GREENIE WATCH MIRROR The CRU graph. Note that it is calibrated in tenths of a degree Celsius and that even that tiny amount of warming started long before the late 20th century. The horizontal line is totally arbitrary, just a visual trick. The whole graph would be a horizontal line if it were calibrated in whole degrees -- thus showing ZERO warming

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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31 August, 2018

More crooked science:  Another researcher who won't release the raw data behind his controversial claims

We see below that Warmists are not alone in that fraud.  Making your raw data available is basic to science.  But since the Left has become overwhelmingly influential in the universities, scientific ethics are much decayed.  Why be honest about your research when you believe that "There is no such thing as right and wrong"?  The Replication crisis has revealed that up to 70% of published research is unreplicable, meaning that its conclusions are almost certainly wrong


A shock 2016 study argued that the U.S. accounted for nearly one-third of all mass shootings, sparking global headlines about the dangers of an American gun culture.

Now another researcher says the original study “botched” the data.

John R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, crunched the numbers and said his count shows that the U.S. had less than 3 percent of the world’s mass public shootings over a 15-year period.

That is smaller than the 4.6 percent of the world’s population that the U.S. accounts for — and way less than the 31 percent of global mass shooters that Adam Lankford, a professor at the University of Alabama, claimed in his widely publicized studies.

“If you fix the data, you get the opposite result from him,” Mr. Lott said. “He has the United States way out there, all by itself in terms of mass public shootings. He’s simply wrong. The United States, when I go through this, ranks 58th in the world in the rate of mass public shootings and 62nd in the world in terms of murders from mass public shootings.”

Mr. Lott said he tried to get Mr. Lankford to disclose his data but the professor won’t share it with him or other researchers, making it impossible to double-check the original claims or to figure out why Mr. Lott’s numbers are so different.

Mr. Lankford’s research, first released in 2015 and presented to the American Sociological Association in 2016, garnered stories from The New York Times, Newsweek, CNN and The Washington Post, among dozens of others, that said it was proof, as CNN put it, that “the U.S. has the most mass shootings.”

Mr. Lankford studied the period from 1966 to 2012 using data from the New York City Police Department’s active shooter report, a 2014 FBI active shooter report and some foreign accounts.

He identified 292 incidents worldwide in which at least four people were killed — the FBI’s definition of a mass murder. Of those, 90 were in the U.S. — 31 percent of the total among 171 countries.

The professor also found that shooters in the U.S. were more likely to arm themselves with multiple weapons and more likely to attack at schools and business locations.

Mr. Lankford, who claimed to be the first to attempt a global survey, said his results suggested there was something to the American psyche that left people disaffected when they failed to achieve the American dream. He said they turn to violent outbursts with firearms.

“It may thus be the lofty aspirations and broken dreams of a tiny percentage of America’s students and workers — combined with their mental health problems, distorted perceptions of victimization, delusions of grandeur, and access to firearms — that makes them more likely to commit public mass shootings than people from other cultures,” he postulated in his 2015 paper.

Yet he has failed to post the data on all 292 shootings. Early academic critics said it’s easy to find data for U.S. shootings but trickier for tracking incidents in foreign countries.

Mr. Lott, meanwhile, turned to data from the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database and followed up with Nexis and web searches to try to catch cases that the database missed.

He said good data exist only for recent years, so he looked from 1998 to 2012 and found 1,491 mass public shootings worldwide. Of those, only 43 — or 2.88 percent — were in the U.S. Divide that by per capita rates, and the U.S. comes in 58th, behind Finland, Peru, Russia, Norway and Thailand — though still worse than France, Mexico, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Looked at from the number of victims in those shootings, the U.S. again ranks low, with just 2.1 percent of mass shooting deaths, Mr. Lott said.

He has released a 451-page appendix detailing each of the shootings and his thoughts on how he classified it, and he shared his data with other academics, including, he said, Mr. Lankford.

The professor, though, told The Washington Times that he wasn’t going to get drawn into a back-and-forth over the issue.

“I am not interested in giving any serious thought to John Lott or his claims,” he said in response to an email seeking comment.

Another professor, Carl Moody, an economist who studies crime at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, said Mr. Lott got it right.

“When I saw John Lott’s paper, I went to the Global Terrorism Database … and counted the number of mass shootings in the U.S. compared to everywhere else. Lott is right,” he said by email.

He added: “By the way, anybody can do this. The GTD database is free and available to all.”

Mr. Lott said his study still overstates the U.S. problem compared with the rest of the world.

He said it’s easy to get good data about shootings in the U.S., but tracking down attacks in far corners of the globe is tough. In some countries, he said, violence is so common that shootings of four people — the minimum for a mass public attack — merits little or no coverage.

Then there are places such as the Solomon Islands that suppress news reports “The police made it clear that since their nation gets most of its revenue from tourism, they saw little benefit to providing this information,” he said.

SOURCE






Global Warming Brings Snow To Europe In Summer

In case you missed it, there is repeated allusion below to a statement made in 2000 by Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia.  He said: "Within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is".  One of Warmism's more amusing false prophecies.  Note that Britain's CRU is one of the great temples of Global Warming


Good news. Children who don’t know what snow is can now ski in summer. Heavy Summer Snowfall in the European Alps – Austria, Italy, Germany & Switzerland Receive Up To 40cm -- Matt Wiseman, Mountainwatch

Heavy snow fell above 1500 meters across the European Alps this weekend with a number of destinations reporting over 40cm of the fluffy white stuff.

While it is still summer in Europe, temperatures dropped over 15 degrees and dipped into the negatives in less than 24hrs

European heatwave comes to an abrupt end -- Debbie White,  Mail Online

There’s been a dramatic plunge in temperature across parts of Europe where searing heat has suddenly given way to heavy snowfall of up to 40cm – despite it still being summer.

About 25cm of snow was dumped on Germany‘s highest peak, the Zugspitze, where temperatures reached a decidedly chilly 19.4F (-7C) yesterday.

Even Italy gets snow and a minus 8 C freeze.  A ski resort in northern Italy was coated with 10cm of snow on Sunday as  temperatures plunged to -8C.

Snow is also falling on Calgary and Alberta too.

Locals are a bit surprised: Monday, August 27, 2018, 9:59 AM – We know it’s Monday, so we won’t blame you for doing a double or even triple take of this August snow in Alberta. That’s right we said SNOW.

No doubt, climate change will be blamed for this freak weather.

Soon, children won’t know what science is.

SOURCE






France’s environment minister quits, raps Emmanuel Macron

Macron is actually less popular than Trump

French President Emmanuel Macron’s reputation as a leading climate change activist suffered a blow Tuesday with the abrupt resignation of his environment minister.

Nicolas Hulot, an outspoken environmentalist and former journalist, unexpectedly announced his departure in the midst of a routine interview on France Inter radio. He cited constant disappointments with what he considers the French government’s lax approach to tackling climate change, as well as its dependence on nuclear power.

"I no longer want to lie to myself," he said. "I don’t want to give the illusion that my presence in the government signifies that we are answering these problems properly. So I have made the decision to leave the government."

The president has been widely seen as the chief defender of the landmark 2015 Paris Climate Accords, as well as one of the few world leaders willing to stand up to President Trump on the issue.

After Trump announced in June 2017 the United States would withdraw from the Paris agreement, Macron pledged to "make our planet great again." He has received positive press for luring US climate scientists to France.

Hulot suggested on Tuesday that there was little substance behind those grandiose declarations.

"Have we begun to reduce the use of pesticides? The answer is no. Have we started to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? The answer is no. Or to stop the erosion of biodiversity? No."

Hulot’s resignation was particularly striking because it took Macron’s government by surprise. Government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux, a guest on BFM TV at the same time as Hulot’s bombshell interview, acknowledged that Macron had not been warned. Some of Hulot’s colleagues, making the usual rounds on the morning shows, were visibly stunned when presented with the news.

"Is that a joke?" asked Marlene Schiappa, France’s gender equality minister, her face angled in an amused smile.

They also struck back at Hulot’s criticisms. "I hear his disappointment, but we must give him and the government credit for what has been done over the course of a year," Griveaux said, citing incremental progress on saving species and transitioning away from nuclear energy. "We can’t have results in just one year, and Nicolas Hulot knows that."

Macron was elected in early May 2017 and took power shortly thereafter.

Hulot’s departure means the loss of one of the most popular members of Macron’s entourage. The minister is a former TV personality whose program endeared him to many in the generation of younger voters who came of age in the 1990s.

It also adds to a quiet but constant stream of turbulence at the Elysee Palace. Although Macron is often seen abroad as the composed, stable antidote to the political tumult in the London of Brexit and the Washington of Trump, four members of his Cabinet have resigned after charges related to political corruption.

Additionally, Macron’s chief of staff, Alexis Kohler, is under investigation for alleged influence peddling and violations of conflict-of-interest rules. Culture Minister Françoise Nyssen is under investigation for having illegally enlarged the premises of the publishing house she ran before entering the government. Budget Minister Gerard Darmanin was investigated for rape earlier this year; the charges were later abandoned. Hulot, too, came under fire in February for allegedly sexually assaulting a granddaughter of former French president François Mitterand in the late 1990s — an allegation from 2008 that he denied. The government stood by him.

The government has also been plagued by a scandal concerning one of Macron’s former personal security guards, Alexandre Benalla, who was caught on camera beating and dragging two protesters during the annual May Day demonstrations.

The way Macron appeared to protect Benalla before the footage was revealed in the press has cost him significantly. The most recent Ifop poll, published Sunday, showed 66 percent of the French public is dissatisfied with his performance, a five-point boost from the month before. Thirty-four percent of those consulted expressed a favorable view.

Hulot’s resignation may portend a shift in the public identity of a government that styles itself as "neither right nor left." From the beginning, the key players in the Macron Cabinet were defectors from France’s traditional center-right party, and Hulot’s absence will mean even less of a voice for those on the left.

Macron’s nominally centrist party, La République En Marche ("Republic on the Move”), holds an absolute majority in Parliament. But what remains of a political opposition immediately seized on Hulot’s resignation as a sign of further trouble ahead.

"The resignation of Nicolas Hulot serves as a vote of censure against Macron," announced Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the far-left France Unbowed faction, on Twitter. "Macronism begins its decomposition."

The president took the news in stride. On an official visit to Copenhagen, Macron refrained from criticizing Hulot, saying he hoped "always to be able to count on the engagement of this free and convinced man."

SOURCE






Climate Activists Want Gov. Brown To Shut Down Fossil Fuel Production In Calif.

On the heels of Judge William Alsup’s decision to dismiss San Francisco’s and Oakland’s climate change lawsuits, local California officials are turning to new symbolic tactics, including pressuring Governor Jerry Brown ahead of his Global Climate Action Summit.

A group of 150 local elected officials sent an open letter to Governor Jerry Brown last week to chastise him for not completely shutting down fossil-fuel production in the state.

In the letter, the local officials demanded that Governor Brown pursue a meaty list of harmful and unrealistic policies:

"Recognizing that we are in a climate emergency, as you have rightly done, and given the grave public health and environmental justice consequences of fossil fuel production in California, we respectfully urge you to make a new statewide commitment and lay out a plan for California to achieve the following:

"End the issuance of permits for new fossil fuel projects, including permits for new oil and gas wells, infrastructure for fossil fuels, and petrochemical projects in California.

"Design a swift, managed decline of all fossil fuel production, starting with a 2,500-foot human health buffer zone around all occupied structures, public parks, and farms to protect public health and vulnerable communities.

"Commit the state to 100% clean, renewable energy, starting with significant investments in disadvantaged communities and areas that are already suffering the most from the negative impacts of fossil fuel extraction.”

To attract additional attention to the letter, Benicia Mayor Elizabeth Patterson and Richmond Vice Mayor Melvin Willis wrote an op-ed that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and decried the "toxic consequences of California’s complicity in one of the most toxic, polluting, dangerous industries on Earth…”

It is important to note that Richmond is one of the cities that filed a climate change lawsuit nearly identical to the lawsuits dismissed from officials in San Francisco, Oakland, and New York City.

The letter comes after reports that extreme environmentalists are livid that Governor Brown has refused to deny all new fossil fuel development in the state.

Kassie Siegel, a climate program director at the activist group Center for Biological Diversity, articulated this goal in response to a statement from the California Department of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources about California’s stringent environmental standards.

"There’s no way that any new fossil-fuel development can be compatible with a safe climate,” Siegel claimed.

In addition to the Center for Biological Diversity, anti-energy groups like 350.org, Earthworks, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Hollywood United for a Healthy California, Oil Change International and others have partnered to create a campaign ominously named Brown’s Last Chance to pressure the retiring Governor ahead of his climate summit.

The campaign also calls for the immediate ban of new fossil fuel production in California, as well as a plan to "phase-out all fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”

Notably absent from the list of activists attacking the governor are some of the country’s largest environmental groups, such as the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Resources Defense Council, and even the Sierra Club.

In an op-ed ‘bravely’ written for the New York Times, a newspaper published approximately 3,000 miles east of Sacramento, 350.org founder Bill McKibben attempted to explain the intense focus on Governor Brown:

"So far, Mr. Brown has not stood up to the oil industry. He’s not alone, of course — very few leaders have shown this kind of courage. (In Canada, the theoretical climate champion Justin Trudeau recently nationalized a pipeline in order to make sure that the exploitation of Alberta’s dirty tar sands could continue.) But Mr. Brown is term-limited, not to mention 80 years old; he’ll never run for office again, so like no other leader, he could resist the financial might of the fossil fuel industry.”

In other words, Governor Brown has nothing to lose since he is on his way out the door.

As the climate change lawsuits brought by local governments continue to fail, local officials and radical environmentalists are becoming increasingly desperate in their attempts to take down the oil and gas industry.

Instead of recognizing Governor Brown’s role in enacting aggressive climate change policies, local officials are now throwing the Governor under the bus to distract from their own failed efforts.

Instead of working toward consensus-oriented solutions to mitigate climate change, environmentalists continue to fight amongst each other over how best to attack oil and gas companies.

We can only wonder how much more chaotic this will become if additional climate lawsuits are similarly thrown out by the courts, as many legal experts expect to happen.

SOURCE





Australia to prioritize electricty prices over climate policy. Power bills to drop more than $400

Household energy bills could drop by as much as $400 under Federal Minister for Energy Angus Taylor's new plan. Mr Taylor set out his priorities before his first speech to parliament today after being sworn into the role.

He will outline the plan, which is focused around better competition, better reliability, a price safety net for consumers, and steps to end price gouging, at a small business summit in Sydney.  

'I'm focused on getting prices down while I keep the lights on. I've got one KPI. I've got one goal,' he told on The Australian on Thursday.

'At the end of the day, we just want to get prices down. We're not going to get ideological about it; we just want to get the outcome. It's very pragmatic,' he said.

Mr Taylor says reducing emissions in line with Paris Climate Agreement targets, which previous plans had said was needed to provide certainty to the industry, is not part of his brief.  'Frankly, I think there is some naivety in the idea that governments can largely eliminate uncertainty, or should even try,' Mr Taylor said.

The price safety net Mr Taylor wants to implement is based around the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission's proposed default market price to replace unregulated standing offers, which could save households up to $416 a year and small businesses up to $1457.   

Mr Taylor takes charge of energy after it was broken off from the Environment portfolio by new PM Scott Morrison in a gesture signalling major market reform.

While working as a financial analyst for Port Jackson Partners in 2013, Mr Taylor authored a report that suggested the costs of electricity could be reduced by dropping the Renewable Energy Target. Speaking at an event in 2013, Mr Taylor said dropping subsidies for wind farms would cut energy bills by more than $3billion. Mr Taylor also argued emission targets could still be met and the savings could be up to $300 per household by 2020.

Energy and emissions targets have long been a dividing issue in party rooms with policies going as far back as the Rudd government's proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme failing to gain consensus.

The latest iteration of the policy, which Mr Turnbull called the National Energy Guarantee, was instrumental in his downfall because the conservative faction in the Liberal Party is staunchly opposed to the plan.

A key point was to legislate a reduction in emissions of 26 per cent, a number in line with the Paris Climate Agreement, but one critics said was pointless if big emitters did not follow suit.

As the new front bench was sworn in on Tuesday, Mr Morrison labelled Mr Taylor his 'most important minister'.

'A tough job, but an extremely important one that has a big impact on so many Australian households and businesses,' Mr Taylor tweeted of the appointment.

Many see Mr Taylor, who has a Master of Philosophy in Economics from Oxford University, as the man to bring sense to the debate.

'The problem with energy policy for years is it doesn't focus on the energy, it focuses on if you are in favour of coal, wind, solar or hydro,' Mr Taylor said. 'What we should be wanting is reliable, affordable power that brings down our emissions.'

The 'Minister for getting energy prices down' as the new PM labelled him when he announced his new front bench on Sunday, has long been a critic of rushing into a transition to renewable energy, particularly the wind farms being built in his electorate of Hume.

'The obsession with emissions at the expense of reliability and affordability has been a massive mistake,' he told radio shock jock Ray Hadley two weeks ago.  

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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30 August, 2018

Polluted air causes a ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals (?)

Here we go again.  This is a typical air pollution study complete with the typical faults. It is a correlational study with no obvious causal chain between pollution and IQ, so the attribution of the IQ variations to pollution is entirely speculative.  And as usual the likely confounding factor -- income -- was not considered.  The likelihood is, as usual, that the poorer people lived in the most polluted areas and the poor are known to have lower IQs.  Pathetic!

It's a wonder after all these years that nobody has tackled this problem of control and done a study with a full range of socioeconomic controls applied. My guess is that there has been but the results were too embarrassing to report

I append the journal abstract


Air pollution causes a 'huge' reduction in intelligence, scientists say.

Shocking new research suggests air pollution has a serious impact on mental capabilities as well as physical health in human beings.

High levels of pollution can trigger a decrease in language and arithmetic skills – with the average impact of 'dirty air' equivalent to losing a year in education.

The United Nations has blamed air pollution for seven million deaths worldwide each year, while campaigners have urged local government to take more action.

An international team of researchers led by Beijing Normal University analysed language and arithmetic tests conducted on 20,000 people across China between 2010 and 2014.

However, the study is relevant worldwide, as the latest figures show around 95 per cent of the global population are now breathing unsafe air.

Scientists conducted the tests across China in areas with varied levels of pollution.

According to the latest findings, air pollution is a significant cause of loss of intelligence – roughly equating to the impact of losing a year of education.

Although previous research had found air pollution is capable of harming cognitive performance in students, this latest study is the first to examine people of all ages.

It also analysed the difference between men and women.

'Polluted air can cause everyone to reduce their level of education by one year, which is huge,' researcher Xi Chen of Yale School of Public Health told the Guardian.

'But we know the effect is worse for the elderly, especially those over 64, and for men, and for those with low education.

'If we calculate [the loss] for those, it may be a few years of education', he said.

Worse still, the researchers found that the longer people are exposed to dirty air, the greater the damage to their intelligence levels.

'We find that long-term exposure to air pollution impedes cognitive performance in verbal and math tests', researchers wrote in their paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

'We provide evidence that the effect of air pollution on verbal tests becomes more pronounced as people age, especially for men and the less educated.

'The damage on the aging brain by air pollution likely imposes substantial health and economic costs, considering that cognitive functioning is critical for the elderly for both running daily errands and making high-stake decisions'.

For the latest study, scientists accounted for the gradual decline in cognition seen as people age.

They also ruled out the possibility that people are more impatient or uncooperative during tests when the pollution levels were especially high.

Following the publication of the latest study, Aarash Saleh, a registrar in respiratory medicine in the UK and part of the Doctors Against Diesel campaign, told the Guardian: 'This study adds to the concerning bank of evidence showing that exposure to air pollution can worsen our cognitive function.

'Road traffic is the biggest contributor to air pollution in residential areas and the government needs to act urgently to remove heavily-polluting vehicles from our roads.' 

Earlier this year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) released the results of its study into fine particle air pollution in nearly 110 countries.

These microscopic particles are invisible to the human eye – but can penetrate deep into the lungs, and also cause heart disease and cancer.

SOURCE

The impact of exposure to air pollution on cognitive performance

Xin Zhang, Xi Chen, and Xiaobo Zhang

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of both cumulative and transitory exposures to air pollution for the same individuals over time on cognitive performance by matching a nationally representative longitudinal survey and air quality data in China according to the exact time and geographic locations of the cognitive tests. We find that long-term exposure to air pollution impedes cognitive performance in verbal and math tests. We provide evidence that the effect of air pollution on verbal tests becomes more pronounced as people age, especially for men and the less educated. The damage on the aging brain by air pollution likely imposes substantial health and economic costs, considering that cognitive functioning is critical for the elderly for both running daily errands and making high-stake decisions.

SOURCE






Ohio Man Gets Five Years For His Role In $47 Million Biofuel Scam

The owner of a New York-based renewable fuels trading company was sentenced to over five years in prison and fined roughly $26 million Monday for his role in a massive biofuel fraud scheme, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ).

Ohio resident Gregory Schnabel used his company GRC Fuels as cover to produce and sell fake Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) worth over $47 million.

Schnabel also defrauded the IRS out of $12 million worth of renewable fuel tax credits. He pleaded guilty to the crimes in court.

"Today’s sentencing shows that the Department of Justice will continue to vigorously prosecute those who seek to defraud the federal government and the public through unlawful renewable fuel credit schemes,” DOJ acting assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Wood said in a statement. "This sentencing serves as a powerful deterrent to those who would consider participating in similar schemes in the future.”

Under the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), oil refineries are required to mix a certain amount of biofuels, such as ethanol or biodiesel, in every batch of fuel produced.

The EPA gives refineries a quota of biofuel to meet and tracks the amount of biofuel each uses through RINs, a 38-digit code attached to every gallon of biofuel.

Gallons of biofuel and their corresponding RINs are sold by producers to oil and gas refineries. If a refinery falls behind on its biofuel quota, it may buy RINs separately and leave the fuel to be distributed elsewhere. The purchased RINs will count toward its biofuel quota.

The market for selling RINs separate from the fuel produced has created firms such as Schnabel’s that operate on trading RINs separate from the fuel they made with.

The market has also attracted fraud as biofuel producers and RIN traders forge fake RINs and sell them to oil and gas companies.

Two brothers operating a Utah-based biofuel producer and a California businessman were recently charged by a grand jury for carrying out a similar scheme that involved defrauding the IRS of $511 million worth of renewable energy tax credits.

SOURCE






‘Green’ California Is More Reliant On Foreign Oil Than Ever Before

There’s a growing call for California Gov. Jerry Brown to stop issuing oil and natural gas leases in the state, with some even arguing that all state fossil fuel production should be shuttered.

Yet continuing the current trend of dwindling in-state crude production wouldn’t mean California stops using oil. The state, ranked as one of the "greenest” in the country, would still use lots of oil, it would just come from other countries.

In fact, more than 56 percent of the crude oil received by California refineries were extracted in foreign countries, according to California Energy Commission data. California, once the third-largest oil state, is now more reliant than ever on foreign oil.

The biggest share of California’s oil imports come from Saudi Arabia, which makes up 29 percent of foreign crude flowing into the state. More than 70 percent of foreign oil imports to the state come from OPEC members, including Iraq, Kuwait and Ecuador.

California’s share of oil coming from foreign sources has ballooned since the late 1990s. Decades of state policies restricting drilling played a role, as did declining production in Alaska.

The state legislature also completely banned new offshore drilling leases in 1994, decades after the massive Santa Barbara oil spill. Geological factors also make it expensive to pump out crude compared to other states.

While environmentalists have chastised California for its oil production, the state’s eschewing of crude extraction has contributed to its increased reliance on foreign oil. (RELATED: Three Times The Media Actually Silenced Global Warming Dissenters)

California’s oil production has fallen 56 percent since 1985, according to state data. Much of that is being replaced by oil imports from countries without the same level of environmental and public health protections that U.S. agencies require.

"The West Coast used to be the part of the country least dependent on oil imports, with heavy California and Alaska production meeting most of their needs,” said Dan Kish, a distinguished senior fellow at the free-market Institute for Energy Research.

"But as the U.S. becomes less dependent on foreign oil, California is racing to the bottom,” Kish told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

California refineries supply almost exclusively in-state because of the costly upgrades to facilities needed to comply with blending requirements. Refineries are also geographically isolated from facilities in other states, and pipelines connecting California plants to other states are meant for exports, not imports.

Experts expect the U.S. to become a net exporter of crude oil by 2022, thanks to abundant shale reserves and a boost in offshore drilling. The port of Houston-Galveston exported more fuel than it imported for the first time ever this year, federal data showed.

All in all, the U.S. is becoming less reliant on foreign energy, while California becomes more reliant on oil imports. And that’s a trend environmentalists want to continue in the name of fighting global warming.

"Although no one expects oil and gas drilling to end overnight, California doesn’t even have a plan for how to begin phasing it out,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune wrote in an op-ed, calling on Brown to shut down in-state oil and gas production.

Brune’s call is only one of many urging Brown to stop fossil fuel production in California. Activists have also urged state lawmakers to pass legislation mandating 100 percent green energy by 2045.

"In fact, under Governor Brown’s leadership, California has approved more than 20,000 new oil and gas wells,” Brune wrote in early August. "That’s leadership — in precisely the wrong direction.”

Two San Francisco Bay area officials wrote an op-ed calling on Brown "to make a plan to phase out oil and gas production in California, to clean up our cities, towns and agricultural lands, and protect our people.”

Mayor Elizabeth Patterson of Benicia and Vice Mayor Melvin Willis of Richmond joined 183 other local officials from 31 California counties asking Brown to end fossil fuel production in the state.

Those local officials joined environmentalists in demanding no new drilling permits be issued and no new refineries be allowed in California. They also want "a swift, managed decline of all fossil fuel production” by shutting down wells within 2,500 feet of "all occupied structures, public parks and farms.”

Their ultimate goal, however, is a state that runs completely on "renewable energy,” according to a public letter of demands.

However, this ignores an obvious criticism of environmentalists’ anti-fossil fuel campaign — California will still use oil, but it will come from overseas. In fact, that’s what state data clearly shows.

"It’s sad for a state that could use the oil and the money developing it would bring, especially since they have huge potential,” Kish said.

In-state refineries still took in nearly 623 million barrels of oil in 2017. That can’t be phased out overnight.

California also gets a small amount of foreign imports from Canada, but state refiners have been using less Canadian oil in recent years. Even if that trend were to reverse, state planners still see refiners offsetting Canadian crude "with other types of oil to maintain consistent average blended properties.”

California’s demand for gasoline declined from 2004 to 2009, but has since been on the upswing as the economy continues to recover from the recent recession and because of population growth.

SOURCE






Conservatives Call On EPA To Go Even Further In Limiting Its Own Power

Conservatives applauded the Trump administration’s proposal to rein in the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) power plant regulations, however, many want this to be a stepping stone to strip the agency of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

"The one Obama era rule that still needs to be revisited is the endangerment finding that labels life-giving carbon dioxide as a threat to public welfare,” former Trump transition official Steve Milloy told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Milloy is referring to an EPA regulatory document from 2009 that found greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide and methane, indirectly harm public health through global warming. That endangerment finding gave EPA the legal cover it needed to issue global warming regulations.

The endangerment finding authority underlies sweeping regulations on power plants, vehicles and oil and gas operations estimated to cost billions of dollars, including the Obama-era Clean Power Plan.

Milloy and others want EPA to put the CO2 genie back in the bottle by reopening the 2009 endangerment finding. The hope is re-examining the evidence would show flaws in the 2009 finding

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council (CHECC) petitioned EPA in 2017 to reconsider the endangerment finding. CEI hopes EPA will consider its petition.

Moreover, CEI argues the Trump administration’s Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule, a more lenient alternative to the Clean Power Plan, will likely be challenged in court.

"We think that granting the petition remains the best option if the court decides that the new rule doesn’t do enough to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from coal and natural gas power plants,” said Myron Ebell, director of CEI’s Center for Energy and Environment.

Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, a Republican, gave conservative groups some hope on Tuesday when he said "the issue is still alive,” referring to considerations over reopen the endangerment finding.

"I think we’ll eventually see changes there, but that hasn’t happened yet,” Inhofe said, E&E News reported.

Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced ACE on Tuesday, rolling back the Obama administration’s plan to cut emissions from coal-fired power plants. Twenty-seven states challenged the 2015 regulation, scoring a legal victory in early 2016 when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay against implementation.

"The ACE proposal establishes breathing space for the endangerment finding rollback to occur in the future,” said Milloy, a lawyer and policy expert who runs the website JunkScience.com.

However, the head of EPA’s air and radiation office suggested the agency had no plans to reconsider the endangerment finding any time soon.

"We are not proposing to rescind to the endangerment finding. We are not proposing to find that power plants do not contribute to that endangerment,” EPA’s Bill Wehrum told reporters Tuesday on a call about the ACE rule.

Instead, Trump’s EPA seems content with scaling back or repealing Obama-era climate regulations that target coal plants, vehicles and oil and gas operations.

Environmentalists oppose revisiting the endangerment finding, going with the oft-used argument that the "science is settled” when it comes to global warming. Some attorneys have also been vocal about how difficult it would be to nix the 2009 finding.

Wheeler told The Washington Post in July he saw no "compelling reason” to review the endangerment finding.

"There would have to be a major, compelling reason to try to ever reopen that. I don’t think that’s an open question at this point,” Wheeler said.

However, Ebell said leaving the endangerment finding in place left the door open for future administrations to impose sweeping regulations over the economy.

"The ‘Clean Power’ Plan was a key part of the Obama administration’s war on affordable energy and based on the finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare,” Ebell said in a statement.

"However, the best and most recent science undermines that claim and therefore reconsideration is warranted,” Ebell said.

SOURCE






Australia: It was climate policy that sank PM Turnbull

Turnbull was a Global Warming believer.  Most of his party were not

Chris Kenny

Readers of The Australian will not have been surprised that Malcolm Turnbull ran into internal strife over climate and energy policy. The media voices Turnbull and his supporters blame for fuelling moves against him surely were the ones warning him. His handicap was not in having critics but in ­ignoring them.

Political commentary is abuzz as journalists, especially from the public broadcasters, offer the absurd proposition that this crisis was about nothing, came out of nowhere and failed because Peter Dutton, the original challenger, didn’t get the leadership.

As with any leadership coup, a range of factors was at play, including resentment, ego, polling and ambition. Turnbull failed the Newspoll test he set, making him vulnerable from the day he lost his 30th in a row. The Longman by-election, where a Liberal National Party primary vote below 30 per cent put the fear of obliteration into Queensland MPs, supercharged anxieties.

All the while, Tony Abbott and his loyalists had worn their sense of injustice like blue ties pulled too tight around their necks. With flushed faces and bursting veins, they were always going to erupt if an opportunity arose.

In this climate, Turnbull must have known he needed to avoid provocations. Yet he walked into this conflagration in the most predictable way. A party voted into office largely on a pledge to repeal costly carbon emissions reduction policy (axe the carbon tax), led by a man who previously had lost the leadership for trying to do a deal with Labor on climate policy and was trying to bed down another costly emissions reduction plan by striking a deal with Labor — this was ­always going to end in tears.

This is not hindsight. On radio, television and in the pages of The Australian, Turnbull was warned his national energy guarantee would test internal accommodations. The NEG was conceived in the wake of such a fright, almost two years ago, when environment and energy minister Josh Frydenberg floated an energy intensity scheme. Turnbull had to move quickly to repudiate it and reassure MPs.

Editorials in The Australian have long warned of potential disruption over the NEG. "The prime minister and his team must act decisively to put solutions in place — which, to be fair, they are working towards — as they battle disunity within the Coalition on this issue,” the paper said in April. In July concerns were raised about the leap of faith involved: "Regardless of the former prime minister’s personal motivation, it is alarming but true, as Mr Abbott said on Monday, that the Turnbull government will be relying on the support of Labor states to back its national energy guarantee at next month’s crucial COAG meeting.”

Early this month I wrote that the Coalition was in dire strife and that "government MPs are torn between enjoying the ride as they go over the cliff and mustering the courage to do something about it”. The main problem was obvious. "In a twist of self-harm difficult to believe given Turnbull’s history on the issue (in 2009 he lost the leadership over climate activism), the Coalition is shrinking from a ­potential contest with Labor over climate and energy; preferring to appease the gods of Paris rather than reclaiming the nation’s cheap energy mantle.”

Turnbull’s media boosters at the ABC and elsewhere either didn’t see the looming problem or underestimated it because they supported the policy — wishful thinking. My columns were not informed by any plotting but, rather, assessments of policy and political trajectories. Given I worked for Turnbull when he lost the leadership in 2009 over climate policy, perhaps I was more sensitive to the dynamic. But a clutch of commentators was vigorously attacking the policy and Abbott and his backbench ally Craig Kelly were openly opposing it.

As far back as April 7, I wrote: "The prime minister has been given an opportunity to retreat in the name of common sense, economic sanity and political advantage. But he stands in a no man’s land of stranded coal assets and stored hydro schemes where he risks another insurrection on the same futile battleground.”

Nine days before he called last week’s first spill, my column said Turnbull would "face open revolt over his national energy guarantee; the outstanding questions are how widespread it will be, whether it derails the policy and/or his prime ministership”. A week later I wrote about the "climate and energy debate that is so volatile it could yet destroy Turnbull’s prime ministership and/or the Coalition government”.

On that day this newspaper’s editorial warned: "Malcolm Turnbull needs a circuit-breaker to rescue his national energy guarantee, revive his government’s direction and protect his leadership … The Coalition was elected in 2013 largely on a promise to defend electricity prices from conceitful climate gestures. (Turnbull and Frydenberg) will abandon that policy and political ground at the grave peril of their own positions and that of the Coalition.”

Turnbull and his cabinet persisted with the policy too long. Even after the Coalition partyroom approved it a fortnight ago, MPs’ concerns deepened as they realised Australia would become the only country to write the Paris targets into law. It became an issue of economic sovereignty.

The policy fell apart and on ­August 20 Turnbull effectively shelved it, saying he would not put the legislation to parliament, ostensibly because it wouldn’t pass but more likely because it might pass with Labor support while a dozen or more government MPs crossed the floor to oppose it.

Announcing this capitulation, the prime minister looked broken and a challenge suddenly appeared inevitable. Until a few days earlier, it had been all about changing the policy, not the leader. Now it would be both.

This week the ABC’s Media Watch portrayed the event as a media-driven panic. Host Paul Barry failed to mention the critical energy conflict that triggered the crisis or report the detailed warnings about Turnbull’s perilous path. Barry, in line with much of the gallery, drew other lessons that entirely missed the point. "Well, one is not to let a cabal of conservative commentators persuade the Liberal Party to do something the public hates — knifing an elected prime minister.”

This is an extraordinary distortion. Media Watch argues loud ­voices antipathetic to Turnbull from the moment he seized the prime ministership from Abbott — Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones, Peta Credlin, Ray Hadley and others — killed off a prime minister by spooking his party. Other commentators have promoted media conspiracy theories. This not only insults the MPs and grossly exaggerates the role of open and honest opinion, it also ignores the majority of media voices at the ABC, SBS, Fairfax Media, commercial TV and radio, online publications and many in News Corp papers who have been supportive of Turnbull and sympathetic to his energy and climate aims. Turnbull’s problem was not (admittedly aggressive and relentless) conservative commentators polluting the minds of his MPs but green-left journalists insulating him from reality.

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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29 August, 2018

Climate change makes trees grow... faster?

An amusing attempted scare below.  They found that wood in trees these days is less dense than wood from 150 years ago.  They admit that they don't know why but suspect that it might be an effect of increasing CO2 in the air over the years. I think they are right.  Increased CO2 makes all green things grow faster and faster growth probably is less dense growth. 

But where is tha problem?  Trees already vary greatly in density.  Tropical trees such as black bean are like iron.  I once broke my drill bit trying to drill a hole in a black bean stud.

And, conversely, some wood is very light.  Most types of pine are very low in density.  And pine grows just about everywhere.  And what type of wood is used in house framing?  Pine.  Douglas fir and Oregon are both pines and are higly valued for their light but strong properties.  And in Tasmania Huon pine is greatly valued in making artisan furniture and other beautiful things.  The conclusion?  We LOVE low density wood


Trees are growing more rapidly due to climate change. This sounds like good news. After all, this means that trees are storing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in their wood and hence taking away the key ingredient in global warming. But is it that simple? A team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) analyzed wood samples from the oldest existing experimental areas spanning a period of 150 years -- and reached a surprising conclusion.

The team led by Hans Pretzsch, Professor for Forest Growth and Yield Science at the TUM, examined wood samples from several hundred trees and analyzed every single annual ring using a high-tech procedure -- a total of 30,000 of them.

Pretzsch explains the analysis procedure: "The heart of the Lignostation is a high-frequency probe which scans each sample in steps of a hundredth of a millimeter. By doing so, we measure the specific weight of the wood with an accuracy and resolution which until recently was unthinkable."

The wood samples come from the oldest experimental forest plots in Europe which were created at the same time the TU Munich was founded 150 years ago. The samples were taken from common European tree species such as spruces, pines, beeches, and oaks. "We have detailed knowledge of the history of every single plot and tree," says Pretzsch. "This allows us to rule out the possibility that our findings could result from the forest being managed differently now as compared to a hundred years ago."

Climate change is making the wood lighter

With the combination of wood samples from the 1870s to the present day coupled with the latest measurement technology, the team at the School of Life Sciences Weihenstephan were able to demonstrate that the annually growing wood has gradually become lighter since observations began: By up to eight to twelve percent since 1900. Within the same period, the volume growth of the trees in central Europe has accelerated by 29 to one hundred percent.

In other words: Even though a greater volume of wood is being produced today, it now contains less material than just a few decades ago. However, the explanation which immediately comes to mind does not apply.

"Some people might now surmise that the more rapid growth could itself be the cause for our observations," says Dr. Peter Biber, co-author of the study -- "In some tree species, it is in fact the case that wider annual rings also tend to have lighter wood. But we have taken this effect into account. The decrease in wood density we are talking about is due to other factors."

Instead, Pretzsch and his team see the causes as being the long-term increase in temperature due to climate change and the resulting lengthening of the vegetation period. But the nitrogen input from agriculture, traffic, and industry also play a part. A number of details lead experts to surmise this, such as the decrease in the density of late wood and the increase in the percentage of early wood in the annual rings.

Lighter wood -- What's the problem?

Lighter wood is less solid and it has a lower calorific value. This is crucial for numerous application scenarios ranging from wood construction to energy production. Less solid wood in living trees also increases the risk of damage events such as breakage due to wind and snow in forests.

But the most important finding for practical and political aspects is that the current climate-relevant carbon sequestration of the forests is being overestimated as long as it is calculated with established but outdated wood densities. "The accelerated growth is still resulting in surplus carbon sequestration," says Pretzsch. "But scaling up for the forests of central Europe, the traditional estimate would be to high by about ten million metric tons of carbon per year."

SOURCE






Are Western Wildfires Driven by Global Warming — Man-Made or Otherwise?

The news media has made the number and intensity of wildfires in western states this summer a household topic. As of Aug. 14, there were hundreds of them, and of major ones, 17 were burning in Alaska, 11 in Arizona, 10 each in Oregon and Colorado, and nine in California. The media and many environmentalists blame them on global warming.

The numbers sound bad to people not studied in the field, but in actuality they’re not unusual. In fact, the number of fires has been decreasing since the 1970s. But the total acreage burned has been increasing over that period. But an even longer view shows an entirely different picture, according to data kept by the National Interagency Fire Center shown in this graph:



Clearly, both the number of fires and the number of acres burned were far higher from the late 1920s through the 1940s than since 2000.

Nonetheless, global warming alarmists and their media lapdogs get it wrong.

"The effects of global warming on temperature, precipitation levels, and soil moisture are turning many of our forests into kindling during wildfire season,” says the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The Associated Press claims "Science Says: Hotter weather turbocharges US West wildfires."

The Chicago Sun Times handles it this way:

As human-caused climate change has warmed the world over the past 35 years, the land consumed by flames has more than doubled.

Experts say the way global warming worsens wildfires comes down to the basic dynamics of fire. Fires need ignition, oxygen and fuel. And what’s really changed is fuel — the trees, brush and other plants that go up in flames.

"Hotter drier weather means our fuels are drier so it’s easier for fires to start and spread and burn more intensely,” said University of Alberta fire scientist Mike Flannigan.

But University of Washington Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Cliff Mass pointed out in a recent interview with the Daily Caller:

Correlation is not causation. Temperatures are warming, that is true. Wildfire area is increasing in parts of the west, also true. But one does not necessarily cause another. Wildfire area could well be increasing because of previous fire suppression, mismanagement of our forests, and a huge influx of people into the west, lightning fires and providing lots of fuel for them.

Likewise, University of Alabama-Huntsville’s Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science John Christy says human mismanagement is the more important cause of the huge fires:

If you don’t let the low-intensity fires burn, that fuel builds up year after year. Now once a fire gets going and it gets going enough, it has so much fuel that we can’t put it out. In that sense, you could say that fires today are more intense, but it’s because of human management practices, not because mother nature has done something.

Yes, what’s really changed is fuel — not how dry it is because of rising temperature or declining precipitation (neither of which has a trend sufficient to make much difference in combustibility) but how much of it there is.

Driven largely by environmentalists who insisted that human management of nature is somehow bad, western states and the federal government generally adopted policies of suppressing fires and not removing undergrowth from forests. Yet fires are a natural phenomenon essential to long-term forest health. Preventing and suppressing them results in denser undergrowth, which means more fuel. Fires then burn hotter and move faster, accounting for the fact that acres burned have generally increased (though not greatly) since the 1970s, while the number of fires has not.

SOURCE







Corrupt environmental police in Massachusetts

The Massachusetts State Police isn’t the only state law enforcement agency mired in a payroll morass.

Members of the Massachusetts Environmental Police regularly take overtime assignments and off-duty details in the middle of the workday, scheduling their normal state work around more profitable side gigs, according to payroll records.

Agency officials and Governor Charlie Baker vowed to crack down on the practice following media reports two years ago, but the routine continues today.

Despite earlier warnings, environmental officers also continue to stay on the clock while traveling between regular and extra shifts, records show. They also use paid time off to stretch their schedules and ensure overtime payouts, according to timesheet data.

"It’s a situation that’s ripe for corruption,” said Thomas Nolan, a criminology researcher and former Boston Police lieutenant.

Still, the ongoing situation at Environment Police has not risen to the same level as the alleged criminal overtime fraud at State Police, which erupted into a major scandal this year. Two troopers have pleaded guilty to federal embezzlement charges, four others are being prosecuted, and dozens more are under investigation.

The low-profile Environmental Police, which employs 83 officers on a $11 million annual budget, enforces fishing, hunting, boating, and recreational vehicle laws. It is led by Colonel James McGinn, a former State Police sergeant who served as Baker’s personal campaign driver before Baker appointed him to the agency’s helm in 2014.

Officials from the state’s executive environmental office told the Globe scheduling flexibility allows officers to do critical work.

Spokeswoman Katie Gronendyke said the work officers do on split shifts is "a crucial component of the Environmental Police’s mission to protect the health, safety, and rights of the public while preserving the environment for future generations.”

Officials also insisted officers can work while traveling between assignments and that the agency is largely powerless to tell officers how they can use time-off benefits.

The average base pay of environmental officers is about $80,000, though about half the force earned six-figure payouts last year with overtime and private details. The highest-paid officer made $181,300, including $26,645 in overtime and nearly $68,000 from details and other pay, records show.

McGinn, who retired from State Police in 2005, earns an annual salary of $132,200. He declined an interview request.

In the fall of 2016, a series of media reports exposed the agency’s "split-shift” policy, allowing officers to interrupt regular shifts, work some hours of higher-paying overtime or detail work, then finish their regular shift.

WCVB-TV also found some officers spent work hours at home or sitting in their trucks during security details.

Baker has pledged changes within the agency, including recently activating GPS tracking technology in State Police cruisers to strengthen accountability.

In contrast, Environmental Police removed GPS tracking devices from its patrol vehicles three years ago at the union’s request. The agency said tracking capabilities have not been restored.

The Globe reported last summer the executive environmental office’s leader Secretary Matthew Beaton used taxpayer funds to pay for a plane ticket during a Florida vacation and was shuttled between the State House and Boston’s airport in an unmarked, fully equipped Environmental Police vehicle, with Perrin as his chauffeur.

Beaton quietly paid back the money only after it was found by an internal audit months later. He faced questions about whether he was qualified for his job when Baker picked him in 2014.

In spring 2017, the Globe detailed how state environmental agencies were rife with employees who have political and family ties, despite Baker’s campaign vow to ban patronage hires. That spurred the state’s Democratic Party to call for an investigation and at least one employee abruptly left months later.

It came on the heels of a series of embarrassing revelations in fall 2016 over environmental agencies’ staff misusing state resources, along with allegations of political intimidation, prompting Baker to order suspensions and firings.

SOURCE






Wind turbine is BLOWN OVER: 196 foot structure is toppled in a park as powerful typhoon hits Japan



A 196-foot wind turbine toppled over after a powerful typhoon tore through Japan. The structure in Hokudan Earthquake Memorial Park was built in 2002 in memory of the Great Hanshin Earthquake which devastated parts of Hyogo prefecture in 1995.

It was uprooted early this morning as powerful Typhoon Cimaron hit the western part of the country.

The turbine was pictured lying fragmented on its side with pieces littered across a road running alongside the park.

The storm caused scattered damage, flooding and landslides as it swept across western Japan.

A worship hall collapsed at a Shinto shrine in Kyoto, leaving the roof almost on the ground.

Strong winds also tipped over trucks on the Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge that connects Awaji Island and Honshu.

Japan's disaster agency tallied 30 people injured, two seriously.

More than 300 flights have been cancelled and high-speed bullet train service was suspended in the region.

The Japan Meteorological Agency said Cimarron, now a tropical storm, was back at sea and heading for northern Japan after bringing heavy rain and high winds to the port city of Kobe and elsewhere in western Japan overnight.

SOURCE





Australia: Green groups want to send water out to sea rather than give it to drought-hit farmers

Environmentalists have lashed Barnaby Joyce's call to divert water to drought-stricken farmers, labelling the special drought envoy's "kneejerk" plan as ill-informed.

The former Nationals leader made a splash as he kicked off his new job, calling for environmental water from the Murray-Darling Basin Plan to be used to grow fodder for stock.

"You either accept this is a national emergency and you're going to do something distinct to deal with it or you just say 'no, no, we really like the pictures of starving cattle'," he told ABC radio on Tuesday. "The water that is going to the environment is going past the irrigation properties that grow the fodder to keep cattle alive."

But the Australian Conservation Foundation's Paul Sinclair said the Murray-Darling river system was also suffering through the drought.

"Mr Joyce's kneejerk and ill-informed reaction risks the health of flood plains, wetlands and wildlife, not to mention the communities downstream that rely on a living river for their livelihoods," Dr Sinclair said.

He said water clawed back from irrigators cost the government billions, and needed to be used to make sure everyone could benefit from a healthy river.

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young slammed Mr Joyce's plan, saying he should ask his "corporate irrigator mates" to help drought-affected farmers. "Barnaby Joyce has used his first day on the job to go back to his old tricks - trying to rip water off of the environment," Senator Hanson-Young said.

Nationals cabinet minister Matt Canavan said the former agriculture and water minister's plan should be considered. "It's almost like he was born for this role to be the drought envoy," Senator Canavan told reporters in Sydney.

Mr Joyce insists he's not eyeing off a return to the front bench after being handed extra responsibility. "I really want to get stuck into this, not because of some ulterior plan, because the drought is there," Mr Joyce said. "I'm going to do my bit to help them with that and if that's where it stops that's where it stops."

Mr Joyce was deputy prime minister until February when he was forced to quit amid a storm of controversy surrounding his affair with a staffer.

New Prime Minister Scott Morrison made him drought envoy on Sunday as he announced his ministerial team.

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

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





28 August, 2018

Court Order for EPA to Ban Pesticide, Spotlights Need for ‘Transparency’ Rule

The "Six Cities" study mentioned below is certainly rubbish. Based on it, the Obama EPA claimed that outdoor air kills hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. EPA then used this claim to: wreck the coal industry; justify expensive and job-killing air quality and climate rules; and to scare Americans about the air they breathe.

It is yet another very careless air pollution study.  I have over time reviewed a lot of them (e.g. here and here and here) and found that they were all naive about controls to the point of making their findings at best moot.  A very simple demolition of the garbage mentioned above is here. Note that the alleged 2005 confirmation of the original results was simply a re-analysis of the original data that did nothing to address the lack of basic controls

Also, Steve Milloys's book "Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA” shows that there is nothing remotely scientific or honest about the Harvard Six Cities and Pope ACS studies, or the alleged HEI review. Steve says that the only thing that was "rigorous” in the studies was the fraud.


How can Americans be certain that scientific studies that are the basis of costly EPA regulations are accurate, and that the benefits of the regulations outweigh the expense?

Contrary to what critics say about a proposed rule from the Environmental Protection Agency, part of the answer lies in greater openness and transparency by federal officials, according to a new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based libertarian think tank.

The rule, called "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science,” would require the EPA to publish the scientific data behind regulations so that the information would be available for public scrutiny.

The value of the proposal became apparent Aug. 9, when a federal appeals court ordered the EPA to ban the pesticide chlorpyrifos within 60 days, says CEI senior fellow Angela Logomasini, who authored the study.

"The Trump administration should certainly challenge this ruling, which goes beyond the bounds of reason and conflicts with all the best science on chlorpyrifos,” Logomasini, who specializes in environmental and consumer issues, said in a press release, adding:

The EPA is currently pursuing a scheduled scientific review on chlorpyrifos, and there is no reason they should stop that because of a misguided activist petition. The Trump administration was right to reject the proposed ban because it was based on a single study that EPA’s science advisory board indicated was inappropriate for drawing any conclusions.

In addition, the researchers refuse to release the underlying data of this study, preventing anyone from doing legitimate scientific review to ensure its validity. This case offers yet another reason why EPA should finalize its pending rule to increase scientific transparency at the agency.

If Congress decided to impose a ban, it would hinder farming and raise consumer prices for food, Logomasini noted in a recent op-ed. Proponents of a ban on chlorpyrifos see a connection between the pesticide and developmental disabilities in children.

A report in The New York Times about the order from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit cites studies concluding that the effects of  chlorpyrifos on children "included lower birth weight and reduced I.Q., with farm workers also reporting loss of working memory and other health consequences that at times resulted in hospital admissions.”

Court watchers consider the 9th Circuit to be one of the most liberal federal courts in the nation, and President Donald Trump hopes to reshape it through his appointments.

What the Rule Would Do:

The EPA’s transparency rule would help to counter unsubstantiated claims against pesticides such as chlorpyrifos that protect crops from insects, Logomasini argues.

The proposed rule would require the EPA to "use peer-reviewed information, standardized test methods, consistent data evaluation procedures, and good laboratory practices to ensure transparent, understandable, and reproducible scientific assessments.” It is modeled after legislation that would have banned the practice of "secret science.”

Several versions of the bill passed the House, but not the Senate.

The EPA’s proposed transparency rule includes language similar to the legislation. EPA officials also included provisions that are quite different from what advanced through the House.

"The rule affords the EPA administrator considerable leeway to permit regulators to use research in cases where privacy or other concerns limit public availability,” Logomasini writes, adding:

In fact, under some laws, such as the newly reformed Toxic Substances Control Act, the EPA must use such research if it constitutes the ‘best available science’ on an issue. In that case, even if data were not fully available, the agency would still be required to rely on those critical studies. However, in cases where data can be more transparent without privacy concerns, the EPA could not refuse to release the data on arbitrary grounds.

If implemented, the transparency rule would not cover all EPA regulatory activities, but it would be applicable to regulations that would be expected to cost at least $100 million a year, according to the report. The rule also includes provisions that safeguard "confidential business information” and is "sensitive to national and homeland security,” Logomasini writes.

The transparency proposal has attracted criticism from some researchers who have expressed concern that it would hinder the scientific process. Logomasini analyzes some of these arguments in the report.

For example, John Ioannidis, a Stanford University professor of medicine, warns in a recent editorial that if the rule is implemented, "science will be practically eliminated from all decision-making processes” and that any new regulations "would then depend uniquely on opinion and whim.”

Despite his expressed misgivings toward the EPA proposal, the CEI report notes that Ioannidis raises "some good points” that make a strong case for greater transparency in science.

Transparency as ‘Inherently Pro-Science’

"Many critics of EPA’s transparency rule claim it is ‘anti-science’ and represents an ideological attack on regulation,” Logomasini says in her report. "It is true that those who prefer less regulation hope that the rule would eliminate unnecessary regulations that are based on poor-quality science. And it is also true that many oppose the rule because they fear it will weaken regulation. But irrespective of these ideological views, increasing transparency in science, whether used for government regulation or not, is an inherently pro-science goal.”

Logomasini also addresses claims raised in some news stories that suggest the transparency rule is laced with a "hidden pro-industry agenda” aimed at undermining air quality regulations.

The EPA implemented those rules for the purpose of alleviating airborne particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, known as PM2.5. The regulations were based on science produced in a taxpayer-funded study from Harvard and Brigham Young University researchers that the agency kept sealed from public scrutiny.

The 1993 study, known as the Six Cities Study, is built around a statistical analysis that found a relationship between the life span of people living in six cities and the levels of the small airborne particles. The study concluded that people living in cities with higher levels of PM2.5 had shorter life spans than those in cities with lower levels.

Researchers who were part of the Six Cities Study have said they never agreed to release the data attached to the study and cited a need for anonymity. The EPA repeatedly has resisted congressional requests to disclose the information.

If researchers have genuine privacy concerns, the transparency rule can accommodate them, Logomasini says in the report. But she also points out that if the study’s findings are accurate, release of the data would serve only to strengthen the case for the air regulations:

Privacy concerns might be a legitimate challenge for releasing some or all of the Six Cities data. If that is the case, the rule, as noted, provides exemptions for rare cases where data cannot be made anonymous and privacy must be maintained. Accordingly, regulators can still use the Six Cities data, if legitimate privacy concerns prevent full release.

In cases where the data can be made anonymous, it should be released regardless of whether it supports weakening or strengthening regulations. After all, if a study’s findings are valid, releasing the data will only strengthen claims about the benefits of these regulations. If the findings are not valid, then we know that regulatory costs may not be justified, and that society actually suffers net negative effects because of those costs.

Indeed, regulation can translate into higher prices for food, transportation, consumer products, and even medicines. The debate over the rule is not about whether it benefits industry or not, but about how it impacts public health and well-being overall.

A Matter of Trust

The EPA’s public comment period for the transparency proposal ended Aug. 16.

Daren Bakst, a senior research fellow in agricultural policy at The Heritage Foundation, submitted comments that same day and credited the agency for recognizing the importance of public participation in the regulatory process.

"A transparent rulemaking process helps to ensure that decisions are being made in a proper fashion,” Bakst wrote, adding:

The public should not be expected to just trust the EPA (or any agency) to promulgate any rule it wants and draw its own conclusions without the public knowing how those conclusions were reached. This expectation does not change simply because the agency is dealing with a scientific study. Further, the EPA is not immune to seeking preferred policy outcomes and using questionable science to achieve those outcomes. Transparency helps to minimize these problems.

But the proposed rule remains the subject of criticism from other researchers and environmental advocacy groups.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit based in New York, argues in a blog post that the rule would "roll back health protections” because it could be used to prohibit studies that were the basis for regulations that protect the public from pollution and other dangers.

"There are many reasons why a  study cannot be made fully public, or replicated,” the NRDC blog says, adding:

For example, the original raw data may no longer exist, the original exposure conditions may no longer exist (such as lead exposures from leaded gasoline), and patient protection and privacy rules may prevent full disclosure of the raw data and information. EPA has long-established and transparent methods for evaluating data in these situations.

Supporters of the EPA proposal view it as a commonsense measure that will bring an added element of accountability to the regulatory process.

"EPA’s proposed rule strengthening science transparency is as common sense as rules come,” Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, told The Daily Signal in an email.

"The public must be able to hold government institutions accountable and that can only be done if the science used to justify costly regulations is rigorous, reproducible, and holds up to independent scrutiny,” Pyle said. "Peer review and factual analysis are hallmarks of scientific research. If the EPA doesn’t have to follow these standards, how can we trust that the rules they put forward are based on sound science and not political science?”

The Institute for Energy Research is a Washington-based nonprofit that favors free-market solutions in setting energy policies.

The EPA said it has begun to review the more than 479,000 comments, a process that could last through fall. The agency then will determine a timeline for making a final decision.

SOURCE






CA: News from Death Valley

A reader takes an interest in temperatures in Death Valley, often said to be the hottest place on earth.  He has not given me a full report of what exactly he has done but the following summary may be of interest.  The valley is NOT warming

I continue to monitor the temperatures of Death Valley and while August has typically the hottest days the temperature as of today has not exceeded 120 deg F, while past years typically reach the mid to high 120's. And compare this to the reported heat wave and drought present across much of the USA and a CO2 level of about 410 ppm. In addition humidity has been relatively low as well in Death Valley. The data from Death Valley would not support Global Warming theories. For the last 8 years the yearly temperature maximums have been dropping lower and lower but also the overnight temperature drop has been much lower than past periods.

There are a number of factors that could have a significant impact on surface temperatures. After thousands of years of sun heating the surface material there would be a certain residual inertia. It is possible that the air mass at the surface is not getting as warm but the near surface earth still has a significant reservoir of energy. There has to be some other explanation for lower max air temperatures as well as  lower overnight cooling even with higher CO2 concentrations and low humidity.

Via email






Trump ends Obama's war on American coal

Donald Trump promised when he was running for president that he would repeal regulations that kill jobs. The Clean Power Plan of the Obama administration is Exhibit A. On the campaign trail in states like Ohio and West Virginia, I saw firsthand how the Clean Power Plan regulations were decimating proud coal towns where economic activity was replaced with unemployment lines and drug use.

This week, the White House announced its plan for overturning the most onerous features of that law, which will throw a lifeline to the American coal industry. Trump is not eliminating clean air standards as the environmentalists are moaning. The new rules would continue to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but in a way that would ensure that the regulatory steamroller does not flatten an industry that employs tens of thousands of Americans and contributes tens of billions of dollars to our economy. The Environmental Protection Agency announced that the new rule will save coal producers $400 million a year in compliance costs and thousands of jobs.

But the left is apocalyptic about these new rules because they want to destroy the American coal industry, no matter how clean coal gets. The Clean Power Plan intentionally set such stringent emission rules that coal producers could not possibly meet them. So coal companies one by one would go bankrupt. Cheap natural gas has proved to be a formidable competitor to coal producers. But the main problem for coal today is not due to Schumpeterian market based "gales of creative destruction.” This is a government directed execution. Hillary Clinton promised that if she were elected president, she would eliminate every coal job in America, yet she wonders why she got clobbered in Ohio, Kentucky, Wyoming and West Virginia.

The left wants coal production stopped, even though clean coal is not a fiction. It is here. Coal production and coal burning is much cleaner than it was 10, 20 or 30 years ago. The real pollutants from burning coal including lead, soot, carbon monoxide and smog have fallen by 50, 60, 80 and even 90 percent over the last several decades. The air we breathe today is much cleaner than it has been 20, 50 or 100 years ago. Even with the new Trump administration rules, the Energy Information Agency projects carbon output to decline 28 percent by the end of the next decade.

Trump is right to stop the government massacre of coal. America was - and still is built on fossil fuels. In my book, "Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy,” I point out the irony that the industrial revolution, when our nation built factories, steam engines, railroads and so on, was made possible by an energy revolution that ditched the inefficiencies of windmills and sundials for powerful coal and oil. But now we have environmentalists who want to turn back the clock and force us to power our $20 trillion industrial economy with energy sources from before the industrial age. Left wing environmental groups are even admitting that once they have killed coal, they are coming after natural gas and oil.

This is an economic death march. Despite all of the talk about a green energy takeover, we still get about 70 percent of our energy from fossil fuels including coal. In 2017, a third of all our electric power came from coal, while solar power and its tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies provided less than 2 percent. The United States is also the Saudi Arabia of coal. We have a 500 year supply of coal, far more than any other nation. For America not to produce coal would be like Nebraska not growing corn. At the very least, coal plants are necessary to back up wind and solar energy, otherwise America is going to experience rolling blackouts and brownouts that will greatly jeopardize our economy and our safety.

Here is the most important point of all. Let us assume for a moment that, God forbid, America were to shut down every coal plant on the continent and every coal miner in America were issued a pink slip. What impact would this have on global carbon emissions? Almost zero. This is because China and India, with their two billion people, are massively increasing their carbon emissions every year. For every coal plant we shutdown, China and India build at least five, and their coal is much dirtier than ours. In 2017 under Trump, the United States reduced our carbon emissions by 0.5 percent (even as our economy grew by 3 percent) while China and India belched out of their factories and cars record amounts of black smoke and added to their carbon footprint.

America is already doing more than its part to clean the planet. We all want clean air and a safe environment. But that doesn’t have to come at the cost of destroying jobs and putting our entire economy at risk. Trump is proving is that economic growth, jobs and a cleaner environment are compatible, and he’s producing all three at once.

SOURCE






Coal comeback? EPA plan would prolong life for power plants seen as climate change culprit

Aging coal-fired power plants could get a new lease on life under an industry-friendly proposal by the Trump administration that would replace the Clean Power Plan, former President Barack Obama's signature plan to confront climate change.

Unveiled Tuesday, the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) Rule would give states broad latitude in how they would regulate power plants' greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming as well as other pollutants, such as smog, soot and mercury.

"Today we are fulfilling the president's agenda. We are proposing a (plan) that promotes affordable, clean and reliable energy for all Americans," Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler told reporters Tuesday, adding that the Clean Power Plan "exceeded the agency's legal authority."

But by the EPA's own admission, the proposal could lead to more than 1,000 premature deaths a year, a statistic opponents pounced on.

"With today’s Dirty Power Plan proposal, the Trump EPA once again proves that it cares more about extending the lives of old coal plants rather than saving the lives of the American people,” said Conrad Schneider, advocacy director of the Clean Air Task Force.

 Environmental groups and some states vowed to sue to stop the plan's implementation, just as opponents of Obama's Clean Power Plan have done.

In a tweet, California Gov. Jerry Brown  called the EPA proposal "a declaration of war against America and all of humanity" that will not go unanswered.

The Clean Power Plan rule was finalized in 2015, mainly targeting coal-fired power plants that account for nearly 40 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. But it remains on hold under a Supreme Court stay pending the outcome of a legal challenge from states.

In October, then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt rolled it back,carrying out a promise by Trump to push an energy agenda that encouraged the use of coal. The president, who has called global warming "a hoax" perpetrated by China to gain a competitive edge, wrote in a tweet May 18 that "we have ended the war on coal."

Aimed squarely at coal-fired power plants, Obama's proposal would require existing power plants to cut harmful emissions based on  2005 levels. By 2030, the reduction would be 32 percent for carbon, 90 percent for sulfur dioxide and 72 percent for nitrogen oxides.

Wheeler called the Obama plan "overly prescriptive and burdensome" and said it would have led to "double-digit" increases in electricity prices in as many as 40 states, Wheeler told reporters on a conference call. EPA officials on the same call said consumer prices will fall slightly under the Trump plan by 2025.

According to the EPA, the Trump plan would:

Define the "best system of emission reduction” for existing power plants as on-site, heat-rate efficiency improvements.

Provide states with a list of "candidate technologies” that can be used to establish standards of performance and be incorporated into their state plans.

Update the New Source Review permitting program to further encourage "efficiency improvements" at existing power plants.

Give "states adequate time and flexibility" to develop their own plans.

Jim Matheson, CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, which serves 42 million consumers nationwide, supports the plan.

"The proposed rule appears to provide electric cooperatives with a more achievable plan that adheres to EPA’s historic approach to using the Clean Air Act," he said in a statement. "This is necessary to provide electric co-ops the certainty and flexibility they need to meet their consumer-members’ local energy needs."

But environmental groups decried the plan as a sop to the coal industry at the expense of public health and the reality of climate change.

Gina McCarthy, former EPA administrator under Obama and an architect of the Clean Power Plan, called the Trump administration's move "a huge gimme to coal-fired power plants" by giving them a "free pass" to increase not just carbon emissions but other unhealthy pollutants as well.

"They are continuing to play to their base, and they are following industry's playbook step by step," she told reporters. "This is all about coal at all costs."

SOURCE  





America First Energy Conference – "an amazing day”

New Orleans event reveals much of what has been hidden from the energy debate

Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris

"It will be an amazing day,” Dr. Tim Huelskamp announced at the start of the America First Energy Conference (AFEC) held August 7 in New Orleans. "You’re going to learn a lot … about so many issues – issues many in the media do not want us to know about.”

Indeed, we did. As Huelskamp, former Kansas Congressman and now President of conference organizer The Heartland Institute, explained to the audience of 225, packed into that single day were presentations from leading representatives of government, science and think tanks determined to set the record straight on where America stands and where it needs to go on energy. Here are samples.

In his morning keynote address Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry summarized the benefits of energy independence. "An energy independent America creates a safe America; it creates a prosperous America. It builds the middle class. It provides good jobs, good schools. It gives government the ability to give teachers a raise, to give our police and firefighters raises. It secures the safety and liberty of the entire world.”

Using the electricity required to power the Houston metropolitan area as an example, Landry discussed the impracticality of trying to replace fossil fuels with alternative energy. To produce that power using corn ethanol would require over 21,000 square miles of corn fields.

"Think about that footprint!” he exclaimed. To produce the same amount of electricity from wind power would take almost 900 square miles of wind turbines, or 150 square miles of solar panels, he added.

Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, was an ever-present voice at the conference. He received an award for valor in the face of extreme opposition to his outstanding work on satellite measurements, which show conclusively that carbon dioxide (CO2) has played no significant role in altering Earth’s temperature.

In his panel presentation on CO2, he made the unarguable case that there are no negatives for the rising amount of CO2 in our atmosphere. It is a miracle molecule that makes life possible on Planet Earth.

Kathleen Hartnett White, Director of the Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment, Texas Public Policy Foundation, talked about the positive impact that her book "Fueling Freedom: Exposing the mad war on energy,” coauthored with Steve Moore of the President’s transition team, has had on the US energy picture.

She also focused on the horrific impacts outcomes forced upon world’s poorest families, when they are deprived of efficient, inexpensive fossil fuels in favor of costly solar and wind energy that can never compete in the free market without major taxpayer subsidies.

Joe Leimkuhler, vice president of drilling for Louisiana-based LLOG Exploration, shocked the audience with incredible data on the efficiency and economics of continuing to developing our vast offshore oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico.

Because of the great advances in development of shale gas through horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, less attention is being paid to more conventional off shore vertical wells. But in fact, three-dimensional seismic data, combined with technological advances that allow multiple wells from the same platform, have costs down and yields up.

Leimkuhler said that in areas of the Gulf of Mexico that are currently open to leasing (i.e., the Central and Western Gulf) more and more offshore leases are likely to receive bids in the future, due to the increased value of Gulf Coast Crude relative to oil from fracking. For the Gulf Coast refineries, offshore Gulf of Mexico crudes provide higher yields of the more valuable products desired by the market (fuel, diesel).

Sterling Burnet, Editor of the Heartland Institute’s Environment and Climate News, moderated a panel on coal, oil, and natural gas. Panelists demonstrated America’s good fortune of holding huge inexpensive reserves that can maintain America’s energy costs dramatically below that of other nations. Burnett said we must end the war on fossil fuels by continuing to explain the economics, safety and efficiency of coal, oil and natural gas.

He described the large numbers of coal fired plants that were shut down by the Obama administration. This trend must be stopped, Burnett emphasized. Coal needs to be brought back as a great American resource in the hearts and minds of the American public.

Myron Ebell, Director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, led the Trump administration’s transition team on energy regulation. At AFEC he reviewed the many regulations being eliminated.

He noted that President Trump called for two rules to be eliminated for every new rule that would be established in his administration; but in fact his administration has eliminated twenty regulations for every new one established. We still have a long way to go to fully unencumber America’s economy, Ebell said, but the start has exceeded most expectations.

Marc Morano, publisher of the influential Washington, DC-based Climatedepot.com, revealed that many of America’s most strident leftist environmental activist groups are heavily financed by Russian money in an effort to hurt the US economy through inhibiting the use of fossil fuels and promoting the waste of government funds for research into implausible man-caused climate change.

Morano’s new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change, is considered one of the most complete guides to the true history of the greatest fraud in history, man-caused climate change.

It was heartening to learn the participants in Panel 6: Reforming the EPA all felt the new administrator Andrew Wheeler will carry on the excellent work of former administrator Scott Pruitt. The problem is, and will continue to be, that the vast majority of EPA staff remain Obama appointees who will continue to impede efforts to make significant reforms. In spite of this, changes for the better are occurring almost daily as Wheeler meets with state groups across the country.

In his keynote address at the conference’s closing session, philosopher and President of the Center for Industrial Progress Alex Epstein explained how to win the energy debate. First establish an agreement on the correct framework, one that is even handed, precise and values human health, living standards and betterment. Then the facts in support of fossils fuels are more likely to be well-received.

Epstein, author of the New York Times bestseller, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, showed a video of his exchange with Senator Barbara Boxer of California at the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Boxer wondered what a philosopher was doing lecturing the committee. He smoothly answered, "to help you learn how to think clearly.” This brought the house down.

All AFEC sessions – including Carbon taxes, cap & trade, and other bad ideas, Fueling freedom and prosperity, Cafe standards: Why they need to go, Climate lawsuits against energy companies and the government – may be viewed on the conference web site: http://americafirstenergy.org/.

Everyone needs to watch these educational conference presentations. It was a day to remember.

Via email

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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 August, 2018

A fun bit of Warmism

A rather attractive woman at a British regional university that was originally a school of art has put out an article (below) in which she compares the arguments put out by climate skeptics to the self-justifications used by criminals. So the intent is clearly derogatory. 

She offers no numerical estimate of how similar the two types of statement are, however, so the article lapses into pointlessness or at best arbitrariness. 

She classifies skeptical arguments quite well and clearly regards them all as illegitimate in some way -- but she offers no evidence or argument -- not even a reference -- for that opinion.

She appears to rely on the old "97% consenus" tale but has obviously not read the foundational paper for that claim  -- by John Cook et al.  I will quote her just one sentence from that paper: "66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW".  In other words only ONE THIRD of climate scientists could be shown to support global warming.  That's  a long way from 97%.  Richard Tol has more on that.

I will resist blonde jokes and simply observe that there are certainly some dim bulbs among Warmists


Climate Change Counter Movement NeutralizationTechniques: A Typology to Examine the Climate Change Counter Movement

Ruth E. McKie


Abstract

The Climate Change Counter Movement has been a topic of interest for social scientists and environmentalists for the past 25 years (Dunlap and McCright, 2015). This research uses the sociology of crime and deviance to analyze the numerous arguments used by climate change counter movement organizations.

Content analysis of 805 statements made by climate change counter movement organizations reveals that the theory "Techniques of Neutralization" (Sykes and Matza, American Sociological Review 22(6):664, 1957) can help us better understand the arguments adopted by these organizations.

Taking two observations from two time points, the author examine not only the composition of the messaging adopted by Climate Change Counter Movement (CCCM)organization, but how these messages have changed over time. In all, there were 1,435 examples of CCCM neutralization techniques adopted by CCCM organizations across these two points in time. This examination of the movement provides valuable insight into the CCCM and the subsequent environmental harm that is partly facilitated by theiractions.

SOURCE






The Modern Automobile Must Die. If we want to solve climate change, there's no other option

First they came for your plastic bags, then your straws, then your balloons… Now your cars!  Fat chance they have. Around half of the passenger automobiles sold in America today are SUVs.  But SUVs are big and heavy so can't go far on batteries.  And even normal cars can't go far on batteries in Northern winters as heating is a big battery drainer too

Germany was supposed to be a model for solving global warming. In 2007, the country’s government announced that it would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by the year 2020. This was the kind of bold, aggressive climate goal scientists said was needed in all developed countries. If Germany could do it, it would prove the target possible.

So far, Germany has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 27.7 percent—an astonishing achievement for a developed country with a highly developed manufacturing sector. But with a little over a year left to go, despite dedicating $580 billion toward a low-carbon energy system, the country "is likely to fall short of its goals for reducing harmful carbon-dioxide emissions,” Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday. And the reason for that may come down not to any elaborate solar industry plans, but something much simpler: cars.

"At the time they set their goals, they were very ambitious,” Patricia Espinosa, the United Nations’ top climate change official, told Bloomberg. "What happened was that the industry—particularly the car industry—didn’t come along.”

Changing the way we power our homes and businesses is certainly important. But as Germany’s shortfall shows, the only way to achieve these necessary, aggressive emissions reductions to combat global warming is to overhaul the gas-powered automobile and the culture that surrounds it. The only question left is how to do it.

In 2010, a NASA study declared that automobiles were officially the largest net contributor of climate change pollution in the world. "Cars, buses, and trucks release pollutants and greenhouse gases that promote warming, while emitting few aerosols that counteract it,” the study read. "In contrast, the industrial and power sectors release many of the same gases—with a larger contribution to [warming]—but they also emit sulfates and other aerosols that cause cooling by reflecting light and altering clouds.”

In other words, the power generation sector may have emitted the most greenhouse gases in total. But it also released so many sulfates and cooling aerosols that the net impact was less than the automobile industry, according to NASA.

Since then, developed countries have cut back on those cooling aerosols for the purpose of countering regular air pollution, which has likely increased the net climate pollution of the power generation industry. But according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, "collectively, cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of all U.S. emissions,” while "in total, the U.S. transportation sector—which includes cars, trucks, planes, trains, ships, and freight—produces nearly thirty percent of all US global warming emissions ... .”

In fact, transportation is now the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States—and it has been for two years, according to an analysis from the Rhodium Group.

There’s a similar pattern happening in Germany. Last year, the country’s greenhouse gas emissions decreased as a whole, "largely thanks to the closure of coal-fired power plants,” according to Reuters. Meanwhile, the transportation industry’s emissions increased by 2.3 percent, "as car ownership expanded and the booming economy meant more heavy vehicles were on the road.” Germany’s transportation sector remains the nation’s second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, but if these trends continue, it will soon become the first.

Clearly, the power generation industry is changing its ways. So why aren’t carmakers following suit?

To American eyes, Germany may look like a public transit paradise. But the country also has a flourishing car culture that began over a hundred years ago and has only grown since then.

Behind Japan and the United States, Germany is the third-largest automobile manufacturer in the world—home to BMW, Audi, Mercedes Benz, and Volkswagen.* These brands, and the economic prosperity they’ve brought to the country, shape Germany’s cultural and political identities. "There is no other industry as important,” Arndt Ellinghorst, the chief of Global Automotive Research at Evercore, told CNN.

A similar phenomenon exists in the United States, where gas-guzzlers symbolize nearly every cliche point of American pride: affluence, capability for individual expression, and personal freedoms. Freedom, in particular, "is not a selling point to be easily dismissed,” Edward Humes wrote in The Atlantic in 2016. "This trusty conveyance, always there, always ready, on no schedule but its owner’s. Buses can’t do that. Trains can’t do that. Even Uber makes riders wait.”

It’s this cultural love of cars—and the political influence of the automotive industry—that has so far prevented the public pressure necessary to provoke widespread change in many developed nations. But say those barriers didn’t exist. How could developed countries tweak their automobile policies to solve climate change?

For Germany to meet emissions targets, "half of the people who now use their cars alone would have to switch to bicycles, public transport, or ride-sharing,” Heinrich Strößenreuther, a Berlin-based consultant for mobility strategies told YaleEnvironment360’s Christian Schwägerl last fall. That would require drastic policies, like having local governments ban high-emitting cars in populated places like cities. (In fact, Germany’s car capital, Stuttgart, is considering it.) It would also require large-scale government investments in public transportation infrastructure: "A new transport system that connects bicycles, buses, trains, and shared cars, all controlled by digital platforms that allow users to move from A to B in the fastest and cheapest way—but without their own car,” Schwägerl said.

One could get away with more modest infrastructure investments if governments required carmakers to make their vehicle fleets more fuel-efficient, thereby burning less petroleum. The problem is that most automakers seek to meet those requirements by developing electric cars. If those cars are charged with electricity from a coal-fired power plant, they create "more emissions than a car that burns petrol,” energy storage expert Dénes Csala pointed out last year. "For such a switch to actually reduce net emissions, the electricity that powers those cars must be renewable.”

The most effective solution would be to combine these policies. Governments would require drastic improvements in fuel efficiency for gas-powered vehicles, while investing in renewable-powered electric car infrastructure. At the same time, cities would overhaul their public transportation systems, adding more bikes, trains, buses and ride-shares. Fewer people would own cars.

At one point, the U.S. was well on its way toward some of these changes. In 2012, President Barack Obama’s administration implemented regulations requiring automakers to nearly double the fuel economy of passenger vehicles by the year 2025. But the Trump administration announced a rollback of those regulations earlier this month. Their intention, they said, is to "Make Cars Great Again.”

The modern cars they’re seeking to preserve, and the way we use them, are far from great. Of course, there’s the climate impact—the trillions in expected economic damage from extreme weather and sea-level rise caused in part by our tailpipes. But 53,000 Americans also die prematurely from vehicle pollution each year, and accidents are among the leading causes of death in the United States. "If U.S. roads were a war zone, they would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever encountered,” Humes wrote. It’s getting more dangerous by the day.

SOURCE






Another Greenie nuisance

In recent months, a new and controversial climate activist has surfaced in the media. Richard Wiles has quickly become the go-to commentator for news stories surrounding a series of copycat lawsuits seeking to hold fossil fuel companies liable for the effects of climate change.

On the surface, Mr. Wiles appears to be a well-meaning climate expert.

But an Energy In Depth investigation reveals his involvement in the larger coordinated scheme to attack energy companies and force the industry to pay for global warming.

Wiles is involved in all aspects of the climate litigation campaign – from running a news outlet dedicated to promoting the lawsuits and coordinating a social media effort to attack the industry, to overseeing the research utilized in many of the lawsuits and pressuring additional cities to bring cases of their own.

Richard Wiles heads Climate Liability News (CLN), a dark-money "news” site set up in 2017 to promote climate lawsuits across the country.

Though CLN doesn’t disclose its funders, its founding editor is Lynn Zinser, a transplant from InsideClimate News who worked on the original #ExxonKnew articles, which were paid for by the Rockefeller Family Fund and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The Rockefellers are key players behind both the #ExxonKnew and climate litigation campaigns. Coincidentally, CLN just happens to have a unique page on its website dedicated to advancing this fringe environmentalist effort.

Kert Davies and Alyssa Johl, a former attorney for the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), serve alongside Wiles on the CLN board of directors.

Davies and members of CIEL attended a secret meeting at the Rockefeller Family Fund in January 2016, which sought to "delegitimize” ExxonMobil and portray it as a "corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm.”

Behind the scenes, Wiles facilitates this "news” site through a 501(c)3 organization called Climate Communications & Law.

Established in 2017, the organization has no website and no publicly available financial disclosures to the IRS (form 990s).

It appears to serve as a shell organization for other powerful players to funnel undisclosed funds to CLN, which means it serves as a de facto public relations component of #ExxonKnew. CC&L is operated out of Wiles’ own home.

Wiles also directs the Center for Climate Integrity, a project that "supports meritorious climate cases aimed at holding fossil fuel companies and other climate polluters liable for the damages they have caused.”

This support includes coordinated social media posts with #ExxonKnew, an initiative by 350.org, and a PR campaign that is pressuring other cities like Houston and Miami to bring lawsuits of their own.

These tactics seem to stem directly from the agenda at the aforementioned Rockefeller Family Fund meeting in 2016:

Part of the memo for the January 2016 meeting at the offices of the Rockefeller Family Fund where activists plotted their #ExxonKnew strategy

Not only is Wiles leading a PR campaign in support of these lawsuits, he also oversaw the research utilized in many of the cases seeking damages from fossil fuel companies.

Wiles is the founder of Climate Central, a Rockefeller-funded organization that researches and reports on the impacts of climate change.

Between 2008-2017, Wiles served as the organization’s Sr. Vice President for Strategic Communications and Research, where he supervised numerous studies cited in the lawsuits represented by Sher Edling.

Climate Central has been involved in the conspiracy to delegitimize the fossil fuel industry from the very beginning: Claudia Tebaldi, a climate statistician for Climate Central, attended the now infamous La Jolla conference on behalf of the organization in 2012.

Portrayed by the media as a dispassionate expert, Richard Wiles is a deeply ingrained collaborator in the climate conspiracy against the energy industry.

He is facilitating a coordinated PR campaign and running a "news” organization to further these baseless attacks, alongside some of the most well-documented #ExxonKnew conspirators.

He even oversaw research conducted after the La Jolla Conference that was later used in the very lawsuits he continues to promote.

Wiles has managed to operate multiple facets of the campaign to undermine the industry while maintaining a public perception as an outside expert.

It’s unclear if Mr. Wiles has any other notable affiliations with the climate litigation campaign, but the additional investigation may yet reveal more to this story.

SOURCE





‘The Time For Action Is Now’: Zinke Orders California To Stop Wasting Farmers’ Water

Sacramento-San Joaquin DeltaInterior Secretary Ryan Zinke directed staff to draft a plan within 15 days that would "maximize water supply deliveries” to farmers south of California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, The Sacramento Bee reported.

California’s State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) is holding public hearings Tuesday on a proposal that would divert less water from the San Joaquin River for use in farms and roughly 3 million households.

The SWRCB wants to increase the amount of water flowing from the river into the ocean in order to help fish populations in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta recover from historically low numbers.

"The State of California is now proposing additional unacceptable restrictions that further reduce the Department’s ability to deliver water to Federal contractors,” Zinke wrote in an Aug. 17 memo to department staff, according to The Sacramento Bee.

"The time for action is now,” the Interior secretary wrote, insisting that more water should be made available south of the delta for use by farms, homes, and businesses.

Further limiting Californian’s use of the water would force thousands to look for a supply underground, straining the state’s already depleted aquifers, critics of the state’s plan say.

Environmentalists oppose the secretary’s plan.

"It’s indicative of a more bullying and hysterical tone,” Natural Resources Defense Council California water program director Doug Obegi told the Los Angeles Times.

The fight between the Trump administration and California over the state’s water policy ratcheted up recently as result of record wildfires sweeping through the state. President Donald Trump has blamed "bad environmental laws” for adding to the wildfires’ severity.

Environmentalists and agriculture interests have fought over the appropriate use for water in the San Joaquin River. Farmers argue that the water is needed for irrigation and to sate California’s high demand for water.

Environmentalists say diverting water from flowing into the delta is harming stocks of fish, particularly the endangered delta smelt.

SOURCE  






Marc Morano: My Viral Climate Change Video Was Smeared as Fake News. Here Are the Facts.

Morano attacker Dana Nuccitelli is a rather crafty Warmist.  He usually backs up his statements by a display of "facts".  When you trace those facts back however you find that the "facts" are just conclusions (read: opinions) of his fellow Warmists

An environmental scientist who writes a column for The Guardian has claimed that my video on climate change "spreads climate denial misinformation” to millions of viewers on Facebook. Not so.

Here is my point-by-point rebuttal to Dana Nuccitelli’s claims in the British newspaper based on my video, which has attracted more than 8 million views and 139,000 shares on Facebook. The video has so alarmed climate activists that they’re using it to pressure Facebook to ban "climate deniers.”

Claim: "Basically, [Marc Morano’s] critique is that the study sample size was too small to make a conclusive determination about the level of expert consensus. That’s a valid point … ”

Response: So Nuccitelli admits my point about "77 anonymous” scientists making up the alleged 97 percent consensus is "a valid point.” Good. Let’s move on.

Claim: "In fact, the authors of seven separate [climate] consensus studies using a variety of approaches (some with very large sample sizes) teamed up in 2016 to publish a paper concluding that the expert consensus on human-caused global warming is between 90 and 100 percent. So, this critique is invalid when considering all the available consensus research.”

Response: Climate Depot, the website I founded, has covered and debunked the claims of these so-called "consensus” studies, which were a rehash of the same claims but packaged together to appear comprehensive. Chapter 3 of my book, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” is devoted to debunking the 97 percent claims.

As I have detailed before: These claims "really confirm that it is easier to get papers published if they support the narrative of man-made global warming.”

Responding to these "consensus” surveys, I told the Media Research Center: "These types of ‘consensus’ surveys are meant to provide talking points to politicians and the media in order to crush dissenting voices and ban skeptics from the mainstream media. It frees the climate crisis promoter from having to research any scientific points and instead allows them to say, ‘90 percent of scientists agree. Case closed!’”

Nuccitelli, as seen here and here, has a history of skewing climate science to fit his political narrative.

Claim: "Morano also critiques the consensus study that my colleagues (including John Cook) and I published in 2013. He does so simply by quoting economist Richard Tol saying our 97 percent figure ‘was pulled from thin air.’ Tol argued that the methodology in our study was flawed, but when we applied his critiques in a follow-up paper published in 2014, we found that the consensus was still 97 [percent, plus or minus 1 percent].”

Response: Here are Tol’s own words on Cook’s claim of 97 percent consensus, and readers can judge whether I accurately quoted him:

The 97 percent estimate is bandied about by basically everybody. I had a close look at what this study really did. As far as I can see, the estimate just crumbles when you touch it. None of the statements in the papers [is] supported by the data that’s in the paper. The 97 percent is essentially pulled from thin air, it is not based on any credible research whatsoever.

Tol continued to be unimpressed with Cook’s claims even after his follow-up paper published in 2014. In 2015, Tol again ripped Cook’s continued claims of a 97 percent consensus. "Cook’s analysis is a load of old bollocks,” he wrote.

(I debated Cook in 2015 at the U.N. Paris climate summit. Listen here.)

Claim: "In short, Morano’s only evidence to dispute the expert consensus on human-caused global warming is to quote an economist who agrees the consensus is 90 to 100 percent, and that the experts are correct that humans are responsible for global warming.”

Response: Tol has pushed back on claims that he cited a consensus of 91 percent.

PolitiFact to Tol in 2015: "The 91 percent endorsement rate is a direct quote from your paper: ‘The headline endorsement rate would be 91 percent in that case.’ (Cook cites it multiple times in his reply to your paper.)”

Tol rebuffed this, writing back to PolitiFact: "Do check the grammar: ‘would […] in that case’ does in no way indicate my agreement with the number. In fact, I make it very clear that any number based on Cook’s data is unreliable.”

In addition, Nuccitelli’s claim in The Guardian that my "only evidence” is Tol is not correct. In the 2-minute Facebook video, I alluded to Tol’s comment and to the other key "consensus” study. But in my book, I devote a whole chapter to debunking all of the various 97 percent consensus claims.

Also see this and this. And past climate "consensuses” have changed dramatically, as seen here and here.

Claim: "Morano claims that we’re not actually in the midst of the hottest period on record, and that ‘hottest year’ claims are ‘merely political statements’ because for example, he claims, scientists can’t say with 100 percent certainty that 2016 was hotter than 2015 due to the margin of uncertainty in the data. This claim is similar to one made on Fox News that earned a ‘Pants on Fire’ rating from PolitiFact based on consultation with climate scientists. The years 2014 through 2017 are indeed the four hottest years on record, outside the range of uncertainty.”

Response: First off, citing PolitiFact as a climate science authority is beyond the pale, even for The Guardian. Second, the media has been forced to admit that "hottest year” claims are statistical noise.

In 2015, the Associated Press issued a "clarification,” stating in part:

The story also reported that 2014 was the hottest year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, but did not include the caveat that other recent years had average temperatures that were almost as high—and they all fall within a margin of error that lessens the certainty that any one of the years was the hottest.

"Hottest year” claims are purely political statements designed to persuade the public that the government needs to take action on man-made climate change.

In Chapter 7, my book deals with "hottest year” claims and their statistical significance.

Claim: "Morano argues that the experts are wrong because there are hundreds of factors influencing Earth’s climate, and that carbon dioxide ‘is one of these factors that gets essentially drowned out, and you can’t distinguish its effect from natural variability.’ That claim is entirely false, as elegantly illustrated in this graphic created by Bloomberg.”

Response: The claim here is that carbon dioxide can have a warming impact on the atmosphere, but this does not mean CO2 is the control knob of the climate.

Philip Stott, University of London’s professor emeritus of biogeography, rebuts the notion that carbon dioxide is the main climate change driver, writing:

As I have said, over and over again, the fundamental point has always been this: Climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically selected factor (CO2), is as misguided as it gets.

Climate is the most complex coupled nonlinear chaotic system known to man. Of course, there are human influences in it, nobody denies that. But what outcome will they get by fiddling with one variable (CO2) at the margins? I’m sorry, it’s scientific nonsense.

Atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, a pioneer in development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at the Netherlands’ Royal National Meteorological Institute, has declared (as quoted in my book): "I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached.”

Claim: "Human-caused global warming now [is] far outside the range of natural variability. In fact, we’re now warming global temperatures more than 20 times faster than Earth’s fastest natural climate changes.”

Response: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever points out that ".8 degrees is what we’re discussing in global warming. [Just] .8 degrees. If you ask people in general what it is, they think—it’s 4 or 5 degrees. They don’t know it is so little.”

Climatologist Pat Michaels explained that in any case the world’s temperature "should be near the top of the record given the record only begins in the late 19th century when the surface temperature was still reverberating from the Little Ice Age.”

"We are creating great anxiety without it being justified … there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic,” award-winning climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. "The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

As climatologist Roy Spencer wrote in 2016:

Global warming and climate change, even if it is 100 percent caused by humans, is so slow that it cannot be observed by anyone in their lifetime. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts and other natural disasters have yet to show any obvious long-term change. This means that in order for politicians to advance policy goals (such as forcing expensive solar energy on the masses or creating a carbon tax), they have to turn normal weather disasters into ‘evidence’ of climate change.

University of Pennsylvania geologist Robert Giegengack, as I write in my book, noted in 2014:  "None of the strategies that have been offered by the U.S. government or by the EPA or by anybody else has the remotest chance of altering climate if in fact climate is controlled by carbon dioxide.”

Claim: "And of course, climate scientists have observed human fingerprints all over climate change … ”

Response: As Spencer wrote, "There is no fingerprint of human-caused versus naturally-caused climate change … To claim the changes are ‘unprecedented’ cannot be demonstrated with reliable data, and are contradicted by some published paleoclimate data which suggests most centuries experience substantial warming or cooling.”

Richard Lindzen, an MIT climate scientist, said that believing CO2 controls the climate "is pretty close to believing in magic.” Climate Depot revealed the real way they find the "fingerprint” of CO2.

Nuccitelli’s "fingerprint” argument in The Guardian echoes claims by the Associated Press from 2017, when AP science reporter Seth Borenstein wrote: "There’s a scientifically accepted method for determining if some wild weather event has the fingerprints of man-made climate change, and it involves intricate calculations. Those could take weeks or months to complete, and then even longer to be checked by other scientists.”

I responded to Borenstein’s claims by writing that he seems to believe "there is some kind of arcane black box that finds the fingerprint of man-made global warming” and it is available only to a select few.

Claim: "It would be absurd to take Marc Morano’s word over the evidence published in peer-reviewed studies by climate scientists at NASA and other scientific institutions around the world.”

Response: I wholeheartedly agree. There is no reason to take the word of either The Guardian’s Nuccitelli or me. We have science, data, and the geologic history of the Earth to handle that.

Current NASA climate claims (under Gavin Schmidt and formerly James Hansen) are steeped in politics and funding. Former NASA scientists have criticized the agency (see here and here).

Other prominent scientists reject carbon dioxide fears.

Ivy League geologist Robert Giegengack, former chairman of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke out against fears of rising CO2 impacts promoted by Al Gore and others. Giegengack noted that "for most of Earth’s history, the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has rarely been cooler.”

He explained:

[Gore] claims that temperature increases solely because more CO2 in the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat. That’s just wrong … It’s a natural interplay. As temperature rises, CO2 rises, and vice versa. … It’s hard for us to say that CO2 drives temperature. It’s easier to say temperature drives CO2.

In 2014, Giegengack told Climate Depot: "The Earth has experienced very few periods when CO2 was lower than it is today.”

SOURCE (See the original for links)

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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 August, 2018

The latest global warming fraud

There a lot of versions of the graph below online but I could find none that included calibrations. It's a thoroughly dishonest piece of work as, for any graph to be interpretable, it has to include calibrations.  I have in fact never before seen a graph without calibrations. 

It would ruin the Warmist story if calibrations were included because what is not mentioned is that the differences in temperature between the time periods illustrated are in mostly in hundredths of one degree only, which is practically meaningless.

There HAS been overall warming over the last century or so but it has been only in isolated spurts and is in total less than one degree Celsius. IF such warming continues it would cause as little trouble as the warming we have had so far. It is trivial



IS IT a work of art in a gallery? A chart? It’s neither and both, and it shows a big change in Australia.

IT LOOKS like a piece of art. Or maybe a very brightly coloured barcode. Or even a duvet cover. But the striped image is a visual representation of Australia’s average temperature each year over the last century.

A climate scientist from the UK has released a series of images that depict the warmest and coldest temperatures since records began places all over the globe.

University of Reading climate scientist Professor Ed Hawkins calls the pieces "warming stripes”. He has created them for parts of England, Germany, Toronto, Australia and the world as a whole.

"Each stripe represents the temperature of a single year, ordered from the earliest available data to now,” Prof Hawkins on the website Climate Lab Book.

The coldest years recorded are a dark blue and the hottest a deep red with everything in between a different shade depending on whether it’s over or under the long-term average.

If the average temperatures regularly fluctuated from hot to cold, you could expect to see red and blue stripes relatively evenly distributed.

In the graph for Vienna, for example, which covers a period from 1775 — 2017, the first half of the image seems to be fairly random with lots of reds and blues. But in recent years, the Vienna chart is mostly red denoting hot years.

For the stripes showing the annual global average temperatures, it’s a smooth transition from dark blue to dark red; from record cold years to record hot years.

There’s less data to go on for Australia as records only go so far back. But there’s still a century or so to compare.

Prof Hawkins took Bureau of Meteorology data from 1910 — 2017: "The colour scale goes from 20.7°C (dark blue) to 23.0°C (dark red),” he said.

The lowest annual temperature was recorded in 1917. The highset, more than 1C above the overall average, was in 2013.

In the last 20 years in Australia, only three years have seen annual temperatures dip below average. And during those years it’s dipped only slightly below the line.

But many of the most recent years that have seen above average temperatures that have soared over the line.

SOURCE 





Nancy Pelosi Mocks Coal Power In U.S., Then Drops A Threat

House Minority Leader mocked coal power plants in America on Wednesday, and not-so-subtly threatened to forbid more coal-fired plants in the United States.

During a discussion on energy policy at the Public Policy Institute of California, Pelosi began by pretending to be religious and spoke about preserving God’s creation on Earth.

After mentioning how she fought off Democrats when the nation’s capital was fueled by coal, she said "with all due respect to West Virginia,” that’s never going to happen again.

"And it really is a moral issue if you believe as I do that this is God’s creation [and] we have to be good stewards of it. We have evangelicals and others with us — er, some, those who believe in God’s creation. So, in any case this was a big thing for us. I had to fight some Democrats. Senator Byrd had a coal powered plan fueling the Capitol, you know… I … that’s gonna go, with all due respect to West Virginia we’re not gonna have a coal power plant floating around.”

Pelosi’s comments are eerily similar to many made by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election, where the former secretary of state made it clear to many that she wanted the coal industry to wither away.

"We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” Clinton shouted at a March 2016 town hall in Ohio.

Pelosi’s comments on Wednesday were reminiscent of that, where she all-but vowed to do everything she can to prevent coal power plants from moving to the capital and, presumably, other parts of the nation.

Ironically, one day before she mocked coal power plants, workers, and West Virginians, the White House announced plans to scale back Obama-era rules stifling coal-fired plants in America.

The Trump administration plans to scale back Obama’s regulations on coal power plants. Former President Barack Obama’s war on coal was catastrophic, but the industry has been booming since Trump took office — which has helped ignite the already booming economy.

Aside from Pelosi’s insulting remarks on Wednesday, this isn’t the first time the out-of-touch California Democrat has made headlines for making embarrassing comments.

Last month, Pelosi came under fire for referring to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 — which led to roughly 3,000 innocent Americans being killed — as an "incident.”

Before that, she stuttered herself into embarrassment, suffered a brain freeze, and struggled to remember Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s name, forcing an aide to finish her sentence and help her.

Pelosi has stuttered several times in recent interviews, where she was unable to cite simple Bible verses, got busted for lying about the economy under Trump, and defended MS-13 gang members after the president called them "animals.”

While many conservatives are thrilled that this bizarrely behaving woman continues to be the face of the Democratic Party, Pelosi continues to make the perfect case for why we need congressional term limits.

And with the crucial midterm elections less than 70 days away, she has resorted to mocking coal plants and workers. This is what the Democratic Party represents.

SOURCE  






Weepy Gov. Inslee Wants To Sue Trump For Air Pollution Deaths That May Or May Not Occur

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee threatened to sue the Trump administration for rolling back Obama-era regulations on coal plants, going so far as to label President Donald Trump as an "unindicted co-conspirator” in air pollution deaths that haven’t, and may not, happen.

"Even under the rosiest assumptions by his own agencies, would conclude that this would cause the premature death of 1,400 people a year, every year,” Inslee, a Democrat, said at a press conference Wednesday. "That’s the population of Kittitas, Washington, suffering premature death every year.”

"I think it is fair to say that Donald Trump is an unindicted co-conspirator in the premature death of 1,400 people every year if this misbegotten plan went into place,” Inslee said. "We find this unacceptable.”

Inslee is riding a wave of liberal criticism of the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule popularized by The New York Times — keeping coal plants open longer would result in 1,400 more deaths from air pollution every year.

It’s also not true EPA’s "rosiest assumptions” predict 1,400 premature deaths a year from fine particulate matter or PM2.5. It’s actually the upper range of estimated PM2.5-induced deaths based on a 2012 study — only one of a range of estimates based on different assumptions.

The Times’ report, though, only presented one upper estimate of future air pollution deaths, not giving readers the full context of EPA’s figures. The Times’ reported figure is also based on public health modeling that’s come under increased scrutiny in recent years.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed to put ACE in place of the Clean Power Plan, which was imposed by the Obama administration in 2015. The Clean Power Plan never went into effect, however, because the U.S. Supreme Court blocked its implementation in early 2016.

EPA’s regulatory analysis showed billions of dollars would be saved, but it also gave a range of public health costs, including premature deaths in 2030 from coal plant pollution.

Estimates of premature deaths, however, are based on two studies for which the underlying data was never made public, which Republicans have labeled "secret science.”

Estimates of premature deaths from air pollution are also just that, estimates based on epidemiological studies looking for strong statistical relationships between PM2.5 levels and reported deaths.

EPA says PM2.5 can cause lung disease and premature death, which is certainly what most studies claim, but new research has called into question that relationship.

EPA is also looking 15 years into the future, and cannot take into account future innovations or technologies that could reduce premature deaths from air pollution.

There’s also a lot of uncertainty around estimated deaths at low levels of PM2.5, but EPA’s estimate of 1,400 deaths assumes there’s no safe level of fine particulates.

Democrats and environmentalists opposed ACE, saying the Clean Power Plan was necessary to fight global warming and improve air quality. Virtually all opponents of ACE cited the NYTimes’ report of increased air pollution deaths.

Inslee promised legal action against the Trump administration if they finalize the ACE rule. Other Democratic states and environmentalists are likely to follow suit.

"And if you want to know why this is a terrible idea take a look out your window because we are choking on dirty air, and he would give us dirtier air to breathe,” Inslee said.

However, the "dirty air” hovering over Washington is the product of wildfires raging along the West Coast. More than one million acres have been consumed by wildfires in California, Oregon, and Washington this year.

So, far from being the product of coal-burning or Trump, it’s the years of poor forest management by federal and state officials that allowed dead trees and debris to pile up.

Todd Myers, the director of the Center for Environment at the Washington Policy Center, pointed out Inslee’s administration has not met its own "forest treatment” targets. In fact, they’ve failed so badly, the administration hasn’t updated its efforts since 2015.

SOURCE  






Tesla has Mere 14% of Cars Pass Inspection

Newly leaked internal documents show that Elon Musk’s Tesla continues to face production woes, with only 14 percent of cars passing first inspection, as opposed to industry targets of 80 percent.

Business Insider recently reported on leaked internal Tesla documents which show that the company had to rework more than 4,300 of the 5,000 Model 3 vehicles that it manufactured in the first week of June, when the company announced that they had reached their self-imposed production milestone. Tesla reportedly reworked 4,300 cars during the week of June 23 with each car taking an average of 37 minutes to repair.

Car manufacturers refer to cars that exit the manufacturing process without requiring any rework as part of the production lines "first pass yield,” (FPY) this means that during the week in which Tesla claimed that they had successfully produced 5,000 Model 3 vehicles, only 700 cars could truly leave the factory. In simpler terms — only 14 percent of Model 3’s produced by Tesla that week required no additional work before being sent to customers. In the same week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly told workers to stop performing a critical brake test as the company rushed to produce cars in a tent they had erected in a field outside their production facility.

Ron Harbour, a consultant at Oliver Wyman and the founder of  "The Harbour Report,” a worldwide guide to manufacturing, commented on Tesla’s first pass yield rate stating: "A competitive plant will pass 80%-plus vehicles that do not require repair. I would say the average plant is about a 65-80% range.” Harbour also stated that the amount of rework required per vehicle can affect the production plant’s overall productivity saying: "It’s a direct impact on their labor productivity if they have to add additional labor hours for repair.”

A representative of Tesla commented on their low FPY rate stating that many cars only require minor reworking: "Our goal is to produce a perfect car for every customer. In order to ensure the highest quality, we review every vehicle for even the smallest refinement before it leaves the factory. Dedicated inspection teams track every car throughout every shop in the assembly line, and every vehicle is then subjected to an additional quality-control process towards the end of the line. And all of this happens before a vehicle leaves the factory and is delivered to a customer.” The Tesla representative also claimed that the number of labor hours per Model 3 vehicle produced had decreased by approximately 30 percent since last quarter.

SOURCE  






The Warmist Arctic obsession again


A few days ago:



With the Arctic full of ice, they had to work pretty hard to find something to lie about.



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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24 August, 2018

Who's the "Cleanest" of Them All

Take a wild guess what country is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions the most? Canada? Britain? France? India? Germany? Japan? No, no, no, no, no and no.

The answer to that question is the U.S. of A. Wow! How can that be? This must be a misprint. Fake news. America never ratified the Kyoto Treaty some two decades ago. We never enacted a carbon tax. We don't have a cap-and-trade carbon emission program. That environmental villain Donald Trump pulled America out of the Paris climate accord that was signed by almost the entire rest of the civilized world.

Yet the latest world climate report from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy finds that in 2017, America reduced its carbon emissions by 0.5 percent, the most of all major countries. That's especially impressive given that our economy grew by nearly 3 percent — so we had more growth and less pollution — the best of all worlds. The major reason for the reduced pollution levels is the shale oil and gas revolution that is transitioning the world to cheap and clean natural gas for electric power generation.

Meanwhile, as our emissions fell, the pollution levels rose internationally and by a larger amount than in previous years. So much for the rest of the world going green.

The world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide emissions is China. According to the invaluable Institute for Energy Research, "China produces 28 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. India is the world's third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide and had the second-largest increment (93 million metric tons) of carbon dioxide emissions in 2017, more than twice as much an increase as the U.S. reduction."

This means it doesn't really matter how much America reduces its greenhouse gases because China and India cancel out any and all progress we make. Those who think they are helping save the planet by purchasing an electric car or putting a solar panel on their roof are barking up the wrong tree. There is no way to make progress on greenhouse gases without China and India on board — which they clearly are not.

This latest data also proves that despite all of the criticism across the globe and in the American media, Trump was right to pull the U.S. out of the flawed Paris climate accord. Nearly every nation that signed on to Paris and has admonished America for not doing so, has already violated the agreement. According to Climate Action Network Europe, "All EU countries are failing to increase their climate action in line with the Paris Agreement goal." All but five countries have even reached 50 percent of their current targets.

So there you have it. The countries in the Paris climate accord have broken almost every promise they've made and the nation (the U.S.) that hasn't signed the treaty is doing more than any other nation to reduce global warming. Yet, we are being lectured by the sanctimonious Europeans and Asians for not doing our fair share to save the planet. It's another case study in how the left cares far more about good intentions than actual results. What matters is that you say that you will wash the dishes, not that you actually do it.

SOURCE  





Trump’s Rollback of CAFE Mandates Is a Big Win for Car Buyers, Consumer Choice

The Trump administration recently proposed the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule. The proposed rule offers modifications to Obama-era Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards with a "preferred alternative” for model years 2021 through 2026.

Without a doubt, the Trump administration’s proposed revision is a welcome victory for consumers’ wallets and for consumer choice.

The Obama administration implemented fuel-efficiency mandates that would force auto manufacturers to have a fleetwide fuel-economy average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. The new rule’s "preferred” change would maintain the existing fuel-economy mandate through 2020 (increasing to 37 mpg) and keep the level at 37 mpg through 2025.

New fuel-efficiency standards create a number of unintended consequences, including higher prices for new cars and costly retooling of existing auto plants.

A 2016 Heritage Foundation analysis estimates the Obama fuel-economy mandates increased new-car prices $6,800 more than the pre-2009 baseline trend, and that eliminating the more aggressive standards would save 2025 car buyers at least $7,200 per vehicle.

As my colleagues detail, "Economists and engineers accurately predicted that the [model year] 2016 standards would hurt consumers by at least $3,800 per car.”

Consumers—not government bureaucrats—should make decisions about what cars they drive.

If consumers value saving money on gasoline, they will simply choose to purchase more fuel-efficient cars, and automakers will meet that demand without a federal mandate. If consumers value other attributes—vehicle weight, engine power, safety—Washington shouldn’t force automakers to ignore consumers’ preferences.

In fact, a 2011 paper from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that if vehicle weight, horsepower, and torque were held constant at 1980 levels, fuel efficiency would have increased 60 percent from 1980 to 2006 instead of the 15 percent increase that did occur.

The reason fuel-efficiency increase occurred at 15 percent instead of 60 percent is because auto manufacturers met buyers’ demands for heavier vehicles with more torque and horsepower. When the federal government comes in and says we need to have a fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon, regulators override those preferences.

Congress established fuel-economy mandates in the 1970s as a response to the Arab oil embargo. A fear existed that the world was running out of oil and that America was too dependent on foreign oil.

CAFE standards were sold under the false notion of scarcity. It makes no sense now that we have an abundance of oil.  But even if the world were running out of oil, fuel-economy mandates were not a good policy then and are not a good policy now.

CAFE standards are not just a relic of the past, but a systemic problem of the way policymakers, regulators, lobbyists, and pundits treat energy markets. Policies and regulations are based on alleged expertise and on making bold predictions about the future of energy supply and demand.

Rather than rely on regulations to tell producers and consumers what to do, we have price signals for that. Higher gas prices communicate information to energy producers to drill for more oil. They communicate information to entrepreneurs to invest in new extraction technologies, alternative vehicle technologies, or more fuel-efficient cars.

Prices also communicate information to energy users to buy more fuel-efficient products, to carpool, or to find other modes of transportation.

When Obama-era regulators set CAFE standards and estimated the alleged savings to consumers, they demonstrated the same level of hubris our politicians did in the 1970s.

When crafting these standards, the Environmental Protection Agency and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that gas prices would be $3.87 per gallon in 2025, increasing to $4.24 per gallon by 2040. They used these price projections to project how much money consumers would save on fuel costs.

While those price-projection scenarios are certainly plausible, increases in supply could also certainly drive prices down, and consumers would save less money on gas by purchasing a more fuel-efficient car.

Alternatively, gas prices could rise even higher than the government projections, and consumers could save even more money from mandated fuel efficiency.

The reality is, we don’t know. It is difficult to project gas prices 22 weeks ahead, let alone for the next 22 years, and it’s dangerous to base policy on those predictions.

Trump’s course correction on CAFE is a welcome step. Congress should demonstrate similar courage and recognize that we don’t need to mandate energy use for cars, dishwashers, or even clocks on microwaves, and scrap these standards altogether.

SOURCE  






Don’t subsidize coal; just stop trying to kill it off

When President Trump speaks Tuesday on energy policy, he is speaking on an industry utterly changed in the past 20 years.

At the turn of the century, Americans fretted over how much we depended on foreign oil. We worried so much about running out of gas that import terminals were built so that foreign firms could ship liquefied natural gas for use in our pipelines.

How things have changed. U.S. dependency on foreign oil isn’t even an issue anymore, as the U.S. approaches its new role as a net exporter. And natural gas has proven to be so abundant, thanks to fracking, that prices have plummeted. Not only are those import terminals being refitted to serve as export terminals, but gas has also overtaken coal as the largest source of electrical generation in the U.S.

This has mostly come about thanks to market forces. But there was an unfortunate interlude — the Obama administration’s concerted effort to bankrupt ( as former President Barack Obama himself put it) coal generators. His overt effort to drive coal out of existence through regulation, heedless of its effect on local communities, left very bad feelings toward Obama and Democrats in some regions of the country and led directly to the election of Trump.

Where Obama wanted to obliterate coal, Trump’s response has often been no better. He has actually proposed bailing out the coal industry, whose chief advantage as a fuel until now had been its economy. His idea is to somehow use national security as an excuse for mandating above-market prices for coal.

This is every bit as bad as similar schemes for so-called green energy, by which ratepayers are fleeced so that politically correct but unfeasible sources of energy are used. Coal, like all other fuel sources, must be allowed to sink or swim on its own economic strength. If it cannot survive in the market, it deserves to be replaced, just like anything else.

There are still ways to help the coal industry today and yet respect this basic principle. That begins with the repeal of unreasonable regulations that Obama created in order to kill the industry as fast as possible.

The abandonment of the Clean Power Plan is a good start in this regard. Trump announces today from West Virginia his intention to let states make their own decisions about carbon regulation. After all, control of carbon was only handed over to the EPA in the first place by a dubious 5-4 Supreme Court decision, in which only two of the current justices voted with the majority, claiming that the Clean Air Act required the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide (the stuff we exhale and trees inhale) as a "pollutant."

Environmentalists are skittish and seem to believe that state regulation will cause hundreds of new coal power plants to spring up overnight. Their concerns only reflect their persistent and wrong-headed mentality that prizes government regulation over actual results. U.S. carbon emissions from electrical power have been falling since the mid-to-late Bush era. There’s a reason no one was rushing to build new coal plants, even before Obama’s regulatory assault on the industry. Utility customers generally don’t pay higher prices just to make a point, unless government stupidly makes them do so.

Which is to say, government should not prop up coal, but nor should government tear coal down unnecessarily.

Trump should drop all ideas about subsidizing coal. If the market demands, coal should be allowed to make a graceful exit. If coal cannot even survive in a friendly regulatory environment, then it simply cannot be saved. This is, as they say, the way the world works.

If that proves to be the case, then workers in the industry whose jobs are threatened by modern developments must adapt, as in all other industries that automate or fall afoul of consumer demand. That might mean making career a move to natural gas or some other related energy industry. But it is not the role of government to keep entire dying industries alive, just to satisfy political or other ambitions.

SOURCE  






ALGF Releases Report on the Problems of Solar Energy

Today, Americans for Limited Government Foundation released a study entitled, "Solar Power Harms Taxpayers and Consumers and Endangers the Reliability of the Grid.” The study points out the problems with solar energy from taxpayer-funded subsidies and increased costs for utility customers to grid reliability concerns.

Solar energy receives heavy federal subsidies that are far more generous than the subsidies for natural gas, coal, or even wind. In addition to federal support, states have also enacted policies to prop up solar power. State renewable energy mandates have encouraged the generation of solar energy. In dozens of states, utility companies are forced to compensate solar panel owners for the excess electricity that they supply to the grid. Those programs are funded by other utility customers.

But in the rush to increase solar power generation, some of the disadvantages of solar power are being overlooked. The intermittency of solar power is a particular problem. This intermittency necessitates the availability of ample backup power plants to ramp up when clouds obscure the sun. Solar power’s intermittency also complicates the job of grid operators to keep the grid adequately supplied with electricity.

The money spent on solar subsidies and new solar plants would be better spent on maintaining and upgrading the creaky, aging grid. After all, huge portions of the grid are at or beyond their expected service life.

"The mandates and incentives to build solar plants and install solar panels have to stop. Taxpayers are being fleeced, working class consumers are subsidizing their wealthier neighbors’ solar panels, and the reliability of the grid is being threatened,” said Richard McCarty, Director of Research at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.

"The money being spent to build new solar power plants in remote locations, to connect them to the grid, and to maintain backup power plants would be much better spent on upgrading our aging grid,” said Richard Manning, President of Americans for Limited Government.

SOURCE  





Australia: Time to Clean the Stables in Canberra

Viv Forbes

Australia is facing an energy/infrastructure crisis caused by years of bipartisan stupidity and driven by a global green agenda. This mess becomes worse and more obvious every day. The Canberra stables are full of horse manure and need cleaning.

Fix Real Infrastructure, Dump Green Grandstanding

Here are two messages for Canberra:

Firstly, Australia does not have a problem with too much carbon dioxide going to the sky – we have a problem storing enough of the water coming from the sky.

Secondly, Australia does not have a shortage of wind and solar "farms” - we have a shortage of water, stock feed and low-cost electricity on real farms.

Politicians fritter our money on dubious "research”, climate propaganda, foreign adventures and handouts for trendy, vote-seeking green causes. But they have not built a serious water supply dam since the 1980’s, and the last big coal-fired power station was opened 11 years ago. For a country with a growing population, abundant supplies of coal and uranium, and a history of severe droughts, these are serious omissions.

The Snowy Mountain Scheme (opened nearly 50 years ago) was a visionary project that produced large volumes of low-cost water for irrigation plus reliable hydro-power for industry.

The new Snowy 2.0 Scheme is a fraud – it will produce no extra water and will be a net consumer of power. Its sole purpose is to try to plug the holes and fluctuations in electricity supply caused by a bi-partisan love affair with expensive green energy toys producing unreliable, intermittent electricity.

Cease this baseless war on carbon fuels. Carbon dioxide does not drive global warming – it is driven out of sea water by ocean warming.

Australia should cancel Snowy 2.0, withdraw from all Paris and Kyoto Climate Treaty obligations, dump the NEG "plans”, remove all green energy subsidies and start building some real power stations and real water supply dams and pipelines.

No matter what the weather does, we will need more cheap, reliable water and 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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23 August, 2018

Sea level rise is already costing property owners on the coast

This is a thoroughly dishonest piece of writing below.  The key word -- subsidence -- is not mentioned once.  There is a great deal of subsidence -- sinking of the ground -- on the East coast in both the USA and England -- particularly in Florida.  And we read here that Charleston land IS part of that sinking.  So it is reasonable to dismiss the  attribution to climate change below.  Subsidence could of course be due to both effects but the article below is too biased to be a guide to anything


Elizabeth Boineau's 1939 Colonial sits a block and a half from the Ashley River in a sought-after neighborhood of ancient live oaks, charming gardens and historic homes. A year ago, she thought she could sell it for nearly $1 million. But after dropping the price 11 times, Boineau has decided to tear it down.

In March, the city's Board of Architectural Review approved the demolition — a decision not taken lightly in Charleston's historic district.

"Each time that I was just finishing up paying off the bills, another flood would hit," Boineau said.

Boineau is one of many homeowners on the front lines of society's confrontation with climate change, living in houses where rising sea levels have worsened flooding not just in extreme events like hurricanes, but also heavy rains and even high tides. Now, three studies have found evidence that the threat of higher seas is also undermining coastal property values, as home buyers — particularly investors — begin the retreat to higher ground.

On a broad scale, the effect is subtle, the studies show. The sea has risen about eight inches since 1900, and the pace is accelerating, with three inches accumulating since 1993, according to a comprehensive federal climate report released last year. Scientists predict the oceans will rise another three to seven inches by 2030, and as much as 4.3 feet by 2100.

In addition, the overall effect on prices appears to be surprisingly small, said Susan Wachter, a professor of real estate at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

"You could turn it around, almost," Wachter said. "Despite all the discussion of sea level rise, and despite the tremendous increase in the number of events over the last years and the destructiveness of the events, coastal building continues and coastal property appreciation continues."

Indeed, beachfront property is not necessarily declining in value. Rather, the studies suggest that more-exposed properties - including properties that have not yet experienced direct flooding - simply are not appreciating as rapidly as their inland neighbors.

Boineau lives in Harleston Village, one of the neighborhoods that has been hardest hit. In October 2015, flooding on the Ashley River damaged gardens and homes after an extreme rain event dropped about 20 inches on the city. Not a month later, an 8.7-foot tide flooded the neighborhood again.

In 2016, Hurricane Matthew drove a 6-foot storm surge into the city. And in 2017, the remnants of Hurricane Irma again flooded some Harleston Village homes, including Boineau's.

"I definitely feel like something has changed," Boineau said when asked about sea level rise and whether flooding in Charleston is getting worse. "And I think that we all have a lot to be concerned about."

"There was no discussion of flooding when we moved into this house in 2004," said Susan Lyons, 75, a retired journalist who lives two blocks from the river and has had to file insurance claims three times to replace flood-damaged ducts. "We've all been blown away by the amount of water that comes from the river."

Boineau put her house on the market last August priced just shy of $1 million, after repairs from two straight years of flooding that had come up under the house but left the interior largely unaffected. Then in September, the remnants of Hurricane Irma inundated the first floor of the house with 8 inches of water.

Even when a property has flooded, local real estate agents said homeowners can reassure buyers by waterproofing electrical systems, moving ductwork and, at the extreme, elevating the entire house — a pricey endeavor.

Boineau made ductwork and other repairs after the first two flooding events, but after the third, she dropped the price down to $599,900 and went through a lengthy process to get permission for demolition.

Now, Boineau says, a new buyer can build a new elevated property on the lot. When that's done, her real estate agent, Robin Reeves, said the property should "go for 1.3 to 1.4 million dollars."

SOURCE  






The Facts about China’s Energy Commitments

Anybody who thinks China is rapidly shifting to renewable energy needs to look at the latest electricity data from the China Energy Portal.

Whilst wind and solar generation has increased by 51 TWh year-on-year in Q2, thermal has increased by 176.9 TWh.

It was a similar situation in Q1:

To put the figures into perspective, total generation in Q2 was 3194 TWh, so the increase of 51 TWh from wind/solar represents just 1.6%. However, because total generation increased by 245 TWh, demand for coal and gas generation increased even more.

In total, wind and solar accounted for 6.6% of generation in the quarter, compared to 5.5% a year ago.

Year-on-year, installed thermal capacity has risen by 4.1%, following an increase of 4.6% in 2017.

SOURCE  





The changing climate of science

By Anthony J. Sadar, a certified consulting meteorologist 

Have mathematical models replaced good old-fashioned scientific testing?

An understanding of the big picture in a field of study helps to frame and give essential perspective to that field. Take the field of natural science for instance. A big-picture look at the overall operation of the natural science profession has traditionally been seen in the "scientific method,” which consists of observation, hypothesis and testing. Rigorous testing of a hypothesis eventually leads to a "theory.”

This makes sense from an objective point of view. Although there is no particular set order to the arrangement of observation-hypothesis-testing, a good example of scientific practice would be the observation of a phenomenon in nature, hypothesizing the cause of the phenomenon, then testing (many times in many ways) the hypothesis. Sufficient confirmation of the hypothesis results in a theory that is tentative, subject to any future negation.

Of late, mathematical modeling, an essential investigative tool, appears to have taken over the world of natural science. And with the ascension of modeling, the focus in scientific endeavors — particularly in the practice of atmospheric science — may have shifted away from the rigor of testing to verify a hypothesis and toward constructing a model to represent a theory.

Here’s a climatic example of the traditional observation-hypothesis-testing arrangement. Based on an observation of increasing global average temperatures over a decade, a hypothesis may be proposed, such as: "Excessive carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere will lead to long-term, catastrophic, global warming.” Given the extended nature of climate, which is officially based on 30-year means, a reasonable testing period can be set up to see if the hypothesis can be substantiated.

This example fairly matches recent history. With the milestone 30-year anniversary of the declaration by James Hansen of NASA at a June 1988 congressional hearing that "the greenhouse effect is here and is affecting our climate now,” there has been a minimal amount of time to begin to test the hypothesis of disastrous climate change.

So far, comparing dramatically increasing atmospheric levels of CO2 with a substantially smaller than expected increase in global average temperatures and typically mixed extreme weather events across the globe, it can certainly be said that the jury is still out on what long-term catastrophic effects, if any, increasing CO2 has on the planet.

Yet, climate hysteria continues with increasing alarm. After all, the worst is yet to come, so say climate crusaders buttressed by their faith in climate models — the same models that performed dubiously when predicting the global-mean temperature trend during the past 30 years.

At least part of the problem of predicting reality can be attributed to the apparent abandonment of the observation-hypothesis-testing construct and replacing the hypothesis component with theory and the testing component with modeling.

And yet, models have a big role to play in our understanding of the atmosphere.

In the introduction to his acclaimed book, "A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming” (MIT Press, 2010), Professor Paul Edwards, a supporter of the "consensus” view of climate change, asserts that "Everything we know about the world’s climate — past, present, and future — we know through models.” He also notes that "without models, there are no data.”

Models have become integral to modern scientific practice. In many fields, Edwards says "computer models complement or even replace laboratory experiments; analysis and simulation models have become principal means of data collection, prediction, and decision making.”

Such is the contemporary world of science aided by the powerful tool of modern computers. The three basic components of the scientific method — observation, hypothesis, and testing — still hold, but in many cases the testing portion has been abetted, if not in some cases usurped, by models.

Still, when it comes to running models to foresee the Earth’s distant future climate, the eminent atmospheric scientist, Reid Bryson, probably gave the best observation: Making a forecast is easy. Being right is the hard part.

SOURCE  





Plastic Bans: More Harm than Help

In Santa Barbara, Calif., restaurant workers caught serving a banned plastic straw after their first offense can get six months in jail. That penalty may be hard to top, but cities anxious about their environmental impact may be willing to try. Next July, San Francisco will outdo Seattle’s recent prohibition on plastic straws in bars and restaurants by banning the straws completely. Such efforts, however, are fundamentally misguided, according to Independent Institute Senior Fellow William F. Shughart and Policy Fellow Brian Isom.

"The substitutes for plastic cost substantially more without being significantly better for the environment,” Shughart and Isom write in an op-ed running in the Sacramento Bee and elsewhere. Paper straws are far more expensive than plastic straws (as much as 22 percent costlier). Moreover, paper substitutes often leave a significantly greater environmental footprint than the plastic versions they’re meant to replace (in the case of shopping bags, up to 43 times more impactful, according to the Danish environmental agency).

Governments can do better than enacting costly mandates of dubious benefit. "If lawmakers want to promote meaningful change,” Shughart and Isom write, "they should focus on creating incentives and good institutions for managing plastic waste and leave it to private businesses to change the way Americans consume plastic.” Above all, they should avoid "unduly burdening smaller businesses and the people who work for them,” the authors conclude.

SOURCE  





Australia: Massive solar farm plan has residents up in arms over project that would be bigger than their town

Residents in the Camperdown district in south-west Victoria are concerned about the scale of a solar farm proposed to be built on farmland near the town.

Camperdown, population 3,300, covers about four square kilometres.

The planned Bookaar Solar Farm, to be located 10km north-west of the town, would occupy about six square kilometres.

"It's unbelievable," local dairy farmer Andrew Duynhoven said of the size of the solar farm.

"The sheer scale of this … it's actually bigger than Camperdown itself."

Mr Duynhoven is part of a growing group of residents concerned about renewable energy company Infinergy Pacific's ambitions in the region.

Power of the sun

The Bookaar Solar Farm would feature 700,000 panels, each measuring about two metres by one metre and standing four metres high.

It would be capable of generating roughly 200 megawatts of electricity, or enough to "supply clean energy to power the equivalent of 80,000 average Victorian homes each year", according to Infinergy Pacific's planning application.

The developer's website states the solar farm would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 400,000 tonnes and save about 700,000 megalitres of water compared to a coal-fired power station.

The plans for the project have been put out for public comment by Corangamite Shire Council, with councillors expected to consider their next step regarding the proposal at their September meeting.

Corangamite Shire mayor Jo Beard said she and her fellow councillors would take on board any concerns raised by residents.  "With any project when involved with agricultural land, it's always going to be questioned," Cr Beard said.

"That's no different to whether it's been a tourism project we've looked at, or even people wanting to subdivide — it always comes back to what are the implications [for] farming land. "From what I can gather so far, that has certainly been the big question."

Conflicts of interest

One councillor who won't be involved in the decision-making process is Bev McArthur. The proposed solar farm is on land owned by her family.

Cr Beard said Cr McArthur declared a conflict of interest and had not been part of any council discussions or briefings on the project.

Cr McArthur may not be part of the council for long though — she was preselected by the Victorian Liberal party last weekend for the Upper House seat of Western District, potentially taking the seat that was occupied by outgoing MP Simon Ramsay.

Cr McArthur refused to answer questions about the planned solar farm.

Mr Duynhoven and the newly formed group opposing the project have a shopping list of concerns and queries.

These include visual amenity, road use during construction, glint and glare, fire risk and firefighting access concerns, the effect of night lighting, the impact on wildlife, drainage issues, noise, nearby property devaluations, and the possibility of micro-climate changes.

But one of the main concerns the group has is the loss of prime agricultural land. "[Most of Australia is] in drought — we're not in drought so we're the food bowl," he said. "We're the most secure food producing [area in Australia].

"[If they approve] this large-scale solar farm, what precedent does it set in the protection of prime agricultural land?"

The planning permit application seeks to address many of the groups claims, saying that noise and glint would be minimal, drainage would not be impacted, and visual amenity would be somewhat mitigated by a vegetation screen.

Bookaar Solar Farm project manager Richard Seymour said proponents of the project were working with the CFA to write up a fire plan.

Mr Seymour confirmed the site was previously earmarked for a wind farm, but when the proponents dropped out, "Infinergy Pacific assessed the feasibility of site and concluded that a solar farm would be the most appropriate form of development".

He said the property had "characteristics that make it a good place for a solar farm" such as flat topography, nearby transmission lines, good sunlight, and no significant environmental constraints.

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 August, 2018

CBS Scares Viewers With Predictions of Climate Change Causing West Coast Hurricanes

Even as NBC’s Today show recently reported that climate change would actually cause fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic during the 2018 season, on Saturday, CBS This Morning warned viewers that warming ocean temperatures could potentially lead to hurricanes in the Pacific hitting the coast of California.

"Hurricanes are well known in the Atlantic and in the Caribbean, but scientists in California are concerned that changing climate conditions could soon bring hurricanes to the west coast,” proclaimed fill-in co-host Elaine Quijano as she introduced the segment.

The headline on-screen blared: "Gathering Storms? Warmer Oceans Increase Risk of West Coast Hurricanes.”

Correspondent Jamie Yuccas began her report by invoking images of deadly east coast storms: "Irma, Harvey, and Katrina are among the hurricanes that have ravaged the east coast and the Gulf of Mexico. But here in California, hurricanes are virtually unheard of.”

She acknowledged hurricanes that regularly form in the Pacific, but pointed out that such storms "usually don’t make it past Baja California,” in Mexico, and that "only one managed to reach as far as San Diego in 1858.”

Sounding the alarm, Yuccas continued: "However, there’s now the potential this rare event could strike the San Diego area again.”

Scientist Art Miller, a researcher for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, fretted: "It could happen, especially if the ocean temperatures continue to stay in this anomalously warm state.”

Yuccas noted: "Scientists at the Scripps Pier have been recording historic temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, as high as 79.5 degrees. That’s about ten degrees above normal.”

Miller argued: "That potentially increases the likelihood that a hurricane might track just a little bit further north than it would have.”

After Yuccas concluded her report, co-host Anthony Mason worried: "Those rising ocean temperatures are startling.”

Quijano agreed: "Startling. And when you think about ten degrees difference, as she pointed out, you think about it’s been a year since Hurricane Harvey. It was this time last year, right? And it was warm ocean waters fueling that as well.”

In August of 2017, CBS repeatedly blamed climate change for causing Hurricane Harvey and intensifying its devastation in Texas.

In November of that year, Mason, while serving as a temporary anchor for CBS Evening News, bemoaned that a lack of environmental activism from the Trump administration meant "saving the world has been harder.”

It’s one thing to claim climate change as the cause when a severe weather event actually occurs, it’s quite another to preemptively argue that any potential future storms would be the result of global warming.

SOURCE  







New York Times hysterical over global greening

by William Happer

When the history of global warming hysteria is written in the future, one of the bizarre examples of that delusion will be the New York Times essay of July 31, 2018, "Global Greening Sounds Good, In The Long Run It's Terrible."

The article begins with a photograph of a vigorous patch of kudzu, presumably stimulated to threatening, unnatural growth by increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), and about to strangle a pine forest. The good news is that the New York Times has finally permitted its readers to hear that the whole world is greening from more atmospheric CO2.

The bad news is that the rest of the article is devoted to demonizing this essential gas, despite the fact that H2O (water) and CO2 are the main building blocks of living things.

As is usual with such "science," the article begins by vilifying any who mistakenly welcomes a greener Earth. They are labeled as "climate change denialists," whatever that is supposed to mean. Who denies that climate is changing now, has changed in the past and will continue to change in the future?

The article then launches into a limp attempt to turn good news into bad by claiming that plants growing with CO2 enrichment will lead to widespread malnutrition because crops will have deficiencies of "nutrients such as nitrogen, copper and potassium." In fact, crops already have these deficiencies, and that is why farmers buy fertilizer, containing nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, and if needed, copper, iron, zinc and other trace nutrients. More CO2 will indeed increase the need for fertilizer, but less land will be needed because of higher productivity.

Plants benefit from more CO2 for two main reasons. First, more CO2 allows land plants to use water more efficiently and tolerate greater aridity. This is why global greening is most pronounced in arid areas. Secondly, more CO2 mitigates "photorespiration," that limits photosynthetic efficiency for most (C3) plants at today's low CO2 and high oxygen levels.

Continuing the demonization of CO2, the article refers to China as "the biggest global polluter." Let's be clear, CO2 is not a "pollutant." The average human breathes out about 2 pounds of CO2 per day. Over most of geological history, CO2 levels have been much higher than today's approximately 400 CO2 molecules per million air molecules (ppm). Operators of commercial greenhouses routinely increase CO2 levels to 1000 ppm or more, if they can afford to pay for the CO2.

We should welcome the fact that CO2 has risen to "levels not seen on Earth for millions of years," even if the "fact" is less certain than you might believe. Plants have been trying to cope with a CO2 famine for millions of years, a famine that is finally ending. With self-assurance worthy of Dr. Pangloss, the article implies that pre-industrial CO2 levels, around 280 ppm, were the "best of all possible worlds." But 280 ppm is much closer to (sea-level) starvation levels of about 150 ppm, when many plants die, than to the optimum levels for plant growth, which greenhouse operators already know are greater than 1000 ppm.

There is fossil evidence of CO2 starvation at the end of the last ice age, when CO2 levels dropped to below 200 ppm. Even today's 400 ppm is far too low for optimum plant growth.

The article ends with the silly claim that the "six warmest years on record occurred after 2010." The alleged record warmings are tenths of a degree or less, comparable to the statistical error. Thermometers have only existed for a few centuries and there are still no reliable networks of thermometers to measure global surface temperatures, although satellite measurements do provide a pretty good global average for the lower atmosphere since the year 1979. There is excellent proxy evidence that Earth's temperature was warmer than today on several occasions since the end of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago.

The real news is that more CO2 is already benefiting the world and even more would be better.

SOURCE  






Trump says conserving oil is no longer an economic imperative

Conserving oil is no longer an economic imperative for the United States, the Trump administration declares in a major new policy statement that threatens to undermine decades of government campaigns for gas-thrifty cars and other conservation programs.

The position was outlined in a memo released last month in support of the administration’s proposal to relax fuel mileage standards. The government released the memo online this month without fanfare.

Growth of natural gas and other alternatives to petroleum has reduced the need for imported oil, which "in turn affects the need of the nation to conserve energy," the Energy Department said. It also cites the now decade-old fracking revolution, which has unlocked US shale oil reserves, giving "the United States more flexibility than in the past to use our oil resources with less concern."

With the memo, the administration is formally challenging old justifications for conservation — even congressionally prescribed ones, as with the mileage standards.

The memo made no mention of climate change. Transportation is the single largest source of climate-changing emissions.

President Trump has questioned the existence of climate change, embraced the notion of "energy dominance" as a national goal, and called for easing what he calls burdensome regulation of oil, gas and coal, including repealing the Obama Clean Power Plan.

Despite the increased oil supplies, the administration continues to believe in the need to "use energy wisely," the Energy Department said, without elaboration. Department spokesmen did not respond Friday to questions about that statement.

Reaction was quick.

"It’s like saying, ‘I’m a big old fat guy, and food prices have dropped — it’s time to start eating again,"’ said Tom Kloza, longtime oil analyst with the Maryland-based Oil Price Information Service.

"If you look at it from the other end, if you do believe that fossil fuels do some sort of damage to the atmosphere . . . you come up with a different viewpoint," Kloza said. "There’s a downside to living large."

Climate change is a "clear and present and increasing danger," said Sean Donahue, a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund.

In a big way, the Energy Department statement just acknowledges the world’s vastly changed reality when it comes to oil.

Just 10 years ago, in summer 2008, oil prices were peaking at $147 a barrel and pummeling the global economy. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries was enjoying a massive transfer of wealth, from countries dependent on imported oil. Prices now are about $65.

Today, the United States is vying with Russia for the title of top world oil producer. US oil production hit an all-time high this summer, aided by the technological leaps of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

How much the US economy is hooked up to the gas pump, and vice versa, plays into any number of policy considerations, not just economic or environmental ones, but military and geopolitical ones, said John Graham, a former official in the George W. Bush administration, now dean of the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University.

"Our ability to play that role as a leader in the world is stronger when we are the strongest producer of oil and gas," Graham said. "But there are still reasons to want to reduce the amount we consume."

Current administration proposals include one that would freeze mileage standards for cars and light trucks after 2020, instead of continuing to make them tougher.

The proposal eventually would increase US oil consumption by 500,000 barrels a day, the administration says. While Trump officials say the freeze would improve highway safety, documents released this month showed senior Environmental Protection Agency staffers calculate the administration’s move would actually increase highway deaths.

"American businesses, consumers and our environment are all the losers under his plan," said Senator Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat. "The only clear winner is the oil industry. It’s not hard to see whose side President Trump is on."

Administration support has been tepid to null on some other long-running government programs for alternatives to gas-powered cars.

Bill Wehrum, assistant administration of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, spoke dismissively of electric cars — a young industry supported financially by the federal government and many states — this month in a call with reporters announcing the mileage freeze proposal.

"People just don’t want to buy them," the EPA official said.

Oil and gas interests are campaigning for changes in government conservation efforts on mileage standards, biofuels and electric cars.

In June, for instance, the American Petroleum Institute and other industries wrote eight governors, promoting the dominance of the internal-combustion engine and questioning their states’ incentives to consumers for electric cars.

Surging US and gas production has brought on "energy security and abundance," Frank Macchiarola, a group director of the American Petroleum Institute trade association, told reporters this week, in a telephone call dedicated to urging scrapping or overhauling of one US program for biofuels.

Fears of oil scarcity used to be a driver of US energy policy, Macchiarola said.

Thanks partly to increased production, "that pillar has really been rendered essentially moot," he said.

SOURCE  






Solar Power Harms Taxpayers and Consumers and Endangers the Reliability of the Grid

The appeal of solar energy is understandable. Who would not want clean, domestic electricity provided for free by the sun? Who would not want high-paying, high-tech jobs producing, installing, and maintaining solar panels?

Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that solar energy is harming taxpayers and utility customers and soaking up funds that would be better spent on maintaining and upgrading the grid. This report explains why politicians, regulators, and the utility industry should halt the rush toward more solar energy production.

America’s Advantage

America’s relatively cheap and reliable electricity gives it a competitive advantage over many other countries where electricity is unreliable or more expensive. To keep this advantage, we must choose dependable, cost-effective sources of electricity to supply the grid and expand capacity as necessary. The alternative of rushing government-favored technology into production before it is ready and before the costs and ramifications of the new technology have been thoroughly examined is a recipe for disaster.

Hidden Costs of Green Energy

While many people applaud green energy construction projects, they may not be aware of all the costs associated with green energy.

"In 2016, an analysis by Strata Policy found subsidies for intermittent energy sources create unseen costs for electricity consumers. First, Americans subsidize the building and operation of wind and solar projects through their taxes. Second, they pay for the electricity these projects produce. Finally, consumers pay the extra costs associated with ensuring reliability as more intermittent sources are deployed.”[1]

Solar power is often generated 100-200 miles from cities.[2] To transmit the electricity from these plants to far-off customers, costly new high-voltage transmission lines must often be built.

Due to its variability, adding more solar energy to the grid necessitates an increase in reserve electric generating capacity. And this reserve capacity must be able to be quickly brought online or ramped up to make up for any lull in solar energy production.

"VG [variable generation] also is not always completely predictable, even on short timescales. This can increase the potential for mismatches between generation and load and, hence, the need for increased regulating reserves.”[3]

Typically, this need for reserve capacity is met by natural gas-fired power plants, which can ramp up much more quickly than coal.

Wasting Needed Funds

The money spent on additional backup power plants and miles of high-voltage transmission lines would be better spent on trimming trees near power lines, replacing aging equipment, securing the grid from hackers, and shielding the grid against solar storms. For 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. energy infrastructure a grade of D+ and wrote,

"Most electric transmission and distribution lines were constructed in the 1950s and 1960s with a 50-year life expectancy, and the more than 640,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines in the lower 48 states’ power grids are at full capacity.”[4]

Government Support for Green Energy

Government subsidies and mandates have fostered investment in green energy.

"There are a number of drivers for sustained high investment in renewables. A primary driver is RPS [renewable portfolio standard] goals and mandates. Currently 37 states, four US territories, and the District of Columbia have RPS or voluntary goals that require a certain percentage of electricity sold by utilities be from renewable sources by a target date. The target years range from 2015 to 2045 and renewable percentage goals vary widely. Some of the most ambitious are California’s mandate to reach 50 percent by 2030, Vermont’s goal to reach 75 percent by 2032, and Hawaii’s target of 100 percent by 2045.” .....

"Companies that build renewable generation know they can often sell the power to other utilities at higher prices than fossil fuel-generated power, since many utilities have requirements to purchase electricity from renewable sources to meet state RPS.”[5]

Without incentives, relatively few consumers would be interested in investing tens of thousands of dollars in solar panels when it is unclear if the panels will ever save them much money.[6] For example, in Nevada when incentives were dialed back, the solar panel industry imploded.[7] After the Nevada Public Utility Commission voted to end a generous subsidy program, three companies stopped selling solar systems in the state,[8] and over 2,600 solar industry jobs were lost.[9]

Solar Energy Is Heavily Subsidized

While boosters of green energy will often tout the fact that the cost of solar energy has been declining, it is important to keep in mind that it still benefits from very generous subsidies. According to a study by the University of Texas at Austin, the coal industry received federal subsidies of $1.06 per megawatt hour in 2016; the oil and natural gas industry received federal subsidies of $0.91 per megawatt hour; the nuclear industry received federal subsidies of $1.30 per megawatt hour; and the wind industry received federal subsidies of $12.74 per megawatt hour while the solar industry received federal subsidies of $61.31 per megawatt hour.[10] Heavy subsidies for solar energy are also projected for next year. "A study by the University of Texas projected that U.S. energy subsidies per megawatt hour in 2019 would be $0.5 for coal, $1- $2 for oil and natural gas, $15- $57 for wind and $43- $320 for solar.”[11] So while some green energy advocates will complain about subsidies for coal and natural gas, it is clear that those subsidies are miniscule when compared to the subsidies for solar.

Utilities Pushed to Overpay Solar Customers

One of the most common solar incentives offered by utility companies is net metering, which is funded by utility customers. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) describes net metering as, "allowing residential and commercial customers who generate their own electricity from solar power to feed electricity they do not use back into the grid.”[12]

According to SEIA, 38 states[13] have adopted state-mandated net metering systems putting the government’s thumb on the scale toward mandatory payment rates benefitting solar users. In some states, power companies pay customers the wholesale rate for the power they supply to the grid; but in the majority of states, power companies are compelled by state governments to pay customers the full retail rate.

Utility companies purchase electricity from a number of competing sources at wholesale rates with those rates fluctuating throughout the day based upon demand. The wholesale cost does not include purchasing or electricity delivery costs. The retail cost is what the residential or business consumer pays for electricity that is purchased and then delivered using the electrical grid.[14] Yet with retail net metering requirements, solar households use the grid to transmit electricity to and from their home, but do not pay their fair share for it.

Net Metering Unfair to Non-Solar Customers

It is unfair for solar customers to be paid the full retail rate for their excess electricity because the retail rate covers the cost of infrastructure and overhead, not just the value of the electricity itself. When states require utilities to purchase excess electricity back from solar customers at the retail price, they create a distorted one-sided market where the utility can neither reject the product because it is unneeded, nor pay the provider the true worth of the product.

Too often, lower-income customers, who are unable to afford the installation of solar panels on their own homes, wind up subsidizing the electric bills of their wealthier neighbors. Warren Buffett, whose holding company owns NV Energy, recognizes and opposes the cost-shifting from solar customers to non-solar customers. "‘We do not want the nonsolar customers, of whom there are over a million, to be subsidizing the 17,000 solar customers,’ Buffett said, talking about NV Energy’s customers in Nevada.”[15] At a bare minimum, taxpayers and ratepayers should get to choose whether or not they subsidize their neighbors’ solar panels.

More Solar Customers, More Problems

If there are only a relatively small number of consumers supplying energy to the grid, then the cost to utility companies and their customers is minimal. But as the number of customers benefiting from net metering grows, the costs to power companies and their customers grow too. The obvious impact is to create a greater strain on non-solar residential customers whose rates would have to increase to cover the electricity grid maintenance and updating costs avoided, at least in part, by solar customers.

As intermittent solar power is added to the grid, the grid has to be upgraded to ensure its stability and reliability. It is crucial for there to be a balance on the electrical grid between energy production and energy consumption; and one of the stressors on the electrical grid is unreliable solar energy.[16] One minute, the sun is shining brightly and solar panels are churning out excess electricity that is being supplied to the grid; and the next minute, the sun is behind clouds; and the output from solar panels collapses. When solar energy production drops, either additional electricity from another source must be added to the grid or customers’ power must be cut to avoid damaging the grid.

Free-riding solar customers force utilities to pay for the maintenance and upgrading of the electrical grid while relying upon fewer ratepayers. The perverse effect is that solar customers benefit when retail electricity rates are necessarily forced higher for non-solar consumers.

This cost-shifting can be easily visualized with the following simplistic example. Suppose the cost of maintaining the grid were $100 for 100 people and each paid $1 to cover the cost. Then suppose that 10 of those customers adopted solar and stopped contributing to the maintenance costs. In that case, the remaining ninety customers would have to pay $1.11 each, rather than $1. Obviously, if 50 of these customers no longer paid for the grid, that increase in costs to the remaining 50 would jump to $2 to maintain the grid that they all use. And, of course, if everyone were a free-rider, the grid would eventually cease to exist. When the sun went down, those customers who were not able to store enough electricity for their own needs would be without power until the sun rose again.

Endangering the Reliability of the Grid

The job of grid operators is important: maintaining a balance between the supply of electricity and demand for electricity to avoid damage to the grid. Demand for electricity is stochastic, which means that it varies and that it is not possible to predict exactly how much electricity will be needed at any one time. Unfortunately, solar energy is also stochastic, which further complicates the job of grid operators.

Nor is the intermittent nature of solar energy is the only problem.

"The addition of substantial levels of wind and solar resources to an electric energy grid raises significant reliability concerns at the transmission system level because these resources operate intermittently and, unlike other generating resources, they do not spin in synchronism with the grid…  Dependable rotating generation operating in synchronism across the power system enabled the evolution of the modern grids.  Without due regard to the issues of intermittency, voltage control, frequency control, and grid inertia an electric grid cannot operate reliably and stably.  If the first world continues to expect affordable electricity, when we want it and in whatever quantity we want, these needs must be met.”[17]

Conclusion

So we see that solar energy is failing in multiple ways. After years of generous, tax-payer-funded subsidies, solar energy is still unable to compete on a level playing field with coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. Regrettably, solar energy’s higher costs have a human impact making it tougher for less affluent people to stay cool in summer and warm in winter. With so many affordable, reliable energy resources in this country, there is just no excuse for the government to be mandating and subsidizing green energy production. Finally, unreliable solar energy often requires expensive changes to the grid and endangers the reliability of the grid.

SOURCE  





Australia: NSW Drought In Perspective

Just a couple more comments on the NSW drought. I have worked out the YTD rainfall in NSW, although this is a pretty artificial measure. This year is the fourth lowest on record, behind 1902, 1965 and 1940 (in that order).

 

If we look at the 12 month figures, this year ranks as 8th driest, behind 1901, 1902, 1919, 1927, 1929, 1940 and 1965.

It is easy to see why how farmers say this is the worst drought in memory, because it is exactly that. Whereas these sort of severe droughts used to come along every decade on average, there has been nothing like it since 1965.

This year the drought has been largely confined to parts of NSW and South Australia:

This certainly was not the case in some of those earlier droughts, which were far more extensive:

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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21 August, 2018

More attribution baloney

I have reproduced below just the first part of a large article splashed across NBCnews.  I give the link for anybody who is masochistic enough to read the whole thing. The title of the article is "Global warming can make extreme weather worse. Now scientists can say by how much. Researchers no longer hesitate to blame climate change for floods, fires and heat waves. Here's how the science works."

The intellectual level of the article is apparent in the first sentence: "When the heat waves, droughts, wildfires and deluges come — as they *seem to* with increasing regularity these days — the question inevitably arises: Did climate change play a role?"

What sort of scientific statement is "seem to"?  Where are the statistics that would confirm that key statement? There are plenty of statistics available from NOAA and elsewhere.  Skeptics point gleefully to them all the time -- because they all show that extreme weather events are no more frequent now than they were in the past. In other words, James Rainey, the author of the article has not got even to first base. He has not established even the starting point of his article -- because it is baloney. "Seem to", indeed!

And there is not one thing new in what he reports.  It's just more modelling, that reliable generator of false prophecies.  You get out of modelling what you put in, nothing more.  Modelling is like putting clothes into a washing machine. They come out wet but they are still the same clothes.  In other words there is no way modelling can be checked against reality at the time the modelling is done.  All you can do is hope that it is right. 

Most Greenie modelling is done for the purposes of prediction and that has the virtue that it can EVENTUALLY be tested against reality.  The prophecies are always way out, however, because they are based on the fiction that tiny amounts of CO2 have big effects. 

But the modelling below is COMPLETELY untestable. It makes no prophecies so can NEVER be shown as true or false. It is just a computer game.  It is science only in that modelling has a place in science but it is NOT science in that science deals with testable propositions.

So why the baloney?  It is just another way of amping up the hysteria about the tired old scare of global warming


When the heat waves, droughts, wildfires and deluges come — as they seem to with increasing regularity these days — the question inevitably arises: Did climate change play a role?

The answer scientists gave for years was that greenhouse gases created by humans likely contributed to extreme weather, but it was hard to definitively tie the warming atmosphere to any single episode.

But that cautious approach, repeated in thousands of news reports for more than a decade, has been changing in recent months. Now, scientists say that they will increasingly be able to link extreme weather events to human-caused global warming and to make such determinations quickly, sometimes within days.

So when a heat wave beset Northern Europe early this summer, bringing temperatures in Scandinavia into the 90s, a consortium of researchers operating under the name World Weather Attribution whipped together a series of computer simulations. Within three days, the scientists issued a finding that the hot spell had been made at least twice as likely because of human-driven climate change.

In less frequent instances, scientists taking more time have reached even bolder conclusions — finding that some extreme events would not have happened at all in a pre-industrial era, when Earth's atmosphere had not been pumped full of carbon dioxide.

The trend promises to become even more pronounced in the coming years, because national weather agencies in countries like Germany and Australia, and the weather service for the European Union, expect to begin issuing regular findings on whether unusual weather events grew out of climate change.

"Usually scientists have been quiet or said only that ‘This is the kind of event that we would expect to happen more often,'" said Friederike Otto, deputy director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University in England. "But now we can, and will, be able to say more."

THE SCIENCE OF ATTRIBUTING EXTREME WEATHER TO CLIMATE CHANGE

Otto is one of the leading scientists in the rapidly evolving field of extreme events attribution. The discipline is being driven by an increasing focus among academics, by better data collection worldwide and by open-source computer models that allow researchers ready access to complex climate simulations, particularly of what Earth’s temperatures likely would have looked like without the profusion of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases over the last century.

Many of the researchers in the field are determined to ensure that experts, not amateurs, drive the discussion of unusual weather. "If the answer is not given by scientists, it will be given by politicians or someone with an agenda,” Otto said. "We want to make sure there is scientific evidence in this debate.”

Martin Hoerling, a scientist at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration lab in Boulder, Colorado, said another factor is influencing the more definitive statements about the impact of global warming. "That signal from climate change is becoming larger, large enough to be detected in the data itself," Hoerling said, "and also in the computer models” that extrapolate on that data.

But scientists say they remain uncomfortable with more definitive statements, such as the question of whether global warming caused a string of wildfires, or a deluge of rain or a particular heat wave.

"The thing we are trying to do is not to give you a binary ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer,” said Stephanie Herring, a NOAA scientist who edits a report on attribution studies that has been published annually since 2012. "We are trying to show how much of an impact climate change is having now and to suggest how much of an impact it might have in the future.”

SOURCE  






A double ban gets a double reversal

Interior Department reverses activist-initiated Obama-era ban on farming activities in refuges

Paul Driessen

I don’t pull my punches over destructive, inhumane or just plain lunatic policies demanded by extreme environmentalists. I criticize them, as well as friends and "good guys,” when I think they got it wrong on energy or environmental issues. I also offer praise when it is deserved.

When Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretary Ryan Zinke – whom I admire greatly – let a last-minute Obama endangered species designation for the "Rusty Patched Bumblebee” (RPB) take effect in March 2017, I faulted the decision (here and here). Now I want to praise his recent decision to reopen certain wildlife refuges to modern farming practices.

The RPB decision did the unthinkable. It gave Interior’s often hyper-activist U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) potential veto power over every farm operation, building project and land use decision across 378 million Eastern and Midwestern acres, the RPB’s (possible) erstwhile habitat. That’s equal to Montana, North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana combined!

All to "protect” a ground-nesting bee that provides minimal pollinating services, has supposedly been sighted” a number of times since 2000 in 13 states, has long been rare for multiple reasons, and got its "endangered” status due to an collusive sue-and-settle lawsuit between agitators and regulators.

This is the same FWS that told a timber company it had to create "potential” habitat on its land in Louisiana for a "dusky gopher frog” that has not been seen in the state for 33 years and could not survive on the 1,544 acres of company land selected by the FWS, because the chosen area did not offer essential habitat conditions. So Fish and Wildlife ordered the company to convert the land into "suitable” habitat, at company expense – after which the company could never cut trees in the area!

The RPB decision was particularly perilous for farmers because, just a few years earlier, the Service had eagerly negotiated yet another sue-and-settle style agreement with radical greens in the Center for Food Safety, to ban genetically engineered crops (aka GMOs) and neonicotinoid insecticides on the extensive lands the FWS leases to farmers in often enormous U.S. wildlife refuges.

The ban was issued without any public consultation or comment period. Worse, it was wholly at odds with USDA and EPA findings on the environmental safety of both GMOs and neonics. But it was a huge gift to activists who have been campaigning against those technologies for years. It set a dangerous precedent of basing government decisions on "precautionary” criteria, much like Europe’s wholly unscientific regulatory process, which is completely antithetical to the risk-based U.S. system.

The infinitely malleable "precautionary” pseudo-guideline says chemicals and other technologies should be restricted or banned if there is any possibility (or accusation by radical activists) that they could be harmful, even if no evidence-based cause-effect link can be shown.

Even worse, the "Precautionary Principle” only examines (often inflated) risks from using technologies that activists or regulators dislike. It never considers the risks of not using them – or risks that using them could reduce or eliminate. Just as perversely, anti-technology factions ignore or actively suppress evidence of harmful impacts from supposed alternatives – and from any technologies they support.

The European Union has formalize the Precautionary Principle as official policy. Regulators thus have carte blanche authority to take any action, at any time, no matter how arbitrary, based on the claim that sometime in the future, in ways not yet understood, something might possibly have a negative impact on people or the environment. Scientific evidence is not needed.

It’s an open door to regulation by activists who are experts at raising alarms and making claims of impending Armageddon unless a targeted technology is banned. Europe’s embrace of "precaution” in agricultural regulation is a major reason why the continent has become a net importer of food, despite having some of the most fertile land and predictably temperate weather in the world.

If this horrendous refuge precedent had stood, combined with the Endangered Species Act, it could have given a few USFWS activist regulators the power to micro-manage enormous swaths of the American public and private landmass, and large segments of the nation’s agricultural and construction economy.

Its impacts would have been felt almost as widely as the infamous "Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule that presidential candidate Donald Trump vowed to kill and which the EPA under Scott Pruitt began to dismantle – or the even more insidious Paris climate treaty, which would have given international and United Nations climate alarmists control over the entire U.S. economy.

I’m therefore happy to note that Mr. Zinke Department has implemented a double reversal of the USFW double ban. In an August 2 memo, Interior again spelled out the need to raise crops in parts of wildlife refuges to provide food for people and forage for ducks, geese and other wildlife – and to note the important role that genetically engineered plants and neonics play in that effort.

Of course, the GMO-neonic ban never made an iota of scientific sense. Hundreds of government and independent studies – and decades of eating and other real-world experience – confirm that GMOs are as safe for human and animal consumption as the almost 100% of crops that have been genetically modified by traditional breeding … or by soaking seeds in harsh chemicals or bombarding them with radiation to cause multiple mutations, some desirable, others unknown, but just fine with organic food promoters.

Equally important, the massively funded environmentalist campaign against neonics was based heavily on the wholly fabricated "bee-pocalypse” scare of several years ago. As most people now know, honeybee populations have been rising the entire time since neonics were first used, and the problems honeybees had for several years were due to due to Varroa destructor mites and an assortment of bee diseases.

Anti-neonic agitation also ran headlong into EPA’s scientific risk assessments. Even amid the regulatory frenzy of the final Obama years, EPA could find no scientific reason to take away the long-standing approvals of these vital crop production tools, which target only insects that actually feed on crop plants.

Not surprisingly, though, once the honeybee-pocalypse was debunked, activists immediately switched gears to the equally fraudulent claim that wild bees are on the path to extinction – because of neonics, of course. However, wild bee problems are also almost entirely due to disease and long-term habitat loss.

The vast majority of wild bee species are "doing just fine,” prominent U.S. Geological Survey wild bee expert Sam Droege has noted. Even more telling, a recent global study of wild bees found that those which pollinate crops and thus come into most frequent contact with neonics are flourishing.

Greens have already announced they will sue to block the refuge decision, but that’s par for the course.

Secretary Zinke deserves high praise for starting to rein in USFWS’s regulatory power grab. However, it’s only a start. There’s much more left to do: at Interior, Agriculture, Energy and of course EPA.

Next up should be the Fish and Wildlife Service’s role in implementing the Endangered Species Act. Even if congressional attempts to rein in some of the worst abuses of the ESA finally succeed, after years of futility resulting from environmentalist intransigence, agency activists will find ways around them.

Mr. Zinke also deserves major kudos for pushing back on the nonsensical claim that 129 million dead trees in California, repeated conflagrations that completely wipe out wildlife habitats and species, over 700,000 once-Golden State acres burned so far this summer (Rhode Island plus Washington, DC), and 57 Californians killed by forest fires in two years – are due to that all-purpose villain: climate change.

As the Secretary makes clear, this horrific destruction is the result of near-criminal mismanagement of that state’s forests, at the behest of rabid greens who refuse to allow any timber harvesting anywhere.

There’s an old saying that "personnel is policy.” Secretary Zinke next needs to replace DOI zealots with permanent, career service land and resource managers who can keep the eco-power-grabbers under control, by honestly, dispassionately and transparently applying evidence-based science to rulemaking.

Via email






 Greenpeace and ‘the awful reality of anti-science activism’

The Austrian research portal "Addendum” released a bombshell video regarding the facts, figures, and positions regarding GMO foods. In this report that attempted to explain the reality of both the technology, economic implications and public discourse, the site sat down with both current and former Greenpeace activists, leading them to reveal the awful reality of anti-science activism.

Whoever was under the illusion that organizations the likes of Greenpeace are actual environmentalists who pursue the improvement of human health and biodiversity, will suffer a severe shock from the exchange included in the Addendum video. Sebastian Theissing-Matei, spokesperson for Greenpeace in Austria gave these answers:

Interviewer: In organic shops, I can buy that were produced with radiation of chemicals (sic). Does it make sense to allow one thing, while demonizing the other [GMO foods]?

Theissing-Matei: This is indeed a certain unsharpness which is born historically –  we have to be honest about it.

Interviewer: Shouldn’t Greenpeace also fight against certain types of apples that are being sold in organic shops and that were produced through radiation?

Theissing-Matei: As said, these are types that historically have existed for much longer. There is an unsharpness in the law, no doubt. We always concentrate on the things that are currently political debates.

Interviewer: Should the arguments of Greenpeace not be based on reality, meaning the danger or non-danger and possible utility [of technological progress], and not only on based on what is being discussed in the media?”

Theissing-Matei: We are a political organization. Of course we try to act in the best interest of the environment, but momentarily the political debate is whether or not new methods for genetic modification should be placed under current legislation of genetic modification.....

Greenpeace has more or less consistently refused to accept grants from governments (including the European Union), which does not endanger any of their funding by that token. It would have to be pointed out that the billion-dollar NGO has, in Europe in particular, benefited from financial support from green political parties, which themselves are entirely government-funded.

As for the political debate that the Austrian Greenpeace spokesperson addresses, it is interesting hearing such a thing from this particular organization. As far back as 1996, Greenpeace was seen protesting the arrival or a transport ship in the harbour of Hamburg, Germany, containing "the first set of genetically modified soybeans in Germany”.

The protest had shown its effects: The then German minister for research demanded that producers label all of their foods if they have been genetically modified. So people talk about an issue that Greenpeace raised, and now this is the only topic it can address. Greenpeace is, in a beautiful fashion, fulfilling its own prophecies.

By any means, it is one thing to oppose genetically modified food in 1996 than it is more than 20 years later. The recent Nature-published meta-analysis on genetically engineered maize on agronomic, environmental and toxicological traits shows clearly that insect that do not feed off of maize are not effected, and that genetically modified maize shows considerably lower concentrations of cancer-causing mycotoxins.

But for Greenpeace, it’s not the scientific evidence that counts, but the fear it can spread as an effective business model. This is confirmed in the same Austrian report, by former Greenpeace activist Ludger Wess, who is now a science writer who was one of the first journalists in Europe to cover the emerging biotechnology and high-tech industries:

"Greenpeace was actually open-minded towards the idea of genetically modified foods. They said: "If it’s true that plants become resistant to insects, then that’s great because we’ll use less insecticides. So we’re for it.”

After getting back from a science-conference on genetically modified maize in 1989, Wess returned to Greenpeace:

I came back, armed with a whole suitcase of papers, and after having a lot of conversations with scientists, and they were all able to defuse my worries. I wasn’t convinced anymore that it would be a danger to human health. I told them [Greenpeace]: we cannot continue to claim that genetically modified foods are bad for human health, it’s simply not true.

I was told that Greenpeace would still continue to make that claim, because only if people are in fear over their health or the health of their children, they’ll open their wallets for donations. Everything else, they said, isn’t suitable for campaigns.

Greenpeace has a history of being more interested in publicity than actual constructive debate and informed discussions. Be it violently blocking petrol stations in Luxembourg, aggressively disrupting the work of an oil rig, or even painting a massive roundabout in Berlin yellow, with water-polluting paint, and causing car damages and thousands of euros of cleaning costs: Greenpeace is an attention-seeking, anti-science activist group, that uses the environment as an excuse to propagate it’s illiterate bias against anything that advances human health and nutrition.

Current donors of this organization need to ask themselves the question whether they want to support this self-admitted political organization, which has no regard for the truth.

SOURCE  






Bid to limit commercial fishing in Australian marine parks defeated by conservative Coalition

The last Labor government locked up vast areas of Australian waters into marine parks where commercial fishing was banned.  The whole thing was just Green/Left bastardry -- the usual Green/Left desire to  hurt people rather than help nature. 

Commercial fisheries in developed countries are normally sustainably managed.  Throughout the world -- for instance in the Mediterranean -- many fisheries have continued in productive  use for hundreds of years or more.  And there is no reason why Australia could not do the same. 

As it is, despite the huge area of Australian waters, we have had to import fish, some of it from New Zealand but a lot from third world countries where uncontrolled fishing practices are very destructive of fish stocks.  So the allegedly Green policy has in fact greatly damaged fish stocks overall.  And yet the wreckers want to lock away yet more of a wonderful food source that we have inherited


A push by the Greens and Labor to attempt to force greater protection of fisheries in Australia’s marine parks has failed for the second time.

The parties had vowed to reject controversial management plans for the parks proposed by the Turnbull government. But on Thursday the Senate crossbench combined with the Coalition to defeat disallowance motions on the basis that the parks would then be left with no plans in place and no limits on fishing.

In March the environment minister Josh Frydenberg issued management plans for 44 marine parks to replace Gillard-era plans that were suspended when the Abbott government was elected in 2013.

Frydenberg said the plans were a "more balanced and scientific evidence-based approach to ocean protection” but most environmental groups opposed them warning they would strip more than 35m hectares of "no-take” ocean from the parks, allowing commercial fishing activities in 37 of the 44 parks.

Labor introduced a disallowance motion, supported by the Greens, but it was defeated on 27 March when the government called it on for a sudden vote before the opposition had time to convince four more crossbench senators to support it.

The Greens and Labor this month proposed a series of new disallowance motions for the south-west, north, north-west, temperate east and Coral Sea marine park plans.

On Thursday the disallowance motions were defeated 36 votes to 29, with One Nation, Centre Alliance, and senators Tim Storer, Derryn Hinch, Cory Bernardi and Fraser Anning siding with the Coalition.

Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson, the co-sponsor of the disallowances, told the Senate the choice was to "reject or reward” the government’s attempts to gut plans put in place by the fishing industry, environmental campaigners and community.

Whish-Wilson said the government had "ignored the advice of their own scientific panel” and 1,400 scientists who signed a petition urging that marine protections not be reduced. He said claims the plans were "balanced” meant the Coalition "giving their stakeholders they represent here, the big end of the fish industry and oil and gas, what they want”.

Labor senator Louise Pratt, the co-sponsor of the disallowances, accused the government of "decimating the original plans worked on for so long by putting their vastly weakened plans forward”.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson warned if the Greens got their way on disallowance the marine parks would "go back to no protection, nothing”. "Why throw the baby out with the bath water? There are protections in place now and if you’re not happy with it, work on it in the next parliament.”

The Liberals and Hanson cited the Pew Charitable Trusts - the one major environmental charity that opposes the disallowance - in their reasons for backing the current marine plans.

Bodies representing recreational fishers and the commercial fishing industry welcomed the result. Seafood Industry Australia chief executive Jane Lovell said it meant the "uncertainty that has plagued much of our wild-catch sector is now gone”.

SOURCE 







Coral Bleaching Just As Bad Or Worse 400 Years Ago

The Greenie lies about coral bleaching, excerpts:

Large-scale coral bleaching has raised concern about the future of the ecosystems and the impact their loss could have on biodiversity.

The fact that we are seeing an increase in bleaching even in these tough corals highlights just how serious the threat of coral bleaching is. –Dr Sebastian Hennige, researcher

The teams found the frequency of bleaching has increased since the 1800s and, despite corals’ ability to recover, there are fears they could now be approaching a "critical threshold”.

Dr Nick Kamenos from Glasgow’s School of Geographical and Earth Sciences said: "It’s clear in the core data we examined that bleaching has been occurring on the Great Barrier Reef for at least 400 years, but the frequency of bleaching events has increased markedly since the early 1800s and those events have affected 10% more corals since the late 1700s.

The facts:

The claim that the frequency of bleaching events has increased markedly since the early 1800s is an utterly dishonest one. Here is the actual graph from the paper itself:



The relevant chart is "B”, which shows the number of years in each decade when at least 20% of corals were affected.

As you can see, although there has been a rise since 1800, there is little difference between recent decades and the 18thC. Indeed bleaching was far worse in the 1890s and 1750s.

Worse still for the alarmists, chart "C” shows little change in the percentage of corals bleached per decade.

There is the usual nonsense about how things will get much worse. But the actual facts show a completely different picture.

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

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





20 August, 2018

Tesla shares fall as CEO admits job stress is getting to him

Tesla CEO Elon Musk told The New York Times the past year has been the most "difficult and painful" of his career.
Shares of Electric car maker Tesla Inc. tumbled about 9 percent Friday after CEO Elon Musk conceded in a newspaper interview that job stress may be getting the best of him.

Tesla shares closed at $305.50, their lowest level since Aug. 1, as analysts and business professors questioned whether the company’s board should grant Musk a leave or even replace him with a more seasoned CEO. The decline lopped $5.4 billion off Tesla’s market value.

Musk admitted to The New York Times that the past year has been the most "difficult and painful" of his career. The newspaper reported that during an hour-long telephone interview on Thursday, Musk alternated between laughter and tears, acknowledging that he was working up to 120 hours a week and sometimes takes Ambien to get to sleep.

"It’s kind of bizarre," said Charles Elson, director of the corporate governance center at the University of Delaware. "It’s a drama we shouldn’t be watching."

Musk told the Times that he has no plans to give up his dual role as chairman and CEO. "If you have anyone who can do a better job, please let me know. They can have the job. Is there someone who can do the job better? They can have the reins right now," he said.

Tesla’s board showed no sign of taking any action Friday. In a statement to The Associated Press, the directors praised Musk’s dedication to the company.

"Over the past 15 years, Elon’s leadership of the Tesla team has caused Tesla to grow from a small startup to having hundreds of thousands of cars on the road that customers love, employing tens of thousands of people around the world, and creating significant shareholder value in the process," the statement said, without addressing Musk’s recent behavior.

The Times interview puts board members in a difficult position because Musk, who entered Tesla as a major investor and built the company into a force that has changed the perception of electric cars, is the company’s public identity.

SOURCE  






Trump to unveil plan for rolling back Obama-era coal plant regulations

The Trump administration next week plans to formally propose a vast overhaul of climate change regulations that would allow individual states to decide how, or even whether, to curb carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants, according to a summary of the plan and details provided by three people who have seen the full proposal.

The plan would also relax pollution rules for power plants that need upgrades. That, combined with allowing states to set their own rules, creates a serious risk that emissions, which had been falling, could start to rise again, according to environmentalists.

The proposal, which President Trump is expected to highlight Tuesday at a rally in West Virginia, amounts to the administration’s strongest and broadest effort yet to address what the president has long described as a regulatory "war on coal.” It would considerably weaken what is known as the Clean Power Plan, Barack Obama’s signature regulation for cutting planet-warming emissions at coal-fired plants.

That rule, crafted as the United States prepared to enter into the 2015 Paris Agreement on global warming, was the first federal carbon-pollution restriction for power plants. In 2016, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the regulation from taking effect while a federal court heard arguments from a coalition of coal states that sued to block the rule. It remains suspended.

Now, the Trump administration wants to defang the Obama-era rule. The move follows a separate decision this month to freeze Obama-era fuel efficiency standards that were also aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

"These are the two biggest sectors of the economy that contribute to greenhouse gases in the country and are just hugely significant in terms of emissions,” said Janet McCabe, the Environmental Protection Agency air chief under Obama. Together the transportation sector and the power sector account for more than half of the country’s emissions, according to the agency.

"The science is just getting clearer and clearer every day,” McCabe said. "I don’t know how many times people need to hear that we’re having the warmest summer on record or how many storms people need to see. This is no fooling.”

Officials at the White House and the EPA did not respond to requests for comment.

The plan is the latest move in a string of efforts — including prodding grid operators to purchase more electricity from coal plants and asserting that coal plant retirements are threatening the reliability of the national power grid — to end what Trump has called his predecessor’s war on coal and a sure sign to the industry that the Trump administration still has its back, even as coal production continues to decline.

Michelle Bloodworth, president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a trade group that represents coal producers, noted that 40 percent of the nation’s coal plants had either been retired or were scheduled to retire.

She put the blame for that on a mix of market conditions and what she called "very stringent” regulations under Obama. But, she said, efforts like Trump’s push to order grid operators to purchase electricity from struggling coal plants along with the new carbon regulations represent a welcome relief for the industry.

"I certainly think we are supportive of what the administration is doing and we applaud their efforts,” she said.

SOURCE  






Taming the EPA Regulatory Hydra: An essential first step

In America’s most powerful, intrusive and costly agency, power resides in one administrator

William L. Kovacs

Since President Trump’s election, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has turned off its massive regulatory printing press. The nation is still here, there have been no man-made environmental catastrophes, and job creation is quickly growing now that the business community is not under the daily fear of another regulation that will slash its profits, force it to lay off employees or put it out of business.

So far, so good. However, if America is to continue its job creation activities, it needs to continue the Trump Administration’s balance between environmental protection and creating jobs and growing businesses. Unfortunately, in the future another anti-business president could be elected.

If the current administrative process and EPA’s organizational structure remain the same, the new, anti-business president could quickly stop economic progress by issuing many billion-dollar regulations that again freeze business activity, while imposing huge extra costs on consumers for everything they purchase from cars, to light bulbs, to housing – once again for little or no health or environmental benefit.

While President Trump ordered EPA to begin deregulatory activity, those efforts take years. To repeal a regulation, the agency must go through the same administrative process it went through to produce the initial regulation.

The Trump administration has started to revise the three most costly regulations: Waters of the United States, the Clean Power Plan and automobile mileage standards. This effort will last well into third or fourth year of the Trump administration – and then the lawsuits will begin. Equally important, while we need wholesale deregulation at EPA, it is likely that this administration will only make a dent in EPA’s historic overreach.

The almost fifty-year history of the EPA regulatory process is like the mythological "Hydra,” a monster with many heads; when one was cut-off, two more grew back. Such an aggressive regulatory process crowned EPA as the most aggressive regulator in history.

EPA alone has published over 25% of all the pages of regulations issued by all the agencies of the Federal Government, and almost twice as many as the much-derided IRS. Of the 28 most costly regulations issued in eight years by the Obama administration, EPA issued 13 of them.

This situation places those seeking a long-term, rational regulatory process at EPA in a quandary. Determining what can be done to tame this monster is a complex undertaking, because stopping new regulations in one administration does not prevent many more regulations from being issued in another.

However, considering EPA administrators of the past, the first change must be to ensure that no single person in the United States government can exercise the massive powers wielded by those past bosses. Such powers determine who gets a permit to operate, and who does not; what technologies a business must use; what lightbulbs are available for your homes; what gas we can buy; what chemicals can be used; where companies can mine; what local land use decisions will survive; and even where a pond can be built on private property.

While the President of the United States has massive powers over war and peace, and sets the operating philosophy of federal agencies, the EPA Administrator has direct power over the business operations … and thus the economy … of the entire nation.

EPA makes the environmental rules we live under. It is the fact finder who determines if we are breaking the rules, the prosecutor of all alleged violations – and the administrative judge who makes the findings of fact, interprets the law, and permits or punishes our actions.

It’s frightening when you think about it how much power one person can have over our lives. Yet, we don’t think about it until the agency wants to "get us.”

How should we restructure EPA to ensure the agency can still protect our environment – while controlling the massive amount of power exercised by one individual?

Several mechanisms would tame this hydra. Perhaps the most important and most effective would be converting EPA from an Executive Branch agency to an independent agency directed by five commissioners: three appointed by the party holding the presidency and two from the other party.

This commission-style agency would limit the power to act by requiring that any final regulation be approved by a majority of the commissioners. While an anti-business president would still appoint a majority of anti-business commissioners, the minority commissioners would have access to all evidence and decision-making documents, and could file dissenting opinions on all final decisions.

These dissents would allow discussion of the flaws in the majority’s reasoning – including facts, science, economics, costs and benefits.

Under the current regulatory process, there is only EPA’s final rule and a record that can run hundreds of thousands of pages. While the public is allowed to comment, the courts usually uphold EPA’s decision if it is "rational,” meaning the agency can point to some part of the record that supports its reasoning, and can conceal or ignore any parts that do not support its reasoning.

Dissenting opinions would ensure that the reviewing court sees the flaws in the majority decision. This would be invaluable for good policy making, since the minority commissioners could also review and present all the science and economics used by the majority. That would enable the minority to keep an out-of-control agency in balance.

Historically, EPA has not provided all the scientific studies and models to the public for review, analysis and comment. Having access to these documents would allow minority commissioners to point out not just flaws, but also deceptions, concealed facts and data, and hidden agendas.

Other actions would enable EPA to bring focus and coordination to the 13 separate statutes it administers, largely in the absence of any mission statement or meaningful congressional direction.

Via email






Australia: National Party supports coal power

The Nationals have urged the federal government to support new coal-fired power plants and lift the ban on nuclear energy.

The party's federal council in Canberra on Saturday passed a motion calling on the government to back building high-energy, low-emissions power stations to provide reliable and affordable power.

A separate proposal from the Young Nationals urging federal and state governments to abolish rules stopping nuclear power plants being built and uranium mining also succeeded.

The call for new coal-fired power station comes as Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull fights internal divisions over energy policy.

Resources Minister Matt Canavan reinforced the case for coal, as conservative backbenchers agitate for its use to drive down power bills.

"I don't want to live in a nation where we just export our energy to the rest of the world to help their development, jobs and pensioners," he told the Nationals council.

"We need to use some of that here and we don't think it's a sin to do so."

SOURCE 





Energy Conferees Shut Down Fuel Economy Mandates as Costly to Consumers

NEW ORLEANS—Sterling Burnett doesn’t always want to sit next to someone he doesn’t know on a train, plane, or bus.

But he’s willing to fight for the freedom of those same strangers when it comes time for them to purchase a motor vehicle.

"What I care about is … your freedom to choose the vehicle of your choice,” Burnett, an environmental policy expert for the Heartland Institute, said during a panel discussion at the free-market think tank’s America First Energy Conference that took a critical look at fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks.

"I don’t think government should be in the business of deciding the characteristics of the vehicle you drive,” Burnett said of the so-called Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. "That’s what CAFE standards do. Automobility is a form of freedom.”

Burnett, a senior fellow on environmental policy at the Heartland Institute, a nonprofit research and education organization based in Illinois, espoused the virtues of automotive freedom:

I take the train, I enjoy the train, and we all fly. And I take buses. But sometimes that’s not my alternative and quite frankly, I don’t always want to sit next to strangers. And maybe I want to listen to a particular kind of music or a news program, and I don’t want plugs in my ears.

When I used to commute to work, I enjoyed my time in the car because it was my time and it wasn’t dominated by work. Cars allow [you] to have the freedom to live outside of inner cities, and to visit distant relatives whenever you want. One hundred years ago, you couldn’t do this.

‘Victory for Consumer Choice’

Congress first enacted Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards in 1975 in response to the Arab oil embargo of 1973 that limited gasoline supplies and drove up prices. The idea was to reduce American dependence on foreign oil.

The latest version of CAFE and emissions standards for light-duty vehicles is called SAFE, an acronym for Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient Vehicles Rule for Model Years 2021-2026 Passenger Cars and Light Trucks.

The Trump administration has proposed a rule change that is a joint initiative of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The two agencies are seeking public comment on regulatory options, according to a press release, "including a preferred alternative that locks in [model year] 2020 standards through 2026, providing a much-needed time-out from further, costly increases.”

Nick Loris, an economist with The Heritage Foundation who focuses on energy, environmental, and regulatory issues, credits the Trump administration with moving forward with a proposal that he sees as beneficial to consumers.

"Without a doubt, the Trump administration’s recent proposal is a welcome victory for consumer choice, but also for people who are just concerned about the upfront costs of new cars and new trucks,” Loris said during the panel discussion at the Heartland Institute conference.

"It would be nice if Congress demonstrated similar fortitude and recognized that energy use mandates for vehicles, for dishwashers, and [for] clocks on microwaves are all unnecessary and repealed these standards, but I think that’s wishful thinking.”

Challenging California

The Trump administration’s preferred alternative "reflects a balance of safety, economics, technology, fuel conservation, and pollution reduction” and is expected to reduce road fatalities and injuries, the EPA and highway safety agency say in the press release.

The rule change begins a process to create a new, 50-state standard for fuel economy and tailpipe carbon dioxide emissions for cars and light trucks with the model years 2021 through 2026.

The Obama administration permitted California to set its own auto emissions standards under a federal waiver, but the Trump administration could seek to eliminate the waiver as part of the change.

Twelve states concentrated in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest follow California’s lead with stricter emissions standards, as does the District of Columbia.

The Obama administration worked with state officials in California to set fuel efficiency standards, a key component of Barack Obama’s efforts as president to address climate change.

If the Trump administration proposal is implemented, California and the 12 other states would need to observe the new federal rules on emissions.

 ‘Relics of the Past’

Loris, the Heritage economist, described energy use mandates and CAFE standards as "relics of the past” and byproducts of "politically concocted problems” that put energy consumers at a disadvantage.

Loris said he sees a "systemic problem” in how politicians, pundits, and lobbyists view energy markets.

"The inability of the federal government and regulators to predict what’s going to happen in energy markets” often leads to counterproductive regulatory policies, he said.

For instance, Loris noted, predictions about the price of oil tend to be off the mark.

For a 2008 article, The Wall Street Journal asked "a wide range of economists, energy analysts, and other experts to predict what the price of oil would be at the end of year,” Loris recalled.

Their predictions ranged from a low of $70 per barrel to a high of $167.50. The actual price: $44.60.

Sam Kazman, a panelist who is a lawyer with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, discussed a legal victory he secured on behalf of the Washington-based free-market public policy organization.

A federal appeals court ruled that federal transportation officials illegally concealed how fuel-efficiency standards jeopardized public safety on the highways.

The court found that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration illegally tried "to paper over” the safety issue through a combination of "fudged analysis,” "statistical legerdemain,” "lame claims,” and "specious arguments.”

Keeping Costs Down

Kazman expressed disappointment that avowed consumer-safety champions such as former presidential candidate Ralph Nader didn’t support the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s position against the fuel-efficiency standards.

But to improve public safety through CAFE standards requires officials to "get rid of a government program, rather than expanding it,” he said.

With the proposed rule change, Trump administration officials say they anticipate consumers will experience reduced costs and improved safety.

"The current standards have been a factor in the rising cost of new automobiles to an average of $35,000 or more—out of reach for many American families,” the EPA’s release says, adding:

Indeed, compared to the preferred alternative in the proposal, keeping in place the standards finalized in 2012 would add $2,340 to the cost of owning a new car, and impose more than $500 billion in societal costs on the U.S. economy over the next 50 years.

Officials also point to a study earlier this year by the highway safety agency that found newer vehicles are safer than older vehicles now on the road, and their wider use would result in fewer fatalities and injuries.

"What the Trump administration has done is stunning,” Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said during another panel examining the administration’s progress on energy policy.

"They have kicked California out of setting the CAFE standard,” Ebell said. "They have done everything right, and it is great for consumer choice.”

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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19 August, 2018

A Greenie dilemma







‘It’s A Nightmare’: American Indians Blast Western States For Waging A War On Coal

Coastal states are using environmental regulations to destroy American Indians’ ability to produce coal, gas, and forms of energy required to lift communities up and out of poverty, according to one prominent American Indian tribe.

A handful of western states — led by Washington — are using EPA regulations to hamstring coal production and transportation, CJ Stewart, a Crow Tribal member and co-founder of the National Tribe Energy Association, told the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Thursday.

Stewart’s tribe is dependent on coal production for its survival.

"Tribal economies face many obstacles to success, and currently the economy of the Crow Tribe is facing a critical crisis,” Stewart told Wyoming Republican Sen. John Barrasso and others on the panel. "While we are blessed with untold mineral wealth in oil, coal, and gas on the Crow reservation, regulatory roadblocks and political crisis force us to languish in poverty.”

"The tribe currently has an unemployment rate of 70 percent,” he added. "Imagine having a trillion dollars in mineral wealth under your feet and yet your people are starving and destitute before you. It’s a cruel nightmare.”

The Crow Tribe is heavily dependent on energy from coal and gas for its economic well-being. It has about 13,000 members and is the biggest employer on the reservation, which spans three states — Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming, Barrasso’s state.

Outside of coal revenues, the tribe relies on funding from states and the federal government to employ about 900 people.

Stewart blamed the Section 401 of the EPA’s Clean Water Act, which was intended to provide states with a way to apply key water quality protections to federally permitted activities.

The U.S. holds more of the world’s coal reserves than any other country, Stewart told the panel, adding that the coal "mined by the Crow Nation is preferred by high-efficiency, low-emission power plants” that are in operation and being built around the world.

Washington has come under intense scrutiny in recent months over Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee’s decision in January to deny coal mining company Lighthouse Resources a permit to build an export terminal to ship western coal to Asia.

Lighthouse sued Inslee and the State’s Department of Ecology for allegedly violating the Constitution’s commerce clause in denying the permit for what would be America’s largest coal export terminal.

SOURCE  







Climate Obsession: Blinding Us to Real Environmental Problems

Are there bigger environmental concerns than climate change? Certainly. But we don’t hear that from our daily news anchors and bulletins.

Why are we obsessed with climate change?

Not long ago, our interests were limited only to weather. But in recent decades, climate change has dominated our news columns.

There is not a day without news on the coming climate doomsday. The reason for this is simple — climate change has been sold by the mainstream media as the most disastrous environmental phenomenon at hand.

But we can safely declare that they’re wrong. The world is not in immediate danger of collapsing due to climate change.

Arctic and Antarctic sea ice volume has never been higher in the last 11,700 years (except during the Little Ice Age of the 16th and 17th centuries), there is no dangerous rise in sea levels, polar bears are healthy, global agricultural outputs are at their highest levels, and there are no signs of global temperatures rising to levels we have not witnessed in the past 2,000 years.

But how about the other environmental problems we are currently facing?

Deforestation is a critical problem, and there are ongoing efforts across the globe to plant more trees. The climate alarmists’ propaganda has largely revolved around closing coal plants and implementing renewables, not planting more trees!

If anything, climate change has actually helped us recover our forest areas. Increasing carbon dioxide concentration levels and relatively warmer temperatures have helped plants grow at a much faster pace than before and also helped expand their ranges into high latitudes and high altitudes previously too cold for them.

Another major problem is the mismanagement of solid waste, especially plastic. The billions of dollars that are being currently spent on climate change mitigation policies could actually have been used for research and better solid waste management.

Water crisis is another major issue in tropical countries of Africa and Asia. Climate alarmists unsuccessfully tried to attribute the existing water crisis to man-made climate change despite no conclusive evidence.

Water is a sensitive resource in many parts of Africa and Asia. Rather than investing billions of dollars in substandard, inefficient, and unreliable renewable technology like wind and solar, the money could have been put to use in large-scale micro and macro water conservation projects.
In fact, the climate change empire’s biggest obsession has been wind and solar. Little do the public know that these two sources are environmentally hazardous and already causing a lot of environmental health issues in China and elsewhere.

Climate change is not people’s most pressing concern. Climate alarmists have done injustice to the environment by diverting people away from real environmental issues that need immediate attention.

Even worse, they have been forcing countries to adopt technologies that are harmful to the environment while providing little return.

The climate obsession has surely blinded us from focusing our efforts towards finding solutions that address real-world environmental problems. Instead we are stuck with mere hypothetical theories about unproven false forecasts of our climate.

Perhaps it is time individuals and local communities move beyond the climate rhetoric of media and climate alarmists and get involved in real-world environmental causes that will leave a positive impact on the environment.

SOURCE  






Mining Regulations Hamper Access to America’s Own Rare Earth Metals and Minerals

Australia is however developing its rare earth mines rapidly

China is President Trump’s favorite whipping boy when it comes to blaming other nations for our chronic international trade deficits. Good economists – a category that assuredly does not include the president’s trade advisor Peter Navarro – don’t worry at all about the balance of trade with any single trading partner. We look for other logical reasons explaining why the United States buys more goods from one nation than we sell to it.

A case in point: the rare earth minerals purchased by the armed forces and critical to national defense. America’s supplies of those materials depend heavily on imports from China and other unfriendly countries.

As a matter of fact, the U.S. Department of Defense procures 750,000 tons of minerals and metals every year. Many of them are essential for manufacturing armaments ranging from bullets, turbine engines, advanced radar and electronic warfare systems, to missiles.

The United States imports half of 50 critical minerals and 100 percent of 21 of them. The imports are shipped from many countries in various corners of the globe – South America, Australia, Africa and Asia. But the largest share by far originates in China or from mines located elsewhere that are owned by Chinese companies.

You might think that the national defense posture of the United States depends on imports of minerals and metals to such a great extent because we’ve run out of them. But you’d be wrong. There is no domestic shortage. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the United States is home to $6.2 trillion worth of minerals reserves. The problem isn’t a lack of resources, but a rather a burdensome regulatory policy toward mining that has pushed minerals production to other countries, most notably China.

Washington’s knee-jerk reaction to the trade imbalance in so-called rare earth minerals and metals is to amend the National Defense Authorization Act to forbid acquisition from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea of minerals used in the production of three of the most militarily sensitive products – tungsten components, samarium-cobalt magnets, and neodymium-iron-boron magnets.

The House approved the ban in an amendment to the defense measure that’s awaiting action by a House-Senate conference committee. The amendment, sponsored by Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV), would also prohibit purchases by U.S. defense industries of eight other commodity minerals from adversarial nations. Copper, molybdenum, gold, nickel, lead, silver and certain fertilizer compounds would be added to a list of critical minerals.

Copper is essential in the production of jets, tanks, and warships; beryllium is used to enhance aircraft speeds and is vital for enemy surveillance technologies; rare earth minerals are used to manufacture night-vision goggles. The bill’s aim is to raise domestic prices and thereby stimulate investment in the domestic mining of these and other strategic minerals.

Trade protectionism always is a bad idea, although it would reduce imports and increase the quantities of minerals extracted here at home. But higher minerals prices caused by limiting supplies from overseas mines would add to an already bloated defense budget.

The good news is that Rep. Amodei’s amendment to the defense measure also would streamline the mine-permitting approval process from the 10 years it now takes to just two years, putting U.S. mining operations on the same regulatory footing as the requirements with which Australian and Canadian mines must comply. The Amodei plan includes formal review timelines and schedules for completing the permitting process, the goal being to lower the regulatory barriers that discourage domestic investment in critical minerals production.

Regulatory reform would help offset China’s comparative advantage in mining more effectively than banning imports from there or from any other country. U.S. dependence on imports of militarily critical minerals from unfriendly nations is less a problem of international trade policy than it is of domestic regulations that make it too costly to mine our own abundant domestic supplies.

Over-reliance on imported rare earth minerals, if it worries you, is our own fault. It can be fixed without inviting retaliation from our trading partners.

SOURCE  






Australian PM rolls over on climate nonsense

Australia is doing OK without a free trade agreement with the EU so lacking one is unlikely to be noticed. And it's very unlikely that the EU will tie trade to emissions reduction since they themselves are not meeting emission goals

Malcolm Turnbull's backflip on plans to legislate the Paris emissions reduction target could cost Australia billions.

Faced with the prospect of ten rebel MPs crossing the floor to vote against his National Energy Guarantee and a possible leadership challenge from Peter Dutton, Mr Turnbull capitulated in an attempt to secure his own political future.

But the move could spell the end of a proposed free trade agreement (FTA) between Australia and the European Union.

Wine and designer goods from Europe would no longer fall in price, and the current five per cent vehicle tariff and luxury car tax would remain.

Australia's pursuit of a free trade agreement between the two 'like-minded' partners was made on June 18 in response to a successful 2017 when the EU was Australia's largest source of foreign investment.

The agreement is intended to open up the market for any Australian purveyor or business person.

Greater access to the EU market would enable Australian farmers to avoid EU tariff quotas on beef, sheep meat, sugar, cheese and rice.

On Friday Mr Turnbull put the deal at risk by dropping the government's plans to legislate the 26 per cent Paris emissions reduction target.

The prime minister instead proposed setting emissions targets by regulation, The Australian reported.

The plan will formally go to Cabinet on Monday night and will be discussed by the coalition party room on Tuesday.

Advice from the competition regulator that power prices would not increase as a result of the commitment will also be required.

The backflip comes after a group of right-wing MPs - led by Tony Abbott - told Mr Turnbull they would vote against his energy policy.

The heart of the policy was the controversial target to cut emissions by 26 per cent by 2030. The Liberal and Nationals MPs who are against NEG and appear willing to cross the floor include Mr Abbott, Andrew Gee, Andrew Hastie, Barnaby Joyce, Craig Kelly, Kevin Andrews, George Christensen as well as Keith Pitt.

Since then the group have urged Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton to mount a leadership challenge following his 38th consecutive Newspoll loss to Bill Shorten's Labor Party.

While Mr Turnbull has the support of Simon Birmingham and Christopher Pyne, Mr Dutton is backed by Barnaby Joyce and Tony Abbott.

Mr Dutton confirmed on Friday he is considering all his options, including resigning his ministry and leading a mass exodus of Coalition MPs across the floor, Nine News reported.

Another Minister told Nine News: 'If the only way this thing gets up is with Labor's support then there is no way it will fly'.

'There are only two good outcomes here - either the energy policy is dead and we can go to the election fighting Labor on it, or Malcolm goes,' an unnamed MP told The Daily Telegraph.

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

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




17 August, 2018

Unexpected effects of climate change: worse food safety, more car wrecks

I hate to be cliche but this study is comparing apples and oranges.  It compares unusually hot days with permanently hot weather. 

I grew up in tropical Australia where our normal temperature range for most of the year was way higher than what Greenies fear for the rest of the world.

Our tempertures were often in the 90s F.  So were we lazybones who had lots of car crashes?  We would have heard all about it if it were so but we did not and when I moved to more temperate climes people's behaviour seemed no different from what I had been accustomed to. Though I suspect that we drank a bit more cold beer.  And here's the rub:  People MOVE there for the less stressful environment.  Lots of people like it hot.  So it cannot be too bad there can it!

What the Solons below overlook is that the human body has a considerable range of heat adaptation and if you are PERMANENTLY in a hot climate, you will adapt to it and the heat will become hardly noticed. 

We always laughed at news of fatal "heat waves" in Britain.  Our WINTER temperatures were similar to British "heatwaves" yet we just went about our business with no accounts of "heatwave" deaths at all.

So the prophecies below can be dismissed as ignorant of human diversity


On excessively hot days, there are more likely to be fatal car accidents and food safety problems, and police officers and government food inspectors tend to do less of their duties, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists, who analyzed data from across the United States, suggest that if the climate continues to change, by 2050 -- and in another 50 or so years beyond that -- our world may be less safe than it is today.

"The crux of the idea -- which is that weather affects how we perform our duties and how we go about our daily lives and the risks that we experience -- is indeed simplistic," said Nick Obradovich, co-author of the study and a research scientist at MIT's Media Lab.

What is not at all simple is that he and his colleagues used a "massive amount of data" to understand how temperature affects crucial government work, and this is the "first time, to our knowledge, that's been done."

"Hot temperatures are basically bad for human functioning," Obradovich said. This is the case across "a broad suite of things" that scientists have studied: Sleep quality, mood, mental health, risk of suicide and work productivity are all "harmed by hot temperatures."

So, do hot temperatures harm government workers' ability to do their jobs?

Obradovich and his colleagues analyzed data from more than 70 million police stops between 2000 and 2017 and more than 500,000 fatal motor vehicle crashes between 2001 and 2015. They also looked at nearly 13 million food safety violations (for restaurants and food production facilities) recorded across more than 4 million inspections between 2012 and 2016.

The researchers established the usual range of temperatures for cities and states and then examined "what happens if you have, all else equal, just an unusually warm day in that range?" Obradovich explained.

"So, let's say it's summer in Columbus, Ohio, and usually that day is, say, 90 degrees Fahrenheit, but today it is 92 degrees Fahrenheit."

Next, the research team asked, "on any given day, is this facility -- is this restaurant or food production facility -- inspected or not? And the probability that a facility is inspected goes down in hot temperatures," Obradovich said. "That's one of the main findings."

A similar picture emerged when the researchers examined traffic accidents and policing.

"What you see is that fatal crash incidence goes up in hot temperatures," Obradovich said. Here, an average temperature range of 30° C to 40° C (or 86° F to 104° F) produces an amplified risk of fatal car crashes of half a percentage point, the study finds.

"It also goes up in particularly cold temperatures, but you see a sharper increase in the hot temperature range," he said.
"So people are more likely to have a fatal crash in hot temperatures, but also, the probability of traffic stops -- the number of traffic stops that are conducted in a county on a given day when it is hot -- goes down," Obradovich said.

SOURCE  






New Docs Suggest EPA Staff Worked With Lobbyists To Thwart Repealing Obama-Era Fuel Regs

New documents show Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) comments critical of the Trump administration’s agenda were sent to the White House by an official whose name appeared in recently revealed emails suggesting agency staff colluded with lobbyists opposed to another deregulatory plan.

William Charmley, the director of the Assessment & Standards division at EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality, sent at least two emails to White House officials in recent months with analysis critical of a Trump administration deregulatory effort.

One email sent June 18 included an EPA memo that criticized key aspects of the Trump administration’s plan to roll back Obama-era greenhouse gas emissions standards for cars and trucks.

The memo sought "to soften the government’s proposal to ease vehicle emission standards,” according to Bloomberg, which first reported on the document Tuesday. EPA officials also "repeatedly questioned assumptions in NHTSA’s draft of the plan,” Bloomberg reported.

For example, the memo sent by Charmley noted the "proposed standards are detrimental to safety, rather than beneficial,” contradicting EPA and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) public claims the rule would save 12,000 lives from fatal accidents.

EPA officials also disagreed with the "changes in prices, fuel economy, and other attributes expected to result” from increased new car sales from rolling back fuel economy rules, the memo noted.

EPA and NHTSA jointly announced a plan in August to roll back Obama-era climate regulations on cars that aimed to achieve an average fuel economy of over 50 miles per gallon by 2025.

The administration said suspending those rules would save money and lives by making safer cars more affordable.

"These emails are but a fraction of the robust dialogue that occurred during interagency deliberations for the proposed rule,” EPA spokesman John Konkus said in an emailed statement.

"EPA is currently soliciting comments on eight different alternative standards and we look forward to reviewing any new data and information,” Konkus said.

However, this is not the first time Charmely has appeared in a public release of documents. His name also came up in emails released earlier in 2018 suggesting Michigan-based EPA officials colluded with trucking lobbyists to undermine the Trump administration’s agenda.

Charmely emailed with Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association (EMA) lobbyist Matthew Spears about a study used by opponents of EPA plans to repeal Obama-era rules on glider trucks, according to emails obtained by JunkScience.com publisher Steve Milloy.

In the emails, Charmley tells Spears the anti-glider study was nearing completion and laid out positions taken by trucking industry opponents of gliders.

The study was never sanctioned by EPA leadership, was not peer-reviewed and bore no official agency markings, but environmentalists and industry opponents of glider kits — trucks with used engines — used it to bolster their case.

Emails show Volvo lobbyist Steven Berry worked with EPA career officials to procure gliders for the study, and Charmley was also contacted by Volvo lobbyist Susan Alt about opposition letters to glider kit deregulation.

Alt somehow obtained a copy of the EPA’s findings, which she touted during a December 2017 public hearing on EPA’s proposal to repeal regulations on glider kits. It’s unclear how she got the study, which was never publicly released.

Four federal lawmakers asked EPA’s Office of Inspector General to investigate communications Charmley and other officials had with opponents of repealing glider kit regulations put in place by the Obama administration in 2016.

"When EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt repealed the current glider rule, career employees at the EPA communicated with the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) with the intent of eliminating the glider industry,” four GOP lawmakers, led by Rep. Bill Posey of Florida, wrote to EPA Inspector General Arthur Elkins in June.

"In our opinion, EPA’s conduct undermines the current Administration’s policies and prevents the repeal of the rule,” Republicans wrote.

SOURCE  






Nir Shaviv: The missing link between exploding stars, clouds and climate on Earth

Nir Shaviv is co-author along with Henrik Svensmark and others of a major new paper in Nature Communications titled Increased ionization supports growth of aerosols into cloud condensation nuclei. He has a write up at his Sciencebits blog. Here’s the introduction:

Our new results published today in nature communications provide the last piece of a long studied puzzle. We finally found the actual physical mechanism linking between atmospheric ionization and the formation of cloud condensation nuclei. Thus, we now understand the complete physical picture linking solar activity and our galactic environment (which govern the flux of cosmic rays ionizing the atmosphere) to climate here on Earth though changes in the cloud characteristics. In short, as small aerosols grow to become cloud condensation nuclei, they grow faster under higher background ionization rates. Consequently, they have a higher chance of surviving the growth without being eaten by larger aerosols. This effect was calculated theoretically and measured in a specially designed experiment conducted at the Danish Space Research Institute at the Danish Technical University, together with our colleagues Martin Andreas Bødker Enghoff and Jacob Svensmark.

Background:

It has long been known that solar variations appear to have a large effect on climate. This was already suggested by William Herschel over 200 years ago. Over the past several decades, more empirical evidence have unequivocally demonstrated the existence of such a link, as exemplified in the examples in the box below.

The fact that the ocean sea level changes with solar activity (see Box 1 above) clearly demonstrates that there is a link between solar activity climate, but it can be used to quantify the solar climate link and show that it is very large. In fact, this "calorimetric” measurement of the solar radiative forcing is about 1 to 1.5 W/m2 over the solar cycle, compared with the 0.1-0.2 W/m2 change expected from just changes in the solar irradiance. This means that a mechanism amplifying solar activity should be operating—the sun has a much larger effect on climate than can be naively expected from just changes in the solar output.

Over the years, a couple of mechanisms were suggested to explain the large solar climate link. However, one particular mechanism has accumulated a significant amount of evidence in its support. The mechanism is that of solar wind modulation of the cosmic rays, which govern the amount of atmospheric ionization, and which in turn affect the formation of cloud condensation nuclei and therefore how much light do the clouds reflect back to space, as we now explain.

Cosmic Rays are high energy particles originating from supernova remnants. These particles diffuse through the Milky Way. When they reach the solar system they can diffuse into the inner parts (where Earth is) but lose some energy along the way as they interact with the solar wind. Here on Earth they are responsible for most of the ionization in the Troposphere (the lower 10-20 km of the atmosphere where most of the "weather” takes place). We now know that this ionization plays a role in the formation of cloud condensation nuclei (CCNs). The latter are small (typically 50nm or larger) aerosols upon which water vapor can condense when saturation (i.e., 100% humidity) is reached in the atmosphere. Since the properties of clouds, such as their lifetime and reflectivity, depends on the number of CCNs, changing the CCNs formation rate will impact Earth’s energy balance.

The full link is therefore as follows: A more active sun implies a lower CR flux reaching Earth and with it, lower ionization. This in turn implies that fewer cloud condensation nuclei are produced such that the clouds that later form live shorter lives and are less white, thereby allowing more solar radiation to pass through and warm our planet.

SOURCE  





Germany’s Failed Climate Goals. A Wake-Up Call for Governments Everywhere

Germany, the nation that did more than any other to unleash the modern renewable-energy industry, is likely to fall short of its goals for reducing harmful carbon-dioxide emissions even after spending over 500 billion euros ($580 billion) by 2025 to overhaul its energy system.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is grappling with the implications of failing to sufficiently raise the renewable share. Those may include extending the life of the most polluting fossil-fuel plants and scaling back future climate pledges under the landmark Paris Agreement, negotiated by more than 190 countries in 2015.

A shortfall in Germany is an ominous signal for other nations struggling to reach their own targets. Emboldened by its prowess in engineering and a consensus across all political parties in favoring green energy, Germany was the first major economy to make a big shift in its energy mix toward low-carbon sources.

Germany’s emissions miss should act as a "wake-up” call to all countries, said Gail Whiteman, professor of environment sustainability at the U.K.’s Lancaster University. "It does not necessarily mean that China or India or even the U.S.A. can’t cut their emissions. The key point is that we need a new kind of climate leadership, both at the nation-state level and across all other actors including companies and mayors.”

Falling short on greenhouse-gas goals has implications for the planet. Scientists have linked the heatwave in the Northern Hemisphere this season to climate change. Higher temperatures shut down power plants across Europe, ignited forest fires in California and shrank glaciers atop Sweden’s highest mountain.

That’s worried scientists, who fear they may have underestimated the impact of rising carbon emissions. "The human fingerprint on rising temperatures was clear in the heatwave this year,” said Michael Mann, a professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University.

"Stalled weather systems caused by a weakening and changing jet stream are probably playing with the unprecedented weather extremes we’re seeing around the world, with human-caused climate change playing a likely role here,” Mann said.

Germany stepped up as a leader on climate change at the start of the century, pioneering a system of subsidies for wind and solar farms that sparked a global boom in manufacturing the technologies.

Merkel, who as environment minister in the 1990s sketched some of the first international climate deals organized by the United Nations, in 2007 pledged to slash emissions by 40 percent by 2020 compared to 1990 levels. She backed that up with more than 100 measures in order to meet that goal. The reductions Germany achieved didn’t have a big impact on the picture for global emissions because of an increase in emissions from developing nations.

"At the time they set their goals, they were very ambitious,” recalled Patricia Espinosa, the lead United Nations envoy on climate change. "It was a political statement that the chancellor was trying to make. What happened was that the industry—particularly the car industry—didn’t come along. Technically they can do it. Economically they can do it. But it’s political.”

Even without hitting the targets, Germany’s energy agenda is having a big impact on the mix of fuels used to generate electricity. Renewables are close to replacing coal as the primary source, and natural gas use is declining. The real problem is that Germany is also also trying to phase out nuclear reactors, a response to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi meltdown in Japan. And with the 2020 goals looking like a stretch, there’s increasing concern that tighter goals the country is planning for 2030 will be completely out of reach.

"The challenge looks really difficult,” said Andreas Loeschel, head of the government commission monitoring Germany’s energy transition. "There was too much confidence that renewables would do the trick. It’s about getting dirty energy out of the mix.”

Shutting down nuclear plants is leaving Germany short of generation plants that can work on the breezeless dark days in winter when wind farms and solar plants won’t provide much to the grid—and demand is at its peak. Another problem: When it’s windy and bright, the grid is so flooded with power that prices in the wholesale market sometimes drop below zero.

The result is a puzzle for politicians. The Bundestag enacted legislation to make sure climate targets are hit, including stringent rules governing energy use, a new building code to make buildings carbon neutral and a utility bill charge that would subsidize investment in green energy.

But grid managers need to keep the lights on. To do that, some big generators like RWE AG are anticipating the government may have to allow some coal plants to remain working longer than ministers would like.

Other nations are looking at how Germany acts if only because many other big polluters have a bigger problem in making reductions. Germany’s economy is dominated by services that require less energy and produce less carbon than places tilted toward industry and manufacturing. China, which is the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, has a larger share of its economy tied to factories and therefore will find it harder to make reductions.

SOURCE  






Sydney rock oysters getting smaller as oceans become more acidic due to climate change

EVERYTHING is caused by climate change!  The study behind the article below does not yet appear to be online. None of my usual search techniques located it anyway.  So I am a bit handicapped in commenting on it. 

I would for instance like to know details of the survey technique they used to arrive at their conclusion that Sydney oysters are  shrinking.  Without representative sampling no generalizations are possible.  My bet is that they did not do comprehensive and representative sampling.

But in the absence of that information, we can still detect some dubious conclusions.  If there has been a decline, how do we know it is due to global warming?  We do not know.  There could be many other causes of the effect.  The most obvious alternative cause would be disease.  Oysters are prone to all sorts of disease stressors: QX disease, POMS disease and many more.  And given the frequency of such attacks there are probably some as yet undetected diseases at work.

Oyster farmers believe that acidic runoff from the land adversely affect oysters.  Susan Fitzer says that has recently been reduced but again I would like details of that assertion and the surveys on which it is based.

And sewage runoff is known to affect oysters.  And there seems little doubt that the breakneck expansion of the Sydney population is putting a lot more sewage into the ocean. (Yes. Sydney does do that).  Could that adversely affect oysters?

And the alleged acidity is in fact reduced alkalinity. Does any level of alkalinity affect oysters?  I can't see why it should.

And the "acidity" is said to be a result of increased global warming.  But, according to the satellites,  global temperatures have been  falling for the last couple of years. 

Furthermore the entire prediction that acidity will increase in the oceans is deliberately dishonest. If, as Warmists predict, the world will warm, that will make the oceans warmer too. And as water warms it OUTGASES CO2, as every drinker of coca cola can observe. Those bubbles in your coke are outgassed bubbles of CO2, outgassed as the drink warms. And less CO2 means less carbonic acid. So a warming ocean will become more ALKALINE.

The Warmists try to have it both ways, saying the oceans will be both warmer and more acidic.  But that flies in the face of basic and easily demonstrable physics.  But they are only pretend scientists so I guess that is OK

And we read here that  ancient planktonic foraminifer shells were still going strong at CO2 levels 5 times higher than today. That sounds like a good augury for oyster shells.

So I think we can say with some confidence that the causal chain suggested by Susan Fitzer is rubbish on a number of counts


The famous Sydney rock oyster is shrinking as oceans become more acidic, new research has found.

In news that will rock seafood lovers, a study released overnight by academics in the UK found oysters in New South Wales have become smaller and fewer in number because of coastal acidification.

It’s part of what researchers fear is a worldwide trend driven by climate change and coastal runoff.

Headed by University of Stirling academic Susan Fitzer, the study looked at oyster leases at Wallis Lake and Port Stephens, both on the NSW coast north of Sydney.

They make up the two largest Sydney rock oyster production areas in NSW.

The study found the oysters’ diminishing size and falling population is due to acidification from land and sea sources, part of a global trend.

"Sydney rock oysters are becoming smaller and their population is decreasing as a result of coastal acidification,” Fitzer said.

"The first thing consumers will notice is smaller oysters, mussels and other molluscs on their plates, but if ocean acidification and coastal acidification are exacerbated by future climate change and sea level rise, this could have a huge impact on commercial aquaculture and populations around the world.”

The risk to oyster populations around the globe from soil runoff has long been recognised.

In 2014 oyster farmers in Port Stephens released an industry-driven environmental management policy which recognised that damage to oyster leases from the drainage from acid-sulphate soils was both "likely” to occur and "severe” in consequence.

But Fitzer’s research argues that run-off is not caused by agricultural activity and is rather the consequence of the impacts of climate change.

"A lot of work has been done near to Australia’s oyster fisheries to mitigate the impact of sulphate soils causing acidification, and there has been a marked decline in levels,” she said.

"The run-off from sulfate soils aren’t produced by agricultural activity, they occur as a natural result of climate change-driven increases in rainfall and sea-level rise.

"But the trend persists and small changes in pH are having a huge impact on these molluscs.”

Increased acidification affects oyster growth by limiting the amount of carbonate in the water.

"Acidic water is damaging oysters’ ability to grow their shells. We see lots of disorder in the calcite layers, because there isn’t enough carbonate in the water for the oysters to draw on for optimal shell formation and growth,” Fitzer said.

"This is the first time that the Sydney rock oysters’ shell crystallography has been studied, and we now know disruption to this process could have a significant impact on Australian aquaculture,” she said.

Fitzer’s research was published in the Journal of Ecology and Environment.

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 August, 2018

BBC’s Blatant Bias On Ridiculous Global Warming Claims In Full Force

Anyone who thinks that the BBC any longer pays the slightest attention to its statutory obligation to report only with "accuracy and impartiality” should have heard two items on last Tuesday’s Today programme on Radio 4, each so one-sidedly propagandist that they made a complete mockery of the BBC Charter.

It was inevitable in light of the recent heat waves that the BBC would rush to publicise the "Hothouse Earth” report, in which a group of global warming zealots claimed that world temperatures are now on the verge of sending the climate spiraling out of control.

Unless we comply with the 2015 Paris climate accords (or possibly even if we do) and allow an environmentalist world government to bring about a "total re-orientation” of human behavior, an apocalypse is likely.

First interviewed was one of the report’s authors, who made the astonishing claim, completely unchallenged, that, thanks to our burning of fossil fuels, we are now seeing "the highest temperatures on Earth since the last ice age”.

It has long been established by proper science that in the Holocene Optimum, which followed the end of that last glaciation 12,000 years ago, parts of the Earth, for three millennia, were often far hotter than they are today.

But next, we only had a senior official of the UN body which organized the Paris conference to echo this message in spades.

What, of course, we never hear from the BBC is that the Paris accord was no more than empty wishful thinking.

The latest official figures from China show that, as already the world’s greatest CO2 emitter, it is still building evermore coal-fired power stations – exactly as most non-Western countries indicated was their intention just before Paris.

Even the accord conceded that CO2 levels would continue to rise after 2015 to 40 percent above their 2005 level.

SOURCE  







Ryan Zinke Torches Climate Change Narrative In Push To Save Forests From Wildfires

Here in the town dubbed the "gateway to the Sierras,” the haze from the Ferguson Fire is fading as Yosemite National Park prepares to reopen, but the debate over how to stop wildfires from razing the state again next year continues to smolder.

California’s catastrophic wildfire season has illuminated the yearslong stalemate between those who want to cut back the overgrown, beetle-infested national forests and environmentalists who have axed efforts to fell more trees, blaming the destructive fires on climate change.

Now the Trump administration is moving to break the logjam. As he tours one California fire site after another this summer, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has pressed for more active forest management while throwing cold water on the climate-first approach.

"I’ve heard the climate change argument back and forth,” Mr. Zinke told KCRA3 in Sacramento on Sunday. "This has nothing to do with climate change. This has to do with active forest management.”

His comments fueled the ire of the environmental movement, including the Center for Western Priorities, which accused him of "either being willfully ignorant or purposely deceptive.”

"Any politician ignoring the role a warming climate plays in record-setting wildfire seasons loses all credibility as an honest broker,” said center deputy director Greg Zimmerman. "Instead, Zinke is in California using an ongoing natural disaster to push an unpopular political agenda.”

Elsewhere, Mr. Zinke has insisted that no matter what your take on global warming, the light-touch approach to thinning the national forests is doing more harm than good.

Wildfires have devastated 695,313 acres in California this year. The Mendocino Complex Fire, the largest in state history and one of nine major blazes still roiling the state, was 70 percent contained Monday after having burned 331,339 acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

In West Redding, where the massive Carr Fire was 61 percent contained Monday after having burned 201,680 acres, Mr. Zinke said that "we’re going to actively manage our forests, reduce the fuel load, and make sure that when we do replant, we replant diversity of species.”

"The president’s right. This is an example of, we have to actively manage our forests,” the interior secretary said in a video from The Sacramento Bee. "I’ve heard the argument of climate change. It doesn’t matter whether you believe or don’t believe in climate change. What is important is that we manage our forests.”

In December, the U.S. Forest Service announced that California had set a record with 129 million dead trees on 8.9 million acres, the result of a five-year drought and beetle-kill, but that its tree mortality task force had removed only about 1 million.

Meanwhile, the logging industry has continued its free fall, with timber harvesting dropping by 80 percent in the past 40 years, as projects in the national forests are killed or delayed by "frivolous litigation from radical environmentalists who would rather see forests and communities burn than see a logger in the woods,” as Mr. Zinke put it in a Thursday op-ed.

Environmentalists have swung back by accusing the administration of using the wildfires as a pretext to prop up the ailing timber industry.

Kirin Kennedy, Sierra Club associate legislative director for lands and wildfire, accused the Trump administration of continuing to "exploit wildfires in California for political gain.”

"[I]nstead of addressing or even acknowledging climate change’s role in exacerbating wildfires, the administration is using fire as cover to serve special interests,” Ms. Kennedy said. "Moving to increase logging and weaken protections for endangered species like salmon risks local and outdoor economies and ignores the need to reduce climate pollution, which is absolutely essential to ensuring the long-term safety of our communities.”

The National Resources Defense Council said the massive California wildfires "underscore the need for California to double down on our convictions on climate” by fighting, for example, the Trump administration’s recent move to lower federal fuel-efficiency standards on vehicles.

President Trump took heat last week for conflating the California water shortage and wildfires in a tweet blaming activists for diverting water supplies needed to fight fires. Fire specialists say a lack of water isn’t the problem.

Mr. Trump made it clear he wanted to see more active forest management by saying, "Must also tree clear to stop fire from spreading!”

Rep. Tom McClintock, a California Republican who toured the Ferguson Fire last month with Mr. Zinke, argued that devoted climate change activists should be the first to embrace more timber harvesting in the name of thinning the national forests.

He cited the greenhouse gas emissions from out-of-control wildfires as well as the beneficial carbon-absorbing properties of healthy trees. A well-maintained forest in the Sierras should have 80 to 100 trees per acre, he said, but that figure is closer to 300 per acre in the national forests.

"Accepting their premise for the sake of argument, forest fires and dead trees make a mockery of all the laws aimed at reducing carbon emissions,” said Mr. McClintock. "A burning or decaying forest releases enormous amounts of carbon into the air. A growing forest absorbs enormous amounts of carbon.”

Unfortunately, said Mr. McClintock, environmentalists are "perfectly all right with dead forests that are ultimately consumed by wildfire. That’s what their policies have produced.”

A former congressman from Montana, Mr. Zinke has made forest health a priority. He issued a secretarial order last year directing the department to "adopt more aggressive practices” to head off catastrophic wildfires, including "robust fuels reduction and pre-suppression techniques.”

"We have dead and dying timber,” he said. "The density of our forests is too high. The fuel load is too great.”

SOURCE  






UK: Bob Ward Complains To IPSO–And Loses!

IPSO = Independent Press Standards Organisation

Readers will probably recall the following Booker piece from last January:

"One of Shakespeare’s persistent themes in Hamlet is that when people set out to fool others, it will eventually catch up with them. Repeatedly he emphasises that "purposes mistook fall on their inventors’ heads”, that such people end up "hoist with their own petard”, or get caught like a "woodcock” in their own trap.

There was a delightful example of this on our letters page last week, when that well-known propagandist for global warming, Bob Ward, tried to challenge what I had written about the recent series of unusually cold winters in North America.

The winters of 2007-08 and 2013-14, which Mr Booker highlights as particularly cold, were respectively only the 68th and 33rd coldest since records began in 1901. The mean temperature for the US in December 2017 was above average.Bob Ward, letters

Mr Ward is employed by the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics, sponsored by a climate change-obsessed billionaire, and challenges anyone who publicly questions global warming orthodoxy. His point last week was to claim that, contrary to what I had written, recent US winters have not been unusually cold at all.

But the only evidence he could cite to support his point was the latest figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), suggesting that seven out of the past 10 US winters have in fact been "warmer than average”.

What Mr Ward has not said here is that, in a way which has aroused widespread suspicion, NOAA’s figures have lately been significantly "adjusted”, to suggest that several famously severe recent winters, such as those in 2008 and 2014, were not unusually cold by the standards of the 20th century.

Several expert bloggers have been analysing the surprising picture given by NOAA’s new figures, as in a post by Paul Homewood on his blog Notalotofpeopleknowthat headed "US cold winters mysteriously disappear”. Indeed, this is only the latest in a whole series of similarly suspect adjustments made to official US temperature figures in recent years, which I have described as one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.

Even odder in this instance, however, was the way Mr Ward failed to mention the continuing stream of academic papers and other interventions by scientists on his own side of the argument trying to explain how these freezing US winters are in fact further proof of global warming.

Their theory, as I mentioned in the item Mr Ward objected to, is that a warming Arctic is pushing the jet stream further south, to grip North America in a swirling "polar vortex” of sub-zero air, snow and ice. All of these papers are predicated on the claim that recent US winters have indeed been exceptionally cold.

Mr Ward may happily ignore all this, preferring to rest his case only on those questionable NOAA figures. But what makes it indeed delightful is that the warmists themselves have now come up with two wholly contradictory ways to explain why the runaway global warming in which they all believe should repeatedly be giving the people of North America such a horribly cold time. Only one of them pretends that this isn’t really happening at all."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/01/20/global-warming-theorists-tripping-explain-americas-cold-winters/

Bob Ward took umbrage to this and decided to complain to IPSO, the Press Regulator, firing off a typically long winded, rambling and inchoate multipage letter.

Ward was particularly vexed that Booker should listen to a "mere blogger”, rather than NOAA or the Met Office! But his ramble boiled down to just two simple points, which he claimed had been inaccurately reported:

1) Some recent US winters had been exceptionally cold.

2) NOAA’s official temperature record had been adjusted with the effect of making recent years appear milder than the actual record suggested.

After being requested to help, I strongly advised the Telegraph to ignore most of Ward’s rant, which simply muddied the waters, and instead focus on those two issues.

It was easy to show that both of Booker’s claims were accurate, as I myself had shown in a series of posts around the time. I submitted a suggested a draft response to the Telegraph, based on these posts.

IPSO have subsequently considered Ward’s complaint and firmly rejected it. Below are their findings:

Findings of the Committee

17. Clause 1 does not prevent a newspaper from publishing controversial opinions on topics which continue to be divisive, such as the existence or impact of climate change. Newspapers are entitled to publish opinions on such topics, and communicate this information in an accessible way, provided that it takes care not to do so in an inaccurate or misleading way.

18. The newspaper provided a number of examples of coverage, from both within and outside of the scientific community, which commented on the cold weather which had affected areas of North America over recent winters, including the winters of 2008 and 2014. The columnist was entitled to rely on this coverage to form the basis for their claim that recent winters in North America had been unusually cold and there was no failure to take care over the accuracy by doing so. The complainant had argued that winter temperatures should be determined by considering seasonal mean temperatures over a three month period using data from a specific landmass. However, in the context of an opinion piece within a publication for general public consumption, the Committee did not establish that readers would have been misled in a significant way, where it was a matter of public record that areas of North America had experienced periods of extreme cold weather over recent winter months. There was no breach of Clause 1 on this point.

19. It was a matter of public record that "adjustments” had been made by NOAA on raw climate data to take into account differences in how, when and where these measurements had been taken; it was not in dispute that some of these adjustments had resulted in the temperature measurements from weather stations to increase. The columnist had questioned whether it was appropriate for the adjustments to have been made on the raw data; they did not comment further on why these adjustments had been made, nor did they interrogate the validity of the corrective action which had been taken by NOAA. The columnist had commented that the adjustments were "suspect” and "questionable”. The complainant strongly disagreed. However, this was an opinion which the columnist was entitled to express and he did not state that raw climate data had been tampered with by NOAA, as suggested by the complainant.

20. The columnist was entitled to reflect critically on the corrective adjustments which NOAA had made to raw data records, in circumstances where it was a matter of public record that some of these adjustments had resulted in temperature measurements from some weather stations being increased. The Committee did not establish that the columnist’s discussion of these adjustments represented a failure to take over the accuracy of the article, nor did it establish that the columnist’s discussion of this issue was significantly misleading or inaccurate, such as to require correction. There was no breach of the Code.

Conclusions

21. The complaint was not upheld.

https://www.ipso.co.uk/rulings-and-resolution-statements/ruling/?id=01570-18

In simple terms, IPSO found that both of Booker’s claims were essentially correct, that there had been some exceptionally cold winters in the US, and that NOAA’s temperature record had been adjusted.

Ward is, of course, paid to clamp down on any dissent from the global warming party line; that is his job. I have now been involved in rebutting at least four of these sort of spurious complaints from Ward, Richard Black and others. On each occasion, they have gone away with their tail between their legs.

However, their objective is to discourage in the first place articles which question global warming dogma. While they are paid to write long rambling complaints, journalists and editors have better things to do.

You may also have noticed how often the likes of Bob Ward get to have letters printed in the press. Editors find it easier to do this than spend time fighting a complaint.

It is worth comparing this situation with the BBC, who regularly and blatantly publish fake climate claims, without fear of any comeback.

SOURCE  






WHERE'S THE WARMING IN JAPAN? JMA data for rural stations show NONE!

A blatant case of NASA corruptly ignoring weather stations that don't suit them



An analysis of the rural-sited Japanese weather stations used by the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) shows there’s been no warming at all over the the past 2 decades or more.

Strangely many of these stations, which are practically unimpacted by data-corruptive urban sprawl, are no longer used by NASA.

For example, NASA quit using the rural Fukaura station back in 1990. Up to that point Fukaura was cooling notably. What follows is the NASA chart for Fukaura:

The same, for example, is true for Nikko.

What follows below is a list of the rural stations I examined, which have a Brightness Index (BI) of 10 or less. The far right column shows the period they were used by NASA.

My earlier enquiries about stations sent to NASA via the Internet went without any answer. Perhaps they don’t reply to foreign requests. I don’t know.

The next chart below is the geographical plot of these rural sited stations. As you see they are all well scattered across the country:

JMA data in fact show no warming

What follows below are temperature charts for each station, using the data from the JMA, arranged in more or less alphabetical order. On some charts I plotted more than one station.

Over 90% of rural stations show cooling or no trend

Of the 22 stations plotted, 20 show no change or some modest cooling over the past two or more decades – that’s more than 90%. Only two stations show some warming, but only a very modest amount.

More HERE  (See the original for links, graphics etc.)





Australia: Token battery being installed to back up wind power

This is just a stunt for propaganda purposes.  If the wind stops blowing the battery will be capable of filling in only for a matter of minutes

Wind power producer Infigen Energy will add battery storage to its Lake Bonney wind farm in South Australia to better be able to respond to industrial customers wanting renewable energy but without risks around intermittent supply.

The $38 million project, including $10 million in state and federal funding, will see a 25 megawatt, 52 megawatt-hour Tesla Powerpack battery installed adjacent to the 278.5 MW wind farm in the state's south-east near Mount Gambier.

It follows the landmark 100 MWh Tesla battery, the world's largest lithium battery, installed at the Hornsdale project in SA last year after a bet between billionaire Elon Musk and Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes.

Infigen last year ramped up its efforts to seal electricity sales contracts directly with commercial and industrial (C&I) customers, signing up Adelaide Brighton for supply from Lake Bonney.

Chief executive Ross Rolfe said the battery investment would enable Infigen to expand that side of the business, as well as providing other benefits in cutting costs for frequency control services and for grid stability in the system more broadly.

"We have already contracted a proportion of our Lake Bonney output into the C&I customer market in South Australia and this enables us to contract more of that capacity and manage the intermittency of production risk associated with that," Mr Rolfe said in an interview.

Stabilising the grid

He said that after deciding in 2016 to diversify its products, Infigen had examined alternative options to firm up intermittent wind generation, including pumped hydro storage and accessing fast-start gas generation. It decided that a battery was the best option, at least for South Australia, which is heavily dependent on renewables supply.

Ivor Frischknecht, chief executive of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which is providing $5 million for the project, said battery storage is becoming a key component of transitioning to a renewables-based energy system. ARENA is also helping fund a battery soon to be brought online in Dalrymple, South Australia, and two grid-scale systems under construction in western Victoria.

"It is clear that grid scale batteries have an important role in stabilising the grid," Dr Frischknecht said.

South Australian energy minister Dan van holst Pellekaan said Infigen's battery project is "welcome news to businesses in the state as it will increase the competitiveness of electricity prices for customers with high energy demand".

Mr Rolfe noted that the project wouldn't have been economic without the $10 million of taxpayer funding.

"The price of batteries still needs to decline, in our view, further before it's possible to look at batteries without some form of support," he said.

"No doubt in due course it will get there, we just don't know when that will be."

Construction is due to start next month on the storage project, which Infigen said would allow it to "firm" at least an additional 18 MW of power.

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 August, 2018

The Greenie fairy tale

A clean and pure pristine primeval planet earth existed for a billion years in natural perfection, wholeness, and wholesomeness – unpolluted, untainted, untarnished and uncorrupted in the perfection of the harmony of nature. The geology, biology, and climatology were in a state of perfection. The climate was stable and unchanging with no extreme weather. Living creatures both plants and animals lived in peace and tranquility as essential elements of nature itself.

There was no ozone depletion, no climate change, no skin cancer, no hurricanes and no species extinction from bad weather. Modern day ecofearology is a yearning for this humanless state of nature – a yearning for a return to what the planet was like before humans came along.

Then the devil appeared in the form of humans who came on spaceships from outer space. Humans are not part of nature but an external force alien to nature and an abomination. They will soon turn this heavenly planet into a living hell with human activity because their nature is to consume and destroy.
At first the alien humans were relatively harmless living off the land as hunter gatherers in harmony with nature. But they were just biding their time and waiting for their numbers to grow. When their population reached 6 million, they made their first move for the conquest of the planet. It was a fundamental change in human behavior that has come to be called the Neolithic Revolution.

In the Neolithic Revolution, the humans gave up their eco-friendly hunter-gatherer lifestyle and cleared forests to build homes and farms and to grow crops and raise animals in an extensive and intensive land use change that would forever alter the ecology of the earth. The strategy was immensely successful for the humans who now commanded incredible wealth and power over all other life forms. Their numbers grew rapidly in a population explosion from 6 million to 60 million.

By the year 1750 the population of humans had surged to one billion. Their affluence from agriculture, tool-making, medical care, and new knowledge about the earth had rapidly increased their power against nature. But the greater and more devastating change was yet to come in the form of the Industrial Revolution made possible with the transition in their source of energy from animal power, wind, and running water to machines burning hydrocarbon fuels dug up from under the ground. This new found energy source and the machines gave them immense power. Nature would soon be at their mercy.

By the year 1950, the population of humans had more than doubled to 2.5 billion and more and more machines were invented so that almost everything the humans did was driven by fossil fueled machines. These included cars and trucks for surface transportation, fossil fueled ships for crossing the oceans, and fossil fueled aircraft for their conquest of the atmosphere. Nuclear bombs were invented, tested, and used. Space travel was opening up new tools and ways for humans to conquer nature. The Anthropocene was now in full force. Whereas humans had once been at the mercy of nature, the tables had been turned, and nature and the planet itself were now at the mercy of humans and human activity.

The consequences of these changes and of the implications of the complete capture of nature by humans for the ability of nature to sustain humans in the future are the primary concerns of the new science of Ecofearology. The science involves the study of nature and human activity as a way of protecting nature and managing nature to preserve its ability to sustain humans. It is based on EIGHT PRINCIPLES.

PRINCIPLE#1: There are no natural or cyclical changes on earth. All measured changes in nature are trends and all trends are human caused.

PRINCIPLE#2: The concentration of all chemicals in the atmosphere and oceans is important. If the concentration is going up it’s a bad thing and its accretion is caused by human activity. Higher concentrations of this thing will be the end of the world.

PRINCIPLE#3: If the concentration is going down it’s a bad thing and its depletion is caused by human activity. If we run out of this thing it will be the end of the world.

PRINCIPLE#4: Humans are not part of nature but space aliens that invaded this once pristine planet. The planet was fine until the dreaded humans arrived.

PRINCIPLE#5: All human caused trends lead to catastrophic results for the environment and by extension, the planet itself. It is not possible for a human caused trend to benefit the planet because humans are not part of nature but space aliens and unnatural.

PRINCIPLE#6: Human scientists can save the planet from the other humans because the impact of bad human intervention in nature can be undone only by good human intervention prescribed by human scientists because they know a lot of science and physics and stuff like that. Human intervention is necessary to save the planet from human intervention.

PRINCIPLE#7: Even if deniers find fault with the science of human caused catastrophe, we must ignore the deniers because we can’t take the chance that the scientists could turn out to be right.

PRINCIPLE#8: The human invaders of this once pristine planet are now the managers of nature and the operators of the planet. Therefore we humans must take care of nature and run the planet because nature can no longer take care of itself like it once did now that the human invaders are here.

SOURCE  






   
Study: Climate change could threaten dairy industry in Lancaster County

Lancaster County’s dairy farmers could be facing devastating drops in corn yields by 2050 because of global warming, according to a new research study.

 "If climate projections hold, it will threaten the dairy industry in Lancaster County,” said Heather Karsten, an associate professor of crop production ecology at Penn State.

That’s because extremely high summer temperatures in Lancaster County could mute key reproduction phases in corn plant growth, decreasing yields for a winter feed that is a linchpin in affordable dairy farming, Karsten said in an interview with LNP.

The extreme temperatures — which are projected to be higher in Lancaster County than anywhere else in the Northeast — not only could retard reproduction at a critical time but could result in corn plants that mature faster but grow smaller, she said.

"We need all that biomass because most corn is harvested for silage,” Karsten observed.

Irrigation more common?
It’s also possible that because of more frequent dry periods Lancaster County dairy farmers will have to use irrigation systems for their corn crops to be healthy, as is common in the Midwest, said Karsten, who headed the study’s research team.

SOURCE  






Climate change alarmism doesn’t help Lancaster county farmers

As if farmers aren’t already facing problems in the dairy industry, Penn State adds insult to injury by releasing a report stating climate change is going to devastate corn yields in Lancaster County by 2050. ("Study: Dairy in peril from climate shift,” June 27 LNP).

An alarmist study at best, the researchers are reporting a worst-case scenario, which then makes headlines in the local news. There is significant reason to question this study. It reveals, in fact, that this is just one of many possible climate change situations that could happen in Lancaster County over the next several decades, if anything happens at all.

"Depending on which climate scenario occurs,” Penn State associate professor Heather Karsten is quoted in the study, "we could see severe impacts on corn production in that major dairy area. Lancaster County is looking like it is going to experience more days with extreme temperature stress that will reduce corn yields.”

The study goes on to state that climate models show the average ambient temperature in the Northeast is projected to warm by about 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, which researchers are predicting will hinder reproduction of the corn plant. However, I do not believe the theory of climate change is settled science.

A 2012 study by Ohio State University pointed out that corn descended from a tropical grass and can tolerate exposures to adverse temperatures as high as 112 degrees for brief periods. Optimal daytime temperatures for corn typically range between 77 and 91 degrees, the study states.

Anyone who knows anything about growing corn knows this versatile crop thrives in long, hot, sun-filled days and moist conditions. In this area, corn is typically planted in late April and early May and then harvested anywhere from mid-August through September. Except for in the month of July, adding 5 degrees doesn’t get the average high temperature above 90 degrees here, according to U.S. climate data for Harrisburg. Of course, there will be swings both ways in temperature and rainfall from year to year, as we just experienced.

There are corn hybrids being used today that are heat- and drought-tolerant. I would expect that by 2050 there will be even more scientific crop improvements to help farmers deal with potential weather changes. The agriculture industry and its farmers have adjusted to many adverse conditions over the years, like insect and weed pressures. If climate change becomes a threat, no doubt the industry will adjust accordingly.

Though corn is widely grown and used as animal feed, there are other foodstuffs that can supplement the crop in a feed ration. For years on my family’s farm, we have been feeding our dairy cattle recycled produce from grocery stores. Who’s to say something else won’t replace the corn plant entirely in our future?

While Lancaster County is known for its rich soils that can tolerate drier conditions, the area doesn’t often disappoint with necessary rain. But irrigation isn’t unheard of here, even though the Penn State study implies that the practice mostly occurs in the Midwest.

In drought years here in the late 1980s, my family irrigated several hundred acres of corn. Many produce farms in this area already currently irrigate their crops. Some farmers have irrigation equipment in place as a way to spread liquid manure. It wouldn’t be a far reach for them to water their crops if needed.

The study continues to propose double cropping with the expected longer growing season brought on by predicted climate change. Guess what? It’s already being done. For years, farmers have planted cover crops after corn to control soil erosion in the winter months and then take advantage of a nutritious feed source in the spring.

While Penn State’s researchers further declare in their study that higher temperatures could adversely affect cows, many barns in our county already are equipped to handle hot summers with tunnel ventilation, sprinkler systems and fans for cow comfort. Though cattle prefer cooler temperatures, any animals faced with extreme temperatures will remain healthy under good management.

As a dairy farmer whose occupation depends on closely following weather forecasts, I find it hard to believe that drastic weather predictions are being made for 34 years from now when meteorologists can’t tell me exactly what the weather will be next week. Developing policies based on varying climate change models that aren’t exact and projecting a "sky is falling” mentality is counterproductive to making sensible and sound policies that can help the agriculture industry feed our population into the future.

The current dairy crisis is significant and exists because of overproduction and lack of consumption. We need to address these economically driven problems in the agriculture industry right now. These overwhelming challenges are driving many farmers to the brink of bankruptcy or causing them to go out of business entirely.

These concerns are paramount compared with Penn State’s nebulous hype about climate change. This study isn’t helping farmers. It makes recommendations about farming practices already being implemented. Penn State needs to work with its food producers to come up with solutions to potential problems rather than promote a fearmongering study and further a misguided agenda.

SOURCE  





Tesla cars melt in the rain

A lot of things melt in the rain. Don't leave your cake out in it. But have you ever had a car bumper fall off? No? Two new owners of Tesla Model 3s say it has happened to them.

The rear bumper, or the bumper cover to be more precise, fell off during his inaugural drive home, says momentarily proud but now perturbed new Model 3 owner Rithesh Nair.

Nair says it appears the bumper cover separated from its screws, and the theory on Twitter goes that a piece of shielding was missing, torn or loose. Without it, rainwater got into the bumper cover, and the weight of accumulated water tore the plastic piece away.

There were reports of quality control issues, most notably one from CNBC, during the long, delayed Model 3 production runup, though recently Munro & Associates conducted a teardown of a Model 3 and pronounced it a "symphony of engineering."

No reply yet from Elon Musk. But late in the day, a Tesla official issued a statement: "We're setting an extremely high bar for Model 3, and what happened in this situation is not how we build our cars. We're investigating the issue to understand what caused it, and we are contacting our customers to resolve this and ensure they are satisfied."

SOURCE  





Australian Center-Right government still trying to square the circle

They claim they can deliver cheaper elecrity, renewable energy and reliable energy all at once

At last some good news for Malcolm Turnbull. He sure needs it.

So an ebullient Prime Minister and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg are delighted to have seen off the vehement attacks by Tony Abbott & Friends on the national energy guarantee. The Coalition party room debate was hardly a polite affair but the small if noisy minority opposed proved to be no more than that.

Even if much of the support was of the "yes, but ..." variety, as Abbott described it in a terse statement, it was more than enough to get through.

It's still far too early, however, to celebrate Turnbull's declaration of the need to "bring an end to the years of ideology and idiocy".

His ostensible target was Bill Shorten and Federal Labor with the Prime Minister putting public pressure on the Opposition to support the bill. Helpfully, that would also remove the government's need to simultaneously get the backing of all Coalition MPs in the House – which looks unlikely – and the permanently fractious cross bench in the Senate.

Despite the bluster from the Opposition leader about "a Frankenstein's monster of a policy" and the inevitable proposed amendments to increase the emissions reductions target, Labor is expected to finally vote for the government's version.

Labor knows it could always up the 26 per cent target on 2005 levels itself if it wins government. As well as bipartisan support providing greater investment certainty for the industry, the structure of the guarantee also provides a conveniently flexible policy for any new government that would inherit the same problems of permanently higher electricity prices.

There's no quick fix to that issue, of course. That's despite Labor's firm promise that its commitment to more renewable energy will miraculously produce lower prices and the Coalition's equally dubious premise the national energy guarantee will also automatically deliver this.

Yet the power market is so complicated that most voters will really just follow their prejudices while politicians on all sides try to exaggerate the benefits or, alternatively, the disastrous impact of particular policies on prices.

This translates into Abbott's jibe about "merchant banker gobbledygook" versus the magical thinking coming from much of the environmental movement and Labor.

Much simpler for voters to comprehend is the Opposition's ability to mock continued displays of Coalition division to foment public scepticism about what the Turnbull government really stands for.

"While Mr Turnbull goes around attacking Mr Abbott, Mr Turnbull is, in fact, giving in to a lot of Mr Abbott's values when it comes to climate change and energy," Shorten insists.

Hardly. Tony Abbott could hardly have been more passionately vocal about the insanity of the Coalition supporting the guarantee, for example. Yet Turnbull promotes it as the best way to finally resolve a "broken" national electricity market.

"Now is the time to provide the certainty and the investment climate that is going to see more generation and lower prices," according to the Prime Minister.

Actually, the greater political problem for the Coalition is that voters might actually believe this and expect lower power bills in the immediate future, even ahead of the next election. When that doesn't happen, they will be looking for someone to blame. Labor will be pointing the way. Step up the Coalition government, owners of the national energy guarantee.

Selling that as a solution that will work if given time is certainly possible for the Coalition. But the impact will be modest at best. Buyer beware the words: "downwards pressure on prices". The real answer is: "higher otherwise."

It is also a much tougher sell when Labor can just quote so many Coalition opponents deriding even the notion that the guarantee can have any impact whatever on reducing prices.

That's also why the Victorian government would be mad to block its establishment ahead of its own state election in November. Not when it can just keep blaming Coalition policy for not delivering on higher levels of renewables without have to take any of the blame for its own failings, particularly its refusal to allow any onshore gas exploration or development.

Yet the Andrews government seems to be so afraid of losing a few inner city seats to the Greens that nothing can be guaranteed about its willingness to trade off that risk against a national policy backed by almost the entire power industry and business groups.

The meeting of the Council of Australian Governments last week agreed to hold a phone hook-up of state energy ministers Tuesday evening after the policy had gone through the Coalition party room. But Victoria, along with the Labor government in Queensland, are still demanding a delay of several more weeks before they finally have to commit to the policy.

Over that period, Labor will try to embarrass the Coalition and bolster its own supporters by suggesting the price of Turnbull and Frydenberg getting internal agreement will be to use taxpayer funds to build new coal-fired power stations.

The Coalition will keep insisting any policy or support is "technology agnostic". Luckily, it now has the key recommendation from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to back this, suggesting the government can effectively become the buyer of last resort for longer term contracts for electricity in order to encourage private sector financing.

The Business Council of Australia makes the obvious point. Households and businesses will pay the price if political leaders continue to play politics.

"It's up to Victoria and Queensland, along with the other states and territories, to stop playing political games with people's power bills," it noted. That may be the ultimate in magical thinking.

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

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










14 August, 2018

Warming is good for flamingos!

In a feat attributed to the heat wave that swept across Europe, rare Andean flamingos at a wetlands reserve in Britain have laid eggs for the first time in 15 years.

The exotic birds are "fickle breeders” and can go years without nesting successfully, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in Slimbridge, England, said in a statement this past week.

But amid scorching temperatures on the Continent — which have spawned wildfires in England and Wales, melted glaciers in Austria and Sweden, and broken records in Portugal — a surprising thing happened at the reserve.

Six of the flock laid nine eggs, which Mark Roberts, the aviculture manager at the reserve, called "a wonderful and welcome surprise.”

"We’ve been encouraging the flock by helping them to build nests,” he said in the statement, "but there’s no doubt that the recent heat has had the desired effect.”

Unfortunately, the organization said, all the eggs were infertile, so no new Andean flamingos will emerge from this batch.

So in a bit of human meddling, caretakers decided to get the Andean birds in parenting mode: They took a few eggs from Chilean flamingos, "near relatives,” and planted them among the Andean birds, who became foster parents to new chicks, the reserve said.

A spokesman for the organization, which is based in Gloucestershire, said by phone on Saturday that the Andean flamingos were some of the oldest at Slimbridge, which describes itself as the only such reserve where all six flamingo species roam.

A few flamingos arrived in the 1960s, according to the reserve, and some of them have been there longer than staff members.

Both the Andean and Chilean flamingos are considered at risk of extinction by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The Chilean birds are described as "near threatened” because of egg-harvesting, hunting, disturbance, and the loss of habitat, while the Andean ones are called "vulnerable” because of past exploitation that shrank their population.

The heat wave broke in other parts of Europe, meanwhile, unleashing torrents of rain that caused flash flooding in France.

SOURCE  






Benefits Of Record CO2 levels: Record Harvests Reported In Numerous Countries

Following recent reports of record coffee harvests comes news that Ukraine, Argentina and the U.S. are expecting record corn and soyabean crops. It would appear that warmer years have been exceptionally good for global agriculture as stocks of cereal, rice and coarse grains all reached record levels.

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 8 (Reuters) – Argentina is expected to produce a record crop of wheat and corn during the 2018-19 season as farmers planted more hectares of both than in previous years, the Rosario grains exchange said on Wednesday.

Brazil Soyabean Production To Touch Record Levels In 2018/19
US forecasts record soyabean crop

The US government has forecast the largest soyabean crop in history thanks to a favourable growing season, putting more pressure on prices for a commodity that has already been hit by Chinese tariffs.

The US Department of Agriculture said the 2018 US soyabean crop would total 4.59bn bushels this autumn, up 4 per cent from last year’s record 4.39bn bushels. The forecast reflected a bumper yield of 51.6 bushels per acre and widespread plantings across the Midwest.

The estimate suggests that farmers will have plenty of soyabeans to sell, albeit at lower prices. The department said the US would still be storing 785m bushels of leftover soyabeans next summer, a forecast up 205m from last month…. The USDA also forecast a larger-than-expected corn crop of 14.6bn bushels, thanks in part to a record yield of 178.4 bushels per acre.

But harvests in Western Europe have been hit by drought conditions this year.

Southern Europe may salvage EU maize harvest but huge imports loom

Favourable prospects for maize in southern Europe could help offset damage from drought and heatwaves further north, but the EU is still expected to import a record amount to feed livestock following a poor wheat harvest, analysts said.

Widely followed analysts Strategie Grains on Thursday increased slightly their European Union grain maize crop forecast, as upgrades for countries like Romania balanced cuts in Germany or France.

SOURCE  





Welcome to Dark Age Britain: Anti-Frackers Demand Research Ban On Shale Gas

It was just a question of time before radical greens would demand an end to scientific research into fields and areas they categorically oppose. In the latest show of dark age mentalities in Green Britain, anti-fracking campaigners are demanding that a new scientific research centre in the North West of England should be banned from researching any issue that deals with shale gas. Welcome to the New Age of unreason and extremism.

Anti-frackers demand a proposed energy research centre near Chester concentrates on renewables but avoids investigations perceived as supporting the shale gas industry.

Government-funded plans envisage a site at Ince Marshes looking at shale gas as well as carbon capture and storage with a sister site in Glasgow focused on geothermal energy.

But Frack Free Dee want British Geological Survey (BGS), who will deliver the project, to drop the shale gas research element fearing its data will be used to support the fracking industry.

Hydraulic fracturing or fracking is the controversial method used to extract the gas from the shale layer with associated concerns around water and air contamination as well as earthquakes. And the government has made no secret of its intention to convince the public that fracking can be safe using independent research.

In a statement, Frack Free Dee said: "We do not support publicly-funded research into an already failed and discredited industry and call on the British Geological Survey to remove this aspect of their research programme at Ince Marshes. There are significant issues with BGS being seen to promote this industry, including loss of professional reputation as identified in their own strategy.

"Frack Free Dee would be supportive of those aspects of research which would remove our dependence upon fossil fuels, have a positive effect on our communities, and help our nation meet its climate change responsibilities.”

SOURCE  






George Soros Pushes for Facebook To 'Ban Anyone' Who Denies Global Warming

The infamous George Soros-funded Media Matters activist group has taken it upon themselves to push Facebook to ban anyone who dares to question global warming.

Following Facebook's recent purge of alternative media pages, and now most recently Alex Jones, the fact that an outlet like Media Matter's is pushing for more censorship on free speech is quite worrying.

Last week, Neon Nettle reported that National Geographic photographer openly admitted that  'viral image' of a polar bear starving to death was fabricated fake news, saying, "We had lost control of the narrative."

It seems most social media platforms becoming a censorship farm, and if you run the risk of being banned from having an opinion on Climate Change, is it even worth being on the platform at all?

SOURCE  






Paris Agreement To Cost Australia $52 Billion

"Following the emissions reduction requirements of the Paris Climate Agreement will impose significant and irreparable economic damage without delivering an environmental dividend,” said Daniel Wild, Research Fellow at the free market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs.

Today the IPA released a research report Why Australia must exit the Paris Climate Agreement. The report estimates that the Paris Climate Agreement emissions targets will impose a $52 billion economic cost, over 2018-2030. This equates to $8,566 per family.

"The immutable law of energy policy is this: lower emissions mean higher prices.”

"Each family in Australia will be at least $8,566 worse off under the Paris Climate Agreement, on average. This is at a time when wages are stagnating and the cost of living is rising.”

"$52 billion could purchase 22 new hospitals or pay for 20 years’ worth of the Gonski 2.0 education funding.”

"For families, $8,566 could be used to pay off credit card debt, pay the school fees for a few years, or pay four years’ worth of electricity bills.”

The report finds the Agreement which Australia signed is much different to how it is currently operating. The United States has exited the Agreement. China is unconstrained by the Agreement. And none of the European Union nations are on track to meet their targets.

"The time to exit the Agreement is now. The government must put lower prices and improved reliability ahead of emissions reductions.”

The report finds that the cost of the Paris Agreement more than twice cancels out the benefits of the government’s tax relief, put forward in the 2018-19 Budget.

"The National Energy Guarantee and the Paris Agreement will lead to higher electricity prices. This will damage business investment, jobs growth, and wages growth, and put upward pressure on everyday goods and services,” said Mr Wild.

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 August, 2018

Despite climate hype and green hysteria, Britain's heatwave failed to break temperature record

75F (23C) is hot???  That's a winter temperature where I live!  It is actually 24C as I write this -- in an Australian midwinter, with no heating on

How Britain's temperatures got above 75F for 47 days in a row during the prolonged heatwave

The top temperature somewhere in Britain reached over 75F (24C) for 47 days in a row during the prolonged heatwave.

Of those 47 days, some 29 saw temperatures of at least 85F (29.4C), while ten got all the way to at least 90F (32C).

However, the record ended yesterday when Plymouth in Devon was the hotspot, but only made it up to 74.1F (23.4C).

The hottest day of 2018 was broken six times within the period - including on four days in a row in June.

The lowest reading in the 47-day period was 75.2F (24C) on July 28, while the highest was 95.2F (35.1C) two days earlier.

This year's run of 47 days with temperatures over 75F (24C) was unusual for Britain - but just missed out on the record.

That is held by 1995 which saw a 53-day period from July 5 to August 26 when the mercury hit at least 75F (24C).

In comparison, the famous heatwave summer of 1976 saw 15 days in a row when temperatures hit at least 89.7F (32C).

SOURCE  





An academic conference for climate skeptics

Designed to look at the REAL causes of climate change,  it will be from 7 September 2018 and takes place in the Portuguese city of Porto (also known as Oporto in English).  Porto is the second-largest city in Portugal after Lisbon and is located along the Douro river estuary in Northern Portugal.  Below is the conference programme
?
Day 1: Friday, 7 September 2018

09.00         Opening ceremony

09.30         Session 1: Changes in Climate and Weather

                    Chair: Pamela Matlack-Klein

09.30         Christopher Essex: Climate: like atomic physics where we are the atoms

10.20         Coffee break – with posters

11.00         Piers Corbyn: European weather in the last years – extreme or normal?

11.20         Nils-Axel Mörner: Atlantic Ocean circulation and Gulf Stream beat

11.40         Maria da Assunção Araújo & Pamela Matlack-Klein: Note on the Portuguese Sea Level Project

12.00         Michael Limburg: Can we trust time series of historical climate data?

12.20         Karl Zeller & Ned Nikolov: Earth + Solar system data and scientific method = New climate science

12.40         Ned Nikolov & Karl Zeller: Implications of semi-empirical planetary temperature model for a new
                      understanding of Earth’s climate history

13.00         Lunch: break for 1.5 hour

14.30         Session 2: CO2, Climate Sensitivity and Greenhouse Effects
?
                    Chair: Jan-Erik Solheim

14.30         Francois Gervais: Cooling of climate sensitivity

14.50         Christopher Monckton: On an error in defining temperature feedback

15.10         Camille Veyres: Eleven facts you must know to avoid being deceived by the AGW

15.30         Edwin Berry: A fatal flaw in global warming science

15.50         Hermann Harde: How much CO2 and also the Sun contribute to global warming

16.10         Hans Jelbring: Regional greenhouse effects – based on observational evidence

16.30         Coffee break – with posters

17.00         Ray Garnett & Madhav Khandekar: Increasing cold weather extremes since the new
                      millennium: an assessment with a focus on worldwide economic impact

17.20           Albrecht Glatzle: Livestock’s role in climate change: Do we need a shift of paradigm? (poster)?

17:30         Philip Foster: Being wrong can have serious consequences /The Nile Climate Engine?

17.40         General discussion-1 including: Student's ask questions
                    
                     Moderators: Nils-Axel Mörner, Pamela Matlack-Klein & Maria da Assunção Araújo 

19.00          End of Day-1

Day 2: Saturday, 8 September 2018

09.30         Session 3: Forcing functions in Climate Change
                    
                     Chair: Thomas Wysmuller

09.30         Piers Corbyn: Mechanisms of weather extremes and climate changes (including long range forecasting)


09.50         Henri Masson: Complexity, causality and dynamics inside the climate system

10.10         Pavel Kalenda et al.: Calculation of solar energy, accumulated in the continental rocks

10.30         Don Easterbrook (ppt submission): The cause of Little Ice Ages and climate change

10.50         Roger Tattersall & Stuart Graham: Climate change: solar-interplanetary forces – not human activity

11.10         Coffee break – with posters

11.40         Jan-Erik Solheim: The length of solar cycle as predictor for local climate

11.00         Harald Yndestad: The climate clock

11.20         Nils-Axel Mörner: Planetary beat and sea level changes

11.40         Nicola Scafetta: Toward a better understanding of natural climate variability

13.00         Lunch: break for 1.5 hour

14.30         Session 4: Further observational facts, interpretations and geoethics
                    
                    Chair: Karl Zeller

14.30         Thomas Wysmuller: The fall of IGCP’s sea-level rise

14.50         Antonio Silva: Relevance of present sea-level changes to coastal risk

15.10         Maria da Assunção Araújo: Greenland: some simple observations on ice retreat and climate evolution ?

15.30         Cliff Ollier (ppt submission): Ocean acidification is a myth

15.50         Peter Ridd (ppt submission): The Great Barrier Reef, climate change and science

16.00         David Block: Salt and albedo

16.20         Conor McMenemie: The Nile Climate Engine

16.40         Coffee break – with posters

17.10         Howard Dewhirst and Robert Heath: Letter to the Geological Society of London

17.30         Aziz Adam (ppt submission): The politics of global change

17.40         Benoit Rittaud: Some historical cases of erroneous scientific consensus

18.00         General discussion-2

                    Moderators: Nils-Axel Mörner & Pamela Matlack-Klein
                   
?                    Jim O’Brien: Announcement

19.00         Closing: Christopher Essex & Maria da Assunção Araújo

                     Postlude: Christopher Monckton
?
?19.30         Cheese & Port Mingle

SOURCE  






The global temperature is NOT sensitive to CO2 variations

Thai mathematician, Cha-am Jamal, reports a rigorous test of the CO2 theory.  Some focused excerpts below.  See the original for graphs and workings

Climate sensitivity described by Jule Charney as the expected temperature increase for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide assumes that surface temperature is responsive to atmospheric CO2 concentration in accordance with the so called “greenhouse effect”. Such responsiveness implies a linear relationship between surface temperature and the logarithm of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.

In theory the Charney climate sensitivity, also called the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity or ECS, is a universal constant. In the ideal scientific process, climate models would use the radiative forcing computations to predict the theoretical value of ECS (as Charney has done) and the testable implication of theory, that surface temperature is responsive to the logarithm of the logarithm of atmospheric CO2 concentration in the observational data at an annual time scale, should yield a value that is in agreement with the theoretical prediction of the climate model.

This procedure has not worked out very well for the ECS because of a wide range of ECS values both for theoretical predictions by climate models and for empirical tests with the observational data of global warming.....

 The ECS value estimates in the 60-year moving window vary from ECS<0 ecs="" to="">6, a much larger range than and inconsistent with the Charney/IPCC standard. The observed variance implies that empirical ECS estimates are unstable and a function of location within the data time series.

This intuition is confirmed in Figure 3 where the three columns marked BOTH are of interest in this discussion because they relate to global temperature. They display the results of a split half test for regression stability which compares ECS values for the full span, the first half of the span, and the second half of the span. The observed values are ECS=0.54 for the first half 1850-1933, and ECS=2.71 for the second half 1934-2017. From the results in Figures 2&3, taken together we may conclude that the OLS linear regression coefficient for temperature against atmospheric CO2 concentration is unstable.

Such instability implies an insufficient correlation exists at the time scale of interest for the further interpretation of the coefficient in terms of its information content. In other words, the regression coefficient does not contain useful information because an insufficient correlation exists between surface temperature and log(atmospheric CO2) at an annual time scale.

In a related study, the satellite temperature measurement era 1979-2017 are used in conjunction with Mauna Loa CO2 data. These data sources are considered to be the most reliable. The results show that the correlation in the observational data between surface temperature and the logarithm of atmospheric CO2 is spurious and an artifact of shared long term trends. 

When detrended, no evidence is found that surface temperature is responsive to atmospheric CO2 concentration at an annual time scale. The full text of this study may be downloaded from SSRN.COM  or from ACADEMIA.EDU. These results suggest that there is no empirical basis for the existence of an ECS climate sensitivity parameter that determines surface temperature according to atmospheric CO2 concentration.

That spurious correlations can lead to false causation conclusions is demonstrated in a parody of the ECS using data for homicides in England and Wales. The full text of this study may be downloaded from SSRN.COM or ACADEMIA.EDU

SOURCE  







The Nazi Roots of Environmentalism and the Climate Change Fraud

With Rupert Darwall








Whose bright idea was that? EU will ban halogen bulbs at the end of the month - after encouraging us to buy them - making lighting our homes TWICE as expensive

Is there nothing so trivial that the pettifogging jobsworth Brussels Bastards don't want to stick their long interfering noses into it?

First, the EU controversially banned our traditional incandescent light bulbs and encouraged us to buy halogen bulbs.

Now, they're banning halogen bulbs and doubling the cost of lighting a home.

The European Union-driven ban on halogen lightbulbs comes into effect at the end of the month.

Householders will have to buy more expensive LED lights under measures designed to cut energy use.

The LED bulbs are at least twice as expensive as halogen lights, but advocates argue they are better value because the LED versions use a fraction of the electricity and have a much longer lifespan, potentially 15 years.

The new ban has gone under the radar in Britain, with a recent survey by lighting product company LEDvance finding that two in three Britons had no idea halogen bulbs were on the way out.

Despite the benefits of LEDs, even some supporters of the switch are questioning whether the EU should be forcing the change, warning it could lead to resentment against green policies.

Supermarkets sell halogens for about £2 each, while the equivalent LED versions are about £4 and can be as much as £7.

Buying new bulbs for the 34 lights found in a typical home would cost £68 if they were halogen, but doing the same with the LED versions is likely to be closer to £150.

The ban on the halogen lights has been driven by the EU, and backed by successive UK governments – and seems certain to come in despite Brexit.

The policy initially resulted in the ban on the import and manufacture of high-power traditional incandescent bulbs in 2009.

This was then expanded to other lower-power versions.

Families were encouraged to switch to alternatives, specifically halogens, which were promoted as green, but these will become obsolete with the adoption of the LED lights commonly used in offices, shops and lamp posts.

Historically, consumers have rejected LED lights because they were expensive and gave off a harsh, bright light.

There were also concerns they may not work in dimmer light fittings, which means they create a constant flickering or buzzing noise.

But prices have fallen significantly recently and it is now possible to produce warmer tones in more expensive LEDs.

At the same time, new lighting systems offer different levels of brightness and colours.

London's Conservative MEP Syed Kamall is positive about benefits of LED bulbs, but said: 'Forcing them on consumers and banning cheaper alternative lightbulbs will come across as heavy-handed and could lead to resentment over 'green' policies.'

The Energy Saving Trust says the move will help homes cut bills because the LED bulbs use about a fifth of the energy burned by halogens.

Stewart Muir, of consumer website TopTenUK.org, said: 'Lighting is an essential, and it tends to be one of the biggest consumers of energy, so the move to end the sale of the expensive halogens will be hugely beneficial.'

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 August, 2018

Report: Trump Admin Mulling Idea To Scrap Obama-Era Lightbulb Regulations

The Trump administration is preparing to repeal an Obama-era rule effectively outlawing a wide swath of popular lightbulbs, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

The Department of Energy is ready to scrap a rule broadening the number of lightbulbs that must meet strict energy efficiency standards set to take effect in 2020, according to a document the agency published on its website.

The document was later removed from the site, WaPo noted.

Former President Barack Obama’s DOE expanded the class of bulbs covered by a 2007 lightbulb ban to include bug lights, three-way bulbs, “rough service lamps,” and some decorative bulbs, such as globe-shaped bulbs.

Obama’s decision came in January 2017 and roped in bulbs that had previously been exempt from the ban.

Obama officials argued the expansion was needed because consumers might use the unregulated bulbs to replace regulated ones. “DOE expects these sales will likely increase since these lamps could be used as replacements for other regulated lamp types,” the law notes.

The Trump administration is clamming up about the change.

“The Department does not comment on ongoing rulemakings beyond what is publicly available in the Unified Agenda published twice a year,” spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes told reporters when asked if the DOE is preparing to ding the regulation.

Eliminating the regulation is potentially as groundbreaking as President Donald Trump’s move to roll back fuel emission rules, according to some experts.

“It’s certainly one of the biggest for energy efficiency standards, setting aside the clean-car standards,” Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, which discovered and saved the document before it was removed from the DOE’s website, said in an interview with reporters.

Congress passed into law in 2007 new efficiency requirements for general lightbulbs, with strict requirements set to take effect in 2020. LED bulbs and compact fluorescent lamps can easily meet the 2020 standard of 45 lumens per watt, according to deLaski.

But the traditional incandescent bulbs on the market cannot.

Obama also banned sales of the 100-watt incandescent lightbulb in 2012 as part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 was taking hold.

Conservatives complained at the time, calling the bans an infringement on consumers’ rights to choose how they light their homes.

“Congress should not be picking winners and losers, allowing big corporate donors to dictate what consumer products we can and can’t buy!” the conservative Eagle Forum wrote in 2012. “If we don’t take a stand to save our light bulbs, what will they go after next?”

SOURCE  






Make Socialism Scientific Again!

I mentionerd the pseudo-academic article this refers to on 8/8/18 -- JR

Remember the good old days when socialism was “scientific”? Keep in mind that the orthodox Marxism of “dialectical materialism” was understood as a scientific doctrine of history, not advocacy based on the abstract principles of egalitarianism. But then socialism crashed and burned everywhere (except on college campuses), which is why today socialism comes to sight as a religious faith, a trait it always had from the beginning, which is why you often found cleric-scientists among the ranks of its enthusiasts in the 19th century. Today I think socialism is more akin to witchcraft. In fact, hold on to that image for a bit.

Meanwhile, I have been dining out for years on the highly revealing statement made back in 2004 by Harvard’s renowned geneticist Richard Lewontin, who told the New York Review of Books that year:

Most scientists are, at a minimum, liberals, although it is by no means obvious why this should be so. Despite the fact that all of the molecular biologists of my acquaintance are shareholders in or advisers to biotechnology firms, the chief political controversy in the scientific community seems to be whether it is wise to vote for Ralph Nader this time.

This time? How about any time? It’s one thing for academic scientists to lean left (though many I know emphatically do not), but this is the kind of statement that makes you wonder. Lewontin deserves his scientific reputation; his political judgment is clearly juvenile.

This is preface for noting the release of a new article from PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), which usually publishes serious and sober work. But I think the fumes in the editorial lab must have been strong the day this article was accepted:

Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene

Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Carl Folke, Diana Liverman, Colin P. Summerhayes, Anthony D. Barnosky, Sarah E. Cornell, Michel Crucifix, Jonathan F. Donges, Ingo Fetzer, Steven J. Lade, Marten Scheffer, Ricarda Winkelmann, and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber

Abstract

We explore the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene. We examine the evidence that such a threshold might exist and where it might be. If the threshold is crossed, the resulting trajectory would likely cause serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies. Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate, and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.

In other words, another typical Malthusian callback to how the world is doomed if we don’t hand over power to an enlightened elite. I’ve highlighted the key part of the last sentence, because those judgments cannot be called “scientific” in any way whatsoever. The complete text of the article is even worse:

We suggest that a deep transformation based on a fundamental reorientation of human values, equity, behavior, institutions, economies, and technologies is required. . .

In other words, we have to change everything. Although the authors won’t say so directly, the implication is global governance of some kind, which by definition will have to be undemocratic. (Which for many people on the left is a feature, not a bug.)

Perhaps this is an entirely unremarkable restatement of a common view that is probably published in an academic journal a dozen times every day, but there is one interesting irony of this particular article. If you look at the fine print, you find this acknowledgement: “Edited by William C. Clark, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and approved July 6, 2018 (received for review June 19, 2018).”

I’ve never met Prof. Clark, and don’t know him at all, but he is the author of one of my very favorite articles about the institutional problems of science and politics way back in 1980: “Witches, Floods, and Wonder Drugs: Historical Perspectives on Risk Management.” It’s a terrific article. It was the late columnist Warren Brookes who first brought it to my attention. Clark’s comparison of the institutional incentives for witch-hunting with contemporary risk assessment (built partially on the terrific work of the late Aaron Wildavsky) has a perfect application to today’s Malthusian environmentalism and especially climate change thermaggeddonism—especially apt for the Inquisition-like treatment of dissent from climate change orthodoxy.

Some samples from the article:

Collective action by the central authority was henceforth required, and any action taken against a particular individual was justified in the name of the common good. In the case of the witch hunts, this “common good” justified the carbonization of five hundred thousand individuals, the infliction of untold suffering, and the generation of a climate of fear and distrust—all in the name of the most elite and educated institution of the day. . .

The institutionalized efforts of the Church to control witches can be seen, in retrospect, to have led to witch proliferation. Early preaching against witchcraft and its evils almost certainly put the idea of witches into many a head which never would have imagined such things if left to its own devices. The harder the Inquisition looked, the bigger its staff, the stronger its motivation, the more witches it discovered. . .

Since the resulting higher discovery rate of witch risks obviously justifies more search effort, the whole process becomes self-contained and self-amplifying, with no prospect of natural limitation based on some externally determined “objective” frequency of witch risks in the environment. . .

In witch hunting, accusation was tantamount to conviction. Acquittal was arbitrary, dependent on the flagging zeal of the prosecutor. It was always reversible if new evidence appeared. You couldn’t win, and you could only leave the game by losing. The Inquisition’s principal tool for identifying witches was torture. The accused was asked if she was a witch. If she said no, what else would you expect of a witch? So she was tortured until she confessed the truth. The Inquisitors justified ever more stringent tortures on the grounds that it would be prohibitively dangerous for a real witch to escape detection. Of course an innocent person would never confess to being a witch (a heretic with no prospects of salvation) under mere physical suffering. The few who lived through such tests were likely to spend the rest of their lives as physical or mental cripples. Most found it easier to give up and burn.

You can see here an early version of the “precautionary principle” (“The Inquisitors justified ever more stringent tortures on the grounds that it would be prohibitively dangerous for a real witch to escape detection”) and many other prominent traits of the climate campaign.

Here is Clark’s killer sentence:

Many of the risk assessment procedures used today are logically indistinguishable from those used by the Inquisition.

And this coda, for which you should swap out “risk assessors” with “climate change advocates”:

Today, anyone querying the zeal of the risk assessors is accused at least of callousness, in words almost identical to those used by the Malleusfive hundred years ago. The accused’s league with the devil against society is taken for granted. Persecution in the press, courts, and hearing rooms is unremitting, and even the weak rules of evidence advanced by the “science” of risk assessment are swept away in the heat of the chase. This is not to say that risks don’t exist, or that assessors are venal. It is to insist that skeptical, open inquiry remains theory rather than practice in the majority of today’s risk debates. That those debates are so often little more than self-deluding recitations of personal faith should not be surprising.

Cue the refrain that “97 percent of scientists believe in climate change.” Believe? It would seem the Inquisition never really went away: it just changed institutions and identified a different class of witches to hunt down.

Clark’s entire paper, with interesting case histories of flood control and drug approval (hence the full title of the paper) is worth reading, even if some of the analysis is now dated and obsolete. But I am begged to ask the question: what happened to that Clark? Or perhaps he cleverly thinks that the best way to chastise politicized scientists is simply to publish their tendentious work?

NB: Scientists are the equal of any other citizens, and are perfectly entitled to their political opinions. But to represent their opinions with the veneer of scientific authority, as is done here, degrades science, and contributes to the decline in public regard for the scientific community. Prof. Kerry Emanuel of MIT, a “mainstream” climate scientist, put the matter well a few years back:

Scientists are most effective when they provide sound, impartial advice, but their reputation for impartiality is severely compromised by the shocking lack of political diversity among American academics, who suffer from the kind of group-think that develops in cloistered cultures. Until this profound and well-documented intellectual homogeneity changes, scientists will be suspected of constituting a leftist think tank.

Instead of offering vague political nostrums like this article, scientists who are sincerely convinced of the high probability of doom from climate change ought to be offering the specs for the technical changes that need to be made to energy supply (i.e., what carbon intensities, what kind of pollution mitigation, what kind of “geoengineering” strategies, etc). To their credit, many scientists do just this. This group of authors clearly want to be in a different line of work—or at least ought to be.

SOURCE  






The Guaranteed-to-Fail Climate Solution: Behavioral Change

BIG PICTURE: The media is in a tizzy this week over the latest climate change research published in America’s PNAS, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

The paper is titled “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.” Once again we see what is supposed to be a reputable organization – the National Academy – misleading the public into believing that the Anthropocene is an official geological epoch rather than a figment of the activist imagination.

But putting that aside, the abstract ends this way:

Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System—biosphere, climate, and societies—and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.

Behavioral changes. Transformed social values. Only academics who haven’t the first foggy clue how the real world works, could write such impractical nonsense.

Widespread behavioral change is simply not possible. Not without turning the entire planet into a police state.

Persuading medical doctors – highly educated, professionally motivated individuals – to wash their hands thoroughly enough to remove harmful bacteria before they move on to the next patient is notoriously difficult. It was difficult in the mid-1800s and it remains difficult today.

The reasons are simple. Doctors are human beings. They’re often rushed. Their minds are often distracted. They’re impatient. Fully aware of what constitutes correct behavior, they nevertheless fail this test on a regular basis.

You can read all about this phenomenon in the 2011 book SuperFreakonomics. Or in this online transcript of a 2012 radio show featuring Stephen Dubner, one of the book’s co-authors. Toward the end, he says:

It’s humbling, isn’t it? To think that the best-educated people in the hospital need to be tricked and shamed and even frightened into washing their hands. It shows just how hard behavior change can be…

Parents, teachers, coaches, workplace supervisors, religious leaders, police officers, and certain other government officials spend a great deal of time telling people not to do all manner of things. If behavior change were easy, there’d be no more lying, cheating, stealing, back-stabbing, substance abuse, unprotected sex, and so on.

But even threats of serious consequences such as disease, job loss, incarceration, and eternal damnation are insufficient. We’re no closer to eliminating those behaviors than the Ancient Romans were.

TOP TAKEAWAY: Whatever the future may hold, we’ll need all the technological fixes we can muster. Billions of people aren’t going to just fall into line. We won’t be voluntary, en masse and in a timely manner, altering our behavior because ivory tower academics think we should.

SOURCE  






EPA study shows it is time to repeal the Renewable Fuel Standard

By Printus LeBlanc

This week the corn lobby celebrated thirteen years since the establishment of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). Thirteen years of the government mandating the public buy an inferior product from well-connected lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and we wonder where they got the idea for the Obamacare individual mandate. There is good news on the horizon though. There is now evidence the RFS isn’t even as good for the environment as originally thought.

The RFS had two goals upon implementation in 2005. The first was to reduce the amount of petroleum the U.S. imports, specifically from the Middle East. This reason as already been refuted. Fracking reduced the amount of foreign imported oil, not ethanol.

The second reason was environmental. It was believed the RFS was more environmentally friendly because it is renewable. The mountains of evidence proving otherwise have been ignored, now a recently released report from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will finally prove the RFS does more harm to the environment than good.

When the RFS was instituted, it was only a matter of time before the law of unintended consequences reared its head. With the government mandating biofuels, it is no surprise more corn and soybeans would be grown. The extra fertilizers and run off lead to algae blooms. The blooms deplete oxygen in the water killing marine life. The report stated, “modeling studies since the 2011 Report suggest that demand for biofuel feedstocks, particularly corn grain, may contribute to harmful algal blooms, as recently observed in western Lake Erie, and to hypoxia, as observed in the northern Gulf of Mexico.”

Causing more fertilizer to be spread which leads to algae blooms killing marine life does not sound environmentally sound.

Not only does the RFS do more harm than good to the soil and water, the program is no friend to the air. The proponents of ethanol like to laud the environmental impacts of the fuel versus gasoline. The problem with the analysis is it looks at the burning of ethanol as a fuel and does not examine what it takes to produce ethanol. Producing ethanol takes farmland that must be tended to, usually with diesel-powered vehicles. The harvest must then be transported to a facility to manufacture the ethanol, once again usually with diesel-powered vehicles. Finally, turning the feedstock into ethanol is an energy-intensive operation.

According to the EPA report, the production facilities are no better than refineries producing gasoline. The report states, “as of mid-2017, there are approximately 200 ethanol production facilities in the U.S. Over 90 percent of these facilities are dry mill facilities processing corn. Facilities producing ethanol from corn and cellulosic feedstocks tend to have greater air pollutant emissions relative to petroleum refineries on a per-BTU of fuel produced basis.”

The final verdict on the report shows what happens whenever the government gets involved. It doesn’t matter if it is healthcare, college, or in this case energy, government interference drives up the cost and makes the problem worse.

It is time to end the RFS. The program does nothing it was supposed to do. It did not reduce the U.S. reliance on petroleum imports, fracking did. It is not good for the environment, multiple studies have shown that, including this latest one. It has bankrupted refineries and finally put undue financial burdens on taxpayers with extra costs. The RFS does do one thing; it pours millions of dollars into the pockets of K Street lobbyists and a few select farmers.

SOURCE  






Now global warming misses Melbourne

Australia's  wimpy Prime minister recently declared that the drought -- mainly affecting outback NSW -- was caused by Global Warming.  Shortly after that declaration Western Australia got huge rainfall.  Now Melbourne has been swamped too.  Australia is  a big place so "Global" effects that miss out both Western and Southern Australia are not very global are they?  PM Turnbull needs to grow a pair and stop trying to pander to Greenie absurdities

WILD weather has lashed Melbourne this afternoon with hail and heavy rain falling across the city.

Hail pelted suburbs including Yarraville, Kingsville, Footscray and Montrose this afternoon as temperatures plummeted to just 7C in the city.

It was a dramatic drop from the “spring-like” conditions yesterday, with temperatures reaching 20C.

Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Richard Carlyon said earlier today it had been “the wettest” since June 17. “The cold front moved through Melbourne and delivered up to 10mm of rain,” he said. “Almost two months ago we saw 16mm.”

Heavy snow has begun falling at Victoria’s alpine resorts with 20cm expected over the weekend.

Snow lovers shivered through a chilly morning, with the mercury languishing in the negatives. The apparent temperature at Mt Buller was -11.2C at 10.30am.

Mt Hotham Alpine Resort general manager Belinda Trembath said the mountain would a snow base of about 180cm by the end of the day.

“We’re very fortunate here in the mountains that we are getting some fantastic snow events, it seems to be successive week after week, consistent snow falls and certainly fantastic conditions for skiers and boarders,” she said.

“It started snow about 8.30am and we’re expecting up to 20cm today.”

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 August, 2018

10 Failed Global Warming Predictions That You Need To Know About

Ever since the theory of global warming began being advanced by the left, there have been failed global warming predictions. Heck, you can look at Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” which was somehow a box office hit a little more than a decade ago, and see just how badly the predictions have failed.

We could (and others have) fill a book with the failed predictions of both scientists and politicians in regard to the climate over the past half-century. However, these are 10 of the biggest failed global warming predictions you need to know about.

Prediction #1: Global cooling is the real problem

When the environmentalist movement began in earnest back in the 1970s, climate change was still a core tenet of true believers. Unlike now, however, they were more concerned about an ice age than a planet that was too hot.

“The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years,” ecologist Kenneth Watt said in 1970. “If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990 but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

He was hardly alone. In 1975, C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said that “(t)he cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” Scientist Nigel Calder wrote that “(t)he threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”

Scientific consensus eventually moved away the global cooling alarums and instead began warning against global warming in the 1980s. Columbia University scientist James Hansen’s 1988 congressional testimony was one of the watershed moments in putting the global warming agenda before the American people in a major way. These days, Hansen is suing the government on behalf of children and future generations because he thinks they’re not doing enough to stop global warming.

Prediction #2: If global warming isn’t reversed by the year 2000, it will be too late to avert catastrophe

That was the 1989 prediction by Noel Brown, an environmentalist apparatchik at the U.N. — that global body that has brought us so much rubbish when it comes to failed global warming predictions.

According to the San Jose Mercury News, Brown said that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos, said Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program.”

None of this Mad Max-esque vision of the world has come to pass in the years since, but that hasn’t stopped people from issuing dire predictions that haven’t shaken out. You’re going to see more than a few of them in this list.

Prediction #3: We’ll be living in Antarctica pretty soon

Ten years ago, a group called Forum for the Future predicted that we would be living in a world so dire that we would actually have to move to Antarctica as “climate refugees.”

The 2008 study produced what the U.K. Telegraph very charitably called “a radical set of ‘possible futures,'” among them that the first climate refugees would begin flooding our planet’s icy, southernmost when temperatures made everywhere else too hot to live.

“Refugees are expected to move to Antarctica because of the rising temperatures that will see the population of the continent increase to 3.5 million people by 2040,” the Telegraph reported. “As the world fails to act on climate change, researchers predict that global trade will collapse as oil prices break through $400 a barrel and electrical appliances will get automatically turned off when households exceed energy quotas.”

Other predictions? “Australia and Oklahoma will be abandoned because of water shortages and athletes will stay at home in the world’s first virtual Olympics, competing against each other in virtual space with billions of spectators,” the Telegraph reported.

We’re just 12 years away from when we were supposed to all start heading to Antarctica, and I think it’s pretty safe to say we can call this one a complete wash-out. (Or not enough of one, given how I’m sure rising sea levels were supposed to play into this.) Meanwhile, the very non-virtual Olympics are planned for 2028 in Los Angeles, so there goes that theory.

“We still have the chance to alter the future,” Forum head Peter Madden said at the time. “This is what the world could be like and some of these options are not very pleasant.”

This is true. They’re also not very accurate. And surprisingly, Madden wasn’t the only person predicting this fate. Back in 2004, the British government’s chief scientist, Professor David King, said that “Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked.” Meanwhile, the average annual temperature in Antarctica currently ranges from -76F for the interior to 14 degrees in some coastal areas. Good luck finding those 3.5 million people to live there.

Prediction #4: Great Britain will be almost snow-less thanks to global warming

Back in 2000, climate scientist David Viner had a very dire prediction for those living in England: Snow was going to become almost extinct there.

In a viral interview with the U.K. Independent, Viner said that snow on the isles was going to be “a very rare and exciting event.”

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” Viner said. “We’re really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time.”

So, in almost 20 years time — Feb. 27, 2018 to be exact — here was the first paragraph of a story from the U.K. Express: “London has been hit by a wall of snow in a huge blizzard as the UK is rocked by bone-chilling temperatures, ice and wintry weather from the ‘Beast from the East’. The snow fell lightly at first but quickly picked up speed as forecasters warned the freezing Siberian winds gripping Britain could be the coldest the UK has faced in 27 years.” And, in fact, the U.K. has faced plenty of snow over the past few years.

Has the Independent disowned Viner’s statement or their original story (titled “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past”)? Of course not, even though they hedged their bets by publishing a story in 2010 with the headline “Expect more extreme winters thanks to global warming, say scientists.” That same year, they published a story admonishing those pointing out Viner’s failed global warming prediction titled “Don’t believe the hype over climate headlines.” You shouldn’t, but not for the reasons the Independent thinks.

Prediction #5: Snow is going to be a thing of the past in other places, too

It wasn’t just the United Kingdom. A 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that “(m)ilder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms” but increase the number of ice storms.

So, how did that work out? A few years ago, the National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center reported that “U.S. snow cover on the morning of Dec. 1, 2015 is the highest on record for this day of the year.” In addition, The New American notes that “Global Snow Lab data also shows Eurasian autumn snow cover has grown by 50 percent since records began in 1979.” Studies of Northern Hemisphere snow area by Rutgers also show little change since 1967.

In response to cold temperatures in 2014, Obama-era director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy John Holdren said that “a growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern we can expect to see with increasing frequency, as global warming continues.”

So you’re either going to see milder winters or colder ones due to climate change. In a way, you can’t even call this a failed prediction, in the same way you’re pretty unlikely to lose when you play roulette and bet on both red and black.

Prediction #6: We only have 50 days to save the world from global warming

During the negotiations for the Copenhagen agreement in 2009, former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown predicted that if they didn’t solve the “impasse” they found themselves in within 50 days, the world was pretty much doomed.

“If we do not reach a deal at this time, let us be in no doubt: once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement, in some future period, can undo that choice,” Brown said. “So we should never allow ourselves to lose sight of the catastrophe we face if present warming trends continue.”

The Copenhagen agreement, much like the Paris agreement that followed and the Kyoto Agreement that preceded it, was reached and did almost nothing except transfer wealth from wealthier nations to poorer ones. The world, meanwhile, hasn’t gone to hell quite yet, in spite of Brown’s predictions.

Prediction #7: Prince Charles says we only have 96 months to save the world

I’m not entirely sure when the moldering heir of the House of Windsor became a climate scientist, but nearly 10 years ago, Prince Charles warned us all “that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world,” the U.K. Independent reported at the time.

“We face the dual challenges of a worldview and an economic system that seem to have enormous shortcomings, together with an environmental crisis — including that of climate change — which threatens to engulf us all,” Prince Charles said, without revealing how he had “calculated” we only had 96 months left to save the world.

A man who has access to the most prodigious conveniences and luxuries in the world told a crowd at St. James Palace that the “age of convenience” was over and that we had eight years to prevent “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.”

Except for technological advancement and a few accords which have had a relatively minor effect on the environment in the intervening years, not much has changed. Prince Charles’ deadline passed in 2017, and the “age of convenience” is still here. So is the planet Earth.

Prediction #8: The Earth will warm by 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2025-2050

Back in 1988, as the global warming “consensus” began to grow, New York Times environmentalism reporter Philip Shabecoff wrote a piece of alarmism based on the work of the aforementioned James Hansen, fresh from his congressional testimony.

“If the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit from the year 2025 to 2050, according to these projections,” Shabecoff wrote. “The rise in global temperature is predicted to cause a thermal expansion of the oceans and to melt glaciers and polar ice, thus causing sea levels to rise by one to four feet by the middle of the next century.”

That’s a pretty wide band of predictions, but it turns out that Shabecoff was still well off. As the Institute for Energy Research points out, 30 years after his prediction, global temperatures have only risen by 1 degree Fahrenheit — not even close to the low mark of 3 degrees and far from the median of 6 degrees — and sea levels are up only up a few inches. And it’s not even clear the latter part is man-made.

“The rate of sea level rise during the period ~1925–1960 is as large as the rate of sea level rise the past few decades,” climate scientist Judith Curry writes. “Human emissions of CO2 mostly grew after 1950; so, humans don’t seem to be to blame for the early 20th-century sea level rise, nor for the sea level rise in the 19th and late 18th centuries.”

Shabecoff could end up being right, but current trends certainly don’t seem to bear that out.

Prediction #9: Most species on the Earth will perish by 1995

Back in 1970, around the time of the first Earth Day, Democrat Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote an article for Look Magazine. In it, he repeated one of the most preposterous claims in the whole climate change/pollution movement: “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

So, how has that worked out? Even the World Wildlife Federation — certainly not known for a lack of alarmism when it comes to climate change — notes that experts “calculate that between 0.01 and 0.1 percent of all species will become extinct each year.” Even if you buy that number, that’s a long way off from getting to 75 to 80 percent. As in, hundreds of years off.

Prediction #10: Pretty much everything in “An Inconvenient Truth”

Yes, the movie that popularized the “hockey stick” graph regarding carbon emissions turns 12 this year, and it’s not exactly looking too prescient, as Michael Bastasch noted two years ago in The Daily Caller.

“One of the first glaring claims Gore makes is about Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. He claims Africa’s tallest peak will be snow-free ‘within the decade,'” Bastasch wrote. “Gore shows slides of Kilimanjaro’s peak in the 1970s versus today to conclude the snow is disappearing.

“Well, it’s been a decade and, yes, there’s still snow on Kilimanjaro year-round. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure this out. One can just look at recent photos posted on the travel website TripAdvisor.com,” he continued. “In 2014, ecologists actually monitoring Kilimanjaro’s snowpack found it was not even close to being gone. It may have shrunk a little, but ecologists were confident it would be around for the foreseeable future.”

Mt. Kilimanjaro isn’t all: “Gore also claims temperature rise from increases in man-made carbon dioxide emissions were ‘uninterrupted and intensifying,'” Bastasch wrote. “He goes on to claim heatwaves will become more common, like the one that killed 35,000 people across Europe in 2003.”

“Sounds terrifying — until you actually look at what happened to global temperature after Gore’s film was released. Global temperatures showed little to no warming trend after Gore released his film. In fact, surface temperature data showed no significant global warming for a period of about 15 years, starting in the early 2000s.”

Then there was Gore’s prediction that storms would increase due to climate change; even the IPCC says that there’s “is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century.” Or you can look at polar ice, of which he said: “within the next 50 to 70 years, it could be completely gone.” (He later said the ice would be gone by 2013, which was even more ridiculous.) Scientists have said that’s simply not going to happen.

Gore still received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, one imagines mostly for his work on this movie. As if the prize needed more devaluing, Barack Obama won it two years later merely for winning an election.

This is the problem when it comes to global warming predictions: We’ve heard so much nonsense over the past half-century that it’s simply difficult to believe more of it. These are just ten of the biggest failures we’ve seen. Rest assured, there will be others — and conservatives need to have the gumption to speak out and chronicle them.

SOURCE  






Environmental radicals are burning the west

California is once again on fire. The Mendocino Complex fire, near Redding, is now the largest wildfire in California history. The blaze is giving firefighters trouble, as it has leapt across barriers, natural and man-made, burning more than 280,000 acres so far. Many were quick to point to the blaze as evidence of global warming because apparently global warming is the cause of everything. But the environmental radicals do raise an interesting question, why does this keep happening out west?

The short and sweet answer is, the environmental policies pushed by the environmental radicals have contributed to and made forest fires out west much worse.

Forest fires were a common sight in the early 20th century. The fires were numerous and large. The available data from National Interagency Fire Center shows the 1920s and 30s were the toughest years out west. From 1926-1929 there was an average of over 140,000 fires per year, burning over 270 acres per fire. The 1930s saw over 180,000 fires per year while burning 218 acres per fire. From the 1940s through the 1970s the average size of fires continued to drop with the 70s being the low point at only 21 acres per fire.

The sheer volume and size of fires in the early 20th century is easy to explain. The west was still sparsely populated, and firefighting had not advanced, technologically or tactically enough to make a difference. Two things happened in the 50s to change all that. First was the westward movement of the population. Returning service members decided to move out west instead of remaining in the overpopulated east.

The second thing to happen was Smokey Bear. In 1944, the Smokey Bear campaign was rolled out, followed in 1947 by the slogan “only you can prevent forest fires.” The campaign gained more recognition after a bear cub was caught in a 1950 New Mexico fire. The poor cub was badly burned and used as a national symbol for the fight against forest fires.

The combination of more people, better technology, and an advertising campaign had a real impact. So much in fact, that the average number of fires per year in the 1970s was 15 percent less than the 1950s and the size of the fires were reduced by an astounding 83 percent.

Then the environmental movement happened. The number of fires continued to decrease, but the size of the fires started to grow. So much so, that from 2010-2017, the average size of a fire increased over 400 percent, to 102 acres per fire. What happened?

The first problem is who is in control of the land. The federal government controls the majority of the land west of Texas. Federal rules and regulations have made it next to impossible remove dead trees, infected trees, and dry underbrush. That is all fuel for a fire. When a fire starts on unmanaged federal land, it doesn’t stop at the fence line or city limits. That is why the fight must be to stop the fires before they happen by denying a small fire the fuel to become large and creating breaks to stop a fire once it starts.

As William Stewart, a forestry specialist at the University of California at Berkeley, told the Washington Post in relation with the recent wildfires, “the rates of mortality from fire, insects, and disease are about three times as high on national forest lands as they are on private lands regulated under California’s strict environmental laws.” Whether the regulations on private land play the vital role there is another matter. The fact is, the underbrush and dead trees are being cleared on the private lands, but not the federal lands.

One only has to look at the map of federally controlled land in the western U.S., figure 1, to understand the problem. There are just as many forests in eastern Texas, Arkansas, and the Appalachian Mountains as there are in the west. The plains are nothing but highly flammable grass. The only difference is the amount of control the federal government has on the land.

Land owned privately is taken care of for a simple reason, profit. If someone owns the land and is intent on harvesting the timber or farming, there is a financial incentive to maintain proper land maintenance. Otherwise, profits could literally go up in smoke.

The federal government might own the land out west, but it is the environmental radicals that control it.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA) have more to do with the increase in the intensity and size of forest fires more than anyone cause. Both were established in the early 1970s. As noted above, it only took a decade to reverse generations of hard work.

The ESA was enacted to protect animals on the verge of extinction. A problem occurs when radical environmental groups sue, under the ESA, to stop forest management practices, such as brush clearing, controlled burns, or logging. The northern spotted owl is the perfect example.

In the 1990s the owl was listed as a threatened species, whose habitat range includes northern California, Oregon, and Washington. A 1991 court order put a halt to logging national forests in those states, for fear of disturbing the habitat. Following the court ruling, logging decreased sharply. The amount decreased by so much that logging on federal lands has decreased 75 percent since 1990.

The decrease in logging is an ecological disaster. When the government is not allowed to remove dead trees and underbrush, it is bound to become fuel for a fire. The dead tree situation in California is an abomination. Late last year, the U.S. Forest Service, Cal Fire, and the Tree Mortality Task Force announced there was a record 129 million dead trees and warned of the danger posed by the excess fuel.

There is good news on the horizon, however. Secretary of the Department of Interior (DOI) Ryan Zinke is working to make the federal government more efficient in its management of forests. Recently he announced a reorganization plan for the department to place more resources and personnel out west, including giving the regional managers more responsibility to act. Zinke wants more personnel in the field and wants them to be able to make decisions, instead of having to wait on D.C. for permission to do anything.

Zinke recently tweeted about the fires out west, “Fires across the west are burning hotter and more intense. The overload of dead and diseased timber in the forests makes the fires worse and more deadly. We must be able to actively manage our forests and not face frivolous litigation when we try to remove these fuels.” But the Secretary can only do so much; Congress must also act.

So far, half of Congress is moving on the issue. Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ariz.) introduced, H.R. 2936 The Resilient Federal Forests Act of 2017. According to the House Committee on Natural Resources, “the bill streamlines onerous environmental review processes to get work done on the ground quickly, without sacrificing environmental protection. The bill also minimizes the threat of frivolous litigation by providing alternatives to resolve legal challenges against forest management activities.” The legislation passed the House on a bipartisan basis and sits in the Senate awaiting action. Hopefully, the intensity of the fires will force the Senate to move the legislation forward as a standalone bill or put it in the upcoming omnibus.

All this situation proves is that there is no one more dangerous to the environment than a radical environmentalist.

SOURCE  






Finally! Some fuel economy common sense

But Greens go apoplectic over rule change that would have no climate or other benefits

Paul Driessen

Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards were devised back in 1975, amid anxiety over the OPEC oil embargo and supposedly imminent depletion of the world’s oil supplies.

But recall, barely 15 years after Edwin Drake drilled the first successful oil well in 1859, a Pennsylvania geologist was saying the United States would run out of oil by 1878. In 1908, the US Geological Survey said we’d exhaust our domestic oil reserves by 1927; in 1939, it moved petroleum doomsday to 1952.

Somehow, steadily improving technology and geological acumen kept finding more oil. Then the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) revolution postponed the demise of oil and natural gas production for at least another century. The fuels that brought wealth, health, longevity, and modern industrialization, transportation, communication and civilization to billions will continue doing so.

However, the powerful forces arrayed against fossil fuels, internal combustion engines and automobiles have kept pushing for tighter CAFÉ rules. In 2012 – claiming that CO2 and other vehicle greenhouse gas emissions required a near-total shift to electric cars to prevent manmade climate cataclysms – the Obama Environmental Protection Agency decreed 54.5 miles per gallon (mpg) rules by 2025.

But climate chaos is a product of computer models, a phony scientific “consensus” and hysterical headlines – not Real World evidence. (See here, here and here to launch some down-to-earth thinking.)

Electric cars represent under 1.5% of new vehicles sold in the USA, a minuscule fraction of the total US vehicle fleet, and a vanishingly small, barely detectable portion of vehicles in use worldwide. Their short range, long recharging times and dauntingly high prices deter most drivers, despite taxpayer subsidies that can reach $10,000 per car sold to rich buyers. And their batteries have significant human health, human rights and environmental problems, as detailed here, here and elsewhere.

Moreover, the rest of the world is rapidly industrializing, building coal and gas-fired power plants to bring electricity to billions who still don’t enjoy its blessings, and putting more cars and trucks on their roads. So even if carbon dioxide has replaced the powerful natural forces that have driven climate and extreme weather fluctuations throughout Earth and human history, US mileage rules would make no difference.

It is therefore hugely refreshing to see that the EPA and Department of Transportation have proposed to freeze fuel economy standards at the existing 2020 target of 37 mpg. The proposal would also create a single national mileage and emission standards – and eliminate the arguably illegal Clean Air Act waiver that the Obama EPA gave California in 2013, letting it set its own tougher automobile emission standards.

To encourage discussion, negotiation and compromise, the EPA/DOT proposal also presents seven alternatives to the 37 mpg freeze: allowing standards to ratchet upward between 0.5% and 3.0% annually through 2026. Public comments will be accepted until the end of September.

Consumer groups and would-be new car buyers welcomed the move. Reactions from certain other quarters were predictably negative. Democratic California Governor Jerry Brown labeled it “an assault on the health” of all Americans – a “reckless scheme” that will force motorists to “pay more at the pump, get worse gas mileage and breathe dirtier air.” He promised his state will “fight this stupidity in every conceivable way possible.” Others claimed it would “roll back” efforts to “protect the climate.”

Major automotive manufacturers would prefer to have mpg standards climb steadily upward. They want to promote their “green” credentials, while selling more cars and light trucks … and avoiding vitriolic backlash from the likes of Gov. Brown and the Sierra Club. They’d like to see a negotiated deal.

As to “dirty air,” there is virtually no connection between mileage and vehicle emissions, which have already plummeted by nearly 98% from what came out of tailpipes in 1970. That’s why radical greens call carbon dioxide “carbon pollution” – to make it sound like soot, instead of the miracle molecule that we exhale, and plants use as a basic building block to make life on earth possible. The more CO2 in the air, the better and faster forest, grassland and crop plants grow, using less water in the process.

And where do greens think electric vehicles get their electricity? Wind turbines and solar panels? Fat chance. Try coal and gas-fired power plants – or nuclear and hydroelectric plants that they also detest.

Climate benefits are equally illusory. Even if there were a connection between CO2 and global warming (or the newer always accurate nomme de guerre “climate change”), the EPA and DOT estimate that the difference between the Trump 37 mpg standard and Obama 54.5 mpg rule would be a completely undetectable 0.0003 degrees Celsius (0.0005 F) by 2100. That’s a microscopic 0.00004 degrees per year!

How can Gov. Moonbeam claim that freezing mpg will harm human health? By ignoring another reality.

As mileage standards tightened, car makers had to downsize vehicles, use less steel, and employ more aluminum and plastic. Even with expensive vehicle modifications like side air bags, these smaller vehicles have less “armor” to protect occupants, and less space between them and any car, truck, bus, tree or other obstacle they might collide with. So they are less safe, and less affordable for poor families.

Insurance industry and other studies show that bigger, heavier vehicles are safer. Drivers and passengers in 54.5 mpg vehicles are more likely to die in a crash – and far more likely to be maimed, disfigured, disabled or paralyzed – than if the fuel economy standards had been relaxed or frozen decades ago.

Freezing standards now at 37 mpg would save car and light truck buyers tens of billions of dollars over the next decade – and save families hundreds of billions in burial, hospital, disability and related costs.

But tougher standards would save drivers billions in gasoline costs, Gov. Brown and his comrades claim. What chutzpah! These are the same folks who demand mandates for ethanol, which costs more and gets a third fewer miles per gallon than gasoline. They’re the same ones whose great champion once said, “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

That champion would be Paul Ehrlich, who remains deeply concerned about “population bombs” … and the human population levels that smaller, lighter, less safe cars are as good a way as any to reduce.

Then there’s the basic matter of “choice.” Not just for pregnant women; consumer choice. Not everyone is an urbanite, with one kid, comfortably squatting down almost to pavement level to squeeze into an econobox “smart car,” happily hauling one or two non-plastic grocery bags a week from Whole Foods.

The rest of us – including those in the 85% of US counties who did not vote for Hillary Clinton – want affordable options, sizes and features that meet our individual needs. We’re tired of having urban and government intellectuals, pressure groups and ruling elites dictating our vehicle choice, steadily reducing our access to full-size sedans, mini or full-size SUVs, light trucks, panel trucks or whatever vehicles best meet our diverse family, boating, camping, farming, ranching, small business or other needs.

54.5 mpg definitely limits choice. And econoboxes are inherently unsafe slamming into an urban wall or tree at even 20 or 25 mph; at virtually any speed “mating” with an oncoming bus or truck; and almost anywhere on a rural highway, with traffic moving at 55-70 mph, and along which many of us have seen these minuscule cars blown right over onto their sides by high winds or passing semi-trucks.

A EQ Smart ForTwo, Fiat 500 or other “micro urban” car may be the perfect “adventure” for some. But not for me, and not for most of the folks I know and love.

From my perch, the best solution would be for EPA and DOT to roll these restrictive, dangerous, even deadly CAFÉ rules back a few notches. At least freeze them where they are – or, as a last-ditch compromise, restrict future hikes to 0.1% annually. If it matters to you, weigh in here by September 30.

Via email







NASA Proves Volcanoes Melting Polar Ice, Not Global Warming

In what amounts to dissension from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) climate change policy, a series of just-released studies by working-level scientists prove that geological and not atmospheric forces are responsible for melting of Earth’s polar ice sheets.

A review of these studies and their significance relative to what force or forces control the climate and climate-related events of Earth’s polar regions is as follows.

NASA Antarctica Study October 30, 2015

This research study authored by NASA Glaciologist Jay Zwally concluded that Antarctica is gaining, not losing, ice mass and thereby challenging the conclusions of many previous studies, most importantly the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report (see the quote from the study below).

“A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.

“The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.

The conclusions of this NASA study were immediately challenged by numerous climate activist groups and biased media outlets (see here). These challenges have since been proven incorrect for several reasons.

Statements by NASA Glaciologist Jay Zwally concerning his soon-to-be-published Antarctic follow-up study reconfirm that Antarctica is gaining, not losing ice.

The results of this follow-up study are bolstered by two other NASA research studies.

The first, dated January 1, 2018, shows that East Antarctica has for many years been accumulating huge amounts of snow that compact into ice and increasing overall ice mass

The second NASA study released on July 19, 2018, showed that the atmosphere above the Antarctic Continent has been continuously cooling and not warming for many years

Obviously, it’s impossible to melt Antarctica’s glaciers via atmospheric warming when the atmosphere is not warming.

Lastly, a NASA study dated Feb. 20, 2018, concludes that outflow of East Antarctic glaciers into the ocean is stable and not increasing (see here). This is proof that East Antarctica’s ice mass is not being diminished by glacial outflow into adjacent oceans.

Bottom line, research by NASA scientists clearly shows that the well-documented ice loss in West Antarctica is more than accommodated by ice gains in East Antarctica. Contrary to hundreds of pro-melting articles, Antarctica’s ice mass is increasing!

NASA Antarctica Study November 7, 2017

This research study entitled “Hot News from the Antarctic Underground“ investigated West Antarctica’s subglacial geology.

It substantiates many previous research studies that have documented this region’s subglacial high-bedrock heat-flow, active faulting, and prevalent volcanism.

Recent research by the University of Rhode Island scientists confirms the premises of a previous Climate Change Dispatch article that subglacial, volcanic heat-flow is melting West Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier

Many previous Climate Change Dispatch articles have reviewed West Antarctica’s subglacial mantle plume and the world-class fault system that is acting to bottom-melt this region’s glacial land sea ice

NASA Greenland Study August 1, 2018

The results of this research study illustrated in Figure 2 confirm the very high geothermal bedrock heat-flow from Greenland’s massive subglacial Mantle Plume, which was originally documented in four previous research studies

A geothermal heat-flow cause for the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet has been the focus of numerous Climate Change Dispatch articles

In summary, the NASA studies mentioned in this article have accelerated the ongoing demise of the once one-hundred-percent-settled-science status of global warming theory.

It is now abundantly clear that even respected mainstream NASA geologists and glaciologists are advocating that formerly underappreciated geological forces working in concert with atmospheric forces are responsible for polar ice cap melting.

Here we note that in many cases these geological forces are dominant and, in some cases, the complete cause of modern-day and ancient polar ice cap melting

Knowing this brings into question other aspects of supposedly 100 percent settled climate dogma.

Specifically, that man-made global warming is the root cause of other supposedly unnatural polar ice cap events such as alteration of marine and land animal migration patterns, anomalous plankton blooms, chemical alteration of adjacent ocean waters, alteration of polar area ocean currents, and changes in meteorological patterns.

Many of these events are more likely the result of, or strongly influenced by, geologically induced heat and chemically charged heated fluid flow at the base of polar ice sheets or in adjacent oceans.

Lastly, there is a quiet revolution occurring within NASA that will play out within the next year or two ending in the complete reconstruction of global warming theory.

The remodeled version will reflect the now proven and significant climate influence of geological forces as per the 2014 Plate Climatology Theory.

SOURCE  






Global warming misses out Western Australia

Even PM Turnbull has made the absurd claim that the drought in South Eastern Australia is due to global warming.  But if there is no drought in Western Australia, the warming is not very global is it?  Besides, global temperatures have been falling for the last couple of years

As farmers on the eastern coast of Australia battle through the worst drought in a century, their Western Australia counterparts are on track to record the best harvest in a decade.

Grain farmers in Western Australia could contribute $6billion to the economy thanks to a combination of rain and high demand.

The increased demand for grain has seen WA prices inflate to as much as $360 a tonne, the most since a record-breaking year in 2016.

Adversely, NSW grain production has slowed to a crawl, as farmers suffer through the worst drought in a century.

It has been at least ten years since seasonal and pricing factors have worked in farmers' favour agriculture marketing director Richard Vincent told The West Australian.

He says that some farmers in the right conditions could end up with as much as 70 per cent higher income than projected.

The Eastern states' drought also contributed to their profits, as a lack of production from the east means more demand for the west's produce.

'Although nobody wants to see our eastern states counterparts in drought, the high grain prices are providing enormous opportunities in the west,' Mr Vincent said.

If Western Australian farmers are able to match their export of 16.6 million tonnes, which they're on track to do, their gross income would be about $6billion.

There's also been 30 per cent more rainfall than anticipated in the west, contributing to a 25 to 40 per cent increase in prices for wheat and barley.

Western Australia produces about seven million tonnes of wheat every year.

Some Western Australian farmers reported they had 78mm of rain in the past week.

In the past month, NSW farmers reported less than 10mm of rain, with the trend of low rainfall projected for at least the next three months.

Authorities officially declared the entire state in drought on Wednesday.

With the weather bureau warning there is no end in sight, the Red Cross has set up a relief appeal, while the Salvation Army is distributing food hampers.

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 August, 2018

Alarmists Now Argue Global Warming Makes Heat Waves AND Cold Spells Even Worse

When the eastern U.S. plunged into a deep freeze last winter, some scientists blamed Arctic ice melt from man-made global warming for the anomalously cold weather in the eastern part of the country.

Now, those same scientists are blaming Arctic warming for weakening the jet stream and exacerbating extreme summer weather across the northern hemisphere.

Global warming makes cold spells and heat waves more extreme, they contend.

Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann is out telling media the heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and floods are made worse because global warming is making the jet stream less stable.

“Climate change is literally making the jet stream more wild,” Mann told PBS NewsHour on Monday. “It undulates more, so you get those weather extremes, and it’s causing the jet stream to slow down, so those extreme weather events stick around.”

“And that’s when you get unprecedented damage and threat,” Mann said.

The basic idea is that the fast-warming Arctic is causing the jet stream to become weaker and wobblier, creating blocking patterns that keep weather patterns in place.

Cold spells and heat waves, for example, become more prolonged under this theory. It’s not a well-accepted theory.

Mann is not the only one perpetuating this theory. Rutgers University scientist Jennifer Francis, probably the theory’s greatest proponent, suggested there was a link between Arctic warming and wildfires and heat waves across the northern hemisphere.

“We can’t finger point directly at the Arctic to say that this summer’s crazy weather is directly related to the rapid warming up there, but it certainly fits the story that we’ve been putting together over the last several years,” Francis told CBC News in July.

Cato Institute climate scientist Ryan Maue criticized Mann’s blaming of a wobbly jet stream for summer weather, tweeting “that’s typical of ‘summer’ in Northern Hemisphere regardless of climate change.”

These jet stream "slow downs" or blocking events are actually poorly understood features of the climate system.

Indeed, the latest National Climate Assessment special report found that “confidence is low regarding whether or by what mechanisms observed Arctic warming may have influenced midlatitude circulation and weather patterns over the continental United States.”

Jetstream hysteria peaked in 2014 when former White House science czar John Holdren put out a video where he claimed record cold weather was actually a sign of global warming.

Holdren later admitted that his video was based on his “personal opinion” of the science, but environmental activists still fall back on it every time frigid weather shakes Americans’ faith in global warming.

As cold and snow pummeled the northeast in early 2018, former Vice President Al Gore claimed it was the product of man-made warming. Mann wrote a blog post for Gore’s environmental group on the subject.

At the time, Mann wrote it is “precisely the sort of extreme winter weather we expect because of climate change.” However, climate scientists challenged Mann’s assertion that warming was making it colder in the eastern U.S.

“Such claims make no sense and are inconsistent with observations and the best science,” University of Washington climatologist Cliff Mass said in January.

“The frequency of cold waves have decreased during the past fifty years, not increased. That alone shows that such claims are baseless,” Mass said.

SOURCE  






Trump Rules Make Driving Safer and Cheaper

A few years ago, I spoke at my son's fifth-grade class about all of the wonderful things that we have today in our great country that weren't around 100 years ago, including inventions like cars. A ponytailed girl in the front of the room raised her hand and, with a solemn look on her face, scolded me: "Cars are bad. They cause pollution." Wow. These were 11-year-olds! It was one of my first encounters with the green indoctrination that goes on in public schools starting in the first grade.

There wasn't time to explain to her that when Henry Ford started rolling his black Model T's off the assembly lines in Michigan, the mass production of automobiles was heralded as one of the greatest environmental and health advances in the history of mankind. It replaced one of the prodigious polluters: the horse. The average 1,000-pound horse dumps 30 pounds of feces and 2 gallons of urine a DAY. Can anyone imagine what Washington, D.C., or Pittsburgh or New Orleans smelled like on a hot, sweltering summer day or what all that feces did to our water supply? Oh, and watch where you step!

Yet, many liberals still seem to agree with Al Gore, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, who says that the combustion engine is one of the worst inventions of all time.

This explains why the ascendant green movement in America has for decades been trying to force Americans out of their cars. They think like that fifth-grader despite being supposedly rational adults.

The war on driving includes calls for carbon and gas taxes, tens of billions of gas tax money diverted to inefficient and little-used mass transit projects, and opposition to building new roads and highways. One of the most nefarious initiatives has been the Obama administration's draconian increases to the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards — a giant and hidden tax on American drivers.

Donald Trump announced last week he wants to ease those regulations. Under the Obama mandates, CAFE requirements would rise from about 35 mpg today to 54 mpg by 2025. This would raise the cost of many new cars by almost $3,000, and the hit to the economy from these rules is expected to reach a cool $500 billion over the next 50 years.

Under Trump's proposed changes, mileage requirements would still rise every year to 42 mpg by 2025 (way too high for my liking). And yet the left is seething in protest, complaining this means the end of our planet. The difference between the Trump and the Obama standards will mean a 31-hundredth degree higher global temperature in 80 years.

The Department of Transportation has found that the best way to get cleaner air is to incentivize families to buy new cars and get the older and higher polluting gas-guzzlers off the road. But because CAFE standards raise car prices, they delay the purchase of new cars, which increases pollution levels.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of the new Trump standards is that they are expected to save about 1,000 lives a year due to lower highway deaths. The Competitive Enterprise Institute has found that CAFE standards kill people for two reasons: first, they induce the car companies to build lighter cars in order to meet the fuel standards. Second, because the regulations keep old cars on the road longer, Americans are more likely to be driving in less safe vehicles. The Trump administration has science firmly on its side here.

It wasn't so long ago liberals opposed military intervention in the Middle East by chanting "no blood for oil." But with higher CAFE standards, they are willing to tolerate more blood on the highways to save on oil.

Hearty congratulations to Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler for a new rule that can save lives, reduce pollution, grow the economy, and let people buy the cars they want — including SUVs, minivans and sports cars. This is a great victory for common sense and a windshield against the left's war on cars. As for those misguided fifth-graders, they will figure out the virtues of cars once they are old enough to get their driver's licenses. But when will liberals grow up?

SOURCE  





NYTimes Hosted Soirée With Activists The Night Before A Massive Climate Piece Ran

The author of a highly criticized article arguing that oil companies get too much of the blame for climate change met with environmentalists and scientists the night before publishing the lengthy piece.

The New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and writer Nathaniel Rich hosted a dinner with activists hours before the newspaper published a 30,000-word piece arguing oil companies are not the primary villain in the climate battle, E&E News reported Thursday.

Rich’s comments at the soirée appear to contradict elements of his article’s main thesis — human nature is the main obstacle to enacting climate policy.

“I wouldn’t let the fossil fuel industry off for anything. I think that they’ve committed crimes against humanity, and I think that’s how they’ll be seen in the future,” he said at the event, which gathered 50 people to a snazzy New York City restaurant to dine on Maine scallops and farm-raised chicken.

The meeting was designed to discuss the merits and demerits of Rich’s piece, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.”

But he did tell those gathered at the restaurant that heaping the blame on ExxonMobil and others was not a good way to approach the history of climate change.

“In fact, it’s almost a form of self-flattery to think that ‘Well, if it wasn’t for this villain, we would have solved this.’ And that seems to me to be a very limited way of looking at the issue, which I don’t think excuses [the fossil fuel industry] at all,” he said, adding that “there’s a false safety in blaming them for this entire crisis,” he said.

Rich’s narrative focuses around the failed efforts of “a handful of people, among them a hyperkinetic lobbyist and a guileless atmospheric physicist who, at great personal cost, tried to warn humanity of what was coming.”

Climate scientists did their level-best in the early 1980s to give “shrewd, passionate,” and “robust” arguments for acting, he wrote. But “they failed.”

His article follows the historical actions of former Friends of the Earth lobbyist Rafe Pomerance and former NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who worked to sound the alarm on catastrophic global warming and convince world leaders to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Former Vice President Al Gore even makes an appearance in Rich’s retelling of how scientists almost defeated global warming in the 1980s.

The piece received criticism from climate skeptics and activists who have long-argued propaganda from Exxon and Chevron were the biggest obstacles for climate scientists.

Pennsylvania State University academic Michael Mann argued that Rich’s piece, while unique in some ways, ultimately gave Exxon and others a “free pass.”

“Frankly, I think a lot is missing,” Mann told reporters at E&E. “The article feels tone-deaf to me. Its message, to quote the great and powerful Oz, seems to be ‘pay no attention to that billion-dollar fossil fuel industry disinformation campaign behind the curtain.’” Dark money from Exxon’s financial backers is mostly responsible for the impasse, he added.

Rich’s arguments also got pushback from academics who are skeptical about some of the scientific models showing man-made global warming could lead to calamitous weather events in the future.

“By the time Reagan came along, conservatives were already against EPA because it already had gotten out of control,” Myron Ebell, who led President Donald Trump’s EPA transition team, told reporters. “This romance that somehow Republicans went sour … that isn’t what happened.”

Roger Pielke, Jr., a University of Colorado professor who has been involved in climate policy discussions for decades, mirrored much of Ebell’s point.

“This NYT article on climate policy history brings together alternative history with a disaster movie plot (brave scientists warns the world),” Pielke Jr. wrote in a tweet Wednesday to his followers. “The world was not on the brink of rapid decarbonization in the 1980s. It’s a fun story though.”

The narrative that Exxon knew about climate change in the 1970s and 1980s has become a central focus for many environmentalists.

A Harvard report conducted in August 2017, for instance, accused the oil company of producing troves of research affirming the existence of global warming, while using advertorials to cast doubt on climate change.

Researchers tossed cold water on the study, though. A report from research group Energy in Depth (EID) found that more than 90 percent of the advertorials acknowledged that climate change was caused in part by human action.

Rich’s piece supports EID’s research — that the oil company became more hesitant to push climate policies after activists began targeting them as the enemies.

Politicians eventually used the narrative to create a full-on assault against Exxon. Former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, for instance, spent more than a year probing the oil company based on claims that Exxon downplayed for decades the severity of global warming to investors.

Much of his probe was based on reports from the liberal-leaning media outlet InsideClimate News, which alleged in a report in 2017 that Exxon has spent decades shelving evidence of climate change.

SOURCE  





EPA decides to keep and defend Obama's strict smog rules

The Trump administration said Wednesday that it will maintain and defend in court the Obama administration’s 2015 national air quality standards for smog-forming ozone.

Justice Department attorneys working for the Environmental Protection Agency told a federal court that the agency could not justify rejecting the Obama-era ozone standard, because of past court rulings and its aversion to a drawn-out legal battle that would bring uncertainty to states needing to comply.

“While EPA officials in the current administration may have supported making different judgments about the significance of background concentrations of ozone and how to judge what standards are requisite to protect public health and welfare, the agency at this time does not intend to revisit the 2015 rule,” the attorneys wrote in a filing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

The Obama-era ozone regulations lowered the level of ozone allowed in a particular area from 75 parts per billion to 70 parts per billion. Ozone is a smog-causing gas that forms when chemical emissions are exposed to heat and sunlight. The Obama EPA said the tougher rules would prevent thousands of premature deaths.

But many areas of the country had not complied with the previous 75 parts per billion standard, set in 2008, before the Obama administration decided to make the standard more strict, critics said.

When Scott Pruitt led the EPA, he tried to delay implementing the Obama administration's ozone rule, but later backed off after 16 Democratic state attorneys general sued. Pruitt was one of the litigants who sued the EPA trying to overturn the 2015 rule when he was Oklahoma's attorney general.

Under the ozone rules, states must ascertain which areas can comply and which cannot, called areas of "nonattainment."

Once the non-attainment areas are designated, states must develop and submit plans for meeting the standards.

Manufacturing and business groups had argued the original version of the updated ozone regulations would place much of the country in non-attainment, hurting heavy industry and stifling energy development.

Congressional Republicans had introduced legislation to block the 2015 rules from going into effect until states have met the previous rules. President Trump promised during the campaign to repeal the rule.

But Andrew Wheeler, the new acting EPA administrator, issued a report Tuesday on the nation's air quality finding that ozone pollution is 22 percent lower since 1990, and credited the 2015 rule with helping to bring down emissions levels.

Jeff Holmstead, a former deputy administrator of the EPA in the George W. Bush administration, said Wheeler is right to not challenge the 2015 rule, because it would have lost in court. Holmstead expects the EPA to make its own ozone standard in the future.

“The EPA has said they are planning to do the next ozone review on time, meaning in less than two years. They can change it then," Holmstead told the Washington Examiner. "I wouldn’t say this means we will have a standard of 70 parts per billion forever going forward.”

SOURCE  






Maybe this heatwave is just a heatwave

BEN PILE

Why climate alarmists see all extreme weather as a portent of doom.

The routine is drearily familiar. Any deviation from weather norms brings on a Biblical torrent of apocalyptic green fearmongering. And so it was with the heatwaves experienced in the Northern Hemisphere this June and July.

It seemed to be the heatwave that climate alarmists have long promised us. June and July certainly brought unusual temperatures to many places, prompting alarmist copy. The BBC’s North America correspondent, James Cook, tweeted: ‘Climate change. It’s here, it’s catastrophic.’ He then cited a list of tragedies from the Greek wildfires to lemon shortages in the US that had unfolded under the summer sun. As usual, though, the climate-change narrative precedes the facts.

For instance, the wildfires in Greece cited by Cook were not the result of high temperatures. Temperatures in Athens – close to the location of the fires – were only slightly higher than the average for this time of year, and not much hotter than in the UK. Worse still for Cook, Greek authorities suspect that the fires were caused by arson, not SUVs and unnecessary flights. And even if temperatures have risen in Europe, wildfires across the continent, and globally, have diminished in this era now described mawkishly as the ‘anthropocene’. Perhaps global warming prevents wildfires?

Cook was not alone in putting the climate narrative before the weather facts. In the Observer, Andrew Rawnsley proclaimed that, ‘Our scorched Earth needs voters to put more heat on their politicians’. He continued: ‘The offices, factories, homes, roads and railways of Britain were designed on the assumption that it is a country of blessedly temperate conditions, immune to extremes of heat and cold.’ These claims are almost comedic in their departure from the reality of Britain’s weather, and from the history of Britain’s housing stock.

Slum clearances in urban centres lasted well into the 1970s, as was well documented by photographer Nick Hedges. And to claim that much of what replaced the slums was ‘designed’ at all, let alone designed to precise temperature ranges, would be to flatter the ‘designers’. Nonetheless, the UK’s population is now far better protected from hot and cold extremes than it has ever been. The 1911 July-September heatwave in Britain caused thousands of deaths in London alone; thousands of children perished from diarrhoea caused by consuming food and milk that had fouled in the heat. Refrigerators are as vital to surviving the weather as walls and roofs.

The news that technological and economic development and improvements in housing have massively reduced the impact of extreme weather has yet to reach parliament, it seems. ‘Regular heatwaves “will kill thousands”’, said the BBC’s environmental analyst, Roger Harrabin, reporting on a warning issued by the Environmental Audit Committee. The maths underpinning this miserable forecast is simple enough: estimate the number of excess deaths per degree of excess temperature, and then multiply by the predicted degree of climate change. But such banal arithmetic is historically blind and deaf to debate, and completely dumb to informing policy.

The addition of air conditioning units to vulnerable homes – or perhaps to everybody’s homes – would massively reduce excess deaths and illnesses now, never mind in the future. There is no natural correlation between heatwaves and deaths; there are only thick policymakers who would rather energy was more expensive, so as to discourage the use of things like air-conditioners, on the basis that such energy usage contributes to climate change. Enter the technocrat head of adaptation at the UK Committee on Climate Change (CCC), Kathryn Brown. She appeared on Channel 4 News to suggest that people install tinted window film, and grow plants up the walls of their homes, to help defer the apocalypse.

The fact that institutions such as the CCC have so little to offer the public suffering in the heatwave should not be a surprise. The CCC was established under the Climate Change Act 2008, with a mandate to issue carbon budgets and policy advice to parliament. MPs were unable to decide for themselves how to ration carbon, and so, much as with the independence given to the Bank of England, they appointed technocrats to do the job rather than risk having the public influence such an important decision. Climate politics epitomises the gulf between the public and politicians, and the latter’s disdain for the interests, wants and needs of the former.

Similarly, the FT’s lofty opinion is that ‘unprecedented heat cannot be ignored’, and ‘extreme weather must spur action against global warming’. But the truth is that this heat is not unprecedented – the UK has suffered hotter. What is unprecedented is the protection we now have against extreme weather. From Spain to the US, populations have become less vulnerable to heatwaves, not more, as the climate alarmists claim. Wealth, it seems, not the ecological austerity that greens prefer, is the best defence against a changing climate.

The problems caused by heatwaves should be taken seriously, but not under the dangerously misleading rubric of climate change. It may be possible that global warming will increase the frequency and intensity of above-average temperatures. But the evidence shows us that resilience to extreme weather requires no armies of climate technocrats, no virtue-signalling zombie politicians, no vapid hacks at the BBC, FT and Guardian – it just requires progress. Indeed, it is the political class’s green ascetism that is now the main barrier to ensuring that extreme weather doesn’t have a dramatic impact on our lives.

SOURCE  

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

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

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







8 August, 2018

The Planet Is Dangerously Close to the Tipping Point for a 'Hothouse Earth'

An opinion about what will happen in 300 years time is worthless. 

Interesting that tipping points are back, though.  A tipping point was integral to the first generation of global warming theory.  Increasing clouds were said to arrive at a tipping point where they would greatly accelerate warming.

Once it became clear that clouds actually had a cooling effect, that one faded out, however, to be replaced by modelled steady increases. 

Now we have a claim that all sorts of things can reach tipping points.  If one doesn't work maybe another will, seems to be the hope

Since the whole prophecy is founded  on the demonstrably false claim that higher levels of atmospheric CO2 lead to higher global temperatures, none of it will come true


It's the year 2300. Extreme weather events such as building-flattening hurricanes, years-long droughts and wildfires are so common that they no longer make headlines. The last groups of humans left near the sizzling equator pack their bags and move toward the now densely populated poles.

This so-called "hothouse Earth," where global temperatures will be 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit (4 to 5 degrees Celsius) higher than preindustrial temperatures and sea levels will be 33 to 200 feet (10 to 60 meters) higher than today, is hard to imagine — but easy to fall into, said a new perspective article published today (Aug. 6) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Top 9 Ways the World Could End]

In the article, a group of scientists argued that there is a threshold temperature above which natural feedback systems that currently keep the Earth cool will unravel. At that point, a cascade of climate events will thrust the planet into a "hothouse" state. Though the scientists don't know exactly what this threshold is, they said it could be as slight as 2 degrees C (around 4 degrees F) of warming above preindustrial levels.

Sound familiar? The 2 degrees C mark plays a big role in the Paris Agreement, the landmark 2016 agreement signed by 179 countries to combat climate change by reducing carbon emissions (the same one that the U.S. announced it would withdraw from last year). In that accord, countries agreed to work to keep global temperature rise well below 2 degrees C, and ideally below 1.5 degrees C, above preindustrial levels this century.

"This paper gives very strong scientific support … that we should avoid coming too close or even reaching 2 degrees Celsius warming," article co-author Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Center and a professor of water systems and global sustainability at Stockholm University in Sweden, told Live Science.

Changing Earth's rhythm

For the last million years, Earth has naturally cycled in and out of an ice age every 100,000 years or so. The planet left the last ice age around 12,000 years ago and is currently in an interglacial cycle called the Holocene epoch. In this cycle, Earth has natural systems that help keep it cool, even during the warmer interglacial periods.

But many scientists argue that due to the immense impact of humans on climate and the environment, the current geological age should be called the Anthropocene (from anthropogenic, which means originating with human activity). Temperatures are almost as hot as the maximum historical temperature  during an interglacial cycle, Rockström said.

If carbon emissions continue unabated, the planet might leave the glacial-interglacial cycle and be thrust into a new age of the "hothouse Earth."

Today, we emit 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year from burning fossil fuels, Rockström said. But roughly half of those emissions are taken up and stored by the oceans, trees and soil, he said.

However, we are now seeing signs that we are pushing the system too far — cutting down too many trees, degrading too much soil, taking out too much fresh water and pumping too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, Rockström said.

Scientists fear that if we reach a certain temperature threshold, some of these natural processes will reverse and the planet "will become a self-heater,"Rockström said. That means, forests, soil and water will release the carbon they're storing.

"The moment the planet becomes a source of greenhouse gas emissions together with us humans, then as you can imagine, things are accelerating very fast in the wrong direction," he said. [Doom and Gloom: Top 10 Postapocalyptic Worlds]

Many tipping points

In their perspective paper, Rockström and his team corroborated existing literature on various natural feedback processes and concluded that many of them can serve as "tipping elements." When one tips, many of the others follow.

Nature has feedback mechanisms, such as a rainforest's capability to create its own humidity and rain, that keep ecosystems in equilibrium. If the rainforest is subject to increasing warming and deforestation, however, the mechanism slowly gets weaker, Rockström said.

"When it crosses a tipping point, the feedback mechanism changes direction," Rockström said, and the rainforest morphs from a moisture engine into a self-dryer. Eventually, the rainforest turns into a savanna and, in the process, releases carbon, he said.

This, in turn, can become part of a cascade that would influence other processes around the world, such as ocean circulation and El Niño events. Other tipping points include the thawing of permafrost, loss of Arctic summer sea ice and the loss of coral reefs.

A global call for help

The first big goal should be to completely stop carbon emissions by 2050, Rockström said. But that won't be enough, he added.

In order to stay away from these tipping points, the "whole world [needs to] embark on a major project to become sustainable across all sectors," he said.

That could be a challenge, as countries around the world grow increasingly nationalistic, he said. Instead of focusing on narrow national goals, the world should collectively work to reduce carbon emissions — for instance by creating investment funds that can support poorer nations that don't have as much capacity to reduce emissions as richer countries do, he said.

All of this means "that it's, scientifically speaking, completely unacceptable that a country like the U.S. leaves the Paris Agreement, because now more than ever, we need every country in the world to collectively decarbonize … in order to secure a stable planet," Rockström said.

The new paper is an opinion article that includes no new research but rather draws on the existing literature, Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University who was not part of the study, told Live Science in an email.

"That having been said, the authors do, in my view, make a credible case that we could, in the absence of aggressive near-term efforts to reduce carbon emissions, commit to truly dangerous and irreversible climate change in a matter of decades," Mann said.

SOURCE  






Weather Channel Tweets Alarmist Thread About Biblical ‘Exodus’ From Global Warming

There is ALREADY massive immigration from warm places in Africa and South America to cool places in Europe and North America, but it is to get more money, not to flee warmth

The Weather Channel website kicked off the week with a long Twitter thread warning of the “climate migration crisis” happening around the world as a result of global warming-fueled extreme weather.

The tweet storm is meant to promote the Weather Channel’s series called “Exodus: The Climate Migration Crisis” — no doubt alluding to the Biblical tale of Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt.

The tweet storm comes as wildfires rage across the western U.S. and intense, near-record heat scorches much of Europe, though links between those events, especially wildfires, and global warming are tenuous.

The IBM-owned website featured a story Monday about Massachusetts coastal residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed by massive flooding in the wake of nor’easters last winter.

This isn’t the first Weather Channel effort to connect global warming to everyday weather events. Earlier this year, the Channel delayed a climate PR campaign until there were no more winter storms.

Once settled on, the Weather Channel’s website had a banner reading, “THERE IS NO CLIMATE CHANGE DEBATE” for an entire day to highlight “climate” stories from all 50 states.

The Weather Channel also retooled the front page of its website in June 2017 when President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris climate accord. The site featured “The United States of Climate Change” series.

SOURCE  






EPA Released A Long-Delayed Report Showing Ethanol Hurts The Environment

Suppression of information is essential to the Green/Left. The facts are so much against them

An extensive report from the Environmental Protection Agency found that including ethanol into the U.S. gas supply is wreaking havoc on the atmosphere and soil.

In a study titled “Biofuels and the Environment: The Second Triennial Report to Congress,” the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determined that ethanol derived from corn and soybeans is causing serious harm to the environment. Water, soil and air quality were all found to be adversely affected by biofuel mandates.

“Evidence since enactment of [the Energy Independence and Security Act] suggests an increase in acreage planted with soybeans and corn, with strong indications from observed changes in land use that some of this increase is a consequence of increased biofuel production,” read a portion of the 159-page report. Other findings from the study show: More ethanol from corn has resulted in greater nitrogen oxide emissions, greater demand for biofuel feedstock has contributed to harmful algae blooms, and increased irrigation has placed greater stress on water sources.

Essentially, the study found that biofuel mandates are boosting production of corn and soybeans. Large-scale production of these crops is causing environmental degradation. The EPA also found that — at least in some instances — using ethanol in lieu of gasoline resulted in worse air emissions.

The mandate in reference concerns the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), a 2005 law that requires oil refineries include a certain amount of ethanol in their fuel mix. The law was passed with the intention of aiding in climate change efforts. The RFS has proven to be controversial, with oil producers deriding the mandate as costly and unneeded. Corn growers, however, support the mandate as it drives demand for the product.

During his time leading the EPA, Scott Pruitt became an adversary of ethanol proponents after granting more RFS waivers and pushing for a rollback of the law altogether. It’s not immediately clear how the Trump administration will handle the RFS debate moving forward. Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler has suggested he will continue seeking changes to the mandate, but President Donald Trump told an Iowa crowd in July that the EPA may soon allow for more ethanol to be included in gas.

The EPA study, published on June 29, came after a long delay. Federal law calls for the EPA to conduct a study on the Renewable Fuel Standard every three years, but the government was four years late this go-around. The agency’s previous ethanol study was published in 2011.

SOURCE  






Big Government and Environmentalists Are Causing Massive Fires in Western States

Editor’s Note: In response to the deadly Carr Fire in Northern California, many in the media have advanced the narrative that it is the result of climate change. However, this misses the ongoing problem of poor forest management which has led to larger fires throughout the West. The following story was published in the wake of the devastating Tubbs Fire.

The massive fires that took the lives of over 40 people in California were not the only devastating wildfires as of late.

Utah, Montana, and other states have been hit by destructive infernos that have left death and widespread property damage in their wake.

Forest fires—what firefighters call wildland fires—are undoubtedly a part of nature and can never be stopped entirely, but the measurable uptick in extraordinarily large fires is a trend that is causing intolerable amounts of damage.

Forest management policy has become calcified and centralized over the last half century, but there are some serious ideas that can turn things around.

Since the 1970s, the number of forest fires in the United States has remained fairly constant, but there’s been a significant uptick in the size of these blazes. The average wildfire is now twice the size of fires of 40 years ago.

Some have tried to pin the blame on climate change, but as a 2015 Reason Foundation study noted, climatic factors like higher temperatures and increased droughts “cannot explain the pattern of fires observed over the past century.”

“While it is possible that climate change has played a role in increasing the size of fires, the primary cause seems to be forest management practices, which have changed several times over the course of the past 200 years,” the study said.

The United States Forest Service, which manages most of America’s wilderness, made some big changes in the 1970s that many say have led to our modern predicament.

The selective clearing of forests, in which only certain trees are removed, had been highly successful in the past. But perverse incentives for the agency made clear-cutting, or uniformly chopping down trees, more common in the 1950s. This led to a backlash of lawsuits, environmentalist attacks, and unfortunately, more centralization in Washington for the Forest Service.

“In 1976 Congress tried to resolve the debate by instituting a comprehensive forest planning process,” wrote Randal O’Toole, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute. “The resulting plans proved to be a costly mistake: The agency spent more than a billion dollars planning the national forests, but the plans were often based on fabricated data, and they did not resolve any debates.”

Nearly a half century of bureaucratic centralization and environmentalist initiatives have left forests overgrown, vulnerable to fire, and dangerous to individual property owners and the economies of many states.

California state Sen. Mike McGuire, a Democrat, estimated that the recent fires may have caused over $3 billion in damages to his state.

California’s fires have gathered most of the media attention, but other Western states also have suffered immensely from out-of-control wildland fires in the past few years.

Last year alone, large wildfires hit nine states, including California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming, according to The Washington Post.

“Fires nationwide have consumed 8,036,858 acres—about 12,550 square miles, larger than the size of Maryland—since Jan. 1,” the Post reported.

A large fire near the town of Brian Head, Utah, burned 13 homes and over 93 square miles of land.

Utah state Rep. Mike Noel, a Republican, along with other Utah legislators and officials, made a short video in October explaining how better forest management could have prevented what became the most expensive forest fire in the state’s history.

In the video, they say the buildup of dead trees caused what should have been a small brush fire to balloon into something much worse. The video notes at the end:

The [United States Forest Service] and the [Bureau of Land Management], like helpless giants, are constrained by a self-imposed web of bureaucratic rules and regulations that impede and stop proper management options that could reduce these large catastrophic fires.

Now Congress is working on measures to stop the bleeding of an increasingly unmanageable problem.

The House recently passed a bill that would allow more aggressive tree clearing and local collaborative organizations to have more control of public land. It would also redirect funds from fighting fires to preventing fires, correcting what has become a major budgetary imbalance over the past few decades.

“Fire expenditures have grown from less than 15 percent of the Forest Service budget in [the] early 1990s to about 50 percent today. Forest Service fire expenditures have increased from less than $1 billion in the late 1990s to $3.5 billion in 2016,” O’Toole wrote.

What is clear is that, unlike the effects of many other natural disasters, there are proven ways, such as aggressively limiting overgrowth and clearing dead wood, to control the effects of wildfires and contain their damage.

Previous generations more effectively dealt with the problem, and federal and state policymakers would be wise to emulate and improve on what they did as we come up with our own innovative solutions.

SOURCE  






EPA: Key Air Pollutants Drop 73 Percent Since 1970

Americans who value clean air and robust economic growth do not need to make an either-or choice, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s new annual report on air quality.

The EPA report released Tuesday finds that between 1970 and 2017, the combined emissions of six main kinds of pollutants decreased by 73 percent even as the U.S. economy grew substantially over the 47 years.

In a formal statement, acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said:

Through federal and state implementation of the Clean Air Act and technological advances in the private sector, America has achieved one of the great public-private successes of our time—dramatically improving air quality and public health while simultaneously growing the nation’s population and economy.

This report details a remarkable achievement that should be recognized, celebrated, and replicated around the world. A 73 percent reduction in any other social ill, such as crime, disease, or drug addiction, would lead the evening news.

Congress originally passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, following up with major revisions in 1977 and 1990. Under the law, the EPA must rely upon scientific data to create “national ambient air quality standards” for pollutants.

In response, the agency set standards for six “criteria pollutants” officials identified as dangerous to human health and the environment: particulate matter (also known as particle pollution), ozone, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and lead.

Diane Katz, a research fellow in regulatory policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal that “less costly” alternatives to the Clean Air Act could have achieved similar results.

“Improvement in air quality is always welcome news,” Katz said in an email. “There’s no doubt that the Clean Air Act contributed to the improvement. But this improvement does not mean that other, less costly and oppressive approaches would not have achieved the same or even greater improvement.”

“After all, new technology, not regulation, is the greatest driver of environmental quality,” Katz said. “To the extent regulatory costs hinder innovation, the environment may actually suffer.”

The Clean Air Act also calls on states to formulate their own plans to upgrade and maintain air quality standards. States are responsible for emissions that cut across state lines.

The new EPA report says the environmental improvement occurred in tandem with increased economic growth as “Americans drove more miles and population and energy use increased.”

Concerned citizens and policymakers with an interest in specific pollutants and geographic locations may access interactive features that flush out the information in the EPA report.

Graphics and illustrations also highlight recent trends. For example, the section on the Air Quality Index includes a bar chart showing that the number of days of unhealthy air quality has dropped significantly in recent years.

The report cites these reductions in “key air pollutants” compared with 1990 levels:

—Carbon monoxide: 65 percent.

—Ammonia: 22 percent.

—Nitrogen oxides: 58 percent.

—Direct particulate matter (2.5 microns): 29 percent.

—Direct particulate matter (10 microns): 25 percent.

—Sulfur dioxide (SO2): 88 percent.

—Volatile organic compounds: 40 percent.

“The Clean Air Act is woefully outdated,” Heritage’s Katz said. “At nearly 50 years old, its provisions lack the many regulatory insights we have gained over the decades. Finally, the recent focus on the act as the principle regulatory vehicle to address climate change has been a colossal waste of time, money, and effort.”

The EPA report, titled “Our Nation’s Air: Status and Trends Through 2017,” is one of several resources online that keep tabs on pollution trends and progress in improving air quality.

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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7 August, 2018

Land under some solar farms can grow food as well

Unlikely to be competitive with normal farming, however.  Agricultural markets are already in glut most of the time so only the most economical producers survive.  The writer below seems to know that -- as he is promoting such "farms" only as a pollen source for bees. Increased honey production will be their only benefit. Bees work without pay, of course. So there will be no return on the money spent to establish and maintain such farms.  They are not an economic proposition, at least in the USA.  Existing experimental farms that claimed to be profitable probably did not count labour costs as the workers were already working for some institution








Beneath some solar arrays, pollinator-friendly plants, fruits, vegetables and forage are cropping up in place of turfgrass or gravel

At a recent solar energy conference in Minneapolis, attendees unwound at happy hour tasting free pints of a local honey-based India Pale Ale called “Solarama Crush.” Minnesota-based 56 Brewing makes the smooth IPA using honey from hives located on solar farms outside the Twin Cities.

Honey producers Travis and Chiara Bolton keep bees at three solar farms where developers seeded native plants underneath and around panels. “The advantage to these sites is that they are intentionally planted for pollinators,” says Travis Bolton. “At these sites they’re really trying to get them back to a native prairie, and that’s a benefit to us.”

Native plants have replaced turfgrass and gravel as the go-to bedding for solar gardens in Minnesota, a result of a 2016 state standard that outlines how developers can create pollinator-friendly environments. More than half of the 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) of solar farms built in 2016 and 2017 feature native plants that not only benefit pollinators but also beautify the site.

Although Minnesota may be in the vanguard of encouraging solar farm developers to grow native plants, it is far from the only place studying how solar farms can harvest more than just energy. Universities in the United States, Germany and elsewhere are testing the concept of “dual use farming,”as some advocates call it, where crops grow below canopies of solar panels. They are finding they grow just fine?—?and, in some cases, better than crops in full sun.

All Kinds of Benefits

Adding plants to solar farms offers all kinds of benefits to the facilities’ primary aim of reducing carbon emissions and expanding renewable energy. “Solar development is happening on a massive scale as lands are being converted from agricultural land or unused land into solar projects,” says Jordan Macknick, energy-water-land lead analyst with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which funds research on the impact of native and crop plants grown in solar farms. “That represents an amazing opportunity to improve our agriculture and improve our food security while developing energy at the same time.”

And native and crop vegetation can help improve the health of pollinators, which are threatened by habitat loss, pesticide poisoning, poor nutrition, disease, decreased genetic diversity and a host of other factors. As a result, managed honeybee colonies used for honey production declined from 5.7 million in the 1940s to around 2.7 million today. Pollinators have an enormous impact on the economy, too, by annually contributing US$24 billion to the nation’s economy.

With more land being devoted to solar energy production, the idea of making those acres pollinator friendly seems to make ecological and economic sense. “Incorporating habitat into these solar farms across the nation is a good way to promote and protect pollinator health,” says Val Dolcini, president and CEO of the San Francisco­–based Pollinator Partnership, a non-profit organization promoting pollinator environments.

Under-panel native plants benefit not just their immediate solar farm surroundings but nearby cropland. Lee Walston, an ecologist at Argonne National Laboratory, says pollinating insects roam beyond solar installations to other agricultural fields, where they help increase production. Native plantings offer refuge for declining species such as monarch butterflies and rusty patched bumblebees while serving the additional purpose of controlling stormwater and erosion, he adds.

Native gardens and vegetables also offer an aesthetic benefit having nothing to do with panels or agricultural production, advocates say. They offer a more colorful and pleasing visual tapestry rather than the monolithic green of turf grass or the gray of gravel, a feature not to be underestimated at a time when some communities seek to stop solar garden expansion due in part to the uniform monotony of endless rows of panels.

Pilot Projects

Pilot projects in Massachusetts, Arizona, Germany, China, Croatia, Italy, Japan and France look encouraging for mixing crops with solar panels, referred to as “dual use” farms because they offer both agricultural and electrical production. “So far, the pilots have been extremely successful in showing that you can grow crops and make electricity at the same time,” Macknick says.

A dual-use farm operated by the University of Massachusetts­–Amherst grows a variety of plants?—?peppers, beans, cilantro, tomatoes, swiss chard, kale?—?below solar panels elevated roughly 7.5 to 9 feet (3 meters) or more above ground to allow for easier harvesting mainly by hand. Project researchers have found that 1- to 1.2-meter (3- to 4-foot) gaps between panel clusters led to crop yields almost the same as what they would have been in full sun sites.

One of the first concepts for mixing solar and agriculture, dubbed “agrophotovoltaics” (APV), was developed more than three decades ago by physicist Adolf Goetzberger. The research institute Goetzberger created?—?the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems?—?finally got around to building its own dual-use farm on one-third of a hectare (just over three-quarters of an acre) at an existing farm cooperative a few years ago. The institute elevated 720 solar panels high enough for farm machinery to harvest plants underneath and nearby, according to a 2017 press release.

The researchers planted wheat, potatoes, celeriac and clover grass in the open and under the panels and compared the yields. Solar shading decreased production 5.3 percent to 19 percent. Yet electricity from the panels, which capture both indirect and direct light, was used to power a crop processing plant and electric farm machinery, offsetting those costs and increasing land use efficiency by 60 percent.

While the farm made a profit, the research team seemed a bit wary of claiming the approach could work everywhere at any scale. Project manager Stephan Schindele said in the press release that “in order to provide the necessary proof-of-concept before market entry, we need to compare further techno-economical applications of APV, demonstrate the transferability to other regional areas and also realize larger systems.”

Similarly, agriculture faculty members at the Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek in Croatiagrow shade-happy organic vegetables beneath solar canopies on a local farm operated partly by faculty members. The energy generated goes to power the farm’s irrigation system and farm machinery. In Austria, an entrepreneur created a system similar to APV but using fewer stationary poles by placing panels on a cable infrastructure in an effort to reduce costs and potential accidents involving farm machinery. APV systems are being tested in another part of Germany and in several other countries.

Greg Barron-Gafford, associate professor in the School of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona, has worked on a solar “agrivoltaic” pilot project?—?basically, the American version of APV?—?for two years. Tucson public schools with existing solar canopies are being used, as well as the university’s Biosphere 2 research and public education center. Focused initially on reducing the heat island effect of solar panels, the project morphed into one testing crop yields under panels.

A first run at a salsa garden of cilantro, pepper and tomato “was awesome,” Barron-Gafford says. Crops grown underneath the panels required only half the water of those growing out in the open and grew well in the microclimate beneath the panels. “The plants seem to love the modulated temperatures,” he says.

Panels protect the plants from frost, allowing a longer season for avocados, cilantro, peppers, tomatoes and mangos. In late spring researchers began harvesting a winter crop of carrots, kale, chard and lemongrass. “It’s really been something to watch,” he says.

The experiment found other advantages to the panels as well. The skin temperature of people harvesting crops underneath the panels was 25 degrees cooler than those working out in in the sun, no small matter in a state with scorching summers. And some claim the shade-grown produce tastes better than conventionally grown crops.

Barron-Gafford would like to try the dual-use concept out in collaboration with a community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm that would involve at least 10 acres of cropland under solar panels, he says. The extra cost of adding a solar canopy over crops could be paid for by the 5 percent gain in power production seen in panels in Arizona, reduced maintenance and premium pricing for solar-grown produce.

Despite the promising results of pilot dual-farm projects the idea of a future where American farms will be covered by solar canopies is not likely anytime soon. Rob Davis is director for the Center for Pollinators in Energy at the nonprofit Fresh Energy in St. Paul. The huge scaffolds holding solar panels cost a great deal of money, he says, and one bad turn by a farm tractor driver hitting a post could bring down hundreds of thousands of dollars of solar panels.

“There are a lot of different ways to design solar arrays that provide significant benefits to agriculture.”?—?Rob Davis
In places where agricultural land is tight and electricity prices high, such as Europe, the economics might play out in favor of dual-use farms. In the United States, however, farmland remains relatively plentiful and acres of canopies are unlikely to be feasible unless energy and agricultural markets change, he says.

“There are a lot of different ways to design solar arrays that provide significant benefits to agriculture,” Davis says. “One of those ways that is certainly the most cost effective?—?and continues the accelerated rate of large scale solar needed to address climate change?—?is creating pollinator habitat in and around solar projects.”

Native plants have their own challenges, such as the perception of higher up-front planting costs partly mitigated by less required maintenance. Not all a solar farms’ neighbors are in love with natives, either, due to their sometimes less-than-tidy appearance. Yet Davis argues American farmers are on board with more native habitats because without pollinators their livelihoods could be at risk.

“They understand the need to keep pollinators alive and in abundance” to seed the fruits and vegetables they grow, to maximize yields and to avoid more regulation, he adds. “This opportunity unlocks private sector dollars and deploys solar energy capital in investing in high quality pollinator habitat that is urgently needed in agriculture.”

SOURCE  






Fire and fury: How government failures make wildfires even worse

While East Coasters are heading off for their August vacations, many families out West are worried that if they leave their home, it may not be standing when they return. That’s the reality when there have been 4,500 wildfires this year so far.

It's hard for Easterners even to appreciate how dry the West is and how easy it is to start a massive fire. This year's fires have so far burned more than 400,000 acres, a land area equivalent to Denver and Los Angeles combined. The wreckage and smoke is so bad that it can be seen from space, and fires in California and Washington state can cloud the skies as far away as Idaho and Montana.

Everyone is quick to blame global warming for this and all other natural disasters. But changes to local weather in this or that part of the country are by no means part of the same scientific consensus that climate change is real and caused in large part by human activity. Western droughts and forest fires have been around a long time, and so has climate change, but the fires have gotten much worse very recently, and government mismanagement of forests is part of the reason.

While liberals waste their time on solutions that won't even scratch the surface of climate change (green buses that either don’t work or that no one rides are not going to make forests less flammable), man-made mistakes in policy are going uncorrected. One of the biggest problems is the overcrowding of Western forests with dead trees, and the areas between stand with dry, flammable grasses. Part of the problem is that logging and grazing have been discontinued or discouraged in too many places. To most Westerners, who have watched the severity of forest fires grow dramatically since the late 1980s, this is both common sense and the common wisdom.

“There are some places where there may be four times as many trees as there should be,” Krystal Beckham of the Little Hoover Commission told the Washington Examiner’s Josh Siegel. “When you have trees that close together, they can’t get the water they need, so they are more susceptible to drought, insects, and disease. And when they start dying, they become a terrible fire threat.”

Instead of clearing out fuel and conducting controlled burns in order to moderate wildfires before they happen, the government puts its money toward suppressing active wildfires. This is done on the theory that it's more natural to let forests grow on their own than to let fires rage except in areas where structures are threatened.

And yes, fire is part of nature (even if many of the fires are man-made) and that approach to forestry is indeed more natural, but that doesn't make it the best approach for people, for whose sake governments exist. This year in California, nearly two dozen people are dead and hundreds more are homeless thanks in part to failed forest management. Nor is it good for people anywhere who pay taxes that more than half of the U.S. Forest Service’s budget is now spent on suppressing active wildfires instead of managing forests.

Congress has now given the Forest Service more funding for prevention, and the Trump administration is finally taking forest treatment and mitigation more seriously. But according to the Property and Environment Research Center, the backlog of restoration work could take decades to complete.

Forest management is not a panacea. Fires will happen either way. But they don't have to be quite so intense or destructive. And the prevention and moderation of wildfires is a much more attainable goal than changing the entire planet’s climate. The Western fires that rage and drive people from their homes should serve as a reminder of this every summer.

SOURCE  






When It Comes To The Environment, These Are The Good Ol' Days

Cleaning Up: Green groups and their uncritical media allies would have you believe that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, at least when it comes to the environment. Despite the scary headlines, the real news is that our environment is getting cleaner all the time.

We were reminded of this once again while reading the Environmental Protection Agency's latest report on air quality. It's an eye opener.

Those who are older than 50 can remember a time when the U.S.' air was fouled with pollutants, especially in major cities. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, kids were regularly called indoors from playing outside when skies became smoggy.

Those days are gone. Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of companies and, yes, the EPA, the air we breathe has become much, much cleaner.

"Through federal and state implementation of the Clean Air Act and technological advances in the private sector," wrote acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, "America has achieved one of the great public-private successes of our time — dramatically improving air quality and public health while simultaneously growing the nation's population and economy."

That's not just talk. From 1970 to 2017, the six major pollutants monitored by the EPA plunged by 73%. By comparison, during that time the U.S.' economy grew 262% and its population by 60%.

The decline in pollution is steep. Carbon monoxide, down 77%. Lead, 80%. Nitrogen oxide, 56%. Ozone, 22%. Particle pollution, off an average 38%. Sulfur dioxide, 88%.

Not included in the report, but equally if not more significant, is the fact that CO2 — the main greenhouse gas — overall has plunged 29% since peaking in 2007. That's been the relentless focus of global warming activists and the left-leaning power elites from their policy perches at think tanks, NGOs, and global government organizations such as the U.N.

Green groups might counter that the EPA's stringent rules since the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970 — and then revised in 1977 and again in 1990 — have worked well. So why not put even more tough rules in place?

The problem with this, of course, is that "tougher" rules are often counter-productive. There's something in economics called the 80-20 rule, or Pareto principle, that's valid here. It says that 80% of the improvement in anything comes from 20% of the effort. The final 20% of improvement requires 80% of the total effort — often a waste of money and effort.

That's where we are with environmental improvements, unfortunately. Desperate measures will raise the costs of cleaning things up immeasurably. The returns on money spent cleaning up the environment diminish. In some cases, the money spent is wasted.

Take, for instance, the current fad of seeking a carbon tax on the global economy, including agriculture. The problem with that is such a tax would make manufacturing and food growing so expensive that people would suffer. Standards of living would decline.

That's not mere conjecture. A new study by Japanese researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis found that "a single climate mitigation scheme applied to all sectors, such as a global carbon tax, could have a serious impact on agriculture and result in far more widespread hunger and food insecurity than the direct impacts of climate change."

That is, the cure is worse than the disease.

And anyway, it's not even clear that there is a disease, if by disease you mean dangerously rising temperatures.

A little notice, peer-reviewed study looking at the Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST) data from NASA and NOAA found that the much-tweaked temperature data sets were "not a valid representation of reality." They all but accused NASA and NOAA of scientific fraud.

"Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever — despite current claims of record setting warming," the author wrote.

These, by the way, are the very same faulty data often cited to justify draconian actions to halt global climate change — including a global carbon tax that would cost trillions of dollars.

Temperature Tinkering

The suspect data were also used by President Obama's EPA in 2009 for its far-reaching "Endangerment Finding" on greenhouse gases and CO2 that justified sweeping, and costly, new regulations and controls on major American industries.

"Since GAST data set validity is a necessary condition for the EPA's GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding, it too is invalidated by these research findings," the report concluded.

The point is, we don't need to hit the panic button about rising temperatures, greenhouse gases or other pollutants in the air. We are making steady progress, cleaning up our skies mostly through technology — not punitive anti-pollution rules.

"After all, new technology, not regulation, is the greatest driver of environmental quality," said Diane Katz, a research fellow in regulatory policy at the Heritage Foundation, as quoted in The Daily Signal. "To the extent regulatory costs hinder innovation, the environment may actually suffer."

That's why President Trump's efforts to deregulate the U.S. economy are welcome. We'll be richer and cleaner, thanks to his efforts.

So don't listen to the fear-mongers. We're getting cleaner all the time. And we're not burning up. These are the good old days.

SOURCE  






Solar Power Is Harming Taxpayers & Consumers

Thanks to politicians, environmentalists, and the solar industry, taxpayers and consumers are being fleeced. The federal government heavily subsidizes the solar industry, and a number of state governments have policies encouraging solar and green energy production.

The federal government subsidizes solar energy much more generously than other sources of electricity.  According to a study by the University of Texas at Austin, the coal industry received federal subsidies of $1.06 per megawatt hour in 2016; the oil and natural gas industry received federal subsidies of $0.91 per megawatt hour; the nuclear industry received federal subsidies of $1.30 per megawatt hour; and the wind industry received federal subsidies of $12.74 per megawatt hour while the solar industry received federal subsidies of $61.31 per megawatt hour.

Furthermore, 29 states have enacted renewable portfolio standards, which mandate the amount of green energy that must be produced. These standards have greatly increased renewable energy production. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, “Roughly half of the growth in U.S. renewable energy generation since 2000 can be attributed to state renewable energy requirements.” Eight other states have set renewable portfolio goals.

Another common policy used by states to increase the supply of solar energy and convince consumers to install solar panels at their homes is net metering. The Solar Energy Industries Association describes net metering as “a billing mechanism that credits solar energy system owners for the electricity they add to the grid.” 38 states have state-mandated net metering systems.

Sometimes states even require utilities to credit solar customers’ accounts for the full retail price of the power they supply to the grid. This is absurd because the full retail rate includes costs, such as overhead and grid maintenance, that solar customers do not have to worry about. Power companies – and their non-solar customers – should not be forced to purchase unneeded or unwanted power from solar customers, nor should they be forced to overpay for the power that they choose to purchase from solar customers.

Depending upon solar customers’ production and usage of electricity, net metering may even allow these customers to benefit from the grid without having to pay a dime for it. Obviously, if too many customers freeload, then there will not be enough people to pay to maintain and upgrade the grid.

Just how important are incentives for the solar industry? Without incentives, relatively few consumers would be interested in investing tens of thousands of dollars in solar panels when it is unclear if the panels will ever save them much money. For example, when incentives were dialed back in Nevada, the solar panel installation industry imploded.

Because of the intermittent nature of solar energy, reserve generating capacity is needed to supply energy to the grid whenever clouds block the sun. Otherwise, grid operators must cut power to customers or risk damage to the grid. Of course, when power companies must maintain more power plants to provide backup power, consumers are stuck with the additional costs.

Huge utility-scale solar plants often require the construction of expensive transmission lines to transmit electricity to customers because the plants are often built in remote locations. In fact, building just a single mile of a transmission line can cost millions of dollars. The money spent on these lines might well be better spent upgrading the country’s aging grid, vital parts of which are 40 to 70 years old. Depending upon which source is consulted, the grid is either in need of tens of billions of dollars or trillions of dollars of investment.

Government mandates and taxpayer-funded incentives for solar and renewable energy should be ended. After all, it is unfair to force poorer consumers and taxpayers to subsidize their wealthier neighbors’ electric bills.

SOURCE  






Australian Left ‘endorsing higher power bills’

Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg has seized on comments by a Labor environmental group which appeared to endorse higher power prices, amid rising pressure on the Turnbull government to seal a deal on its national energy guarantee.

The Labor Environment Action Network, which won support for a 50 per cent renewable energy target at the last ALP national conference, told followers on Twitter that “high prices are not a market failure — they are proof of the market working well”.

The Turnbull government needs state Labor governments to sign up to the national energy guarantee at a crucial Council of Australian Governments meeting next week, or its hopes of reforming the energy market will fail.

But the Andrews government faces a backlash from the Left at the coming Victorian election if it agrees to the plan, with at least two seats — Brunswick and Richmond — under threat from the Greens.

Mr Frydenberg lashed out at federal Labor, using the LEAN tweet to declare “the cat is out of the bag”.

“In a startling admission the federal Labor Party thinks that high power prices are a sign that the market is working well,” Mr Frydenberg said.

By prioritising emissions over price, Labor was “selling out jobs and hurting the hip pocket of Australian families”.

However, LEAN co-convener Felicity Wade said the tweet reflected the group’s distrust of the market-based electricity system.

“It is hardly surprising that a system that’s key organising principle is maximising profit delivers the highest profits it can — and in a natural monopoly situation — this means high prices for consumers,” she said.

Opposition energy spokesman Mark Butler branded suggestions Labor wanted higher power prices “absurd”, arguing more renewable energy in the grid would bring down energy costs.

“If the minister wants to demonstrate his commitment to lower power prices, he will adopt an emissions reduction target for the NEG that will support new renewable investment,” Mr Butler said.

He cited analysis by Reputex showing an NEG with a 45 per cent emission reduction target would deliver 25 per cent lower wholesale power prices than the government’s 26 per cent target.

“As long as the government is beholden to its anti-renewable rump, Australians will pay more for their electricity than they should,” Mr Butler said.

Finance Minister Mathias Cormann became the latest cabinet minister to confirm the government was working on an “NEG-plus” plan to ease concerns over the policy on the Coalition backbench.

Resources Minister Matthew Canavan told The Australian this week the “plus” element to the plan would include the government’s response to the competition watchdog’s recommendation that the government underwrite new dispatchable power.

Senator Cormann said the NEG was just one measure among many the government was pursuing to bring down power prices. “We’ve always had a national energy guarantee plus, plus, plus approach,” Senator Cormann told Sky News.

“The government has been doing a whole range of things in the energy space to bring down electricity prices, including of course, making sure that we had adequate supplies of gas into the east coast market and various other things that have helped to bring down electricity prices.”

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 August, 2018

Deadly heatwaves that can kill people in SIX HOURS could leave a large area of China uninhabitable by 2070

You wonder if some scientists ever set foot outside their own front door.  The "MIT scientists" below are forecasting disaster if temperatures reach 31°C in humid areas of China. 

Do they know nothing of the tropics?  I was born there, and lived in the coastal city of Cairns until I was 19.  And it sure was humid there.  And it was not unusual to have summer daytime temperatures of 100°F (38°C). 

And strange to say, we flourished.  We were actually rather advantaged. We had zero problems in winter time.  No snowplows, no shovelling snow, no chains on our tires, no burst pipes, no need for any heating. So we had year-round convenience for work or anything else we wanted to do.  I wish it on China


Vast swathes of China could be left uninhabitable to humans towards the end of the century due to blistering climate change-driven heatwaves, scientists warn.

China's north plain is the most densely populated region of the country, and serves as a key agricultural region to provide food for the country's 1.4 billion residents.

According to new research, the 1,500 square mile region (4,000 square kilometres) will become a wasteland if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate.

Climate change will result in a fatal combination of both heat and humidity, which can cause healthy individuals to drop dead in a matter of hours.

The scientists behind the study warned that unless China – the largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the world – curbs its pollution levels, it could trigger serious consequences for its population.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists predicted the devastating effect climate change will have on the densely-populated region of China, which stretches the length of the Yellow River.

For the study, which was published in Nature Communications, the researchers looked into the 'business-as-usual' situation and modelled the effects of current greenhouse gas emission levels over the next several decades.

According to the models, fatally humid heatwaves — known as 'wet bulb temperatures' (WBT) — are set to become more common in the north plain region.

Humidity dramatically exacerbates the effects of heatwaves for humans, as it stops them being able to shed excess heat from their bodies by sweating.

Without the use of this natural cooling mechanism, even fit and healthy humans sat in the shade can be overwhelmed and die in less than six hours. 

A WBT above 31°C (87.8°F) is classed by the US National Weather Service as an 'extreme danger', warning people that 'if you don’t take precautions immediately, you may become seriously ill or even die.'

Low rainfall across the region in China makes irrigation networks necessary to effectively plant in the highly fertile soil.

However, as temperatures increase these systems will cause high levels of water evaporation, making the air in the north plain incredibly humid.

The researchers found fatal WBTs of 35°C (95°F) would strike the north China plain repeatedly between 2070 and 2100, unless carbon emissions are cut.

MIT scientists found that Shanghai, for example, would exceed the fatal threshold five times and the 'extreme danger' WBTs would occur hundreds of times.

Even if China makes significant carbon cuts, the models still showed the 'extreme danger' WBT would be exceeded many times between 2070 and 2100.  

'This spot is going to be the hottest spot for deadly heatwaves in the future,' said Professor Elfatih Eltahir, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientist who led the study.

'The projections are particularly worrying because many of the region's 400 million people are farmers and have little alternative to working outside.

'China is currently the largest contributor to the emissions of greenhouse gases, with potentially serious implications to its own population.

'Continuation of current global emissions may limit the habitability of the most populous region of the most populous country on Earth.'

SOURCE  

Comment from a reader: My summers were spent hauling hay, picking cotton and harvesting corn in the Texas southeast ......hot, humid and 120 deg F in the hay barn, 98 deg F in the shade. In the summer I dreamed of winter, in the winter I dreamed of summer. No air conditioning only a window fan.  The human body has evolved to deal with heat.






The Truth About Wildfires

The media's emotional narrative is about climate change instead of a more accurate picture.

Places like California and Greece are suffering from severe wildfires (again), which have caused numerous deaths and terrible destruction. Of course, our alarmist and narrative-driven media can’t cover these catastrophes without conveying some nebulous link to global warming climate change. For example, the Associated Press matter-of-factly declared, “Extreme heat and wildfires made worse by climate change, say scientists.” Wildfires are “part of summer,” the article admits, “but it’s all being made worse by human-caused climate change.”

California Democrat Gov. Jerry Brown likewise blamed global warming for the severity of this summer’s wildfires, committing to efforts that “will help prepare the state to deal with the increasingly extreme weather and natural disasters caused by climate change.”

In truth, this oft-repeated claim lacks congruence. “Scenes of Californians fleeing their homes and Greeks swimming out to sea have fueled alarm about climate change fueling deadly wildfires,” The Washington Times says, “but recent studies show that such destructive blazes are on the decline worldwide. A September 2017 report in the journal Science found that global burned area dropped by about 25 percent over the previous 18 years, a finding consistent with a May 2016 paper published by the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. … Even in California, which for years has wrestled with fire devastation, a study in the International Journal of Wildland Fire found that the number of wildfires burning more than 300 acres per year has been tailing off since a peak in 1980.”

Speaking of California, meteorologist Joe Bastardi, in a May column for The Patriot Post titled “Before the Fact: Why Another Big Wildfire Season May Be on the Way,” explained that a soggy March and April in California set the stage for a bad wildfire season. Similar past patterns that preceded the development of El Niño indicated that drier conditions would follow — which they have — thereby aiding the wildfire season in the West. The opposite is true of Florida and the Northeast.

Regarding the seemingly worsening wildfire conditions, Bastardi offered this insight: “Quite frankly, the buildup in California means residents simply put themselves in positions where nature causes them problems. … As an environmentalist, I think the abuse of nature is not from excess CO2 but from man thumbing his nose at nature and building and paving ill-suited areas and then turning around and blaming something other than the actual cause. When you build houses on beaches that have been shifting forever, what do you think should happen? When you build houses in places that for years were forested, what do you think has to happen?” He added, “Look, it’s your choice if you wish to do that. But don’t go blaming nature when she simply does what she does.”

There may very well be a man-made component here — just not the one we keep hearing about through the media. But what is perhaps most remarkable is the fact that, despite this particular year’s wildfire season being especially severe and despite the increased risk that comes with city buildup, destructive wildfires are actually waning overall. Whether that trend continues remains to be seen, but it should at least make anyone question the prevailing narrative, which focuses solely on the immediate emotional impact of 24/7 televised destruction and human suffering instead of a reasonable view of the bigger picture.

SOURCE  






Young people are about to utterly transform climate politics

Another stupid prophecy.  No numbers. Just hand-waving generalization

Inter-generational justice demands bold, rapid climate action; real climate action demands a giant building boom.

We speak, for the sake of brevity, of “the climate movement.” But there is not one climate movement, but several different movements of people who want climate action, and the tensions between them are rising as younger people get more engaged.

We can see this best, right now, in the U.S. where there is, first, the old mainline environmental movement, which has done the bulk of climate advocacy work for decades.

Largely, this advocacy work has focused on cap-n-trade/CO2 tax policies and support for clean energy.

Mainline enviro groups have tended to treat climate as an environmental issue, indeed, often as one that must be weighed against others (we see this for instance in opposition to windfarms out of concerns for potential bird kills).

And their approach has tended to be technocratic, removed from contact with other social issues and at least overtly bipartisan.

In contrast to these big green groups, we have the older grassroots environmental groups, some of which treat climate seriously. These groups tend to be focused on greenery and lifestyles?—?local habitat preservation/restoration, recycling programs, etc

Much of the work of older local groups, though, has been to block bad things, like polluting factories, landfills, new freeways and what they see as greedy developers. Local enviros are a core of NIMBY opposition to change.

More recently, we’ve had the rise of what many progressives mean when they say “the climate movement”: a network of NGOs that primarily focus on fighting fossil fuel infrastructure (like pipelines) and pushing for divestment from coal and oil. This is the movement lead by 350.org.

The blockade-and-divest climate movement has been greatly magnified by the rise of a group of investors and regulators who see the dangers of the Carbon Bubble and have been nudging huge funds to divest for practical reasons (e.g. @CarbonBubble, @cdp)

At least as effective in actually driving down emissions, though, has been the urbanist climate movement. These are the newer local movements pushing for green building, transit and walkability, and dense, affordable housing. The YIMBYs.

(Here let me put my own cards on the table: I think there’s absolutely no way that the US can meet real carbon goals without fundamentally reforming urban planning and rebuilding urban/metro infrastructure.

Cities are the key to climate action, as I’ve said for 20 years.)

More recently, we’ve seen the rise of conflicting ideas about justice and the climate movement, which tend to get lumped under “climate justice”?—?from building local resilience to redistribution?—?but often have very different goals and aims. That’s worth unpacking another time.

Right now, as well, we’re seeing the rapid rise of business interests who see climate action not as a burden (much less a danger) but as a once-in-a-generation economic opportunity to participate in a huge boom. An iconic example is Tesla.

The business of building a carbon zero economy is about to become by far the most powerful part of the entire climate movement. That alone is going to kick up a lot of conflict, especially among those who consider anti-capitalist aims part of their climate advocacy.

Economic policy and development interests at state and regional levels are also huge players here, and work by yet another set of rules. CA’s climate policies are without a doubt the most important climate policies in America, for instance, but they work with their own dynamics.

On top of this, you have those who are advocating not (just) for reducing emissions but for readiness for disaster: People who want to ruggedize cities and infrastructure; restore ecosystems into the future; even attempt geoengineering and/or “geotherapy.”

On top of all that, you have those who are seeking to support the social stabilization work the planetary crisis will soon demand at massive scales: Folks concerned with forced migration and failed states; food supply and epidemic disease; conflict and recovery.

Take all this (and a few other major interest groups) and now add youth.

Climate change and the planetary crisis it drives are, above all else, generational in their politics. We olds may individually be doing amazing kick-ass work; the interests of the old and the young on the whole are still in obvious and direct conflict on a number of issues.

First, and foremost, there’s the issue of speed. Every day we delay, climate risks worsen & the costs of inevitable change rise.

If we care about intergenerational justice, moving at the most disruptive speed we can on cutting emissions is a clear ethical imperative.

That’s because while those risks and costs will fall almost entirely on the younger two-thirds of the population (and future generations) the money from climate destruction is being mostly accumulated by the older third.

Delay is, in this sense, predatory. On top of speed, though, there’s access.

The reality of American life is not only that younger people are being preyed upon by climate delay, but also that they’re largely shut out from building the lives they want.

We see this in myriad ways, from the housing shortage caused by anti-housing planning policies, to the death grip of car commuting on transportation planning, to the massive costs of education for the young (and its out-dated lack of focus on the tools they really need on a changing planet).

Almost everywhere in America, it’s hard to build the low-carbon new, even though younger people have shown that the low-carbon new is exactly what they want, from car-free neighborhoods to clean energy, bike infrastructure to green multifamily buildings…

So, if you’re a younger person, what you want is a) fast action, b) the chance to build a new low-carbon life and c) a good and meaningful job.

It’s the jobs part that’s going to really jack up the tension in the climate movement. Because for all our enthusiasm for “green jobs,” young people installing solar panels is just the tip of the iceberg, and most of the submerged ice is going to be far more controversial as it rises.

See, many older people have this idea that climate action will be a “transition.” That it’ll be slow, incremental, based on personal choices, largely about small behavioral changes and retrofitting today’s lifestyles with cleantech gadgets?—?composting food waster and driving a hybrid.

 It’s not. Real climate action is disruptive af.

To get the speed of the emissions cuts we need, we’re going to need to build the new on an unprecedented scale, in ways that intentionally alter the fundamental workings of older systems, foreclose high emissions choices and tilt the economics of pollution everywhere.

That build of the new is not a trend that will influence the economy of the future, it IS the economy of the future.

A giant building boom is what successful climate action looks like. That means jobs. Jobs younger people want and will be better prepared to take up.

Young people have a massive self-interest in pushing that boom to happen as fast as possible?—?a self-interest every bit as strong (and far more ethical) as the self-interest that older people pursue through gradualism and delay.

As young people become more and more powerful in the climate movement, fault lines are going to open. Those cracks are visible now. Older leaders are just in the habit of ignoring them.

The climate movement of the 2020s will be fierce and focused on building the new world we need.

The conflict between old movement interest groups and that new call for action at scale and speed is going to be a?—?maybe the?—?major climate story in the coming decade.

SOURCE  







No, Vertical Farms Won’t Feed the World

While they are well-intentioned, new indoor “farms” won’t help feed the world or reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture. We would be better to focus our efforts elsewhere

We’re beginning to see a new fad in agriculture?—?so-called “vertical farms” that grow food indoors with energy-intensive, artificial life support systems.

In the last few years, a number of tech companies have designed “farms” that utilize artificial lights, heaters, water pumps, and computer controls to grow crops inside. These systems glow with a fantastic magenta light?—?from LEDs that are specially tuned to provide optimal light for photosynthesis?—?often with stacked trays of plants, one on top of the other. Some of this technology is new, especially the LEDs, although pot growers have used tools like this for years.

Some of the more notable efforts to build indoor “farms” include Freight Farms in Boston. And there is a group at MIT that is trying to create new high-tech platforms for growing food inside, including “food computers”. These folks are very smart, and have done a lot to perfect the technology.

At first blush, these “farms” sound great. Why not completely eliminate food miles, and grow food right next to restaurants, cafeterias, or supermarkets? And why not grow crops inside closed systems, where water can be recycled, and pests can (in theory) be managed without chemicals.

It sounds great, doesn’t it? But there are many challenges.

First, these systems are really expensive to build. The shipping container systems developed by Freight Farms, for example, cost between $82,000 and $85,000 per container?—?an astonishing sum for a box that just grows greens and herbs. Just one container costs as much as 10 entire acres of prime American farmland?—?which is a far better investment, both in terms of food production and future economic value. Just remember: farmland has the benefit of generally appreciating in value over time, whereas a big metal box is likely to only decrease in value.

Second, food produced this way is very expensive. For example, the Wall Street Journal reports that mini-lettuces grown by Green Line Growers costs more than twice as much as organic lettuce available in most stores. And this is typical for other indoor growers around the country: it’s very, very expensive, even compared to organic food. Instead of making food moreavailable, especially to poorer families on limited budgets, these indoor crops are only available to the affluent. It might be fine for gourmet lettuce, or fancy greens for expensive restaurants, but regular folks may find it out of reach.

Finally, indoor farms use a lot of energy and materials to operate. The container farms from Freight Farms, for example, use about 80 kilowatt-hours of electricity a day to power the lights and pumps. That’s nearly 2–3 times as much electricity as a typical (and still very inefficient) American home, or about 8 times the electricity used by an average San Francisco apartment. And on the average American electrical grid, this translates to emitting 44,000 pounds of CO2 per container per year, from electricity alone, not counting any additional heating costs. This is vastly more than the emissions it would take to ship the food from someplace else.

And none of it is necessary.

But, Wait, Can’t Indoor Farms Use Renewable Energy?

Proponents of indoor techno-farms often say that they can offset the enormous sums of electricity they use, by powering them with renewable energy?—?especially solar panels?—?to make the whole thing carbon neutral.

But just stop and think about this for a second.

These indoor “farms” would use solar panels to harvest naturally occurring sunlight, and convert it into electricity, so that they can power…artificial sunlight? In other words, they’re trying to use the sun to replace the sun.

But we don’t need to replace the sun. Of all of the things we should worry about in agriculture, the availability of free sunlight is not one of them. Any system that seeks to replace the sun to grow food is probably a bad idea.

Besides, “Food Miles” Aren’t a Big Climate Problem

Sometimes we hear that vertical farms help the environment by reducing “food miles”?—?the distance food items travel from farm to table?—?and thereby reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

This sounds logical, but it turns out to be a red herring.

Strange as it might seem, local food typically uses about the same amount of energy?—?per pound?—?to transport as food grown far away. Why? Short answer: volume and method of transport. A larger food operator can ship food more efficiently?—?even if it travels longer distances?—?because of the gigantic volumes they work in. Plus, ships, trains, and even large trucks driving on Interstate highways use less fuel, per pound per mile, than small trucks driving around town.

Plus it turns out that “food miles” aren’t a very big source of CO2 emissions anyway, whether they’re local or not. In fact, they pale in comparison to emissions from deforestation, methane from cattle and rice fields, and nitrous oxide from over-fertilized fields. And local food systems?—?especially organic farms that use fewer fertilizers, and grass fed beef that sequesters carbon in the soil?—?can reduce these more critical emissions. At the end of the day, local food systems are generally better for the environment, including greenhouse gas emissions. Just don’t worry about emissions from food miles too much.

And These Vertical “Farms” Can’t Grow Much

A further problem with indoor farms is that a lot of crops could never develop properly in these artificial conditions. While LED lights provide the light needed for photosynthesis to occur, they don’t provide the proper mix of light and heat to trigger plant development stages?—?like those that tell plants when to put on fruit or seed. Moreover, a lot of crops need a bit of wind to develop tall, strong stalks, needed later when they are carrying heavy loads before harvest. As a result, indoor farms are severely limited, and have a hard time growing things besides simple greens.

Indoor farms might be able to provide some garnish and salads to the world, but forget about them as a means of growing much other food.

A Better Way?

I’m not the only critic of indoor, high-tech, energy-intensive agriculture. Other authors are starting to point out the problems with these systems too (read very good critiques here, here, here, and here).

While I appreciate the enthusiasm and innovation put into developing indoor farms, I think these efforts are, at the end of the day, counterproductive.

Instead, I think we should use the same investment of dollars, incredible technology, and amazing brains to solve other agricultural problems?—?like developing new methods for drip irrigation, better grazing systems that lock up soil carbon, and ways of recycling on-farm nutrients. Organic farming and high-precision agriculture are doing promising things, and need more help. We also need innovation and capital to help other parts of the food system, especially in tackling food waste, and getting people to shift their diets towards more sustainable directions.

An interconnected network of good farms —real farms that provide nutritious food, with social and environmental benefits to their communities?—?is the kind of innovation we really need.

SOURCE  








The Renewable Fuel Standard is the Obamacare of the energy industry

By Printus LeBlanc

After Scott Pruitt resigned as EPA Administrator, the cheers from K street could be heard around the country. The lobbyist camp led the fight against Pruitt because since coming into the position, Pruitt set his sights on one of the biggest sacred cows in D.C., the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). Just because he is gone, that doesn’t mean the fight over the RFS should end.

The RFS was created in 2005 as a result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The RFS mandates a certain amount of renewable fuel is blended with gasoline. The renewable fuel is mostly corn ethanol.

The regulation was further updated in 2007 with the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA). This bill was another gift to the renewable fuel industry as it increased the amount of renewable fuel to be blended. EISA had the goal of increasing the amount of renewable fuel by well over 300 percent from 11.1 billion gallons in 2009 to 36 billion gallons in 2022. A windfall for King Corn.

However, when Scott Pruitt came to the swamp, he sought to change the RFS. Pruitt knew the RFS did not do what it promised and was nothing more than the Obamacare mandate for the energy industry.

The RFS was intended to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil and reduce the number of pollutants released into the environment. When looking at the data the U.S. is less dependent on foreign oil and pollutants have been reduced, but it has nothing to do with the RFS. In fact, a study released in 2014 showed corn ethanol actually did more damage to the quality of the air than regular gasoline.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America released a report titled, “Life cycle air quality impacts of conventional and alternative light-duty transportation in the United States.” The scientific report came to some startling conclusions. The report stated, “Scenarios with substantially decreased air quality-related health impacts compared with gasoline include gasoline hybrid vehicles (30% decrease) and EVs powered by natural gas or by WWS (50% and 70% decrease, respectively); scenarios with substantially higher damages than gasoline include corn ethanol (80% increase).”

Wasn’t the purpose of the RFS to reduce the pollutants in the air? How is that possible if it is almost twice as bad as gasoline?

Ask anyone in the energy industry, and it will become clear quickly the RFS also had nothing to do with the reduction of foreign oil imports either. That miracle was thanks to fracking. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) clearly shows the introduction of fracking had more to do with the reduction in imported oil than anything else.

It gets worse for the RFS. Not only does it not reduce foreign dependence on oil, but it also reduces fuel economy, causing more consumption of petroleum. A quick search of the EIA website and any researcher can find the agency admitting the RFS does not do what it is advertised to do. The EIA states, “The energy content of ethanol is about 33 percent less than pure gasoline. The impact of fuel ethanol on vehicle fuel economy varies depending on the amount of denaturant that is added to the ethanol. The energy content of denaturant is about equal to the energy content of pure gasoline. In general, vehicle fuel economy may decrease by about 3 percent when using E10 relative to gasoline that does not contain fuel ethanol.”

Ok, so the RFS is not as advertised. At least the taxpayers are saving money, right?

No, not even close. Aside from the billions in subsidies from the farm bill, the RFS adds additional costs to fuel prices. A 2014 study by the Congressional Budget Office found the RFS adds between $0.13 and $0.26 per gallon of regular gasoline and $0.30 to $0.51 for diesel.

Considering in 2017 the U.S. consumed about 142.85 billion gallons of gasoline, according to the EIA, the RFS forced Americans to spend at least an extra $18.57 billion.

The utter failure that is the RFS is in place for two reasons and only two reasons. The first is money. King Corn spends millions on lobbying in D.C., and the second and probably most important is the Iowa primary. Almost no politician that wants to be President has the desire to tackle King Corn in its backyard with momentum in the Presidential nomination at stake. However, the evidence is overwhelming that the RFS does not help the environment, does not increase fuel efficiency, and does not reduce foreign dependence on oil. It does one thing and one thing only, transfer wealth. It is time to end the Obamacare of the energy industry.

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 August, 2018

Hysteria reminiscent of Hitler from Jerry Brown.  Says: "Since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition"

The facts as advised by Meterorologist Joe Bastardi:

Statewide most recently  2006, 2005, 2003 were all warmer. Here are my previous links on this:

This  May 17 on wildfires
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/56002-before-the-fact-why-another-big-wildfire-season-may-be-on-the-way 

Then May 19 on heat
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/56059-more-reason-for-a-climate-ambulance-chaser-watch-summer

And again June 1! showing the changes are natural
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/56287-the-past-is-once-again-giving-valuable-hints-to-the-future-this-summers-texas-heat

Climate historian Tony Heller notes that California has always had massive forest fires.  One in 1868 burned up much of the Santa Cruz mountains. (https://www.newspapers.com/image/50915615/?terms=forest%2Bfires )




With more than 20 active fires small and very large tearing across the state, California Gov. Jerry Brown warned today that “nature is powerful, and we’re not on the side of nature,” and that devastating blazes are "the new normal."

The Carr Fire in Shasta and Trinity counties, which was sparked July 23 by a non-criminal vehicle fire at Highway 299 and Carr Powerhouse Road west of Redding, Calif., has burned more than 115,000 acres and was 35 percent contained as of this morning. It's now ranked as the sixth most destructive wildfire in the state's history after killing six and destroying more than a thousand homes.

Cal Fire said that "steep terrain, erratic winds, and previously unburned fuels are contributing to spot fire potential." More than 4,100 firefighters are battling the blaze.

Along with a bulldozer contract employee and a Redding firefighter killed in the Carr Fire, the captain of a wildland hotshots team and a Cal Fire heavy equipment operator have been killed in the Ferguson fire burning near Yosemite in Mariposa County. The more than 62,000-acre blaze was 39 percent contained this afternoon.

Dreaming of Three Californias

At a state Office of Emergency Services press conference today, Brown said firefighters would have to adapt to increasingly severe wildfires in the years to come because of climate change.

“We’re fighting nature with the amount of material we’re putting in the environment, and that material traps heat, and the heat fosters fires, and the fires keep burning," he said.

The governor added that "since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse and that’s the way it is."

“Some people don’t want to accept that, some just outright deny it," Brown continued. "I don’t say it with any great joy here – we’re in for a very rough ride. It’s going to get expensive. It’s going to get dangerous, and we have to apply all our creativity to make the best of what is going to be an increasingly bad situation, not just for California, but for people all over America and all over the world.”

Brown said the state's budget would also have to figure in the cost of increased fire fury in the upcoming years. “So far, this fire activity is a small part of our very large budget, but it is growing and it will continue to grow as we adapt to the changing weather,” he said.

The governor said that steps to combat global warming can still, eventually, “shift the weather back to where it historically was.”

SOURCE  






Anti-Fracking Groups Pull Fast One On Media By Repackaging Debunked ‘Health’ Report

frackingMoms Clean Air Force released a new “report” this week that alleges widespread health harms from oil and natural gas development based entirely on an array of debunked talking points and anecdotal accounts, rather than actual air measurements.

If this sounds familiar, it’s probably because two other anti-fracking groups, Earthworks and Clean Air Task Force (CATF), released essentially the exact same “report” just two weeks ago, utilizing an all-too-common “Keep It In the Ground” repackaging strategy designed to generate headlines rather than contribute to the honest scientific debate on the issue of fracking and public health.

And you don’t have to take our word for it.

The “new” Moms Clean Air Force report even notes, “This report builds on data and analysis from the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) and Earthworks quantifying the health impacts of oil and gas operations across the U.S.”

Rather than saying the report “builds” on CATF and Earthworks “data,” a more accurate description would have been that the report recycles that report’s long-debunked anti-fracking scare tactics.

As the following side-by-side comparisons show, the reports are nearly identical.

Both reports’ introductions prominently feature Earthworks’ infamous “Threat Map,” which merely identifies the fact that many Americans live near oil and gas development.

The bodies of each report are comprised of anecdotal accounts from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado, along with nearly identical Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) images that Earthworks has admitted provide no scientific evidence of harmful emissions.

The reports’ conclusions are also strikingly similar, calling for increased oil and gas setbacks and — shocker — more federal regulations.

The fact remains that neither of these reports includes any original air quality data to verify their conclusions. And unfortunately for these groups, the timing of the anecdotal Washington County, Pa., profiles in both reports couldn’t be worse, as new Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Pa. Department of Health (DOH) air monitoring reports were released last week that found that Washington County oil and gas emissions are protective of public health.

This latest Moms Clean Air Force report – in true KIITG fashion – is anything but new. And since the group chose to release a report with nothing new to add to the conversation, here’s the original debunk of this CATF/Earthworks “report” that EID published two weeks ago:

SOURCE  






‘It Would Save 12,000 Lives’: Andrew Wheeler Stumps Dem Senator Chastising Trump Admin For Backing Off Obama-Era Fuel Standards

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) acting administrator Andrew Wheeler pushed back against assertions that a draft Trump administration proposal reducing fuel efficiency standards would help industry while harming Americans.

Wheeler testified in front of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Wednesday less than a month after he took control of the EPA. Wheeler’s appearance marks the first time he has sat before Congress since taking over the agency.

Democrat Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts tried to corner Wheeler, accusing the acting administrator and the Trump administration of acting in the best interests of oil companies to the detriment of consumers and the environment.

“Over the lifetime of the current fuel-economy standards, consumers will save $1 trillion on gasoline and will keep $12 billion barrels of oil in the ground,” Markey said at the beginning of his questioning. “That’s the simple formula for fuel-economy. You save consumers money and you save the planet at the same time.”

The Obama administration placed increasingly strict fuel-economy standards on car manufacturers’ vehicle fleets in 2012. Under the Obama-era rule, a carmaker’s fleet of vehicle models must average 39 miles per gallon in 2020 and 50 miles per gallon in 2025. The Trump administration is considering freezing the fuel efficiency standards at 2020 levels, according to Bloomberg.

No official proposal on the matter has been made.

The oil industry is “scared to death that $1 trillion will stay stranded in the pockets of consumers, and that is why the Trump administration is moving to roll back these standards,” Markey said before asking Wheeler if leaving the standards in place would result in more demand and consumption of oil.

“I believe the analysis shows that more oil would be consumed,” Wheeler answered. “But it would also save 12,000 lives and $500 billion.”

Markey recognized that Wheeler was correct about an increase in oil consumption but ignored the second part of Wheeler’s answer. The senator then asked if the Trump proposal would increase the price of gas relative to the current standards, citing the nonprofit environmental group Union of Concerned Scientists that claimed the Trump proposal would cost drivers $20 billion in extra fuel costs in 2025.

“That I do not know. I know that we have $500 billion in savings to the American consumers under the proposal,” Wheeler answered.

SOURCE  






#Fake News: We Could Have Stopped Global Warming In 1980s

New York Times Magazine dedicated an entire issue to an article called “Losing Earth” that alleges humanity was on the cusp of stopping man-made global warming in the 1980s, but then didn’t.

Writer Nathaniel Rich narrative focuses around the failed efforts of “a handful of people, among them a hyperkinetic lobbyist and a guileless atmospheric physicist who, at great personal cost, tried to warn humanity of what was coming.”

“Their efforts were shrewd, passionate, robust. And they failed,” Rich wrote in his 30,000-word article published Wednesday after much hype.

The problem is — many policy experts and journalists aren’t buying Rich’s narrative.

University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke, Jr., who’s been involved in climate policy for decades, said the magazine article “brings together alternative history with a disaster movie plot.”

NYT reporter Brad Plumer was also skeptical the world was really ready to “stop” global warming in 1989, asking the obvious question, “how would we convince China to forego coal?”

Rich’s article follows a cast of characters, including former Friends of the Earth lobbyist Rafe Pomerance and former NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who worked to sound the alarm on catastrophic global warming and convince world leaders to cut greenhouse gas emissions — and, yes, former Vice President Al Gore is in there too.

Hansen is remembered for his 1988 congressional testimony where he told lawmakers “greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

His testimony made waves in the media, despite being contradicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change two years later.

The narrative crescendos in 1989 when Rich claims the world was poised to sign a global agreement to stop global warming — but didn’t. Rich suggested human nature was to blame for failing to stop global warming.

Former New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin noted a major presumption of the article is “exploded” in the first few paragraphs.

The presumption is in this line: “It is true that *much of the damage that might have been avoided* is now inevitable.” Nowhere does the piece demonstrate that what is cast as a pivotal moment in 1989 was in fact pivotal

Many environmental activists and journalists were quick to attack Rich’s article for not laying blame at the feet of the fossil fuel industry for waging a misinformation campaign against climate science.

Rich mentions the theory but says fossil fuel companies didn’t start campaigning against climate policies in earnest until after 1989. Environmentalists disagreed.

Other activists took to social media to caution supporters not to lose hope in mitigating global warming, arguing that action can still be taken today to avert catastrophe.

Of course, none of them mentioned that many of the dire predictions about global warming made during this time have not come true, including Hansen’s own projections of temperature increases.

Two recent analyses found that observed temperature increases most closely followed Hansen’s lowest and “least likely” scenario for warming.

This scenario also assumed carbon dioxide emissions flatlined after the year 2000, which didn’t actually happen.

SOURCE  






Time to Drain Australia's Energy Swamp

By Viv Forbes

The Australian electricity market has become a stinking swamp covered with a tangled net of treaties, laws, rules, obligations, prohibitions, targets, taxes and subsidies. The swamp conceals the rubble of demolished coal generators; another plant destined for destruction (Liddell) is gradually sinking in the green ooze.

The way out of the energy swamp is to retrace the way we got in.

First, get to the root of the problem – UN Climate Alarmism. Disown the Paris and Kyoto Treaties and dump all the obligations, costs, hobbles and distortions they have created. Stop their pointless war on carbon energy. Carbon dioxide does not control climate but it does support all life on earth.

Abolish green energy targets and renewable energy certificates – they belong in museums beside the WW2 ration cards.

Then de-fund and boycott the rotten core of climate alarmism - the UNIPCC. Shun their never-ending climate conferences and cease funding all of their green tentacles. Cancel the tax exempt status of political activists posing as honest scientists.

Then unravel the electricity regulations mess. Stop politicians from banning or promoting their energy favourites – speculators should be free to build wind, solar, geothermal, wave, coal, gas, nuclear or pig-poo power generators free of all special taxes, subsidies and market mandates. But no electricity distributer, retailer or consumer should be forced to accept unreliable or expensive electricity.

Then abolish all guaranteed returns on inflated capital for those who gold-plate power lines and poles, or expect big returns on under-used connections to remote wind farms or other green energy toys. Consumers should not be saddled with these hidden green taxes.

All electricity producers and retailers should face competitive market prices, get no special subsidies and obey the same tax laws. But they should be encouraged to enter into long term contracts to supply base-load or peak power at agreed prices. Such contracts could underpin construction of new reliable generation capacity.

De-centralise decision making. Politicians should stop backing losers. Test energy theories properly by letting green states go deep green on intermittent energy, while others place their bets on long-term contracts from new HELE (High Energy Low Emissions) running on solid reliable black “fossil sunshine”. Allow isolated communities to try sealed transportable nuclear power packs.

The choice for our crippled electricity industry is stark – swift surgical reform and practical innovation; or let the lights go out as our once-cheap-and-reliable grid drowns in the smelly regulatory swamp.

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

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




3 August, 2018

Hot summer on the way in Australia: map shows just how bad Australia's drought really is

These predictions are just speculation based on models that frequently get it wrong. It's just one of the routine scares that the BoM put out regularly to promote their global warming beliefs.

And note again the North/South split in rainfall, a regular oscillation.  Most of NSW and half of Victoria (the South) is in drought but rain is fine in nearly all Queensland (the North). We have had quite a few rainy nights in Brisbane (Qld.) during July, even though our winters tend to be dry. The rain will swing South in due course and Brisbane will be dry



This is the map that shows just how desperate some areas of Australia are for drought-breaking rain - and there's no relief in sight with a hot, dry summer a certainty.

Looking at the past six months, large areas of NSW have experienced their lowest rainfall on record, and most of the rest of the state isn't far behind.

Almost all of NSW has received less than 20 per cent of its usual rainfall since January, and Australia as a whole just experienced its warmest and driest July in 20 years.

Weatherzone reports that Forbes, in NSW's central west, only received 0.8mm of rain at the beginning of the month and did not record any rainfall for the rest of July.

Meanwhile, extreme temperatures already recorded in NSW and south-east Queensland this winter look set to continue amid concerns a 'hot and deadly' summer is on the way.

ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes heatwave expert Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick told Weatherzone that Australians should be expecting extreme weather considering the dryness and warmth of the past few months.

'We are heading towards an El Nino summer, so we are more likely to have hotter and more extreme weather,' Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said. 'We should certainly be worried.'   

Temperatures so far this winter have been unusually high, with Sydney and large regions of eastern Australia encountering an average high of 19.8 degrees last month - 3.4 degrees more than what was expected, according to Weatherzone.

Sydney recorded 13 days where temperatures reached 20 degrees. The last time Sydney experienced such warm temperatures in July was back in 2013 with a record high of 19.5 degrees. 

With such a dry and warm July and above-average temperatures expected, the chances of El Ni¤o forming in spring is at 50 per cent - which is double the normal chance, according to Weatherzone.

Five of eight models indicate El Ni¤o levels will be reached in the southern hemisphere's springtime, while a sixth model says El Ni¤o will be reached in December.

This means Australia could be expecting even drier months and hotter temperatures as it heads towards spring and summer.

SOURCE 





Bombshell: New York Times Debunks #ExxonKnew Climate Campaign

The New York Times Magazine has published an entire issue devoted to a single investigative piece on climate change, which observes that by the late 1970s and early 1980s, “everybody knew” it was happening.

The conclusion is a major blow to climate activists, who have spent years engaging in a political campaign targeting energy companies for supposedly covering up the risks of climate change, and thus preventing global action.

The author, Nathaniel Rich, writes that from 1979 to 1989 humanity had the best opportunity it has ever had to solve global warming and that “nothing stood in our way – nothing except ourselves.”

Rich even goes as far as to say that “[a] common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry,” but during the time when “everybody knew,” oil companies “including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.”

This lengthy report shreds the narrative put out by anti-oil and gas activists in recent years. As Rich told PBS NewsHour:

“By 1979, there was a strong consensus within the scientific community about the nature of the problem. The fundamental science hasn’t really evolved since then. It’s only been refined really. There was no politicization of the issue throughout the decade. A number of prominent Republicans were leading the charge to insist on a major climate policy, and industry, which we now blame for much of our paralysis, had not turned against science or truth and if anything, especially in the early part of the decade, was engaged in trying to understand the problem and determine solutions…

“By the mid-50s, you had top government scientists speaking about the issue. You had major articles in Life Magazine and Time. So it wasn’t just industry that was following it. It was at the highest levels of government. Lyndon Johnson sent a special message to Congress in 1965 that discussed the problem.” (emphasis added)

If all of humanity was informed of the dangers of climate change in the 1970s and agreed that something needed to be done, how can activists lay the blame for global inaction at the feet of the industry and political partisanship? As Rich writes,

“The rallying cry of this multipronged legal effort is ‘Exxon Knew.’ It is incontrovertibly true that senior employees at the company that would later become Exxon, like those at most other major oil-and-gas corporations, knew about the dangers of climate change as early as the 1950s. But the automobile industry knew, too, and began conducting its own research by the early 1980s, as did the major trade groups representing the electrical grid. They all own responsibility for our current paralysis and have made it more painful than necessary. But they haven’t done it alone.

“The United States government knew. Roger Revelle began serving as a Kennedy administration adviser in 1961, five years after establishing the Mauna Loa carbon-dioxide program, and every president since has debated the merits of acting on climate policy. Carter had the Charney report, Reagan had ‘Changing Climate’ and Bush had the censored testimony of James Hansen and his own public vow to solve the problem. Congress has been holding hearings for 40 years; the intelligence community has been tracking the crisis even longer.

“Everybody knew. In 1958, on prime-time television, ‘The Bell Science Hour’ — one of the most popular educational film series in American history — aired ‘The Unchained Goddess,’ a film about meteorological wonders, produced by Frank Capra, a dozen years removed from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ warning that ‘man may be unwittingly changing the world’s climate’ through the release of carbon dioxide. ‘A few degrees’ rise in the Earth’s temperature would melt the polar ice caps,’ says the film’s kindly host, the bespectacled Dr. Research. ‘An inland sea would fill a good portion of the Mississippi Valley. Tourists in glass-bottomed boats would be viewing the drowned towers of Miami through 150 feet of tropical water.’ Capra’s film was shown in science classes for decades.

“Everyone knew — and we all still know.”

This conclusion – that #EveryoneKnew – is even supported by activists, though they haven’t yet followed their arguments to their logical conclusion.

Groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Greenpeace were quick to follow #ExxonKnew with #ShellKnew and #UtilitiesKnew, blaming every company they don’t like while failing to acknowledge their own amnesia on climate change.

The idea that energy companies “knew everything there was to know about climate change,” as Bill McKibben likes to say, and that the rest of us didn’t know about it until James Hansen testified before Congress in 1988, “is one of the worst examples we have of the cultural amnesia of this country and especially around this issue,” Rich told NewsHour.

Confirming that Rich’s narrative is a direct threat to the multi-million-dollar campaign they have waged in recent years, anti-energy activists intensely criticized the report before it was even released.

The loudest rebuttal came from Hunter Cutting, a director of strategic communications for Climate Nexus, a project of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

The Rockefellers have funded every aspect of the #ExxonKnew campaign, and are no doubt alarmed by the New York Times contradicting the very basis for their campaign.

The activist group 350.org also condemned the story shortly after it was published.

For several hours after the report was released, the umbrella group for the #ExxonKnew campaign dedicated its Twitter page to criticizing Rich’s narrative and retweeting others who were scrambling to control the damage.

Rich’s story ultimately concludes that it’s too simplistic to point your finger at one company, industry, or political party for inaction on climate change, which is a complex global problem.

The issue was receiving mainstream media attention and was the subject of multiple Congressional hearings in the 1970s and 1980s, long before the supposed “disinformation campaign” that environmental activists cite ever began.

It may not have been the intent of New York Times Magazine to throw cold water on a fringe environmental activists campaign, but the damage has clearly been done. The attempt at damage control from the #ExxonKnew campaign is only beginning.

SOURCE  





Mismanagement Turned California Forests Into A ‘Terrible Fire Threat,’ Expert Says

Years of mismanagement built up in California forests are feeding massive wildfires scorching the state, which is on track to experience its most destructive fire season ever.

Nearly 3,000 acres of state and local lands in California have been burned this year, about triple the size of the five-year average for this time of year. The amount outpaces 2017’s historic fire season in the state by about 70,000 acres, The San Francisco Chronicle reports. (RELATED: ‘We Are Not Climate Scientists’: Firefighters Dismiss Concerns Related To Global Warming)

The Little Hoover Commission (LHC), an independent California oversight agency, has been documenting forest mismanagement in the Golden State for decades. LHC described California’s Timber Harvest Plan in 1994 as an “inadequate tool” for balancing environmental and economic needs.

“Litigation rather than resolution is often the focus of the participants, leading to a strained decision-making process and lack of consensus,” LHC’s report said, pointing out one of the main issues with logging and forestry management in California.

Other issues in the Timber Harvest Plan included a limited view of the site impacts without accounting for the health of the overall ecosystem and focusing on process rather than outcome, according to LHC.

Recent droughts and bark beetle infestations have killed millions of trees in California that lie throughout the forests and are extremely susceptible to fire. About 129 million dead trees have littered California from 2010 to 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“Our forests are dramatically overcrowded,” LHC project manager Krystal Beckham told The Washington Examiner.

“There are some places where there may be four times as many trees as there should be,” Beckham said. “When you have trees that close together, they can’t get the water they need, so they are more susceptible to drought, insects, and disease. And when they start dying, they become a terrible fire threat.”

SOURCE  






WACKY NEW CLAIM: Global Warming Will Knock Out The Internet In 15 Years

A government-funded study predicts rising sea levels will likely submerge over 4,000 miles of internet cables and more than 1,000 data centers in the next 15 years.

But even the study’s authors admit their results are based on the “most extreme” sea level rise scenario of 6 feet by the end of the century.

The study’s dire predictions are based on future sea level rise that’s worse than even the most “extreme” scenario in the latest National Climate Assessment Special report released by the Trump administration in 2017.

The study, by University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Oregon researchers, uses the “most extreme” scenario considered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“We find that 4,067 miles of fiber conduit will be under water and 1,101 nodes (e.g., points of presence and colocation centers) will be surrounded by water in the next 15 years” with 1 foot of sea level rise, the study’s authors wrote.

“That was a little bit unexpected,” co-author Paul Barford told NBC News. “We sort of expected that it might be parceled out over a longer period of time, but that’s not the case.”

Of course, news headlines blared warnings the internet was in danger from man-made warming. (RELATED: Trump’s Tax Cuts, Tariffs Force Trudeau To Retreat On Carbon Taxes)

“Rising seas could knock out the internet — and sooner than scientists thought,” NBC News reported. “Climate change could literally break the internet,” reads The Huffington Post’s subheadline.

National Geographic went with the not-so-subtle headline: “The Internet Is Drowning.”

But how realistic is this dire prediction? The new study relies on an extreme scenario that projects more sea level rise than the latest NCA report’s most extreme scenario.

The NCA presents a range of sea level rise estimates of between 0.3 and 0.8 feet by 2030, but Barford and his colleagues went beyond that by modeling internet infrastructure inundation from sea level rise of one foot by 2030.

The NCA’s “intermediate” sea level rise scenario only predicts half a foot of sea level rise by 2030 and 3.3 feet by 2100. Barford’s study relies on a scenario of 6 feet by the end of the century.

“Specifically, in the next 15 years, as much as 2,429 miles of metro fiber conduit will be submerged after a 1 ft of sea level rise, whereas as 2,637 miles of metro fiber conduit will be affected in the next century,” the study found.

Researchers overlapped NOAA sea level rise data with internet cable and data center information mapped out by the website InternetAtlas.org. The study was funded by the federal government, including the National Science Foundation and Department of Homeland Security.

SOURCE  






Gene editing in agriculture affectively banned in the European Union

Matt Ridley

A court decision condemns farmers to using pesticides instead.  The European Court of Justice's bizarre decision to treat genome edited crops as if they were transgenic

The European Court of Justice has just delivered a scientifically absurd ruling, in defiance of advice from its advocate general, but egged on by Jean-Claude Juncker’s allies. It will ensure that more pesticides are used in Britain, our farmers will be less competitive and researchers will leave for North America. Thanks a bunch, your honours.

By saying that genome-edited crops must be treated to expensive and uncertain regulation, it has pandered to the views of a handful of misguided extremists, who no longer have popular support in this country.

Let’s compare two plant varieties: golden promise barley and a wheat resistant to a fungal pest called powdery mildew. The barley was derived from seeds bombarded with gamma rays at a nuclear facility in the 1950s, scrambling some of their genes, which had the happy if accidental result of making better malting barley. It became (and remains) a popular variety for brewing beer among (wait for it!) organic farmers.

The wheat was produced by Calyxt, a US company, last year using a genome-editing technique to tweak one part of one gene, introducing no foreign DNA. It will need less fungicide sprayed on it than normal wheat. The US government says it needs no special regulation. The EU has effectively said it will take Calyxt many years and vast sums of money to find out whether it might or might not approve the wheat for growing.

Calyxt and others like it won’t bother applying, so we will be deprived of the chance to use less fungicide. We will miss out on a new genome-edited potato variety that needs 80 per cent less spray. We are already missing out on GM varieties of maize and other crops that use much less insecticide and are proven safe by 25 years of consumption.

The ruling condemns Britain to the innovation slow lane, denying us greener crops. It will deter investment and drive our world-class scientists to move abroad. As one Canadian professor said: “Great news for Canadian and American farmers today. EU based environmental NGOs have politically manipulated their legal system to drive every last cent of ag R&D out of the EU, guaranteeing their farmers will no longer be competitive. Hope all Europeans enjoy their future higher food prices.”

Welcome to our continuing regulatory alignment with the EU.

SOURCE  

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

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

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





2 August, 2018

Green/Left lies and stupidity about the fires in CA

CA unusually hot?  I reproduce below some conversation between two skeptics:

Tony Heller, climate historian: "Hotter than 134 degrees during July, 1913?"

Tony Heller again: "1988 was hotter than this year, and 2006 was just as hot.  Redding got up to 118 degrees in 1988, five degrees warmer than this year's top temperature.  I drove through Sacramento on the hottest day in 2006, and remember it was right around 115 degrees.

Joe Bastardi, meteorologist: Spot on right. 2006 was hotter and 2005,2003 just as hot 

Tony Heller: "2006 was an amazing weather year.  It was so warm in January in Fort Collins that I was wearing a T-shirt most days. Then I was working in Cupertino, CA from February-July, and our pool in Cupertino got hot all the way to the bottom. Most years that pool stays cold all year around. 

We moved back to Colorado in the middle of the heatwave, and it was so hot my son's soccer camp didn't go outside some days.

But in the middle of September, the weather changed dramatically.  It got cold and wet and stayed that way for six months - I was coaching soccer and it was miserable most weekends.  Then Fort Collins had the largest snowstorm on record Christmas week.

Amazing how many different temperatures the same level of CO2 can produce."


The northern Sacramento Valley was well on its way to recording the hottest July on record when the Carr fire swept into town last Thursday.

*It was 113 degrees*, and months of above-average temperatures had left the land bone-dry and ready to explode. Within a few hours, hundreds of structures were lost and six people killed.

The destruction adds to California’s worst wildfire year on record — dozens dead since October, with more than 10,000 structures lost from San Diego to Redding.

There are many reasons for the grim totals, but experts say one common denominator connects the disastrous fires: California is facing extreme heat, the likes of which it has never seen in the modern historical record.

“The temperatures have just been almost inexorably warmer all the time,” said University of California, Los Angeles climate scientist Daniel Swain, and fires “burn more intensely if the fuels are extremely dry.”

In the past, there has been some reluctance among scientists to cite climate change as a major factor in California’s worsening wildfires. Human-caused ignitions and homes being built ever closer to forests have played a large role. But the connection between rising temperatures in California and tinder-dry vegetation is becoming impossible to ignore, according to experts who study climate and wildfires.

“The regional temperatures in the western U.S. have increased by 2 degrees since the 1970s,” said Jennifer Balch, director of Earth Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “You’re seeing the effect of climate change.”

Neil Lareau, assistant professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno, said unusual warmth is now routine, and that heat “leads to drying things out quicker.”

Vegetation can have various degrees of dryness — a wet log in the woods could smolder before puttering out, while tinder-dry chaparral on a 110-degree day could explode when ignited, Swain said. Extremely flammable vegetation can create a particularly intense fire with the potential to grow much faster — leaving less time for firefighters to get a handle on a blaze and for people to escape.

“What that means is the fire has to do less work to ignite the vegetation right next to it. And it can spread faster, and it releases energy more quickly,” Lareau said.

SOURCE  





All Of These Climate Change Lawsuits Will Be Thrown Out

All of these climate suits are likely to be thrown out. As Judge Alsup noted in his opinion, “No plaintiff has ever succeeded in bringing a nuisance claim based on global warming.” All district or appellate courts are likely to eventually rule that climate change issues are to be decided by the federal government, not state and local governments.

Last week, a federal judge dismissed New York City’s climate change lawsuit against five major oil companies. Last month, another federal judge dismissed similar global warming claims against oil firms brought by San Francisco and Oakland. More than a dozen climate lawsuits filed during the last year by cities and counties seek billions of dollars in damages from oil and gas companies. But it appears that all of these lawsuits will eventually be thrown out.

New York City sought monetary damages from BP, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell as compensation for damage caused by dangerous global warming allegedly caused by the companies. But John F. Keenan, District Court judge for the Southern District of New York, disagreed and dismissed the complaint.

Judge Keenan ruled that, “…it would thus be illogical to allow the City to bring state law claims when courts have found that these matters are areas of federal concern that have been delegated to the Executive Branch as they require a uniform, national solution…Global warming and solutions thereto must be addressed by the other two branches of government.”

On June 25 on the west coast, US District Judge William Alsup threw out similar suits brought by the California cities of Oakland and San Francisco. Judge Alsup stated, “…it is true that carbon dioxide released from fossil fuels has caused (and will continue to cause) global warming. But against that negative, we must weigh this positive: Our industrial revolution and the development of our modern world have literally been fueled by oil and coal. Without those fuels, virtually all of our monumental progress would have been impossible.” Judge Alsup concluded that the courts should “defer to the legislative and executive branches.”

Note that Judge Alsup is not a conservative judge. Alsup was nominated by President Bill Clinton in 1999. In January, he blocked Trump Administration efforts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Several other climate lawsuits are pending in California. In July of last year, San Mateo County, Marin County, and Imperial Beach filed separate suits against 37 oil and gas companies in California Superior Court. Last December, Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz County also brought suits in California Superior Court against 29 companies. In January, the City of Richmond, California and the County of Contra Costa also filed claims against 29 companies.

Other state entities also initiated legal action this year. In April, the city of Boulder, Boulder County and San Miguel County filed a suit in Colorado against Exxon and Suncor. In May, King County Washington, the home of Seattle, filed suit against five companies. Just this month, the state of Rhode Island and the City of Baltimore filed separate climate change suits against oil and gas companies.

But all of these suits are likely to be thrown out. The New York City and the Oakland/San Francisco suits, the lawsuits with the highest profile, have now been dismissed. As Judge Alsup noted in his opinion, “No plaintiff has ever succeeded in bringing a nuisance claim based on global warming.” All district or appellate courts are likely to eventually rule that climate change issues are to be decided by the federal government, not state and local governments.

It’s clear that climate lawsuits do not reflect the will of congressional representatives elected by the American people. In December of 1998, President Bill Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 international treaty signed by 192 nations committing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But the US Senate passed a resolution of disapproval with a vote of 95-0, so the treaty was never submitted to the Senate for ratification. Cap and trade legislation was rejected by Congress in 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009. Last week the US House of Representatives passed a resolution opposing a carbon tax.

While advocates of climate common sense are pleased with the recent court decisions, the acceptance that humans are causing dangerous climate change by the oil and gas defendants is very disappointing. Evidence shows that natural factors, not emissions from industry, dominate global temperatures.

Nor are the feared climate disasters happening. Evidence shows that storms, droughts, or floods are neither more frequent nor more severe than in past decades. Oceans are rising 7-8 inches per century, not the 20 feet per century predicted by former Vice President Al Gore and others. And the polar bears are doing just fine.

SOURCE  






Global warming is not people’s most pressing concern

Most people don’t really care, don’t think it affects them much, and don’t believe the hype

Tom Harris

In a recent interview with the Vatican News service, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore again claimed “the climate crisis is now the biggest existential challenge humanity has ever faced.”

Gore boasted, “I have been fortunate to be able to pour every ounce of energy I have into efforts to contribute to the solution to his crisis.” Ironically, Mr. Gore personally uses vast amounts of energy, often traveling in private jets, SUVs and limousines, and lives in mansions, one of which uses 21 times more electricity than the average American home.

We often hear claims that man-made climate change is our greatest threat. But according to a recent Gallup poll, very few people in the United States actually believe it is. Indeed, even the United Nations own polling reveals that respondents across the world rate climate change last among issues they would like the UN and governments to focus on. No matter how long the list, climate change is always last.

In telephone interviews conducted July 1-11, 2018 with a random sample of 1,033 adults, over the age of 18 and living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, Gallup News Service asked: “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” The question was “open ended,” in that any answer was accepted. 

According to the respondents, the top problems facing America were “Immigration/Illegal aliens” (22%) and “Dissatisfaction with government/Poor leadership” (19%). Only 2% of respondents cited “Environment/Pollution.”

This 2% figure included those who mentioned climate change, as well as those who listed other environmental concerns such as ocean pollution, endangered species and toxic wastes. The fraction of Americans who labeled climate change as the nation’s most serious problem must have been very small indeed.

This sort of result is also reflected in July 5 poll reported by the New York Times. Among the main reasons young adults gave for not wanting (or not being sure they wanted) children, worries about climate change ranked #13 out of 19 reasons given. The first three reasons cited were “Want leisure time,” “Haven't found partner,” and “Can't afford child care.”

While other polls show varying levels of public concern about climate change, when people are asked to prioritize issues, climate change often does not rate highly. Even in 2014, just before then-President Barack Obama addressed the heavily publicized UN Climate Summit 2014 in New York City, Pew Research polling indicated that Americans did not consider climate change to be among the top six threats facing the country.
The UN’s own survey confirms that this trend is even more prominent internationally. After polling 9.7 million people from 194 countries, the UN’s My World global survey finds that “action taken on climate change” rates last out of the 16 suggested priorities for the agency. This despite the fact that on the survey website, the UN lists climate change action as the first choice given respondents. Access to reliable energy, better healthcare, government honesty, a good education, etc., are apparently far greater concerns to people across the world.

This should not be a surprise. In contrast to vitally important issues people must deal with on a daily basis, concerns about man-made climate change are based merely on a theoretical hypothesis, not what is happening now or even in the recent past. After all, even NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies asserts that the Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change from 1880 to 2017 is only just over one degree Celsius despite a reputed 40% rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) content. And the impact of further CO2 rise diminishes as the concentration increases.

It is not known whether the rate of sea level rise has increased or not. However, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s U.S. state-wide extreme weather records database, probably the best of its kind in the world, there has been no increase in extreme weather. So, the primary rationale for “action taken on climate change” through expensive restrictions to CO2 emissions is merely the possibility of dangerous climate change in the future. And this is based on computer models of future climate states, models that have failed to forecast what has actually happened.

Dr. John Christy is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science, Alabama State Climatologist and Director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. During his February 2, 2016 testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space & Technology, he presented a graph that dramatically demonstrates how far apart computer model temperature forecasts differ from what has actually been measured by satellites and weather balloons.

In fact, as of 2016, there was already a 0.5 degree Celsius (0.9 degree Fahrenheit) difference between real-world temperatures and the “runaway” temperature predicted by averaging 102 climate model estimates. And yet those faulty models have become the basis for countless claims of imminent climate doom – and the foundation for policies that would replace abundant, reliable, affordable fossil fuel energy with sporadic, unpredictable, weather-dependant, expensive wind, solar and biofuel energy.


Five-year averaged values of annual mean global mid-tropospheric temperature as depicted by the average of 102 IPCC CMIP5 climate models (red), compared to the average of 3 satellite datasets (green - UAH, RSS, NOAA) and 4 balloon datasets (blue, NOAA, UKMet, RICH, RAOBCORE)

Christy told Congress, “[T]hese models failed at the simple test of telling us ‘what’ has already happened, and thus would not be in a position to give us a confident answer to ‘what’ may happen in the future and ‘why.’ As such, they would be of highly questionable value in determining policy that should depend on a very confident understanding of how the climate system works.”

To create the models requires vast amounts of weather and climate data. We also need to input accurate data as the starting conditions for model-generated forecasts to be performed.

However, the collection and interpretation of the necessary data has only just begun, says former University of Winnipeg professor and historical climatologist Dr. Tim Ball. But there are relatively few weather stations that have temperatures records of adequate length or reliability on which to base model forecasts of future climate, Ball explains.

Referring to former-President Barack Obama’s worries about dangerous future climate change, Ball concludes, “Obama’s worries therefore have absolutely no credibility in the real world.”

Ball is not alone in holding this view. Extensive analyses and reports by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) summarize thousands of studies from peer-reviewed scientific journals that debunk or cast serious doubt on the hypothesis that emissions of CO2 from human activities will cause catastrophic climate change.

Yet there is nothing hypothetical about the issues that Americans, and people all over the world, list as their top priorities. Problems with immigration and government are happening right now in America.

The issues rated highest in developing countries like Nigeria (2,735,062 Nigerians voted in the UN poll) are similarly pressing: access to a good education, better healthcare, better job opportunities, better transportation and roads, political freedom, affordable and nutritious food.

All are immediate concerns – today, to real people who understand that the world has real problems to solve: problems that affect our lives and well-being right now.

They realize we don’t have the time, money or manpower to obsess over problems that exist only in computer models, questionable news stories, or the fertile imaginations of multi-millionaires like Al Gore.

Via email






Largest US Wind Project ever, denied on the basis of economics

The Texas Public Utility Commission on Thursday unanimously rejected the project as proposed, saying it didn’t offer enough benefits for Texas ratepayers as structured.

“We are disappointed with the decision in Texas that resulted in the cancellation of the project,” PSO official Steven Pate said in a news release.

The $4.5 billion project centered on construction of a 300,000-acre wind farm — the largest in the United States — in Cimarron and Texas counties by international energy giant Invenergy. AEP and its subsidiaries would acquire the 2,000-megawatt wind farm and a 360-mile dedicated generation tie line to the Tulsa area, where it was to connect to the electrical grid for delivery to PSO customers in Oklahoma and Southwest Electric Power Co. customers in Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas.

Tulsa World attempts to reach Invenergy for comment on the future of the wind farm Friday afternoon were unsuccessful.

Preapproval for cost recovery from all four states involved in the project in a timely manner to qualify the project for energy tax credits was necessary for it to move forward, according to Nicholas K. Akins, AEP chairman, president and chief executive officer.

Arkansas was the first to approve it, and Louisiana followed. After repeated hearings, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission had yet to rule, but the project clearly faced hurdles.

“We are disappointed that we will not be able to move forward with Wind Catcher, which was a great opportunity to provide more clean energy, lower electricity costs and a more diverse energy resource mix for our customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas,” Akins said in the press release.

The announcement came just a few hours after dozens of local landowners attended a hearing in Creek County District Court, where the landowners were mounting a challenge against PSO in refusing the company access to survey their properties for the transmission line.

“So it’s over? It’s done? That is so wonderful. That’s excellent,” resident Marta Koenig said upon hearing the news. She learned that the line might cross her property and had attended the court hearing to learn what she could, even though she had learned that the line might not cross her property after all.

“People have organized in social media and all over. There was a man in the parking lot that at his own expense had made ‘No Wind Catcher’ signs, and he was just passing them out. I brought a couple home,” she said. “It was affecting so many people that I know.”

At the morning hearing the cases of unrepresented landowners were continued and would have been rolled in for hearing with those of several families who had hired attorneys. That hearing had been set for Monday afternoon.

Alan Weeks, one of the represented landowners, said he learned from his attorney Friday afternoon that the court case was withdrawn.

Weeks and his family have a 400-acre Creek County property that they have acquired and improved upon for 18 years. He said they were crushed to learn that the line might cut diagonally across their property.

“We’ve been waiting to exhale for a long time,” Weeks said. “It feels good to breathe again knowing that a place so special to us will remain undisturbed. It’s an awesome answer to many prayers.”

Greg Ganzkow of Bixby saw the result as one of awareness and community efforts.

As a small-business owner and director of land sales for Coldwell Banker, he had many existing and potential clients who were concerned and said he saw land deals fall through as a result of uncertainty about the line. His was one of several families who hired attorneys, started a No Wind Catcher Facebook page that had 1,200 members, and encouraged the Bixby City Council to oppose the giant generation tie line, which would have been the largest power line west of the Mississippi.

“I think Bixby really made a difference. It was one of the first big dominoes that went,” he said. “Bixby showed other communities, other people, that we could fight this. It surged the movement forward.”

He praised neighbors to the south. “Texas has tremendous backbone and immediately sniffed this out,” Ganzkow said. “In Louisiana and Arkansas they weren’t going to have the wind turbines and the big transmission line. They didn’t have much to lose, and it didn’t touch as many customers. In Oklahoma the whole thing was just so polluted with the campaign about how great it would be for everyone.

“This is just a really big win for the landowners and the people,” he said. “It was a David versus Goliath thing, and we really have the media to thank for listening to the David part of that David and Goliath battle, too.”

Americans for Prosperity-Oklahoma, the state’s largest free-market advocacy group, was an early opponent of the project and welcomed the news Friday.

“The project was a boondoggle from the beginning,” it said in a statement. “Thousands of activists and landowners from across Oklahoma spoke out against this project. Whether because of the cost, the impact to their property or the future impact to ratepayers, they were vocal in opposition to the project and their efforts were invaluable to help kill the project.”

Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter also expressed concerns about the project from its first airing.

“I commend the Texas Public Utility Commission for its sound and sensible ruling,” he said in his own statement. “We have said from the beginning PSO failed on several fronts to qualify for pre-approval and cost recovery of this project, including its failure to comply with the (Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s) rules for competitive bidding, the inability to show a need for the generation capacity and unrealistic assumptions of ratepayer savings.”

Hunter said his office was not critical of the companies or wind power but the plan.

“PSO has proven itself as one of our state’s most valuable corporate citizens. We look forward to them continuing to provide quality service to thousands of Oklahomans for many years to come. We also look forward to working with them on future rate cases to keep customers’ rates reasonable, and PSO’s parent company, American Electric Power, attractive to investors,” he said.

Akins, of AEP, emphasized that the plan had always relied upon pre-approval and said the company will continue to grow in spite of this outcome.

“To realize the full benefits of Wind Catcher for customers, timely approvals were required from all jurisdictions so we could complete the project by the end of 2020 and be eligible for 100 percent of the federal production tax credit,” he said. “The strategic investments we are making in our regulated businesses will continue to support our 5 percent to 7 percent earnings growth rate. We are investing in a cleaner, smarter energy system for our customers and will continue to pursue opportunities to provide the new energy resources and technology solutions that bring value to our customers.”

SOURCE  






Not everything is a feminist issue

Even climate change is now looked at through a gendered lens.

Feminism is no longer a specific political outlook, with specific issues attached. No, today it seems that everything is a feminist issue, from adverts on the Tube to the level of air-conditioning in an office. Thinking about buying a razor? There’s a feminist issue to be considered there, too.

But this week’s announcement that former Irish president and UN high commissioner Mary Robinson is launching a ‘feminist fight against climate change’ really takes the biscuit. Along with comedian Maeve Higgins, Robinson is hosting a new podcast called Mothers of Invention, which insists that ‘climate change is a manmade problem that requires a feminist solution’. Climate change, Robinson argues, is an issue which ‘affects women far more’, because ‘women are more likely to die in a climate disaster, and day to day they are the ones cooking on solid-fuel stoves that can ultimately poison them’.

Climate change is only the latest in a long line of political issues which have been rebranded feminist issues. At the height of the European migrant crisis in 2015, many news outlets focused on the plight of women despite the fact that the vast majority of migrants were young men. Earlier this year, the United Nations Population Fund published ‘Five reasons migration is a feminist issue’. The first reason is that ‘almost half of migrants are women and girls’. No3 is that women ‘face double discrimination – as women and as migrants’.

Poverty is also now a feminist issue, because of ‘period poverty’: the idea that some young women are so poverty-stricken they can’t access sanitary products. This is a favoured cause among many feminist commentators and MPs. Scottish Labour Party politician Danielle Rowley made a speech in parliament in June describing the plight of women who can’t afford the ‘£500 annual cost’ of sanitary products. Leaving aside the fact that Rowley’s ridiculous sum indicates she must be buying her tampons in Harrods, the idea that poor families don’t provide for their daughters’ basic hygiene needs is pretty insulting.

This desire constantly to gender political issues reveals modern feminism’s inability to extend solidarity. spiked has often been critical of the politics around climate change, but any discussion of how to make the planet a more habitable, functional place should surely include everyone. No moral person hears about the tragic deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean and feels more sorry for the female victims. And no one only expresses solidarity with struggling working people on the basis of their alleged inability to buy sanitary products.

Feminists today suggest that women’s experience of life and politics is inherently different to that of men. But what they don’t seem to understand is that a female migrant will have more in common with her fellow travellers than she would with a UN official in spike heels, and a girl from Tottenham will have more in common with the boy living next door to her than with a retweet-hungry Scottish MP waxing lyrical about sanitary pads.

We need to stop making everything a feminist issue. If we want to get serious about changing the world, let’s stop feeding the gender war.

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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1 August, 2018

Greenhouse Gas Climate Science Is Broken Beyond Repair

Written by Hans Schreuder

In earlier centuries, science had a positive influence on society in developing social awareness around objectivity and rationality.

It replaced the witchcraft and hocus pocus of charlatans with evaluation of objective evidence as the means of determining truth. But now, science is leading the pack for charlatanism and witchcraft, as junk science is acquiring a greater legitimacy than the charlatans ever had.

Wherever there is corruption in science the most important, underlying facts are contrived, while science is applied to more superficial elements of the subject. Omitting the science where it is most relevant isn’t an error, it is fraud. That’s why the word fraud must be used in describing the major corruptions of science.

Nowadays, science bureaucrats require that every detail of research be described in grant proposals; and in the laboratory, the researchers can do nothing but fill in the blanks with numbers. The claim is that doing otherwise would be defrauding the public. So the research has to be done at a desk instead of the laboratory.

Science bureaucrats are not politicians. They are scientists who put themselves in competition with the scientists in the laboratories. The editors and reviewers of science journals do the same. The result is that the laboratory scientists are dominated by office scientists who dictate how their work will be designed and reported.

Madness has taken over the western world, an insanity that demands we destroy ourselves over the ludicrous claim that a tiny increase of a trace gas has endangered the world due to an even more ludicrous “atmospheric greenhouse effect”.

Let me therefore conclude my “I Love My Carbon Dioxide” mission by stating the following, which is in the tradition of proper science, not radiative forcing’s greenhouse effect pseudo-science:

1.
The settled science that a greenhouse warms up due to re-radiated light (energy), as set out by Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), Arrhenius (1896), NASA (2008), et al., is false.

2.
Considering, therefore, that even inside an actual greenhouse with a barrier of solid glass no such phenomenon as a greenhouse effect occurs, most certainly there can be no greenhouse effect in our turbulent atmosphere.

Energy can not be created from nothing, not even by means of re-radiated infra red. Widely accepted theory has it that more energy is re-radiated to earth than comes from the sun in the first place, amounting to almost an extra two suns. All materials above zero Kelvin radiate energy, yes, but energy does not flow from a cold body to a warm one and cause its temperature to rise.

A block of ice in a room does not cause the room to warm up, despite the block of ice radiating its energy into the room.

Yet carbon dioxide’s re-radiation of infrared energy warming up planet earth is the preposterous theory hailed by not only the alarmists, but accepted and elaborated by most skeptics as well, with mathematical theorems that do little more than calculate the number of fairies that can dance on a pinhead.

The accepted carbon dioxide greenhouse theory is thus declared a complete and total scam, as more fully detailed in these papers, amongst many (and I salute all scientists who agree with these papers and will gladly publicise all papers on this subject) :

“Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics”

www.tech-know.eu/uploads/Falsification_of_the_Atmospheric_CO2_Greenhouse_Effects.pdf and

“Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis Violates Fundamentals of Physics”
http://freenet-homepage.de/klima/indexe.htm

SOURCE  






San Francisco Bans Plastic Straws, Cocktail Swords



San Francisco's Board of Supervisors has voted unanimously to ban single-use plastic straws, making it the second major American city to do so.

The ordinance outlaws not just plastic straws, but also plastic splash sticks, toothpicks, and cocktail sticks, which would have to include those little swords and umbrellas. Other straw bans typically target food service businesses, but this one will prohibit anyone, including grocery stores and other retailers, from selling plastic straws.

"The negative environmental impacts of single-use plastics are astronomical," bill sponsor Katy Tang said in a statement. "San Francisco has been a pioneer of environmental change, and it's time for us to find alternatives to the plastic that is choking our marine ecosystems and littering our streets."

Like all good straw bans, the text of Tang's bill mentions the questionable statistic that Americans use 500 million straws a day. This statistic comes from a unconfirmed 2011 phone survey of straw manufacturers conducted by a 9-year-old. Market analysts think the actual number is far lower.

Violators of San Francisco's plastic straw/sword ban will face between $100 and $500 in fines, depending on the number of violations. While an explicit exemption for disabled people—many of whom lack the motor skills to drink or eat without a straw—is not included, the bill does say that "strict compliance" with the law is not required when it would "interfere with accommodating for any person's medical needs."

This makes it less punitive than the straw ban in nearby Santa Barbara, which has no disability exemption and even allows for the possibility of criminal sanctions. In other ways, though, San Francisco's straw ban is quite restrictive. Unlike Seattle's straw ban, for example, San Francisco's does not allow straws made from most compostable bioplastics.

The bill also includes a ton of other non-straw-related regulations aimed at cutting down on single-use food containers. Starting in 2020, event planners will now have to make reusable cups available for 10 percent of attendees. That same year, businesses will be required to meet yet-to-be-determined targets for using recycled content in containers, cups, and other "food service ware."

Tang's bill also restricts city departments' ability to issue waivers or exemptions for those claiming financial hardship.

A final vote enacting this ordinance into law is not expected until next week. But given the board's unanimous sign-off, this is a mere formality. The straw ban will take effect in July 2020.

As I've written many times in the past, straw bans are a useless environmental measure. San Francisco's is no exception. The United States is responsible for less than one percent of the world's plastic marine waste, and straws make up a tinier portion of this still. The best way to cut back on plastic pollution in the oceans is to improve waste management systems in China and other parts of the developing world, not to tinker with individuals' consumption habits in the States.

Despite the medical exemption, many disabled people will no doubt find it harder to have a drink out on the town. Able-bodied consumers will be inconvenienced too, although to a lesser degree. Meanwhile, straw-dependent bars, restaurants, and tea shops will see their costs rise even higher in the notoriously expensive city. These might not be life-altering hardships, but the government nevertheless shouldn't be imposing them on people.

SOURCE  





Climate change alarmists burned by studies showing destructive wildfires in decline

Global burned area dropped by about 25 percent over the previous 18 years, study shows

Scenes of Californians fleeing their homes and Greeks swimming out to sea have fueled alarm about climate change fueling deadly wildfires, but recent studies show that such destructive blazes are on the decline worldwide.

A September 2017 report in the journal Science found that global burned area dropped by about 25 percent over the previous 18 years, a finding consistent with a May 2016 paper published by the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

“[G]lobal area burned appears to have overall declined over past decades, and there is increasing evidence that there is less fire in the global landscape today than centuries ago,” said the study by British researchers at Swansea University.

Even in California, which for years has wrestled with fire devastation, a study in the International Journal of Wildland Fire found that the number of wildfires burning more than 300 acres per year has been tailing off since a peak in 1980.

“The claim commonly made in research papers and the media that fire activity is increasing throughout the western USA is certainly an over-statement,” the authors, Jon E. Keeley and Alexandra D. Syphard, said in The Orange County Register.

Mr. Keeley is a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, and Ms. Syphard is with the Conservation Biology Institute.

Such findings appear to fly in the face of widespread reports that human-caused global warming is increasing the severity and frequency of wildfires by fueling drought and higher temperatures.

“Extreme heat and wildfires made worse by climate change, say scientists,” an Associated Press article proclaimed this week on NBC News.

“We now have very strong evidence that global warming has already put a thumb on the scales, upping the odds of extremes like severe heat and heavy rainfall,” Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh told the AP.

Yale Environment 360 declared in an Oct. 2 article, “Stark Evidence: A Warmer World Is Sparking More and Bigger Wildfires,” and concluded that “the fires being seen today … are man-made, or at least man-worsened.”

This year’s U.S. wildfire season was forecast to be worse than average, and so far it has kept with predictions, with 98 wildfires blackening 4.6 million acres as of Monday, more than the 10-year average of 3.7 million acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

California has been hit hardest, but firefighters made progress Monday. They lifted some evacuation orders on the Carr fire in Shasta County about 150 miles north of Sacramento, the deadliest and most destructive of the blazes, and reached 30 percent containment on the Ferguson fire near Yosemite National Park.

Six people have been killed so far in the California wildfires, including two firefighters, a great-grandmother and two of her great-grandchildren. About 410,000 acres have burned across the state amid unpredictable winds and high temperatures.

The death toll in Greece rose to 91 on Sunday as wildfires swept through seaside communities, at one point sending dozens of people out to sea to escape the flames engulfing the resort town of Mati, as shown on a dramatic video.

California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, cited global warming last week as a factor in his proposal to reduce the legal liability of Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the utility company whose equipment was found to have sparked 15 of the state’s 2017 wildfires.

Mr. Brown and legislative leaders announced amended legislation July 2 to heighten California’s wildfire response, saying the effort “will help prepare the state to deal with the increasingly extreme weather and natural disasters caused by climate change.”

In a May report, “Indicators of Climate Change in California,” state Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Matthew Rodriguez said extreme weather events like wildfires are “not isolated incidents.”

“They are suggestive of the significant and increasingly discernible impacts of climate change in California,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “The most dramatic impacts include wildfires that are larger and more frequent, and the most severe drought since recordkeeping began.”

Others have argued that news coverage of fire disasters has contributed to the perception that wildfires driven by increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are raging out of control, despite evidence to the contrary.

“[M]any consider wildfire an accelerating problem, with widely held perceptions both in the media and scientific papers of increasing fire occurrence, severity and resulting losses,” said the Royal Society paper. “However, important exceptions aside, the quantitative evidence available does not support these perceived trends.”

In the Western United States, the study found that the limited data on fire severity “indicate little change overall, and also that area burned at high severity has overall declined compared to pre-European settlement.”

What’s responsible for the drop-off? The Science article pointed to an expansion of agriculture production in savannas and grasslands, resulting in a roughly 25 percent decrease in global burned area “despite the influence of climate.”

The discrepancy was not lost on climate skeptics such as Australia’s JoNova, who concluded Monday, “Global warming means a global fall in wildfires.”

Anthony Watts, who runs the Watts Up With That website, added: “Remember when we were told that wildfires would increase due to global warming? Never mind.”

University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor Clifford Mass said a host of factors may have contributed to this year’s California wildfires, including a modest temperature increase over the past several decades.

Add to that the drought, an increase of non-native invasive species, a huge influx of homeowners in fire-prone areas and aggressive fire suppression in the first half of the 20th century that left some forests overgrown and ripe for ignition.

“So there is a lot of talk of climate change ‘supercharging’ fires, but really no proof of it,” Mr. Mass said in an email. “And some fires are clearly NOT associated with climate change, like the wine country fires of last October.”

His conclusion? “I suspect climate change is a minor element in the CA wildfires, while fire suppression and human population growth into the wildlands are the dominant elements.”

SOURCE  





Wet & Cold: The Shape Of British Summers To Come?

Global cooling?

It’s been a dull, damp few months and some scientists think we need to get used to it. Melting ice in Greenland could be bringing permanent changes to our climate

[…] A series of unusually wet and cold summers has afflicted the UK for several years. Remember the devastating floods of 2007, when some areas received double their normal rainfall for June? Or the predictions of a “barbecue summer” in 2009 that backfired badly on the Met Office as the (correctly anticipated) high temperatures were accompanied by heavy clouds and rainstorms? The impression that many Britons have had that summer weather has been getting worse in recent years is borne out by the data – five out of the last six years (2007-2012), have shown below-average sunshine from June to August, and in some cases well below average. All have had above-average rainfall – in some cases more than 50% above the long-term average. “It is not just a perception – we have had a run of relatively poor summers,” says Stott.

This year has been the worst so far. April was the wettest on record, and so was the period from April to June. The sun was missing too – June was the second dullest recorded. Hopes that August might bring more settled weather were dashed when the first few days brought floods as far apart as Scotland and Somerset, forcing scores of people from their homes. The unseasonally wet and miserable summer may have failed to dampen the Olympic spirit but it has brought misery to thousands.

Nor has the UK been alone in suffering extreme weather. In the US, the eastern seaboard has been hit by heatwaves and storms but even worse has been the “dustbowl effect” in Texas and across much of the nation’s agricultural heartland. India’s monsoon failed to appear on schedule, leaving millions of farmers in the subcontinent facing destitution. Floods in Beijing, after the heaviest rainfall in 60 years, caused devastation to millions.

The consequences across the world have been and will be dire. A food crisis is now all but inevitable, according to the US agriculture secretary. Emergency plans are being discussed in India, while in China the clear-up is accompanied by concerns that environmental degradation may be making the country’s problems worse.

Attributing any single weather event, or short pattern of events, however extreme, to climate change is always tricky. Extreme weather events occur, in the scientists’ term, stochastically – they happen by themselves, unpredictably, owing to the natural variations of the weather.

But the science of climate change has progressed rapidly in recent years. Last month, the Met Office and NOAA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published a groundbreaking report that showed recent events could be attributed to human causes. Last year’s unseasonally warm November in the UK – the second hottest since records began in 1659 – was shown to be at least 60 times more likely to have happened because of climate change than because of natural variations in the earth’s weather systems.

Stott says: “We are much more confident about attributing [weather effects] to climate change. This is all adding up to a stronger picture of human influence on the climate.”

For the British Isles, the melting Arctic could hold the key to whether the weather is changing under human impacts. Recent poor summers have been strongly linked by scientists to a change in the usual position of the jet stream, a weather system that normally lies in high latitudes during the northern hemisphere summer.

Earlier this year, two US scientists published a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggesting that the meandering of the jet stream could be linked to the reduction in sea ice. Edward Hanna, reader in climate science at the University of Sheffield, who is taking part in similar research, explains: “The last six summers since 2007, while often rather cool and wet over the UK, have brought Greenland unusually high air pressure, mild southerly winds, record-breaking temperatures and melting of the land ice.” The link, he believes, is that Arctic sea-ice losses and the release of heat over the Arctic Ocean have tended to weaken the jet stream and make it more meandering. This has brought more low pressures over Britain, less stable conditions, more cloud cover and rain-bearing weather systems from the Atlantic.

This year, the jet stream moved much more than usual, passing south of the UK. It also persisted in this position for an unusually long time. If this pushing of the jet stream southward is indeed linked to less sea ice over the Arctic circle, as Hanna suspects, then the signs are that we will see many more of these wet summers in future.

SOURCE  






Elevated CO2 Overpowers the Effects of Drought in Wheat
    
Paper Reviewed: Uddin, S., Löw, M., Parvin, S., Fitzgerald, G.J., Tausz-Posch, S., Armstrong, R., O'Leary, G. and Tausz, M. 2018. Elevated [CO2] mitigates the effect of surface drought by stimulating root growth to access sub-soil water. PLoS ONE 13: e0198928.

In a study conducted in a glasshouse at the University of Melbourne, Creswick, Victoria, Australia, Uddin et al. (2018) set out to investigate the interactive effects of drought and elevated CO2 on wheat (Triticum aestivum, cv. Yitpi). The plants were maintained at either ambient (400 ppm) or elevated (700 ppm during daylight hours only) CO2 levels and one of four water treatments during the course of the growing season. In the first water treatment (WW), plants were well-watered to maintain a soil water content close to field capacity across the depth of the soil column for the entire length of the experiment. In the second (WD), third (DW) and fourth (DD) water treatments, drought was imposed at stem-elongation (62 days after sowing) on the lower, upper and full layer of the soil column, respectively, by withholding 33% of the irrigation, which droughted conditions were maintained through maturity and harvest (175 days after sowing).

Not surprisingly, the results of the experiment revealed that drought negatively impacted plant photosynthesis and biomass production, while elevated CO2 enhanced it. In describing some of the CO2-induced benefits Uddin et al. say that "plants under elevated CO2 were taller, had more tillers, a larger leaf area, more heads and greater numbers of grains, which resulted in greater aboveground biomass under elevated CO2 than ambient CO2"  Plant water use efficiency, below ground biomass and grain yield were also stimulated by elevated CO2, with the latter parameter rising by an average 63% across the four water treatments. What is more, the grain yields under elevated CO2 in the WD and DW water treatments were both higher than the well-watered treatment at ambient CO2, indicating that elevated CO2 fully compensated for the negative impacts of these two drought treatments. And although the magnitude of grain yield in the DD treatment under elevated CO2 is slightly lower than the grain yield at ambient CO2 under well-watered conditions, the researchers note that the yield values of these two treatments "were not significantly different" from one another.

Clearly, based on the results described above, rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide will increase the yield of wheat, even during times of moderate to severe drought (relative to well-watered and ambient CO2 conditions of today). And on those rare instances of extreme drought, wheat yields of tomorrow should still be similar to those observed under well-watered conditions of today, thanks to the incredible molecule -- CO2 -- that we like to call the elixir of life!

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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IN BRIEF


Home (Index page)


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

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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