GREENIE WATCH -- by Dr. John Ray

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

This document is part of an archive of postings on Greenie Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written. My Home Page. My Recipes. My alternative Wikipedia. My Blogroll. Email me (John Ray) here. NOTE: The short comments that I have in the side column of the primary site for this blog are now given at the foot of this document.

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31 December, 2019

For evangelicals, climate change causes a split between young and old that could hurt Republicans

This is a story about just one person so it may have little generalizability

SIOUX CENTER, Iowa — Cornfields flank the highway that forms the main road here and grain elevators tower overhead, constant reminders of how farming permeates this rural community in the state’s northwest corner.

What also permeates Sioux Center is evangelical Christianity. It is, for most, an unquestioned way of life here in the most Republican county in a state that plays an outsized role in presidential elections. There is an evangelical college, a Christian secondary school, and churches up and down the main road. Bibles are as commonplace as smartphones in the local coffee shop. Business meetings sometimes begin with a prayer.

Lindsay Mouw, 25, grew up here, her family well-known for the Ford dealership they have owned since the days of the Model T, and she shares their deep Christian roots. But her ideas about religion are different now, because of a topic few people in her community talk about — climate change. Concern for the environment has challenged her political views and those of many other young evangelicals, a trend that could one day spell trouble for the Republican hold on this religious group.

Mouw’s evolution began in 2015 on a study-abroad trip to New Zealand, where she learned about the devastating effects of noise and plastic pollution on the ocean. “From that point on, I remember being pretty committed to saying, ‘I’m not going to contribute to these problems anymore. This isn’t going to be on me,’?” she said.

It was for her, as for many of her peers, the beginnings of a wedge between them and their older evangelical counterparts. Other issues, including LGBT rights and immigration, have likewise caused an internal reckoning that breaks along generational lines. Many — though not Mouw — now call themselves ex-vangelicals.

“The church has become unrelatable to the world today,” she said.

This split also reminds that while a generational divide seems already sure to affect the Democratic Party in 2020 — with both the oldest- and youngest-ever candidates in pursuit of the White House — so too could it shift the picture in the GOP. White evangelicals are one of the largest, most loyal voting blocs of support for President Trump, and a crack in that support could foreshadow trouble for the Republican Party — if perhaps not in this election season, then in time.

“They’re reading the Bible and they’re saying, ‘Wait a minute, something is not jibing and we need to rethink this,’ ” said Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Dartmouth College who studies evangelicals.

About a quarter of all American adults identify as evangelical protestants, according to a 2014 poll by the Pew Research Center. One in six of those is between the ages of 18 and 29,

Mouw lives a life well outside the norm in Sioux Center, a community of 7,000 with a strong Dutch heritage. Having left the GOP, she is working to elect a Democrat from Iowa to the US Senate, someone who believes in working to address climate change.

Also, for the moment, she no longer attends church.

Mouw and other young evangelicals find themselves caught where two political statistics collide. White evangelical Protestants are the most skeptical of any religious group about climate change, a recent poll found. But the overwhelming majority of young people believe climate change is happening and is caused by humans, according to the same poll.

And so, these young evangelicals have found that they share more in common with their generation broadly than with their faith community. Young people believe that climate change will harm them directly in their lifetime, giving the issue a personal sense of urgency that does not exist for some older Americans. And young people are poised to play an especially influential role in this election, projected to vote in numbers greater than ever before.

“You’re right to say that younger evangelicals are probably particularly more attuned to the issue and probably give it a higher priority than maybe some of our older members,” said Galen Carey, vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, a group that considers climate change a problem but does not lobby lawmakers on the issue. “But we’re not giving up on our older members either. We want everyone to recognize what a concern it is.”

Young people who care about climate change should push their elected officials to embrace both environmental issues and also antiabortion policies, he said.

But some of those young people, it’s unclear how many, have chosen to leave the evangelical church altogether. Others are turning to more progressive denominations. Then there are those, like Mouw, who have chosen to retain their evangelical identity even as they hope to redefine it.

“I think we can reclaim it and say that this is what we stand for, and we can do good in the world, and we can be that light whereas most of society has written us off,” she said.

For her, things began to change while she was attending Dordt University, a local college affiliated with the Christian Reformed Church. When she studied abroad in New Zealand, she encountered an approach to life utterly foreign to her. There, students composted, ate vegan and vegetarian food, rode bikes whenever possible, and grew their own food. “This is some weird hippie stuff that I’m not OK with,” she thought at first. It seemed excessive.

Then her world turned. In her marine ecology class in New Zealand, she heard from a marine biologist about the real effects of climate change on the environment. “Eventually I stopped pushing back. I was like, OK, this is pretty important,” she said.

An introvert by nature, Mouw returned to Sioux Center energized and started an environmental club and initiatives on campus. This was in 2015 with the presidential election quickly approaching and Republican candidates starting to cycle through Sioux Center.

Mouw connected with the national group Young Evangelicals for Climate Action and soon they gave her a job — asking every Republican who came to town for their views on climate change. She pushed through her fear of public speaking and started to seek out the microphone at rallies and town halls. Quickly she became frustrated and discouraged with their answers — or lack thereof.

“I really still believed at that point that Republicans could do this,” she said.

Mouw tried speaking to her church pastor about climate change, but he told her the topic wasn’t important enough to address in the 30 minutes he had each Sunday to preach to his congregation.

So she found other ways to apply herself. She journeyed to rural Minnesota, where she did environmental conservation work, and is now back in Iowa assisting the campaign of Democrat Michael Franken, who supports efforts to combat climate change.

“I don’t think it was really until two years ago that I abandoned the Republican Party,” Mouw said, referring to the aftermath of Trump’s election. “I kind of gave up hope because you get to the point where you’re just like, ‘This is a losing battle.’?”

This splitting away of younger evangelicals started in 2008 when Barack Obama ran for president, according to Balmer, the Dartmouth professor. Young conservative Christians had been raised to believe that abortion and same-sex marriage were the only salient moral issues to vote on, he said. But on college campuses, Balmer said, he began to hear from young people who cared about a broader spectrum of issues including climate change, hunger, poverty, and the Iraq War.

The 2016 election only exacerbated the generational divide, he said.

“It’s kind of a sad thing, in some ways, because this is something that they grew up with and they just can’t, some of them, bring themselves to abandon it,” he said. “But they also kind of know instinctively that something is wrong, something is very, very wrong with this movement.”

Young Evangelicals for Climate Action has sought to capture the energies and attention of these people hungry for change within their faith community.

“More and more, we have younger evangelicals who are pretty disillusioned and disenfranchised with that traditional political alliance,” said Ben Lowe, 35, who founded the group in 2012. Interest in climate change has only grown since then and the organization works to educate young people on Christian college campuses and in churches, as well as political leaders through legislative meetings and advocacy.

Mouw’s personal story and political work have attuned her to the views of older conservative Christians so now when she talks to them about climate change, she is prepared. One morning this fall, Mouw met some of her grandfather’s friends, men in their 70s and 80s who gather every morning for coffee at the Dutch bakery downtown. The men agree that climate change is happening and they are concerned, but they do not think the government can be trusted to fix it.

Mouw listened quietly for the better part of an hour. When the conversation turned to her, she spoke without a hint of judgment. “I think we have the climate crisis because we are sinful, and we have failed to [care for the Earth] properly,” she said, the men murmuring in agreement. She mentioned ways to curb global warming like energy-efficient home heating and alternative agricultural practices.

But then she continued, in her gentle but firm tone, with a second notion that is more controversial: “I think it’s important for us as evangelicals who care about climate to really be involved in the political scene and make sure we are electing people who promote the sustainability of the earth.”

The men weren’t sure what to say about that. One of them, Willis Alberda, a retired professor from Dordt University, asked Mouw if she makes that same provocative point when she meets with members of Congress. Mouw said she did.

“Oh really?” the 83-year-old asked with genuine curiosity. “Some would agree with what you say?”

Yes, she said.

SOURCE

Are cats and dogs climate traitors?

One day I will write a book, 111,111 ways our saviors have proposed to save the planet from the coming climate extinction. But here’s one you may not have considered.

At my cat-loving daughter’s house the other day I ran across one of her books. The title:

How to Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You (by Matthew Inman). Then I saw this headline:

“Hollywood Celeb Emma Thompson: Eat Your Pets To Survive ‘Climate Crisis’.”

My first thought? “Emma must have read this book!”

But I read on. Dame Emma, we are told, who has won an OSCAR!, warned the world that the climate extinction crisis we are facing means we must expect “crop failures, water contamination, damaged houses, and ruined lives” and the prospect of eating our own pets in order to survive the coming climate apocalypse.

But don’t get your dander up about Emma. Turns out she is late to the game.

Back in 2017, the online journal journal PLoS ONE published a report on research by UCLA scientist Gregory S. Okin, entitled “Environmental impacts of food consumption by dogs and cats.” In the U.S. alone, Okin reported, 163 million dogs and cats have a detrimental impact on the environment from the food they consume to the waste they produce.

Okin found that U.S. dogs and cats “consume as much dietary energy as 62 million [human] Americans” and are responsible for 25 to 30 percent of Is there a coming climate CAT – astrophe? 1the environmental impact of meat consumption in the U.S. If these four-footed friends were a separate country, Catdoggia would rank fifth globally in meat consumption. Getting rid of dogs and cats, Okin gushes, would be “the environmental equivalent of removing 13.6 million cars from the road.”

Some cat lovers might note that these numbers are dog-heavy and conclude that the world is going to the dogs. Sorry, Garfield.

Back in 2013, based on a 3-year U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service funded study, researchers found that previous estimates that cats kill hundreds of millions of birds a year were very low. Cats, they reported, actually kill between 1.4 billion and 3.7 billion birds annually, PLUS 6.9 billion and 20.7 billion mammals – mainly mice, shews, rabbits, and voles.

And then there is top New Zealand economist and self-styled environmentalist Gareth Morgan who created a foundation to promote his cat-killing ideas. Morgan demanded that New Zealand register and neuter ALL cats , raise the bar for cat ownership; encourage citizens to cage-trap loose cats and turn them over to the cat gestapo (er, local authorities); euthanize all unregistered cats and fine all registered owners; and require all local authorities to “dispose” of cats for free.

We understand that Morgan is the local hero of the New Zealand Mouse Union. But even Morgan is a piker.

Writing in the German leftist Neues Deutschland (New Germany), Katharina Schwirkus argued that, “In addition to their disgusting excretions, pets are also bad for the climate — because they eat meat and thus contribute to the emission of carbon dioxide. Schwirkus says the ecological footprint of a German cat on average is as large as that of a human Egyptian.

Schwirkus insists that, “If you want to do something good for the climate, you shouldn’t buy a dog or cat. The breeding of four-legged friends should be stopped in the long term…. [T]he romantic picture of pets must finally be deconstructed. Children should be made aware from a young age that it is absolutely selfish to keep a dog or a cat in a city.”

Meanwhile, according to ethicist William Lynn [writing in The Conversation], the Australian government in 2015 declared a war on feral cats, with a goal of killing over 2 million felines by 2020 via shooting, trapping, and a reputedly “humane” poison. Lynn argued that there was no scientific basis for the government’s estimate of 20 million feral cats in Australia, thus for killing a tenth of that alleged number.

Lynn instead argues that individual animals have a moral value, and second that cats are themselves victims of human ecological errors. Lynn also questions the moral legitimacy of climate extinctionists who advocate for lethal management, which he says rests “on the assumption that individuals don’t matter – but ecosystems do. Lynn concludes by stating that, “it is human beings [not cats] who bear direct moral responsibility for the ongoing loss of biodiversity in our world.”

It is also human beings – not cats – who are spreading irrational fear about a coming climate extinction crisis and producing massive volumes telling everyone else what THEY must do to save the planet while flitting about in private jets to five-star resorts to bemoan just about everything that has brought joy to the world.

SOURCE

Cash cows: Meat, milk and renewables

One of the more ludicrous positions of some in the green movement is to go “meatless” in the interests of having fewer cows resulting in less methane, a greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere. The problem with such extremism is that cows not only produce essential milk and protein-rich meat, but also are increasingly producing energy to heat homes and businesses.

Natural gas, or “biogas,” is increasingly being produced from cow manure and other animal waste. Organic waste-producing facilities called anaerobic digesters are under construction in several states that will breakdown animal waste into usable fuel and fertilizer. Several new digester facilities are being built around dairy farms where the operators will purchase cow manure from nearby farmers, extract the methane in the digesters, and connect to natural gas pipelines to distribute the energy for residential, governmental and commercial use.

Biogas technology was part of the Obama administration’s Climate Action Plan, which included a tri-agency report in 2014 that outlined the potential of converting cattle waste to energy.

As reported recently in the Wall Street Journal, natural gas from animal waste is more expensive to produce than from hydro fracturing shale formations. Manure from up to 30,000 cattle is required for each anaerobic digester facility to be economical. Nonetheless, the biogas from cows and other animals is in demand from consumers, companies and local governments in the interests of lowering greenhouse gas emissions and generating tradable carbon credits.

The utility company, Dominion Energy is expanding its investment in the production of biogas. The company recently made a financing deal with Dairy Farmers of America and Vanguard Renewables to construct and operate digesters around clusters of dairy farms in five different states.

Some environmental extremists obsess about the volume of methane produced by cows that add to carbon emissions. A single cow, in fact, produces in one year the equivalent carbon emissions of a mid-size SUV driving 12,000 miles. Still, cows are invaluable for a healthy diet of protein from meat and milk products, which developed countries take for granted. For the developing world, higher protein diets are in much greater need.

Global warming alarmists are increasingly attacking meat as a way to fight climate change, as CFACT recently discussed. The United Nations’ Environment Program recently claimed, “huge reductions in meat eating are essential to avoid dangerous climate change.” The global citizenry fortunately knows better than U.N. bureaucrats and others producing anti-meat “studies,” as meat consumption has increased substantially, particularly in the developing world.

Still, the war on meat, because of cow emissions, continues to the point of extremists hoping to drive up food prices to discourage consumption. Joining this anti-meat fray are some politicians who imposed “meatless Mondays” in school districts around the country, including the nation’s largest district, New York City, with one million students.

The anti-meat agenda was in full throttle at the recent U.N. Climate Change Conference in Madrid, Spain. The delegates were pushing for nothing less than an all-plant based diet as another means to fight climate change. However, as CFACT reported, that did not keep many of the delegates themselves from consuming meat at a nearby Burger King.

A Whopper for me, not for thee.

The increasing use of cows to now produce renewable energy should temper such hypocritical anti-cow, anti-meat extremism.

Using anaerobic digester technology, methane from cows will increasingly be diverted to biogas to add to the renewable energy supply, rather than add to greenhouse gas emissions. Dairy and other farmers also can earn extra revenue from the sale of manure and, in some cases, lease the acreage to energy companies to house the anaerobic digester facilities to produce the energy. There is an added bonus: after the methane is extracted from animal waste to produce energy, the liquid and solid remains can be retaken for fertilizer and compost.

Green extremists at the United Nations and elsewhere who are waging war on meat need to rethink their approach, which always was senseless and counterproductive. Cows can produce much more than milk and meat. Using anaerobic digestion technology, cows, pigs and chickens are increasingly producing energy while reducing emissions in the process. A “win-win” proposition.

SOURCE

Australian Prime Minister Defies ‘Reckless’ Climate Protesters, Backs Coal Exports as Demand Soars

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has slammed calls from radical climate activists to end the export of coal – an industry worth $67billion a year to the nation’s economy – as a new report shows global demand is set to keep increasing over the next decade and beyond.

Strong demand from China and India for this electricity-generating commodity is driving the growth. Morrison wants Australia to maintain its edge by staying a key exporter and protecting the jobs of Australians who rely on the coal mining industry for their future and their financial security.

Nationally, the coal mining industry employs 50,400 people, when thermal and coking operations were combined, Australian Bureau of Statistics labour force data for November showed, with exports going mainly to China, India, Korea, Japan and Chile.

The conservative coalition leader spoke on the back of protests last week that called for Australia to end coal exports to ease pressure on the climate.

Morrison, who once once famously brandished a lump of coal in parliament, crying, “This is coal – don’t be afraid!” vowed those climate protesters – including Greta Thunberg – would not be dictating energy or trade policy.

“I never panic,” he told the local Sunrise program last week. “I don’t think panicking is to way to manage anything and the urge for panic that has come from some, often politically motivated, to pursue a particular agenda is not something I’m ever intimidated by or distracted by.”

“We won’t embrace reckless targets and abandon our traditional industries that would risk Australian jobs while having no meaningful impact on the global climate,” he said in an opinion piece for the Daily Telegraph.

“In short, we will continue to act responsibly on climate change, avoiding extreme responses and get the balance right.”

He spoke just days after a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) revealed Australia’s coal exports are expected to rise over the next five years on the back of growing demand from Asia.

The report, published by the IEA on 17 December, found demand for coal in India could rise by 4.6 percent by 2024 and by 5 percent in Indonesia and Vietnam. As a result, Australia’s total coal production is expected to rise 1.4 percent annually from 409 million t in 2018 to 444 million t in 2024.

Coal exports were worth an estimated AUS$67 billion (US$45.9 billion) to the nation’s economy in the 2018 – 2019 financial year, overtaking iron ore as Australia’s most valuable export.

Matt Canavan, Australia’s Minister for Resources, said the report supported the need for new coal mines in the states of New South Wales and Queensland. He commented: “We will need more than Adani,” referring to the Carmichael coal mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.

The Adani mine, which received final environmental approval in June, is expected to produce at least 10 million t of thermal coal every year.

SOURCE

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30 December, 2019

Another Year Of Useless Climate Madness Looms

The year 2019 saw the rapid rise of climate hysteria, but as the saying goes: “You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.”

Now that the hysteria is firmly established and well organized, it is sure to get bigger and louder. But I see very little coming from it except the noise, as long as skeptics keep up the good fight.

This is especially true in the U.S. Presidential race, which is climate policy-wise by far the biggest thing going on in the world. Many of the Democrat candidates are going to try to ride the hysterical wave to victory. Their winning is not likely.

My take is the further left you go the fewer votes you get, and these folks are going far left on climate.

In my view the only viable candidate in the pack is Biden and he may not be crazy enough to get the nod. Nor can he beat Trump, so things are looking good on that front.

Another big unknown is what the hysterical demonstrators are going to do. Bigger marches? More disruption? (The police now have glue remover.) Or maybe something we have not seen before, hopefully not more violent.

I am sure the advocacy insider email traffic is buzzing over this. (Maybe some new wacky signs. “I don’t want to die!” seems to be catching on.)

For that matter, will the hysterics endorse specific candidates for the Democrat nomination? Or perhaps get active in specific Congressional races? They might even form their own party (but Greta Thunberg cannot run, more’s the pity).

Political action seems like the logical next step for the extremists, which could further destabilize the green movement, given that most of the political action groups are moderates.

There are lots of other climate crunch points in progress as well. In a recent meeting, the EU failed to come up with a more ambitious emission reduction goal for 2030, despite its hysterical leadership calling for one.

The next meeting on this proposal will be in June. No doubt we will see lots of “Action Now!” marches and demonstrations then, but ambition may well be lacking at the EU national member level, which is all that counts.

Several countries are already missing their 2020 target and there are anti-action demonstrations too boot, from yellow vests to farmers and coal miners. The political leaders are running a bit scared of this stuff.

The UN will have several semi-summits, leading up to the grand COP 26 in Glasgow, beginning in November. Given what happened in Madrid’s COP 25 we are likely to witness the progressive collapse of the entire UN climate action process.

The UN’s Paris Accord process is entirely too slow and compromising for the Action Now! hysterics to tolerate. This will be especially certain if the Action Now! hysteria builds in 2020, which is very likely.

That the mythical $100 billion a year promised to the developing countries does not show up in Glasgow will compound the collapse.

Then too there is a lot going on at national levels around the world. Especially promising is the rapid rise of new populist parties that oppose the drastic actions demanded by the Action Now! radicals.

Left-wing hysteria typically generates a conservative reaction. How could it not? Angry mobs are dangerous.

Mind you I expect to see a lot of meaninglessly symbolic green action in response to the hysterical noise-making. This includes toothless declarations of “climate emergency” and pointless promises of zero emissions by far off 2050. Politicians promising the impossible, to be delivered in the far distant future, do no harm. Hence their popularity.

My definition of winning the great climate change debate is that no serious harm is done by the alarmists.

While I expect an escalating crescendo of hysterical shrieking during the course of 2020, the reason will be that my side is winning and the loud side is losing.

As things stand now, skeptics have a chance to win big in 2020, but we must keep the pressure on. Hold your nose, plug your ears, and hit them hard. You ain’t seen nothin yet.

SOURCE

?Trump trashes the Green New Deal at TPUSA Summit

On Sunday, President Donald Trump spoke at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he trashed the Green New Deal and all who support the disastrous plan.

"The Green New Deal, I think it's a wonderful thing I do want to think about it. I want to study it closely. I want to see whether or not we should use airplanes again," Trump said sarcastically.

"How about the senator from Hawaii, nasty, nasty horrible...what she says is so mean and so angry. She's not the smartest person on the planet. She wants the Green New Deal, and they informed her that that doesn't include airplanes. And they said, what are you going to do? And they talked about building a trail to Hawaii," Trump said.

SOURCE

Climate alarmist banks go carbon-colonialist

Africa must move forward without them, using fossil and nuclear energy to build prosperity

Paul Driessen and David Wojick

Africa has the world’s lowest electrification rate. Its power consumption per capita is just 613 kilowatt-hours per year, compared to 6,500 kWh in Europe and 13,000 in the United States, African Development Bank (AfDB) President Akinwumi Adesina observed in July 2017. That’s 9.4% of EU and 4.7% of US electricity consumption. It’s equivalent to Americans having electricity only 1 hour a day, 8 hours a week, 411 hours per year – at totally unpredictable times, for a few minutes, hours or days at a stretch.

It’s actually even worse than that. Excluding significantly electrified South Africa, sub-Saharan Africans consume an almost irrelevant 181 kWh of electricity per capita – 1.4% of the average American’s!

In Sub-Saharan Afria, over 600 million people have no electricity, and over 700 million rely on wood, grass and dung for cooking and heating. The region is home to 16% of the world’s population, and 53% of those without electricity. By 2050, its urban populations could increase by 600 million.

Determined to transform the “dark continent,” the AfDB launched a $12-billion New Deal on Energy in 2017 and a Light Up and Power Africa initiative in July 2018. It frequently emphasized that access to sufficient supplies of reliable, affordable modern energy – including fossil fuels – is critical for the continent’s social and economic development. Without energy, it is impossible to create jobs, increase productivity, reduce inequality, improve people’s health and wellbeing, or end poverty.

The bank’s lofty goal for its energy New Deal is 100% access to electricity in urban areas, and 95% in rural areas, by 2025. In July 2017, Mr. Adesina told the African Union Summit he was excited that “Japan has answered our call” to “adopt a balanced energy mix” that includes “its ultra-super critical clean coal technologies” that remove sulfur, nitrogen oxides and particulates, while greatly reducing CO2 emissions.

In 2018, the bank approved seed money for a Nigerian coal project and geared up to finance a 350MW coal plant in Senegal. It also initiated plans for a $2-billion coal-fired power station in the Kenya’s port city of Lamu, after the IMF, World Bank and other western lenders rebuffed Kenya.

But then Mr. Adesina and the AfDB caved in to carbon colonialist pressure. The bank now says almost nothing about coal or even natural gas. Its new themes include: responding to global concerns about climate change, gradually adopting a “low-carbon and sustainable growth path,” significantly reducing reliance on fossil fuels, and transitioning to “green growth” and “clean renewable energy,”

In September 2019, the bank announced that it planned to begin scrapping coal-fired power plants all across Africa, build “the largest solar zone” in the world, and pull funding for the Lamu power plant. “We’re getting out of coal,” Mr. Adesina said. “Coal is the past, and renewable energy is the future.”

So the AfDB has joined the World Bank, Goldman Sachs and other Multilateral anti-Development Banks in caring more about climate alarmism and avoiding criticism from the likes of Greta, the perpetually aggrieved and angry Grinch of Christmas 2019 – than they do about safeguarding the lives, livelihoods, health and living standards of hundreds of millions of electricity-deprived Africans.

This 180-degree flip-flop is delusional, dysfunctional and disingenuous. For many, it will be lethal.

First, there is nothing “green,” “clean” or “renewable” about wind and solar energy. The vast amounts of land and raw materials, mines and factories required to build wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and transmission lines – to harness widely dispersed, insufficient, intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar energy to benefit Sub-Saharan Africans – are anything but clean, green, renewable or sustainable. In fact, trying to meet those needs would require millions of turbines and billions of solar panels.

Second, The AfDB cannot possibly achieve its Energy New Deal or Light Up and Power Africa goals with wind and solar. It will never reach 100% or even 25% access to meaningful electricity that way. No country has ever built or sustained a modern economy this way – and countries that have tried to by mandating wind, solar and fossil-fuel-free economies are paying a terrible price. Headlines tell the story.

Germany’s green suicide: Industrial job losses top 80,000. German wind industry faces extinction. 340,000 German families have pricey electricity cut off. British steel faces insolvency; British families are already deeply in debt to their energy suppliers, before winter even sets in. Meanwhile, the fossil and nuclear-based US economy added another 266,000 jobs in November and wages also grew.

Third, there is no evidence to support claims that temperatures, droughts and weather anywhere in Africa are unprecedented or due to carbon dioxide from fossil fuels – or from wood, grass and dung fires. They and other climate changes have been common throughout history, and an energy-rich, prosperous Africa will be far better able to deal with future changes than a poor, energy-deprived continent could.

Fourth, China, India, Indonesia and other countries are not going stop building coal- and gas-fired power plants – and emitting enormously more CO2. Why should Africa and the AfDb go down a different path?

Finally, banishing fossil fuels (and nuclear), and focusing on pseudo-renewable energy will mean millions of children and parents will continue to suffer and die needlessly every year from diseases of poverty and energy deprivation. This eco-manslaughter at the hands of climate activists and banks must not continue.

Africans have a fundamental human right to more than the few light bulbs, cell phone charging stations and one-cubic-foot refrigerators that can be supported by a wind turbine and solar panel economy.

Thankfully, Botswana, Tanzania and other countries recognize that their continent is rich in coal, oil, natural gas, hydro and uranium. They intend to utilize those resources, take charge of their destinies, develop their economies and improve their people’s lives – by building coal- and gas-fired power plants, hydroelectric facilities, and pebble bed modular or other nuclear power plants. They will also install wind turbines and solar panels in distant villages until electrical grids bring 24/7/365 power to the villages.

No single solution will work everywhere. But “under no circumstances are we going to apologize” for developing Africa’s oil, gas and coal fields, Equatorial Guinea energy minister Gabriel Obiang Lima has said, adding it is “criminal” for any non-African to suggest that Africa should ignore any resources it has.

“Energy is the catalyst for growth,” says Gwede Mantashe, South Africa’s new Mineral Resources and Energy Minister and national chair of its African National Congress. Africa has long exported its oil and gas to the rest of the world, while remaining energy-deficient itself, he noted during a recent Africa Oil Week conference in Cape Town. That is no longer tenable. His new Integrated Resources Plan includes coal and nuclear, and all forms of energy, as appropriate to a given time and situation.

South Africa’s trade unions now see that solar and wind will not create jobs or prosperity; they promote coal power for inland areas where coal is plentiful, and nuclear for coastal regions where water can cool reactors. Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana and Rwanda all appear prepared to join SA in going nuclear – and Zambia has a new Zambian Atomic Energy Agency (ZAMATOM), headed by Dr. Roland Msiska; it has begun building a nuclear center and preparing for a new generation of small modular nuclear reactors.

“I am tired of being lectured by people in rich countries who have never lived a day without electricity,” says Nigerian Sam Bada. “Maybe they should just go home and turn off their fridge, hot water, laptops and lights. Then live like that for a month and tell us, who have suffered for years, not to burn coal.”

Energy deprivation perpetuates economic deprivation – and creates breeding grounds for terrorist groups in weakened African nations. Recent Islamic State attacks underscore this growing danger. Meanwhile, too many banks lack the moral decency to stand up for fossil fuels or nuclear, or question climate alarm doctrine. If they continue to balk, China could well step in – and gain greater influence and expanded control of Africa’s raw materials in the process. It would be much better if Africa stood up for itself.

Every new power plant generates electricity, jobs, better living standards, and more tax revenues to build more power plants, transmission lines and prosperity. Every country can do this, just as China, India and other nations have already. There’d be no better holiday gift than to banish Greta the Grinch from Africa.

Via email

Climate Related Deaths Down 99.9% Since 1932

The Left’s newest Saint, Greta Thunberg, “informed” us during a now famous speech she gave at the U.N. Climate Action Summit in NYC “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you.”
She then accused world leaders of doing nothing while “solutions are in sight.”

Speaking of solutions, while the climate is changing, humans are adapting to it. As it turns out, building infrastructure to protect against climate related catastrophes is a heck of a lot easier than altering the world’s temperature through political policies that would require the entire world to sign on. That has been attempted with the Paris Climate Agreement, but even that doesn’t actually bind nations to their pledges to cut carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, adapting to the climate has saved literally millions of lives per year. According to the Cato Institute:

In the decade from 2004 to 2013, worldwide climate-related deaths (including droughts, floods, extreme temperatures, wildfires, and storms) plummeted to a level 88.6 percent below that of the peak decade, 1930 to 1939. The year 2013, with 29,404 reported deaths, had 99.4 percent fewer climate-related deaths than the historic record year of 1932, which had 5,073,283 reported deaths for the same category.

The climate catastrophists don’t want you to know this because it reveals how fundamentally flawed their viewpoint is. They treat the global climate system as a stable and safe place we make volatile and dangerous. In fact, the global climate system is naturally volatile and dangerous—we make it livable through development and technology—development and technology powered by the only form of cheap, reliable, scalable reliable energy that can make climate livable for 7 billion people.

Note that the above information is from an article published in 2014. By 2018, climate related deaths had fallen further to 5,000 that year, or a 99.9% decrease.

Thank God – we didn’t steal Greta’s childhood after all!

SOURCE

Australia: Green ideology, not climate change, makes bushfires worse

The article by Miranda Devine below is from March 5, 2019 but it has lost none of its relevance

Melissa Price, the new federal Environment Minister, has done untold political damage to a government already divided over climate action by spouting idiotic green propaganda about Victoria’s bushfires.

On Tuesday, she linked the fires to climate change, claiming there is “no doubt” of its impact on Australia.

“There’s no doubt that there’s many people who have suffered over this summer. We talk about the Victorian bushfires … There’s no doubt that climate change is having an impact on us. There’s no denying that.”

Sorry, minister, it wasn’t climate change that caused the latest bushfires which have so far destroyed nine homes in Victoria, and it wasn’t climate change that killed almost 200 people in the Black Saturday fires ten years ago.

The real culprit is green ideology which opposes the necessary hazard reduction of fuel loads in national parks and which prevents landholders from clearing vegetation around their homes.

The ongoing poor management of national parks and state forests in Victoria and green obstruction of fire mitigation strategies has led to dangerously high fuel loads over the past decade.

That means that when fires do inevitably break out they are so intense that they are devilishly difficult for firefighters to contain. As a federal parliamentary inquiry heard in 2003, if you quadruple the ground fuel, you get a 13-fold increase in the heat generated by a fire.

Locals know the truth. Andrew Clarke, owner of Jinks Creek Winery, which has been destroyed by a fire which raged out of the Bunyip State Forest, “begged” for fuel reduction burns to protect his property.

“I’ve been begging them [Forest Fire Management Victoria] for 20 years to burn off the state forest at the back of our place and still to this day it hasn’t happened,” he told the ABC’s Country Hour.

Clarke said a planned burn-off was called off because of concerns about nesting birds.

So how did that work out for the birds?

Hundreds of emergency workers have worked across Victoria throughout the week to bring fires under control. Picture: AAP / David Crosling
Just three weeks ago, Victoria’s former chief fire officer Ewan Waller warned that state forest fuel loads were reaching deadly, Black Saturday levels. No one paid any attention.

But you can bet Premier Daniel Andrews will hide behind the climate change furphy.

Parroting green lies suits politicians because then they can avoid blame for their own culpability.

The Black Saturday Bushfire Royal Commission criticised the Victorian government for its failure to reduce fuel loads in state forests. It recommended more than doubling the amount of hazard reduction burns.

Instead, in the last three years, alone, the Andrews government has slashed the amount of public land being hazard reduced by almost two thirds.

It’s a crime.

The wonder is that the Morrison government is helping him with his alibi.

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 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 December, 2019

Record hit for most ice to melt in Antarctica in one day

The "data" comes from a model (which starts in 1979 only) so is not data at all, just guesswork. And generalizing from one instance is in any case close to brain-dead

What seems to be happening is that the Antarctic ice sheet is the big frustration for Warmists -- as it is if anything gaining mass -- so this one little glimmer of melting is seized on eagerly, making a mountain out of a pimple

The record in recent decades for the highest level of ice to melt in Antarctica in one day was reached on Christmas Eve, data suggests.

Around 15 percent of the continent's surface melted on Monday, according to the Global Forecast System (GFS) by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). The data comes from the Modèle Atmosphérique Régional (MAR), a model used for meteorological and climatic research.

Xavier Fettweis, a climatologist at the University of Liège in Belgium, who tweeted the data on Friday, said this is the highest melt extent in Antarctica in the modern era, since 1979. He added the production of melt water is a record 230 percent higher than average since November this year. That's despite the melting season not yet being over.

For the first time, Fettweis said, the melting seemed to explain a negative anomaly in data on Antarctica's surface mass balance (SMB). This is the net balance between what causes a glacier's surface to grow or deplete, for instance because it evaporates or melts away.

"It should be noted that this process is currently missing in most of SMB estimations over Antarctica as melt has been negligible until now. But the climate is changing..." Fettweis said.

Fettweis told Newsweek Antarctica has been "significantly warmer than average" this melting season. But he stressed the data is from a model, and not an in situ observation. The melting could be driven by a number of factors, and experts will need to wait two to three melting seasons to confirm what is going on.

"We have observed a crash of the Antarctica polar vortex just before this melting season," explained Fettweis, referring to low pressure near the pole. "A weaker polar vortex allows warm air masses to reach easier the ice sheet (which is usually protected by its polar vortex as it was the case the previous summer). The fact that the sea ice extent is very low also enhances the possibility of warm air masses to reach the ice sheet."

Asked whether climate change is to blame, he said: "As for most of the anomalies observed on these last months over the Earth (e.g. in Australia), the signal coming from global warming can not be ignored here."

SOURCE

Japanese banks to the rescue of coal power

Financial institutions have chaneled $745 billion over the past three years to new coal power projects worldwide despite effort to reduce fossil fuel use to fight climate change, a report released Thursday said.

The amount was calculated using data covering both lending and underwriting between January 2017 and September 2019 for all 258 coal plant developers identified in the Global Coal Exit List, drawn up by the Urgewald and BankTrack groups.

Altogether, the report cites more than 1,000 new coal power stations or units in the pipeline.

“Most of the top banks providing loans or investment banking services to these companies acknowledge the risks of climate change, but their actions are a slap in the face to the Paris Climate Agreement,” said Greig Aitken, climate campaigner at BankTrack.

The top three lenders listed are the Japanese banks Mizuho, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and the Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.

These are followed by Citigroup and BNP Paribas.

SOURCE

America, Not Paris, is the Environment’s Best Champion

President Trump recently shed light on a little-acknowledged but critical fact: Free-market American ingenuity, not the Paris Agreement, is improving our environment.

“The Paris Accord would’ve been a giant transfer of American wealth to foreign nations that are responsible for most of the world’s pollution,” President Trump said at the Shale Insight conference in Pittsburgh. “My job is to represent the people of Pittsburgh, not the people of Paris.”

Three years in, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Paris Agreement is a sham. Its anti-energy, globalist ideas are not only detrimental to the global economy, prioritizing liberal elite ideology over human well-being, but also utter failures at their ultimate goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Only seven countries are on track to meet their emission targets, and many of the Paris Agreement’s signatories have actually increased their carbon dioxide emissions.

Germany, a supposed world leader in renewable energy, has reduced its emissions by about 10% — but renewables have only been a minor factor. The decrease has been largely attributed to a decline in manufacturing, driven out by high energy prices. While Germany has spent $200 billion in its shift to renewable energy, its electricity prices have risen by more than 50%—some of the highest prices in the world, a significant burden for families and business owners to bear.

Ironically, Germany is now forced to turn to high-emission energy sources to sustain its renewable energy agenda. Unable to rely on wind and solar power alone, the nation is now acquiring much of its energy from biomass (wood pellets imported from the United States) and building natural gas pipelines from Russia. In Europe, importing Russian natural gas produces 41% more lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions than importing American natural gas.

Meanwhile, the United States has cut more total carbon dioxide emissions than any other nation. From 2008 to 2018, our energy-related emissions fell by 9% when the rest of the world increased their emissions by 17%. China’s emissions growth alone wiped out America’s reductions in 2017 by more than threefold, and now its emissions are growing even faster.

The widespread failure to comply with the Paris Agreement proves its just empty political posturing—virtue-signaling fanfare with no promise of action. But even if the signatories managed to rise to the occasion and meet their emission reduction targets for the rest of the century, global temperatures would be just 0.17 degrees lower in 2100.

Does two-tenths of a degree really justify strangling our energy industry and, therefore, our economy and way of life?

In reality, there’s no evidence to suggest climate change will be anything other than mild and manageable. The environment will be better off if we prioritize cutting pollution and encouraging economic growth and innovation. Contrary to the popular narrative, economic growth and environmental quality historically go hand-in-hand.

More important than greenhouse gases are reducing toxic pollution known to cause human harm. Here the United States is a leader as well. Despite the common belief that our environment is deteriorating, America’s air is the cleanest on record. We’ve cut the EPA’s six key air pollutants, toxic substances that cause humans harm, by 74% since 1970.

We’ve achieved these unprecedented improvements while growing our economy by 275%, our energy consumption by 49%, our vehicle miles traveled by 191%, and our population by 60%.

And our air might be even cleaner were it not for Asia’s air pollution problem. Several studies show a significant portion of the West Coast’s air pollution is blown over from Asia. Ironically, states like California that continually pass stricter environmental regulations often force manufacturing jobs overseas, further contributing to this problem. Our competitors in Asia can produce goods cheaply in part because they don’t utilize our advanced pollution control technology—something President Trump was right to call attention to.

America’s environmental leadership is something to celebrate, but it shouldn’t stop there. We should challenge world leaders to take a bold step: to meet America’s air quality standards. We should expect our allies and trading partners to share our commitment to environmental stewardship.

While other nations feign moral superiority by fighting a so-called crisis, the United States is leading the world through its actions. It’s only fair we ask the rest of the world to step up to the plate and do the same.

SOURCE

750 Billion Reasons Why Goldman Is Rooting For Greta Thunberg's Success

Having lost much of its central banker incubation skills over the past decade, and handing over the crown of Wall Street's most profitable trading desk to Morgan Stanley, in recent years Goldman Sachs has been best known for enabling and profiting wildly from Malaysia 1MDB criminal fraud, which culminated with the arrest of former Malaysia PM Razak, but not before Goldman made billions in illicit profits from selling bonds offered by the country's sovereign wealth fund.

And while Goldman is still waiting to learn its criminal and civil fate, and more importantly, how many billions it will have to pay Malaysia/the DOJ to put its 1MDB fraud in the rearview mirror, the company - which a decade ago was hoping to make billions from aggressively entering the carbon credit/offset market as profiled delightfully in Matt Taibbi's "The Great American Bubble Machine" - is already scheming how to profit from the latest round of anti-climate change euphoria, conveniently spawned by a 16-year-old child with Asperger's Syndrome.

On Monday, Goldman Sachs said it will provide $750 billion in financing, advisory services and investments for initiatives that fight climate change, as well as those that foster economic opportunities for under-served people over the next decade. What Goldman did not say is that it will pocket a generous commission, somewhere in the 3-5% ballpark, by peddling "green" products to naive investors (including central banks) who have fallen for the whole ESG virtue signalling charade.

The bank also updated its internal environmental policy framework to rule out providing financing to any new projects that will drill for oil in the Arctic or that create new thermal coal plants or new thermal coal mines. Of course, the destructive consequences of the bank's involvement in the 1MDB scandal would be quietly excluded from this virtuous charade.

Ironically, Goldman's policy changes come just as the United Nations concludes a conference that failed to ramp up efforts to combat global warming, according to Reuters.

Goldman CEO David Solomon announced the plans in an editorial in the Financial Times, where he wrote that there is "a powerful business and investing case" for the bank to take steps to address climate change and the growing worldwide opportunity gap.

Very powerful: having failed to make almost any money from the bank's last foray into carbon tax and cap-and-trade, Goldman is now seeking to directly appeal to fellow fake virtue signalers, who in turn will hope to extract capital from naive investors pursuing the oh so noble goal of only investing in green, renewable, and "clean" (whatever that means) projects. Goldman's bottom line, assuming a blended 3% commission on the $750BN in financial services it sells to gullible clients, works out to about $22.5 billion - a "powerful business case" indeed.

Additionally, Goldman emphasized that it will not pass up any significant amount of revenue as a result of the $750 billion commitment and the ban on financing certain drilling and coal activities. A Goldman Sachs executive said on a call with reporters that the bank has not financed any projects like those in recent memory. However, since US shale producers, most of whom are funded by the ultra-generous US junk bond market, are hardly losing sleep, it only means that other, less "virtuous" banks will be delighted to pocket a far higher commission by stepping into the "dirty" market where ESG virtue signalers now refuse to tread.

And speaking of drilling and coal activities, the bank said it has a rigorous due-diligence process that takes into consideration, among other things, impacts on endangered species and indigenous populations, the executive said.

The $750 billion commitment will be deployed in several ways, including by investing in and advising companies to take steps to reduce their carbon emissions and become more sustainable, the bank said. For example, earlier this year Goldman worked with Italian electricity company Enel to raise $1.5 billion through a bond offering that linked the investments to Enel’s commitment to increase its renewable energy base by 25% before 2022.

Translation: Goldman made about $15 million selling a bunch of bonds to a bunch of "green" liberals managing other liberals' money. Because when central banks have taken over the market and Goldman's own trading desk is shrinking quarter after quarter, and when the coming negative rates will make Goldman's recent investment into retail banking a disaster, one can always make money betting on liberal guilt, and nobody knows this better than Goldman Sachs... and Greta Thunberg.

And just in case Thunberg falls short of sparking the next major revenue driver on Wall Street, there is always the Fed. On Monday, the San Fran Fed published a paper titled "The Economics of Climate Change: A First Fed Conference" in which the authors concluded that "the economic consequences of climate change are likely to be substantial and will require responses from a wide range of policy institutions". More importantly, they will make tens of billions in revenue for such idealistic, progressive, "green" organizations as Goldman Sachs.

SOURCE

Australia: GetUp stirs the climate claims of fire activists

The GetUp activist group is driving the campaign of some bushfire survivors who blame climate change for fires burning in southeast Australia and are calling for “100 per cent renewable energy for all”.

Key among demands of the Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action group is that the Morrison government curb the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels by vetoing development of the Adani coalmine in north Queensland — a campaign priority similar to GetUp’s own.

The bushfire survivors’ group gained national attention when it was launched in February with a personal endorsement from decorated former NSW Fire and Rescue commissioner Greg Mullins.

GetUp promoted the launch on its Twitter feed in advance, telling supporters Mr Mullins would join Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action at a press conference in Canberra.

Mr Mullins leads a group of ex-fire chiefs — Emergency Leaders for Climate Action — funded by Tim Flannery’s Climate Council. They have accused Scott Morrison of a “policy-free zone” on climate change and urged the government to respond to the bushfire crisis with curbs on carbon emissions. A spokesman for the former NSW fire chief stressed that, while not demurring from his support of the bushfire victims’ group, he had “no affiliation” with GetUp.

The GetUp website promoting Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action provides harrowing accounts of fire victims’ experiences. It seeks support for their cause and is authorised by GetUp’s national director, Paul Oosting.

The site says GetUp provides “in-kind support” while “ad hoc media support” comes from the Climate Media Centre.

Asking supporters to “join us” in urging the government to take action, Bushfire Survivors says the Morrison government can no longer ignore the way climate change is hurting communities. “They must take Australia beyond coal projects like Adani and move to 100 per cent renewable energy for all,” it states.

Prominent among the group’s survival stories is Lyn Trindall’s account of how she escaped her lower Blue Mountains home at Winmalee in October 2013. Ms Trindall, the local GetUp group co-ordinator and a former Blue Mountains councillor, tells of a frightening evacuation as the wheelchair she uses spilt into a garden bed and a fire team came to her aid.

Another survivor, retired teacher Janet Reynolds from Bega and a supporter of recent “school strike” protests over climate change, tells of confronting a wall of flames and fallen trees during her escape.

The fire chiefs group led by Mr Mullins has no direct link to GetUp but some of the Climate Council’s supporters and contractors do have GetUp connections. The Mullins group, with Climate Council support, is pledging to hold a national summit after the fire season has ended early next year to devise a strategy on combating future fires that would take account of climate change.

The Prime Minister has been criticised by both Mr Mullins and the Bushfire Survivors group for refusing to meet them.

Government insiders say Mr Morrison has been reluctant to kowtow to lobby groups linking climate change to bushfires.

His office is believed to be wary of the politics involved, arguing the groups’ associations with the Climate Council and GetUp as support organisations suggests they are anti-Coalition, leaning more to Labor or the Greens.

A Climate Council spokesman rejected claims of an “anti-Coalition association”, saying his organisation was strictly non-partisan.

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 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 December, 2019

Climate Crisis? Four Major Metrics That Say Otherwise

By meteorologist Joe Bastardi

      I have long advocated that climatologists take a course on long-range forecasting so they can better understand the inherent errors in trying to predict the weather or climate. In the debate over the fate of the planet, where one side is always pushing hysteria, the weather is plainly not cooperating with the missive.

Forecasters take climatology classes and are now being taught the one-sided climate narrative, but in general, climatologists do not have to learn how to forecast. If they did, they would have to confront errors. I have had to confront mine, the latest example being this past winter’s botched forecast for the Southeast. Because climatologists are not exposed to forecast verification, it has led to a bold initiative that simply pushes an issue because no one will question it.

From the evidence I have seen, not only is the cause of warming questionable (there’s no question it’s warming; the question is why it’s warming), but the implied negative impacts are also questionable, because there are factual examples of the opposite happening.

I am not trying to be mean and nasty. That is not my mission. My mission in writing a piece like this is to show what I am looking at and why I question what I am being told. It does me no good to engage in the kind of activity I see out there today with derogatory labeling. In fact, I am trying to go the other way.

The assumption, of course, is that everyone is truly searching for the right answer. But if that is the case, is the missive being pushed not unlike using the fruit of a poisoned tree, wherein the means justify the ends? What if the ends are not at all what they are purported to be? If a catastrophe that is driving children to sue the government is actually occurring, why are there major metrics opposite of what is being claimed?

As a young child, I had no interest in suing the government. I was given a book in which an entire chapter was devoted to climate. It stated that if the earth warmed, it would snow more because the warming would not be enough to prevent snow in very cold places, and the warming would be from more water vapor. And due to water runoff into the ocean from extra snowmelt, a cooling cycle would begin. I read that 55 years ago.

When I got to college, that is precisely what we were taught in climatology. Of course, the sun is involved, and there are people opining that the low solar activity means a little ice age is on the way. I believe too much heat has accumulated in the oceans over the years due to natural processes (perhaps including 200 years of high sunspots) for that to come true. In short, I see a balancing act natural to the system occurring, and humans are observing it — each person with a different way of viewing things. I wrote previously about perspective, and I think that is very important.

There is no denying the planet is warmer now than it was at the start of the satellite era, and a linkage to the oceans is clearly seen. That being said, where it’s warming gives us a clue as to why it’s warming. More warming in the coldest, driest areas is a function of increased water vapor, not CO₂. Because the oceans have warmed, there is more water vapor in the air. I understand the CO₂ feedback argument, but as stated before, in the face of the planet’s entire history, why shouldn’t we question that argument?

In any case, a look at snow cover across the Northern Hemisphere shows the increase that is occurring, which is in line with natural climate cycle theory.

So here’s the question: If you learned something when you were young and then you later saw it happening in front of you, would you not at least question the ideas that say it is the result of something different? Is it unreasonable to do so? Why are the “no more snow” cries we heard back in 2000 not robustly questioned?

The back end of the cold PDO period from 2007-2013 produced a lot of drought across the U.S. This was turned into a perma-drought missive, first in Texas then in California. And of course, if we look at the Palmer Drought Index, we see it was dry in 2012.

At the time, my company took the lead in pointing out the similarities to the 1950s in the Southern Plains. And like clockwork, it turned. We said this because we had interests not in climate change but in supplying clients with accurate ideas on where patterns were going. If you pour concrete or raise crops or even have to schedule Little League baseball games, it pays to know if it’s going to be drier or wetter than average. That is what we do. That is always my main focus.

But you can see how that can conflict with a missive that says something very different. If almost everyone is saying you are in a perma-drought, and a lone voice is saying it will reverse, then someone has to be right and someone has to be wrong. My question is why no one bothered to call out the hysteria after the big drought years. It has since turned wet in California as the Pacific Decadol Oscillation (PDO) has warmed.

The result is the opposite of the hysteria. So much so that the missive now is too much rain, which of course will reverse as it always does in the coming years.

Sea surface temperatures went from this (notice the cold ring in the Pacific)…

…to this over the past 5 years:

The PDO is a known major driver of the weather, and yet the people pushing the perma-drought narrative won’t even acknowledge the direct link.

Tornadoes are a big deal, of course. But across the board, the metrics are showing the opposite of the hysteria being pushed. Tornado frequency is decreasing:

The frequency of strong to violent tornadoes is also decreasing:

You are always going to have a warm-air source for tornadoes. But if it’s warming more where the environment is naturally cooler, it decreases the overall clash potential. Past colder periods clearly featured more strong tornadoes than have recent warm times. This year we think the tornado count will be a bit below average, but you can bet whether above or below average, any destructive tornado will be portrayed as evidence of the climate catastrophe we supposedly are in.

The decrease in fatalities is a flat-out compliment to the men and women who are leading the way in issuing warnings. This shows exactly how to adapt to the weather with better technology, not try to change what we cannot. You have a much better shot at getting far enough away to save your life with a 10-minute warning than you do with a two-minute warning — which, again, is a great tribute to the advancement made in forecasting and to the great job done by NOAA in providing for the common defense. I cannot overstate enough my admiration.

Given more people are living in harm’s way, this chart is a finger in the eye of those claiming the situation is getting worse.

The trend is clearly down across the board. Yet why are no mainstream journalists curious about this?

Finally, with regard to hurricanes, how many times have we heard it is worse than ever? Or that an aberration of an active season is a harbinger of things to come?

Dr. Phillip Klotzbach provides these charts showing a clear decline in the frequency of landfalling U.S. hurricanes and intensity.

Will any mainstream journalist stand up to people asserting the opposite?

With the summer season coming, we turn away from the snow season to focus on droughts, tornadoes, and hurricanes. We believe it’s going to be another wet summer as a whole for the U.S., with drought held down — which, of course, will raise hysteria about too much rain.

It has rained a lot in California, so guess what? Another big wildfire season is on the way there as we have demonstrated for you over the past two years.

I think the tornado count is bit below normal, but I am not as bullishly low as other sources. Still, if it happens to be above normal, it will be an aberration against the trend.

We also predict a below-average hurricane season, but you should know full well that if a big one hits, hysteria will ensue.

You can see how muddy the waters have become. The purity of what I love is being destroyed. How can this be? You are being told the numbers are out of control, yet I have provided four major metrics in which that is clearly not the case. I am not “cherry picking.” It is people pushing the issue that keep insisting that the opposite is happening, and they are using their claims to try to drive home a point that I believe is based on an agenda. Their claims are are clearly not in line with the examples shown above. Which is why I tell people that today’s dialogue on climate and weather in reality have little to do with climate and weather. That’s the biggest shame of all.

SOURCE

How Binge-Watching On Streaming Services Is Hurting The Environment (?)

EVERYTHING is bad for the planet

Movie nights once required driving to the local video store to rent, rewind and return the latest blockbuster. Now on-demand video content providers offer countless binge-worthy options at the touch of a finger.

But experts say the ease of streaming services comes with a hefty environmental price tag.

Watching a half-hour show would lead to emissions of 1.6 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent, said Maxime Efoui-Hess of French think tank the Shift Project. That's equivalent to driving 3.9 miles (6.28 kilometres).

Last year, online video streaming produced emissions equivalent to Spain and that amount may double in the next six years, according to the Shift Project.

While most of the online traffic -- 34 percent -- is related to streaming videos, on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu, for example, the next biggest sector is online porn.

"Digital videos come in very large file sizes and (are) getting bigger with each new generation of higher definition video," said Gary Cook of Greenpeace, which monitors the IT sector's energy footprint.

"More data equals more energy needed to maintain a system that is ready to stream this video to your device at a moment's notice," Cook told AFP.

Much of the energy needed for streaming services is consumed by the data centre, which delivers data to your computer or device, explained Cook.

The centres contribute about 0.3 percent of all carbon emissions, according to an article by Nature.

Experts remain divided on how much that number will grow.

'Waste of resources on all levels'"

"For energy consumption to stay flat for the next five to 10 years, significant improvement in IT equipment and data centre energy performance must be made or our appetite for computations must diminish," said Dale Sartor of the Center of Expertise for Data Centers, linked to the US Department of Energy.

Anders Andrae of Huawei Technologies told AFP he estimated they would consume as much as 4.1 percent of global electricity by 2030.

Web-based video traffic is expected to increase four times from 2017 to 2022 and account for 80 percent of all internet traffic by 2022, according to the CISCO Network.

Netflix is continuing to expand globally -- the company reported a 53-percent increase in international revenue for streaming subscriptions between 2017 and 2018. And Disney and Apple are launching their own streaming services this year.

Meanwhile, the equipment used to view videos is getting larger -- the average screen size shot up from 22 inches (55 centimetres) in 1997 to an expected 50 inches by 2021, according to the Consumer Technology Association.

"The changing screen size and related shift to digital video technology has set the stage for higher definition and thus larger file sizes that we are streaming," said Cook.

Screens with 4K resolution use about 30 percent more energy than high-definition screens, according to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Last year, 8K screens made their debut.

The consequence is "a waste of resources at all levels", added Laurent Lefevre of the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation.

Experts suggest that viewers disable autoplay and stream over Wi-Fi in lower-definition formats. The worst-case scenario is watching over a 3G connection on a mobile device, said Lefevre.

The Shift Project offers a browser extension that monitors internet use, displaying the amount of electricty used, the CO2 that electricity produces, and how far the user would have to drive to match those emissions.

Cook emphasizes the most impactful change consumers can make is through their wallets.

"Exercising collective responsibility, with individuals demanding internet giants rapidly transition their data centres to renewable energy, has been the biggest driver thus far," he said.

SOURCE

GND Effects: 'Barely Distinguishable From Zero'

In a column for The Patriot Post in August of 2015, meteorologist and climate analyst Joe Bastardi asked, “All This for .01 Degrees Celsius?” in reference to Barack Obama’s scheme “to reduce greenhouse gases to save us from an apocalyptic atmosphere.”

Bastardi’s point was to show that Obama’s carbon-emissions-reduction methods would accomplish virtually nothing. But don’t take his word for it. He cited former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, who at the time “admitted that the steps being taken would only prevent .01 degrees Celsius of warming, but it was the example that counted for the rest of the world.”

The Green New Deal is no different — both in terms of its bloviators and its influence.

According to the American Enterprise Institute’s Benjamin Zycher, the Left’s newest climate and socioeconomic monstrosity would similarly accomplish nothing — except to promote socialism. “Notwithstanding the assertions from GND proponents that it is an essential policy to confront purportedly adverse climate phenomena,” he writes, “the future temperature impacts of the zero-emissions objective would be barely distinguishable from zero: 0.173°C by 2100, under the maximum Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change parameter (equilibrium climate sensitivity) about the effects of reduced GHG emissions.” He adds, “Under an assumption consistent with the findings reported in the recent peer-reviewed literature, the effect would be 0.083°C by 2100.”

Coming back full circle to Gina McCarthy’s ultimate objective, The Daily Wire’s Emily Zanotti says, “Green New Deal proponents, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), have long claimed that the GND … would be worth it if it such extreme measures would in the long run lessen our impact on climate.” Yet Zycher reports that “the annual economic cost of the GND would be about $9 trillion.” That’s a whole lot of nothing for a “deal” that will cost the economy $9 trillion annually and not really lessen our impact on climate.

Whether it’s the Clean Power Plan, Paris Climate Accord, or Green New Deal, the Left believes that spending oodles of money will solve the “problem” (whatever that is), even though some of them have conceded that temperatures won’t really change all that much. As Zycher summarily puts it, “The GND’s real goal is wealth redistribution to favored political interests under the GND social-policy agenda and a dramatic increase in government control of resource allocation more generally.”

SOURCE

Greenies want global speed limits on roads

The Greenies are getting their meddling fingers into even more pies. It's only a "declaration" that they are asking for at this stage but once the declaration has been signed, governments will come under pressure to implement it

Hopefully, most governments will foresee its unpopularity and kick the can down the road, in a way that governments are good at doing. The 55mph limit that Nixon and Jimmy Carter imposed on Americans was hugely unpopular so was eventually rescinded -- by Bill Clinton

Australia is preparing to sign an international road safety declaration in Sweden that endorses a 30km/h limit on suburban roads in response to "traffic injuries, air quality and climate change".

Nationals leader Michael Mc-Cormack is scheduled to attend a global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety on February 19, where he will join other transport and infrastructure ministers in ratifying the Stockholm Declaration, which will be referred to the UN.

A draft obtained by The Weekend Australian includes a preamble recommending integration of road safety with UN Sustainable Development Goals, including climate action, gender equality and reduced inequalities targets. The summit is expected to endorse speeding up the "shift toward cleaner, safer and more affordable modes of transport, incorporating higher levels of physical activity such as walking, cycling and using public transit".

Clause seven of the draft declaration suggests mandating lower speeds on urban roads, which would have a significant impact on Australian residential limits, currently 50km/h. It resolves to strengthen "law enforcement to ensure zero speeding and mandate a maximum road travel speed limit of 30km/h ... in residential areas and urban neighbourhoods within cities as efforts to reduce speed will have an impact on both road traffic injuries, air quality and climate change".

The two-day road safety summit, which includes sessions with Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf and Prince Michael of Kent, will also focus on "sustainable transport. The Stockholm Declaration calls on public and private organisations to purchase "safe and sustainable vehicle fleets".

It flags addressing "the connections between road safety, mental and physical health, development, education; equity, gender equality, environment and climate change". A spokesman for Mr McCormack said the Deputy Prime Minister "has had no approval or input into the wording of the current draft text". "The draft Stockholm Declaration will be considered at the Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety in February," he said.

Despite The Weekend Australian understanding Mr McCormack and his chief of staff were confirmed to represent the government in Sweden, his spokesman said they were not sure whether his "schedule will permit him to attend". "If the Deputy Prime Minister does attend, the draft text will be carefully reviewed and the government would provide input where necessary," he said.

If he pulls out, Assistant Road Safety Minister Scott Buchholz would likely attend. Mr McCormack did not answer questions on whether he supported 30km/h limits, integrating road safety with climate action or if the government would purchase a "sustainable vehicle fleet".

In October, Scott Morrison delivered a speech urging Australia to "avoid any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community ... And worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy".

Mr McCormack's visit comes after the Australian Automobile Association in August warned about government inaction on the national road safety strategy. The AAA released analysis showing only nine of 33 individual safety performance indicators were "on track" to be met. Pressure is also building on the Coalition to accelerate policy settings in response to the influx of electric vehicles.

From The Weekend Australian of 21 December, 2019

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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 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 December, 2019

100 scientific papers: CO2 has minuscule effect on climate

Increasing evidence destroys primary claim of alarmists

Within the past few years, more than 50 papers have been added to a compilation of scientific studies that refute the primary claim of climate-change activists that CO2 causes global warming.

The papers compiled by the NoTricksZone website, now numbering 106, find that CO2 has a minuscule effect on climate.

Words such as "negligible" are used to describe CO2's effect on the climate.

A 2019 paper, for example, noted that the "enhancement of the atmospheric greenhouse effect due to the increase in the atmospheric greenhouse gases is often considered as responsible for global warming."

But the analysis by Costas Varotsos and M.N. Efstathiou of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens "did not show a consistent warming with gradual increase (in CO2) in low to high latitudes in both hemispheres, as it should be from the global warming theory."

"Based on these results and bearing in mind that the climate system is complicated and complex with the existing uncertainties in the climate predictions, it is not possible to reliably support the view of the presence of global warming in the sense of an enhanced greenhouse effect due to human activities," the researchers write.

WND reported in September an MIT-trained scientist who has specialized for nearly 25 years in abnormal weather and climate change published a book explaining why he believes the data underpinning global-warming science are unreliable.

Mototaka Nakamura, who earned a doctorate of science from MIT, has conducted his work at prestigious institutions such as MIT, Georgia Institute of Technology, NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology and Duke University, reported the website Electroverse.

In his book "The Global Warming Hypothesis is an Unproven Hypothesis," Nakamura explained why global mean temperatures before 1980 are based on "untrustworthy data."

"Before full planet surface observation by satellite began in 1980, only a small part of the Earth had been observed for temperatures with only a certain amount of accuracy and frequency," he says. "Across the globe, only North America and Western Europe have trustworthy temperature data dating back to the 19th century."

Earlier in September, a group of 500 scientists and professionals in climate science wrote a letter to the United Nations contending there is no climate crisis and that spending trillions on the issue is "cruel and imprudent."

They urged the U.N. to "follow a climate policy based on sound science, realistic economics and genuine concern for those harmed by costly but unnecessary attempts at mitigation."

Electroverse noted that today's "global warming science" is built on the work of a few climate modelers who claim to have demonstrated that human-derived CO2 emissions are the cause of recently rising temperatures "and have then simply projected that warming forward."

"Every climate researcher thereafter has taken the results of these original models as a given, and we're even at the stage now where merely testing their validity is regarded as heresy."

Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of atmospheric sciences at MIT who has published more than 200 scientific papers, says in a video produced by PragerU "it seems that the less the climate changes, the louder the voices of the climate alarmists get."

He pointed out that the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, admitted in its 2007 paper that the "long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible."

The truth is, the professor said, that climate-change scientists and "skeptics" in the scientific community agree that the climate is always changing and that over the past two centuries, the global mean temperature has increased slightly and erratically by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

So, why are so many people panic-stricken, including some who are warning the world has only 12 years left to save itself?

He points to politicians, activists and media. "Global warming provides them, more than any other issue, with the things they most want," he said.

For politicians, it's power and money. For activists, it's money for their organizations and "confirmation of their near-religious devotion to the idea that man is a destructive force acting upon nature."

For the media, Lindzen says, it's ideology, money and headlines. "Doomsday scenarios sell."

SOURCE

We’ve just had the best decade in human history. Seriously

Little of this made the news, because good news is no news

Matt Ridley

Let nobody tell you that the second decade of the 21st century has been a bad time. We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.

Little of this made the news, because good news is no news. But I’ve been watching it all closely. Ever since I wrote The Rational Optimist in 2010, I’ve been faced with ‘what about…’ questions: what about the great recession, the euro crisis, Syria, Ukraine, Donald Trump? How can I possibly say that things are getting better, given all that? The answer is: because bad things happen while the world still gets better. Yet get better it does, and it has done so over the course of this decade at a rate that has astonished even starry-eyed me.

Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.

This does not quite fit with what the Extinction Rebellion lot are telling us. But the next time you hear Sir David Attenborough say: ‘Anyone who thinks that you can have infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is either a madman or an economist’, ask him this: ‘But what if economic growth means using less stuff, not more?’ For example, a normal drink can today contains 13 grams of aluminium, much of it recycled. In 1959, it contained 85 grams. Substituting the former for the latter is a contribution to economic growth, but it reduces the resources consumed per drink.

As for Britain, our consumption of ‘stuff’ probably peaked around the turn of the century — an achievement that has gone almost entirely unnoticed. But the evidence is there. In 2011 Chris Goodall, an investor in electric vehicles, published research showing that the UK was now using not just relatively less ‘stuff’ every year, but absolutely less. Events have since vindicated his thesis. The quantity of all resources consumed per person in Britain (domestic extraction of biomass, metals, minerals and fossil fuels, plus imports minus exports) fell by a third between 2000 and 2017, from 12.5 tonnes to 8.5 tonnes. That’s a faster decline than the increase in the number of people, so it means fewer resources consumed overall.

If this doesn’t seem to make sense, then think about your own home. Mobile phones have the computing power of room-sized computers of the 1970s. I use mine instead of a camera, radio, torch, compass, map, calendar, watch, CD player, newspaper and pack of cards. LED light bulbs consume about a quarter as much electricity as incandescent bulbs for the same light. Modern buildings generally contain less steel and more of it is recycled. Offices are not yet paperless, but they use much less paper.

Even in cases when the use of stuff is not falling, it is rising more slowly than expected. For instance, experts in the 1970s forecast how much water the world would consume in the year 2000. In fact, the total usage that year was half as much as predicted. Not because there were fewer humans, but because human inventiveness allowed more efficient irrigation for agriculture, the biggest user of water.

Until recently, most economists assumed that these improvements were almost always in vain, because of rebound effects: if you cut the cost of something, people would just use more of it. Make lights less energy-hungry and people leave them on for longer. This is known as the Jevons paradox, after the 19th-century economist William Stanley Jevons, who first described it. But Andrew McAfee argues that the Jevons paradox doesn’t hold up. Suppose you switch from incandescent to LED bulbs in your house and save about three-quarters of your electricity bill for lighting. You might leave more lights on for longer, but surely not four times as long.

Efficiencies in agriculture mean the world is now approaching ‘peak farmland’ — despite the growing number of people and their demand for more and better food, the productivity of agriculture is rising so fast that human needs can be supplied by a shrinking amount of land. In 2012, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and his colleagues argued that, thanks to modern technology, we use 65 per cent less land to produce a given quantity of food compared with 50 years ago. By 2050, it’s estimated that an area the size of India will have been released from the plough and the cow.

Land-sparing is the reason that forests are expanding, especially in rich countries. In 2006 Ausubel worked out that no reasonably wealthy country had a falling stock of forest, in terms of both tree density and acreage. Large animals are returning in abundance in rich countries; populations of wolves, deer, beavers, lynx, seals, sea eagles and bald eagles are all increasing; and now even tiger numbers are slowly climbing.

Perhaps the most surprising statistic is that Britain is using steadily less energy. John Constable of the Global Warming Policy Forum points out that although the UK’s economy has almost trebled in size since 1970, and our population is up by 20 per cent, total primary inland energy consumption has actually fallen by almost 10 per cent. Much of that decline has happened in recent years. This is not necessarily good news, Constable argues: although the improving energy efficiency of light bulbs, aeroplanes and cars is part of the story, it also means we are importing more embedded energy in products, having driven much of our steel, aluminium and chemical industries abroad with some of the highest energy prices for industry in the world.

In fact, all this energy-saving might cause problems. Innovation requires experiments (most of which fail). Experiments require energy. So cheap energy is crucial — as shown by the industrial revolution. Thus, energy may be the one resource that a prospering population should be using more of. Fortunately, it is now possible that nuclear fusion will one day deliver energy in minimalist form, using very little fuel and land.

Since its inception, the environmental movement has been obsessed by finite resources. The two books that kicked off the green industry in the early 1970s, The Limits to Growth in America and Blueprint for Survival in Britain, both lamented the imminent exhaustion of metals, minerals and fuels. The Limits to Growth predicted that if growth continued, the world would run out of gold, mercury, silver, tin, zinc, copper and lead well before 2000. School textbooks soon echoed these claims.

This caused the economist Julian Simon to challenge the ecologist Paul Ehrlich to a bet that a basket of five metals (chosen by Ehrlich) would cost less in 1990 than in 1980. The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, Simon said, arguing that we would find substitutes if metals grew scarce. Simon won the bet easily, although Ehrlich wrote the cheque with reluctance, sniping that ‘the one thing we’ll never run out of is imbeciles’. To this day none of those metals has significantly risen in price or fallen in volume of reserves, let alone run out. (One of my treasured possessions is the Julian Simon award I won in 2012, made from the five metals.)

A modern irony is that many green policies advocated now would actually reverse the trend towards using less stuff. A wind farm requires far more concrete and steel than an equivalent system based on gas. Environmental opposition to nuclear power has hindered the generating system that needs the least land, least fuel and least steel or concrete per megawatt. Burning wood instead of coal in power stations means the exploitation of more land, the eviction of more woodpeckers — and even higher emissions. Organic farming uses more land than conventional. Technology has put us on a path to a cleaner, greener planet. We don’t need to veer off in a new direction. If we do, we risk retarding progress.

As we enter the third decade of this century, I’ll make a prediction: by the end of it, we will see less poverty, less child mortality, less land devoted to agriculture in the world. There will be more tigers, whales, forests and nature reserves. Britons will be richer, and each of us will use fewer resources. The global political future may be uncertain, but the environmental and technological trends are pretty clear — and pointing in the right direction.

SOURCE

Contrast Of Climate And Energy Policies, And Economic Results, In The U.S. And Germany

If you are reading your normal diet of “mainstream” press, you are getting hit with a constant barrage of climate alarm, together with a near total boycott on any good economic news for as long as Trump remains President. As a result, it is very easy to lose track of the widening chasm in the climate and energy policies, and also in the economic results, between the U.S. and its major European competitors. When you put some easily-available numbers together in one place, the contrast becomes very striking. For today, I will collect a smattering of relevant statistics, focusing on the U.S. and Germany.

And then there are the positions on these subjects of the candidates for the Democratic nomination for President. I find those positions beyond belief.

You probably know that the so-called “fracking” revolution in oil and gas production has led to a large increase in U.S. production of those fuels over the last ten or so years. The actual numbers are quite remarkable. On the oil side, according to data from the government’s Energy Information Agency here, in 2008 U.S. production of crude oil from all sources averaged 5 million barrels per day. By 2018, that figure had well more than doubled to 10.99 million bbl/dy. By contrast, crude oil production in Saudi Arabia in 2018 was 10.445 million bbl/dy (up from 9.261 bbl/dy in 2008), and in Russia was 10.759 bbl/dy (up from 9.357 bbl/dy in 2008). Of today’s U.S. production, some 59% — representing essentially all of the increase since 2008 — comes from so-called “tight” resources, meaning those that are produced by fracking.

The large increase in U.S. production has been accompanied by a correspondingly large decline in the price of oil and natural gas. Oil of the WTI (West Texas Intermediate) grade that traded at $110 per barrel in 2013 closed today at $59.12. U.S. prices for a gallon of regular grade gasoline, which reached a high of $3.90 in 2012, fell as low as $2.25 earlier this year, and are currently around $2.60. Natural gas prices are quite volatile, but were in the range of $4 to $6 per thousand cubic feet in 2014, and most recently $2.29.

In September, the U.S. became a net exporter of oil for the first time since the 1940s. The EIA expects that status to continue for the foreseeable future.

Over in the economic news category, the U.S. continues to thrive. Today, the Labor Department reported an increase in jobs of 266,000 during November, the unemployment rate down to 3.5% (lowest since 1969), and wages up 3.1% over a year ago. All of those must be considered excellent results.

And then there’s Germany. According to CleanEnergyWire here, Germany in 2018 imported 98% of its oil needs, and 95% of its gas. But doesn’t Germany have at least one good shale formation that could be developed? The answer is that Germany pretty much banned all fracking in 2017. They are still caught up in the Energiewende, or, in other words, the delusional idea that wind and solar power can replace fossil fuels within a few years. Nearly ten years into this, their carbon emissions have barely decreased at all, while emissions increases in places like China and India make any marginal decreases that Germany can achieve completely irrelevant. Meanwhile, they depend for their oil and natural gas on places like Russia and the Middle East.

GlobalPetrolPrices gives the most recent price of consumer gasoline in Germany as 1.385 euros per liter, equivalent to $5.807 per gallon. Admittedly, this cannot be blamed solely on supply restrictions; embedded taxes are also substantially at fault. But those embedded taxes are also part of the ongoing war against fossil fuels. German consumer electricity prices are also about triple the U.S. average.

And the economic news from Germany? It seems that the industrial sector is in the midst of a slump, in substantial part caused by the mad drive to force energy conversion without consideration of the costs. From the Daily Express, December 3:

The German car industry is facing disaster with up to 50,000 jobs under threat or expected to be lost before the end of the year in what has been described as the “biggest crisis since the invention of the automobile”. last week the owner of Mercedes-benz announced plans to axe at least 10,000 employees globally, taking the number of jobs losses by German carmakers to almost 40,000 this year as the industry sinks under a massive sales slump. Daimler wants to save £1.2billion in staff costs as it prepares to invest billions in the electric cars boom. Audi, which is owned by volkswagen, has also said it would be shedding almost 10,000 people – around around 10 percent of its global workforce.

Trading Economics here states that German GDP “rebounded” to a growth of 0.1% in the third quarter, after a decline of 0.2% in the second quarter of 2019. Congratulations!

Meanwhile, among the Democratic candidates for President, the contest is between those who would ban fracking immediately and those who advocate some period of “transition” to some fanciful alternative. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have vowed to ban fracking immediately. It’s not clear how they would do that, other than that they view the presidency in their hands as a dictatorship of unlimited powers. Then there’s the “moderate” Joe Biden, who said (yesterday) “I’d love to make sure we can’t use any oil or gas, period,” but then hedged that we would need some period to “transition away” from those fuels.

“Transitioning” away from fossil fuels — that’s what Germany is doing.

SOURCE

Is screen time bad for kids? It depends on many factors, including what you even mean by “screen time.”

The first iPhone was introduced in 2007; just over a decade later, in 2018, a Pew survey found that 95 percent of teenagers had access to a smartphone, and 45 percent said they were online “almost constantly.” When researchers began trying to gauge the impact of all this “screen time” on adolescent mental health, some reported alarming results. One widely publicized 2017 study in the journal Clinical Psychological Science found that the longer adolescents were engaged with screens, the greater their likelihood of having symptoms of depression or of attempting suicide. Conversely, the more time they spent on nonscreen activities, like playing sports or hanging out with friends, the less likely they were to experience those problems. These and other similar findings have helped stoke fears of a generation lost to smartphones.

But other researchers began to worry that such dire conclusions were misrepresenting what the existing data really said. Earlier this year, Amy Orben and Andrew K Przybylski, at Oxford University, applied an especially comprehensive statistical method to some of the same raw data that the 2017 study and others used. Their results, published this year in Nature Human Behavior, found only a tenuous relationship between adolescent well-being and the use of digital technology. How can the same sets of numbers spawn such divergent conclusions? It may be because the answer to the question of whether screen time is bad for kids is “It depends.” And that means figuring out “On what?”

The first Step in evaluating any behavior is to collect lots of health-related information from large numbers of people who engage in it. Such epidemiological surveys, which often involve conducting phone interviews with thousands of randomly selected people, are useful because they can ask a wider range of questions and enroll far more subjects than clinical trials typically can. Getting answers to dozens of questions about people’s daily lives — how often they exercise, how many close friends they have — allows researchers to explore potential relationships between a wide range of habits and health outcomes and how they change over time. Since 1975, for instance, the National Institute on Drug Abuse has been funding a survey called Monitoring the Future (M.T.F.), which asks adolescents about drug and alcohol use as well as other things, including more recently, vaping and digital technology; in 2019, more than 40,000 students from nearly400 schools responded.

This method of collecting data has drawbacks, though. For starters, people are notoriously bad at self-reporting how often they do something or how they feel. Even if their responses are entirely accurate, that data can’t speak to cause and effect. If the most depressed teenagers also use the most digital technology, for example, there’s no way to say if the technology use caused their low mood or vice versa, or if other factors were involved.

Gathering data on so many behaviors also means that respondents aren’t always asked about topics in detail. This is particularly problematic when studying tech use. In past decades, if researchers asked how much time a person spent with a device — TV, say — they knew basically what happened during that window. But “screen time” today can range from texting friends to using social media to passively watching videos to memorizing notes for dass — all very different experiences with potentially very different effects.

Still, those limitations are the same for everyone who accesses the raw data. What makes one study that draws on that data distinct from another is a series of choices researchers make about how to analyze those numbers. For instance, to examine the relationship between digital-technology use and well-being, a researcher has to define ‘‘well-being.” The M.T.F. survey, as the Nature paper notes, has 13 questions conceming depression, happiness and self-esteem. Any one of those could serve as a measure of well-being, or any combination of two, or all 13.

A researcher must decide on one before running the numbers; testing them all, and then choosing the one that generates the strongest association between depression and screen use, would be bad Science. But suppose five ways produce results that are strong enough to be considered meaningful, while five don’t. Unconscious bias (or pure luck) could lead a researcher to pick one of the meaningful ways and find a link between screen time and depression without acknowledging the five equally probable outcomes that show no such link. “Even just a couple of years ago, we as researchers still considered statistics kind of like a magnifying glass, something you would hold to the data and you would then see what’s inside, and it just helped you extract

the truth,” Orben, now at the University of Cambridge, says. “We now know that statistics actually can change what you see.”

‘The part that people don’t appreciate is that digital technology also has significant benefits.

To show how many legitimate outcomes a large data set can generate, Orben and Przybylski used a method called “specification curve analysis” to look for a relationship between digital-technology use and adolescent well-being in three ongoing surveys of adolescents in the United States and the United Kingdom, including the M.T.F. A “specification” is any decision about how to analyze the data — how well-being is defined, for example. Researchers doing specification curve analysis don’t test a single choice; they test every possible combination of choices that a careful scientist could reasonably make, generating a range of outcomes. For the M.T.F., Orben and Przybylski identified 40,966 combinations that could be used to calculate the relationship between psychological well-being and the use of digital technology.

When they averaged them, they found that “digital-technology use has a small negative association with adolescent well-being.” But to put that association in context, they used the same method to test the relationship between adolescent well-being and other variables. And in all the data sets, smoking marijuana and being bullied were more closely linked with decreased well-being than tech use was; at the same time, getting enough sleep and regularly eating breakfast were more closely tied to positive feelings than screen time was to negative ones. In fact, the strength of the association screen time had with well-being was similar to neutral factors like wearing glasses or regularly eating potatoes.

Not finding a strong association doesn’t mean that screen time is healthy or safe for teenagers. It could come with huge risks that are simply balanced by huge rewards. “The part that people don’t appreciate is that digital technology also has significant benefits,” says Nick Allen, director of the Center for Digital Mental Health at the University of Oregon. These include helping teenagers connect with others. The real conclusion of the Nature paper is that large surveys may be too blunt an instrument to reveal what those risks and benefits truly are. What’s needed are experiments that break “screen time” into its component parts and change one of them in order to see what impact that has and why, says Ronald Dahl, director of the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley. A screen-related activity may be beneficial or harmful depending on who is doing it, how much they’re doing it, when they’re doing it and what they’re not doing instead. “If we just respond to emotions or fears about screen time, then we actually could be interfering with our ability to understand some of these deeper questions,” he says.

Allen notes a vexation: The behavioral data “is already being quantified” on the granular level researchers need. But tech Companies don’t routinely share that information with scientists. To deliver the advice the public wants, Orben says, will require “a very difficult ethical conversation on data sharing. I don’t think we can shy away from it much longer.” Till then, parents struggling with how much screen time is O.K. for their children might benefit from trying, as researchers are, to get a more detailed picture of that behavior. “Ask your kids: “What are you doing on there? What makes you feel good? What makes you feel bad?’ ” says Michaeline Jensen, of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She was an author of a study in August showing that on days when teenagers use more technology, they were no more likely to report problems like depressive symptoms or inattention than on days when they used less. “Even an hour a day, that could be particularly problematic — or enriching.”

SOURCE

Australia: Dangerous electric scooters

Saddening scooter crash rate revealed. These have had quite an uptake among young people and clearly kept cars off the road. Another Greenie idea that creates problems

THE rate of horror injuries caused by Lime Scooter accidents could be almost 30 times higher than originally believed, according to shocking new research. The data reveals almost 450 people presented at Brisbane emergency departinents in the 12 months to October this year, equating to 27 serious accidents per 100,000 trips.

A leading Queensland lawyer has called on the State Government to force companies like Lime to register their scooters and obtain Compulsory Third Party insurance. "Perhaps the State Government would be thinking twice about allowing e-scooter companies to skip registration and therefore Compulsory Third Party insurance," lawyer Travis Schultz said.

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail' of 23 December, 2019

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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 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 December, 2019

Glyphosate (Roundup) to the rescue

The weedkiller that Greenies hate is the only one that can control black grass

The UK's food security is being put at risk by herbicide-resistant black-grass, ZSL [Zoological Society of London] has revealed, as it calls for a ban on overuse of weed killer.

The grass out-competes wheat for soil nutrients and reduces the number of wheat plants where it grows - and it is likely to spread further across the UK.

This would increase the prices of bread and biscuits, and there would be less animal feed available so could also affect how much meat costs.

Black-grass (Alopecurus myosuroides) is a native annual weed which although natural, large infestations in farmers’ fields can force them to abandon their winter wheat – the UK’s main cereal crop.

Farmers have been using herbicides to try and tackle the black-grass problem – but ZSL has found that in many areas of England the agricultural weed is now resistant to these herbicides.

According to new research from the scientists at Rothampsted Research in Hertfordshire as well ZSL and the University of Sheffield, the cost of black-grass , is setting back the UK economy £400 million and 800,000 tonnes of lost wheat yield each year, with potential implications for national food security.

A spokesperson for ZSL said: "We must reduce herbicide use. We need government policy to address this at a national level and drive behaviour change, e.g. through a national action plan.

"Farmers must adopt more truly integrated past management practices, using all the tools available to them rather than relying mainly on chemical herbicides. This will include much more diverse crop rotations, cultural control methods, direct sowing, strict field hygiene measures and regular monitoring and delayed drilling to allow stale seedbeds."

The report, published in Nature Sustainability today, found the UK is losing 0.82 million tonnes in wheat yield each year (equivalent to roughly 5 per cent of the UK’s domestic wheat consumption) due to herbicide resistant black-grass.

The worst-case scenario – where all fields contained large amounts of resistant black-grass – is estimated to result in an annual cost of £1 billion, with a wheat yield loss of 3.4 million tonnes per year.

Lead author and postdoctoral researcher at ZSL’s Institute of Zoology, Dr Alexa Varah said: “This study represents the first national-scale estimate of the economic costs and yield losses due to herbicide resistance, and the figure is shockingly higher than I think most would imagine.

“We need to reduce pesticide use nationwide, which might mean introducing statutory limits on pesticide use, or support to farmers to encourage reduced use and adoption of alternative management strategies. Allocating public money for independent farm advisory services and research and development could help too.”

Over-use of herbicides also leads to poor water quality and biodiversity loss, meaning a reduction in numbers of insects and rare farmland birds.

Glyphosate is now one of the few herbicides that black-grass has not evolved resistance to, with farmers now reliant on repeated applications to control the weed. However, evidence from a recent study shows that resistance to glyphosate is now evolving in the field too.

Dr Varah added: “Understanding the economic and potential food security issues is a vital step, before looking at biodiversity, carbon emissions and water quality impacts in greater detail. We hope to use this method to aid the development of future models to help us understand how British farmers battling black-grass could do it in a way that is more beneficial to biodiversity like insects, mammals, wild plants and threatened farmland bird species like skylarks, lapwing and tree sparrows – unearthing how their numbers are linked to changes in farming practices.”

SOURCE

World Faces Trash Glut After China Ban

Recyclers search for alternatives to exports, while some towns drop programs

For decades, America and much of the developed world threw their used plastic bottles, soda cans and junk mail in one bin. The trash industry then shipped much of that thousands of miles to China, the world’s biggest consumer of scrap material, to be sorted and turned into new products.

That changed last year when China banned imports of mixed paper and plastic and heavily restricted other scrap. Beijing said it wants to stimulate domestic garbage collection and end the flow of foreign trash it sees as an environmental and health hazard. Since then, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia—other popular markets for the West’s trash—have implemented their own restrictions.

The moves have caused a seismic shift in how the world deals with its waste. Long used to shipping off trash to poorer countries to sort and process, nations are now faced with the question of what recycling is worth to them. They are undertaking new investments in domestic processing, ramping up alternative strategies such as incineration and rolling out education campaigns to teach homeowners to sort trash. Others are dropping programs altogether.

Recycling is “something that’s ingrained in you, and one day it suddenly all goes away,” said Kyle O’Brien, the town manager of Broadway, Va. The town had offered curbside recycling for two decades but canceled the service last year after Beijing started turning away the world’s recyclables. The company that processed the materials, van der Linde Recycling, closed its household waste processing facility, blaming the severe drop in prices.

For years, the world’s bottles and boxes made their way to China on ships that offered deep discounts to avoid returning empty after dropping off cargo in the U.S. and other countries. Since 1992, China has imported 45% of the world’s plastic waste, according to data published last year in the journal Science Advances.

“It was a great relationship, where we bought their goods and sent them back the empty boxes,” says Brent Bell, vice president of recycling for Houston- based Waste Management, the largest waste management company in the U.S.

Last year, China instituted a ban on 24 categories of waste— including, for example, plastic clamshell containers, soda and shampoo bottles, and junk mail. It said foreign garbage was “provoking a public outcry.”

As of October, U.S. scrap exports of plastic to mainland China were down 89% since early 2017, when China began to make clear it would ban many categories, while mixed paper exports were down 96%, according to the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries.

Total U.S. plastic scrap exports to all countries were down 64% in that period, while mixed paper exports were down 42% according to ISRI.

Scramble for buyers

Cities and towns have been scrambling to find new buyers for their waste ever since. One big problem is that many locations outside cities such as New York are used to putting recycling in a single bin. Different materials must be painstakingly separated before they can be processed. Much paper is too damp and plastic too soiled with food or grease to be recycled at all.

China accepted dirty and mixed recyclables because it had low-wage workers to sort out unwanted material, often by hand. That gave American contractors little incentive to weed out food scraps, plastic bags and nonrecyclable junk stateside.

After China rejected imports, a flood of trash was rerouted to countries such as India, Indonesia and Malaysia. Many of those places now say they are overwhelmed and have imposed their own restrictions on paper or plastic imports. The countries also want to focus on developing their own waste collection industries.

Malaysia in May began sending back 60 containers of imported trash to the U.S. and other countries, complaining it had become a dumping ground for rich countries. The containers were meant to contain plastic scrap but were contaminated with other items such as cables and electronic waste. A government spokeswoman said more containers will be returned as Malaysia ramps up inspections.

Japan, which historically sent most of its plastic exports to China, had been redirecting trash to Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam after China’s ban. But when those countries began turning dirty recycling away, Japanese collectors started stockpiling, in hopes a new market would arise. Over the past year, Japan has amassed 500,000 tons of plastic waste, according to Hiroaki Kaneko, deputy director of recycling at the environment ministry.

Japan, the second-biggest exporter of plastic waste behind the U.S., is trying to stimulate domestic processing by earmarking billions of yen to subsidize plastic recycling machinery for private companies.

Daiei Kankyo Holdings, a recycling company based in Kobe, recently applied for the government subsidies, which are estimated to cover up to half the cost of recycling equipment for a new plant slated to open next year in Osaka. The plant will double the company’s current capacity to around 30,000 tons a year.

Asei Co., a Japanese plastic waste exporter, moved the production of plastic pellets, which are created during the recycling process and used to produce new products, home from its factory in Shanghai. It spent 500 million yen, or close to $5 million, on two new facilities northeast of Tokyo.

The U.K. is burning more of its trash, including dirty or low-value recycling. Attitudes toward incineration vary greatly by country. In the U.S., where space is plentiful, it has long been cheaper to send materials to landfills, and incineration has remained unpopular. Across much of Europe, by contrast, trash burned for energy has been popular for years.

Incineration and recycling rates in England are now on par at roughly 42%, according to government data. Waste collected by local authorities sent for incineration climbed to 10.8 million metric tons last year from 10.2 million tons a year earlier, while recycling dropped to 10.9 million tons from 11.3 million tons.

“We are fast moving into a crisis where we don’t have market capacity for the materials collected, and already prices have plummeted,” said Simon Ellin, CEO of the Recycling Association, a U.K. trade body.

London-based waste contractor Paper Round has begun asking customers to stop putting plastic film, which isn’t easily recyclable, into recycling bins dotted around the office buildings, hotels and restaurants it collects from, because buyers don’t want it.

It is holding breakfast seminars for office workers and sending educational emails to staff at the buildings it serves explaining what can and can’t be recycled. It has also warned customers that unless prices for cardboard rise it will start charging for some collections.

“The China ban has highlighted that we can no longer export our problem,” said managing director Bill Swan. Paper Round’s buyers have much higher standards now, he said, such as checking moisture levels, which can decrease the quality of paper.

In Memphis, Tenn., Republic Services Inc., one of America’s largest waste haulers, last year stopped accepting mixed recycling put in a single bin from some businesses, saying it was too contaminated.

“When you’re in a buyer’s market—and we are certainly in a buyer’s market—you can demand higher quality,” said Pete Keller, head of recycling at Phoenix-based Republic.

The move in Memphis prompted the city’s airport to send bottles, cans and paper to landfills. For months it left in place recycling bins in case the service returned but recently gave up and removed them.

To improve the quality of what it does still collect, Republic has hired more staff to sort materials and acquired new optical scanners to distinguish between metals, colored paper and different types of plastic. It opened a new facility in Texas earlier this year that uses a variety of technologies to sort material in milliseconds.

Other waste collectors have also made investments, which have driven up costs for customers. Philadelphia is paying $92 a ton for its recyclables to be collected, up from $44 a ton before the China ban. Higher costs initially prompted the city to start burning half its recyclables before backtracking after public criticism.

The city is now spending $500,000 on an advertising campaign it hopes will reduce contamination rates—down to 10% from the current 25%—to secure it a discount on collection costs. “Often the material people put in bins, they don’t know whether it’s recyclable,” said Department of Streets Commissioner Carlton Williams, who counts bowling balls, garden hoses and old toys among examples of contaminants he has seen.

This summer, Philadelphia put ads on bus shelters and the radio telling people to “take a minute before you bin it” and “if in doubt throw it out.” The campaign asks residents to stop putting plastic bags in recycling bins and to rinse food containers. It has also sent staff doorto- door to tell residents what should go in the recycling bin, and has put lids on bins to protect paper from the rain.

SOURCE

Now Alcohol and Sugar Are Even Worse for the Planet Than Eating Meat

Scientists want us to eat bugs. Eating actual meat, from delicious cows and chickens and pigs and whatnot, is supposedly killing the planet. Instead, we should be eating wormburgers and maggot-dogs and cricket tacos. That's literally what the eggheads want. They say it's the only way we'll keep everybody from dying of global warming. Every other day there's another "news" story encouraging us all to eat filthy insects, like the mud-caked peasants they think we are.

So let's say you do what your moral, ethical, and intellectual betters tell you to do. You stop eating meat. Maybe you don't choke down cockroach casserole like they keep telling you, but you stop eating dead animals. You make that sacrifice for the common good. Now you're off the hook, aren't you? Now they'll leave you alone, right?

Wrong!

Daily Mail:

Families that often dine out and consume large quantities of sweets and alcohol are likely to have a higher carbon footprint than meat eaters, a study claims.

Researchers came to this conclusion after studying the food habits and carbon footprints of around 60,000 households across Japan.

They found that meat consumption typically only accounts for only 10 per cent of the different in environmental impact between low and high carbon households.

In contrast, households with high carbon footprints typically consumed around two to three times more sweets and alcohol than those with low footprints.

Well, it's Japan, so I really feel like Godzilla screws up the average. He's got a huge footprint, in every sense. But even so, obviously this means everybody should stop eating sugar and drinking alcohol. Otherwise, Greta Thunberg won't grow up to scold us some more.

You know what? Why stop there? Everybody should just stop eating, period. Let's all starve ourselves to death. Our only carbon footprint will be whatever is released as our corpses decompose. And then, that'll be it. Just let mankind die off to save the world. (Everybody except Arnold Schwarzenegger and Leonardo DiCaprio, of course. As always, they're exempt from the rules they want to impose on the rest of us.)

Environmentalists hate humanity and feel guilty for being part of it. If you derive any pleasure out of life, you must be stopped. Or as raconteur Jesse Kelly puts it: "The entire climate change platform is, 'If you're evil enough to be alive, at least have the decency to be miserable.'"

The holidays are depressing enough as it is. Go ahead, have some eggnog. Eat some cookies shaped like snowmen and Christmas trees. Flip off a scientist. Whatever makes these next few weeks bearable. Tell those Scrooges to go scold themselves.

SOURCE

Australia building gas-fired generators

A NEW power station to help keep the lights on in Queensland and NSW will "be announced today, the first of a series of new electricity generators to be given the tick. The gas-fired power plant at Gatton will be underwritten by the Morrison Government and is one of 12 generators short-listed just prior to the election.

No decision has yet been made on a coal-fired power station at Collinsville, championed by some LNP MPs, which was also short-listed.

At 132 megawatts, the Gatton gas plant is a smaller generator but can be used to firm up renewable power and can switch on with little notice during peak periods. It is also hoped it will put downward pressure on power prices should it be given final approval by the company behind it, Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners.

Quinbrook, which specialises in renewable and low-carbon projects, has previously warned the project would not go ahead without government support. Energy Minister Angus Taylor said the decision to underwrite the project was made after consideration of the project's financial viability, benefit to consumers and potential environmental impacts: "The Government will now enter detailed underwriting and contractual negotiations with the project proponent ahead of its financial investment decisions," he said.

Construction will begin once private sector funding is secured. The Federal Government is not funding the project, but instead underwriting its debt, so taxpayers will not have to fork out for the construction and any financial exposure is expected to be minimal.

Mr Taylor said it would increase competition, helping to keep energy prices down. Any excess gas from the project will be put on the Queensland gas market, which would increase competition for AGL and Origin.

An interconnector linking the Queensland and NSW power grids means the project could boost the southern state's energy supply if needed.

In relation to Collinsville, Mr Taylor said a first study was due this week, but further feasibility studies would be needed early in the new year.

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail' of 23 December, 2019

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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 or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

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

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25 December, 2019

Dave Lowe found measurable proof of climate change 50 years ago. He's watched in horror ever since (?)

Below is the preface to a very long-winded story that ignores the elephant in the room. Dr Lowe did NOT find "measurable proof of climate change" 50 years ago or at any other time. All he found was that levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were rising fairly steadily. Nobody argues with that. It's a fact. What they do argue about is how much (if any) effect that has on global temperatures. And that is not at all obvious at first sight or any other sight.

It becomes obvious when you look at how well global temperature tracks CO2 levels. It is supposed to but it doesn't. The theoretical case that CO2 should influence temperature is clear enough but the big question is: "By how much"? Scientists measure things so that is the burning question. And the answer appears to be: "By less than the error of measurement." So the effect is so small as to be virtually undetectable. CO2 is a minute fraction of the atmosphere so that its effects are minute is very much what one would on theory expect, an expectation that is borne out by the data

Greenies say the effect is large but that is little more than an expression of opinion. So what are the facts? There is much in the temperature record that one could point to but my favorite is the "Grand Hiatus". That datum is a real lulu. The central assertion of the whole Greenie case is that post-WWII the world industrialized vigorously and the many new factories and industries concerned belched out vast amounts of CO2, thus warming the planet.

But did it? The first half of the story is spot-on. Atmospheric CO2 levels did soar from that point on. But what about the temperature? It flatlined. For 30 years between 1945 and 1975, CO2 levels leapt but global temperatures remained flat, which completely contradicts the theory. See here. At the very moment that the Global Warming theory was first bruited, it was demonstrably false. At the very time Warmists point to as the start of global warming, it was not warming.

Greenies say that "special factors" explain the discrepancy but what special factor could exactly cancel out the effect of CO2 for 30 years? It's an absurdity. CO2 is irrelevant.

Dr Lowe would appear to be a man of faith, true to his Greenie religion at all costs

There's a certificate on the wall of Dave Lowe's small cottage in Petone, Wellington, New Zealand.

It could easily be missed by a passing guest. But if they cared to take a second glance, three words would immediately jump out: Nobel Peace Prize. It's the 2007 Prize, awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Lowe was a lead author on their largest-ever report.

It was by far the greatest honor of his career. He resigned almost immediately afterward, walking away on top of the scientific world.

The Prize is a testament to all that he has achieved in his career, but at the same time, to him, it's a haunting reminder of all the things he didn't, or couldn't, change.

"I've lived this horror for 50 years," he says. "There's so little time left and we've just been so bloody stupid."

Dave Lowe was one of the first people on Earth to find measurable proof that human activities were changing the atmosphere and warming the planet.

For the past 50 years, he has watched on, helpless and frustrated, as the situation around him has gotten worse, and worse, and worse.

More HERE

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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 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 December, 2019

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year to all who come by here

May this Holy time bring you all its blessings

I will be posting over the Christmas New Year period but not as much as usual

These activists really are crackers! Now the Greenies want to ban your Christmas bonbon – and the reason why is all too familiar

Environmental activists are calling for the traditional Christmas cracker to be banned as they contribute to plastic waste.

Environmentalist and founder of eco-friendly online store Biome, Tracey Bailey, says the Christmas tradition is responsible for a large contribution of plastic waste to landfill every year.

Ms Bailey told the Courier Mail that the disposable plastic toys inside the crackers should be considered just as harmful as other single use plastic items including straws, cutlery, beverage stirrers and cotton buds.

She believed that the plastic trinkets should be included in worldwide government bans on single use plastics and explained: 'They are just as likely to end up washing down drains and in to our oceans.'

Ms Bailey said that families could help reduce the large amount of rubbish over Christmastime by abstaining from purchasing crackers with the plastic toys.

She told how the yule tradition led to excess waste and said: 'Once the festivities are over, the toys are usually forgotten and discarded with the rubbish from Christmas lunch or dinner.'

A spokesperson from the environmental organisation Planet Ark said that avoiding bonbons would be a good way to reduce the impact of Christmas waste.

He said: 'It is possible to make your own low waste bonbons by using recycled paper and treats you've made yourself.'

Ms Bailey explained that making your own plastic free Christmas crackers would be a good eco friendly alternative.

She said that you can use cardboard toilet roll inserts, recycled paper and twine to create the outside shell and replace the plastic toy with a random act of kindness card for the recipient to complete.

SOURCE

Trump Administration Finalizes Rule That Will Roll Back Light Bulb Ban

The Energy Department announced that it had finalized its decision to roll back the 2007 rule that banned incandescent light bulbs in favor of energy-efficient CFLs.

DOE said that although the CFLs increase efficiency in light bulbs, it costs the consumers 300 percent more to light their homes. But the real benefit to repealing the ban is that it will once again, give consumers a choice.

Reuters:

The move is part of the administration’s push to ease regulations by requiring agencies to ditch two old regulations for each one they propose. The administration has also rolled back Obama-era regulations on pollution and emissions as it seeks to maximize oil, gas and coal production.

The roll back on light bulbs has been challenged in court by 15 states and Washington, D.C. who say it would harm state efforts to fight emissions blamed for climate change.

Environmental groups decried the decision. The Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit, said it would cost consumers $14 billion in energy bills annually and create the need to generate the amount of electricity provided by an additional 30 500-megawatt power plants.

I call BS on those claims. They don't factor in savings from buying incandescent rather than CFL bulbs and many people realize the savings and will keep using CFLs. What the greens object to is giving people a choice. You see, they don't think you're smart enough to act in your own interest.

The NRDC said old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, which give off more of their energy in heat rather than light, comprise nearly half of today’s bulb sales.

“The Trump administration just thumbed its nose at Congress, America’s families and businesses, and the environment,” said Noah Horowitz, an energy efficiency specialist at the NRDC.

This American family thanks the president for giving us the choice. It's called "freedom" for that reason and the green hysterics can't stand it.

Some people may want to continue using the CFLs. There is an argument that they lower electric bills by using less energy. But many other consumers balk at the expense and complain about the reduced illumination. A 105-watt-equivalent bulb can cost between $25 and $50.

Most CFLs are fine for general illumination, but I like a nice, bright, soft, 100-watt incandescent bulb to read by. It may be energy inefficient, so sue me. That's my choice and I'm glad I still have it.

SOURCE

Trump to Make Dishwashers Great Again!

The president’s war on environmental regulations is one of his signature fights. Here’s where dishwashers come into it.

As Congress voted to impeach President Trump in Washington, D.C., he appeared at a spirited rally in Battle Creek, Michigan.

During a long speech, he turned his attention to another issue on his mind: dishwashers.

The president said he'd heard complaints about environmental regulations making the kitchen appliances inefficient.

"Remember the dishwasher?" he said. "You'd press it, boom! There’d be like an explosion. Five minutes later you open it up, the steam pours out.”

"Now you press it 12 times. Women tell me ..." the president said. "You know, they give you four drops of water."

The statement quickly went viral, but this is not the first time dishwashers have made recent news. The New York Times reported a lobbying group FreedomWorks –an offshoot of a group founded by Charles and the late David Koch– to ‘Make Dishwashers Great Again’ through more lax environmental regulations.

A signature feature of Trump’s presidency has been the effort to end or roll back Obama-era environmental policies to generate economic growth that many believe is hindered by green regulations.

The president described his plan as based on rolling back federal regulations and incorporating “better machinery” into the market.

Environmental advocates argue that changes to water regulations for dishwashers, if placed into effect, would have negative impacts. Modern dishwashers have improved greatly and now only use half of the water and energy of older models. Eliminating these regulations would use more water and more energy, advocates say, and cost the average household more money.

SOURCE

The snark of carbon capture and storage (CCS)

The original use envisaged for carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology was to take CO 2 out of the chimneys of coal-fired power plants and pump it deep underground; do it right and the power station will be close to carbon-neutral. Apply the same technology to a biomass-burning plant and the CO 2 you pump into the depths is not from ancient fossils, but from recently living plants—and, before them, the atmosphere. Hey presto: negative emissions. And BECCS does not just get rid of CO 2: it produces power, too. The solar energy that photosynthesis stored away in the plants’ leaves and wood gets turned into electricity when that biomass is burned. It is almost as if nature were paying to get rid of the stuff.

There are, as you might expect, some difficulties. Even if you regularly take some away for burning, growing biomass on the requisite scale still takes a lot of land. Also, the bog-standard CCS of which BECCS is meant to be a clever variant has never really made its mark. It has been talked about for decades; the IPCC produced a report about it in 2005. Some hoped that it might become a mainstay of carbon-free energy production. But for various reasons, technical, economic and ideological, it has not.

The world has about 2,500 coal-fired power stations, and thousands more gasfired stations, steel plants, cement works and other installations that produce industrial amounts of CO 2. Just 19 of them offer some level of ccs, according to the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute (GCCSI), a CCS advocacy group. All told, roughly 40m tonnes of CO 2 are being captured from industrial sources every year— around 0.1% of emissions.

Why so little? There are no fundamental technological hurdles; but the heavy industrial kit needed to do CCS at scale costs a lot. If CO 2 emitters had to pay for the privilege of emitting to the tune, say, of $100 a tonne, there would be a lot more interest in the technology, which would bring down its cost. In the absence of such a price, there are very few incentives or penalties to encourage such investment. The greens who lobby for action on the climate do not, for the most part, want to support ccs. They see it as a way for fossil-fuel companies to seem to be part of the solution while staying in business, a prospect they hate. Electricity generators have seen the remarkable drop in the price of wind and solar and invested accordingly.

In some circumstances, you do not need a subsidy, a carbon price or any other intervention to make capturing CO 2 pay.

Selling it will suffice. The commercial use of CO 2 is nothing new. Not long after the great British chemist Joseph Priestley first made what he called “fixed air” in the 1760s, an ingenious businessman called Johann Jacob Schweppe was selling soda water in Geneva. CO 2, mostly from natural sources, is still used to make drinks fizzy and for other things. Many greenhouses make use of it to stimulate the growth of plants.

The use case

The problem with most of these markets from a negative-emissions point of view is that the CO 2 gets back into the atmosphere in not much more time than it takes a drinker to belch. But there is one notable exception. For half a century oil companies have been squirting CO 2 down some of their wells in order to chase recalcitrant oil out of the nooks and crannies in the rock—a process known as enhanced oil recovery, or EOR. And though the oil comes out, a lot of the CO 2 stays underground.

The oil industry goes to some inconvenience to capture the 28m tonnes of CO 2 a year it uses for EOR from natural sources (some gas wells have a lot of CO 2 mixed in with the good stuff). That effort is rewarded, according to the International Energy Agency, with some 500,000 barrels of oil a day, or 0.6% of global production. That seems like a market that CCS could grow into—though the irony of using CO 2 produced by burning fossil fuels to chase yet more fossil fuels out of the ground is not lost on anyone. The fact that oilfields in Texas regularly use EOR has made the state a popular site for companies trying out new approaches to carbon capture. A startup called Net Power has built a new sort of gas-fired power plant on the outskirts of Houston. Most such plants burn natural gas in air to heat water to make steam to drive a turbine. The Net Power plant burns natural gas in pure oxygen to create a stream of hot CO 2 which drives the turbine directly—and which, being pure, needs no further filtering in order to be used for EOR.

Also in Texas, Occidental Petroleum is developing a plant with Carbon Engineering, a Canadian firm which seeks to pull CO 2 straight out of the air, a process called direct air capture. Because CO 2 is present in air only at a very low concentration (0.04%) DAC is a very demanding business. But oil recovered through EOR that uses atmospheric CO 2 can earn handsome credits under California’s Low-Carbon Fuel Standards cap and trade programme. The scheme aims to be pumping 500,000 tonnes of CO 2 captured from the air into Occidental’s nearly depleted wells by 2022.

Not all the CO 2 pumped into the ground by oil companies is used for EOR. Equinor, formerly Statoil, a Norwegian oil company, has long pumped CO 2 into a spent field in the North Sea, both to prove the technology and to avoid the stiff carbon tax which Norway levies on emissions from the hydrocarbon industry. As a condition on its lease to develop the Gorgon natural-gas field off the coast of Australia, Chevron was required to strip the CO 2 out of the gas and store it. The resultant project is, at 4m tonnes a year, bigger than any other not used for EOR, and the world’s only CCS facility that could handle emissions on the scale of those from Drax.

In Europe, the idea has caught on that the costs of operating big CO 2 reservoirs like Gorgon’s will need to be shared between many carbon sources. This is prompting a trend towards clusters that could share the storage infrastructure. Equinor, Shell and Total, two more oil companies, are proposing to turn CCS into a service industry in Norway. For a fee they will collect CO 2 from its producers and ship it to Bergen before pushing it out through a pipeline to offshore injection points. In September, Equinor announced that it had seven potential customers, including Air Liquide, an industrial gas provider, and Acelor Mittal, a steelmaker.

Return to sender

Similar projects for filling up the emptied gasfields of the North Sea are seeking government support in the Netherlands, where Rotterdam’s port authority is championing the idea, and in Britain, where the main movers are heavy industries in the north, including Drax.

This is part of what the GCCSI says is a steady increase in projects to capture and store, or use, CO 2. But the trend needs to be treated with caution. First and foremost, global carbon capture is still measured in the tens of millions of tonnes, not the billions of tonnes that matter to the climate. What the Gorgon project stores in a year, the world emits in an hour.

Second, the public support the sector has received in the past has often proved fickle or poorly designed. In 2012, the British government promised £1bn in funding for ccs, only to pull the plug in 2015. Two projects which had been competing for the money, a Scottish one that would have trapped CO 2 at an existing gas plant and one in Yorkshire which planned to build a new coal-fired power station with ccs, were both scrapped. This history makes the £800m for CCS that Boris Johnson, the prime minister, has promised as part of the current election campaign even less convincing than most such pledges.

Tax breaks, experimental capture plants, new fangled ways of producing electricity and talk of infrastructure hubs amount to an encouraging buzz, but not yet much more. A CCS industry capable of producing lots of BECCS plants remains a long way off, as does the infrastructure for gathering sustainably sourced biomass for use in them. Carbon Engineering and its rival DAC companies, such as Climeworks and Skytree, remain very expensive ways of getting pure CO 2. If they can find new markets and push their costs down both by learning better tricks and through economies of scale, they may yet be part of the solution.

But for now, it looks like most of the CO 2 being pumped into the atmosphere will stay there for a very long time.

SOURCE

Australia: Investment in solar, wind farms drying up

A sharp slump in new investment in wind and solar farms will continue unless a price is put on carbon or the Renewable Energy Target is extended beyond next year, the Clean Energy Council warns.

CEC chief executive Kane Thornton said investment in renewable energy had dropped by 60 per cent in the past year and declines would continue without government intervention. He said this would put pressure on power prices and reliability as coal generators aged.

The comments ignited a debate about whether renewable energy was the cheapest form of power, as advocates including Anthony Albanese and Malcolm Turnbull claim. Energy Minister Angus Taylor said large-scale renewables projects would not receive any further government support. "The clean energy industry has assured us that the cost of renewables is now competitive with alternatives so we would expect investment to continue in the absence of subsidies," he said. "An industry that is now competitive shouldn't require additional subsidies, Mr Taylor said.

Nearly 70 per cent of Australia's electricity was generated from coal-fired power this year compared with 22.6 per cent from renewables. The RET will result in 33,000GWh of power being derived from renewable power generation next year and the subsidies will continue until 2030 but only for plants constructed by 2020.

The scheme operates by allowing large renewable power stations, such as wind farms, to create renewable energy certificates for every megawatt hour of power they generate. The certificates are bought by electricity retailers who sell the electricity to householders and businesses.

Mr Thornton said the industry was not asking for subsidies, despite his call for an extension of the RET. "The RET could actually be extended in a way that provides that certainty," he said "The market will decide whether there is in fact a subsidy delivered or not "(In one project), the renewable energy certificates that were delivered were worth zero. So that project was essentially getting no subsidy but was getting certainty from the target."

The fall in investment from renewables, also shown in a report released this month by the Clean Energy Regulator, comes amid continuing tight supply in parts of the electricity market during periods of high demand.

The Australian Energy Regu-lator launched an investigation on Friday after South Australia's wholesale spot electricity price hit the market price cap of $14,700 a megawatt hour twice on Thursday night, amid a severe heatwave.

With the Morrison government moving to fund a feasibility study into a coal-fired power station in central Queensland, the Opposition Leader this week declared a new coal plant was not needed because "renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels".

"Markets will determine what the economics are of projects," he said. "And the economics of projects are showing that renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels and that change has occurred over a period of time. And one would expect that would continue."

According to a draft report on the energy market released by the CSIRO this month, electricity generated from new renewables projects will be cheaper than from coal projects that include carbon-capture storage.

It predicts a new wind project with six hours' storage would generate electricity at between $88-$112/MWh in 2030, dropping to between $82-$108/ MWh in 2030 and $71-$102/1"h in 2050. A new solar project with six hours storage will generate power at between $75-$11.8/MWh falling to $52-$95 by 2050:

A new thermal coal-fired power station that stored its carbon emisions would produce electricity at between $148-$200 MWh in 2020 and $137-$202/ MWh in 2050.

However, the projections show that new gas and coal projects without carbon-capture storage will be cost competitive with renewables. A new coal-fired power station is expected to produce electricity for between $83-$l12 in 2020, with the price reducing slightly by 2050. Electricity from a new gas power plant would produce power at between $67-$117.

Grattan Institute director Tony Wood said new coal-fired power stations without carbon capture storage would have trouble receiving finance because of concerns they would be forced to close if emissions targets became more ambitious.

He said the RET had helped renewable energy become competitive and he doubted major clean energy projects would come online under the Morrison government's policy settings.

From The Weekend Australian of 21 December, 2019

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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 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 December, 2019

COP 25: Paris Accord destroyed

“Action Now!” radicalism has destroyed the slow moving, consensus based Paris Agreement. It is not just COP 25 that failed; the UN climate change machinery has collapsed. This is good news, even though the reason is bad news.

I have been writing about the climate alarmism movement tearing itself apart for months now. For example here.

The new radicalism is at war with the establishment moderates. This great gulf between radicals and moderates hit the COP 25 summit in Madrid with a vengeance. These annual summits are normally protracted exercises in compromise among the almost 200 nations represented. Not this time.

In Madrid the Action Now! radicals would not even consider compromise. Their extremism then caused the moderates to take hard line positions as well, so the COP stalled out and failed to act on any significant issue. That what the radicals demand is impossible did not help. The negotiating machinery ground to a noisy halt.

So now we have two very different versions of the alarmist rhetoric and a lot of people on each side. I call them the “Action Now!” hysterics (Greta, XR, etc.) and the moderates. The Paris Accord reflects the slow moving moderate view. It turns out that a lot of national delegations now take the hysterical view, especially the small island states and the Africans (both of which stand to make the most money).

You could see the breakdown coming on, as Madrid was hyped as the “action COP” when it was nothing of the sort. Even the COP leaders took part in this foolish rhetoric. Yet the sorts of radical national actions being called for were simply not on the agenda. I doubt the moderate negotiators on the ground in Madrid had the authority to even consider the radical’s hysterical demands for immediate drastic action.

Nor is such radical action on upcoming COP agendas. It is not part of the Paris Accord process and therein lies the problem for the Action Now! radicals. They demand what cannot happen.

The hysterics are calling for radical action at next year’s Glasgow COP at the latest. This is highly unlikely, to say the least.

In fact the harassed moderates in Madrid pointed out that most countries, including all of the major emitters, do not have to file new emission reduction plans until 2030. China and India, the first and fourth biggest emitters, have already said that is their intent. Additionally, their plans allow for unlimited emission increases until 2030, which is intolerable for the Action Now! hysterics.

America, the number two emitter, is certainly not going to file a radical action plan. U.S. membership in the Paris fiasco officially ends the day before the 2020 Glasgow COP begins in November.

If the Action Now! radicals continue their intransigence then the Paris Accord is essentially dead. This is almost certain to happen. Ironically the Paris Agreement has been killed by the irrational fear of climate change that spawned it in the first place. Is that cool or what?

The death of the silly Paris Accord is fine by me. My only real concern is that the hysterics might somehow do real damage. So far this seems unlikely, given that what they are demanding is impossible.

This is why I cherish the hysterics. They are wrecking the climate scare political movement. It is like I am fighting an enemy force and suddenly it is having an endless civil war. I am all for that.

SOURCE

A California economy built on wind and solar is a mirage

In its never-ending war to demonstrate political correctness in the era of “climate change,” California lawmakers are demonstrating their ignorance of economics and resource allocation and angering voters across the nation in the process.

Just last year, the California legislature enacted a law that requires the state to obtain all of its electricity from “clean” sources – wind, solar, hydro – by 2045, with shorter term goal of 60 percent renewable by 2030. One has to wonder how the state is going to meet what promises to be a massive increase in energy demand just 25 years from now.

The California Energy Commission estimated that the state will consume 301,525 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity in 2020 – and that’s the lowball estimate! Just four years ago, the Golden State was importing a third of its electricity, and 44 percent of its electrical energy generation was from oil, coal, and natural gas.

California, however, is still the nation’s third largest producer of oil and natural gas. One wonders if and when the state will stop issuing operating permits for these facilities, which generate significant revenues and provide thousands of jobs for Californians.

Also in 2018, Assemblyman Phil Ting (D, San Francisco) introduced a bill that would have banned the sale and registration of new passenger vehicles and light-duty trucks powered by internal combustion engines beginning in 2040. Though that bill died, the 2020 state budget empowers the California Energy Commission to conduct a study of how to move the state toward 100 percent electric vehicles by 2040.

Currently, only about 3 percent of the 26 million passenger vehicles in California are personal electric vehicles. How is California going to generate enough electricity within 20 years to power 23 million more personal vehicles? The California Energy Commission notes that 15.1 billion gallons of gasoline and 4.2 billion gallons of diesel fuel were sold in the state in 2015. That’s a boatload of energy that will have to be replaced with wind and solar electricity.

Moreover, while some believe these bans will result in Californians driving existing internal combustion engines as long as they can be operated, one wonders at what point in time California will ban the SALE of gasoline and diesel fuel.

Earlier this year, progressive Berkeley banned the construction of natural gas lines to single-family homes, town homes, and small apartment buildings starting in January 2020; the ban will be extended to commercial buildings and larger residential structures once the state developes, develop regulations. Several other California cities have followed suit, and the trend is likely to continue.

Jacques Leslie, who was a war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times during the Vietnam war, stated flatly in a LA Times op ed that, “California has set a climate mandate of 100% clean, renewable energy by 2045. It won’t reach that goal unless it eliminates natural gas from buildings.” Leslie went on to assert that, “Now that regulations aimed at the 2045 mandate are in place for cars, trucks, and coal-fired power, natural gas has to be next. The popular image of gas cooking and heating — clean, cheap and reliable, a “bridge fuel” from coal to renewables — requires drastic revision. Natural gas is in fact the new coal.”

According to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, about 12 million California homes have gas stoves and/or furnaces. Natural gas consumption in the state in 2018 totaled 2,136,907 million cubic feet (Mcf), of which 614,722 Mcf went for electric power generation, 766,415 Mcf to industrial users, 423,915 Mcf to residential users, and 248,012 to commercial users. That is a whopping amount of energy that will have to be replaced with wind and solar electricity.

To jumpstart the state’s intoxicating goals for zero emissions, California in November announced it would no longer buy sedans powered solely by internal combustion engines and will purchase only plug-in electric or hybrid vehicles. SUV’s, trucks, and certain public safety vehicles are exempt – for now. The state further announced it would only purchase vehicles from automakers that recognize the California Air Resources Board’s authority to set tough greenhouse gas standards for vehicles – Ford, Volkswagen, BMW, and Honda.

This decision is a declaration of war against General Motors, Fiat Chrysler, Toyota, and other automakers that are seeking to become a party to a legal battle between the Trump Administration and California over whether the state can set auto emission rules for itself.

Curiously, one week after this announcement, California motorists reported they had to wait in a half-mile-long line for hours to recharge their ZEV Teslas at the Kettleman City recharging station halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco on Interstate 5, even though the station has 40 individual charging points. A day earlier a video entitled ‘Tesla Energy Crisis’ revealed a sizable line of 15 Teslas waiting for their turn at a supercharger station in San Luis Obispo on Thanksgiving Day.

But if you think waiting in line for hours just to get home from a weekend outing is tough, imagine trying to recharge your electric vehicle during one of Pacific Gas & Electric’s intentional rolling blackouts, one of which reportedly affected 700,000 California households – and which PG&E promises may be needed for years to come as part of their fire prevention plan?

California’s commitment to 100 percent renewable electricity – no natural gas, no coal, no oil, and no nuclear power (the state’s lone nuclear power plant will sunset in 2021) — violates the maxim popularized in 1605 by Miguel Cervantes, “It is the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket.”

SOURCE

Giant African wetland boosts global methane emissions

For over a decade, scientists have been scratching their heads trying to figure out what is behind rising methane emissions around the world. Is it soaring production of natural gas, led by the fracking boom in the U.S.? Or is it agriculture, with all those flatulating cattle?

Now, the real culprit appears to have been found: It’s a giant wetland in East Africa. Coming in at 22,000 square miles, the Sudd wetlands in South Sudan is about the size of the state of West Virginia. Water entering the wetlands is fueling plant growth and soil microbiol activity, producing gobs of methane. It is now one of the largest freshwater ecosystems in the world, and growing. The influx of water appears to be the result of upriver dam releases on the Nile River and its tributaries.

Everything Became Greener

Satellite images “showed the Sudd wetlands expanded in size, you can even see it in aerial imagery – everything became greener,” Paul Palmer, and atmospheric scientist at the University of Edinburgh who co-authored the research, told BBC News. “There’s not much ground-monitoring in this region that can prove or disprove our results, but the data fit together beautifully.” The scientists published their findings in early December in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.

“The level of the East African lakes, which feed down the Nile to the Sudd, increased considerably over the period we were studying,” Mark Lunt, a geoscientist at the University of Edinburgh who headed the research, told Yale Environment 360. “It coincided with the increase in methane we saw, and would imply that we were getting this increased flow down the river into the wetlands.”

As the East African wetlands expand, vegetation, including trees, will proliferate. Scientists are now focusing more attention on trees in tropical wetlands as a source of methane. The greener the earth gets, the more methane we’re going to get. It comes with the territory.

A Greener Planet

Proponents of human-caused (anthropogenic) global warming/climate change often describe methane as a “potent greenhouse gas,” far more powerful than the villainous carbon dioxide. But just as almost all CO2 occurs without human input, methane, too, is part of the natural world. For years satellite images have shown a greening planet, most notably in Africa. Contrary to the dire predictions of climate alarmists, deserts are shrinking, and plant life is taking hold where it has been absent for thousands of years.

All of this is good for biodiversity and food production and attests to the benefits of rising CO2 levels.

SOURCE

Greenhorns of the climate crusade

Everyone loves children. They’re the best part of a better world to come. Unfortunately, kids are clueless about both the world as it is and the means to improve it. That’s why they’re sent to school to learn rather than teach. However, climate-change activists have managed to short-circuit the educational process and fashion millions of “green” greenhorns raring to fight for a decarbonized global economy. Sensible adults should step forward and gently disabuse misguided minors of the notion that the world is about to go up in smoke. It’s not.

Teenage “climate leader” Greta Thunberg led a children’s crusade into the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Madrid last week, intent on hectoring world leaders over their failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions claimed to be crucial to prevent climate cataclysm. For the bold activism that brought her from picketing Parliament in her native Sweden to become the world’s most famous environmentalist virtually overnight, Time magazine named her “Person of the Year.”

The 16-year-old high school dropout topped with a girlish braid pleaded with thousands of policymakers and fellow climate activists to settle for nothing short of solid commitments to limit atmospheric carbon dioxide in order to keep its blanketing effect from raising global temperatures above the U.N. ceiling of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

“Why is it so important to stay below 1.5 degrees?” she queried rhetorically of the conferees before answering her own question: “Because with even one degree, people are dying from the climate crisis. Because that is what the united science calls for to avoid destabilizing the climate.”

It was quite a grown-up performance, and one emboldening other young ideologues to take their own stand against the supposed depredations of modern civilization. At one point, dozens of exultant young activists stormed the Madrid conference stage, chanting, “We are unstoppable, another world is possible.” Seamless self-assurance is a gift of adolescence, when individuals feel like they’re the smartest in the room. Over the course of time, most learn otherwise.

Still, children shouldn’t be faulted for gathering from their brief life experience that their destiny is to save the world from some sort of mortal threat. During the 13th century, legions of credulous French and German youth, believing themselves anointed to convert the Muslims, marched on the Holy Land. Their Children’s Crusade proved an impossible dream as many died on the long journey and others were sold into slavery. The lucky ones eventually straggled home.

The 20th century saw two generations of westerners come of age in the midst of existential threats to civilization from malevolent powers. Millions of patriotic youth volunteered to fight and, if necessary, die to save the world. Many shed their blood to uphold their military oath and they did, in fact, save the world from heartless aggressors.

The generation born in the 21st century has been reared in relative safety, but weaned on ubiquitous tales of an impending global warming doomsday. With free access to the social media cyberworld, young Americans have undoubtedly heard the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez making the breathless claim that “We’re like the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”

That’s a frightening forecast for those who haven’t heard similar declarations in the past. Former Vice President-turned climate activist Al Gore predicted in 2008 that the Arctic polar cap would completely melt in five years. Kids residing in the lower 48 may not have noticed, but it hasn’t. In 2014, France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, appeared with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Washington, where he predicted Earth had 500 days to avoid “climate chaos.” The planet easily glided past that dreaded milestone around 2,300 days ago, none the worse for wear.

In fact, scientific consensus that carbon dioxide is the controlling factor in temperature variation is still a work in progress, despite the U.N.’s efforts to paper it over. And while atmospheric carbon dioxide has climbed to 400 parts per million during the era of human industrialization, global temperatures have not risen clearly in concert, as the carbon dioxide-temperature correlation theory demands.

“Green” greenhorns like Greta Thunberg need reassurance that despite what they have learned from cagey activists, a world afire is not their future. In time, they may learn what preceding generations have come to understand: The worst fear is fear itself.

SOURCE

Australian PM rules out changes to government’s climate change policies amid bushfire crisis

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has made clear that there will be no change to current climate change policies, as he addressed the ongoing bushfires crisis after returning from holiday.

Speaking to the media at the NSW Rural Fire Service headquarters in Sydney, Mr Morrison said a range of measures in place were adequate and contributing to a reduction in emissions.

Yesterday, while still in his capacity as Acting PM, Nationals leader Michael McCormack conceded that Australia “absolutely” must do more to tackle climate change.

“I agree entirely,” Mr McCormack. “Yes I do. We will have those discussions.”

But today, just hours after jetting in from Hawaii in the wake of ongoing criticism over his absence while large parts of the country burn, Mr Morrison ruled out any immediate changes.

“What we will not do is act in a kneejerk or crisis or panicked mode. A panic approach and response to anything does not help,” he said. “It puts people at risk.”

Mr Morrison defended the government’s climate policy and reaffirmed his commitment to “meet and beat” Australia’s emissions targets under the Paris agreement.

“There is no argument, in my view and the government’s view, and any government in the country, about the links between broader issues of global climate change and weather events around the world,” he said.

“But I’m sure people would equally acknowledge the direct connection to any single fire event is not a credible suggestion to make that link. We must take action on climate change and we are taking action on climate change.”

However, climate change experts have criticised the government’s use of a so-called “loophole” that allows it to use carry-over credits from the Kyoto agreement to meet Paris targets.

Mr Morrison deflected a direct question about the loophole today, instead reiterating his view that current policies represented a “balanced” approach.

“Emissions are lower than at any time they were under the previous government. “We have had record investment in renewables in Australia and now, thankfully, as a result of policies the Government has put in place we are also getting electricity prices down, some $65 a year.

“And on top of that we’ve been doing it without embracing the reckless job destroying and economy crunching targets that others are seeking to force upon us.”

Later, when asked about Mr McCormack’s remarks, the PM denied it was an indication that new targets are needed.

“The Kyoto targets that were set by the previous Labor government, when we came to government there was the projections were that we would miss those by some 700 million tons,” Mr Morrison said. “Now we’re going to beat them by 411 million tons.”

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 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

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

22 December, 2019

Ruthless Joe Biden Admits He'll Sacrifice Hundreds of Thousands of Blue-Collar Workers for His Green Dream

You've got to give it to Democrats: they freely admit they do not care one bit about blue-collar workers. They don't. They're the party by and for leftist academics, illegal immigrants, and SJW whackjobs. Although this has been the case for at least a few decades, they've always pretended to care about John Doe. Not any longer. All pretenses are dropped.

Case in point: Joe Biden admitting during Thursday's Democratic presidential debate that he's more than willing to hang out blue-collar workers to dry in order to pursue a costly and largely useless green dream:

"Would you be willing to sacrifice some of that growth, even knowing potentially that it could displace thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers in the interest of transitioning to that greener economy," the moderator asked Biden.

Instead of beating around the bush, Biden simply admitted that "the answer is yes."

Yes, he's quite willing to destroy those people. Hundreds of thousands of them -- and their families.

This is downright shocking. Of course Democrats like Biden also pretend that they're going to "re-train" or "re-educate" those same workers, but everybody with an IQ of 60 or over (indeed, that almost includes chimpanzees) knows that this isn't going to happen. You can't just send those folks back to school. Instead, they'll end up unemployed, sitting at home, feeling useless because they're no longer able to take care of themselves, let alone provide for their families.

It's sickening. This is how little Democrats care about blue-collar workers -- the very people who form the backbone of American society and the nation's economy.

The good news? Team Trump only has to use this video and air it all year long in the Rust Belt states. They don't even have to add anything to it. Just this clip and end it with "I am Donald Trump and I approve this message." That's enough.

SOURCE

UK: After Brexit, let’s embrace gene editing

EU rules are killing vital innovation in biotech.

Virus-resistant tomato, disease-resistant rice, stem-cell treatment for paralysis, for heart disease, for spinal-chord injury and even for cornea repair — these are just some of the many innovations made possible through gene editing.

Canada has created permissive rules for these technologies, as has Japan, where scientists are working night and day to find therapeutic treatments that root out cancer and the Zika virus.

In Europe, however, the prospects are bleak. Bureaucrats and politicians are stifling the speed with which scientists can make breakthroughs available to consumers and patients. Granted, wealthy elites will always be able to fly to Tokyo or the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota to get treatments. But for Brits who cannot afford this, we need laws and regulations that will allow for the research and development of innovative treatments.

Gene editing is effectively banned throughout the EU. The slightest word in favour of innovative technologies such as CRISPR (a prominent genome-editing technology) gets you yelled at by politicians and EU-funded NGOs alike. With Brexit on the horizon, the UK has a unique opportunity to embrace innovation.

There is some light at the end of the tunnel on the continent. At the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture (GFFA) in Berlin next month, approximately 70 ministers of agriculture from around the world intend to adopt a communiqué about the global direction of agriculture. The hope is that these delegates will recognise the value in technologies like gene editing.

In Germany, some green activists like the Youth Greens seem to be waking up to the problem. Several activists have warned that strict regulation makes the application of gene technologies more expensive, meaning only big corporates can afford it.

However, we cannot rely on what happens internationally. Britain has an obligation to its citizens to allow scientists to develop new cures and new foods for the 21st century. Brexit offers a unique opportunity to rethink biotech regulations as we break away from the EU’s anti-science dogma. We cannot let Britain lag behind in global innovation.

SOURCE

Obesity is bad for the planet

Journal article below. The war on fat continues

The Environmental Foodprint of Obesity

Faidon Magkos et al.

Abstract

Emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) are linked to global warming and adverse climate changes. Meeting the needs of the increasing number of people on the planet presents a challenge for reducing total GHG burden. A further challenge may be the size of the average person on the planet and the increasing number of people with excess body weight. We used data on GHG emissions from various sources and estimated that obesity is associated with ~20% greater GHG emissions compared with the normal?weight state. On a global scale, obesity contributes to an extra GHG emissions of ~49 megatons per year of CO2 equivalent (CO2eq) from oxidative metabolism due to greater metabolic demands, ~361 megatons per year of CO2eq from food production processes due to increased food intake, and ~290 megatons per year of CO2eq from automobile and air transportation due to greater body weight. Therefore, the total impact of obesity may be extra emissions of ~700 megatons per year of CO2eq, which is about 1.6% of worldwide GHG emissions. Inasmuch as obesity is an important contributor to global GHG burden, strategies to reduce its prevalence should prioritize efforts to reduce GHG emissions. Accordingly, reducing obesity may have considerable benefits for both public health and the environment.

SOURCE

Could sidewalks and buildings combat air pollution?

Is it possible to create sidewalks, buildings and other city structures that help lower air pollution and further clean our cities?

Well believe it or not, the answer could be “yes” – at least according to researchers at a company called Graphene Flagship partners.

Working with experts from a number of prestigious universities including the Israeli Institute of Technology, University of Bologna, and University of Cambridge, among others, the firm has developed a graphene-titania photocatalyst that degrades up to 70 percent more atmospheric NOx than standard nanoparticles in tests on real air pollution.

In laymen’s terms, that means this compound, when spread on buildings and sidewalks, absorbs pollution out of the air over time.

Although the level of air pollution in the U.S. has dropped dramatically in recent decades, it nevertheless remains a top priority of environmental and health officials. Thus, researchers are continually seeking new and improved ways to reduce harmful pollutants like NOx and volatile organic compounds in the atmosphere. Using photocatalysts such as titania might be a great way to accomplish this, according to the researchers.

How did the researchers develop their process? As reported in Science Daily, they did so in the following manner:

By performing liquid-phase exfoliation of graphite — a process that creates graphene — in the presence of titania nanoparticles, using only water and atmospheric pressure, they created a new graphene-titania nanocomposite that can be coated on the surface of materials to passively remove pollutants from the air. If the coating is applied to concrete on the street or on the walls of buildings, the harmless photodegradation products could be washed away by rain or wind, or manually cleaned off.

As for how they could apply this technology, Xinliang Feng, Graphene Flagship Work Package Leader for Functional Foams and Coatings, explains:

“Photocatalysis in a cementitious matrix, applied to buildings, could have a large effect to decrease air pollution by reducing NOx and enabling self-cleaning of the surfaces — the so-called “smog-eating” effect. Graphene could help to improve the photocatalytic behaviour of catalysts like titania and enhance the mechanical properties of cement.

In this publication, Graphene Flagship partners have prepared a graphene-titania composite via a one-step procedure to widen and improve the ground-breaking invention of “smog-eating” cement. The prepared composite showed enhanced photocatalytic activity, degrading up to 40% more pollutants than pristine titania in the model study, and up to 70% more NOx with a similar procedure.

SOURCE

Australian bushfire crisis: fire chief’s city slicker claims not relevant, says Campbell Newman

Former premier Campbell Newman has blasted a prominent former fire chief for blaming intense bushfires on climate change, saying Lee Johnson never raised the issue when he headed emergency services in Queensland.

“He had a solid two years where he could have come to me and expressed, one on one, these views that he’s now espousing. I have no recollection of him doing so,” Mr Newman said.

Mr Johnson, commissioner of Queensland Fire and Emergency Services when Mr Newman led the state, was one of the six former fire chiefs who accused Scott Morrison this week of abandoning bushfires raging across the country and offering “no moral leadership” on climate change.

As part of the Emergency Leaders for Climate Action group funded by Tim Flannery’s Climate Council and spearheaded by former NSW fire chief Greg Mullins, Mr Johnson said firefighters were seeing the effects of climate change “first-hand”.

He called for a national strategy to tackle extreme weather linked to climate change, saying the Brisbane River flooding he witnessed as fire chief in 2011 amounted to an “inland tsunami”.

“I can feel the tsunami of public opinion rolling on to Canberra,” Mr Johnson said.

Mr Newman, Queensland LNP premier from 2012-15, challenged Mr Johnson’s expertise on bushfires and climate change, saying he found it curious all his group “seem to be urban guys”.

“Mr Johnson’s career was particularly about urban firefighting,” Mr Newman said. “There is a world of difference between urban and rural firefighting. Urban firefighters are about spraying lots of water and chemical foams and stopping fires, whereas rural firefighters know they have to use fire as a tool, in terms of hazard-reduction burns and backburning.”

Mr Newman said he never recalled Mr Johnson saying, as fire commissioner, that the state was not doing enough hazard-reduction burning or other land management. As premier, Mr Newman said, he was also very concerned about tensions between urban, unionised firefighters under Mr Johnson’s leadership and rural fire services.

“Behind the scenes, city-based firefighters were trying to exert control operationally, in a quite profound way, over the rural and volunteer fire services. They pushed back,” he said. “So here we have this schism between urban and rural firefighters, and Lee Johnson suddenly jumps into this area on bushfires … I would prefer to hear the views of experienced volunteer rural firefighters.”

He accused Mr Johnson of “hysterical nonsense” in calling Brisbane floods an inland tsunami when records showed much worse events. “When Lee Johnson starts talking about weather, he needs to do his homework,” he said.

Mr Newman said he felt compelled to “cry foul” because bushfires had resulted from poor land management, not climate change.

“I am sick and tired of people like Mr Johnson telling people from their positions of trust and respect in the community that things are unprecedented when they are not,” he said.

Emergency Leaders, which has grown to 29 former fire chiefs since its formation in April, says it will convene a national summit early next year to devise a bushfire strategy with strong emphasis on climate change. The former fire chiefs, almost all with distinguished careers involving urban brigades, want an immediate end to burning fossil fuels.

Mr Johnson left his Queensland fire chief’s position in December 2014 following a report on the “hostile” work environment for women in the service.

Report author Margaret Allison found evidence of sexual harassment and bullying, and “systematic problems” in dealing with them.

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 or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

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

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20 December, 2019

The CO2 Coalition Corrects the Record on How to Report on Climate Science

The CO2 Coalition today issued a memo to the media correcting the record on how they cover stories related to climate science in an increasingly polarized news cycle.

The memo is written by Dr. Caleb Rossiter, a climate statistician and the Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition, a group of climate scientists and energy economists that inform public officials and the American public about the benefits of carbon dioxide. It addresses how the press has been inaccurately reporting on the "climate crisis" and provides an accurate framing that adheres to the research that has been conducted on climate science.

"For too long, the American public has been misled on the science behind recent patterns in our climate," said Dr. Caleb Rossiter, climate statistician and Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition, a group of climate scientists and energy economists. "We hope this memo to the press can better inform the way these stories are covered to provide a more accurate description of the global climate."

1. Climate change (as in "climate change is real"): Climate change is indeed real, and humans have little to do with it.
What is the specific change you have in mind? Is it a typical fluctuation or a statistically significant trend? Is it caused by an increase in average temperature, locally or globally? Is the increase driven by CO2 levels, or natural causes? The scientific answer to each of these questions is usually complex, uncertain, and not alarming at all.

2. Climate "crisis" (or "emergency"): There is no climate crisis or emergency. UN IPCC data show no statistically significant trends in "crisis" variables like storms, floods, hurricanes, droughts and rate of sea-level rise in the last 100 years. That is before CO2 emissions could have had a measurable impact on temperature.

3. "A consensus (of 97% of scientists) agrees": Agrees about precisely what? This has nothing to do with claims of a "crisis," or with the potential of "renewable" energy. The "consensus" was declared by non-scientists, who judged the content of articles in science journals - often incorrectly. They tried to determine whether the articles agreed with the IPCC opinion that at least 0.25 of the 1°C rise in global average temperature since 1900 was likely caused by industrial CO2 emissions.

4. "It's already happening": This confuses climate with weather.
Climate - a statistical average - is what we expect; weather - random and often extreme fluctuations - is what we get. Hurricanes Harvey, Andrew, Sandy, and Katrina, California wildfires, regional droughts and floods, and sea-level rise are all almost entirely natural. Similar events occur in historical records going back millennia.

5. "(X out of the Y) warmest months, years, decades on record have occurred recently": This has been true throughout the past 250 years, for natural reasons.

Temperature has been rising slowly and steadily since the Little Ice Age, well before CO2 levels increased. Slightly higher records are to be expected.

6. CO2 emissions are causing "ocean acidification": The ocean will never become acidic (i.e. below "neutral" 7 on the pH scale). Sea water is alkaline, not acidic, with a pH of around 8. A one-unit change to 7 on this logarithmic scale would require a 10-fold increase in pH. Even a tripling of current CO2 levels, over 600 years, would drive pH down only to 7.8. Rainwater is naturally acidic, at 5.6. Ocean health is improved by the plant and phytoplankton food: CO2.

7. "Carbon pollution": CO2 is not a "pollutant" but an essential plant food. A pollutant damages human health. CO2 is an inert, natural, non-toxic, mild warming gas. The rise of CO2 levels from 0.03% of the atmosphere to 0.04% has increased plant growth by a third. Human breath has 100 times this level. EPA does not list CO2 as a "criteria pollutant," like carbon monoxide (CO) from cars and sulfur dioxide from power plants. Ironically, catalytic converters remove these real pollutants by oxidizing them to CO2.

8. Social Cost of Carbon (SCC): There is a far greater cost to using "renewables." The current SCC of $40 in damages per metric ton of CO2 is based on 300-year projections of the economy and CO2-driven extreme weather. Both are wildly uncertain. At present the true cost of wind and solar is four times that of fossil fuels, per mile of travel and per kilowatt-hour of electricity. The SCC ignores these costs.

9. Renewable Energy: Converting it to power is NOT renewable.
Wind and solar are free and renewable but using them is not. The costly turbines, solar panels, batteries, and transmission lines must be mined, produced, transported, and disposed of after their short lifetimes. What powers those industries? Reliable, cheap fossil fuels.

10. "Highest CO2 levels in (thousands, millions) of years": Correlation is not causation. Al Gore tried to convince movie-goers that CO2 and temperature "go together." Indeed, they do, but on these time scales, it is temperature that drives CO2. As the Earth has warmed and cooled over the past million years of recurrent ice ages, changes in CO2 come long after changes in temperature. That's because CO2 is released from warming oceans and land and is absorbed again when they cool.

11. "Climate models predict...": No, IPCC computer estimations "project scenarios". The IPCC's models run about three times too "hot." Why? Because they "tune" the models to make past CO2 levels drive temperature changes. Nature hasn't cooperated with their theory of strong warming when the models are run into the future. The models require thousands of guesses about physics and economics, and their error bands are bigger than their projected temperature results.

12. "Exxon Knew": That alarmist science was uncertain.
The #ExxonKnew lawsuits are based on a fraud: the plaintiffs and their advocates cynically edit Exxon's scientific memos before quoting them, removing key words and phrases. This reverses the scientists' conclusions, because they were summarizing alarmist predictions and explaining their uncertainties.

13. "The debate is over": See 1-12, above.

Via email from the CO2 Coalition: info@co2coalition.org

The Renewable Fuel Standard is the gift that keeps on taking

As we approach Christmas it is time to take another look at one of the “gifts” Congress gave the U.S. and how it continues to be the gift that keeps on taking. It is a gift that has not only failed to do what it was supposed to do, it has had the exact opposite impact. Of course, that gift is the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). If Congress wanted to give the American people a gift this Christmas, they should repeal this un-environmental, expensive, job killing regulation.

The RFS was initiated to accomplish two main goals: Reduce foreign dependence on energy; and Improve energy efficiency and protect the environment.

Sadly, the mandate has failed at the two jobs it had.

Every year the amount of biofuel the federal government mandates be used goes up. It goes up regardless of the much-improved vehicle fuel mileage since its inception. The mandate continues to increase regardless of the number of electric cars on the road, or the increased amount of people taking public transportation in major cities. The RFS mandate has expanded so much it has now made the U.S. dependent on foreign sources of biofuel.

Yes, that’s right. The law passed by Congress in 2005, and “updated” in 2007, has turned one of its mandates, to reduce foreign dependency on energy, and increased it.

Thanks to a 15-billion-gallon biofuel mandate, the U.S. must import hundreds of millions of gallons of biofuel to meet, not the demand for the fuel, but the artificial requirement put on the U.S. consumer by the federal government. This happens because the U.S. does not have the infrastructure to produce more biofuels nor is there the demand. Primarily, the U.S. is importing the hundreds of millions of gallons of biofuel from nations that heavily subsidize their industries, like Brazil and Indonesia.

It is not hard to see the problem on the horizon with this. Because fuel refiners must either produce the ethanol, buy the ethanol, or purchase the Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) to comply — RINs are how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tracks compliance with the RFS, the refiners are going to go with the cheapest option. The cheapest option is often going to be the government subsidized one. This will end up in a subsidy vs subsidy battle with the U.S. taxpayer coming out the loser.

The RFS was supposed to be more environmentally friendly but recent studies have proven that false. The Department of Energy even posts on its website that E10 and E15 get 3 to 5 percent fewer miles per gallon than regular gasoline. Flex fuel vehicles, E85 are even worse at an astounding 15 to 27 percent fewer miles per gallon. That’s the exact opposite of environmentally friendly.

Possibly even worse than the lower mileage, is the land use and lost opportunity costs. Because it is a mandate, farmers grow corn to be used in ethanol because they know it is a guaranteed consumer. That land is now not being used to grow other crops for human consumption, nor are the crops being used to feed other parts of the farm industry, such as beef, port, and poultry.

The RFS is so bad for the environment groups that once pushed for RFS are now calling it a failure. Scott Faber, Senior Vice President for Government Affairs of the Environmental Working Group, testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety and the Senate Committee on Environment and Public works in 2013. He stated, “the RFS has delivered too many ‘bad’ biofuels that increase greenhouse gas emissions, pollute air and water, destroy critical habitat for wildlife and drive up the price of food. The corn ethanol mandate of the RFS, once promoted as a tool to combat climate change, has instead raised greenhouse emissions, exacerbated air and water pollution challenges and inflated the price of staple foods.”

If most of the oil industry and environmental groups can agree on the uselessness of the RFS, why can’t Congress?

Let’s take a final look at the RFS score card. Did it make the U.S. less dependent on foreign sources of energy? No. Did the RFS improve energy efficiency? No. Does the RFS protect the environment? No. The RFS is an abject failure on every level. It is a favorite of farmers that want the government to subsidize their crops instead of competing in the marketplace, and Wall Street speculators love it because the RINs it creates are another artificial product they can sell and get enormous fees for. It is time for Congress to give the American taxpayer and consumer a Christmas gift and end the Renewal Fuel Standard which has become just another example of government mandates turning into crony capitalism gone wild. It is a Christmas gift that only a Bad Santa would give and should be rejected by Congress.

SOURCE

Don’t Bet Only on the Sun and the Wind

Can the production and use of energy be transformed soon enough to prevent the worst effects of global warming? Yes, if market prices are permitted to signal the most cost-effective adjustments. But we can’t pretend that solar and wind alone will be enough.

The International Energy Agency projects that renewables will be the most important global energy source by 2030. While growth in carbon emissions will slow, total emissions are expected to rise. Fossil fuels still will account for about 75 percent of the global energy mix. That won’t come close to reining in carbon emissions and achieving the dramatic cuts the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims are needed.

An approach that leans solely on renewables will make meeting the challenge all the more difficult and costly while ignoring some important truths.

If we want to live in a new energy future, nuclear power and “carbon capture utilization and storage” are keys to the door.

Plans to reduce carbon emissions should be guided by practicality. Globally, coal remains the dominant fuel for power production; its share of the total around 40 percent. Countries such as China and India, whose economies rely heavily on coal, are likely to keep many existing coal plants in operation for decades. In fact, hundreds of new coal plants are under construction or in development around the world.

People must become rich before they begin to care about the environment. The operators of those coal-fired plants will reduce emissions only with profit-driven incentives. One such profit source is turning carbon emissions into useful organic (i.e., carbon-based) products.

The good news is that emissions at some coal and natural-gas plants already are being captured and repurposed to make reinforced concrete, among other products. And researchers are seeking ways to turn emissions into petrochemicals and plastics. Such efforts deserve much more attention.

What about nuclear power? The answer is clear: The Department of Energy, with advice from a blue-ribbon panel of nuclear experts, should select an advanced reactor design for full-scale demonstration in the United States.

Such a reactor—competitive with natural gas and designed so it cannot melt down—would extend the benefits of nuclear power well into the future. But it would need to be built on-budget and ready to operate in considerably less time than it’s taken for the approval and construction of conventional nuclear plants.

What better place than the Idaho National Laboratory to build an advanced nuclear plant? INL is where the world’s first nuclear plant, ER-1, began generating electricity in 1951. Its successful operation ushered in a fleet of nearly 100 U.S. nuclear plants.

Contrary to the assertions of antinuclear organizations, nuclear power is neither dead nor dying. Today, 445 nuclear plants operate globally; around 50 plants are under construction, according to the World Nuclear Association.

The accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima, alarming as they may have been, occurred in plants relying on technologies at least two generations old. Chernobyl happened in the Soviet Union’s fossilized planned economy, for crying out loud.

In the United States and France, the two countries with the largest nuclear fleets, nuclear plants have an outstanding performance record. Nuclear plants in the United States today supply electricity more than 90 percent of the time. They are the emissions-free foundation of the grid, providing power when demanded, not when the weather permits.

That capacity to dispatch power on demand can’t be replaced by unreliable wind and solar energy. While the idea of storing solar and wind energy for use at night or when solar panels and windmills are offline is promising, its development still is in the early stages. We need all carbon-free sources.

Both the DOE and IEA project that global energy use will increase almost 30 percent by 2040. The key to sound energy policy is to ensure that America has an integrated program of nuclear power, CCUS at coal and gas plants, renewables, demand management with real-time pricing for energy consumers, and energy efficiency. No investor puts all of the eggs in one basket.

SOURCE

How Houston Is Becoming America’s Next Dense City

Anyone who advocates for “Market Urbanism”—aka free-market city policy—must grapple with a common response: “but then we’ll get a bunch of Houstons.” The implication is that Houston is a sprawling mess of traffic, pollution, and bad architecture, and has become this way due to no regulation. The city doesn’t have zoning, after all, and skeptics warn that replicating it will lead to the same urban form elsewhere.

But Houston’s narrative should be more complicated. If I were to summarize Houston, I’d say the aspects of it that thrive are due to it having a functioning market; while the aspects of it that urbanists hate are the outcome of its centrally-planned paradigm. Let’s unpack both.

Houston’s Sprawl

The first thing to understand about Houston land use is that it’s not really a free market. While it doesn’t technically have zoning, it has other regulations that replace it, and that would be common in other municipal zoning codes. As Ryan Holeywell notes for the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, it has deed restrictions in some neighborhoods that are sanctioned by residents or developers, and protected by the city. It has lot size minimums of 5,000sqft for single-family homes. The minimum required setback is 25 feet on some properties, and there are minimum parking requirements throughout much of the city. This all has the effect of discouraging infill housing.

Houston has, at the same time, subsidies that encourage sprawl; there are a network of local, state, and federal roads that have been built throughout the metro, at greater capacity than is found elsewhere in the U.S.

Houston’s Density

But Houston still has fewer-than-normal regulations against density. The lack of zoning is key here: unlike other major U.S. cities, which have broad swaths on their zoning maps to separate residential, commercial, and industrial structures, those uses can be built together in Houston. This has not created some anarchy of incompatible uses, since market forces still mostly separate them. But it does cause housing to get squeezed into tighter and more unorthodox spaces—as this great Houston Chronicle photo essay shows. While lot-size minimums, setbacks, and parking requirements do exist, they vary, or are not enforced at all, depending on the neighborhood. Developers can sometimes lobby for waivers anyway. Unlike other cities, Houston allows accessory dwelling units and micro-units, making tiny living possible. Houston does not regulate for density in many areas—which is almost unheard of in urban America.

All this means there are fewer barriers to construction—and lots of construction happens in the core. A recent Curbed piece talks about how much denser and more urban the city is getting.

“Houston is projected to add roughly 16,000 units this year alone, according to a report from commercial real estate firm JLL, with another 23,000 in the pipeline,” writes Patrick Sisson. “For the first time this year, according to the long-running Kinder Houston Area Survey administered by Rice University, a majority or near majority of local respondents wanted to live in denser, mixed-use neighborhoods.”

This is backed by the city’s real estate trends. Houston is routinely at or near the top of the list for most annual housing permits issued, and this includes for multi-family housing. It has America’s 4th-most skycrapers, which are mostly spread across 3 separate business districts, but pop up anywhere (again, no zoning). Much of the additional multi-family goes across the city, from trendy neighborhoods like Montrose and Midtown, to outlying immigrant ones. I found while writing a 2017 analysis for Forbes that Houston is denser than similar Sunbelt cities. And the Kinder Institute notes that in some neighborhoods, density matches levels found in East Coast cities. Sisson writes that this will likely increase, as concerns about flooding and traffic push consumers to seek higher-elevated, centrally-located areas.

Houston’s Affordability

There’s a quality about Houston, though, that transcends its built pattern: affordability. For decades, Houston has been the nation’s leading example of an “opportunity city”. It has, like coastal cities, high demand—aka fast growing job opportunities and population growth. But unlike those metros, it builds lots of housing, thus stabilizing prices. The median home price is $190,000, which is just 4/5ths the national average, according to Zillow. Midtown’s median home prices are $309,000, extremely low for a centrally-located urban neighborhood. This affordability has made Houston a refuge for expats from expensive states, and for immigrants—it is now the nation’s most diverse city.

The affordability can be tied to both Houston’s density and sprawl. Rather than one being good and the other bad, both forms of growth have helped stabilize prices. But the multi-family infill housing is the most organic outcome to be found in the Houston model. If America had a more market-oriented urban approach, those aspects of Houston—the density and affordability—would be the ones most likely replicated. For this reason, “getting a bunch of Houstons” should be an urbanist goal.

SOURCE

Regulators approve environmental plan for Equinor’s proposed oil exploration well in Great Australian Bight

Australia could once again become independent of overseas oil

A controversial plan for oil drilling in the Great Australian Bight has received environmental approval amid protests from green groups.

Drilling for an oil exploration well could take place in the Great Australian Bight next year after a Norwegian company received approval for its environmental plan amid protests from green groups.

The approval of Equinor’s plan has been welcomed by the South Australian and federal governments as well as the energy sector, but environmental groups have described it as “madness”.

The decision from the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (NOPSEMA) is the second of four approvals Equinor requires to move ahead with the plan.

The oil drilling has been controversial among environmental groups and has sparked protests in South Australia.

“We are gobsmacked that NOPSEMA could approve Equinor’s plan that experts have slammed,” Wilderness Society South Australia director Peter Owen said.

Earlier this year a group of energy and natural resource experts, led by the University of Sydney, made a submission to NOPSEMA that Equinor’s “overconfidence” in its ability to prevent a major spill could lead to catastrophic environmental impacts.

“Throughout the environmental plan, Equinor has consistently made optimistic choices in order to convince the public and NOPSEMA that ‘it is safe’ to drill,” they wrote.

“However, we saw a similar style of overconfidence demonstrated in BP’s proposal to drill in the Gulf of Mexico, which led to one of the world’s biggest oil spills in 2010.

“History has shown us that overconfidence precedes catastrophic failure in many spheres of engineering endeavour. No matter how many layers of defence there are between a hazard and an accident, accidents can and still do happen.”

But Equinor’s country manager for Australia, Jone Stangeland, told The Advertiser in November that the chemical would only be used if there were “shortfalls in the supply chain” of accepted dispersants.

NOPSEMA has made it a condition of approval that Equinor demonstrates its spill response equipment is appropriate before it drills.

“Equinor has obviously failed to satisfy the regulator of that yet,” Greenpeace Australia Pacific head of campaigns Jamie Hanson said.

James Cook University professor Jodie Rummer produced a report for Greenpeace about the dispersant, which had been shown to cause symptoms such as nausea, memory loss, nervous system damage and irritation to the skin, eyes, nose and throat in humans.

“Studies from the Deepwater Horizon spill show that dispersants mixed with oil are often more toxic to marine life than oil alone,” Prof Rummer said.

The Australia Institute also released a report this year that showed 27,000 jobs in South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania would be put at risk if a catastrophic oil spill occurred.

“Equinor have already had 239 oil spills in their history and, according to their own modelling, a major incident in The Bight would cover thousands of kilometres of the Australian coastline,” The Australia Institute’s SA projects manager Noah Schultz-Byard said.

Greenpeace’s Jamie Hanson said Equinor could not be trusted to operate in the pristine waters of the Great Australian Bight without the risk of incidents that could coat Australia’s much-loved beaches in black oil.

“This disastrous decision paves the way for an oil company that has a worsening safety record, and a history of accidents all over the world, to conduct dangerous, experimental drilling in Australia’s whale nursery in the Great Australian Bight,” he said.

Greenpeace and the Wilderness Society say they will continue to fight the proposal.

“The approval flies in the face of experts, communities, traditional owners, surfers, coastal families and the South Australian seafood industry who have all relentlessly campaigned against plans to drill for oil in the Great Australian Bight for over five years,” Mr Hanson said.

The Wilderness Society said it was considering legal options to stop the well from going ahead. “The fight for The Bight is one of the biggest environmental protests Australia has seen, and this approval will only further mobilise community opposition,” director Peter Owen said.

Equinor was first granted a petroleum title over areas in The Bight in 2011 and now has an accepted environment plan.

It must still have a well operations plan and a facility safety case approved before it can begin drilling its proposed Stromlo-1 well at a site about 400 kilometres off the SA coast in water more than 2.2km deep.

If approved, Equinor plans to begin work in late 2020 with the operations expected to last for 60 days.

Federal Resources Minister Matt Canavan said The Bight project had the potential to open up a major new petroleum basin.

“In a continent as large as ours I hope we can find another oil and gas province to replace the Bass Strait,” he said.

Mr Jone Stangeland, said environmental approval was an important milestone for the drilling program.

“We have been preparing for safe operations for two-and-a-half years, holding over 400 meetings with more than 200 organisations across southern Australia,” he said.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here 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 December, 2019

Climate Change Shakedown Ends in Failure

Boris Johnson’s historic victory in the United Kingdom’s latest election is indicative of many things, but first and foremost is the “quaint” idea that a substantial majority of people favor the nation state more than the democracy-crushing globalist alternative.

Nonetheless at the United Nations, transnational governance remains the order of the day. Last Wednesday, that collection of feckless bureaucrats warned the Trump administration that America must compensate poorer nations for climate change, despite President Donald Trump honoring his 2016 campaign promise to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate.

The impetus for their demands stems from the 1992 climate treaty, formally titled the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). A timeline since then reveals that the initial idea of developed countries lowering their emissions to 1990 levels by 2000 was the first pipe dream that ended in failure. Five years later, President Bill Clinton committed our nation to the Kyoto Protocol, which was so “popular,” the Senate unanimously rejected it 95-0.

In 2001, President George W. Bush withdrew America’s signature, but President Barack Obama subsequently announced his allegiance to the Copenhagen Accord in 2009, which was a non-biding deal negotiated outside the auspices of the UN. The following year, America set an emissions-reduction target of 17% from 2005 levels by 2020. Yet even when the Paris Agreement was being negotiated in 2015, the Obama administration was fighting what were UN-designated “loss and damage” payouts, which it rightly viewed as unlimited liability arising from adverse weather.

The Paris Agreement itself? The latest edition of the world’s “moveable goal posts” approach to emissions reductions remains just that: The overwhelming majority of signatories to the agreement are still “far off track,” as The New York Times reported in December 2018.

In the last year, nothing has changed. At the (Conference of Parties) COP25 negotiations in Madrid that drew to a close on Sunday, the 197 parties present produced no concrete commitments. “These talks reflect how disconnected country leaders are from the urgency of the science and the demands of their citizens in the streets,” said Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute think tank.

Citizens in the streets? Despite Boris Johnson’s overwhelming victory, London was rocked by “citizen in the street” protests, suggesting that those who make the loudest noise are wholly disconnected from majority opinion. Perhaps nothing indicates the equally puerile nature of the climate protests better than the reality that their leader is media darling and Time Magazine Person of the Year Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old girl with mental-health problems whose most recent contribution to the cause consisted of an apology for telling her followers that politicians should be put “against the wall.”

Perhaps the real reason these talks failed is because attendees were being told by green groups that the funds necessary to compensate nations victimized by climate change will ultimately exceed $300 billion annually by 2030.

Unsurprisingly, the United States was expected to be invoiced for the lion’s share of those costs, financed by taxing wealthy nations’ financial transactions, international air travel, and fossil fuels.

The latest negotiations revolved around a mechanism established in 2013, known as the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (WIM). It was supposed to look at ways to deal with compensation, but as the International Business Times describes it, that mechanism did not produce an agreement “on where the money might come from or even if it should be paid.”

American negotiators circulated a document whereby a key provision under the 2015 Paris Agreement stating that that accord “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation,” would applied to the wider COP25 process. Developing nations saw this liability waiver as “unimaginable” and vowed to block it. “The Trump administration is now making a cynical and paranoid play to further distance itself from responsibility for the harmful impacts of climate change and to further protect itself and other polluters from liability for the crisis,” complained Harjeet Singh, global climate lead at ActionAid.

What to do? What bureaucrats always do: set up another committee of “experts” to discover new sources of finance. Moreover, according to Singh, a “Santiago Network on Addressing Loss and Damage” may be established as well.

In 2017, when Trump announced he would withdraw American from the Paris Agreement, he made it quite clear his administration had little use for international shakedown artists, stating that the “well being” of Americans was the motivating factor behind his decision.

At the time, Trump also cited a National Economic Research Associates study noting that the compliance goals pursued by the Obama administration would have cost this nation 2.7 million jobs by 2025. By 2040, Trump insisted, the cost to the economy would have been realized in losses of nearly $3 trillion of GDP, 6.5 million industrial jobs, and American household enduring $7,000 losses in annual income. “In many cases,” he added, it would be “much worse than that.”

By contrast, The Washington Post reports that the latest global study, courtesy of researchers from the University of Cambridge, the International Monetary Fund, the University of Southern California and the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan asserts that if the U.S. doesn’t adhere to the Paris Agreement goals, the nation will endure a 10.5% cut in GDP — by 2100. “The hardest hit countries will be poorer, tropical nations, but in contrast to previous studies, the new paper finds that no country will be spared and none will see a net benefit economically from global warming,” the Post adds.

No country will see a net benefit from global warming, not even countries with colder climates that might see an increase in arable land, e.g.?

Unfortunately for the activists and their supporters, an “inconvenient truth” has emerged: The sun is on the verge of breaking the 2008 record of no solar activity for 268 days, according to a panel of experts from NASA and NOAA. Even when the next solar cycle upswing takes place between 2023 and 2026, the panel predicts the number of sunspots produced will be well below average.

Such slowdowns often cause cooling in Earth’s atmosphere.

Whatever one is to make of climate change, it seems there is never enough alarmism to go around. Moreover the notion that countries with developed modern economies are not only less “virtuous” than those without but should be held accountable while less-developed countries remain beholden to different standards is absurd. The non-binding Paris Agreement made the distinction, insisting developed nations should pursue “economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets,” while developing countries could “move over time towards economy-wide emission reduction or limitation targets in the light of different national circumstances.”

In other words, some pollution is “more equal” than other pollution.

So what’s this really all about? Nine years ago, Ottmar Edenhofer, a member of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, stated the real goal: “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

Last week, columnist Rupert Darwall echoed that reality. “Saving the planet takes money, and lots of it,” he explained, adding that “a vast river of cash flows through the UN climate process.”

No doubt.

SOURCE

End of the apple sticker, as major British supermarkets say they will ditch the labels as part of plastic pledge

For some they are a collector's item, and for others they are just an annoyance when trying to eat an apple on the go, but now the time of the fruit and vegetable sticker is at an end as supermarkets vow to ditch them in a new plastics pledge.

All of Britain's major supermarkets, including Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury's, Morrissons and Asda have signed up to waste charity Wrap's "Plastic Pledge", and are among 85 companies promising to get rid of a billion single-use plastic items by the end of 2020.

Retailers will no longer be using pointless plastic items including stickers on fruit and vegetables, and will be providing recycling plants for crisp packets, frozen food wrappers and bread bags.

These materials are incredibly difficult for consumers to recycle usually and account for 25 per cent of consumer plastic packaging, but only four per cent is recycled.

Plastic stickers on fruit and vegetables were there to let cashiers know what the product is and how much it costs. They also let consumers know whether the product is organic.

A spokesperson for Wrap said some supermarkets have already made the switch away from fruit stickers, adding; "Some have provided additional training to staff and introduced visual cue cards at the till.

"Others have moved to compostable stickers. I’ve also seen previously that M&S were looking at lasering dates on to their avocados! So there is a range of alternatives being explored."

Members of the pact have also signed up to ensure that 100 per cent of plastic packaging will be reusable, recyclable or compostable.

To achieve this by the end of 2020 all members are aiming to remove 21,000 tonnes of unrecyclable PVC and polystyrene from their packaging.

Data from the organisation shows that when the group first began in 2018, just 65 per cent of their packaging could be recycled.

Since then, supermarkets have removed 19,000 tonnes of non-recyclable black plastic, as well as 3,400 tonnes of plastic packaging from fresh produce.

Morrisons have rolled out loose fresh produce areas to 60 stores with more to follow next year, where customers can choose from up to 127 varieties of loose fruit and vegetables, avoiding plastic waste.

There has also been an increase in reusable packaging, such as the Waitrose ‘Unpacked’ trial stores providing refill stations for dry goods, wine, beer, and detergent refillables.

Several items such as straws and cotton buds have already been eliminated by the majority of members.

Marcus Gover, Wrap CEO, said: “Our Pact members have shown that they’re committed to this challenge and our new report demonstrates the breadth of action so far on tackling plastic waste. These aren’t token gestures – changes like these require a huge amount of investment and innovation. It shows that our members are working collaboratively towards the same goal.

“Moving forward we face significant challenges, particularly around films and flexible packaging, increasing recycling, and development of re-use and refill models. These will be our top priorities as we work urgently towards a world where plastic is valued and doesn’t pollute the environment."

SOURCE

Why climate demonstrations have become so persistent

Mother Jones knows:

IN NOVEMBER 2018, I was enjoying a post-midterms vacation when I saw the news: Six days after Democrats had taken back the House, a scrappy group of 150 young people staged a sit-in at Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s office because they weren’t convinced by her pledge to push forward on climate change legislation. The hourslong protest might have been a forgotten blip in the news cycle—if progressive star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t stopped by. Her cameo set offa chain of events that meant, by the time I returned to DC, there were teenage and twentysomething activists everywhere in black T-shirts emblazoned with a symbol of a rising sun. They called themselves the Sunrise Movement, and they were calling for an ambitious bundle of climate legislation known as the Green New Deal.

At first, I was skeptical that these young people deserved the hype. They tended to slip into a dizzying patois of activism theory—during one phone call, I heard one Sunrise member cheerfully cite Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, and civil rights academic Charles Payne in one breath. But over the course of the past year, I’ve noticed a sea change in the climate movement. The older white men who still lead the national environmental groups have started to give way to a much younger, more diverse, more in-your-face set of activists with their own set of leaders, like the teenage Swedish climate crusader Greta Thunberg.

This revitalized climate movement isn’t a fluke. Sunrise leaders say their secret sauce is a relatively new organizing strategy called Momentum, which teaches activists how to keep a movement growing instead of fizzling out after a few splashy protests. The Momentum approach has also influenced the Black Lives Matter movement and the immigration rights group Cosecha, as well as new climate groups like Extinction Rebellion, and some older ones like 350.org. For Sunrise, which claims 15,000 members in 200 hubs across the country, the strategy seems to be particularly effective.

Varshini Prakash, the 26-year-old executive director of Sunrise, thinks the Capitol Hill sit-in would have unfolded very differently without Momentum’s forward-thinking strategy. “When these big moments happen, like you sit in Nancy Pelosi’s office and there are 5,000 articles written about climate change in the next two days, what do you do with that moment?” she said. “Do you say, ‘Wow, that was awesome—let’s pack up and go home,’ or do you say, ‘How do we use this moment to drive thousands and thousands of people toward our organization and create a leadership pathway?’”

Momentum theory grew largely with the help of two brothers from Iowa, Mark and Paul Engler. A writer and a community organizer, respectively, the Englers were frustrated with social movements’ lack of staying power. In 2013, they began developing an approach based on the modern history of civil resistance, from Dr. King to Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. “Many of the founders of Momentum, including me, have had the experience of living through a cycle of mass protest, with its exhilarating peaks, and then experiencing its failure or collapse,” Paul Engler told me. That inspired “a long process of trying to figure out what happened and analyzing how to do it better.”

The Englers came up with a set of principles for organizers: Devise a clear narrative for what you want to accomplish from the start, then think about your work in a cycle of “escalation” —attracting a wider base largely through rallies and mass protest—and “absorption” —in-person trainings and call-in sessions, where eager new members can become more effective soldiers in the fight.

Many of the Sunrise Movement’s founders, including Prakash, attended the first Momentum trainings in New York in 2014 and 2015. They came up with the idea for Sunrise and spent nearly a year planning before officially launching it in 2017. They decided to focus on motivating youth: Young people have a good track record of challenging the status quo. But more importantly, the threat of climate change feels particularly acute to young people—without immediate action, the environment will profoundly change in their lifetimes. Sunrise’s leaders also decided to focus on pushing Democrats on climate policy; trying to convince Republican lawmakers to accept the science seemed like a poor use of precious time and resources.

Since those early days, the group has pulled offa handful of successful escalations—protests, school strikes, and confrontations with top Democrats whose climate policies they deem too timid. After each of these actions, Sunrise leaders have swooped in to set up recruitment drives and more trainings for new members. That last bit, according to Momentum principles, is key: Other movements often consider a successful protest the last step. For Momentum, it’s just the beginning.

In September, I went to Philly to see Sunrise in action at a gathering of Green New Deal supporters. After seven hours of climate speeches, the crowd of college students and other young adults, along with veteran organizers, all cooped up in an auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania, was restless. Even the most committed were ready to call it a day—until Prakash took the mic.

The daughter of South Indian immigrants, Prakash wore her long hair loose and moved confidently around the stage in jeans and a green canvas jacket. She described Sunrise’s vision for a radically different climate movement. The world desperately needs “a militant force of young people,” she said, to prevent the type of dystopian future that feels imminent to her generation. “I spent my college years imagining what kind of bunker we would all need to create to shield ourselves from a militarized band of bandits that were out because the government just collapsed and all of society was in ruin,” she said.

After the conference, Prakash reflected on Sunrise’s rapid growth over the past year. “Every time we would do something really big, we would have a mass call where thousands of people would join, understand what Sunrise is, what the next action is,” she said. After Sunrise’s Kentucky hub targeted Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell with protests recently, 1,000 people joined one of its organizing calls, and 700 of them agreed to do a congressional office visit in their hometown. One of those visits was to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, which resulted in a viral video of the California Democrat haughtily dismissing the Green New Deal, saying, “There’s no way to pay for it.” Yet by February, 11 senators and 67 House representatives, including every senator running for president, had endorsed a symbolic resolution in support of the bill. (By early November, that number had grown to 109 total.)

So far, Sunrise hasn’t figured out how to channel its energy into actually passing climate legislation. The group “put it on the agenda, they’re driving a ton of alignment, and all that is impressive,” said one activist, who didn’t want to be named while criticizing the organization. But, he continued, “The scale we need to win it is going to transcend Sunrise.”

There’s not a lot of time. When Sunrise members say there’s only a decade to act, they’re not exactly right—climate change doesn’t work like an on/offswitch. Rather, the impacts escalate the longer we delay. But they are correct that the next 10 years is a critical window for action. Sunrise leaders have made big plans: In 2020, they aim to sweep a Democrat into the White House who will tackle global warming, spurred on by what Sunrise hopes will be the largest youth strikes in US history in 2021.

Onstage in Philadelphia, Prakash was aware of how impossibly idealistic all this may sound. “We’re working on it,” she quipped with a self-deprecating laugh. She invited everyone to stand and join her in a singalong of “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen. “There is a crack in everything,” the crowd sang. “That’s how the light gets in.”

SOURCE

Science and economics trump government mandates with climate change

By Richard W. Rahn

Many in the political and media classes, showing their ignorance, try to ignore the laws of physics and economics, particularly when it comes to climate change. Various candidates make grand declarations that if elected they will stop all carbon emissions by “x” year. They usually propose to do this by requiring all cars to be electric by some arbitrary year, and that the country move totally to renewable energy sources — most often wind and solar.

It is true that most cars will probably be electric in the next couple of decades — but no faster than battery technology improves — and that is dependent not on legislative mandate but on scientific advancement. Batteries still require massive subsidies to compete with gasoline on a cost basis.

The electricity that will power the cars of the future and everything else will be provided by nuclear fission, hydro, fossil fuels and renewables. There is a limit to the quantity of renewables that an electric power grid can use because of the intermittent nature of wind and solar.

The Germans found out that solar turned out to be much more expensive than forecast and that wind had health side effects for those living nearby and was a massive killer of birds, etc. German electric rates are on average about triple those in the United States, making much of their industry non-competitive and causing a consumer political revolt. As a result, the Germans are returning to more traditional sources of power generation.

The United States has actually been reducing carbon emissions, not because of government mandates, but as a result of the huge increase in natural gas usage for power plants due to the fracking revolution (created by private-sector engineers and entrepreneurs). The irony is that the United States met the Paris agreement target reductions in carbon, while Europe, despite all of their big green programs, has not. Again, physics and economics trump government mandates.

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is a function of all global, natural and man-made emissions. The Chinese now have 148 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity under active construction, which is almost equivalent to the 150 gigawatts of existing coal capacity in the EU.

There are also another 105 gigawatts of coal plants under construction in the rest of the world. The bottom line is no matter what the United States (and the EU) do to curb emissions, it will have virtually no effect on the Earth’s temperatures, because the increases in CO2 in the rest of the world are swamping U.S. actions.

The middle-income and developing nations argue that the United States and Europe became rich in part because of cheap energy, and the rich nations have no moral right to mandate energy restrictions and costs on the developing countries.

Furthermore, taxpayers and consumers, as the citizens of Europe have already shown, are not going to stand for government schemes to increase the cost of energy and more taxes. People can see what these big green programs are really about — a further power grab by the Washington politicians — having little to do with a greener world.

This does not mean that we ought to do nothing. To date, the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere has been a net benefit. Plants inhale CO2 and exhale oxygen. More CO2 has increased plant growth — including food plants — bringing down the price of food. Greenhouse operators pump CO2 into their greenhouses to increase yields. At the moment, the world is far below the CO2 level to optimize plant growth — but at some time in the future, the optimum will be exceeded.

There are lower-cost ways to delay the negative effects of CO2 growth than massive tax- and welfare-redistribution schemes, and freedom-destroying mandates as to how we travel and live our lives. For at least 2,000 years, men have been re-engineering shore-lines — to cope with higher sea levels which have steadily risen from the end of the last ice age (the rate of increase in sea levels has not increased in recent decades, despite many forecasts that it would).

Recent studies have shown there is a low-cost way to stop the increase in CO2 for the next century or so — that is, plant a trillion trees (the Earth already has approximately 3 trillion trees). (Yes, there are doomsayers who claim we have only a few years left – it varies from speaker to speaker – if we don’t take massive government action. But they have been saying such things for decades, and nothing happened.)

Ecologist Thomas Crowther and his colleagues at ETH University in Zurich (the MIT of Switzerland) have determined there is enough suitable and underused or abandoned land to grow an additional 1.2 trillion trees. The trees would have enough storage capacity to cancel out a decade of CO2 emissions.

Appropriate trees would need to be planted for different climates. And the new forests need to be well-managed so that the forest floor is kept clean to reduce the chances of forest fires. Trees also have the benefit of holding ground water, which reduces flooding, providing attractive screening against urban blight and other eyesores, supplying many useful products. In sum, as the poet Joyce Kilmer wrote: “I think I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.”

SOURCE

Why electric cars cannot compete against combustion engines

Electric cars will not be able to compete in the same price range as fuel-driven vehicles while they rely on lithium-ion batteries.

This is according to a report from the MIT Energy Initiative, which argues that the price of electric vehicles batteries will not be sufficiently reduced for more mainstream adoption in the coming years.

Although the price of lithium-ion batteries, which makes up about a third of the cost of an electric vehicle, is steadily declining, the reductions will soon reach a limit.

The Executive Director of the Mobility of the Future group at MIT, Randall Field, explained the problem related to the cost of materials.

“If you follow some of these other projections, you basically end up with the cost of batteries being less than the ingredients required to make it,” Field said.

According to Technology Review, the current average price of a lithium-ion battery pack ranges between $175 and $300 per kilowatt-hour (kWh).

Informed projections have estimated that the price of lithium-ion batteries will be reduced to $100 per kWh by 2025. This number is punted as the ideal figure where electric car prices will be on par with fuel-based models.

To reach this level would require that the prices of the metals and materials needed for the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries remain flat, notwithstanding the fact that the demand for these would rise as more electric vehicles enter the market.

MIT’s research therefore indicated that the price per kWh would likely only be at $124 by 2025.

This would be enough to drive the cost-of-ownership down to around the same price as that of conventional cars, but the initial purchase prices for electric cars would still be significantly higher.

Other battery technologies needed

The study further stated that from 2030 onwards, other battery technologies would need to be developed to drive prices down, as the material costs will make up an increased part of the total cost.

These include battery types such as lithium-sulfur, lithium-metal, and solid-state.

SOURCE

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18 December, 2019

Scientist's theory of climate's Titanic moment the 'tip of a mathematical iceberg'

This is just mathemtical tomfoolery that tells us nothig. You can write all the formulas you like but it is the numbers you plug into the formula that give you any infomation. And the numbers relevant to Schellnhuber's formula are moot

When is an emergency really an emergency?

If you’re the captain of the Titanic, approaching a giant iceberg with the potential to sink your ship becomes an emergency only when you realise you might not have enough time to steer a safe course.

And so it is, says Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, when it comes to the climate emergency.

Knowing how long societies have to react to pull the brake on the Earth’s climate and then how long it will take for the ship to slow down is the difference between a climate emergency and a manageable problem.

Rather than being something abstract and open to interpretation, Schellnhuber says the climate emergency is something with clear and calculable risks that you could put into a formula. And so he wrote one.

Emergency = R × U = p × D × ? / T

In a comment article in the journal Nature, Schellnhuber and colleagues explained that to understand the climate emergency we needed to quantify the relationship between risk (R) and urgency (U).

Borrowing from the insurance industry, the scientists define risk (R) as the probability of something happening (p) multiplied by damage (D).

For example, how likely is it that sea levels will rise by a metre and how much damage will that cause.

Urgency (U) is the time it takes you to react to an issue (?) “divided by the intervention time left to avoid a bad outcome (T)”, they wrote.

Schellnhuber, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, tells Guardian Australia the work on the formula was just the “tip of a mathematical iceberg” in defining the climate emergency.

“It can be illustrated by the Titanic disaster, but it applies to many severe risks where you can calculate the do-nothing/business-as-usual probability of a highly damaging event,” he says. “Yet there are options to avoid the disaster.

“In other words, this a control problem.”

There is a time lag between the rapid cuts to greenhouse gases and the climate system reacting. Knowing if you have enough time tells you if you’re in an emergency or not.

Schellnhuber used “standard risk analysis and control theory” to come up with the formula, and he was already putting numbers to it.

“As a matter of fact, the intervention time left for limiting global warming to less than 2C is about 30 [years] at best. The reaction time – time needed for full global decarbonisation - is at least 20 [years].”

As the scientists write in Nature, if the “reaction time is longer than the intervention time left” then “we have lost control”.

Schellnhuber says: “Beyond that critical point, only some sort of adaptation option is left, such as moving the Titanic passengers into rescue boats (if available).”

Earlier this month, Oxford Dictionaries announced “climate emergency” as the word of the year, defining it as “a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it”.

One website tracking climate emergency declarations says 1,195 jurisdictions in 25 countries, representing 454 million people, have already voted on the emergency.

This week the European parliament joined them, as did Ballina shire council in northern New South Wales, the 76th local government authority in Australia to make the declaration.

Prof Will Steffen, of the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and a co-author of the article, says: “Emergency can mean many things to many people. But there are some hard numbers behind why so many people are saying we are in a climate emergency.

“This formula sharpens our thinking. So we have 30 years to decarbonise and to stabilise our pressure on the climate system.”

In the Nature article, the scientists highlight nine “tipping points” that, if crossed, become almost impossible to stop. At least five are already “active”.

Some of them, like melting permafrost or forest degradation, can start to add more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, making the job of keeping global temperatures down even harder.

“There are a range of these intervention times left,” Steffen says. “How long do we have before [the Greenland ice sheet] goes? Maybe we have 20 to 25 years and then we might be committed to losing Greenland.

“But the time we have left to intervene to stabilise coral reefs, for example, is a lot less than 30 years.

“Our reaction time has to be fast and to decarbonise by 2050 we have to really move now. That’s the point of [Schellnhuber’s] maths. “To err on the side of danger is a stupid thing to do.”

SOURCE

The final score from Madrid

Craig Rucker

They came for your car, your light bulb, your dishwasher and washing machine, your toilet, your electricity, your airline flight and so much more. Now you can add your burger and steak to their list of what they want to legislate, regulate or confiscate out of your existence. YOUR existence. Not theirs.

The global warming agenda is the gift that keeps on giving for everyone who wants to control what you do. Dangerous manmade climate change justifies all manner of meddling, in the name of saving the planet. And like the mafia, UN cops want a piece of the action whenever money and power are on the line.

Anti-meat crusaders have been pushing hard in recent months to use climate change to achieve their goal of forcing you into an all plant-based diet. This year their rhetoric became a big part of the dialogue at UN 25th Conference of the Parties (COP-25) on climate change, in Madrid.

They’ve introduced a new buzzword you’ll be hearing a lot of, “peak meat” – as in “peak oil,” or something that we’re going to run out of really soon ... not because we’re actually going to run out, but because government policies will make it off limits and drive it into oblivion. As CFACT’s team learned – as usual – it’s do as I say, not as I do.

So ban meat, it is, especially beef. But what do you suppose was the big seller for anyone looking for lunch at the UN climate conference? Burger King! Delicious all-meat American burgers, with not a single one of Burger King’s latest meatless Whoppers in sight.

Oh well. It’s for us little people to tighten our belts. Our high-flying climate masters need their perks if they are to have the energy and fully functioning brain cells to decide how the rest of us should live.

CFACT’s investigation into UN burger hypocrisy made a splash in the media and was picked up by Fox News, The Washington Times and more.

In the end, though, COP-25 delegates were far more successful at scoring a burger than in advancing the Paris Climate Accord. In fact, left-wing protesters became so incensed when the climate talks stalled that over 200 of them, including the kids from Greta Thunberg’s “Fridays for Future” staged a protest where they banged on pots and chanted outside the main plenary session. UN security guards tossed them all out of the COP. (At least it wasn’t us CFACT folks getting tossed out this time).

Our burger scoop and the rest of our action-rich agenda were all officially submitted to and permitted by our UN minders, who get to decide whose educational programs and antics are allowed, and whose get banned. Recall that last year, the UN permitted hecklers to disrupt the official US climate delegation’s presentation – while those of us who tried to object to the rude hecklers were told we would be thrown out if we said another word.

Why is the UN having a hard time advancing the global warming ball? One name – Donald J. Trump and his plans to pull America out of the Paris Climate Accord. It’s no fun making plans to spend $100 billion per year on Green Climate Fund anything-but-fossil-fuels projects when you can’t leach off the world’s biggest economy.

The European bloc did announce plans for 28 nations to go “carbon neutral” by mid-century. But it had planned to announce this “big news” before COP-25 started. During the COP, its delegates sheepishly had to admit that Poland refused to go along.

Polish coal is cheap, plentiful and reliable. And the last thing the Poles want is to be dependent on Russian energy. They’ve met the Russians before. They also aren’t too keen on adopting Germany’s anti-coal and gas policies. They’ve got experience with that country too and have seen how its policies are hammering Germany’s automotive and other energy-intensive industries and jobs. The Poles are smart.

COP-25 followed the usual script and went into overtime, the double overtime, because there was so much dithering and bickering during the regulation period.

In the end, the UN announced “big victories,” which are nothing of the sort. In fact, aside from waxing poetic about its agreement on a “gender action plan” (whatever that is), they had little more to announce than plans for yet another big COP event next year.

Among themselves and under their collective breath, they were also hoping COP-26 won’t have to be rescheduled to another city at the last minute, when the first venue suddenly erupts in violent protests against energy policies imposed in the name of preventing “catastrophic manmade climate change.” It was mighty embarrassing for the UN when that happened in Chile a few weeks before COP-25.

Ultimately, COP 25 was an embarrassing failure for the United Nations, and a blessing for everyone who isn’t lining up at the crony UN-corporatist-activist-scientist trough for more mandates and subsidies. In the end, the UN couldn’t even advance its expanded “rule book” or agree to a newfangled “international carbon market” for buying and selling carbon indulgences, so that folks like Harrison Ford can claim they bought “carbon offsets” for their flights and big companies can do their own “greeenwashing.”

If UN Secretary General (and former President of the Socialist International) António Guterres was “disappointed” that “the international community” lacks sufficient ambition “to tackle the climate crisis,” the rest of humanity should be grateful we still have fossil fuels to support our jobs and living standards.

What’s actually going on at this year’s UN climate talks is a wait-and-see game geared toward next November’s US elections. After watching Britain give the Tory party its biggest victory since Margaret Thatcher amid the Madrid talks, and observing moves now afoot to pull Britain out of the EU once and for all, the UN crowd can see that government by global bureaucracy is under threat.

The UN is plenty scared. That’s a nice thought going into this festive holiday season.

Via email

Congress must stop subsidizing wealthy car buyers: Pelosi and Schumer tout a bill that extends tax favors for the rich

Why are Democrats Sen. Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi teaming together to lobby for a tax bill that would provide about 80 percent of the benefits to Americans who make more than $100,000 a year?

Mr. Schumer and Mrs. Pelosi are the ones who for the last two years have been railing against income inequality and “tax cuts for the rich,” but now they are head cheerleaders for a bill that would extend and even expand tax favors padding the pockets of mostly wealthy Americans who can afford to buy pricey Tesla and GM electric vehicles. The price tag for taxpayers could reach $16 billion for this bill.

What’s next, tax breaks for buying a Porsche or a Rolls Royce?

Half of the tax breaks would go to residents of just two states. Guess which two. California, home state of Mrs. Pelosi. And New York, home state of Mr. Schumer. Coincidence? The voters of 48 states would get stuck paying most of the tab to underwrite the cars of those living in Manhattan and Silicon Valley.

These tax credits are far and away more generous than the rebates the car dealerships typically use to entice buyers. Uncle Sam offers a $7,500 tax credit for electric car buyers — a policy that is supposed to be phased out this year for the two biggest manufacturers — Tesla and GM. Surprise, surprise, they are lobbying furiously to keep the money flowing.

Mr. Schumer has threatened to hold this year’s tax bill hostage if the Tesla “temporary” subsidy isn’t renewed. The credits are to be phased out beginning next year, but the Senate bill would give them a new lease on life. The House bill is even worse: It would triple the existing cap on subsidies of 200,000 per manufacturer. There is also talk in the House of creating a new credit of up to $2,500 for used electric vehicles. So you buy it you get $7,500 and then you sell it and the new buyer gets $2,500 on the same vehicle.

The bill also includes billions of dollars for extensions of wind and solar subsidies (that were also supposed to expire many years ago). They even added in $5 billion of new spending on “environmental justice” grants to universities — as if campus green leftists needed any more help.

The head start program for EVs is especially egregious because, as my Heritage Foundation colleague, economist Nick Loris, notes many states have their own EV incentives, and in these states taxpayers are essentially writing a $10,000 rebate check to EV drivers. Mr. Loris also notes that because EVs don’t use gasoline at the pump, they receive an added subsidy because they don’t pay directly for the roads and highways and bridges they use.

Even worse, while Congress is preparing to expand this program, the Treasury inspector general has recently uncovered rampant fraud. The IG found an astonishing 16,510 tax returns with “potentially erroneous” electric vehicle tax credits worth a total of $73.8 million.

It appears that credits are being claimed for ineligible vehicles and that many leased vehicles are being fraudulently double subsidized — with one valid claim by the leasing company and a second, invalid claim by the lessee. The additional $2,500 per vehicle credit for the sale of used EVs will open a whole new garage full of fraudulent claims.

“The credit is working. It just needs a little more time,” says Genevieve Cullen, president of the Electric Drive Transportation Association. But experience teaches us that these green subsidies never go away once they are extended. They become lifetime entitlements.

The biggest single beneficiary of the EV tax subsidy is Tesla founder Elon Musk. He is a billionaire and if Congress extends the tax credits, the value will be capitalized into Tesla stock and he is about to get a lot richer. Rather than unworkable wealth taxes on America’s millionaires and billionaires, wouldn’t it be better if Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer stopped subsidizing them?

SOURCE

Wind turbines traumatizing animals as well as people

The same wind turbines that are causing reports of severe health harms to people around the world appear to be having a similar or more severe impact on dogs and other animals. This is especially troubling because dogs and other domesticated animals rely on humans for humane living conditions and they are unable to tell us when they are under distress from wind turbines.

A couple typical examples are reported in the Hamilton (Australia) Spectator and the World Council for Nature website. The Spectator article documents how a family was forced to seek medical attention for its female Kelpie shortly after wind turbines were placed approximately one mile from the family’s home.

“It is usually very active, alert and an excellent working dog, and it has become very withdrawn and this is more evident when wind is coming from the same direction that the wind turbines are in,” treating veterinarian Scott Shrive told the Spectator.

“The dog is reluctant to come out of its kennel when the wind is coming from that direction – it won’t work, they can’t get it to work, it won’t even jump up on the vehicle, but on days when there is no wind, so when the turbines aren’t working, it goes back to normal, it comes out of its kennel it is happy to work all day like it normally does,” Shrive added.

“She has never behaved like this before, when she is lying on the floor of the kennel in the morning it takes nearly half an hour to coax her up, then when she gets outside she just runs mad, all over the place, it is like her brain is scrambled,” the dog’s owner told the Spectator. “She just runs crazy and then she will settle down and just be very quiet and if you take her away (from the wind farm) then she goes back to normal later on in the day.”

The negative effects of wind turbines are apparently not limited to dogs. The World Council for Nature reported an incident of more than 1,600 minks being born prematurely – many of them deformed – after a wind farm began operation approximately 350 yards away.

Environmental stewardship involves more than merely reducing air emissions. It also requires protecting animals from unnecessary trauma caused by wind turbines.

SOURCE

Family, not climate, top of mind for Australian tweens

Family issues weigh more heavily in the minds of Australians aged between 10 and 13 than big global concerns such as the environment, a new study shows.

The longitudinal study run by the Australian Institute of Family Studies ranked concern about families highest, followed by terrorism, the use of drugs and alcohol, and school-related issues.

"Many parents may be surprised to hear that young people worry most about their families in their 'tweens' and early teenage years, showing how important family relationships continue to be as children get older," AIFS director Anne Hollonds said.

"Our study found two-thirds of 10-11-year-olds were worried about a family member becoming seriously ill or injured, more than half were concerned about fighting in their family and nearly half were worried about their parents losing their job," she said.

"By the age of 12-13, the level of worry about family issues had declined but still remained a prominent concern for this age group, with more than half worrying about the health of family members and close to four out of 10 concerned about family fighting and parental job loss."

The Growing Up in Australia Longitudinal Study of Australian Children found about four in 10 children in these age groups were concerned about terrorism and war, and a third worried about the environment

"Concern about the environment remained fairly stable over time," report author and AIFS research fellow Suz-anne Vassallo said.

"The use of drugs and alcohol was also a concern for many children (44 per cent at 10-11 years), although this appeared to become less of an issue once they reached their teens (37 per cent at 12-13 years)." She said relatively fewer teens and tweens worried about how they looked and whether they fitted in with their friends.

From "The Australian" of 17 December, 2019

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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 or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

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

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17 December, 2019

No breakthrough at Madrid

After two weeks of contentious negotiations, world leaders put in charge of averting a cluster of accelerating climate threats remained at loggerheads late Saturday about whether they could commit, just on paper, to raise voluntary climate targets next year.

The annual talks, which had been scheduled to end on Friday, were meant to hammer out the final details of the landmark 2015 Paris climate accord, and expectations initially ran high that they would yield a collective political call for raising climate targets.

The delegates from nearly 200 countries who gathered in the Spanish capital were similarly stuck on two other issues that have vexed the Paris Agreement since its inception: working out rules for an international carbon trading system and providing money for the poor countries that suffer most from climate catastrophes.

The draft texts that emerged early Saturday immediately set off furious criticism from inside and outside the plenary room. By Saturday night, delegates were waiting for new drafts and there was no telling when the sessions would wrap up, with or without an agreement.

“Adopting this would be a betrayal of all the people around the world suffering from climate impacts and those who are calling for action,” said Jennifer Morgan, the executive director of Greenpeace International.

Diplomats and advocates at the deliberations repeatedly cited opposition from large economies that are run by leaders suspicious of international cooperation — including Australia, Brazil, and the United States, the only country in the world that is pulling out of the Paris accord.

The US delegation was among those that objected to the notion that the conference document should signal the need to enhance climate targets next year, saying it did not support “expansive additional language on gaps and needs.”

And while the divide between rich and poor countries loomed over these talks, as it often does in climate negotiations, the battle lines were far more muddled this time. Many countries from the global South, like Fiji and Colombia, insisted on higher ambitions by 2020, while India was among those that resisted such a deadline.

“The spirit and the objectives of the Paris Agreement are being eroded clause by clause, discussion by discussion,” Simon Stiell, the environment minister of Grenada, said as the negotiations entered the final stretch.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, went further. In a twitter message Saturday afternoon, she called the talks “an utter failure.”

These are the last negotiations that the United States can participate in before it formally retreats next year, and it used the Madrid session to vigorously push back against appeals from several poor countries to be compensated for the economic damage they suffer from hurricanes, droughts, and slow-moving climate catastrophes like the decimation of coral reefs. They have been seeking “loss and damage” funding that is separate from what is now in place to help poor countries rein in their emissions and adapt to the effects of climate change.

Delegates from other countries said the United States had insisted on a waiver in the negotiations that would protect big emitters from liability claims in other countries, but that was unacceptable to many developing nations.

“We refuse to import that paragraph,” said Ammar Hijazi, a Palestinian diplomat who is chairman of a large bloc of poor countries, known as the Group of 77, which is backed by China. “If we accept it at this stage it will come back to haunt us.”

SOURCE

The EU’s Green misdeal

In poker if you are dealt a hand with a card missing that is a misdeal and the dealer must shuffle the deck and start again. The EU’s so-called Green Deal is just like that.

What is missing is any hint of a plan. The proponents of this planless nonsense gleefully admit they have no idea how to make it work. The fact is it can’t work.

The GD is nothing but a bunch of distant future targets for emission reductions. Target dates range from 2030 out to 2050, all of which are politically very comfortable. Nothing serious has to be done right bnow, so praise to all, we have a deal.

The warm fuzziness of this non-plan is evident in its proposed budget, which is a magically round 100 billion euros. It sounds like a lot of money, but spread out over 30 years it is just 3.3 billion a year.

This is chump change when it comes to restructuring the EU’s entire energy system, which is what the GD proposes to do. A 1,000 MW wind farm costs about a billion euros a year. Adding three of these farms a year would not even cover the retirement of the existing wind facilities that blight the EU landscape.

In fact disposing of the myriad worn out existing wind farms will likely cost a lot more than this. To my knowledge the EU presently has no budget for this nasty business.

In short this 100 billion euros contributes nothing to decarbonizing the EU energy system. A few trillion euros might begin to approach the goal. I say approach because it simply can’t be done. The technology does not exist to decarbonize modern civilization. Nor can it be invented, developed and deployed in time to meet these absurd targets.

Keep in mind that this is just the usual climate emergency nonsense, which is driven by worthless computer models. The extreme targets are taken from the IPCC’s playbook for keeping future warming under a minuscule 0.5 degrees C (according to the hot computer models).

The control freak alarmists have morphed this tiny warming into the threshold of climate catastrophe. There is no scientific basis for this, not even in the hopped up IPCC reports. A half degree of warming, if it actually happened, would never be noticed.

As with the budget, the targets are wonderfully simple, reality not being a constraint. The nearest term target is truly bizarre. The 2030 emissions target is presently a 40% reduction from 1990 levels. The GD target raises this to a whopping 55%.

What makes this truly strange is that the EU’s environmental agency just issued a report saying the 40% target will be missed. They will be lucky to get to 30% as things are going.

This pretty well certifies the 55% as impossible, especially given the ponderous slowness with which energy technology must be deployed. Extreme measures would be called for and these are politically very unlikely, given the widespread anti-action demonstrations that are already occurring.

No wonder the GD proponents say they don’t know how to do it, because it can’t be done. But they want to pass a law mandating it anyway. How crazy is that? Well crazy is where we’re at, when it comes to the climate emergency hysteria.

Hysterics are not known for sound judgement and the EU leadership is no exception. Fortunately 2030 is not far off so the nonsensical nature of this non-plan will soon show up. I give it five years at most.

The Green Deal is a card short and that card is reality. This game will be fun to watch.

SOURCE

Greta Thunberg Threatens to Put World Leaders Who Don't Act on Global Warming 'Against the Wall'

Greta Thunberg is a smart, brave, young woman who, at 16 years old, has offered herself as a spokesperson for her generation on climate change. It's a noble undertaking and she should certainly be commended for her activism.

She is also, if you listen to her adult supporters, above reproach and criticism. She must only be encouraged, coddled, and praised. Any criticism is "bullying." If you point out that she's hardly an expert on the extraordinarily complex issues of climate change -- issues that involve a half-dozen scientific disciplines -- you must be scolded for hurting the poor little girl's feelings.

It doesn't get any lower than using children as a shield against criticism. And Greta Thunberg needs to be criticized. The notoriety appears to have gone to her head and unless some adult intervenes, she will become another used-up, tragic victim of leftist political activism, a late-night comedian's one-liner.

Daily Mail:

Greta Thunberg told cheering protesters today 'we will make sure we put world leaders against the wall' if they fail to take urgent action on climate change.

The Swedish teen activist was addressing the crowd at a Fridays for Future protest in Turin, Italy.

She arrived there from Madrid where she had been attending the UN climate summit but said she feared the event would not lead to change.

She was speaking metaphorically, of course. No one believes she's going to want to storm the White House and line Trump and other leaders against the wall and shoot them. I might say, "string them up from the highest yardarm" but that doesn't mean I'm threatening to hang anyone from the spar of a sailing ship.

Except if it had been a climate skeptic saying those words, the left would have been apoplectic and accused them of plotting the mass murder of world leaders. Such is the Twitter world we live in.

Of course, Ms. Thunberg can be criticized. She has shouldered her way into the arena and is using her notoriety to hysterically denounce politicians -- freely elected and carrying responsibilities that she cannot possibly understand.

If she understood those responsibilities, she'd know that the world she is asking for -- even if everyone agreed with her -- will take decades to achieve at an unimaginable cost. That's real money coming out of real people's pockets -- the fruits of their labor. She has a child's view of how the world works. This puts her on par with other hysterical activists who have a similar worldview. They apparently don't understand that simply throwing a tantrum about predicting the end of the world changes no minds nor moves anyone toward their position.

There are ways to criticize the child without being mean or bullying about it. Trump's tweet that sent the left into orbit was actually not a bad way to go about criticizing her.

SOURCE

COP 25: The business of climate change

Saving the planet takes money, and lots of it. Money is both the theme and the subtext of the latest round of UN climate talks being held here—a vast river of cash flows through the UN climate process. Formally, the meeting is about nailing down one of the more obscure provisions of the Paris Agreement: Article 6, which provides for market-based instruments so that countries can trade their way out of their decarbonization commitments. Billions of cross-border dollars and transaction fees hang on the outcome.

With the negotiations concerning mind-paralyzing definitions of interest only to the most intrepid climate geeks, business and finance leaders could wind up taking center stage. When they first started coming to climate conferences, it was to observe and advise. Now it’s to show-and-tell their green virtue. “Momentum is there,” declared Paul Polman, the former Unilever CEO. “Climate change is the biggest business opportunity of all time.” We’re close to several policy tipping points, he suggested.

The EU is about to approve a massive Green New Deal. Michael Bloomberg’s Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TFCD) encourages companies to make voluntary climate-related risk disclosures. Draft EU regulations, meantime, could pave the way for mandatory climate disclosures that would force investment managers to justify their investments against climate and environmental benchmarks. Businesses are transitioning to “net zero,” Polman claims—meaning zero carbon emissions. They’re so far advanced that at this point, it’s only governments holding them back.

Peeling away the hype reveals a very different picture. Companies promising to cut their carbon emissions rely on offsetting—that is, paying for their consumption of hydrocarbon energy by supporting projects that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, such as renewable energy. If companies were genuine in their commitment to tackle climate change, though, they would develop zero-carbon baselines for their own activities.

A growing number of companies boast about the proportion of wind and solar in their energy consumption. These claims rely on an entirely legal accounting fraud that says that renewable electricity can be stored; the physical reality is that electricity is consumed the instant that it’s generated. In peddling the falsehood that business and households can depend on anything close to 100% intermittent renewable energy, companies are misleading the public.

Rather than demonstrating a genuine – and painful – commitment to radical decarbonization, business leaders’ public professions of climate awareness reflect a confluence of interest between, on the one hand, corporate public-affairs departments steeped in doctrines of corporate social responsibility (CSR), and, on the other, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It’s a collusive process. The more environmental reporting requirements, the greater the importance of CSR in corporate hierarchies, the more work there is for external environmental consultants—and the greater the leverage NGOs wield over corporations.

Then there’s the psychology of herding, whereby CEOs are fearful of being hung out to dry if they don’t sign the latest statement pledging their company to save the world from climate breakdown.

All this might remind readers of two groups in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: the Moochers, comprising, in this example, the craven CEOs and their in-house CSR crowd; and the Looters, the environmental NGOs. Their ultimate victim is capitalism, the only economic system ever to have produced durable, transformative economic growth.

Madrid also marks the debut of finance ministers at UN climate talks, with the formation of a coalition of finance ministers for climate action. Under their Santiago Action Plan, over 50 finance ministers, including most from the EU, pledged to incorporate climate-change considerations into economic policy and seek “analytical expertise” to put their economies on the path of “inclusive economics, social, and wider restructuring.”

The first rule of economic policymaking is that any government intervention in the economy involves trade-offs. In the case of decarbonization policies that drive up energy costs, “net zero” means zero growth. The en masse capitulation of finance ministries before the altar of climate change sends a negative signal about future economic growth. Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the UN climate-change convention, has already sent out invitations to finance ministers to attend next year’s talks. Once on the climate bandwagon, it’s almost impossible to get off.

Then there are those desperate to get on the climate bandwagon and never get off. Anyone who has attended a UN climate conference will have noticed that some of the best-dressed participants are from Africa’s poorest nations, some with chunky Rolexes on their wrists. The UN makes sure that they suffer no hardship from their climate-change-fighting efforts. The Daily Subsistence Allowance, once handed out in envelopes with $100 bills, is now disbursed in its plastic equivalent of Swiss value cards. NGOs, whose role at climate conferences is to act as the spontaneous expression of civil society, are also eligible. Unsurprisingly, youth NGOs want to get in on the DSA act, too.

The incentive this creates is to make the UN what its critics always accuse it of being: a talking shop. According to one estimate, participants in the Article 6 discussions have already spent 70,000 hours failing to define what a “market instrument” is. Why decide, when another comfortable meeting in another expensive city beckons?

When it comes to Article 6, rich nations want tight rules to ensure that their money won’t be used to fund phony emissions cuts. Environment ministries in poorer nations naturally see Article 6 as a stream of funding that will flow through them. In principle, though, it’s hard to see how an emissions market can work as intended, when developed nations with hard caps on their emissions can pay to outsource their cuts to nations with no caps and no rigorous inventory of greenhouse gases.

Back in the U.S., some 80 business leaders have signed a statement urging the U.S. to remain in the Paris Agreement, with its commitment to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial levels. Anyone who has looked at the numbers and what they entail in terms of global emissions cuts knows that this is next to impossible. It’s conceivable that global greenhouse-gas emissions will plateau, but steep cuts to “zero” aren’t going to happen. But America must have a seat at the table, comes the response. Perhaps, then, to show that they have some skin in the game, these business leaders should endure thousands of hours of meetings trying to decide what a market instrument is.

SOURCE

Australia: The soaring cost of gas and electricity is the top financial concern for households in 2020, a new report has found

Despite an energy pricing shake-up this year resulting in cheaper deals for many, power prices still remain a significant burden on budgets. Canstar's 2019 Consumer Pulse report, which surveyed 2000 people, found that 14 per cent of respondents said their biggest monetary concerns for the coming year were electricity and gas.

Next was grocery prices (10 per cent), job security (10 per cent) and running out of retirement savings (8 per cent).

Canstar's Simon Downes said power bills remained a "consistently high cost that is a shock to the budget". The report found that three out of four people opted to pay
power bills quarterly, which Mr Downes said was a big part of the problem. "If you are paying quarterly you are almost setting yourself up for a shock every quarter," he said.

"Quarterly energy bills can be $600 or $700 and it triggers shock in your head, leaving you cursing energy bills." He urged households to look for a provider that bills monthly or to set money aside each month.

The Australian Energy Market Commission's 2018 Residential Electricity Price Trends report shows the national average annual residential bill in 2017-18 was $1522. Origin's Jon Briskin said most of their customers "still receive and pay for their bills quarterly" but there were alternatives.

"Another option that many customers find helps with managing their household's budget is to set up a payment plan and make regular monthly, fortnightly or weekly payments," he said

"For people with a smart meter in their home, an easy way to reduce the stress of big quarterly bills is to switch to monthly billing and make smaller but more frequent payments." However households with a smart meter may still face an "estimated" read, which does not reflect actual energy use.

EnergyAustralia's head of retail. Mark Brownfield said most of their customers were billed quarterly. However he said that of those with a specific payment plan, 16 per cent paid weekly, 64 per cent fortnightly and 20 per cent monthly. "When people use the EnergyAustralia smart phone app, they can check their electricity usage down to the hour," Mr Brownfield said.

From the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" of 8 December, 2019

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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 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

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

16 December, 2019

UN climate summit in Madrid at risk of collapse after all-night talks leave nations more divided than ever on how to combat global warming

A UN climate summit is at risk of collapsing today after all-night negotiations between countries left them more divided than ever over on how to fight global warming and pay for its ravages, having already gone into overtime for the talks.

Delegates from across the world have been in Madrid for the COP 25 conference for nearly two weeks attempting to work towards a deal for countries to commit to new carbon emissions cuts by the end of 2020.

Diplomats from rich nations, emerging giants and the world's poorest countries - each for their own reasons - found fault in a draft agreement put forward by meeting host Chile in a botched attempt to strike common ground.

The South American country was meant to host the event but billionaire President Sebastian Pinera cancelled the hosting plans as well as an Asia-Pacific APEC economic summit in November due to protests.

Faced with five-alarm warnings from science, deadly extreme weather made worse by climate change, and weekly strikes by millions of young people, negotiations in Madrid were under pressure to send a clear signal that governments are willing to double down in tackling the crisis.

But the 12-day talks, now deep into overtime, had retreated even further from this goal on Saturday.

'It appears that we are going backwards on the issue of ambition when we should be calling for a quantum leap in the other direction,' Marshall Islands climate envoy Tina Stege said.

'I need to go home and look my children in the eye and say we got an outcome that is going to ensure their future, and the future of all of our children,' she added, a catch in her voice.

Veteran observers of UN climate talks were stunned by the state of play nearly 24 hours after the negotiations had been set to close.

'I have never seen such a disconnect between what the science requires and the people of the world demand, versus what the climate negotiations are delivering,' said Alden Meyer, strategy and policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Outside the exhibition centre, activists from Extinction Rebellion dumped horse manure as they staged a protest alongside an international movement of school children demanding faster and more tougher action.

Under the Paris accord, countries agreed in 2015 to work to limit global temperature rises to 'well below' two degrees Celsius through a series of voluntary action pledges that step up over time.

'The one thing in Paris that gave us hope was that the deal is going to be strengthened over time,' said Mohamed Adow, Director of Power Shift Africa, referring to the 196-nation Paris climate treaty. 'If that doesn't come through, Madrid will have failed.'

The push for a strengthening of voluntary carbon cutting plans is led by small-island and least-developed states, along with the European Union.

Ministers from this 'high ambition coalition' have called out countries they see as blocking a consensus call for all countries to step up, notably the United States, Australia and Saudi Arabia.

China and India, the world's No. 1 and No. 4 carbon emitters, meanwhile, have made it clear they see no need to improve on their current emissions reduction plans, which run to 2030.

These emerging giants have chosen instead to emphasise the historical responsibility of rich nations to lead the way and provide financing to poor countries.

The COP 25 summit was also meant to finalise a chapter on carbon markets in the Paris rulebook, which goes into effect next year.

But a complicated wrangle over how to structure markets, and deal with carbon credits left over from the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of 2020, have remained deadlocked, and may be punted to further talks next year.

The United States, which is leaving the landmark Paris climate deal next year, was accused of acting as a spoiler on a number of issues vital to climate-vulnerable nations. This included so-called 'loss and damage' funding to help disaster-hit countries repair and rebuild.

'The US has not come here in good faith,' said Harjeet Singh, climate lead with charity ActionAid.

'They continue to block the world's efforts to help people whose lives have been turned upside down by climate change.'

SOURCE

Mike Bloomberg says he will close the country's 251 coal-fired power plants by 2030 if he's elected president next year

Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg has unveiled a radical plan to completely eliminate coal-fired power plants by 2030.

The New York billionaire, 77, vowed Friday that he would close the country's 251 coal plants within the next ten years should he become Commander-in-chief. However, he stopped short of revealing how he would help communities severely impacted by such closures.

Bloomberg made the announcement during a campaign stop in Virginia - a surprising choice given the state is considered the heart of coal country.

During the announcement, he also boasted that he had already 'helped to close more than half the nation's dirty coal plants.'

He cites his partnership with a the environmental organization, Sierra Club, 'which has since shuttered more than half - 299 to date - of America's coal-fired power plants, and counting.'

In addition to eliminating coal-fired plants, Bloomberg vowed Friday to halt construction of 150 new gas facilities. Both plans are part of a bid to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2030.

The presidential hopeful further claims he wants to move the nation toward phasing out fossil fuels 'as soon as humanly possible' - ideally before 2050.

Bloomberg's climate plans will also include an emphasis on 'environmental justice' and 'environmental racism'.

In a statement accompanying the release of his new policy, he said: 'The president refuses to lead on climate change, so the rest of us must.

'As president, I'll accelerate our transition to a 100% clean energy economy.'

Bloomberg's plans drastically contrasts with President Trump - who has previously vowed to save the coal sector.

Bloomberg has not outlined a cost for his plan, but campaign officials said he would begin to release estimates in the coming weeks.

Climate is shaping up as a central issue in the 2020 Democratic primary election, with Bernie Sanders. Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar all signing on to the Green New Deal.

But Bloomberg - who is positioning himself as a more moderate candidate - has not agreed to such proposals.

The former New York mayor is currently in a precarious position, having to vacillate between more liberal positions in order to scoop the Democratic primaries, while at the same time still appealing to centrist voters in order to be viable candidate at the general election 2020.

SOURCE

The EU’s absurd environmental risk aversion stifles new ideas

Matt Ridley

Excessive regulation means the health and environmental benefits of new technology are suppressed

Last month, at the WTO meeting in Geneva, India joined a list of countries including Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil and Malaysia that have lodged formal complaints against the EU over barriers to agricultural imports. Not only does the EU raise hefty tariffs against crops such as rice and oranges to protect subsidised European farmers; it also uses health and safety rules to block imports. The irony is that these are often dressed up as precautionary measures against health and environmental threats, when in fact they are sometimes preventing Europeans from gaining health and environmental benefits.

The WTO complaints accuse the EU of “unnecessarily and inappropriately” restricting trade through regulatory barriers on pesticide residues that violate international scientific standards and the “principle of evidence”. Worse, they say, “it appears that the EU is unilaterally attempting to impose its own domestic regulatory approach on to its trading partners”, disproportionately harming farmers in the developing nations whose livelihoods depend on agriculture.

The problem is that the EU, unlike the rest of the world, bases its regulations on “hazard”, the possibility that a chemical could conceivably cause, say, cancer, even if only at impossibly high doses. WTO rules by contrast require a full “risk” analysis that takes into account likely exposure. Coffee, apples, pears, lettuce, bread and many other common foods that are part of a healthy diet contain entirely natural molecules that at high enough doses would be carcinogenic. Alcohol, for instance, is a known carcinogen at very high doses, though perfectly safe in moderation. The absurdity of the EU approach can be seen in the fact that if wine were sprayed on vineyards as a pesticide, it would have to be banned under a hazard-based approach.

This is all part of the EU’s insistence on using an especially strong version of the precautionary principle, as required by the Lisbon Treaty. Along with diverging from international scientific standards, this creates an insurmountable bias against new innovations, as anything new presents hypothetical risks, while the hazards of existing technologies are not assessed in the same way. Ironically, the precautionary principle will make it impossible to develop innovative technologies that can promote human health, improve the environment and protect biodiversity. Everything has potential downsides: what should count is the balance between risk and benefit.

Germany plans to phase out the use of glyphosate herbicide by 2023 and the European Commission is moving towards a ban, though not on other more toxic herbicides. This is one of the issues that has brought thousands of German farmers on to the streets in protest. Glyphosate has repeatedly been shown to be less toxic to animals than coffee, even at high doses, let alone at the doses people in practice encounter. This has been confirmed by the European Food Safety Authority and its equivalents in America, Australia and elsewhere.

This problem matters because glyphosate (better known as Roundup) is a valuable tool in conservation, used for protecting habitats from invasive alien weeds. Moreover, throughout the Americas today glyphosate used as part of “minimal tillage” replaces ploughing as a means of controlling weeds. This results in better soil structure, less soil erosion, less damage to soil fauna, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, more carbon storage and better water retention.

By protecting old-fashioned farming practices, such as ploughing, or the use of much more toxic pesticides by organic farmers, such as copper sulphate, the EU is effectively imposing lower environmental standards on its citizens than in some other parts of the world. This makes a mockery of some Remainer claims that leaving the EU will result in a lowering of our environmental standards.

The EU has effectively banned genetically modified crops by requiring impossibly complex, uncertain and lengthy procedures for their approval, and has now ruled that even gene-edited crops (where no “foreign” genetic material is added) must be subject to the same draconian regulations. Crops produced by random bombardment with gamma rays, a less predictable process, are exempt, merely because that is an older technology.

Most maize, cotton and soya bean in the Americas is grown with a gene inserted from a bacterium that kills certain insects but is harmless to humans. It protects the crop against pests but leaves “innocent civilian” insects such as butterflies unharmed. There has been a noticeable improvement in biodiversity in and around such genetically modified crops elsewhere in the world. The greatest irony is that the gene in question, known as Bt, is derived from a bacterium that has been used as an organic pesticide by organic growers for almost a century.

European protectionism does not only discriminate against poor countries, raise costs for domestic consumers and damage the competitiveness of domestic producers. Increasingly it also results in lower environmental standards.

SOURCE

No end in sight for the biofuel wars

Biofuels are unsustainable in every way, but still demand – and get – preferential treatment

Paul Driessen

The Big Oil-Big Biofuel wars rage on. From my perch, ethanol, biodiesel and “advanced biofuels” make about zero energy, economic or environmental sense. They make little political sense either, until you recognize that politics is largely driven by crony-capitalism, campaign contributions and vote hustling.

Even now, once again, as you read this, White House, EPA, Energy, Agriculture and corporate factions are battling it out, trying to get President Trump to sign off on their preferred “compromise” – over how much ethanol must be blended into gasoline, how many small refiners should be exempted, et cetera.

This all got started in the 1970s, when publicly spirited citizens persuaded Congress that “growing our own energy” would safeguard the USA against oil embargoes and price gouging by OPEC and other unfriendly nations, especially as our own petroleum reserves rapidly dwindled into oblivion. Congress then instituted the Renewable Fuels Standard in 2005, when the Iraq War triggered renewed fears of global oil supply disruptions. The RFS requires that almost all gasoline sold in the USA must contain 10% ethanol – which gets a third fewer miles per gallon than gasoline and damages small engines.

But, we were told, these fuels are renewable, sustainable, a way to prevent “dangerous climate change.”

It’s all bunk. In recent years, the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) revolution has given America and the world at least a century of new oil and natural gas reserves. America has become the world’s largest oil and gas producer and within five years could be producing far more oil and gas than any other country in the world. Terminals built years ago to import fuel from distant lands are being reconfigured to export abundant US oil, liquefied natural gas and refined products to distant lands.

Average global temperatures – as actually measured by satellites and weather balloons – are now almost a full degree Fahrenheit lower than predicted by climate models (the average of 102 IPCC computer model forecasts) that also foretell the daily litany of climate and weather cataclysms. However, hurricanes are less frequent and intense than a half-century ago, and Harvey was the first Category 3-5 hurricane to make US landfall in a record 12 years. Violent F4-5 tornadoes have also been less frequent over the past 34 years than during the 35 years before that, and not one F4-5 tornado hit the USA in 2018.

Over their full life cycle (from planting, growing and harvesting crops, to converting them to fuel, to transporting them by truck or rail car, to blending and burning them), biofuels emit just as much (plant-fertilizing) carbon dioxide as oil-based gasoline and diesel. Those biofuels also require enormous amounts of land, water, fertilizer, insecticides and energy. None of this is renewable or sustainable.

In fact, corn turned into E85 fuel (85% ethanol/15% gasoline) and grown where rainfall is insufficient requires irrigation – and up to 28 gallons of water from rivers or groundwater supplies per mile traveled!

US ethanol production utilizes 38% of America’s corn and 27% of its sorghum – grown on cropland the size of Iowa: 36 million acres, much of which would otherwise be wildlife habitat. And the fertilizers used to grow those crops, especially the corn, result in nutrient-rich runoff that increases nitrogen levels in the Gulf of Mexico, causing deadly algal blooms. When the algae die and decompose, they create low and no-oxygen zones the size of Delaware – killing marine life that can’t swim away quickly enough.

In short, biofuels have huge downsides and do nothing to address the scary scenarios that have either shriveled amid the winds of history – or were wildly exaggerated or imaginary to begin with.

But once these biofuel programs were launched, they became permanent. They created a biofuel industry that wants to get bigger every year, and supports politicians who want to get reelected year after year. That brings us back to the Executive Branch biofuel battles – and to issues that I myself struggle to comprehend, amid the morass of acronyms and conflicting policies and mandates.

Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency require that refiners blend “conventional biofuel” (mostly ethanol) into gasoline – and also meet various “advanced biofuel” and biomass-based diesel requirements. However, too much ethanol in gasoline damages engines in older cars, generators, garden equipment and boats; that puts a limit on how much ethanol can actually go in the fuel supply (the “blend wall”). As a result, while ethanol blending continues to increase gradually, American motorists have never been able to consume enough ethanol to satisfy applicable Renewable Fuel Standards.

However, biofuel interests want the government to keep mandating even more ethanol – a desire that faces multiple problems. Gasoline demand is decreasing, as people drive less, in more fuel-efficient cars, and in electric and hybrid vehicles (that are heavily subsidized under other laws).

Tariff wars with China and other countries have hurt corn and sorghum farmers, who want to be “compensated” via more biofuel mandates under the Renewable Fuels Standard – even though beef, pork and poultry farmers get hurt by higher grain prices resulting from so much corn devoted to ethanol.

Declining fuel demand and the blend wall mean refiners cannot mix all the mandated 15 billion annual gallons of ethanol into gasoline. They are thus forced to over-comply with the “advanced biofuel” part of the RFS mandate by buying expensive foreign biodiesel and “renewable” diesel. Refiners that do not control the point where biofuel can be blended into gasoline (eg, large distribution terminals or local gas stations) must buy “credits” called Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) that show (or pretend to show) the required (foreign) biofuels were mixed with the gasoline they make domestically.

This all gets really expensive, really fast, which is why the law allows exemptions to small refiners that face “disproportionate economic hardship” from costs that have gotten so high that courts have ordered the EPA to grant more “small refinery exemptions” (SREs) – waivers from the RFS mandates.

However, biofuel has been blended into the fuel small refiners make anyway. This situation resulted in ample supplies of RFS compliance credits, and RIN prices have dropped from over 90 cents apiece to 12 or 20 cents over the past two years or even lower at times. Of course, this all angered the biofuel lobby, which has attacked the Administration for issuing SREs, falsely claiming the exemptions are   “destroying demand” for biofuel and “hurting American farmers.”

They levied these attacks on EPA, despite the fact that the Trump Administration granted the biofuel industry its biggest request in 20 years: an air quality waiver that allows E15 to be sold year round. So some in the Administration have proposed to “reallocate lost biofuel gallons” the biofuel industry says were caused by SREs. But there’s nothing to reallocate, since ethanol is being blended despite the SREs.

The reallocation proposal thus has the practical effect of increasing the biofuel mandate by over 700 million gallons above the 15-billion-gallon statutory ceiling on ethanol. That brings us back to the fact that America is not producing enough advanced biofuels, biodiesel or renewable diesel. That means refiners have to buy more foreign supplies of these fuels, from Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia, et cetera.

Of course, that does nothing to help American farmers. It just turns the Renewable Fuel Standard into a big foreign biofuel mandate. It also means President Trump is caught between trying to placate two of his core constituencies: farmers, primarily in the Midwest, and the oil and refining industry with all its jobs.

This is mind-numbingly complicated. But the bottom line is pretty simple: Every time Congress gets involved in trying to fix complex energy and economic problems – instead of letting free market industries and innovators sort things out – it creates a legislative, regulatory, legal and lobbying mess. Every attempted additional fix makes things worse. And trying to justify all the meddling, by claiming we’re running out of oil or face manmade climate cataclysms, just makes things worse.

We should end this crazy-quilt biofuel program. But anyone who thinks that will happen in Washington, DC or Des Moines, Iowa is smoking that stuff that’s now legal and widespread in Boulder, Colorado. But President Trump and his EPA should at least reduce – and certainly not increase – any biofuel quotas.

Via email

Climate change is not Australia's burning issue

Stoic. We used to be stoic and sensible. And proudly so.

In Britain this was encapsulated by the wartime poster “Keep calm and carry on”. Here in Australia we have exhibited a phlegmatic hardiness down the generations, dealing with all that a sunburnt country of droughts and flooding rains could throw at us.

Now hysteria reigns. That British poster today would read, “Cry panic and herald Armageddon”. The Australian visage of calm practicality has been replaced by a Munch-like scream.

On Christmas Day 1974, households around the nation were shocked by news coming through from Darwin and rang to offer their homes to house families evacuated in the wake of Cyclone Tracy. If it happened today many people would go and protest against the climate instead.

Rational arguments, hard facts and intelligent debate have been cast aside in favour of woke whingeing. In this information age, ill-informed emotionalism dominates public debate (although thankfully the great mainstream remain level-headed and smart, as they showed in this year’s so-called climate election).

We live in an age when Greta Thunberg can be named person of the year for doing nothing more than allowing herself to be the face of protest, bringing teenage hyperventilation to what should be a rational and scientific policy debate. She is to the climate debate what the Bay City Rollers were to music.

But she is far from alone. When Sydney was smothered in bushfire smoke this week The Sydney Morning Herald published Mark Mordue. “There is no other way to see it,” he wrote, “our dead future is here.” In The Guardian Australia Charlotte Wood wrote about her trauma from Sydney’s inner-west suburb of Marrickville. “We’re used to turning our attention briefly, intensely, to ‘those poor people’ affected by climate change, then returning to normal life,” Wood wrote, without telling us who or what she was referring to. “Now those poor people include us.”

The New York Times fed the hyperbole, quoting novelist Anna Funder looking at bushfires on a flight into Sydney. “It was as if the country were being devoured by a chemical reaction,” she said.

“Dear prime minister,” Katharine Murphy wrote in The Guardian Australia, “the country is not parched but desiccated, and it is burning like a tinderbox, and people are frightened.”

Remember when journalism was about facts?

A host of people from the prominent to the anonymous took to social media to tell us that “Australia is burning”. NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean blamed the fires on climate change — without evidence.

Rather than explain what his department had done or failed to do to reduce fuel loads in national parks and forests — the one part of the bushfire equation humans can control — he promised more action on carbon emissions reductions policies that, of course, can and will never do anything to reduce or alleviate the bushfire threat. Yet, in this post-rational age, he was applauded by many.

People rallied in the streets not to offer their services with other fire volunteers for hard yakka on the frontline with backpacks and rakes or making sandwiches to help; no, they rallied for more government action on carbon emissions reductions. We have reached an absurdity when people blame governments for deliberately lit fires and the smoke they produce. Grown adults blame governments for weather.

Therese Rein, wife of former prime minister Kevin Rudd, took to social media to sheet home blame for destructive fires at the feet of Scott Morrison. Needless to say, she has never publicly blamed her husband for the 170 deaths on Black Saturday, when Rudd was prime minister just over a decade ago.

The divide in approaches was illustrated by the actions of two other former prime ministers. While Tony Abbott has spent weeks on distant fire fronts volunteering with his local Rural Fire Service brigade, Malcolm Turnbull jetted back to Sydney, posted a picture of the smoke and said we needed to take more climate action.

The silliness is constantly reinforced in the media. ABC presenters ask daily inane gotcha questions. Hamish Macdonald demanded drought tsar Shane Stone declare whether anthropogenic global warming was a thing, and Michael Rowland demanded to know whether federal Communications Minister Paul Fletcher would join Kean in blaming climate change for bushfires.

The point about this game-playing is that nothing turns on the answers, except to desired creation of political embarrassment or the chance to shame someone for defying the zeitgeist. Whatever we do to combat drought and bushfire is what we have always done — build dams, supply feed, reduce fuel, protect houses and so on — because these are threats that are endemic to our land.

The expert analysis shows that if there is a long-term influence from climate change on either of these blights, it will be to make each of them slightly more common in a land where they are common already. Whatever Australia does on carbon emissions can have no impact on any of this, at least for decades to come as global emissions continue to rise. And if, at some unlikely time in the future, international resolve sees substantial cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions, Australia will still be a land menaced by drought and fire.

There is no drought-free and bushfire-free Nirvana awaiting us, no matter how much nonsense we hear from Kean, Turnbull and Thunberg. It is only the practical that matters. Yet it is usually the gotcha moments, emotional cries and virtue signalling that dominate the public debate. We are our own worst enemies.

Look at the ridiculous coverage and response given to the Climate Change Performance Index released in Madrid this week. It is the work of European climate activist think tanks — comparable to The Australia Institute in our country — yet their findings are reported as though they are dispassionate assessments.

The overall ratings had the US ranked last and Australia third from last despite both these developed nations having reduced emissions and, in our case, being committed to further reductions. China — a country that is increasing its emissions annually by more than Australia’s total emissions — was ranked almost 30 places above Australia. India, too, was ranked high on the list.

Australia was marked down for approving the Adani coalmine but India was given a leave pass for burning the coal. The index pays more regard to climate politics and posturing than to emissions facts and outcomes.

Yet this week ABC opinionista Barrie Cassidy tweeted about the index by saying: “I don’t think we’ve ever had a government so out of touch with a national concern and an opposition so incapable of putting pressure on them.” I guess Cassidy has already forced himself to forget the “climate election” of seven months ago.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese also used the index to criticise the government’s performance and his frontbencher Mark Dreyfus said our nation was now an “international embarrassment”. But the ALP’s climate spokesman, Mark Butler, would not be outdone: “Australia is burning. We can feel the impacts of climate change. Scott Morrison’s climate policy is ranked dead last, below Donald Trump. This is a crisis and the government won’t act.”

Against all this panic and politicking, we need to consider the facts. In NSW this has been a bad bushfire season, one of the worst the state has seen, certainly since 1974. With NSW’s drier winters and wetter summers, the season is usually earlier and less intense than the most bushfire-prone states of Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania.

With widespread fires this year the smoke haze has been bad too. But, again, not unprecedented.

In 1936 the smoke haze was so bad in Sydney a ship from Hong Kong, the Neptuna, struggled to find the heads and sounded its foghorn but the harbourmaster couldn’t find the ship or see across the harbour. In 1951 all Sydney airports, from Mascot, through Bankstown to Richmond, were shut for hours because the smoke was too thick for planes to land.

Apart from rampant arson, the reason NSW’s fire season is bad is the drought. On this point it is important to note the clear assessments of University of NSW’s Andrew Pitman, who heads the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes. “This may not be what you expect to hear but as far as the climate scientists know, there is no link between climate change and drought,” he said. “Now, that may not be what you read in the newspapers and sometimes hear commented but there is no reason a priori why climate change should make the landscape more arid.

“And if you look at the Bureau of Meteorology data over the whole of the last 100 years there’s no trend in data, there’s no drying trend, there’s been a drying trend in the last 20 years but there’s been no drying trend in the last 100 years and that’s an expression of how variable the Australian rainfall climate is.”

When Pitman was embarrassed by the use of his quote in the climate debate, he issued a statement saying he should have used the word “direct” — so there is no “direct link” between the drought and climate change.

There you have it. Most of the rest is just noise.

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 or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

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15 December, 2019

Climate change is pumping our food full of carbs

I last studied botany more than 50 years ago so I cannot tell if the reasoning below is right or not. But it sounds possible. The question to ask, however, is "So what?" If some of our food has a higher calorie count it hardly matters to us -- given the "obesity epidemic". We already eat to excess and calorie counting is an accepted way to counter that.

But what about poor countries? Having more carbohydrates in their food should help them avoid hunger. So long live carbohydrates!

I have lost contact with the latest diet fads but I think refined sugar is now the villain. Carbohydrates have been rather praised in some eras. I suspect they are seen as good now too

The claim that having more carbohydrates in your food is a "nutritional decline " rather bamboozles me. All food is nutrition. They seem to assume that only some rare elements in food are nutrition, which is rubbish

It could be, as claimed, that increased carbs drive out other nutrients but, if so, where is the evidence that the effect is strong enough to matter to human health?

Mother Jones:

OF ALL THE INSULTS that greenhouse gases hurl at our food supply—a warming climate that triggers more severe droughts and floods in key agriculture regions like the Midwest and California, declining yields of staple crops—the most insidious may involve the deterioration of the nutritional quality of plants we eat.

That’s the startling message of growing research led by Irakli Loladze, a mathematical biologist with joint appointments at the Bryan College of Health Sciences in Nebraska and Arizona State University.

Ever since we started burning massive amounts of coal three centuries ago, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have nearly doubled. Plants are very flexible in their chemical composition, Loladze says. When the air that surrounds plants is richer in CO 2, they use it to synthesize more carbohydrates, including starches and sugars, which they store in their cells. These carbs dilute other beneficial molecules, including protein and some vitamins and minerals. This has no harmful effect on the plants themselves, which “aren’t the least concerned about the quality of our nutrition. We eat them—we’re kind of their enemies,” Loladze says.

For people, this nutritional decline could be life-changing. Consider your breakfast toast. The bread’s wheat contains lower levels of protein than the wheat that people were consuming decades ago, Loladze says, citing a 2004 study led by Lewis Ziska, then a Department of Agriculture researcher. Every bite of toast delivers more carbs and less protein. Other studies show lower quantities of essential minerals such as calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc.

What’s true for humans is also true for the animals that rely on plants. And the deficit moves up the food chain, from the rabbit nibbling on weeds to the bobcat eating that rabbit. The effect has already shown in cows, which gobble up grasses with declining nourishment. For a 2017 study, researcher Joseph Craine, along with Texas A&M and University of Maryland scientists, compared cattle dung samples taken between 1994 and 2015 from pastures across the country. The grasses showed a nearly 10 percent decrease in protein over the time range, enough to cause the cattle to gain weight more slowly. To compensate for the protein gap, beef producers would have had to spend an extra $1.9 billion on soybean feed to supplement the animals’ diet, the scientists calculated—added pressure for cash-strapped ranchers.

If you haven’t heard about this, you’re not alone. President Donald Trump’s agriculture department has hardly trumpeted the studies. In a 2018 paper, Loladze and a team that included the usda’s own researchers found that increasing CO 2 concentrations had diminished the nutritional quality of rice, causing significant drops in protein, iron, and zinc, as well as vitamins B1, B2, B5, and B9. Rather than sound the alarm about the decline of a crucial staple crop, the usda declined to publicize it and tried to convince the University of Washington not to either, as Politico’s Helena Bottemiller Evich reported in June. In Trump’s usda, Loladze says, there’s an “implicit directive not to promote agriculture research related to climate change.”

What’s to be done, given that global carbon emissions show no sign of dropping anytime soon? Currently, farmers are rewarded for total output, not for the amount of nutrients in their crops. “If we want to make our food more nutritious, we should change the incentives,” Loladze says. “We should start paying farmers for quality.”

Research into farmers’ best chances for counteracting the dilution effect remains in its infancy. But scientists from the United Kingdom have hit upon a possible solution for wheat. The scientists identified wheat strains that are especially good at developing a symbiotic relationship with common soil-dwelling fungi. The wheat plants give the fungi some of the carbon dioxide they suck from the air, in exchange for nitrogen and phosphorous, key elements for plant growth. The symbiosis means less reliance on fertilizers—a core driver of climate change—but also potentially less carbon, and thus carbs, diluting the nutrients of the wheat. Sounds like a line of inquiry that the usda should pursue and publicize if its climate denial fever ever breaks.

SOURCE

Greta Thunberg Is the Perfect Hero for an Unserious Time

One of my readers writes: "Greta Thunberg has become the Christ Child of the Environment Religion and is destined to be sacrificed on the cross of Global Warming"

I am slightly apologetic to mention it but the Time man of the year in 1938 was Adolf Hitler. Will Greta be as poorly regarded in decades to come? It's possible. Hitler was a Greenie too. And in future the Global Warmists of the present day may look like dangerous madmen

Who better than a finger-wagging teen bereft of accomplishment, or any comprehension of basic economics or history, to be Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2019? Greta Thunberg’s canonization is a perfect expression of media activism in a deeply unserious time.

Has there ever been a less consequential person picked to be Person of the Year? I doubt it. I mean, Wallis Simpson, 1936’s Person of the Year, got King Edward VIII to abdicate the throne. Thunberg can’t even get you to abdicate your air-conditioning.

These days we celebrate vacuous fire and brimstone. “Greta Thunberg”—the idea, not the girl—is a concoction of activists who have increasingly taken to using children as a shield from critical analysis or debate. She’s the vessel of the environmentalist’s fraudulent apocalypticism-as-argument. Her style is emotion and indignation, histrionics and fantasy. She is a teenager, after all.

How dare you attack a poor defenseless child who suffers from Asperger syndrome!

You’ll notice that, on one hand, Thunberg’s champions demand that the world take her Malthusian crusade seriously, and on the other, they feign indignation when you actually do. The argument that young people, because they will inherit the future, are also best equipped to comprehend it is as puerile as any of Thunberg’s positions.

Perhaps a better question is this: What kind of parents, editors, producers, or U.N. officials would thrust a vulnerable child, with Asperger syndrome, no less, into a complex and contentious debate? I have great sympathy for her. It’s her ideological handlers who have stolen her childhood.

Surely, we should be allowed to consider the positions of Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year? Because the problem with Greta Thunberg—the idea, not the girl—is that she proposes not only that the people of her native Sweden abandon modernity but that billions of people in Asia and Africa remain in destitution. Thunberg, unlike many of her ideological allies, does not hide the truth of modern environmentalism. She believes that wealth and economic growth—modernity—are the problem.

Shamefully, radical environmentalists have convinced Thunberg and millions of others that the world is on the precipice of “mass extinction.” Even poor Prince Harry struggles to get out his Kensington Palace bed and start the day, so crushed is he by the weight of “eco-anxiety.” (You know, I have some ideas on how he might lower his carbon footprint.)

Like Joan of Arc, as Thunberg’s mother tells it, she experienced her first vision in her early teens, going months without eating properly. Thunberg, her heart rate and blood pressure indicating starvation, stopped talking to anyone but her parents and younger sister.

Rather than helping Thunberg overcome this irrational dread, her parents sacrificed her childhood to Gaia. Now, Thunberg is a child warrior, unrestrained by fact or reason, the human embodiment of years of fearmongering—in our schools, in culture, in our news—over progress, technology, and wealth.

Thunberg is merely repeating “unassailable science,” Time claims. “Oceans will rise. Cities will flood. Millions of people will suffer.” The unassailable truth is that climate deaths have plummeted dramatically and billions of people have been lifted from abject poverty by the system that Thunberg assails.

There is no “unassailable science” that tells us how the future looks: what technologies humans will devise, how they will adapt. One imagines a magazine such as Time, which once published pieces about now-discredited predictions of a “population bomb” and global cooling, might understand that the future is always more complicated than we imagine.

The reality is that Thunberg was bequeathed the healthiest, wealthiest, safest, and most peaceful world that humans have ever known. She is one of the luckiest people ever to have lived. And unlike most of her ancestors, she can continue to be a professional activist her entire life, thanks to market economies and emerging technological advances.

In a just world, she would be sailing her high-tech, multimillion-dollar, ocean-racing yacht and crew to the United Nations to thank the United States for helping to create this uniquely wonderful circumstance. In a just world, she would be in school with her friends and teachers.

It’s been years, of course, since Time, or the magazine’s Person of the Year, mattered very much. The truth, though, is that Time did an admirable job of mapping out consequential people of the 20th century. Looking back now, I see a list populated by the men and women, nefarious and heroic, who helped shape the modern world. Sadly, Time has come a long way from “The Hungarian Freedom Fighter,” its choice for Man of the Year in 1957.

If we Americans lived in a more serious time, the Hong Kong freedom fighter, the men and women who risk their lives for liberty, would be Time’s Person of the Year. We don’t.

SOURCE

The dangerous winds of trying to prevent climate change

Inconvenient facts show why wind energy is not renewable, sustainable or climate-friendly

Duggan Flanakin

Wind turbines continue to be the most controversial of so-called “renewable” energy sources worldwide. But, you say, wind is surely renewable. It blows intermittently, but it’s natural, free, renewable and climate-friendly.

That’s certainly what we hear, almost constantly. However, while the wind itself may be “renewable,” the turbines, the raw materials that go into making them, and the lands they impact certainly are not. And a new report says harnessing wind to generate electricity actually contributes to global warming!

Arcadia Power reports that the widely used GE 1.5-megawatt (MW) turbine is a 164-ton mini-monster with 116-foot blades on a 212-foot tower that weighs another 71 tons. The Vestas V90 2.0-MW has 148-foot blades on a 262-foot tower, and a total weight of about 267 tons. The concrete and steel rebar foundations that they sit on weigh up to 800 tons, or more. And the newer 3.0-MW and even more powerful turbines and foundations weigh a lot more than that.

Citing National Renewable Energy Laboratory data, the U.S. Geological Survey notes that wind turbines are predominantly made of steel (which comprises 71-79% of total turbine mass), fiberglass and resin composites in the blades (11-16%), iron or cast iron (5-17%), copper (1%), aluminum (0-2%), rare earth elements (1-3%) and other materials. Plus the concrete and rebar that anchor the turbines in the earth.

It takes enormous amounts of energy (virtually all of it fossil fuels) to remove the overlying rock to get to the ores and limestone, refine and process the materials into usable metals and concrete, fabricate them into all the turbine components, and ship everything to their ultimate locations. Petroleum for the resins and composites – and all that energy – must also be extracted from the earth, by drilling and fracking, followed by refining and manufacturing, again with fossil fuel energy.

Wind turbine transportation logistics can be a deciding factor in scheduling, costing and locating a project, Wind Power Monthly admits. The challenge of moving equipment from factories to ports to ultimate industrial wind power generation sites has become more formidable almost by the year, as the industry has shifted to larger and larger turbines. Offshore turbine sizes (up to 10 megawatts and 650 feet in height) present even more daunting logistical, maintenance and removal challenges.

Back in 2010, transportation costs totaled an average 10% of the upfront capital cost of a wind project. Transporting the nacelles (housings for the energy-generating components, including the shaft, generator and gearing, to which the rotor and blades are attached) typically required a 19-axle truck and trailer that cannot operate using renewable energy and which a decade ago cost about $1.5 million apiece. Those costs have continued to escalate.

Highways and city streets must often be closed down during transport to wind farm sites hundreds, even thousands, of miles away – to allow nacelles, 100-foot tower sections and 150-foot blades to pass through.

Transmission lines and transformers add still more to the costs, and the need for non-renewable materials – including more steel, copper, aluminum and concrete. To get wind-generated energy from largely remote locations to cities that need electricity and are eager to cash in on the 2.3 cent per kilowatt-hour production tax credit, the U.S. is spending $47.9 billion to construct transmission lines through 2025.

Of that, $22.1 billion will be spent on transmission projects aimed at integrating renewable energy into the existing power grid, without making it so unstable that we get repeated blackouts.

On top of all that, wind turbines only last maybe 20 years – about half the life spans of coal, gas and nuclear power plants. Offshore turbines last maybe 12-15 years, due to constant corrosion from constant salt spray. Then they have to be decommissioned and removed. According to Isaac Orr, policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment, the cost of decommissioning a single turbine can reach half a million dollars. Then the old ones have to be replaced – with more raw materials, mining and smelting.

Recycling these materials also consumes considerable energy, when they can be recycled. Turbine blades are extremely hard, if not impossible to recycle, because they are complex composites that are extremely strong and hard to break apart. A lot of times, the blades just get cut up in large segments and dumped in landfills – if they can find landfills that want them. The massive concrete bases often just get left behind.

All these activities require incredible amounts of fossil fuel energy, raw materials, mining lands and waste products (overburden, mined-out rock and processed ores). How much, exactly? The wind energy industry certainly isn’t telling, wind energy promoters and environmentalist groups certainly don’t want to discuss it, and even government agencies haven’t bothered to calculate the amounts.

But shouldn’t those kinds of data be presented front and center during any discussion of what is – or is not – clean, green, free, renewable, sustainable, eco-friendly energy?

We constantly see and hear reports that the cost of wind energy per kilowatt-hour delivered to homes and businesses are becoming competitive with coal, gas, nuclear and hydroelectric alternatives. But if that is the case, why do we still need all the mandates, feed-in tariffs and other subsidies? And do those reports factor in the huge costs and environmental impacts presented here?

Amid all these terribly inconvenient facts about wind energy, it shouldn’t be too surprising that a new study destroys the industry’s fundamental claim: that wind energy helps prevent global warming. Harvard professor of applied physics and public policy David Keith and his postdoctoral researcher, Lee Miller, recently found that heavy reliance on wind energy actually increases climate warming! If this is so, it raises serious questions about just how much the U.S. or other nations should rely on wind power.

As the authors explain, the warming is produced because wind turbines generate electricity by extracting energy out of the air, slowing down wind and otherwise altering “the exchange of heat, moisture, and momentum between the surface and the atmosphere.” The impact of wind on warming in the studied scenario was 10 times greater than the climate effect from solar farms, which can also have a warming impact, the two scientists said.

The study, published in the journal Joule, found that if wind power supplied all U.S. electricity demands, it would warm the surface of the continental United States by 0.24 degree C (0.43 Fahrenheit). That is far more than any reduction in warming achieved by totally decarbonizing the nation’s electricity sector (around 0.1 C or 0.2 F)) during the 21st century – assuming climate models are correct about the amount of warming that carbon dioxide emissions are allegedly causing.

“If your perspective is the next ten years, wind power actually has – in some respects – more climate impact than coal or gas,” says Keith, a huge wind power supporter. But, he added, “If your perspective is the next thousand years, then wind power is enormously cleaner than coal or gas.”

Of course, his analysis assumes significant warming that has yet to occur, despite increasing use of fossil fuels by China, India, Indonesia and other countries. It also assumes the world will still be using increasing amounts of coal and natural gas 100 to 1,000 years from now – a highly dubious proposition. And it ignores every point made in this article, which clearly explains why wind energy is not really cleaner than coal or gas.

Maybe, my friends, the answer is not blowing in the wind.

Via email

UN’s Whopper of Hypocrisy: UN climate activists line up for Burger King at Madrid summit despite UN’s warning on dangers of eating meat

The UN climate summit in Madrid has been hit with a whopper of hypocrisy as delegates and activists attending are lining up daily for hamburgers at the conferences’ onsite Burger King despite the UN warnings that eating meat is not climate-friendly.

UN climate summit attendees devoured the Burger King burgers daily, despite the UN’s loud admonitions on the alleged climate dangers of consuming meat.

Climate Depot was able to confirm that the onsite Burger King at the UN summit DID NOT offer any fake meat alternatives like the Impossible Burger. Burger King only offered real cow meat at the summit location. No fake meat burger available is even more ironic, given that the UN just gave its “Planetary Heath” award to the company responsible for Burger King’s fake meat “Impossible Meat” burgers on December 10.

With solutions like the Impossible Burger, consumers can drive the movement to create a food system consistent with the urgent goals of the Paris Agreement,” said Jessica Appelgren, vice president of communications for Impossible Foods.

The UN climate summit features anti-meat protestors outside the entrance with many messages to urge a halt to meat-eating. But this did not phase the hungry meat-eaters inside.

SOURCE

Australia cops hate at UN climate summit

Australia’s lax approach to climate change has been called out on the final day of the United Nations climate summit in Madrid.

Among other things, Australia has come under fire for resisting proposed future emissions targets and changes to carbon markets.

Escalating tensions, Costa Rica’s environment and energy minister Carlos Manuel Rodríguez outright blamed “Australia, Brazil and the US” for the stalemate.

“Some of the positions are totally unacceptable because they are inconsistent with the commitment and the spirit that we were able to agree upon (in Paris in 2015),” he said.

UN chief Antonio Guterres also warned of a global crisis unless big emitters such as Australia can meet demands. Australia’s reliance on coal-fired power makes it one of the world’s largest carbon emitters per capita.

The summit comes on the heels of countless climate-related disasters across the planet, including unprecedented cyclones, deadly droughts and catastrophic fires.

Along with Costa Rica, Fiji officials have also extensively criticised Australia’s stance.

At the talks, vulnerable countries expressed outrage over Australia’s bid to hold onto piles of emissions vouchers left over from a now-discredited system under the Kyoto Protocol. That approach could potentially allow Australia to meet its climate commitments on paper, without actually reducing pollution.

While Britain, Germany, New Zealand and others have slammed the notion, Australia continues pushing to maintain the loophole.

Asked about Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s recent assertion that his country was part of the “Pacific family,” the Minister for Economy of Fiji responded that “when you have family members you also have some black sheep members too in the family.”

“At the moment, it would seem that they appear to be far from eating at the same table,” Aiyaz Sayed Khaiyum told reporters in Madrid, adding that he hoped Australia would “let go of their current position.”

Small, low-lying islands like Fiji are particularly vulnerable to tropical storms and sea-level rise worsened by climate change.

Nations are also at odds over how the fight against climate change should be funded and how carbon trading schemes should be regulated.

In addition, there has been little progress over the issue of “loss and damage” – how countries already dealing with the worst impacts of climate-related extreme weather and drought should be compensated.

Amid growing calls for action to address climate change, the Prime Minister was forced to address it earlier this week. The recent release of the 2020 Climate Change Performance Index - which looks at national climate action internationally - deemed the Morrison government a “regressive force”, saying the re-elected Morrison government “has continued to worsen performance at both national and international levels”.

Asked about that report during a press conference, Mr Morrison said he “completely rejects” it. Asked to elaborate, he only said, “Because I don’t think it’s credible” before moving on to another question.

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 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

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

13 December, 2019

Greenland ice melt 'is accelerating,' new study reveals

Until someone of a different religion checks these calculations, we cannot be sure how accurate they are. And why was a 26 year period chosen? You can prove almost anything by choosing your starting and finishing dates carefully.

But we don't actually need to ask such questions. The key question is: what does it prove? Even if the findings are perfectly accurate, what do they prove? Precisely nothing.

To the monomaniacs of the Green/Left, there can be only one cause of the melt -- global warming. But what if there are other influences behind the melting? And there are. There have been increasing findings in recent years of subsurface vucanism in Greenland. Putting it plainly, the most likely cause of the melt is volcanic activity, not global warming. You too would melt if you had a volcano under your bottom.

How sad for the Green/Left! Reality will just NOT co-operate with their simplistic notions

The Greenland ice sheet's losses have accelerated dramatically since the 1990s and it's now losing more than seven times as much ice per year, according to a new study.

The new assessment comes from an international group of 89 scientists that reviewed satellite observations over a 26-year period.

According to their research, published Tuesday in the journal Nature, Greenland's contribution to overall sea-level rise is now tracking at what had been seen as a pessimistic projection of the future.

This means an additional 7 centimeters (2.7 inches) of ocean rise could be expected by the end of the century just from Greenland, experts say.

"The simple formula is that around the planet, six million people are brought into a flooding situation for every centimeter of sea-level rise. So, when you hear about a centimeter rise, it does have an impact," Andy Shepherd, of Leeds University, told BBC News.

The group of scientists reanalyzed data from 11 satellite missions flown from 1992 to 2018 — looking at repeat measurements of the ice sheet's thickness, flow and gravity, BBC News reports.

Greenland, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, is the world's largest island. The gigantic ice sheet that covers the island is over a mile thick at the center.

SOURCE

Another Round of Energy Pork

Christmas is upon us, and the elves are busy in the North Pole suburb of Capitol Hill. The House has produced a draft piece of “green energy” legislation that would yield massive costs, massive economic distortions and massive environmental damage.

Rep. Mike Thompson, D-California, justifies his “Growing Renewable Energy and Efficiency Now (GREEN) Act,” as “a comprehensive approach to addressing the threat of climate change through our tax code.”

Put aside the fact that there is no evidence — none — that there is a climate “crisis” to be addressed. Instead, nowhere have the supporters presented an actual estimate of the “climate” effect of this ostensible effort to achieve “net zero” U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050.

Applying the climate model used by the Environmental Protection Agency, under assumptions that exaggerate the effects of reduced emissions: 0.17 degree Celsius by 2100. Under assumptions more consistent with the recent scientific literature: 0.08 degree Celsius.

So much for the “climate” rationale for this bill. Instead, the legislation is a blatant pork-barrel exercise for innumerable interest groups. In its most important provisions, it would:

—Extend the wind production tax credit through 2024.

—Make permanent the solar investment tax credit, at a declining rate.

—Extend the investment tax credit until 2026 to a variety of energy sources that were excluded from the 2015 tax deal.

—Extend the investment tax credit at a declining rate to batteries and various other technologies at least through 2026.

—Renew a number of lapsed incentives for biofuels until 2024.

—Extend and revise the sales limit for the electric vehicle tax credit by raising the current 200,000-vehicle-per-manufacturer sales cap to 600,000, while reducing the credit from $7,500 to $7,000.

—Implement a new credit for purchases of used plug-in EVs through 2024, with buyers able to claim a base credit of $1,250 for qualifying used vehicles. The credit would be limited to the lesser of $2,500 or 30 percent of the sale price.

—Implement a new manufacturer credit through 2024 for the sale of “heavy zero emission vehicles,” defined as those powered “solely by an electric motor which draws electricity from a battery or fuel cell.”

One searches in vain for a cost estimate for all this political largesse. Instead, amusingly, the summary of the bill states that the “Revenue raisers” are “To be provided.” Note that the tax revenues needed to “pay” in the federal budget for all the tax expenditures in the bill are not the correct analytic issue; instead, it is the cost of the bill to the economy that matters, however difficult it is to measure.

That true economic cost is at least double the revenues lost as a result of the various tax credits and incentives, because of the economic distortions (“excess burden”) created by them.

Nor have the proponents mentioned the environmental damage from unconventional energy. Because the energy content of wind and sunlight is unconcentrated, land use both massive and unsightly is necessary for a renewables system. The production process for wind turbines, apart from the use of large quantities of steel, concrete and other such straightforward industrial materials, requires also significant amounts of such toxic heavy metals as neodymium and dysprosium for the magnets, for the most part produced in China, where environmental controls are hardly stringent.

The disposal problem for wind turbines’ blades and magnets only now is beginning to be recognized. The noise and light-flicker effects of wind turbines are a serious problem that siting arrangements can solve only partially. There is no easy solution for the disposal of solar panel waste — as much as 78 million metric tons worldwide by 2050 — because of the lead, cadmium, chromium and other toxic metals that are released if the panels are broken during the disposal process. And there is the large amount of wildlife destruction attendant upon the operation of wind farms and solar fields.

Because of the unreliability of wind and solar power, the conventional backup units must be cycled up and down depending on whether the renewable units are producing power. That cycling reduces the operating efficiency of the backup units, increasing net emissions of conventional pollutants, and increasing greenhouse gas emissions under a broad range of conditions.

This legislation is a classic example of Beltway pork-barrel chicanery, justified on the basis of half-truths and worse, with actual effects diametrically in conflict with those advertised. It is a wealth redistribution special-interest bonanza with the costs inflicted upon the great mass of the unsuspecting citizenry. It should be rejected, loudly.

SOURCE

Isle Of Man Seabird Populations Plummet As Wind Farms Overwhelm The Irish Sea

The Isle Of Man wildlife charity Manx Birdlife has reported a shocking 40% decline in the populations of many species of sea birds around the island's coast.

The worrying figures emerged following a comprehensive census that took place over two years. Whatever the reason for the sharp decline of the birds, it illustrates that something has gone very wrong.

I've noted with interest that this unprecedented drop in populations, of several of the island's maritime species, coincides with the proliferation of wind farms in the Irish Sea - something which has worried me during the past few years, as I have witnessed the frenzied development of the wind industry in the waters off the western coasts of England and Wales.

We know that offshore turbines kill birds and bats, though it is almost impossible to estimate the number of casualties because there are no retrievable carcasses to count at sea....

It is also highly likely that wind farms adversely affect many marine mammals.

The world's largest offshore wind farm is now in operation off the Cumbrian coast at Walney, just 40 miles or so from the Isle of Man, and, with the news that nearby bird populations are in free-fall, we must seriously ask whether the huge turbines might be killing more birds than we ever anticipated.

The Isle of Man study was, ironically, partly supported by the Walney Extension Offshore Wind Farm Project. How paradoxical would it be to find that the project itself, with its giant 640 feet turbines, was responsible for the plummeting numbers of sea birds.

The report is full of depressing statistics. Herring Gulls are down 82%, European Shag down 51%, Razorbills down 55%. The list goes on.

I've been increasingly concerned at the feverish pace of industrial offshore wind farm development in this country and especially in the Irish Sea. Such a high density of turbines in a confined area - an area renowned for its wildlife - has been watched with dismay by many environmentalists, especially since large parts of the sea have been designated Marine Protected Areas (MPA's), supposedly limiting the scale of industrial development in precious areas that provide important habitat for so many species.

Alas, development has been allowed in vast parts of the sea that fall just outside the protected zones - and there have even been hints that the MPA's themselves may not be off limit for future wind farm expansion. Last year, a report carried out for the Welsh government suggested that "this protection may not necessarily be a major barrier to new projects" - which sounds shockingly irresponsible to me.

Though the Isle Of Man currently has none of its own offshore wind farms, their government is reportedly close to approving industrial wind development off the island's coast as early as next year. Such plans might seriously threaten the survival of species already struggling to cope with the industrialisation of their habitat.

Wind energy companies might flaunt their green ideologies for all to see - but their industry nevertheless hides a grim reality. Their 'green' energy kills wildlife.

SOURCE

The Incredible Story Of How Climate Change Became Apocalyptic

Roger Pielke

In recent years the issue of climate change has taken a decidedly apocalyptic turn. Earlier this week United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned, “If we don’t urgently change our way of life, we jeopardize life itself.” A group of scientists writes that we “might already have lost control” over “tipping points” in the Earth’s climate, warning that the “stability and resilience of our planet is in peril.”

It’s true that apocalyptic narratives have always had a place in discussions of climate. In 1989 the United Nations warned that the world had “a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.” But the escalation of apocalyptic climate rhetoric in recent years is unprecedented. The drumbeat of doom has led some prominent figures to turn on the mainstream climate community, complaining that “climate scientists have been underestimating the rate of climate change and the severity of its effects.” In reality, climate science has not just accurately anticipated unfolding climate change, but has done so consistently for the past 50 years.

There is thus an inconsistency here. Discussions of climate change have become more apocalyptic, but climate science has not. I have been working hard to understand this inconsistency, and while I don’t yet have all the answers, I have identified a big part of the puzzle, which I can report here for the first time.

Discussions of climate change are directly and indirectly shaped by the work of experts who work under the umbrella of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC. The IPCC was established in the 1980s to assess and summarize climate science to inform policy makers, and since then has produced five major assessment reports, along with periodic topical assessments.

I have testified before the U.S. Congress on multiple occasions on the critical importance of the IPCC. The IPCC plays such an important role that if it didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. Research on climate change results in a large and varied literature that would be impossible to comprehend without expert assessments like those of the IPCC. The IPCC thus serves a crucial role at the intersection of science and policy.

I have argued for decades about the importance of policies to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions and the need to better adapt to climate variability and change. But effective policy making is presently threatened by the apocalyptic turn in the climate debate.

Decisions made within the IPCC have contributed to the apocalyptic turn in discussions of climate, moving us away from constructive discussions, scaring children and contributing to overheated rhetoric. To understand the role of the IPCC in in recent rise of climate doom requires understanding how the body performs its assessments.

Underpinning everything that the IPCC does in its scientific assessments are scenarios of the future. Such scenarios are used to project future climate change, to project the impacts of such change on society and the environment, and to project the costs and benefits of mitigation action intended to reduce those impacts.

In order to produce such projections, in its scenarios the IPCC has long differentiated between “baseline scenarios” of the future which describe where the world is headed in the absence of climate policies and “mitigation scenarios” which describe a world where climate policies are put into place. Baseline scenarios are often referred to as “business as usual.”

The rise of the new climate apocalysm can be traced directly to an consequential but little appreciated change in how the IPCC presents its scenarios. The consequences of this change have reverberated through the scientific community, media reporting, policy discussions and civic advocacy.

Almost two decades ago the IPCC developed a set of scenarios as the basis for integrating the work of its three working groups on science, impacts and mitigation. The scenarios were created to serve as the basis for projecting future climate change, the impacts of climate change and the consequences of mitigation action. Such coordination across the assessment work of the IPCC makes obvious sense.

At the time the IPCC recognized that “the future is inherently unpredictable and so views will differ as to which of the storylines and representative scenarios could be more or less likely. Therefore, the development of a single "best guess" or "business-as-usual" scenario is neither desirable nor possible.” Based on this perspective, the IPCC developed a set of scenarios for our collective futures but did not identify any of them as more probable than another, explaining that, “the term “business-as-usual” may be misleading” and “most climate scenarios considered in this report can be regarded as exploratory.”

The result of this approach was that projected futures in the absence of climate policies encompassed a very wide range of possible outcomes. The fourth assessment report of the IPCC published in 2007 acknowledged this wide range of futures, “There is still a large span of [carbon dioxide] emissions across baseline scenarios in the literature, with emissions in 2100 ranging from 10 GtCO2 [billion tons of carbon dioxide] to around 250 GtCO2.”

In other words, when it came to carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and the associated climate consequences, the long-term future included possibilities that spanned from the highly optimistic (the 10 billion ton scenario) to the highly pessimistic (the 250 billion ton scenario), and everything in between. Climate change was not necessarily apocalyptic, but possibly could be if we made decisions leading to bad outcomes.

An enormously consequential change in approach occurred from the forth IPCC assessment report in 2007 to the its fifth in 2013. The IPCC abandoned its earlier acknowledgement of fundamental uncertainties and ignorance about the future and instead fully endorsed the notion of choosing a “business as usual” scenario for the future. The “business as usual” scenario adopted by the fifth IPCC assessment was associated with one of its most extreme scenarios of the future.

The fifth IPCC assessment report states that while future greenhouse gas emissions were uncertain, “between 1970 and 2010, emissions increased 79%, from 27 Gt of [greenhouse gases] to over 49 Gt [billion tons]. Business-as-usual would result in that rate continuing.” An increase of that rate to 2100 would result in 189 billion tons of greenhouse gases being emitted at the end of the century, which is in the 99th percentile of all scenarios included in the database of reference scenarios of the fifth assessment report.

The fifth assessment report went further and explicitly identified a subset of reference scenarios that characterized where the IPCC believe the world was heading in the absence of climate policies. The IPCC fifth assessment report’s range of 2100 carbon dioxide emissions for “business as usual” is 50 GtCO2 to 106 GtCO2 (which it describes as the 10% to 90% percentiles of its scenario database). The report went further and identified a single scenario as “business as usual” with 2100 carbon dioxide emissions of more than 80 billion tons of carbon dioxide (this scenario is called RCP 8.5).

From the IPCC’s fourth to fifth assessment report our collective future, as envisioned by the IPCC, changed dramatically. The world was no longer heading for a wide range of possible futures, conditioned on enormous uncertainties, but instead was heading with some certainty toward a future characterized by an extreme level of carbon dioxide emissions. Quantitatively, futures with less than 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2100 simply disappeared from the IPCC reference scenarios and the focus was placed on a “business as usual” scenario of more than 80 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2100.

The apocalypse had been scheduled.

The decision by the IPCC to center its fifth assessment report on its most extreme scenario has been incredibly consequential. Thousands of academic studies of the future impacts of climate change followed the lead of the IPCC, and have emphasized the most extreme scenario as “business as usual” which is often interpreted and promoted as where the world is heading. For instance, so far in 2019 two new academic studies have been published every day that present this most extreme scenario as “business as usual” and predict extreme future impacts. Journalists promote these sensationalist findings, which are amplified by activists and politicians and as a consequence climate change becomes viewed as being more and more apocalyptic.

The problem with the extreme “business as usual” scenario of the IPCC’s fifth assessment report is that it is already out of date. For 2020 the scenario wildly overstates emissions, and has been critiqued in the academic literature as a highly unlikely if not impossible future. The International Energy Agency has proposed scenarios for the next several decades that diverge greatly from the favored scenario of the IPCC. It is of course possible that the world will collectively choose to emit massive quantities of carbon dioxide, which would require a massive increase in coal burning. But that scenario is certainly not preordained, and other futures are certainly possible.

Remarkably, the IPCC is set to repeat its reliance on extreme scenarios as “business as usual” in its forthcoming sixth assessment report, even though these scenarios are already out of date.

I will have much more to say on this subject in coming columns, as this topic is an active focus of my research. The bottom line for today is to understand that a fateful decision by the IPCC to selectively anoint an extreme scenario from among a huge range of possible futures has helped to create the climate apocalypse, a scary but imaginary future.

SOURCE

Widespread electrical blackout in central Australia caused by...clouds

The danger of reliance on electrical generation power sources that can suddenly surge or diminish the way wind and solar energy do was highlighted by a major blackout that left central Australia and the "major" town of Alice Springs without electricity for up to nine hours. Yesterday, two top energy officials in the Northern Territory lost their jobs over the fiasco:

The Northern Territory Labor government has sacked the territory's two most senior energy chiefs following a damming report from the market regulator into a "system black" event that hit the city of Alice Springs in October.

Tim Duignan, the CEO of Territory Generation, and Michael Thompson, the head of network operator and systems control company Power and Water Corporation were both sacked after the government received a report from the Utilities Commission into the outage, which affected 12,000 customers for between 30 minutes and 10 hours.

It seems clear that this is not a problem about technology — despite some trying to sheet the blame on the amount of rooftop solar in the local grid and the impact of passing clouds — but of corporate and energy culture. And of incompetence.

An investigating report by consultants Entura — requested by the Utilities Commission — found that staff managing the system did not anticipate the approaching cloud cover, and did not know what to do when they realised what was happening and output from the Uterne solar farm and rooftop solar panels declined.

Who could anticipate clouds?

Seriously, anyone with a brain — which is why solar and wind power installations require backup generators that come into use only when unexpected events like clouds or low winds happen. But that requires maintaining the backup systems:

Thermal generators failed because they had not been properly maintained, and the staff had no idea how to re-start the machinery, because procedures had not been updated since the installation of a big battery. To cap things off, there was insufficient spinning reserve and the system was unstable.

As Australian blogger JoNova comments: "Welcome to the new complexified energy grid, where a cloud can cause a system black event."

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 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

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

12 December, 2019

Madrid and Lessons From Three Decades Of Failed Climate Policy

by Judith Curry

The UN Climate Conference (COP25) is beginning today in Madrid. I’ve been invited to write an op-ed for a newspaper in Madrid, which I assume will be published sometime this week (in Spanish). Below is the text of my op-ed.

JC op-ed

The UN Climate Change Conference this week in Madrid provides an important opportunity to reflect on state of the public debate surrounding climate change.

Most of the world’s governments are prioritizing energy security, affordability and industrial competitiveness over commitments made for the Paris climate agreement. Even if these countries were on track to meet their commitments, a majority of the national pledges are totally insufficient to meet the Paris targets. At the same time, we are hearing increasingly shrill rhetoric from Extinction Rebellion and other activists about the ‘existential threat’ of the ‘climate crisis’, ‘runaway climate chaos’, etc.

There is a growing realization that Paris climate agreement is inadequate for making a meaningful dent in slowing down the anticipated warming. And the real societal consequences of climate change and extreme weather events remain largely unaddressed.

How have we arrived at this point? For the past three decades, the climate policy ‘cart’ has been way out in front of the scientific ‘horse’. The 1992 Climate Change treaty was signed by 190 countries before the balance of scientific evidence suggested even a discernible observed human influence on global climate. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was implemented before we had any confidence that most of the recent warming was caused by humans. There has been tremendous political pressure on the scientists to present findings that would support these treaties, which has resulted in a drive to manufacture a scientific consensus on the dangers of manmade climate change.

Fossil fuel emissions as the climate ‘control knob’ is a simple and seductive idea. However this is a misleading oversimplification, since climate can shift naturally in unexpected ways. Apart from uncertainties in future emissions, we are still facing a factor of 3 or more uncertainty in the sensitivity of the Earth’s temperature to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We have no idea how natural climate variability (solar, volcanoes, ocean circulations) will play out in the 21st century, and whether or not natural variability will dominate over manmade warming.

We still don’t have a realistic assessment of how a warmer climate will impact us and whether it is ‘dangerous.’ We don’t have a good understanding of how warming will influence extreme weather events. Land use and exploitation by humans is a far bigger issue than climate change for species extinction and ecosystem health. Local sea level rise has many causes, and is dominated by sinking from land use in many of the most vulnerable locations.

We have been told that the science of climate change is ‘settled’. However, in climate science there has been a tension between the drive towards a scientific ‘consensus’ to support policy making, versus exploratory research that pushes forward the knowledge frontier. Climate science is characterized by a rapidly evolving knowledge base and disagreement among experts. Predictions of 21st century climate change are characterized by deep uncertainty.

Nevertheless, activist scientists and the media seize upon each extreme weather event as having the fingerprints of manmade climate change — ignoring the analyses of more sober scientists showing periods of even more extreme weather in the first half of the 20th century, when fossil fuel emissions were much smaller.

Alarming press releases are issued about each new climate model prediction of future catastrophes from famine, mass migrations, catastrophic fires, etc. Yet, these press releases don’t mention that these predicted catastrophes are associated with highly implausible assumptions about how much we might actually emit over the course of the 21st century. Further, issues such as famine, mass migrations and wildfires are caused primarily by government policies and ineptitude, lack of wealth and land use policies. Climate change matters, but it’s outweighed by other factors in terms of influencing human well being.

We have been told that climate change is an ‘existential crisis.’ However, based upon our current assessment of the science, the climate threat is not an existential one, even in its most alarming hypothetical incarnations. However, the perception of manmade climate change as a near-term apocalypse and has narrowed the policy options that we’re willing to consider.

We have not only oversimplified the problem of climate change, but we have also oversimplified its ‘solution’. Even if you accept the climate model projections and that warming is dangerous, there is disagreement among experts regarding whether a rapid acceleration away from fossil fuels is the appropriate policy response. In any event, rapidly reducing emissions from fossil fuels and ameliorating the adverse impacts of extreme weather events in the near term increasingly looks like magical thinking.

Climate change – both manmade and natural – is a chronic problem that will require centuries of management.

The extreme rhetoric of the Extinction Rebellion and other activists is making political agreement on climate change policies more difficult. Exaggerating the dangers beyond credibility makes it difficult to take climate change seriously. The monomaniacal focus on elimination of fossil fuel emissions distracts our attention from the primary causes of many of our problems and effective solutions.

Common sense strategies to reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events, improve environmental quality, develop better energy technologies, improve agricultural and land use practices, and better manage water resources can pave the way for a more prosperous and secure future. Each of these solutions is ‘no regrets’ – supporting climate change mitigation while improving human well being. These strategies avoid the political gridlock surrounding the current policies and avoid costly policies that will have minimal near-term impacts on the climate. And finally, these strategies don’t require agreement about the risks of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions.

We don’t know how the climate of the 21st century will evolve, and we will undoubtedly be surprised. Given this uncertainty, precise emissions targets and deadlines are scientifically meaningless. We can avoid much of the political gridlock by implementing common sense, no-regrets strategies that improve energy technologies, lift people out of poverty and make them more resilient to extreme weather events.

SOURCE

Skeptical Climate ‘Talking Points’ 36-Page Report Released at UN Climate Summit in Madrid

Selected Excerpts:

INTRODUCTION: Global warming hype and hysteria continue to dominate the news media, academia, schools, the United Nations, and the U.S. government. The Green New Deal being pushed on Capitol Hill and in the 2020 presidential race is based upon “solving” an alleged “climate crisis.”

Teen school-skipping climate activists are testifying to the U.S. Congress and the United Nations and young children are being recruited for lawsuits against the U.S. government for its alleged climate “inaction.” The phrase ‘climate emergency’ has emerged as the favorite for climate campaigners.

But the arguments put forth by global warming advocates grossly distort the true facts on a host of issues, ranging from rising sea levels and record temperatures to melting polar caps and polar bears, among others. In short, there is no “climate crisis” or a “climate emergency.”

The UN, climate activists, the media, and academia are using the climate scare as an opportunity to lobby for their alleged “solutions” which require massive government expansion and central planning.

This talking points memo is designed to arm people with the voices of the rising number of scientists, the latest data, peer-reviewed studies on key facts so they can better engage in climate change debate with those advocating the UN/Al Gore/Green New Deal positions.

The global warming movement has morphed into a coalition of “climate cause deniers.” They deny the hundreds of causes and variables that influence climate change and instead try to pretend that carbon dioxide is the climate “control knob” overriding all the others factors and they pretend that every bad weather even it somehow “proof” of their “global warming.”

Footnotes and weblinks are provided to source material in this document.

…

Claims of an alleged “97% consensus” of scientists are “pulled from thin air”

Despite former Vice President Al Gore’s claim in 2019 that “It’s beyond consensus of 99 percent of the scientists,” the facts say otherwise. There is absolutely no scientific “consensus” about catastrophic man-made climate change. Claims that 97 or 99 percent of scientists agree are not backed up by any “credible” study or poll.

UN IPCC lead author Dr. Richard Tol: “The 97% is essentially pulled from thin air, it is not based on any credible research whatsoever.”

Princeton Professor Emeritus of Physics William Happer in 2017 drew parallels to the “consensus” on witches. “I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the consensus on climate change and the consensus on witches. At the witch trials in Salem the judges were educated at Harvard. This was supposedly 100 percent science. The one or two people who said there were no witches were immediately hung. Not much has changed,” Happer quipped.

…

CO2 is not the “control knob” of the climate

There is a lack of connection between higher levels of CO2 and warming. During the Ice Age, CO2 levels were 10 times higher than they are today.

There are many, many factors which impact climate – including volcanoes, wind oscillations, solar activity, ocean cycles, volcanoes, tilt of the Earth’s axis, and land use. CO2 is just one factor, and not the control knob of the climate.

University of Pennsylvania geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack has declared, “CO2 is not the villain that it has been portrayed.”

Today’s levels of roughly 400 parts per million (PPM) of CO2 are not alarming. In geologic terms, today’s CO2 levels are among the lowest in earth’s history.

“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. Its scientific nonsense,” University of London professor emeritus Philip Stott has noted.

…

There is no “climate emergency”

Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer, a former Trump Science Advisor ripped the claims of a “climate emergency” in 2019. “We are here [at the UN climate summit in Madrid] under false pretenses, wasting our time talking about a non-existent ‘climate emergency.’” Happer explained from Madrid. “It’s hard to understand how much further the shrillness can go as this started out as ‘global warming’ then it was ‘climate change’ or ‘global weirding’, ‘climate crisis’, ‘climate emergency’. What next? But stick around it will happen. I hope sooner or later enough people recognize the holiness of this bizarre environmental cult and bring it to an end.”

Go Socialist or Die!? The Age of the ‘Climate Emergency’ – UN, Universities, Cities, & Now Congress?! to declare ‘Climate Emergency’ – Gore & Streisand helped pioneer phrase

University of Colorado’s Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. explained how the UN helped shape the hysterical nonsense of a ‘climate emergency.” The UN IPCC switched to “extreme scenarios” in the most recent report and thus “helped to create the climate apocalypse, a scary but imaginary future,” Pielke explained in 2019.

SOURCE

Exxon Found 'Not Guilty' in Politically Motivated Climate Change Suit

The state of New York sued American oil giant Exxon Mobile for withholding the "true costs" of climate change from investors. In fact, the charges used to be much broader when the suit was filed by the New York attorney general 4 years ago. At that time, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman claimed that Exxon knew about the impact of climate change but failed to inform shareholders.

But even the reduced charges didn't fly with the judge. New York Supreme Court Justice Barry Ostrager not only ruled that Exxon did not mislead investors, but that the AG office lied about producing investors as witnesses who had actually been harmed by the company's "lies."

CNBC:

“The Office of the Attorney General failed to prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that ExxonMobil made any material misstatements or omissions about its practices and procedures that misled any reasonable investor,” Ostrager wrote in his ruling.

“The office of the Attorney General produced no testimony from any investor who claimed to have been misled by any disclosure, even though the Office of the Attorney General had previously represented it would call such individuals as trial witnesses,” he added.

Not proving that any investor had been materially harmed by Exxon's actions was critical. It basically meant that the state had absolutely no grounds to bring the suit in the first place.

The $1.6 billion suit brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James alleged that Exxon deceived investors about the true cost of climate change. The trial, which began in October and was the first climate fraud suit to go to trial, was the result of a four-year investigation.

“Today’s ruling affirms the position ExxonMobil has held throughout the New York Attorney General’s baseless investigation,” Exxon spokesperson Casey Norton said in a statement. “We provided our investors with accurate information on the risks of climate change. The court agreed that the Attorney General failed to make a case, even with the extremely low threshold of the Martin Act in its favor,” he added.

The AG was aided by anti-fossil fuel groups and contingency-fee lawyers who helped trump up the charges against Exxon.

When he took the stand on Oct. 30, former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson said that the company tried to understand the impact of climate change, and tried to accurately communicate this impact to shareholders. Exxon said the case was misleading and politically motivated, and the result of a coordinated effort by anti-fossil fuel groups.

“Lawsuits that waste millions of dollars of taxpayer money do nothing to advance meaningful actions that reduce the risks of climate change. ExxonMobil will continue to invest in researching breakthrough technologies to reduce emissions while meeting society’s growing demand for energy,” Norton added.

The legal fight to force fossil fuel companies out of business is just starting. There are dozens of similar lawsuits brought by other states and cities as well as liability suits brought by class action lawyers. This is lawfare writ large and it remains to be seen how successful any of them will be.

SOURCE

Global warning: Facts are facing extinction

Andrew Bolt, writing from Australia

CHILD messiah Greta Thunberg was excited: "500,000 people marched in Madrid last night ... The world is slowly waking up to the climate and environmental crisis."

No, what the world should be waking up to this: Facts are now dead. Rarely have I seen newspapers report exaggerations on the scale I saw after the weekend rally by global warming hysterics, many of them young: "Organisers claimed 500,000 people turned out for the march, but authorities in Madrid put the number at 15,000."

The Washington Post, puzzled, added that there was "no immediate explanation for the disparity in the count". But there is. It's that facts no longer count. What counts is the myth. That's why Thunberg is today's great goddess, treated as an oracle by the United Nations.

She's just 16, refuses to go to school, claims her Asperger's is a "superpower", and is ascribed such mystical powers that her mother even claims "she can see carbon dioxide with the naked eye ... how it flows out of chimneys".

Here is a symbol of a new invincible ignorance — a refusal to even engage with facts and arguments. No wonder Thunberg particularly inspires children, the least educated and most dogmatic.

But this giddy disregard for facts now infects even the smartest adults. Take Therese Rein, who is not just the wife of former prime minister Kevin Rudd, but a very rich businesswoman. Even she joined in blaming Prime Minister Scott Morrison for the NSW bushfires, tweeting. "Parts of NSW on fire at least in part because your party has blocked, and also not initiated, effective climate change policies ... Time to repent"

Time to repent? That's the hot language of faith, not the cool of reason. The science is clear. Morrison can do nothing to change the world's climate and stop fires. Australia is just too small to make a difference.

Rein and other critics such as Malcolm Turnbull are plainly irrational to suggest Morrison could dial down some giant thermostat. Is there any point in also showing that the fires aren't caused by global warming, and that a recent NASA study shows fires are now burning less land, not more?

No, facts have lost their power ever since postmodernism conquered our universities and reassured the stupid they were mere social constructs. Even conspiracies.

To mention facts now is no longer to bring light into darkness, but to set fire to your reputation.

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail" of 9 December, 2019

'We've had bushfires in Australia for 60,000 years': Mark Latham slams State environment minister for breaking rank and blaming fires on climate change

One Nation state leader Mark Latham has slammed the NSW Environment Minister for blaming extreme weather conditions, bushfires and smoke clouds on climate change.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian has refused to be drawn into a climate debate for the length of the fire season, but her Environment Minister Matt Kean on Tuesday said 'no-one can deny' climate change is to blame. Mr Kean was a speaker at the Smart Energy Summit in Sydney on Tuesday, as the Sydney basin was choked by thick, grey smoke.

But Mr Latham told 2GB's Steve Price the comments were 'opportunistic' and didn't take into account Australia's long history with extreme weather. 'In Australia, we've had bushfires for 60,000 years,' he said.

'We've had fires in Sydney before... to be making a political argument relevant to the minister's portfolio defies the proper respect for firefighters themselves,' he said.

Mr Price agreed with the argument, telling listeners he 'couldn't believe' the comments when he heard them. 'What does climate change have to do with arsonists lighting fires?,' he asked.

'What does science say about governments who haven't built a dam in decades and have screwed up water policy to the point where there is no water policy?'

The air quality in the harbour city was 11 times more than what is considered as a hazardous level. The state's health authorities warned the 'grotty' smoke pollution was a recipe for severe illness.

Particulate readings of 778 for PM2.5 in Mona Vale on the city's north-east coast meant the suburb had the highest reported pollution levels in the world on Tuesday morning. By comparison, Shanghai had a PM2.5 level of 188 while Hong Kong had a reading of just 135 at midday.

Mr Kean said the weather patterns were 'exactly what scientists warned would happen,' Sydney Morning Herald reported. 'We need to reduce our carbon emissions immediately, and we need to adapt our practices to deal with this kind of weather becoming the new normal,' Mr Kean said.

He commented on the low visibility in the harbour city on Tuesday, where it was so low that Sydney ferries were forced to stop running, while smoke infiltrated train stations and set off fire alarms, causing havoc for the public transport system.

Despite Mr Kean's comments, Premier Berejiklian again wouldn't draw any links between the weather and climate change.

'The smoke blanketing Sydney is simply shocking,' Ms Berejiklian said. 'I urge everyone to please follow the advice given by our health experts. Even if you are not directly affected, chances are someone close to you is.'

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 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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11 December, 2019

Explaining Extreme Events from a Climate Perspective

Just one little word sinks the boat. Rubric below. As Luther said long ago in a famous hymn: ein Wörtlein kann ihn fällen. And note that Luther was talking about the Devil.

These galoots know that what they are attempting to do is impossible. They have not nearly got the data they need to arrive at firm conclusions

This BAMS special report presents assessments of how human-caused climate change MAY have affected the strength and likelihood of individual extreme events.

The desiccating Four Corners drought, intense heat waves on the Iberian peninsula and in northeast Asia, exceptional precipitation in the Mid-Atlantic states, and record-low sea ice in the Bering Sea were 2018 extreme weather events made more likely by human-caused climate change, according to new research published today in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS).

The eighth edition of the report, Explaining Extreme Events in 2018 from a Climate Perspective, presents 21 new peer-reviewed analyses of extreme weather across five continents and one sea during 2018. It features the research of 121 scientists from 13 countries looking at both historical observations and model simulations to determine whether and by how much climate change may have influenced particular extreme events.

SOURCE

COP 25: Climate Alarmists wage a war of words, but where’s the beef?

Looking back, the climate alarmist’s movement started with Al Gore’s 2007 movie when he proclaimed the eminent extinction of the polar bears due to global warming. Since the population of polar bears has blossomed over the last decade, we’ve yet to hear another word from Al Gore on that subject.

The doomsday forecasters are now grasping at new names to rebrand the movement. What was once global warming, is now climate change, climate disaster, global meltdown, climate collapse, scorched earth, climate emergency, and the latest movement, “we don’t have time”. Like Gore’s initial predictions, all the tweets lack the basis for their dismal projections.

The parents of millennials may remember from the late 1950’s this best-known quote “Just the facts, ma’am.” from Sgt. Joe Friday with the TV series Dragnet. A few decades later there was Clara Peller who was a manicurist and American character actress who, at the age of 81, starred in the 1984 “Where’s the beef?” advertising campaign for the Wendy’s fast food restaurant chain.

The short emotional tweets from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) with 5.9 million followers, Greta Thunberg with 3 million followers, Al Gore’s 3.1 million followers, Tom Steyer’s 250 thousand followers, and Jane Fonda’s 500 thousand followers, all bumble about the doomsday that’s coming.

The tweets are void of any “beef or facts” as to what’s going to cause this forthcoming demise. They tweet rhetorical questions and emotional statements, and the millions of followers being brainwashed with scaremongering dogma slurp it up, as environmentalism has become the new religion.

The alarmism over global warming, climate change, etc., is at the forefront of these tweeted fear tactics, but when such alarmist conclusions are openly rebutted, the rebutters are being besieged with oratory that 97 percent of “all” scientists, and even the non-scientific community of 175+ organizations active on climate change believe mankind has played a role in changing the earth’s climate.

I have two problems with that 97 percent claim, 1) common sense tells us that no large group of people on our planet could ever reach 97 percent agreement on anything, even the world being round, and 2) shockingly, none of the scientists of the 97 seem to have a name, it’s just a holistic group of no-names!

It seems that none of these “97” are able to “talk” specifically about selective microscopic sound bites from vast data that are the supposedly the basis of these dire warnings about time running out and the idea of a 12-year deadline for the annihilation of life as we currently know it.

Of the almost 8 billion people living on this planet, we know that 80% of them, or more than 6 billion, are living on less than $10 a day. Obviously, those poor in underdeveloped countries cannot afford to subsidize themselves out of a paper bag and continue to use what’s readily available – coal.

It must be the other 20 percent of the population, or about 1.6 billion, in developed countries that are the targets of these climate alarmists rebranding efforts. The tweeters are promoting a global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.

Yet, it’s that same 20% that have come out of poverty in the last one hundred years as a result of what those deep earth mineral and fuels have provided society, enhancing their lives and improving their standard of living. Basically, the same fossil fuels that are being deprived from the other 80 percent that now live in abject poverty with no hope of reaping the benefits of what prosperous societies are enjoying.

The folks in prosperous societies that have embraced and increased their production of fossil energy have been amply rewarded with greater economic development and growth, and a healthier society. Virtually all diseases are now under control with medications and medical equipment that was not available in the 1800’s, before fossil fuels starting to run everyone’s lives. Today, we can live in any weather condition and we’ve got military equipment, airlines, merchant ships, cruise ships, truck and cars all over the world that dominate the lifestyles of prosperous societies.

The fossil fuel industry would not be needed except to meet the demands of the current users in those prosperous societies. My belief is that those users are less inclined to go back to living in medieval times without all the amenities that the thousands of products and the various fuels that the fossil fuel industry have been able to fulfill in their daily lives.

I presume the alarmists that constantly refuse to surface from behind their tweet machines to debate is because they have no case to debate the facts that they are using to justify their growing alarmist vocabulary. Unless there’s a face to face debate with the supposedly deniers, that have more data than words, we’ll never hear both sides of the climate discussions.

It’s definitely time for the alarmists to show us “where’s the beef” behind their tweets and marches, so the public can decide for themselves to consider the data from each side or just continue to accept the barrage of tweeted words of impending climate disasters that will end life as we know it.

From the extensive data available on temperatures, weather, sea levels, emissions, etc. that several scientists have shared, I don’t see the cause for such a dismal outlook for the earth and its civilization. I suspect that classifies me as a “denier”. I’m willing to join the doomsday parade, but only if the tweeters would come out from behind their tweet machines and “show their cards”. Looking forward to face-to-face discussions.

SOURCE

Britain’s Political Class Has Surrendered to the Green Blob

The entirety of Britain’s political class, left and right, has surrendered to the Green Blob. Here is how the various parties responded to a question from the Guardian: ‘Is the climate crisis the biggest issue the UK faces as a nation?’

Conservatives: Yes, it is one of the biggest issues facing the world. Thanks to the efforts of successive governments, the UK has cut carbon emissions by more than any similar developed country. We have also already doubled our support for developing nations to tackle climate change.

Greens: Absolutely. The science is clear: it is the biggest threat facing the UK and the world.

Labour: Yes and this election is our last chance to tackle it. We’re already off course to meet our targets and radical and urgent action over the next five years is essential.

Liberal Democrats: Yes, a Liberal Democrat government would solve Brexit on day one, so climate change would be the biggest issue.

SNP: Scotland – like the rest of the world – faces a climate emergency. We have a moral responsibility to tackle climate change and will lead the way in showing how our society can transition to net zero.

As you see, there is not a single mainstream party left in Britain that is prepared to stand up to eco-fascism.

There is no credible evidence whatsoever that the world is facing a ‘climate crisis’, still less that it is ‘the biggest issue the UK faces as a nation?’ (What? Not Brexit? Immigration? Healthcare? Knife Crime? The Economy?)

Yet all the main parties, even the Conservatives, have bought into the false narrative written by the kind of people who hate them and always will.

I analysed the green phenomenon in my book Watermelons and concluded that the primary purpose of environmentalism is to advance leftist causes – wealth redistribution, bigger government, identity politics, the destruction of Western industrial civilisation, the promotion of commissar-style ‘experts’ and technocrats, state-mandated restrictions on freedom – behind a cloak of green righteousness. Watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside.

The only choice British voters are being offered is one of degrees: do you support unaffordable, uncosted, economically debilitating green lunacy or do you support head-banging, window-licking, away-with-the-fairies green lunacy or some shade of green lunacy in between?

Not even the Brexit Party has been prepared to talk sense on this issue. Yes, Nigel Farage has been robust. But not his party, as I reported with some disappointment, here.

This cowardice in the face of perhaps the world’s most dangerous ideological movement is something we shall all come to rue.

Already, we inhabit such a bonkers climate of environmental righteousness, that the Guardian feels able to ask questions like this of Britain’s political parties:

Will your government implement a policy to reduce red meat consumption in the UK?

And instead of getting a two-word response from the Conservatives, the second which is ‘off!’, the actual response from the Conservatives is, as follows:

"Conservatives: The meat that British farmers produce is already significantly less carbon-intensive than meat produced elsewhere in the world. We will back our farmers to match their own net zero by 2040 ambition with funding to develop new agri-tech to reduce emissions and farm in an even more environmentally friendly way."

Why do the Conservatives pander to the enemy in this way? It ought to be a straightforward Conservative position that it is not the business of government to interfere with people’s diets. Since when did the Conservatives so lose touch with their ideological first principles that they are now prepared to treat insinuating, loaded questions like this from the Guardian with anything other than total contempt?

I hear nasty rumours that once the Conservatives have won this election, as I believe they will with a decent working majority, they plan to put Michael Gove in charge of implementing their Zero Carbon by 2050 policy.

Britain’s contribution to global carbon dioxide emissions is about one percent. What is the point of putting one of the ablest ministers in government in charge of an economically destructive, environmentally pointless crusade to decarbonise the UK economy when, within a year, any notional benefits will have been more than offset by China’s new coal-fired power stations?

Even if we decarbonised completely, (at our enormous expense) nobody would ever notice.

Especially as big countries like China and India are totally unfazed about CO2 and burning coal and gas as fast as they can get it.

Is it any wonder so many natural Conservative voters are so unenthused about their party’s direction of travel?

SOURCE

Tighter Climate Policies Could Erase $2.3 Trillion in Companies Value

Tighter government climate regulations by 2025 could wipe up to $2.3 trillion off the value of companies in industries ranging from fossil fuel producers to agriculture and car makers, an investor group warned in a report.

Rules aimed at lowering carbon emissions are expected to accelerate in the coming years as countries scramble to meet obligations under the 2015 Paris climate agreement limiting global warming.

Any abrupt policy shifts risk severely disrupting current investment strategies, U.N.-backed Principles of Responsible Investing (PRI), a group representing investors with $86 trillion of assets under management, said in a report.

"As the realities of climate change catch up, social pressure mounts, and low carbon solutions get cheaper, it's highly improbable that governments will be allowed to let the world sleep-walk into greater rises in temperature without being compelled into forceful action sooner," PRI Chief Executive Fiona Reynolds said.

"This poses huge threats for assets and for the wider system."

Most exposed is the fossil fuel sector which could lose one third of its current value, the report said. Fossil fuels account for around two thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Coal firms could lose as much as 44% in value, while the world's top oil and gas companies risk losing up to 31% of their current market share, according the report which forecasts oil demand peaking around 2027.

The analysis showed that broad index-based funds such as the iShares MSCI ACWI ETF could lose up to 4.5% or $2.3 trillion in its value under the most extreme scenario.

The shift would nevertheless also lead to winners. Auto makers heavily invested in electric vehicles and electric utility firms using low-carbon power could more than double their values, the report said.

The report came out as world leaders meet in Madrid for the 2019 United Nations climate change conference, known as COP25.

SOURCE

The miserable ghost is a pot calling the kettle black

If Warmism is not a religion, nothing is

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has launched a scathing attack on Scott Morrison's government for making religion a central issue of the climate change debate.

After being largely absent from the political scene since being ousted from the nation's top job, Mr Turnbull appeared on Monday night's Q&A program.

When asked about the bushfire crises, Mr Turnbull said a better plan was necessary as we will see 'more fires and hotter fires' due to global warming.

He then steered the topic to the collapse of his prime ministership over the controversial National Energy Guarantee plan.

'There is a group within the Liberal Party and the National Party who deny the reality of climate change,' Mr Turnbull said. 'And will oppose to the point of essentially blowing up a government, my government in this case, if there is action taken to reduce emissions - and we saw that.'

Mr Turnbull said that while Mr Morrison and current treasurer Josh Frydenberg were supportive of the energy policy, the government was being 'held to ransom by a group of deniers within the party'.

'The problem is that people… on the right, they are treating what should be a question of physics and science and economics and engineering as though it were an issue of religion and belief... and it's nuts,' Mr Turnbull said.

SOURCE

Note: Turnbull once said that defeated politicians who fail to shut up are "miserable ghosts"

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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 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 December, 2019

No time for science at COP25

The official signage throughout the UN facility reads “COP25: #TimeForAction”. Not “COP25: #TheLatestScience”. Not “COP25: #PursuingTruth”. No, it is “#TimeForAction”. And the “Time for Action” theme permeates the exhibits of climate activist groups, protesters, and even the exhibit booths of the various nations. Action is our theme, gosh darn it, and everybody better be on board.COP 25: Climate propaganda crowds at objective science

With the UN so fully committed to urgent and immediate action, what does that tell us about the objectivity of its incessant ‘science’ reports? The answer is clearly that all reports must diminish or completely ignore scientific evidence countering the alarmist narrative. The funding, forward momentum, and very existence of the international climate bureaucracy depends on the perpetuation of the asserted climate crisis. Not only does scientific evidence contradicting the alarmist narrative create substantial embarrassment for a world body committed to “TimeForAction,” but it jeopardizes the jobs, salaries, and very existence of the enormous international climate bureaucracy.

So here at COP25, the United Nations pushes political propaganda rather than objective science. To the limited extent science is presented, it is one-sided and resting on flimsy evidence.

The people of the world deserve more for all the tax dollars we send to the United Nations climate establishment.

SOURCE

French wine climate scare debunked

Wine must be getting more popular, as climate alarmists are increasingly claiming global warming is harming wine production. That is the consistent playbook for climate alarmists – figure out what people like and then claim climate change is destroying it.

During recent months, climate alarmists and their media sock puppets have frequently been claiming global warming is devastating French wine production. Titles of some recent media articles include:

“Heat-stricken French wine harvests sound climate alarm” – Reuters

“Can French wine survive the climate change fiasco? – RFI France

“Winemaking In France Is Being Disrupted By Climate Change” – NPR

However, just as we have shown for previous false wine scares regarding California, Italy, and Greece, the objective data show French wine production consistently benefits from ongoing warming temperatures.

As we reported as part of a recent article addressing the fake Greek wine crisis:

Global wine production set a new record last year. Even more remarkably, wine production set a new record despite a steady decline during the past five years in the amount of planted vineyards. Fewer acres of vineyards yielding record total production is astonishingly good news for wine production. Italy was the largest producer.

So could it be that somehow France is defying the global trend – as well as the trends in nearby Italy and Greece – and somehow French wine production is suffering? Hardly.

Not only is global wine production improving throughout the world, it is also improving in France. French wine production approached record highs in 2018, recovering from the negative impacts of late spring frosts in 2017 (a negative event that will become rarer if temperatures continue their modest recent rise) that hampered production. See here.

Perhaps global warming is actually harming French wine production … in some alternate universe. However, in the world we live in, French wine production continues to improve as the Earth modestly warms. Despite the lies the climate alarmists and their media mouthpieces tell us.

SOURCE

Carbon Policies Are ‘Futile Gesture Politics’

A prominent economist says that Britain’s climate and energy policies are ‘futile gesture politics’, and will fail to bring about any change to the climate.

Dr Ruth Lea, who has wide-ranging experience of working in the civil service, the financial sector and policy institutions, says that while politicians celebrate their increasingly ambitious decarbonisation targets, most of the world is ignoring them:

“The UK now represents just 1% of global emissions, so any reduction we make will not even be noticed. And it will be offset many times over by increases in the developing world, which continues to burn cheap coal and gas as fast as it can.”

And Lea warns that politicians’ determination to be seen to ‘do something’ about climate change carries major political risks:

“The decarbonisation programme that we are embarking on will be extraordinarily expensive and will hit businesses and consumers harder every year. That can’t carry on for ever, and eventually a major political price will be paid.”

Dr Lea’s comments mark the publication of a series of her essays on climate policy by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

SOURCE

Solar Variability And Climate

Talk by Prof. Joanna D. Haigh

Below we present one of the most informative and dispassionate summaries, from a top UK physics professor, on the role of solar variability on climate.

Commenting on Professor Haigh’s presentation, Colin Mill wrote:

“A wonderfully clear discussion of this aspect of the science. Thank you. I was interested to hear Joanna say at 15:39 that the radiometer instrumentation isn’t quite there yet – a very important point to make in the face of those talking about the science being settled. Unfortunately there are many other areas where the instrumentation is, or has been, lacking. I did my Ph.D in cloud microphysics in the 1970s and spent some 20 years in cloud physics research. Clouds remain rather poorly understood while having the potential to massively modify the radiative balance of the Earth interacting, as they do, with both incoming and outgoing radiation over most of the solar spectrum (cf. CO2).

Small changes to, for example, the Cloud Condensation Nucleus spectrum (CCN) could change the albedo and the lifetime of clouds that in turn could affect the radiative balance. Unfortunately, there are many problems on the question of CCN – a lack of any significant and reliable historical measurements combined with an incomplete understanding of the sources (especially those of organic origin that may have been modified by, for example, land usage, changes in vegetation type etc.). Certainly in my day you could depress yourself about your chances of doing meaningful work in cloud physics simply by running two notionally identical CCN counters side by side sampling the same air only to observe that they didn’t agree by factors of 50% or more.”

Joanna Dorothy Haigh, CBE, FRS, FRMetS (born 7 May 1954) is a British physicist and academic. Before her retirement in 2019[5] she was Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Imperial College London, and co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. She is a former head of the Department of Physics at Imperial College London. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a former president of the Royal Meteorological Society.

SOURCE

Matt Canavan challenges Anthony Albanese to voice Adani coal support

The dreaded coal has got the Australian Left all in a twist

Resources Minister Matt Canavan has challenged Labor leader Anthony Albanese to say he supports the Adani coal mining project during his tour of central Queensland this week.

Speaking to Sky News on Monday Senator Canavan said the trip presented a test for Mr Albanese and the Labor Party. “They say now they support the export of coal,” he told Sky News. “I haven’t heard Anthony Albanese say three simple words: ‘I support Adani.’”

Mr Albanese’s visit to regional Queensland comes as the Labor Party lays the foundations for policies it will be taking to the next federal election.

Party members are debating how to approach climate change and how ambitious the party should be in relation to its emissions reduction target.

Labor’s ambivalence of coal and the Adani project have been blamed for former leader Bill Shorten’s poor results in regional Queensland and the Hunter Valley, which saw massive swings against the party.

This was backed by Labor’s scathing internal review, which found ambiguous language around the Adani coal mine cost the party votes in coal mining regions.

Mr Albanese told Nine Newspapers on Monday Australia’s priority should be to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under strong global agreements, but that this would not be achieved by stopping coal exports.

He echoed this sentiment when speaking to 2GB Radio on Monday, where he said the scrapping of coal exports would just lead to more coal being used from other places in the world.

“[It would] likely lead to an actual increase in global emissions because much of our coal is much better quality than is available from the alternatives,” Mr Albanese said. “So, we need to be sensible about the way we examine this. We do need to reduce our use of fossil fuels around the world.”

Greens MP Adam Bandt savaged the Labor leader. “As Australia burns and Sydney chokes, Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese are abandoning climate action. Liberal and Labor value coal more than human life,” he told reporters in Melbourne.

“Coal is fuelling the fires, coal is fuelling the drought, and coal is fuelling the smoke over Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. If you don’t have a plan to get out of coal you don’t have a plan to deal with the climate crisis. We stopped selling asbestos and we need to phase out coal exports too.”

But Mr Albanese said Australia needs a “sensible” approach to dealing with emissions, arguing coal will be phased out by the market anyway. “I think, very clearly, it’s obvious to all there won’t be a new coal-fired power built in Australia. The market is indicating that just won’t happen. There’s nothing stopping it at all except for the economics.”

The Australian revealed on Monday revealed Jenny Hill, the Labor Mayor of Townsville, had lashed the ALP’s “anti-worker” and “disruptive” environmental wing, arguing federal Labor did not have an answer to problems in north and central Queensland and was too focused on “elitists” in capital cities.

Ms Hill’s intervention came as Labor MPs Meryl Swanson and Terri Butler warned at a conference held by a Labor think tank on the weekend against talking down coal jobs in favour of lower-paid jobs in the renewables sector.

Mr Albanese told Nine Newspapers the environmental “climate change convoy” of activists led by former Greens leader Bob Brown to Queensland during the election campaign hurt the climate change cause by offending voters.

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 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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9 December, 2019

Next decade is crucial in combating declining ocean oxygen levels which are threatening sealife and could 'jeopardise humankind', experts warn

Knowing who did the study, it is unlikely to be anything but crass propaganda but some desultory comments spring to mind:

It is possible that oxygen levels have shown some decline but only in certain areas. Such declines are known in areas where there is a very heavy presence of marine life. So select your area and get the result you want.

According to Greenies, the oceans have been gobbling up lots of CO2 since about the beginning of this century. But CO2 is plant food so marine plants should be more abundant. But what do plants do? Convert CO2 to oxygen. So the oceans should now hold MORE oxygen, not less. Or have the oceans now stopped gobbling CO2? If so, when and why?

And if there is a decline it could hardly be due to global warming -- since there has been no recent warming according to the satellites. If the study were a serious one, they would have correlated global temperatures with oceanic oxgen levels. But there is no hint of that. I wonder why? The omission means that their case is totally unproven

The next decade will be crucial in combating declining ocean oxygen levels which are threatening sealife and could eventually put humankind at risk, according to experts.

The new study, which is the biggest report of its kind, was carried out by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Its findings were presented in Madrid, Spain, at the global UN Climate Change conference earlier today.

The researchers found that climate change and pollution were the main causes of oxygen loss, also known as deoxygenation.

There are thought to be more than 1,000 dead zones in the ocean, where deoxygenation has taken hold, with currently around 700 already confirmed.

But prior to 1960 there were just 45, showing that the areas completely depleted of oxygen have quadrupled over the past five decades.

Peter Thomson, the UN's special envoy for oceans, said in the study: 'I believe the report demonstrates that the next 10 years will be more important for humanity than the last hundred, indeed thousands of years have been for our survival.'

The report went on to say that deoxygenation is now altering the balance of marine life as it favours the species which do not require as much oxygen to thrive.

These include jellyfish, microbes and some squid.

Those particularly at risk include tuna, marlin and sharks because their size means that they have higher energy demands to their marine companions.

It seems as though these species are in turn moving to shallower areas where they become much more vulnerable to over-fishing.

There were 67 experts from 17 countries who were involved in the study.

IUCN acting director general, Dr Grethel Aguilar, said: 'With this report, the scale of damage climate change is wreaking upon the ocean comes into stark focus.

'As the warming ocean loses oxygen, the delicate balance of marine life is thrown into disarray.

'The potentially dire effects on fisheries and vulnerable coastal communities mean that the decisions made at the ongoing UN Climate Change Conference are even more crucial.'

Oceans are expected to lose up to four per cent of their oxygen by the end of the century and the report warns that the ripple effect could prove costly for millions of people.

Isabella Lovin, Sweden's minister for environment and climate, wrote in the report: 'Whilst we have known about dead zones in the ocean for many decades, ocean warming is now expected to further amplify deoxygenation across great swathes of the ocean.

'Ocean deoxygenation is putting life at risk. Failing to protect our ocean will jeopardize humankind, as our security, economy and our very own survival depends on it.'

Three of this year's Nobel Prize laureates recently spoke out about the need to address climate change during a news conference in Sweden.

SOURCE

Activist junk science breeds bad policy

Banning neonic pesticides in wildlife refuges would hurt birds, bees, other wildlife and people

Paul Driessen

The House of Representatives Committee on Natural Resources recently approved HR 2854, the 2019 Protect Our Refuges Act, prohibiting the use of neonicotinoid insecticides in any of the nation’s 560 National Wildlife Refuges, some of which are the size of Delaware and even Indiana. The legislation will now be considered by the full House, while a companion bill (S 1856) makes its way through the Senate.

The legislation is unnecessary, misguided and based on embarrassingly bad science. Rather than protecting our refuges, it would force farmers to use other insecticides that truly are harmful to bees, birds and other wildlife (and even humans), or end programs to grow crops that nourish refuge inhabitants and visitors. Sadly, the forces driving it forward are par for the course on far too many ecological issues.

The twin bills are designed to reinstate a 2014 Obama-era US Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) ruling that banned neonic use in refuges, in response to sue-and-settle lawsuits and intense pressure from anti-pesticide groups. The FWS reversed the ban in 2018, after analyzing multiple scientific studies that found the insecticides are safe for bees, birds and other wildlife. The reversal once again allows the use of neonic-coated seeds or neonic sprays in parts of certain refuges where cooperative agreements between the FWS and farmers permit growing corn, alfalfa, sorghum, soybeans, wheat, clover and other crops.

Such agreements are employed when the Service determines that it cannot meet its wildlife enhancement and refuge management goals without assisting natural ecosystem processes. Refuges benefit from farmers providing more food for wildlife, including bees and migrating birds, under conditions set forth by the FWS. The farmers benefit from harvesting and selling the remaining crops.

The arrangements have worked well for decades. However, some environmentalist groups oppose any pesticide use (and even biotech crops) in refuges, while others oppose all farming (and grazing) in refuges. In recent years, they focused on neonics, alleging that this new insecticide technology threatens honeybees. After the 2018 decision, they sought legislation like HR 2854 to impose their views.

For years they had claimed neonics were causing “colony collapse disorder” around the world. When “bee-pocalypse” claims were disproven by studies in multiple countries, and by the rapid recovery of honeybee colonies from Varroa destrutor mites and other lethal pests and diseases, the groups shifted their attention to wild bees, about which far less is known. More recently, they have claimed birds are affected.

HR 2854 sponsor Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) insists that neonics are “toxic chemicals” that “infect” our soil and waterways, threaten biodiversity, bees and other wildlife in our refuges, and just pad “the bank accounts of chemical manufacturers.” She rarely lets reality get in the way of her rhetoric.

In a fascinating new article that should be required reading for every Member of Congress prior to voting on these bills, science journalist Jon Entine presents the facts about neonics, and depressing details about the junk science behind the ongoing activist and media frenzy about alleged threats to birds and bees.

For example, claims that bees are harmed by neonicotinoids are based on lab tests that exposed honeybees to dozens of times more neonics than they would ever encounter foraging for pollen or nectar. Assertions that birds are endangered by the same Imidacloprid are based on studies that force-fed sparrows the equivalent of at least 120 corn seeds at one time. Moreover, that earliest of all neonics is tens of times more toxic to birds than neonics that are actually used to coat corn, canola and other seeds today.

Moreover, neonics are used on only a few of the crops commonly planted in refuges (corn, alfalfa and wheat, for instance, but not clover), and not all those crops attract bees or birds. It’s a complex reality, which should not be (but too often is) simplified by cheap slogans and sound bites to drive agendas.

Neonicotinoids have become the world’s most widely used insecticide class because they work and are safe. At times they sprayed on fruits or vegetables, but about 90% of them are used as seed coatings. Either way, but particularly with coated seeds, their pest-killing properties are absorbed into plant tissues and so affect only insects that actually feed on the crops, especially early in the growing season. Neonics also reduce the need for multiple sprays, often with more harmful insecticides.

By the time the plants flower and attract bees, the amount of “neonics” in flowers, nectar and pollen can be measured in a few parts per billion, equal to a few seconds in 32 years.

This helps explain why dozens of extensive field studies in multiple countries found no harmful effects from neonics on bees under real-world conditions. That fact and increased success in controlling Varroa mites and bee diseases helps explain why hive numbers and honeybee populations have rebounded nicely. Most wild bees are also healthy, despite little-reported problems, such as diseases carried to wild bee colonies by their domesticated cousins.

Moreover, a 2015 study found that most wild bees never even come into contact with crops, or the neonics that supposedly threaten them. Only 2% of wild bees do much crop pollination in any event, and thus get exposed to various neonic pesticides; yet they are among the healthiest of wild bee species.

Bird counts are up, down or stable, depending on the species, while the sparrows used in the forced-feeding study have increased in numbers since neonics were introduced in the 1990s.

In recent decades, a lot of habitat and forage land has been lost to housing, business and shopping mall developments, solar installations, biofuel farms and other changes. The extra nourishment that crops planted in refuges can provide often offsets those losses. Farmers and ranchers should be given incentives to plant crops, not subjected to bans, disincentives, and increased costs that reduce flowers and forage.

More land dedicated to corn, sorghum, canola and other monoculture crops for biofuels has also reduced overall wildlife habitat land and flowers that bloom later in the season, nourishing bees during the critical weeks before winter sets in. Refuges planted with clover and other flowering crops can help here too.

Farmers who do plant these crops – and the bees that benefit – are much better served by neonic-coated crop seeds, than they are by a return to outdated insecticides that neonics have largely replaced: such as pyrethrin and organophosphate pesticides, which definitely do kill bees and other beneficial insects, threaten birds and other wildlife, and pose poisoning, cancer and other health risks to humans.

This higher-risk category includes crop-protection chemicals used by organic farmers. They may be “natural,” but many are highly toxic to bees – and people. Pyrethrum and pyrethrins can kill bees on contact; these powerful neurotoxins have also been linked to leukemia in humans. Rotenone is also highly toxic to bees and fish and can enhance the onset of Parkinson’s disease. Copper sulfate fungicide is highly toxic to soil organisms, fish and aquatic invertebrates – and to human brains, livers and hearts.

Rep. Velázquez needs to acknowledge these realities. She should also recognize potentially serious threats to bees, wildlife, soils, waters and plants in refuges from sources that she, her colleagues and their environmentalist and media allies routinely ignore: solar panels, for instance. Not only do they blanket many thousands of acres, allowing little to grow beneath or between them. They can also leach cadmium and other metals into soils and waters. They should no longer be built near wildlife refuges.

Finally, it’s not just bees. It’s also birds, and bats – which are already being killed and even eradicated in many areas by America’s 56,000 wind turbines. Imagine what Green New Deal turbine numbers would do.

If Ms. Velázquez and her colleagues truly care about bees, birds, bats, other wildlife and refuges, they would hold hearings on all these problems – and enact legislation to address them. At the very least, Members of Congress should pay attention to the facts and studies noted here before they vote on HR 2854 or S 1856.

Via email

California Farmer Fights Government Claim That Dirt Is a Pollutant

No one told Jack LaPant that he could be in violation of the Clean Water Act for farming his own land.

That’s mostly because the federal law includes a clear exemption for “normal” farming activities. But it’s also because the government officials LaPant consulted didn’t view overturned dirt that has been tilled and plowed as pollution.

In 2016, the Army Corps of Engineers, which administers the Clean Water Act with the Environmental Protection Agency, began legal action against LaPant for plowing he did in 2011 to plant wheat on a ranch property he owned in Northern California.

But in March 2012, LaPant had sold the property, located in Tehama County about 4 miles south of the city of Red Bluff.

Before plowing his field to plant wheat, LaPant conferred in person with the Farm Service Agency in California, which is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“All of these government officials I spoke with, and they have all been deposed, they never once suggested that I should go meet with the Army Corps of Engineers,” LaPant said in a phone interview with The Daily Signal.

“I asked them if it was OK to take this piece of land and grow wheat and they all said it was OK,” he recalled. “Even today, you can go into these offices and they will not tell a farmer that he needs to go and see the Army Corps to farm on his own land. It makes no sense and the Department of Agriculture doesn’t understand any of it, and we are talking about the same federal government.”

LaPant recalls visiting “four different government folks” with expertise in soil conservation when he was researching the history of the farm.

“They all gave me the same answer,” LaPant said. “They told me, ‘Jack, if you’d like to go ahead and plant it the same way it’s been planted in the past, go ahead. But if you want to go in and plant a permanent crop, then maybe we’ll go back and study it.’ So, I went ahead and planted 900 acres of wheat.”

The legal complications for LaPant began after he sold the property to Duarte Nursery, a family-owned nursery operation based in Tehama County, California, which then encountered similar problems with the Army Corps of Engineers.

Duarte Nursery entered into a settlement agreement with the federal government after suing the Army Corps of Engineers for denying due process. Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit, public interest law firm based in Sacramento, California, and Washington, D.C., represented the nursery in the case and now represents LaPant.

Tony Francois, a lawyer with Pacific Legal Foundation who specializes in property rights, told The Daily Signal that the orchard-planting operations of another company, Goose Pond Ag, may be what led to the prosecution of LaPant.

Goose Pond Ag, a Florida-based farmland management company, purchased a portion of the California property from Duarte Nursery in 2012. Six years later, in 2018, the company reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department in which it agreed to pay $5.3 million in civil penalties for Clean Water Act violations, according to media reports.

“It’s the orchard planting and the preparations for the orchard planting, which involves fairly substantial earthwork, that really got the Army’s attention and got this whole enforcement action going,” Francois said. “What’s odd about it is that they roped LaPant into it, and we think the Army may have initially thought LaPant was part of this plan to plant the orchard.”

This month, Pacific Legal Foundation plans to submit a motion for summary judgment to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California that could resolve some or all of LaPant’s case based on “application of the law to the undisputed facts in the case,” Francois said.

If the case is not resolved, it could move to a jury trial sometime in 2020.

The Daily Signal sought comment from the Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency. Neither agency had responded by publication time.

What’s particularly alarming to LaPant and other farmers familiar with his case is that in their view the Corps saw fit to modify the Clean Water Act without congressional approval, Francois said.

“There’s a pretty broad, clear statement in the Clean Water Act that you don’t need a permit for normal farming activities,” Francois said, adding:

This would include normal ranching, farming, forestry activities. But the Army has added multiple conditions that you have to meet for these protections [for such operations] to continue.

One of these conditions is that the property has to be tilled pretty regularly for this protection to continue. But there are many reasons why a farmer may suspend tilling. For example, cattle may have a higher price than wheat or corn, and so the land might be used for grazing for a period of time.

The Army has definitely added hurdles and obstacles to a pretty clear and simple statement of the Clean Water Act that you don’t need a permit for normal farming activities. In our view, what they’ve done is to change the policy decision Congress made.

SOURCE

Catholics urged to divulge ‘eco-sins’ during Confession as Bishops launch a new environmental campaign

What you get with a Pope steeped in South American liberation theology

Catholics are being urged to divulge their ‘eco-sins’ during Confession as Bishops launch a new environmental campaign.

As part of an initiative to ensure that the Catholic Church plays a role in tackling the climate crisis, it is encouraging congregants to go to Confession, or “reconciliation services”.

The lay-run campaign, called Journey to 2030, was launched last weekend in partnership with the Bishops’ Conference and the Ecological Conversion Group, a volunteer group for young Catholics.

The initiative aims to “create a sense of urgency towards our ecological crisis and those suffering from its ill effects” as well as promote confession of environmental sins.

As a result, it has created a toolkit for church leaders to help Catholics confess their environment-related sins and is sending out its resources to parishes across the country.

Before entering the confessional, sinners will be offered an environmental ‘examination of conscience’. This works like a checklist that people can go through before confession with prompts, such as ‘have you taken flights unnecessarily?’

Journey to 2030, which was launched in the Diocese of Arundel and Brighton, encourages parishes to be hubs for community projects, and offers ideas for activities under the headings: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.”

Its website also offers resources for an ‘Advent Reconciliation service’, which invite Catholics to reflect on their own impact on the environment in the areas of diet, transport, clothes and electronics before Confession.

Catholics will be asked to consider whether their clothes are fairly traded, how many animal products they consume, and whether they overuse their mobile phones.

The campaign’s lead organiser, John Paul de Quay, told The Tablet: “Care for God’s creation and the dignity of our brothers and sisters is key to our faith, yet as a Church, action was lacking.”

He said he saw there was a need for a long-term Church-wide project that could bring everyone’s existing works together to “ignite the spark that had been steadily smouldering”.

Pope Francis has recently been quoted as considering the addition of ‘ecological sins’ against our common home to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The Environmental Advisor to the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales said that “these advent reconciliation services are a way of recognising that in our increasingly interconnected world the smallest of our actions has effects beyond our local community, and that we cannot truly show love for our neighbours without caring for nature and our common home”.

2030 is the year that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has pinpointed which greenhouse gas emissions must be curbed in order to prevent irreversible damage to the planet.

SOURCE

UK: The plot against fracking

How cheap energy was killed by Green lies and Russian propaganda

The first coffee house in Marseilles opened in 1671, prompting the city’s vintners to recruit a couple of professors at the University of Aix to blacken their new competitor’s reputation. They duly got one of their students to write a pamphlet claiming coffee was a vile foreign novelty made from a tree favoured by goats and camels. It burned the blood, dried the kidneys and attracted the lymph, inducing palsies and impotence. “From all of which we must necessarily conclude that coffee is hurtful to the greater part of the inhabitants of Marseilles.”

Thus does novelty run up against vested interests. Today similar pseudoscience is used to blacken the reputation of almost any new development. Usually, as was the case with coffee, the campaign fails. But these days the anti-innovation forces have deep pockets and few scruples and have won some big battles. We now know that the opposition to genetically modified crops in Europe has resulted in more pesticide use than would otherwise have been the case, yet that opposition was very profitable for the big green pressure groups.

They fanned the flames of opposition, coining terms such as “Frankenfood”, and nimbly hopped from one fear to the next as each myth was busted: biotechnology was going to poison people, damage ecosystems, cause allergies, impoverish small farmers, boost corporate profits, and so on. They turned Monsanto into a pantomime villain and forced it to contemplate a strategy (making plants that could not breed true so the plants could not spread in the wild) that activists then criticised as a “terminator technology” designed to prevent small farmers saving seed, thus forcing them to rely on Monsanto.

Eventually, the issue lost its ability to yield donations and media interest, so the green business blob moved on. As Mark Lynas, a prominent anti-GM campaigner, now ruefully admits: “We permanently stirred public hostility to GMO foods throughout pretty much the entire world, and — incredibly — held up the previously unstoppable march of a whole technology. There was only one problem with our stunningly successful worldwide campaign. It wasn’t true.”

Cameron’s government projected gas prices would either rise fast, medium or slow – In fact they fell

More than a decade later, environmentalists hit upon another money spinner: opposition to fracking. When the shale gas revolution first came along, some environmentalists welcomed it, and rightly so. It “creates an unprecedented opportunity to use gas as a bridge fuel to a twenty-first-century energy economy that relies on efficiency, renewable sources, and low-carbon fossil fuels such as natural gas,” wrote Senator Tim Wirth, a prominent environmentalist. And so it has proved: the country that adopted shale gas first and most — the United States — is the country that lowered its carbon dioxide emissions first and most, because gas displaced coal, a much higher-carbon fuel.

But then the vested interests got to work. Renewable energy promoters panicked at the thought of cheap and abundant gas. Their business model was predicated on the alleged certainty that prices would rise as fossil fuels ran out, making subsidised wind and solar power look comparatively cheap. David Cameron’s coalition government produced three projections about what might happen to gas prices: that they would rise fast, medium or slow. In fact they fell, a possibility the government had entirely ignored.

It is hard to recall now just how sure almost everybody was in 2008 that natural gas was running out. Its price had risen as gas fields in North America and the North Sea began to run dry. Peak gas was coming even sooner than peak oil or peak coal. Yet in the suburbs of Fort Worth, Texas, something was stirring. Engineer Nick Steinsberger, working for a company called Mitchell Energy, tried different ways to fracture shale rocks deep underground so that the gas would flow. Hydraulic fracturing had been invented the 1940s, generally using petroleum gels, but it did not work in shale, which contained an enormous amount of gas and oil. Nobody much minded you pumping gels down into rocks in those days. After all, the rocks themselves are — by definition — already soaked in toxic mixtures of oil and gas.

Steinsberger noticed water worked a bit better than gel. In 1998, he tried sending water down first, then some sand to prop open the cracks and — whoosh! — out came a lot of gas. And it kept on coming. “Slick-water fracking” had been invented, using far fewer chemicals than previous methods, allowing vast shale reserves around the world to be exploited.

Most experts said shale gas was a flash in the pan and would not much affect global supplies. They were wrong. By 2011 America’s declining gas output shot up and oil soon followed suit. The US has now overtaken Russia as the biggest gas producer in the world, and Saudi Arabia as the biggest oil producer. Cheap gas brought a stream of chemical companies rushing back from Europe and the Persian Gulf to manufacture in America. Gas import terminals were rebuilt as gas export terminals. The Permian basin in Texas alone now produces as much oil as the whole of the US did in 2008, and more than any Opec country except Iran and Saudi Arabia. This — not wind and solar which still provide only 2 per cent of world primary energy — is the big energy story of the past decade.

One country that should have taken sharp notice is Britain. As late as 2004 Britain was a gas exporter, but as North Sea production declined it rapidly became a big net importer, dependent on Norway, Qatar or Russia. As Britain was paying far more for its gas than America, that meant that our huge chemical industry was gradually moving out.

Russia Today television ran endless anti-fracking stories, including one that “frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles”

Fortunately, it then emerged that Britain has one of the richest and thickest seams of shale: the Bowland shale across Lancashire and Yorkshire contains many decades of supply. Fracking it would mean drilling small holes down about one mile, then cracking the rocks with millimetre-wide fractures and catching the gas as it flowed out over the next few decades. Experience in America showed this could be done without any risk of contaminating ground water, which is near the surface, or threatening buildings. The seismic tremors that have caused all the trouble are so slight they could not possibly do damage and were generally far smaller than those from mining, construction or transport. The well pads would be hundreds of times smaller than the concrete bases of wind farms producing comparable amounts of energy.

Still, friends of the earth, which is effectively a multinational environmental business, spotted a chance to make hay. Despite being told by the Advertising Standards Authority to withdraw misleading claims about shale gas, it kept up a relentless campaign of misinformation, demanding more delay and red tape from all-too-willing civil servants. The industry, with Cuadrilla fated to play the part of Monsanto, agreed to ridiculously unrealistic limits on what kinds of tremors they were allowed after being promised by the government that the limits would be changed later — a promise since broken. Such limits would stop most other industries, even road haulage, in their tracks.

The Russians also lobbied behind the scenes against shale gas, worried about losing their grip on the world’s gas supplies. Unlike most conspiracy theories about Russian meddling in Western politics, this one is out there in plain sight. The head of Nato, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, said the Russians, as part of a sophisticated disinformation operation, “engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations — environmental organisations working against shale gas — to maintain Europe’s dependence on imported Russian gas”.

The Centre for European Studies found that the Russian government has invested $95 million in NGOs campaigning against shale gas. Russia Today television ran endless anti-fracking stories, including one that “frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles”. The US Director of National Intelligence stated that “RT runs anti-fracking programming … reflective of the Russian Government’s concern about the impact of fracking and US natural gas production on the global energy market and the potential challenges to Gazprom’s profitability.” Pro-Russian politicians such as Lord Truscott (married to a Russian army colonel’s daughter) made speeches in parliament against fracking.

As night follows day, Tory politicians lost courage and slipped into neutrality then opposition

No scare story was too far-fetched to be taken up and amplified. Tap water would catch fire (no: though it’s a natural phenomenon in some places in America where gas naturally contaminates ground water). There would be significant gas leaks (no: there are more gas leaks from natural sources and pipelines). The water that comes out of the well is dangerously radioactive (no: it is not). Fracking uses a lot of water (a lot less than farming). And so on. The unelected quangocracy that runs these things on behalf of taxpayers, mainly in the form of the Environment Agency, appeared at times to be taking its instructions directly from Friends of the Earth. So, of course, did the BBC.

The endless delays imposed by regulators played into the hands of shale gas’s opponents, giving them time to organise more and more protests, which were themselves ways of getting on the news and hence getting more donations. Never mind that few locals in Lancashire wanted to join the protests: plenty of upper-middle class types could be bussed in from the south.

As night follows day, Tory politicians lost courage and slipped into neutrality then opposition, worrying about what posh greens might think, rather than working-class bill-payers and job-seekers. A golden opportunity was squandered for Britain to get hold of home-grown, secure, cheap and relatively clean energy. We don’t need fossil fuels, the politicians thought, we’re going for net zero in 2050! But read the small print, chaps: the only way to have zero-emission transport and heating, so says the Committee on Climate Change, is to use lots of hydrogen. And how do they say most of the hydrogen is to be made? From gas.

After genetically modified crops and fracking, what innovation will be next to get stopped in its tracks by vested interests? Vaping, I reckon. It’s an open secret that the pharmaceutical industry pours money into anti-vaping campaigns because the technology is a threat to their lucrative nicotine patches and gums, which they have been getting doctors to prescribe to smokers trying to quit for years. Unlike e-cigarettes, which are the most effective aids to quitting yet found, Big Pharma’s products don’t work very well. So they are worried. Next time you hear somebody arguing that e-cigarettes (like coffee) burn the blood, dry the kidneys and attract the lymph, ask who benefits.

SOURCE

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8 December, 2019

Research corner: Climate models got it right (?)

This appears to be a new version of a 2017 article in "Carbon Brief" by Zeke Hausfather. This version has been widely reported so deserves a rebuttal by people familiar with the detailed statistics. There is an interesting first approach to that in an email from Pat Michaels below. It would seem that we once again have the typical Green/Left strategy of playing fast and loose with the facts:

I was interviewed by Science on this article. I told the reporter that it contains a simple and obvious fatal flaw.

The authors do state that indeed Hansen Scenario B is too warm. But they assert that it assumed an increase in forcing from CFCs and methane that was too high, given the evolution of concentrations in the thirty years after it was published. So I looked up the original forcing and it was +0.46 w/m-sq, which they said was 27% too high, or .12 w. You can see the original forcings in an Appendix to the 1988 original Hansen paper.

But Hansen also WAY overestimated the negative forcing from sulfates, at around -1.35w.. Using observations Stevens recalculated the negative forcing from sulfates, which Lewis and Curry note is -0.5w. So Hansen had -0.85w too much negative forcing. This means the overall forcing in the 1988 model was 0.73w/m-sq too LOW. Note that Stevens' result has never been refuted and that he is of very high repute. So if Hausfather et al. would have corrected for BOTH forcings, which they should have (and they must have known that Hansen's -1.35 was WAY too large), then they would have found that Scenario B was even warmer than the unadjusted Scenario A.

As I told the interviewer from Science, the paper should have noted the "what's good for the methane goose should also apply to the sulfate gander".

Models that climate scientists used in recent decades to project temperature changes have generally been very accurate, a new peer-reviewed study concludes.

Why it matters: It serves to rebut conservative opponents of proposals aimed at cutting emissions, who have long argued that models haven't gotten it right as part of broader attacks on climate science.

What they found: The study in Geophysical Research Letters reviewed the performance of 17 models published between 1970 and 2007.

"We find no evidence that the climate models evaluated in this paper have systematically overestimated or underestimated warming over their projection period," the paper states.

"In general, past climate model projections evaluated in this analysis were skillful in predicting subsequent [global mean surface temperature] warming in the years after publication."

Some, however, showed too much and others too little.

The big picture: Climate models look at the physical relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and temperature, as well as other factors including human-influenced emissions variables like economic growth and technology change.

As Vox puts it, it's about "predicting physics vs. predicting humans."

If you simply look at how well the models predicted temperature changes that later occurred, 10 of 17 were essentially spot-on — "virtually indistinguishable from observations," as this Washington Post story notes.

But if you look at how well models did at assessing the relationship between changing greenhouse concentrations and temperature, they did even better.

14 of the 17 were "consistent with observations," the paper notes, and "statistically indistinguishable from what actually occurred," co-author Gavin Schmidt writes in a blog post.

SOURCE

The GRL abstract

Evaluating the performance of past climate model projections

Zeke Hausfather et al

Abstract

Retrospectively comparing future model projections to observations provides a robust and independent test of model skill. Here we analyse the performance of climate models published between 1970 and 2007 in projecting future global mean surface temperature (GMST) changes. Models are compared to observations based on both the change in GMST over time and the change in GMST over the change in external forcing. The latter approach accounts for mismatches in model forcings, a potential source of error in model projections independent of the accuracy of model physics. We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model?projected and observationally?estimated forcings were taken into account.

SOURCE

Cockamamie Climate Schemes Like Air Travel Bans and Meat Rationing Are Dead on Arrival

While Democrats constantly insist that the science on climate change is settled and humans are to blame, voters are not so sure. Even those who buy into the narrative do not want government restrictions on air travel and meat consumption.

Most voters disagreed with the claim that it is "very likely" that "climate change will be catastrophic for humans, plants and animals," which many alarmists claim to be the scientific consensus. Even so, 43 percent of voters held this view, according to a poll from the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports.

Many voters said catastrophic climate change is "somewhat likely" (20 percent), while others said it is "not very likely" (18 percent), or "not at all likely" (16 percent).

Some might counter that 63 percent of voters said catastrophic climate change is "likely," but the difference between "very likely" and "somewhat likely" seems important given the Democratic alarmism on the issue. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Grow Yucca in NYC) and Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-Hell Yes We Take Your Guns) have insisted that the world only has 12 years (AOC) or 10 years (Beto) left to fight climate change. To alarmists like them, anything less than "extremely likely" counts as "science denial."

Voters also proved skeptical on the causes of climate change. When asked, "Is climate change caused primarily by human activity or by long-term planetary trends?" a plurality (48 percent) pointed to "human activity," while nearly as many voters (38 percent) pointed to "long-term planetary trends." Fourteen percent said they are "not sure." Alarmists insist that the science is settled (when it is not), but Americans are not convinced.

The poll went on to ask more questions of voters who blamed human activity for climate change. Pollsters presented four different forms of government regulation to fight climate change.

The vast majority of these voters (76 percent) agreed that "federal or state governments" should "require people to engage in activities that will lower carbon-dioxide emissions." Only 14 percent disagreed, while 10 percent said they were not sure.

Half of the voters who blame human activity (50 percent) said governments should "punish with fines or jail time fossil-fuel business owners and/or executives." A quarter of these voters (25 percent) said no to this proposal, while another 25 percent said they were not sure.

Even those who blame human activity for climate change did not support restrictions on air travel or meat consumption, however. Only 34 percent said they would back government limits on air travel and 24 percent said the same for meat consumption. Most human-blamers said no to both proposals (50 percent against air travel restrictions, 61 percent against meat rationing).

Democrats proved more likely to agree that climate change is caused by human activity (67 percent), but even these Democrats proved unwilling to back government restrictions on air travel and meat consumption. Only 37 percent supported air travel bans and 27 percent backed meat rationing.

The poll also asked voters whether they had a favorable view of Sens. Bernie Sanders (S-USSR) and Elizabeth Warren (D-1/1024th of a Plan).

Voters with a "very favorable" view of Sanders were more likely to blame humans for climate change (78 percent). They were also more likely to support jailing fossil fuel executives (63 percent), government regulations to cap emissions (85 percent), restrictions on air travel (47 percent), and meat rationing (36 percent).

Similarly, those with a "very favorable" view of Warren proved more likely to blame humans (79 percent). These pro-Warren human-blamers also proved more likely to support jailing fossil fuel executives (69 percent), government regulations to cap emissions (83 percent), air travel bans (39 percent), and meat rationing (37 percent).

Authoritarians of a feather flock together. Another recent poll found that fans of Sanders and Warren proved more likely to support government restrictions on speech, complete with jail time for speech offenders.

When it comes to climate alarmism, Americans are right to be skeptical. Alarmist climate models have proven wrong time and time again. Last year, the Maldives refused to sink beneath the waves on schedule. Even the vaunted 97 percent "consensus" is an outright lie.

Climate catastrophe is possible, of course, but it is not likely. Americans should not abandon the immense wealth and opportunity of free-market capitalism based on false predictions and alarmist rhetoric.

SOURCE

New Scientific Study Shows Climate Change is Less Sensitive to Rising Carbon Dioxide Than the UN Projects

As governments gathered in Spain for a UN meeting on energy policy, a group of climate scientists today released a study showing that global temperature warms far less from carbon dioxide emissions than UN computer models project. Dr. Richard Lindzen, the emeritus Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, released On Climate Sensitivity as part of the Coalition's "Climate Issues in Depth" series. The topic lies at the center of the public policy debate over climate and energy, and the author is one of America's most distinguished atmospheric physicists.

The paper cites data showing that human-induced global warming above the lower end of the UN model range of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius for a doubling of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere requires "highly implausible adjustments." Another CO2 Coalition member Dr. Roy Spencer, the University of Alabama Huntsville climatologist who invented and manages satellite "remote sensing" of climate data, provided review assistance.

Dr. Lindzen found no evidence for "feedbacks" boosting human-caused warming, which have been publicized recently by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The paper by the former UN IPCC lead author, which summarizes his 50 years of climate research and peer-reviewed publication, finds "no reason to expect" significant warming or related crises from CO2 emissions.

An excerpt from the paper states:

It is commonly accepted that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere should lead to some warming (e.g. Arrhenius, 1896; Callendar, 1938). This, per se, is not particularly worrisome. As has been recognized since antiquity, the dose makes the poison. The notion that any warming, however small, is evidence of coming disaster defies reason. With respect to CO2, the dose is determined by what we call climate sensitivity. By convention, this is the eventual total increase in global mean temperature associated with a doubling of CO2. The reason we refer to a doubling is that the impact of each doubling is the same: i.e. a well-established equation based on empirical data shows that we get the same warming from an increase from 400 parts per million (ppm) to 800 ppm as we would from 200 ppm to 400 ppm (Pierrehumbert, 2011).

That is to say, the impact of each added unit of CO2 is less than the impact of its predecessor. In addition, reasonably straightforward calculations suggest that, all other indirect factors (e.g. clouds) being held constant, a doubling of CO2 should produce about one degree Celsius (1°C) of direct warming-a value that is not generally held to be alarming (Wilson and Gea-Banacloche, 2012). The radiative forcing effect of CO2 is measured in units of Watts per square meter. Each doubling of CO2 is expected to provide about 3.7 Watts per square meter (Pierrehumbert, 2011). This can be compared to the natural flows of radiant energy in and out of the climate system, estimated to be 235 to 245 Watts per square meter (Trenberth et al., 2009).

CO2 Coalition executive director Caleb Rossiter, a climate statistician, welcomed the report:

"Professor Lindzen is a great teacher. He presents the complex and chaotic world of dynamic meteorology in a way that will allow many readers in the public, the media and Congress to understand for the first time just what it is that physicists are arguing about: hypothesized warming feedbacks in computer models that simply aren't showing up in the real-world data."

Email from The CO2 Coalition: info@co2coalition.org

The super-nutty French Left

French police battled with protesters in Paris on Thursday as France came to a standstill due to the largest public-sector strike in decades. Workers are striking over Macron's proposals to reform the public pension system.

The strike paralyzed the nation as mass transit shut down, teachers stayed home, and hospitals operated with skeleton staffs.

And, it wouldn't be a strike in France without left-wing loons making their presence felt.

As commuters in Paris turned to using bikes and scooters, the environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion claimed responsibility for the sabotage of 3,600 electric scooters in Paris and other French cities, saying the green image of the fashionable gadgets hid an “ecologically catastrophic” reality.
Extinction Rebellion said it had sabotaged 3,600 scooters, including more than 2,000 in Paris as well as in Bordeaux and Lyon, by obscuring the QR codes that riders use to unlock them with their smartphones.

“Contrary to their reputation as a ‘soft’ or ‘green’ way of getting around, the electric scooters are ecologically catastrophic,” the group said in a statement on its French Facebook page.

The radicals won't be satisfied until we have to walk to work.

SOURCE

Australia: When Green/Left dam-hatred killed dozens of people and caused billions of dollars of flood damage

Brisbane has a history of occasional big floods so a few decades ago, the conservative-led Queensland State government built a big flood-control dam at Wivenhoe that should have ended the floods. It was completed in 1985 and even before it was finished, in 1983, it did stop a potentially disastrous flood.

But in 2011 a flood as big as any hit Brisbane. Why? A court has just adjudicated that. They found that the Wivenhoe dam was mismanaged -- as it undoubtedly was. They blamed only the dam managers, however, without looking into the deeper background of what happened.

The court decision is something of a vindication for me personally. I said from the beginning that Brisbane's big Wivenhoe flood control dam would have protected us perfectly well if it had been properly used. The court has found that it was not properly used. The dam engineers were indeed at fault. They were very arrogant in fact. They ignored warnings from experienced people who could see what was coming. They thought they knew it all. So they did not start discharging until it was too late.

What the report below does not tell you is that the lameduck Bligh Labor government of the day was also grossly at fault for two reasons:

1).Had there been a competent minister in charge of the dam he could have put a rocket up the engineers and told them to start discharging. In fact he was a Leftist featherbrain who knew nothing and did nothing. He was a waste of breath

2). The Bligh government had also compromised the dam for Greenie reasons. Because of recent water shortages and drought fears at the time, there was a need to build more dams. But a Green/Left government cannot do that. So they decided instead to use the flood compartment of Wivenhoe for water storage, thus risking exactly what happened.

So the conservative Bjelke-Peterson government had built us a massive protective asset in the form of the Wivenhoe dam but even that could not save us from human negligence. The dam would have protected us had either the engineers or the government behaved responsibly. Sadly, neither did

It is perhaps fitting that a Labor government now has to pick up the pieces for a folly by a previous Labor government

As flood victims celebrated after years pursuing a complicated class-action suit against the government and its water management agencies, the financial implications of the NSW Supreme Court decision to uphold their claim were still being assessed.

Supreme Court judge Robert Beech-Jones found the operation of Wivenhoe Dam was negligent in the lead-up to the deluge, with dam operators failing to take into account rainfall forecasts in the days leading up the flood. This failure contributed to the downstream flooding of parts of Ipswich and Brisbane.

Deputy Opposition Leader Tim Mander demanded Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk apologise for the “incompetence” of the Bligh government — in which she was a minister — and explain how her cash-strapped administration would pay for the compensation.

“The Labor government was responsible for the management of Wivenhoe Dam during the 2011 floods and they blew it,” Mr Mander said. “Labor’s incompetence has put lives at risk and ruined thousands of homes and businesses.”

The only official response from the government yesterday was a short statement by Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath saying it acknowledged the court’s decision. “The government will closely examine the judgment before making any comment on a possible appeal,” Ms D’Ath said.

Pine Mountain Nursery manager John Craigie, whose investigations were crucial to the spotlight being shone on the role the operators of the dam played in contributing to the magnitude of the flood, described the decision as bittersweet. Mr Craigie — denied an appearance at the year-long royal commission-style inquiry into the floods run by now Queensland Chief Justice Catherine Holmes — forced a reopening of public hearings and rewriting of its findings that initiated the class action.

Mr Craigie said it was the discovery of the documents and collaboration with The Australian’s Hedley Thomas and retired chemical engineer Mick O’Brien that laid the groundwork for the class-action win. “Had I not done the research that opened the way for a reopening of the flood inquiry there probably would not have been sufficient evidence to initiate a class action,’’ he said.

The decision is a victory for the more than 6800 claimants who sued the Queensland government, and dam managers SEQwater and SunWater over the scale of the disaster. Justice Beech-Jones accepted engineers tasked with managing Wivenhoe and Somerset dams in the lead-up to and during a “biblical” deluge in January 2011 failed in their duty of care. He said they did not follow the dam operating manual that they themselves had helped write.

No cost decision has been made, with the case to return to court in February for a costs hearing.

The decision follows the findings by the Floods Commission of Inquiry that Wivenhoe Dam had been operated in breach of its operational manual.

The inquiry found that the dam operators had failed to use rainfall forecasts in making decisions about dam operating strategies.

The status of an estimated $1.5bn in insurance payments distributed to victims since the flood is also unclear, with Insurance Council of Australia spokesman Campbell Fuller saying insurers “will review today’s decision for its commercial implications”.

Queensland Law Society president Bill Potts said while SunWater and SEQwater did have legal liability insurance that could cover the compensation, it could be capped to a certain monetary value.

But Mr Potts said the state government was effectively self-insured and did not take out external insurance because it was such a large entity. He said it was likely the government would have to fund any compensation through its cash reserves, borrowing more money, creating a new levy, or increasing various taxes.

Mr Potts said defeated parties would consider whether there were grounds to appeal. “No doubt all of the parties will consider whether there’s been any error in the judgment or evidence which has been excluded that should have been included; they effectively have 28 days to appeal to the NSW Court of Appeal,” he said.

There were tears from some victims as the ruling was delivered, almost nine years after a disaster that devastated so many families.

Goodna retiree Frank Beaumont, 77, mulled over the years of distress he suffered after his home went under. “The mental stress has been horrendous,” Mr Beaumont said in Ipswich. “We’ve had so many trodden-down moments where the insurance didn’t pay, being kicked out of a rental home and then having to rebuild an absolutely devastated house.”

After Maurice Blackburn lawyers get paid, and their litigation funders, IMF Bentham and Innsworth, take their share of the damages payout, the rest will be shared between the class-action claimants. It is unlikely to be equal, with compensation to be based on the level of damage and financial loss.

The class action was filed by Maurice Blackburn in July 2014, with the trial starting in the Supreme Court of NSW in December 2017 and running for nearly 18 months. The litigation had to be filed interstate because, at the time, class actions could not be filed in Queensland.

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 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 December, 2019

Physicist Dr. William Happer rips ‘non-existent climate emergency’ & ‘Phoniness of this bizarre environmental cult’

Recorded on Dec3 in Madrid, Spain, the site of the UN’s COP25. William Happer, former Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director of Emerging Technologies on the National Security Council

Excerpt: "We are here under false pretenses, wasting our time talking about a non-existent climate emergency." ... "Phoniness of this bizarre environmental cult." ...It's hard to understand how much further the shrillness can go as this started out as global warming then it was climate change or global weirding climate crisis climate emergency what next but stick around it will happen. I hope sooner or later enough people recognize the holiness of this bizarre environmental cult and bring it to an end."

Requiem for a Climate Dream

If the world isn’t slashing CO2, blame overreaction to the Fukushima disaster.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Rigor could be restored to mainstream climate journalism with a single clause. That clause consists of the words “if climate models are accurate.”

A United Nations study issued in advance of this week's climate summit in Madrid would appear in a different light, though still worrisome, and still a challenge to policy makers, if it were reported as saying: To avoid any chance of a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius, annual emissions cuts of 7.6% must begin next year if computerized climate simulations are correct.

Such simulations, we should admit, are science. Their findings represent a legitimate pursuit of knowledge. The common failing in the media involves leaving out the necessary caveats. Such carelessness has ultimately enabled a new kind of science denial on the left, where advocates like Greta Thunberg and the U.K. group Extinction Rebellion increasingly talk about climate change leading to a human demise that is nowhere supported in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or other scientific bodies.

In my view, Al Gore bears heavy responsibility here. Name any important policy commitment in history-whether Social Security or Medicare or even fighting World War II-that required that all debate be silenced and all skeptics vilified before it could proceed. The Gore formula is good for stoking tribalism. It's not good for making policy progress in a democracy. And so it has proved. Nobody remotely believes the supposedly necessary emissions cuts will take place. The only response left to the climate crowd is to ratchet up even more dire predictions.

Let's start over. If stated properly, the "scientific consensus" would run as follows: climate models teach us to expect some warming from human-caused atmospheric CO2 increases, but disagree about how much. It's hard to make cost-benefit judgments on such a basis, but happily the Green New Deal makes it easy-it would cost a lot of money and accomplish nothing since U.S. emissions are just 14% of the total and shrinking. India and China, not the U.S., will determine the fate of climate change.

Cost-benefit analysis also tells us a bunch of things that might be worth doing even in light of the uncertainties. A tax reform based on a revenue-neutral carbon tax could make our tax system more efficient and pro-growth. Government investment in basic research tends to have a high payoff, and battery research is a particularly attractive opportunity. Rethinking nuclear power and regulation is another area of huge potential. Safer and cheaper nuclear technologies continue to advance on the drawing board even in today's inhospitable political environment.

And guess what? All the above would be easier to sell to other countries than Green New Deal masochism. Voters would readily gobble up new energy technologies and tax models that would make their societies richer and stronger.

In honor of this week's global climate gathering in Madrid, the New York Times aptly refers to the "gap between reality and diplomacy." International agreements, by their nature, are designed to put an imprimatur on what domestic politicians would do anyway, and that doesn't include prematurely ending their careers by imposing on consumers the kind of crushing burdens the green left seeks.

Look elsewhere for the turning points that actually matter. If climate change proves as severe as some scientists believe, the most damning moment will be one that passed largely unremarked except in this column: the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown after Japan's 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Under Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany, the world's sixth biggest emitter, chaotically and thoughtlessly announced within weeks that it would close all 17 of its nuclear plants. China and India, then pursuing ambitious nuclear expansions that should have become more ambitious, instead recommitted themselves to burning vast amounts of coal.

Nuclearphobes should remind themselves that more people die each year from coal-mining accidents than have been killed in all the nuclear accidents in history. Never mind the tens of thousands who are statistically estimated to die annually from inhaling particulates.

No technology is perfect, but NASA's James Hansen, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Gaia theorist James Lovelock, and the late Harvard economist Martin Weitzman are among the diverse and serious students of climate change who have said that meaningful cuts won't happen without nuclear.

The Fukushima accident, widely misread and breathing new life into the antinuclear lobby, will prove more significant than even the advocacy errors of Al Gore. It will prove more significant than the Paris Agreement, the election of Donald Trump, the tiresome legal vendetta against Exxon, or any of the matters that obsess the climate left. It probably put paid to any hope that emissions cuts will play a role in climate change for at least the next three or four decades. Get used to it.

SOURCE

Comment on the above article

CO2 Coalition Executive Director Caleb S. Rossiter says:

"Yes, it's all about the models! This is the most important op-ed of the year in the energy field. Yes, the entire policy debate is predicated on model accuracy, and it hasn't been very good. The atmosphere-ocean-land energy transfer system is the modeling problem from hell.

"Nearly all the models put in a parameter estimate with too much sensitivity to CO2. We are publishing a seminal paper by MIT atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen this week on why sensitivity is below even the lower bound of the IPCC model estimates of 1.5 to 4.5 C temp increase for a doubling of CO2 levels.

"The best model, by Russian scientists, has lower CO2 sensitivity than the others, and tracks well when run forward.

"The result of all the thousands of parameter estimates that provide a good "backfit" for the IPCC models with past temperatures is that when the models are then run forward, they have three times too much warming when compared to now 40 years of data.

"In my testimony and writings I try to educate Congress and the public on how models work...and don't, as witnessed by the ever-receding projections of severe warming:

Via email

The Fauxvironmentalists of San Francisco

San Francisco policymakers recently received a building proposal that one might think fits the city’s environmental goals. A developer wants to build a 5-story, 20-unit building in the Outer Sunset, a neighborhood that’s added only 21 units since 2011. The project would include 5 affordable units, abut a rail line, and replace a vacant gas station.

As with many San Francisco projects that are code compliant, this one can be appealed by residents for $750. So an appeal is being filed against it to reduce the unit number, increase the number of parking spaces, and potentially kill it altogether. It was filed by Mike Murphy, a former Board of Supervisors candidate… and councilor for the San Francisco Green Party.

Welcome to the wacky world of San Francisco climate activism.

Various groups there call for, in the abstract at least, environmental sustainability, but frequently organize to block mixed-use, multi-story, transit-oriented housing developments. This sends a growing Bay Area population further to the suburbs, where they make long car commutes into the city.

The most notorious offender has been the Sierra Club’s San Francisco Bay chapter. In 2017, I wrote a Forbes piece listing the projects they’d opposed in the city and nearby dense suburbs like Berkeley. It ranged from various high-rise projects downtown, to housing around the Giants’ stadium, to a shipyard redevelopment that would clean up a toxic site and produce 12,000 units. For the article, I interviewed three different chapter representatives. Each interview was strange.

The reps would insist that they favor infill development, citing the chapter’s bylaws which say so. But for each project I mentioned, they’d cite specific reasons for their opposition. It included aesthetic gripes, soil concerns, grievances about the projects’ affordability, or the fact that developers would profit. Conor Johnston, former chief of staff to current San Francisco Mayor London Breed, also noted their consistent but opaque opposition in a San Francisco Examiner article.

“Time and again, chapter leaders hedge their opposition with statements like, ‘We support infill development, just not this plan.’ But if you oppose every plan, that hedge rings awfully hollow.”

The aforementioned San Francisco Green Party has, by comparison, been more open about its anti-growth stances. It has long endorsed candidates—or fielded its own—who oppose infill development. This November, it opposed 2 ballot initiatives that would spur more housing production. Measure A would fund $600 million in affordable housing construction, including for seniors and the chronically poor; and Measure E would loosen zoning to build more teacher housing. Regarding the Outer Sunset project, Murphy on Twitter called it a “pre-apocalyptic future sandcrawler”, while the San Francisco Green Party account tweeted that it would be “more luxury condos on toxic land.” The response about toxic land did not, however, explain why the Green Party wants less housing and more parking. I contacted both accounts for comment about this apparent contradiction, but have not heard back.

Aside from the Sierra Club and Green Party, a third way San Francisco climate activists block development is through the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. The law was passed in 1970 to file appeals against environmentally-harmful developments. It has since been used as a standard means to obstruct environmentally-friendly ones. According to one study, 98% of units targeted by CEQA are in urban areas. In San Francisco, CEQA has been used to try and block the new Warriors arena, the redevelopment of a laundromat into housing, and a homeless shelter.

Lastly, there are random residents who aren’t affiliated with specific laws or organizations, but think up environmentally-based arguments to use. For example, a recently-approved 744-unit project in the Laurel Heights neighborhood was opposed because it meant cutting down 200 trees. But as Johnston noted in a phone interview, the developer promised to replant twice that number during development.

The thing is, dense development really is good for the environment—especially when built in San Francisco. A study by economists Ed Glaeser and Matthew Kahn found that the city has the 2nd-lowest CO2 emissions per household of major U.S. metros, due to its mild climate, efficient use of utilities, and low car ownership. The more people who live there, the better for our climate.

Why some local environmentalists protest such growth is hard to know, since they don’t give straight answers. It may be that they’re anti-capitalist, and prefer sticking it to developers even when the developers are helping the environment. Another theory, offered by Johnston, is that there’s a strand within the movement that wants population control, and thinks restricting development will accomplish that. But it may simply be that they are NIMBYs, and are using distorted environmental arguments to serve their goals.

“It would be comical if it wasn’t so horrible,” said Johnston. “Opposing urban infill housing under the banner of environmentalism is hypocritical and harmful to the environment that we’re all actually trying to protect.”

But the obstruction remains powerful in San Francisco. It has left Outer Sunset and other neighborhoods with almost no recent growth, worsening the housing shortage and expanding sprawl.

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 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 December, 2019

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Heat waves, Cold winters explained in the Oct. 18, 1877 issue of the Royal Cornwall Gazette, Truro, Cornwall, England.

The UN’s ‘Woke’ Climate Propaganda Is An Insult To Science

The climate change “emergency” is fake news. Many will roll their eyes in exasperation at the conspiratorial bombastry of yet another “denier”. But for years I have been a plastic recycling, polar bear cooing middle-grounder.

In fact, Aristotle would probably turn in his grave at the logical fallaciousness of my long-held presumption that the truth must lie somewhere between those two mutually loathing opposites – Skepticism and Armageddon.

But as the doom-mongering acquires the rubber-stamped smell of institutionalized illness, it is impossible to ignore that the “woke” are the new “slept” – too deep in their sugar coma of confected hysteria to realize they are being duped by disinformation.

Before I explain why the climate “emergency” is the most electrifyingly effective propaganda exercise of the 21st century, two clarifications.

I have no fight to pick with glaring evidential realities: surface records clearly show the planet is getting warmer.

Nor do I have a culture war-bloodied ax to grind with the fundamental chemistry: carbon dioxide indisputably contributes to the greenhouse effect.

But I do take issue with how the mainstream debate has become an insult to both the public’s intelligence and basic science.

This was clearer than ever yesterday, as bureaucratic catastrophists kicked up dystopian dust-clouds on their way into the UN Madrid climate change summit.

As Greta Thunberg arrived by yacht (after her British skipper likely clocked up 3 tonnes of carbon emissions flying to the US to pick her up), UN Secretary-General António Guterres rumbled that, over the horizon, he could see “the point of no return”.

Delegates waved the UN’s latest Emissions Gap Report as if it were both a millenarian death oracle and a methodologically indisputable text; in it, the recommendation to cut emissions by at least 7.6 percent per year for the next decade.

One can’t help but feel that we have heard such curiously precise warnings before. Last year the UN warned that we had just 12 years to save the planet.

Scientists have since revised this to approximately 18 months. Or perhaps it is already too late. The experts don’t seem quite sure.

Indeed, the distinction between present and future seems to be fading to discardable subtlety.

Take the study which has gone viral in recent days for claiming that parts of the world have either already reached – or are inching towards –“tipping point”, whereby the planet becomes caught in destructive feedback loops.

Are we already doomed, or nearly doomed, or nearly already doomed? More is the mystery.

Claims such as these are projections, but they are routinely presented to the public as unquestionable facts. This effectively reduces them to fake news.

Even more so, given that the accuracy of the climate modeling upon which these figures and scenarios rely is contested, and the climate does not change in a straight line.

To take one example, the UN’s international climate change body, the IPCC, said in 2007 that temperatures had risen by 0.2C per decade between 1990-2005 and used that figure for its 20-year projection.

Inconveniently, warming turned out to have been just 0.05C per decade over the 15 years to 2012.

The IPCC acknowledges the uncertainty of the computations it champions; hence the disclaimer squirreled away on its website stating that it does not guarantee the accuracy of the information it contains. A caveat lost in translation at the resplendently funereal press conferences.

This post-truth scam is having a chilling effect on science. Experts are locked in a race to the bottom to make detailed and disastrous premonitions.

And despite the fact that disciplined debate is the motor of scientific discovery, eco-extremists are shutting down discussions that dissent from the Apocalypse narrative.

SOURCE

Historic Cold in U.S., Record Snow Across Northern Hemisphere: Winter Arrives Early

If you haven’t heard about the historic snow across the northern hemisphere this winter, hear it now. Yes, winter began early with unusually heavy snow and extraordinary cold.

Many parts of the U.S. recorded historic lows in November, especially during the second week. Media reports confirmed “record-breaking temperatures across the U.S.” Buffalo, New York, broke its highest snowfall record for Nov. 11 with 8.7 inches of snow.

On Nov. 12, the National Weather Service (NWS) in Indianapolis tweeted, “The current temperature is 13 [degrees Fahrenheit] which breaks a 108 year old record low for the city. Old record low was 14 [degrees Fahrenheit] in 1911.”

The Midwest registered over 850 daily temperature records. NWS in Grand Rapids tweeted, “Preliminary numbers from G.R., Lansing, Muskegon, and Kalamazoo indicate this has been a Top 3 coldest first-half of November, competing with 1991 and 1951, with temperatures averaging near 32 degrees! Normally we’re around 41 degrees.”

A similar situation prevailed in Canada. Pearson airport in Toronto recorded 5.5 inches of snow. That was four times higher than the previous record set in 1983. The Weather Network observed that “record January-like cold, bitter wind chill” descended in Ontario. The nation’s capital, Ottawa, registered at least four record-breaking cold days in November.

The northern hemisphere as a whole experienced above-normal snowfall.

The European Space Agency’s Global Snow Monitoring for Climate Research (GlobSnow) quantifies snow levels in terms of snow water equivalent (SWE). SWE is “the amount of liquid water in the snow pack that would be formed if the snow pack was completely melted.”

Data from GlobSnow confirm that snow-mass levels for the past few weeks have been well above the 30-year average (1982–2012).

According to Environment and Climate Change Canada, the snow extent in the northern hemisphere is at its highest levels in recent decades.

National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) reported that the daily snow extent for November has been at a 14-year high (2005–2019).

If the trend continues, the winter of 2019–2020 could be one of the coldest, and snowiest, in recent decades.

Regardless, we can say with certainty that winter has arrived early this year. Arctic blasts have provided us with record-breaking new lows.

Climate activists are largely silent on the record cold and snow. They seem increasingly out of touch with climate reality.

These record lows may or may not presage long-term changes in climate. They do, however, belie false predictions that winters would become milder due to rapid climate change.

Ecclesiastes is right: There is nothing new under the sun!

SOURCE

Pelosi blows climate hot air in Europe

As the Democrats' effort to convince the country that President Donald Trump deserves to be impeached falters and is on the verge of backfiring, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi decided it was time to change the subject. So, with a delegation of House Democrats in tow, Pelosi jetted off to the UN's latest climate summit, known as COP25, in Madrid, Spain. She declared that, despite the fact that Trump initiated our official withdrawal from the dubious 2015 Paris Agreement, the U.S. is "still in." Pelosi asserted, "By coming here we want to say to everyone we are still in. The United States is still in. Our delegation is here to send a message that Congress's commitment to take action on the climate crisis is ironclad."

The Democrats' favorite boogieman is "climate change," but they clearly don't believe it's real based upon their behavior and proposed "solutions." Nevertheless, they love to ring the alarm bells, virtue signaling their "commitment" to "save the planet." Of course, as we have repeatedly noted, the solutions Democrats offer would do nothing to mitigate climate change and in fact would cause greater local ecological damage, while at the same time destroying the American economy — which is their real agenda.

The reality is that since 2007, CO2 emissions have fallen in the U.S. by 14%, thanks in large part to the natural-gas boom from shale fracking, which the ecofascists and Vladimir Putin want to shut down. Furthermore, as of 2017, America's emissions were 5% lower than in 1990, despite a population increase of at least 75 million. And a majority of Americans recognize that the climate alarmists' proposed solutions would only lead to less freedom and more government interference in their lives, followed by more suffering. They simply aren't buying the Democrats' "solution."

Hence the climate alarmists' push to rebrand "climate change" into something that sounds much more dire and imminent. "Global meltdown" or "global melting" are a couple of terms proposed by climate activist Aaron Hall. He explains, "After the global climate strike this past September, I found myself thinking about the terms 'climate change' and 'global warming.' Are these scientific terms too neutral? Do they do enough to grab attention and inspire people to take action?" While his proposed alternative terms sound silly, Pelosi has clearly bought into the concept, as she emphasized that climate change was a "crisis." In fact, the term "climate crisis" has increasingly gained traction with the mainstream media. And former Secretary of State John Kerry continues the half-century leftist obsession with treating domestic concerns as warfare, insisting, "We've got to treat this like a war."

The truth is, the Democrats' problem isn't with "climate change" or whatever new alarmist term they adopt; it's with capitalism. This is demonstrated by their continual refusal to praise and recognize the American free-market economy as the most effective means of producing practical solutions to tackle the challenges caused by climate change, all while they turn a blind eye to the planet's largest polluter, communist China.

SOURCE

Why Don’t Climate Change Alarmists Promote Nuclear Power?

In 2008 Al Gore said climate change threatens to “destroy the future of human civilization.” He continued, “We are facing a planetary emergency which, if not solved, would exceed anything we’ve ever experienced in the history of humankind.” To address the problem will “require us to end our dependence on carbon-based fuels.” Not everyone agrees with Mr. Gore’s conclusions on climate change, but for those who do, why are they not strong advocates of nuclear power? It is a proven technology in use today that emits no greenhouse gasses and can substitute for massive amounts of fossil fuels.

If we need to take action now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, there is no surer way to do it than to build nuclear power plants. According to the EPA, electricity generation and transportation account for 57 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Assuming that most transportation emissions are from motor vehicles, then generating all electricity from nuclear power (and other zero-emissions technologies like solar and wind) and replacing petroleum-fueled vehicles with electric vehicles could eliminate more than half of greenhouse gas emissions. Residential and commercial is another 12 percent, which could shift almost entirely to electricity, and industry accounts for another 22 percent, which also could be largely electrified.

By using existing technology to substitute nuclear power for fossil fuels in the generation of electricity, by substituting electricity for petroleum to fuel motor vehicles, and by shifting commercial and residential heating to electricity, emissions of greenhouse gasses could be reduced by 80 percent or more.

If climate change is a catastrophe on the horizon, and immediate action is needed, why are climate change alarmists not solidly backing nuclear power—a remedy that is available today?

I’m not siding with (or against) the climate change alarmists here. Maybe they are right. Maybe not. But they think they are right, and if they hold these strong convictions, their lack of active support for nuclear power is completely baffling. They perceive a problem. A proven and readily available remedy already exists, but they are not clamoring to implement it. They are not advocating the one change we could implement now to avoid what they see as the biggest planetary emergency to have ever faced humankind.

Admittedly, nuclear power has its own drawbacks, but they are small and manageable compared to the alternative of global catastrophe. France generates about 75 percent of its electricity through nuclear, and many countries generate 30 to 50 percent of their electricity through nuclear power, so the substitution of nuclear power for fossil fuels for electricity generation, and to power motor vehicles and heat homes and commercial spaces, is obviously feasible because it is being done now.

Meanwhile, Germany and Switzerland have started phasing out their nuclear power plants and will completely eliminate them. I’m not objecting to their decision, but the climate change alarmists should be. Those who view greenhouse gasses as a serious threat to human civilization should be outraged at nations that are eliminating zero-emissions sources of power.

Some economists advocate carbon taxes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While carbon taxes would undoubtedly have an effect—look at the difference in the size of the average automobile in Europe, where taxes push the price of gasoline to more than double the US price, and in the United States—they won’t eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. Small cars still emit greenhouse gasses. A political problem with carbon taxes is that people resist being taxed, so carbon taxes will be a tough sell.

If governments around the world encouraged nuclear power, and perhaps even subsidized it, energy prices would fall, which people would like much more than rising energy prices, adding to the attractiveness of nuclear power. Electric cars are already cheaper to operate than petroleum-powered cars. What if governments offered reduced cost, or even free, charging stations for electric cars? I’m not suggesting governments should do this. I’m wondering why climate change alarmists aren’t advocating it.

Some climate change alarmists might not advocate nuclear power out of ignorance: They don’t realize the potential of nuclear energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Some alarmists might be hypocrites: They don’t really believe their own arguments. Some alarmists are more anti-capitalist and support climate change hysteria because the remedies proposed would move in the direction of undermining capitalism.

Surely some climate change alarmists are both sincere and knowledgeable. So, why is there no visible support within that group for nuclear 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 or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

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

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4 December, 2019

Could climate change become a security issue — and threaten democracy?

Indeed it could. Warmists often say that democracy has to be limited to get the actions they want. It is warmists, not warming that is the threat to democracy

Action to address climate change has been left so late that any political response will likely become an international security issue — and could threaten democracy.

That's the view of Ole Wæver, a prominent international relations professor at the University of Copenhagen, who also says climate inaction could lead to armed conflict.

"At some point this whole climate debate is going to tip over," he tells RN's Late Night Live.

"The current way we talk about climate is one side and the other side. One side is those who want to do something, and the other is the deniers who say we shouldn't do anything."

He believes that quite soon, another battle will replace it. Then, politicians that do 'something' will be challenged by critics demanding that policies actually add up to realistic solutions.

When decision-makers — after delaying for so long — suddenly try to find a shortcut to realistic action, climate change is likely to "be securitised".

Professor Wæver, who first coined the term "securitisation", says more abrupt change could potentially threaten democracy.

"The United Nations Security Council could, in principle, tomorrow decide that climate change is a threat to international peace and security," he says.

"And then it's within their competencies to decide 'and you are doing this, you are doing this, you are doing this, this is how we deal with it'."

A risk of armed conflict?

Professor Wæver says despite "overwhelmingly good arguments" as to why action should be taken on climate change, not enough has been done.

And he says that could eventually lead to a greater risk of armed conflict, particularly in unstable political climates.

"Imagine these kinds of fires that we are seeing happening [in Australia] in a part of Africa or South-East Asia where you have groups that are already in a tense relationship, with different ethnic groups, different religious orientations," he says.

"And then you get events like this and suddenly they are not out of each other's way, they'll be crossing paths, and then you get military conflicts by the push."

He isn't the first expert to warn of the security risks of climate change.

Professor Wæver argues that delayed action will lead to more drastic measures. "The longer we wait, the more abrupt the change has to be," he says.

"So a transformation of our economy and our energy systems that might have been less painful if we had started 20 years ago, 30 years ago. "If we have to do that in a very short time, it becomes extremely painful.

"And then comes the question: can you carry through such painful transformations through the normal democratic system?"

He says classifying climate change as a security issue could justify more extreme policy responses.

"That's what happens when something becomes a security issue, it gets the urgency, the intensity, the priority, which is helpful sometimes, but it also lets the dark forces loose in the sense that it can justify problematic means," he says.

This urgency, he says, could lead to more abrupt action at an international level.

"If there was something that was decided internationally by some more centralised procedure and every country was told 'this is your emission target, it's not negotiable, we can actually take military measures if you don't fulfil it', then you would basically have to get that down the throat of your population, whether they like it or not," he says.

"Aa bit like what we saw in southern Europe with countries like Greece and the debt crisis and so on.

"There were decisions that were made for them and then they just had to have a more or less technocratic government and get it through."

SOURCE

Venice’s floods are not signs of a ‘climate apocalypse’

There is no reason why local solutions cannot be found to the flooding.

Venice has endured a terrible two weeks of flooding. On 12 November, over 80 per cent of the city was flooded. The reading on the local tide gauge reached 187cm – the highest level recorded for 53 years. Venice mayor Luigi Brugnaro tweeted: ‘This is the result of climate change.’ His claim was widely repeated by the media. Luca Zaia, governor of the Veneto region, added that ‘We are faced with total apocalyptic devastation’.

The floods were certainly dramatic and damaging. In Venice’s city centre, St Mark’s Church was flooded and there are concerns about damage to the crypt, columns and floor mosaics. Three water buses sank and some banked on to public walkways. Boats and docking platforms were damaged throughout the lagoon due to high winds of 100km per hour and a tornado close to St Mark’s Square.

The worst damage was on the island of Pellestrina, where an elderly man died when he was struck by lightning. Pumping flood waters was a significant problem for flooded properties on this island. Other coastal areas of the region also experienced flooding and damage, including Chioggia, Jesolo and Caorle.

The damage is estimated to have cost hundreds of millions of euros. Churches, businesses, transport organisations and residents have suffered damage to their properties and boats. The height of the tide was underestimated. Winds were stronger than expected, leaving most people unprepared. On 14 November, the government declared a state of emergency and earmarked €20million to support Venice and its population.

But despite all the damage, the statement by Veneto governor Zaia, that Venice faced ‘total apocalyptic devastation’, is both inaccurate and historically ignorant. Venetians have suffered far more from past flooding than they have over the past two weeks. Fewer flood defences, less sturdy buildings and weaker infrastructure have hugely exacerbated the consequences of flooding.

Given its location, Venice has faced devastating floods throughout its history of over 1,500 years. In 1106 severe flooding wiped away every single building in the Venetian town of Malamocco. Historical accounts of flooding in 782, 840, 875, 1102, 1240, 1268 and 1794 reveal people frequently died from drowning or being stranded in cold water.

In modern times, during the floods of November 1966, the tides reached up to 194cm and 100 per cent of the city was flooded. Several thousand people were made homeless and the city was without electricity or telephones for days. The consequences of the 1966 floods were far more severe than today’s ‘total apocalyptic devastation’. Since 1966, measures such as the construction of jetties and breakwaters, waterproofing, raised paths and improved drainage mean that Venice is much better protected today – especially against low- and medium-level floods.

But as the recent floods clearly attest, Venice is still vulnerable. High-level floods – measured as above 110cm on the tide gauge – have become more frequent over the past century. These are caused by short-term weather effects, especially high winds blowing a greater volume of water from the Adriatic Sea into the Venetian lagoon, combined with rainfall and water from the surrounding rivers.

In addition, there has been a long-term rise in the mean sea level relative to the land. This correlates strongly with the increasing frequency of high floods.

The increase in the mean sea level in Venice has two causes. One is a sea-level rise related to climate change. The other is subsidence – meaning that the land around Venice is getting lower. The principal reason for so much subsidence is that groundwater used to be extracted from the aquifer under the lagoon between the 1930s and 1970s. Between 1897 and 1983, the relative sea level to the land in Venice rose by 23cm – with 12cm due to subsidence and 11cm caused by rising sea levels. Since the 1970s, subsidence has slowed and sea levels have risen by approximately 5cm.

Venice’s mayor was therefore wrong to say that the recent floods were only the result of climate change. Sea-level rise due to climate change has certainly contributed more to high floods in recent years, but land subsidence has been a major cause over the longer term.

Understanding these various causes is important in formulating responses. Blaming the ‘climate emergency’ misses the fact that the worst of the flooding could have been prevented – and can be prevented in future – with the right infrastructure. For instance, one long-term proposal being considered is whether to pump water back into the ground to raise the land level across the lagoon.

The most recent floods might have been blocked had the MOSE mobile dams been completed on time. These dams were designed to protect Venice and its lagoon from tides of up to 3m high. They began construction in 2003 and were due to be completed in 2011. Unfortunately, completion has been delayed due to environmental objections (including from the EU), technical and funding problems, frequent changes of government, and a local corruption scandal in 2014. The earliest the dams are estimated to be fully functioning is 2022.

Venice’s problems need to be dealt with as a matter of urgency. They are serious. But they are not apocalyptical. We are more than capable of solving them.

SOURCE

Can we go back to the pre-fossil fuel era?

Seems like an easy yes or no answer, but there are numerous financial costs and social change ramifications of going Green that make the answer weighty. If everyone can recall history, the worlds already experienced life without fossil fuels just a few short centuries ago.

We never had the oil industry before the 1900’s, so why do we believe society can adjust to living in those medieval times with just electricity? With no infrastructures to move things that are the basis of commerce, and no chemicals to make the products that are the basis of our lifestyles.

The Green New Deal (GND) may be in larval form right now, but the fact that it’s being seriously discussed in Congress (and around the world) is a quantum leap for politics. If nothing else, the advancing of Ocasio-Cortez and Markey’s bill signals that some of our elected officials are on board with inviting Americans to dream again — to imagine a better future for ourselves, even if the road between now and then hasn’t come entirely into focus yet.

What the GND affirms for Millennials, Gen Z and other young people is that we are not living in the best of times, and that recalibrating the world for sustainability and economic justice will not come from taking polite baby steps. We simply don’t have the time for that.

I know politicians both here and abroad are supportive of the GND to sunset the oil industry, BUT imagine how life was without that industry just a few hundred years ago before 1900 when we had NO militaries, NO communications systems, including cell phones, computers, and I Pads, NO vehicles, NO airlines that now move 4 billion people around the world, NO cruise ships that now move 25 million passengers around the world, NO merchant ships that are now moving billions of dollars of products monthly throughout the world, NO tires for vehicles, and NO asphalt for roads, NO water filtration systems, NO sanitation systems, NO space program, NO medications and medical equipment, NO vaccines, NO fertilizers to help feed billions.

Even more important than living without the above-mentioned infrastructures, before the 1900’s we had NONE of the 6,000 products that come from oil and petroleum products.

For now, forget about the questions of how to finance the GND’s guaranteed jobs for everyone with no infrastructures to work and high-quality healthcare for all with no medications or medical equipment. Just imagine living in those pioneer days with only electricity available and nothing to power since virtually everything we have today is made with the chemicals and by-products manufactured from crude oil.

Turning to the oil industry after 1900 we found that nothing powers economies the way refined oil does; oil can be turned into an array of products: cosmetics, athletic equipment, shoelaces, bowling balls, milk jugs, medications and the aviation, diesel and gasoline fuels. The two prime movers that have done more for the cause of globalization are the diesel engine and the jet turbine. Both get their fuels from oil and without this fuel transportation and commerce return to the pre-Industrial revolution age. In short, oil may be the single most flexible substance ever discovered, so why sunset that industry?

Renewables, such as solar, wind, and biofuels, require taxpayer financial subsidies that are derived from the infrastructures supported by fossil fuels. They require countryside-devouring land mass sprawl due to their low-power density to produce significant electricity, i.e., precious land that will be required to feed the billions on this earth.

How do we provide subsidies to the renewables industries when so many people living on earth survive on less than $10 a day? Today, across southern Asia, portions of Europe, parts of Africa and Australia, there are families attempting to live on virtually nothing. As hard as it is to believe, it is a truism.

How do we provide healthcare to those children in underdeveloped countries? Mostly from energy starved countries that are experiencing 11 million child deaths every year, and mainly from preventable causes when we have no transportation infrastructures to deliver the “medicine man”, since there will be no medications and medical equipment without the oil industry.

For those that support sun-setting the oil industry that is currently running this world’s economy and embark on those unknown GND roads, negotiate its many turns, obstacles and possibly suffer the consequences of removing an industry before we have an alternative industry to replace it, then keep supporting the GND proponents.

For those that believe we should have an alternative replacement for the oil industry before abandoning the industry responsible for international commerce, then it may be time to change our political leaders.

While developed countries with thriving economies continue to seek out an “alternative energy” that can maintain our economy, the billions of people in undeveloped countries may find difficulty adapting to a world without the oil industry as they are just starting to enhance their lifestyles and commerce.

SOURCE

New EU leaders take office vowing to tackle climate change

Virtue signalling

BRUSSELS — A new team of leaders took office at the helm of the European Union on Sunday, pledging to put the fight against climate change at the top of their agenda and foster European unity despite the likely departure of Britain from the 28-nation bloc.

Germany’s Ursula von der Leyen replaced Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the EU’s powerful executive arm, which polices EU laws and negotiates trade on behalf of member countries. The former German defense minister becomes the first woman in the post.

Former Belgian premier Charles Michel succeeded Donald Tusk as president of the European Council, meaning he will chair summits of national leaders and drive their common agenda forward.

In the company of European Parliament President David Sassoli and new European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde, von der Leyen and Michel marked the start of their five-year terms in Brussels with events marking the 10th anniversary of the Lisbon Treaty, the EU’s rule book.

“Today we can present a unified face to the rest of the world. With more weight and greater coherence in a rules-based world,” Michel said. “Today we do more than look back, we celebrate a new beginning, with great enthusiasm and hope.”

Sassoli urged the EU’s main institutions and the new team to deliver on the hopes invested in them by the more than 500 million citizens who make up the world’s biggest trading bloc.

“We need to turn the promises of the past few months into results that improve people’s lives,” he said. “From the fight against climate change to tackling the rise in the cost of living, Europeans want to see real action.”

At the commission’s headquarters, as workers were still moving in office furniture and equipment, von der Leyen outlined her schedule, seeming somewhat relieved to be at work after “a difficult and bumpy start” getting her policy commissioners approved by the European Parliament.

Setting the tone for what she describes as “geopolitical commission,” von der Leyen held phone talks with the leaders of China, South Korea, Turkey, Indonesia, and Australia, with more due later. She showed she is hitting the ground running on an issue of major European concern, heading Monday to Madrid for the international climate conference.

“The European Union wants to be the first climate neutral continent in 2050. Europe is leading in this topic, and we know that we have to be ambitious for our planet,” she told reporters.

On Friday, von der Leyen makes her first foreign trip and has chosen Africa. In Addis Ababa, she will meet with Moussa Faki Mahamat, chairman of the African Union Commission, as well as the president and prime minister of Ethiopia.

The future of Britain’s place in the EU should become clearer after its Dec. 12 election.

SOURCE

Rare earths industry welcomes new US-Australian deal to ensure critical minerals supply

A newly-signed deal between Australia and the United States focusing on critical minerals could be the push to create a thriving rare earths industry in Australia and more specifically, central Australia, according to some mineral experts and rare earths industry players.

The deal comes months after the world's rare earths supply was thrust into the spotlight after Beijing threatened to restrict the rare earth trade as part of its ongoing trade war with the US.

On the other side of the world in outback Australia, Nolans Bore, a rare earths project north of Alice Springs, has welcomed the new deal.

The facility has been more than 15 years in the making, and the company behind it, Arafura Resources, said pending native title approval and finance, it was planning to start construction late next year.

Full details of the deal have not been made public but Brian Fowler, general manager for the Northern Territory with Arafura, said it was a sign that politicians were realising how geopolitically threatened rare earths are due to China's dominance in the market.

"[China] controls 85 per cent of the world's supply of rare earths," he said.

According to the company, the $1 billion project has a large, globally significant rare earth deposit of roughly 56 million tonnes.

"We have the potential to supply somewhere in the region of 8 to 10 per cent of the world's requirement for neodymium and praseodymium, two of the rare earths minerals," Mr Fowler said.

"Their role is in the production of the highest strength magnets on the planet, they are the absolute essential elements in the electrification of motor vehicles and in the production of clean energy using things like wind turbines."

Mr Fowler said considering the amount of car companies looking to make electric models, the current global supply of neodymium and praseodymium was not adequate to meet the predicted demand going forward.

Chris Vernon, processing research director for CSIRO's mineral resources, agreed that demand was about to soar. He said that although Australia had a significant supply of rare earths and sophisticated technology, investment had been holding the industry back. "[The deal] looks very promising," he said.

"One of the bottlenecks to getting a project off the ground in Australia was the financing and the uncertainty [so] if government is stepping in and providing some surety about getting finance, that can only be a good thing."

He reiterated that the China-US trade war was to thank for throwing rare earths into focus. "The rare earths market is about to explode, simply because we expect to put so many electric vehicles on the road; every one of those requires rare earths for their magnets," he said.

"There's also a burgeoning market in other technology uses.

"A car only takes a few tens of kilograms of rare earths but when you're looking at some high-tech military equipment for example, you could be looking at hundreds of kilograms of rare earths.

"There is a real hunger for more rare earths."

While Nolan's Bore has the required environmental approvals, a local advocacy group said it still had concerns around the mine.

However, they conceded that rare earths were needed for the transition to green energy by increasing the use of electric cars and wind turbines.

Alex Read, policy officer with the Arid Lands Environment Centre [ALEC], said the organisation was cautiously supportive of the project, providing that environmental regulations were followed.

"We understand the importance of having a supply of these metals for electric vehicles and renewable energy but we need to take a cautious approach to this," he said. "And we need to have a broader conversation about the costs and benefits of these projects."

The Northern Territory Government will soon start consultation on draft environment protection regulations after passing the Environment Protection Bill earlier this year.

But ALEC would like to see proposed legislation changes in place before any new mines come online.

"One of the key flaws in the current framework is there is no way for directors to be held personally liable if they don't comply with their environmental requirements," Mr Read said.

"We want to make sure they have a chain of responsibility framework to make sure they're held personally responsible and we want to make sure that the rehabilitation program is completed as they say it would be.

"Rare earth mining comes with a lot of risks.

"Particularly with this project, we're seeing it's associated with elevated levels of radionuclides and we understand that they're going to be significant risks to groundwater, surface water [and] public health."

Mr Read said ALEC would also like to see changes put into place to ensure mining companies had to pay for their water licences.

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 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 December, 2019

A new conversation with Prof. William Happer

Four years ago, Stuart went to Princeton University to interview Professor William Happer.

When he interviewed him, he was aware that he was a CO2 (and its impact on climate) contrarian.

Mr. Happer points out carbon dioxide is an important trace gas and an integral part of the carbon cycle, a bio-geo-chemical cycle in which carbon is exchanged between the oceans, soil, rocks and the biosphere.

Virtually all of life on the plant requires CO2 concentrations to be above 150 parts per million.

The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere over the past 500 million years has been as high as 4,000 ppm and as low as 180 ppm.

Since 1880 when CO2 was measured at Mauna Loa in Hawaii levels have risen from 280 ppm to 413 ppm as of April 2019.

Happer, as you will hear, says the impact of CO2 on temperature rise has already taken effect and he points to the logarithmic scale, which is a nonlinear scale often used to analyze a large
range of quantities. According to Mr. Happer, it would take another 400 ppm to affect temperature by one additional degree.

Mr. Happer is also aware of the folly of predictions. And he, like Freeman Dyson, points to the inability of models to accurately predict climate outcomes. Then add in length of day, which changes by milliseconds, transferring massive amounts of energy mostly into the oceans – causing oscillations that, according to climatologist Judith Curry, are not considered in current climate models. I must ask: is the science of climate really settled? Can it ever be?

Mr. Happer’s position on climate, his scientific credentials and his role in the Trump administration have made him a very large target.

He is a physicist who specialized in the study of atomic physics, optics and spectroscopy. He is the Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics and he is the Davisson-Germer Prize winner in
Atomic or Surface Physics. He is not nor could he be a climate scientist because that designation is so new that UCLA only just launched a degree program in 2018.

Since that interview, Greenpeace outed him in a sting operation and President Donald Trump recruited Professor Happer to be a member of a Presidential Committee on Climate Security.

However, in September of 2019, the unflinching Mr. Happer quit. According to Science Magazine, while Happer may have been unflinching, Trump’s White House isn’t. So on Sept 13, 2019, Mr. Happer resigned.

Professor Happer, as you will see in this interview, firmly believes the impact of CO2 has been misrepresented.

SOURCE

Forcing banks to feed the climate machine

Can banks fight climate change? Should the bankers attempt to change the future weather of the planet? The notion is farfetched, yet politicians are trying to get banks to do just that.

Several members of Congress recently urged the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Jerome Powell, to use the agency’s powers to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Mr. Powell wisely is having none of it. It’s not the Fed’s job under the law to address the climate, he recently informed Congress. Legislation also has been proposed to require the Fed “manage climate-related financial risks.”

The Federal Reserve is a powerful agency that controls the U.S. money supply. Its mission established by Congress, most recently in 1978, is to pursue price stability and full employment. The Fed does this through its control of monetary policy, which includes determining the prime interest rate, and loaning banks money.

The Fed has a complicated and challenging mission to keep a lid on price inflation. Congress established the nation’s central bank a century ago as an entity run by a board of governors appointed by the president and with Senate approval for fixed terms of office in order to shield it at least somewhat from politics.

Just how would or could the Federal Reserve Bank influence CO2 emissions? The term follow the money is apt here, since the Fed controls its supply. The Fed also is a powerful regulator of banks and the financial sector writ large. It examines their holdings and investments.

Climate alarmists want the Fed to force banks and financial institutions to dictate how money is loaned and invested. Don’t like fossil fuels? The Fed ultimately could impede the ability of oil and gas companies to attract investors and obtain bank loans. If you think, as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez believes, that Miami will be flooded in a few years by a rising Atlantic Ocean, then the government, through agencies like the Fed, could discourage development in such coastal places.

Central banks in European countries already are getting deep in this fool’s errand of climate change and CO2 emissions. Even if you believe the Federal Reserve in the U.S. should add to its plate – beware, since its monetary policy track record includes some spectacular failures.

The double-digit percentage growth in annual price inflation in the late 1970’s was due primarily to an excessive expansion of the U.S. money supply by the Fed during that decade. High inflation has a broad, crippling effect on any economy, and the U.S. economy by the late ‘70’s experienced its worse condition since the Great Depression. To cure this high inflation, the Fed had to inflict more harm by raising interest rates that led to a deep recession in the early 1980’s.

The Fed also was a main culprit in the Great Recession of 2008-09, which resulted from its keeping interest rates too low for too long, which led to over-priced housing, commodities and company stocks. By late ’08, these bubbles burst and the Fed had to step in to keep the economy afloat with liquidity; again, fixing its own mistakes.

The Fed in its history has been mostly effective, but it is not the font of all wisdom, as these and other financial episodes demonstrate. But that hasn’t kept politicians from trying to use it, and every other level of government, to control society in the effort to control climate, as if accomplishing the former would enable the latter.

When climate alarmists are in charge of powerful agencies, the absence of applicable laws or sound science is no impediment to using government to force climate policies on an unwilling public. Examples abound, such as the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan to control carbon emissions by butchering the intent of the Clean Air Act. The U.S. Supreme Court put on hold on the CPP and the Trump administration has since replaced it with its Affordable Clean Energy rules.

The Federal Reserve doesn’t need to spend fruitless time and resources in some attempt to control the weather. It already is a full plate to preside over the U.S. economy. But that won’t stop climate alarmist politicians from demanding such as another tool to reorder society to fit their political agenda.

SOURCE

U.S. Reports First Month in 70 Years as Net Exporter of Oil

What happened to "Peak Oil"?

Remember a few years ago when the United States was heavily dependent on foreign oil and experts were telling us we'd be a slave to OPEC forever?

I remember it well. We fought wars for oil, undermined unfriendly governments for oil, but in the end, we were at the mercy of others for our oil supply. Our economy was held hostage by OPEC, as even a small change in the price of oil would send markets reeling and slow economic growth.

But in September, that all pretty much ended. For the first time since records were kept beginning in 1949, the United States became a net exporter of oil.

Bloomberg:

“The U.S. return to being a net exporter serves to remind how the oil industry can deliver surprises -- in this case, the shale oil revolution - that upend global oil prices, production, and trade flows,” said Bob McNally, a former energy adviser to President George W. Bush and president of the consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group.

Soaring output from shale deposits led by the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico has been in main driver of the transition -- but America’s status as a net exporter may be fragile. Many Texas wildcatters are predicting a rapid decline in production growth next year, while some Democratic contenders for the White House have called for a ban on fracking -- the controversial drilling technique that unleashed the boom.

“In the days of Jimmy Carter and even Ronald Reagan, we would have longed for this day,” said Jim Lucier, managing director of Washington, D.C.-based Capital Alpha Partners LLC. “Now we scarcely notice it at all.”

It's true. There were no parades or speeches marking the celebration of our energy independence. Part of that, I'm sure, is that we still import a sizable portion of some refined oil products as well as some crude oil.

But could it also be that the naysayers, the doomsday predictors, the "peak oil" movement, and those "experts" who believed the American energy sector would never rise again were s wrong they're embarrassed to be reminded of it?

Analysts at Rystad Energy said this week the U.S. is only months away from achieving energy independence, citing surging oil and gas output as well as the growth of renewables.

“Going forward, the United States will be energy independent on a monthly basis, and by 2030 total primary energy production will outpace primary energy demand by about 30%,” said Sindre Knutsson, vice president of Rystad Energy’s gas markets team.

In 1972, the global think tank Club of Rome published "Limits of Growth" which predicted economic collapse before the new millennium and notably, that oil reserves would be depleted by 1990. Today, there are approximately 1.73 trillion barrels of oil in the world's reserves with more being discovered every year. This is enough to last 50 years. And that's not taking into account alternative energy sources and efficiencies that would save us millions of barrels a year.

Why we keep listening to these fools is a mystery. They've been predicting the end of the United States for 200 years and somehow, we keep going. What seems like a miracle is actually the simple process of markets working their magic and human ingenuity doing the rest.

And those are things that the "experts" never take into account.

SOURCE

Prof. Michael Kelly: Energy Policy Needs ‘Herds Of Unicorns’
Climate Policy Research

Utopian thinking is putting the economy at risk says Cambridge professor

The UK’s decision to embark on a wholesale decarbonisation of the economy is beset by superficial thinking that ignores engineering reality.

That’s according to Professor Michael Kelly, emeritus professor of engineering at the University of Cambridge. At the Annual GWPF Lecture Professor Kelly told an audience in London last night that the government’s 2050 net zero target is unachievable without major social disruption.

“For the world to reverse two centuries of industrial development in a few decades would require the efforts of herds of unicorns”, he jokes. “It simply isn’t going to happen, as much as the zealots in Parliament and on the streets shout about it”.

Professor Kelly, a former chief scientist at the Department of Communities and Local Government, also hit out at the Committee on Climate Change’s claim that decarbonisation can be achieved cheaply.

“Their estimates are pie in the sky”, he says. “We have real-world data that shows that the cost would run to trillions of pounds. If politicians listen to them, we are in trouble”.

SOURCE

Australia is doing well at adaptation to the threat of climate change

It’s not surprising that the continuing drought, the driest ever for many parts of the country, record temperatures and the early and explosive start of the bushfire season have increased public concern about climate change and triggered accusations the government is failing to prepare communities for these growing hazards.

While it is true that government responses are lagging in Australia, as they are in most other countries, the Morrison government is doing more to build Australia’s climate resilience than its critics (or even the government itself) may realise. That’s because many of its initiatives are not branded as “climate change” and are embedded in the bureaucratic silos of government departments that have other mandates.

Some examples of this include the $5bn Future Drought Fund, the $4.5bn Roads of Strategic Importance Initiative, the $3.9bn Emergency Response Fund, the $1.5bn National Water Infrastructure Development Fund, the $130m National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework, and the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements, each of which provides very significant funding for activities to strengthen resilience to floods, droughts and other climate-related hazards that climate change is amplifying.

The problem is that this lack of integration at whole-of-government level is creating inefficiencies that we can ill-afford in a rapidly changing climate.

The Department of Environment and Energy co-ordinates the National Climate Resilience and Adaptation Strategy, but the strategy is not integrated with the Department of Home Affairs’ National Disaster Risk Reduction Framework, even though more than 90 per cent of all disasters are from hazards, such as floods and droughts, that climate change is worsening.

Similarly, the $100bn National Infrastructure Investment Program in the Department of Transportation, Cities and Regional Development, could be better leveraged to build regional and local resilience to climate hazards.

The ADF and the Australian aid program should also be key elements of a coherent national approach.

As we are already seeing, our military will increasingly need to be called upon to support disaster response within Australia and to respond to regional disasters, territorial disputes, and people movements driven by food instability and other climate-related disruptions. Careful targeting of the aid program’s $665m of development assistance for resilience-building can support both our humanitarian and national security objectives, decreasing the need for ADF responses to some of these emerging challenges.

We must bring together this significant ongoing work more coherently.

The recent Independent Review of the Australian Public Service, submitted to the Prime Minister last September, suggests a useful way forward. The review highlighted the key role of the APS Secretaries Board in driving policy across portfolios and explored options to strengthen the governance and resourcing of the board to drive delivery of whole-of-government outcomes. Building Australia’s resilience in the face of our changing climate is exactly the sort of cross-departmental challenge that would benefit from the board’s leadership.

Preparing a more coherent national approach would also make it easier to identify gaps that need to be addressed. A few already stand out. The federal government has no legislated authority defining its role, powers and responsibilities in responding to catastrophic natural disasters. This will become increasingly problematic in a rapidly warming climate. Governments in Canada and the US have this authority, even though they too have federal systems that vest the primary responsibility for responding to natural disasters at a state level.

Greater attention should also be devoted to mainstreaming disaster risk reduction across all of the commonwealth’s investments and we need to begin thinking more deeply about the implications for communities that are, or will soon be, in chronic crisis, including options such as managed retreats, land swaps and financial incentives for farmers to transition to other livelihoods.

Notwithstanding the polarising political rhetoric, there is strong bipartisan support for initiatives to build Australia’s resilience to climate hazards. Both major parties, for example, supported passage of the Future Drought and Emergency Response funds.

Given the increasing impact disasters are having on Australian communities, it is in our national interest for this bipartisan approach to become stronger, more visible and explicit. As this happens, it may also help to unlock opportunities for bipartisan efforts in other, more politically challenging, but fundamentally important areas, such as climate change mitigation.

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 or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

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

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2 December, 2019

Climate convert Jeremy Clarkson calls Greta Thunberg, 16, 'a stupid idiot' and a 'weird Swede with a bad temper' for offering no solutions to climate change while 'sailing across the ocean in a diesel-powered yacht'

Clarkson is Britain's bad boy. Because of his popularity he can get away with words that other Britons could not

Jeremy Clarkson has branded the eco-warrior Greta Thunberg 'a stupid idiot' and a 'weird Swede with a bad temper' in an explosive interview.

The 59-year-old gave his candid thoughts on the 16-year-old during promotion for The Grand Tour.

Clarkson - who regularly calls out the activist on social media and in his column with The Sun - has accused her of being a hypocrite.

Dismissing her as nothing more than 'a stupid idiot,' Jeremy said her speech at the United Nations offered no solutions when she accused leaders of stealing her 'dreams and childhood'.

He told The Independent: 'I think she's a weird Swede with a bad temper. Nothing will be achieved by sailing across the ocean in a diesel-powered yacht, and then lying about the diesel engine.'

He added that we've been aware of climate change for quite some time, and now 'there's that weird Swede running around making all sorts of 'we're going to die' noises, so we're all aware of it.'

The journalist also discussed witnessing first hand the impact of climate change as he saw rivers reduced to puddles while filming The Grand Tour in Cambodia.

He added: 'But rather than having her jumping up and down and waving her arms in the air, you can actually go there and say, 'Bloody hell, fire! Look at what this climate change has done to this place.'

'We simply said, 'Here's an example of it.' What do you want me to do now? Get on my carbon fibre yacht and go and shout at Donald Trump?'

He continued, criticising her for going to Chile for the climate change conference which was then moved to Madrid, saying that it made him 's*** himself laughing'.

Previously in his column for The Sun, he called Greta 'naive'.

The teen has come under fire from some critics for inciting fear among children with her climate activism.

SOURCE

Recycling failure in Britain

England burnt more waste than it recycled last year, prompting campaigners to call for a moratorium on all new incinerator projects.

Recycling rates have fallen over the past five years in more than half of local authority areas and the nation incinerated 11.2 million tonnes of rubbish last year, compared with recycling and composting 10.9 million tonnes.

Critics say that the proliferation of energy-from-waste incinerators, which burn rubbish to provide electricity, has caused recycling to fall while adding to carbon emissions pollution.

The plants were welcomed in the 1990s as a way to divert rubbish from landfill while also generating electricity. There are 42 fully operational energy-from-waste plants in Britain and a further 20 either under construction or in late-stage commissioning.

SOURCE

The Green New Deal – welcome to super-austerity

Environmentalists are obsessed with driving down people's living standards.

The Extinction Rebellion (XR) protest that ended when angry passengers pulled climate activists off the roof of an underground train at Canning Town tube station was no mere tactical error. It was in line with the contempt towards the public inherent in environmentalist thinking. Although greens generally express their views in guarded ways, their goal is to impose drastic cuts in people’s living standards.

Unfortunately, it is all too common to hear critics claim that greens have their hearts in the right place, even if their tactics are sometimes misguided. For example, after the Canning Town incident, many argued that XR should have protested in central London rather than in one of its poorest areas. Others said the public transport system was the wrong target, as it should help provide a solution to the problem of climate change.

But such arguments miss the key point. The Canning Town protest was not a tactical aberration. Rather, it was entirely in keeping with green thinking. It exemplified the elitism that pervades the outlook, not just of activists, but also of mainstream environmentalism.

Just think about the protesters perched on top of the underground train. Essentially, they were asserting they were superior to the general public. Rather than attempting to convince the commuters of their case, they were insisting that the residents of Canning Town should know their place. When a passenger attempted to climb towards the protesters, he was kicked in the face.

No doubt many who sympathise with environmental ideas more generally would recoil at the suggestion they are elitist. They would argue that that their goal is not just to save the planet, but to make life better for people, too. However, those who take this view should look more closely at what is being said by green thinkers. They would see that greens’ ambition is to slash living standards far more harshly than anything the Tories have attempted over the past decade. Environmentalism is essentially an attempt by a section of the elite to make super-austerity socially acceptable.

Take the argument for what is often called a Green New Deal. At first glance it might seem like an enlightened plan, designed to bolster the economy and tackle environmental problems. It is anything but. In fact, it would make our economic plight far worse, while failing in the stated aim of providing a solution to climate change.

The term ‘New Deal’ harks back to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Back then, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt attempted to bolster the US economy with a combination of public spending and job-creation schemes. This time around, the idea is to combine stimulus measures with initiatives to tackle what is widely dubbed a ‘climate emergency’. Typically, this includes large-scale job creation, energy efficient houses, a shorter working week and shifting to renewables (primarily solar and wind). Often the different initiatives are combined – for example, proposals to employ large numbers of people to retrofit old houses so that they consume less energy.

In the UK, the Green New Deal is often associated with Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, although Corbyn sometimes talks of a ‘green industrial revolution’ instead. In the US, it is associated with the left-wing of the Democratic Party, represented by, for example, presidential candidates such as senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (widely known as AOC), the New York congresswoman, has also proposed legislation designed to address climate change and economic inequality.

Less widely known in the UK is that the new European Commission has made the Green New Deal – renamed the European Green Deal – its priority for the next five years. Meanwhile, the United Nations Environment Programme unveiled a Global Green New Deal over a decade ago.

Nor should it be forgotten that political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic have supported it in the past. Barack Obama was an advocate when he was US president and Gordon Brown supported it as British prime minister. Fortunately, neither managed to proceed far in implementing it. The term itself was used by Thomas Friedman, a high-profile New York Times columnist, as far back as January 2007.

If Green New Deal measures were implemented on a large scale, they would lead to economic disaster. Consider, for example, the Labour Party’s support for a four-day working week. In a parallel universe, where productivity was rising strongly, this could be a desirable policy. It would mean people would have more spare time in which to do what they want. But in our historical moment, when productivity growth is stagnant, it would effectively mean slashing incomes by a fifth. This, of course, is not a mistake. It is the goal of the policy. It is entirely in line with the drive to curb consumption.

Indeed, there is no need to speculate about what a Green New Deal would look like in terms of energy consumption and carbon emissions. It has already been tried on an enormous scale in Germany, with the promotion of renewables since 2000, and the phasing out of nuclear power announced in 2011. The Energiewende (energy transition) has involved spending many billions of euros with only minimal cuts in carbon emissions. Even Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading news magazine and a strong supporter of the Energiewende, has had to concede the programme so far has been a failure. Germans have had to pay far more for their energy bills, while their energy supply is yet to be decarbonised.

In fact what the economy needs is to find ways to increase production rather than curb consumption. As Phil Mullan has argued on spiked, a key element of such a policy is to allow the process of creative destruction to take place. That would mean rejecting the still dominant approach to economic policy, which involves central banks keeping the economy afloat by simply pumping money into it. Inefficient firms should be allowed to go bankrupt, while new firms and new technologies should receive government backing.

As it happens, such an approach could help address problems associated with climate change. It is completely in line with the need to improve existing technologies and develop new ones.Technology, such as new forms of nuclear-fission reactor, could provide ways to generate more energy, while polluting less than in the past. Renewables have a place, but it is likely to be limited as the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always blow.

Two recently published books on the Green New Deal show that even the most radical-sounding forms of green thinking are inherently reactionary.

On Fire is a collection of essays and speeches by Naomi Klein, a high-profile Canadian political activist with ties to AOC. It includes contributions to the Guardian, the Nation and the New York Times, as well as a speech at the Labour Party conference in 2017. The Case for the Green New Deal by Ann Pettifor, a British economist with close links to Corbyn, is less engagingly written, but more coherent. Pettifor tries to make a logically argued case for the Green New Deal, while On Fire, as a collection of articles, is inevitably more of a hotchpotch.

Although Pettifor provides a clearer exposition of the ideas of key green thinkers, she sometimes makes claims that are either ignorant or outlandish. For example, she argues that the concept of economic growth barely existed before the Second World War. It is true the terminology has changed over the decades. But the idea of increasing prosperity was central to economic thought from the mid-18th century onwards. Classical economic thinkers such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx may not have used the term ‘economic growth’, but the concept was central to their work. Instead they used terms such as capital accumulation or expansion of capital.

Marx’s critique of capitalism, for instance, centered, in essence, on the idea that the market system systematically created barriers to generating sufficient economic growth. In Marx’s view, its weakness was that it did not provide enough growth. Greens today argue the opposite, that capitalism generates too much growth.

Despite their stylistic differences, Klein’s and Pettifor’s arguments have much in common. For a start, both employ the language of radicalism. Klein talks of her preferred policy measures as ‘bold’ and ‘ambitious’, while Pettifor calls for radical action and progress.

But they share a warped view of radicalism. Both contend that consumption levels need to be curbed, and that the public should be prepared to make do with less. They argue that people should eat less meat, consume less energy and fly less (although greens activists are typically all too eloquent when it comes to justifying their own airmiles). They also redefine prosperity in the non-economic terms of family relationships, and disparage the consumer tastes of the public.

Often the arguments for restricting consumption come alongside a demand for the redistribution of wealth. But they are not arguing that the vast bulk of the population should have higher living standards. Rather they are saying that all except those living in the direst of circumstances should be prepared to make sacrifices. In other words, large inequalities are used as a way of trying to get the public to accept a kind of super-austerity.

Common to both books is the frequently stated assumption that humanity is constrained by natural limits. Resources are limited, so the argument goes, therefore we have to give up on economic growth. Pettifor in particular focuses on the limited energy resources she claims are available (frequently referring to thermodynamics to give her argument a scientific veneer). From this she concludes that a ‘steady state economy’, that is a stagnant one, is the only solution.

Pettifor seems unaware that the adherence to limits was first challenged centuries ago. To be fair to Klein she has some inkling that this is the case. Francis Bacon, the founder of the scientific method, argued as far back as the early 17th century that man can transcend the limits that he faces. Klein quotes his argument that nature should be ‘put in constraint, moulded, and made as it were new by art and the hand of man’.

In relation to energy use, for instance, this would mean finding ways to generate more energy, rather than rationing its use. Given the huge amounts generated by conventional and nuclear means, as well as the massive amounts of solar radiation that bombard the earth, it is hard to conceive of any practical limit to energy production. The main challenge is to find the best way to harness these resources. Over time, it will also be necessary to develop better technology so that the energy supply can be decarbonised.

But rather than find ways to go forward to a better future, the advocates of the Green New Deal prefer to hold us back. Rather than working out how the world can become more prosperous they insist that we must make do with less. Like the XR protestors at Canning Town, Klein and Pettifor are hectoring the rest of us from on high and insisting we know our place.

SOURCE

Why “green” energy is a terrible idea

There are lots of reasons, actually, but Charles Rotter of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) does a good job of explaining some of them:

Ask them for details, and their responses range from evasive to delusional, disingenuous – and outrage that you would dare ask. The truth is, they don’t have a clue. They’ve never really thought about it. It’s never occurred to them that these technologies require raw materials that have to be dug out of the ground, which means mining, which they vigorously oppose (except by dictators in faraway countries).
***
Using wind power to replace the 3.9 billion megawatt-hours that Americans consumed in 2018, coal and gas-fired backup power plants, natural gas for home heating, coal and gas for factories, and gasoline for vehicles – while generating enough extra electricity every windy day to charge batteries for just seven straight windless days – would require some 14 million 1.8-MW wind turbines.

Those turbines would sprawl across three-fourths of the Lower 48 US states – and require 15 billion tons of steel, concrete and other raw materials. They would wipe out eagles, hawks, bats and other species.

Fifteen billion tons. That’s 30 trillion pounds.

Using solar to generate just the 3.9 billion MWh would require completely blanketing an area the size of New Jersey with sunbeam-tracking Nellis Air Force Base panels – if the Sun were shining at high-noon summertime Arizona intensity 24/7/365. (That doesn’t include the extra power demands listed for wind.)

Solar uses toxic chemicals during manufacturing and in the panels: lead, cadmium telluride, copper indium selenide, cadmium gallium (di)selenide and many others. They could leach out into soils and waters during thunderstorms, hail storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and when panels are dismantled and hauled off to landfills or recycling centers. Recycling panels and wind turbines presents major challenges.

Because wind turbines don’t last long–20 years–those massive disposal problems are now coming to the fore. Every wind turbine contains 45 tons (90,000 pounds) of non-recyclable plastic that must be disposed of in landfills. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to decommission each wind turbine.

Using batteries to back up sufficient power to supply U.S. electricity needs for just seven straight windless days would require more than 1 billion half-ton Tesla-style batteries. That means still more raw materials, hazardous chemicals and toxic metals.

I have never seen a coherent explanation of how batteries can be produced and deployed so as to store the vast quantities of electricity needed in the U.S. alone. It would cost a prohibitive $133 billion to buy batteries sufficient to store one state’s electricity–Minnesota’s–for 24 hours. Minnesota is an average sized state, so that corresponds to around $6.6 trillion for 24 hours storage for the U.S. That is much more than the entire budget of the U.S. government. This assumes that such batteries exist, which they don’t.

Bringing electricity from those facilities, and connecting a nationwide GND grid, would require thousands of miles of new transmission lines – onshore and underwater – and even more raw materials.

Providing those materials would result in the biggest expansion in mining the United States and world have ever seen: removing hundreds of billions of tons of overburden, and processing tens of billions of tons of ore – mostly using fossil fuels. Where we get those materials is also a major problem.

If we continue to ban mining under modern laws and regulations here in America, those materials will continue to be extracted in places like Inner Mongolia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, largely under Chinese control – under labor, wage, health, safety, environmental and reclamation standards that no Western nation tolerates today. There’ll be serious pollution, toxics, habitat losses and dead wildlife.

Even worse, just to mine cobalt for today’s cell phone, computer, Tesla and other battery requirements, over 40,000 Congolese children and their parents work at slave wages, risk cave-ins, and get covered constantly in toxic and radioactive mud , dust, water and air. Many die. The mine sites in Congo and Mongolia have become vast toxic wastelands. The ore processing facilities are just as horrific.

Meeting GND demands would multiply these horrors many times over. Will Green New Dealers require that all these metals and minerals be responsibly and sustainably sourced, at fair wages, with no child labor – as they do for T-shirts and coffee? Will they now permit exploration and mining in the USA?

“Green” energy is basically a hoax. The world runs on fossil fuels, and will continue to do so until nuclear energy is adopted on a mass scale, or another reliable, high-intensity energy source is discovered.

SOURCE

The rise of solar power is jeopardising the WA energy grid, and it's a lesson for all of Australia

In Western Australia, one of the sunniest landscapes in the world, rooftop solar power has been a runaway success.

On the state's main grid, which covers Perth and the populated south-west corner of the continent, almost one in every three houses has a solar installation.

Combined, the capacity of rooftop solar on the system far exceeds the single biggest generator — an ageing 854 megawatt coal-fired power station.

But there is now so much renewable solar power being generated on the grid that those responsible for keeping the lights on warn the stability of the entire system could soon be in jeopardy.

It is a cautionary tale for the rest of the country of how the delicate balancing act that is power grid management can be severely destabilised by what experts refer to as a "dumb solar" approach.

"We talk about 'smart' this and 'smart' that these days," said energy expert Adam McHugh, an honorary research associate at Perth's Murdoch University. "Well, solar at the moment is 'dumb' in Western Australia. We need to make it smart."

An isolated solar frontier

Mr McHugh's remarks come at a time of profound change in the energy industry across the globe.

But nowhere is the change being more acutely felt than in Western Australia. Stuck out on its own at the edge of the continent, he said WA had become "a laboratory experiment in the uptake of rooftop solar". "We're at the front of the curve, the bleeding edge," Mr McHugh said.

"The technology that we're seeing being developed rapidly around the world is flowing into Western Australia at a more rapid rate, potentially … than anywhere else on the planet."

While much of the debate about the intersection of climate and energy policy is focused on the eastern states — and its national electricity market (NEM) — WA is hurtling towards a tipping point.

At heart of the state's problem is its isolation.

Unlike states such as South Australia, which has even higher levels of renewable energy, WA cannot rely on any other markets to prop it up during times of disruption to supply or demand.

The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), which runs WA's wholesale electricity market (WEM), said the islanded nature of the grid in WA made it particularly exposed to the technical challenges posed by solar.

AEMO chief executive Audrey Zibelman said these challenges tended to be most acute when high levels of solar output coincided with low levels of demand — typically on mild, sunny days in spring or autumn when people were not using air conditioners.

On those days, excess solar power from households and businesses spilled uncontrolled on to the system, pushing the amount of power needed from the grid to increasingly low levels.

Ms Zibelman said WA's isolation amplified this trend because the relative concentration of its solar resources meant fluctuations in supply caused by the weather had an outsized effect.

Low-power days become a big problem

The only way to manage the solar was to scale back or switch off the coal- and gas-fired power stations that were supposed to be the bedrock of the electricity system.

The problem was coal-fired plants were not designed to be quickly ramped up or down in such a way, meaning they were ill-equipped to respond to sudden fluctuations in solar production.

"What's changing in the WEM is the fact that rooftop solar is now our single largest generator," Ms Zibelman said. "That has really made a huge difference in terms of how we think about the power system.

"The concern we have for the first time in probably the history of this industry is you start thinking about sunny days during the spring or [autumn] when you don't have a lot of demand, because you don't have a lot of cooling going on.

"And that becomes an interesting issue because you have lots and lots of solar and very little demand. "We've never worried about a system around low demand. You're always worried about the highest periods of the summer.

"What we're recognising now is that the flexibility we need in the system is one [issue] that we have to think about — how do we integrate solar and storage better? And these are new problems that we have to solve."

Rolling blackouts possible within three years

In a "clarion call" earlier this year, AEMO said that if nothing was done to safeguard the grid, there was a credible danger of rolling blackouts from as early as 2022 as soaring levels of renewable energy periodically overwhelmed the system.

At worst, AEMO warned there was a "real risk" of a system-wide blackout.

It said 700MW of demand was the floor below which it would struggle to ensure that voltage and frequency levels stayed within acceptable limits. "At that point, we worry about the voltage," Ms Zibelman said.

"But also it's that [point] we worry about the other generators, because below that level you actually have demand that's smaller than the smallest generator. "So if something trips off, it's very hard to respond."

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 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

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

1 December, 2019

Air pollution and the brain-dead British Medical Journal

They are heavily politicized and perhaps in a tacit recognition of that they have renamed themselves as the BMJ. They still however publish articles that look like good academic research and which tend to be accepted as such in the media. Below is an example: I give what the public are reading first followed by the journal abstract.

I am reluctant to quote the founding philosopher of Leftism, GWF Hegel but he did say one wise thing: “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.”

Hegel

He could have been talking about the article below. It repeats a tired old folly that now has a long history. There is much I could say about the article (error-rate approach etc) but I will confine myself to one major point: The article does not control for income.

Blind Freddy knows that the poor have worse health across the board. They die up to ten years younger. And poor people mostly live in poor areas. So if your data show that certain areas house people with worse healh, those areas are likely to be filled with poor peple. So if you wish to show that there is some other cause of ill health in those areas, you first have to control for income. The article below did not do that so is all but brain dead. Its conclusions are moot. The ill health episodes surveyed could be due to poverty, not pollution. Given previous findings about the negligible effects of pollution, they probably are. Sigh! Why on earth the BMJ publishes such junk is a mystery. It makes zero contribution to knowledge

Air pollution has been linked to septicaemia and renal failure for the first time

US researchers discovered that even levels below international air quality guidelines are causing serious health problems

Air pollution has for the first time been linked to fatal diseases such as septicaemia and renal failure after researchers discovered that even levels below international guidelines are causing serious health problems.

Urinary tract infections, skin and tissue infections, and fluid and electrolyte disorders were also among the illnesses not previously thought to be linked to exposure to low levels of fine particulate matter in the air - known as PM2.5. The study also confirms several previously established causes of hospital admission associated with short term exposure to PM2.5- including heart and lung diseases, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and diabetes.

A research team at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health in Boston analysed more than 95 million hospital insurance claims for adults aged 65 or older in the United States from 2000 to 2012. Causes of hospital admission were classified into 214 mutually exclusive disease groups and these were linked with estimated daily exposure to PM2.5 based on data from the US Environmental Protection Agency.

SOURCE

Short term exposure to fine particulate matter and hospital admission risks and costs in the Medicare population: time stratified, case crossover study

Yaguang Wei et al.

Abstract

Objective: To assess risks and costs of hospital admission associated with short term exposure to fine particulate matter with diameter less than 2.5 µm (PM2.5) for 214 mutually exclusive disease groups.

Design: Time stratified, case crossover analyses with conditional logistic regressions adjusted for non-linear confounding effects of meteorological variables.

Setting: Medicare inpatient hospital claims in the United States, 2000-12 (n=95?277?169).

Participants: All Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries aged 65 or older admitted to hospital.

Main outcome measures: Risk of hospital admission, number of admissions, days in hospital, inpatient and post-acute care costs, and value of statistical life (that is, the economic value used to measure the cost of avoiding a death) due to the lives lost at discharge for 214 disease groups.

Results: Positive associations between short term exposure to PM2.5 and risk of hospital admission were found for several prevalent but rarely studied diseases, such as septicemia, fluid and electrolyte disorders, and acute and unspecified renal failure. Positive associations were also found between risk of hospital admission and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, phlebitis, thrombophlebitis, and thromboembolism, confirming previously published results. These associations remained consistent when restricted to days with a daily PM2.5 concentration below the WHO air quality guideline for the 24 hour average exposure to PM2.5. For the rarely studied diseases, each 1 µg/m3 increase in short term PM2.5 was associated with an annual increase of 2050 hospital admissions (95% confidence interval 1914 to 2187 admissions), 12?216 days in hospital (11?358 to 13?075), US$31m (£24m, €28m; $29m to $34m) in inpatient and post-acute care costs, and $2.5bn ($2.0bn to $2.9bn) in value of statistical life. For diseases with a previously known association, each 1 µg/m3 increase in short term exposure to PM2.5 was associated with an annual increase of 3642 hospital admissions (3434 to 3851), 20?098 days in hospital (18?950 to 21?247), $69m ($65m to $73m) in inpatient and post-acute care costs, and $4.1bn ($3.5bn to $4.7bn) in value of statistical life.

Conclusions: New causes and previously identified causes of hospital admission associated with short term exposure to PM2.5 were found. These associations remained even at a daily PM2.5 concentration below the WHO 24 hour guideline. Substantial economic costs were linked to a small increase in short term PM2.5.

SOURCE

10 Things Climate Alarmists Don't Want You to Be Thankful For

This Thanksgiving, Americans have a great deal to be thankful for, but climate alarmists would ruin much of it. Thanks to free markets, relative global stability, and the explosion of technology involving fossil fuels, Americans enjoy an unprecedented degree of prosperity — and the blessings have spread to billions across the world. Climate alarmists warn that this progress is unsustainable if not somehow evil, but there are many reasons to celebrate it.

The Heartland Institute released videos celebrating "the ten facts climate alarmists don't want you to be grateful for."

10. Global greening
Vegetation growth has increased across the earth thanks to carbon dioxide.

9. Higher life expectancy
In the past 60 years, global life expectancy has increased by 48 percent. In 1950, people could expect to live 48 years, on average. In 2015, the number had increased to 71.4 years.

AOC Chief of Staff: Green New Deal 'Wasn't Originally a Climate Thing at All'

8. Failure of the Green New Deal
The Heartland Institute celebrated that "Americans unequivocally rejected the Green New Deal," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's plan to change the entire economy — I mean, "save the earth." Her resolution called for rebuilding every single building in America, among many other things. It has been estimated to cost between $49.109 trillion and $93 trillion — and there's good reason to believe both are underestimates. The first five years of the Green New Deal would cost $250,000 per household, on average. Even taxing the rich at 100 percent would fall trillions short of the bill.

The U.S. Senate rejected the Green New Deal, and the House has not yet voted on it. Sadly, I think this video celebrating its defeat is premature. Many of the Democrats running for president in 2020 have endorsed the Green New Deal or some version of it. All the same, Americans should celebrate the temporary defeat of this dangerous bill.

7. Exiting the Paris Climate Accord
The Heartland Institute is right to celebrate America's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord under Trump.

6. Transportation
We should all be thankful for modern transportation. Not only can we cheaply travel across continents and oceans, but trucking transported $721 billion worth of goods across America in 2017. Modern city life would not be possible without it.

5. Where's the beef?
Climate alarmists have encouraged Americans to consume less meat, and emphasized the detrimental environmental impact of cow farts. An unofficial document connected to the Green New Deal — and later withdrawn by AOC's staff — mentioned cow farts, and Bill Nye wants to tax them. Other alarmists have suggested we go vegan to save the earth.

Beef is the second-most consumed meat in the U.S., and cows represent only about 2 percent of the U.S.'s contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. Americans should be thankful for their beef.

4. Fracking
Hydraulic Fracturing has revolutionized American oil production, leading the U.S. to become a net exporter of oil for the first time in decades in 2018. According to some estimates, fracking saved Americans $1.1 trillion over the last decade.

3. Warmer weather saves lives
If the globe really is warming, that may be something to be thankful for. Cold weather kills 20 times more people than hot weather.

2. Petroleum
Alarmists may demonize oil, but without petroleum, we wouldn't have: Aspirin, bicycle tires, cell phones, chewing gum, computers, toothpaste, water bottles — oh, and solar panels!

1. The American patriot
Heartland's last video praises the Americans who fought and died for our freedom. While I heartily agree that we should be extremely thankful for our veterans, the Founders, and the founding generation, I don't think climate alarmists necessarily demonize American patriots. Let's be thankful for our veterans, and on this point at least, climate alarmists should agree with us.

SOURCE

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued a fiery defense of free speech Monday morning as the high court announced it would not hear an appeal from the conservative magazine National Review in a defamation case against it by liberal climate science professor Michael Mann

Mann's case against the magazine stems from his creation of the infamous "hockey stick graph" and a central role in the "Climategate" scandal -- in which his employer, Penn State University, eventually cleared him of wrongdoing.

National Review published an op-ed that called his graph -- which displays earth's temperature increasing seemingly exponentially beginning right around the industrial revolution -- "deceptive" and "fraudulent" over its substitution of certain types of data for thermometer readings for time periods before thermometers were available. The magazine called for an investigation into Mann and doubled down on its stance in subsequent writings.

Monday's decision means Mann can continue his defamation suit against National Review, which argued that its articles criticizing his methodology were protected speech.

"If the speech in all these cases had been held to be unprotected, our Nation's system of self-government would not have been seriously threatened," Alito wrote after naming several recent cases in which the Supreme Court upheld controversial speech, including the trade name "F-U-C-T" for a clothing company. "But ... the protection of even speech as trivial as a naughty trademark for jeans can serve an important purpose: It can demonstrate that this Court is deadly serious about protecting freedom of speech."

The petition the court denied was on a procedural issue in a lower court -- whether a jury could decide if a claim is "provably false" -- and National Review will have the chance to appeal the ruling if lower courts rule against it. In fact, the Supreme Court's denial of National Review's petition is just one more step in a case that's been in the courts since 2012. But Alito said protecting the First Amendment meant the Supreme Court should take up the case that it would normally let play out at lower levels before stepping in.

"[R]equiring a free speech claimant to undergo a trial after a ruling that may be constitutionally flawed is no small burden," he wrote. "A journalist who prevails after trial in a defamation case will still have been required to shoulder all the burdens of difficult litigation and may be faced with hefty attorney's fees. Those prospects may deter the uninhibited expression of views that would contribute to a healthy public debate."

It its petition to the high court, National Review argued its criticisms of the graph's "cherry-picking of data and apples-to-oranges comparisons," were valid, adding that since it was at the center of a larger controversy about climate change the op-ed fell squarely within protected speech and National Review could not be sued for defamation.

Mann, on the other hand, leaned on the argument that he -- and his graph -- had survived significant scrutiny following the leaked emails that led to the "Climategate" scandal.

"Furthermore, the court's repeated findings that the allegations against Dr. Mann were capable of verification were unequivocal," his legal team's brief in the case said. "These allegations were not only 'capable of being proved true or false,' they were proven 'false by four separate investigations.'"

Alito, however, emphasized the importance of open debate for America's democratic process, especially about hot-button issues like climate change.

"If citizens cannot speak freely and without fear about the most important issues of the day, real self-government is not possible," he said. "To ensure that our democracy is preserved and is permitted to flourish, this Court must closely scrutinize any restrictions on statements that can be made on important public policy issues. Otherwise, such restrictions can easily be used to silence the expression of unpopular views."

SOURCE

Vladimir Putin endorses 2020 Democrats energy policy

Last week, Vladimir Putin threw his support behind the major 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. At least, he did so on energy policy.

Speaking at a Moscow business forum, the Russian president echoed Sens. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders.

"The fact is that today's technologies of shale oil and shale gas production are, without any exaggeration, barbaric and bad for the environment," Putin said. "In some areas of shale oil production, people get black slurry instead of tap water in their homes. We will never use such production technology, no matter how lucrative it may be."

Like most of the time, Putin is lying here. There is no evidence that shale extraction, properly regulated, is more risky to public health than other conventional energy extraction methods. And no one is getting "black slurry" out of their tap.

But the lie is part of Putin's campaign — backed by ample political meddling and Russian cash — to undercut fracking in Europe and in the United States. Putin opposes fracking because it is putting a global price ceiling on Russian energy exports and giving Europe a new measure of independence from Russian energy.

That puts Putin in undeniable alignment with top Democrats. You know, the same Democrats who otherwise claim that they will oppose the Russian leader if elected president. On this, they will do his bidding. Like Putin, Democrats allege that fracking hurts the environment and undercuts green energy jobs. As noted, the first claim is false. And the second claim is also a lie: Green jobs are economically noncompetitive absent generous subsidies.

As with Putin's statements last week, there's another truth which Democrats should heed: In pushing their hard-line anti-energy stance, they are playing right into the hands of America's second-most powerful adversary.

SOURCE

Australia to fight Europe on climate demands in free-trade deal

Trade Minister Simon Birmingham has described France's push to force Australia to adopt climate change targets in a planned trade deal with European Union as "unprecedented", declaring he will only accept terms that are in the best interests of the nation.

Senator Birmingham wants to clinch a free-trade agreement (FTA) with the EU by the end of next year, followed by Britain in early 2021, after Parliament this week ticked off on deals with Indonesia, Hong Kong and Peru.

In a week when Australia-China relations soured over allegations of a plot to install a Chinese agent in federal Parliament, Senator Birmingham stressed the benefits of diversifying Australia's trading interests around the world through the new FTAs, but said China would remain a major trading partner with Australia for years to come.

He also declared he wouldn't "capitulate" to Europe's claim for exclusive use of key food names including feta, Parmesan and Gorgonzola cheeses.

Climate change targets are shaping to be a major sticking point in trade negotiations with Europe - already Australia's second-biggest trading partner - after France publicly tied Australia's domestic action on climate change to the proposed FTA.

Ahead of a speech in Sydney on Thursday night to the European Australian Business Council, Senator Birmingham told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age he believed trade agreements were "overwhelmingly commercial undertakings between countries" and they should "focus on commercial realities".

He said Australia "had a good environmental story to tell" and was happy to discuss any proposed terms with the EU referencing the Paris climate agreement, but would push back on provisions that included sanctions for not meeting climate targets.

"We're completely committed to meeting our [Paris climate] targets and we've always met and exceeded our targets, but I think it would be unprecedented to see those type of provisions proposed in an agreement," Senator Birmingham said.

The Trade Minister said he didn't want to prejudge the negotiations, but Australia would put up a "strong defence" to some of the 172 foods and 236 spirits the EU wants protected under the geographical indication (GI) system.

"The areas of greater industry concern are those that have been publicly speculated on such as feta, Parmesan and Gorgonzola," he said. "The EU shouldn't expect that Australia is about to agree to every term that they've requested."

Australia is one of the first countries UK Trade Secretary Liz Truss has visited, to lay the groundwork for post Brexit trade deals.

He said there were significant agricultural opportunities in the EU, including increasing the 20,000-tonne quota for sheep meat, as well as creating more opportunities to export professional services as well as financial and regulatory technologies.

FTAs have gone from covering about 26 per cent of Australia's two-way trade five years ago to about 70 per cent today and this would increase to about 80 per cent under deals with the EU and Britain.

At a time when the United States was blocking appointments of appellate judges to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) amid a trade war with China, Senator Birmingham said it was up to middle powers like Australia to stand up for the "rules-based order" and drive reform of the WTO.

He said a trade working group had already been established to begin talking with Britain, and talks would ramp up assuming Brexit took place on January 31, 2020.

With China making up almost 40 per cent of Australia's export market, Senator Birmingham said Australia's trade would be more evenly spread "in an ideal world".

In its relationship with China, Senator Birmingham said it was important for Australia to hold true to its values, raise legitimate concerns and protect its interests as a democracy. But he said Australia must continue to pursue commercial opportunities with China because that was what gave the government avenues to address any problems with Beijing.

He said the new trade deals with Indonesia, Hong Kong and Peru provided "big new opportunities", but it was up to Australian businesses to "walk through that door instead of China, or as well as China".

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 or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

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IN BRIEF

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Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here. It shows that we actually live in an era of remarkable temperature stability.

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.”

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

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.

"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Theoretically, the effect of added CO2 in the atmosphere should be instant. It allegedly works by bouncing electromagnetic radiation around and electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. But there has been no instant effect. Temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.

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."

Fossil fuels are 100% organic, are made with solar energy, and when burned produce mostly CO2 and H2O, the 2 most important foods for life.

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:

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered, than answers that can’t be questioned.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, Physicist

“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.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

UNRELIABLE SCIENCE:

(1). “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness… “The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of ‘significance’ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale…Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent…” (Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet, in The Lancet, 11 April, 2015, Vol 385, “Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?”)

(2). “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)

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

"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)

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