government’s position could lead to a constitutional crisis.

But the stance of Horgan’s government has helped to create “unquantifiable risk,” Kinder Morgan said in its statement Sunday, and it’s unclear if some of the province’s obstructive actions can succeed.

“Unfortunately B.C. has now been asserting broad jurisdiction and reiterating its intention to use that jurisdiction to stop the project,” the company said. “B.C.’s intention in that regard has been neither validated nor quashed, and the province has continued to threaten unspecified additional actions to prevent project success.”

SOURCE

British Antarctic Snowfall Study Deepens the Mystery of Global Warming

It's only a mystery to Warmists

Over the past century, the Antarctic has gone from being a vast Terra Incognita to a continent-sized ticking time bomb: according to NASA, Antarctica has lost "approximately 125 gigatons of ice per year [between 2002 and 2016], causing global sea level to rise by 0.35 millimeters per year."

If global temperatures continue to rise, Antarctica's melting glaciers will cause the oceans to rise, as well as drastic changes in climate. However, new research by British Antarctic Survey shows that Antarctica paradoxically saw a 10 percent increase in snowfall over the last 200 years.

The research comes from 79 ice core samples collected across the continent, and the estimated increase in snow represents about 272 gigatonnes of water.

"There is an urgent need to understand the contribution of Antarctic ice to sea-level rise and we use a number of techniques to determine the balance between snowfall and ice loss," said lead author on the study, Dr. Liz Thomas.

"When ice loss is not replenished by snowfall then sea level rises...Our new results show a significant change in the surface mass balance [from snowfall] during the 20th century. The largest contribution is from the Antarctic Peninsula, where the annual average snowfall during the first decade of the 21st century is 10 percent higher than at the same period in the 19th century."

The increase in snowfall doesn't contradict previous estimates of ice loss around Antarctica's coast, but it does make the picture more complicated.

Previous climate change models, proposed in 2013, predicted that global sea levels would rise by a meter by the year 2100 due in part to melting Antarctic ice, but those estimates have proven to be flawed.

Dr. Thomas echoes the advice of Tim Naish, who acknowledged that the Antarctic is an important factor in climate change, but still a poorly understood one:

"There is an international effort to create computer simulations of future sea-level rise in a warming world. It is complex and challenging for scientists to fully understand and interpret changes in the ice that we see happening today. We know that the two major influencers affecting change—the mass gain (from snowfall) and the mass loss (from melt)—are acting differently from one another. Our new findings take us a step towards improving our knowledge and understanding."

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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10 April, 2018

48,000 Brits dead after worst winter in 42 years

THE UK is being hit by its worst winter death toll in 42 years, a new search says. One Brit dies every three minutes from the cold.

After a brief mild spell, temperatures are set to dip again in April after the chilliest March in 21 years.

It is estimated that 20,275 Brits more than average died between December 1 and March

An additional 2,000 deaths more than average were expected due to cold conditions between March 23 and 31, this winter’s average death rates show.

Campaigners have called the deaths a “national tragedy” as cold weather victims fatalities could be prevented - especially in the elderly.

According to the Office of National Statistics, one in 10 cold weather deaths are among under-65s, one in 10 among 65-75s and eight in 10 among over-75s.

The Department of Health also said cold conditions worsen winter killers including flu, chest diseases, heart attacks, strokes and dementia.

It means this winter is set to total at least 48,000 deaths due to cold weather – which works out at an average of one death every three and a half minutes.

National Federation of Occupational Pensioners chief executive Malcolm Booth said: “It’s shocking and disturbing that winter’s excess deaths look like exceeding 40,000. “It’s a national tragedy, with so many families affected.

“Many who die are senior citizens. The elderly should make sure they eat hot meals, dress warmly and, if unable to heat your whole home, heat one room spend your time there.”

Department of Health chief medical officer Professor Dame Sally Davies, said: “Cold-related deaths represent the biggest weather-related source of mortality.

“There are too many avoidable deaths each winter, primarily due to heart and lung conditions from cold temperatures. “It is vital to tackle the range of causes and reduce the number of ‘excess’ deaths each winter.”

SOURCE

Americans are increasingly seeing climate change through a partisan lens

Some notes from a sad Green/Leftist below

The Trump administration's rollbacks of crucial climate change policies, from the intended pullout from the Paris Agreement to the scuttled Clean Power Plan, have earned most of the media attention and scorn from environmentalists.

However, the ignorant climate science statements espoused by top federal officials, from the president to the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the secretary of Energy, and many others is having a corrosive effect on Americans' understanding of climate science.

Recent public opinion polling clearly shows that Americans are more divided now than they were a year ago on the causes of global warming, its seriousness, and the urgency of taking action.

While the majority of Americans still believe that global warming is caused by human activities, and that the effects of it have already begun, it's clear that the building drumbeat of flat out incorrect statements about climate science uttered by top officials is molding public opinion in a way that makes it harder for action to be taken on climate change.

A recent Gallup poll, for example, found that Republicans and independents have become more skeptical in their views on climate change, while Democrats have become even more convinced of the need to urgently reduce greenhouse gas emissions to curb global warming.

According to the Gallup poll, which is consistent with other public opinion surveys, majorities of Americans say that most scientists think global warming is taking place (66 percent), that it is caused by human activities (64 percent), and that its effects have already begun (60 percent).

However, there's a hardening of the partisan divisions that's occurred under Trump.

Gallup's annual survey on the environment, conducted during the first week of March, found that Americans are more divided than ever on climate change.

"President Donald Trump, who has called global warming a "hoax," may have contributed to this widening divide by reversing a number of government actions to address the issue," Gallup wrote in their online analysis accompanying the poll results.

Trump and his cabinet officials have also frequently misstated the scientific consensus on global warming in ways that cast doubt on the seriousness of the problem or even its existence.

For example, Trump does not seem to know the difference between weather and climate, using a December cold snap to rebut evidence of global warming.

Scott Pruitt, the embattled EPA administrator, has openly questioned the scientifically solid link between increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the air and global warming, telling CNBC last year that this long-lived greenhouse gas is not a "primary contributor" to global warming. (This is at odds with scientific knowledge documented in the 18th Century.)

"I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there's tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it's a primary contributor to the global warming that we see," Pruitt said.

The Gallup poll found that while 82 percent of Democrats think global warming has already begun, only 34 percent of Republicans agree. In fact, 32 percent of Republicans said climate change effects will "never happen."

In addition, about 69 percent of Republicans said news reports exaggerate the seriousness of global warming, but 64 percent of Democrats say the seriousness of global warming is underestimated.

Even though the vast majority of climate scientists know that global warming is human-caused and already occurring, going as far as saying in a 2017 government report that there is no natural explanation for the global warming we've seen in recent decades.

Yet despite such scientific assessments, a sizable 63 percent of Republicans think climate change is mostly due to natural causes, according to the Gallup poll.

Climate scientists understand that the use of the bully pulpit to espouse unscientific nonsense does not come without consequences.

In a Twitter thread on Friday, Texas Tech University climate researcher Katharine Hayhoe linked officials' statements with public opinion trends and a slowing down of urgently needed actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid the worst global warming impacts.

Tony Leiserowitz, senior research scientist and director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, said up until the 2016 election, recognition of climate change as a real, important issue was growing within the Republican Party. But that has changed dramatically in the last year, which he attributes largely to cues coming from the party's leaders.

“It’s the power of political elite cues,” he said, noting in an interview that partisans “... tend to listen to and follow the lead of what they hear from their political leaders.”

After the rise of the Tea Party and Trump, Leiserowitz said, his polling group has also found a steep drop in Republican recognition of the scientific consensus on climate change.

He said the Republicans made a “huge lurch to this new position that climate change is a hoax.” “They climbed way out not just a limb but the farthest twig of a limb.”

He called his own group's findings and Gallup's conclusions evidence of the "Trump Effect" when it comes to climate change in particular. “Groups are getting farther and farther split apart,” Leiserowitz said

SOURCE

40 New Scientific Papers Say Global Warming Does Not Exist

Hundreds of scientists involved in 40 recent scientific papers say the scare about global warming is based on hysteria and false science.

Over 40 scientific papers on the global warming hoax have been published in just the first three months of 2018. What their charts show is that “nothing climatically unusual is happening.“

Breitbart.com reports: In the chart below from a study by Polovodova et al, we see that 20th century warming is perfectly normal in a long-term historical context. It was no warmer – indeed, is slightly cooler – than either the Roman Warm Period or the Medieval Warming Period.

A number of strident global warming scientists prefer to dismiss the significance of Europe’s temperature record, claiming that it is local in nature and does not tell us what is really happening globally. However, other papers fully contradict this. For example, a paper by Wündsch et al., 2018 shows us that the warming today in South Africa also is nothing unusual.

Temperature reconstructions show the same is true in Southeast Australia, according to McGowan et al., 2018, Northern Alaska (Hanna et al., 2018), the Tibetan Plateau (Li et al., 2018), South Korea (Song et al., 2018), Antarctica (Mikis, 2018), to cite just a few among dozens of others.

In further bad news for climate alarmists, it seems that two of their favorite bellwethers of global warming doom – Greenland and the South Pole, are cooling not warming.

This puts Greenland’s recent warm spell in its historical context: over 150 years it wasn’t unusual. Temperatures now are cooler than they were in the 1930s.

Furthermore, much to the surprise of global warming scientists, Greenland temperatures have again been falling since 2000. Westergaard-Nielsen et al., 2018 examined the most recent and detailed trends based on MODIS (2001–2015) and concluded that if there is any general trend for Greenland it is “mostly cooling”.

As is the South Pole:

At the other end of the planet at the South Pole, new findings by Cerrone and Fusco, 2018 confirm the large increase in the southern hemisphere sea ice and suggest it “arises from the impact of climate modes and their long-term trends”.

They write that the results indicate a progressive cooling has affected the year-to-year climate of the sub-Antarctic since the 1990s and that the SIC [sea ice concentration] shows upward annual, spring, and summer trends.

Global warming? What global warming??

SOURCE. (See the original for links and graphics)

Cities can be GOOD for wildlife

Viscount Ridley

Recently I was walking alongside a canal in central London, surrounded by concrete, glass, steel and tarmac, when I heard the call of a grey wagtail. Looking to my right I saw this bold, fast, yellow-bottomed bird, which I associate with wild rocky rivers in the north, flitting into a canal tunnel. Later that week I stared up at two peregrine falcons circling high above parliament — and got funny looks from passers-by.

Like other cities, London is increasingly home to exotic wildlife and is as biodiverse as some wildernesses. Mumbai has leopards, Boston turkeys, Chicago coyotes and Newcastle kittiwakes. Suburbs are already richer in wildlife than most arable fields in the so-called green belt, making environmental objections to housing development perverse. Gardens, ledges, drains, walls, trees and roofs are full of niches for everything from foxes to flowers and moths.

Two Czech scientists counted the species of plants in the city of Plzen compared with a similar area of surrounding countryside. In the city the number of species had risen from 478 in the late 19th century to 773 today. In the countryside it had fallen from 1,112 to 745.

Since most animals have shorter lifespans than us and no welfare state, they are genetically adapting faster to the concrete world than we are. A fascinating book by a Dutch biologist, Menno Schilthuizen, called Darwin Comes to Town, documents just how wide and deep this urban wildlife evolutionary pulse is. We have unleashed an unprecedented burst of natural selection.

Once a species thrives in a man-made habitat, it may find itself giving up living elsewhere. This must have happened to swallows and sparrows a long time ago: they became so successful nesting in buildings that the genes of their tree or cliff-nesting cousins died out. Today it is probably happening with peregrine falcons and herring gulls: urban ones are having more young than rural ones, so will soon swamp the whole species with their genes.

Urban landscapes present new evolutionary pressures. Street lights confuse and massacre moths and cause songbirds insomnia. Metal concentrations can be toxic. Noise drowns out birdsong. Instead of remaining insuperable, however, these novelties bring out the ingenuity in evolution. Urban insects may be changing their genetic make-up so they no longer fly towards lights: suicide as a selective force. One Swiss study found that ermine moths from the countryside are almost twice as likely to fly towards a light as their cousins from the city of Basel.

Other examples of urban evolution abound. Killifish in polluted American harbours have developed genetic resistance to the effect of polychlorinated biphenyls, an industrial pollutant. Acorn ants in Cleveland, Ohio, can withstand high temperatures better than ants from the country — which is necessary because city temperatures tend to be higher. Mexican sparrows that incorporate cigarette butts in their nests have fewer bloodsucking mites feeding on their chicks because nicotine is a pesticide.

Birds sing higher-pitched songs in cities — the ones that stayed low having attracted fewer mates over the sound of traffic. In the countryside, the opposite is true: female great tits mated to high-pitched males are more likely to stray. So the species is splitting into soprano town-tits and bass country-tits. In the Netherlands, chiffchaff warblers and grasshoppers both sing higher-pitched songs if they live near busy roads. Pigeons in big cities have darker plumage because melanin pigment binds zinc, excreting it from the body and improving the birds’ health.

Human beings, too, have been forced to evolve by urbanisation. For centuries cities such as London were population “sinks”, killing more people with disease than their birth rates could match and sustaining their population only by immigration from the countryside. That put a premium on genetic mutations that resisted urban diseases. People with long histories of urban living tend to have genes that resist tuberculosis and leprosy, for example. It would not be a surprise to find that an ability to tolerate continual noise may also be partly genetic as well as learnt.

Walking to the Tube in London each morning at this time of year I hear goldcrests and goldfinches, parakeets and dunnocks, wrens and long-tailed tits, none of which lived in the middle of cities in my youth. Experiments show that urban tits, finches and sparrows are less “neophobic” than rural ones: they have evolved to be less fearful of the appearance of new objects on bird tables, for example. Compared with the egg-stealing, catapult-wielding youths of previous centuries, young people today simply do not pester animals as much.

Blackbirds first showed up in London in the 1920s, later than in continental cities. Studies in France and the Netherlands found that urban blackbirds were rapidly diverging from rural ones. They tend to have shorter beaks and wings, longer intestines and legs, as well as higher-pitched songs. They may soon count as a separate species, just as town pigeons are very different from their rock-dove cousins. Dr Schilthuizen argues that “as the urban environment expands its reach, it will become more and more an ecosystem in its own right, writing its own evolutionary rules and running at its own evolutionary pace”. Wildernesses experience very slow rates of species formation because they are already mature ecosystems. Cities, like archipelagos of islands, experience a much faster rate of change.

The immediate reaction of many people to this tale of urban biodiversity might be to lament the human interference in nature and discount urban wildlife as artificial. We sometimes despise rather than admire creatures that become urban: town pigeons are “feathered rats”, urban foxes “mangy vermin”.

An increase in urban wildlife cannot compensate for the extinction crisis in wilder spaces. But thanks to increased awareness and new techniques, we have shown we can halt extinction if we try.

In recent centuries we have lost 61 of 4,428 species of mammals and 129 of 8,971 birds. Thanks to the genetic change that is happening in the urban Galapagos, we can create new species too, albeit unwittingly.

SOURCE

Australian government lobbies company board to force coal-fired power plant to continue operating

The company thinks it can make more profits by converting the plant to subsidized renewables. They are probably waiting for a subsidy for coal generation to change their minds

The energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, has all but confirmed he had personally lobbied board members of AGL Energy in an effort to force a sale of the ageing Liddell power plant.

Sources have told Guardian Australia Frydenberg has been calling individual board members in an effort to crash through management opposition to offloading the coal-fired facility in New South Wales to a competitor, the Hong Kong-owned Alinta Energy, which is looking to expand its market share.

The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, contacted the chairman of the company last Tuesday.

When it was put to Frydenberg on Sunday that he was also involved in the highly unusual practice of speaking personally to board members, the energy minister said: “Well, we’ve made it very clear that it’s in the interests of the company to consider this offer.”

Last week the AGL chief executive, Andy Vesey, insisted the company would proceed with plans to transform the Liddell site into a renewables hub, saying it will bring cheaper, greener and more reliable energy, while providing quality, long-term jobs for decades.

The government has for months been trying to persuade AGL to sweat the Liddell asset for longer and keep the plant operating beyond its scheduled closure in 2022.

While both the competition watchdog and the Australian Energy Market Operator have argued that more competition in the NSW energy market would be beneficial to consumers, the federal government has no power to force AGL to do anything with the asset it acquired from the state government in 2014.

So the government is subjecting the company to an extraordinary campaign of public pressure and private intervention in an effort to force its hand.

Former deputy prime minister and Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce last week accused AGL of “shorting” the market by hanging on to Liddell rather than selling it to a competitor prepared to extend its operating life – a charge the company rejects.

The public pressure on the company has perturbed institutional investors. The Investor Group on Climate Change – a group that represents over 68 Australian and New Zealand institutional investors with more than $2tn in funds under management – wrote to Vesey last week validating the company’s approach.

“Many of IGCC’s members are direct investors in AGL and have engaged with AGL over many years on the significant challenges inherent in delivering capacity to market, managing price impacts for consumers and reducing greenhouse gas emissions in line with Australia’s commitments under the Paris agreement,” the IGCC chief executive, Emma Herd, said.

“Long-term planning, an early and unambiguous notification to the market of intention to close, strategic investment in the repurposing of infrastructure and the adoption of new technologies to deliver increased generation capacity is exactly the kind of business planning that investors want to see from companies managing climate change impacts for their business.

“IGCC notes that this is the approach that AGL has adopted in providing seven years’ notice to market of intention to close Liddell power station, while investing in alternative renewable energy generation, repurposing the existing infrastructure and continuing to play a role in the local community.

“A divergence away from this plan, particularly one that does not provide a long-term vision for future uses of the Liddell power station site, its infrastructure and its workforce, would be of considerable concern to investors due to the risks and uncertainty it would create.”

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

9 April, 2018

Is your neighbor’s Tesla costing you money?

It certainly seems like going “green” is trendy these days. And we hear a lot about the benefits of renewable energy and electric cars. But there may be hidden costs in the pursuit of “clean energy,” and they may affect consumers more than expected.

Take California’s new Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate. California and nine other states are requiring automakers to sell a progressively larger number of electric cars each year. And so, automakers must either meet their annual ZEV quotas or purchase costly credits to make up the difference.

Unfortunately for automakers, consumers aren’t hurrying to buy electric cars. One reason, of course, is the price tag. Even the least expensive ZEVs, like the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt, cost roughly $30,000. Those prices are simply out of reach for much of America, where the median annual income is approximately $44,000. A more likely option, in contrast, would be a small, fuel-efficient vehicle like the $17,000 Chevy Cruze. But consumers may also be balking at the limited range of electric cars. The Chevy Volt travels only 53 miles per charge. A Tesla Model S, which currently costs $70,000, may travel 200 to 300 miles per charge.

California is clearly in the vanguard of environmental activism, but the ZEV mandate is having an outsized effect on consumers in others states. That’s because automakers are feeling the progressively rising cost of their ZEV obligations. In 2015, states following the ZEV mandate represented 28 percent of all U.S. vehicle sales. By 2025, those 10 states have mandated that ZEV purchases must exceed 15 percent of total car sales.

Automakers not meeting their ZEV quota must purchase credits from electric vehicle manufacturers, like Tesla, or pay a $5,000 fine for each credit they are short. Noting the hefty price tag for electric cars, and the obvious limitations of battery range, it’s likely that automakers will be forced to buy an expensive chunk of credits each year in order to meet their increasing ZEV obligations.

That’s when things get interesting, since auto manufacturers already survive on tight margins. Meeting ZEV requirements will mean automakers passing the cost of these credits on to their customers. And that means conventional autos rising in price to help subsidize more costly electric cars.

Realistically, the ZEV mandate means cash-strapped consumers in heartland America will be paying more to buy a conventional car. And they will be doing so to aid the purchase of electric cars for wealthier Americans. It’s a strangely convoluted scenario, since electric cars are typically purchased as a second or third vehicle for more affluent families. But now, wealthier America will purchase a Tesla more easily, thanks to the subsidies being shouldered by lower-income families.

There’s a further irony here, too, since almost two-thirds of all electricity generated in the U.S. comes from coal and natural gas power plants. Thus, these plug-in electric vehicles will still be powered mostly by fossil fuels.

If ZEV mandates increase, more Americans could be compelled to purchase electric cars — or face escalating auto prices. That could mean even middle class Americans struggling to afford a car. But that might well be the grand intention of those pushing so hard for electric cars — to simply price conventional automobiles out of reach for everyday Americans.

SOURCE

China is a paper tiger on rare earth metals and President Trump should make that clear by tapping abundant U.S.-based rare earth metals

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement in response to a piece by Jeff Spross at The Week suggesting China could “win” a trade war by “clamp[ing] down on these exports”:

“With the U.S. increasingly vulnerable to Chinese stranglehold on the rare earth marketplace, it is time for President Trump and Interior Secretary Zinke to do whatever is necessary to open up rare earth mining facilities. The U.S. has an abundance of rare earth minerals in the west on federal lands which could be rapidly developed but extraordinary measures would need to be taken to overcome national security threatening regulations.

“Additionally, rare earth metals are being developed in Afghanistan where the United States has poured 17 years of blood and treasure incredibly the Chinese are being allowed to develop those rare earth metals. It might be worthwhile for President Trump to talk to Afghani President Ashraf Ghani about redirecting that development to be exported to the United States.

“In the meantime, America has a great abundance with incredible mineral reserves that have been put under regulatory lock and key, it is time for us to get back in the domestic mining business so that we are no longer fully dependent on foreign powers for the critical materials necessary for a modern economy and military.”

SOURCE

US Is Net Natural Gas Exporter for 1st Time in 6 Decades Thanks to New Infrastructure

Natural gas has transformed the domestic energy industry. The United States now exports more natural gas than it imports – for the first time since 1957. While higher levels of production and the development of new sources such as the Utica and Marcellus shales have played a significant role, putting the energy transportation infrastructure in place is just as vital, as can be seen from the evolution of liquefied natural gas exports.

From 1975 to 2015, annual LNG exports never exceeded 0.2 billion cubic feet per day. LNG exports more than doubled in 2016 to a then-record of 0.5 billion cubic feet per day. The key was putting the infrastructure in place to make higher exports possible and updating the process to review applications to export LNG to countries for which there is no free trade agreement in place.

Previously the Department of Energy reviewed applications for conditional approval in the order in which they were submitted. This led them to review some applications from projects that were never viable or close to construction, while others that had already wound their way through the necessary environmental review process waited years for their export application to be approved.

The convoluted process contributed to lengthy export application times, which could stretch across multiple years. In February, 2014, the Energy Department had a backlog of 24 export applications to non-Free Trade Agreement countries working through the review process, compared to only 6 approvals. Under the new framework, the Department has now approved 29 of these applications, although 21 are still under review due to a higher total number of applications. While the Department has made some strides, it should strive to make further progress in reducing review times.

Without LNG exports, natural gas transportation to other countries is largely confined to pipelines, which face their own capacity constraints. In addition, pipelines are geographically limited to neighboring Canada and Mexico.

The only previously active terminal in the country, Kenai LNG Terminal in Alaska, ceased operations in 2015. Fortunately, the approval and construction of new LNG terminals has substantially increased capacity and helped facilitate strong export growth.

The Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana began service in 2016, and now has four active liquefaction units with another on the way. The Cove Point terminal in Maryland was put into service even more recently, with the first cargo of LNG shipped in March 2018. These two terminals alone increased export capacity to 3.6 billion cubic feet per day.

The Sabine Pass terminal enabled LNG exports to quadruple, from 0.5 billion cubic feet per day in 2016 to 1.94 billion cubic feet per day in 2017. The capacity to ship LNG to other countries has opened up more destination countries for exports, reaching 25 countries in 2017.

LNG exports increased both to countries that had previously been export destinations and to new markets. In 2017, LNG exports to Mexico were 5 times higher than in 2016, in China they were 10 times higher, and to South Korea they were 12 times higher than the previous year. These three countries accounted for more than half of LNG exports in 2017, and exports to just these countries were higher than total LNG exports for any year stretching back to 1975.

Other countries that had previously only imported a marginal amount of LNG from the United States, including Japan, Jordan, and Spain, are increasing their U.S. imports. U.S. exports to Asia, the Americas, and Europe all saw substantial growth from 2016 to 2017.

The approval for exports to non-Free Trade Agreement countries has also grown. Exports to those countries accounted for 53 percent of LNG export volume from February 2016 to March 2018.

The impressive growth last year was likely just the beginning. The Cove Point LNG terminal’s exports are not reflected in the 2017 growth, as its first cargo went out in 2018. Four additional LNG export terminals are scheduled to come into service in the coming years, and they will increase total export capacity to 9.6 billion cubic feet per day by the end of 2019. By that time, U.S. LNG export capacity will be more than six times higher than it was in latter half of 2016.

Prices, production levels, weather disruptions, and other factors will continue to be important, but U.S. infrastructure will be able to support much higher levels of exports. The Department of Energy has also reduced review times for LNG export applications due to a rule change, leading to more applications being approved. Due to these developments, the Energy Information Administration projects the United States to become the third-largest LNG exporter by 2020, after Australia and Qatar.

New LNG terminals have supported massive growth in exports, which played a role in America becoming a net natural gas exporter for the first time in six decades. LNG exports will play an increasingly important role in the years to come, and this rapid growth has only been made possible by having the necessary energy infrastructure in place.

SOURCE

3 Reasons the Left Hates Scott Pruitt

You know why they are going after Environmental Protection Agency secretary Scott Pruitt? I can give you at least three reasons.

No. 1: He has led the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle President Barack Obama’s expensive and ineffective climate legacy piece by piece.

From the Clean Power Plan, which was all about Obama’s climate agenda and which had nothing to do with creating clean air (we already have laws about that), to the Waters of the United States regulation, which could turn a puddle in your front yard into environmentally-protected swamp land—Pruitt has been rolling back many of the regulations put in place by Obama’s overzealous, power-grabbing, and arguably unconstitutional EPA.

Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. But this can't be done alone. Find out more >>

No. 2: They also don’t like the fact that just this week Pruitt’s team at the EPA revised a mandate on fuel standards that will make new cars significantly cheaper—maybe as much as $7,000 cheaper.

No. 3: Under Pruitt, the EPA has announced it will no longer develop regulation based on “secret science”—meaning studies only the so-called experts at the EPA, but not the public, can see. It’s called transparency, and believe me, the deep state in Washington hates that.

So no, Pruitt doesn’t believe the EPA is an all-powerful agency with no accountability except to itself. And no, he doesn’t believe we should be creating useless regulations that eliminate jobs and make families pay more for energy just so Al Gore and most of Hollywood can feel good about themselves.

And that is why they are going after Scott Pruitt.

SOURCE

Hawaiian Nene Goose May Be Knocked Off Its Endangered Species Perch After 51 Years

The nene, the state bird of Hawaii, has been listed as an endangered species since 1967. But now, after 51 years on the endangered list, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) wants to reclassify the nene from endangered to threatened.

The reclassification proposal, posted on April 2 at the Regulation.gov website, runs 209 pages and 25,830 words.

Under the Endangered Species Act, a species may warrant reclassification from endangered to threatened if it is no longer in danger of extinction. "The Hawaiian goose (nene) is listed as endangered, and we are proposing to reclassify nene as threatened because we have determined it is no longer in danger of extinction," the proposal says.

FWS said Hawaii's current nene population totals 2,855 -- up from 600 in 1983 -- and that population is "self-sustaining" and "well distributed" in the Hawaiian islands.

"The species continues to be conservation-reliant (dependent on long-term predator control and habitat management), but with ongoing management we expect these populations to continue to be self-sustaining without additional releases of captive-bred birds."

A species is listed as “threatened” if it is likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future throughout all or a “significant portion of its range.” The FWS proposal lists every potential and actual threat to the nene -- from cats to bees, from vehicles to parasites, to mankind and climate change -- then concludes:

We have carefully assessed the best scientific and commercial information available regarding the past, present, and future threats to the nene. Based on the analysis above and given increases in population numbers due to recovery efforts, we conclude the nene does not currently meet the Act's definition of an endangered species in that it is not in danger of extinction throughout all of its range.

Although population numbers have increased, our analysis indicates that because of significant remaining threats, the species remains likely to become in danger of extinction in the foreseeable future throughout all of its range. Because the species is likely to become in danger of extinction in the foreseeable future throughout all of its range, the species meets the definition of a threatened species. Therefore, we propose to reclassify the nene from an endangered species to a threatened species.

FWS said adoption of the proposal would recognize that the nene, known for its "nay-nay" call, is still impacted by predation, habitat loss and degradation.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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8 April, 2018

Top Climate Scientist: CO2 Model Assumptions “Invalid”…”Natural Climatic Variations Dominate”!

The addition of an esteemed Norwegian climate scientist to the London-based GWPF will help bring some sobriety back to a science that has all too often been immersed in alarmism.

The London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) recently announced Professor Ole Humlum of Norway was joining its Academic Advisory Council. This brings another persuasive voice to the influential think tank.

Dr. Ole Humlum is a former Professor of Physical Geography at the University Centre in Svalbard, Norway, and Emeritus Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Oslo. He is a member of the Norwegian Scientific Academy for Polar Research.

The GWPF appointment is a move that climate science critics say will deliver some much needed sobriety to a science that has too frequently found itself immersed in activism, hysterical projections and alarmism.

In the wake of his appointment, Prof. Humlum answered some questions on climate science posed by NTZ via social media.
Sea level rise projections overblown

Concerning global sea level rise, Prof. Humlum believes the planet will see only “8-15 cm rise by the year 2100”. And though most scientists agree man is warming the planet through CO2 emissions by burning fossil fuels, Prof. Humlum wrote that the figure for CO2 climate sensitivity is completely in dispute.

Natural factors at play, modest cooling ahead

On what has driven the climate change observed over the past 40 years, Prof. Humlum wrote that it goes far beyond just CO2 and that the sun, clouds and oceans have played huge roles. Over the coming decades he thinks the planet will cool, but that “it won’t be dramatic”.

Concerning whether the 20th century warming has led to more weather extremes today, he answered: “No, not according to statistics known by me.”

“Natural climatic variations dominate”

He summarized:

    "On the global scale natural climatic variations dominate over effects caused by man. Climate models often claim to incorporate natural variations, but this is not correct, as can be shown by statistical analyses. Thus, the argument that only by assuming a large effect of CO2 can climate models reproduce global climate change since 1950 is invalid.”

Bringing expertise to climate science

Prof. Humlum has authored or co-authored some 100 publications on climate related topics. Few scientists are able to claim having such a broad and valuable interdisciplinary knowledge that Professor Humlum possesses. His specialties include:

Glacial- and periglacial geomorphology

Landforms derived from bedrock weathering, with emphasis on rock glaciers

Reconstruction of Quaternary ice sheets, glaciers in the North Atlantic region

Historical and modern climatology of the Arctic and North Atlantic region

The impact of climate on societies the North Atlantic region

Comparison and integration of different climate proxy series

Numerical modelling in geomorphology

Mapping Arctic and Antarctic surface temperature changes

Modelling natural cold-climate geomorphic processes and -hazards

Permafrost and periglacial processes

Physical geography of Svalbard

Snow avalanche risk in Svalbard

SOURCE

Another Reason to Reject Wind Farms

There are a number of legitimate reasons for opposing wind farms; (1) they kill birds, bats and other animals, (2) they create undesirable ambient noise, (3) they blight the landscape and (4) the power they generate is far more costly per kilowatt hour than that obtained from conventional fossil fuels.

Now, however, thanks to the studious research* of six Chinese scientists (Tang et al., 2017), we can add a fifth reason for avoiding wind farms — they reduce the productivity of surrounding vegetation.

In reaching this conclusion, Tang et al. used remotely-sensed imaging data, including leaf area index (LAI), normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), an enhanced vegetation index (EVI), gross primary production (GPP) and net primary production (NPP), coupled with other climate-related data (temperature, soil moisture, evapotranspiration, albedo and wind) over the period 2003-2014, to analyze the effects of a recently built wind farm on summer (Jun-Aug) vegetative growth in the Bashang region of northern China.

Located in the Hebei province, the Bashang study area (40.9-41.5°N, 113.9-114.7°E) witnessed a total of 1747 wind turbines constructed between the period 2005 and 2011. Land cover in Bashang primarily consists of grassland and crops, which account for 53.4 and 44.7 percent, respectively, of the total cover.

Thus, using the remotely-sensed and climate data described above, Tang et al. set out to determine whether the wind farm construction in Bashang exerted any influence on the growth and productivity of the region’s summer vegetation.

And what did their analysis reveal?

In describing their findings, Tang et al. report that construction of the wind turbines elevated both day (by 0.45-0.65°C) and night (by 0.15-0.18°C) temperatures, which increase, they say, “suppressed soil moisture and enhanced water stress in the study area.”

As a result, local vegetative growth and productivity decreased (see Figure 1). More specifically, they calculated an approximate 14.5, 14.8 and 8.9 percent decrease in LAI, EVI, and NDVI over the period of study, as well as “an inhibiting [wind farm] effect of 8.9% on summer GPP and 4.0% on annual NPP.”

Consequently, these several findings led Tang et al. to conclude that their research “provides significant observational evidence that wind farms can inhibit the growth and productivity of the underlying vegetation.”

And thus we have yet another reason to question the wisdom of policy makers who are seemingly rushing to install more and more of these bird-killing, noise-polluting, eyesore-viewing, cost-prohibiting and vegetative-decreasing low power producing energy sources.

It doesn’t make any sense, does it?

SOURCE

Why is the Media Suddenly So Interested in the EPA?

Funny what happens when a Republican wins the White House. The media mob suddenly develops an interest in transparency and fiscal responsibility. This week—in a story that has been developing over several months—all eyes are on the Environmental Protection Agency.

For eight years, President Obama’s two EPA administrators—Lisa Jackson and Gina McCarthy—received very little scrutiny from major news organizations. Reporters and opinion writers overlooked their misconduct at the EPA: excessive travel costs; blatant disregard of congressional oversight and lying to Congress; deleted texts and phony email accounts; colluding with activists who sought to use the agency to impose their costly, ideological agenda.

When the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the agency’s Clean Power Plan in 2016 because it exceeded administrative authority—the first time the court blocked a major EPA rule—no one called for McCarthy’s resignation or even criticized her role in writing the bad regulation. The editorial boards at the New York Times and Washington Post didn’t demand that McCarthy step down after she apologized for the disastrous Gold King Mine spill in Colorado, where 3 million gallons of toxic sludge befouled a river system spanning three states.

When McCarthy defended her agency’s role in the Flint water crisis, the Washington Post described her as some sort of hero: “She stood up to often-furious questioning at a congressional hearing that included Republican calls for her resignation, asserting that under the law her agency had done all it could to protect Flint’s residents.”

Time and again, sympathetic scribes in the mainstream media gave the EPA chiefs a pass.

But that drastically changed on December 7, 2016, when Donald Trump nominated Scott Pruitt to be his EPA administrator. Pruitt, the former Oklahoma attorney general, was an outspoken critic of the agency and sued the EPA several times in his role as the Sooner State’s top lawyer. His appointment was a Southern-styled boot-kick to the far-left scientific establishment and the environmental lobby, signaling an end to their unchecked power grip at the EPA.

To his credit, Pruitt refused to try and win them over: He immediately scrubbed the EPA’s website of climate change propaganda and encouraged the president to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.

The unrelenting media assault on Pruitt is yet another tale of contrasts between how the Washington press corps covers the Trump Administration versus how it covered for the Obama Administration. One quick example: The New York Times, which has a particularly vicious vendetta against Pruitt, has published 395 articles, columns, and editorials about the current EPA chief since November 9, 2016: Nearly all are negative. The Times has churned out dozens of stories about Pruitt’s travel expenses, including his purchase of first-class airline seats for foreign trips. (Jackson and McCarthy did, too. The pair tallied over $1 million in travel costs on international junkets, according to a report last month in the Washington Free Beacon.)

But from March 2013 until November 2016, the Times only ran 156 articles that mentioned McCarthy. While she received some tepid criticism from the paper for her mishandling of the Flint water crisis, most of its coverage was nebulous if not glowing.

One puff piece described McCarthy as “a listener and a saleswoman” with a “salty sense of humor and a history of negotiating with polluting industries.” Even though that same article referenced McCarthy’s “regular cross-country road trips that are both listening tour and sales pitch,” the Times’ reporters didn’t bother to ask how she traveled or demand to see any expense reports. In fact, the only Times article that raised McCarthy’s travel schedule is buried at the end of a piece on Pruitt’s travel:

"Gina McCarthy also traveled frequently to her home in Boston. A spokeswoman estimated that Ms. McCarthy traveled home roughly every other weekend during her term. She said Ms. McCarthy paid for the travel. Ms. McCarthy’s travel could not be immediately verified because her travel records are not publicly available."

Exactly. Her travel records were not publicly available because no one asked for them.

Now ponder a lengthy Times piece on Pruitt’s official schedule. Eric Lipton and Lisa Friedman reviewed 320 pages of Pruitt’s schedule from February through May of last year, then accused the EPA chief of holding “back-to-back meetings, briefing sessions and speaking engagements almost daily with top corporate executives and lobbyists from all the major economic sectors that he regulates—and almost no meetings with environmental groups or consumer or public health advocates.”

Midway through the story, Lipton and Friedman briefly mention how they reviewed one year of McCarthy’s official schedule and concluded it “also demonstrated a partisan bent.” McCarthy “held a disproportionate number of meetings with Democratic lawmakers and environmental groups, particularly in the summer of 2014, when the administration was making the case for sweeping climate-change regulations.”

That’s it. Although McCarthy handled most of Obama’s arm-twisting and bureaucratic chicanery to impose his unlawful climate change agenda, the Times could only muster a few brief paragraphs about her meeting and travel schedule over a four-year period. After she was gone.

So it’s no surprise that McCarthy found a safe space on the Times’ editorial page last week to blast Pruitt for his recent announcement to end the use of “secret science” at the EPA. The insular scientific establishment—which portrays any outside request for accountability as an “attack of science”—is furious that Pruitt will no longer allow burdensome and unnecessary federal regulations to be buttressed by independent research that is not publicly available.

Pruitt, quite logically, told The Daily Caller that the EPA must “make sure their data and methodology are published as part of the record. Otherwise, it’s not transparent. It’s not objectively measured, and that’s important.”

In an interview with the Hoover Institution, Pruitt further defended his move:

We have rules that we’ve adopted as an agency, historically, where we’ve contracted science out to a third party, and as the third party provides the findings and the conclusions, they don’t provide the data and the methodology that was used to reach the conclusion. We just simply made the change that if we contract out any particular third party to undergird rules, we’re going to make sure that the data and methodology is transferable and can be viewed by the public to ensure that it’s been done right.

But McCarthy, who has been accused of withholding potentially biased data from Congress, wants the research kept under wraps.

“But don’t be fooled by this talk of transparency,” she wrote in her Times op-ed. “[Pruitt] and some conservative members of Congress are setting up a nonexistent problem in order to prevent the E.P.A. from using the best available science. These studies adhere to all professional standards and meet every expectation of the scientific community in terms of peer review and scientific integrity.”

(Pruitt’s action is based on legislation sponsored by House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican and longtime McCarthy critic.)

None of the Left’s non-stop condemnation of Pruitt has anything to do with fiscal restraint or solid science. Pruitt has been a one-man wrecking crew at the EPA, dismantling Obama’s cherished climate change legacy, repealing the Clean Power Plan, dismissing activist-scientists who feed at the public trough, and ending the practice of “sue and settle,” a tactic used by special interest groups to force the agency to enact regulations they demand.

There is no greater threat to the reach and power of the federal government than Pruitt right now, and the Left not only wants him gone, they want him destroyed. (Thanks to the media’s despicable coverage of Pruitt, he and his family are facing an unprecedented number of death threats.)

The anti-Trump mob is also terrified at the prospect that Pruitt would replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the Justice Department, where he would undoubtedly apply the same smash-mouth approach and uncover God-knows-what. They want him so damaged that he’d never survive a Senate confirmation hearing.

It is difficult to calculate how hypocritical the media has been in covering this administration versus the previous one. But its collective coverage of the EPA and Scott Pruitt in particular has to be the most appalling—and destructive—example yet.

SOURCE

Easter Island myths and realities

The island’s demise was a human and Little Ice Age tragedy, not “ecological suicide”

Dennis Avery

In a recent New York Times column, Nicholas Kristof misleads us about the awful history of Easter Island (2,300 miles west of Chile), whose vegetation disappeared in the cold drought of the Little Ice Age. In doing so, he blinds modern society to the abrupt, icy climate challenge that lies in our own future.

Kristof repeats the archaeological myth that Easter Island’s natives committed “ecological suicide,” by cutting down all their palm trees. They supposedly used the logs as rollers to move their famous huge statues. Afterward, they could no longer build canoes to catch the fish that were their key protein source. Worse, he says, clearing the trees resulted in so much soil erosion that most of the population starved and/or killed each other in famine-driven desperation.

This myth disguises the impacts of the Little Ice Age on Easter, and ignores the inevitable reality that our coming generations could relatively soon face another icy age that will harshly test our technologies. The cold centuries may even make man-made global warming look positively attractive!

Easter Islanders never cut their palm trees at all! According to their cultural legends, when the Polynesians’ canoes reached Easter about 1000 AD, the island was covered in grasses. There were only a few palms. Modern pollen studies confirm this, showing that the island did have palm trees in the ancient past – but most died in the cold droughts of the Dark Ages (600–950 AD). The few surviving palms died during the Little Ice Age after the Polynesians colonized the island. The last palm died about 1650.

Kristof seems not to understand the killing power of the cold, chaotic, carbon dioxide-starved climate in those “little ice ages.”

The islanders wouldn’t have used palm logs for canoes in any case. The Polynesians knew palm logs are far too heavy. Canoes need to skim on top of the waves, even when carrying heavy loads. The Polynesians made their canoes out of sewn planks from the much-lighter toromiro trees, whose seedlings they’d brought with them from the Marquesas Islands to the west.

Soil erosion? The Easter Islanders didn’t need to clear trees from their land to grow their crops of taro, yams and sweet potatoes. They planted the tubers between the stumps of smaller trees cut for occasional house-building. The cut trees re-grew from their living stumps; their root systems remained alive and continued to protect the soil. In fact, the islanders’ agricultural techniques protected soil even more effectively than mainland farms did until the advent of modern no-till farming.

No fish to eat? A U.S. Navy lieutenant, who visited Easter in 1886, shortly after the Little Ice Age ended, reported that the natives ate huge amounts of seafood! Most of the fish were caught from small inshore canoes, with rockfish a favorite. The natives also speared dolphins in the shallows, after confusing the animals’ famed “sonar” by clapping rocks together. Crayfish and eels abounded in the shoreline’s rocky crevices, and flying fish flung themselves onto the beaches. Turtles and shellfish were plentiful.

Nor did the islanders kill each other off in hunger wars – although the sweet potato crops were scanty and population numbers dropped during those chilly Little Ice Age droughts.

What did happen to the Easter population? The truth is a sickening look at exploitation of some of the most vulnerable people on earth by some of the most powerful of the day. Peruvian slave-raiders took most of the men to Peru in the 1800s, to dig shiploads of seabird dung (guano) from offshore islands to fertilize Europe’s fields. Terrible conditions, overwork and European diseases killed most of the kidnapped slaves.

Peruvian citizens’ outrage over their mistreatment eventually forced the authorities to return the few who had survived. Unfortunately, the survivors carried smallpox back to Easter. Only a few natives lived through the ensuing epidemic. Later, well-meaning missionaries brought tuberculosis.

The final disaster was Peru’s leasing of the island’s grasslands to absentee landlords for sheep-grazing. The sheep destroyed the last of the toromiro trees, while the surviving natives were (unbelievably) penned behind barbed wire – until 1960 – when worldwide condemnation finally intervened.

Kristof, who may have gotten his Easter Island myths from Jared Diamond’s misguided book Collapse, demeans the sustainable traditions of the South Pacific’s Polynesian settlers. Their insightful tradition was not to use up a resource more rapidly than they could see it restoring itself.

Mother Nature, not the Polynesians, destroyed the trees. She did it over and over: in the Iron Age Cooling, during the cold Dark Ages and then again amid the Little Ice Age. Nor was Mother Nature being “careless.” She was responding to the age-old commands of the sun, the gravitational fields of the four biggest planets, and the other powerful natural forces that have always governed Earth’s climate.

Those same planetary patterns also govern our future, whether we like it or not. Another “icy age” will inevitably replace our current and relatively supportive climate warmth and stability. That probably (hopefully) won’t arrive for another several centuries. Our current warming period is only 150 years old; the shortest Dansgaard-Oeschger warm phase on record was the Medieval, which lasted 350 years.

The Easter Islanders were technologically capable enough (if barely) to sustain their society through Nature’s climate cycles. Elsewhere, nomads from the Black Sea region survived the Last Glacial Maximum (in temperatures below -40 degrees Celsius/Fahrenheit) by inventing mammoth-skin tents to survive the cold as they followed migrating mammoths. Those huge furry beasts were themselves forced to move frequently as the Ice Age turned the grass into less-nourishing tundra.

Our ancestors also made the most important discovery in all human history farming, only about 10,000 years ago. Farming finally allowed humans to become more than scattered hunting bands, carrying their babies and scant possessions on their backs. They could support larger populations, create languages, build temples, cities and trading ships, and launch industries that made copper, bronze and then iron.

Collective learning has now gotten us to the point where we create resources rather than just finding them. Think nitrogen fertilizer, which is taken from the air that’s 78% nitrogen, and then returned to the sky through natural processes. Think computer chips and fiber optic cables made from sand.

We are no longer doomed to thrive, only to collapse again. Our challenge today is not to retreat into a harsh and uncertain dependence on Mother Nature and her deadly “ice age” betrayals. Rather, we can and must prepare for the next “icy age” we know is coming – by continuing our collective learning, using a matured wisdom, and not turning our backs on the fossil fuel, nuclear and other reliable, affordable energy sources that have made our industries, health, innovations and living standards possible.

Mr. Kristof’s mythology would lead us back into ignorance, not forward.

Via email

Australian Greens’ agenda targets bosses and billionaires in tax-the-rich plan

The Greens are Leftists who have learnt nothing

The NSW Greens are pushing a hard-left policy manifesto that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, heavily tax the nation’s wealthy and cap the salaries of chief executives.

The manifesto also supports starving private schools of public cash, cutting the standard working week, abolishing higher education debts and making university and public transport free.

The policy document, released by Greens NSW MP David Shoebridge, threatens to further undermine national leader Richard Di Natale and expose the party to ridicule in the lead-up to the next federal and NSW elections.

Mr Shoebridge has outlined dozens of detailed policy positions, headlined by a billionaires’ tax of up to 10 per cent that the party says could raise as much as $11 billion.

Dismissing the drug ecstasy as “relatively safe’’, the document also suggests renters should be able to stay as long as they like if they continue to meet their financial and contract obligations.

It argues that there should be no “handouts’’ to churches and backs renationalising the power grid.

Although Mr Shoebridge backs Senator Di Natale’s push for a $250bn-plus universal basic income, he is critical of the party’s failure to capitalise on a reduced Liberal and Labor vote at the 2016 federal election.

He advocates a more radical social and economic agenda that includes targeting the richest Australians.

“There is a false perception that the Greens focus almost entirely on the environment at the expense of other economic and social issues, which are more important to likely and former Greens’ voters,’’ he writes. “This perception is a barrier to growing our vote.’’

Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese blasted the Greens as a virtual “secret society’’ that banned scrutiny of their party conferences and just stopped short of “abolishing all private ownership in anything’’.

“When the public examine the specifics of their policies they reject them,’’ Mr Albanese said.

Openly borrowing from British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, Mr Shoebridge says Australia’s wealthiest have $111bn between them. “It’s time that wealth was shared,’’ he said. “That’s more than three times the government’s annual spend on education; it’s more than the wealth of most countries.

“If in addition to income tax, which is largely avoided by the super-wealthy, we taxed billionaires just 5 per cent of their accumulated wealth each year, we’d have $5.5bn more to spend on public education, affordable childcare, housing and cheap, clean energy.

“If we taxed their wealth at 10 per cent, that figure jumps to $11bn. This pays for an awful lot of things that will benefit all of us, not just the mega rich.’’

He adds that chief executive salaries could be capped at 10 times or 20 times average earnings, claiming the average chief executive earns 78 times more than the average worker.

Institute of Public Affairs policy director Simon Breheny said: “The Greens manifesto is a grab-bag of radical socialist proposals. These policies would be disastrous for Australia. They would result in our best and brightest entrepreneurs and risk-takers leaving Australia.”

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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6 April, 2018

A climate quiz

Warmists usually just pour out abuse at skeptics but sometimes they try to be more factual. One such effort is a "climate quiz" that came out last year. It pretends to be a factual approach to explaining why there is and will be global warming. And it is. It does deal in facts -- or the Warmist version of facts, to be precise.

I just did the first 3 or 4 questions and got them all wrong but they were very technical questions so I was not sure how well founded their answers were. They asked, for instance, "When Glacier National Park in Montana was founded in 1910 it had 150 glaciers. How many are left?" The answer was allegedly 25. I had no idea how many nor would most people and the answer is probably disputable anyway.

Then I came to a question: "What was likely the first mammal to lose its habitat and go extinct due to the crisis?"

Now the answer to that was really obscure. I did however happen to know the answer that they were looking for: The Bramble Cay Melomy. And I knew a bit about that story.

Bramble Cay is a 9 acre sand cay which is the Northernmost part of Australia. There is a lighthouse (now automatic) there and some grass. A type of rat known as a Melomys was known there which in times past was used as target practice by bored visitors. In 2016 scientific visitors could not find any of them anymore.

So how does that relate to global warming? It doesn't. We have no idea why the Melomys has died out if it has died out. It is just speculation that global warming was to blame. Most likey it was shot out by visitors. It is only 34 miles South of New Guinea and New Guineans would undoubtedly eat them. Melanesians are poor but are excellent sailors.

They normally have very little animal protein in their diet. There are no grazing animals in New Guinea. They were probably all hunted to extinction thousands of years ago. So now all they have is their pigs and an occasional bird. And they can't feed enough pigs to slaughter one very often. So a Melomys would be a treat.

And it is only the Melomys on that cay which is missing. There are lots of them elswhere in that part of the world. So it is not even a small tragedy.

I had some more comments on the melomys story in 2016 (Scroll down)

So that's the quality of the "quiz". In typical Warmist style, its facts are between dubious and wrong and they don't prove anything anyway -- JR

EPA Administrator: Obama’s Emissions Standards Forced Automakers to Make Cars People Won’t Buy

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt said the Obama administration’s focus was on forcing car manufacturers to make cars that people won’t buy when the focus should have been on making cars that people actually buy more efficient.

Pruitt said the emissions standards for cars and light trucks set by the previous administration were “inappropriate and should be revised.” His agency announced Monday that it planned to revise the standards, but did not specify what specific standards would be set going forward.

“I think the focus in the past has been on making manufacturers in Detroit, making manufacturers in various parts of the country make cars that people aren’t going to buy, and our focus should be on making cars that people purchase actually more efficient,” Pruitt told reporters.

“To have arbitrary percentages of our fleet made up of vehicles that aren’t going to be purchase, that defeats the very purpose of what the CAFE standards are supposed to address,” Pruitt said.

“We should be focused on making those cars more efficient, because if not, then individuals will stay in older vehicles, as Peter indicated, and emissions will go up, so we will get this right going forward this year, but it is very right for us to be here to recognize that what was done in 2011 and 12 as we evaluate it now is not appropriate going forward, and we’re going to get it right as we address it this year,” he said.

Pruitt said revising emissions standards is “another step” in President Donald Trump’s “deregulatory agenda.”

“This president has shown tremendous courage to say to the American people that America is going to be put first, and I think this mid-term evaluation, the auto sector, the importance of auto manufacturing in this country, the president is again saying, America is going to be put first, and we have nothing to be apologetic about with respect to the progress we’ve made in reducing emissions as a country,” he said.

“We’ve led the world with respect to reduction of GHG, mobile sources and otherwise through technology and innovation, and the auto sector from my perspective has been the leader in achieving that through better design and through better technology, and that’s exciting, and we should celebrate that as a country,” Pruitt added.

SOURCE

EPA Chief Scott Pruitt Says Media Reports About Him Don’t Tell True Story

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt defended his living arrangement in Washington during the presidential transition, noting that career ethics officials at the EPA found no problems with his choice of where to sleep.

“This was an Airbnb-type situation where I rented literally one room that was used in a temporary status until I found more permanent residence.” @EPAScottPruitt says.

Media reports, Pruitt told The Daily Signal during an interview Tuesday, are incomplete and don’t reflect “the truth.”

“I think the information has been, as things go, I think very intermittent and very sporadic and not terribly complete with respect to what the truth is,” Pruitt said in the interview.

Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. But this can't be done alone. Find out more >>

As Pruitt on Monday announced a rollback of Obama administration emission rules for vehicles in model years 2022 to 2025, multiple media reports focused on the EPA chief’s renting of a bedroom on Capitol Hill.

Pruitt paid $50 a night to the wife of J. Steven Hart, chairman and CEO of the Washington law firm of Williams & Jensen, whose clients include energy companies. He paid Vicki Hart only for the nights he slept in the room at the condo, according to news reports and critics.

“We had a memo and a statement from career ethics officials here that have actually reviewed the lease, that actually reviewed comps—comparables of similar units,” Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma, told The Daily Signal.

“And I think what’s missed in this: I didn’t rent a unit,” Pruitt said. “I didn’t rent an apartment. This was an Airbnb-type situation where I rented literally one room that was used in a temporary status, until I found more permanent residence.”

This was during his early days in Washington after the president nominated him as EPA administrator, he said.

“My wife wasn’t here yet. My children were back in Oklahoma,” Pruitt said. “The needs were different. As soon as my wife came up, we moved to a different location where I couldn’t just be living out of a suitcase.”

In a March 30 memo, Kevin S. Minoli, the designated agency ethics official, to EPA General Counsel Matthew Z. Leopold, stated:

The regulations issued by the Office of Government Ethics are clear that if a federal employee pays market value for something, it is by definition not a gift under those regulations. … Under the terms of the lease, if the space was utilized for one 30-day month, then the rental cost would be $1,500, which is a reasonable market value.

The lease authorized use by the Administrator and his immediate family, specifically including his spouse and children, and consistent with that provision of the lease his immediate family did stay there when they were in Washington, D.C. The lease did not require payment when the property was not utilized.

Neither of these two provisions render the rental cost under the lease as something other than market value. Therefore, entering into the lease was consistent with federal ethics regulations regarding gifts, and use of property in accordance with the lease agreement did not constitute a gift as defined in those regulations.

But in a letter Tuesday, two House Democrats, Reps. Ted Lieu of California and Don Beyer of Virginia, urged EPA Inspector General Arthur Elkins Jr. to investigate the matter.

The lawmakers contend Pruitt didn’t pay a fair market rate because he paid only for the days he stayed in the space:

Administrator Pruitt didn’t pay $1,500 a month. He paid far less because the unusual lease allowed him to have the condo on demand but he only had to pay for the days he stayed at the condo. Over a period of six months, Administrator Pruitt paid only a total of $6,100 for the furnished condo. This is far below market value and, as such, would constitute an impermissible gift under federal regulations.

Asked about Pruitt on Tuesday, President Donald Trump told reporters: “I hope he’s going to be great.”

Trump reportedly called Pruitt on Monday and told him: “Keep your head up. Keep fighting. We got your back.”

Pruitt also pushed back against reports that he rented space from an energy lobbyist.

“The other thing I would say is that the owner of the residence—people, I’ve heard, say that he’s an energy lobbyist,” Pruitt told The Daily Signal.

Speaking of Hart, Pruitt said: “He’s the chairman of a law firm. I’ve know this gentleman for years. He’s an Oklahoman, and his firm represents these [energy industry] clients, not him. There has been no connection whatsoever in that regard.”

Trump reportedly spoke Monday to Pruitt, according to media reports Tuesday. White House chief of staff John Kelly also spoke with the EPA administrator.

Pruitt declined to comment on media speculation regarding his future at the EPA.

SOURCE

President Trump should stand by EPA Administrator Pruitt

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement urging President Donald Trump to stand by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt:

“Scott Pruitt’s tenure as Administrator of the EPA is one of the best examples of a successful cabinet level pick by President Donald Trump. It is normal that those who are attempting to defend the Obama EPA’s radical stranglehold on our economy would subject Pruitt to a constant barrage of complaints to hamper the deregulatory agenda that is ending the war on coal. Reports from the agency that Pruitt has been subjected to a dramatic increase in threats to his and his family’s safety demonstrates the kind of courage and commitment it takes to unwind the radical environmentalist agenda.

President Trump has been right in the past when he regularly and openly praised Pruitt for his dedication, hard work and commitment to restoring balance to America’s environmental regulations. Now there are those who are attempting to besmirch Pruitt’s reputation through attacks about his Washington, D.C. living arrangements. Let’s be clear. Pruitt received approval from career civil servants in charge of the EPA ethics office that are now being questioned by partisans with a radical agenda.

“President Trump knows better than anyone what it is like to be falsely attacked by people with an agenda and how the anti-Trump news media will accuse first and look for the facts later. Trump should embrace Pruitt as a man of integrity and empower him to continue doing his outstanding work at the EPA, carrying out the Trump agenda to end the war on energy development and make America competitive again.”

SOURCE

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Australia's Greens leader admits he agrees with conservatives about one thing – Australia MUST lower its immigration intake

Greens are anti-people so that figures

Greens leader Richard Natale has admitted he agrees with former prime minister Tony Abbott's call to cut immigration.

The left-wing party leader told journalists in Canberra big business was behind the push for high population growth.

'The notion that we need a big Australia based on economic drivers is not one we support,' he told the National Press Club on Wednesday.

'Often this is an argument that is run by the business community.'

With Australia's population set to surpass the 25 million milestone this year, Tony Abbott has called for the nation's net annual immigration rate to be slashed from 190,000 to 110,000.

However Senator Di Natale, who hails from Melbourne, declined to explicitly confirm he agreed with the former Liberal PM even though reducing population growth is Greens policy.

'I don't buy into the debate that Tony Abbott is trying to run at the moment,' he said.

'He is not having a debate about population, he is having a debate about the leadership of the Liberal Party. It is not a sophisticated debate about immigration.'

Under Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's watch, Australia's population is growing at 1.6 per cent a year, which is more than double the United States' 0.7 per cent and well above the world average of 1.1 per cent.

Millionaire businessman Dick Smith has called for Australia's net annual immigration rate to return to the 20th century average of 70,000 a year, a position shared by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson.

Like them, the Greens agree 'population policy should not be primarily driven by economic goals or to counter the effects of an ageing population'.

'The current level of population, population growth and the way we produce and consume are outstripping environmental capacity,' the party's policy platform said.

Despite agreeing with Tony Abbott, Senator Di Natale said the debate about reducing population growth should not be held as the former Liberal prime minister makes efforts to destabilise Malcolm Turnbull.

'We are very happy to have that debate but let’s not have it in an environment when what is actually happening is a proxy war between the Prime Minister and the former prime minister,' he said.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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5 April, 2018

Environmentalist Publishes Op-Ed on Climate Change… Covers it With Blatant Lies

An anti-fossil fuel movement proponent dubiously claimed Tuesday natural gas development’s methane emissions are hitting catastrophic levels.

Activist are failing to impress upon people the dangers associated with the fracking industry, according to Vermont’s Middlebury College Professor Bill McKibben. He also suggested most research shows methane emissions from natural gas are pitching above a safe level, yet many studies show the antithesis.

“When I think about my greatest failing as a communicator — and one of the greatest failings of the climate movement — it’s not that global warming still continues,” McKibben wrote Wednesday for Yale Environment 360.

The movement’s biggest moral failing, he said, was not selling people on the danger unchecked methane emissions pose to the climate.

Democrats, Republicans and the public have generally accepted the idea natural gas is a fine alternative to other forms of fossil fuel production, but the general population is unaware methane emissions from such energy put the climate in a precarious spot, McKibben added.

“It turns out that there are lots of places for leaks to happen — when you frack a field, when you connect a pipe, when you send gas thousands of miles through pumping stations — and so most studies show that the leakage rate is at least three percent and probably higher,” he noted without citing any specific study buttressing his claim.

McKibben relied on data from Cornell University Ecology Professor Bob Howard’s studies to conclude methane emission leakage rates were nearly three percent, he told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Howard’s work has been criticized in the past for using too short a time frame. He uses a 20-year window to study the global warming potential of methane emissions in the atmosphere as opposed to the more common 100-year horizon.

Environmental groups have also scrutinized Howard’s work.

“While I can see an argument for using a time horizon shorter than 100 years, I personally believe that the 20-year GWP is too short a period to be appropriate for policy analysis,” former National Resources Defense Council director Dan Lashof said in 2011 of McKibben’s chronological methodology.

Environmental Protection Agency research and other studies, meanwhile, paint a much different story.

Actual emissions from gas power plants were “nearly 50 times lower than previously estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency,” a 2013 University of Texas study availed. Researchers at UT concluded methane emissions from the supply chain’s upstream portion are 0.38 percent of production.

EPA’s latest methane emissions data from 2017 show very low methane leakage rates of approximately 1.2 percent. The agency and UT’s data and research were concluded, using the more reliable 100-year time frame. McKibben has spent several years thrashing Democratic leaders for promoting the natural gas industry.

McKibben was singing a different tune in 2009 when he felt so strongly about power plants switching to natural gas he was willing to be jailed in support of the cause. He was one of several celebrities who protested on Capitol Power Plant’s front steps in Washington, D.C.

“There are moments in a nation’s — and a planet’s — history when it may be necessary for some to break the law … We will cross the legal boundary of the power plant, and we expect to be arrested,” McKibben told reporters prior to the March 3, 2009, protest.

“(I)t would be easy enough to fix. In fact, the facility can already burn some natural gas instead, and a modest retrofit would let it convert away from coal entirely. … It would even stimulate the local economy,” he added.

SOURCE

EPA’s Scott Pruitt Begins Repeal Of Obama Climate Regs For Cars, Trucks

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt announced Monday the Obama administration’s fuel economy regulations were not appropriate and would be revised.

Pruitt said EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would begin crafting new greenhouse gas emission and mileage, or Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE), standards for vehicles built in 2022 through 2025.

“The Obama EPA’s determination was wrong,” Pruitt said in a statement. “Obama’s EPA cut the midterm evaluation process short with politically charged expediency, made assumptions about the standards that didn’t comport with reality and set the standards too high,” Pruitt said.

EPA’s revising of CAFE regulations also put the agency on a collision course with California. The Golden State got permissions from the Obama administration to issue its own, higher emissions standards.

Conservative groups urged Pruitt to repeal California’s waiver, arguing the state can use its influence over automakers to supplant federal standards. EPA is still examining California’s waiver, but Pruitt seemed critical of continuing the policy as it stands.

“Cooperative federalism doesn’t mean that one state can dictate standards for the rest of the country,” Pruitt said. “EPA will set a national standard for greenhouse gas emissions that allows auto manufacturers to make cars that people both want and can afford – while still expanding environmental and safety benefits of newer cars.”

“It’s in everyone’s best interest to have a national standard, and we look forward to working with all states, including California, as we work to finalize that standard,” said Pruitt.

EPA’s is also moving against President Barack Obama’s emissions pledge under the Paris accord, which he joined in 2016. Obama committed the U.S. to cut greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent by 2025.

The Obama-era rules required cars to get 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. Officials estimated the rules would cut 540 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions and save consumers money.

However, automakers missed fuel efficiency targets for model year 2016 cars and light trucks by about 9 grams per mile. Indeed, the Obama EPA’s own analysis found cars may not meet the 2025 target, only getting between 50 and 52.6 miles per gallon by then.

SOURCE

UK: 'Major milestone' as first well completed at controversial fracking site

Work on creating the first well at a controversial Lancashire fracking site has been completed.

Energy firm Cuadrilla said drilling of the UK's first horizontal shale gas well had been successfully completed at its site on Preston New Road in Fylde.

The company will now begin drilling a second well and has planning permission for a total of four wells on the site.

A spokesman for the firm said it would apply for permission to frack the completed well in the "very near future" and planned to be in a position to frack the first two wells on site later this year.

CEO Francis Egan said:

Our completion of the UK's first ever horizontal shale gas well is a major milestone towards getting Lancashire gas flowing into Lancashire homes as we lead the way on UK exploration.

"From the data we have amassed so far we are optimistic that, after fracturing the shale rock, natural gas will flow into this horizontal well in commercially viable quantities demonstrating that the UK's huge shale gas resources can be safely produced and contribute to improving the UK's energy security."

The site was initially refused planning permission by Lancashire County Council in 2015 but was given the go-ahead by Cabinet minister Sajid Javid following an appeal and a planning inquiry.

Campaign groups lost a High Court action to overturn the decision, but protests have continued at the site.

The controversial process of fracking involves drilling vertically deep underground and then horizontally, before pumping in liquid at high pressure to fracture shale rock and release gas trapped in the shale.

A planning inquiry on a second Cuadrilla site, at Roseacre Wood in Lancashire, is due to be held next week

SOURCE

If environmental radicals are in full panic mode over Scott Pruitt at EPA, that means he is doing a good job

The left has spent over a decade trying to expand the influence and oversight of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but the American people voted against this influence when they elected President Trump to prioritize economic advancement. Trump followed through on this promise by appointing Scott Pruitt as EPA Administrator. The left is now trying everything to destroy his position and defame his record, but Pruitt must power through, his job is far too important.

Last year, nearly every Republican and two Democrats voted to confirm Pruitt. North Dakota Senate Democrat Heidi Heitkamp explained, “Once Mr. Pruitt is confirmed to lead EPA, I’ll work to make sure EPA focuses on smart regulation and works with states and local communities to address issues like the unworkable Waters of the U.S. rule and the punitive final Clean Power Plan rules.”

And this is exactly what Pruitt has done. Under Pruitt’s leadership in the last year, the EPA has begun receiving public comments to replace the Clean Power Plan and blocked the implementation of the Waters of the U.S. rule. Both of these Obama-era initiatives dramatically expanded the EPA’s influence over local waterways and implemented emissions regulations to “combat climate change,” and as a consequence, close businesses ruled environmentally hazardous.

Pruitt has been integral in implementing the conservative agenda of President Trump, and it terrifies liberals. So the left has resorted to character attacks.

Democrats, such as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), have been quick to blast Pruitt for his expenditures on increased security this year, not realizing, they are the reason for the cost.

Pruitt and his entire family have received an unprecedented number of direct threats to their life.

The EPA’s assistant inspector general for investigations, Patrick Sullivan, told CNN on Nov. 2017, “We have at least four times — four to five times the number of threats against Mr. Pruitt than we had against [Obama’s EPA Chief] Ms. McCarthy… They run the variety of direct death threats — ‘I’m going to put a bullet in your brain’ — to implied threats — ‘if you don’t classify this particular chemical in this particular way, I’m going to hurt you.’”

Additionally, the Washington Examiner reported on Feb. 2018; the EPA currently has 70 open probes into threats against Pruitt and his family. This has caused the EPA’s Criminal Investigations Division to provide Pruitt with a 24/7 security detail to ensure his and his family’s safety.

Now, the left has cooked up a new conspiracy against Pruitt.

It has recently been revealed that Administrator Pruitt and his family stayed in a Capitol Hill condominium partially owned by the wife of an energy lobbyist several times over the last year. The lease has sparked controversy because of its “unconventional” term, Pruitt paid for the space by the day at a rate of $50 a night. His payments amounted to $6,100 over the course of six months, according to documents shared with Bloomberg News.

Pruitt received approval in advance for the arrangement by the EPA Ethics office, but in spite of this okay, Democrats have been quick to call “corruption!”, claiming that the lobbyist wife’s ownership of the condo makes it a “gift” to Pruitt.

In a March 30 memo, Kevin Minoli, a career attorney, and the EPA’s designated ethics official explained, “Market value for rental apartments is commonly thought of in terms of rental cost per month. Under the terms of the lease, if the space was utilized for one 30-day month, then the rental cost would be $1500, which is a reasonable market value… “The lease authorized use by the administrator and his immediate family, specifically including his spouse and children, and consistent with that provision of the lease his immediate family did stay there when they were in Washington, D.C.”

Minoli continued, “Entering into the lease was consistent with federal ethics regulations regarding gifts, and use of the property in accordance with the lease agreement did not constitute a gift as defined in those regulations.”

Minoli is the second EPA ethics official to come to Pruitt’s defense. Justina Fugh, an ethics lawyer at the EPA for a dozen years, told BuzzFeed News this story was causing “so much drama” for what she believes to be an above board living arrangement.

Scott Pruitt has done his job, and he has done it well. All the left’s continued attacks prove is that it is willing to dismiss facts in favor of pushing an agenda. Pruitt must continue charting the EPA’s path toward a balance between environmental concerns and economic development and security, rather than be distracted by the baseless attacks from political opponents, and President Trump needs to stand behind this stalwart of his administration, who is big part of what is needed to make America great again.

SOURCE

What the Pope Doesn’t Know about the Environment

Along with poverty reduction, Pope Francis made environmental protection a theme of his 2015 encyclical about “care for our common home.” Unfortunately, the pontiff voiced widespread misunderstandings about markets and the environment, mistaken claims he repeated last January during his widely reported visit to Peru. In truth, rather than being inherently antagonistic, the free market creates strong incentives for the prudent conservation of earth’s amenities.

“Private property and the profit motive are crucial to the long-term preservation of resources, from water and land to endangered species,” write Independent Institute Research Fellows Robert M. Whaples and Adam B. Summer in a recent op-ed. “Pope Francis and other critics of free-market capitalism need to understand that the deciding issue isn’t whether or not capitalists—or companies—have humanitarian motives. It’s whether or not the environment and humanity are better served when environmental resources are privately owned and property rights are vigorously enforced, or when government runs the show.”

Free-market pricing for water, for example, discourages the wasting of that scarce resource, whereas mandated below-market pricing encourages demand to outstrip supply. Similarly, a free market in rhinoceros farming and the sale of horns drastically reduced rhino poaching in South Africa, whereas a ban in neighboring Kenya decimated the rhino population, Whaples and Summer explain. Such examples can be found around the globe, enabling us to draw a robust conclusion. As one study by Guatemalan economist Daniel Fernandez puts it, “The greater the economic freedom, the better the environmental quality indexes.”

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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4 April, 2018

That pesky cooling in the Antarctic

CO2 levels have risen steadily to a record high but Antarctica has shown a clearly growing sea ice cover since 1980, totally contradicting global warming theory. The authors below therefore have begun to look at what actually influences the Antarctic

Low-Frequency Climate Modes and Antarctic Sea Ice Variations, 1982–2013

Abstract

The NCEP–NCAR composite dataset (comprising sea level pressure, 500-hPa geopotential height, 500-hPa temperature, and meridional wind stress at 10 m above the surface) is used for compiling a set of climate indices describing the most important physical modes of variability in the Southern Hemisphere (SH): the southern annular mode (SAM), semiannual oscillation (SAO), Pacific–South American (PSA), and quasi-stationary zonal wavenumber 3 (ZW3) patterns. Compelling evidence indicates that the large increase in the SH sea ice, recorded over recent years, arises from the impact of climate modes and their long-term trends. The examination of variability ranging from seasonal to interdecadal scales, and of trends within the climate patterns and total Antarctic sea ice concentration (SIC) for the 32-yr period (1982–2013), is the key focus of this paper. The results herein indicate that a progressive cooling has affected the year-to-year climate of the sub-Antarctic since the 1990s. This feature is found in association with increased positive SAM and SAO phases detected in terms of upward annual and seasonal trends (in autumn and summer) and upward decadal trends. In addition, the SIC shows upward annual, spring, and summer trends, indicating the insulation of Antarctica from the warmer flows in the midlatitudes. This picture of variations is also found to be consistent with the upward trends detected for the PSA and ZW3 patterns on the annual scale and during the last two decades. Evidence of a more frequent occurrence of the PSA–ZW3 combination could explain, in part, the significant increase of the regional and total Antarctic sea ice coverages.

SOURCE

Egyptian election: Army-backed President wins second term with 97% of vote

There's that 97% again -- the hallmark of a fraud: In climate politics as in any politics. Warmists really are in good company

Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has won a second, four-year term in office, with more than 97 per cent of the vote in last week’s election, according to official results announced on Monday by the election commission, which put turnout at 41.05 per cent.

SOURCE

The Stunning Statistical Fraud Behind The Global Warming Scare

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration may have a boring name, but it has a very important job: It measures U.S. temperatures. Unfortunately, it seems to be a captive of the global warming religion. Its data are fraudulent.

What do we mean by fraudulent? How about this: NOAA has made repeated "adjustments" to its data, for the presumed scientific reason of making the data sets more accurate.

Nothing wrong with that. Except, all their changes point to one thing — lowering previously measured temperatures to show cooler weather in the past, and raising more recent temperatures to show warming in the recent present.

This creates a data illusion of ever-rising temperatures to match the increase in CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere since the mid-1800s, which global warming advocates say is a cause-and-effect relationship. The more CO2, the more warming.

But the actual measured temperature record shows something different: There have been hot years and hot decades since the turn of the last century, and colder years and colder decades. But the overall measured temperature shows no clear trend over the last century, at least not one that suggests runaway warming.

That is, until the NOAA's statisticians "adjust" the data. Using complex statistical models, they change the data to reflect not reality, but their underlying theories of global warming. That's clear from a simple fact of statistics: Data generate random errors, which cancel out over time. So by averaging data, the errors mostly disappear.

That's not what NOAA does.

According to the NOAA, the errors aren't random. They're systematic. As we noted, all of their temperature adjustments lean cooler in the distant past, and warmer in the more recent past. But they're very fuzzy about why this should be.

Far from legitimately "adjusting" anything, it appears they are cooking the data to show a politically correct trend toward global warming. Not by coincidence, that has been part and parcel of the government's underlying policies for the better part of two decades.

What NOAA does aren't niggling little changes, either.

As Tony Heller at the Real Climate Science web site notes, "Pre-2000 temperatures are progressively cooled, and post-2000 temperatures are warmed. This year has been a particularly spectacular episode of data tampering by NOAA, as they introduce nearly 2.5 degrees of fake warming since 1895."

So the global warming scare is basically a hoax.

This winter, for instance, as measured by temperature in city after city and by snow-storm severity, has been one of the coldest on record in the Northeast.

But after the NOAA's wizards finished with the data, it was merely about average.

Climate analyst Paul Homewood notes for instance that in New York state, measured temperatures this year were 2.7 degrees or more colder than in 1943. Not to NOAA. Its data show temperatures this year as 0.9 degrees cooler than the actual data in 1943.

Erasing Winter

By the way, a similar result occurred after the brutally cold 2013-2014 winter in New York. It was simply adjusted away. Do this year after year, and with the goal of radically altering the temperature record to fit the global warming narrative, and you have what amounts to climate fraud.

"Clearly NOAA's highly homogenized and adjusted version of the Central Lakes temperature record bears no resemblance at all the the actual station data," writes Homewood. "And if this one division is so badly in error, what confidence can there be that the rest of the U.S. is any better?"

That's the big question. And for those who think that government officials don't have political, cultural or other agendas, that's naivete of the highest sort. They do.

Since the official government mantra for all of the bureaucracies at least since the Clinton era is that CO2 production is an evil that inevitably leads to runaway global warming, those who toil in the bureaucracies' statistical sweat shops know that their careers and future funding depend on having the politically correct answers — not the scientifically correct ones.

"The key point here is that while NOAA frequently makes these adjustments to the raw data, it has never offered a convincing explanation as to why they are necessary," wrote James Delingpole recently in Breitbart's Big Government. "Nor yet, how exactly their adjusted data provides a more accurate version of the truth than the original data."

There are at least some signs of progress, however. In the case of the Environmental Protection Agency, future reports and studies will include the data and the underlying scientific assumptions for public scrutiny.

That's one way to bring greater honesty to government — and to keep climate charlatans from bankrupting our nation with spurious demands for carbon taxes and deindustrialization of our economy to prevent global warming. The only real result won't be a cooler planet, but rather mass poverty and lower standards of living for all.

SOURCE

Climate Alarmists May Inherit the Wind

They likened a courtroom ‘tutorial’ to the Scopes Monkey Trial. But their side got schooled.

Five American oil companies find themselves in a San Francisco courtroom. California v. Chevron is a civil action brought by the city attorneys of San Francisco and Oakland, who accuse the defendants of creating a “public nuisance” by contributing to climate change and of conspiring to cover it up so they could continue to profit.No trial date has been set, but on March 21 the litigants gathered for a “climate change tutorial” ordered by Judge William Alsup—a prospect that thrilled climate-change alarmists. Excited spectators gathered outside the courtroom at 6 a.m., urged on by advocates such as the website Grist, which declared “Buckle up, polluters! You’re in for it now,” and likened the proceeding to the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.

In the event, the hearing did not go well for the plainti s—and not for lack of legal talent. Steve W. Berman, who represented the cities, is a star trial lawyer who has made a career and a fortune suing corporations for large settlements, including the $200 billion-plus tobacco settlement in 1998.

“Until now, fossil fuel companies have been able to talk about climate science in political and media arenas where there is far less accountability to the truth,” Michael Burger of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University told Grist. The hearing

did mark a shi toward accountability—but perhaps not in the way activists would have liked.

Judge Alsup started quietly. He flattered the plainti s’ first witness, Oxford physicist Myles Allen, by calling him a “genius,” but he also reprimanded Mr. Allen for using a misleading illustration to represent carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and a graph ostensibly about temperature rise that did not actually show rising temperatures.

Then the pointed questions began. Gary Griggs, an oceanographer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, struggled with the judge’s simple query: “What do you think caused the last Ice Age?”

The professor talked at length about a wobble in the earth’s orbit and went on to describe a period “before there were humans on the planet,” which “we call hothouse Earth.” That was when “all the ice melted. We had fossils of palm trees and alligators in the Arctic,” Mr. Griggs told the court. He added that at one time the sea level was 20 to 30 feet higher than today.

Mr. Griggs then recounted “a period called ‘snow ballers,’ ” when scientists “think the entire Earth was frozen due to changes in things like methane released from the ocean.”

Bear in mind these accounts of two apocalyptic climate events that occurred naturally came from a witness for plainti s looking to prove American oil companies are responsible for small changes in present-day climate.

The defendants’ lawyer, Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., emphasized the little-discussed but huge uncertainties in reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the failure of worst-case climate models to pan out in reality. Or as Judge Alsup put it: “Instead of doom and gloom, it’s just gloom.”

Mr. Boutrous also noted that the city of San Francisco—in court claiming that rising sea levels imperil its future—recently issued a 20-year bond, whose prospectus asserted the city was “unable to predict whether sea level rise or other impacts of climate change or

flooding from a major storm will occur.”

Judge Alsup was particularly scathing about the conspiracy claim. The plainti s alleged that the oil companies were in possession of “smoking gun” documents that would prove their liability; Mr. Boutrous said this was simply an internal summary of the publicly available 1995 IPCC report.

The judge said he read the lawsuit’s allegations to mean “that there was a conspiratorial document within the defendants about how they knew good and well that global warming was right around the corner. And I said: ‘OK, that’s going to be a big thing. I want to see it.’ Well, it turned out it wasn’t quite that. What it was, was a slide show that somebody had gone to the IPCC and was reporting on what the IPCC had reported, and that was it. Nothing more. So they were on notice of what in IPCC said from that document, but it’s hard to say that they were secretly aware. By that point they knew. Everybody knew everything in the IPCC,” he stated.

Judge Alsup then turned to Mr. Berman: “If you want to respond, I’ll let you respond. . . . Anything you want to say?”“No,” said the counsel to the plainti s. Whereupon Judge Alsup adjourned the proceedings.

Until now, environmentalists and friendly academics have found a receptive audience in journalists and politicians who don’t understand science and are happy to defer to experts. Perhaps this is why the plainti s seemed so ill-prepared for their first court outings with tough questions from an informed and inquisitive judge.

Activists have long claimed they want their day in court so that the truth can be revealed. Given last week’s poor performance, they may be the ones who inherit the wind.

SOURCE

Australia: Pressure from conservative parliamentarians for more coal-fired electicity

Malcolm Turnbull faces a challenge to his signature energy policy from a group of Coalition backbenchers, including Tony Abbott, Eric Abetz and Kevin Andrews, who have formed a lobby group to promote government support for the construction of new coal-fired power stations.

Liberal MP Craig Kelly and Nationals MP George Christensen yesterday claimed more than 20 government MPs had joined the newly created Monash Forum, named after World War I military hero John Monash, a key figure in opening Victoria’s Latrobe Valley to coal production.

The Australian was told last night that Barnaby Joyce had thrown his support behind the new informal political faction along with up to 11 other Nationals. The former deputy prime minister did not respond to requests for comment.

The lobby group could threaten the Prime Minister’s national energy guarantee (NEG) as he attempts to secure support from state and territory governments for a new national framework later this month.

While not opposed to the NEG, the Monash Forum aims to test Mr Turnbull’s assurances to the Coalition partyroom that the government framework is “technology-neutral” by aggressively pushing for more coal-fired power stations.

One member of the new group said: “Some of us see energy as being the only ticket to ride in the next election and the NEG is clearly not going to cut it for us.”

The backbench lobby group push comes as Mr Turnbull faces pressure over his leadership, with the Coalition on track to trail Labor for 30 consecutive Newspolls — the benchmark Mr Turnbull used to oust Mr Abbott as prime minister in September 2015.

The Australian understands the new ginger group is based on the Lyons Forum of the early 1990s which was made up of conservative Liberals who played a vital role in facilitating John Howard’s leadership ascension in 1995.

The Lyons Forum, dubbed the “God squad” by some commentators, included Liberal MPs Mr Andrews and Senator Abetz.

The Monash Forum is understood to have its own mission statement or policy manifesto, which was given to backbenchers when parliament sat in Canberra last week. Some MPs were encouraged to sign documents to confirm their support.

“It says the government is building a Snowy 2.0 so why can’t it build a Hazelwood 2.0,” Mr Kelly said of the manifesto.

“The group wants to see the replacement of Australia’s existing coal-fired power fleet with new high-efficiency, low-emissions (HELE) coal-fired power stations.”

Mr Kelly and Mr Christensen said yesterday they expected more than 30 MPs to join the forum, which would be more than half of the backbench. Mr Christensen said 10 Nationals had formally joined the group and another two had verbally told him they would join.

Mr Christensen last week sent a message to Nationals MPs asking them to join. “We are setting up a new group called the Monash Forum encouraging the government in the promotion of and facilitation of and/or construction of coal-fired power stations,” he wrote. “Why Monash? Because he opened the La Trobe coal reserves and oversaw the construction of coal-fired power there.”

Mr Christensen said there needed to be more federal government support for coal-fired power. He said the government should “secure” Liddell power station in the NSW Upper Hunter and then expand the baseload network.

“I think that there is a strong desire within the backbench for the government to get more actively involved in the construction of reliable, around-the-clock baseload power,” Mr Christensen said. “Most of us haven’t bought into the great green lie that that is going to be achieved by solar with batteries or wind power. Those products have their place but they do not supply affordable, around-the-clock, secure, baseload power. The only thing in the Australian market that does that is coal-fired power.”

When asked if the forum’s requests would be possible within the framework of the NEG, Mr Christensen said: “We are told the NEG is technologically neutral … within those parameters the best solution currently available to us is coal-fired power”.

Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg said yesterday the government’s policy was technology-neutral.

He said independent modelling by the Energy Security Board had suggested coal would make up more than half of the energy mix in 2030. In its advice to government in October, the ESB said renewables were likely to reach 28 to 36 per cent of the energy mix by 2030 under the NEG — with wind and solar providing 18 to 24 per cent.

The NEG is aimed at guaranteeing energy reliability, while lowering costs for consumers and delivering on Australia’s Paris Agreement commitment to reducing carbon emissions by 26 per cent on 2005 levels. It will put an obligation on electricity retailers to buy power at a set level of emissions intensity each year to meet a 2030 reduction target — set by government — for the power generation sector while also forcing retailers to meet a percentage of demand from reliable power generation.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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3 April, 2018

The evolution of global warming theory

I have not seen any explicit comment on this but it seems that there has been a large change over the years in what Warmists try to scare us with. There has been a Warmism 1 and a Warmism 2.

Warmism 1 is the Warmism of Al Gore, with sea level rises of 20 feet drowning most coastal cities. That was certainly scary and warranting of urgent action. But it was most implausible. 96% of the earth's glacial ice is in Antarctica and even at the continental margins the temperature there is many degrees below zero. So a few degrees of temperature rise might melt some sea ice but nothing more would happen. Melting sea ice cannot raise the sea level. So where was the required great volume of water going to come from? Mars?

Warmism 1 had another fault as well. It assumed a most implausible effect of clouds. It said that warming would be gradual until the cloud cover became much more extensive than it now is. And there is no doubt that a warmer world WOULD have more clouds as more water evaporated off the oceans.

But Warmism 1 at that point made two great theoretical leaps. They said that the increased cloud cover would warm the earth when clouds in fact normally cool the earth by blocking out the sun. But let's glide over that point and accept their assumption that clouds would warm us. The Warmist at that point makes another great leap. He says that at some point a "tipping point" would be reached so that warming would suddenly accelerate and we would really roast.

Normally, when scientists try to predict the future they make a straight line extrapolation from existing trends. But Warmism 1 aborts that. Because of the tipping point, the past is no longer a guide to the future. Things will get a lot hotter very suddenly. They will get much hotter than they would under a normal extrapolation from the past. So while scientific prediction of the future is possible in some instances -- by looking carefully at the past -- Warmism 1 abandons that and makes a prophecy based purely on speculation.

I have tried to tell the story of Warmism 1 as straight as I can but I think its implausibilities are nonetheless obviously gross. And, although it has never been formally abandoned by anyone, it has quietly faded away from most Warmist discourse. It is, for example, years since I have heard anything of the tipping point. So Warmism 1 has been replaced by Warmism 2

Warmism 2 is much less fantastical. It has reverted to the normal scientific method of predicting the future by extrapolations from the past. There is no Deus ex machina that causes warming to suddenly leap. It hypothesizes a steady process of warming at some specified rate. But finding that rate is the issue. Vast guesses about what CO2 does are used to get a rate.

Different authors assume different rates and the actuality always seems to be less than any predicted rate. So the accepted rate of warming has trended steadily down in the face of all the predictive failures

So under Warmism 2 we will have a temperature rise of only about 2 degrees Celsius and a consequent rise in sea levels of inches, not the yards predicted by Al Gore.

But that is rather boring. It is hard to frighten people with just a few inches of sea level rise so a whole new industry has arisen which says that the few degrees of predicted warming will lead to catastrophic weather events -- hurricanes etc. But even that is a dead end as dramatic weather events considered overall do not seem to be increasing and may even be decreasing.

So Warmism has in a way disappeared up its own back passage. It no longer has any pretence of science behind its warnings of doom. It is merely an example of telling a big enough lie often enough so that less informed people will believe it. And while it continues to give scientists a golden shower of research grant money, the myth will be maintained -- JR.

The Federal government needs to prosecute grant fraud

Including all grants given to study global warming?

Every year, the federal government gives out billions of taxpayer dollars through dozens of federal agencies to study man-made climate change. It has become a cottage industry supporting hundreds of “scientists” around the world. Their research has led to countless federal agency regulations costing the U.S. economy thousands of jobs and trillions in economic output. What would happen if the underlying data in the studies was falsified?

The studies are used in courts of law around the country. New York City is suing Exxon, Shell, and several other oil companies for what it calls, “present and future damage to the city from climate change.” San Francisco and Oakland are also suing five oil companies in California, stating oil companies must “pay for the cost of protecting the Bay Area from rising sea levels and other effects of global warming.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger is even getting into the act, recently announcing he is going to sue oil companies “for knowingly killing people all over the world.” He has yet to announce he is going to stop making movies that use copious amounts of energy to produce or quit flying private.

But a recent decision by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt may throw everything up for grabs, including the studies used to launch the lawsuits. As the Daily Torch reported last week, Pruitt is ending the practice of “secret science” to justify regulations within the EPA.

This raises an interesting question. If the scientists manipulated data to come to a preconceived result, is this a crime? If the scientists filled out grant applications using manipulated data, is that fraud? The law says yes.

18 U.S. Code 1341 – Frauds and swindles – Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, or to sell, dispose of, loan, exchange, alter, give away, distribute, supply, or furnish or procure for unlawful use any counterfeit or spurious coin, obligation, security, or other article, or anything represented to be or intimated or held out to be such counterfeit or spurious article, for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice or attempting so to do, places in any post office or authorized depository for mail matter, any matter or thing whatever to be sent or delivered by the Postal Service, or deposits or causes to be deposited any matter or thing whatever to be sent or delivered by any private or commercial interstate carrier, or takes or receives therefrom, any such matter or thing, or knowingly causes to be delivered by mail or such carrier according to the direction thereon, or at the place at which it is directed to be delivered by the person to whom it is addressed, any such matter or thing, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

18 U.S. Code 1343 – Fraud by wire, radio, or television – Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises, transmits or causes to be transmitted by means of wire, radio, or television communication in interstate or foreign commerce, any writings, signs, signals, pictures, or sounds for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.

18 U.S. Code 371 – Conspiracy – If two or more personsconspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. to commit offense or to defraud United States.

After looking at the hacked emails of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, it certainly appears data was manipulated to achieve a preconceived outcome. Several scientists around the world manipulated data to end the Medieval Warming Period (MWP) according to the leaked emails. The new data was then used to push massive governmental regulations.

This is not the first time questionable science has been used to justify regulations or lawsuits.

The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), a division of the Centers for Disease Control, issued a report linking health problems to a chemical called diacetyl. The report spawned more than 1,000 lawsuits, but there appears to be a flaw in the science.

The agency tries to link diacetyl to Bronchiolitis obliterans, also known as popcorn lung, through exposure from microwave popcorn and coffee roasting, but the agency ignores cigarette smoke. Perhaps they do this because other studies cannot link smokers to popcorn lung. Cardno ChemRisk published a study in Critical Reviews on Toxicology stating, “We found that diacetyl and 2,3-pentanedione exposures from cigarette smoking far exceed occupational exposures for most food/flavoring workers who smoke.” They continued, “Further, because smoking has not been shown to be a risk factor for bronchiolitis obliterans, our findings are inconsistent with claims that diacetyl and/or 2,3-pentanedione exposure are risk factors for this disease.”

Why would NIOSH ignore one set of facts to concentrate on another set of facts? Could trial lawyers have anything to do with it?

If the federal government is going to continue handing out billions in grants for research, then create regulations based on the research, it must ensure the accuracy of the research and prosecute fraud when found. All data must be made available to agencies and the public, bare minimum. And if a scientist manipulates data to meet a preconceived result, he is not a scientist, he is a fraud and should be prosecuted as such.

SOURCE

Weather Underground, The Weather Company, IBM

Duane Thresher

Weather Underground prominently features Bob Henson, who declares himself a meteorologist everywhere. He is not a meteorologist (and certainly not a climatologist, even though he writes a lot about climate, including the books he hawks on Weather Underground).

Weather Underground came to be seen as a weather authority, which made it seem worth the price to IBM (via The Weather Company). However, it is only a weather authority if its people are and Bob Henson, for starters, is not, by any stretch of the imagination.

Weather Underground (and so The Weather Company and IBM) are companies like any other and so subject to laws about making false claims, like claiming to be authorities on the weather. Weather can be a life or death issue where false claims can be disastrous.

Additionally, it is outrageous in this day and age that Weather Underground thumbs its nose at common decency and keeps its name. Its name is a tribute to a terror bombing group bent on overthrowing the U.S. Government. If that is OK with you why not update the name to Al-Qaeda? As someone who lived in New York City during 9/11 and in Austin during the recent bombings, I find you offensive.

For more on all this see: HERE

U.S. Energy Exports Hit Record in 2017; Petroleum and Natural Gas Both Hit All-Time Highs

U.S. total energy exports hit a record high in 2017 when measured in British Thermal Units (Btu), according to the Monthly Energy Review released today by the Energy Information Administration, which is a part of the U.S. Department of Energy.

U.S. petroleum and natural gas exports (measured in Btu) also both hit all-time highs in 2017, according to Table 1.4b in the report, while the U.S. energy trade deficit (measured in dollars) hit a 20-year low, according to Table 1.5.

During 2017, total U.S. energy exports equaled 17.998711 Quadrillion Btu, according to the report. That was up approximately 27.4 percent from the 14.129837 Quadrillion Btu in total U.S. energy exports in 2016.

At the same time, the U.S. imported 25.342199 Quadrillion Btu in total energy, meaning the U.S. was a net importer of 7.343488 in energy in 2017.

That is the lowest net energy imports the United States has seen since 1982 (measured in Btu), when the country was a net importer of 7.253481 Quadrillion Btu of energy.

The U.S. total energy exports included a record 12.044051 Quadrillion Btu in total petroleum exports (including both crude oil and refined products such as gasoline, kerosene and lubricants). That was up approximately 20.6 percent from the 9.989907 Quadrillion Btu that the U.S. exported in 2016.

U.S. total energy exports in 2017 also included a record 3.196449 Quadrillion Btu in natural gas. That was up approximately 35.6 percent from the 1.237954 Quadrillion Btu in natural gas that the U.S. exported in 2016.
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U.S. total energy exports in 2017 also included 2.487339 Quadrillion Btu in coal exports. That was up approximately 60.9 percent from the 1.546253 Quadrillion Btu in coal exports the U.S. made in 2016.

According to the Monthly Energy Review, U.S. energy exports in 2017 had a merchandise trade value of $136,358,000,000. At the same time, U.S. energy imports had a merchandise trade value of $194,945,000,000. That gave the U.S. an energy trade balance for the year of -$58,587,000,000.

That is the smallest energy trade deficit the United States has had (measured in dollars), according to the Monthly Energy Review, since 1998, when it was -$47,072,000,000.

The Congressional Research Service has attributed the U.S. surge in the international energy market to the development of new technologies including “hydraulic fracturing.”

“The United States has seen a resurgence in petroleum production, mainly driven by technology improvements—especially hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling—developed for natural gas production from shale formations,” said a CRS report published in 2015.

“Application of these technologies enabled natural gas to be economically produced from shale and other unconventional formations and contributed to the United States becoming the world’s largest natural gas producer in 2009,” said CRS.

SOURCE

The huge labor costs of "renewable" energy

LONDON: In the US electric power generation sector, the solar industry employed nearly 374,000 people in 2015-16 – double the number of jobs in oil, coal and gas combined, according to a new report from the US Department of Energy.

Traditional energy and energy efficiency sectors today employ approximately 6.4 million Americans. These sectors increased in 2016 by just under 5%, adding over 300,000 net new jobs – roughly 14% of all those created in the country.

A separate report by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) shows how sustainability now collectively accounts for an estimated 4.5 million jobs – up from 3.4 million in 2011 – with renewable energy now making up 64% of new electricity generation capacity installed in the US each year.

“These newly published statistics show once more that clean energy is good for the environment, businesses and the whole economy,” comments Amy Davidsen, Executive Director North America, The Climate Group.

“We recently published our RE100 Annual Report, which demonstrates how leading companies are going 100% renewable - not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it also makes business sense. In the US alone, RE100 member companies source almost 7 terawatts/hours from renewable electricity – the highest amount in any country worldwide.

“We urge businesses, companies and states to accelerate this journey to deliver a healthier, more sustainable and prosperous future for all.”

REPORT HIGHLIGHTS

Electric power generation and fuels technologies sectors in the US employ almost 800,000 workers in low carbon emission generation technologies.

The solar workforce increased by 25% in 2016 (+374,000 jobs), while wind energy employment increased by 32% (+102,000 jobs).

Between September 2015 and September 2016, net generation from coal sources declined by 51% – while electricity generation from natural gas increased by 33% and solar by over 5,000% in the same period.

In the transmission, distribution and storage sector, almost a third of employees work in grid modernization or other utility-funded modernization projects.

The advanced vehicles industry employs 174,000 individuals, especially in the hybrid sub-sector.

There are now 769,000 renewable energy jobs – mainly in bioenergy – with a compound annual growth rate of nearly 6% since 2012. By comparison, jobs in fossil fuel extraction and support services had a negative rate of -4.25%.

California leads on solar and energy efficiency jobs, while Texas has the largest employment for the wind sector.

Solar and wind jobs have grown at rates of about 20% annually in recent years and are each creating jobs at a rate 12 times faster than that of the rest of the US economy.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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2 April, 2018

Climate study shows Sahara getting bigger

But does it? The journal article is much more interesting than the lay article below and the abstract ends with an admission that generalizations are difficult and shaky in this area so maybe I should really just leave it at that. I append the journal abstract to the lay summary below.

The thing that bothers me is that the overall conclusions of this study appears to contradict what we have long heard about the Sahara -- namely that its green border -- the Sahel -- is expanding. So why the reversal?

There is actually no reversal. The authors admit (highlighted in the rubric below) that the Sahel was expanding up until 2013 -- if you look at it in a long term way. So they are putting a lot of weight onto occasional fluctuations in a way that I frankly do not understand

So why has the Sahel gone into reverse recently? No great mystery. Many parts of Africa have been in drought in the last few years and the drought is not yet breaking. I think we have all heard recently about Capetown's reticulated water supply running dry. So drought in the Sahel sounds very much like just another part of that.

But WHY is a lot of Africa in drought? It cannot be because of global warming. The rain would be pissing down if the oceans were warmer. It is almost certainly an El Nino effect. The recent El Nino was a strong one and much more long-lasting than expected. And the expected reversal in the form of a La Nina has yet to clearly emerge. But just why El Nino affected Africa so strongly I will have to leave to the climatologists. It seems likely to me that it coincided with some other natural drying cycle within the African climate system and that Africa got a doubly whammy because of that

Earth’s largest hot desert, the Sahara, is getting bigger, a new study finds. It is advancing south into more tropical terrain in Sudan and Chad, turning green vegetation dry and soil once used for farming into barren ground in areas that can least afford to lose it.

Yet it is not just the spread of the Sahara that is frightening, researchers say. It’s the timing: It is happening during the African summer, when there is usually more rain. But the precipitation has dried up, allowing the boundaries of the desert to expand.

“If you have a hurricane come suddenly, it gets all the attention from the government and communities galvanize,” said Sumant Nigam, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic science at the University of Maryland and the senior author of the study. “The desert advance over a long period might capture many countries unawares. It’s not announced like a hurricane. It’s sort of creeping up on you.”

The study was published Thursday in the Journal of Climate. The authors said that while their research focused only on the Sahara, it suggests that climate changes also could be causing other hot deserts to expand – with potentially harsh economic and human consequences.

Deserts form in subtropical regions because of a global weather circulation called the Hadley cell. Warm air rises in the tropics near the equator, producing rain and thunderstorms. When the air hits the top of the atmosphere, it spreads north and south toward the poles. It does not sink back down until it is over the subtropics, but as it does, the air warms and dries out, creating deserts that are nearly devoid of rain.

“Climate change is likely to widen the Hadley circulation, causing northward advance of the subtropical deserts,” Nigam said.

Nigam and the study’s lead researcher, Natalie Thomas, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, used data from the Global Precipitation Climatology Center to arrive at their finding.

SOURCE

Twentieth-Century Climate Change over Africa: Seasonal Hydroclimate Trends and Sahara Desert Expansion

Natalie Thomas and Sumant Nigama

Abstract

Twentieth-century trends in seasonal temperature and precipitation over the African continent are analyzed from observational datasets and historical climate simulations. Given the agricultural economy of the continent, a seasonal perspective is adopted as it is more pertinent than an annual-average one, which can mask offsetting but agriculturally sensitive seasonal hydroclimate variations. Examination of linear trends in seasonal surface air temperature (SAT) shows that heat stress has increased in several regions, including Sudan and northern Africa where the largest SAT trends occur in the warm season. Broadly speaking, the northern continent has warmed more than the southern one in all seasons. Precipitation trends are varied but notable declining trends are found in the countries along the Gulf of Guinea, especially in the source region of the Niger River in West Africa, and in the Congo River basin. Rainfall over the African Great Lakes—one of the largest freshwater repositories—has, however, increased. It is shown that the Sahara Desert has expanded significantly over the twentieth century, by 11%–18% depending on the season, and by 10% when defined using annual rainfall. The expansion rate is sensitively dependent on the analysis period in view of the multidecadal periods of desert expansion (including from the drying of the Sahel in the 1950s–80s) and contraction in the 1902–2013 record, and the stability of the rain gauge network. The desert expanded southward in summer, reflecting retreat of the northern edge of the Sahel rainfall belt, and to the north in winter, indicating potential impact of the widening of the tropics. Specific mechanisms for the expansion are investigated. Finally, this observational analysis is used to evaluate the state-of-the-art climate simulations from a comparison of the twentieth-century hydroclimate trends. The evaluation shows that modeling regional hydroclimate change over the African continent remains challenging, warranting caution in the development of adaptation and mitigation strategies.

SOURCE

Climate alchemy

Using a climate model the authors reach conclusions that contradict well-known thermodynamic principles. They claim that a DECREASE in global atmospheric pressure would cause a WARMING?! Amazing what you can do with models. Someone should give them an erector set

Long-term climate forcing by atmospheric oxygen concentrations

Christopher J. Poulsen1 et al.

Abstract

The percentage of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere varied between 10% and 35% throughout the Phanerozoic. These changes have been linked to the evolution, radiation, and size of animals but have not been considered to affect climate. We conducted simulations showing that modulation of the partial pressure of oxygen (pO2), as a result of its contribution to atmospheric mass and density, influences the optical depth of the atmosphere. Under low pO2 and a reduced-density atmosphere, shortwave scattering by air molecules and clouds is less frequent, leading to a substantial increase in surface shortwave forcing. Through feedbacks involving latent heat fluxes to the atmosphere and marine stratus clouds, surface shortwave forcing drives increases in atmospheric water vapor and global precipitation, enhances greenhouse forcing, and raises global surface temperature. Our results implicate pO2 as an important factor in climate forcing throughout geologic time.

SOURCE

Climate chaos claims continue causing consternation

From the Oakland v. oil company lawsuit to ridiculous “research,” the onslaught never ends

Anyone who thought “manmade climate cataclysm” rhetoric couldn’t possibly exceed Obama era levels should read the complaint filed in the “public nuisance” lawsuit that’s being argued before Federal District Court Judge William Alsup in a California courtroom: Oakland v BP and other oil companies.

The allegations read at times like they were written by a Monty Python comedy team and a couple of first year law students. Defendant companies “conspired” to produce dangerous fuels, the complaint asserts, and “followed the Big Tobacco playbook” to promote their use, while paying “denialist front groups” to question “established” climate science, “downplay” the “unprecedented” risks of manmade global warming, and launch “unfounded attacks on the integrity” of leading “consensus” scientists.

“People of color” and other “socially vulnerable” individuals will be most severely affected, it continues. (They’ll be far more severely impacted by climate policies that drive up energy and food prices.)

Oakland’s lawyers excoriate astrophysicist Wei Hock “Willie” Soon for committing the unpardonable sin of suggesting the sun might have something to do with climate change. They couldn’t even get his PhD degree right. They call him an “aerospace engineer,” and claim he personally received $1.2 million that was actually paid to Harvard University (as multiple, easily accessible documents make clear).

They don’t even mention the billions of taxpayer dollars that have been divvied up year after year among researchers and activists who promote alarmist views on global warming and renewable energy.

Oakland and its fellow litigants expect the court to accept their claims at face value, as “established” science, with no need to present real-world evidence to support them. They particularly emphasize rising seas and the resulting “imminent threat of catastrophic storm surges” that are “projected” by computer models that assume carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is now the primary or sole driver of climate change, replacing the sun, cosmic rays, ocean currents and other powerful natural forces that did so “previously.”

In suing the five major oil companies, they ignore the fact that the companies burn very few of the hydrocarbon fuels they produce. It is the plaintiff city governments and their constituents who have happily burned oil and natural gas for over a century, to fuel their cars, heat, cool, light and electrify their offices and homes, and make their industries, communications, health and living standards possible.

In the process, it is they who have generated the plant-fertilizing CO2 that is allegedly causing the unprecedented global warming, melting ice caps and rising seas. Hydrocarbons also fuel essential backup electricity generators for California’s wind and solar facilities – and provide raw materials for fabrics, plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals and countless other products the litigants use every day.

Equally problematical for the plaintiffs, the “established, consensus” science asserted throughout their complaint and courtroom presentations is increasingly uncertain and hotly debated. As Heartland Institute scholar Joe Bast points out, even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now expresses numerous doubts and uncertainties about rates of sea level rise, the role of CO2, the cause and duration of a global warming “pause” that has now lasted some 23 years. Indeed, the temperature spike caused by the 2015-16 El Niño has now almost disappeared, as the oceans and atmosphere continue to cool once again.

The oil companies decided not to present much climate science in the courtroom. However, expert materials prepared by Christopher Monckton, Will Happer, Richard Lindzen and colleagues addressed questions about equilibrium climate sensitivity and related issues in amicus curiae filings for the court.

Oakland’s claim that the oil companies “conspired” to hide and misrepresent “the science” on global warming and climate change is on thin ice. Some reports say Judge Alsup dismissed the claim or ruled that plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that there was a conspiracy. In any event, a decision on the merits will eventually be made, the losing party will appeal, and the case will likely end up in the US Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, climate chaos claims continue causing consternation in some circles. Too much money, power, prestige, control and wealth redistribution is at stake for anything else to happen.

Indeed, many in the $1.5-trillion-a-year Climate Industrial Complex are determined to use this issue (and equally malleable “sustainability” mantras) to replace free enterprise capitalism with totalitarian one-world governance; fossil fuel and nuclear power (the source of 85% of US and global energy) with expensive, land-intensive wind, solar and biofuel energy; and the hopes and dreams of poor people everywhere with policies that permit their living standards to improve only minimally, at the margins.

Actually, climate chaos hype-potheses now blame not just carbon dioxide and methane for runaway global warming, but also asthma inhalers and meat diets. The results aren’t just rising seas, warmer and colder weather, wetter and drier seasons, forest fires, nonexistent mass extinctions and the other oft-cited pseudo-cataclysms. They also include shrinking animals, a worse opioid crisis, and the endless litany of often amusing afflictions and disasters chronicled in The Warmlist and its video counterpart.

The “solution” isn’t just keeping fossil fuels in the ground. It also includes accepting profound lifestyle changes and dining on climate friendly insects (not ruling elites; just the rest of us).

And the real effects of manmade climate cataclysm fears are not just soaring prices for less available, less reliable, grid-destabilizing “green” electricity. They also include having to rescue adventurers who try to sail, snowmobile or trek across supposedly melting Arctic and Antarctic ice packs – only to become stranded and frostbitten or have their ships trapped in rapidly freezing ice.

So, what should climate disaster stalwarts do, when temperatures and sea levels refuse to cooperate with Al Gore speeches and computer model “projections” and “scenarios”? Or when forecasts of more hurricanes are followed by a record 12-year absence of any Category 3-5 storms hitting the US mainland?

One strategy is refusing to debate anyone who challenges the dire hypotheses, data or conclusions. Another involves “homogenizing,” “correcting” and manipulating original data, to make Dust Bowl era temperatures less warm – and this year’s long and bitterly cold winter not nearly so frigid, by adjusting records from local temperature stations by as much as 3.1 degrees Fahrenheit (1.7 Celsius).

As to the numerous articles and studies published on WattsUpWithThat.com, DrRoySpencer.com, ClimateDepot.com, ClimateChangeReconsidered.org and other sites that focus on evidence-based climate studies and research, and challenge assertions like those relied on in the Oakland complaint – the increasingly preferred strategy is to employ algorithms and other tactics that relegate their work to the bottom of search engine results. Long lists of alarmist claims, articles and perspectives appear first, unless a student or other researcher enters very specific search terms. Even the major shortcomings of wind power are hard to find, if you don’t know precisely what you are looking for.

Google, Facebook, You Tube and other search, information and social media sites appear determined to be the arbiters of what information, facts and realities we can access, what our children can learn. They help stigmatize and bully scientists whose research or views do not hew to accepted liberal perspectives, and have even enlisted corporate advertisers into policing the speech of political opponents.

All this from the champions of free speech, tolerance, diversity and inclusion. Just bear in mind:

The issue is not whether our planet is warming, or whether climate and weather are changing. The issue is what is causing those fluctuations, how much is due to fossil fuels versus to natural forces, and whether any coming changes will be as catastrophic as natural forces have caused multiple times in the past. (Imagine what would happen to cities, farms and humanity if we had another Pleistocene ice age.)

All of this once again underscores why America and the world need “Red Team” climate science exercises, more evidence-based climate education, and a reversal of the Obama EPA’s unsupported finding that carbon dioxide emissions somehow endanger human health and welfare.

Via email

The Climate Change Trial: Reason vs. Extremism

The legal battle against oil companies for their purported role in contributing to a climate change crisis is starting to take shape. This past Wednesday, a federal judge in San Francisco made history, holding the first-ever U.S. court hearing exploring the impact of climate change. Lawyers representing the cities of Oakland and San Francisco as well as five of the largest multinational oil companies named in the lawsuit, participated in a climate change “tutorial,” a chance to explore both sides’ positions on several questions related to climate change.

Here’s what we learned from the hearing: future litigation will pit reasoned dialog in line with mainstream climate science against the politically charged rhetoric of climate change extremism.

Attorneys from the two California cities allege that rising sea levels and other extreme weather phenomena are the result of climate change, which will force the municipalities to spend unspecified billions of dollars to mitigate the damage. Further, the lawsuits they filed last fall seek to pin all the blame and financial responsibility for the purported damage on just five publicly traded American energy companies: BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Shell.

Climate change is a global issue, yet greedy trial lawyers are targeting the five major energy companies exclusively because they see them as a potential jackpot in attorneys’ fees; a whopping 23.5 percent of the entire multibillion-dollar payout if they succeed. In truth, we all share a responsibility for climate change. The petroleum industry is primarily interested in extracting, producing, and promoting petroleum products or fossil fuels. Third-party consumers use fossil fuel materials to heat their homes, run their vehicles, and power industry and manufacturing.

The case is flawed and relies on fundamentally weak arguments that have been tried before and failed in court. The plaintiffs attempt to portray a handful of energy companies as solely responsible for climate change. Interestingly enough, they might succeed in making the oil companies seem like the only adults in the room.

Oil companies recognize that climate change is a long-term issue which requires global attention. Each of the companies named in the lawsuit is making significant strides to take a balanced and measured approach toward addressing unique problems associated with climate change. These five companies have invested billions of dollars into efforts to develop technology solutions that boost energy efficiency, expand the supply of cleaner burning fuels, and lead industry engagement toward positive policy solutions. The oil industry is interested in understanding and addressing issues associated with potential climate change. This was made abundantly clear at the hearing on Wednesday.

U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup called for the climate change tutorial as a primer to obtain a better understanding of climate change, and rightfully so. Climate science includes aspects of atmospheric chemistry, atmospheric physics, oceanography, and biogeochemistry. It’s a complex field.

The energy companies were able to present a fair and objective answer to every question. Their analysis was based on the most widely-accepted peer-reviewed scientific views on climate change. This wasn’t an opportunity for advocacy of a specific position but rather a forum to present dispassionate scientific findings in line with most mainstream climate science.

It’s also worth noting that Judge Alsup did not warm to the cities’ argument that the oil and gas industry has been conducting a conspiracy to suppress climate science from the public. San Francisco’s city attorney had charged that the companies “have known for decades that fossil fuel-driven global warming and accelerated sea level rise posed a catastrophic risk to human beings and to public and private property.”

In dismissing the plaintiff’s conspiracy accusation, the judge gutted the core component of the bizarre lawsuit. It was a big test for the energy companies and they won.

While Judge Alsup’s evenhanded approach to the tutorial may have been praiseworthy, U.S. climate policy is inherently complex and impacts every American. It is therefore preposterous to suggest that such a matter can rightfully be decided by one judge acting alone in a California courtroom. But unless, as the Supreme Court has already ruled, this case is left to the EPA and the Congress to resolve, that is exactly what will happen.

SOURCE

Australia: Wholesale electricity prices up in Victoria since closure of big brown coal generator

Brown coal is more polluting than black coal so the Greenies wanted it closed. It also produced power very cheaply and that was unforgiveable

Wholesale electricity prices have shot up in Victoria since the closure of the coal-fired Hazelwood power station, which has also caused Victoria to rely on power from other states for the first time in almost a decade, according to a new report.

A year on from the closure of the 1600 megawatt-sized plant in the Latrobe Valley, the report from the Australian Energy Regulator found wholesale prices in Victoria were up 85 per cent on 2016.

The regulator's chair Paula Conboy said the rise was driven by the replacement of Hazelwood's cheap, brown coal-fired power generation with power from higher cost sources such as black coal, gas and hydro, at a time when black coal and gas prices were rising.

"The impact of the Hazelwood closure has been, and continues to be, significant right across the [National Electricity Market]," Ms Conboy said.

From mid-2017, for the first time in almost a decade, Victoria relied on energy from interstate to meet its needs, as it increased its imports of gas-generated power from South Australia, and black coal-fired electricity from New South Wales.

Ms Conboy said the price increases and the energy market's response to Hazelwood's closure had been as expected, but new investment in electricity generation was "critical" to put downward pressure on prices.

The regulator said it was difficult to determine the impact of Hazelwood's closure on retail prices, because of the way energy retailers use contracts to purchase power in advance.

But the Australian Energy Market Commission said it expects retail prices in Victoria to increase 15.9 per cent this financial year compared to 2016-17.

However the commission expects prices for households to drop 6.6 per cent in 2018-19 and a further 9.7 per cent in 2019-20, as more wind and solar power becomes available.

Mario Mancusso, a butcher in the Melbourne suburb of Flemington, said his business was feeling the pinch. "At the moment, I'm looking at $3,500 to $4,000 a quarter — 14 years ago when I opened, I was paying $600," he said.

He said power bills were having a huge impact on his business and he had to pass on the costs to his customers. "Once I pay this bill, it will take me weeks to recover. It's costing me a fortune."

He said he understood the closure of Hazelwood had cut greenhouse gas emissions, but the pros did not outweigh the cons. "At the end of the day, I look after my own interests. And I cannot sustain those sorts of bills."

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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BACKGROUND

Home (Index page)

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts

"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Yet temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried

Antarctica is GAINING mass

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion

Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

The plight of the bumblebee -- an egregious example of crooked "science"

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below

WISDOM:

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." --- Richard P. Feynman.

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement" -- Karl Popper

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

A Warmist backs down: "No one knows exactly how far rising carbon concentrations affect temperatures" -- Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

The frequency of hurricanes has markedly DECLINED in recent years

Here's how that "97% consensus" figure was arrived at

97% of scientists want to get another research grant

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

To Greenies, Genghis Khan was a good guy, believe it or not. They love that he killed so many people.

Greenie antisemitism

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

Comparing climate alarmist Hansen to Cassandra is WRONG. Cassandra's (Greek mythology) dire prophecies were never believed but were always right. Hansen's dire prophecies are usually believed but are always wrong (Prof. Laurence Gould, U of Hartford, CT)

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

UPDATE to the above: It seems that I am a true prophet

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Help keep the planet Green! Maximize your CO2 and CH4 output!

Global Warming=More Life; Global Cooling=More Death.

The inconvenient truth about biological effects of "Ocean Acidification"

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is maximum 4%.

Cook the crook who cooks the books

The great and fraudulent scare about lead

How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The "precautionary principle" is a favourite Greenie idea -- but isn't that what George Bush was doing when he invaded Iraq? Wasn't that a precaution against Saddam getting or having any WMDs? So Greenies all agree with the Iraq intervention? If not, why not?

A classic example of how the sensationalist media distort science to create climate panic is here.

There is a very readable summary of the "Hockey Stick" fraud here

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: "The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Relying on the popular wisdom can even hurt you personally: "The scientific consensus of a quarter-century ago turned into the arthritic nightmare of today."

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.

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