GREENIE WATCH -- by Dr. John Ray

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

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28 February, 2018

Unusual heat over the Arctic

It is well-known that there is extensive and vigorous subsurface vulcanism in the Arctic, particularly around Gakkel and Lomonosov ridges, but that is never called on as an explanation of surface warming. WHY NOT? Arctic warming is irregular, just like volcanoes are and the Arctic warms by much larger amounts than the rest of the globe. It is completely out of sync with global warming, which hardly exists

Climate scientists are used to seeing the range of weather extremes stretched by global warming but few episodes appear as remarkable as this week's unusual heat over the Arctic.
Zack Labe, a researcher at the University of California at Irvine, said average daily temperatures above the northern latitude of 80 degrees have broken away from any previous recordings in the past 60 years.

"To have zero degrees at the North Pole in February - it's just wrong," said Amelie Meyer, a researcher of ice-ocean interactions with the Norwegian Polar Institute. "It's quite worrying."
The so-called Polar Vortex - a zone of persistient low-pressure that typically keeps high-latitude cold air separate from regions further south - has been weakening for decades.

In this instance, "a massive jet of warm air" is penetrating north, sending a cold burst southwards, said Dr Meyer, who has relocated to Hobart to research on the southern hemisphere, and is hosted by Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies.

"The anomalies are really extreme," Andrew King, a lecturer in climate science at the University of Melbourne, said. "It's a very interesting event."

Warm, moist air is penetrating much further north than it would normally at a time when the North Pole is in complete darkness.
Cape Morris Jessup, the world's most northerly land-based weather station, in Greenland, touched 6 degrees late on Saturday, about 35 degrees above normal for this time of year.

Robert Rohede, a Zurich-based scientist with Berkeley Earth, posted on Twitter that Cape Morris Jessup had already recorded 61 hours above freezing so far in 2018.

The previous record of such relative was just 16 hours recorded to the end of April in 2011. "Parts of Greenland are quite a bit warmer than most of Europe," Dr King said.

The cold snap will sink temperatures moderately below freezing in London each day until Friday. However, cities such as Berlin will dive to as low as minus 12 degrees and Moscow to minus 24.

With a weak jetstream, surface winds are taking an unusual course - bringing snow from the east and prompting some commentators to dub the event the "Beast from the East".

"For Britain and Ireland, most weather systems would typically blow in from the west, but [on Tuesday] we will see a cold front cross Britain from the east," Dr King said.

There is open water north of #Greenland where the thickest sea ice of the #Arctic used to be. It is not refreezing quickly because air temperatures are above zero confirmed by @dmidk's weather station #KapMorrisJesup. Wacky weather continues with scary strength and persistence.

Along with the unusual warmth over the Arctic, scientists are monitoring the retreat of sea ice in the Bering Sea.

The ice coverage in the region is now at levels previously seen only in May or June, Mr Labe posted on Twitter, citing data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre.

While climate change itself is only likely to have exacerbated regional weather variability, the long-term shrinkage of sea ice has a reinforcing effect on global warming in a region already warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, Dr King said.
Ice reflects sunlight back to space. When it melts, the sea ice exposes more of the dark ocean beneath, which then absorbs that solar radiation, adding to the warming.

Sea ice coverage is currently at or close to record low levels at both the Arctic and Antarctic regions.

The impact of the relatively warm air in the Arctic could play out for months to come. Multi-year ice is likely to be thinner and more cracked, leading to a faster melt when spring arrives, Dr Meyer said.

While researchers had pegged 2050 as a possible year when the Arctic will become ice-free, this winter and the previous one - also unusually warm - had thrown those estimates out.
"It's going much faster than we thought," said Dr Meyer, who will begin work later this year at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.

SOURCE

Our next energy and security crisis?

Importing 65% of US oil in 2005 vs 100% of many key minerals now (from China and Russia)

Paul Driessen

Oil and natural gas aren’t just fuels. They supply building blocks for pharmaceuticals; plastics in vehicle bodies, athletic helmets, and numerous other products; and complex composites in solar panels and wind turbine blades and nacelles. The USA was importing 65% of its petroleum in 2005, creating serious national security concerns. But fracking helped cut imports to 40% and the US now exports oil and gas.

Today’s vital raw materials foundation also includes exotic minerals like gallium, germanium, rare earth elements and platinum group metals. For the USA, they are “critical” because they are required in thousands of applications; they become “strategic” when we don’t produce them in the United States.

They are essential for computers, medical imaging and diagnostic devices, night vision goggles, GPS and communication systems, television display panels, smart phones, jet engines, light-emitting diodes, refinery catalysts and catalytic converters, wind turbines, solar panels, long-life batteries and countless other applications. In 1954, the USA imported 100% of just eight vital minerals; in 1984, only eleven.

Today, in this technology-dominated world, the United States imports up to 100% of 35 far more critical materials. Twenty of them come 100% from China, others from Russia, and others indirectly from places where child labor, worker safety, human rights and environmental standards are nonexistent.

The situation is untenable and unsustainable. Literally every sector of the US economy, the nation’s defense, its energy and employment base, its living standards – all are dependent on sources, supply chains and transportation routes that are vulnerable to disruption under multiple scenarios.

Recognizing this, President Trump recently issued an executive order stating that federal policies would henceforth focus on reducing these vulnerabilities, in part by requiring that government agencies coordinate in publishing an updated analysis of critical nonfuel minerals; ensuring that the private sector have electronic access to up-to-date information on potential US and other alternative sources; and finding safe and environmentally sound ways to find, mine, reprocess and recycle critical minerals – emphasizing sources that are less likely to come from unfriendly nations, less likely to face disruption.

The order also requires that agencies prepare a detailed report on long-term strategies for reducing US reliance on critical minerals, assessing recycling and reprocessing progress, creating accessible maps of potentially mineralized areas, supporting private sector mineral exploration, and streamlining regulatory and permitting processes for finding, producing and processing domestic sources of these minerals.

Incredibly, the last report on critical minerals and availability issues was written in 1973, the year the first mobile telephone call was made. That inexcusable 45 years of neglect by multiple administrations and congresses dates back to the era of “revolutionary” Selectric typewriters and includes the appearance of desktop computers in 1975 and the first PC in 1981. (That PC had a whopping 16 KB of memory!)

As former geologist, Navy SEAL and military commander – and now Secretary of the Interior – Ryan Zinke has observed, allowing our nation to become so heavily “reliant on foreign nations, including our competitors and adversaries,” for so many strategic minerals “is deeply troubling.”

It’s actually far worse than “troubling” or “neglectful.” It involved a concerted, irresponsible, ill-considered effort to place hundreds of millions of acres in wilderness, wilderness study and other highly restrictive land use categories – often with the very deliberate intention of making their mineral prospects off limits, before anyone could assess the areas’ critical, strategic and other mineral potential.

The 1964 Wilderness Act had contemplated the preservation of a few million or tens of millions of acres of wild and primitive areas and natural habitats. To ensure informed land use decisions and access to vital mineral resources, Congress included “special provisions” that allowed prospecting and other activities in potential and designated wilderness areas – and required surveys by the US Geological Survey “on a planned, recurring basis,” to gather information about mineral or other resources – if such activities are carried out “in a manner compatible with the preservation of the wilderness environment.”

In 1978, while hiking with him, I asked then Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Rupert Cutler how he could defend ignoring this clear statutory language and prohibiting all prospecting, surveys and other assessment work in wilderness and study areas. “I don’t think Congress should have enacted those provisions,” he replied, “so I’m not going to follow them.”

As of 1994, when geologist Courtland Lee and I prepared a detailed analysis, areas equal to Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming combined (427 million acres) were off limits to mineral exploration and development. The situation is far worse today – and because of processes unleashed by plate tectonic, volcanic and other geologic forces, these mountain, desert and other lands contain some of the most highly mineralized rock formations in North America, or even the entire world.

The deck was stacked: for wilderness, and against minerals and national security. This must not continue.

These areas must be surveyed and explored by government agencies and private sector companies. The needs of current and future generations are at stake. Failure to conduct systematic evaluations violates the most fundamental principles of national defense, national security and responsible government.

The Departments of Agriculture and the Interior should follow the special provisions of the Wilderness Act; abolish, modify or grant exceptions to existing motorized access restrictions; and ensure that areas are evaluated using airborne magnetic and other analytical equipment, assay gear carried in backpacks, truck-mounted and helicopter-borne drilling and coring rigs, and other sophisticated modern technologies.

This approach also complies with environmental and sustainability principles. It ensures that we can get vital strategic minerals from world class deposits on small tracts of land, instead of having to mine and process vast quantities of low quality ores. That protects most of our wild, scenic and wildlife areas – and modern techniques can then restore affected areas to natural conditions and high quality habitats.

Even ardent environmentalists should support this, because the renewable energy, high-tech future they want and promise depends on these minerals. For example, generating all US electricity (3.5 billion megawatt hours per year) from wind would require some 14 million 1.8 MW turbines, requiring some 8 billion tons of steel alloys and concrete, 2 million tons of neodymium, other rare earths, and vast amounts of cobalt, molybdenum and other minerals. Substituting photovoltaic solar panels for turbines would require arsenic, boron, cadmium, gallium, indium, molybdenum, selenium, silver, tellurium and titanium.

Backing up that electricity for seven windless or sunless days would require 700 million 100kw Tesla battery packs – and thus millions of tons of lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel and cadmium.

Every generation of renewable energy, computer, communication and other high-tech equipment requires new materials in new quantities – and thus renewed exploration, mining and processing.

The United States is the only country that locks up its strategic mineral resources. No sane, responsible nation risks or forecloses its energy, technology, economic, employment, defense and sustainable future. So it will be fascinating to see which legislators, judges and pressure groups vilify the activities proposed in the Trump executive order, government minerals report and this article.

Those that try to block progress in these areas should be named and shamed (along with their financial supporters) – and their actions made key issues in election campaigns and social responsibility discussions. Perhaps they should be the first to get shut off from electricity, cars, computers, cell phones, medical care, social media and other modern benefits that depend on petroleum and critical minerals.

Let the Interior Department know your views on these vital issues. And maybe take a page from the Cutler-illegal immigrants playbook: Become a sanctuary county or state, simply ignore troublesome laws, regulations and court dictates – and just initiate your own exploration and mining programs. J

Via email

The Weaponization of the EPA Is Over: An Exclusive Interview With Scott Pruitt

In his first year as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt has already transformed the agency in many ways. He spoke exclusively to The Daily Signal before addressing attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s annual Reagan Dinner. An edited transcript of the interview is below.

Rob Bluey: You gave a speech at CPAC last year where you were just at the beginning of your tenure at the Environmental Protection Agency, and you outlined some of the things that you wanted to do. Here we are a year later, you’ve repealed, taken back, 22 regulations at a savings at $1 billion, a significant contribution to the U.S. economy, as President Donald Trump talked about in his speech. What does that mean?

Scott Pruitt: Busy year. And it was great to be at CPAC about two weeks after having been sworn in last year. And I talked last year about the future ain’t what it used to be, that Yogi Berra quote that I cited about the change that was gonna take place at the agency and I think we’ve been about that change the last year. Focusing on rule of law, restoring process and order, making sure that we engage in cooperative federalism as we engage in regulation.

But the key to me is that weaponization of the agency that took place in the Obama administration, where the agency was used to pick winners and losers. Those days are over.

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You know, to be in Pennsylvania as I was early in my term, shortly after the CPAC speech last year, and to spend time with miners in Pennsylvania and be able to share with them underground. I was a thousand feet underground and 3 miles in. First time that an administrator in history had done that, and I talked to those long wall miners in Pennsylvania, and delivered the message from the president that the war on coal is over. That was a tremendous message for them, emotion that I saw on their faces.

Can you imagine, in the first instance, an agency of the federal government, a department of the U.S. government, declaring war on a sector of your economy? Where is that in the statute? Where does that authority exist? It doesn’t. And so to restore process and restore commitment to doing things the right way, I think we’ve seen tremendous success this past year.

Bluey: President Trump cited a number of examples that have come out of EPA in his speech to the CPAC attendees, and one of them was coal, another one was the Paris climate treaty. Talk about those two issues and your work with the president in terms of why you decided to take those actions in conjunction with him?

Pruitt: The president’s decision to exit the Paris accord—tremendously courageous. When you look at that decision, it put America first, which is what the president said in the Rose Garden in June.

What was decided in Paris under the past administration was not about carbon reduction. It was about penalties to our own economy because China and India, under that accord, didn’t have to take any steps to reduce CO2 until the year 2030. So, if it’s really about CO2 reduction, why do you let that happen?

“That weaponization of the agency that took place in the Obama administration—where the agency was used to pick winners and losers—those days are over.”

When you look at who’s led the world in CO2 reduction, it’s us. From the year 2000 to 2014, we reduced our CO2 footprint almost 20 percent through innovation and technology. So, we have nothing to be apologetic about as a country, and yet, the past administration went to Paris, hat in hand, and said, “Penalize our economy”, which is what happened with the Clean Power Plan.

The president saying no to that and putting America first was the tremendously courageous and right thing to do. I’m very excited about that decision. I know he talked about that in his speech and it was a wonderful decision he made, and I think great for the American people.

Overall, this regulatory reform agenda—this regulatory certainty that we’re about—is achieving good things for the environment, but it’s also achieving, as you say, good things for our economy. We can do both. And I think that’s what’s key.

President Donald Trump listens to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt after announcing his decision that the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. (Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters/Newscom)
Bluey: President Trump certainly cited deregulation as just as significant, I believe he said, as the tax cuts. We’ve seen some of the benefits for many American businesses, and certainly American workers as a result of that.

Pruitt: When you think about an EPA—armed, weaponized, if you will—like a rule like WOTUS, the Waters of the United States rule, that would take a puddle and turn into a lake. To take land use decisions away from farmers and ranchers and landowners across this country, and people think it was just farming and ranching. It was the building of subdivisions. It was really all land use decisions.

I was in Utah last year meeting with some folks there that were building a subdivision, and there was an Army Corps of Engineers representative that was standing outside the subdivision with me, and he pointed to an ephemeral drainage ditch and he said, “Scott, that’s a water of the United States.” And I said, “Well, it’s not gonna be anymore.”

That’s exactly the kind of attitude that drove the past administration. It was all about power. It wasn’t about outcomes necessarily. It was about power and picking winners and losers, and we’re getting that corrected.

Bluey: That’s one thing I want to talk to you about because right now your agency is going across the country. You’re having hearings on the Clean Power Plan. You’re trying to get input from Americans, and not just Americans in Washington, D.C., and the Beltway, but places like Wyoming and Missouri and West Virginia. Why is that important to get out and hear from Americans about how government affects their lives?

Pruitt: Couple things: One, we’ve been to 30-plus states. And as we’ve met with stakeholders, farmers and ranchers, and those in the utility sector and the energy sector, landowners, representatives from the state’s governors, and DEQs from across the country, I think what we didn’t recognize over the last several years with the past administration is that those folks are partners. They care about outcomes.

“We shouldn’t start from the premise that those folks are adversaries or don’t care about clean air or clean water. We should start from the premise that they do, and work with them to achieve good outcomes.”

Think about those farmers and those ranchers. They’re our first conservationists. They’re our first environmentalists. I think of the young man, David, in Florida that I meant about a month ago, 12 years old. I was speaking to a group of individuals in Florida. David was there with his dad and his granddad was there. Now, think about what their greatest asset is? Their land. And they’re teaching David how to cultivate and harvest and care for that land and act as a steward.

That’s the message we’re sending across the country.

SOURCE

Why are government scientists manipulating data on behalf of the Church of Environmental Radicalism?

In the 1970’s it was called “Global Cooling.” When that didn’t happen, it was switched to “Global Warming.” After another failure, the Church of Environmentalism finally came up with a new phrase that was sure to catch all, “Climate Change.” This new phrase could not possibly be wrong because it means if anything changes, it must be Climate Change. Now the church has gone even further than changing a name, it has resorted to changing the data to fit its narrative.

For anyone that has taken a high school science class, manipulating data to fit a hypothesis is not considered science. But that is where we find ourselves, and one of the U.S. government’s scientific organizations is in the crosshairs again. It seems the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been caught manipulating weather data to fit a narrative yet again.

Paul Homewood was reviewing the NOAA data for the recent cold spell experienced in the Northeast. You may remember it was bitterly cold this past January with tales of animals freezing and falling from trees and sharks freezing in the ocean. But when Homewood looked at the data from NOAA, it didn’t seem to match what was observed. When Homewood got to the raw temperature data, he found it had been manipulated.

Homewood stated, “So at the three sites of Ithaca, Auburn and Geneva, we find that January 2018 was colder than January 1943 by 1.0, 1.7 and 1.3F respectively.” He continued, “Yet NOAA say that the division was 2.1F warmer last month. NOAA’s figure makes last month at least 3.1F warmer in comparison with 1943 than the actual station data warrants.”

Upon further investigation, Homewood found more data manipulation in 2013. Homewood remarked, “on average the mean temperatures in Jan 2014 were 2.7F less than in 1943. Yet, according to NOAA, the difference was only 0.9F…Somehow, NOAA has adjusted past temperatures down, relatively, by 1.8F.”

This is not the first time NOAA has manipulated data to prove a hypothesis. In 2015, NOAA published the Karl study that reportedly showed there was no “climate change hiatus” between 1998 and 2013. During this time frame, the rate of global temperature growth slowed, throwing a wrench in every climate model. The Karl study adjusted the data to show the warming had not decreased.

John Bates, a retired NOAA climate scientist, blew the whistle on the study accusing NOAA of, “flagrant manipulation of scientific integrity guidelines.” He went on to hint the study was rushed to publication, so it could have an impact on the 2015 Paris climate talks. You may remember the Paris Climate Agreement is an international agreement that does nothing for the environment. However, it does put a stranglehold on the U.S. economy, because the U.S. government was the only government likely to enforce the harsh regulations against its citizens.

The situation has gotten so bad Congress has gotten involved. For over two years the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has been fighting with NOAA to get to the bottom of the data manipulation. NOAA has decided it is not going to cooperate with Congress and has fought oversight through the entire process. If they did nothing wrong and are proud of their work, what are they hiding?

As people sit back and try to figure out why data manipulation is crucial to them, they must realize policymakers and government bureaucrats are making decisions based on the manipulated data. When policy is enacted based on biased data grocery and fuel bills go up, electric and heating bills go up, and people are put out of work.

It is not enough to be wrong about almost every prediction since the 1970’s. The Church of Environmentalism has taken to flat out lying to reach its goals. Congress must continue to investigate NOAA and force the truth to come out. Scientists that manipulate data to fit a narrative are not scientists; they are committing fraud.

SOURCE

Polar bears are flourishing, making them phony icons, and false idols, for global warming alarmists

One powerful polar bear fact is slowly rising above the message of looming catastrophe repeated endlessly by the media: More than 15,000 polar bears have not disappeared since 2005. Although the extent of the summer sea ice after 2006 dropped abruptly to levels not expected until 2050, the predicted 67-per-cent decline in polar bear numbers simply didn’t happen. Rather, global polar bear numbers have been stable or slightly improved. The polar bear’s resilience should have meant the end of its use as a cherished icon of global warming doom, but it didn’t. The alarmism is not going away without a struggle.

Part of this struggle involves a scientific clash about transparency in polar bear science. My close examination of recent research has revealed that serious inconsistencies exist within the polar bear literature and between that literature and public statements made by some researchers. For example, Canadian polar bear biologist Ian Stirling learned in the 1970s that spring sea ice in the southern Beaufort Sea periodically gets so thick that seals depart, depriving local polar bears of their prey and causing their numbers to plummet. But that fact, documented in more than a dozen scientific papers, is not discussed today as part of polar bear ecology. In these days of politicized science, neither Stirling nor his colleagues mention in public the devastating effects of thick spring ice in the Beaufort Sea; instead, they imply in recent papers that the starving bears they witnessed are victims of reduced summer sea ice, which they argued depleted the bears’ prey. There are also strong indications that thick spring-ice conditions happened again in 2014–16, with the impacts on polar bears being similarly portrayed as effects of global warming.

The polar bear's resilience should have meant the end of its use as an icon of global warming doom

One reason that the 2007 predictions of future polar bear survival were so far off base is that the model developed by American biologist Steven Amstrup (now at Polar Bears International, an NGO) assumed any polar bear population decline would be caused by less summer ice, despite the Beaufort Sea experience. Moreover, Amstrup and fellow modelers were overly confident in their claim that summer ice was critical for the polar bear’s survival and they had little data on which to base their assumption that less summer ice would devastate the polar bears’ prey.

Consequently, many scientists were surprised when other researchers subsequently found that ringed and bearded seals (the primary prey of polar bears) north of the Bering Strait especially thrived with a longer open-water season, which is particularly conducive to fishing: These seals do most of their feeding in summer. More food for seals in summer means more fat seal pups for polar bears to eat the following spring, a result that’s probably true throughout the Arctic.

As long as polar bears have lots of baby seals to eat in spring, they get fat enough to survive even a longer-than-usual summer fast. And while it’s true that studies in some regions show polar bears are lighter in weight than they were in the 1980s, there is no evidence that more individuals are starving to death or becoming too thin to reproduce because of less summer ice.

Not all bears get enough to eat in the spring, of course. Starvation has always been the leading natural cause of death for polar bears, due to a number of factors including competition, injury, tooth decay and illness. Some cancers induce a muscle-wasting syndrome that leads to faster-than-usual weight loss. This is likely what happened to the emaciated Baffin Island bear captured on video in July 2017 and promoted by National Geographic late last year. The videographers claimed it showed what starvation due to sea-ice loss looked like — an implausible conclusion given the time of year, the isolated nature of the incident, and the fact that sea ice that year was no more reduced than previously.

That starving-bear video may have convinced a few more gullible people that only hundreds of polar bears are left in the world. But it also motivated others to locate the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List report for 2015 that estimated global polar bear numbers at somewhere between 22,000-31,000, or about 26,000, up slightly from 20,000-25,000, or about 22,500, in 2005. Newer counts not included in the 2015 assessment potentially add another 2,500 or so to the total. This increase may not be statistically significant, but it is decidedly not the 67-per-cent decline that was predicted given the ice conditions that prevailed.

The failure of the 2007 polar bear survival model is a simple fact that explodes the myth that polar bears are on their way to extinction. Although starving-bear videos and scientifically insignificant research papers still make the news, they don’t alter the facts: Polar bears are thriving, making them phony icons, and false idols, for global warming alarmists.

SOURCE

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

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

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27 February, 2018

NEW BOOK just out

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change by Marc Morano

It's a very comprehensive coverage of all the issues associated with the global warming theory

From the blurb:

Less freedom. More regulation. Higher costs. Make no mistake: those are the surefire consequences of the modern global warming campaign waged by political and cultural elites, who have long ago abandoned fact-based science for dramatic fearmongering in order to push increased central planning. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change gives a voice -- backed by statistics, real-life stories, and incontrovertible evidence -- to the millions of "deplorable" Americans skeptical about the multibillion dollar "climate change" complex, whose claims have time and time again been proven wrong.

The Russian encouragement and perhaps origin of the now discredited theory of "nuclear winter"

Matt Ridley

So, Russia does appear to interfere in western politics. The FBI has charged 13 Russians with trying to influence the last American presidential election, including the whimsical detail that one of them was to build a cage to hold an actor in prison clothes pretending to be Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, it emerges that the Czech secret service, under KGB direction, near the end of the Cold War had a codename (“COB”) for a Labour MP they had met and hoped to influence — presumably under the bizarre delusion that he might one day be in reach of power.

There is no evidence that Jeremy Corbyn was a spy, or of collusion by Trump campaign operatives with the Russians who are charged. Yet the alleged Russian operation in America was anti-Clinton and pro-Trump. It was also pro-Bernie Sanders and pro-Jill Stein, the Green candidate — who shares with Vladimir Putin a strong dislike of fracking.

The Keystone Cops aspects of these stories should not reassure. The interference by Russian agents in western politics during the Cold War was real and dangerous. A startling example from the history of science has recently been discussed in an important book about the origins of the environmental movement, Green Tyranny by Rupert Darwall.

In June 1982, the same month as demonstrations against the Nato build-up of cruise and Pershing missiles reached fever pitch in the West, a paper appeared in AMBIO, a journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, authored by the Dutchman Paul Crutzen and the American John Birks. Crutzen would later share a Nobel prize for work on the ozone layer. The 1982 paper, entitled The Atmosphere after a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon, argued that, should there be an exchange of nuclear weapons between Nato and the Soviet Union, forests and oil fields would ignite and the smoke of vast fires would cause bitter cold and mass famine: “The screening of sunlight by the fire-produced aerosol over extended periods during the growing season would eliminate much of the food production in the Northern Hemisphere.”

Alerted by environmental groups to the paper, Carl Sagan, astronomer turned television star, then convened a conference on the “nuclear winter” hypothesis in October 1983, supported by leading environmental and anti-war pressure groups from Friends of the Earth to the Audubon Society, Planned Parenthood to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Curiously, three Soviet officials joined the conference’s board and a satellite link from the Kremlin was provided.
In December 1983, two papers appeared in the prestigious journal Science, one on the physics that became known as TTAPS after the surnames of its authors, S being for Sagan; the other on the biology, whose authors included the famous biologists Paul Ehrlich and Stephen Jay Gould as well as Sagan. The conclusion of the second paper was extreme: “Global environmental changes sufficient to cause the extinction of a major fraction of the plant and animal species on Earth are likely. In that event, the possibility of the extinction of Homo sapiens cannot be excluded.”

Who started the scare and why? One possibility is that it was fake news from the beginning. When the high-ranking Russian spy Sergei Tretyakov defected in 2000, he said that the KGB was especially proud of the fact “it created the myth of nuclear winter”. He based this on what colleagues told him and on research he did at the Red Banner Institute, the Russian spy school.

The Kremlin was certainly spooked by Nato’s threat to deploy medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe if the Warsaw Pact refused to limit its deployment of such missiles. In Darwall’s version, based on Tretyakov, Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, “ordered the Soviet Academy of Sciences to produce a doomsday report to incite more demonstrations in West Germany”. They applied some older work by a scientist named Kirill Kondratyev on the cooling effect of dust storms in the Karakum Desert to the impact of a nuclear exchange in Germany.

Tretyakov said: “I was told the Soviet scientists knew this theory was completely ridiculous. There were no legitimate facts to support it. But it was exactly what Andropov needed to cause terror in the West.” Andropov then supposedly ordered it to be fed to contacts in the western peace and green movement.

It certainly helped Soviet propaganda. From the Pope to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to the non-aligned nations, calls for Nato’s nuclear strategy to be rethought because of the nuclear winter theory came thick and fast. A Russian newspaper used the nuclear winter to inveigh against “inhuman aspirations of the US imperialists, who are pushing the world towards nuclear catastrophe”. In his acceptance speech of the Nobel peace prize in 1985, the prominent Russian doctor Evgeny Chazov cited the Nobel committee's citation: "a considerable service to mankind by spreading authoritative information and by creating an awareness of the catastrophic consequences of atomic warfare". The statement continued: "...this, in turn, contributes to an increase in the pressure of public opposition".

“Propagators of the nuclear winter thus acted as dupes in a disinformation exercise scripted by the KGB”, concludes Darwall. We can never be entirely certain of this because Tretyakov’s KGB colleagues may have been exaggerating their role and he is now dead. But that the KGB did its best to fan the flames is not in doubt.

It soon became apparent that the nuclear winter hypothesis was plain wrong. As the geophysicist Russell Seitz pointed out, “soot in the TTAPS simulation is not up there as an observed consequence of nuclear explosions but because the authors told a programmer to put it there”. He added: “The model dealt with such complications as geography, winds, sunrise, sunset and patchy clouds in a stunningly elegant manner — they were ignored.” The physicist Steven Schneider concluded that “the global apocalyptic conclusions of the initial nuclear winter hypothesis can now be relegated to a vanishingly low level of probability”.

The physicists Freeman Dyson and Fred Singer, who would end up on the opposite side of the global-warming debate from Schneider and Seitz, calculated that any effects would be patchy and short-lived, and that while dry soot could generate cooling, any kind of dampness risked turning a nuclear smog into a warming factor and a short-lived one at that.

By 1986 the theory was effectively dead, and so it has remained. A nuclear war would have devastating consequences, but the impact on the climate would be the least of our worries.

The stakes were higher in the Cold War than today. The Soviet peace offensive secured the support of many western intellectuals and much of the media, and very nearly prevailed.

SOURCE

Delingpole: NOAA Caught Lying About Arctic Sea Ice

The Arctic is melting catastrophically! Sea ice levels are experiencing their most precipitous decline in 1500 years! Something must be done – and fast…

Well, so claims the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and we know by now what that means, don’t we?

Yep: the Arctic sea ice is doing just fine. Yep: yet again, the NOAA is telling porkies.

As usual, Paul Homewood has got its number.

First, here’s what the NOAA is claiming, as relayed in a scaremongering piece at Vox:

The Arctic Ocean once froze reliably every year. Those days are over.

Arctic sea ice extent has been measured by satellites since the 1970s. And scientists can sample ice cores, permafrost records, and tree rings to make some assumptions about the sea ice extent going back 1,500 years. And when you put that all on a chart, well, it looks a little scary.

In December, NOAA released its latest annual Arctic Report Card, which analyzes the state of the frozen ocean at the top of our world. Overall, it’s not good.

“The Arctic is going through the most unprecedented transition in human history,” Jeremy Mathis, director of NOAA’s Arctic research program, said at a press conference. “This year’s observations confirm that the Arctic shows no signs of returning to the reliably frozen state it was in just a decade ago.”

Now, courtesy of Homewood, are the facts:

Sea ice in the Arctic is recovering after a period of decline:

Arctic sea ice is getting thicker:

Arctic temperatures now are no higher than in the 1930s and 1940s:

On longer timescales. there is nothing unusual about Arctic temperatures:

If you’re still worried that the Arctic is about to disappear, here are more papers confirming that Arctic sea ice is well within its normal range of variability.

One of them, Stein et al. argues that there is more Arctic sea ice now than there has been for most of the last 10,000 years:

If only liberals and greenies relied on media that give facts rather than narrative, eh?

SOURCE

Cheap energy forever: Permian’s mammoth cubes herald supersized shale future

‘Cube development,’ which taps multiple layers of shale all at once, could accelerate the U.S. shale boom and make the world swim in cheap and abundant energy for much of the next 250 years, as The GWPF reports.

In the scrublands of West Texas there’s an oil-drilling operation like few that have come before.

Encana Corp.’s RAB Davidson well pad is so mammoth, the explorer speaks of it in military terms, describing its efforts here as an occupation.

More than 1 million pounds of drilling rigs, bulldozers, tanker trucks and other equipment spread out over a dusty 16-acre expanse. As of November, the 19 wells here collectively pumped almost 20,000 barrels of crude per day, according to company reports.

Encana calls this “cube development,” and it may be the supersized future of U.S. fracking, says Gabriel Daoud, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst who visited Davidson last year. The technique is designed to tap the multiple layers of petroleum-soaked rock here in Texas’s Permian shale basin all at once, rather than the one-or-two-well, one-layer-at-a-time approach of the past.

After a years-long land grab by explorers, “the Permian is graduating,” according to Daoud. “Now it’s all about entering manufacturing mode.”

With the new technique, Encana and other companies are pushing beyond the drilling patterns that dominated during the early, exploratory phases of the shale revolution. Now, operators are assembling projects with a dozen or more well bores that touch multiple underground layers of the Permian and other shale plays simultaneously, tapping the entire 3-D “cube” beneath a producer’s acreage.

The shift has been controversial, with some of the biggest names in oil shying away from the approach as too aggressive and expensive. But if proponents are right, the cube could accelerate a drilling boom that’s already helped push U.S. production past an historic 10 million barrels a day, rewriting the rules of global energy markets along the way.

SOURCE

Battery storage* in perspective - solving 1% of the problem

The energy world is fixated on the "huge" amounts of battery storage presently being installed to back up slowly-increasing levels of intermittent renewables generation. The feeling seems to be that as soon as enough batteries are installed to take care of daily supply/demand imbalances we will no longer need conventional dispatchable energy - solar + wind + storage will be able to do it all. Here I take another look at the realities of the situation using what I hope are some telling visual examples of what battery storage will actually do for us. As discussed in previous posts it will get us no closer to the vision of a 100% renewables-powered world than we are now.

*Note: "Battery storage" covers all storage technologies currently being considered, including thermal, compressed air, pumped hydro etc. Batteries are, however, the flavor of the moment and are expected to capture the largest share of the future energy storage market.

This post is all about the difference between pipe dreams and reality. Prof. Mark Jacobson of Stanford University et al. have just published a new study that responds to the critics of their earlier 2017 study. The new study is paywalled, but Stanford's press release describes the basic procedures used:

For the study, the researchers relied on two computational modeling programs. The first program predicted global weather patterns from 2050 to 2054. From this, they further predicted the amount of energy that could be produced from weather-related energy sources like onshore and offshore wind turbines, solar photovoltaics on rooftops and in power plants, concentrated solar power plants and solar thermal plants over time. These types of energy sources are variable and don't necessarily produce energy when demand is highest.

The group then combined data from the first model with a second model that incorporated energy produced by more stable sources of electricity, like geothermal power plants, tidal and wave devices, and hydroelectric power plants, and of heat, like geothermal reservoirs. The second model also included ways of storing energy when there was excess, such as in electricity, heat, cold and hydrogen storage. Further, the model included predictions of energy demand over time.

Scenarios based on the modeling data avoided blackouts at low cost in all 20 world regions for all five years examined and under three different storage scenarios.

What's the energy mix that leads to this happy ending in no fewer than 139 of the world's countries? The lead-in figure of Jacobson et al's 2017 report, reproduced below as Figure 1, tells us. Rounded off to the nearest percent it's 5% hydro + geothermal, 37% wind, 58% solar and not a kilowatt of nuclear.

In contrast to Jacobson et al, who compare this energy mix with computer-generated demand scenarios that foresee the replacement of fossil fuels with wind and solar somehow lowering demand by 42.5%, I have taken my usual approach of comparing an energy mix with real-life grid data, which raises the question of which real-life data to use. Well, Stanford University is in California, and I happen to have quite a lot of grid data from the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), so I used that. And California is also a good example to use because it's heavy into solar and battery storage, or at least would like to be.

So what’s the problem with energy storage in California? It’s widely perceived to be the now-famous California duck curve, which shows how rapidly increasing solar generation could within a few years increase afternoon ramp rates to the point where existing gas-fired and hydro balancing facilities are no longer able to handle them:

Figure 2: The California duck curve

But while this could indeed be a problem in the future it isn’t at the moment. We begin our analysis of the real-life CAISO grid data with Figure 3, which plots hourly generation against demand for three days in early March 2015. With the help of imports from surrounding states California had no difficulty matching generation to demand over this period, with most of the load-balancing handled by gas-fired generation:

Figure 3: Actual CAISO generation by source and demand (black), hourly data, March 3, 4 and 5, 2015

Figure 4 now shows what Figure 3 would have looked like with the Jacobson et al renewables generation mix (5% hydro+geothermal, 37% wind, 58% solar) in place. It looks more like the Shanghai skyline than a duck:

Figure 4: Generation and demand, hourly data, March 3, 4 and 5, 2015, Jacobson et al generation mix. Generation is scaled to match demand over the period.

In this case CAISO would have considerable difficulty balancing generation against daily demand, and since a) the imbalances are caused almost entirely by solar and b) when it’s dark in California it will be dark in the surrounding Western US states too there will be little or no surplus energy available. So balancing will have to be done by storing the daytime solar surpluses for re-use at night. How much storage would be needed over the three-day period considered? According to Figure 5, about 300 GWh, the equivalent of over 2,000 Big South Australian Batteries (BSABs):

This, of course, is not a real-life case. No sane grid operator, nor even the California state legislature, would allow imbalances and ramp rates of this magnitude to develop in the first place.......

As noted earlier this is not a real-life case, but should it wish to go 100% renewable California will clearly have a seasonal energy storage requirement which vastly exceeds its daily “duck curve” requirement. And what does California, which claims to be a world leader in energy storage, propose to do about it?

Well, in 2010 it passed an energy storage mandate, the wording in which (offpeak, peaking powerplants, peak load requirements) left little doubt that its basic intention was to flatten out the daily duck curve when more solar comes on line:

    SECTION 1.

    (b) Additional energy storage systems can optimize the use of significant additional amounts of variable, intermittent, and offpeak electrical generation from wind and solar energy
    (c) Expanded use of energy storage systems can (avoid or defer) the need for new fossil fuel-powered peaking powerplants
    (d) Expanded use of energy storage systems will reduce the use of electricity generated from fossil fuels to meet peak load requirements on days with high electricity demand

The mandate went on to confirm that this was indeed its intention by calling for 1.325 gigawatts of energy storage without specifying how many hours the gigawatts were to last for. Apparently this was unimportant. According to recent reports California is about to call for two gigawatts more “storage”, with gigawatt-hours again unspecified. It‘s questionable whether California even understands what energy storage is.

Now there’s no question that high levels of intermittent renewables generation will require fast-frequency-response capabilities to ensure grid stability during the day, but what is California doing about seasonal storage, which makes up 99% of its total storage problem?

Absolutely nothing. It has yet to recognize its existence.

And the same goes for everyone else, including the UK, where proposed revisions to the energy storage market concentrate almost entirely on “fast frequency response” (I remember reading somewhere that according to National Grid any storage exceeding 15 minutes in duration will be superfluous but can’t find the reference).

People may be wondering why I’ve been spending so much time recently writing about energy storage problems. Well, this is why. Go back to Figure 7 and imagine what it would look like with the little wiggles gone. To all intents and purposes it would look exactly the same. And these little wiggles are all the growing rush for battery storage is going to remove.

More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)

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

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

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26 February, 2018

Climate Accord Nations Failing, Complaining and Buying Coal

The Paris climate accord, which the U.S. wisely vacated last year, accomplishes nothing in the way of meaningful environmental changes. One huge and inherent roadblock is that other nations are only halfheartedly and haphazardly invested. In fact, aside from the obvious fact that Barack Obama signed onto it unconstitutionally, that was one of conservatives’ biggest gripes against the Obama administration’s obsession with making the U.S. a captive of the agreement.

Not only is the accord a misnomer in that it won’t significantly alter future temperatures (realists rightfully doubt it will alter temperatures at all), but major pollution emitters other than the U.S. are far less inclined to clean up their act. The expectation of fecklessness by other nations wasn’t so much a prediction as an inevitability.

This week, a Washington Post story — “Countries made only modest climate-change promises in Paris. They’re falling short anyway.” — proves this is exactly the case. The articles says the persistence of deforestation in Brazil and the development of new coal plants in nations like Turkey and Indonesia are a few major reasons for the world’s “struggling to hit the relatively modest goals set in Paris.” In Germany, “The county’s emissions actually rose slightly in 2015 and 2016 because of continued coal burning and emissions growth in the transportation sector.”

With 2030 acting as the embryonic deadline for emissions targets, environmentalists are hoping that nations step up and push hard over the next 12 years to fulfill their obligations. As the Post notes, “The emissions-cutting pledges that countries brought to the table in Paris were nowhere near sufficient to meet such goals, which world leaders acknowledged at the time. The plan was for nations to ramp up their ambition over time.”

However, it continues, “By 2020, countries are expected to actually ramp up the promises they made in Paris.” This is a pipe dream. These nations were never expected to actually keep their promises, much less take initiative by going the extra mile. What makes anyone think they’ll change their ways in a few years?

Foreign nations can certainly be criticized for expecting the Paris climate accord to actually accomplish anything, not to mention their hypocrisy on the matter. But it’s not unreasonable for nations to put their interests ahead of a fairy tale accord. For example, The Washington Times reports: “As France, Germany and Italy chastised President Trump for rejecting the Paris climate accord in June and mocked the U.S. for turning its back on the environment, their nations were busy importing record amounts of American coal.”

An additional 95 million short tons of coal were shipped out of the U.S. last year. According to the Times, “About 31 million short tons of that went to Asia, nearly double the amount from 2016. China alone imported 2.8 million short tons through September 2017 — a wild increase over the previous year’s 205,000. Total exports to Europe reached 40 million short tons — 13 million more than in 2016.”

The U.S., thanks to Donald Trump, is making its economic interests a top priority by producing and exporting more energy resources. Meanwhile, other nations that greatly need them are happily taking it off our hands. It’s a win-win situation that benefits each nation. The bottom line? While the results are antithetical, contradictory and hypocritical regarding the rhetoric we’re hearing from “environmental leaders,” it demonstrates why the Paris climate accord will never work.

SOURCE

Germany Had to Ground Its 'Green' Luftwaffe

Too much biodiesel in the fuel mix leaves our NATO ally grounded and way behind schedule.

How’s that “green” fuel initiative by the United States military and our allies working out? Not too well. In fact, one NATO ally has seen its military readiness take a huge hit as a result of placing being “green” over being ready for war.

According to a report by UK Defence Journal, the German Luftwaffe’s force of Tornado IDS strike aircraft has been grounded. The reason? Too much biodiesel in the fuel mix. As a result, these potent strike aircraft are out of action until their fuel tanks can be flushed, new-pilot training is now three months behind schedule, and the Germans may not be able to lead the NATO force slated to counter Russian aggression, the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, next year.

Now, “green fuel” from various sources (anything from beef fat to plants) can be useful as a reserve in case of a disruption in the supply of oil. But when jet fuel costs almost $30 a gallon or can only use a small amount of biofuel because it would break the bank, using it regularly is pretty stupid.

But there’s another “green” fuel with no carbon footprint that could be very useful here. That’s nuclear power, and it’s already used on the aircraft carriers and submarines of the United States Navy. What you may not remember is that it also was once used to power the Navy’s nine cruisers.

Perhaps a good idea might be to develop two classes of nuclear escorts for the nuclear-powered carriers: One would be an aerospace-defense cruiser loaded with Mk 41 vertical-launch cells — something at least the size of the one-of-a-kind USS Long Beach (CGN 9). The other would be a general-purpose escort — think something like an updated California-class guided-missile cruiser (originally designated a guided-missile destroyer leader).

Doing this could be a start in helping to free up some of the fuel resources. In 1962, the Navy used Task Force One to go around the world in two months without re-fueling. That’s not a bad thing.

SOURCE

Britain and Europe must ban palm oil in biofuel to save forests, EU parliament told

If Britain and other European nations are to fulfil forest protection goals, they must ban the use of palm oil for biofuel and tighten oversight of supply chains, a delegation of forest peoples told parliamentarians this week.

The call for urgent, concrete action comes amid an increasingly heated diplomatic row over the issue between the EU and the governments of major palm-producing nations such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Costa Rica.

The European parliament voted last April to prohibit sales of biofuels made from vegetable oils by 2020 in order to meet its climate goals. This was followed by a related vote last month. Whether and how this might be implemented is now being considered by the European Commission and member states.

The pushback has been strong, particularly in south-east Asia, the origin of 90% of the world’s palm oil exports, which is used in hundreds of supermarket products. Palm oil can also be blended with diesel to power engines, which is what the ban would halt.

Influential politicians in these countries, many of whom are closely linked to the industry, accuse the EU of trade protectionism, colonial thinking and undermining poverty reduction efforts. Malaysia’s plantations minister described the proposed ban as “crop apartheid.”

But indigenous and other communities who are negatively affected by the plantations urge the EU to push ahead with the ban and to go further by tightening other supply chain controls to prevent damage to their land, rights and environment.

Franky Samperante, a founder of the indigenous peoples’ organisation Pusaka, said the Indonesian government had granted concessions to more than 50 companies to open plantations on 1.2m hectares of land claimed by local communities. For him, any palm oil from this area should be considered a conflict product and prohibited from sale in Europe.

“There should be sanctions. If not, there is no point,” he said.

Samperante is part of a group of 14 forest peoples representatives from 11 nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America visiting Europe this week to lobby for a new action plan on sustainable supply chains.

The delegation proposed concrete steps, including for European nations to establish sustainable trade ombudsmen to look into reports of human rights and environmental violations, and for companies to adopt binding human rights policies rather than voluntary actions. Their call was supported by a coalition of environmental NGOs including the Forest People’s Programme, Global Witness, Greenpeace, WWF and the Environmental Investigation Agency.

Tom Griffiths, the author of , said lofty goals to protect forests were being undermined by a failure to protect the rights of those who live in them.

“There are so many pledges and commitments by companies and government that sound good on paper, but the reality on the ground is starkly different,” he said. “At the meetings this we, they are all saying close the gap.”

Their recommendations will be presented at a multilateral meeting in Paris in June, when the French president, Emmanuel Macron, is expected to launch his strategy for “deforestation-free trade”.

SOURCE

The RFS has bankrupted its first refinery, more to follow

By Printus LeBlanc

Americans for Limited Government has been warning of the impending bankruptcies in the petroleum refining industry for some time now. Well, the first canary, Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES), has died, and the only question left is how many more will die before the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Congress wake up.

In 2005, Congress passed, and President Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Among the many new regulations created in the legislation, the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) was birthed. The RFS mandated a certain amount of renewable fuels, mostly corn ethanol, be blended with gasoline. The amount was 4 billion gallons in 2006 with a rise to 7.5 billion in 2012.

In 2007, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 was passed. The bill increased the amount of renewable fuel to be blended. It required 9 billion gallons be blended in 2008 with an increase to 36 billion gallons in 2022. Of course, this made the subsidy loving corn growers extremely happy. The federal government was now mandating citizens purchase their product. And we wonder where they got the idea for the Obamacare individual mandate.

To track the renewable fuel usage, Renewable Identification Numbers (RIN) were created. A RIN is a string of numbers and letters used to identify each batch of biofuel produced. The RINs count towards the Renewable Volume Obligation (RVO), an amount designated to each refinery by the EPA. The RINs are the problem.

When the EPA instituted the program, it believed the costs would only be a few cents per RIN. As usual, when the federal government gets involved the costs spiraled out of control. Wall Street speculators now routinely drive up the prices. In one seven-month period in 2013, the value of one RIN went from 7 cents to $1.43. The volatility is creating economic hardships for refiners across the nation and has caused the largest refinery on the east coast to declare bankruptcy.

PES filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January with over an estimated $600 million in debts. The company owns the largest refinery on the East Coast with the capability to refine 335,000 barrels per day. In the bankruptcy filing, PES stated the second largest expenditure behind crude oil was RINs, spending $218 million on the imaginary numbers in 2017.

Mixing ethanol and gasoline is not as easy as it sounds. A refinery, like the PES facility, cannot combine the two ingredients at the plant. Because ethanol degrades the mixture over time, there is a relatively short shelf life once the two chemicals are mixed, around three months. For this reason, the ethanol is mixed in at the point of sale to the consumer.

This does not have an impact on refineries that own gas stations. Several of the larger companies like Exxon and Saudi Aramco also own gas stations across the country. What are small and medium-sized refiners to do, go out and spend millions to purchase gas stations?

Of course, King Corn could care less about the companies going bankrupt because they are being forced to buy their product. All King Corn cares about is making sure the government mandate stays in place, regardless of the outcome to the consumers or refiners.

However, there is a middle ground everyone can agree on. Allowing RINs attached to exported biofuels to be counted towards the RVO benefits almost everyone:

The refiners no longer must pay twice for RINs;

The corn producers still produce the same amount of corn, and will have greater access to overseas markets;

Increases American exports;

EPA Administrator Pruitt must act quickly. The first canary in the ethanol corn maze is dead. The next one is likely to come from Delaware. It is time to reform the RFS and get the government out of picking winners and losers. The RINs system must be updated.

SOURCE

Rainfall’s Natural Variation Hides Climate Change Signal

New research from The Australian National University (ANU) and ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science suggests natural rainfall variation is so great that it could take a human lifetime for significant climate signals to appear in regional or global rainfall measures.

Even exceptional droughts like those over the Murray Darling Basin (2000-2009) and California (2011 to 2017) fit within the natural variations in the long-term precipitation records, according to the statistical method used by the researchers.

This has significant implications for policymakers in the water resources, irrigation and agricultural industries.

“Our findings suggest that for most parts of the world, we won’t be able to recognize long-term or permanent changes in annual rainfall driven by climate change until they have already occurred and persisted for some time,” said Professor Michael Roderick from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.

“This means those who make decisions around the construction of desalination plants or introduce new policies to conserve water resources will effectively be making these decisions blind.

“Conversely, if they wait and don’t act until the precipitation changes are recognized they will be acting too late. It puts policymakers in an invidious position.”

To get their results the researchers first tested the statistical approach on the 244-year-long observational record of precipitation at the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford, UK. They compared rainfall changes over 30-year-intervals. They found any changes over each interval were indistinguishable from random or natural variation.

They then applied the same process to California, which has a record going back to 1895, and the Murray Darling Basin from 1901-2007. In both cases, the long dry periods seem to fit within expected variations.

Finally, they applied the process to reliable global records that extended from 1940-2009. Only 14 percent of the global landmass showed, with 90 percent confidence, increases or decreases in precipitation outside natural variation.

Professor Graham Farquhar AO also from the ANU Research School of Biology said natural variation was so large in most regions that even if climate change was affecting rainfall, it was effectively hidden in the noise.

“We know that humans have already had a measurable influence on streamflows and groundwater levels through extraction and making significant changes to the landscape,” Professor Farquhar said.

“But the natural variability of precipitation found in this paper presents policymakers with a large known unknown that has to be factored into their estimates to effectively assess our long-term water resource needs.”

SOURCE

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

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

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25 February, 2018

World's coral reefs face new peril from beneath within decades (?)

This is just a new variation on an old fraud. For the ocean to become more acidic it has to absorb more CO2 and thus produce carbonic acid (H2O + CO2 = H2CO3). And as CO2 levels rise, that might happen to some degree.

But according to Warmist theory higher CO2 levels will bring higher temperatures. But higher ocean temperatures will REDUCE the carrying capacity of the oceans for CO2. So CO2 will OUTGAS from the oceans under higher temperatures and the oceans will be LESS acidic.

So if the galoots below really believed in global warming they would welcome it as REDUCING the threat to corals.

So there is a small potential threat to corals from higher CO2 levels but it will only eventuate if there is NO global warming. Fun?

The world's coral reefs, already enduring multiple threats from bleaching to nutrient run-off from farming, also face another challenge - this time from below.

New research, published in the journal Science on Friday, has found the sediments on which many reefs are built are 10 times more sensitive to the acidifying oceans than the living corals themselves. Some reef bases are already dissolving.

The study used underwater chambers at four sites in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, including Heron Island in the Great Barrier Reef, and applied modelling to extrapolate results for 22 reefs in three ocean basins.

As oceans turn more acidic, the corals themselves produce less of the calcium carbonate that forms their base. Instead of growing, the reef bases start to dissolve.

"The public is less aware of the threat of ocean acidification [than warming waters]," said Brendan Eyre, a professor of biogeochemistry at the Southern Cross University and the paper's lead author.

“Coral reef sediments around the world will trend towards dissolving when seawater reaches a tipping point in acidity - which is likely to occur well before the end of the century,” he said.

At risk will be coral reef ecosystems that support tourism, fisheries and the many other human activities, he said.

The ocean's acidity has increased about 30 per cent since the start of the industrial revolution, as seas absorb about one-third of the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“It is vital that we put pressure on governments globally to act in concert to lower carbon dioxide emissions as this is the only way we can stop the oceans acidifying and dissolving our reefs,” Professor Eyre said.

Rates of dissolving reef sediment will depend on their starting points, including their exposure to organic sediment. The Hawaiian reef studied is already showing signs of its sediment dissolving, with higher organic nutrient levels likely to be contributing, he said.

"Carbonate sediments in Hawaii are already net dissolving and will be strongly net dissolving by the end of the century," the paper said.

Living corals themselves appear to be able to resist the acidification process, with mechanisms and strategies to resist some of the impacts.

Still, the study said the transition of the dissolution of reef sediment "will result in the loss of material for building shallow reef habitats such as reef flats and lagoons, and associated coral cays". It is unknown if the reefs will face "catastrophic destruction" once the erosion begins, the paper said.

Over time, as coral bases begin to dissolve, they are more likely to become more vulnerable to cyclones and other threats, Professor Eyre said.

He said further study was needed to understand how reefs would be affected by temperatures, rising organic and nutrient levels and more acidic waters in combination, he said.

The impact of bleaching - such as the two mass events in the 2015-16 and 2016-17 summers on the Great Barrier Reef - would most likely accelerate the breakdown of reefs by "making more sediment and organic matter available for dissolution", the paper said.

SOURCE

Groupthink On Climate Change Ignores Inconvenient Facts

Christopher Booker

Since we’ve now been living with the global warming story for 30 years, it might seem hard to believe that science could now come up with anything that would enable us to see that story in a wholly new light.

But that is what I am suggesting in a new paper, just published in the UK by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, thanks to a book called Groupthink, written more than 40 years ago by a professor of psychology at Yale, Irving Janis.

What Janis did was to define scientifically just how what he called groupthink operates, according to three basic rules. And what my paper tries to show is the astonishing degree to which they explain so much that many have long found puzzling about the global warming story.

Janis’s first rule is that a group of people come to share a particular way of looking at the world which may seem hugely important to them but which turns out not to have been based on looking properly at all the evidence. It is therefore just a shared, untested belief.

Rule two is that, because they have shut their minds to any evidence which might contradict their belief, they like to insist that it is supported by a “consensus”. The one thing those caught up in groupthink cannot tolerate is that anyone should question it.

This leads on to the third rule, which is that they cannot properly debate the matter with those who disagree with their belief. Anyone holding a contrary view must simply be ignored, ridiculed and dismissed as not worth listening to.

What my paper does is look again at the entire global warming story in the light of Janis’s rules, and to show how consistently they explain so much of the way it has unfolded all the way through.

The alarm over man-made climate change was first exploded on the world in 1988 by a tiny group of scientists who had become convinced that, because both CO2 levels and global temperatures were rising, one must be the cause of the other. Unless something very drastic was done, they urged, the planet was heading for catastrophe.

In November that year, two of these fervent believers in what they called “human-induced climate change” were authorized to set up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. This would report to the world’s politicians on the basis of computer models programmed, according to their theory, to predict just how fast the world was likely to heat up over the next 100 years.

With startling speed, their theory was soon proclaimed as being supported by a scientific “consensus”, backed by governments, all the main scientific journals and institutions, environmental pressure groups and the media.

In fact right from the start, many scientists, like the eminent physicist Richard Lindzen of MIT, were highly skeptical, both of the theory itself and of those computer models. These, as Lindzen wrote, were so narrowly focused on CO2 that they were far too simplistic to allow for all the other natural factors which shape the earth’s climate.

But such dissenters were ignored. And for nearly 20 years the “consensus” rolled on, ever more extreme in its apocalyptic claims, with each new IPCC report scarier than the last. By 2006 Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was outdoing them all.

Anyone daring to question the “consensus” was now being vilified as just an “anti-science denier”, no better than those crazies who deny the reality of the Nazi Holocaust.

Just then, however, the story was beginning to change. It was noted that, since the abnormally hot year of 1998, caused by a record El Nino, global temperatures had not risen at all. Those computer models had not predicted this.

Even more significant, thanks to the internet, expert science blogs were now appearing, able to show that not a single one of the claims from the “consensus” – vanishing Arctic ice, disappearing polar bears, unprecedented hurricanes, floods, droughts etc – was supported by the factual evidence.

By 2009, the “consensus” was facing considerable embarrassment, with the highly damaging Climategate emails between the little group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC, followed by the collapse in disarray of the great Copenhagen climate conference.

Then there was the spate of scandals surrounding the IPCC itself when it was revealed some of the scariest predictions of its latest report had not been based on proper science at all, but only on more hysterical claims by climate activists.

Finally, in Paris in 2015, came what I describe as the crux of the whole story. This was yet another great global conference to decide what the world must do to avert catastrophe.

Every nation had been asked in advance to submit its energy plans for the years up to 2030. The West, led by President Obama and the EU, dutifully pledged that it would be cutting its “carbon emissions” by up to 40 percent.

But from the rest of the world, a totally different story emerged. China, by now the world’s largest CO2 emitter, was planning to build so many new coal-fired power stations that by 2030 its emissions would have doubled. India, the third largest emitter, was planning to triple them. Altogether global emissions by 2030 were set to rise by a staggering 46 percent.

The rest of the world was just giving two fingers to the “consensus”, and planning to carry on regardless, But not one Western leader mentioned this until 2017 when President Trump gave it as his reason for pulling the US out of that meaningless “Paris Accord”.

In effect, Trump was thus finally calling the bluff of the groupthink which for 30 years had driven the whole global warming scare. If other Western countries wanted to commit economic suicide, that was their affair. But the rest of the world was no longer taken in by it, and the US was now with them.

SOURCE

2 More New Papers Affirm There Is More Arctic Ice Coverage Today Than During The 1400s

Earlier this year, Stein et al., 2017 published a reconstruction of Arctic sea ice variations throughout the Holocene that appeared to establish that there is more Arctic sea ice now than for nearly all of the last 10,000 years.

The study region, the Chukchi Sea, was deemed representative of most of the Arctic, as the authors asserted that “the increase in sea ice extent during the late Holocene seems to be a circum-Arctic phenomenon as PIP25-based sea ice records from the Fram Strait, Laptev Sea, East Siberian Sea and Chukchi Sea display a generally quite similar evolution, all coinciding with the decrease in solar radiation.”

The proxy data used to reconstruct Arctic-wide sea ice variations over the Holocene (PIP25) clearly show that modern sea ice extent has only modestly retreated relative to the heights reached during the Little Ice Age (the 17th and 18th centuries), and that the from about 1400 A.D.on through the rest of the 10,000-year-long Holocene, Arctic sea ice extent was much lower than it is today.

In 2014, Dr. Qinghua Ding and colleagues published a consequential paper in the journal Nature contending that much of the warming trend in the Arctic since 1979 can be traced to “unforced natural variability” rather than anthropogenic forcing.

“A substantial portion of recent warming in the northeastern Canada and Greenland sector of the Arctic arises from unforced natural variability.”

Then, a few months ago, Dr. Ding and co-authors published another Nature paper (Ding et al., 2017) that extended a natural attribution to trends in Arctic sea ice variability, concluding that as much as half of the decline in Arctic sea ice since 1979 is due to internal (natural) factors, further undermining the position that anthropogenic forcing dominates Arctic sea ice changes.

“Internal variability dominates the Arctic summer circulation trend and may be responsible for about 30–50% of the overall decline in September sea ice since 1979.”
Within the last month, two more papers have been published that further affirm the conclusion that modern Arctic sea ice extent has not changed significantly relative to even the last few centuries, nor has it fallen outside the range of natural variability.

1. Like Stein et al. (2017), Yamamoto et al., 2017 largely attribute Holocene sea ice concentration variations to solar forcing, and they assemble a reconstruction of sea ice trends for the region that once again clearly shows sea ice coverage is greater now than it has been for almost all of the Holocene.

“Millennial to multi-centennial variability in the quartz / feldspar ratio (the BG [Beaufort Gyre] circulation) is consistent with fluctuations in solar irradiance, suggesting that solar activity affected the BG [Beaufort Gyre] strength on these timescales. … The intensified BSI [Bering Strait in-flow] was associated with decrease in sea-ice concentrations and increase in marine production, as indicated by biomarker concentrations, suggesting a major influence of the BSI on sea-ice and biological conditions in the Chukchi Sea. Multi-century to millennial fluctuations, presumably controlled by solar activity, were also identified in a proxy-based BSI record characterized by the highest age resolution. … Proxy records consistent with solar forcing were reported from a number of paleoclimatic archives, such as Chinese stalagmites (Hu et al., 2008), Yukon lake sediments (Anderson et al., 2005), and ice cores (Fisher et al., 2008), as well as marine sediments in the northwestern Pacific (Sagawa et al., 2014) and the Chukchi Sea (Stein et al., 2017).”

2. In another new paper, Moffa-Sánchez and Hall, 2017 analyze subpolar temperature changes, glacier advances and declines, and sea ice variations in the Labrador Sea, North Atlantic, North Iceland, Alaska, Swedish Lapland, and Northwestern Europe region.

“Paleoceanographic reconstructions from a more northward location of the polar front on the North Iceland margin show centennial-scale cold events and marked increases in sea ice with similar timing to the cold events recorded in the eastern Labrador Sea. … The records from the northernmost sites show a linear cooling trend perhaps driven by the Neoglacial decrease in summer insolation in the northern high latitudes and its effects on Arctic sea ice production. “

“Periods of increased influence of polar waters in the eastern Labrador Sea, reduced LSW [Labrador Sea Water] formation and weaker subpolar gyre largely coincide with well-established cold periods recorded in glacier advances, tree-ring and pollen records in the circum-North Atlantic and northwest Europe [Dark Ages Cold Period, Little Ice Age]. … Conversely, periods of reduced influence of polar waters in the eastern Labrador Sea, stronger subpolar gyre and increase LSW [Labrador Sea Water] formation largely coincide with mild/warm periods in Europe namely the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Climatic Anomaly.”

The authors find that while Arctic sea ice coverage was more advanced during the Little Ice Age, sea ice concentrations in the waters north of Iceland were far lower than now from about 500 years ago onward, especially during the centuries encompassing the Medieval Warm Period (or Medieval Climate Anomaly) and Roman Warm Period.

Glacier advance and retreat for the Alaska and Swedish Lapland regions also followed the climate trends associated with the Little Ice Age, Medieval Climate Anomaly, Dark Ages Cold Period, and Roman Warm Period.   During the earlier warm periods and for most of the last 3,000 years, glacier recession was more pronounced than it is now.

Moffa-Sánchez and Hall (2017) also report that sea surface temperatures north of Iceland were much warmer in the past than they are now.

Finally, the 10-150 m layer of the Labrador Sea has also not undergone any net warming trend in the last 75 years.

SOURCE

Terence Corcoran: Polar bear battle in Toronto! It’s good science vs. climate do-gooders

Two events next week juxtapose two conflicting conclusions on the current health and future for polar bears. Behind the science, there’s also a juicy personal clash

Are the great, charismatic polar bears, all white, cuddly-looking and dangerous, caught in the death grip of climate change

Coming next Tuesday to Toronto’s swanky Yorkville district, it’s the 2018 Polar Bear Showdown, an international display of conflicting views on the state of polar-bear science. Are the great, charismatic creatures, all white, cuddly-looking and dangerous, caught in the death grip of climate change?

At one corner in Yorkville, in the ballroom of the upmarket Four Seasons Hotel, Polar Bears International (PBI) will stage a grand, $15,000-a-table gala to raise funds to protect the allegedly threatened Arctic species from the ravages of our addiction to fossil fuels. Sponsored by a klatch of corporate goody-two-shoes — a couple of Canadian banks, a major accounting outfit, The Globe and Mail — and filled with razzle-dazzle entertainment and good food, the purpose of the event is to mark International Polar Bear Day and draw attention to PBI’s science-based effort to sound a global polar-bear alarm.

At another corner, exactly one block away, in the Founders’ Room at the down-market Toronto Reference Library, the Global Warming Policy Foundation of London, England will launch a new report on the state of polar bears by Susan Crockford, adjunct professor at the University of Victoria. There will be no entertainment, and no food, but the science will be far superior.

As a science showdown, the Yorkville events juxtapose two conflicting conclusions on the current health and future prospects for polar bears amid climate change. Behind the science, there’s also a juicy personal clash.

There will be no entertainment, and no food, but the science will be far superior

The chief scientist at Polar Bears International is Steven Amstrup, adjunct professor at the University of Wyoming and a leading purveyor of the theory that climate change could exterminate polar bears from the Arctic regions. In recent months, Amstrup has launched direct attacks on Crockford and joined others in producing what can only be described as junk-science attempts to undermine her polar-bear research. In return, Crockford recently published a critique of Amstrup’s decades-long campaign to portray polar bears as an endangered species and establish them as the poster-species for climate change.

Crockford’s conclusion is that PBI’s chief scientist and prime motivational guide, whose biographic page contains a catalogue of polar-bear alarmism, spent more than a decade creating a media scare that drove many (including Al Gore) to believe in a threat that didn’t exist. As Crockford wrote in a posting on her polarbearscience.com blog last month: “Polar bear experts who falsely predicted that roughly 17,300 polar bears would be dead by now (given sea ice conditions since 2007) have realized their failure has not only kicked their own credibility to the curb, it has taken with it the reputations of their climate change colleagues.”

Crockford’s new paper is aimed at a wide audience of teachers, scientists, students, decision-makers and the general public. It should be required reading for attendees at the Polar Bear Day gala. An executive summary of the report, State of the Polar Bear Report 2017, says that global polar-bear numbers have been stable or have risen since 2005, despite lower summer sea ice levels: “Overly pessimistic media responses to recent polar bear issues have made heartbreaking news out of scientifically insignificant events.”

As of this writing, one of those insignificant heartbreaking events — the video of a lone and apparently starving polar bear — adorns PBI’s website and serves as part of the sales pitch for next Tuesday’s gala in Yorkville. The video went viral in December, but has since been widely criticized. As veteran British environment writer Fred Pearce wrote recently in New Scientist magazine: “Emaciated, it stumbled across a green Arctic landscape without a speck of snow or ice in sight …Media outlets seized on the video as an example of how climate change is killing its poster child. But behind the headlines is an awkward question: have climate change activists chosen the wrong mascot?”

Pearce notes that the theory of looming polar-bear extinction has proved wrong. With rising temperatures in the Arctic and less ice “the polar bear population should have crashed. It hasn’t. If anything, numbers are up compared with 10 years ago.” Population numbers are also up since 1973, when hunting bans were put in place. While Pearce still sees the bears at some risk from a variety of threats, current estimates suggest “the species is not at immediate risk of extinction.”

Another recent commentary makes a similar point. In a release summarizing a recent polar-bear conference in Fairbanks, Alaska, an organization funded by the Russian Geographical Society quotes a Russian conservation official, Yegor Vereshchagin, on the fate of polar bears in Russia’s Chukotka region, across the Bering Sea from Alaska. “Both scientific data and traditional knowledge prove that nothing threatens our bears. During spring counts of dens we often find female bears with three cubs, which proves that the population is in good shape and there is no danger of a decrease in the population.”

Surely the attendees, corporate sponsors and organizers of that big Yorkville gala will find it instructive if they were to download Crockford’s paper when it is released by the Global Warming Policy Foundation next Tuesday, a few hours before their ritzy event. They will no doubt be thrilled by the good news. Maybe one of them will grab the mic that night and propose a toast: “Here’s to the polar bears, who are doing great!”

SOURCE

Deregulate Australian energy market and go back to coal

The catastrophic outcome of government energy market interventions is palpably clear. As the latest new regulatory body, the Energy Security Board, diplomatically puts it: “Fifteen years of climate policy instability … (have) left our energy system vulnerable to escalating prices while being both less reliable and secure.”

Australia has seen electricity prices double since 2015 and the once reliable supply is now suspect. From enjoying the world’s lowest cost electricity a decade ago, Australia now has among the most expensive.

The main cause has been subsidies and regulatory favours to renewable energy — chiefly wind — that have forced the closure of reliable coal-fired generators, particularly Northern in South Australia and Hazelwood in Victoria. Without these subsidies, costing about $5 billion a year, there would be no wind or solar. Not only are customers and taxpayers slugged with the subsidy costs but the outcome also has been to raise prices and reduce reliability.

A new Australian coal plant would produce electricity at about $50 a megawatt hour. A new wind farm can produce electricity, at best, at $110/MWh and its present subsidy is about $85/MWh. Solar is about twice the cost of wind

Fundamentally, the cost disadvantage of wind and solar stems from their low “energy density”. To get the equivalent energy from a standard 500MW coal generation unit requires 300 wind generators or 900,000 solar panels, and storage or back-up capacity is required to offset the inherent unreliability of energy sources dependent on the vagaries of the weather. Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg put the cost of this at $16/MWh, an optimistic estimate even with the government’s 23.5 per cent renewable target.

Wind farm entrepreneur Simon Holmes a Court recently argued on this page that the world is abandoning coal for electricity generation. Australia’s booming coal exports testify to the ludicrous nature of such statements. In fact, according to Greenpeace’s data, China has 300,000MW of new coal plant under way, increasing its capacity by a third; Japan has 20,000MW, which also would raise capacity by a third; while India has plans for an additional 148,000MW, adding 65 per cent to its capacity. Australian coal generating capacity is about 25,000MW.

The US has no new coal generators planned. This is partly a legacy of Barack Obama, who declared his policies would bankrupt any new coal generators, and partly because of the US boom in gas and oil production. Due to fracking, a technology largely banned in Australia, the US has gas at less than half the Australian price, making it cheaper than coal for new electricity generation.

Holmes a Court was correct in drawing attention to the costly failures of “carbon capture and storage”, the global propaganda arm for which is largely financed by the Australian government, and of high-energy, low-emissions coal power stations. These technologies reduce carbon dioxide emissions but involve add-on costs.

The Minerals Council of Australia, anxious to retain the support of BHP, has promoted low-emission technologies. For internal reasons, BHP supports renewables and opposes coal generation in Australia notwithstanding its dependence on international coal sales and cheap energy generally. The firm’s promotion of renewable energy confronted the reality of this with high fuel costs for its Olympic Dam mine in wind-dependent South Australia. It also took a $137 million hit from the 2016 wind-induced collapse of SA’s power system.

Many firms support renewable policies out of self-interest. Revenue from subsidies is itself valuable and, in addition, coal generators, as Origin Energy’s half-year results last week showed, are earning huge profits from the doubled wholesale price. Others are conscripted to support renewables for PR reasons, as part of what German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann has called a “spiral of silence”, where a loud and confident group is perceived to be majority opinion, leading others to acquiesce in much of its message.

The ESB has been tasked with creating an electricity market blueprint that marries lower carbon dioxide emissions with lower costs and greater reliability. This is an impossible task and would require massive new regulatory interventions.

The ESB’s proposals envisage creating a market combining emissions and energy in which every retailer and generator would need to participate. They would add new dimensions of complexity to electricity supply, bringing a further proliferation of administrative resources within the bureaucracy and the industry.

Envisaging such further controls as bringing improved efficiency represents a triumph of hope over experience. We can restore our latent competitiveness in cheap energy only by abandoning all the intrusions and distortions that are in place. Donald Trump has achieved success from such an approach and we may have to await full recognition of this before our politicians adopt similar deregulatory policies.

SOURCE

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

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

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23 February, 2018

Who is right? Judith or Nils Axel?

Nils Axel Morner is a Swedish sea-level expert and he does searching research leading to a conclusion that the sea level is stable overall. His recent Fiji research is exemplary. The only response to it from Warmists is an "ad hominem" one -- noting that a group of climate skeptics quite openly helped Morner with costs of his trip to Fiji. The Warmists see that as a fatal flaw. They fail to see any similar problem flowing from the fact that Warmists generally have their research funded by sympathetic university departments. Universities are unbiased, you see. Anybody who has worked in a university department will give that a horse-laugh.

Judith Curry calls herself a "lukewarmer", meaning that she accepts global warming theory but doubts that the warming will be large enough to be worth bothering about. But she does accept that there has been some sea level rise in the 20th century.

These days, just about everything bad is said to be made worse by global warming but the original scare was sea-level rise. Both Hansen and Gore, for instance, predicted in the early '90s that substantial parts of Manhattan would be permanently underwater some time soon. If that were true, some parts of Manhattan should already by now be looking a bit watery.

Sadly, however Manhattan and most of the rest of the world are going about business as usual. For most of the world, the sea seems to be just about where it always was. The lay observer at least can see no change. So Morner would seem to be the only scientist with his feet on the ground. Only his account coincides with commonly perceived reality.

So the big threat of severe worldwide flooding seems utterly empty -- which is why a vast range of other bad outcomes from warming have been conjured up. There have to be new fears to replace the old failed fear.

Warmists are never deterred by reality, however, and continue to assert that sea levels are rising, even if it is very slowly. So there is a minor industry of trying to work out exactly what the sea level is doing. And most researchers agree that there is some sea level rise going on, though they all estimate only minute amounts of it. And estimate is the word. Gross sea level rises such as Gore and Hansen predicted would have hit you in the eye but the tiny rises that Warmists can squeeze out of their data are very slippery. There is nothing clearly observable. It is all guesswork.

And a moment's thought will tell you that it HAS to be guesswork. Oceans have these pesky things called waves. The ocean won't stay still enough for you to measure it. You can try to measure high-water marks but what if a gust of wind causes a really big splash during the day that is not repeated later in the day? Is that the high-water mark?

In addition to those commonsense limitations on measuring small changes in sea level there are more profound difficulties. Judith Curry lists some of them. See the folowing excerpt:

"To reconstruct equilibrium sea level changes from tide gauges, account must be made of vertical shifts of the land, caused by geological processes or land use (e.g. ground water extraction). To improve scientific utility for sea level studies, numerous modern tide gauges are being augmented with automated, continuous GPS measuring instruments which records vertical land movements. Further, account must be made of non-eustatic dynamic changes in sea level due to tides, storm surges, tsunamis and large-scale ocean currents.

Further, tide gauge technology has changed over time. Simple wooden staffs have evolved into higly sophisticated digital equipment — it is likely that the results from different equipment might not agree with each other.

A wooden staff is not going to measure with the same degree of accuracy-or under the same circumstances as a digital equipment.

Tide gauges have the following disadvantages for determining global sea level changes: uneven distribution around the world; missing data; spatial and temporal variations in ocean circulations; and land movements. Because of these disadvantages, calculating global mean sea level rise from the limited tide gauge network has proven to be difficult.

Although considerable progress has been made, further improvements to the historical record are still needed, particularly in accounting for ocean circulation changes."

Despite all that however, Judith does accept that some sea-level rise is proven. She says: "Global mean sea level (GMSL) has risen about 8 inches during the 20th century".

In coming to that conclusion she relies heavily on "corrected" data and Morner claims that corrections are the whole of any stated sea level rise. For instance, Curry appears to accept the Stockholn record. And it's true that the official Stockholm record does show a slight rise. But what did that record show before it was "corrected"? John Daly has the graph:

So an actual FALL in the sea level in the Baltic has been "corrected" to show the opposite. That is some shenanigans. But shenanigans like that are common in global warming "research".

So how do they justify their shenanigans? They postulate just enough "isostatic uplift" to get the result they want. By isostatic uplift they mean that the ground was rising rather than the sea level falling. And the theory behind that is that the last ice age put such heavy glaciers on the ground that the ground sank down a bit. So, when the glaciers retreated, the land bounced back up again. That seems to be true. But how come that is still happening thousands of years after the ice has gone? It makes no sense. It is just a theoretical fix, not reality-grounded.

It is true that in different times and places the ground does rise or fall in response to various local factors but those changes are all over the place, not just where glaciers used to be. The most established changes are falls in the land on the East coasts of both Florida and England. And where I live in Northern Australia, the land is geologically very ancient and very stable. Glaciers never reached us. Yet I have documented a notable sea-level FALL in the ocean nearby over recent decades. And let us not forget the earlier but carefully delineated sea level fall at the Isle of the Dead in Tasmania.

And that goes back to the fact that the oceans don't behave like water in a jug. Water in a jug has a fixed level. The level in one part of a jug will be the same as the level in all other parts of the jug. But the earth is not a jug. It is a sphere and the water sloshes about. So the level in one time and place will be different from the level in other times and places. You can calculate a statistical average but there is no physical reality to it. And attributing a cause to the observed movements can only be guesswork. The RAW tide-gauge data is full of both rises and falls. There is no detectable uniform effect -- as global warming theory would require.

But Let's get back to Stockholm and the Baltic. As a very enclosed sea situated withing a limited latitude range and little subject to air and water currents, it should be a fairly good "thermometer" of what the sea level as a whole is doing -- if anything. So that Stockholm data is pretty important. So is it real? Has the sea level really fallen that much or is it just some error of measurement? Are there similar findings in other parts of the Baltic? Could the Swedish scientists have been right to "adjust" it?

Hardly. The Baltic sea level really has fallen. You can see evidence of it that no adjustment can hide. In the ancient Hanseatic port city of Talinn in Estonia at the East end of the Baltic you can see where the old sea walls used to be. But they are about a kilometer inland from the present sea-shore. As the sea level has fallen, Talinn has gained several hectares of new land where the sea used to be. Even the most dedicated Warmists would have difficulty adjusting that out of existence. So there are places on earth where the sea level has fallen and places where it has risen. The situation is nothing like what global warming theory predicts.

Nils Axel Morner is the one in touch with reality. Now that she is retired maybe Judith too can become more skeptical -- JR.

Stronger Law on Foreign Agents Eyed Amid Russia’s Links to Green Groups

Congress appears ready to crack down on individuals and groups who work on behalf of Russia and other foreign nations but don’t fully disclose those ties.

Legislation toughening requirements and closing loopholes in the 80-year-old Foreign Agents Registration Act is advancing in response to growing concerns that some advocacy groups and lobbyists have been permitted to conceal financial and other connections with foreign governments.

In a recent phone interview with The Daily Signal, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., who introduced the legislation amending the law, expressed confidence that his bill could clear both houses of Congress with broad support.

The law isn’t achieving all that it should, Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, a free-market think tank based in Washington, told The Daily Signal.

“The Foreign Agents Registration Act calls on individuals and organizations to provide full disclosure when they are working to advance the public policy interests of a foreign government,” Cohen said.

“This appears to be exactly what these green groups are doing,” he added, “and the law should be applied to them.”

In a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin last summer, Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, asked for the administration to look into allegations that the Russian government has funded U.S. environmental groups surreptitiously in a “propaganda war against fossil fuels.”

Such concerns have motivated lawmakers on the House and Senate judiciary committees to move quickly on his legislation, Johnson told The Daily Signal.

The letter from Smith, chairman of the House’s Science, Space and Technology Committee, describes how “publicly available reports connect the dots” of a complex scheme by the Russian government to “advance a political agenda with little or no paper trail” against the U.S. energy sector.

The letter says Moscow primarily targets innovative drilling techniques such as hydraulic fracturing, widely known as fracking, that make it possible to extract natural gas deposits from shale formations.

Smith cites government and other reports that Russia steers funds to U.S. environmental groups, often in the form of anonymous donations, so that those groups may bankroll what the Texas Republican calls “covert anti-fracking campaigns.”

What Moscow Knows

“Russia has a long track record of funding ‘green’ groups as part of an effort to slow down, if not stop altogether, domestic energy production,” Luke Coffey, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy, said in an email to The Daily Signal, adding:

This has been particularly the case regarding fracking. European governments have also faced similar challenges from Russia, because Moscow knows that each barrel of oil produced in the USA or Europe is one less needed from Russia.

Ken Stiles, a 29-year veteran of the CIA, told The Daily Signal in a recent interview that congressional investigators identified a “money trail” suggesting a connection between the Russian government and activist groups opposing fracking operations and pipeline construction in vartious parts of the country.

As previously reported by The Daily Signal, Stiles suspects two anti-pipeline groups in Virginia are “agents of influence” unknowingly operating on behalf of Moscow under Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Those campaigns fell short of obstructing pipeline projects, but environmental advocacy groups have succeeded in blocking natural gas development in New York and other states.

“A very important consideration is whether these domestic forces among U.S. environmental groups actually know that they are being targeted and exploited by the Russians,” Paul Kengor, a Grover City College political science professor, said in an email to The Daily Signal.

“Moreover, if they are willfully working with Vladimir Putin’s Russia—deliberate collusion—then that would be egregious and a very serious matter demanding our government’s fully investigating the situation,” Kengor said.

“If these U.S. environmentalists are mere dupes,” he said, “that’s not legally or even morally as bad, but I think they’d have at least a moral obligation to change their ways if and once they’ve realized they’re being targeted and exploited.”

Kengor, a biographer of Ronald Reagan, added:

"Finally, politically speaking, consider the striking irony here: We have the apparent possibility of liberals from the environmental movement working with and helping Putin and the Russians at the very moment that liberals have been screaming about alleged cooperation between the Trump presidential campaign and the Russians. Imagine that."

SOURCE

Survey results show Christians becoming less concerned about the environment

There has been no "greening of Christianity" among people in the pews, despite efforts by some religious leaders to emphasize environmental stewardship, according to new Indiana University research.

David Konisky of IU's School of Public and Environmental Affairs analyzed 20 years of survey results from Gallup public opinion polls in one of the first major studies of how attitudes about the environment by self-identified U.S. Christians have shifted over time.

He found that environmentalism is not increasing, and there are signs it is actually in decline. For example, Konisky's analysis of the survey responses from 1990 through 2015 indicates that Christians, compared to atheists, agnostics and individuals who do not affiliate with a religion, are less likely to prioritize environmental protection over economic growth, and they are more likely than others to believe global warming is exaggerated.

For example, the likelihood that a Christian survey respondent expressed a great deal of concern about climate change dropped by about a third between 1990 and 2015.

The pattern generally holds across Catholic, Protestant and other Christian denominations and does not vary depending on levels of religiosity.

"This relationship between religion and the environment is significant because of the increasing importance of climate change," Konisky said. "There may come a time when religious leaders and faith-based organizations generate more interest in protecting the environment and more willingness to demand action, but we haven't seen it yet."

The current lack of enthusiasm comes despite high-profile calls for action such as the encyclical letter on the environment released by Pope Francis in 2015 and despite initiatives led by Evangelical Protestant groups, such as the formation of the Evangelical Environmental Network.

While those efforts are relatively recent, Konisky said there is a historical divide in how Christians view their relationship to the planet: "Some believe in the importance of stewardship and practice an ethic of 'creation care,' while others believe in human dominion over the Earth, a belief that undermines any obligation to protect the environment."

Konisky said more research is needed to determine whether that belief in human dominion or some other aspect of how people experience religion is influencing a reduced concern for the environment.

SOURCE

US Blizzards, Snowfalls Have Increased Since1950s, Surprising Global Warming Climatologists

On January 4 NTZ weekly contributor Kenneth Richard published a list of 485 papers dumping cold water on climate alarmism in 2017.

Looking through the list I find published papers showing that snowfall frequency has in fact increased over the the past 60 years!

Blizzard activity jumps fourfold

For example a paper by Coleman and Schwartz, 2017 revealed 713 blizzards over the 55 years with 57 federal disaster declarations resulting. Of these 57 declared disasters, more than a half have occurred since the year 2000.

The published scientific study also founds that "seasonal blizzard frequencies displayed a distinct upward trend, with a more substantial rise over the past two decades".

It adds that the modeled increase in blizzard activity showed a "nearly fourfold upsurge between the start and end of the study period at 5.9 and 21.6 blizzards, respectively". If the trend continues, then we would need to expect even more such blizzards.

In a another publication, Changnon, 2017 evaluated heavy 30-day snowfall amounts east of the Rockies in the United States during the period 1900-2016. The comprehensive data assessment identified 507 stations in this long-term climate study.

The author examined the top 30-day heavy snowfall amount and the average of the top five 30-day heavy snowfall amounts. The findings also surprised global warming scientists who warned earlier that snowfall would become less frequent as the globe warmed. The publications abstract reads:

The northern Great Plains, Great Lakes, Midwest, and Northeast experienced more top five periods [more snow] in the second half of the 117-year period [1958-2016], where most of the southern states experienced top five periods throughout the study period."

Finally a study conducted by Hatchett et al., 2017 found a "winter snow level rise in the northern Sierra Nevada from 2008 to 2017". Sea surface temperatures offshore California were observed to be related to snow cover.

More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)

Science or silence? My battle to question doomsayers about the Great Barrier Reef

By Professor Peter Ridd. His university is desperate to shut him up as he tells basic scientific truth, which they see as threatening the funding that they have bought with lies and alarmism. Ridd leads the Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Australia and has authored over 100 scientific papers

Around the world, people have heard about the impending extinction of the Great Barrier Reef: some 133,000 square miles of magnificent coral stretching for 1,400 miles off the northeast coast of Australia.

The reef is supposedly almost dead from the combined effects of a warming climate, nutrient pollution from Australian farms, and smothering sediment from offshore dredging.

Except that, as I have said publicly as a research scientist who has studied the reef for the past 30 years, all this most likely isn’t true.

And just for saying that – and calling into question the kind of published science that has led to the gloomy predictions – I have been served with a gag order by my university. I am now having to sue for my right to have an ordinary scientific opinion.

My emails have been searched. I was not allowed even to speak to my wife about the issue. I have been harangued by lawyers. And now I’m fighting back to assert my right to academic freedom and bring attention to the crisis of scientific truth.

The problems I am facing are part of a “replication crisis” that is sweeping through science and is now a serious topic in major science journals. In major scientific trials that attempt to reproduce the results of scientific observations and measurements, it seems that around 50 percent of recently published science is wrong, because the results can’t be replicated by others.

And if observations and measurements can’t be replicated, it isn’t really science – it is still, at best, hypothesis, or even just opinion. This is not a controversial topic anymore – science, or at least the system of checking the science we are using, is failing us.

The crisis started in biomedical areas, where pharmaceutical companies in the past decade found that up to 80 percent of university and institutional science results that they tested were wrong. It is now recognized that the problem is much more widespread than the biomedical sciences. And that is where I got into big trouble.

I have published numerous scientific papers showing that much of the “science” claiming damage to the reef is either plain wrong or greatly exaggerated. As just one example, coral growth rates that have supposedly collapsed along the reef have, if anything, increased slightly.

Reefs that are supposedly smothered by dredging sediment actually contain great coral. And mass bleaching events along the reef that supposedly serve as evidence of permanent human-caused devastation are almost certainly completely natural and even cyclical.

These allegedly major catastrophic effects that recent science says were almost unknown before the 1980s are mainly the result of a simple fact: large-scale marine science did not get started on the reef until the 1970s.

By a decade later, studies of the reef had exploded, along with the number of marine biologists doing them. What all these scientists lacked, however, was historical perspective. There are almost no records of earlier eras to compare with current conditions. Thus, for many scientists studying reef problems, the results are unprecedented, and almost always seen as catastrophic and even world-threatening.

The only problem is that it isn’t so. The Great Barrier Reef is in fact in excellent condition. It certainly goes through periods of destruction where huge areas of coral are killed from hurricanes, starfish plagues and coral bleaching. However, it largely regrows within a decade to its former glory. Some parts of the southern reef, for example, have seen a tripling of coral in six years after they were devastated by a particularly severe cyclone.

Reefs have similarities to Australian forests, which require periodic bushfires. It looks terrible after the bushfire, but the forests always regrow. The ecosystem has evolved with these cycles of death and regrowth.

The conflicting realities of the Great Barrier Reef point to a deeper problem. In science, consensus is not the same thing as truth. But consensus has come to play a controlling role in many areas of modern science. And if you go against the consensus you can suffer unpleasant consequences.

The main system of science quality control is called peer review. Nowadays, it usually takes the form of a couple of anonymous reviewing scientists having a quick check over the work of a colleague in the field.

Peer review is commonly understood as painstaking re-examination by highly qualified experts in academia that acts as a real check on mistaken work. It isn’t. In the real world, peer review is often cursory and not always even knowledgeable. It might take reviewers only a morning to do.

Scientific results are rarely reanalyzed and experiments are not replicated. The types of checks that would be routine in private industry are just not done.

I have asked the question: Is this good enough quality control to make environmental decisions worth billions of dollars that are now adversely affecting every major industry in northeast Australia?

Our sugar industry has been told to make dramatic reductions in fertilizer application, potentially reducing productivity; our ports have dredging restrictions that threaten their productivity; scientists demand that coal mines be closed; and tourists are scared away because the reef is supposedly almost dead – not worth seeing anymore.

Last August I made this point on Sky News in Australia in promotion of a chapter I wrote in “Climate Change: The Facts 2017,” published by the Australian free market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs.

“The basic problem is that we can no longer trust the scientific organizations like the Australian Institute of Marine Science, even things like the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies … the science is coming out not properly checked, tested or replicated and this is a great shame because we really need to be able to trust our scientific institutions and the fact is I do not think we can any more,” I said.

The response to these comments by my employer, James Cook University, was extraordinary. Rather than measured argument, I was hit with a charge of academic serious misconduct for not being “collegial.”

University authorities told me in August I was not allowed to mention the case or the charges to anybody – not even my wife.

Then things got worse. With assistance from the Institute of Public Affairs, I have been pushing back against the charges and the gag order – leading the university to search my official emails for examples of where I had mentioned the case to other scientists, old friends, past students and my wife.

I was then hit with 25 new allegations, mostly for just mentioning the case against me. The email search turned up nothing for which I feel ashamed. You can see for yourself.

We filed in court in November. At that point the university backed away from firing me. But university officials issued a “Final Censure” in my employment file and told me to be silent about the allegations, and not to repeat my comments about the unreliability of institutional research.

But they agreed that I could mention it to my wife, which was nice of them.

I would rather be fired than accept these conditions. We are still pursuing the matter in court.

This case may be about a single instance of alleged misconduct, but underlying it is an issue even bigger than our oceans. Ultimately, I am fighting for academic and scientific freedom, and the responsibility of universities to nurture the debate of difficult subjects without threat or intimidation.

We may indeed have a Great Barrier Reef crisis, but the science is so flawed that it is impossible to tell its actual dimensions. What we do know for certain is that we have an academic freedom crisis that threatens the true life of science and threatens to smother our failing university system.

SOURCE

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

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

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22 February, 2018

Governments are poor guardians of the environmemt

Governments too often ignore data, and fail badly. Citizens must take more responsibility

Justhy Deva Prasad

A primary reason governments exist is to protect their citizens from dangerous threats - foreign, domestic and natural. People can play important roles in this arena, but most lack the resources, funds, legal authority or political power to act on their own.

In recent years, government roles have become even more dominant and pervasive. On environmental or other grounds, federal, state and even local bodies have steadily taken responsibilities from the private sector, and even prohibited citizens from taking steps to protect their lives and property, such as constructing seawalls to block storm surges or thinning out trees to prevent catastrophic wildfires.

Under these circumstances, it is essential that governments do their jobs right: by implementing informed policies, gathering and utilizing data about potential risks, making wise decisions in time to safeguard property and lives, and not letting special interests delay or obstruct those decisions.

Modern technologies greatly facilitate all these tasks, if they are employed properly. They make existing data readily available, and make it easy and affordable to acquire vital missing information. However, governments have too frequently failed in these obligations, often spectacularly.

These examples are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and a call for governments to do much better.

Fukushima. Everyone - legislators, regulators, utilities and citizens - knows Japan is in an earthquake and tsunami zone. And yet they permitted insufficient seawalls around nuclear power plants and, even worse, emergency generators in basements, where they would be flooded and rendered inoperable. The resultant reactor meltdowns, power outages and radiation contamination were certainly predictable.

Why didn't Japanese government officials utilize readily available data to prevent this catastrophe?

Superstorm Sandy. City planners, leaders and builders had ample data about previous storms. They knew a direct hurricane hit would have devastating consequences for the New York City region. Yet they narrowed rivers, so that storm surges could go in only one direction: up. They required backup electrical generators, but put them in basements, where they would be flooded and rendered inoperable.

They provided no indicators along streets to show how high waters would rise with specified storm surges, leaving citizens unaware of the dangers they faced. Their warnings were late, inadequate and misleading. People did not evacuate or move treasured belongings in time. Over one hundred died.

After hundreds of U.S. hurricanes, how could governments here and elsewhere be so derelict?

California wildfires. The Golden State has battled droughts, high winds and wildfires for 150 years. But in recent decades, it has succumbed to environmentalist pressure not to thin out forests or allow private communities to remove brush and dead trees, even as more and more homes have been built in or near forested areas, and even as massive conflagrations devastated homes, businesses and wildlife habitats.

The U.S. Forest Service says California has 129 million dead trees, mostly from droughts and pine bark beetles - perfect tinder for enormous fires. Governments even permit or require (or let homeowner associations do so) cedar shake roofs and other flammable materials for homes in fire-prone areas.

They have failed to stockpile sufficient water and fire suppressants or have sufficient aircraft; they have even decreed that fires can be battled only if started by humans, but not by lightning (as if that can be determined amid a conflagration). Again the results are totally predictable. Yet the policies continue.

The 2017 wildfires incinerated some 1.2 million acres of forest habitat - as much land as in Delaware - destroyed 8,400 homes, forced hundreds of thousands to evacuate, often at a moment's notice, with the clothes on their backs, threatened cities like Beverly Hills, cost billions in damages, and killed 43 people. Rain-soaked, barren hillsides then unleash mudslides that destroy more property and kill more people.

Oroville Dam. The tallest dam in the United States, this now 50-year-old dam employs a concrete spillway and a backup earthen spillway to discharge excess water buildup during rainy periods, so that the dam doesn't fail. In 2005, environmental groups raised concerns that the spillways could erode during heavy winter rains and cause massive downstream flooding - and deaths. Federal and state officials rejected their advice, saying everything was fine. Tests for concrete cracking apparently were never done.

Inspectors could have used side scanning radar to detect cavities beneath the concrete, but instead relied on occasional visual inspections from a distance. The last such state inspection was in 2015. Amid historic storms in late 2017, the concrete spillway collapsed into a large, undetected cavern beneath it. Officials ordered 188,000 people living in communities below the dam to evacuate. Luckily no one died.

Rarely, if ever, are the responsible, incompetent, malfeasant, derelict authorities singled out, punished, fined, fired, or even reprimanded or identified publicly when governments fail so spectacularly.

Rarely, if ever, do governments offer compensation to affected families, business owners and employees for lost paychecks, gross inconveniences . or even the total loss of businesses, inventories, homes, cars, precious and irreplaceable keepsakes, life savings, livelihoods, or very lives - as though many of those losses could ever really be compensated. Anything not covered by insurance is just gone.

Except in the case of Fukushima, government officials tried to deflect blame for the above failures by saying the disasters were cause or worsened by "climate change." It's an absurd, indefensible excuse.

Separating human from natural factors in changing weather and climate is impossible. Far more relevant and important, neither human nor natural climate or weather changes can excuse government officials from failing to acquire and analyze readily available or obtainable data - and then failing to use that information to develop sound policies, laws and regulations, and make timely, informed decisions that safeguard people's property and lives.

Climate change does not prevent or outlaw thinning out forests, putting emergency generators above likely flood levels, inspecting and maintaining spillways, or taking other steps to minimize disasters. Neither do other excuses often offered up by government officials to absolve their action or inaction.

Legislators, regulators and judges cannot escape accountability by claiming their hands were tied by environmental, builder, business or other groups that did not want government officials to disrupt their accustomed ways of doing things. They cannot escape their own culpability by saying California, New York, the United States and other countries worldwide should spend tens of trillions of dollars attempting to control Earth's climate - but then fail to spend mere millions on practical steps that would prevent cataclysmic losses from fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, volcanoes and other natural disasters.

They cannot say, "We take full responsibility" for missteps - when they rarely or never do so.

There are billions of people on our planet. Hundreds of millions live along seacoasts, next to forests or in other areas threatened by recurrent natural horrors.

Modern data technologies enable governments to formulate policies and rules that can predict many natural disasters, and prevent or minimize their worst consequences. Other modern technologies enable government officials, citizen groups, businesses and families to build disaster-resistant structures that can save property and lives. But those technologies are worthless if they are not used.

What can be done? Legislators, regulators, judges and even special interest groups should utilize data to develop and implement more informed, responsible laws and policies - that put people first instead of last (or dead last). Insurance companies and homeowner associations should assess threats and take commonsense steps to minimize them. Citizens should elect better representatives - or failing that, take personal steps within the law to better protect their property and families. It all starts with data.

Via email

Cars Remain Popular Because They Are Vastly Superior to Transit Alternatives

The Los Angeles Times has recently reported that public transit agencies "have watched their ridership numbers fall off a cliff over the last five years," with multi-year decreases in mass transit use by up to 25 percent. And a new UCLA Institute of Transportation study has found that increasing car ownership is the prime factor for the dive in usage.

As Homer Simpson would say, "Doh."

Southern California residents bought 4 times as many cars per person in the 15 years after the turn of the century, compared to the decade before. That substantial jump in automobile ownership caused the share of Southern California households without access to a car to fall by 30 percent, and 42 percent for immigrant households. As one of the study's authors, Michael Manville, put it "That exploding level of new automobile ownership is largely incompatible with a lot of transit ridership." In other words, once a household has access to a car, they almost universally prefer driving to mass transit.

This patronage plunge threatens transit agencies. Typical responses echo Hasan Ikhrata, executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments, who said, "We need to take this study as an opportunity to figure out how we make transit work better for us." In other words, we should ignore increasing access to automobiles and overwhelming revealed preferences for driving over mass transit, and find new ways to fill bus and train seats.

Many things are already in motion to solve transit agencies' problems. For instance, in 2015, Los Angeles began a 20-year plan to remove auto lanes for bus and protected bike lanes, as well as pedestrian enhancements, diverting transportation funds raised from drivers and heightening congestion for the vast majority who planners already know will continue to drive.

Such less than effective attempts to cut driving by creating gridlock purgatory suggest we ask a largely ignored question. Why do planners' attempts to force residents into walking, cycling and mass transit, supposedly improving their quality of life, attract so few away from driving?

The reason is simple-cars are vastly superior to alternatives for the vast majority of individuals and circumstances.

Automobiles have far greater and more flexible passenger- and cargo-carrying capacities than transit. They allow direct, point-to-point service, unlike transit. They allow self-scheduling rather than requiring advance planning. They save time, especially time spent waiting, which surveys find transit riders find far more onerous. They have far better multi-stop trip capability. They offer a safer, more comfortable, more controllable environment, from the seats to the temperature to the music to the company.

Those massive advantages explain why even substantial new restrictions on automobiles or improvements in alternatives leave driving the vastly dominant choice. They also reveal that policies which will punish the vast majority for whom driving remains far superior cannot effectively serve all residents' interests.

The superiority of automobiles doesn't stop at the obvious, either. They expand workers' access to jobs and educational opportunities, increase productivity and incomes, improve purchasing choices, lower consumer prices and widen social options. Trying to inconvenience people out of their cars also undermines those major benefits.

Cars' allow decreased commuting times if not hamstrung, providing workers access to far more potential jobs and training possibilities. That improves worker-employer matches, with expanded productivity raising workers' incomes as well as benefiting employers. One study found that 10 percent faster travel raised worker productivity by 3 percent, and increasing from 3 mph walking speed to 30 mph driving is a 900 percent increase. In a similar vein, a Harvard analysis found that for those lacking high-school diplomas, owning a car increased monthly earnings by $1,100.

Cars are also the only practical way to assemble enough widely dispersed potential customers to sustain large stores with affordable, diverse offerings. "Automobility" also sharply expands access to social opportunities.
In all, attempting to force people out of cars and onto transit recycles earlier failures and harms the vast majority of citizens.

As Randal O'Toole noted: "Anyone who prefers not to drive can find neighborhoods ... where they can walk to stores that offer a limited selection of high-priced goods, enjoy limited recreation and social opportunities, and take slow public transit vehicles to some but not all regional employment centers, the same as many Americans did in 1920. But the automobile provides people with far more benefits and opportunities than they could ever have without it."

SOURCE

Security Officials Recommended Pruitt Fly First Class

Media fail to mention high level of death threats against Pruitt and his family

A significant increase in death threats leveled at Scott Pruitt led to security officials to recommend the Environmental Protection Agency administrator fly first class.

Journalists and liberals have made light of security concerns, mocking Pruitt for following the recommendations from the head of his 24-hour security detail, which was required due to "unprecedented" threats.

The Washington Post reported Sunday that Pruitt had spent $90,000 flying in first or business class. The article briefly notes records showing Pruitt does so for "security concerns," and that the regulations allow officials to fly first class under "exceptional security circumstances."

By Thursday, the Post reported the decision to fly first class was made by Pasquale Perrotta, the head of Pruitt's security detail. The security team said there are many reasons why flying first class is necessary for Pruitt's security, such as "the chance to make a quick exit if a situation arises."

Politico questioned the need to fly first class in an article Thursday that made no mention of the death threats against Pruitt and his family.

"Pruitt's security threat? A passenger shouting, `You're f-ing up the environment'" the headline reads.

Journalists and liberals seized on the story, mocking the example of the threatening environment faced by Pruitt, given by Henry Barnet, the director of the EPA's Office of Criminal Enforcement. Barnet cited an incident at an airport where a liberal harassed Pruitt, recording him on a cell phone, while yelling, "You're f-ing up the environment."

Vanity Fair claimed Pruitt's "excuse" for flying first class is "whiny environmentalists."

"Apparently, individuals going up to the E.P.A. administrator and making completely factual statements was a bridge too far. It's not totally clear why the security team believes that only people flying coach think Pruitt is a prick who deserves to be told as much, but perhaps they'll address that at a later date," the fashion magazine wrote.

A reader had to come to the end of the Politico story to discover that the "threats are so prevalent" against Pruitt that his security detail has to perform a new threat assessment every 90 days.

"EPA instituted 24/7 protection for Pruitt last year, a step up from previous administrators who typically were guarded only when in public or traveling," the penultimate paragraph of the Politico story reads.

"Citing security concerns, EPA does not announce Pruitt's travel plans ahead of time, a departure from the habits of previous administrators who would often alert the media about upcoming trips, particularly overseas," the article concludes. "Barnet said that scheduling announcements are not a decision made by the security detail."

The article fails to mention the number of death threats Pruitt and his family have received.

"He has had significantly more threats directed against him," said Patrick Sullivan, the EPA's assistant inspector general for investigations. "There's absolutely no question about it."

Pruitt told Bloomberg News last year that his family was also being targeted, and security officials said the administrator had received threatening letters and packages delivered to his home.

"The quantity and the volume-as well as the type-of threats are different," Pruitt said. "What's really disappointing to me is it's not just me-it's family."

Pruitt recently said he does not make the security decisions but blamed a "toxic" political environment.

For instance, the FBI had to open an investigation after a drunk viewer watching MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show threatened to kill Pruitt and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.). A San Francisco columnist justified the increased number of death threats against Pruitt last fall, saying the threats "make a warped sort of sense."

Pruitt has received up to five times the amount of threats than his predecessor Gina McCarthy, Sullivan has said. The inspector general opened 70 threat investigations in 2017, nearly double the amount during the previous year.

Pruitt has received direct threats, such as, "I'm going to put a bullet in your brain."

SOURCE

WESTERN Nations, Driven By A Global Agenda Of Climate Alarmism, Are Destroying Their Industries With Carbon Taxes And Promotion Of Expensive, Intermittent Green Energy

ANTHROPOGENIC "climate change", and the control of carbon dioxide (energy) has deep roots in a radical, yet gravely misguided campaign to reduce the world's population.

GLOBAL warming aka climate change has little to do with the "environment" or "saving the planet". Rather, its roots lie in a misanthropic agenda engineered by the environmental movement in the mid 1970's, who realised that doing something about "global warming" would play to quite a number of the Lefts social agendas.

THE goal was advanced, most notably, by The Club Of Rome (Environmental consultants to the UN) - a group of mainly European scientists and academics, who used computer modelling to warn that the world would run out of finite resources if population growth were left unchecked.

"In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that .. the threat of global warming.. would fit the bill.. the real enemy, then, is humanity itself." - Club Of Rome

THE Club Of Rome's 1972 environmental best-seller "The Limits To Growth", examined five variables in the original model: world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion.

NOT surprisingly, the study predicted a dire future for mankind unless we `act now':

AROUND the same time, influential anthropologist and president of the American Medical Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Margaret Mead, gathered together like-minded anti-population hoaxsters at her 1975, North Carolina conference, "The Atmosphere: Endangered and Endangering". Mead's star recruits were climate scare artist Stephen Schneider, population-freak George Woodwell and former AAAS head, John Holdren (Barack Obama's Science and Technology Czar). All three of them disciples of Malthusian catastrophist Paul Ehrlich, author of the "The Population Bomb".

THE conference concluded that human-produced carbon dioxide would fry the planet, melt the ice caps, and destroy human life. The idea being to sow enough fear of man-made climate change to force global cutbacks in industrial activity and halt Third World development.

WE are given clues as to the motives of this extreme agenda from various statements by prominent environmental `icons'.

"Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun."
- Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University

"The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man."
- Club of Rome, premier environmental think-tank, consultants to the United Nations

"If we don't overthrow capitalism, we don't have a chance of
saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have
an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don't think it is possible under capitalism"
- Judi Bari, principal organiser of Earth First

"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

"No matter if the science of global warming is all phony. climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world."
- Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment

"In Searching For A New Enemy To Unite Us, We Came Up With The Threat Of Global Warming" - Club of Rome, premier environmental think-tank, consultants to the United Nations

"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)

"Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class - involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing - are not sustainable." - Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the UN's Earth Summit, 1992.

***

VIV Forbes on how the control of population growth and people's lifestyles manifests today through the control of energy supply.

The "zero-emissions" zealots want to force us backwards down the energy ladder to the days of human, animal and solar power. They oppose the main thing that sets us apart from all other species - the use of fire from explosives, coal, oil, gas or nuclear power.

They have yet to explain how our massive fleet of planes, trains, tractors, harvesters, trucks, road trains, container-ships and submarines will be powered and lubricated by windmills, treadmills, windlasses, solar energy, distilled whiskey and water wheels.

Western nations, driven by a global agenda of climate alarmism, are destroying their profitable industries with carbon taxes; and their promotion of expensive, intermittent green energy is pushing us back down the energy ladder; and our competitors in Asia are climbing the energy ladder as quickly as they can. At the same time, the enormous waste of public money on government promotion of the climate industry has created a global fiscal mess.

Unless reversed, this wasteful de-energising policy will drive much of the world's population back to the poverty and famines which often prevailed in the past. Some see the inevitable de-population this would cause as a desirable goal.

SOURCE

Enlightenment Environmentalism: The Case for Ecomodernism

Is progress sustainable?

A common response to good news about global health, wealth, and sustenance is that it cannot continue. As we infest the world with our teeming numbers, guzzle the earth's bounty heedless of its finitude, and foul our nests with pollution and waste, we are hastening an environmental day of reckoning. If overpopulation, resource depletion, and pollution don't finish us off, then climate change will.

To be sure, the very idea that there are environmental problems cannot be taken for granted. Beginning in the 1960s, the environmental movement grew out of scientific knowledge (from ecology, public health, and earth and atmospheric sciences) and a Romantic reverence for nature. The movement made the health of the planet a permanent priority on humanity's agenda, and it deserves credit for substantial achievements - another form of human progress.

Yet today, many voices in the traditional environmental movement refuse to acknowledge that progress, or even that human progress is a worthy aspiration. While it is true that not all the trends are positive, nor that the problems facing us are minor, it is crucial to understand that environmental problems, like other problems, are solvable, given the right knowledge.

In contrast to the lugubrious conventional wisdom offered by the mainstream environmental movement, and the radicalism and fatalism it encourages, there is a newer conception of environmentalism which shares the goal of protecting the air and water, species, and ecosystems but is grounded in Enlightenment optimism rather than Romantic declinism. That approach is called ecomodernism.

Environmental problems, like other problems, are solvable, given the right knowledge.

Ecomodernism begins with the realization that some degree of pollution is an inescapable consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. When people use energy, they must increase entropy elsewhere in the environment in the form of waste, pollution, and other forms of disorder. The human species has always been ingenious at doing this - that's what differentiates us from other mammals - and it has never lived in harmony with the environment. When native peoples first set foot in an ecosystem, they typically hunted large animals to extinction, and often burned and cleared vast swaths of forest.[1]

A second realization of the ecomodernist movement is that industrialization has been good for humanity.[2] It has fed billions, doubled lifespans, slashed extreme poverty, and, by replacing muscle with machinery, made it easier to end slavery, emancipate women, and educate children. It has allowed people to read at night, live where they want, stay warm in winter, see the world, and multiply human contact. Any costs in pollution and habitat loss have to be weighed against these gifts. As the economist Robert Frank has put it, there is an optimal amount of pollution in the environment, just as there is an optimal amount of dirt in your house. Cleaner is better, but not at the expense of everything else in life.

The third premise is that the trade-off that pits human well-being against environmental damage can be renegotiated by technology. How to enjoy more calories, lumens, BTUs, bits, and miles with less pollution and land is itself a technological problem, and one that the world is increasingly solving. If people can afford electricity only at the cost of some smog, they'll live with the smog, but when they can afford both electricity and clean air, they'll spring for the clean air. This can happen all the faster as technology makes cars and factories and power plants cleaner and thus makes clean air more affordable.

This idea, that environmental protection is a problem to be solved, is commonly dismissed as the "faith that technology will save us." In fact, it is a skepticism that the status quo will doom us - that knowledge and behavior will remain frozen in their current state for perpetuity. Indeed, a naive faith in stasis has repeatedly led to prophecies of environmental doomsdays that never happened.

The first is the "population bomb," which defused itself. When countries get richer and better educated, they pass through what demographers call the demographic transition.[3] Birth rates peak and then decline, for at least two reasons. Parents no longer breed large broods as insurance against some of their children dying, and women, when they become better educated, marry later and delay having children. Fertility rates have fallen most noticeably in developed regions like Europe and Japan, but they can suddenly collapse, often to demographers' surprise, in other parts of the world. Despite the widespread belief that Muslim societies are resistant to the social changes that have transformed the West, Muslim countries have seen a 40 percent decline in fertility over the past three decades, including a 70 percent drop in Iran and 60 percent drops in Bangladesh and in seven Arab countries.[4]

The other environmental scare from the 1960s was that the world would run out of resources. But resources just refuse to run out. The 1980s came and went without the famines that were supposed to starve tens of millions of Americans and billions of people worldwide. Then the year 1992 passed and, contrary to projections from the 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth, the world did not exhaust its aluminum, copper, chromium, gold, nickel, tin, tungsten, or zinc. In 2013 the Atlantic ran a cover story about the fracking revolution entitled "We Will Never Run Out of Oil." Humanity does not suck resources from the earth like a straw in a milkshake until a gurgle tells it that the container is empty. Instead, as the most easily extracted supply of a resource becomes scarcer, its price rises, encouraging people to conserve it, get at the less accessible deposits, or find cheaper and more plentiful substitutes.

A naive faith in stasis has repeatedly led to prophecies of environmental doomsdays that never happened.

Indeed, it's a fallacy to think that people "need resources" in the first place.[5] They need ways of growing food, moving around, lighting their homes, and displaying information. They satisfy these needs with ideas: with recipes, formulas, techniques, blueprints, and algorithms for manipulating the physical world to give them what they want. The human mind, with its recursive combinatorial power, can explore an infinite space of ideas, and is not limited by the quantity of any particular kind of stuff in the ground. When one idea no longer works, another can take its place.

Take the supply of food, which has grown exponentially even though no single method of growing it has ever been sustainable. In The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis, the geographer Ruth DeFries describes the sequence as "ratchet-hatchet-pivot." People discover a way of growing more food, and the population ratchets upward. The method fails to keep up with demand or develops unpleasant side effects, and the hatchet falls. People then pivot to a new method. At various times, farmers have pivoted to slash-and-burn horticulture, night soil (a euphemism for human feces), crop rotation, guano, saltpeter, ground-up bison bones, chemical fertilizer, hybrid crops, pesticides, and the Green Revolution.[6] Future pivots may include genetically modified organisms, hydroponics, aeroponics, urban vertical farms, robotic harvesting, meat cultured in vitro, artificial-intelligence algorithms fed by GPS and biosensors, the recovery of energy and fertilizer from sewage, aquaculture with fish that eat tofu, and who knows what else - as long as people are allowed to indulge their ingenuity.[7]

SOURCE

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

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

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21 February, 2018

Apocalypse Not

In 1919, the director of the U.S. Bureau of Mines offered a dire warning for the future. “Within the next two to five years the oil fields of this country will reach their maximum production, and from that time on we will face an ever-increasing decline.”

Nearly a century later, in July 2010, The Guardian ran a story with an ominous headline: “Lloyd’s adds its voice to dire ‘peak oil’ warnings.” Citing a report by the storied London insurer, the newspaper warned that businesses were “underestimating catastrophic consequences of declining oil,” including oil at $200 a barrel by 2013, a global supply crunch, and overall “economic chaos.”

I thought of these predictions on seeing the recent news that the United States is on the eve of breaking a 47-year production record by lifting more than 10 million barrels of crude a day. That’s roughly twice what the U.S. produced just a decade ago, and may even put us on track to overtake Saudi Arabia and even Russia as the world’s leading oil producer. As for global production, it rose by some 11 percent just since the Lloyd’s report, and by almost 200 percent since 1965.

Call it yet another case of Apocalypse Not. In his fascinating new book, “The Wizard and the Prophet,” Charles C. Mann notes that President Roosevelt — Teddy, not Franklin — called the “imminent exhaustion” of fossil fuels and other natural resources “the weightiest problem now before the nation.” Prior to that, Mann adds, there were expert forecasts that the world would soon run out of coal. Later on, the world became fixated on the fear of running out of food in the face of explosive population growth.

The wizard and the prophet of Mann’s title are, respectively, Norman Borlaug and William Vogt, the former the agronomist widely credited as the father of the Green Revolution, the latter the founder of what Hampshire College’s Betsy Hartmann calls “apocalyptic environmentalism.”

“In best-selling books and powerful speeches, Vogt argued that affluence is not our greatest achievement but our biggest problem,” Mann writes. “Our prosperity is temporary, he said, because it is based on taking more from than earth than it can give. If we continue, the unavoidable result will be devastation on a global scale, perhaps including our extinction.”

In our own day, people like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein have made careers saying more or less the same thing. This is a world where the clock is permanently set at two minutes to midnight, and where only a radical transformation of modern society (usually combining dramatic changes in personal behavior along with a heavy dose of state intervention) can save us. Above all, the Vogtians say, we need less: less consumption, less stuff, fewer people, and so on.

Borlaug and the Borlaugians take a different view. It’s not that they see environmental threats as bogus: The world really would have suffered catastrophic famines if Borlaug hadn’t developed high-yield, disease-resistant varieties of wheat. Oil is a finite resource, but whether reserves last 50 or 500 years will probably depend less on overall supply than on technologies to extract and use those reserves more efficiently.

The same goes for climate change, which will not be helped by some centrally planned, Chinese-style “Green Leap Forward,” but by a multitude of technological advances that in turn require a thriving capitalist economy to fund, develop, commercialize and make affordable. The foolish idea that capitalism is the enemy of the environment misses the point that environmentalism is itself a luxury that few poor countries can adequately afford. If you doubt this, contrast the air and water quality in New York City with that of any similar-sized city in the developing world.

I fall in the Borlaugian camp. That’s worth noting because one of the more tedious criticisms by the environmental left is that people like me “don’t care about the environment.” But imputing bad faith, stupidity or greed is always a lousy argument. Even conservatives want their children to breathe.

It also misses the point. As Mann notes, Borlaugians are environmentalists, too. They simply think the road to salvation lies not through making do with less, but rather through innovation and the conditions in which innovation tends to flourish, greater affluence and individual freedom most of all.

There’s also this: So far, the Borlaugians have mostly been right. To the extent that starvation is a phenomenon of recent decades — as in places like North Korea and Venezuela — it is mainly the result of gross political mismanagement, not ecological disaster. Peak oil keeps being defeated by frackers and deepwater explorers. As my colleague Nick Kristof recently pointed out, by most metrics of human welfare, the world keeps getting better with every passing year.

If environmental alarmists ever wonder why more people haven’t come around to their way of thinking, it isn’t because people like me occasionally voice doubts in newspaper op-eds. It’s because too many past predictions of imminent disaster didn’t come to pass. That isn’t because every alarm is false — many are all too real — but because our Promethean species has shown the will and the wizardry to master the challenge, at least when it’s been given the means to do so.

SOURCE

Crucial Climate Verdict, Naked Conflict-of-Interest

SPOTLIGHT: History’s most momentous climate decision was made by people with substantial conflicts-of-interest.

BIG PICTURE: In November 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared for the first time that humans were changing the climate. Its verdict turned on a single piece of then-unpublished research. Four months after the fact, the research was submitted to a prominent journal. Three months later it was published.

The world then learned that 25% of the IPCC personnel tasked with making its most crucial determination were involved with this research. In a naked a conflict-of-interest, these nine people, led by IPCC chapter head Ben Santer, had evaluated the persuasiveness of their own fledgling scientific work – and had judged it sound enough to change history.

Academic journals receive thousands of scientific papers each year from researchers hoping to get their work published. Papers that make it to second base are sent to knowledgeable third parties for evaluation. This system, known as peer review, has many shortcomings. But when it works as it’s supposed to, it slams the brakes on exaggerated claims.

In Searching for the Catastrophe Signal, Bernie Lewin notes that this research was toned-down during the pre-publication process. (If reviewer criticisms are judged to be valid, journals will insist on changes as a condition of publication.)

In Lewin’s words, the title of the published version “heralds no breakthrough finding, but instead only describes a search” for human influence (his emphasis). The accompanying abstract tells us it’s likely that a temperature trend is “partially due to human activities, although many uncertainties remain…” (my emphasis).

In other words, the first time outsiders had an opportunity to take a proper look, they weren’t convinced the research demonstrated what the IPCC said it did. Standards at a scholarly journal are evidently higher than at this UN body.

A 2010 review of IPCC procedures identified numerous areas of concern. Among them was the startling fact that, 22 years after it had been established, the IPCC still had no conflict-of-interest policy.

TOP TAKEAWAY: IPCC scientists routinely pass judgment on their own work – and on the work of their scholarly rivals. But we’re supposed to take its findings seriously.

SOURCE

"Clean" electricity tying New England in knots

All electricity is perfectly clean -- but not in New England, it seems

Massachusetts utilities and state energy officials have picked a backup plan to bring clean power into the state from Canada, while still giving a controversial transmission project more time to overcome objections in neighboring New Hampshire.

The alternative route is a 148-mile transmission project known as the New England Clean Energy Connect that would be built by Central Maine Power Co. and its parent, Avangrid, in Maine.

The state’s three big electric utilities are required by law to increase their purchases of clean power. In late January, a team representing the utilities picked a project that would import around 1,100 megawatts of electricity from Hydro-Quebec through a transmission project known as Northern Pass.

But on Feb. 1, the New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee rejected a crucial permit for the 192-mile long Northern Pass. On Friday, state officials said Northern Pass executives have until March 27 to determine whether the transmission project can overcome its opposition in New Hampshire.

Eversource Energy owns the $1.6 billion Northern Pass project, and is also one of the utilities buying the clean power from Hydro-Quebec.

The moves Friday by the Baker administration essentially keep doors open for both projects, Northern Pass and New England Clean Energy Connect.

“The Baker-Polito Administration is pleased that with today’s announcement the Commonwealth is progressing toward securing the largest amount of renewable energy in Massachusetts’ history,” spokesman Peter Lorenz said in a statement.

Eversource is represented on the evaluation team of utility companies that are collectively negotiating contracts for the big clean energy purchase. Separately, Eversource’s promise that Northern Pass could be finished by the end of 2020 was cited as a reason it was initially chosen in January.

The subsequent permit denial in New Hampshire has thrown that timeline into question.

Eversource officials say they can make a strong legal argument to get the New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee to reconsider its project, and have a little over a month to prove they can pull it off.

Eversource officials said Friday they appreciate the flexibility being offered by the Baker administration and the other utilities involved in the bidding process, National Grid and Unitil. The decision, Eversource said, strikes a sensible balance by continuing negotiations on Northern Pass while having a backup plan take shape.

The New England Clean Energy Connect comes in at a smaller cost than Northern Pass — $950 million — but would be finished in 2022. The line would run from the Canadian border in western Maine down to a connection point in Lewiston.

Importantly, most of the line would run through existing utility rights-of-way, which could lessen the kind of opposition from neighbors that undermined Northern Pass in New Hampshire.

“We believe the NECEC is a cost-effective response to Massachusetts’ needs,” Central Maine Power chief executive Doug Herling said in a statement. “Given our experience building projects of greater scale and complexity here in our home state, we’re confident we can meet our commitments to the Commonwealth.”

SOURCE

Greenland, Antarctica And Dozens Of Areas Worldwide Have Not Seen Any Warming In 60 Years And More!

For example the North Atlantic, an important region concerning global climate, has not warmed since the 1870s!

The North Atlantic was warmer 130 years ago than it is today. Source: de Jong and de Steuer, 2016.

Greenland as stable as ever

Greenland, a major concern of climate alarmists because it stockpiles enough ice to raise global sea levels some 6 meters, also hasn’t warmed in since the 1880s, as the following chart from Mikkelsen et al 2018 shows:

Antarctica: no warming in 200 years

The big sea level kahuna of course is Antarctica. If that huge block of ice ever melted completely, sea levels would rise some 60 meters! And thus submerge vast areas of lowlands worldwide (never mind it would take thousands of years at extremely higher global temperatures).

Yet According to Schneider et al 2006, there hasn’t been warming there in 200 years!

Antarctic temperatures in fact had been heading sharply south at the time the paper was published.

Himalayas: no warming in 300 years!

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Director Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber once embarrassed himself by claiming the massive Himalayan glaciers would melt by the year 2030. But the following chart tells us that it might take just a bit longer:

According to a study by Thapa et al, 2015, the Himalayas recently have been cooling and the temperature there now is like it was 300 years ago! Don’t worry, when the year 2030 comes around, we’ll be sure to check to see if the ice is still there. In the meantime, do your best bearing all the suspense.

And so it goes region after region. So the next time the media and climate alarmists issue panicked warnings of rapid warming and melting ice caps, we need to ask ourselves: What the hell are they raving about? Are they okay?

The following is only an abbreviated list of places that have not cooled in a long time, and Kenneth says there are hundreds more like these. Many are from the results of very recent papers.

Since 1870s – no warming
Greenland – no warming
New Zealand – no warming
Antarctica – no warming
North Atlantic – no warming
Western Pacific – no warming
India/Western Himalaya – no warming
Pakistan – no warming
Turkey – no warming
Himalayas/Nepal – no warming
Siberia – no warming
Portugal – no warming
NE China – no warming
SW China – no warming
South China – no warming
West China – no warming
Southern South America – no warming
Canada (B.C.) – no warming
Canada Central – no warming
Since 1940s/50s – no warming
Northern Hemisphere – no warming
Arctic Region – no warming
Greenland – no warming
South Iceland – no warming
North Iceland – no warming
Alaska – no warming
New York – no warming
Rural U.S. – no warming
Northern Europe – no warming
Western Europe – no warming
Mediterranean Region – no warming
Finland and Sweden – no warming
East Antarctica – no warming
North Atlantic – no warming
Western North Atlantic – no warming
Brazil – no warming
SE Australia – no warming
Southern South America – no warming
Andes Mountains – no warming
Chile – no warming

If you live there, send them to your lawmakers and ask why they are wasting so much money preventing something that isn’t even happening.

More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)

A Coral's Biological Control of its Calcifying Medium to Favor Skeletal Growth

Great news for those concerned about potential future impacts of so-called ocean acidification on corals. A New Study shows they are able to continue skeletal growth under the most pessimistic of ocean acidification scenarios

Paper Reviewed: Raybaud, V., Tambutté, S., Ferrier-Pagès, C., Reynaud, S., Venn, A.A., Tambutté, É., Nival, P. and Allemand, D. 2017. Computing the carbonate chemistry of the coral calcifying medium and its response to ocean acidification. Journal of Theoretical Biology 424: 26-36.

Introducing their very intriguing study, Raybaud et al. (2017) write that "critical to determining vulnerability or resilience of reef corals to ocean acidification (OA) is a clearer understanding of the extent to which corals can control carbonate chemistry in their extracellular calcifying medium (ECM) where the calcium carbonate skeleton is produced." However, information about the coral ECM is sparse due to the difficulty of accessing it (it is located under several overlying cell layers and has a thickness varying from a few nanometers to a few micrometers).

In an effort to overcome this measurement obstacle, the team of eight researchers presented what they describe as "a novel, alternative means of indirectly assessing ECM carbonate chemistry using coral calcification rates, seawater characteristics (temperature, salinity and pH) and pH measurements of the ECM (pH(ECM))." More specifically, this involved (1) calculating coral species-specific relationships between seawater pH and pH(ECM) using pH(ECM) data from six publications on 5 different species that have measured pH(ECM) at several different levels of seawater pH, (2) calculating the aragonite saturation state (?arag.(ECM)) and calcium carbonate ion concentration ([CO32-](ECM)) in the ECM from coral calcification rates previously published in 20 peer-reviewed studies and (3) using pH(ECM) and [CO32-](ECM) to calculate the ionic concentration of the other chemical parameters in the carbonate system of the ECM under current and reduced values of seawater pH. This approach yielded a number of significant findings described in the paragraphs below.

The species-specific relationships between seawater pH and pH(ECM) revealed that all five of the corals analyzed in this stage of the analysis (Desmophyllum dianthus, Cladocora caespitosa, Porites spp., Acropora spp. and Stylophora pistillata) upregulated their pH(ECM) relative to that at normal seawater pH. What is more, the degree of pH(ECM) upregulation increased as seawater pH decreased, indicating, in the words of the authors, "an active biological control of the ECM chemistry by corals."

In the second phase of their work, Raybaud et al. discovered that the ?arag.(ECM) values calculated from the 20 coral studies they analyzed ranged from 10.16 to 38.31 (mean of 20.41), which values were "~5 to 6-fold higher than ?arag. in seawater (?arag.(SW)), which favors the aragonite precipitation of coral skeleton in the ECM." They also note that "?arag.(ECM) was higher for cold-water corals, which have slower growth rates than for tropical ones," adding that "the greater ability of certain cold-water coral species to raise their ?arag.(ECM) may be an adaptive mechanism, as recently suggested by Hendriks and colleagues (Hendriks et al., 2015), enabling these organisms to grow in seawater that is close to under-saturation with respect to aragonite (?arag.(SW) ~1; (Thresher et al., 2011))."

Finally, with respect to the third phase of their study -- assessing other chemical parameters in the carbonate system of the ECM -- the authors report that (1) dissolved inorganic carbon and total alkalinity were approximately 3 times higher in the ECM than in seawater at normal pH, (2) carbonate concentration was 5.9 times higher, (3) bicarbonate ions were 2.1 times more concentrated and (4) hydroxide 2.3 fold higher, which observations clearly indicate the ability of corals to biologically mediate the process of calcification in the ECM under present-day seawater pH conditions. But will they continue to do so in the future under projections of pH decline?

To answer this question, Raybaud et al. utilized data from a long-term laboratory experiment performed on the tropical coral Stylophora pistillata in order to assess how coral ECM chemistry might change due to ocean acidification. The results are presented in the figure below, which illustrate the impact of ocean acidification on calcification rates and various ECM chemical characteristics of S. pistillata coral colonies exposed to normal (8.0) and reduced (7.8, 7.4 and 7.2) seawater pH levels for a period of one year.

As indicated there, ?arag.(ECM) and [CO32-](ECM) exhibited only small reductions under increasing levels of ocean acidification compared to corresponding changes that occurred in normal seawater. For instance, although ?arag. of the seawater decreased by 78% (from 3.17 to 0.69, as denoted by the blue horizontal lines in Figure 1e), when the pH declined from 8 to 7.2, ?arag. and [CO32-] of the ECM each fell by a much smaller 9 percent to values that were 22.4 times higher than those reported in seawater outside the ECM in the most severe ocean acidification treatment (i.e., pH of 7.2). Consequently, the team of researchers write that "the ECM in S. pistillata under ocean acidification has a higher buffer capacity than under current pH," evidenced by the increasing difference between ?arag.(ECM) and ?arag.(SW) as the seawater pH treatments decline from 8.0 to 7.2 (see the vertical arrows and orange numbers associated with ?arag. under the different pH treatments shown in Figure 1e).

In light of all of the above facts, Raybaud et al. conclude their results clearly show that "despite unfavorable ?arag.(SW) [down to a seawater pH of 7.2], corals are able to maintain ?arag.(ECM) sufficiently high to allow calcification to proceed," as "the biological regulation of ECM chemistry keeps ?arag.(ECM) almost constant" under ocean acidification scenarios far beyond those likely to ever occur. And that is incredibly wonderful news for those concerned about potential future impacts of so-called ocean acidification on corals.

SOURCE

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

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

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20 February, 2018

A basic statistical fallacy in a figure relied on by Warmists

Limitations of the TCRE: Transient Climate Response to Cumulative Emissions

Jamal Munshi

Abstract

Observed correlations between cumulative emissions and cumulative changes in climate variables form the basis of the Transient Climate Response to Cumulative Emissions (TCRE) function. The TCRE is used to make forecasts of future climate scenarios based on different emission pathways and thereby to derive their policy implications for climate action. Inaccuracies in these forecasts likely derive from a statistical weakness in the methodology used. The limitations of the TCRE are related to its reliance on correlations between cumulative values of time series data. Time series of cumulative values contain neither time scale nor degrees of freedom. Their correlations are spurious. No conclusions may be drawn from them.

SOURCE

Climate alarmism is still bizarre, dogmatic, intolerant

Claims defy parody, as alarmists become more tyrannical and their policies wreak havoc

Paul Driessen

Climate alarmism dominated the Obama era and run-up to Paris. But it’s at least as bizarre, dogmatic and intolerant now that: President Trump pulled the United States out of the all pain/no gain Paris climate pact; the US EPA is reversing anti-fossil fuel programs rooted in doom-and-gloom climatology; America is producing and exporting more oil, gas and coal; developing nations are burning vastly more of these fuels; Poland is openly challenging EU climate diktats; and German, British Australian and other politicians are voicing increasing concerns about job-killing, eco-unfriendly “green” energy.

With trillions of dollars in research money, power, prestige, renewable energy subsidies, wealth redistribution schemes, and dreams of international governance on the line, the $1.5-trillion-per-year Climate Industrial Complex is not taking the situation lightly. Climate fear-mongering is in full swing.

Tried-and-true scare stories still dominate the daily news, often with new wrinkles tied to current events. The Winter Olympics were going to take “a huge hit from our warming planet,” the pressure group Protect Our Winters warned us (yes, it’s an actual organization). Of course, that was before fiendishly frigid conditions repeatedly postponed events and drove spectators from PyeongChang slopes.

But of course, bitter cold is “exactly what we should expect” from the global warming “crisis,” said Climategeddon expert Al Gore, who got a C and D in the only two science courses he took in college. It’s reminiscent of dire predictions that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2010 (or 2015 or 2025), and “children just aren’t going to know what snow is” (until record cold and snow battered the UK a couple years later).

We’re likewise propagandized constantly with deliberate falsehoods about “carbon pollution.” We burn carbon, in the form of hydrocarbons and coal. In the process, we emit carbon dioxide which is not a pollutant. It is the miracle plant food that makes life on Earth possible.

Other standard scares ignore the innumerable, monumental benefits of carbon-based fuels – and blame these fuels and CO2 emissions for planetary warming (and cooling), rising seas, forest fires, and every major problem from malaria to rainstorms, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes.

A newly discovered danger, say a couple researchers, endangers green sea turtles. Planetary warming is causing up to 99% of turtle eggs to hatch as females. It won’t be long, perhaps just decades, until “there will not be enough males” to propagate the species. Some “30 years of knowledge” support this thesis.

That would take us all the way back to 1988, a decade before the 18-year global warming “hiatus” that was interrupted by the 2015-16 El Niño; a half-century since the Dust Bowl and record high planetary temperatures of the 1930s; 40 years after scientists were convinced Earth was about to enter a new little ice age; and some 750 years after the 300-year-long Medieval Warm Period. One has to wonder how sea turtles managed to survive such previous warm spells – and cold periods like the four-century-long Little Ice Age, since cold weather apparently churns out only male sea turtles.

Not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton asserted that women “will bear the brunt of looking for food, looking for firewood, looking for the place to migrate to when all the grass is finally gone, as the desertification moves south” because of climate change. Wrong. Entire families will continue to bear these burdens because of anti-energy policies imposed in the name of sustainability and climate change prevention.

(For more fearsome forecasts, see The Warmlist, a no longer complete, but still entertaining compendium of some 800 horrors supposedly caused by “dangerous manmade global warming and climate change.”)

The constant consternation strikes many as ridiculous. But others have become true believers – and have committed to not having children, not taking showers, de-carbonizing, de-industrializing and de-growing developed countries, shutting off oil pipelines, and other futile actions that bring no earthly benefits.

Our planet has certainly been warming. Thank goodness for that, because the extra warmth lifted habitats and humanity out of the Little Ice Age and its chilly, stormy weather, greatly reduced arable land, short growing seasons and CO2-starved crops. Powerful, uncontrollable natural forces drove that temperature rise. Earth may now face dangerous Mann-made global warming and climate cataclysms concocted by computer models – but no “unprecedented” or “existential” human-caused dangers in the real world.

Question or challenge climate crisis orthodoxy, however, and you will be vilified and face RICO prosecutions, bogus slander and SLAPP lawsuits, censure or expulsion from your university, attacks for sponsoring museum exhibits, or even “four hots and a cot” in a jail or a faraway gulag.

Thankfully, there are excellent antidotes: books by climatologists Roy Spencer, Patrick Michaels, Jennifer Marohasy, Tim Ball, political observer Marc Steyn and others; and websites like ClimateDepot.com, WattsUpWithThat.com, DrRoySpencer.com and Global Warming Policy Foundation.org, for example.

For a concise, yet comprehensive, and eminently readable lay guide to real climate science, geologist Gregory Wrightstone’s Inconvenient Facts: The science that Al Gore doesn’t want you to know may meet your needs. Its 123 pages are organized into two sections and 30 easily understood chapters, written in plain English and complimented by over 100 colorful charts, graphs, tables and illustrations, covering all the common climate issues, fears and myths.

The book is capped off by a handy list of 60 inconvenient facts that eviscerate alarmist dogma, and15 pages of references. As Lord Christopher Monckton’s says in his foreword, Wrightstone has succeeded “splendidly” in reliably distinguishing myths from realities in the climate debate.

The opening section devotes 54 pages to explaining greenhouse and climate basics, showing how carbon dioxide is huge in planetary life but minuscule on the climate front, skewering the myth of a 400 ppm CO2 “tipping point,” analyzing climate models versus real world measurements of global temperature, and showing why and how water vapor plays such a vital and dominant role in weather and climate.

Carbon dioxide, he notes, is essential plant food that makes forests, grasslands and crops grow faster and better, with less water, and thus able to feed more people from less land. Figure I-15 summarizes data from 3,586 experiments on 549 plant species and depicts how crop yields would increase and generate trillions of dollars in overall monetary benefits, if CO2 levels rose by 300 ppm. His analysis of the “hockey stick,” computer models and temperature predictions is equally illuminating.

Part II of Wrightstone’s book examines the many assertions and myths of a coming climate apocalypse, and demonstrates why they fail to meet basic standards of scientific evidence and integrity. The opening chapter demolishes the phony 97% “consensus” of scientists who supposedly agree that humans are now the primary cause of extreme weather and climate change, ushering in a catastrophic future. Subsequent chapters address famines, forest fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, melting ice packs, rising seas, polar bear populations, and other staples of climate alarmism.

“Ocean acidification,” he points out, is a term deliberately chosen to alarm people about an imaginary problem. Being honest, and saying seas might become very slightly less alkaline (have slightly lower pH levels) from more atmospheric and oceanic CO2 in the coming centuries, wouldn’t suffice. Worse, an oft-cited study ignored a full century of readily available data, and instead used computer models to fill in the contrived “gaps” on pH levels. As Wrightstone suggests, many people would call it Climate pHraud.

The bottom line? Scientists still do not understand the complexities of climate and weather. They still cannot separate human influences from the effects of powerful natural forces that have brought often profound climate changes throughout history. There is no evidence of a coming climate cataclysm.

Spending trillions of dollars – and condemning billions of people to expensive, insufficient, unreliable, land and raw material gobbling wind, solar and biofuel energy – is not just unnecessary. It is immoral.

Via email

Whatever happens they will say it "is consistent with what you would expect from a warming planet."

Shale is the real energy revolution

Shale gas and oil have banished peak oil, revived industry and changed geopolitics: Britain's opportunity

Gas will start flowing from Cuadrilla’s two shale exploration wells in Lancashire this year. Preliminary analysis of the site is “very encouraging”, bearing out the British Geological Survey’s analysis that the Bowland Shale beneath northern England holds one of the richest gas resources known: a huge store of energy at a cost well below that of renewables and nuclear.

A glance across the Atlantic shows what could be in store for Britain, and what we have missed out on so far because of obstacles put in place by mendacious pressure groups and timid bureaucrats. Thanks to shale, America last week surpassed the oil production record it set in 1970, having doubled its output in seven years, while also turning gas import terminals into export terminals.

The effect of the shale revolution has been seismic. Cheap energy has brought industry back to America yet carbon dioxide emissions have been slashed far faster than in Europe as lower-carbon gas displaces high-carbon coal. Environmental problems have, contrary to the propaganda, been minimal.

All thoughts of imminent peak oil and peak gas have vanished. Opec’s cartel has been broken, after it failed to kill the shale industry by driving the oil price lower: American shale producers cut costs faster than anybody thought possible. A limit has been put on the economic and political power of both Russia and Saudi Arabia, no bad thing for the people of both countries and their neighbours. Shale drillers turn gas and oil production on and off in response to price fluctuations more flexibly than old-fashioned wells.

Seven years ago it was possible to argue that shale would prove a flash in the pan. No longer: horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing are the biggest energy news of the century. For those who still think the falling price of wind and solar is more dramatic, consider this. Between them, those two energy sources provided just 0.8 per cent of the world’s energy in 2016, even after trillions of dollars in subsidy, and will reach only 3.6 per cent by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency. Gas will then be providing 25 per cent of the world’s energy, up from 22 per cent today.

SOURCE

Rise of the eco-cup enterprises as war on waste steps up

I am sort of sympathetic to this. I grew up in a long-gone era where the motto was "Waste not, want not" and nothing was "disposable". So mountains of old disposable coffee cups do seem a waste.

On the other hand, digging big holes and filling them with rubbish is not exactly hi-tech or difficult. And when the dump fills up it is customary to resurface it as a sports field or park. A lot of our sports facilities originated that way.

As it happens, I always drink my coffee out of a china cup -- because I like it that way

When Simon Karlik saw rubbish bins overflowing with water bottles, coffee cups and takeaway food containers, he thought the amount of waste was “just insane”.

“I thought, can’t we go back to, in my terms, grandma's day, where you didn't rely on this very lazy option of just using something once and throwing it away,” says Karlik.

That prompted Karlik to start Cheeki, the Sydney-based company which makes vacuum-insulated stainless steel coffee cups you can carry to your café.

Today, his company, which produces a range of eco-friendly food and drink containers, turns over between $3 million to $4 million.

Reusable coffee cups rose in popularity in the wake of the ABC’s groundbreaking television series, War on Waste, which accelerated the public debate about Australia’s waste disposal problems.

According to the program, we throw out around 1 billion coffee cups each year.

Karlik started Cheeki in 2009 with stainless steel water bottles. “The water bottle was my focus for the first year or so and then we fairly quickly went into the coffee cups. And more recently, lunch boxes and food containers.”

He says while the water bottles were well received from the outset, “the coffee cups were certainly slower in the beginning. I remember early on we had a slogan, ‘No excuse for single use’. People didn't even understand that. We tried to speak to a lot of cafes about offering a discount if you brought in your reusable cup and they just didn't really understand.

“And then it really took off with the War on Waste TV show last year. That was the big one that put it into the mainstream consciousness. But there certainly had been a groundswell leading up to that TV show.”

Karlik says he saw an instant spike in website traffic. “It has dwindled away somewhat. But for the month after the TV show, it was incredibly powerful.”

Cheeki products are available through around 1200 retailers including health stores, organic grocers, pharmacies, homeware stores, which account for 95 per cent of their sales. They are also available online.

Karlik says Cheeki focuses on “insulated stainless steel cups and mugs which keep the product very hot for a long time. We have a couple of different styles, but our most popular style is leakproof, meaning you could literally get your coffee and put it in your handbag and run to the bus or something.”

He says the company does “considerable R & D work” and the overseas market is firmly on its radar.

While Cheeki sells in the UK and European market in “a small way”, it is planning to launch properly in the US and Europe in March.

Another product surfing this trend is the JOCO coffee cup.

“The JOCO brand was created in 2008,” says founder Matt Colegate. “The concept or the basis behind the brand was developed out of a personal protest against disposable waste and plastic.”

Colegate says the goal was to have a brand with values that could create eco-friendly products and solutions that then empower those values, “and also empower the individual to make a difference in their everyday life without sacrificing any luxuries as well”.

While the brand was born in 2008, Colegate says the “first product from the JOCO brand was literally a mug I grabbed from the office where I worked. I made a lid for it and started using that at the local cafes rather than disposable cups.

“The JOCO Cup that we feature is far more refined. We didn’t start production till a few years later because it was a side project for us. We had day jobs and the development process was substantial because we were attempting to work outside of the plastic world and that proved to be a big challenge.”

The first cups from the Torquay-based company were rolled out around 2012.

“When we started developing the product, we chipped in around $2000 to work out the design and so forth. Once we got around to the sampling stage, and our first production, we invested around $40,000.”

Colegate says things picked up from there. “Every year we have seen really good growth in uptake of reusable vessels and plastic-free vessels. The business was inefficient basically due to the fact that we were operating outside the plastic world, our costs were huge.

“In the last 24 months, we have really seen a big uptake, especially within parts of Europe and Australia. And then in the last year, with the War on Waste, we have seen increases of over 500 per cent in particular regions.”

The reusable glass JOCO cups are designed, developed and produced in-house, he says. “In the development process we worked very closely with leading baristas from around the world to get the input as to what they need to make the cup a perfect tool for their processes.”

SOURCE

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

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

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19 February, 2018

World’s Largest Science Organization Gives Top Honor To Conspiracy-Monger Michael Mann

If you need another example of scientific establishment’s deteriorating credibility since the election of Donald Trump, here it is: The world’s largest science organization is bestowing a top honor on a climate propagandist who spends lots of his time making hateful, inflammatory comments about the president, his family, his administration and GOP lawmakers on social media.

Michael Mann, a Penn State University professor and infamous author of the so-called “hockey stick” graph to show the planet is warming, will receive the 2018 “Public Engagement with Science” award by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) this weekend. The award will recognize Mann’s “tireless efforts to communicate the science of climate change to the media, public and policymakers.”

There’s no question that Mann is the climate tribe’s most outspoken firebrand. He is the media’s go-to source for a doomsday comment about anthropogenic global warming. Since the beginning of the month, Mann has been quoted in dozens of articles—not necessarily about science, but to berate the Trump administration for reversing many of President Obama’s climate change policies.

He is the “Citizen Secretary of Science and Environment in the so-called Shadow Cabinet to troll Trump cabinet members. After Trump was elected, Mann warned how “my colleagues and I are steeling ourselves for a renewed onslaught of intimidation, from inside and outside government. It would be bad for our work and bad for our planet.”

Rather than offer thoughtful, persuasive arguments for why climate change is a legitimate threat, Mann instead excoriates anyone, including so-called climate deniers and fellow scientists, who does not conform to his ideological worldview.

“The AAAS has sent quite a message to the public by giving a communications award to Michael Mann, who made multiple false claims about being a Nobel prize winner, including to a court of law,” Steve Milloy, author of “Scare Pollution” and publisher of junkscience.com, told me. “Mann has conspired with others to silence critics and prevent opponents from being published in science journals. He has sued his critics but, ironically, spends a great deal of time making ad hominem attacks against politicians and scientists with whom he disagrees.”

Earlier this month, Mann led an effort to oust philanthropist and GOP fundraiser Rebekah Mercer from the American Museum of Natural History board of directors. Why? Mercer, according to Mann and his fellow climate bullies, is a “financier of climate denialism” because her foundation also contributes to nonprofit organizations such as the Heartland Institute, which challenges the grip that climate change orthodoxy has in the media and public education.

Although Mercer has a science background and has donated $4 million to the museum, Mann accused her of “spending millions to discredit science,” and called her a “sponsor of fake news and climate disinformation.” Mercer responded to his attacks in the Wall Street Journal on February 15, admitting that “absurd smears have inspired a few gullible, but vicious characters, to make credible death threats against my family and me.”

This Kind of ‘Public Engagement’ Isn’t Praiseworthy

But it’s Mann’s shameful—one might argue unstable—rants against the current administration and Republican lawmakers that should have disqualified him from receiving a “public engagement” award from the world’s top scientific society. His Twitter timeline is a disturbing mix of self-promoting puffery and enraged political tirades with very little science. In just the past few days, Mann has called the president “a pathetic excuse for a human being,” a “sociopath,” and wondered if he would be “tied up with the golden lasso.”

The award-winning communicator has called Kellyanne Conway “evil,” accused House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes of being a “traitor,” and routinely blasts Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt. Mann said this to Rolling Stone last year about Pruitt’s appointment: “If there was ever an example of the fox guarding the henhouse, this is it. We have a Koch-brothers-connected industry shill who is now in charge of climate and environmental policy for the entire country.”

The climatologist saves his most petty and pernicious attacks for fellow scientists who challenge the failings of climate science. During a congressional hearing last year, Mann testified alongside two climate scientists he has relentlessly bashed: Judith Curry and Roger Pielke Jr. Although both believe in manmade climate change, their objections to faulty modeling and inaccurate projections have placed them on Mann’s hit list.

After one lawmaker asked about this, Curry addressed Mann’s unprofessional conduct: “What I’m concerned about is the behavior of scientists. I’ve been called a denier for the congressional record from Michael Mann’s testimony. What kind of a behavior is that? This is not the behavior of scientists who are respectfully disagreeing and open to debate.” Mann replied he hadn’t called her a denier, even though it was in his written opening remarks. He can’t even keep his own story straight.

In a blog post, Pielke—who was also smeared by the Obama White House—didn’t mince words about the AAAS’s decision to celebrate Mann: “The AAAS is telling us that engaging in hyper-partisan, gutter politics, targeted against Republicans and colleagues you disagree with, using unethical tactics, will be rewarded by leaders in the scientific community. AAAS could work to help to defuse the pathological politicization of science. Instead, it has thrown some gasoline on the fire.”

Apparently Everything Is Political Now to the Left

So, why did the AAAS choose Mann? For precisely the reasons Pielke outlined. Since the presidential election, the scientific establishment has largely lost its collective mind. Rather than leverage its expertise and power for the common good, it is fueling the nation’s partisan divide, pushing identity politics over science, and working with anti-Trump foes to undermine his presidency.

The AAAS chief is former Democratic congressman Rush Holt, who late last year helped push the phony story that the Centers for Disease Control had banned seven words under direction from Trump’s White House. He ironically told CNN this about the mythical ban: “The epidemic I’m talking about is widespread negligent attitude toward science, neglect of evidence, where people far and wide seem very comfortable substituting wishful thinking and opinion and ideology for evidence.”

After the election, scientific leaders claimed Trump would destroy science. But glorifying political demagogues with PhDs and wrapping it in the cloak of science will do more lasting damage to science than anything Trump does or tweets. As Curry wrote this week in response to Mann’s award: “What to say about this, other than the climate science world is upside down? On one level, all this is highly amusing. On another level, I absolutely despair for the integrity of academic climate science.” And all science.

SOURCE

Surprise! Spiegel Online Slams Profiteering From Climate Alarmism… Munich Re Admits: “No Climate Signal”

Spiegel Online published two days ago an excellent article by science journalist Axel Bojanowski on the widespread “disinformation surrounding climate change” and the profit made from the hyping and exaggeration of weather extremes.

Examples cited are the Deutsche Bundesbahn (German Railway), the reinsurance industry, foremost Munich Re, and alarmist climate scientists such as Potsdam Institute’s Stefan Rahmstorf.

All have been playing it loose with the data on weather events and exaggerating (at times grossly) and with the aim of deriving profit, Spiegel reports.

Bojanowski’s piece has since found much praise and positive reaction for its content. For example high profile meteorologist Jörg Kachelmann tweeted (translation follows):

Grateful that @Axel_Bojanowski via @SPIEGELONLINE is allowed to correctly report on the science of climate change, and even if he’ll be confronted by people foaming at the mouth.”

Recently the Swiss meteorologist Kachelmann came under harsh attack from Potsdam scientist Stefan Rahmstorf and a leading German Green politician – for having the nerve to give the real facts on storm frequency and intensity on a television talk round that included Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber.

Seasoned journalist Michael Miersch also tweeted: “The best that I’ve ever read on the instrumentalization of climate change.”

German Railway: climate change as a cover for poor management
Bojanowski begins by describing how today the German Railway (Deutsche Bundesbahn) – once heralded for its outstanding punctuality and overall efficiency – has discovered how to use climate change to deflect blame away from its recent poor management, which over the years has often led to lousy service.

Over the years, the Bundesbahn has made the maintenance of its tracks a victim to cost cutting. Trees and vegetation along the tracks no longer get sufficiently cut back, and so it is common for routes to get blocked during stormy weather. What better excuse than climate change could the Deutsche Bahn have to explain all the disruptions?

Data in fact show no increasing trend in extreme weather
All the cancellations, service shutdowns and delays are of course due to ever increasing storm intensity and frequency, the Deutsche Bahn management likes to claim, and they get the full backing of the media, policymakers and alarmist climate scientists. Yet Bojanowski calls out these claims by the Bundesbahn for what they are: lame excuses based on hyped up science.

The Spiegel journalist writes that a number of scientists have shown that there has in fact been no increase in storm intensity and frequency in Europe, commenting:

"That’s amazing, as many scientists anticipate fewer storms in Central Europe as a consequence of climate change.”

Munich Re bilking the public with climate hype?

Another industry caught hyping up extreme weather activity is the reinsurance industry, which insures regular insurance companies against major claims events. The reason for the added hype: justification for hefty premium increases, Bojanowski suggests.

Munich Re admits no real climate signal

One company Bojanowski cites is the world’s largest reinsurer, Munich Re, which annually publishes a report on “natural catastrophes”, in which the company likes to blame climate change, cite alarmist experts and claim there is today a “new normal”. When asked by Spiegel to comment concerning data showing that it isn’t really so, a climate expert from Munch Re was forced to admit:

"The blanket statement that weather-dependent damages worldwide show a climate signal cannot be supported.”

So even the Munich Re knows their claims are hype, yet they continue preaching climate doom and gloom.

Bojanowski also accuses the reinsurers and alarmist climate scientists of “staying silent on claims from the scientific community that it’s all very much in dispute“.

The Spiegel journalist also describes how companies selling environmental products also shamelessly hype climate change in order to get municipalities and cities to invest more in climate protection and environmental systems. Such companies often pay (handsomely) alarmist scientists, such as those from the Potsdam Institute, to spread fear over a rapidly approaching climate doom.

SOURCE

Let's suppose that 100% renewable energy were possible. What would be the result?

A: the complete destruction of the Earth through massive mining operations and the generation of enormous amounts of toxic waste.

Interior Dept. Is Weeks Away From Holding The Largest Oil And Gas Lease Sale In History

The Department of the Interior (DOI) will offer 77.3 million acres for offshore drilling in the largest oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history on March 21, according to the DOI.

The sale will cover areas off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. It will include about 14,776 lease blocks from three to 231 miles offshore.

“Responsibly developing our offshore energy resources is a major pillar of President Trump’s American Energy Dominance strategy,” DOI Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt said in statement. “A strong offshore energy program supports tens of thousands good paying jobs and provides the affordable and reliable energy we need to heat homes, fuel our cars, and power our economy.”

The sale is part of the Trump administration’s National Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Oil and Gas Leasing Program, a five-year program that may open up areas along the Atlantic and Pacifica coasts and around Alaska to offshore drilling. The new OCS plan has been touted as a reversal of the previous plan under former-President Barack Obama which placed 94 percent of the OCS off-limits to drilling.

“We have the strongest safety regulations in the world and today’s technology is making the responsible development of our resources even safer,” Bernhardt said. “We look forward to this important sale and continuing to raise energy revenues, which fund efforts to help safeguard our natural areas, water resources and cultural heritage, and to provide recreation opportunities to all Americans.”

More of the OCS may be opened and offered in a lease sale later. DOI Secretary Ryan Zinke has promised to meet with every governor opposed to opening waters off their states’ coasts to offshore drilling. Zinke has already promised Florida Gov. Rick Scott exemptions in some areas off the state’s coast.

SOURCE

Renewable subsidies and the destruction of Australian energy competitiveness

Alan Moran

Yesterday I was the token rationalist speaker at the Australasian Agricultural and Resources Economics Society’s “The Future of Australian Energy Symposium”.

Two other speakers were Tony Wood (from the ALP’s think tank Grattan Institute recently rewarded for the damage his advice has done with an AO) and Danny Price from Frontier Economics (also an ALP consultant).

In so far as their advice has been followed, these two prominent characters have been instrumental in forging the taxing policies on fossil fuel generators that have destroyed our energy market. They now acknowledge the market is broken, it being impossible to shrug off the line ball reliability and doubling soon-to-be trebling of prices

But the politicians’ favoured consultants’ solution is one further attempt to get the interventionary policies right. Like the fans of socialism, they say its failure is because it has never been done properly!

The other speakers were operationally oriented – largely consultants – who proffered ways that the renewable target, now sanctified by the Paris Agreement few recognise as dead and buried, could be operationalised.

We have seen the wholesale price for electricity rise from under $40 per MWh with very little trend up until 2012, and was still $40 in 2015, to its present level of around $90 per MWh

?Wind has risen from nothing in the early part of the century to a share of over 10 per cent today. All of that wind is dependent on subsidies currently around $85 per MWh. In addition, there is the roof top solar (subsidised at $40 per MWh plus advantageous export tariffs). ?

Due to its abundant coal supplies, Australia had perhaps the cheapest electricity in the world ten years ago. As a result of the renewable subsidies it is now among the most expensive. Aside from increased direct costs to households, this has immense adverse consequences for the competitiveness of Australian industries and hence the nation’s living standards.

We can reverse direction and perhaps the demonstration effect of the US will provide the catalyst.

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. Email me (John Ray) here.

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

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18 February, 2018

Snow-covered beaches? Chilly iguanas? They are part of a mysterious ‘hole’ in global warming

Mysterious is the word. You can't have a hole in warming. Thermodynamics would not allow it. The "hole" discussed below is just a fancy name for saying that over large areas reality does not match the theory. It's just another example of special pleading, which always weakens the theory. In science, very little special pleading would be tolerated before the theory is discarded

Frigid iguanas in Florida. Snowball fights on North Carolina’s beaches. Recent winters have delivered a bitter chill to the Southeast, reinforcing attitudes among some that global warming is a fraud.

But according to a scientific study published this month, the Southeast’s colder winter weather is part of an isolated trend, linked to a more wavy pattern in the jet stream that crosses North America. That dipping jet stream allows artic air to plunge into the Southeast. Scientists call this colder weather a “hole” in overall global warming, or a “warming hole.”

“What we are looking at is an anomaly,” said Jonathan M. Winter, an assistant professor of geography at Dartmouth College and the principle investigator in the study. “The Southeast is the exception to the rule.”

Winter and lead author Trevor F. Partridge, a Dartmouth graduate student, say this year’s extreme cold in Southeast could be a product of the warming hole. “It is the same mechanism that causes this bitterly cold air to come down,” said Winter.

The Southeast’s warming hole has been studied many times before, but the Dartmouth study in Geophysical Research Letters nails down some of its key features. The study concludes the trend started in the late 1950s, and is concentrated in six states — Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. Nearby states are also affected, such as east Texas, Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina.

Either because of coincidence or cooler climes, residents of these states tend to be relatively doubtful that global warming is happening and is largely caused by human activities, according to surveys compiled by Yale and George Mason universities.

As some streets flood from king tide events, Miami Beach launched an aggressive and expensive plan to combat the effects of sea level rise. The city will spend between $400 to $500 million over the next five years. (From March 15, 2016.) Emily MichotMiami Herald

Yale researchers are now curious the “warming hole” has influenced opinions about climate change in the region. “That is something we are actively investigating,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

In January, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that 2017 was one of the warmest years on record globally. But during snows and freezes of the last two months, some Americans scoffed at such claims. This included President Trump, who tweeted right before New Year’s Eve that “perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old global warming.”

The unusually cold weather has produced a mix of outcomes for farmers, wildlife and human residents. South Carolina peach farmers welcome a certain number of cold winter days for their trees to produce a full crop. But they’ve been walloped when a freeze arrives late, as have Florida’s citrus growers and Georgia’s Vidalia onion farmers.

Across the region, the cold helps knock pests, but it can stress native flora and fauna. Some 35 manatees died of cold stress syndrome in January, according to a preliminary report from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The cold also numbed the state’s invasive iguanas, some of which started falling out of trees in January, prompting Floridians to rush to their rescue.

Climate change scientists say the Southeast is an illustration of how global warming is not a globally uniform phenomena. Certain regions will see different effects than others, based on El Ninos and other natural weather patterns.

In the arctic, a natural phenomenon known as the polar vortex is a huge driver of colder winters. When the polar vortex is stable, arctic cold air is contained by the jet stream flowing to the south.

But when the jet stream is wavy, it allows frigid winds to blow down into the Southeast, a pattern that has repeated itself in many, but not all, years since the 1960s.

What is causing the more wavy jet stream?

A study published last year suggested that rapidly melting arctic ice sheets, an impact of climate change, could be contributing. But cyclical patterns in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans could also be important factors, say the Dartmouth researchers and scientists who wrote about the warming hole for the third National Climate Assessment in 2014.

“From our research, we are confident there is a natural variability component,” said Winter. “We hypothesize there is a contribution of climate change. But we don’t want to get out over our ski tips on that.”

The Southeast’s warming hole tends to last through the winter and spring. After that, the warming hole tends to shift to the Midwest, where evaporation from large-scale agricultural production causes an abnormal cooling affect, says the study.

The Dartmouth researchers based their findings on examining NOAA data from 1,407 temperature stations and 1,722 rain stations across the United States, from 1901 until 2015. They then identified stations that were persistently cooler than average from 1960 to 2015, which gave them their results on the six states at the center of the warming hole.

Overall, daily temperatures in the hole have cooled by an average of 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958, whereas global average temperatures have risen 1 degree over the same time period.

The southeastern United States is one of two major warming holes globally. The other is in the North Atlantic Ocean, where a mysterious “blob” of cold water has concentrated near where Greenland’s ice sheets are melting. Is there a connection? Scientists are studying if influxes of fresh water from melting sea ice are disrupting currents, known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which carries warm water north from the equator.

SOURCE

New Paper: "No significant trend" in hurricanes

“Continental United States Hurricane Landfall Frequency and Associated Damage: Observations and Future Risks“

The abstract reveals findings that contradicts the mainstream news narrative about hurricanes during 2017. It cites other studies with similar findings (all ignored by journalists). Roger Pielke Jr. mentioning some of this data got him labeled a “climate denier” by climate activists (details here). The conclusions are a clear example of focused research applied to questions important for America.

“While United States landfalling hurricane frequency or intensity shows no significant trend since 1900, growth in coastal population and wealth have led to increasing hurricane-related damage along the United States coastline. Continental United States (CONUS) hurricane-related inflation-adjusted damage has increased significantly since 1900. However, since 1900 neither observed CONUS landfalling hurricane frequency nor intensity show significant trends, including the devastating 2017 season.

“Two large-scale climate modes that have been noted in prior research to significantly impact CONUS landfalling hurricane activity are El Niño-Southern Oscillation on interannual timescales and the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation on multi-decadal timescales. La Niña seasons tend to be characterized by more CONUS hurricane landfalls than do El Niño seasons, and positive Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation phases tend to have more CONUS hurricane landfalls than do negative phases.

“Growth in coastal population and regional wealth are the overwhelming drivers of observed increases in hurricane-related damage. As the population and wealth of the US has increased in coastal locations, it has invariably led to the growth in exposure and vulnerability of coastal property along the US Gulf and East Coasts. Unfortunately, the risks associated with more people and vulnerable exposure came to fruition in Texas and Florida during the 2017 season following the landfalls of hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Total economic damage from those two storms exceeded $125 billion.

“Growth in coastal population and exposure is likely to continue in the future, and when hurricane landfalls do occur, this will likely lead to greater damage costs than previously seen. Such a statement is made recognizing that the vast scope of damage from hurricanes often highlight the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of building codes, flood maps, infrastructure, and insurance in at-risk communities.”

We are told that global warming makes hurricanes worse — some combination of more frequent and more intense (depending on the source). There is an easy first test of this. The world has been warming since the middle of the 19th century. The IPCC’s AR5 tells us that…

“It is extremely likely (95 – 100% certain) that human activities caused more than half of the observed increase in global mean surface temperature from 1951 to 2010.”

What is the trend in hurricane activity during the past 12 decades? One of the best records is that of landfalls on continental US. The authors show the data. First, all hurricane landfalls. Then landfalls of major hurricanes (Saffir-Simpson Category 3-5). These cause over 80% of all hurricane-related damages. Do you see any trend in either graph, in the “natural” era (1900-1950) or the anthropogenic era (1951-2017)?

More HERE

Overheated claims on temperature records

It’s time for sober second thoughts on climate alarms

Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris

Now that the excitement has died down over the news that Earth’s surface temperature made 2017 one of the hottest years on record, it is time for sober second thoughts.

Did the January 18 announcement by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that 2017 was our planet’s third-hottest year since 1880, and NASA’s claim that it was the second hottest year, actually mean anything?

Although the Los Angeles Times called 2017 “a top-three scorcher for planet Earth,” neither the NOAA nor the NASA records are significant. One would naturally expect the warmest years to come during the most recent years of a warming trend. And thank goodness we have been in a gradual warming trend since the depths of the Little Ice Age in the late 1600s! Back then, the River Thames was covered by a meter of ice, as Jan Grifier’s 1683 painting “The Great Frost’ illustrates.

Regardless, recent changes have been too small for even most thermometers to notice. More important, they are often less than the government’s estimates of uncertainty in the measurements. In fact, we lack the data to properly and scientifically compare today’s temperatures with the past.

This is because, until the 1960s, surface temperature data was collected using mercury thermometers located at weather stations situated mostly in the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom and eastern Australia. Most of the rest of the planet had very few temperature sensing stations. And none of the Earth’s oceans, which constitute 70 percent of the planet’s surface area, had more than an occasional station separated from its neighbors by thousands of kilometers or miles.

The data collected at the weather stations in this sparse grid had, at best, an accuracy of +/-0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit). In most cases, the real-world accuracy was no better than +/-1 deg C (1.8 deg F). Averaging such poor data in an attempt to determine global conditions cannot yield anything meaningful. Displaying average global temperature to tenths or even hundreds of a degree, as is done in the NOAA and NASA graphs, clearly defies common sense.

Modern weather station surface temperature data is now collected using precision thermocouples. But, starting in the 1970s, less and less ground surface temperature data was used for plots such as those by NOAA and NASA. This was done initially because governments believed satellite monitoring could take over from most of the ground surface data collection.

However, the satellites did not show the warming forecast by computer models, which had become so crucial to climate studies and energy policy-making. So bureaucrats closed most of the colder rural surface temperature sensing stations – the ones furthest from much warmer urban areas – thereby yielding the warming desired for political purposes.

Today, virtually no data exist for approximately 85 percent of the earth’s surface. Indeed, fewer weather stations are in operation now than in 1960.

That means surface temperature computations by NOAA and NASA after about 1980 are meaningless. Combining this with the problems with earlier data renders an unavoidable conclusion: It is not possible to know how Earth’s so-called average surface temperature has varied over the past century and a half.

The data is therefore useless for input to the computer models that form the basis of policy recommendations produced by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and used to justify eliminating fossil fuels, and replacing them with renewable energy.

But the lack of adequate surface data is only the start of the problem. The computer models on which the climate scare is based are mathematical constructions that require the input of data above the surface, as well as on it. The models divide the atmosphere into cubes piled on top of each other, ideally with wind, humidity, cloud cover and temperature conditions known for different altitudes. But we currently have even less data above the surface than on it, and there is essentially no historical data at altitude.

Many people think the planet is adequately covered by satellite observations, data that represents global 24/7 coverage and is far more accurate than anything determined at weather stations. But the satellites are unable to collect data from the north and south poles, regions that the IPCC, NOAA and NASA tout as critical to understanding global warming. Besides, space-based temperature data collection did not start until 1979, and 30 years of weather data are required to generate a single data point on a climate graph.

So the satellite record is far too short to allow us to come to useful conclusions about climate change.

In fact, there is insufficient data of any kind – temperature, land and sea ice, glaciers, sea level, extreme weather, ocean pH, and so on – to be able to determine how today’s climate differs from the past. Lacking such fundamental data, climate forecasts cited by climate activists therefore have no connection with the real world.

British Professor Hubert Lamb is often identified as the founder of modern climatology. In his comprehensive 1972 treatise, Climate: Past, Present and Future, he clearly showed that it is not possible to understand climate change without having vast amounts of accurate weather data over long time frames. Lamb also noted that funding for improving the weather database was dwarfed by money being spent on computer models and theorizing. He warned that this would result in wild and unsubstantiated theories and assertions, while predictions failed to improve. That is precisely what happened.

Each and every prediction made by the computer models cited by the IPCC have turned out to be incorrect. Indeed, the first predictions they made for the IPCC’s 1990 Assessment Report were so wrong that the panel started to call them “projections” and offered low, medium and high “confidence” ranges for future guesstimates, which journalists, politicians and others nevertheless treated as reliable predictions for future weather and climate.

IPCC members seemed to conclude that, if they provided a broad enough range of forecasts, one was bound to be correct. Yet, even that was too optimistic. All three ranges predicted by the IPCC have turned out to be wrong.

US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt is right to speak about the need for a full blown public debate among scientists about the causes and consequences of climate change. In his February 6 television interview on KSNV, an NBC affiliate in Las Vegas, Mr. Pruitt explained:

“There are very important questions around the climate issue that folks really don’t get to. And that’s one of the reasons why I’ve talked about having an honest, open, transparent debate about what do we know, and what don’t we know, so the American people can be informed and they can make decisions on their own with respect to these issues.”

On January 30, Pruitt told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that a “red team-blue team exercise” (an EPA-sponsored debate between climate scientists holding differing views) is under consideration. It is crucially important that such a debate take place.

The public needs to understand that even the most basic assumptions underlying climate concerns are either in doubt or simply wrong. The campaign to force America, Canada, Europe and the rest of the world to switch from abundant and affordable coal and other fossil fuels – to expensive, unreliable, land intensive alternatives – supposedly to control Earth’s always fluctuating climate, will then finally be exposed for what it really is: the greatest, most damaging hoax in history.

Via email. Dr. Tim Ball is an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba. Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition

Bitter cold at Winter Olympics chills global-warming hype

The bone-chilling cold and icy winds in Pyeongchang have contributed to any number of wipe-outs for Olympic skiers and snowboarders, not to mention a public-relations face plant for the climate-change movement.

Its dire warnings about how the Winter Olympics face an existential threat from global warming have been all but buried by the flurry of reports about frigid conditions at the 2018 games in South Korea, which are expected to set an Olympic record for cold temperatures.

Climate activists have also been frustrated by a lack of global-warming coverage by NBC Sports, prompting a social-media campaign led by Public Citizen, Protect Our Winters and Climate Nexus urging the network to stop the “climate whiteout.”

“Winter sports are taking a huge hit from our warming planet and the athletes who depend on cold weather and snow—are witnessing and experiencing climate change first hand,” they said in a statement on Alternet. “We can no longer talk about the Winter Olympics without warming.”

This year, however, it’s impossible to talk about the Olympics without freezing. Organizers handed out blankets and heat pads to spectators at Friday’s opening ceremony, which was shortened by two hours in response to wind-chill temperatures that dipped below zero.

A number of skiing events have been delayed as a result of high winds and ice pellets, and reports of spectators leaving outdoor events early in order to escape the brutal cold are rampant.

“It was unbelievably cold,” ski jumper Noriaki Kasai of Japan told the AP. “The noise of the wind at the top of the jump was incredible. I’ve never experienced anything like that on the World Cup circuit. I said to myself, ‘Surely, they are going to cancel this.’”

Skeptics like Climate Depot’s Marc Morano couldn’t resist needling leading environmental groups as they struggled to keep the global-warming theme afloat.

“More bad luck for climate activists as they push for more talk of ‘global warming’ during what is perhaps the coldest Olympics on record,” said Mr. Morano, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.”

“The activists had the climate script written well in advance of the Olympics, but their message has literally been frozen out by the extreme cold,” he said in an email. “Despite this cold reality, the activists demand that the climate narrative go forth.”

Climate groups have touted an updated 2014 study by University of Waterloo geography professor Daniel Scott, whose climate models found that nine of the 21 previous host cities would be too warm by midcentury to accommodate the games.

“According to Scott’s research, using emissions projections in which global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise through midcentury and global temperatures increase by 4 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050, nine of the host locations will be too hot to handle the Games,” said the University of Waterloo in a Jan. 12 press release.

The last two winter games—Sochi in 2014 and Vancouver in 2010—saw organizers bring in artificial snow after being hit with unexpected warm temperatures.

Since the 1920s, the average temperatures at the Winter Olympics have risen from about 33 degrees Fahrenheit to more than 46 degrees for games held since 2000, according to Yale Climate Connections.

“The climate in many traditional winter sports regions isn’t what it used to be, and fewer and fewer places will be able to host the Olympic Winter Games as global warming accelerates,” said Mr. Scott in a statement.

The problem with climate models in general is their shaky track record, said University of Colorado Boulder meteorologist Roger A. Pielke Sr.

“Such claims are based on climate models that have shown essentially no skill at predicting multidecadal changes in regional climate statistics when tested against observed multidecadal regional climate changes and variations over the past decades (called “hindcasting”),” said Mr. Pielke in an email.

“If they cannot skillfully predict such changes in the past, we should have no confidence in what they tell us with respect to the coming decades,” he said. “Claims to the contrary are based on political advocacy and not robust science.”

The 2018 Winter Olympics are on pace to go down as the coldest in recorded history, with night temperatures in Pyeongchang falling as low as -20 degrees Celsius, or -4 Fahrenheit, according to Reuters.

Such a mark would easily surpass the record of -11 degrees Celsius set at the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.

David Arkush, managing director of Public Citizen, argued that the overall trend still supports warmer global temperatures and what his group described as “disappearing winters.”

“Nothing in climate science says the temperature today must always be higher than yesterday or one year ago,” he said in an email. “But the overall warming trend is unmistakable and alarming.”

He pointed to quotes from skiers and other winter athletes who have said deteriorating snow conditions have made it more difficult to train.

“It’s a scary thing right now for winter sports,” U.S. aerials coach Matt Saunders told AP. “There’s fewer and fewer places and all the glaciers are melting. It’s definitely getting harder and harder to get on snow early, for sure. We are having to travel further and further.”

Climate activists have also argued that frigid weather is consistent with global warming—former Vice President Al Gore said last month that bitter cold is “exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis”—prompting skeptics to accuse them of adjusting their theories to fit the latest weather patterns.

The International Olympic Committee has seen a drop in interest in cities interested in hosting both the summer and winter games, although for reasons related more to rising costs—Sochi spent a mind-boggling $51 billion—and lack of public support than climate change.

Six European localities have pulled out or opted not to make bids for the 2022 Winter Olympics, and only four cities have shown interest in the 2026 winter games.

SOURCE

Permitting reform is key for economic growth, infrastructure planning, and national security

You may not know it, but a hearing on Capitol Hill today, in the House Natural Resources Committee, will have an impact on every American. The Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources is holding a hearing on legislation introduced by Rep. Mark E. Amodei (R-Nev.), H.R. 520, the National Strategic and Critical Minerals Production Act. The U.S. has become increasingly dependent on imports of these minerals despite having an abundance of many of them. Congress and the Trump administration are looking to change the permitting process for not just these mines, but for all projects.

Last year, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) released a report frightening report titled, “Critical Mineral Resources of the United States— Economic and Environmental Geology and Prospects for Future Supply.” The report lists minerals that are important for the economic health and national security of the U.S.:

Antimony (Sb), barite (barium, Ba), beryllium (Be), cobalt (Co), fluorite or fluorspar (fluorine, F), gallium (Ga), germanium (Ge), graphite (carbon, C), hafnium (Hf), indium (In), lithium (Li), manganese (Mn), niobium (Nb), platinum-group elements (PGE), rare-earth elements (REE), rhenium (Re), selenium (Se), tantalum (Ta), tellurium (Te), tin (Sn), titanium (Ti), vanadium (V), and zirconium (Zr).

The world as we know it cannot exist without these critical minerals. Cobalt is one of the most essential minerals on the list. Just about every battery on the planet has cobalt in it, including cell phones and electric vehicles. The military and civilian aviation use cobalt in jet engines. Life would be very different from what we know without this mineral.

A group of elements known as rare earth elements is probably the most important. The group represents 15 elements between atomic numbers 57 and 71. The elements have unusual physical and chemical properties that give them multiple applications.

The most common use for rare earth elements is in magnets. Two magnets used extensively in military technologies are samarium cobalt (SmCo), and neodymium iron boron (NdFeB). These are powerful magnets. The NdFeB magnet is considered the world’s strongest permanent magnet. This allows a small magnet to be used instead of a larger device and aides in the miniaturization of technology. SmCo magnets are used for high-temperature applications where stability over a wide range of temperatures is essential.

The Congressional Research Service listed defense-related applications for REEs:

fin actuators in missile guidance and control systems, controlling the direction of the missile;

disk drive motors installed in aircraft, tanks, missile systems, and command and control centers;

lasers for enemy mine detection, interrogators, underwater mines, and countermeasures;

satellite communications, radar, and sonar on submarines and surface ships; and

optical equipment and speakers.

It’s pretty clear we do not have a worthy Defense Department without these critical minerals. Unfortunately, the U.S. is 100 percent dependent on foreign mines to supply U.S. needs, and China supplies 97 percent of the world’s supply. Yes, that is right. The U.S. military is dependent on an adversary nation for its weapons systems.

The bill has passed the House in previous Congresses but continuously dies in the Senate. That could change with President Trump’s proposed infrastructure plan, the key of which calls for a reduction in regulations for projects. Currently, the permitting process for projects takes years and crosses multiple agencies. According to the Department of Transportation, the median length of time to complete an environmental impact study is 3.5 years, and that is just some asphalt for a road.

The process gets much more cumbersome when discussing the mining industry. The average time for final permitting approval in the U.S. is 7-10 years, while Canada and Australia average just two years. Mining consulting giant, Behre Dolbear, listed “permitting delays” as the most significant risk to mining projects. Who is willing to invest hundreds of millions in a project before even a shovel of dirt can be dug up? This is not the way to stir economic growth.

President Trump and Congress must pass permitting reform before the infrastructure bill is passed. It does no good to pass an infrastructure bill without permitting reform. If that were to happen, the money would disappear into the federal bureaucracy instead of going to the needed projects. H.R. 520 must be included in the permitting reform. In fact, the upcoming budget is the perfect place to put the legislation with the rest of the permitting reform. President Trump and the Republicans should use their leverage to press permitting reform. By putting it in the budget, it is one less thing that can be bargained away in the infrastructure negotiating process.

SOURCE

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

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

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16 February, 2018

A rather clever paper below shows that there is NO specifiable effect of CO2 on temperature

Just the abstract below. Jamal Munshi uses temperature changes after 1850 and known CO2 levels to test whether one influences the other. He shows that there is no correlation and that any effect of CO2 on temperature is therefore at least unknown. We have all been able to see that there is no correlation just by looking at the graphs but Munshi does the numbers

Uncertainty in Empirical Climate Sensitivity Estimates 1850-2017

Jamal Munshi

Abstract

Atmospheric CO2 concentrations and surface temperature reconstructions in the study period 1850-2017 are used to estimate observed equilibrium climate sensitivity. Comparison of climate sensitivities in the first and second halves of the study period and a study of climate sensitivities in a moving 60-year window show that the estimated values of climate sensitivity are unstable and unreliable and that therefore they may not contain useful information. These results are not consistent with the existence of a climate sensitivity parameter that determines surface temperature according to atmospheric CO2 concentration.

SOURCE

It’s weather, not climate change, Governor Brown

Weather, not human-caused CO2-fueled global warming, is responsible for California wildfires

Robert W. Endlich

2017 featured incredibly intense, damaging wildfires in California: first the Wine Country fires of October, and later the massive Thomas Fire in December. Each destroyed hundreds of homes, the latter in many of the affluent suburbs and enclaves northwest of Los Angeles and Hollywood.

The Thomas Fire is the largest in modern California history, with over 1000 structures destroyed. The fires and subsequent mudslides killed over 60 people and left many others severely burned or injured.

California Governor Jerry Brown almost predictably blamed human-caused, carbon dioxide-fueled global warming and climate change, specifically droughts, as the cause of these conflagrations. During a December 9 visit to Ventura County, he again insisted that the drought conditions were the “new normal.” While acknowledging that California has experienced “very long droughts” throughout its history, he claimed that the returning dry spells of recent decades were “very bad” and would be “returning more often” because of manmade climate change.

It’s a nice attempt to deflect blame from his state’s ultra-green policies and poor forest management practices. Moreover, Governor Brown is just wrong about the alleged role of manmade climate change, as an examination of meteorological and climate data demonstrates. NOAA’s rainfall records for California show rainfall slightly increasing in California over the 125-year period since rainfall records began.

Meteorological conditions, as they develop over the course of a year, and during the multi-year El-Niño to La Niña cycles known as ENSO (El Niño Southern Oscillation), result in conditions that favor wildfires in California. Fire is a part of nature, much to the consternation of those who blame manmade climate change, and much to the dismay of those whose lives are disrupted by wildfire events such as these.

Of course, they can be – and are – worsened and even made catastrophic by failures to manage forests properly, especially when hundreds of homes are built near forests, and when weather and climate cycles intersect with those failures and incidents that start a wildfire.

In the United States, the “Sun Belt” from California to Florida receives that name because a feature of global circulation causes descending air about 30 degrees north and south of the equator. At the surface, this “Hadley cell” is evident in high pressure monthly and annual means (or averages); it’s also called the subtropical high and subtropical ridge.

In the northern hemisphere, the position and strength of the subtropical ridge changes over the course of the year, getting stronger and moving further north in the summertime.

In California that poleward migration of the subtropical ridge diverts rain-producing storm systems poleward to the north, resulting in an almost complete loss of rainfall in the summer. The annual Los Angeles climatology illustrated in Figure 1 helps tell the story of the California wildfire season.

With this information, if we think critically, the usual situation is for vegetation to sprout in wet winter months, grow – and then dry out because of the lack of summer rainfall, causing vegetation to be driest in late summer and early fall.

This is exactly the situation described in a recent article that mentions October as the worst month for wildfires and quotes University of California fire expert Max Moritz, who says “By the time you get to this season, right when you’re starting to anticipate some rain, it’s actually the most fire prone part of the year.” Power line and other management failures increase the likelihood of disaster.

Yet another factor is the failure or refusal of government agencies to permit the removal of dead, diseased and desiccated trees and brush from these woodlands – especially in the broad vicinity of these communities. In fact, California forests have 129 million dead trees, according to the US Forest Service. Together, these factors all but ensure recurrent conflagrations and tragic losses of property and lives.

As autumn sets in, the first cold frontal passages and cold air masses build into Nevada and adjacent states, and a northeasterly pressure gradient develops over California. Because of atmospheric physics, a process called adiabatic compression causes hot, dry winds to develop, often quickly and dramatically.

The Wine country fires of 2017 began suddenly during the evening of October 8, with development of the first fierce Diablo Winds of the season. Contemporary news accounts link the onset of ten fires within ninety minutes to PG&E power poles falling, many into dry trees. In one account, a Sonoma County resident said “trees were on fire like torches.”

The Mercury News carried a story saying that Governor Brown had vetoed a unanimously-passed 2016 bill to fund power line safety measures. But the governor wants to spend still more money combating manmade climate change and compelling a major and rapid shift from fossil fuels to expensive, unreliable, weather-dependent wind and solar power for electricity generation

There was a significant cooling of Pacific Ocean temperatures from the peak of the 2015-16 El Niño to December 2017, such that La Niña conditions have developed in recent months. This distinct pattern shift brought distinctly drier conditions from southern California and Arizona to Florida and South Carolina.

This pattern shift is part of the evolution of temperature and precipitation change areas characteristic of the ENSO sequence of events. Contrary to Governor Brown’s politically inspired assertions, it clearly is not the result of human-caused, CO2-fueled global warming.

This brings us to the devastating Thomas Fire, which began on the evening of 4 December 2017, and was not completely contained by New Year’s Eve, 31 December. Behavior of this fire was controlled by a large-in-extent and long-in-duration Santa Ana Wind event, and like the previous Wine Country Fire, was dominated by high pressure over Nevada and persistent hot, dry, strong down-slope winds that commonly occur during such meteorological conditions.

In short, it is meteorological conditions which create the environment for the spread of such fires. This year’s changeover from wet El Niño to dry La Niña conditions played a significant part in the atmospheric set-up for the 2017 fires.

In Australia, it is widely accepted that fuel reduction actions are an accepted practice in fire management.

This is not the case in the USA, where considerable debate still rages over the issue, and where environmentalists, politicians, regulators and courts have united to block tree thinning, brush removal and harvesting of dead and dying trees. The resulting conditions are perfect for devastating wildfires, which denude hillsides and forest habitats, leaving barren soils that cannot absorb the heavy rains that frequently follow the fires – leading to equally devastating, equally deadly mudslides.

In fact, environmental regulations associated with ill-fated attempts to help the spotted owl have eliminated logging and clearing throughout California and most of the Mountain West – with catastrophic results. Special legislation has been drafted to begin to address this problem.

However, it is uncertain whether the legislation will be enacted and whether timber harvesting and/or fuel reduction strategies can be implemented in time to address the fuel excesses that exacerbate these dangerous conditions, setting the stage for yet another round of infernos and mudslides that wipe out wildlife habitats, destroy homes and communities, and leave hundreds of people dead, injured or burned horribly. When will the responsible parties be held accountable, and compelled to change their ways?

Via email. Robert W. Endlich has a bachelor’s degree in geology and a master’s in meteorology and served as US Air Force Weather Officer for 21 Years. He has provided toxic corridor and laser propagation support to the High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility at White Sands Missile Range, published in the technical literature and worked as software test engineer at New Mexico State University

More Evidence the Ethanol Mandate Hurts the Economy

Much of the trouble has to do with a regulatory requirement known as renewable identification numbers (RINs).

Oil refinery Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) has a serious beef with the George W. Bush-era biofuel mandate that it says has forced the company into bankruptcy. Unfortunately, other companies face a similar plight absent major regulatory changes. It’s been more than a decade now since Congress stipulated that ethanol be blended with gasoline before hitting the market. It’s a boon for farmers, but it hurts both consumers and refineries like Philadelphia Energy Solution. Much of that has to do with a regulatory requirement known as renewable identification numbers (RINs).

According to The Washington Times, “RINs work to ensure that refiners — who hold the ‘point of obligation’ under law, meaning they are responsible for blending ethanol with gas — meet the yearly biofuels quotas set by the EPA. But many refiners, such as Philadelphia Energy Solutions, don’t have the infrastructure to blend the fuels. In such circumstances, companies use a system that somewhat resembles a cap-and-trade approach: buying unused RINs from larger refineries that have blending capacity and have extra credits to spare. The price of those RINs fluctuates wildly. Just a few years ago, RINs were sold for just a few cents, but they have skyrocketed to well over $1 recently.”

This process is unfair and elicits corruption from major industry players that have better resources and can sell credits for their own benefit. As one energy-sector official explained it: “It’s picking and choosing winners within the oil industry in a way that’s causing some to go bankrupt.” Moreover, when used to support large-scale operations, that money adds up quickly. In fact, PES says crude oil accounts for its biggest expense, but, amazingly, that’s followed in second place by RIN compliance costs. Yet Renewable Fuels Association CEO Bob Dinneen asserts, “If refiners truly want lower RIN prices, the answer is really quite simple: blend more ethanol.” He added, “The very purpose of the [mandate] is to drive expanded consumption of renewable fuels, and the RIN provides a powerful incentive to do just that.”

This is a baffling and self-defeating position to take. Anyone who owns an older vehicle or lawn care equipment knows the mechanical damage that ethanol causes. Despite this, congressional leaders like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) remain diehard fans of the mandate. According to Grassley, “I’m confident that the Renewable Fuel Standard isn’t harming refineries, that other factors are at work and that the RFS law is working as Congress intended. Once these facts are known, there ought to be an end to the misleading rhetoric blaming the RFS.” Grassley is so invested in this ruse that last October he threatened to sideline Trump’s nominees unless they left the mandate alone.

Unfortunately, Grassley’s support is shared by the Trump administration. Last May, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue announced the mandate would stay intact. At least EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt recognizes the RIN catastrophe. He recently said, “We need RIN reform. It’s something I’ve talked to Congress about. We have to take steps to address this, and I think there are many that understand that.”

But even he went on to explain, “This isn’t getting rid of the ethanol requirement; this is the accounting mechanism to ensure that a certain percentage of our fuel actually has ethanol. So it truly is an enforcement mechanism that is being used in ways that it really wasn’t intended. We need to get reform around that.” What all of them miss is that the RIN situation is just a symptom of a very bad law. The U.S. is awash in oil, but that production can’t be maximized unless the biofuel mandate is repealed in its entirety. At least the Philadelphia Energy Solutions ordeal provides another good reason to keep trying.

SOURCE

Update: libel cases and the ‘climate wars’

by Judith Curry

Big news in the world of ‘climate wars’ – the libel case of Andrew Weaver versus Tim Ball has been dismissed by the judge — for a rather surprising reason.

Some context on all this is provided in a WUWT post by Tim Ball — Tim Ball’s Victory in the First Climate Lawsuit Judgement – The Backstory.   The text of the judgment is available online [here].

A post at DeSmog blog — Climate Denier Tim Ball: Trump Approved, But Not Credible Enough to Stand Accountable For Libel — makes an interesting point that is the main focus of my comments:

Justice Skolrood found that “… despite Dr. Ball’s history as an academic and a scientist, the Article is rife with errors and inaccuracies, which suggests a lack of attention to detail on Dr. Ball’s part, if not an indifference to the truth.” The judge further accepted that Ball was committed to damaging Weaver’s reputation. Justice Skolrood wrote: “These allegations are directed at Dr. Weaver’s professional competence and are clearly derogatory of him. Indeed, it is quite apparent that this was Dr. Ball’s intent.”

From Justice Skolrood’s Reasons for Judgment: “The Article is poorly written and does not advance credible arguments in favour of Dr. Ball’s theory about the corruption of climate science. Simply put, a reasonably thoughtful and informed person who reads the Article is unlikely to place any stock in Dr. Ball’s views, including his views of Dr. Weaver as a supporter of conventional climate science.”

Having admitted that his client was guilty of defamation, Scherr demanded that Weaver should have to prove that the defamatory comments actually caused damage. In the judge’s words, Scherr was seeking “a threshold of seriousness,” and arguing, in effect, that his client’s work didn’t meet that threshold.

The notion arose from a case in another Canadian province (Vellacott v. Saskatoon Star Phoenix Group Inc. et al, Saskatchewan, 2012). In that case, the court found that certain published comments were not defamatory because they were so ludicrous and outrageous as to be unbelievable and therefore incapable of lowering the reputation of the plaintiff in the minds of right-thinking persons. Against that standard, Justice Skolrood wrote, “the impugned words here are not as hyperbolic as the words in Vellacott, (but) they similarly lack a sufficient air of credibility to make them believable and therefore potentially defamatory.”

Weaver’s lawyer, Roger McConchie, is already preparing the appeal.

So did Tim Ball libel Andrew Weaver? Yes. Did Tim Ball’s libelous statements damage Andrew Weaver in any way? No. Was the judge’s argument of ‘lacking a sufficient air of credibility’ an appropriate rationale for his decision? Is making a libelous statement canceled out if your argument lacks credibility?

Well, application of this kind of reasoning takes you into some interesting directions in Mann’s libel lawsuits

Mann’s lawsuits

Weaver vs Ball is a sideshow to the main events of Michael Mann’s lawsuits against Tim Ball, Rand Simberg, National Review and Mark Steyn.

The suits involving Simberg, Steyn and National Review seem hopelessly mired in delays in DC courts. The Mann vs Ball case will also be tried in the Canadian court system, and presumably will move forward (somewhat) more quickly.

If the same reasoning in the Weaver versus Ball case prevails, then I would expect a similar outcome in Mann versus Ball.

How would this reasoning play out in the Mann versus Steyn et al. lawsuits? Steyn and Simberg (who are not scientists) made comments about Mann that were intended to be humorous and clever in the context of political satire, rather than seriously argued professional assessments of Mann’s research.

Under this ruling, it seems that carefully argued statements against an individual or an argument are required for damage? Even mores if the statements are made by an expert?

I have made this point before: Mann’s libelous statements about me (because he is a scientist with many awards) are far more serious than say Rand Simberg’s statements about Mann.

Mark Jacobsen’s lawsuit against scientists and PNAS who published a rebuttal of his paper definitely meets the requirement of damage to his reputation, but it isn’t libel if the statements are correct or at least justified by evidence and arguments.

It seems that the following reasoning should apply to these lawsuits:

assess whether there was any reputational or financial damage incurred by the litigant

assess whether the statement in question is well argued and/or ‘true’

assess whether the defendant in the litigation has sufficient reputation or standing to influence public opinion on the topic of the litigation.

The instinct of the defendants in these cases has been to address #2. It is arguably more important and effective defense to address #1 and #3.

Mann’s AAAS Award

It is becoming very hard for Mann to claim damages from such ‘insults’ and alleged libel, given the awards, big lecture fees and book fees.

The latest award bestowed upon Mann:   the AAAS has decided in 2018 to give him its prestigious award for Public Engagement with Science.

More HERE

Exxon Sues the Suers in Fierce Climate-Change Case

As climate-change lawsuits against the oil industry mount, Exxon Mobil Corp. is taking a bare-knuckle approach rarely seen in legal disputes: It’s going after the lawyers who are suing it.

The company has targeted at least 30 people and organizations, including the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts, hitting them with suits, threats of suits or demands for sworn depositions. The company claims the lawyers, public officials and environmental activists are “conspiring” against it in a coordinated legal and public relations campaign.

Exxon has even given that campaign a vaguely sinister-sounding name: “The La Jolla playbook.” According to the company, about two dozen people hatched a strategy against it at a meeting six years ago in an oceanfront cottage in La Jolla, Calif.

"It’s an aggressive move,” said Howard Erichson, an expert in complex litigation and a professor at Fordham University School of Law in New York. “Does Exxon really need these depositions or is Exxon seeking the depositions to harass mayors and city attorneys into dropping their lawsuits?”

At Stake

Experts say Exxon’s combative strategy -- an extraordinary gambit to turn the tables -- is a clear sign of what’s at stake for the fossil-fuel industry. So far, New York City and eight California cities and counties, including San Francisco and Oakland, have sued Exxon and other oil and gas companies. They allege that oil companies denied findings of climate-change scientists despite knowing that the use of fossil fuels posed “grave risk” to the planet.

Attorneys general Eric Schneiderman of New York and Maura Healey of Massachusetts, are investigating whether Exxon covered up information on climate change, defrauding shareholders and consumers.

Exxon, the world’s 10th biggest company, has denied the allegations and says its defense is intended to show that it’s being punished for not toeing the line on climate change, even though it agrees with the scientific consensus.

“The attorneys general have violated Exxon Mobil’s right to participate in the national conversation about how to address the risks presented by climate change,” said Dan Toal, a lawyer who represents Exxon. “That is the speech at issue here -- not some straw man argument about whether climate change is real.”

‘Scare Tactic’
Plaintiff lawyers and legal experts contend the oil giant’s tactics are meant to intimidate while shifting the spotlight away from claims of environmental damage. And they say there’s nothing improper with lawyers discussing legal strategies together.

"It’s crazy that people are subpoenaed for attending a meeting," said Sharon Eubanks, a lawyer who was at the La Jolla gathering. "It’s sort of like a big scare tactic: reframe the debate, use it as a diversionary tactic and scare the heck out of everybody."

Exxon has focused on the La Jolla meeting as ground zero for its conspiracy claim. Ironically, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a nonprofit run by descendants of John D. Rockefeller who are pressing Exxon to address climate change issues, has funded organizations that led the La Jolla conference (Exxon, which grew out of John D.’s Standard Oil, also subpoenaed the fund to testify.)

At the gathering, participants met to discuss litigation strategies that could be applied to climate change, according to a 35-page summary that was later made public. Eubanks, a former Justice Department lawyer, talked about how the U.S. government used the racketeering law against cigarette makers, for example.

More than four years after the meeting, Eubanks got a subpoena from Exxon to testify about it. The subpoena is pending.

Document Request

Exxon has also aimed its legal firepower at Matthew Pawa, whose firm represents Oakland, San Francisco and New York in their suits against Exxon. Last month, Exxon asked a state judge in Fort Worth, Texas, to order Pawa to turn over documents and testify under oath about the La Jolla conference and other conversations with lawyers and activists. He’s also been subpoenaed to testify in a federal action Exxon has brought against the state attorneys general.

Pawa declined to comment.

The company is also seeking testimony from 15 municipal lawyers and officials in California. Exxon said it’s seeking evidence for “an anticipated suit” claiming civil conspiracy and violation of its First Amendment and other Constitutional rights.

Routine Meetings

Experts in litigation say that lawyers in big lawsuits, including those targeting tobacco, guns and pharmaceuticals, routinely meet to share information and coordinate strategy.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with plaintiffs’ lawyers and attorneys general strategizing together,” said Fordham professor Erichson, ”just as I don’t think there’s anything wrong with lawyers for oil companies strategizing together.”

But Linda Kelly, general counsel of the National Association of Manufacturers, said the climate litigation is really a play for money and votes.

“It’s a coming together of plaintiffs’ lawyers who have a profit motive and a liability theory, environmental activists who have a political agenda and politicians who are looking to make a name for themselves with this issue,” Kelly said.

Contingent Fees

San Francisco has promised 23.5 percent of any settlement to its lawyers. New York is working on a contingent-fee deal like San Francisco’s, according to a spokesman for the city’s Law Department.

In recent years, the most notable attack on a plaintiff lawyer came in 2011 when Chevron Corp., claiming it was target of an extortion scheme, successfully pursued a civil racketeering suit against Steven Donziger, the attorney behind a $9.5 billion Ecuadorian judgment against the company over pollution in the Amazon.

Some experts say Exxon’s strategy goes beyond mere litigation tactics.

"People often try to use litigation to change the cultural conversation," said Alexandra Lahav, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, pointing to litigation over guns and gay rights as examples. "Exxon is positioning itself as a victim rather than a perpetrator."

SOURCE

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

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

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15 February, 2018

Satellites show warming is accelerating sea level rise (?)

Dedicated Warmist Seth Borenstein sets out below a coherent story about warming causing sea-level rise. He regurgitates all the usual Warmist talking points regardless of their truth. He says, for instance, that the Antarctic is melting when it is not.

So we have to go back to the journal article behind Seth's splurge to see what the scientists are saying. I append it below Seth's article.

And what we see there is very different from Seth's confident pronouncements. We see a very guarded article indeed which rightly lists many of the difficulties in measuring sea level rise. And they can surmount those difficulties only by a welter of estimates and adjustments. Anywhere in that process there could be errors and biases. And as a result, we see that the journal authors describe their findings as only a"preliminary estimate" of sea level rise.

And it gets worse. When we look further into the journal article we see that the sea level rise is measured in terms of only 64 thousandths of one millimeter. So we are in the comedy of the absurd. Such a figure is just a statistical artifact with no observable physical equivalent.

So the sea level rise Seth talks about with great confidence ends up being an unbelievably small quantity measured with great imprecision! Amazing what you find when you look at the numbers, isn't it?

Melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are speeding up the already fast pace of sea level rise, new satellite research shows.

At the current rate, the world’s oceans on average will be at least 2 feet higher by the end of the century compared to today, according to researchers who published in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

Sea level rise is caused by warming of the ocean and melting from glaciers and ice sheets. The research, based on 25 years of satellite data, shows that pace has quickened, mainly from the melting of massive ice sheets.

It confirms scientists’ computer simulations and is in line with predictions from the United Nations, which releases regular climate change reports.

"It’s a big deal" because the projected sea level rise is a conservative estimate and it is likely to be higher, said lead author Steve Nerem of the University of Colorado.

Outside scientists said even small changes in sea levels can lead to flooding and erosion. "Any flooding concerns that coastal communities have for 2100 may occur over the next few decades," Oregon State University coastal flooding expert Katy Serafin said.

More than three-quarters of the acceleration of sea level rise since 1993 is due to melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, the study shows. Of the 3 inches of sea level rise in the past quarter century, about 55 percent is from warmer water expanding, and the rest is from melting ice.

Like weather and climate, there are two factors in sea level rise: year-to-year small rises and falls that are caused by natural events, and larger long-term rising trends that are linked to man-made climate change.

Nerem’s team removed the natural effects of the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption that temporarily chilled Earth and the climate phenomena El Nino and La Nina, and found the accelerating trend.

Sea level rise, more than temperature, is a better gauge of climate change in action, said Anny Cazenave, director of Earth science at the International Space Science Institute in France, who edited the study. Cazenave is one of the pioneers of space-based sea level research.

Global sea levels were stable for about 3,000 years until the 20th century, when they rose and then accelerated due to global warming caused by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, said climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute in Germany, who wasn’t part of the study.

Two feet of sea level rise by the end of the century "would have big effects on places like Miami and New Orleans, but I don’t still view that as catastrophic" because those cities can survive — at great expense — that amount of rising seas under normal situations, Nerem said.

But when a storm like 2012’s Hurricane Sandy hits, sea level rise on top of storm surge can lead to record-setting damage, researchers said.

Some scientists at the American Geophysical Union meeting last year said Antarctica may be melting faster than predicted by Monday’s study.

Greenland has caused three times more sea level rise than Antarctica so far, but ice melt on the southern continent is responsible for more of the acceleration.

"Antarctica seems less stable than we thought a few years ago," Rutgers climate scientist Robert Kopp said.

The reduction of ice in Antarctica has increased the sense of urgency among travelers hoping to see the continent. Tourism in Antarctica has risen from fewer than 2,000 visitors in the 1980s to more than 45,000 visitors from around the world last year.

The number of people traveling to the frozen continent dipped during the economic recession of the late 2000s, but rose again in recent years, according to data kept by the Rhode-Island based International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators.

SOURCE

Climate-change–driven accelerated sea-level rise detected in the altimeter era

By R. S. Nerem et al.

Abstract

Using a 25-y time series of precision satellite altimeter data from TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, Jason-2, and Jason-3, we estimate the climate-change–driven acceleration of global mean sea level over the last 25 y to be 0.084 ± 0.025 mm/y2. Coupled with the average climate-change–driven rate of sea level rise over these same 25 y of 2.9 mm/y, simple extrapolation of the quadratic implies global mean sea level could rise 65 ± 12 cm by 2100 compared with 2005, roughly in agreement with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report (AR5) model projections.

Introduction

Satellite altimeter data collected since 1993 have measured a rise in global mean sea level (GMSL) of ?3 ± 0.4 mm/y (1, 2), resulting in more than 7 cm of total sea-level rise over the last 25 y. This rate of sea-level rise is expected to accelerate as the melting of the ice sheets and ocean heat content increases as greenhouse gas concentrations rise. Acceleration of sea-level rise over the 20th century has already been inferred from tide-gauge data (3?–5), although sampling and data issues preclude a precise quantification. The satellite altimeter record of sea-level change from TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, Jason-2, and Jason-3 is now approaching 25 y in length, making it possible to begin probing the record for climate-change–driven acceleration of the rate of GMSL change (6). Unlike tide-gauge data, these retrievals sample the open ocean and allow for precise quantitative statements regarding global sea level. However, detecting acceleration is difficult because of (i) interannual variability in GMSL largely driven by changes in terrestrial water storage (TWS) (7?–9), (ii) decadal variability in TWS (10), thermosteric sea level, and ice sheet mass loss (11) that might masquerade as a long-term acceleration over a 25-y record, (iii) episodic variability driven by large volcanic eruptions (12), and (iv) errors in the altimeter data, in particular, potential drifts in the instruments over time (13). With careful attention to each of these issues, however, a preliminary satellite-based estimate of the climate-change–driven acceleration of sea-level rise can be obtained. This estimate is useful for understanding how the Earth is responding to warming, and thus better informs us of how it might change in the future.

SOURCE

Massachusetts hypocrisy

To build the new $27 billion gas export plant on the Arctic Ocean that now keeps the lights on in Massachusetts, Russian firms bored wells into fragile permafrost; blasted a new international airport into a pristine landscape of reindeer, polar bears, and walrus; dredged the spawning grounds of the endangered Siberian sturgeon in the Gulf of Ob to accommodate large ships; and commissioned a fleet of 1,000-foot icebreaking tankers likely to kill seals and disrupt whale habitat as they shuttle cargoes of super-cooled gas bound for Asia, Europe, and Everett.

On the plus side, though, they didn’t offend Pittsfield or Winthrop, Danvers or Groton, with even an inch of pipeline.

This winter’s unprecedented imports of Russian liquefied natural gas have already come under fire from Greater Boston’s Ukrainian-American community, because the majority shareholder of the firm that extracted the fuel has been sanctioned by the US government for its links to the war in eastern Ukraine and Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. Last week, in response to the outcry, a group of Massachusetts lawmakers, led by Senator Ed Markey, blasted the shipments and called on the federal government to stop them.

But apart from its geopolitical impact, Massachusetts’ reliance on imported gas from one of the world’s most threatened places is also a severe indictment of the state’s inward-looking environmental and climate policies. Public officials, including Attorney General Maura Healey and leading state senators, have leaned heavily on righteous-sounding stands against local fossil fuel projects, with scant consideration of the global impacts of their actions and a tacit expectation that some other country will build the infrastructure that we’re too good for.

As a result, to a greater extent than anywhere else in the United States, the Commonwealth now expects people in places like Russia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Yemen to shoulder the environmental burdens of providing natural gas that state policy makers have showily rejected here. The old environmentalist slogan — think globally and act locally — has been turned inside out in Massachusetts.

But more than just traditional NIMBYism is at work in the state’s resistance to natural gas infrastructure. There’s also the $1 million the parent company of the Everett terminal spent lobbying Beacon Hill from 2013 to 2017, amid a push to keep out the domestic competition that’s ended LNG imports in most of the rest of the United States.

And there’s a trendy, but scientifically unfounded, national fixation on pipelines that state policy makers have chosen to accommodate. Climate advocates, understandably frustrated by slow progress at the federal level, have put short-term tactical victories against fossil fuel infrastructure ahead of strategic progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and so has Beacon Hill. They’ve obsessed over stopping domestic pipelines, no matter where those pipes go, what they carry, what fuels they displace, and how the ripple effects of those decisions may raise overall global greenhouse gas emissions.

The environmental movement needs a reset, and so does Massachusetts policy. The real-world result of pipeline absolutism in Massachusetts this winter has been to steer energy customers to dirtier fuels like coal and oil, increasing greenhouse gas emissions. And the state is now in the indefensible position of blocking infrastructure here, while its public policies create demand for overseas fossil fuel infrastructure like the Yamal LNG plant — a project likely to inflict far greater near and long-term harm to the planet.

SOURCE

Trump budget guts climate science funding

If it's "settled science" why does it need any more research?

The Trump administration is targeting federal funding for studying and tracking climate change while boosting the continued burning of fossil fuels.

The White House’s 2019 spending plan seeks to reduce or eliminate climate science programs across an array of federal agencies, from gutting efforts to track greenhouse gas emissions and research to eliminating funding for NASA satellites that study the impacts of climate change.

Though President Donald Trump’s budget unveiled earlier this week is highly unlikely to be adopted by Congress, it is a direct indicator of just how little weight his administration is giving to warnings from climate scientists about longer droughts, stronger storms and rising seas.

Mr Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and appointed forceful advocates for increased oil, gas and coal production to lead key federal agencies overseeing environmental enforcement, energy production and public lands.

In the 160-page budget summary released by the White House, the term “climate change” is only mentioned once — in the name of a science program marked for elimination at the Environmental Protection Agency.

A week after EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt suggested global warming might be beneficial to humanity, his agency issued a 47-page strategic plan for the next five years that does not include the word “climate.” Asked about the absence of climate change in the budget and the strategic plan, EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said the agency will focus on its core goals which “are designed to transform the way the agency does business and more efficiently and effectively delivers human health and environmental results.”

Environmentalists say the deep budget cuts, if implemented, would amount to suppressing facts about global warming while turning up the Earth’s thermostat by pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Mr Trump’s proposed budget for EPA eliminates $US16.5 million in funding and 48 full- time jobs at the Global Change Research program, which develops scientific information related to climate change and its impacts on human health, the environment and the economy. Also zeroed out is $US66 million for the Atmospheric Protection Program, a collection of climate-related partnerships seeking voluntarily air pollution reductions by private companies.

EPA’s Atmospheric Protection Program, tasked with completing an annual US inventory of greenhouse gas emissions to fulfil international climate treaty obligations would be slashed from $US103 million to less than $US14 million, a reduction of about 87 per cent. The White House would also eliminate the Science to Achieve Results program, which provides $US28 million in research grants and academic fellowships in environmental science and engineering.

At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, money for climate- related research would be cut by more than one third, to $US99 million. That includes eliminating research programs to better understand the Earth climate system and research into decreases in Arctic sea ice. Trump’s budget also seeks to cancel five Earth-observing satellites costing about $US133 million in 2019. That includes a satellite designed to monitor Earth’s carbon cycle, which is key to tracking climate change.

Meanwhile, the White House is promoting what Mr Trump has dubbed an “energy dominance” strategy, emphasising increased investments in oil, gas and coal. At the Department of Energy, research into new renewable energy technologies is shifting to boost research into fossil fuels.

The budget “demonstrates the administration’s commitment to American energy dominance, making hard choices, and reasserting the proper role of the federal government,” the White House’s budget blueprint says. “In so doing, the budget emphasises energy technologies best positioned to enable American energy independence and domestic job-growth.” The budget for the Department of Interior seeks to ramp up drilling and mining on federally owned land while repealing an Obama-era rule requiring oil and gas operations to reduce leaks of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps about 25 times more heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

SOURCE

Pope Francis, the Amazon, and Property Rights

Pope Francis decried the poverty and environmental ruination of the Amazon during his trip to Peru last month. He has also announced the convening of Catholic bishops next year to discuss problems facing the region’s resources and peoples. However, he has yet to draw attention to the institution that would both conserve the environment and promote economic self-improvement: property rights. The omission is glaring, given the support that the church has historically expressed toward property rights, according to Independent Institute Research Fellow Robert M. Whaples, editor of Pope Francis and the Caring Society, and Research Fellow Adam Summers.

To understand why private landownership is so helpful in promoting economic empowerment and prosperity, Whaples and Summers explain, Pope Francis would do well to consult the writings of Pope Leo XIII, who in 1891 wrote: “Men always work harder and more readily when they work on that which belongs to them.” Property rights offer a similar benefit for resource conservation. Inadequate enforcement of property rights is, in fact, the reason that wildlife poachers and illegal gold miners have succeeded in threatening endangered species, destroying sensitive habitat, and corrupting public officials.

To see the difference that property rights can make, one need only compare the lush forests of the Dominican Republic, where property rights are enforced, with the relative environmental squalor of neighboring Haiti, where property-rights protections are weaker. “Incorporating these lessons would help Pope Francis and the church to even better advance the aims of protecting the environment and drastically reducing poverty and corruption,” Whaples and Summers conclude.

SOURCE

Let's Make America a Mineral Superpower

Why is the United States reliant on China and Russia for strategic minerals when we have more of these valuable resources than both these nations combined?

This has nothing to do with geological impediments. It is all politics.

This is an underreported scandal that jeopardizes American security. As recently as 1990, the U.S. was No. 1 in the world in mining output. But according to the latest data from the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. is 100 percent import dependent for at least 20 critical and strategic minerals (not including each of the “rare earths”), and between 50 and 99 percent reliant for another group of 30 key minerals. Why aren’t alarm bells ringing?

This import dependency has grown worse over the last decade. We now are dependent on imports for vital strategic metals that are necessary components for military weapon systems, cellphones, solar panels and scores of new-age high-technology products. We don’t even have a reliable reserve stockpile of these resources.

Fortunately, the Trump administration is working to reverse decades of policies that have inhibited our ability to mine our own abundant resources, mostly in the western states — Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and the Dakotas. In December the Trump administration issued a long-overdue policy directive designed to open up federal lands and streamline the permitting process so America can mine again.

No nation on the planet is more richly endowed with a treasure chest of these metals than the U.S. The U.S. Mining Association estimates there are more than $6 trillion in resources. We could easily add $50 billion of GDP every year through a smart mining policy.

Environmentalists are threatening to file lawsuits and throwing up other obstacles to this pro-economic development mineral policy — just as they oppose more open drilling for oil and gas. The stupidity of this anti-mining stance is that the green energy sources that they crave — solar and wind power — are dependent on rare metals to be viable.

Rare earth minerals are the seeds for building new technologies, and a strong case could be made that these strategic metals are the oil of the 21st century.

The suite of 15 primary minerals — which the U.S. has in abundance domestically — has been referred to as “the vitamins of chemistry.” They exhibit unique attributes, such as magnetism, stability at extreme temperatures, and resistance to corrosion: properties that are key to today’s manufacturing. These rare earth elements are essential for military and civilian use for the production of high-performance permanent magnets, GPS guidance systems, satellite imaging and night vision equipment, flat screens, sunglasses and a myriad of other technology products.

Thanks to hostility to mining, huge portions of public lands in the west have not been explored or mapped in nearly enough detail to satisfy the hunt for minerals. It takes seven to 10 years to get mining permits here, versus two or three years in Australia and Canada. The nation must also map and explore again as was done in the Old West, when mining for gold, copper, coal and other resources was common.

Mineral imports from China and Russia are providing enormous geopolitical leverage to these countries at precisely the wrong time in global events. China, Russia and others have used their mineral wealth to hold importing countries hostage. Do we want Vladimir Putin to hold the commanding heights on strategic minerals?

We need a change in strategy and philosophy when it comes to mining. For federal land development, the 20th-century philosophy of “lock up and preserve” needs to be replaced with an ethic of “use and explore.” We have hundreds of years of these resources with existing technology.

China’s leaders have been known to boast that the Middle East has the oil and China has the rare earth minerals. But that’s false. We do. With a pro-mining policy, we can make America a mineral-exporting superpower, not an importer reliant on our adversaries. This strategy has worked like a charm when it comes to energy; it should be employed to yield the same America First results for strategic minerals.

SOURCE

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

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

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14 February, 2018

For global water crisis, climate may be the last straw

The usual rubbish about drought below. It lists a whole lot of population factors that threaten the water supplies in many countries. The recent big increase in the population of India, for instance, is putting big pressure on water supplies there. So far, all very well and good.

But then comes an attempt to link the water shortage to global warming. A link is just asserted, however, with no facts or reasoning to support it other than quotes from the ethically challenged Peter Gleick and his ilk.

The fact is of course that warming would produce more rain, which would ALLEVIATE the problem, not magnify it

A lot of Africa is certainly in drought at the moment but that is one consequence of El Nino. It shifts rain around from one place to another. If a good La Nina gets going, that should bring back the rain.

The interesting thing is that in many countries in Africa and elsewhere, it is well known that water shortage is a recurrent fact of life. So do you do anything about that? You can't build any new dams because the Greenies will make such a fuss that the poliicians will cave in. Greenies would rather have people die of thirst than build a dam.

But there is one country that HAS moved out of being water-deprived and into water riches. That is Israel. They have super-efficient desalination plants on the coast that get all the water Israel needs from the sea. So the problem is solvable but it takes brains and effort. Australia has very variable rainfall so it also has big desalination plants in most of its major cities -- but it hasn't had to turn them on yet, thanks mainly to El Nino.

Before man-made climate change kicked in – and well before “Day Zero” in Cape Town, where taps may run dry in early May – the global water crisis was upon us.

Freshwater resources were already badly stressed before heat-trapping carbon emissions from fossil fuels began to warm Earth’s surface and affect rainfall.

In some countries, major rivers – diverted, dammed or over-exploited – no longer reach the sea. Aquifers millennia in the making are being sucked dry. Pollution in many forms is tainting water above ground and below.

Cape Town, though, was not especially beset by any of these problems. Indeed, in 2014 the half-dozen reservoirs that served the South African city’s four million people brimmed with rainwater.

But that was before a record-breaking, three-year, once-every-three-centuries drought reduced them to a quarter capacity or less.

Today, Capetonians are restricted to 50 litres a day – less than runs down the drain when the average American takes a shower.

Climate scientists foretold trouble, but it arrived ahead of schedule, said Helen Zille, premier of the Western Cape province. “Climate change was to have hit us in 2025,” she told a local news outlet.

“The South Africa Weather Services have told me that their models don’t work any more.”

Worldwide, the water crises hydra has been quietly growing for decades.

Since 2015, the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risk Report has consistently ranked “water crises” as among the global threats with the greatest potential impact – above natural disasters, mass migration and cyberattacks.

Borrowed time

“Across the densely-populated Indo-Gangetic Plain” – home to more than 600-million people in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – “groundwater is being pumped out at an unsustainable and terrifying rate,” said Graham Cogley, a professor emeritus at Trent University in Ontario Canada.

More than half the water in the same basin is undrinkable and unusable for irrigation due to elevated salt and arsenic levels, according to a recent study.

Groundwater provides drinking water to at least half of humanity, and accounts for more than 40% of water used for irrigation.

But underground aquifers do not fill up swiftly, as a reservoir does after a heavy rain. Their spongy rock can take centuries to fully recharge, which makes them a non-renewable resource on a human timescale.

As a result, many of the world’s regions have passed the threshold that Peter Gleick, president-emeritus of the Pacific Institute and author of “The World’s Water,” has called “peak water”.

“Today people live in places where we are effectively using all the available renewable water, or, even worse, living on borrowed time by overpumping non-renewable ground water,” he told AFP.

Exhausted groundwater supplies also cause land to subside, and allow – in coastal regions – saltwater to seep into the water table.

Dozens of mega-cities, rich and poor, are sinking: Jakarta, Mexico City, Tokyo and dozens of cities in China, including Tianjin, Beijing and Shanghai have all dropped by a couple of metres over the last century.

“Half a billion people in the world face severe scarcity all year round,” said Arjen Hoekstra, a water management expert at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

More than one in three live in India, with another 73-million in Pakistan, 27-million in Egypt, 20-million in Mexico, 20-million in Saudi Arabia and 18-million in war-torn Yemen, he calculated in a recent study.

Enter climate change

“Global warming comes on top of all this,” said Hoekstra.

For each degree of global warming, about seven percent of the world’s population – half-a-billion people – will have 20% less freshwater, the UN’s climate science panel has concluded.

By 2030, the world will face a 40% water deficit if climate change continues unchecked.

Glaciers in the Himalayas and Andes upon which half-a-billion people depend are rapidly retreating.

At the same time, global water demand is projected to increase 55% by mid-century, mainly driven by the growth of cities in developing countries.

For Gleick, global warming is already a threat multiplier.

So far, Earth’s surface temperature has risen by one degree Celsius, and the odds of meeting the UN goal of capping the rise at “well under” 2 C lengthen each year. Global warming alters wind and humidity, in turn affecting rainfall patterns.

“Climate changes caused by humans are driving changes in our water resources and demands,” Gleick told AFP. “As climate change worsens, impacts on water resources will also worsen.”

The prospect of empty water pipes haunts other urban areas in climate hot spots.

California has just emerged from a five-year drought, the worst on record. In 2014-15, Sao Paulo’s 12-million souls came close to its own “Day Zero”. Beijing, New Delhi, Mexico City and Las Vegas are among other cities that have been facing “huge water supply risks for more than a decade”, noted Hoekstra.

When climate change really kicks in, large swathes of Africa – the Sahel, along with its southern and western regions – will be especially vulnerable.

Currently, only five% of the continent’s agriculture is irrigated, leaving its population highly vulnerable to shifting weather patterns.

Two-thirds of Africans could be living under water stress within a decade, according to the World Water Council.

For Cape Town, drought conditions may be a taste of things to come.

“Our new normal, at least when it comes to rainfall, is that the chance of dry years increases as we go forward toward the end of the century, and the chance of wet years decreases,” said Piotr Wolski, a hydro-climatologist at the University of Cape Town who had compiled data going back more than a century.

More HERE

A cautious retreat

The article below was headed "Expect more 'complete surprises' from climate change: NASA's Schmidt". And that is surprisingly honest. The article starts out with a re-run of the old pine beetle scare -- which I have dealt with previously -- and from then on consists of a whole litany of things that Warmists don't know or don't understand. Most refreshing! They seem to be gradually getting around to admitting that they don't know whether the globe will warm up or not

A very amusing bit occurs at the end of the article below. Schmidt is quoted to say that the ozone layer is also being surprising. But the journalist "forgets" to say exactly what the surprise is. It is that the "Ozone layer NOT recovering" the way the Greenies said it would. Much fun!

The eruption of pine bark beetles that has devastated millions of hectares of forests in North America is an example of the surprises yet to come as the planet warms, says Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The tiny beetles, which have infested forests from Colorado to Alaska, develop a type of anti-freeze as winter arrives. With fewer cold snaps before the insects are "cold hardened", more of them are making it through to spring.

“We just don’t understand ecosystems to the extent we understand the physical climate systems," Dr Schmidt told Fairfax Media during a visit to Sydney. “We will see over the next few decades more and more thresholds being crossed.”

However, that's not to say the physical climate is fully understood either.

Carbon dioxide levels are now the highest in about three and a million years when the Earth had a "very, very different climate", Dr Schmidt said, adding it was inevitable more "unknown unknowns" would emerge.

The southern hemisphere, especially Antarctica, is of particular interest to NASA and other global organisations trying to understand how the build-up of additional heat will affect planetary processes, he said.

“There’s a tonne of extra energy that’s going into the south - in fact there’s more energy going into the sourthern ocean than the north," Dr Schmidt said. "But that isn’t necessarily being seen at the surface."

Scientists' understanding of Antarctica continues to be limited by the short observational record, with much of the data compiled only since the late 1950s.

Satellites and argo floats are also not very helpful in gauging changes under the sea ice and ice shelves.

The region is already throwing up surprises. Dr Schmidt cited the Mertz Glacier Tongue, which used to protrude about 80 kilometres into the Southern Ocean until it was cut in two by an iceberg in 2010. “It seemed very, very stable...but the whole thing got taken out by an iceberg and now it’s totally disappeared," he said.

Research is focused on places such as the Totten ice sheet "where people think there is the greatest amount of potential change in the East Antarctic ice shelf", Dr Schmidt said.

A study out last year in Science Advances estimated Totten itself had the potential to lift global sea levels by 3.5 metres if it melted entirely.

The east Antarctic ice shelves, though thought to be mostly stable, "are big enough that should anything start to happen there, these will be noticeable increases to the rate of sea level rise," Dr Schmidt said. "So that makes them interesting.”

Sea ice cover around Antarctica is close to record low levels - set just a year earlier - as the region approaches its summer minimum extent.

Antarctica is also home to another scientific surprise: the ozone hole that was detected over the contenent in the mid-1980s.

While the class of chemicals - mostly chlorofluoro carbons - were relatively well known, their potential to destroy the crucial ozone layer that helps keep out cancer-causing ultraviolet light was not.

"It was a massive shock to the system - it hadn't been predicted by anyone," Dr Schmidt told a public talk last week.

SOURCE

The Epic Failure Of Glacier-Melt. Sea Level Rise Alarmism Continues To Bespoil Climate Science

Injecting frightening scenarios into climate science reporting has seemingly become a requisite for publication.

In a new Nature Geoscience editorial, a common scare tactic is utilized by the (unidentified) author so as to grab readers’ attention.

Nature Geoscience, 2018

"The East Antarctic ice sheet is currently the largest ice mass on Earth. If it melted in its entirety, global sea levels would rise by more than 50 metres"

Wow. 50 meters. That would be catastrophic.

But then we read about real-world observations for East Antarctica. And they don’t even come close to aligning with the catastrophic scenario casually tossed into the editorial.

First of all, East Antarctica is not losing mass and adding to sea levels. The ice sheet is gaining mass and thus removing water from sea levels. The surface mass gains have been occurring not only since 1800 (Thomas et al., 2017), but for the recent decade (2003-2013) too (Martín-Español et al., 2017). Even the author of the Nature Geoscience editorial acknowledges this.

Nature Geoscience, 2018

"The East Antarctic ice sheet may be gaining mass in the current, warming climate. The palaeoclimate record shows, however, that it has retreated during previous episodes of prolonged warmth"

Not only has East Antarctica been gaining mass, the author goes on to say that it would take 100s of thousands to millions of years for Antarctica to even exhibit partial retreat. So much for the “if it melted in its entirety” warning we read earlier.

In terms of immediate sea-level rise, it is reassuring that it seems to require prolonged periods lasting hundreds of thousands to millions of years to induce even partial retreat.

So if the editorial department at Nature Geoscience realizes that it would take 100s of thousands to millions of years to even witness a partial retreat of the ice sheet, is there any scientific justification for the inclusion of the sea-levels-would-rise-50-meters-if-East-Antarctica-melted commentary? Since when do imaginary scenarios pass as science?

A ‘Staggering’ 9 Trillion Tons Of Greenland’s Ice Has Been Lost Since 1900!

It’s frightening to learn that the Greenland Ice Sheet has lost a “staggering” 9 trillion tons of ice since 1900, which is what the Washington Post warned us about in 2015.

It’s not frightening to learn that 9 trillion tons of ice losses actually amounts to less than 1 inch of sea level rise contribution from Greenland meltwater in 115 years.

Since a total sea level rise contribution of 1 inch in 115 years from the Greenland ice sheet isn’t scary, the author of the Washington Post article (Chris Mooney) finds it necessary to offer his readers a macabre thought experiment: What if that additional 1 inch of water sitting atop the world ocean were to be collected somehow and then dumped onto all the United States interstate highways?   Now that would be scary. It would mean that 1 inch of sea level rise turned into 98 feet of sea levels rise (63 times over) in very same imaginary world where additional sea water is dumped onto U.S. interstate highways.

This is how the modern version of climate science works.

More HERE

Crooked polar bear scientists

Richard Tol has recently written a commentary on a paper by some polar bear scientists which is designed to discredit honest observer and Arctic expert, Susan Crockford. Crockford says the bears are flourishing. Tol says that the paper has been stuck in the editorial office for a month now but he has put it up on the net anyway. The Abstract is below. What he writes is a total demolition of this dishonest attack on Crockford. If global warming was science, the reputation of the authors would be totally destroyed. You can read the full paper at the link below.

LIPSTICK ON A BEAR: A COMMENT ON INTERNET BLOGS, POLAR BEARS, AND CLIMATE-CHANGE DENIAL BY PROXY

Anand Rajan KDa and Richard S. J. Tol

Abstract

Harvey et al. (2017) is an attempt on a colleague's reputation. They collected data by an unclear process, validated by data of unknown provenance. They artificially inflate the dimensionality of their data before reducing that dimensionality with a questionably applied PCA. They pretend their results are two dimensional where there is only one dimension. They suggest that there are many nuanced positions where there are only a few stark ones (in their data), using a jitter to conceal poor data quality, and obscure the underlying perspectival homogeneity due to self-selection. They show that there is disagreement on the vulnerability of polar bears to climate change, but offer no new evidence who is right or wrong, apart from a fallacious argument from authority, with a “majority view” taken from an unrepresentative sample.

SOURCE

Britain Needs To Embrace The Shale Revolution

Matt Ridley

Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing are the biggest energy breakthrough of the century.

Gas will start flowing from Cuadrilla’s two shale exploration wells in Lancashire this year. Preliminary analysis of the site is “very encouraging”, bearing out the British Geological Survey’s analysis that the Bowland Shale beneath northern England holds one of the richest gas resources known: a huge store of energy at a cost well below that of renewables and nuclear.

A glance across the Atlantic shows what could be in store for Britain, and what we have missed out on so far because of obstacles put in place by mendacious pressure groups and timid bureaucrats. Thanks to shale, America last week surpassed the oil production record it set in 1970, having doubled its output in seven years, while also turning gas import terminals into export terminals.

The effect of the shale revolution has been seismic. Cheap energy has brought industry back to America yet carbon dioxide emissions have been slashed far faster than in Europe as lower-carbon gas displaces high-carbon coal. Environmental problems have, contrary to the propaganda, been minimal.

All thoughts of imminent peak oil and peak gas have vanished. Opec’s cartel has been broken, after it failed to kill the shale industry by driving the oil price lower: American shale producers cut costs faster than anybody thought possible. A limit has been put on the economic and political power of both Russia and Saudi Arabia, no bad thing for the people of both countries and their neighbours. Shale drillers turn gas and oil production on and off in response to price fluctuations more flexibly than old-fashioned wells.

Seven years ago it was possible to argue that shale would prove a flash in the pan. No longer: horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing are the biggest energy news of the century. For those who still think the falling price of wind and solar is more dramatic, consider this. Between them, those two energy sources provided just 0.8 per cent of the world’s energy in 2016, even after trillions of dollars in subsidy, and will reach only 3.6 per cent by 2040, according to the International Energy Agency. Gas will then be providing 25 per cent of the world’s energy, up from 22 per cent today.

SOURCE

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

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

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13 February, 2018

British Labour Party leader Promises To Nationalise Britain’s Energy Companies To Prevent ‘Climate Catastrophe’

This makes not a scrap of sense but it may win a lot of votes

Jeremy Corbyn will nationalise all of Britain’s energy companies in order to avoid the “climate catastrophe” threatened by global warming, the Labour leader said today.

Corbyn used his appearance at his party’s “alternative models of ownership” conference in central London, to promise that he will buy up Britain’s entire energy network.

“The challenge of climate change requires us to radically shift the way we organise our economy,” he said.

“In 1945, elected to govern a country ravaged by six years of war, the great Attlee Labour Government knew that the only way to rebuild our economy was through a decisive turn to collective action. Necessary action to help avert climate catastrophe requires us to be at least as radical.”

The Labour leader said his government would be part of a “wave of change” in favour of nationalising public utilities across the world.

“We can put Britain at the forefront of the wave of change across the world in favour of public, democratic ownership and control of our services and utilities,” Corbyn said.

“From India to Canada, countries across the world are waking up to the fact that privatisation has failed, and taking back control of their public services.

The Labour leader raised the possibility of local communities being told to produce their own energy, which would then be hooked up to the national grid. “The greenest energy is usually the most local,” he said.

“But people have been queuing up for years to connect renewable energy to the national grid. With the national grid in public hands, we can put tackling climate change at the heart of our energy system. To go green, we must take control of our energy.”

Corbyn’s announcement follows his similar calls to nationalise the railway network and other utilities.

Recent polling has found high support for Labour’s agenda. A Populus poll, commissioned by the Legatum Institute last October, found that 83% of the public supported nationalising water providers, while 77% supported nationalising the electricity and gas networks and 76% supported nationalising the railway network.

However, business leaders today dismissed Corbyn’s announcement as “missing the point.”

“Labour’s calls for nationalisation continue to miss the point,” Neil Carberry, CBI Managing Director for People and Infrastructure, said,

“At a time when the UK must be seen more than ever as a great place to invest and create jobs, these proposals would simply wind the clock back on our economy.

“If Labour turns its back on good collaboration between the government and the private sector, public services, infrastructure and taxpayers will ultimately pay the price.”

SOURCE

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EPA head Scott Pruitt says global warming may help 'humans flourish'

EPA administrator says ‘There are assumptions made that because the climate is warming that necessarily is a bad thing’

Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has suggested that global warming may be beneficial to humans, in his latest departure from mainstream climate science.

The EPA administrator said that humans are contributing to climate “to a certain degree”, but added: “We know humans have most flourished during times of warming trends. There are assumptions made that because the climate is warming that necessarily is a bad thing.

“Do we know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100 or year 2018?” he told a TV station in Nevada. “It’s fairly arrogant for us to think we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”

Pruitt said he wanted an “honest, transparent debate about what we do know and what we don’t know, so the American people can be informed and make decisions on their own”.

Under Pruitt’s leadership, the EPA is mulling whether to stage a televised “red team blue team” debate between climate scientists and those who deny the established science that human activity is warming the planet.

Donald Trump has also repeatedly questioned the science of climate change, tweeting during a cold snap in December that the US “could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against”.

The EPA itself is unequivocal that warming temperatures, and resulting environmental changes, are a danger to human health via heatwaves, smoke from increased wildfires, worsening smog, extreme weather events, spread of diseases, water-borne illnesses and food insecurity.

Research has pointed to some potential benefits in certain areas of the world, such as areas of the Arctic opening up to agriculture and shipping as frozen soils thaw and sea ice recedes. Deaths from severe cold are also expected to drop, albeit offset by rising mortality from heatwaves.

Since being installed by Trump to lead the EPA, Pruitt has overseen the repeal or delay of dozens of environmental rules, including the Obama administration’s clean power plan, which sought to curb greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants.

“There was a declared war on coal, a war on fossil fuels,” Pruitt said in his Nevada interview. “The EPA was weaponized against certain sectors of our economy and that’s not the role of a regulator. Renewables need to be part of our energy mix, but to think that will be the dominant fuel is simply fanciful.”

SOURCE

MPs Warn UK Government Not To Drop Manifesto Pledge To Block Onshore Wind Farms

MPs have warned the Government not to drop its manifesto pledge to block onshore wind farms after ministers suggested the rules could be relaxed.

David Cameron’s 2015 manifesto vowed to halt the spread of subsidised onshore wind turbines after more than 100 Conservative MPs wrote to the Prime Minister calling for wind subsidies to be scrapped.

But the dormant row over onshore wind farms threatens to reigniteafter energy ministers Claire Perry and Richard Harrington alarmed their backbench colleagues by revealing that they are working on ways to support future projects.

Ms Perry raised eyebrows late last year after saying that onshore wind “is absolutely part of the future” and that she is working on ways “to see how we might bring forward onshore wind, particularly for areas of the UK that want to deploy it.”

Richard Harrington, the junior energy minister, has also said publicly that he sees “no reason” why onshore wind farms should not compete on a level playing field against other energy options vying for financial support.

Glyn Davies, the MP for Montgomeryshire in Wales, who played a leading role in the backbench campaign against onshore wind farms, said he was “alarmed” by the change of tone among energy ministers.

“I’ve spoken to Claire Perry because I wanted to let her know my view. The minister assured me that there hasn’t been a change and I am a bit reassured by that,” he said.

“We’ve got huge numbers of people who demonstrated their opposition previously and I think all those people would be reactivated if the Government changed its position,” he warned.

SOURCE

Australia: Townsville is NOT dry because of global warming

Townsville is always pretty dry because of where it is. Why was Townsville founded? It has a negligible natural harbour, can't grow much, has no natural resources and only service industries.

Townsville was founded for one reason and one reason only. There is immediately behind it a gap in the Great Dividing Range and the gap is close to the coast. There are some small hills around the place -- who can miss the pink granite monolith of Castle hill? -- but nothing like the behemoths of the great Dividing Range elsewhere, like Mt. Bartle Frere and Bellenden Ker.

So Townsville was an ideal place to run bullock teams and later a railway from the coast through to some pretty good country inland, including the Charters Towers goldfields and the rich silver, lead and zinc mines of Mt Isa. Both trains and bullock teams are very bad at handling mountains but by starting out at Townsville, severe gradients could be avoided (maxing at 2%).

But the Great Dividing Range is the reason why the East coast strip of Queensland is generally so wet. When trade winds blow inland from the Pacific, they are heavily laden with moisture from ocean evaporation. They hit the mountains of the Great Divide and drop the moisture as rain. So a couple of hours drive to the North of Townsville are two of the highest mountains in the State -- Bartle Frere and Bellenden Ker. And guess what lies in their foothills? The town of Innisfail, one of the wettest places in the world.

So Townsville's reason for existence, a break in the Great Divide there is also the main reason why it is dry. You can't have your cake and eat it too. So the guff below is total nonsense. There's NO "invisible barrier that stops rain". It's the lack of a barrier that stops rain. Townsville will always be dry. It would not exist otherwise.

Townsville pipes in water from Mt Spec and Lake Paluma. And the Ross river has a dam on it which also supplies some water. So, with irrigation, Townville does grow crops and life is comfortable, even without much rain.

TOWNSVILLE could go from being the driest city in North Queensland to the wettest place in the state due to a quirk of global warming, a leading professor says.

Professor Ray Wills spoke to the Bulletin after a recent article which stated geography in Townsville could be to blame for the notorious “dome” — an invisible barrier that stops rain — and instead blames climate change.

Prof Wills is a commentator and adviser on sustainability and technology and responded to comments made by Thomas Hinterdorfer, a forecaster from weather group Higgins Storm Chasing.

Mr Hinterdorfer said the geography of Mount Stuart and other smaller surrounding hills were forming a barrier against rain.

Prof Wills noted Townsville had historically experienced wet periods and argued climate change was the real driver of the long dry period and failed wet seasons.

“Mount Stuart hasn’t changed in height, however the climate has and it is changing as a result of global warming,” he said.

Prof Wills said the phenomenon was linked to atmospheric circulation, temperature and rainfall.

He said Townsville temperatures were up and rainfall was down, especially in summer.

The Bureau of Meteorology’s 2017 Annual Climate Survey showed Townsville was the driest of the coastal cities in North Queensland last year and had 30 per cent less rain than the long-term average.

Townsville received just 791mm in 2017, against the long-term average of 1128mm. It is the fifth consecutive year of below-average rainfall in Townsville. The city’s residents also endured a year of hotter-than-average temperatures. But it might not stay dry for long.

Prof Wills said climate change was moving the “climate belt” — areas with distinct climates — south. “What Townsville could well be experiencing is what would have been a dry area further north that is being pushed southward,” he said.

With places such as Tully to the north of Townsville — where average annual rainfall is more than 4000mm — that could mean a wet future for Townsville.

“That’s a possible scenario,” Prof Wills said, but it could take decades. He also said mountains surrounding Townsville complicated forecasts, as did oceanic currents and atmospheric circulation.

Prof Wills said although some areas could benefit from climate change, overall it should be treated as a concerning phenomenon.

SOURCE

Firsthand in Fukushima: Fish, Evacuations, and the Real Dangers of Our Opinions

Ever since Heather and I launched Mothers for Nuclear on Earth Day, 2016, we have fielded a steady barrage of anti-nuclear sentiment from people who are not convinced about the merits of nuclear energy. One consistent taunt we hear is “go to Japan, go to Fukushima, then you’ll see that nuclear energy is not the clean energy solution you say it is.” So, on one chilly day in February of 2018, we accepted the challenge.

The timing could have been better. Besides the winter cold, I am six months pregnant and girding myself for the inevitable accusations that I am an irresponsible mother. Piles of research papers fill the backpack at my feet telling me that my choice is safe, but data alone does not explain the pull that I feel to see firsthand what happens when nuclear energy goes wrong.

We park at a TEPCO building and meet with employees to receive a briefing on our visit, who relay the current status of the site cleanup. We are directed to leave our cameras and cell phones behind, and we board a bus that will take us into the evacuation zone.

The evacuation zone is surreal – buildings devastated by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake are frozen in time. Cars are abandoned in driveways, signs for commercial buildings teeter in the air and violent piles of broken glass lay across showroom floors. Vehicle traffic passes through, but turnoffs and driveways are gated to restrict anyone from lingering. Although my intellect is aware that the earthquake caused this damage, my emotion weaves the words “nuclear disaster” into the images passing by our icy windows.

Trees and grasses didn’t get the evacuation message, and they happily stayed behind to take over buildings, parking lots, and abandoned cars. Fields that were once rice paddies are now young forests - branches tangling together and reaching for the sun with no one there to restrict their growth.

As we arrive onsite, the first thing I see is a wide expanse of tanks. These aren’t just any tanks, they are huge, hulking, welded steel giants, a silent army standing before us. TEPCO has clear-cut a forest to create space for yet another tank farm, and we learn that the site has capacity for a whopping 300 more tanks. These tanks hold processed water that was removed from the basements of the reactor buildings. Although the water has been filtered and cleaned up, the presence of tritium, a mildly radioactive isotope of hydrogen, complicates the future of this water.

Although the level of tritium in the water is far below levels that would have an impact on human health, the scientific perspective is not the only lens through which to view this issue (Conca, 2017). Officials are wrestling with the complicated issues of public perspective and stakeholder involvement – while the science says it’s safe, what will release of this water do to public opinion? Will the fishing industry be affected? Will public trust be affected? Will discrimination towards people and agricultural products from the prefecture persist? The situation requires careful consideration, and it is not a decision I envy.

After arrival onsite we are ushered into a building to begin the entry process into the radiation-controlled area. We receive another briefing, this one related to radiation exposure. I am always cautious about my radiation exposure, and especially so when pregnant. I wrote earlier about the fear that radiation exposure causes – a fear that’s amplified by our inability to see radiation or perceive how much dose we are receiving. I am not immune from that fear, but the thing that many people don’t realize about nuclear sites is the high attention given to radiation detection and measurement. For people who like being informed, a nuclear site is a comfortable place to be in regards to radiation – you can find out the radiation levels in an area before you go there, and you can use precise measuring equipment to monitor your exposure. This knowledge enables you to make real-time adjustments and keep your exposure low.

On this journey we have the honor of traveling with delegates from many different countries. A representative from Finland shared her perspectives on radiation, relating the relatively high levels of naturally occurring background radiation in Finland and in other areas around the world. If our entire globe was being held to the same cleanup standard as the land around Fukushima Dai-ichi, whole countries would be on the cleanup list (“Nuclear Radiation and Health Effects,” 2016, and “First Returns and Intentions…,” 2016). In the same conversation, we also noted the long life expectancy that Fins enjoy, and the fact that she looks close to my age when in fact she is a grandmother. Perhaps a little extra radiation isn’t the worst thing.

As the bus winds through the surprisingly large site, we see that much of the rubble created by the hydrogen explosions at Units 1, 3 and 4 has been cleared away. An enclosure is being built around the Unit 4 fuel pool to prepare for the next steps of fuel removal and storage. Radiation levels around Unit 3 are the highest that we encounter onsite as our bus passes next to the crippled structure. Closer to the water we see huge tanks that were thrown around by the tsunami like children’s bath-toys. On the site it is especially difficult to differentiate tsunami and earthquake damage from the damage caused by the hydrogen explosions. After this experience it is easier to understand why the natural disasters are conflated with the nuclear accident in the hearts and minds of people around the world.

The cleanup at the Fukushima Dai-ichi site will take decades and cost billions of dollars, although it is hard to say that this is a direct result of the nuclear accident. Some of this is also a product of our fears. Because of our fear of radiation and lack of public support for nuclear, policies are created that impose arduous and costly cleanup measures. While some of these measures are essential for continued protection of public and worker safety, many are not, and the line between the two is very blurred and very gray.

Conflicting messages from government, academic, nuclear industry, environmental advocates, and anti-nuclear groups all play a role in low public opinion and widespread mistrust. Scientists tell us that low levels of radiation are not harmful, but the policies regarding radiation limits for the general public are inconsistent. For example – in Fukushima prefecture, an evacuation order can be lifted once the radiation levels are low enough to result in an annual dose to the public of 20mSv (“First Returns and Intentions…,” 2016). However, the government also set 1mSv annual dose as a long term goal (“For Accelerating the Reconstruction of Fukushima…,” 2013). So what is safe – is 20mSv per year safe, or is 1mSv per year safe? It is not difficult to see why the public is suspicious (“First Returns and Intentions…,” 2016).

Communication needs to improve, that is undeniable. The public needs to hear consistent and accurate information about why nuclear energy is important to them, the trade-offs inherent in every energy source, and the real risks involved in their choices. Most people want to know why something matters to them before they will spend time asking questions about how it works. We can’t expect the public to become discerning nuclear experts just because a policy paper has been distributed, someone handed out a leaflet on radiation, or some guy in a suit announced that nuclear is safe. The nuclear industry has gained expert status at scaring people.

Although decades of poor communication have crippled public acceptance of nuclear energy, perhaps the most egregious offenders in this space are those individuals and organizations who intentionally spread misinformation for the purpose of stoking public fears. There is no kind way to justify this behavior. Not everyone will accept nuclear energy even when given correct information, and it is their right to be able to make up their own minds. However, I think it is also the public's right to have access to accurate information upon which to base their decisions.

Spreading fear of nuclear is not a victimless act. Have you ever said “Fukushima” to someone as a way of expressing an opinion about nuclear energy? Heather and I see this all the time on social media, as many commenters think that simply typing the word communicates enough for us to change our minds and start spewing vitriol about nuclear energy. However, did it occur to you that Fukushima is the name of an entire Japanese prefecture? Callous exaggerations of the dangers of low level radiation and the branding of the Fukushima prefecture as a toxic disaster zone is a shameful attack on the many beautiful citizens of this area, their livelihoods, their identities, and their futures.

The ocean is fine, the reopened areas are fine, and the people living here need your support (Buesseler, 2016; Conca, 2017; and “First Returns and Intentions…,” 2016). Many of these people are the same ones who saw 18,000 of their friends, family, and neighbors killed in an instant by a monstrous wave. These people deserve empathy and compassion as they rebuild their lives, not the scarlet letter that the world has pinned on them for their association with one troubled nuclear site.

Our freedom of thought is one of our most valuable treasures, but we should all understand the impact our beliefs and opinions have on others. I don’t fault those who make decisions they feel are “conservative” when lacking information, but the behavior I’d like to see us all adopt is a willingness to change our minds when presented with better information instead of digging in our heels and turning to fringe websites and discredited sources to confirm our original opinions. This is especially important when our opinions have a victim on the other end of them.

It will take weeks, months, or maybe longer to unpack and process everything I saw and learned on this visit, but for now I’ll close with these thoughts – nuclear accidents are scary, natural disasters are scarier, fear of radiation hurts people, and the fish from Fukushima are delicious.

SOURCE

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

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

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12 February, 2018

America's fight with internal enemies

The 1787 Constitution launched the concept of federalism: the idea that a national government should legislate and rule only on national issues, but otherwise should leave individual states to innovate and test their own governing principles, for better or worse. They might devise brilliant solutions that are copied by all, or provide glaring examples of what not to do elsewhere.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Lord, what were you thinking this time around, as the Founders’ vision was sorely tested on so many fronts, and the US political scene tossed and turned? My take on recent history:

Innovative, entrepreneurial spirits – aided by federalism, private land and mineral ownership, and an ability to get well underway before antagonistic federal regulators knew about it – launched a “fracking” revolution that unlocked gushers of oil and natural gas, ended “peak oil” fears, created numerous jobs, sent US and global energy prices tumbling, and powered US oil and gas production to record highs.

Related to that was the anger and frustration many had with government agencies and activist groups that ignored the enormous environmental progress America has made over the past four decades, and were demanding that we spend trillions of dollars on imaginary problems and for barely detectable (or even fabricated) benefits from further reductions in pollution – even substances that clearly are not pollutants: plant-fertilizing, crop-enhancing, planet-greening, life-giving carbon dioxide, for instance.

Those attitudes and actions reflected an obsession in some quarters with “dangerous manmade climate change” and fostered a war on fossil fuels that was locking up the nation’s huge energy supplies, driving up energy costs, forcing businesses to downsize or close their doors, killing jobs, and driving young people back to their parents’ basements or out of small towns in search of employment and better lives.

These voters were buoyed, above all, by hope that a new Washington team would bring change, reform the regulatory state, reduce burdensome taxes and regulations, and once again unleash America’s too long pent-up entrepreneurial, innovative and investment instincts, passions, spirits, abilities and determination.

The evidence suggests their hope is being rewarded, say former CKE Restaurants CEO Andy Pudzer and other observers. In anticipation of and response to an exit from the Paris climate accord, a reemphasis on fossil fuels, and multiple regulatory and tax reductions, the Dow Jones skyrocketed from 17,888 points on November 3, 2017 to an unprecedented 26,617 on January 26, 2018 – before plummeting an unheard of 2,500 points over the next six trading days, then went on a rollercoaster of corrections and profit taking.

Portfolio values soared for millions of college and retirement funds, and company, union and government pension funds. Even San Francisco decided not to eliminate fossil fuels from its pension holdings.

Over 125 companies gave hefty bonuses to employees. Walmart and other companies raised salaries. ExxonMobil plans to repatriate $50 billion for reinvestment in America, while Apple intends to bring back $350 billion over the next five years, creating 20,000 new jobs in the process. Overall, during 2017, the US economy added over 2 million full-time jobs with benefits, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics, despite two major hurricanes in Q3, the first big ones to hit the US mainland in a record twelve years.

In 2016, says Pudzer, the BLS recorded “the highest number of people working part time at year’s end since it began recording the data in 1968. In 2017, it recorded the highest number of people working full time at year’s end since 1968 and the fewest working part-time since 2011.” Meanwhile, GDP growth averaged 3% during the last three quarters of 2017, compared to a meager 1.5% during 2016.

Back on the energy and climate front, the Energy Information Administration says fossil fuels will still provide 79% of US energy in 2050–globally too. Wind and solar remain too expensive, unreliable and land-intensive to power economies or give impoverished nations the living standards they dream of.

Meanwhile, the Obama EPA’s MAGGICC climate analysis model determined that even shutting down all US coal-fired power plants and drastically limiting the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions – at a cost of up to $39 billion per year – would prevent just 0.03 degrees F of manmade global warming by 2100, even assuming CO2 drives climate change, because the world will still be burning fossil fuels. In fact, all the damage and dire threats supposedly caused by greenhouse gases exist only in computer climate models.

And those models haven’t worked in the past, don’t work now and are unlikely to work in the foreseeable future, say scientists like William Happer and Anthony Sadar. That’s because they focus on CO2, ignore the most important atmospheric gas (water vapor) and can’t solve enough equations needed to accurately describe Earth’s climate. Relying on them to decide energy and economic policies is folly and fakery.

SOURCE

Department of Energy projections to 2050 suggest that fossil fuels, not renewables, are the energy sources of America’s future

EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook provides modeled projections of domestic energy markets through 2050, and it includes cases with different assumptions regarding macroeconomic growth, world oil prices, technological progress, and energy policies. Strong domestic production coupled with relatively flat energy demand allow the United States to become a net energy exporter over the projection period in most cases. In the Reference case, natural gas consumption grows the most on an absolute basis, and nonhydroelectric renewables grow the most on a percentage basis.

The EIA provides a description of its Reference case on page 9 of the full report:

The Reference case projection assumes trend improvement in known technologies along with a view of economic and demographic trends reflecting the current views of leading economic forecasters and demographers. The Reference case generally assumes that current laws and regulations affecting the energy sector, including sunset dates for laws that have them, are unchanged throughout the projection period. The potential impacts of proposed legislation, regulations, and standards are not included.

EIA addresses the uncertainty inherent in energy projections by developing side cases with different assumptions of macroeconomic growth, world oil prices, technological progress, and energy policies. Projections in the AEO should be interpreted with a clear understanding of the assumptions that inform them and the limitations inherent in any modeling effort.

Based on the Reference case, the chart above shows that EIA projections assume that fossil fuels (crude oil, coal, and natural gas) will continue supplying about 80% of America’s energy for the next 32 years through 2050, falling just slightly below 80% starting in 2034, but still providing more than 79% of the energy supplied in 2050.

Nuclear’s share of total energy will gradually fall from 8.4% this year to slightly above 6% in 2050, while all renewables together (conventional hydroelectric, geothermal, wood and wood waste, biogenic municipal waste, other biomass, wind, photovoltaic, and solar thermal sources) will supply less than 15% of America’s energy a generation from now when today’s teenagers are middle-aged by mid-century.

That’s not a lot of progress for what President Obama called the “energy sources of the future,” while dismissing fossil fuels as “energy sources of the past.”

Bottom Line: Despite all of the hype, hope, cheerleading, fuel standards, portfolio standards, and taxpayer subsidies for renewable energies like wind and solar, America’s energy future will still rely primarily on fossil fuels to power our vehicles, heat and light our homes, and fuel the US economy. In other words, America’s energy future will look a lot like it does today with fossil fuels providing American consumers and businesses with low-cost, dependable and reliable energy for about 80% of our energy needs. Carpe oleum.

SOURCE

Global Warming Alarmism Hits Childbearing

All for the good. Getting Green/Leftists out of the gene pool would be great

“No Children Because of Climate Change? Some People Are Considering It.” That’s the topic of a New York Times piece this week in which the idea of population control goes beyond conceptualization. Some people, it turns out, are following through on the notion of sacrificing a fuller family to “save the planet.”

The Times trepidatiously reports, “It is not an easy time for people to feel hopeful, with the effects of global warming no longer theoretical, projections becoming more dire and governmental action lagging.” Speculation aside, it goes on to note, “A 32-year-old who always thought she would have children can no longer justify it to herself. A Mormon has bucked the expectations of her religion by resolving to adopt rather than give birth. An Ohio woman had her first child after an unplanned pregnancy — and then had a second because she did not want her daughter to face an environmental collapse alone.”

Population control is a contentious idea, but it’s been advocated for quite some time now — ever since the climate change scare went mainstream. It’s been suggested by people like Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, Bill and Melinda Gates, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Ted Turner, Prince William, Prince Charles and Prince Philip, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Nye, to name just a few. And let’s not forget the even more sinister side of population control — eugenics — of which Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, among others, was a big fan.

The Times acknowledges that “few, if any, studies have examined how large a role climate change plays in people’s childbearing decisions.” Regardless, there are people out there who are taking it quite seriously. But there is also hypocrisy on the part of well-known elitists who advocate population control and encourage others to oblige. For example, Bill and Melinda Gates are parents to three kids. Ted Turner has five children. Prince Philip had four. And that’s their prerogative. In fact, it’s not unnatural to want many children. It’s even — gasp — biblical.

Which makes the whole idea of population control so preposterous. Not everyone enjoys parenting or wants to be a parent — even for ridiculous reasons, as the Times piece demonstrates — but for many, there is joy in parenting. And that’s by design. It’s so impregnated in us, in fact, that some people who demand population control end up rearing numerous children of their own.

Given the prevailing winds, it seems inevitable that the population control rhetoric will, at least temporarily, win out and that more people will decide against having children. But for how long? At what point will that reckless idealism succumb to human nature’s natural instinct to seek childbearing? It depends entirely upon society’s reinvesting in the way culture is intended to operate by the Creator.

SOURCE

The sun is growing colder

By 2050, our sun is expected to be unusually cool. It’s what scientists have termed a “grand minimum” — a particularly low point in what is otherwise a steady 11-year cycle.

Over this cycle, the sun’s tumultuous heart races and rests. At its high point, the nuclear fusion at the sun’s core forces more magnetic loops high into its boiling atmosphere — ejecting more ultraviolet radiation and generating sunspots and flares.

When it’s quiet, the sun’s surface goes calm. It ejects less ultraviolet radiation.

Now scientists have scoured the skies and history for evidence of an even greater cycle amid these cycles.

One particularly cool period in the 17th century guided their research. An intense cold snap between 1645 and 1715 has been dubbed the “Maunder Minimum.” In England, the Thames River froze over. The Baltic Sea was covered in ice — so much so that the Swedish army was able to march across it to invade Denmark in 1658.

But the cooling was not uniform: Distorted weather patterns warmed up Alaska and Greenland.

These records were combined with 20 years of data collected by the International Ultraviolet Explorer satellite mission, as well as observations of nearby stars similar to the sun.

Now physicist Dan Lubin at the University of California San Diego has calculated an estimate of how much dimmer the sun is likely to be when the next such grand minimum takes place.

His team’s study has been published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. It finds that the sun is likely to be 7 percent cooler than its usual minimum. And another grand minimum is likely to be just decades away, based on the cooling spiral of recent solar cycles.

For Earth, Lubin says it first thins the stratospheric ozone layer. This impacts the insulating effect of the atmosphere, with flow-on effects including major changes to wind and weather patterns.

But it won’t stop the current trend of planetary warning, Lubin warns.

“The cooling effect of a grand minimum is only a fraction of the warming effect caused by the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” a statement from the research team reads.

“After hundreds of thousands of years of CO2 levels never exceeding 300 parts per million in air, the concentration of the greenhouse gas is now over 400 parts per million, continuing a rise that began with the Industrial Revolution.” [And what has happened as a result of that? Nothing]

SOURCE

The Greens imperil Australia's economy, alliances and world standing

One of the consequences of the creeping advance of political correctness that constrains debate in academia, bureaucracy, politics and the media is that the extreme left is normalised. In the polite society of the political/media class, overt condemnation is reserved for the hard right while even the most anarchic or obscene contributions from the green left are tolerated, apparently because their intentions might be pure.

How else to explain why the hateful and inane intercessions of the Greens are tolerated and amplified in national affairs, often without vigorous challenge from journalists or other left-of-centre politicians? Radical views from the far left are now everyday fare on social media, while public broadcasters and even News Corp’s Sky News provide it with a platform despite its stubbornly niche voter support. This skews debate and helps drag our political class further to the left.

The Greens long ago expanded their remit from protecting forests and rivers to a broader and more extreme mission. More than three decades after blocking the Franklin River dam, the Greens behave with radical internationalist fervour as their activism undermines our institutions, undercuts our economy, sabotages our borders, divides our society and opposes our alliances.

In recent weeks, Greens leader Richard Di Natale has trolled the nation by demonising Australia Day. “It’s a day that represents an act of dispossession, an act of theft,” he said. “It’s a day that represents the beginning of an ongoing genocide, the slaughter of so many Aboriginal people.”

And these are the words of someone whose freedom, upbringing, education, prosperity and career have been bestowed as a consequence of the settlement that began on January 26, 1788.

This week another Greens MP, Adam Bandt, attacked the nation’s newest senator, Jim Molan, who led Australian and US forces in battles against insurgents and Islamist extremists in Iraq. Bandt and others took exception to some videos Molan had shared on social media not because of the content but because of the organisation that had originally posted them.

“When you share white supremacists’ videos and justify it by saying ‘I’m doing it to stimulate debate’, you’re a coward. You’re a complete coward,” Bandt told Sky News. “I tell you what … if there was a proper inquiry into the war in Iraq in Australia … I think you’d find Jim Molan would probably be up for prosecution rather than praise.” (Threatened with defamation, Bandt first issued a graceless apology, then a more substantial one yesterday.)

Bandt’s response to the war on terror, as he tells it, was to write a PhD exploring the interplay between Marxism, globalisation, workplace relations and the rule of law. Molan’s was to risk his life in the service of his nation, defending people in Iraq who wanted freedom and democracy.

Yet the Greens decried Molan as the coward.

These are more than attacks on our national day or a military hero: they point to a broader agenda where the Greens tilt at the fundamental strengths of our nation. Our borders, for instance, are the foundation of our sovereignty but the Greens have long promoted open borders and for a few years under Labor we saw a living experiment of their ideal. Despite 800 boats arriving with more than 50,000 asylum-seekers, giving us the trauma of detention centres filled in every state and at least 1200 people dying in attempts to join the rush, the Greens still argue for this approach.

With many Labor MPs sympathetic, leftist media activism ongoing and Greens votes needed in the Senate, a future Shorten government would be drawn to softer border policies like a Greens senator to a student rally. This would be disastrous for our regional diplomacy, finances and, most importantly, immigration system. The high level of public support for immigration and our multi-ethnic society is founded on an orderly system. We mess with that, as we have seen, at our peril. Not to mention the unfairness to refugees legitimately trying to get access to our humanitarian program who don’t have money to pay criminal people-smugglers.

On the economy, the Greens campaign against our second largest export industry, coal. Never mind how we would replace more than $50 billion in exports, $5bn in royalties or 75 per cent of our national electricity generation: there is the issue of replacing 51,000 jobs, so many families that do not seem to matter to the Greens.

Even if you accept the Greens want to scrap our coal industry in order to reduce global carbon emissions (it wouldn’t because China and India would buy their coal elsewhere) we still have to reconcile their opposition to nuclear power, yet another energy source we have in abundance and export to the world but which the Greens oppose.

When they inveigled themselves into a rainbow coalition with Julia Gillard’s Labor, the Greens forced the introduction of a carbon tax that Gillard had ruled out. This not only destroyed her government but consigned climate policy to another decade of dysfunction. When you recall it was the Greens who conspired with the Coalition to twice vote down Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme, you can see this party of so-called environmentalists has vandalised climate policy.

The Greens support a range of positions most voters find abhorrent, such as legalising drugs, increasing taxes and ending the US alliance. “As long as taking drugs is illegal, governments can and do create environments in which people are at greater risk when they choose to use drugs,” Di Natale told his party’s conference last year. On coal he said: “We Greens and our movement are the only thing that will keep the coal from Adani’s mine in the ground.” And on the alliance, he referred to activists speaking out “against wars fought overseas in support of American imperialism”.

This is the sort of dreamworld posturing we might hear from student activists, dishevelled academics or UN bureaucrats. Six years ago, then Greens leader Bob Brown opened a speech by welcoming his “fellow Earthians”. The Greens espouse a John Lennon-style imagine-there’s-no-countries idealism that has no currency in the real world.

If people spouted this sort of stuff at barbecues or front bars beyond their university years, friends would either say they are bonkers or find an excuse to leave. The Greens are a fringe group, the loony left that attracted only 8.7 per cent of the national Senate vote last year. Yet their contributions are often provided at length, and largely unchallenged, on the public broadcasters and the Sky News daytime political coverage.

Sure, they have crucial Senate votes and are part of the political equation. But their wacky views should be challenged, exposed and derided at least as much, and probably more than, the fringe parties of the right.

Labor is chasing the Greens to the left: repeating the Occupy Wall Street inequality mantra, adopting an anti-corruption commission and toughening criticism of Adani. And, encouraged by social media and 24/7 political/media class broadcasting, the political debate is shifting with it.

In the short term, this is good news for Malcolm Turnbull as Labor runs the risk of frightening centrist voters away. But in the long term our major parties need to find a way to coalesce around mainstream values again. The Greens’ vision for Australia needs to be marginalised because it would undermine our economy, borders, alliances and character, rendering us unrecognisable and unsustainable.

Turnbull could demonstrate he understands all this by running a candidate in Batman and preferencing the Greens last.

SOURCE

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

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

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10 February, 2018

Polluted air may pollute our morality

The study below took a lot of trouble to get things right but was defeated by reality, rather hilariously at times. Studies showing bad effects of air pollution are a dime a dozen and usually fail through failures of control, control for income particularly. In study I below, for instance, they controlled for a blizzard of potential confounds, including the biggies, education and income.

You get a shock about something being badly wrong with their conclusions when you look at their table of intercorrelations. With one minor exception, the correlations (Table 1) between pollution (composite) and crime are all less than .10. Their sample size is so large that statistical significance is irrelevant but such very low correlations would normally be dismissed as having no significance in any sense. They are effectively zero. Putting it another way, pollution explained only 5 thousandths of criminality -- not 5 percent, 5 thousandths. It was really rather unethical to report such negligible correlations as showing anything. They in fact showed that pollution has NOTHING to do with crime.

Their other studies used Mechanical Turk to get respondents and the population who take internet surveys is known to be biased in various ways and is probably also biased in ways unknown. It seems fairly clear, for instance that there is a strong liberal bias in that population, with all the unrealism and defensiveness that that implies. In any event it is not a representative sample of any specifiable population so allows no generalizations towards any population. It may not even be a representative sample of Mechanical Turk users, for all we know. Mechanical Turk users presumably pick and choose which surveys they will answer. So once again, the authors have proved nothing.

If they want to make any valid generalizations, they have to use a representative sample of some known population. I did in my research career. It is harder to do that than all the shortcut ways but otherwise you are just playing. Their conclusion that "The current findings have important implications for policymakers" is quite simply wrong and false. They prove nothing. The authors are all business school people. Does business school teach no sociology? They would have learnt some very needful lessons about sampling if it did

Exposure to air pollution, even imagining exposure to air pollution, may lead to unethical behavior, according to findings published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. A combination of archival and experimental studies indicates that exposure to air pollution, either physically or mentally, is linked with unethical behavior such as crime and cheating. The experimental findings suggest that this association may be due, at least in part, to increased anxiety.

"This research reveals that air pollution may have potential ethical costs that go beyond its well-known toll on health and the environment," says behavioral scientist Jackson G. Lu of Columbia Business School, the first author of the research. "This is important because air pollution is a serious global issue that affects billions of people—even in the United States, about 142 million people still reside in counties with dangerously polluted air."

Previous studies have indicated that exposure to air pollution elevates individuals' feelings of anxiety. Anxiety is known to correlate with a range of unethical behaviors. Lu and colleagues hypothesized that pollution may ultimately increase criminal activity and unethical behavior by increasing anxiety.

In one study, the researchers examined air pollution and crime data for 9,360 US cities collected over a 9-year period. The air pollution data, maintained by the Environmental Protection Agency, included information about six major pollutants, including particulate matter, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide. The crime data, maintained by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, included information about offenses in seven major categories, including murder, aggravated assault, and robbery.

The researchers found that cities with higher levels of air pollution also tended to have higher levels of crime. This association held even after the researchers accounted for other potential factors, including total population, number of law enforcement employees, median age, gender distribution, race distribution, poverty rate, unemployment rate, unobserved heterogeneity among cities (e.g., city area, legal system), and unobserved time-varying effects (e.g., macroeconomic conditions).

To establish a direct, causal link between the experience of air pollution and unethical behavior, the researchers also conducted a series of experiments. Because they could not randomly assign participants to physically experience different levels of air pollution, the researchers manipulated whether participants imagined experiencing air pollution.

In one experiment, 256 participants saw a photo featuring either a polluted scene or a clean scene. They imagined living in that location and reflected on how they would feel as they walked around and breathed the air.

On a supposedly unrelated task, they saw a set of cue words (e.g., sore, shoulder, sweat) and had to identify another word that was linked with each of the cue words (e.g., cold); each correct answer earned them $0.50. Due to a supposed computer glitch, the correct answer popped up if the participants hovered their mouse over the answer box, which the researchers asked them not to do. Unbeknownst to the participants, the researchers recorded how many times the participants peeked at the answer.

Polluted air may pollute our morality
Participants assigned to the "nonpolluted" condition saw a collage of photos showing nonpolluted scenes taken in Beijing, China. They saw this collage as they wrote a diary entry describing what it would be like to live in the location …more
The results showed that participants who thought about living in a polluted area cheated more often than did those who thought about living in a clean area.

In two additional experiments, participants saw photos of either polluted or clean scenes taken in the exact same locations in Beijing, and they wrote about what it would be like to live there. Independent coders rated the essays according to how much anxiety the participants expressed.

In one of the experiments conducted with university students in the US, the researchers measured how often participants cheated in reporting the outcome of a die roll; in the other experiment with adults in India, they measured participants' willingness to use unethical negotiation strategies.

Again, participants who wrote about living in a polluted location engaged in more unethical behavior than did those who wrote about living in a clean location; they also expressed more anxiety in their writing. As the researchers hypothesized, anxiety level mediated the link between imagining exposure to air pollution and unethical behavior.

Together, the archival and experimental findings suggest that exposure to air pollution, whether physical or mental, is linked with transgressive behavior through increased levels of anxiety.

Lu and colleagues note that there may be other mechanisms besides anxiety that link air pollution and unethical behavior. They also acknowledge that imagining experiencing air pollution is not equivalent to experiencing actual air pollution. They highlight these limitations as avenues for further research.

Ultimately, the research reveals another pathway through which a person's surroundings can affect his or her behavior:

"Our findings suggest that air pollution not only corrupts people's health, but also can contaminate their morality," Lu concludes.

SOURCE

Journal abstract:

Polluted Morality: Air Pollution Predicts Criminal Activity and Unethical Behavior

Jackson G. Lu, Julia J. Lee, Francesca Gino, ...

Abstract

Air pollution is a serious problem that affects billions of people globally. Although the environmental and health costs of air pollution are well known, the present research investigates its ethical costs. We propose that air pollution can increase criminal and unethical behavior by increasing anxiety. Analyses of a 9-year panel of 9,360 U.S. cities found that air pollution predicted six major categories of crime; these analyses accounted for a comprehensive set of control variables (e.g., city and year fixed effects, population, law enforcement) and survived various robustness checks (e.g., balanced panel, nonparametric bootstrapped standard errors). Three subsequent experiments involving American and Indian participants established the causal effect of psychologically experiencing a polluted (vs. clean) environment on unethical behavior. Consistent with our theoretical perspective, results revealed that anxiety mediated this effect. Air pollution not only corrupts people’s health, but also can contaminate their morality.
Keywords

SOURCE

Climate change 'worst case' scenario is NOT likely to happen, researchers say

The slow retreat towards reality has begun

Climate change might not be as extreme as once presumed, a new study has found.

Researchers from the University of British Columbia have discovered that previous estimates for the severity of global warming that stemmed from coal usage might not be realistic.

Instead, they say - based on new methods of predicting what the environment will look like at the end of this century - that we are much closer to reaching goals outlined at the Paris Climate Accord than was previously believed.

The study's authors, Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi, warned that traditional climate change predictions are not necessarily realistic.

The report says: 'Climate change modeling relies on projections of future greenhouse gas emissions and other phenomena leading to changes in planetary radiative forcing.'

It then details the methods by which predictions about what is to come at the end of the century are developed, and, explains the alternative methods the researchers think should be used to make these predictions.

'Scenarios of socio-technical development consistent with end-of-century forcing levels are commonly produced by integrated assessment models.

'However, outlooks for forcing from fossil energy combustion can also be presented and defined in terms of two essential components: total energy use this century and the carbon intensity of that energy.'

This method allowed the researchers to come up with multiple possible outcomes based on scenarios that depict realistic estimations of the amount of coal that will be burned in the coming years.

According to their findings, climate change goals are much closer than we think to becoming a reality.

'This orientation runs counter to the experienced "dynamics as usual" of gradual decarbonization, suggesting climate change targets outlined in the Paris Accord are more readily achievable than projected to date,' the study said.

While their findings are hopeful, they don't signify an end to the severity of man-made global warming side effects.

As Bloomberg pointed out: 'The bad news is that this is good news in the way a destabilizing climate-shift is preferable to planetary extinction: We are still in a lot of trouble.'

The hope of the study is that if policymakers learn of the findings and explore their validity, they will be encouraged to focus resources toward lessening the effects of global warming since the issue will be less severe than they once imagined.

The researchers explained this notion in their study, which said: 'Evidence confirming steady-state and recarbonization scenarios as unlikely would also indicate that ambitious policy goals will be less challenging than previously considered.'

SOURCE

'Sinking' Pacific nation Tuvalu is actually getting bigger, new research reveals

The Pacific nation of Tuvalu -- long seen as a prime candidate to disappear as climate change forces up sea levels -- is actually growing in size, new research shows.

A University of Auckland study examined changes in the geography of Tuvalu's nine atolls and 101 reef islands between 1971 and 2014, using aerial photographs and satellite imagery.

It found eight of the atolls and almost three-quarters of the islands grew during the study period, lifting Tuvalu's total land area by 2.9 percent, even though sea levels in the country rose at twice the global average.

An analysis of aerial photographs and satellite imagery between 1971 and 2014 suggests the island isn’t being swallowed up, as previously thought – instead, it appears to be growing.

Co-author Paul Kench said the research, published Friday in the journal Nature Communications, challenged the assumption that low-lying island nations would be swamped as the sea rose.

'We tend to think of Pacific atolls as static landforms that will simply be inundated as sea levels rise, but there is growing evidence these islands are geologically dynamic and are constantly changing,' he said.

'The study findings may seem counter-intuitive, given that (the) sea level has been rising in the region over the past half century, but the dominant mode of change over that time on Tuvalu has been expansion, not erosion.'

It found factors such as wave patterns and sediment dumped by storms could offset the erosion caused by rising water levels.

The Auckland team says climate change remains one of the major threats to low-lying island nations.

But it argues the study should prompt a rethink on how such countries respond to the problem.

Rather than accepting their homes are doomed and looking to migrate to countries such as Australia and New Zealand, the researchers say they should start planning for a long-term future.

'On the basis of this research we project a markedly different trajectory for Tuvalu's islands over the next century than is commonly envisaged,' Kench said.

SOURCE

Lease the OCS – to benefit all Americans

An informed decision-making process will safely produce energy that belongs to all Americans

Paul Driessen

Under the current offshore energy program developed during the Obama years, 94% of the nation’s Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) is off limits to leasing and drilling. Under the Draft Proposed Program (DPP) announced January 4 by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, over 90% of OCS acreage and 98% of “undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and gas resources” in these federal offshore areas (beyond the 3-mile limit of state waters) will be considered for possible future leasing, exploration and development.

The Trump-Zinke plan proposes the largest number of lease sales in US history: 19 off Alaska, 7 in the Pacific, 9 in the Atlantic, and 12 in the Gulf of Mexico (where the vast majority of leasing, drilling and production have taken place over the past 65 years). Government experts estimate that these areas could hold 90 billion barrels of oil and 327 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, worth over $6.5 trillion.

Shortly after the DPP was presented, Florida Governor Rick Scott contacted the secretary, discussed the plan and issued a statement saying the Eastern Gulf was no longer under consideration. Other governors insisted that areas off their coasts also be eliminated from consideration. Energy companies and others said the Florida decision was premature, and the normal planning process should be followed.

Actually, there has been no decision on Gov. Scott’s request, and the process is being followed. The Department of the Interior (DOI) and its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) are still in the midst of their 60-day comment period on the DPP. That will lead to a Proposed Program, Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement and another public comment period. A Proposed Final Program, another EIS, more public input, and eventually a new Five-Year Leasing Plan will follow.

Meanwhile, Secy. Zinke will be speaking with coastal state governors and legislators, to hear their concerns, explain the process, and discuss how drilling can be conducted with increasing safety.

Somewhere during this long process, new seismic surveys should be conducted, to identify and interpret subsurface structures that could contain oil and/or natural gas. The last Atlantic region surveys were 30 years ago, and other areas were never surveyed. Oil companies need high quality data to determine whether an area has enough potential to warrant bidding on a lease. The BOEM needs the best possible data to make informed decisions on which areas should be kept in or dropped out of the planning process – and later on whether bids reflect an area’s potential value or should be rejected.

Since companies may be reluctant to spend many millions on seismic for areas that may never be made available for leasing, creative incentives may have to be developed to get that vital information.

Leasing and drilling would come only in some areas, only after this entire process has been completed.

The 1969 Santa Barbara and 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowouts are indelibly etched in our memories, even though these two spills are the only ones in some 1.3 million wells drilled in state and OCS waters since 1969 where significant oil reached shore and caused serious environmental damage (which nature slowly but surely repaired). They show why public concerns about oil spills must be heard and addressed.

Neither of these major spills (nor any of the other dozen instances of lost well control involving more than 50 barrels of spilled oil since 1969) should have happened – just as car, train, airliner and other accidents should never happen. They happened because of human frailties and failures: in technologies, equipment maintenance, vigilance, training, and timely operator and regulator reactions to unfolding crises.

That’s why offshore drilling and production operators, in conjunction with state and federal regulators, are doing much more to prevent future accidents, including tougher standards, better training and equipment maintenance, improved blowout preventers and oil spill response equipment, and establishing a Center for Offshore Safety to ensure best practices and constant improvement in these and other areas.

Seismic practices are also steadily improving, minimizing impacts on marine mammals, fishing activities and military operations. For example, gradually increasing sound levels allows whales and porpoises to leave an area if they become uncomfortable, trained marine mammal observers on survey vessels watch for animals and order shutdowns if necessary, and surveys are coordinated with Navy officials.

One of the most fascinating aspects of offshore production platforms (rigs) is the artificial reefs they create on support structures beneath them. I’ve been scuba diving beneath California and Gulf of Mexico rigs, fished off them, written professional papers and magazine articles about the reefs, and produced a documentary film about this phenomenon and the process of turning rigs into permanent reefs once they are no longer producing oil or gas. The amount and variety of marine found there is simply astounding.

Vibrant arrays of colorful sea anemones, corals, sponges and shellfish latch onto platform legs, providing habitats and food for crabs and lobsters and attracting legions of fish of every conceivable species. Gulf rigs provide homes for Caribbean species that couldn’t exist in this vast mud-bottom region that Mississippi River sediments created. Because they are in such a nutrient-rich zone, California platforms host scallops the size of dinner plates, mussels six inches long and starfish nearly three feet across!

Fishing, shrimping, tourism and military ops continue to thrive in the Gulf, among hundreds of rigs. And yet some say they don’t even want to see a few dozen oil platforms three to twenty miles off Atlantic coast beaches. How do they feel about hundreds or thousands of 400-foot wind turbines a thousand feet to three miles offshore? That is what’s being discussed to replace fossil fuels and nuclear in electricity generation.

Those huge turbines would chop up seabirds that will sink out of sight and mind; create obstacle courses for pleasure, military and commercial shipping; and emit constant low level noise that will interfere with aircraft as well as whale and porpoise sonar navigation and communication.

After taxes, OCS operations provide the second largest source of revenue to the US Treasury. Some of this goes to the Land and Water Conservation Fund for environmental programs. However, OCS revenues fell from $18 billion in 2008 to $2.5 billion in 2016 – even as state offshore oil and gas revenues actually rose during the same period. This decline was partly because of lower oil and gas prices, but largely because the Obama Administration issued so many regulations and delays, but so few leases and permits

Gulf Coast states also share in OCS revenues, totaling billions of dollars over the years. Atlantic Coast States should enjoy revenue sharing, if leasing, drilling and production take place off their shores.

The US Energy Information Administration projects that oil and gas will still supply two-thirds of the USA’s energy three decades from now. OCS resources developed under this new plan will come online as current and near-term deposits are being depleted. Those resources belong to all Americans.

It is the responsibility of state, local and federal governments to help ensure that America knows what oil and gas resources might exist off our shores, so that we can make informed decisions about developing the best prospects – while safeguarding marine and coastal habitats, tourism and other values.

East and West Coast states have enormous demands for oil and gas, to fuel tourism and other sectors. They should have full roles in discussions, input, planning, decision-making, oversight, inspections and other aspects of offshore oil and gas operations. But they should help meet their own and US energy needs and should not be able to short-circuit or veto the process – or to block OCS or other development in Alaska or the Central or Western Gulf of Mexico, or elsewhere, if those states support leasing and drilling.

OCS oil and gas are essential for America’s long-term energy security. They are the common heritage of all Americans. These resources will support economic growth, investment and manufacturing, create thousands of new jobs, and ensure reliable, affordable energy for manufacturers, businesses, hospitals, schools, tourism, farming, and poor, minority and blue-collar families.

We should let the planning process move forward – and make sure we drill and produce this energy safely.

Via email

Australia: Protect your people from shark attacks, Frydenberg tells Green/Left State government

Greenies would rather have people die than sharks

Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg has warned the West Australian government to take “stronger action to protect its citizens”, after a CSIRO study revealed an explosion in adult great white shark numbers off the west coast.

Mr Frydenberg said the “groundbreaking” CSIRO study clearly showed a greater number of larger white sharks off the west coast compared with eastern Australia. “These results along with the high number of fatal shark attacks in Western Australia make a compelling case for the WA government to take a more proactive approach to protect the public from shark attacks,” he said.

“The primacy of public safety is non-negotiable. That is why the commonwealth continues to call on the West Australian government to take stronger action to protect its citizens.”

In December, The Australian reported on preliminary results of the CSIRO study, which revealed more than double the number of adult great white sharks inhabited the waters between Wilson’s Promontory and northwestern WA compared with the eastern Australian population.

The final 64-page CSIRO report, “A national assessment of the status of White Sharks”, provides a scientific analysis of juvenile and adult great white shark populations off the Australian coastline. Commissioned following a series of great white shark attacks off WA and NSW, it is the first detailed analysis of white shark populations.

The report, labelled the first of its kind in the world, concedes that “shark attack rates in Australia have risen over recent years”.

“The results and methods employed represent a step-change in capacity to assess otherwise difficult-to-monitor species, such as white sharks,” it said.

Preliminary analysis of the data showed that the animal’s current adult population in the west was between 750 and 2250, with a 90 per cent survival rate year-to-year.

In the east there are about 750 adult sharks (with a range of between 470 and 1030 great whites) at a yearly survival rate of more than 90 per cent.

The final research revealed the total number of white sharks in the eastern population is 5460, with a potential range between 2909 and 12,802.

CSIRO lead author Dr Richard Hillary said sharks take 12—15 years to become mature adults, ”so we wouldn’t expect to see the effect on the adult population of that reduction in juvenile shark mortality until the next few years”.

“Now that we have a starting point, we can repeat the exercise over time and build a total population trend, to see whether the numbers are going up or down,” Dr Hillary said.

“This is crucial to developing effective policy outcomes that balance the sometimes conflicting aims of conservation initiatives and human-shark interaction risk management.”

The Australian understands the CSIRO data focuses mainly on adult white sharks, with NSW Department of Primary Industries tagging research tracking large numbers of juvenile great whites along east coast beaches.

Mr Frydenberg, who commissioned the report last June, has noted the shark population in the west “may not be increasing” but was “significantly larger” when the juvenile sharks were included in the data.

“Couple these higher numbers with the 15 fatal shark attacks over the last 17 years in Western Australia and it’s clear the state government needs to look seriously at rigorous and proactive measures to protect its citizens from shark attacks,” Mr Frydenberg previously told The Australian.

Multiple fatal shark attacks off WA in recent years prompted the former Barnett government to consider protective measures. A culling program was cancelled after it mainly caught tiger sharks instead of great whites.

SOURCE

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

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- whic
h 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 February, 2018
Pesky Ozone hole defying Greenie predictions

Scientists are surprised that the ozone is thinning out in the lower stratosphere because their models do not show this trend and CFCs continue to decline.

A team led by researchers from ETH Zurich and the Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos in Switzerland have found that despite the ban on CFCs, the concentration of ozone in the lower part of the stratosphere has continued to decline at latitudes between 60 degree South and 60 degree North.

Geneva: The ozone layer – which protects life on Earth from high-energy radiation – has continued to thin over the last three decades, a study has warned.

In the 20th century, when excessive quantities of ozone-depleting chlorinated and brominated hydrocarbons such as CFCs were released into the atmosphere, the ozone layer in the stratosphere – ie at altitudes of 15 to 50 kilometres – thinned out globally.

The Montreal Protocol introduced a ban on these long-lasting substances in 1989.

At the turn of the millennium, the loss of stratospheric ozone seemed to have stopped. Until now, experts have expected that the global ozone layer would completely recover by the middle of the century.

However, a team led by researchers from ETH Zurich and the Physikalisch-Meteorologisches Observatorium Davos in Switzerland have found that despite the ban on CFCs, the concentration of ozone in the lower part of the stratosphere has continued to decline at latitudes between 60 degree South and 60 degree North.

The study, published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, used satellite measurements spanning the last three decades together with advanced statistical methods.

Ozone is formed in the stratosphere, mainly at altitudes above 30 kilometres in the tropics. From there it is distributed around the globe by atmospheric circulation.

The scientists were somewhat surprised that the ozone is thinning out in the lower stratosphere because their models do not show this trend and CFCs continue to decline.

SOURCE

New study claims economic systems must be restructured to fit `within planetary boundaries.'

This is basically a re-run of the old "Limits to Growth" paper of 1972. It says that basic needs (as defined by them) can be met for everyone without exceeding the resources available on the planet but for higher needs to be met "provisioning systems must be fundamentally restructured". But they have no idea how to do that

A good life for all within planetary boundaries

Daniel W. O'Neill et al.

Abstract

Humanity faces the challenge of how to achieve a high quality of life for over 7 billion people without destabilizing critical planetary processes. Using indicators designed to measure a `safe and just' development space, we quantify the resource use associated with meeting basic human needs, and compare this to downscaled planetary boundaries for over 150 nations. We find that no country meets basic needs for its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. Physical needs such as nutrition, sanitation, access to electricity and the elimination of extreme poverty could likely be met for all people without transgressing planetary boundaries. However, the universal achievement of more qualitative goals (for example, high life satisfaction) would require a level of resource use that is 2-6 times the sustainable level, based on current relationships. Strategies to improve physical and social provisioning systems, with a focus on sufficiency and equity, have the potential to move nations towards sustainability, but the challenge remains substantial.

Introduction

This Article addresses a key question in sustainability science: what level of biophysical resource use is associated with meeting people's basic needs, and can this level of resource use be extended to all people without exceeding critical planetary boundaries? To answer this question, we analyse the relationships between 7 indicators of national environmental pressure (relative to biophysical boundaries) and 11 indicators of social outcomes (relative to sufficiency thresholds) for over 150 countries. Our study measures national performance using a `safe and just space' framework1,2 for a large number of countries, and provides important findings on the relationships between resource use and human well-being.

A safe and just space

There have been two recent, complementary advances in defining biophysical processes, pressures and boundaries at the planetary scale. The first is the planetary boundaries framework, which identifies nine boundaries related to critical Earth-system processes3. The boundaries jointly define a `safe operating space', within which it is argued the relatively stable conditions of the Holocene may be maintained4. Of the seven measured planetary boundaries, four are currently transgressed (biosphere integrity, climate change, biogeo-chemical flows and land-system change)3.

The second advance is the estimation of environmental `foot-print' indicators for multiple types of biophysical resource flows. Footprint indicators associate specific environmental pressures (for example, CO2 emissions, material extraction, freshwater appropria-tion) with the consumption of goods and services5. This approach assigns responsibility for embodied resource use to final consumers, and includes the effects of international trade.

We combine these two approaches to measure sustainability at the national scale, by comparing national consumption-based environmental footprints to `downscaled' planetary boundaries6. The nascent literature proposes a number of different ways that plan-etary boundaries could theoretically be downscaled to national equivalents7, taking into account factors such as geography, international trade and equity8. Some studies apply a top-down approach that distributes shares of each planetary boundary to countries based on an allocation formula9-11, while others apply a bottom-up approach that associates local or regional environmental limits with each planetary boundary12,13.

Within our analysis we apply a top-down approach that distributes shares of each planetary boundary among nations based on current population (a per capita biophysical boundary approach). While the environmental justice literature emphasizes the need for differentiated responsibilities in practice14, a per capita approach allows us to explore what quality of life could be universally achieved if resources were distributed equally. It is an important question to address given that it is often claimed that all people could live well if only the rich consumed less, so that the poor could consume more2,15. We acknowledge that an annual per capita boundary may not be an appropriate way to manage resources that are geographically and temporally bounded (for example, freshwater use, where river-basin geography and a monthly timescale may be more appropriate in practice16). Moreover, a deeper understanding of equity may require some notion of shared responsibility between producers and consumers17.

Here, we adopt a human needs-based approach to defining and measuring social outcomes, drawing on the work of Max-Neef18 and Doyal and Gough19. Human needs theory argues that there are a finite number of basic human needs that are universal, satiable and non-substitutable. `Need satisfiers' can vary between individuals and cultures, but arguably have certain universal characteristics that may be measured empirically20.

The theory of human needs developed by the above authors under-pins the safe and just space (SJS) framework proposed by Raworth1, and described in her book Doughnut Economics2. The framework combines the concept of planetary boundaries with the complementary concept of social boundaries. It visualizes sustainability in terms of a doughnut-shaped space where resource use is high enough to meet people's basic needs (the inner boundary), but not so high as to transgress planetary boundaries (the outer boundary).

The SJS framework includes 11 social objectives, which were selected by Raworth based on a comprehensive text analysis of government submissions to the Rio+ 20 conference. The objectives reflect the main social goals mentioned in the majority of submis-sions, and thus align well with contemporary policy, including the social objectives in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)21. The SJS framework also has important precedents in the ecological economics literature, namely the objectives of sus-tainable scale, fair distribution and efficient allocation22.

SOURCE

Regional ambient temperature is associated with human personality

This study was rather good on the whole. I myself have done research on the effect of climate on conservatism but this study asks whether climate affects your personality. They first defined an optimal (clement) average temperature as 22 degrees Celsius and examined the personality of people living inside and outside that limit. They found that people who grew up in "clement" climates were all-round good eggs.

They derive from that a suggestion that global warming might make people bad eggs but that is poor logic. Global warming would surely do no more than change polewards where the good eggs were to be found

Regional ambient temperature is associated with human personality

Wenqi Wei et al.

Abstract

Human personality traits differ across geographical regions1,2,3,4,5. However, it remains unclear what generates these geographical personality differences. Because humans constantly experience and react to ambient temperature, we propose that temperature is a crucial environmental factor that is associated with individuals' habitual behavioural patterns and, therefore, with fundamental dimensions of personality. To test the relationship between ambient temperature and personality, we conducted two large-scale studies in two geographically large yet culturally distinct countries: China and the United States. Using data from 59 Chinese cities (N?=?5,587), multilevel analyses and machine learning analyses revealed that compared with individuals who grew up in regions with less clement temperatures, individuals who grew up in regions with more clement temperatures (that is, closer to 22?øC) scored higher on personality factors related to socialization and stability (agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability) and personal growth and plasticity (extraversion and openness to experience). These relationships between temperature clemency and personality factors were replicated in a larger dataset of 12,499 ZIP-code level locations (the lowest geographical level feasible) in the United States (N?=?1,660,638). Taken together, our findings provide a perspective on how and why personalities vary across geographical regions beyond past theories (subsistence style theory, selective migration theory and pathogen prevalence theory). As climate change continues across the world, we may also observe concomitant changes in human personality.

Summary from the body of the article:

In summary, to large-scale studies from China and the United States found that the ambient temperature during an individual's youth was related to the key dimensions of personality: individuals who grew up in more clement regions scored higher on both the socialization factor (Alpha) and the personal growth factor (Beta) of personality, as well as on each of the Big-Five personality factors.

These effects were robust when controlling for various factors that might affect personality-related constructs: selective migration, individual response style, demographic factors (age, gender, and education), socioeconomic factors (population density, GDP per capita, rice-farming area, and wheat-farming area), ecological factors (pathogen prevalence), and other meteorological factors (air pressure, humidity, and wind speed).

It is particularly telling that our large datasets from two geographically large yet culturally distinct countries provided converging evidence. Taken together, these findings are consistent with our temperature clemency perspective of personality: growing up in temperatures that are close to the psychophysiological comfort optimum encourages individuals to explore the outside environment, thereby influencing their personalities.

SOURCE

It’s All Over: Hong Kong Pulls The Plug On Electric Cars Incentives

Tesla’s sales in Hong Kong plunged during much of 2017 after the local government cut tax incentives for electric vehicles.

Data from Hong Kong´s Transport Department shows Tesla sales fell to just 32 between April and December 2017, a dramatic decline from the near 2,000 sales notched up over the same period of 2016.

The removal of tax incentives in Hong Kong almost doubled the price of some Tesla models.

A major blow for Tesla, it underlines how the company´s sales can be highly sensitive to changes in government policy.

There was also a similar fall in electric car sales in Denmark following the local authorities´ decision to end tax breaks.

Tesla shares were down 1.3% in pre-market trading on Monday.

Tesla is lobbying the Hong Kong authorities to at least partially reverse the tax change.

The sheer scale of the sales slump is likely to have come as a surprise to the government, strengthening the hand of those supporting a rethink when it finalises its budget in the next few weeks.

In total, including non-Tesla models, just 99 electric cars were registered in Hong Kong over the last nine months of 2017.

SOURCE

Back to Earth: Tesla's losses grow on Model 3 delays

The day after Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk blasted his Tesla Roadster into space, his electric car company's mounting losses brought him back to Earth again.

Tesla Inc. posted a record quarterly net loss of $675 million in the fourth quarter, up from a net loss of $121 million in the same period a year ago. The Palo Alto, California-based automaker is struggling to meet production targets for its first mass-market car, the Model 3 sedan. It's also spending heavily on future vehicles, including a semi that's supposed to go into production next year.

Tesla lost $1.96 billion for the full year, a record for the company and nearly three times its loss of $675 million in 2016. Tesla has never made a full-year profit since it went public in 2010.

Tesla's adjusted fourth-quarter loss of $3.04 per share was ahead of Wall Street's estimated loss of $3.15 per share, according to analysts polled by FactSet. The adjusted loss eliminates one-time expenses, including stock-based compensation. Revenue for the quarter was $3.3 billion, which was in line with analysts' forecasts.

Tesla's total revenue for 2017 was $11.8 billion, which was also in line with analysts' forecasts.

Musk is a masterful marketer, and the red ink may not stem investors' excitement. The company's shares jumped 3 percent to close at $345 Wednesday after SpaceX successfully launched its Falcon Heavy rocket with Musk's cherry red Roadster as its cargo. The convertible, with a dummy in a space suit at its wheel, is now heading toward an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Tesla's shares are also in the stratosphere, up 8 percent from the start of this year.

While Tesla's true believers love these stunts, some analysts are questioning whether Musk should be spending more time fixing Tesla's woes. Clement Thibault, a senior analyst with the web site Investing.com, grumbled about Musk's recent fundraising efforts for The Boring Co., his new tunnel-drilling company.

"He appears to be more eager to sell hats and flamethrowers rather than meeting previously stated production targets for Tesla vehicles," Thibault wrote in a note to investors.

Musk said Tesla has learned some valuable lessons about production and is steadily resolving problems with the Model 3. For example, he said, the company has nearly completed an automated battery module assembly line which will speed production at its Nevada battery factory. But he didn't say whether the company will meet its stated goal of making 10,000 Model 3s per week at some point this year.

"If we can send a Roadster to the asteroid belt, we can probably solve Model 3 production. It's just a matter of time," Musk said on a conference call with analysts.

SOURCE

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

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

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8 February, 2018

Hillary Clinton: Women Will Be ‘Primarily Burdened With The Problems Of Climate Change’

Nutty stuff from another failed Democrat Presidential candidate. Women are going to be looking for food, looking for firewood and moving livestock. Sure sounds harder than going to Wal-Mart. And sexism and misogyny were behind Trump's campaign. If so, I wonder why 53% of white women voted for him?

Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is back with an important message — not only is climate change real and important, it is very sexist.

“I would say that particularly for women, you’re absolutely right, they will bear the brunt of looking for the food, looking for the firewood, looking for the place to migrate to when all of the grass is finally gone as the desertification moves south and you have to keep moving your livestock for your crops are no longer growing, they’re burning up in the intense heat that we’re now seeing reported across North Africa, into the Middle East, and into India.”

“So yes, women once again, will be the primary…primarily burdened with the problems of climate change.”

At this same event at Georgetown University, Clinton complained of the sexism and misogyny she believed influenced Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.

“Some of it was old fashioned sexism and a refusal to accept the equality of women and certainly the equality of women’s leadership,” she said. “And some of it as an outgrowth of all of this anxiety and insecurity that is playing on people and leading them in a hunt for scapegoats.

SOURCE

Trump Is Repealing Obama’s Harmful Water Rule. Why Efforts to Stop Him Are Misguided

In 2015, the Obama administration finalized its infamous “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule—also known as the Clean Water Rule—that sought to regulate almost every type of water imaginable under the Clean Water Act.

To its credit, the Trump administration is taking action to get rid of this rule by withdrawing it and then issuing a new definition of what waters are covered under the Clean Water Rule.

This process, though, will require significant litigation as lawsuits pile up in an effort to block the administration from protecting the environment in a manner that also respects property rights, federalism, and the rule of law.

In fact, the litigation is already getting underway.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers just finalized a rule that would delay the applicability date of the WOTUS rule by two years. This action helps give the agencies time to work through the regulatory process without rushing, and ensures that during this time, the WOTUS rule won’t go into effect.

The agencies explained:

Given uncertainty about litigation in multiple district courts over the 2015 rule, this action provides certainty and consistency to the regulated community and the public, and minimizes confusion as the agencies reconsider the definition of the ‘waters of the United States’ that should be covered under the Clean Water Act.

This commonsense delay, though, apparently didn’t please New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. He recently announced that he was going to sue the administration for this new rule to delay the Obama administration WOTUS rule.

He explained, “The Trump administration’s suspension of these vital protections [the WOTUS Rule] is reckless and illegal.”

He also stated, “Make no mistake: Abandoning the Clean Water Rule will mean pollution, flooding, and harm to fish and wildlife in New York and across the country—undermining decades of work to protect and enhance our water resources.”

He makes it sound as if the WOTUS rule is the only thing protecting us from Armageddon. But in fact it is new policy and hasn’t even gone into effect—so how does it have anything to do with decades of environmental protection? It isn’t as though nixing the WOTUS rule means there will be no environmental protections.

It’s hard to see how a federal power grab that would regulate what most people would consider dry land is so critical to water, or why making it more difficult for farmers to engage in normal farming practices is going to be good for New York and the country.

Is the regulation of man-made ditches a must? Is it really a must for the agencies to regulate waters that can’t even be seen by the naked eye? Should the federal government act as a de facto local zoning board and intrude on traditional state and local power? Do we need to trample on property rights to protect the environment?

These are all effects of the WOTUS rule.

Maybe Schneiderman and others who want to block the administration from getting rid of one of the most egregious federal rules in recent memory think these are all good impacts. Most people, though, likely think otherwise.

There is an underlying assumption held by many of those who welcome such federal overreach: the federal government must regulate almost every water because there is no other alternative. They choose to ignore the fact that even the Clean Water Act expressly recognizes that states are supposed to play a leading role in addressing water pollution.

They see regulation as the only solution to any alleged water problems, not other government alternatives and especially not private means of protecting the environment. Respect for property rights, the rule of law, and federalism apparently are not important.

What should be important to them and certainly to most people is a clean environment. An overboard and vague rule though that seeks to regulate almost every water and ignores states is harmful to the environment, and this is precisely how to describe the WOTUS rule.

By developing a new rule that recognizes the need to work with states to address water issues, the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers will be helping the environment, not hurting it. A clear and objective rule, unlike the mess that is the WOTUS rule, helps both the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers with enforcement and makes consistent compliance by regulated entities far more likely.

The Trump administration appears to recognize the importance for such a new rule. It is unfortunate that some will use lawsuits to make it more difficult for them to achieve this critical objective.

Ultimately, Congress needs to clarify in the Clean Water Act exactly what waters are considered to be “waters of the United States,” because even if the Trump administration comes up with the greatest rule in history, a future administration could easily undo that excellent work.

In the interim, though, Congress needs to step in and eliminate unnecessary obstacles for the administration as it seeks to move forward with a new rule.

SOURCE

Endocrine Disruption Is A Medieval Spell in the Hands of Environmentalists

By Rich Kozlovich

The Federal Environmental Protection Agency is back on the endocrine disruption (ED) bandwagon and it's important we understand the history of this issue in order to make sure more "new" science on ED's isn't being made up as was the "old" science on ED's. Truth is the sublime convergence of history and reality - unless you're the EPA - then truth is meaningless. We need to get that.

In chapter one of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring she talks about some community where "a strange blight" crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community".

Then she claims there were all sorts of maladies sickening and even killing the sheep, chickens, cattle, unexplained deaths among children and adults who would suddenly sicken and die....and the birds disappeared....and the people had done it to themselves. There was only one problem with this story. That town didn't exist! She even says it doesn't exist! Then goes on to claim some of these things are happening in a lot of communities - somewhere. Yet she conveniently fails to give a name even one of those cities or towns. Why? Because these communities didn't exist!

Reality and green speculatory scare mongering rarely have anything in common, and time is the great leveler of truth. As the cancer scare was running out of steam, environmentalists needed a new voodoo scare. Endocrine disruption was just the thing. The National Academy of Science more accurately refers to them as hormonally active agents" (HAAs), a term that's bound to generate anxiety.

A 1996 book called Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival?--A Scientific Detective Story, caught the public's attention, especially when they called these chemical "environmental estrogens".........[that] disrupted normal hormonal processes, even at low exposure levels generally accepted as safe." According to the book mankind's future was in serious jeopardy because ED' s were going to impact our fertility, intelligence, cause attention deficit disorder and even jeopardize our survival.

According to Geoffrey C. Kabat in his book Getting Risk Right, "hormones are chemical messengers secreted by ductless glands and travel through the blood stream to affect distant organs. Hormones play a role in orchestrating the body's growth, maintaining physiologic balance, and sexual functioning and development." "Once secreted a hormone must be transported via the blood stream to the target organ by a carrier protein. Once ether it binds to a receptor and the hormone-reception unit binds to a specific region of a cell's DNA to activate particular genes."

As Michael Fumento noted in his paper " Hormonally Challenged": "Virtually any real or possible human or animal health problem may be blamed on these chemicals, including cancer, birth defects, falling sperm counts, lesbian seagulls (giving rise to the term "gender benders" for HAAs), and alligators with shrunken members", impacting all life like some medieval witch's spell in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale instead of science.

In comes Steven F. Arnold of the Tulane University Center for Bioenvironmental Research who along with his gang published a study in June of 1996 "claiming that combinations of pesticides and PCBs were up to 1,000 times more potent as endocrine disruptors than the individual chemicals alone."

Carol Browner - head of EPA at the time - declared: "The new study is the strongest evidence to date that combinations of estrogenic chemicals may be potent enough to significantly increase the risk of breast cancer, prostate cancer, birth defects and other major health concerns." She went on to say: "I was astounded by the findings. Dr. Lynn Goldman, EPA pesticide chief, claimed "I just can't remember a time where I've seen data so persuasive … The results are very clean looking."

But time - the great leveler of truth - once again came into play. According the journal Science, Arnold was found to have "committed scientific misconduct by intentionally falsifying the research results published in the journal Science and by providing falsified and fabricated materials to investigating officials." It was also found "there is no original data or other corroborating evidence to support the research results and conclusions reported in the Science paper as a whole."

Steve Milloy noted: "by August 1997, Arnold was forced to retract his study from publication. His retraction stated, "We … have not been able to reproduce the results we reported." He later added, "I can't really explain the original findings."'

Six months after the Food Quality Protection Act was enacted (which required the EPA to identify chemicals which were HAA's) it was reported there wasn't a lab anywhere in the world that could replicate the Tulane study, and it was then formally withdrawn. Now we know why — he cheated. The penalty imposed on Arnold was a five-year ban from federal grants. Although a lifetime ban and perhaps even criminal prosecution would have been more appropriate — after all, he was found guilty of "intentionally falsifying" taxpayer-funded research".

He wasn't alone by the way, there's hermaphrodite frog study and the small phallus alligator study, but space makes it impossible to discuss them all.

Yet the endocrine disruption component of the FQPA remains requiring the EPA to identify chemicals which are considered HAA's. In 2001 they were spending 10 million dollars a year attempting to meet that requirement. But they've had trouble declaring chemicals as HAA’s. Why?

Well there's that time as the great leveler of truth problem.

I've followed this issue from the beginning and I knew the problem they were having was - and still is - separating the ED potential of synthetic chemicals versus those which are naturally occurring. And that's the rub.

In his book The Really Inconvenient Truths Iain Murray states:

"The entire theory that industrialization is causing severe endocrine disruption falls completely apart when exposures to naturally occurring endocrine modulators are taken into account. Plants naturally produce endocrine modulators called "phytoestrogens" to which human being are expose at levels that are thousands and sometimes millions of time higher than those of synthetic chemicals. Humans consume these chemicals every day without adverse effects some even contend these chemicals promote good health."

He goes on to say:

"Laboratory experiments have shown that there are so-called "endocrine disruptors" present in forty-three different foods common in the human diet, including corn, garlic, pineapple, potatoes, and wheat. Most amusingly, soybean, that product so beloved by liberal environmentalists, is a particularly potent source of phytoestrogens"....."it appears that on average human beings consume just over 100 micrograms of estrogen equivalents a day from natural sources. Compare that to the amount of industrial chemical amount of 2.5 micrograms."

He also notes:

"As it turns out phytoestrogens are actually much more potent than the chemicals that act like estrogens. Our friend DDT, for instance, has a relative potency to natural estrogen of 0.000001, meaning it takes one million molecules to have the same impact of one molecule of real estrogen."

And what is the most potent ED the public is exposed to? Oral contraceptives! And that number is massive. Oral contraceptives are the most potent ED in the nation's waterways today. But EPA only screen and test pesticide chemicals, commercial chemicals and environmental contaminants because they claim pharmaceutical regulation is a Food and Drug Administration concern. That's an easy way for the EPA to avoid facing the fact if they "compared contraceptives and phytoestrogens these two sources would dwarf the impact of pesticides."

Solution? Repeal or seriously revise the Food Quality Protection Act, which has nothing to do with food, protection or quality. But it has had a great deal to do with creating the national bed bug plague.    And that really is a Medieval curse.

SOURCE

The Sahara is cooling

Locals were stunned to see snow on the sand dunes in the Sahara Desert yesterday - after it snowed in a small Algerian town for the second time this year.

Following a 37-year spell of no snow which ended in December 2016, Ain Sefra in the country's northwest, has seen snow no less than four times.

Children could be seen playing on the snow-covered sand dunes just outside the town, while others posed on the snow to document the rare event.

The town was seen covered with a coating of snow and many locals took to the nearby sand dunes to enjoy the unusual weather.

While Monday's snowfall was unusual, the town was covered in the white stuff last month, the third time in nearly 40 years.

In 2016, the town known as 'The Gateway to the Desert' saw deep snow shortly after Christmas and it caused chaos, with passengers stranded on buses after the roads became slippery and icy.

Come January 2017, the town saw snowfall yet again, and children made snowmen and even sledged on the sand dunes.

Climb every mountain: The heavy snowfall makes the sand dunes look like snow-covered Alpine mountains

Before that, snow was last seen in Ain Sefra on February 18, 1979, when the snow storm lasted just half an hour.

Ain Sefra is located around 3,280ft above sea level and surrounded by the Atlas Mountains.

Despite its altitude and recent storms, it is very rare to see snow in the town, and it is normally six to 12 degrees Celsius in the city around this time of year.

SOURCE

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

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

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

7 February, 2018

Many of the world’s coasts would become unviable if Antarctic ice continues to melt into sea

This is just prophecy. Despite the slight warming over the last century or so, sea levels in many places have FALLEN. Listen to an expert on the subject

MELTING ice poses one of the greatest threats to the modern world, a top Australian climate change professor has warned.

UNSW Sydney professor Matthew England is one of six keynote speakers at an international conference which kicked off in Sydney yesterday. The international gathering is seeking to address climate change and in particular is intent on looking for solutions to problems in the Southern Hemisphere.

Prof England says up to 15 metres of Antarctica ice could melt into the oceans if the Earth gets hot enough over the next several centuries. “And that’s enough to make many of the world’s coasts unviable if we do nothing to limit atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.”

“Tens of millions of people could be displaced.”

Sydney professor warns of the hidden threat contained in Antarctica if climate change persists.

Sydney professor warns of the hidden threat contained in Antarctica if climate change persists.Source:Supplied

It comes after 2017 research showed about eight islands in the Pacific Ocean have disappeared due to rising sea-levels, with many others being drastically reduced in size as their shorelines are swallowed by creeping oceans.

Past meetings of scientists at the national forum have led to global policies to ban the use of ozone-depleting chemicals, managing commercial activity to protect Southern Ocean ecosystems and have informed international discussions on climate change.

The other five keynote speakers have expertise in subjects ranging from space studies, atmospheric research, coral reef studies, climate science and weather extremes.

The 25th AMOS-ICSHMO 2018 will be the largest ever meeting of meteorologists, oceanographers and climate scientists in the Southern Hemisphere involving 35 countries.

Prof England received the Tinker-Muse Prize for Science and Policy in Antarctica for his research, leadership and advocacy in Antarctic science on Monday.

The conference runs until Friday at the University of NSW.

SOURCE

Already nearly 40K views of Dr. Will Happer's Prager U video on how it is impossible to predict future climate with computer models. "It's not science, it's science fiction."

No Evidence of an Anthropogenic Influence on Floods

Paper Reviewed: Hodgkins, G.A., Whitfield, P.H., Burn, D.H., Hannaford, J., Renard, B., Stahl, K., Fleig, A.K., Madsen, H., Mediero, L., Korhonen, J., Murphy, C. and Wilson, D. 2017. Climate-driven variability in the occurrence of major floods across North America and Europe. Journal of Hydrology 552: 704-717.

Model projections of future increases in precipitation from anthropogenic global warming have led to concerns that there will be corresponding increases in river flooding. Consequently, many researchers have begun to search for evidence of more frequent and/or severe flooding over the past several decades. The latest team of scientists to conduct such an investigation is Hodgkins et al. (2017), who examined trends in the occurrence of major floods across North America and Europe over the past eight decades.

In preparing for their analysis, the twelve researchers first made sure to build a proper database free of contaminating influences. This was accomplished by their using only those hydrologic stations that were located in minimally altered catchments. Such catchments, for example, had to contain (1) less than 10 percent urban area, (2) have no substantial flow alteration or changes in land cover, (3) less than 10 years of missing data and (4) good quality gauges capable of providing accurate peak-flow data. By sticking to these criteria, the authors were confident that any trends they found in the data would most likely be the result of climate-driven influences (either human-induced or natural in origin). This winnowing process led the authors to select 1204 hydrologic stations, which they utilized to examine for changes in major flood events over the period 1961-2010. They then repeated their analysis on a smaller subset of 322 stations over the longer time period of 1931-2010. And what did their results reveal?

Hodgkins et al. report that "there was no compelling evidence for consistent changes over time in major-flood occurrence during the 80 years through 2010," adding that "the number of significant trends in major-flood occurrence across North America and Europe was approximately [equal to] the number expected due to chance alone." Consequently, they conclude that "compelling evidence for increased flooding at a global scale is lacking." And this lack of evidence, we would add, disproves any and all attempts by climate alarmists to claim that major floods are currently increasing due to anthropogenic-induced climate change -- at least over this large portion of the globe!

SOURCE

Shock Paper Cites Formula That Precisely Calculates Planetary Temps WITHOUT Greenhouse Effect, CO2

A more accurate and much simpler theory than the CO2 theory

In a new peer-reviewed scientific paper published in the journal Earth Sciences last December (2017), a Federation University (Australia) Science and Engineering student named Robert Holmes contends he may have found the key to unlocking our understanding of how planets with thick atmospheres (like Earth) remain “fixed” at 288 Kelvin (K), 740 K (Venus), 165 K (Jupiter)…without considering the need for a planetary greenhouse effect or changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

The Greenhouse Effect ‘Thought Experiment’

Perhaps the most fundamental conceptualization in climate science is the “thought experiment” that envisions what the temperature of the Earth might possibly be if there was no greenhouse effect, greenhouse gases, or atmosphere.

Dr. Gavin Schmidt, NASA:

“The size of the greenhouse effect is often estimated as being the difference between the actual global surface temperature and the temperature the planet would be without any atmospheric absorption, but with exactly the same planetary albedo, around 33°C. This is more of a ‘thought experiment’ than an observable state, but it is a useful baseline.”

Simplistically, the globally averaged surface temperature clocks in at 288 K.   In the “thought experiment”, an imaginary Earth that has no atmosphere (and thus no greenhouse gases to absorb and re-emit the surface heat) would have a temperature of only 255 K. The difference between the real and imagined Earth with no atmosphere is 33 K, meaning that the Earth would be much colder (and uninhabitable) without the presence of greenhouse gases bridging the hypothetical “heat gap”.

Of that 33 K greenhouse effect, 20.6 K is imagined to derive from water vapor droplets in the atmosphere (1,000 to 40,000 parts per million [ppm] by volume), whereas 7.2 K is thought to stem from the “natural” (or pre-industrial) 200-280 ppm atmospheric CO2 concentration (Kramm et al., 2017).

As a “thought experiment”, the critical heating role for water vapor droplets and CO2 concentrations lacks real-world validation. For example, the Earth’s oceans account for 93% of the planet’s heat energy (Levitus et al., 2012), and yet no real-world physical measurements exist that demonstrate how much heating or cooling is derived from varying CO2 concentrations up or down over a body of water in volume increments of parts per million (0.000001). Consequently, the CO2 greenhouse effect is a hypothetical, model-based conceptualization.

And in recent years, many scientific papers have been published that question the fundamentals of not only the Earth’s hypothetical greenhouse effect, but the role of greenhouse gases for other planets with thick atmospheres (like Venus) as well Hertzberg et al., 2017, Kramm et al., 2017, Nikolov and Zeller, 2017 , Allmendinger, 2017, Lightfoot and Mamer, 2017, Blaauw, 2017, Davis et al., 2018).   The Holmes paper highlighted here may just be among the most recent.

‘Extremely Accurate’ Planetary Temperature Calculations With Pressure/Density/Mass Formula

Holmes has argued that the average temperature for 8 planetary bodies with thick (0.1 bar or more) atmospheres can be precisely measured with “extreme” accuracy — an error range of just 1.2% — by using a formula predicated on the knowledge of 3 parameters: “[1] the average near-surface atmospheric pressure, [2] the average near surface atmospheric density and [3] the average mean molar mass of the near-surface atmosphere.”

Holmes used the derived pressure/density/mass numbers for each planetary body.   He then calculated the planets’ temperatures with these figures.

Venus’ temperature was calculated to be 739.7 K with the formula. Its measured temperature is 740 K. This indicates that the formula’s accuracy is within an error range of just 0.04% for Venus.

Given Earth’s pressure/density/mass, its calculated temperature is 288.14 K using Holmes’ formula. Earth’s measured temperature is 288 K, an exact fit.

Saturn’s calculated temperature is 132.8 K. Its measured temperature is 134 K — an error range of only 0.89%.

SOURCE

Critic of coral reef alarmism Raised $99K To Defend Freedom Of Speech In Just 48 Hours

Last week Professor Peter Ridd launched a GoFundMe to fundraise for his legal costs against James Cook University in the Federal Court.

Amazingly, after a public appeal, he has reached the required $95,000 to cover his defence in just 48 hours.

Institute of Public Affairs Executive Director, John Roskam, spoke to Alan Jones on 2GB this morning about Professor Ridd’s case.

In August last year Professor Ridd was interviewed by Alan Jones on Sky News about his chapter in a book Climate Change: The Facts 2017 published by the Institute of Public Affairs. In his chapter, The Extraordinary Resilience of Great Barrier Reef Corals, and Problems with Policy Science, Professor Ridd wrote:

"Policy science concerning the Great Barrier Reef is almost never checked. Over the next few years, Australian government will spend more than a billion dollars on the Great Barrier Reef; the costs to industry could far exceed this. Yet the keystone research papers have not been subject to proper scrutiny. Instead, there is a total reliance on the demonstrably inadequate peer review process."

Professor Ridd said on Sky News:

"The basic problem is that we can no longer trust the scientific organisations like the Australian Institute of Marine Science, even things like the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies – a lot of this is stuff is coming out, the science is coming out not properly checked, tested or replicated and this is a great shame because we really need to be able to trust our scientific institutions and the fact is I do not think we can any more…

…I think that most of the scientists who are pushing out this stuff they genuinely believe that there are problems with the reef, I just don’t think they’re very objective about the science they do, I think they’re emotionally attached to their subject and you know you can’t blame them, the reef is a beautiful thing."

JCU claimed that Professor Ridd’s comments denigrated the university and the university directed him to make no future such comments.

Thanks to the contributions of many IPA members and supporters of Professor Ridd, he is able to defend scientific integrity and academic freedom in the Federal Court.

You can now read the Professor Ridd’s full chapter. The extraordinary resilience of Great Barrier Reef corals, and the problems with policy science, here

SOURCE

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

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

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6 February, 2018

Greens are sexual harassers too

News from Australia's Green Party

A young Greens volunteer was sexually assaulted in Canberra. That’s scandalous enough, but the party’s response to the assault has added to the injury. Former Greens candidate Christina Hobbs weighs into the debate, in response to a staggering OpEd by party founder Bob Brown.

This week I’ve realised that in the aftermath of #MeToo, disappointment packs a particular punch when it is your hero who lands the blow.

Bob Brown has been an inspiration for much of my life. It is our common shared values of social justice and environmental sustainability that led me into a career with the United Nations. It is his legacy that inspired my first non-violent civil disobedience to protect the Liverpool Plains. I joined the party he founded, and in 2016 I represented the Greens as the ACT Senate Candidate.

It is with huge sadness therefore to see how Bob has chosen to publicly respond to a story written by the survivor of a sexual assault, seeking to use his clout to discredit and diminish her voice, and failing to recognise the immense courage it took her to speak out.

In an article printed last month in The Saturday Paper, a woman described how she was sexually assaulted by a senior Greens volunteer after leaving an election night party in 2016.

She believes the Greens failed her, and so do I. It should be a moment for radical introspection. Yet Bob began his response to the paper by referring to her as an “anonymous correspondent”, and described her criticism of the Greens as “anonymous pillorying”.

Bob may not know her identity, but I do. She was one of a number of young women who became the glue of the campaign. She is a hard working, smart, talented and effective campaigner for our movement, passionate about progressive values.

The author is not an anonymous agitator hiding in the shadows; she is a brave survivor using an alias so that this incident is not the first story that future employers, future partners or even future children read about when her name is searched online.

Bob’s letter descends into classic victim blaming, stating that she should have “immediately reported” this assault to the police, but “inexplicably” did not do so for many months. I am shocked that Bob does not recognise how difficult it is for survivors to report what has happened to them. Instead of saluting her courage and bravery in seeking justice, he has chosen to blame and criticise her.

This woman did go to the authorities, and it appears the police have decided not to press charges. Bob appears shocked by this, even though you would imagine that the former leader of Australia’s most progressive political party would know how hard it is to prosecute this type of case.

In his response, he says the police “should re-open their investigation of what reads as an open-and-shut case of rape”.

This kind of comment appears to be an attempt to shift the focus to the police as opposed to scrutinising the failures of the party itself to prevent and respond to such an incident. He says the Greens “could not and should not have been expected to substitute for the criminal justice system handling such a heinous crime”.

The young woman in question is not asking the ACT Greens to “substitute” the justice system, and it is absurd to suggest this. She does however believe that the response of the party to her earlier reports of harassment, prior to the assault, fell on deaf ears. She considers that the assault was not properly followed up when she did report it, and that the Greens haven’t fully acknowledged failings or offered her a genuine apology.

In part, this is because she disputes ACT Greens Minister Shane Rattenbury’s current public account of how the matter was handled.

Volunteers are generally entitled to the same protections as employees under workplace health and safety, and anti-discrimination laws. There are also laws that mean that, in certain situations, organisations can be held legally responsible for the actions of volunteers.

If the ACT Greens had stronger processes and guidelines in place before the election began; if senior officials and staff had been trained on strategies for creating safe workspaces; and if those in oversight positions had been empowered to properly monitor the campaign, this assault may never have happened.

Looking back, I also should have done more to raise issues relating to culture in the early months of the campaign.

If nothing is clearer it is that progressive political ideology is not enough to protect women. Rape is the consequence of unbalanced power. If checks and balances to power are not in place to support all employees or volunteers to thrive, then the #MeToo movement has shown us that sexual assault and harassment will prevail no matter what sector of our society.

As a young woman, our volunteer has never held the power in this story, and following Bob’s letter in The Saturday Paper, even less so.

Publicly detailing a sexual assault is incredibly brave. As a powerful man in the progressive movement, Bob could have used his influence to listen, to understand, and to help mediate. This could be a powerful moment for the Greens to say, “Yes #UsToo”.

Instead, Bob has used his clout to back the words of another powerful man – a Greens Minister who can hold his own.

There is no shame in admitting that we can and must do better. Our membership demands it. The ACT Greens, including Minister Rattenbury, have stated that they are already working on it.

Will our party go far enough in order for this young woman to gain closure? I don’t know. But if progressive organisations cannot be leaders in protecting and promoting women in the workplace, then we will lose authority to advocate on fundamental issues of workers rights, gender equality and justice.

The elected leaders of the Australian Greens should immediately distance themselves from Bob’s remarks. The nation’s most progressive political party must ensure such an incident never occurs again.

SOURCE

39 Years of Data

The “Global Temperature Report” for December 2017 by the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) contained an illuminating global map. The map showed the global temperature change in the lower troposphere as calculated from satellite measurements from December 1979 to December 2017 – 39 years.

These calculations are independently verified by direct measurements of temperatures from weather balloons. These are the most comprehensive temperature data compiled, far more inclusive than surface-air data, taken about shoulder height off the ground, largely in westernized regions of the global land mass.

Further, it is in the atmosphere where the greenhouse gas effect occurs, not at shoulder level. [Satellite data do not include the region directly over the poles.]

These atmospheric data reveal a pronounced warming over the Arctic, as one would expect from greenhouse gas theory. However, except for the region known as Queen Maud Land, roughly south of Africa, which shows a pronounced warming, the bulk of Antarctica shows a cooling, or no change.

This is contrary to what one would expect from the greenhouse gas theory, as expressed in the 1979 Charney Report produced by the US National Academy of Sciences.

Further, the bulk of the atmosphere over the tropics does not show a strong pronounced warming, contrary to what the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) asserted in its Second Assessment report, claiming it had detected a distinct human influence (human fingerprint) on climate from greenhouse gases (SAR, 1995).

The atmosphere continues to contradict the findings of the IPCC, and it is past time to re-evaluate the assumptions made by it, its supporters, and its models.

Also, when will the IPCC advocates in NOAA and NASA admit that greenhouse gas warming occurs in the atmosphere, not on or near the surface of the earth? NOAA and NASA continue to undermine their own credibility by their continued use of surface (surface-air) temperatures and by their manipulation of historic data, producing a false warming trend.

SOURCE

World Leading Authority: Sea Level “Absolutely Stable”… Poor Quality Data From “Office Perps"

German-speaking readers will surely want to save the text of an interview conducted by the online Baseler Zeitung (BAZ) of Switzerland with world leading sea level expert Prof. Nils-Axel Mörner.

Few scientists have scientifically published as much on sea level as Mörner has.

Yet because he rejects the alarmist scenarios touted by the media and alarmist IPCC scientists, the Swedish professor has long been the target of vicious attack campaigns aimed at discrediting him – yet to little effect.

Mörner, who headed of the Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics (P&G) Department at Stockholm University from 1991 to 2005, has studied sea level his entire career, visiting 59 countries in the process.

Sea level hijacked by an activist agenda

In the interview Mörner tells science journalist Alex Reichmuth that climate and sea level science has been completely politicized and hijacked by an activist agenda and has become a “quasi religion”.

According to the BAZ, recently Mörner has been at the Fiji Islands on multiple occasions in order “to study coastal changes and sea level rise”, and to take a first hand look at the “damage” that allegedly has occurred due to climate change over the past years.

IPCC is false

The Swedish professor tells the BAZ that he became a skeptic of alarmist climate science early on because “the IPCC always depicted the facts on the subject falsely” and “grossly exaggerated the risks of sea level rise” and that the IPCC “excessively relied on shaky computer models instead of field research.”

He tells the BAZ: “I always want to know what the facts are. That’s why I went to the Fiji Islands.”

“Very poor quality data” from “office perps”

Mörner also dismisses claims by the Swiss ProClim climate science platform who recently announced that the Fiji Islands are seeing a rapid sea level rise. According to Mörner the data were taken from poor locations. “We looked over the data, and concluded that they are of very poor quality” and that the researchers who handled the data were “office perps” who were “not specialized in coastal dynamic processes and sea level changes”.

Many of them have no clue about the real conditions.”

Sea level “absolutely stable”

Mörner tells the BAZ that sea level at the Fiji islands was in fact higher than it is today between 1550 and 1700. Coral reefs tell the story and “they don’t lie,” the Swedish professor said. He added he was not surprised by the data because “it is not the first time the IPCC has been wrong”.

Over the past 200 years: “The sea level has not changed very much. Over the past 50 to 70 years it has been absolutely stable”.

“Because they have a political agenda”

Not only is sea level rise due to climate change at the Fiji Islands exaggerated, but the same is true worldwide as a rule. When asked why are we seeing all the warnings from scientists, Mörner tells the BAZ: “Because they have a political agenda.”

Mörner warns readers that the IPCC was set up from the get-go with the foregone conclusion man was warming the globe and changing the climate: Mörner says: “And it is sticking to that like a dogma – no matter what the facts are.”

When asked if sea level rise poses a problem for the islands, Mörner answers with one simple word: “No.”

Strong evidence solar activity impacts sea level

The Swedish professor also tells the BAZ that the rates of water rushing into the ocean due to glacier melt are exaggerated and that thermal expansion of the ocean is minimal. Mörner adds:

Sea level appears to depend foremost on solar cycle and little from melting ice.”

Junk surveys produce “nonsense”

When asked by the BAZ why he became skeptical, Mörner recalls the “great anger” from an IPCC representative when he spoke at a 1991 sea level conference in the USA. He was surprised by the reaction, alluding to the fact that it is normal to have different views in science. And as the years followed, he became increasingly aware of the falsehoods made by the IPCC and the organization’s refusal to admit to them.

On the subject of publishing research results:

Publishers of scientific journals no longer accept papers that challenge the claims made by the IPCC, no matter the paper’s quality.”

In his decades long career, Mörner has authored some 650 publications, and he tells the BAZ that he has no plans to stop fighting. “No one can stop me.”

Near the end of the interview Mörner calls the claim that 97% of all climate scientists believe global warming is man-made “nonsense” and that the number comes from “unserious surveys”.

In truth the majority of scientists reject the IPCC claims. Depending on the field, it’s between 50 and 80 percent.”

Cooling over the next decades

Mörner also sees little reason to reduce CO2 emissions, and calls the belief in man-made climate change a religious movement driven by public funding.

In conclusion Mörner tells the BAZ that he thinks solar activity will likely decrease and that cooling will ensue over the coming decades.

Then it will become clear just how wrong the global warming warnings are.”

SOURCE

Things Your Professor Didn’t Tell You About Climate Change

Davos 2018 is gone, but not forgotten. This year’s World Economic Forum provided yet another opportunity for those who believe in apocalyptic climate change to harangue us about the evils of greenhouse gases amid warnings the world will end in 2050 or 2100 or one of these days when it gets warm enough. Most striking is the annual spectacle of the world’s wealthy and privileged disembarking from their fuel-gulping private jets and limousines or emerging from luxury hotel suites, to proclaim the world must cut back on the use of fossil fuels, or to question why the world’s common people do not feel as deeply or passionately about climate change as they do.

Other than a propensity for believing everything they are told, why are these people so agitated?

If you look at climate change predictions, almost all of them are bad. Critics refer to these views collectively as climate alarmism. Alarmists believe the Earth’s climate is warming because greenhouse gases are being added to the atmosphere through human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels. They claim unless the buildup of greenhouse gases is stopped, global temperatures will begin to rise exponentially, which will have terrible consequences, such as major flora and fauna extinctions, coastal inundation caused by melting ice caps, heatwaves, drought, famine, economic collapse, war, and the potential for human extinction.

The basis for many of these predictions are the reports issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). One of the functions of the IPCC is to model the Earth’s climate to predict changes in global temperature. Although the Earth is warming a bit, their models always seem to be more enthusiastic about warming than the Earth appears to be. In fact, a recent study from the UK suggests climate models factor in too much warming.

In science, if a hypothesis is proposed and predictions based on that hypothesis happen as predicted, the hypothesis becomes a theory. If not, the hypothesis is rejected. Not so with global warming. When global temperatures fail to meet the IPCC’s model predictions, they simply move the prediction date out into the future, all the while making it clear the global warming apocalypse is still coming.

Speaking of ominous, in 2006 former vice-president and climate change activist Al Gore claimed:

Unless drastic measures are taken to reduce greenhouse gases in the next ten years, the world will reach a point of no return.

I doubt that point was reached a few weeks ago when I shoveled a surprise blanket of frozen climate change off my driveway. Fortunately, this and many of Gore’s other ominous climate predictions, have not come true.

So, what do we really know?

First, we know the percentage of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is increasing. Carbon dioxide levels are approximately 45% higher now than they were 150 years ago, likely caused by the burning of fossil fuels during the twentieth century and recent industrialization in Asia.

Even though the present warming trend may be linked to rising amounts of CO2, this is an unproven hypothesis, not settled science. Scientists are still arguing over surface temperature data, including the way it is collected, adjusted, and interpreted; whether CO2 is affecting global temperatures as much as believed; and if water vapor, which humans have no control over, really dominates the greenhouse effect in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Incidentally, the news about carbon dioxide is not all bad. An international study found plant life thriving worldwide thanks to higher CO2 levels.

We know the Sun has a larger effect on the Earth’s climate than anything else. Small changes in solar insolation due to variations in the Sun’s energy output or cyclical variations in the Earth’s orbit, known as the Milankovitch Cycles, can make a big difference in the surface temperature. Yes, greenhouse gasses, ocean currents, volcanic eruptions, and many other things can affect the climate, but the Sun is still the 800 lb. gorilla in the room.

We live in an ice age. Over the last 450,000 years the ‘normal’ average global temperature has been approximately 5 degrees Centigrade cooler than it is today. During that time our climate cycled between long cool periods, known as glacials, which can last 50,000-100,000 years, and shorter warm periods called interglacials, which usually last between 10,000-20,000 years. During glacial periods glaciers and continental ice sheets develop and grow. During interglacial periods, like the one we are experiencing now, the Earth warms and sea level rises as most of the ice melts.

We know, due to the above-mentioned factors and other natural climate oscillations, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the 11-year Sunspot Cycle, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), and perhaps the De Vries Solar Cycle, the world’s climate continually changes. This means the present warming trend could be a natural climate oscillation unrelated to CO2 or possibly a combination of both.

One of those oscillations occurred between 1940 and 1977 as the Earth went through a minor cooling trend, possibly linked to the PDO. This prompted a global cooling scare as scientists feared we were sliding into another glacial period.

We are fairly certain the Earth has been warmer in the past than it is today, perhaps as recently as 950 -1250 AD during the Medieval Warm Period, or 5000-8000 years ago during the Holocene Climatic Optimum, or during the Eemian Interglacial Period around 130,000-125,000 years ago.

We are also certain sea level was higher in the past than it is today. In their 2014 Climate Report the IPCC claims:

Maximum global mean sea level during the last interglacial period (129,000 to 116,000 years ago) was, for several thousand years, at least 5 m higher than present.

So, if the Earth was naturally warmer in the past and sea level was higher, both without extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, doesn’t this cast doubt on the CO2 apocalypse?

One item of concern is sea level, which has risen a bit over eight inches since 1880. Alarmists point out roughly ten percent of the world’s population live near the ocean at elevations of ten meters or less, and they present this information as if sea level rise is an imminent threat.

The present accepted rate of sea-level rise is about the thickness of two pennies stacked one on top of the other, around 3 millimeters per year. At this rate, sea level would rise barely 9 inches by 2100, meaning New York City, average elevation 10 meters, would be flooded in a little over 3,000 years. The point is this is a slow-motion process and something we can deal with.

To sum up, there are plenty of reasons to doubt human activities are the sole cause of climate change. If you are feeling anxious or guilty because of alarmist predictions, relax. The climate will continue to warm and cool and it is a good bet Mother Nature will be the one in the driver’s seat. If you still want to be an eco-warrior, recycle, plant a tree, and try to be energy efficient. It is good for the planet.

SOURCE

Great Barrier Reef in 'deep trouble' as climate, other threats mount: official

More lying Greenie propaganda. Their claims about bleaching in 2015/2016 were not and could not be verified. When Prof. Ridd pointed that out, what did they do? Present evidence of verification? No way. They sued Peter Ridd for letting the cat out of the bag. What frauds! What jerks! They just love the funding they get for their lies. They've just got $60 million from the Feds

The Great Barrier Reef is in "deep trouble" as climate change and other threats mount, hindering the ability of corals to rebound from natural events, a senior scientist with the reef's Marine Park Authority said.

Unprecedented back-to-back mass coral bleachings resulted in 29 per cent of the shallow water corals dying in the summer of 2015-16 and a further 20 per cent last summer, David Wachenfeld, director of recovery at the authority, said.

Fortunately, "there's no prediction of substantial mass bleachings at this point" for this summer. Still, February - typically the worst month for heat stress on corals - "is going to be a slightly nervous month" for scientists, Dr Wachenfeld said.

The roughly 50-per cent death rate for the corals excludes damage done last March by Cyclone Debbie, which tore into the northern end of the southern section of the Great Barrier Reef - an area largely spared from the bleaching events.

While corals have a natural ability to bounce back, the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather made recovery harder.

"[E]very time we get impacts on the reef, they are slightly or a lot worse than previous impacts," Dr Wachenfeld told Fairfax Media. "And the question is, as we keep seeing bigger impacts, will the reef continue to be as resilient as it has been in the past?"

How climate change will affect the Great Barrier Reef and other parts of Australia will feature at a week-long gathering of senior scientists in Sydney for the first Australian/New Zealand Climate Forum held in seven years.

Terry Hughes, Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and one of the speakers at the event, said scientists were in "uncharted territory" when it came to predicting how fast the reef can recover.

"Normally, after a cyclone, it takes 10-15 years for the fastest-growing species to bounce back," Professor Hughes said.

"Optimistically, 50 per cent mortality after the two recent heatwaves means the glass is still half full," he said. "The survivors ... are tougher than the corals that died - there is about a billion of them, and they are reproducing."

Dr Wachenfeld said tackling other stressors on corals, including from nutrient run-off from farms and the latest big outbreak of crown-of-thorns starfish, were important local efforts to help corals rebound.

"That's the way to give the reef the best chance to survive the global threat of climate change," he said.

"The reef is still a dynamic, vibrant, awesome place," Dr Wachenfeld said. "But it's in deep trouble, and at the moment, it's not heading in the right direction."

SOURCE

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

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

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5 February, 2018

Global Temperatures Drop Back To Pre-El Nino Levels

According to the satellite data

The onset of La Niña in the tropical Pacific Ocean has caused temperatures drop to levels not seen in six years, according to satellite temperature data.

“Note that La Niña cooling in the tropics has finally penetrated the troposphere, with a -0.12 deg. C departure from average,” wrote atmospheric scientists John Christy and Roy Spencer, who compile satellite data at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

Satellite data, which measures Earth’s bulk atmosphere, show temperature anomalies dropped from 0.41 degrees Celsius in December to 0.26 degrees in January. The temperature drop was brought about by a La Niña cooling event in the tropics.

La Niña is in full swing in 2018, plunging temperatures in the tropics to -0.12 degrees Celsius in January, down from 0.26 degrees the previous month. It’s the third-largest tropical temperature drop on record.

“The last time the tropics were cooler than this was June, 2012 (-0.15 deg. C),” the scientists wrote.

“Out of the 470 month satellite record, the 0.38 deg. C one-month drop in January tropical temperatures was tied for the 3rd largest, beaten only by October 1991 (0.51 deg. C drop) and August, 2014 (0.41 deg. C drop),” they wrote.

La Niña settled in late 2017, with cooler waters reaching from South America, across to eastern Pacific islands. It’s the opposite of El Niño warming events.

“The last time the Southern Hemisphere was this cool (+0.06 deg. C) was July, 2015 (+0.04 deg. C),” Christy and Spencer wrote.

“The linear temperature trend of the global average lower tropospheric temperature anomalies from January 1979 through January 2018 remains at +0.13 C/decade,” they wrote.

SOURCE

Great Lakes ice cover isn't cooperating with the "runaway global warming" narrative:

2/2/2016: 5.8%
2/2/2017: 8.3%
2/2/2018: 29.1%

SOURCE

The solar influence

When comparing current Solar Activity (SC24) to 100 years ago its very obvious the future trend is for COOLING... as to why the MetOffice, NASA and NOAA predict Warming is a complete mystery. The next Cycle (SC25) is expected to be even lower.

The area enclosed by the black line represents the latest solar activity and that area is well down on previous periods, meaning that the sun has been unusually inactive recently. And solar cycles DO correlate with weather.

SOURCE

A Washington State Carbon Tax: All Pain, No Gain

Even with unrealistically positive assumptions, the benefits would be minuscule. With respect to Washington governor Jay Inslee’s renewed proposal for a “carbon” tax on that state’s greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, a number to keep closely in mind is: 2/1000 of a degree. That would be the global temperature effect in the year 2100 if Washington were to reduce its GHG emissions to zero immediately.

That figure comes from the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate model, under a set of assumptions that exaggerate the effects of emissions reductions. Obviously, the effect of the governor’s proposed tax would be vastly smaller. And by the way, the governor’s proposal would not apply to jet fuel, as Boeing is the state’s largest private employer.

Even with that glaring concession to political reality, Inslee apparently still believes that the state should make itself a moral example and “mark the way.” Sorry, but the federal bureaucracy until Donald Trump assumed the presidency was way ahead of him. Implementation of the Obama administration’s entire package of climate policies would have reduced temperatures by 25/1000 of a degree, while the Paris agreement, if implemented fully, would yield a reduction of 17/100 of a degree.

Those effects, by the way, would be too small to be measured reliably. And so Inslee’s claim that his proposed tax would “save our children” from droughts, flooding, fires, and other “existential threats” is preposterous.

Inslee seems implicitly to recognize this, and so he reverted to a justification based upon the employment that will be created by an expansion of “clean energy” production. That, too, is deeply dubious. His tax on energy would shift employment away from energy-intensive sectors toward others, and in the aggregate would reduce employment by making the economy smaller. (U.S. data show that energy consumption and employment move together closely. The same is true for energy consumption and GDP growth, household income, and reductions in the poverty rate.)

And about that “clean energy”: There is nothing “clean” about it. There is heavy-metal pollution created by the production process for wind turbines. There are noise and flicker effects of wind turbines. There is the large problem of solar-panel waste. There is wildlife destruction caused by the production of renewable power. There is massive and unsightly land use made necessary by the unconcentrated nature of renewable energy.

And above all, there is the increase in emissions of conventional effluents caused by the up-and-down cycling of the backup conventional-generation units, which are needed to avoid blackouts caused by the unreliability of wind and solar power — a reality curiously underreported in the popular discussion.

With respect to the “existential threats” asserted by Inslee: There is no question that increasing GHG concentrations are having measurable effects. But they are far smaller than the climate models would lead one to believe. The degree to which recent warming has been anthropogenic is unsettled in the scientific literature, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its fifth assessment report (AR5) has reduced its estimated range of the effect in 2100 of a doubling of GHG concentrations from 2.0–4.5 to 1.5–4.5 degrees C.

Moreover, there is little evidence of strong climate effects attendant upon increasing GHG concentrations, in terms of sea levels; Arctic and Antarctic sea ice; tornado activity; tropical cyclones; U.S. wildfires; drought; and flooding. IPCC in the AR5 is deeply dubious (Table 12.4) about the various severe effects often hypothesized (or asserted) as future impacts of increasing GHG concentrations.

Climate change caused by GHG emissions might prove to be a serious problem. It might prove to be a minor problem, and it might prove to be beneficial on net. We simply do not know, and the argument that very large costs ought to be imposed by climate policies upon the economy — that is, upon actual people — with trivial or unmeasurable benefits is deeply problematic. More research, more technological advance, and adaptation over time are likely to prove far wiser.

In his State of the State address, Inslee used the phrase “carbon pollution” no fewer than five times. That term is political propaganda, the obvious purpose of which is to cut off debate before it begins by assuming the answer to the underlying policy question. Carbon dioxide is not “carbon,” and it is not a “pollutant,” as a certain minimum atmospheric concentration of it is necessary for life itself.

By far the most important GHG in terms of the radiative properties of the troposphere is water vapor; no one calls it a “pollutant.” Why not? Is it because ocean evaporation is a natural process? So are volcanic eruptions, but the toxins, particulates, and other effluents emitted by volcanoes are pollutants by any definition. All of us would do well to use the phrase “greenhouse gases,” which has the virtue of being scientifically accurate without assuming the answer to the underlying policy question. Willie Sutton, who robbed banks because “that’s where the money is,” would be proud.

Whatever Inslee’s spending preferences for the revenues, interest-group competition within the legislature guarantees that good intentions would yield quickly to ordinary pork-barrel politics. With no prospect of environmental improvement and little of real beneficial spending, what is the rationale for a tax on “carbon?” Why not on zucchini?

SOURCE

UN does not like Australia's climate policies

Oh, Goodie!

Australia's climate policies are "a decade behind" other rich nations, according to a United Nations investment official, leaving the country exposed to risks of a so-called "green paradox" when carbon emissions will have to make a precipitous retreat.

A phasing out of coal and other fossil fuels is the centrepiece of four recommended investor goals to be unveiled by the UN's Principles for Responsible Investment unit in New York on Thursday morning, eastern Australian time.

Fiona Reynolds, UNPRI's managing director, said investors needed to take the lead in forcing companies to reveal their exposure to fossil fuels and to step up pressure on governments to meet their Paris climate commitments.

"Investors have a huge, huge role to play on climate change," Ms Reynolds told Fairfax Media, citing their ability to influence the companies they own, including steering them away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. "This a really urgent issue."

While countries in Europe of all political persuasions were tackling the need to switch to a low-carbon future, the debate in Australia 10 years behind, she said.

"Australia keeps battling about the downsides and not the opportunities that could be available to the country in this transition," Ms Reynolds said.

The Abbott government's scrapping of a carbon price in 2014 - and the kryptonite reaction to another policy since - went against the global trend.

Some 40 nations had introduced some form of carbon pricing and major international investors were generally supportive, Ms Reynolds said. "They say, 'As investors, we work in market-based systems. We need carbon pricing,'" she said. "It's a high priority."

Josh Frydenberg, the environment and energy minister, said the Turnbull government won't support a carbon price: "The last time Australia had a price on carbon it was Labor's $15.4 billion carbon tax which was a disaster that sent electricity prices up and made us less competitive."

Pricing carbon, though, received support this week from European researchers who say putting a price on emissions would be a key method to avoid a "green paradox" that had implications for nations such as Australia.
'Nightmare scenario'

In a paper published in Nature Climate Change, the researchers looked at the possibility that fossil-fuel owners, in anticipation of future carbon curbs, would accelerate extraction rates to maximise profits - contrary to the object of those restrictions.

"Strong and timely signals" from climate policy-makers are necessary to counter the incentive to expand output of fossil fuels in the short term, they said.

Nico Bauer, a modeller from Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the paper's lead author, said Australia faced the "grass paradox" because of its fossil fuel wealth, including about 13 per cent of the world's coal reserves.

A "serious carbon price" would affect use of coal in Australia and promote faster take-up of renewable energy, Dr Bauer said.

Australia faced being "a victim of a blame game" if the Paris goal of a 2-degree warming limit is exceeded, a prospect that should serve to motivate climate action, he said, adding "the carbon price would be economically the most efficient instrument".

A delay also increased the likelihood of a "carbon bubble" emerging that would end up being popped rather than deflated if governments resorted to a "climate policy shock" to get emissions down to the required rate of reduction.

"This, however, is a kind of a nightmare scenario for financial regulators, because they figure out a financial crisis scenario and they fear something like a fossil-fuelled Lehman Brothers event," Dr Bauer said.

SOURCE

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

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

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4 February, 2018

Extreme cold, frostbite and hypothermia force halt to Yukon Arctic Ultra race

According to the Greenies, the earth started to warm immediately after WWII -- as industrialization picked up and produced more and more CO2 emissions.

They got one part right. CO2 has risen steadily since then. But where is the warming? After 70 years of warming there should be none of these repeated incidents of extreme cold. Extreme cold should have greatly moderated. But it has not. Worldwide there have been constant severe winters.

Greenies say these freezing periods are just weather but when does weather become climate? Frequent cold weather is part of climate so the Greenie prophecies have just not been fulfilled. The global warming prophecy was wrong

It's billed as "the world's coldest and toughest ultra" race — and few would argue, after this year.

The long-distance, backcountry Yukon Arctic Ultra race, which began Thursday in Whitehorse, was put on hold on Friday after a slew of competitors fell victim to hypothermia and frostbite, calling for help, and dropping out of the race.

"We are in what we refer to as 'high alert status,'" says a notice on the race website.

The temperature in Whitehorse as racers set off on Thursday morning was hovering around –30 C. Overnight, it was closer to –45 C, race officials say.

"We were hoping most of them will get through the night without major problems. Unfortunately, this was not the case," the race website says.

As of Friday afternoon, several competitors had already been retrieved from the trail, and some have gone to hospital to be treated for frostbite.

Mark Kelly, a Whitehorse photographer, found himself unexpectedly busy on Friday morning, picking up racers in distress on his snowmobile and delivering them to safety.

He had arranged to meet one of the racers on the trail, freelance journalist Eva Holland, to take some photographs for her. He didn't get far out of town before he was sidetracked.

"I was maybe five or eight kilometres on the trail, and a fellow hopped out of the bush and waved me down and just said, 'rescue me!'. Poor guy, I really felt for him. He was definitely hypothermic," Kelly said.

Kelly gave the cold man some hot tea, loaded him on his sled, and took him back to his truck to warm up and wait to be picked up. Kelly then set off again to meet Holland.

Again, he was stopped before he reached her. Another man was in trouble, and calling for help.

"After the second fellow with the blackening fingers, I thought, this is serious," Kelly said.

"One of the fellows, he'd stopped [to camp] because he was freezing cold, but his hands were so frostbitten that he couldn't even open his Thermarest. So he was laying, literally, right on the frozen ground — no wonder he was hypothermic."

Kelly eventually made it to Holland, who in the meantime had also called for help. Her fingers were frostbitten, but she was in good spirits, Kelly said.

SOURCE

Where the floating plastic comes from. It is not "us"

A picture is worth a thousand words

The wetland reserve at the mouth of the Yangtze is supposed to be the last unspoilt tract of seaside by Shanghai.

Yet here in the delta of the world’s third longest river, which is the leading source of plastics polluting the oceans, it is more like a disaster zone of flotsam and debris.

The tides sweep a myriad of garbage — bits of old appliances, plastic jugs, packaging fragments, torn fishing lines and polystyrene foam — on to the shoreline at Jiuduansha.

“Plastic waste far outnumbers any other kind of waste I have found on beaches,” Tang Heqing said, who is trying to clean the area and gauge the level of pollution.

SOURCE

Climate change is making some women reluctant to have children

Good, good, Good! I am all in favor of lamebrains voluntarily removing themselves from the gene pool

Climate change is creating yet another debate -- this time largely among women who are wondering what it means for their reproductive future.

They are not saying they fear their ovaries are affected by climate change; instead, they are saying they are so worried about climate change, it has made them wonder if bringing a child into the world right now is a bad idea.

The state of worry has created groups such as Conceivable Future. The group is made up of men and women. Though largely made of women, everyone comes to discuss the next generation and climate change. Members of the organization aren't optimistic for what is ahead, so they are unsure about bringing a child into an uncertain future.

Gone are the days of getting married and nine months later, happy couples welcome their first child into the world.

Now, future parents are calculated, often double earners faced with skyrocketing college costs, the consequences of living in a digital age, ever increasing health risks, and the declining state of our planet. At Conceivable Future, the environment discussion is all about how climate change affects family.

“It’s one way to talk about climate that really cuts both across everybody’s life and cuts to the core of what it really means to be a human," Josephine Ferorelli, co-founder of Conceivable Future, said.

The organization’s founder holds house parties across the U.S., including areas such as Chicago. The mission of these house parties is to get attention with help from testimonials from members.

Hannah Harpole, 34, from New York, is among those that are worried about the future.

“At this point, I feel it is very unlikely that I will have children,” Harpole said. “It’s a biological feeling that It’s a very bad idea to have children because of what’s going on with the climate.”

Harpole is not alone in feeling this way. Andree Zaleska, 48, from Boston, is right behind Harpole.

“I have had to raise my kids with the knowledge that their future is completely uncertain to me," she said.

According to the organization, it is a chance for everyone to have and hold a conversation. Everyone is welcome, men and women, adults and children, those with kids and those without. It’s a forum, a safe place, they say, to share and to ask questions.

Ferorelli initiates this conversation with a question that allows for the discussion to begin.

“How is climate change impacting our reproductive lives? That’s the conversation, as open-ended as that,” she said.

The questionable climate change has prompted others to consider having more children or even a child at all.

Eleanor Ray is one of the many women that see the climate as a reason why she has settled on not having kids.

“Every other thing is eventually going to depend on what the weather does,” Ray said. “ I think it will be the shaping force of the next 100 years, and we’re not planning for it.”

SOURCE

Conservation, Not Environmentalism

Much of the disagreement over the use of America's natural resources stems from confusion over the difference between conservation and environmentalism. Conservation, a rational, conservative approach to protecting and preserving the environment, is an ethic of resource utilization. Conservationists view man as a natural, invested partner in the endeavor to preserve the environment to ensure its continued, sustainable use by humans.

Environmentalism began as a sincere conservationist movement but subscribes to a view of man as nature's enemy. Nature itself is revered and intrinsically embodied with value. Environmentalists seek to limit human access to, rather than allow use of, nature to advance human life, health, and happiness. Environmentalists perceive man as an immoral, destructive interloper who can interact only negatively with his natural surroundings.

In his book, Smoking Them Out: The Theft of the Environment and How to Take It Back (American Tradition Institute, 2013), Greg Walcher focuses on these ideological differences as he examines the environmental movement.

Walcher begins with the history of the environmental movement. He demonstrates how the stewardship of our resources – water, forests, energy sources, other natural resources – has become less about real science and conservation and more about politics and achieving centralized control. This change in focus has created unintended consequences, far removed from the ideals of caring for the environment and, today, bordering on malfeasance.

The author describes an environmental industry that has grown by leaps and bounds since the 1980s. Although their stated goals have remained the same, the nature of the groups has changed radically as they borrowed techniques from non-profit organizations in other fields and raised huge sums of money, much from major foundations such as the Ford Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and other entities known for supporting anti-capitalist goals.

Many of the organizations boast membership statistics that dishonestly include visitors to their websites and attendees to their meetings to claim extensive and widespread support for their activities, while having few actual, dues-paying members. Large organizations often spawn new groups that are portrayed as concerned citizens promoting an alleged grassroots issue of regional concern, such as "Friends of the Canyon," to give an image of neighborhood conservation groups valiantly fighting large, evil corporations.

The emphasis has been on stopping development rather than compromising to balance community needs with legitimate environmental concerns. As a result, hundreds of new local groups have sprung up to influence nearly all major natural resource agencies at every level of government. They pursue lawsuits in staggering numbers, greatly impeding progress on the development of environmental policies. The Sierra Club alone filed 129 federal lawsuits between 2001 and 2007.

During his tenure as head of the Department of Natural Resources in Colorado, Walcher dealt firsthand with the full smorgasbord of environmental concerns. He describes his interactions with factions of the powerful, politically connected international environmental industry and takes issue with their negative characterizations of coal-miners; oil, gas, and mining companies; loggers; and farmers as irresponsible abusers of the environment.

Walcher considers the Endangered Species Act of 1973 – the most powerful environmental law ever passed – a failure. Half of the species on the endangered list have been on the list for more than 20 years, and only one third have an actual recovery plan in place. The legislation has accomplished little to recover endangered species, and, in the vast majority of cases, the situation has worsened. Rather than recovering and reintroducing self-sustaining populations of species, the focus has been on habitat conservation, resulting in legislation and regulations to control property, land access, and resources with a negligible effect on actual species recovery.

Walcher's approach to species endangerment was to build state-of-the-art recovery facilities: first an aquatic species hatchery and, later, similar facilities for birds and mammals. The goal was to recover sufficient numbers of the species to place them into a suitable habitat for their growth.

While the program became overwhelmingly successful, little interest arose from the government and environmental groups. Walcher became aware that listings of endangered species were made with inadequate proof that they were, in fact, endangered, and statistics on historic populations or recovery goals were not part of the equation. Further, the law offered no appeals process or comment period for the public to contest a potential listing. Since the inception of the Act, 1,435 species had been placed on the list, and only eight had been removed. From this dismal record, Walcher concluded that the real agenda was to control land and human activity.

In his well researched book, Walcher describes similar scenarios of environmentalists' intrusions in the management (or mismanagement) of other resources: forests, land, water, and energy. He shows how well endowed environmental organizations are adept at imposing their agendas at any cost and with any subterfuge necessary.

In land management, he explains how America's forests had traditionally been kept in check by nature, with periodic fires sparked by lightning. But forest management was created and engaged in fire suppression, with logging taking the place of fire to thin forests. In the late 1990s, logging became unpopular and a hot-button issue for environmentalists. The result: a massive overgrowth of trees, brush, grasses, and weeds that deteriorated the health of forests and produced a literal tinderbox. Our forests are so overcrowded that they currently burn at a rate unmatched in recorded history, threatening the wildlife they sustain.

An interesting split on land management and development issues between the West and East is also explored in Smoking Them Out. Whereas in the Western states, much of the land is state- and federally owned, government land ownership constitutes a mere 1% to 2% in the East. For example, Nevada consists of nearly all public land, while less than 1% of New York State land is government-owned. This means that Nevada has a much lower tax base available for local schools, fire departments, water and sewer services, and other needs. The amount of publicly owned lands presents a difficult challenge for Western states hampered by government regulation of much of the land surrounding their communities.

In the end, Walcher promotes a policy of hands-on environmentalism – recovering endangered species, restoring forests through effective clearing, responsible mining with an emphasis on mitigation and reclamation, and other such sensible interventions. With millions of acres of land currently restricted for human activity, our forests and water supply have suffered, and we have strayed from the original intent of resource protection to a hidden agenda of control.

Flush with cash and an armamentarium of legal guns, the environmental groups have embarked on a multi-decade destructive crusade that has plundered resources and ensured that the next generation will not enjoy the same standard of living; will travel less; will live in smaller homes; will relinquish cars; and will consume, manufacture, and produce less. In Smoke Them Out, Greg Walcher demonstrates that the answer is not to continue to promulgate a massive regulatory morass, but to engage in sensible conservation and recovery policies.

Moving forward, environmental policy should be about responsibly providing the necessary natural resources to sustain a prosperous country. As is clear from the many examples set by impoverished countries, when people have inadequate resources to sustain their communities and livelihoods, they focus on survival and don't expend time and energy for conservation.

SOURCE

Australia: Greenies trying to gag honest scientidst

Marine scientist commented on their "unvalidated" public pronouncements about catastrophic damage to the Great Barrier Reef. The reef is now back to normal so he was proved right.

Marine scientist Peter Ridd has refused to accept a formal censure and gag order from James Cook University and expanded his Federal Court action to defend academic freedoms and free speech.

A revised statement of claim alleges JCU trawled through private email conversations in a bid to bolster its misconduct case against him.

JCU had found Professor Ridd guilty of “serious misconduct”, including denigrating a co-worker, denigrating the university, breaching confidentiality, publishing information outside of the university and disregarding his obligations as an employee. [i.e. He told the truth]

Professor Ridd has asked the Federal Court to overturn the university ruling and confirm his right not to be silenced.

In the revised statement of claim, Professor Ridd has dropped an earlier claim of conflict of interest against JCU vice-chancellor Sandra Harding, but has alleged other senior staff had been biased and had not acted fairly or in good faith.

Professor Ridd’s Federal Court action is seen as a test of academic freedom and free speech, and has been supported by the Institute of Public Affairs.

Professor Ridd said he would seek public donations to continue the fight against JCU. He first took court action in November in a bid to stop a JCU disciplinary process against him for comments he made to Sky News presenter Alan Jones.

The university said by expressing concerns about the quality of some reef science, Professor Ridd had not acted in a “collegiate” manner.

Professor Ridd told Sky News: “The basic problem is that we can no longer trust the scientific organisations like the Australian Institute of Marine Science, even things like the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.”

He said a lot of the science was not properly checked, tested or replicated and “this is a great shame because we really need to be able to trust our scientific institutions and the fact is I do not think we can any more”.

A JCU spokesman said the university’s lawyers had invited Professor Ridd to discontinue his proceedings. “(He) has amended his proceedings. His decision to do so is a matter for him,” he said.

“The university intends to vigorously defend those proceedings (but) as these matters are before the courts, JCU will not comment further.”

Lawyers for JCU wrote to Professor Ridd on November 28 confirming the university had determined he had engaged in “serious misconduct” and issued him with a “final censure”.

“The disciplinary process and all information gathered and recorded in relation to the disciplinary process (including the allegations, letters, your client’s responses and the outcome of the disciplinary process) is confidential pursuant to clause 54.1.5 of the university enterprise agreement,” the JCU lawyers said.

Professor Ridd has subsequently published his concerns about the quality of reef science in a peer-reviewed journal. He said he was determined to speak freely about his treatment “even though it will go against explicit directions by JCU not to”.

“This is as much a case about free speech as it is about quality of science,” he said.

SOURCE

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

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

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2 February, 2018

Global warming is shrinking insects: Study reveals the four largest beetle species in Canada have shrunk 20% in the last 45 years in an attempt to survive hotter temperatures

This claim is a hardy perennial. It flies in the face of the fact that the age of the dinosaurs was warmer than today. And they were LARGER than present day terrestrial creatures. The entomologsts below have ignored a basic law of statistics -- that correlation is not causation. There were probably plenty of other things in the environment affecting the bugs as the climate (slightly) warmed

Researchers in Canada found that some native beetle species are getting 20 per cent smaller as their habitats get warmer.

They say their study provides evidence that climate change is affecting the size of organisms.

Assistant professor of botany and zoology Dr Michelle Tseng at the University of British Columbia (UBC) who oversaw the research, said: 'In nature, there is so much going on that can affect body size so we weren't sure we were going to see anything.

'This research provides evidence that climate change is affecting even the smallest organisms out there.'

Scientists expect living organisms to respond to climate change in three ways - by moving to new regions, changing the timing of their life stages or shrinking.

Up until now, most of the evidence for organisms shrinking has come from laboratory work where the environment and living conditions can be tightly controlled.

Dr Tseng asked students in her fourth-year class to look into whether that is happening by examining beetle specimens in UBC's Beaty Biodiversity Museum collection, as well as historical weather data.

They selected eight species of beetles from the Lower Mainland and Okanagan for their data set.

They photographed more than 6,500 beetles and inputted information about each insect, when it was collected and where it was found into a database.

Sina Soleimani, one of the students who co-authored the paper, said: 'We got data from 100 years of caught specimens.
Researchers wanted to know if animal species' were shrinking

'It's cool that people have been collecting these insects since 1910 and noting all of their collection information. That's probably what makes our paper stand out.'

The students measured whether the beetles had changed in size in the last 40 or 100 years.

They then used a climate database from the faculty of forestry to gather data about changes in the environment for the two regions where the beetles lived.

Shrinking in body size is seen from several global warming events.

With the global temperatures set to continue to rise, it is expected the average size of most animals will decrease.

At first, the figures didn't indicate a clear trend - some beetles were shrinking, some were not.

But by taking a closer look, they found that it was the larger beetles that were shrinking, while the smaller ones were not.

SOURCE

Greenland’s recent temperature drop

They say it is just weather, not climate. 14 years of bad weather? It sounds like the 70 years of bad weather that Russian farmers had in the old Soviet union. The amusing thing is that Greenland is part of the Arctic and Warmists regularly have orgasms about the slightest warming in the Arctic. "Last year, winter sea ice fell to the smallest extent on record" is the excited sort of utterance we hear. A change of just ONE year is paraded as significant. If the Arctic warms it is climate. If it cools it is just weather

Using satellite data, a group of scientists has studied the development of temperature over the past 15 years in a large part of Greenland.

More precisely, they looked at surface temperatures (the temperature close to the Earth’s surface) in a part of the country that is not covered by ice—around one fifth of the surface area of Greenland.

Intuitively, you may think that temperature throughout all of Greenland has been increasing, but that is not the case. When you look at the yearly average, the ice-free parts of Greenland show a slight drop in temperature between 2001 and 2015. With swings in temperature from year to year.

However, these results should not be interpreted as “proof” that the Earth is not warming, say the scientists behind the research, which is published in the journal Scientific Reports.
This is weather, not climate

You need to have thirty years’ worth of data before you can “talk about climate,” says Professor Bo Elberling, an environmental geochemist and senior scientist on the study.

So we should be wary of discussing these results in the context of climate change, says Elberling, who is head of the Center for Permafrost (CENPERM) at the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

“What’s interesting here is that with these new data we have a unique description of the spatial distribution of surface temperatures across the entire ice-free part of Greenland, which we couldn’t pull out of the approximately 45 weather stations that cover Greenland today,” he says.

SOURCE

Trump Slashes Budget of Global Warming Madrassa

Slowly but surely the Trump administration is draining the climate swamp.

Here’s the latest good news, courtesy of American Geophysical Union’s Eos, in a piece headlined “Prestigious Climate-Related Fellowships Rescinded.”

It reports on the reduction (by half) of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) “prestigious” Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship Program — or what I would call a madrasa for climate change alarmists.

Since 1992, at a cost of around $2 million per annum, the program has sponsored eight fellows a year in order “to help create the next generation of researchers needed for climate studies.”

The graduates’ list is a veritable Who’s Who of prominent climate alarmists.

Among the program’s alumni is Myles Allen, a man-made climate change specialist at Oxford University; Gavin Schmidt, now head of the notoriously climate alarmist NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies; and Heidi Cullen, who writes alarmist propaganda for the website Climate Central.

Not all alumni, it’s true, go on to shill for the great global warming scam.

For example, one alumnus — Chris Landsea, a meteorologist specializing in hurricanes — took the brave and principled decision of resigning in 2005 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report. Landsea objected to the way his views were being misrepresented by one of the report’s lead authors, Kevin Trenberth.

Trenberth wanted to promote the idea that “global warming” (as it was then known) would lead to an increase in intense hurricane activity.

Landsea was outraged because this contradicted all available scientific studies, including his own. So he resigned in protest, no doubt costing himself a well-paid career on the climate change gravy train.

But Landsea is almost certainly the exception rather than the rule.

The majority of the Climate and Global Change Program’s 218 alumni will have gone on to positions in the science departments of some of the finest universities in the U.S. There, they will, of course, have helped entrench and promote the view that “anthropogenic global warming” is both a significant threat and an eminently worthwhile subject for scientific study.

Unfortunately for them, the U.S. is now run by an administration which doesn’t believe any of this.

Here is what President Donald Trump had to say recently on the subject in a TV interview with Piers Morgan:

    "There is a cooling and there’s a heating. I mean, look, it used to not be climate change, it used to be global warming. That wasn’t working too well because it was getting too cold all over the place.

    The icecaps were going to melt, there were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records, OK? They’re at a record level."

This is Trump-speak for: “I’m not buying that nonsense.”

His administration is acting accordingly. With the support of administrators like Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency, the draining of the climate swamp has begun.

One measure of the new approach is the dramatic reduction in the number of U.S. university grant applications mentioning the words “climate change.” According to the National Science Foundation, there was a 40 percent drop in 2017.

Another sign that time is up for the alarmists is the reduction of NOAA’s Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

Where in previous years, it funded as many as eight candidates, the 2017 intake had just four. Another four had their initial offers withdrawn, which the article in Eos appears to think is a matter of great sadness.

It quotes Katie Travis, who was finishing a PhD in atmospheric chemistry at Harvard University, landed a place on the program, but then subsequently had the offer rescinded because of budget cuts.

    “This was the first grant I wrote myself,” she said. “It was really validating for me to be selected, which is why it’s so crushing that the program ended up the way it did.”

But the story gets sadder still. Another victim of this savage funding cut back, it seems, was the cause of “diversity.”

    "Especially troubling to Abigail Swann, an ecologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, is that three of the rescinded offers were to women, whereas the four who were funded are all men. That makes the 2017 class the only one in the program’s 27-year history other than the first to be all male. Swann and two program alumni wrote a letter—since signed by more than 100 program alumni, hosts, selection committee members, and others—expressing concern that the lack of diversity makes it even harder for female geoscientists to bridge the “PhD-to-Professor gap,” a precarious career stage when many women scientists leave the field. They also noted that NOAA itself has committed to increasing diversity."

Putting aside the sarcasm for a moment, let me gently suggest that while these may feel like issues of burning importance to Abigail Swann, Katie Travis, and the author of the article, a lot of readers here will be thinking: “This is why we voted for Donald Trump.”

Indeed, the very existence of this grant program is a measure of just how out of touch liberal academia is with reality.

In what way is it or was it ever good value for taxpayers to fork out $2 million a year so that needy science PhDs like Katie Travis could feel “validated”? Or that other female PhDs could feel their diversity was being celebrated? Or that science post-graduates generally should be diverted from doing something actually beneficial to mankind and instead encouraged onto a program designed to parachute them into the almost entirely pointless $1.5 trillion-plus global warming industry?

To be absolutely clear, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) “prestigious” Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is a waste of money. It always was a waste of money.

The four places on the program which have been scrapped so far are a very good start.

Let’s hope the other four places on the program are nixed soon.

SOURCE

Al Gore’s global warming vision proves more mirage than material

Al Gore’s vision of a dangerous climate “tipping point”, foreshadowed in his 2007 book Assault on Reason, has failed to materialise, according to a top American business professor who a decade ago challenged the former US vice- president to bet on how global average temperature would change.

Mr Gore’s staff said he did not take bets, but a decade on Scott Armstrong, a business professor at the Wharton Business School, has concluded that global temperature deviations since 2007 had easily fallen within the natural level of variation, and “no change” was the most accurate way to describe global weather patterns over the past decade.

“When you lack scientific evidence, the primary way to keep ‘global warming’ alive is to avoid having a testable hypothesis,” Professor Armstrong said, mocking how some observers had “touted the extremely cold weather that occurred in January (in the northern hemisphere) as another piece of evidence of global warming”.

The UN’s 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected warming of 3C every century, which prompted governments to introduce taxes and regulations to curb CO2 emissions.

Professor Armstrong said he had seen “no dangerous long-term trends” in temperature data and, in any case, “like most people”, he would prefer temperatures “a little warmer”. “A few years ago, people in the US were asked how much tax they would be willing to pay on gasoline to completely eliminate dangerous global warming — the amount was about a dollar.”

Professor Armstrong and his academic colleague Kesten Green at the University of South Australia took Mr Gore’s “tipping point” scenario, charitably, to be the “business as usual” forecast from the UN’s 2001 panel on climate change, which had anticipated a 0.3C increase in average global temperature every decade.

The “bet” was monitored on theclimatebet.com site using global temperature data from University of Alabama researchers.

“Global temperatures have always varied on all timescales and Professor Armstrong was not highly confident that he would win a 10-year bet when temperatures had commonly drifted up or down by 0.3C over 10-year periods in the past,” Dr Green said.

The monthly data showed the years from 2008 to 2014 were largely cooler than the 2007 average deviation, while 2016 and last year were warmer. Between AD16 and 1935, a “no change” forecast over periods of one to 100 years was “much more accurate” than a hypothesis of global cooling or warming, the academics said.

The 2001 IPCC report said “...the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible”.

“The fact the last two years … favoured the warming forecast is meaningless in the context of the swings in temperature that occurred during the bet, and that will continue to occur in the future,” Dr Green said.

“Basing public policy on failed alarmist scenarios is irrational, and is causing enormous harm.”

SOURCE

Australia: The end of recycling

Recycling in Victoria is on the brink of collapse, with councils facing having to stockpile millions of tonnes of waste - or dump it in landfill - as a China export ban begins to bite.

Several councils have already had recycling contracts cut off, with the Municipal Association of Victoria warning the problem could soon spread to the entire state.

The Chinese town of Giuyu used to be a dumping ground for the world's trash. Now China has banned imports of foreign waste to crack down on its own chronic pollution problem.

Experts said any solution would be expensive, with ratepayers likely to be slugged if the crisis takes hold.

The recycling industry has been warning for some time that a decision by China – our largest export destination for recycling – to ban waste imports would have a catastrophic impact on the sector, possibly making it unviable.

Those warnings came home to roost this week. Recycling giant Visy told Wheelie Waste, a bin collector that services 11 councils in Victoria’s west including Greater Shepparton, Macedon Ranges, Horsham and Ararat, that it would stop accepting council recycling on February 9.

The company cited China’s ban as the reason for the move. Wheelie Waste declined to comment, and Visy did not respond to requests for comment.

The Age understands several other councils have also been told they will lose service. "We think ultimately there’s a potential for them all to be affected," Municipal Association of Victoria CEO Rob Spence said. "This is just the beginning of the potential impacts."

SOURCE

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

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

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1 February, 2018

USA Today claims it doesn't publish climate-denying op-eds. That's not true

The Leftist article below shows an absolute horror over anti-Warmist views getting any publicity at all. Their attitudes to opposing views are thoroughly North Korean. And their objections to climate skepticism are entirely "ad hominem". There is no reference to any scientific facts against which we could evaluate Warmism.

And in their final paragraph below they say that global warming is not getting nearly enough attention in the media. But if you google "global warming" you get something like 50 pro-Warmist articles to about one skeptical article. So how come they have not long ago made their case to everyone with all that support for it? That the theory is heavily at variance with the evidence they cannot consider

Each editorial USA Today publishes is accompanied by an "opposing view" op-ed that presents a counter-argument. This is a particular problem when it comes to the topic of climate change. As Media Matters has documented on multiple occasions, the newspaper's “opposing view” format regularly leads it to publish climate denial and misinformation from authors who have undisclosed fossil-fuel industry connections.

USA Today has heard from critics who have called on it to stop running climate-denying op-eds, but instead of changing its practices, the paper's editorial board is trying to defend them. Its defense does not hold up to scrutiny.

Bill Sternberg, the paper's editorial page editor, put forward that defense in a January 26 piece titled, "Why does USA TODAY pair editorials with opposing views?" From the piece:

In recent years, perhaps no debate topic has been more controversial than global warming. A number of readers and outside groups have demanded that we stop running opposing views from climate change skeptics.

We’ve tried to adhere to the rule of thumb put forth by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York: Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but they are not entitled to their own facts.

In other words, we won’t run pieces that deny the reality of human-induced climate change. The scientific consensus on that point is overwhelming, and increasingly so.

But we will run opposing views that disagree about proposed remedies, discuss the urgency of the climate change problem compared to other problems, or raise questions about costs versus benefits.

And whenever possible, we try to disclose potential conflicts of interest, such as whether the writers, or their organizations, have received money from fossil-fuel interests.

But in fact USA Today has regularly run "opposing view" op-eds that "deny the reality of human-induced climate change." And many of them have been written by people who have "received money from fossil-fuel interests," which the paper typically fails to disclose.

A 2016 Media Matters study found that USA Today published five “opposing view” opinion pieces featuring climate denial or misinformation from January 1, 2015, through August 31, 2016. All five were written by individuals with fossil-fuel ties, which USA Today did not disclose to readers.

For example, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the Senate's leading climate denier, argued in a March 2015 "opposing view" piece that "the debate on man-driven climate change is not over," though in fact it is over. There is overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change, as Sternberg admits in his own piece.

And, in October 2015, then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) wrote an "opposing view" op-ed claiming that “temperatures have been essentially flat for 18 years," pushing a favorite climate-denier myth that has been thoroughly discredited. USA Today did not disclose that Inhofe and Sessions had both received substantial campaign contributions from fossil fuel industry interests -- millions of dollars in Inhofe's case and hundreds of thousands in Sessions'.

More recently, in August 2017, USA Today published an op-ed casting doubt on a federal climate report; the piece was written by Chris Horner, who the paper identified only as "a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute." As Media Matters pointed out at the time, Horner's work has been funded by big fossil-fuel corporations for years. Horner has received payments from Alpha Natural Resources, one of the largest coal companies in the U.S., and has numerous other ties to the coal industry. Horner’s employer, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has received more than $2 million from ExxonMobil over the past two decades, as well as funding from Marathon Petroleum, Texaco, the American Petroleum Institute, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, Koch Industries, and the Koch brothers' charitable foundations, among others.

But USA Today might be making modest progress on disclosure, at least. In September 2017, an "opposing view" piece by longtime climate denier Myron Ebell did acknowledge some of his conflicts of interest. The bio that ran under his piece read, "Myron Ebell is director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has received donations from fossil fuel interests."

If USA Today recently adopted a policy of disclosing authors' fossil-fuel industry ties, that would be a modest step in the right direction. But it still needs to do more to fix its problem. Instead of giving a platform to an increasingly small group of climate deniers, whose views are far outside the mainstream, the paper should be inviting more commentary from diverse voices in the business, military, scientific, and other communities who are arguing for different kinds of climate solutions.

The country desperately needs intelligent debate about the best ways to combat and cope with climate change, not about whether climate change is a serious problem. If, as Sternberg claims, USA Today wants to make its readers "better informed," it should publish more op-eds by people who take climate change seriously and create a vibrant forum for honest and constructive back-and-forth about climate action.

SOURCE

We Will Make You Green

BOOK REVIEW: "Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex" by Rupert Darwall

Anyone remember the “acid rain and forest death” scare of the 1970s and 1980s? Rupert Darwall, in Green Tyranny, provides a reminder of this and much more while “exposing the totalitarian roots of the climate industrial complex”.

Acid rain caused by sulphur emissions from coal-fuelled power stations was supposedly poisoning Scandinavian and northern American soil, lakes, fishes and forests. Scandalously, the national science academies of the US, Canada, UK, Sweden and Norway said so loudly. But it was bunk, and put to rest by a 1990 report by the US government’s National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program, a decade-long US$500 million study.

Darwall is not a scientist or an academic but an investment banking and public policy wonk, with an after-hours specialty in the history of ideas. His previous book was The Age of Global Warming: A History (2013). In this new volume, his forensic rigour again puts muscle into every page.

The book gains novelty and heft by focusing on how Sweden and Germany generated the global—or rather, the West’s—renewables transformation. The Swedes (population 8 million) have been extraordinarily influential, due largely to their supposed integrity and independence from power blocs. Above all, the Swedes were father to the IPCC.

Darwall busts the stereotype with detail, such as Sweden’s refusal to accept Jews fleeing from the Nazis, and its alliance with NATO in the Cold War that was kept secret from the Swedish and world public (Sweden was not neutral at all). In a hall-of-mirrors exercise, Sweden was also used by the Soviets as a drop-box and credible source for their misinformation campaigns. These included the “nuclear winter” phoney scare, designed to undermine the US nuclear armament drive that, ultimately, led to communism’s defeat. In the twenty-first century Swedish bureaucrats continue to enforce conformity to the state line, including suppression of wayward journalism.

The “climate industrial complex” is necessarily led by the state, with its power to engorge the renewables industry rent-seekers through tax, regulations, laws and administration. “Dense networks connect state bureaucracies and regulatory bodies to universities, think-tanks, NGOs, the media, special interest groups, financiers and their lobbyists, and religious institutions,” Darwall says.

Their aim is to overwhelm business opposition, control advice to government and suppress the sensible objections to draconian renewables targets. Thus is occurring “the largest misallocation of resources in history”. As one example, Angela Merkel coerced the EU in 2007 into a legally-binding 20 per cent renewables target by 2020. This was in the absence of any technical knowhow about the grid integration, let alone the cost (which in Germany’s case alone is heading towards 1.1 trillion euros, about the same as its renovation costs for East Germany). As Darwall puts it, “Government support for wind and solar was less about assuring the survival of the unfittest than guaranteeing the triumph of the unfittest.”

That the climate-saving rationale is a sham is proven by the same environmentalists’ successful attacks on nuclear power and strivings against the dazzlingly emissions-effective fracked gas.

The climate cabal’s own-goals would be hilarious if the issues were not so world-changing. Before 2010, the environmental NGOs attacked Volkswagen as a polluter, but greased by Volkswagen million-euro donations, changed tune and lauded the company in 2012 as the world’s ecologically-nicest car-maker. Then in 2015 the sensational Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal came to light.

A far bigger scandal is the West’s subsidising or enforcing a switch from petrol cars to allegedly low-carbon-dioxide-emission diesel, such that by 2011 more than half of all Europe’s new cars were diesel. But the authorities knew from the start that diesel-based air pollution in big cities is an immediate cancer and health risk. As a London Department of Transport official who had helped draft the UK’s pro-diesel switch put it:

We did not sleepwalk into this. You are talking about killing people today rather than saving lives tomorrow. Occasionally we had to say we were living in a different world and everyone had to swallow hard.

The same authorities are now enforcing anti-diesel policies. As Darwall says, it’s a “world created by environmentalism and carbon policy monomania”.

The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research is on the front line for the climate industrial complex. Its head, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, believes the carrying capacity of the planet is under 1 billion (currently 7.6 billion) because of global warming. He has also warned of a possible “ocean heat belch” that would shock-heat the first ten kilometres of the atmosphere by thirty-six degrees. Schellnhuber was Angela Merkel’s top climate adviser for many years and was also appointed by Pope Francis to help write his climate encyclical Laudato Si. The Potsdam Institute, by the way, now partners with Melbourne University. Schellnhuber said at the partnership launch that global warming “has to be tackled with the best scientific evidence”.

Because the renewable targets are so destructive, a vital task of the climate industrial complex is to maintain all-pervasive faith in the supposed warming crisis (notwithstanding the now scientifically accepted finding that the climate models have exaggerated heat forecasts). Darwall believes the complex has created what he calls the “spiral of silence”, a psychological phenomenon known for half a century in which people shrink from expressing dissenting views if they believe their views would be widely unpopular.

As a local example, Robyn Williams of the ABC’s Science Show lavishes time on climate nutter Naomi Oreskes while excluding and mocking sceptics. When finally giving leading sceptics airtime last June, Williams also brought in anti-sceptic professors Andy Pitman and Steve Sherwood with their “gold star” science (Williams’s description) to dominate the conversation lest any listener be contaminated by the likes of US sceptic climatologist Judith Curry. Incidentally, Pitman’s remarks included a prediction of Sydney temperatures of up to fifty-five degrees.

But Australia’s “spiral of silence” is, thankfully, collapsing. The importance of Tony Abbott’s London sceptic speech in October was not just in telling some climate truths but also in legitimising others to defy the “consensus”. It also forced the sceptic case into the left-wing media, where a panicked Fairfax refers even in straight news to “Abbott’s ‘loopy’ speech”.

Darwall’s book abounds in surprising factoids.

• The carbon-dioxide emissions research pioneer Svente Arrhenius inspired the creation in 1922 of the State Institute for Racial Biology. The goal was selective breeding to improve racial characteristics, and one lecturer was the future Nazi “Race Pope” Hans Guenther. In 1933 the Swedes legislated for sterilisation without consent in some cases. The cause was taken up by Gunnar Myrdal (Nobel Prize for economics 1974) advocating sterilisation of “low-quality” people.

• Hitler domestically was an ardent environmentalist, at the height of the war intervening to protect German wetlands. He backed giant wind tower plans to cut coal consumption, and was still funding wind power research in 1944.

• From 2006 the revered bird-loving group the Audubon Society endorsed “clean energy” wind farms, knowing, as its US president John Flicker said, that “wind turbines sometimes kill a lot of birds”—in fact, nearly 600,000 birds a year in the US, including 80,000 raptors, as well as over 900,000 bats. “We very much appreciate Audubon’s leadership on this issue,” responded the American Wind Energy Association.

• An unintended consequence of California’s legalisation of pot smoking and production is that private indoor pot growers are now consuming 9 per cent of the state’s electricity, jeopardising the state’s emission targets. Some large growers are paying a million dollars a month in electricity bills.

Darwall is writing largely for a US audience, and the book’s timing is obviously caught short by Trump’s counter-attack in favour of fossil fuels. But Darwall’s long-term warning holds:

Global warming poses a question about the nature and purpose of the state: whether its role is to effect a radical transformation of society or whether its principal task is to protect freedom …

Delivering pre-ordained emission cuts requires a powerful administrative state. Uniquely, America’s Constitution and its separation of powers provide checks against it. This, ultimately is what is at stake in the battle of Paris and the climate war. It is a fight for America’s soul.

SOURCE

NY’s latest power play

Renewable energy companies aren’t building the windmills and solar panels Governor Andrew Cuomo hoped for when he pledged in 2015 to have 50 percent of the state’s electricity come from renewables by 2030. Cuomo’s latest solution? The state will build them itself.

Part GG of Cuomo’s proposed Transportation and Economic Development (TED) Article VII budget bill would let the state Power Authority, which owns and operates the massive hydroelectric dams at Niagara Falls and Massena, “finance, plan, design, engineer, acquire, construct, operate or manage” renewable energy projects, defined as “solar power, wind power, hydroelectric, and any other generation resource authorized by any renewable energy standard adopted by the state for the purpose of implementing any state clean energy standard.”

It’s difficult to overstate what type of change this represents in state energy policy, which since Cuomo was elected has been to cajole private interests into investing in utility-scale renewable energy projects without the state building them itself.

The state since 2013 has been financing green energy projects through the Cuomo-created Green Bank, which last year reported having lent $259 million for the purpose and committed another $85 million. More importantly, the state Public Service Commission’s 2016 Clean Energy Standard ordered utilities and anyone getting power directly from the grid to begin buying renewable energy credits (RECs), a mechanism by which renewable generators could remain profitable while selling electricity into the grid at a loss.

That heavy-handed approach, by which the state puts up the capital and then makes people buy the product, still isn’t delivering the desired results. The state has twice had to slash the amount of RECs it’s requiring utilities and others to buy simply because not enough eligible renewable energy is produced here (and since power generated by rooftop solar panels didn’t count toward the total).

NYPA, by the way, is authorized already to use its profits from the large hydroelectric plants to buy energy on the market, a mechanism by which it was hoping to prop up offshore wind developers as recently at 2011. This brute-force legislation would go the last mile and let NYPA build and operate them itself.

That, however, opens up a new array of problems. For one thing, NYPA would have to pay artificially inflated construction costs, since it’s subject to the state’s archaic prevailing wage law. NYPA’s expenses would also be elevated by mandatory contributions to the state pension system, the state’s arbitrary requirement to contract with minority- and woman-owned business enterprises (MWBEs) and the work rules set out in the authority’s union contracts. And all of this would be happening while NYPA’s finances are being drained by the money-losing canal system, which state legislators transferred to the Authority last year.

It is, in short, the Cuomo administration’s last resort.

The move is likely necessary to maintain even the appearance New York is making progress toward the governor’s ballyhooed “50-by-30” goal of having half the state’s electricity come from renewables by 2030. That target, the Empire Center explained in 2016, raises significant cost, land-use and transmission issues, all while New York simply isn’t the most practical place to deploy solar panels or wind turbines.

The difficulty in reaching 50 percent is compounded by the artificial constraints placed on the state’s own initiatives. All Canadian hydroelectric power—and any existing renewable generators—are disqualified from competing for the newest set of renewable energy subsidies. And, as noted in this space previously, the renewable push itself has been something of a green smokescreen for the Clean Energy Standard’s real purpose: a multi-billion dollar bailout of upstate nuclear plants toward which 99.3 of related funds will flow by the end of 2018.

The governor’s criticism of New York’s renewable energy spending in his written 2013 State of the State message still holds true: “despite all of this spending, NYS is not on track to achieve its clean energy goals.”

SOURCE

A 'Climate Skeptic' Just Took Charge Of EU Environment Policy

Neno Dimov, the man who took over as the president of the EU's Environment Council on Jan. 1, got an earful yesterday when he appeared before members of the European Parliament. Some of his past words were coming back to haunt him.

Lawmakers were aghast that a man who once called climate change a fraud and described himself as an opponent of climate science was going to be coordinating the EU's environment policy for the next six months.

“You personally have been questioning climate change and whether human activity is the cause; you even challenged the theory of sea-level rise,” Dutch Liberal MEP Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy said to him. Other MEPs demanded he clarify his personal stance.

Dimov demurred. He would not say anything about his personal opinion on climate change, noting only that there is a "political consensus" within the EU on climate change and that he will "keep this consensus alive." However, he said, there is always room for "challenges and doubts." A vocal admirer of U.S. President Donald Trump, Dimov has in the past said global warming is being used as a tool of intimidation.

Musical Chairs

So how did the EU end up with a climate-skeptic environment chief?

The European Union, always keen to avoid the impression of being centralized around Brussels, has a variety of traditions meant to diffuse power throughout the bloc.

One of these is the "rotating presidency." Every six months, one of the EU's 28 member countries takes charge of the Council of the EU – the bloc's upper chamber, made up of ministers from each of the national governments. Each of the Council's policy configurations – for instance, the Agriculture Council, made up of the 28 different agriculture ministers – is chaired by the presidency country.

As Bulgaria's environment minister, Dimov will chair the Environment Council until the end of July. This means he will set the agenda and conduct negotiations with the European Parliament on behalf of all the member states. The Council does not propose legislation – that task falls to the Commission, the EU's executive branch, and its environment commissioner, Karmenu Vella. But Dimov will still have the power to steer important pieces of legislation over the coming months.

Dimov became Bulgaria's environment minister in May of last year, and shortly afterward he gave a TV interview saying that "climate change is a scientific debat?; there is no consensus, and every part has arguments." He said that he is one of the opponents.

In 2015 he said in an online video that global warming is a "fraud … used to scare the people." "The melting of the ice will not raise the sea level even with a millimeter," he said. "The main factor for climate change is solar activity."

But it is Dimov's stance on sustainability and preservation issues that have riled environmentalists in his home country. He is currently embroiled in controversy over his decision to open up protected nature areas in the country to development, including for a large new ski resort. Earlier this week, Bulgarian environmentalists gathered in front of the Council of the EU to give a jar of fresh air from one of the nature reserves to Dimov as he arrived in Brussels for his meetings.

"There are big protests in a lot of cities in Bulgaria and abroad because of the National Park Pirin, and we want Neno Dimov's resignation as a main wish of the protests," says Danita Zarichinova of Friends of the Earth Bulgaria. "He's made total chaos in the ministry on the politics of air pollution, plastics, Natura 2000 zones and so on."

Dimov is no stranger to environmental issues. He has built his career portraying himself as a fair-handed and reasonable arbiter, striking a balance between environmental protection and economic development. "We must have some symbiosis between these two trends, if we want to improve the standard of our living as they both determine the quality of life," he told Bulgaria's Focus Radio this month. "This is actually what I was trying to achieve from the very beginning."

Dimov served as Bulgaria's deputy minister of the environment from 1997 to 2002, during which time he was also a member of the management board for the EU's European Environment Agency – somewhat analogous to the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States.

Afterward, he conducted Bulgaria's EU accession negotiations in the field of environment. He has written a book critical of environmental red tape, called "From Environmentalism to Freedom.”

Dimov will not be the traditional president of the Environment Council, where previous minister-presidents have tended to come from either purely political or environmentalist backgrounds.

In this way, he may find common cause with a counterpart across the Atlantic. Scott Pruitt, the new head of the U.S. EPA, has a similar background of crusading against environmental red tape and casting doubt on climate change.

SOURCE

Australia: Classrooms powered by renewable energy to be trialled in NSW schools

This sounds like fun. What happens when it is an overcast day? Do the kids alternately freeze and boil?

School children across Australia could soon be taught in classrooms powered entirely by renewable energy as a result of the innovative ‘Hivve’ modular classroom, now being trialled in two New South Wales schools.

On behalf of the Australian Government, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) is providing Hivve Technology Pty Ltd with $368,115 in funding to pilot their modular classrooms in a school environment.

Known as the ‘Hivve’, the portable classroom incorporates solar PV generation, real time energy metering, CO2 metering, data capture and communications to actively manage energy demands and control indoor environment quality.

Each Hivve classroom has the potential to generate enough electricity to power itself and two other classrooms in the school.

A regular classroom can consume on average 3,800 KWh per year, but when a HIVVE classroom is in use, there is an estimated net energy generation of 7,600 KWh per year.

Ready for the start of 2018 school year this week, the two pilot classrooms are being trialled at St Christopher’s Catholic Primary School in Holsworthy in Sydney’s south western suburbs and at Dapto High School in Dapto where the performance of the Hivve classrooms will be monitored and evaluated over a 12 month period.

A prototype building built by Hivve Technology Pty Ltd has successfully demonstrated the functionality in a controlled environment and this will be the first time the Hivve classroom and technology has been trialled in a real school.

ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht said there was enormous potential for Australia’s public schools to not only educate on renewables, but also reduce their reliance on the grid.

“This is a great way to get the next generation involved in renewables at an early age and educate them as to what the positive benefits will be as Australia continues its shift towards a renewable energy future,”

“The success of the Hivve project could lead to a nation-wide adoption of the modular classrooms, reducing reliance on the grid and even providing a significant amount of electricity back to the NEM.” Mr Frischknecht said.

Hivve Director David Wrench said the Hivve Technology was conceived and designed to deliver sustainable solutions – both environmental and economic – to help meet Australia’s growing school infrastructure needs.

“We are very pleased to be partnering with ARENA on this exciting project. We have carefully designed every element of the Hivve classroom to create the best possible learning environment for students”, Mr Wrench said.

Media release from hivve.com.au

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

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

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BACKGROUND

Home (Index page)

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts

"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Yet temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried

Antarctica is GAINING mass

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion

Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

The plight of the bumblebee -- an egregious example of crooked "science"

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below

WISDOM:

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." --- Richard P. Feynman.

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement" -- Karl Popper

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

A Warmist backs down: "No one knows exactly how far rising carbon concentrations affect temperatures" -- Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

The frequency of hurricanes has markedly DECLINED in recent years

Here's how that "97% consensus" figure was arrived at

97% of scientists want to get another research grant

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

To Greenies, Genghis Khan was a good guy, believe it or not. They love that he killed so many people.

Greenie antisemitism

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

Comparing climate alarmist Hansen to Cassandra is WRONG. Cassandra's (Greek mythology) dire prophecies were never believed but were always right. Hansen's dire prophecies are usually believed but are always wrong (Prof. Laurence Gould, U of Hartford, CT)

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

UPDATE to the above: It seems that I am a true prophet

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

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

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Help keep the planet Green! Maximize your CO2 and CH4 output!

Global Warming=More Life; Global Cooling=More Death.

The inconvenient truth about biological effects of "Ocean Acidification"

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is maximum 4%.

Cook the crook who cooks the books

The great and fraudulent scare about lead

How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The "precautionary principle" is a favourite Greenie idea -- but isn't that what George Bush was doing when he invaded Iraq? Wasn't that a precaution against Saddam getting or having any WMDs? So Greenies all agree with the Iraq intervention? If not, why not?

A classic example of how the sensationalist media distort science to create climate panic is here.

There is a very readable summary of the "Hockey Stick" fraud here

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: "The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Relying on the popular wisdom can even hurt you personally: "The scientific consensus of a quarter-century ago turned into the arthritic nightmare of today."

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.

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