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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31 January, 2018

‘Climate change may hit farm income’in India

The unfortunate Indians have been sold a pup. Global warming would produce MORE rainfall, meaning LESS need for irrigation

The Economic Survey 2017-18, said farmer income losses from climate change could be between 15% and 18% on an average, rising to anywhere between 20%-25% in unirrigated areas of the country.

“Applying IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)-predicted temperatures and projecting India’s recent trends in precipitation, and assuming no policy responses, give rise to estimates for farm income losses of 15% to 18% on average, rising to 20%-25% for unirrigated areas,” pointed out the Survey, adding that at current levels of farm income, that translates into more than Rs. 3,600 per year for the median farm household.

“[The] Prime Minister’s goal of doubling farmers’ incomes — increasingly runs up against the contemporary realities of Indian agriculture, and the harsher prospects of its vulnerability to long-term climate change,” pointed out the Survey, adding that India needed to expand irrigation – and do so against a backdrop of rising water scarcity and depleting groundwater resources.

“In the 1960s, less than 20% of agriculture was irrigated, now this number is in the mid-40s. The Indo-Gangetic plain, and parts of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh are well irrigated. But parts of Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand are still extremely vulnerable to climate change on account of not being well irrigated,” said the Survey.

SOURCE

New Paper: Declining Caribou Numbers Linked To Arctic COOLING

In a new paper (Mallory et al., 2018), scientists have again concluded that the Arctic warms in response to a positive Arctic Oscillation (AO) and cools in response to a negative AO, precluding a deterministic role for anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

The authors point out that the Canadian Arctic has undergone an overall cooling trend since the late 1990s, or as the AO has pivoted from a positive (1988-1996, warming) to negative (1997-2016) stage.

Unfortunately, the recent (1990s-present) cooling trend has not been beneficial for the caribou populations native to this region.

Cooler temperatures mean less vegetation is available for foraging, and hence the body condition of the herds deteriorates and broad declines in population intensify. Alternatively, a warming Arctic climate means more food sources are available for caribou herds, leading to better body condition and greater fertility.

As Mallory and colleagues summarize, “population trajectories of caribou herds followed the direction of the AO: herds increased under positive AO intensity, and decreased under negative AO intensity.”

SOURCE

Renewable Energy: the mad saga continues

Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) lobbies hard for renewable subsidies and estimates global “clean energy” investment at $333 billion. This excludes hydro-electricity other than Politically Correct “small hydro”. Some 85 per cent of expenditure is in wind or solar with the rest including biomass, electric vehicles and waste-to-energy.

To recap, in Australia electricity from subsidised renewable energy – and wind is the cheapest of those sources – costs three times as much as energy from coal. It is viable only because the government requires increasing proportions of energy it designates as renewable to be incorporated in our supply and therefore in our bills.

This results in a subsidy, which at present is $85 per MWh for wind and large scale solar, and $40 for rooftop solar. Those sums are on top of the market price all energy receives. That market price used to be around $40 per MWh but, as a result of closures caused by subsidised wind forcing increased costs on coal and gas generators, it is now around $90 per MWh; research conducted by the Minerals Council puts new build for coal at under $50 per MWh, costs that are consistent with those estimated for the thousand plus coal generators being built, mainly in Asia.

The upshot is a double whammy – we replace low cost highly reliable electricity with supplies that are three times as expensive and which are highly unreliable – and we call that progress!! The $9 billion of subsidy-induced malinvestment in renewables last year alone would have been sufficient to finance over 4,000 MW of new coal plant – more than double the capacity of the now closed Hazelwood station, even if it is in fashionable but high cost low emissions plant. That would have returned prices to their 2015 level, half those now prevailing, and given us the reliability that is now a wistful nostalgia.

At present one of the man energy regulators, the AEMC, estimates renewable subsidies increase electricity prices by 10 per cent directly (p.10). That would be increased by another 20 per cent due to the subsidies boosting the overall generation cost and perhaps more due to them requiring increased transmission investment.

The lobby industry has taken to interviewing itself to raise the ante for new subsidies. BNEF in response to Reneweconomy notes that the capacity of renewables driven by existing schemes, which focus on the Paris Agreement’s 26-28 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030, will soon be met. Hence they are calling for further expansion of subsidies (existing ones, unless terminated, will live on for decades). BNEF argues “So what’s required is a more ambitious emissions reduction target under the National Energy Guarantee (NEG), or for state governments to continue to develop policy to ramp up investment.” And the hope of the industry is that Mr Turnbull will exercise his influence and “States should be throwing their weight around the COAG table and only signing up to a NEG if it ups ambition on a pathway to net zero emissions by 2050”.

The industry also claims renewable energy is already competitive, pointing to recent contracts struck by AGL and Origin Energy for renewable power at around $60 per MWh. But public information of these contracts’ details is missing, including about what happens to the subsidy (which on forward markets remains above $50 per MWh). It is difficult to square claims made by many lobbyists on the back of such contracts that renewables are now competitive with coal especially since the same lobbyists say investment will dry up without more subsidies.

Meanwhile we have politicians swallowing the propaganda of the renewable industry or too timid or committed to renewable energy to stand up and tell it as it is.

Only a couple of minor players in Europe and the great Donald are resisting the madness. The USA is benefitting immensely from Trump’s energy policies with waves of new investment – including from Australia – announced almost weekly.

In time the success of Trump’s policies will surely remove the blinkers from the eyes of politicians but in the interim we can expect to lose considerable wealth, energy-dependent investment and face trying times in the reliability of the electricity supply system.

SOURCE

The Climate-Change Doomsday Just Got Canceled

A new study published in the prestigious journal Nature finds that all those global warming doomsday scenarios aren't credible. Not that you would ever know based on how little coverage this study is getting.

The study, published on Thursday, finds that if CO2 in the atmosphere doubled, global temperatures would climb at most by 3.4 degrees Celsius. That's far below what the UN has been saying for decades, namely that temperatures would rise as much as 4.5 degrees, and possibly up to 6 degrees.

Basically, the scientists involved in the Nature study found that the planet is less sensitive to changes in CO2 levels than had been previously believed. That means projected temperature increases are too high.

Of course this is just one study, but it supports the contention climate skeptics have been making for years — that the computer models used to predict future warming were exaggerating the impact of CO2, evidenced in part by the fact that the planet hasn't been warming as much as those models say it should.

Why is this important? Because all those horror stories told over the past decades are based on predictions of temperature increases that are much higher than 3.4 degrees.

A 2008 National Geographic series, to cite just one example, contended that scientists are warning that the global average temperature could increase by as much as 6 degrees Celsius over the next century, "which would cause our world to change radically." Oceans, it said, would become marine wastelands, deserts would expand, catastrophic events would be more common.

The Obama administration's EPA put out a report in 2015 claiming that climate change would triple the number of extremely hot days in the U.S. by 2100, increase air and water pollution, cause $5 trillion in damages for coastal property, and result in tens of thousands of premature deaths.

The EPA assumed a global temperature increase of 5 degrees.

The Nature study blows a hole in these and other doomsday scenarios that have been peddled for decades by everyone from Al Gore to Prince Charles.

In other words, it's big news.

And don't be surprised if scientists end up revising peak warming down even further. That's been the trend up until now, after all. Back in 1977, the National Academy of Sciences said temperatures would shoot up 6 degrees C by 2050 because of CO2 emissions. In 1985, James Hansen claimed that doubling CO2 levels would boost temperatures up to 5 degrees, and other computer models at the time put the upper bound at 5.5 degrees.

As it happens, though, on the same day the Nature study was published, NASA released its latest report on global temperatures, declaring that 2017 was the second hottest year on record, with 2016 the hottest.

Guess which story made front page news?

The New York Times put the NASA story on its main webpage, and ignored the Nature study entirely.

Even if it's true that 17 of the 18 hottest years have occurred since 2001 — which requires one to assume the government's manipulation of past temperature data has been on the up and up — the relevant question isn't what's happening now, but what is likely to happen going forward.

If the scientific evidence is showing that the harm from CO2 emissions will be far less than feared, we should be celebrating.

Surely all those "settled science" folks would agree.

SOURCE

U.S. Regains The Ability To Identify Real National Security Threats

Maybe Donald Trump is just not your type of guy, and certainly not the guy you would want to be President; but keep in mind who was the alternative. Before these things fade into the memory hole, bring back to mind a few of the wildly incompetent policies of the previous administration. Looking around today for a candidate as the policy of the previous administration that could be the very most wildly incompetent of all, with a very real potential to put the security of the country in serious jeopardy, my leading contender is the decision to declare "climate change" to be a top-priority national security risk.

Do you remember Obama doing that? It wasn't that long ago. In his second inaugural address in January 2013, Obama declared that “no challenge – no challenge – poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” Then, over the next couple of years, he ramped up the claimed "challenge" of climate change from mere "greatest threat to future generations" to an "immediate threat to national security." Think about that for a minute -- how would it even work? Suppose the temperature goes up a few degrees over the next few decades. Does it mean that we don't have an army any more? Does it mean that our weapons won't work? Nevertheless, in a National Security Strategy document in February 2015, the Obama administration declared climate change to be “an urgent and growing threat to our national security,” Then in May 2015, Obama gave a commencement address at the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut. Excerpt:

I am here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security, and, make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country. And so we need to act, and we need to act now.

Supposedly, something like sea level, or maybe wildfires, or maybe floods -- all completely speculative -- would somehow make the country harder to defend. Meanwhile, when Obama talked about "acting now," what he meant was restricting production fossil fuels in the United States. What did he think was the fuel that powers the planes and ships and missiles, let alone powering the economy that provides all the logistical support to keep the military functioning? As far as I could tell, he had no idea. In the name of "national security" he would hobble and ultimately shut down our own oil and coal and gas industries, leaving us to go begging for the necessary fuel to -- where? OPEC? Russia? Venezuela? You really need to be delusional not to be able to distinguish the real national security threat here from the imaginary one.

As you probably know, in a new National Security Strategy document released yesterday President Trump reversed this ridiculous policy of President Obama. The new document does not contain any section explicitly dealing with "climate," but it does have a section titled "Embrace Energy Dominance." Key quote:

Access to domestic sources of clean, affordable, and reliable energy underpins a prosperous, secure, and powerful America for decades to come. Unleashing these abundant energy resources—coal, natural gas, petroleum, renewables, and nuclear—stimulates the economy and builds a foundation for future growth. Our Nation must take advantage of our wealth in domestic resources and energy efficiency to promote competitiveness across our industries. . . . Climate policies will continue to shape the global energy system. U.S. leadership is indispensable to countering an anti-growth energy agenda that is detrimental to U.S. economic and energy secu- rity interests. Given future global energy demand, much of the developing world will require fossil fuels, as well as other forms of energy, to power their economies and lift their people out of poverty. The United States will continue to advance an approach that balances energy security, economic development, and environmental protection.

Bullet dodged, at least for the moment.

Now, perhaps on reading this, you remain skeptical that hobbling U.S. fossil fuel energy production could jeopardize national security by making the U.S. dependent on the likes of OPEC or Russia for fuel needed to run the military or the economy. If so, I would urge you to pay attention to what has just been occurring in the UK. The UK is thought to have substantial natural gas-bearing shale formations (full extent unknown due to lack of exploration) that could be tapped to supply fuel for the country. However, during the whole time of the shale gas revolution in the United States, the process of horizontal drilling and "fracking" for gas has been essentially shut down by regulators over concerns of environmentalists. The first exploratory well after the moratorium finally got going just this August. From the Financial Times, August 17:

Drilling has started on the first UK shale well for six years even as debate intensifies among geologists over how much gas is available for fracking. Cuadrilla, the company leading the push to bring US-style shale gas production to the UK, said on Thursday it had begun drilling a vertical well expected to reach 3.5km beneath its site near Blackpool, Lancashire. . . .   Fracking has been on hold in the UK since 2011 when two small earth tremors were blamed on exploratory operations by Cuadrilla at another site near Blackpool. Cuadrilla was given the go-ahead by the government last year to resume drilling, reflecting ministers’ hopes of replicating the shale revolution that has cut US gas prices and bolstered American energy security.

Lacking a home-grown, land-based gas supply from fracking, the UK has been relying on gas from the aging North Sea fields, as well as gas that comes from the Middle East and also Norway via pipelines across Europe. Both of those sources then suddenly experienced supply disruptions in the past couple of weeks. From the Telegraph, December 13:

Around 40pc of the UK’s domestic [natural gas] supplies have been wiped out until the new year due to the emergency shutdown of the North Sea’s Forties pipeline, operated by Ineos. Supply from Europe has also been constrained by the explosion at a hub in Austria and technical problems in the Norwegian North Sea.

Time to crank up the vast reserves of solar panels? No, dummy, those don't work in the winter. Wind turbines also have zero ability to step up in an emergency. The first result of the supply disruptions was a huge spike in natural gas prices in the UK:

[R]ocketing demand in Europe [has driven] the price for gas delivered to the UK to more than $10 per million British thermal units.

For comparison, a representative recent spot price in the U.S. was $2.84 per million BTUs. But you've got to get your energy somewhere. So who will sell you gas at a gouging price when you are desperate? The answer, of course, is Russia:

Britain has emerged as the unlikely first recipient of gas from a sanctioned Russian project after fears of a winter supply crisis drove prices close to five year highs. . . . Now a deal has been struck to bring the debut cargo from Yamal to the Isle of Grain import terminal via a specially built ice-breaking tanker by the end of the month.

It's really hard to believe how dumb these people are to have put themselves in this position. But then, when they make their decisions, they do it against the backdrop of the U.S. military shield, let alone of the frack-happy U.S. as an alternative emergency supplier when Russia puts on the squeeze. But if we had shut down our fracking over concerns about "climate change," we would have been dependent on OPEC and Russia like Europe and the UK are now. Who would have been our emergency supplier when those guys decided to put on the squeeze? And, rest assured, Hillary, following in Obama's footsteps, would have enthusiastically put the country in this position.

SOURCE

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

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

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30 January, 2018

A recent Warmist sea-level estimate

"20th century rise was extremely likely faster than during any of the 27 previous centuries". But it's all guesswork. The author has form as a nitwit. See here, and here

Kopp et al. (2016) “compiled a global database of regional sea level reconstructions from 24 localities, many with decimeter-scale vertical resolution and subcentennial temporal resolution. Also included are 66 tide-gauge records.”

Immediately, the issue appears of how representative are the samples of 24 localities and 66 tide-gage records? There are hundreds of tidegage records giving dramatically different results. For example, the Gulf of Bothnia, and in Scandinavia tidal gages show sea levels are falling, due to rebound of the land from last Ice Age, called post-glacial rebound or isostatic rebound.

Other areas, such as tidewater Virginia, tidal gages show sea levels are rising due to land subsidence, primarily from groundwater extraction. Gages at The Battery, show Manhattan may be subsiding, from heavy buildings built on bedrock.

In the Kopp study, the long-term proxy data and the tide-gage data are dominated by the East Coast of the US and by Western Europe, with no proxy data from Scandinavia. The sample appears not to be representative of the coast lines of the world, thus may be of little value.

An obligation of research proposing samples are representative is to remove every possible source of bias, not to introduce bias. A second major issue is the use of semi-empirical models, which Willem de Lange and Robert Carter found to be the most alarmist of all the techniques they reviewed in their study of global sea-level change.

In general, these modeling techniques do not explicitly state assumptions, that can be challenged or substantiated by observations. They tend to be built more upon assumptions supporting assumptions, which has little value in understanding the physical world.

A third major issue is excessive precision in estimates of 20th century sea level rise. Adding speculative probability statements only adds doubt to the skeptic.

In sum, the conclusion of the Kopp study that 20th century sea level rise was extremely likely faster than during any of the 27 previous centuries is not substantiated, although there is little doubt that sea levels are higher than they have been since the last interglacial period, the Eemian, about 115,000 to 130,000 years ago.

SOURCE

Be Skeptical of Those Who Treat Science as an Ideology

Below is a good description of the scientific method. It is roughly the opposite of Warmist practice

Scientific knowledge is always provisional. The point is to produce evidence, not doctrine.

Skepticism is the lifeblood of scientific progress. By constantly asking whether there is a different answer, a better approach or an alternative view, scientists drive improvements and innovations that ultimately benefit everyone. It is not “antiscience” to be skeptical—it’s definitively pro-science. At a time when people of all ideological stripes are seeking definitive sources of truth, we should all embrace our inner skeptics and turn to the scientific method for a fresh approach to resolve our differences.

When I started out as an oncologist in the mid-1980s, women with the most aggressive form of breast cancer were subjected to surgical removal of not only their breasts but large amounts of their chests and rib cages. Treatment later evolved toward less-extensive surgery but greater use of chemotherapy, which too often came with debilitating side effects. I still remember what I called “the mother sign”—women being helped into my clinic by their moms because they were so weak from the therapies I gave them.

In the 1990s I left patient care for biotechnology, which held promise in improving cancer treatments. I led product development at Genentech, where we developed drugs such as Herceptin, which targeted cancerous cells and left healthy ones largely intact. By challenging the status quo, we found ways to treat at least some patients without first making them sicker. In a little over a decade, cancer treatment moved from disfiguring surgery to powerful drugs to precise gene therapies. Today, harnessing the immune system to treat cancer shows immense promise for the next advance.

But whereas skepticism and uncertainty have always been the heart and soul of science, confidence and certainty are the coin of the realm in much of today’s public discourse. Unquestioning confidence is deeply troubling for the scientific community because it is not the currency we trade in, and it has led people in America and around the world to question scientific enterprise itself. We should all be troubled when science is treated as if it were an ideology rather than a discipline.

Valuing beliefs over science manifests itself as cynicism at best, denialism at worst. Scientists talk about skepticism to assert that nothing should be accepted or rejected without considerable evidence.

Denialism—the refusal to accept established facts—is different and dangerous. According to Harvard research, between 2000 and 2005 AIDS denialism in South Africa led to an estimated 330,000 deaths because the government rejected offers of free drugs and grants and dragged its heels on establishing a treatment program.

And in just eight weeks last year—April 7 to June 2—Minnesota saw more cases of measles, a disease easily prevented with a vaccine, than had occurred in the entire United States in 2016.

The point of science is not to produce doctrine, but to collect and test evidence that points toward conclusions, which in turn inform approaches, treatments and policies based on rigorous research. These conclusions are provisional. Scientific investigation is undertaken to question today’s knowledge, to seek new evidence through research and experimentation.

That is not to say that previous evidence was “false,” merely that it was less complete. Those surgeons who performed radical mastectomies in the 1980s were acting with the best knowledge available at that time. As the understanding improved, so did the methods. Nor is it to say that current knowledge shouldn’t be trusted—there is strong evidence that vaccines save lives, for example, and scant evidence that they cause harm.

When I was a practicing oncologist, one way I built trust with patients was to be open and honest about what I knew for certain and what I didn’t. On my best days, I didn’t just talk; I listened. I answered patients’ questions to the best of my knowledge and did follow-up research on the ones I couldn’t answer. If I witnessed an outcome I didn’t expect, I revisited my assumptions. That’s how I applied the scientific method in the wild.

I follow a similar approach in my current job. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation uses a data-driven, evidence-based decision-making model. When the evidence changes, so does our strategy—as it did with malaria. Once it was clear that controlling the disease world-wide was practically and politically unsustainable, we increased our focus on accelerating elimination in regions where it is feasible now. At the same time, we’re continuing to support efforts to save lives and develop the tools that will eventually allow us to eradicate the disease.

What is undeniable is that the scientific breakthroughs in which we invest, such as new vaccines and hardier crops, help people around the world survive and thrive. How many more people benefit—and how quickly—will depend in part on public confidence in science.

We can rebuild that confidence by uniting around the qualities of the scientific method. As the name suggests, the scientific method is not a belief system, it is a practice. We would all benefit from more practice.

SOURCE

Melting Greenland ice caused by geothermal activity, not anthropogenic global warming

I have been pointing out the role of geothermal heat at both poles for years so this is nice confirmation

In North-East Greenland, researchers have measured the loss of heat that comes up from the interior of the Earth. This enormous area is a geothermal “hot spot” that melts the ice sheet from below and triggers the sliding of glaciers towards the sea.

Greenland's ice sheet is becoming smaller and smaller. The melting takes place with increased strength and at a speed that no models have previously predicted.

Today, in the esteemed journal ‘Scientific Reports’, researchers from the Arctic Research Centre, Aarhus University, and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources present results that, for the first time, show that the deep bottom water of the north-eastern Greenland fjords is being warmed up by heat gradually lost from the Earth's interior. And the researchers point out that this heat loss triggers the sliding of glaciers from the ice sheet towards the sea.

Icelandic conditions

“North-East Greenland has several hot springs where the water becomes up to 60 degrees warm and, like Iceland, the area has abundant underground geothermal activity,” explains Professor Søren Rysgaard, who headed the investigations.

For more than ten years, the researchers have measured the temperature and salinity in the fjord Young Sound, located at Daneborg, north of Scoresbysund, which has many hot springs, and south of the glacier Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden, which melts rapidly and is connected to the North-East Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS).

By focusing on an isolated basin in the fjord with a depth range between 200 and 340 m, the researchers have measured how the deep water is heated over a ten-year period. Based on the extensive data, researchers have estimated that the loss of heat from the Earth's interior to the fjord is about 100 MW m-2. This corresponds to a 2 megawatt wind turbine sending electricity to a large heater at the bottom of the fjord all year round.

Heat from the Earth’s interior – an important influence

It is not easy to measure the geothermal heat flux – heat emanating from the Earth’s interior – below a glacier, but within the area there are several large glaciers connected directly to the ice sheet. If the Earth releases heat to a fjord, heat also seeps up to the bottom part of the glaciers. This means that the glaciers melt from below and thus slide more easily over the terrain on which they sit when moving to the sea.

“It is a combination of higher temperatures in the air and the sea, precipitation from above, local dynamics of the ice sheet and heat loss from the Earth's interior that determines the mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet,” explains Søren Rysgaard.

“There is no doubt that the heat from the Earth’s interior affects the movement of the ice, and we expect that a similar heat seepage takes place below a major part of the ice cap in the north-eastern corner of Greenland,” says Søren Rysgaard.

The researchers expect that the new discoveries will improve the models of ice sheet dynamics, allowing better predictions of the stability of the Greenland ice sheet, its melting and the resulting global water rise.

SOURCE

Do our politicians realize that wind and solar are intermittent power sources?

A comment from Belgium

Something I have wondered for a long time: do the politicians who want to go for 100% wind & solar realize that these power sources are intermittent and therefor balancing and/or storage is needed in the transition? When I look at the competencies of the Minister of Energy, his crew and the energy experts among the politicians, then I fear for the worse. The need for balancing/storage is completely absent in the discussion. We only hear that we need more wind and solar in our energy mix, but never about measures to overcome intermittency.

My initial guess was that they don’t realize it, that they consider intermittent energy sources to be dispatchable energy sources and go from there. Then I saw this tweet from the spokes woman of the Minister of Energy. It seems a statement of the Minister himself:

‘The real challenge is storage. There is not always wind and the sun is not always shining. I strongly believe in innovation and I am counting on the enterprises to help us find solutions to make the #energy transition together'

This shows that he at least realizes that wind & solar are intermittent and therefor storage is important in a continuous working system.

However, it also shows that he currently has no clue how to solve the issue of intermittency, he just “believes in innovation” and “counts on enterprises” to “find solutions”. They are making it up as they go along, hoping that a solution for the intermittency will be found in the future. This is in stark contrast with other power sources that don’t have the same privilege. For example, new developments in nuclear power are not even considered and basically ignored or dismissed.

They are probably silent about this because it could demotivate the public, knowing that the construction of wind mills and solar panels is not the end of the investments, but only the beginning. Do they plan to present the public (the voters) with a fait accompli?

Not sure whether they realize the extent of the problem, more specific seasonal variation and the risk of having an insignificant supply of both solar and wind energy in winter at peak consumption. That is not really clear, not only because it is not mentioned in their communications, but also since they seem to gamble on future innovation of the private sector to solve the issues.

So yes, our politicians seem to realize that wind & solar are intermittent and backup will be a challenge, but that is not so reassuring after all. Knowing that our transition is in the hands of a group of bureaucrats (trained in law and political sciences) who apparently have no real plan to solve intermittency/backup/storage and in the meanwhile are willing to increasing the share of wind & solar while working very hard on phasing out conventional power sources, yet are happy with the prospect of possible future innovation…

What could ever go wrong?

SOURCE

The Never-ending Battles of the Coral Sea

Viv Forbes

For at least 50 years Australian taxpayers and other innocents have supported a parasitic industry in academia, bureaucracy, law, media and the tax-exempt Green Alarm “Charities”, all studying, regulating, inspecting and writing about yet another “imminent threat to Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef.”

It has become the never-ending battle of the Coral Sea.

The threats change, but there is always a doomsday forecast – Crown-of-Thorns, oil drilling, fishing, cane farming, coastal shipping, global warming, ocean acidity, coral bleaching, port dredging, chemical and fertiliser runoff, coal transport, river sediments, loss of world heritage status etc. Every recycled scare, magnified by the media and parroted by politicians, generates more income for the alarm industry, usually at the expense of taxpayers, consumers or local industries.

The reality is that sea creatures would starve in pure water – all marine life needs nutrients, salts and minerals. These come from other life forms, from decomposing rocks and organic matter carried to the sea by rivers, from dissolving atmospheric gases, or from delta and shelf sediments stirred up by floods, cyclones, dredging or coastal shipping. No one supports over-use of toxic man-made chemicals, but well-run cane, cattle and coal companies can co-exist with corals.

Corals first appeared 500 million years ago and have proven to be one of Earth’s great survivors. They outlasted the Carboniferous Forests, the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions, the dinosaurs, the mammoths, the Neanderthals and the Pleistocene cycles of ice age and warming. They thrive in warm tropical water, cluster around hot volcanic fumaroles and survive massive petroleum spills, natural oil seeps, tidal waves and volcanic dust. They have even recolonised the Montebello Island waters devastated by atomic bomb testing in the 1950’s.

The ENSO oscillation of blobs of warm Pacific water which caused recent coral bleaching can be identified in historical records for at least 400 years. Corals have survived El Nino warmings for thousands of years and they will probably outlast Homo Alarmism as Earth proceeds into the next glacial epoch.

Corals do not rely on computer models of global temperature to advise them – they read the sea level thermometer which falls and rises as the great ice sheets come and go.

In the warming phase like the one just ending, ice melts, sea levels rise and the reef that houses the corals may get drowned. Corals have two choices – build their reef higher or just float south/inshore and build a new reef (like the Great Barrier Reef) in shallower, cooler water. When islands sink beneath rising oceans, corals may build their own coral atolls as fast as the water rises.

Then when the cold era returns, ice sheets grow, sea levels fall, and the warm era coral reefs (like the Great Barrier Reef) get stranded on the new beaches and coastal plains. Usually the process is slow enough to allow the coral polyps to float into deeper warmer water closer to the equator and build another reef.

This eminently sensible policy of “move when you have to” has proved a successful survival policy for the corals for 500 million years.

Humans should copy the corals – “forget the computer climate models but watch real data like actual sea levels and . . . move when you have to.”

SOURCE

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

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

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29 January, 2018

Air pollution delays the age girls start their periods and makes their menstrual cycles more irregular, according to a study

Greenies have been pumping out studies like this for decades. Car exhaust has got to be bad for you! It's got those evil microparticles in it. It does. But are they harmful and at what concentration are they harmful? The study below does not allow those basic questions to be answered.

It did not in fact measure anybody's exposure to the particles. The researchers just looked at where people lived during their childhood. And if that area had a lot of pollution they theorized that people brought up there should have bad health. And they found it was so.

But correlation is not causation and they failed to look at WHY some people lived in more polluted areas. But we know why. Because they were poor. Leafy areas are for rich people. The poor live where they can afford it, beside major roads, industrial areas etc.

So what we are most likely seeing here is that it is the poor who have worse health, which has been known for years.

If the researchers had controlled for income they might have had a story but there seems to be no indication that they did. And the effects they observed were tiny anyway, making it highly likely that any control would wipe them out.

Control for income would only be a first step, however. I set out some other problems with this sort of study a month ago

Journal abstract follows the summary below

Air pollution delays the age girls start their periods, according to the first study of its kind.

Exposure to total suspended particulate (TSP), which are particles circulating in the air that measure 0.05mm, during girls' teenage years also makes their menstrual cycles less regular, a trial found.

TSP, which is largely made up of vehicle exhaust and coal combustion fumes, is thought to disrupt hormone production in people's bodies.

In females, this can cause excessive amounts of male sex hormones, such as testosterone, which the researchers believe could delay or disrupt girls' periods.

Study author Dr Shruthi Mahalingaiah from Boston University, said: 'While air pollution exposures have been linked to cardiovascular and pulmonary disease, this study suggests there may be other systems, such as the reproductive endocrine system, that are affected as well.'

Women exposed to air pollution before getting pregnant are nearly 20 percent more likely to have babies with birth defects, research suggested in January 2018.

Living within 5km of a highly-polluted area one month before conceiving makes women more likely to give birth to babies with defects such as cleft palates or lips, a study by University of Cincinnati found.

For every 0.01mg/m3 increase in fine air particles, birth defects rise by 19 percent, the research adds.

Fine air particles, which weigh less than 0.0025mg, are given out in vehicle exhaust fumes and, when breathed in, become deposited in the lungs where they enter the circulation.

Previous research suggests this causes birth defects as a result of women suffering inflammation and 'internal stress'.

Physicians Committee figures reveal birth defects affect three percent of all babies born in the US.

Around six percent of infants suffer in the UK, according to a report from the British Isles Network of Congenital Anomaly Registers

The researchers analyzed 290,000 babies living in Ohio between 2006 and 2010.

Monthly fine air particle levels were matched to the home addresses of pregnant women before and after they conceived.

How the research was carried out

The researchers analyzed 34,832 women aged between 25 and 42 who were enrolled in the 1989 Nurses' Health Study 2.

They investigated the TSP levels in the air surrounding the study's participants' homes they lived in during high school. This information was obtained from the US Environmental Protection Agency.

The women were asked how old they were when they started their period and how long it took for their cycles to become regular.

Air pollution increases period irregularity

Results further reveal that for every 45 ?g/m3 increase in TSP exposure during high school, girls have an eight percent higher risk of suffering moderate or persistent irregularity.

The researchers defined moderate irregularity as periods that were always erratic during high school or between the ages of 18 and 22.

Persistent irregularity is an inconsistent menstrual cycle both at high school and the ages 18-to-22.

The findings also show that for every 45 ?g/m3 rise in TSP exposure, a girl's risk of producing excessive male hormones increases by up to 11 percent.

Dr Mahalingaiah said: 'While air pollution exposures have been linked to cardiovascular and pulmonary disease, this study suggests there may be other systems, such as the reproductive endocrine system, that are affected as well.'

The findings were published in the journal Human Reproduction.

SOURCE

Perimenarchal air pollution exposure and menstrual disorders

S Mahalingaiah et al

Abstract

STUDY QUESTION

What is the association between perimenarchal exposure to total suspended particulate (TSP) in air, menstrual irregularity phenotypes and time to menstrual cycle regularity?

SUMMARY ANSWER

Exposures to TSP during high school are associated with slightly increased odds of menstrual irregularity and longer time to regularity in high school and early adulthood.

WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY

The menstrual cycle is responsive to hormonal regulation. Particulate matter air pollution has demonstrated hormonal activity. However, it is not known if air pollution is associated with menstrual cycle regularity.

STUDY DESIGN, SIZE, DURATION

Cross sectional study of 34 832 of the original 116 430 women (29.91%) enrolled in 1989 from the Nurses’ Health Study II (NHSII). The follow-up rate for this analytic sample was 97.76% at the 1991 survey.

PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING, METHODS

Annual averages of TSP were available for each year of high school attendance. We created three case definitions including high school menstrual irregularity and androgen excess. The time to menstrual cycle regularity was reported by participants as <1 1="" 3="" 45="" 5="" 95="" adjusted="" and="" baseline="" br="" calculated="" confidence="" exposure="" factors="" for="" g="" in="" increases="" intervals="" irregularity.="" longer="" m3="" menstrual="" never="" odds="" on="" or="" questionnaire.="" ratios="" risk="" the="" tsp="" were="" year="" years="">
MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE

In multivariable adjusted models, we observed that for every 45 ?g/m3 increase in average high school TSP there was an increased odds (95%CI) of 1.08 (1.03–1.14), 1.08 (1.02–1.15) and 1.10 (0.98–1.25) for moderate, persistent, and persistent with androgen excess irregularity phenotypes, respectively. TSP was also associated with a longer time to cycle regularity, with stronger results among women with older ages at menarche and those living in the Northeast or the West.

LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTION

The outcomes of menstrual regularity and time to cycle regularity were retrospectively assessed outcomes and may be susceptible to recall bias. There is also the potential for selection bias, as women had to live until 2011 to provide addresses.

WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS

Temporal exposure to air pollution in the adolescent and early adulthood window may be especially important, given its association with phenotypes of menstrual irregularity. The data from this study agrees with existing literature regarding air pollution and reproductive tract diseases.

SOURCE

Trump plan would reduce environmental rules for infrastructure projects

The White House has drafted a proposal to scale back environmental rules in an effort to make it easier to construct roads, bridges, and pipelines across the country, as part of an infrastructure plan that President Trump could release as soon as next week.

The plan would change things such as how officials decide a pipeline route, how a proposed border wall with Mexico would be built, and whether the National Park Service could object to a development that would impair tourists’ views from scenic parks such as the Grand Canyon, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post.

Administration officials say they are willing to alter elements of the legislative package to win enough votes for Senate passage.

SOURCE

Lowest temperature ever recorded in Bangladesh history

“Record cold in Tokyo, record cold in Bangladesh, but the MSM doesn’t report this,”

The mercury fell to 2.6 degrees Celsius at Tetulia in Panchagarh on January 8, the lowest temperature ever recorded in the country’s history, beating the country’s previous the record low of 2.8 degrees Celsius set in Srimangal in Moulvibazar in 1968.

Hospitals have been flooded with kids and elderly patients due to the severe cold across the country this winter.

SOURCE

Eating some sandwiches causes global warming, UK scientists say

Given their absurd assumptions, that conclusion does probably follow logically

Scientists at the University of Manchester say they've found a surprising global warming culprit: sandwiches.

Can the simple act of eating a sandwich really be bad for the environment?

New research by British scientists suggests a shocking response: Depends on the sandwich.

Researchers at the University of Manchester Thursday announced the results of what they claim to be "the first ever study looking at the carbon footprint of sandwiches, both home-made and pre-packaged."

Perhaps not surprisingly, the results are bad news for meat-eaters. The study found that sandwiches containing pork meat (that's bacon, ham and sausage), cheese and prawns contained the highest carbon footprints.

The worst of the lot, the so-called "all-day breakfast" sandwich containing egg, bacon and sausage, created the same carbon dioxide emissions as driving a car 12 miles.

The study took into account the environmental impact of raising various sandwich ingredients, processing them, transporting them, packaging them and refrigerating them before purchase and consumption.

In their conclusion, the researchers recommend reducing the amount of cheese and meat in sandwiches, extending sell-by and use-by dates, and making sandwiches at home if at all possible.

The sandwich is something of a U.K. specialty. John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, is believed to have invented the delicacy sometime in the 1700s for those occasions when he was unable to fit a meal into his busy work schedule (or gambling schedule, depending on what source you believe).

According to the British Sandwich Association (yes, there is such a thing and they even have a magazine), more than 11.5 sandwiches are consumed each year in the U.K. alone.

SOURCE

Just ten hours of sun fell on German panels in December

During December 2017, Germany’s millions of solar panels received just 10 hours of sunshine, and when solar energy did filter through the clouds, most of the panels were covered in snow. Even committed Green Disciples with a huge Tesla battery in their garage soon found that their battery was flat and that there was no solar energy to recharge it.

The lights, heaters, trains, TVs, and phones ran on German coal power, French nuclear power, Russian gas, and Scandinavian hydro, plus unpredictable surges of electricity from those few wind turbines that were not iced up, locked down in a gale, or becalmed.

Germany has long supported two incompatible ideas: engineering excellence and green totalitarianism. Angela Merkel’s support of climate alarmism while preaching energy efficiency continues this discordant tradition.

But King Winter has exposed the weak underbelly of Germany’s energy policy. Empress Merkel now faces a hostile political climate with no clothes.

The green energy retreat has started in the green energy movement’s own heartland.

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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28 January, 2018

Shocking satellite images show how the world's lakes are shrinking at an alarming rate and turning to dust bowls

Pretty rubbishy stuff below. They admit that the dry lakes were caused by people taking water from rivers for irrigation etc. but still say -- with no evidence whatever -- that global warming contributed to the loss.

It might also be mentioned that Africa generally has been hard hit by drought recently -- but that was an effect of ElNino, not CO2. El Nino is winding down more slowly than expected but when it does the rain will return.

Had there ACTUALLY been any effect of global warming, rains would have INCREASED, not decreased -- which is High School physics

They were once great bodies of water containing an abundance of wildlife and an important resource for humans.

But a growing number of lakes, some that were once thriving destinations for tourists, are drying up faster than ever - and in the majority of cases the blame lies with water mismanagement and climate change, according to an ecology expert.

Shocking satellite pictures show how lakes such as the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan and Lake Urmia in Iran are getting smaller and smaller by the year.

In the case of the Aral Sea, it started drying up in the 1960s as water was taken away from the lake to irrigate the crops in the dried land of what was the USSR.

And the impact of that means the lake now only stands at 10 per cent of its former surface area of 26,300 square miles - and has decreased by an estimated 167 billion gallons of water.

A similar situation has arisen with Lake Urmia, which was once a luxury holiday destination, but has started to shrink due to dams on the rivers feeding it. Today, it has lost 40 per cent of its previous area of 2,000 square miles.

Another tourist destination under threat is the Dead Sea in the Middle East, which is also shrinking at an alarming rate due to water mismanagement.

Water levels have been dropping by up to three feet per year, and Israel, Jordan and Palestine have agreed to a plan to pump in about 53 billion gallons of water a year from the Red Sea to boost levels.

Meanwhile the demand for water in the US states of California and Nevada has been blamed for Owen's Lake reducing significantly since 1926. This is because the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power diverted the Owens River into the LA Aqueduct instead of the lake.

Now, over 90 years on, city officials are spending $1.2 billion to try and stop the lake from becoming a complete dust bowl.

Lake Faguibine in Mali, shockingly, has been almost completely dry since 1990 following a prolonged drought. It had previously stood at 230 square miles but has almost completely disappeared.

According to lakes expert Lisa Borre, who is a researcher at the Cary Institute in Millbrook, New York, human intervention is the main reason these landmarks are disappearing.

She told MailOnline Travel: 'Extensive research on the worst of these disasters, including well documented examples such as the Aral Sea and Lake Urmia, show that the main culprit is diverting water or other mismanagement in the watershed that prevents enough water from reaching the lake.

'That said, the situation on every lake is unique and requires understanding of its natural setting and climate as well as what is happening to the source of water feeding the lake and the amount of water leaving the lake through natural and human causes.

'Climate change can exacerbate problems caused by mismanagement of water resources. With few exceptions, lakes across the globe are warming.

'Many experience natural cycles of drying and flooding, but climate change is also altering the natural water cycle, causing more variability and extreme conditions.'

Lake Assal in Djibouti is also evaporating at an alarming rate due to drought as temperatures in the African country can often reach over 50 degrees celsius, which could be a result of global warming. The lake also sees very little rainfall feed it and is one of the few bodies of water that is shrinking for reasons other than human intervention.

In Mexico, Lake Chapala has reduced by 25 per cent due to a combination of drought and diversion. The surface area of Lake Chapala in March 1986 was 1,048 square kilometers (259,000 acres). By March 2001, it had diminished to 812 square kilometers (201,000 acres)

And even though the loss of a lake may not seem like a problem for most people, Ms Borre says we should all be concerned.

She added: 'The loss of any lake is a concern because lakes provide important ecosystem services.

'In the most extreme cases, the toxic dust blowing off dried lake beds can create human health problems.

'Less freshwater in the lake creates higher salinity, making the water inhospitable to the fish, wildlife and humans that depend on the lake for water and food.

'Many of the most threatened lakes in the world are also important for biodiversity conservation and support migratory birds and diverse fisheries.

'When a lake dries up, it affects the human communities that depend on the lake for food, water, transportation, commerce and their very way of life.'

SOURCE

No CO2 warming for the last 40 years?

It is very cold here in the Eastern US and the President is joking about the lack of global warming. More interesting by far is the fact that there appears to have been no CO2 induced warming in the last 40 years, which is as far back as the satellite measurements go.

That this incredible fact has gone unnoticed is due mostly to the scientific community’s fixation on the warming shown by the surface temperature statistical models. But as explained here, these complex computer models are completely unreliable.

Also, the satellite measurements do show some global warming, which people have mistakenly assumed somehow supports the hypothesis of human caused, CO2 induced warming. Careful inspection shows that this assumption is false. There is in fact no evidence of CO2 warming in the entire satellite record.

To see this one must look at the satellite record in detail. To understand this, bear in mind that science is all about the specific details of an observation. These details can overthrow grand theories that are widely accepted.

For example, the negative result of the Michelson-Morley experiment led to the revolutionary special theory of relativity. When it comes to global warming, the 40 year satellite measurements provide a strong negative result for the CO2 warming hypothesis. The CO2 warming just is not there.

To see this negative result, let us look closely at this graphic.

It gives the monthly almost-global temperature readings for the lower atmosphere. The satellites do not cover the entire globe, just most of it. There is also a red line showing a 13-month running average temperature.

Note that on the vertical scale the temperatures are shown as what are called anomalies, not as actual temperatures. An anomaly here is the difference in degrees Celsius between the actual temperature and an arbitrarily chosen average temperature. That average temperature defines the zero line in the graph. Why this is done is not important for our discussion.

To begin with look at the period from the beginning to 1997. The red line shows that this is what is called an aperiodic oscillator. It is an oscillator because it consistently goes up and down, up and down, etc. It is aperiodic, as opposed to periodic, because the ups and downs are somewhat irregular.

It should be clear by inspection that there is very little, if any, overall warming during this period. That is, the red line is oscillating around roughly the -0.1 degree line.

When you have an aperiodic oscillator with this few oscillations there is no point in trying to be extremely precise, because the next oscillation might change things a bit. In particular, one must be very careful in doing straight line (that is, linear) trend analysis, because the result will be very sensitive to where you start and stop the trend.

So let’s just say that there is little or no warming during this period. This was well known at the time and it was a major issue in the climate change debate.

Then comes what is often called the giant El Nino, although it is actually a giant El Nino-La Nina cycle in ocean circulation. First the temperatures go way up, then way down, before stabilizing back into a natural aperiodic oscillator.

The giant El Nino-La Nina cycle looks to begin mid-1997, interrupting a downward moving aperiodic oscillation. It ends sometime in 2001, followed by a new aperiodic oscillation. However, this oscillation is warmer, centered roughly on the +0.15 line. The new oscillator continues until another big El Nino-La Nina oscillation hits, around 2015. What this last El Nino cycle will do remains to be seen

Thus the graph looks to have basically four distinct periods. First the little-to-no warming period from 1979 until 1997. Second the giant El Nino-La Nina cycle from 1997 until 2001. Third, the warmer little-to-no warming period from 2001 to 2015. Fourth the new El Nino-La Nina cycle that is still in progress.

Yes there is some warming but it appears to be almost entirely coincident with the giant El Nino-La Nina cycle. The simplest explanation is that the second flat aperiodic period is warmer than the first because of the El Nino effect. Perhaps some heat was injected into the atmosphere that remained, thereby increasing the baseline for the next aperiodic oscillator.

But in no case is there any evidence of CO2 induced warming here, nor of any human-caused warming for that matter. These causes would produce a relatively steady warming over time, not the single episodic warming that we clearly see here. In particular, to my knowledge there is no known way that the gradual CO2 increase could have caused this giant El Nino-La Nina cycle.

Thus the little warming that there is in the last 40 years appears to be more or less entirely natural. In any normal science this result would be sufficient to invalidate the hypothesis that the increasing CO2 concentration is causing global warming.

SOURCE

The EPA Has Managed To Bankrupt One Of The Biggest Refineries In The Northeast

There’s a headline I bet you didn’t see coming, huh? We’re living in a time when the American energy sector is surging and becoming a dominant force not only domestically, but globally as well.

There’s a president in the White House who is loosening up restrictions on drilling as we speak. Older pipeline projects are finally being finished and newer ones are kicking into gear. That includes Pennsylvania where, as we recently discussed, the Mariner East II Pipeline may soon be bringing even more product into the Philadelphia/New York region for processing and shipment.

So with all of those conditions in place, how in the world could the Philadelphia Energy Solutions LLC refinery, one of the biggest around, be filing for bankruptcy? That must be a mistake, right? But it’s not.

Philadelphia Energy Solutions LLC, owner of the largest oil refinery serving the New York Harbor gasoline and diesel market, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

The company, a joint-venture between The Carlyle Group LP and a subsidiary of Energy Transfer Partners LP, filed a petition Sunday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. Chief Executive Greg Gatta said in a memo obtained by Bloomberg News that the company had a prepackaged reorganization plan and cited the more than $800 million it paid since 2012 to comply with the U.S. government’s Renewable Fuel Standard as a key factor for the decision.

The company’s debt is between $1 billion and $10 billion, it said in its filing, without providing further details in its initial petition.

How did that happen with energy products being so plentiful? The easy answer is provided by the company which owns the refinery. It’s not one of the newest designs so they’re not equipped to process biofuels and blend them into gasoline. And because of our old friend the Renewable Fuel Standard, that means that the refinery has to purchase government mandated RIN credits (Renewable Identification Number) in order to legally operate.

In case you’re wondering how much those RIN credits cost these days on the bizarre market which has grown out of the government mandate, Philadelphia Energy Solutions had to spend $217M in 2017 for them. That was their second highest operating cost, adding up to more than any other expense besides crude oil to process, and more than twice their total salary for the workforce. At the same time, as I mentioned above, an abundant oil supply is something of a double edged sword. High supply and steady demand means lower prices, so the government was jacking up their costs massively just as profits were getting slimmer.

Was there anything that could have been done? Of course. We were first saddled with this program by George W. Bush, much to our dismay. Then it really kicked into high gear under Barack Obama. But there was always hope that perhaps Donald Trump could help. Yes, he had sworn fealty to King Corn in Iowa when he was on the campaign trail, but at least some relief could have been offered. But when the EPA quietly floated a trial balloon about possibly scaling back the RFS standards a bit, Trump shot the idea down. More recently, several state governors, including Pennsylvania’s, pleaded with the President to grant waivers to some of the hardest hit states. Once again, Trump denied the request. And now Philadelphia Energy Solutions has entered Chapter 11.

Bush started this. Barack Obama made it worse. But Donald Trump had multiple chances to do something about it and he has refused. This one lands on his plate as far as I’m concerned.

SOURCE

California Considers $1,000 Fine for Waiters Offering Unsolicited Plastic Straws

Ian Calderon wants restaurateurs to think long and hard before giving you a straw.

Calderon, the Democratic majority leader in California's lower house, has introduced a bill to stop sit-down restaurants from offering customers straws with their beverages unless they specifically request one. Under Calderon's law, a waiter who serves a drink with an unrequested straw in it would face up to 6 months in jail and a fine of up to $1,000.

"We need to create awareness around the issue of one-time use plastic straws and its detrimental effects on our landfills, waterways, and oceans," Calderon explained in a press release.

This isn't just Calderon's crusade. The California cities of San Luis Obispo and Davis both passed straws-on-request laws last year, and Manhattan Beach maintains a prohibition on all disposable plastics. And up in Seattle, food service businesses won't be allowed to offer plastic straws or utensils as of July.

The Los Angeles Times has gotten behind the movement, endorsing straws-on-request policies in an editorial that also warned that "repetitive sucking may cause or exacerbate wrinkles on the lips or around the mouth." Celebrity astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson (always up for a little chiding) and Entourage star Adrian Grenier have appeared in videos where an octopus slaps them in the face for using a plastic straw.

The actual number of straws being used is unclear. Calderon, along with news outlets writing about this issue—from CNN to the San Francisco Chronicle—unfailingly state that Americans use 500 million plastic straws a day, many of them ending up in waterways and oceans. The 500 million figure is often attributed to the National Park Service; it in turn got it from the recycling company Eco-Cycle.

Eco-Cycle is unable to provide any data to back up this number, telling Reason that it was relying on the research of one Milo Cress. Cress—whose Be Straw Free Campaign is hosted on Eco-Cycle's website—tells Reason that he arrived at the 500 million straws a day figure from phone surveys he conducted of straw manufacturers in 2011, when he was just 9 years old.

Cress, who is now 16, says that the National Restaurant Association has endorsed his estimates in private correspondence. This may well be true, but the only references to the 500 million figure on the association's website again points back to the work done by Cress.

More important than how many straws Americans use each day is how many wind up in waterways. We don't know that figure either. The closest we have is the number of straws collected by the California Costal Commission during its annual Coastal Cleanup Day: a total of 835,425 straws and stirrers since 1988, or about 4.1 percent of debris collected.

Squishy moderates on the straw issue have pushed paper straws, which come compostable at only eight times the price. Eco-Cycle skews a bit more radical, with their "Be Straw Free" campaign—sponsored in part by reusable straw makers—that urges the adoption of glass or steel straws. Because we all know how good steel smelting is for the environment.

In any case, criminalizing unsolicited straws seems like a rather heavy-handed approach to the problem, especially since we don't actually know how big a problem it is. But don't take my word for that. Ask Milo Cress.

"If people are forced not to use straws, then they won't necessarily see that it's for the environment," he tells Reason. "They'll just think it's just another inconvenience imposed on them by government."

SOURCE

Honesty even among senior scientists cannot be assumed

A scooter, a polaroid camera, a drone and pink LED lights are some of the purchased items that have Queensland's chief scientist in hot water.

Suzanne Miller faced court on Wednesday over allegations she used a state government-funded credit card to buy the random items as well as a high-pressure cleaner, Go-Pro camera and industrial fan.

Miller, currently stood down from her position, appeared in Brisbane Magistrates Court to face 31 new counts of fraud.

The Crime and Corruption Commission slapped the 52-year-old, who was first charged last July over a $45,000 private health insurance claim, with the extra 31 offences in December.

It alleges Miller, who was also the chief executive of the Queensland Museum, used a corporate credit card to buy more than $30,000 worth of items for her own use between September 2013 and July 2017.

Court documents show the items, including the cameras, scooter, drone, high-pressure cleaner, pink LED lights, and fan.

Miller was stood aside on full pay in 2017 after she was charged with the separate fraud offence in July.

The state's corruption watchdog alleges she dishonestly gained private health insurance worth $45,000 as an employee of the Queensland Museum between February 2014 and July 2017.

The Scottish-born professor was also charged with one count of uttering a forged document in March 2015, namely an immigration letter.

Miller, who made no comment as she left court on Wednesday, had her bail continued and matters adjourned until February 19.

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

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

26 January, 2018

Jim Hansen covers his bets

He now says that it may not warm in the near future but it will eventually. Rather reminiscent of old Christian prophecies about the second coming of Christ. Hansen implicitly admits that there is no evidence of warming so far outside tiny fluctuations in heavily cooked statistics. But just you wait! He could say the same if we were in the middle of an ice age. It's not falsifiable and hence not science

by David Wojick

James Hansen, one of the key originators of climate change alarmism, is back in the news. This time it is with a prediction that we may see a ten year “hiatus” in global warming. He says that alarmism is not affected. I agree with his prediction but not with his conclusion. In my view alarmism is being falsified right before our eyes.

The big difference between us lies in whose temperature record this hiatus occurs. Hansen sees it as a pause in long-term human caused warming. But I see it as a continuation of almost no warming, and what little there is, is natural. This is a bit complicated, but here goes.

Hansen created one of the leading statistical models that supposedly estimates global surface temperatures. He did this as director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) so the model is called the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis or GISTEMP. (Hansen is an astronomer by training.)

This computer model shows more or less steady global warming for the last 40 years or so. This supposed warming is the primary basis for climate change alarmism.

GISTEMP has some well known problems, especially the fact that it has been repeatedly adjusted to increase the long-term warming. This in itself is a science scandal, but I think the problems with these statistical models go much deeper.

I argue in my article “Fake Temperatures” that all of these statistical surface models are worthless. Their purported global warming is actually just what is called an artifact of the model, not something real.

My basis for writing off these computer models is that the satellites, which actually measure temperatures, show no such global warming. In real science observations trump computer models.

What the satellites show is explained in my article “No CO2 warming for 40 years?” Simply put the record looks like this. First there is no warming from the beginning in 1978 until 1997, a period of roughly 20 years. Then there is what is called a Super El Nino cycle, which takes several years. After that there is again a long period of no warming. Finally there is the recent Super El Nino, the cycle of which is still in progress.

However, the second long period of no warming is warmer than the first. Thus there is indeed some global warming in this record, but it looks to be caused by the Super El Nino cycle. There is no evidence of human cause in this small warming and it is the only warming in the record.

This leads to the question: what will happen after the present Super El Nino cycle ends? What is obviously most likely is that we will see another long period of no warming. This period may well be a bit warmer than the last period, just as that period was a bit warmer than its predecessor.

So in this limited respect I agree with Hansen, which is something I never expected to happen! But while he sees a coming hiatus as just a minor glitch for climate change alarmism, I see it as another big nail in the coffin.

There simply is no evidence of human caused global warming in the entire satellite record. What small warming there is looks to be entirely natural, a bit of heat left over from a Super El Nino cycle.

If this pattern continues for another ten years it will surely mean that the hypothesis of dangerous human caused global warming is finally falsified by real world observation.

SOURCE

Sea-level FALL

British team unearths Roman amphitheatre at ancient port

A face appears eerily from beneath the ground at the site of an ancient port that once hustled and bustled supplying goods to the rulers of Rome.

The well-preserved statue is one of many stunning artefacts uncovered by British archaeologists, who have unearthed a major amphitheatre at Portus, close to Fiumicino airport.

The ancient gateway to the Mediterranean was twice the size of the port of Southampton and supplied the centre of the Roman Empire with food, slaves, wild animals, luxury goods and building materials for hundreds of years. It is now two miles inland.

The excavation team conducted the first ever large-scale dig at Portus, which has been described by experts as one of the major archaeological sites in the world.

Today it sits incongruously next to the airport runway and the team digs to the sound of jet engines.

The project concentrated on the banks of a hexagonal-shaped man-made lake which formed part of the 2nd century harbour, about 20 miles from the Italian capital, and found the amphitheatre inside a gigantic imperial-style palace. It could have held up to 2,000 people and is similar in size to the Pantheon in Rome.

The Roman port is now two miles from the current coastline

Portus project director Professor Simon Keay said he thought the material used to build the amphitheatre means it could have played host to the famous Roman emperors in the 2nd century.

Prof Keay said: 'This amphitheatre is, in fact, tucked away. It's at the eastern end of the palace and it's a very intimate building and you would not even know it was there unless you approached from the east.

'Its design, using luxurious materials and substantial colonnades, suggests it was used by a high status official, possibly even the emperor himself, and the activities that took place there were strictly private: it could have been games or gladiatorial combat, wild beast baiting or the staging of mock sea battles, but we really do not know.

'What we do know is it's unusual to find this type of building with elements of imperial architecture so close to a harbour.'

Portus was close to the ancient river port of Rome Ostia and was certainly very important and vital to the survival of the Roman Empire and so would have been of interest to the emperors, who would have used it to travel to and from the city.

The team has found a 295ft-wide canal that linked two huge basins where ships weighing up to 350 tonnes unloaded their cargo to Ostia. Cargo could then use the Tiber to travel to Rome.

Prof Keay said the dig is very important and has also uncovered thousands of smaller finds. 'It's going to generate a lot of rethinking about how ports were used and that will change the way we think about Rome's relationship with the Mediterranean,' he said.

'The site has been known about since the 16th century but it has never ever been given the importance it deserves. It has been grossly understudied. This is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world.

'Certainly it should be rated alongside such wonders as Stonehenge and Angkor Wat in Cambodia. So much of this imperial port has been preserved and there is much more to learn about its role in supplying Rome and in the broader economic development of the Roman Mediterranean.'

SOURCE

Greenie rag "New Scientist" admits bad motives among Warmists

THE idea that we are living in a historic, even apocalyptic, age exerts a powerful pull on the human mind. Eschatology – the theology of end times – is a religious concept, but crops up in many other systems of thought. Marxism and neo-liberalism were both driven by an “end-of-history” narrative. Scientific thinking isn’t immune either: the technological singularity has been called eschatology for geeks, and the study of existential risk even has its own centre at the University of Cambridge. You don’t have to believe in the four horsemen to see the apocalypse coming.

How credible are these worries? The end of the world itself is a given, but is so far off as not to be worth fretting about. However, the end of the world as we know it – aka Western civilisation – is a different matter. There is an emerging strand of respectable scientific thought that says its decline and fall has started already, or soon will (see “End of days: Is Western civilisation on the brink of collapse?“).

What are we to make of such claims? There seems little reason to doubt that Western civilisation will eventually collapse. Unless it is immune – by accident rather than design – to the forces of history, it will go the way of all civilisations. Recent political events and long-term environmental trends offer little comfort; artificial intelligence and synthetic biology add a more urgent threat.

But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and as yet the warnings of impending collapse don’t add up to a compelling reason to stock up on bottled water and canned food.

“For some activists, climate change was a golden opportunity to further their political agenda”
Nonetheless, we ought to give them a fair hearing. Unlike earlier civilisations, we have ways to identify subtle trends and the means to intervene.

But those making the case for action need to be canny. There is already ample scientific evidence of one real but avoidable threat to civilisation. And yet our efforts to avert it verge on the pitiful.

That threat, of course, is climate change. One of the reasons we’re struggling to deal with it is that some activists saw it as a golden opportunity to further their political agenda: reining in corporations, regulating free markets and imposing environmental legislation. For them, climate change was less of an inconvenient truth than a convenient one.

The point is not that the activists’ answers are wrong. Business as usual is a sure way to climate catastrophe. It is that they prematurely politicised the science and hence provoked pushback from people on the other side of the fence.

Evidence for an impending civilisational collapse is much weaker, but is already being politicised in a similar way. The causes being offered are familiar bugbears of the left: inequality, population growth and resource depletion. The proposed answers are equally predictable and contentious.

The risk is that this new and important science is turned into yet another culture war. Before proposing divisive solutions, scientific eschatologists need to concentrate on nailing the basic facts. Otherwise, historians of the future may judge us harshly for reading the danger signs but failing to act.

SOURCE

France fails to meet targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions – Macron: ‘We are losing the battle’ against ‘global warming’

France failed to meet its targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in 2016, the government said Monday, just a month after President Emmanuel Macron warned that “we are losing the battle” against global warming.

The environment ministry said the country emitted 463 tons of greenhouse gases, measured as carbon dioxide equivalents, or 3.6 percent more than its goal.

It attributed the slip in part to lower oil prices which can prompt people and businesses to consume more in areas such as transportation or heating.

But emissions were down 15.3 percent from 1990 levels.

As part of the Paris climate accord signed by 195 nations in 2015, France has pledged to cut carbon emissions 27 percent from 2013 levels by 2028, and by 75 percent by 2050.

SOURCE

Australia: Big talk, big cost, big battery but small result

On 1 December last, South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill flipped the on switch for the giant lithium-ion battery at Jamestown and this facility went online.

It was a huge celebration all round for the South Australian Government which is facing what promises to be a very difficult election and the US company Tesla which constructed and installed the battery – well, actually, lots of smaller batteries – known as the Hornsdale Power Reserve.

The Reserve is designed to store 129 megawatt hours of power for use at times of acute shortage and is supposed to provide 30,000 South Australian homes power for more than an hour in the event of a failure. For the record, the 2016 Census reported that South Australia had 767,267 dwellings. Even the battery facility’s loudest champions can’t escape the unfortunate fact that a very small number of homes could only be supplied for a very short time if the facility was working at peak efficiency.

Premier Weatherill must be hoping that these lucky 30,000 homes are strategically scattered among Labor’s marginal seats.

The facility is linked to a wind farm owned and operated by French firm Neoen. Power produced there is sent to the battery facility and stored for future use.

Australia generally and South Australia in particular have been treated to a masterful public relations blitz by Tesla’s US boss Elon Musk who has long shown a remarkable ability to con money from governments and the public when both have been dazzled by his non-stop self promotion.

Typical of his behaviour was the extravagant bet that he would have the battery facility up and running within one hundred days of the contracts being signed or, he solemnly promised, it would be free. Other companies who tender for projects and then sign contracts for fixed-price projects within a required time do so quietly as a matter of course and don’t feel the need to shout about bets and gambles. They know what their contract requires and they do it or suffer penalties – just like Mr Musk’s contractual obligation. But the “bet” was good PR and everybody – including the South Australian Government lapped it up. And guess what? Mr Musk won his bet. What a surprise!

However, when very hot weather struck southern Australia in January, the battery facility proved to be seriously wanting.

On the two January days of highest temperatures, the wind was blowing so little in South Australia that it was only producing about 6.5 per cent of its capacity. South Australia was relying on Victoria for 31 per cent of its power, 23 per cent of which was provided by hydro-electricity.

According an Institute of Public Affairs analysis, wind contributed only 3.5 per cent of national energy generation on the second day of highest temperatures.

The South Australian Government has refused to say what this battery facility cost although it is generally accepted to be at least $50 million. The mere matter of taxpayers’ money is nothing compared to what Premier Weatherill calls “history in the making”.

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 January, 2018

The NYT resurrects lake Poopo

And I say it is a lot of poop. I don't use rude words very often but sometimes the opportunity is too tempting. Lake Poopo really is called that. It is a lake in South America that lacks water at the moment and Warmists like to say the water has all gone away because of global warming. So the NYT has up a big picture of the dry lake bed.

But NYT readers must be mostly scientific illiterates. Given their Leftism I can believe it. It's High School science that warmer waters give off more evaporation which eventually comes back down as more rain. So any real global warming would fill Poopo up! Drought suggests global COOLING!

What is actually happening is that the growing population in the region is diverting the water from the rivers that flow into Poopo and using the water for irrigation and domestic purposes. The NYT is just completely dishonest about it in the usual Leftist way

The article underneath the picture of Poopo is below. It says that the governments of the world are finding it too hard to stop global warming but that at some unknown time in the future they may get serious about it. Rather a waste of print, it seems to me. A lot of Poopo, even

In 1988, when world leaders convened their first global conference on climate change, in Toronto, the Earth’s average temperature was a bit more than half a degree Celsius above the average of the last two decades of the 19th century, according to measurements by NASA.

Global emissions of greenhouse gases amounted to the equivalent of some 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year — excluding those from deforestation and land use. Worried about its accumulation, the gathered scientists and policymakers called on the world to cut CO2 emissions by a fifth.

That didn’t happen, of course. By 1997, when climate diplomats from the world’s leading nations gathered to negotiate a round of emissions cuts in Kyoto, Japan, emissions had risen to some 35 billion tons and the global surface temperature was roughly 0.7 of a degree Celsius above the average of the late 19th century.

It took almost two decades for the next breakthrough. When diplomats from virtually every country gathered in Paris just over two years ago to hash out another agreement to combat climate change, the world’s surface temperature was already about 1.1 degrees Celsius above its average at the end of the 1800s. And greenhouse gas emissions totaled just under 50 billion tons.

This is not to belittle diplomacy. Maybe this is the best we can do. How can countries be persuaded to adopt expensive strategies to drop fossil fuels when the prospective impact of climate change remains uncertain and fixing the problem requires collective action? As mitigation by an individual country will benefit all, nations will be tempted to take a free ride on the efforts of others. And no country will be able to solve the problem on its own.

Still, the world’s diplomatic meanderings — from the ineffectual call in Toronto for a reduction in emissions to the summit meeting in Paris, where each country was allowed simply to pledge whatever it could to the global effort — suggest that the diplomats, policymakers and environmentalists trying to slow climate change still cannot cope with its unforgiving math. They are, instead, trying to ignore it. And that will definitely not work.

The world is still warming. Both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last week that global temperatures last year receded slightly from the record-setting 2016, because there was no El Niño heating up the Pacific.

While the world frets over President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement, I would argue that the greatest impediment to slowing this relentless warming is an illusion of progress that is allowing every country to sidestep many of the hard choices that still must be made.

“We keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome,” said Scott Barrett, an expert on international cooperation and coordination at Columbia University who was once a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Climate diplomats in Paris didn’t merely reassert prior commitments to keep the world’s temperature less than 2 degrees above that of the “preindustrial” era — a somewhat fuzzy term that could be taken to mean the second half of the 19th century. Hoping to appease island nations like the Maldives, which are likely to be swallowed by a rising ocean in a few decades, they set a new “aspirational” ceiling of 1.5 degrees.

To stick to a 2-degree limit, we would have to start reducing global emissions for real within about a decade at most — and then do more. Half a century from now, we would have to figure out how to suck vast amounts of carbon out of the air. Keeping the lid at 1.5 degrees would be much harder still.

Yet when experts tallied the offers made in Paris by all the countries in the collective effort, they concluded that greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 would exceed the level needed to remain under 2 degrees by 12 billion to 14 billion tons of CO2.

Are there better approaches? The “climate club” proposed by the Yale University economist William Nordhaus has the advantage of including an enforcement device, which current arrangements lack: Countries in the club, committed to reducing carbon emissions, would impose a tariff on imports from nonmembers to encourage them to join.

Martin Weitzman of Harvard University supports the idea of a uniform worldwide tax on carbon emissions, which might be easier to agree on than a panoply of national emissions cuts. One clear advantage is that countries could use their tax revenues as they saw fit.

Mr. Barrett argues that the Paris agreement could be supplemented with narrower, simpler deals to curb emissions of particular gases — such as the 2016 agreement at a 170-nation meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, to reduce hydrofluorocarbon emissions — or in particular industries, like aviation or steel.

Maybe none of this would work. The climate club could blow up if nonmembers retaliated against import tariffs by imposing trade barriers of their own. Coordinating taxes around the world looks at least as difficult as addressing climate change. And Mr. Barrett’s proposal might not deliver a breakthrough on the scale necessary to move the dial.

But what definitely won’t suffice is a climate strategy built out of wishful thinking: the proposition that countries can be cajoled and prodded into increasing their ambition to cut emissions further, and that laggards can be named and shamed into falling into line.

Inveigled by three decades of supposed diplomatic progress — coupled with falling prices of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries — the activists, technologists and policymakers driving the strategy against climate change seem to have concluded that the job can be done without unpalatable choices. And the group is closing doors that it would do best to keep open.

There is no momentum for investing in carbon capture and storage, since it could be seen as condoning the continued use of fossil fuels. Nuclear energy, the only source of low-carbon power ever deployed at the needed scale, is also anathema. Geoengineering, like pumping aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s heat back into space, is another taboo.

But eventually, these options will most likely be on the table, as the consequences of climate change come more sharply into focus. The rosy belief that the world can reduce its carbon dependency over a few decades by relying exclusively on the power of shame, the wind and the sun will give way to a more realistic understanding of possibilities.

Some set of countries will decide to forget Paris and deploy a few jets to pump sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to cool the world temporarily. There will be a race to develop techniques to harvest and store carbon from the atmosphere, and another to build nuclear generators at breakneck speed.

It will probably be too late to prevent the Maldives from ending up underwater. But better late than never.

SOURCE

Even the one reliable source of "renewable" power is problematical

Great feats of Canadian engineering are seen as a honeypot by parasitical native people

Deep beneath a granite mountain in the vast, snow-covered wilds north of the Saint Lawrence River, a frigid torrent surges through a massive, man-made tunnel, its white water propelling eight powerful turbines that generate electricity for hundreds of thousands of people.

Within two years, a significant amount of that power, along with hydroelectricity from other plants in this Canadian province, could be exported to Massachusetts, providing the state with a long-awaited influx of renewable energy.

This week, state officials are expected to announce whether they intend to buy more hydropower as part of the Baker administration’s energy plan. But in and around this old paper mill town about 400 miles northeast of Montreal, the indigenous peoples of the region harbor major concerns about the environmental impact of the project, complicating the quest for climate-friendly power.

State energy officials are considering six bids for renewable energy projects that would produce enough electricity to power about a million homes, enabling Massachusetts to reduce its carbon emissions 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, as required by state law.

Three of those bids are for lucrative long-term contracts from Hydro-Québec, a government-owned company that generated $13.3 billion in revenue in 2016 from its immense system of 63 dams and 27 reservoirs, many of which were built amid great controversy. By some estimates, the contract with Massachusetts, which would run for 20 years, could be worth $12 billion.

But those bids have thrust Massachusetts into a long-running dispute between the power company and the region’s indigenous peoples, some of whom have accused Hydro-Québec of “cultural genocide” and damaging rivers that have been vital to their economy and traditions for generations.

“Hydro-Québec has destroyed our territories,” said Chief René Simon of the Pessamit, an indigenous group of the Innu nation whose ancestral lands are now the source of nearly one-third of the company’s hydropower. “I would advise the governor of Massachusetts not to buy the power from Hydro-Québec.”

Officials at Hydro-Québec acknowledge the concerns of the Pessamit, and after years of protests, the company’s chief executive in December welcomed Simon to his office in Montreal. The two agreed to a series of negotiations in hopes of settling the Pessamit’s longstanding claims against Hydro-Québec, which include multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the company.

Company officials maintain that a deal to sell Massachusetts an additional 1,200 megawatts of power — a tiny percentage of Hydro-Québec’s overall capacity — would have little to no impact on the Pessamit.

They also note that they have previously sought to accommodate the group’s concerns, both historical and environmental, by agreeing to share profits from one of their power stations on Pessamit ancestral lands, providing them with grants, and spending years trying to reduce the damage their dams inflict on salmon.

“Hydro-Québec categorically refutes the allegations of the Innu of Pessamit, who claim that increasing our exports will adversely affect [their rivers],” said Lynn St-Laurent, a spokeswoman for the company. She has called claims of cultural genocide “offensive,” adding they “couldn’t be further from reality.”

“Over the past 40 years, Hydro-Québec has diligently consulted the native population for all of our production and transmission projects, including the Pessamit,” St-Laurent said.

In Massachusetts, Baker administration officials declined to comment on whether they’re considering the concerns of indigenous groups in choosing a bid. The other bids include proposals by National Grid to import wind power from Québec and by Emera to build a power line beneath the ocean, from New Brunswick to Plymouth.

SOURCE

Trump Misses the Mark With Solar Tariffs

In essence, Trump's decision continues the government's proclivity for picking winners and losers.

This week, solar industry imports were dealt a heavy blow with Donald Trump’s decision to impose a 30% tariff. The Associated Press reports that among those advocating for the tariff on solar panels was the U.S. International Trade Commission. According to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, “The president’s action makes clear again that the Trump administration will always defend American workers, farmers, ranchers, and businesses in this regard.”

China’s Commerce Ministry was angered by the tariff, responding: “The U.S. side once again abused its trade remedy measures. China expresses its strong dissatisfaction with this.” Mexico is also rattled. The nation’s Economy Department shot back, “Mexico will use all available legal resources in response to the U.S. decision to apply protections on Mexican washing machines and solar panels.”

These complaints are to be expected given where they’re coming from. Nevertheless, was this a wise decision? As Heritage Foundation analyst Katie Tubb explains, not exactly. She writes: “The case involves two failing manufacturing companies — Suniva and SolarWorld — which have petitioned the government for globally applicable tariffs on inexpensive imports of solar cells and panels. That petition has run the gauntlet of comments, hearings, and analysis from the U.S. International Trade Commission. Since then, organizations across the political spectrum, including the Solar Energy Industries Association, have made the case for why the requested tariffs would be harmful for the solar industry writ large.”

Tubb lists three justifications for “why rejecting the request for sweeping tariffs would be consistent with Trump’s campaign trail ideals and policy vision for energy dominance.” It begins with innovation. As Tubb explains, “There is almost no better way to fossilize an industry than by guaranteeing prices and knocking out the competitors of a select few companies. The only innovation that this spurs is creative ways to lobby the government for new ways to interfere in energy markets.” Moreover, “[Government] intervention would also punish competitive American solar companies in order to keep two failing ones afloat.”

Secondly, tariffs handcuff competition. “Trump should protect competition, not specific competitors,” says Tudd. “The solar industry in America can provide customers the best, most affordable service to Americans when it is able to access components from the most competitive companies around the globe. The proposed tariffs block this access. In essence, they are a massive regulatory subsidy for Suniva and SolarWorld — at the expense of the rest of the solar industry.”

And finally, there’s the issue of fostering a healthy job market. Tudd notes: “Suniva and SolarWorld argue that global tariffs are essential to their survival and will create thousands of jobs. Using the force of government to eliminate a company’s competitors will almost certainly preserve those company jobs.” However, “There will be negative implications for the rest of the industry and the indirect jobs it creates if the administration bends over backward to shore up two failing companies. The federal government shouldn’t be the arbiter of whose job is more valuable.”

National Taxpayer Union’s Free Trade Initiative director Bryan Riley makes yet another shrewd point: “Because the government provides a whopping 30 percent tax credit for the installation of solar energy systems, a big chunk of increased costs generated by the new trade restrictions will be paid for by the federal government. That doesn’t seem like an ‘America First’ policy.”

In essence, Trump’s decision, unfortunately, continues the government’s proclivity for picking winners and losers. Furthermore, the Associated Press reports, “Sen. Ben Sasse … said Republicans need to understand that tariffs are a tax on consumers.” He’s right. There’s no doubt any of this was the administration’s intent — Trump, after all, once pledged, “We will get the bureaucracy out of the way of innovation, so we can pursue all forms of energy” — but nevertheless, the decision was made without taking these issues into account. Imposing tariffs on the solar industry wasn’t one of Trump’s brightest decisions.

SOURCE

Mega Blizzard Complicates Travels At Conference On Global Warming

World leaders are worried that a massive blizzard could derail their opportunity to talk about solutions to global warming at a major economic conference in Switzerland.

Snowflakes are canvassing Davos in nearly six feet of snow. Snow kept pounding the valleys and areas surrounding the town Monday night, causing plutocrats, members of the media, and world business leaders to slip and slide on their way to various conferences at this year’s World Economic Forum.

Some participants say it’s the worst snow storm they’ve seen at the conference in years.

“I’ve been coming for eight years and this is the worst I’ve seen it,” Linda P. Fried, the dean of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told The New York Times. She dismissed critics who mock the incongruity of talking climate change during a giant snowstorm.

“It isn’t accurate, people just don’t understand, that’s not the metric” said Fried, who was late to a discussion on climate change, despite having etched out three hours for travel from her hotel to the conference hall. Journalists who were late to interviews at the conference tweeted out photos of the enormous snowbanks blocking their travels.

Organizers are hoping the snowy conditions loosen up by the time President Donald Trump arrives on Friday to give the closing address. Things could dicey if snow continues apace, especially if the president decides to use helicopters to land in Davos.

“When Trump comes on Friday it is far from obvious whether he will be able to use a fleet of large helicopters to land in Davos,” a source close to the organizing committee told Reuters. “Large helicopters increase the risk of avalanches.”

A bulletin from the SLF Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos, which calculates the possibility of avalanches, showed a broad band of the mountainous country under Level 5 avalanche danger, the highest on a 1-5 scale.

SOURCE

Top down command is not the way to improve the environment

The [British] government’s 25-year environment plan is more than a piece of virtue signalling, despite its chief purpose being to persuade the young to vote Conservati(ve)onist. It is full of sensible, apolitical goals and in places actually conveys a love of the natural world, which is not always the case with such documents.

The difficulty will be putting its ambitions into practice. It is all very well to want cleaner air and water, more biodiversity, less plastic litter and richer soils. How are these to be achieved? Except in a few places, such as the discussion of “net environmental gains” in the construction industry, the plan is worryingly vague.

The word that bothers me most, appearing often, is “we”. “The actions we will take . . . we will protect ancient woodland . . . we will increase tree planting” and so on. Who is we? This is the language of the central planner, who assumes that the government decrees and the passive population obeys. There is relatively little sense here that the vast majority of our environment is managed by people or organisations other than the government and that the vast majority of actions that damage or improve it are taken by people other than civil servants.

People do not foul their own nests, on the whole, so the role of government is to create as much sense of real environmental ownership as possible. If the de facto owner of the environment is the state, through too many rules and restrictions, then people will not volunteer to help. Communised assets lack a sense of ownership: look at the litter in laybys, for example, or the terrible state of the environment in Soviet Russia under the state planning committee, or Gosplan.

At the micro level it’s easy to create sense of ownership. Private property is a powerful motivator. At communal levels it’s harder, but not impossible. There are many local conservation charities and private organisations looking after a woodland and a flower meadow here, a stretch of river there: small groups of people who take pride in the responsibility.

Now, you cannot always use a commercial market in environmental matters, because people do not willingly pay for the things they want (though sometimes they do — most winter bird seed crops are planted by shooters). But you can at least try different things in different places to learn what works.

The big green pressure groups forget all this. They are more comfortable with a centralised and top-down policy, amenable to lobbying. The reaction of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) to Michael Gove’s plan is telling: “But these commitments will only become a reality if they are backed by the force of law, money and a new environmental watchdog.” In other words, a green Gosplan, a Goveplan, which would be counterproductive for the same reasons that Gosplan didn’t work.

Take the agri-environment schemes under which farmers are rewarded for doing things that, say, make yellowhammers [a bird] happy. Most agree, and this plan notes this, that under the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) the schemes have been wasteful, spending fortunes on things that work poorly and too little on things that work well. Talk to smaller research organisations such as the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust and you will find that they have learnt through experimentation how to stop yellowhammers starving at the end of the winter (non-dehiscent plants that don’t shed all their seeds too early). It is the same with wild flowers, woodland and clean water. Good practice spreads by word of mouth in the countryside after practical people discover it through trial and error. The rewilding of the Knepp estate in West Sussex by Sir Charles Burrell, for example, has shown that nightingales are attracted to breed in unkempt thorn hedges.

In the inflexible world of the CAP, with its pillars and schemes and schedules, experimentation is impossible. To the extent that the vagueness of Mr Gove’s plan is a tacit recognition that government’s job should not be to tell people what to do, but to encourage a thousand metaphorical (and literal) flowers to bloom, good. To the extent that it sets out an agenda for the pressure groups and corporatist quangos to colonise with their tick-box mentality, bad. We will have to see which turns out to be true.

In this respect, another welcome feature of the plan is the focus on local environmental goals: plastic, clean water, clean air, soil, wildlife, trees. The big global issues that have dominated the professional environmental industry for so long — global population, resources, acid rain, ozone, climate change — are in the document, but no longer crowding out the local ones as they did for years, and in many cases actively making things worse.

There are still problems. The plan mentions in one breath both climate change mitigation and the prevention of international deforestation, yet fails to spot that the burning of wood for “renewable” electricity and the cultivation of palm-oil biodiesel plantations have been inspired and justified entirely by misguided climate policies. Wind farms do kill birds, as well as trashing landscapes; hydro on free-flowing rivers does harm fish, and so on. Environmental objectives do conflict but the plan shows little recognition of this. The main omission, however, is science. There is no sense in the plan of the technologies becoming available to protect the environment: the biotechnology that has already made agriculture so much greener elsewhere in the world and is limiting land-take; the gene editing that promises to enable us to grow better crops with fewer chemicals; the British breakthroughs that promise to give us contraceptive vaccines to control invasive species humanely; the new techniques for eradicating rats from oceanic islands to save seabirds.

The good intentions of Mr Gove’s plan are obvious and welcome, but they could have been written down any time in the past century, while the means hinted at are regrettably tinged with an anti-scientific and potentially authoritarian puritanism that just won’t work. Five out of ten.

SOURCE

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

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

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24 January, 2018

With talk of ‘mini ice age,’ global warming debate may again be about to change

The unfalsifiable theory

Many Americans believe the debate over whether man is primarily responsible for Earth’s recent warming was started by Al Gore in the 1990s, when the issue prominently made its way onto the national stage, but scientists have been debating humans’ role in our changing climate for many decades.

For instance, in 1969, the New York Times reported, “Col. Bernt Balchen, polar explorer and flier [now serving with General Dynamics], is circulating a paper among polar specialists proposing that the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two. … A number of specialists believe that an ice-free Arctic Ocean would not freeze again.”

In the 1970s, some scientists speculated Earth was about to go through an extensive global cooling period, with some even suggesting the cooling could be catastrophic.

These dire predictions, and many more just like them, never occurred, of course, but they all have one thing in common: Environmentalists have consistently used scientific projections to justify radical, often socialistic policy changes, including carbon taxes and exchanges, incentives to limit population growth and other extreme measures that take power away from individuals and give it to an ever-growing centralized government.

I believe we could be about to experience another remarkable shift in the climate change debate, although radical environmentalists’ plan to seize your rights will likely remain the same.

Another ‘mini ice age’?

On Dec. 27, Sky News, a large media outlet in the United Kingdom, published a news article on its website titled, “Scientists predict ‘mini ice age’ could hit UK by 2030.” In this article, reporter Gerard Tubb describes a new report from researchers at Northumbria University that claims “a mathematical model of the Sun’s magnetic activity suggests temperatures could start dropping here from 2021, with the potential for winter skating on the River Thames by 2030.”

Sky News reported the research team, led by professor Valentina Zharkova, projects there will be “rapidly decreasing magnetic waves for three solar cycles beginning in 2021 and lasting 33 years.”

Zharkova says there is a 97 percent chance the model is accurate, but she and her team say because of man-caused global warming, it’s not clear how much cooler things might get. Still, Zharkova says it’s very possible global temperature will drop in a manner similar to when solar activity was last at Zharkova’s projected levels, in the mid-1700s, when much of the world experienced a so-called “mini ice age.”

Many of those who believe humans are primarily responsible for global warming have already denounced the mini ice age prediction. They believe humans are creating so much warming that it will far outweigh changes in the sun’s magnetic waves.

“The effect is a drop in the bucket, a barely detectable blip, on the overall warming trajectory we can expect over the next several decades from greenhouse warming,” Michael Mann, a professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University and the man behind the infamous “hockey stick graph,” said in an email to the Washington Post.

If Mann is right and the “warming trajectory” — which I think is a rather misleading term given some of the findings by Dr. John Christy and other researchers — continues, then it’s unlikely the climate change debate will change much over the next decade or two. Alarmists will continue to say the world is about to end, skeptics will say they think the alarmists are wrong, and most people will go on with their lives, waiting until the debate definitively ends or until climate alarmists get their wish and institute massive, far-reaching and expensive policies that will control how much carbon dioxide people can emit without paying a fine.

However, if Mann is wrong and the changes to solar magnetic waves expected by Zharkova’s team do occur and do cause warming to cease, or even cooling, then the climate change debate will inevitably shift, as alarmists and politicians scramble to come up with an explanation for why their many highly touted and dire predictions never occurred. How will far-left environmentalists save themselves from total embarrassment?

A new strategy

Interestingly, at least some climate scientists are already beginning to drop hints about how they might react. When asked by Sky News about how potential alterations to the sun’s magnetic waves might affect global warming, Zharkova responded, “I hope global warning will be overridden by this effect, giving humankind and the Earth 30 years to sort out our pollution.”

Ah yes, how fortunate it is that the sun’s changes will give Earth “30 years” to come up with a solution to global warming! Rather than admit that they might be wrong and that warming could be driven primarily by factors other than carbon-dioxide emissions, Zharkova suggests instead that an extreme cooling period would push the red line people like Al Gore are always ranting about 50 years into the future.

This conveniently gives the environmental left and many Democrats a doomsday deadline far enough off into the future that it will theoretically affect most people now living (or at least their kids) but not so far off that people aren’t concerned about it.

Given what I’ve read about Zharkova, it doesn’t seem as though she should be classified as an “alarmist.” In fact, in accordance with good scientific practices, she seems very willing to consider all the evidence on both sides of the debate. But her statement speaks volumes about the future of the global warming movement should her predictions about the Sun turn out to be accurate.

Zharkova isn’t the only one who has suggested such a view, either. In a Newsweek article, James Renwick, a professor at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, was quoted as saying any cooling would be limited to the 30-year period projected by Zharkova, and that global warming would pick up right where it left off, or be even worse, when the solar activity changed again around 2050.

“If things played out as described in Zharkova’s paper, and we did see a decrease in solar output roughly as happened in the 1700s, there would be some cooling for 20 or 30 years,” Renwick said. “But the levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are so much higher now (and will be even higher in 2030) that temperatures would not drop much below where they are today. And that drop would last only until 2050 or so. Then we’d have a bounce upwards again.”

Newsweek reported Howard Diamond, the program director for the U.S. Climate Reference Network, also concluded warming temperatures would quickly rebound, even if Zharkova is right.

As these statements show, even if we experience lots of cooling because of solar changes, many climate scientists are likely to ignore those alterations as evidence that natural causes may be the most important climate change consideration.

Instead, it appears they will stick to their climate change theory about man’s responsibility and possibly use the cooling period (if one occurs) as a time to rally support for radical energy policies. This situation is eerily similar to when alarmists shifted away from using the term “global warming,” replacing it with the more-ambiguous and all-encompassing “climate change.”

Climate change doesn’t appear to be on the way out, but the debate could be on the verge of evolving again, this time putting alarmists on the defensive as global temperature cools because of changes in the Sun’s magnetic waves.

SOURCE

Bob Lutz slams Tesla’s future prospects, says if you like electric cars ‘buy one while they’re still available’

TESLA was once the darling of the automotive industry, but it’s starting to lose its lustre with those in the know.

CAR industry veteran Bob Lutz has cast doubt on the future of electric car maker Tesla, which has struggled to make a profit, and suffered chronic production delays and quality problems.

The former high ranking executive from General Motors, now retired, said Tesla boss Elon Musk “hasn’t figured out the revenues have to be greater than costs … when you are perennially running out of cash you are just not running a good automobile company”.

A Los Angeles Times report said Lutz, 85, made the comments while addressing a crowd of vintage car collectors at an auction in the US.

Lutz praised the latest Tesla electric car as “one of the fastest, best handling, best braking sedans that you could buy in the world today” with enough acceleration to “beat any $350,000 European exotic”.

However, Lutz said the future prospects of the company are grim.

“I don’t see anything on the horizon that’s going to fix that, so those of you who are interested in collector cars may I suggest buying a Tesla Model S while they’re still available,” Lutz said.

Afterwards, Lutz told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times: “Twenty-five years from now, [the Model S] will be remembered as the first really good-looking, fast electric car. People will say ‘Too bad they went? broke’.”

Lutz — who has worked for BMW, Ford, Chrysler and, finally, General Motors before he retired from the US car giant in 2010 — is known for his direct and outspoken views in an industry mired in political correctness and marketing speak.

It is not the first time Lutz has questioned Tesla’s “cash burn”, drawing attention to it during a CNN interview in 2016.

“The last time I checked their quarterly cash burn is about $250 million. For a company that size that’s horrific,” Lutz said.

Although he was instrumental in approving the development of the Chevrolet Volt petrol-electric plug-in hybrid car, Lutz describes himself as a climate change sceptic rather than a climate change denier.

In 2008 he told a room full of journalists “global warming is a crock of shit”, before explaining “I’m motivated more by the desire to replace imported oil than by the CO2 (argument)”.

Among his list of career achievements, Lutz played a key role in getting the Holden Monaro coupe and Holden Commodore sedan exported to the US in the early to mid 2000s.

He was also a senior executive at GM in charge of future models when the company went into bankruptcy in the 2008-2009 global financial crisis, and it was forced to axe brands such as Hummer and Pontiac.

However, Lutz is not the only high ranking executive to question Tesla’s claims.

Last year General Motors’ director of autonomous vehicle integration Scott Miller said “I think he’s full of crap” when asked about Musk’s claims that certain Tesla cars “already have the hardware for full self driving capability”.

Mr Miller said Tesla vehicles currently lack the back up systems to properly deliver a truly autonomous car.

“Do you really want to trust one sensor measuring the speed of a car coming into an intersection before you pull out? I think you need some confirmation,” Miller told Australian media in a technology briefing in Detroit.

Despite the gloomy forecast, Tesla is buoyed by the value placed on it by investors.

According to the latest data, Tesla has a market value of $US59 billion and trades at $US351 a share even though it only produced 101,000 vehicles in 2017.

By comparison, General Motors has a market value of $US61.5 billion and trades at $US43 a share after producing more than 9 million vehicles in 2017.

The world’s number one car maker Volkswagen has a market value of $US116 billion and trades at $US46 a share after producing approximately 11 million vehicles in 2017.

SOURCE

The Dangers of Asserting 'Hottest Year Since...'

It's one thing to compare satellite temps and quite another to make claims using dubious 100-year-old logs.

We recently turned the calendar over to a new year, which provides us an opportunity to analyze last year’s climate rankings. According to Dr. Roy Spencer, a renowned climate researcher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), the temperature of the lower troposphere in 2017 registered a positive anomaly of 0.38°C. This measurement originated via satellite recordings that began in the 1970s and uses 1981-2010 as a baseline. According to Spencer, at +0.38°C, 2017 ranks as the third-warmest year (2016 and 1998 were both higher).

Similarly, the California-based Remote Sensing Systems company, whose niche is “specializing in satellite microwave remote sensing,” says based on its analysis that “the lower troposphere [in] 2017 was the second warmest recorded since satellite observations began in 1979.” Both the UAH and RSS computations take into account a 39-year satellite history. This is very important, as we’ll explain.

On Thursday, NASA asserted that “Earth’s global surface temperatures in 2017 ranked as the second warmest since 1880.” More specifically, “Globally averaged temperatures in 2017 were 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.90 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean.” Strangely, even the libertarian site Reason ran with the headline, “2017 Was the Second Hottest Year Since 1880, Says NASA.” It’s true that the NASA ranking is similar if not identical to the satellite reports, but it’s incredibly deceptive to pretend they mean the same thing.

It’s one thing to compare more modern satellite temperatures and quite another to make concrete claims that are heavily dependent on logs from 100-plus years ago. Satellite measurements — the most reliable tool we have — went into commission in the late 1970s. On the other hand, NOAA is taking us all the way back to 1880, when satellite data was nonexistent. Anyone who claims that global climate data from then up until the satellite era is anywhere close to factual is delusional. Moreover, NASA is utilizing revisionist temperature data along with very spurious methodology. So next time you hear “It’s the hottest year since…” remember, it’s all relative. And if government data is involved, it’s most likely based on highly unsubstantiated claims.

SOURCE

We can't win: Cleaning up pollution may make global warming WORSE

Or so they say

The very contaminants that are helping to fuel global warming may also be masking its effects, research has indicated.

Efforts to remove pollutants from the air could result in an increase in warming, extreme weather and other climate effects, according to the study, which was published in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Specifically, removing aerosols, which are human-made pollutants often emitted by industrial activities, could push the earth's temperature to become half a degree to 1.1 degree C warmer.

It might not seem like much of an increase, but it has the potential to make the earth's temperatures approach dangerous levels.

Experts have said they hope to keep world temperatures within 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius of their pre-industrial levels, Scientific American noted.

The earth may have already warmed by a degree, which means any incremental increases could make a big difference.

Not only would cooling the earth result in warmer global temperatures, but it may also enhance the related effects of global warming.

Chief among those effects are increasingly dangerous weather, such as precipitation and natural disasters.

'We also see that the impact that these aerosols have on temperature in Asia really transports northwards to the Arctic region, northern Europe, Norway, the northern U.S.,' said Bjørn Samset, the study's lead author, according to Scientific American.

'That part of the world is also quite sensitive to the changes in aerosols in Asia.'

The scientists also noted that the negative effects of removing pollutants tend to be stronger in areas that were more polluted to begin with.

Researchers used four global climate models to simulate the impact of removing human-contributed emissions of major aerosols, such as sulfate and soot.

The scientists concluded that doing so would warm the earth by half a degree to 1.1 degrees Celsius.

For the time being, Samset said he hopes that the study will help 'inform the next generation' of climate research.

The study follows similar research that found artificial cooling techniques, often referred to as 'geoengineering,' can be harmful to the earth.

One technique involves firing aerosols into the atmosphere to combat global warming. Doing so would cool ultimately cool the earth by blocking incoming solar radiation. However, if the geoengineering technique is abruptly stopped, it can actually cause the planet to warm ten times faster than normal.

This could lead to devastating floods or droughts and could be a 'huge threat' to the natural environment and biodiversity.

SOURCE

Supreme Court agrees to hear appeal over endangered frog

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to hear a lower-court decision protecting a dusky gopher frog on private land in Louisiana.

The high court will hear the case of the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service against Weyerhaeuser Company, a timber producer.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had designated nearly 6,500 acres in Louisiana and Mississippi as a critical habitat for the frog living underground in open-canopied pine forests. That includes more than 1,500 acres on private land in St. Tammany Parish in Louisiana.

Since 2001, the dusky gopher frog has been listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act. In 2012, the U.S. agency designated the private land as protected.

In June 2016, a three-judge panel of 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the classification even though the frogs no longer live on the St. Tammany Parish land. But the court agreed with the federal agency that those lands are essential because they contain five ephemeral ponds, each within hopping distance of the next. They lay their eggs only in these temporary ponds and the parish was the last known Louisiana breeding ground.

The Weyerhaeuser Company wants to use the land for residential and commercial development, as well as timber operations. It argued the wildlife agency abused its power under the Endangered Species Act.

"The landowners thus face the Catch-22 that they can continue forestry operations on the frogless land largely unhindered by the designation," the company wrote.

If it tries to develop the land, consistent with existing plans and zoning, the designation may well stop the development in its tracks -- "which again would not help the frog. Either way, the designation destroys economic activity, leaves the land as unoccupied non-habitat, and does nothing to help the frog."

The lower court ruled that critical-habitat designations do not transform private land into wildlife refuges.

"We're disappointed the Supreme Court took up the case but confident the justices will ultimately uphold this imperiled frog's habitat protections," said Collette Adkins, a Center for Biological Diversity attorney who works to conserve amphibians and reptiles. "The Fish and Wildlife Service followed the unanimous advice of frog experts in deciding to protect essential habitat of these critically endangered animals."

Although at one time prevalent throughout Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, dusky gopher frogs are now nearly extinct.

"The Supreme Court's ruling is bad news for these endangered frogs," said Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of the Gulf Restoration Network. "This lawsuit attempts to gut essential habitat protections for the frog. For too long the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has had to focus its limited resources on defending this decision rather than recovering the frogs and restoring their habitat."

The Center for Biological Diversity and Gulf Restoration Network are participatating in the litigation before the Supreme Court.

SOURCE

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

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23 January, 2018

You CAN have your cake and eat it too -- if you are a Warmist

The first article below is fairly logical. Warmer oceans would indeed produce more rain. But the second article predicts drought from warming. Which should we take heed of? Easy answer: Neither.

Unless countries urgently boost their flood defences, millions more people will be at risk from river flooding in the next 20 years as global warming increases the likelihood of severe rainfall, scientists said on Wednesday

In Asia, the numbers at risk will more than double to 156 million, up from 70 million, with India, China and Indonesia among the worst-affected countries, according to a study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Pakistan, already prone to flooding, "will observe almost a doubling in high-end flood risk," with 11 million people at risk of floods unless protective measures are taken by 2040.

The numbers at risk in South America also will double, to 12 million, and Africa will see a rise to 34 million facing flooding threats, up from 25 million, the researchers said.

However, the actual number of people at risk is likely to be higher than the scientists' predictions, as the estimates do not take into account population growth or more people moving to areas at risk of flooding, scientists said.

In a new study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers calculate how much more flood protection will be needed to keep the risks of high-end floods constant in the next 25 years.

Unless actions are taken - such as enhancing dykes, boosting building standards, relocating settlements and managing rivers - the number of people affected by devastating floods could skyrocket, warns the report, based on models that are 10 times more precise than commonly used climate computer simulations.

The United States and parts of Europe also will need to make major investments in flood protection - such as improving river dykes, river management and building standards, or relocating people - to prevent a rise in the numbers of people facing flooding.

"More than half of the United States must at least double their protection level within the next two decades if they want to avoid a dramatic increase in river flood risks," Sven Willner, from the Germany-based Potsdam Institute, said in a statement.

"In South America the number of people affected by flooding risks will likely increase from six to 12 million, in Africa from 25 to 34 million," the study said.

In Germany the number of people affected is projected to rise seven-fold, from 100,000 to 700,000.

In North America, it could rise from 100,000 to one million.

Global warming increases the risk of flooding because the amount of rain that can fall during an extreme downpour "increases exponentially" as temperatures rise, Anders Levermann, also of the Potsdam Institute, said in an interview.

When more heat-trapping pollutants surround the Earth, more moisture is held in the air, leading to more rainfall.

Cutting these emissions is crucial to reducing flood risks for future generations.

Global temperatures have already risen by more than 1 deg C above pre-industrial levels, and are expected to continue rising.

Countries committed in 2015 to try to hold global temperature rise to "well below" 2 deg C, but the world is currently on track for more than 3 deg C of warming, a level expected cause much more extreme and unpredictable weather, and to cause worsening crop failures and more migration.

"The findings should be a warning to decision-makers," added Levermann. "Doing nothing will be dangerous."

Although river floods may seem less dramatic than hurricanes and cyclones, they can inflict serious damage.

Last year, Peru experienced its worst flooding in decades, causing up to US$9 billion (S$12 billion) in damage. South Asia in 2017 suffered its worst monsoon flooding in a decade, which killed more than 1,400 people, left hundreds of villages submerged and drove tens of thousands of people to relief camps.

Disaster management officials in the region said although flooding is normal during the monsoon months, they received a whole year's rain in just a few days.

But the question of how best to protect people from river floods is a complex one.

"It's not that straightforward to think if only we built dykes and levees along the rivers ... then the world will be a safe place," said Richard Klein, a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute.

Building flood protection "will also have an effect on food production and it will increase the risk of particularly high magnitude events", he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In Bangladesh for example, regular and often predictable floods dump a fertile layer of river sediment on fields, one reason the country is self sufficient in rice, Klein said.

"People tend to pick up their stuff, move to higher ground and come back when the water's gone, and (they) benefit from the fertile soil that they have," he said.

Building infrastructure to contain floodwaters can also give people a false sense of security, so they are more likely to build in areas still at risk of flooding after a severe downpour. "That's not to say one shouldn't protect people, but ... simply protecting ... has consequences," he said.

SOURCE

Earth will become a DESERT by 2050 if global warming isn't stopped, claims latest study

The globe is set to start drying out dramatically if global warming isn't stopped.

That's the message from a new environmental study published by the journal Nature Climate Change .

Over 25% of Earth will start experiencing the effects of "aridificaiton" by the year 2050 if humans don't meet the changes proposed by the Paris climate agreement .

The study claims that if the Earth's average temperature goes up by two degrees Celsius over the next 32 years, the planet will start to become a desert.

“Our research predicts that aridification would emerge over about 20-30 percent of the world’s land surface by the time the global mean temperature change reaches 2ºC," said Manoj Joshi, the lead researcher of the study.

"But two-thirds of the affected regions could avoid significant aridification if warming is limited to 1.5ºC (34.7 degrees Fahrenheit)."

The study goes on to point out that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will keep global warming under the 2 degree threshold and reduce the likelihood of aridification.

An annual U.N. audit of progress towards that goal showed emissions are likely to be 53.0-55.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year by 2030, far above the 42 billion tonne threshold for averting the 2 degree rise.

Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, said climate-fuelled hurricanes, floods and drought would rapidly worsen unless ministers committed to keep fossil fuels in the ground.

"Paris was just the starting point," she said.

The Nature Climate Change study predicts the regions that will be most affected by an average temperature increase are those located in Central America, Southeast Asia, Southern Europe, Southern Africa and Southern Australia.

SOURCE

Despite What You've Heard, Global Warming Isn't Making Weather More Extreme

We keep reading about how the extreme weather of 2017 is the "new normal" thanks to global warming — even if the weather in question is frigid air. But the data don't show any trend in extreme weather events in the U.S. for decades. Science, anyone?

The latest to make this "new normal" claim is Munich RE, which issued its annual report on the damage costs from hurricanes, floods, wildfires and the like on Thursday.

According to the report, insurers paid out a record $135 billion because of these disasters, and total losses amounted to $330 billion, the second worst since 2011. It was also, the report says, the costliest hurricane season on record. And if you look at the chart in the report, it does appear that the cost of natural disasters has been on the uptrend since 1980.

Naturally, climate change advocates point to this as further proof that the increase in CO2 levels is already causing calamities around the world. "As human-induced climate change continues to progress, extreme weather is becoming more frequent and dangerous," is how the Environmental Defense Fund put it.

Munich RE's own Corporate Climate Center head claims that "2017 was not an outlier" and that "we must have on our radar the trend of new magnitudes."

But what evidence is there that extreme weather "is becoming more frequent and dangerous." In the U.S., there isn't any.

If you don't believe that, then look at the series of charts below, which are taken from government sites, that depict trends in hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts and wildfires — all of which should be, according to environmentalists, on the uptrend.

What do you see in these charts. There is no trend in any of them.

Look at the data on drought conditions, from the EPA. There is no meaningful increase from 1900 to 2016. In fact, the past decade has been relatively mild on the drought front, with several years below average.

The same is true when it comes to tornadoes. The number of tornadoes in 2014 was below the number in 1954, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association data show. Indeed, the trend line seems to indicate that tornado activity has been lower since the mid-1980s than it was in three decades before that.

What about hurricanes? Yes, this year was a bad one in terms of the number and damage caused by hurricanes. But these storms came after years of lower than normal hurricane activity, both in the Atlantic and in the Pacific. NOAA data show the annual Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) in each region going back to 1970.

As NOAA explains "The ACE index is used to calculate the intensity of the hurricane season and is a function of the wind speed and duration of each tropical cyclone." Can anyone see a discernible upward trend in this index in the past 46 years? As with tornadoes, the index seems to have declined since the 1980s.

Wildfires? Sorry, but as with the other natural disasters, there's nothing here to validate the environmentalists scare stories, either. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, there were 67,743 wildfires in 2016. That's down from more than 85,000 in 1986. By December 22 of last year, there had been about 66,000 fires, NIFC data show.

The snowfall trend hasn't changed in decades, either, according to EPA data, although you'd think there'd be less snow as the planet warms. Of course, whenever there's a blizzard or a blast of arctic air — as with the "bomb cyclone" in the northeast — environmentalists start mewling about how that, too, is a sign of global warming. So if there's no trend one way or another, what does that mean?

Even global temperatures aren't rising as fast as the global warming computer models say they should be, as we pointed out in this space recently.

Yet despite these data, story after story continues to peddle the claim that the weather is getting more extreme, using whatever recent string of bad weather as the hook.

OK, but what about the Munich RE numbers showing the continued increase in costs? That can easily be explained by the fact that the past several decades have seen increases in development and population in areas that are prone to severe weather.

If a hurricane battered Florida 100 years ago, the monetary damages would be far, far less than today — even if you adjust for inflation — for the simple reason that Florida's population and its economy have exploded over the intervening years.

It's also not inconceivable that Munich RE could have a vested interest in playing up the potential for climate-caused natural disasters, as a way to justify rate increases. That would present a conflict of interest that journalists — normally on guard for things — are noticeably disinterested in exploring.

In any case, the question remains: If climate change is supposed to unleash waves of horrifying natural disasters as climate experts claim, why aren't we seeing any evidence of it here?

SOURCE

Despite global warming, some reefs are flourishing, and you can see it in 3D

Maybe it’s not the end of the world for corals after all.

That’s one of the surprising findings of a new project called the 100 Island Challenge, led by two scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

Jennifer Smith, Stuart Sandin and their team from Scripps are studying the changes taking place on 100 coral reef systems around the world. What they have found offers a surprising, and hopeful, glimpse of the current state of coral reefs.

“We’ve seen evidence of health pretty much everywhere,” says Sandin. “This isn’t saying that every reef is thriving, and every reef has stayed immune to climate change. But what we’re seeing is that after a reef dies, organisms grow.” Call it the Jurassic Park effect: life finds a way.

While they acknowledge that some reef systems like the Great Barrier Reef in Australia have suffered tremendously from recent warming events, other reefs seem to be thriving.

“We were inspired by some observations that we had about seeing coral reefs in far flung places that showed signs of resilience, that showed bounty, that showed wonder,” says Sandin. “And these observations that we had were somewhat in contrast to some of the news reports of doom and gloom, of loss.”

If you don’t believe it, take a look at the video above, which the team has assembled as part of the 100 Island Challenge. In vivid 3D, corals bulge with life, exhibiting vibrant hues that stand in stark contradiction to the pale skeletons left behind after coral bleaching events that have ravaged other reefs.

The videos themselves are an astonishing and important part of the project. Although the corals look computer generated, the videos represent actual reef systems shot with off the shelf DSLR cameras. They are assembled from as many as 4000 photographs, shot by divers who swim lawnmower patterns over the reef, snapping a picture every second. The images are then run through a software process called photogrammetry, which stitches the images together into a 3-dimensional whole, allowing the viewer to glide across the reef with resolution down to one centimeter.

The team has shot over 70 reefs so far, in places like Hawaii, the Marianas, the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, Tonga, and French Polynesia. This year, they will visit the Marshall Islands, the Republic of Kiribati and several islands across the Caribbean.

They plan to return to each one after 2-3 years to repeat the process. The idea is to gain a fine-grained understanding of the changes that are taking place over time on the reefs, and to do so without harming the coral. It is the most detailed study of its kind on the planet, and it’s providing data the likes of which has never been collected before.

“Now we’re able to do a single dive on a reef, capture thousands of images, bring them back home, recreate that reef in the lab and then spend hundreds of hours extracting data out of that one dive, whereas normally that would have taken hundreds of hours underwater to collect the same data,” says Smith.

Although they have not yet determined how the reefs are changing over time, perhaps the most surprising results they have seen reveal how well many reef systems are doing, even in places facing human impact. Jamaica, for example, has long been held out as a case study for coral loss. But the team visited last year and came away surprised.

“You can see these little colonies of pretty much every species of Caribbean coral alive, growing slowly,” says Sandin.

The team is already taking the study into other interactive realms, with plans to create virtual reality tours of the reefs, adding sound and expanding into 4D by adding the dimension of time into the experience. They believe that the images will become a valuable baseline for understanding the changes, both good and bad, that are taking place on the planet.

“These models are essentially a living library of reefs that will essentially be an opportunity to take a time machine into the past 20 years from now,” says Sandin.

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

Australia: New funding for the Great Barrier Reef

This is in response to Greenie claims that the GBR is "dying". The reef has been there for millennia but Greenies talked up some recent changes as if they were catastrophic and final. As is now clear even to a Greenie, the reef "fixes" itself. It has rebounded from the small but highly exaggerated degree of damage that it suffered.

Dead coral revives when the stressor -- in this case a temporary sea level fall -- goes away. To Greenies, of course, coral deaths are caused by Global Warming.

The new money seems to be reasonably allocated even if the need for it was built on false pretences

THE number of crown-of-thorns starfish control vessels will be more than doubled under a new $60?million Great Barrier Reef funding suite.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will unveil the package in Townsville today as he continues the North Queensland tour that began in Cairns yesterday.

The Federal Government will spend $10.4 million for what Mr Turnbull labelled an “all-out assault on coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish” to increase the number of culling ships from three to eight.

Another $36.6 million will go towards measures to reduce run-off pollution entering the reef, giving farmers incentives to cut down soil erosion, improve nutrient management, and restoring coastal and riparian vegetation in reef catchments.

“This $60 million funding boost over 18 months will set in motion a major research and development program for coral reef restoration,” Mr Turnbull said.

“For the first time The Commonwealth will bring together key agencies to explore ways the reef can best adapt to the changing environment to protect it for decades to come.

“By supporting the development of innovative new reef technologies we are also helping to cement Australia’s international reputation as a strong innovation-driven economy.”

The Australian Institute of Marine Science and CSIRO will share in $6 million to scope and design the program to develop heat-tolerant coralswith a focus on leveraging private investment.

Mr Turnbull said $4.9 million would be spent to boost the number of field officers protecting the reef and the 64,000 jobs that rely on it.

“It is a vibrant, resilient ecosystem and one of the best-managed coral reef ecosystems in the world,” he said.

“While it is facing increasing threats we intend to remain leaders in reef management.

“The specific science focus of the R & D funding is part of the government’s broader focus on science, innovation and jobs and the central role they will play now and into the future.

“Innovation and science are key to future employment opportunities for Australians.”

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 January, 2018

Germany Becomes the New Poster Child for Climate Change Hypocrisy

Climate hypocrisy is nothing new.

Celebrities cruise around the world in their private jets, eating filet mignon while telling you to pack a salad and bike to work to reduce your carbon footprint.

So, color me not at all surprised that Germany, a vocal critic of the U.S.’ decision to exit the Paris climate accord, is preparing to abandon its 2020 climate targets.

Strong economic growth is a critical reason why Germany is very likely to miss its target.

Germany has an aggressive plan to cut its greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2020. Last November, a leaked document from the country’s Environmental Ministry projected the country would miss the mark by 8 percent without additional action.

In other words, even with generous subsidies for renewable power, the Germans would have to implement some form of economy-restricting policy to curtail emissions. So much for the “go green and grow the economy” mantra.

The Environmental Ministry said the failure would be “a disaster for Germany’s international reputation as a climate leader.” One would think a stronger economy would be cause for celebration, not demonization.

Germany’s abandoned 2020 targets are the latest domino to fall in what is failed international climate policy. Many proponents of action argue that even though the Paris climate accord is nonbinding, with no repercussions when a country fails to comply with its nationally determined contributions, the agreement was an important first step.

The parties that have entered into the Paris accord sure have a funny way of showing they’re committed to it.

Despite bashing the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris accord, all of the industrialized countries are not on schedule to meet their respective targets. Germany is not alone in the European Union.

An article published last summer on Nature.com argues that the EU “faces a big gap between words and actions.”

Even if the United States and the rest of the developed world meet their intended targets, it wouldn’t make any meaningful impact on global temperatures. Carbon dioxide reductions from the developing world, many of whose people are still living without dependable power, are necessary to move the climate needle.

However, developing nations set targets so lax that they likely won’t change any behaviors. Paris proponents can brag all they want about China taking the lead in solar power, but turn a blind eye to the massive amounts of new coal power generation moving forward in China, India, and the rest of the developing—and, in some cases, developed—world.

The Financial Times recently reported, “Between January 2014 and September 2017, international banks channeled $630 [billion] to the top 120 companies planning to build new coal plants around the world, according to research by campaign groups, including the Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, and Friends of the Earth.”

And yet, those who want stringent climate mitigation say the Paris targets are only approximately one-third of what is needed to allegedly keep global warming in check.

Paying attention to what you perceive as positive action on climate (e.g., Paris, subsidizing renewables) while ignoring the realities of new coal build, retiring nuclear power plants, and global economic growth around the world is a curious strategy.

“Do as I say, but don’t pay attention to what I actually do” is the trademark of climate change policy. The Trump administration took a different approach and told it like it is: Paris is a costly, meaningless non-solution.

The reason countries such as Syria, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea have entered into the accord is not an indication of global commitment to act on climate. It is an indication of how toothless and meaningless the agreement is.

The rest of the world can act high and mighty on climate, but when the rubber meets the road for action, it’s a different story.

SOURCE

The fake 'Trump is racist' issue

Trump’s words are far less despicable than what Green-Democrat policies do to people

Paul Driessen

By now, nearly the entire world has heard reports that President Trump referred to the origins of some immigrants as “sh**hole countries.”

Democrats and their media allies spent an entire week castigating the president, calling him racist for using the salty language of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson and Hillary Clinton. Their faux outrage served to distract people from the ways Mr. Trump’s energy, deregulation and tax reform policies have rocketed the stock market to record highs a record number of times, created over two million jobs, slashed black and Hispanic unemployment, and increased US wealth by some $8 trillion since his inauguration.

Pounding on this bad-word Fake News story also muddied discussions about immigration, which Dems hope will bring big electoral gains in November. As former Obama aide Jennifer Palmieri recently put it, illegal immigrants are “a critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success.”

Mr. Obama himself waded in, saying Trump supporters and other Fox News viewers live “on a different planet” than people who watch “mainstream media.” In this era of hyper-partisan news coverage and political views, he’s absolutely right. You might call that other planet the Real World, inhabited by hard-working blue collar folks … and struggling families overseas. Which brings us to the real issue.

The naughty-word firestorm also distracts people from the Democrats’ own racial history and animus. The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln ended slavery and championed civil rights in the 1960s, while the Democrats were the party of slavery, the KKK, segregation, and policies that even today condemn too many minority children to failed schools, fatherless homes and crime-ridden cities. Especially under President Obama, their unending war on fossil fuels hampered economic development and job creation, and brought poor, minority, middle class and blue collar family living standards down a couple notches.

Far worse is what the modern Democratic Party and its allies in the media, radical environmentalist movement and global government agencies are doing to the world’s most impoverished, malnourished, diseased, energy-deprived, politically powerless families. They do it in the name of environmental protection, sustainable development or preventing “dangerous manmade climate change.” But the policies are callous, unjust, dehumanizing, eco-imperialistic and often lethal. Some would even call them racist.

In 2009, President Obama told Africans they should refrain from using “dirty” fossil fuels and focus instead on their “bountiful” wind, solar, geothermal and biofuel energy. In 2013, he told another African audience that global warming constitutes “the biggest challenge we have environmentally,” greater than all other environmental calamities like “dirty water, dirty air.”

“If everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house,” he continued, “the planet will boil over.” He then announced his “Power Africa” initiative for a “sustainable Africa” – which emphasized wind, solar, biofuel and geothermal power … but didn’t even mention fossil fuels.

His Overseas Private Investment Corporation refused to support construction of a gas-fired power plant in Ghana that would provide clean and affordable electricity to that power-deprived nation – using natural gas that companies were flaring (burning and wasting) in Ghanaian oil fields. His administration ignored South Africa’s request for a World Bank loan to continue building its state-of-the-art, coal-fired Medupi power plant. Europe’s former colonialist powers had the same attitudes toward their former colonies.

Thankfully, both projects eventually got the necessary funding and were completed.

Continued energy poverty condemns the world’s poor “to real poverty and the diseases, malnutrition and desperation that go with that absence of modern energy,” said Ugandan Steven Lyazi, who died recently in a tragic accident on a horrid African road that is also a product of pervasive poverty. These problems are due to dysfunctional government and incompetent, corrupt leaders, but also to “callous, imperialistic people in rich countries” who use exaggerated or imaginary environmental concerns and fake disasters “to limit how much poor countries may use fossil fuels (or nuclear power) to develop their economies.”

“The principal and unchanged interest” of poor countries continues to be “development and a better quality of life for [their] people,” says Pakistani academic Adil Najam: health, nutrition, jobs, education and life spans. Their principal fear is that the industrialized world is “using environmental issues as an excuse to pull up the development ladder behind it.”

“The greatest threat to the alleviation of the structural poverty of the Third World is the continuing campaign by Western governments, egged on by some climate scientists and green activists, to curb greenhouse emissions, primarily the CO2 from burning fossil fuels,” writes economist Deepak Lal. (He also wrote the foreword to the India edition of my book, Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.)

The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health now claims the Third World is suffering millions of deaths annually from industrial pollution. This is false, says Professor Mikko Paunio. Most of the deaths the commission attributes to industrial air pollution are actually caused by burning wood and dung. Most deaths from diarrhea are no longer caused by polluted water, as it claims, but from poor hygiene because the world’s poor still do not have enough water for proper bathing, cleaning and hygiene.

For the developing world, says Paunio, “adequate water supply has completely fallen off the agenda. Instead, environmental health for poorer countries has come to mean only provision of some clean drinking water and latrines. But the copious supplies of clean water that allow hygienic conditions – and therefore public health – are no longer seen as a priority for the world’s poorest.”

That’s largely because abundant clean water requires abundant, reliable, affordable electricity – which requires large centralized coal, natural gas, nuclear or hydroelectric generators … which Greens oppose. As to renewable energy, ultra-green Germany’s millions of solar panels received just ten hours of (weak) sunshine during the entire 31 days of December 2017! Try running a country or water system on that.

The same radical groups that battle energy also oppose DDT and insecticides to control malaria and other insect-borne diseases. They condemn and obstruct GMO food – even crops created to replace staples that are being decimated by disease, and even Golden Rice, the genetically engineered miracle grain that could end childhood Vitamin A Deficiency and the blindness and slow death that accompany it.

The undeniable result of all these campaigns is that the world’s most destitute people are kept where they are, or allowed to improve their lives only a little, at the margins, to the extent possible with inadequate renewable energy, clean water, bed nets and subsistence farming. That these impacts fall most heavily on the world’s non-white families underscores the racial injustice of so many environmentalist policies.

Like their ancient forebears, today’s superstitious Gaia worshipers sacrifice people to prevent droughts, global warming and climate change. They protect impoverished families from computer-generated climate disasters decades from now – by shortening their lives today. The lesson is simple.

Poor countries should not do what rich countries are doing now that they are rich. They should do what rich countries did to become rich – using the best modern technologies available.

China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and other countries are doing exactly that. They are tired of being told not to develop, because it “might hurt the climate” or “wouldn’t be sustainable.” They’re building hydroelectric dams and coal- and gas-fired power plants at a rapid pace – often with the aid of Chinese loans, expertise and technology, because western nations have abdicated their responsibilities.

So yes, there is another planet besides the one where Mr. Obama and his likeminded friends reside. It’s a world where people are tired of kowtowing to ruling elites who live in luxury while telling “commoners” they must roll back their living standards, or never aspire to conditions much better than they have now.

But in a few more years or decades, today’s poor countries will reach economic parity with rich nations – and even surge ahead of those that sacrifice their industries and “commoners” on the Earth goddess altar.

Via email

Europe’s Green Energy Burning Is Killing 40,000 People Per Year, Study Claims

Domestic wood burning has become more widespread in Europe in recent years. Exposure to smoke from domestic biomass use caused 40,000 deaths across the EU28 in 2014, new study claims.

The European Union’s dependence on burning solid biomass – most of it wood – to meet its renewable energy targets makes no sense environmentally. It harms the climate, and damages forests and biodiversity.

Because of this, opposition to the policy has swelled over the past year among the public and scientists.

Next week the European Parliament will vote on a proposed revision to the Renewable Energy Directive, which will determine the EU’s future use of biomass. If approved, it will inevitably mean the continued burning of vast quantities of biomass, mainly in the form of wood.

Quite apart from its disastrous environmental impact, there’s another reason any legislation which increases biomass burning for heating and power should be strenuously resisted.

And it’s one that – until now – has been largely overlooked.

New research for Fern by Dr Mike Holland, a leading independent air pollution expert, reveals the perilous cost to EU citizens’ health from burning solid biomass.

It indicates that tens of thousands of EU citizens are dying prematurely every year as a result of exposure to air pollution from burning solid biomass.

Other health impacts include cancers, cardiac and respiratory complaints, asthma attacks and working days lost to ill health.

Dr Holland’s main focus was assessing 27 biomass burning power plants in the EU where emissions data was available.

Ten of these plants were former coal power stations that have been converted to run on biomass or to be co-fired with a mixture of biomass and coal. The other 17 plants were purpose built biomass plants.

The former coal plants accounted for the bulk of the negative health impacts, due to factors including their much greater size and generally higher levels of harmful sulphur emissions, which were partly linked to continued coal burning in co-fired sites.

Dr Holland’s analysis indicates that more than 1,300 people are dying prematurely each year as a result of exposure to air pollution from the 27 facilities considered.

Measured in financial terms, health costs linked to biomass burning for power generation run into billions of euros each year, with health costs associated with emissions from former coal and co-fired plants amounting to 137,000 euros per year on average for every mega-watt of electrical capacity installed.

Investments in power generation are long term. So once a power plant is built it’s likely to stay in operation for several decades – with the health impacts spreading over that time.

Dr Holland’s report also reviews the evidence of the health impact of air pollution from the use of biomass in domestic heating in the EU.

This has become more widespread in recent years driven partly by renewable energy policies, but also because wood is often cheaper than alternative heating fuels such as coal and oil. Domestic biomass burning increased in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis.

A study by Sigsgaard and others estimates that exposure to smoke from domestic biomass use led to 40,000 deaths across the EU in 2014. The authors say this is a conservative figure.

Dr Holland extends Sigsgaard’s analysis to produce a fuller picture of the range of health impacts from domestic biomass burning. In a single year, he estimates that in addition to the 40,000 deaths across the EU, there were more than 130,000 cases of bronchitis, more than 20,000 respiratory and cardiac hospital admissions, a million asthma symptom days for children aged 5-19, 43 million restricted activity days and 10 million working days lost. All because of exposure to fine particles from domestic biomass emissions.

SOURCE

A climate change skeptic travels to a den of true believers

Story by Gerald Holland. Not sure how much is for real

A few years ago a regional newspaper informed its readers about an upcoming Climate Change religion evangelistic meeting at a local hotel. I decided to go and see what the religion had to offer.

The expectant believers huddled in a small meeting room at the hotel. The not-so-moderate moderator and preachers droned on about their expectations of global demise caused by global warming. They played snippets from the first climate change billionaire, Al Gore's, screed, "An Inconvenient Truth." The sermons called for carbon taxes, windmill farms, solar panel energy, something called "sustainability" and so forth. They warned of tipping points, melting polar caps and rising sea levels.

The moderator cautioned the rapt audience about people such as U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, who said the climate change and global warming movement is one of the biggest hoaxes in history.

From the back of the room near the door, in case I had to run for my life, I raised my hand and shouted, "I agree with Senator Inhofe." Instantly all eyes turned toward me, shooting glares like arrows from Robin Hood's bow.

I plowed ahead. "Most of the people peddling this fear have their snouts in the government-grant trough and fear being kicked away from the trough if they dissent from the required dogma."

One man in the congregation claimed that the non-believers are in the pockets of Exxon and other Big Oil. I said many independent academics and climate observers deny that catastrophic climate change is a cause for worry.

I continued. "So you think that if you get paid by the government your output is holy writ, but if you work in the private sector your science is automatically suspect."

Shortly thereafter the meeting adjourned for lunch. None of the true-believers wanted me at their tables, but I brought my food to a group of eight or nine of them and made myself comfortable anyway. To stimulate conversation, I quickly stated my opinion that it was all a bunch of fear-mongering like the Salem witch trials.

One of the table-mates, while nearly choking at my comment, retorted, "What's fear-mongering about it?"

I answered that it's like child abuse when the Global Warming believers show Al Gore's climate-change-gospel movie to scare little children so that they will go home and badger their parents that the earth is going to burn up and the parents need to change their ways to save the family from the hellish earth.

"What are your credentials?" he snapped.

"What are yours?" I snapped back.

"I'm a graduate statistician," he said, snarling.

I responded, mockingly: "So as a graduate statistician you think other people can't question this new dogma that the world is going to fry if we don't turn our lives over to gangs of climate change Nazis."

I said the climate has always changed — in pre-history and recorded history. Long before there were industry and fossil fuels there were warmings and coolings. There was an Ice Age, then the earth warmed, thank God. Later there was about 300 years of Little Ice Age when people starved and diseases and plagues killed millions. People migrated en mass to escape the cold's death and devastation. It's warmer now, we're prosperous and healthier, and we should again be thankful.

A quiet young man at the table spoke softly that he lived in Kansas and that lack of water is a big problem for farmers and ranchers in the Great Plains. In a spirit of good will I offered this helpful suggestion: Our government should invest in a massive global warming infrastructure program. Lay huge pipes to carry the polar ice melt to arid areas of North America. Glacier-melt water could be squirting from nozzles on corn, wheat, oats, barley, alfalfa and rye. Cattle and wildlife could graze and flourish on green grass every summer. Pumping units could push the surplus ice-cap water down to replenish the depleted water tables. Problems solved. The diners seemed to be stunned into silence by my unique proposal.

Pretty soon the subject was changed to a discussion of the dangers of armadillo infestation, which I consider to be a greater threat than human-caused climate change. I thanked them for their company, paid my bill and went home. Since then I have never seen a notice in the papers about climate change meetings.

SOURCE

Confidence returns for Australian coal miners

Note: Thermal coal is the coal used in those evil coal-powered electricity generators. Metallurgical coal is used in blast furnaces to make steel

Did the doubters declare the death of thermal coal too soon?

Certainly the major listed Australian thermal coal miners have all seen positive movement in their share price from late 2017 through into 2018, bucking the wider perception of a market in decline.

That was in turn driven by a resurgent thermal coal price after its massive bust three years ago.

From August 2015 to August 2016, prices languished below $US60 ($75) a tonne. By October of last year that had spiked to more than $US100 a tonne in October 2016 and remained in a healthy range rarely falling below $US80 a tonne.

There are combination of international and domestic market factors as well as smarter play by Australian miners that have created market conditions where thermal coal has regained ground, shaking off the zombie company taglines that have dogged the industry over the last year.

The domestic market is also different. Australia has significantly fewer thermal coal miners today than it did five years after a spate of sell-offs, divestments, and exits from the market, and now those who survived are reaping the benefits of a strengthening market.

Whitehaven Coal has been one of the standout performers. In February of 2016 Whitehaven's share price hit 37 cents. Earlier this month it hit $4.77 only slowing down on the back of lowered production guidance figures last week.

New Hope Group has seen strong movement northwards, hitting a share price high point not seen since early 2015.

New Hope chief executive Shane Stephen told Fairfax Media pinpoints the sector's turning point as May 2016, when China announced it would institute new controls on domestic production sending buyers elsewhere.

"We're seeing strong demand for higher quality Australian thermal coal in Asia, and that is what's driving the price. Additionally, we're also not seeing a material increase in supply coming out of Australia

"Prices are around US$107 from Newcastle, to put that in perspective, any price with an eight or nine in front of it is considered good," Stephen says.

"With demand at these prices, New Hope is strongly profitable. I think most coal producers in Australia will produce strong financial numbers in their first half results."

Stephen says the company is continuing to focus on expansion and gaining approvals for its Acland Stage 3 project and the possibility of bringing new coal mines in the Surat Basin online as soon as 2023.

Yancoal is also starting to chart a recovery a massive slump in its share price after it announced its intention to acquire Rio Tinto’s Hunter Valley Operations and Mount Thorley Warkworth thermal coal mines.

Rio's rival, BHP, used its quarterly production announcement this week to spruik an expectation defying result for its energy coal division.

Production was up 8 per cent quarter on quarter, and up 4 per cent for the December 2017 half year from the previous corresponding period, with 14,029 kilotonnes produced during the December

Glencore has maintained its focus on thermal coal, telling Fairfax Media it is aiming to continue growth in the area, although it is still seeking to divest its Rolleston coal asset.

Coal mining regions are welcoming this revival of the industry and the flow-on social and economic effects it will have.

"This is most definitely a positive for the Singleton region," Singleton Mayor Sue Moore says. "The industry has been ticking upwards for the last six months, and we're seeing a turnaround, although it is slow. We expect to see this flow through to the local business sector over the next 12 months, beyond just the mining industry.

Newcastle, home of the largest coal port in the world, is looking beyond coal to future energy. ''The City of Newcastle recognises the role that coal plays in our local, state and national economy," Newcastle Lord Mayor Nuatali Nelmes says.

"The Newcastle and the Hunter Region has a proud history of coal mining, with the mining industry supporting thousands of local jobs for well over 100 years. We understand that coal will continue to be exported from the Port of Newcastle into the future; but Newcastle also has a proudly progressive history where our people demonstrate time and time again their ability to adapt with changing economic opportunity," she says.

Fat Prophets analyst David Lennox says the changing face of the world’s energy needs will eventually have a major impact on thermal coal, but the growth of renewables will not negate coal in the near to medium term.

“Even though we’re seeing significant interest for renewables, we’ll still see thermal coal power stations for a long time,” Mr Lennox told Fairfax Media.

This has been reinforced by the Turnbull Government’s National Energy Guarantee, an energy policy announced late last year which sees coal-fired power generation still playing a major role in Australia’s energy landscape.

Mr Lennox says Australia’s higher quality thermal coal is being sought as its lower impurities means lower emissions when burnt in power plants.

“While we don’t consume significant quantities of coal in Australia, there is high demand from China and India.”

Whitehaven's chief executive Paul Flynn said Australia's higher quality coal and location so close to Asian customers has given it an edge. "Australia as a whole has done a good job rebasing its costs quickly as supply and demand has tightened," Mr Flynn said.

"What we've observed is very strong demand out of Asia fuelled by their demand for high-quality coal to fuel their supercritical power stations."

Another major Australian coal miner agreed, stating that significant growth is forecast from South East Asia.

“Thermal coal’s story hasn’t changed, we’ve always had an optimistic view of it in the medium to long-term. China’s domestic consumption even reached an all-time record last year,” the miner’s spokesman says.

A recent Credit Suisse analysis agrees noting that while much of the developed world is turning away from coal, there is still strong demand from South East Asian nations.

"These nations expect to add 32 to 56 gigawatts of coal-fired generation from 2015 to 2025. The high end of the range may represent increased coal demand of 150 million tonnes per annum," it says.

This is the focus for Whitehaven's Flynn. He says the coal outlook has been strong and exceeded many market expectations in the lead up to north Asia's winter period.

"A number of factors are helping to maintain these higher prices - China's draw on the seaborne thermal coal market is steady, demand for high-quality coals from South East Asia and the traditional Asian markets of Japan, Korea and Taiwan remains strong, reflecting buoyant economic conditions across Asia while a number of factors including Australian industrial relations issues and poor weather in Indonesia have limited supply response," Mr Flynn says.

"The outlook for thermal coal in the short to medium term is favourable."

MineLife's Gavin Wendt believes the combination of growth in China’s manufacturing sector and “an almost surprising level of discipline and fiscal management” is aiding a thermal coal revival.

“Thermal coal is trending at its highest level since 2016,” Mr Wendt told Fairfax Media. “This is mainly driven by manufacturing activity in China having a direct impact on coal demand 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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21 January, 2018

Experts say

Ya gotta laugh! During the temperature rise of 2015/2016, Warmists sedulously ignored the influence of El Nino. They pretended that the rise was due to CO2 -- anthropogenic global warming. Now that temperatures are allegedly sinking back, the fall is all due to El Nino. To Warmists, having your cake and eating it too is a cinch! Let them eat cake!

So now they agree with what skeptics said from early 2015 onwards and completely wipe off the recent warming period as irrelevant to their anthropogenic global warming story -- and say that 2017 is still warm even AFTER El Nino has gone. But wait a minute! How do we define the El Nino period except via temperature? According to their own GISS data, temperatures (J-D) broke upward in 2014 and have stayed high ever since. So who decided that 2017 was not influenced by El Nino -- which is the whole point of the article below? Nobody knows. What we see below is the product of shifty definitions, nothing else.

In theory, you could detect El Nino by a detailed examination of sea levels but as we see here measuring sea levels is a mug's game. By choosing different reference points you can get widely different results. The earth is not a bowl and water does not lie flat on it. And I won't mention the matter of hokey "corrections" for isostatic balance.

So what appears to have actually happened is that 2014-2017 temperatures have suddenly broken upwards to a new plateau, which is a common natural occurrence in the temperature record.

So say we concede all that they tell us with their array of numbers below. Say that we really have moved to hotter average temperature levels after the temperature stasis of the first 13 years of the century. What caused that rise? Was it CO2? They offer no proof of that. It is all "Experts say". Experts say a lot of things that are often wrong. And Warmists have yet to make an accurate prediction. So relying on such "experts" is very cold comfort indeed. We could just be dealing with some of the many natural phenomena that we don't understand.

And what is the evidence for what "Experts say"? In the large and colorful article excerpted below I strangely can find not a single statistic for CO2, the supposed cause of global warming. Why? Are the 21st century temperature changes due to changing CO2 levels, as the experts say? Do the temperature changes correspond to CO2 changes? They do not. Philosopher David Hume insisted that the one precondition for detecting a cause was constant conjunction. But there is no constant conjunction between CO2 changes and temperature changes. So one did not cause the other.

Just for fun I have downloaded the CSV data file for monthly CO2 averages from Cape Grim. So is the temperature stasis up to 2013 matched by a plateauing of CO2 levels? Far from it. The levels show a steady rise up to the end of 2013 -- continuing to July 2016. It's only from July 2016 that the CO2 levels get "stuck" on 401 ppm. They don't resume rising until June 2017.

So what a laugh! There is NO resemblance between the CO2 and temperature records. The steady CO2 rise has now resumed and reached a new height in "cooling" August 2017, the last year for which there is data. No wonder that the Warmist journalist below sticks to "Experts say" rather than dive into that inconvenient data.

Note: My use of GISS and NOAA data does not constitute an endorsement of it. I use it because Warmists do. It amuses me to show that their own data does not support their madcap theory

Last year was the HOTTEST on record without an El Nino: New figures reveal man-made global warming has overtaken the influence of natural trends on the climate

By Daily Mail Science & Technology Reporter Tim Collins

Last year was the hottest on record without the influence of the El Nino weather phenomenon that helps push up global temperatures, a new study reports.

El Nino years happen when a change in prevailing winds cause huge areas of water to heat up in the Pacific, leading to elevated temperatures worldwide.

Including El Nino years, 2016 was warmer and 2017 was joint second warmest with 2015.

The main contributor to rising temperatures over the last 150 years is human activity, scientists have said.

This includes burning fossil fuels which puts heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

They say man-made climate change is has now overtaken the influence of natural trends on the climate.

Experts say the 2017 record temperature ‘should focus the minds of world leaders’ on ‘scale and urgency’ of the risks of climate change.

The El Nino event spanning 2015 to 2016 contributed around 0.2°C (0.36°F) to the annual average increase for 2016, which was about 1.1°C (2°F) than average temperatures measured from 1850 to 1900.

However, the main contributor to warming over the last 150 years is human influence on climate from increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, experts say.

2017 remains close to 1°C (1.8°F) above pre-industrial temperatures of 1850 to 1900.

The Met Office annual average global temperature forecast for 2017 said the global mean temperature for 2017 was expected to be between 0.32°C (0.57°F) and 0.56°C (1°F) above the long-term average.

The provisional figure for 2017, based on an average of three global temperature datasets, of 0.42°C (0.75°F) above the long-term average is well within the predicted range.

The forecast, made at the end of 2016, also correctly predicted that 2017 would be one of the warmest years in the record.

Experts from the Met Office's Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit were involved in the findings.

They produce the Hadcrut4 dataset, which is used to estimate global temperatures.

This found that 2017 was almost 1°C (1.8°F) warmer than pre-industrial levels, measured from 1850 to 1900, and 0.38°C (0.78°F) warmer than average temperatures measured from 1981 to 2010.

That would make it the third hottest on record, including El Nino years.

Figures from a series of different international analyses, including from the NOAA and Nasa in the US, place 2017 as either second or third warmest on record.

Last year's temperatures were outstripped only by the record heat of 2016, and in some of the analyses by 2015.

Both 2016 and 2015 saw a significant El Nino, a natural phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean that increases temperatures, on top of human-induced global warming.

Dr Colin Morice, of the Met Office Hadley Centre, said: 'The global temperature figures for 2017 are in agreement with other centres around the world that 2017 is one of the three warmest years and the warmest year since 1850 without the influence of El Nino.

SOURCE

Ecofascist Big Brother on America's Fishing Boats

Michelle Malkin

Salt water. Seagulls. Striped bass. My fondest childhood memories come from fishing with my dad on the creaky piers and slick jetties of the Jersey shore. The Atlantic Ocean is in my blood. So when fishing families in New England reached out to me for help spreading word about their economic and regulatory struggles, I immediately heeded their call.

Now, these "forgotten men and women" of America hope the Trump administration will listen. And act.

The plague on the commercial fishing industry isn't "overfishing," as environmental extremists and government officials claim. The real threats to Northeastern groundfishermen are self-perpetuating bureaucrats, armed with outdated junk science, who've manufactured a crisis that endangers a way of life older than the colonies themselves.

Hardworking crews and captains have the deepest stake in responsible fisheries management — it's their past, present, and future — but federal paper-pushers monitor them ruthlessly like registered sex offenders.

Generations of schoolchildren have been brainwashed into believing that our seas have been depleted by greedy commercial fishermen. In the 1960s and 1970s, it is true, foreign factory trawlers from Russia and Japan pillaged coastal groundfish stocks. But after the domestic fishing industry regained control of our waters, stocks rebounded.

Reality, however, did not fit the agenda of scare-mongering environmentalists and regulators who need a perpetual crisis to justify their existence. To cure a manufactured "shortage" of bottom-dwelling groundfish, Washington micromanagers created a permanent thicket of regional fishery management councils, designated fishing zones, annual catch limits, individual catch limits and "observers" mandated by the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

Even more frustrating for the fishing families who know the habitat best, the federal scientists' trawler surveys for assessing stocks use faulty nets that vastly underestimate stock abundance.

Meghan Lapp, a lifelong fisherwoman and conservation biologist, points out that government surveyors use a "net that's not the right size for the vessel," which produces "a stock assessment that shows artificially low numbers. The fishing does not match what the fishermen see on the water."

Instead of fixing the science, top-down bureaucrats have cracked down on groundfishermen who fail to comply with impossible and unreasonable rules and regulations. The observer program, which was intended to provide biological data and research, was expanded administratively (not by Congress) to create "At Sea Monitors" who act solely as enforcement agents.

Yes, Big Brother dispatches a fleet of spies to track and ticket commercial fishing families while they work. And the biggest slap in the face? New England groundfishermen have to pay for it. A study done by the National Marine Fisheries Service estimates the program costs about $710 per day or $2.64 million per year.

Last fall, I visited the Williams family, which owns two fishing vessels based in Point Judith, Rhode Island, and Stonington, Connecticut, to see the crushing impact of this ever-intrusive bureaucracy for myself. Patriarch and small-business owner Tom Williams Sr. began fishing with his father-in-law in the 1960s. Son Tom Jr. captains the Heritage, which harvests cod, flounder and haddock. Son Aaron operates the Tradition, which harvests scup, whiting, squid and sea bass. Grandson Andrew, 20, is the fourth-generation fisherman in the family.

"What we do is feed America," soft-spoken Tom Sr. told me. "We're not just indiscriminately raping the ocean, we're trying to feed people — feed them good, healthy, quality fish."

Long before he departs from the dock, Tom Jr. must seek permission to do his job. "Before we sail, we have to do declarations on our boat tracks, which is a vessel monitoring system," Tom Jr. explained. "We have to declare what areas we're going to be fishing in. We also have to submit a sector-trip start hail and operator's permit number. ... (Then) you have to submit a daily task report, what area you were in, and all the species that you caught."

On top of all that, an at-sea observer boards the Williams' boats and bunks in tight quarters with the crew, looking over their shoulders at every turn. Over the years, the expanding reach of regulators has become overbearing and, as brother Aaron described it, "humiliating."

David Goethel, a boat captain and research biologist who served on the New England fishery management council, sued to overturn the unfunded at-sea monitoring mandate. But he was rebuffed by the U.S. Supreme Court last fall because he filed the suit too late.

He worries not only about his survival and the fate of the New England groundfishing industry, but about the precedent this power and money grab has set.

"There's nothing to stop other government agencies from doing an end-run on Congress to get a budget increase by passing off their regulatory cost to the regulated public," Goethel warned.

For his part, 20-year-old Andrew Williams hopes someone in Washington will ignore the environmental propaganda he has been taught in the classroom and get the facts.

Working on the seas "is all I ever known," he told me. "It started when I was 8 years old, and I never thought about doing anything else."

Like his family, neighbors and crewmates, he is hoping President Donald Trump can help make commercial fishing great again by getting government out of the way.

SOURCE

US Poised to Shatter Records for Oil Production, Gas Exports

The U.S. is well on its way to becoming a net exporter of natural gas for the first time in decades after breaking an annual record for oil production, according to the latest government data.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects the U.S. to become a net natural gas exporter once it’s compiled all the data for 2017. The U.S. is sending more gas to Mexico via pipeline and shipping more liquefied natural gas overseas.

It’s good news for President Donald Trump’s administration, which has been promoting an “energy dominance” agenda for the past year, but the implications could be farther reaching. Unleashing U.S. energy exports has the potential to upset longstanding geopolitical and economic arrangements across the world.

The Energy Information Administration expects the U.S. to have the third-largest gas liquefaction capacity in the world by the end of 2019, behind Qatar and Australia, assuming all such projects underway are finished on time. The administration also expects a doubling of gas pipeline capacity to Mexico, furthering pushing up exports.

That news came about after the administration released its short-term U.S. energy outlook this January. In that report, the statistics agency projected U.S. crude oil production averaged 9.3 million barrels per day in 2017.

Production is projected to further increase through the next year, averaging 10.3 million barrels per day and breaking the record set in 1970 of 9.6 million barrels per day. Production could average 10.8 million barrels per day in 2019, rivaling Russia.

Russia and Saudi Arabia agreed in November to extend oil production cuts until the end of 2018 to keep prices up after the collapse in the summer of 2014. Though with crude now hovering around $70 a barrel, some are predicting that agreement could fall apart.

SOURCE

Turning the Tables on Coastal Ecofascists

New York and California aim to punish energy companies for climate change. Here's how to fight back.

In the progressive-dominated bicoastal fever swamps known as New York and California, hysterical leftists are once again in search of sympathetic courts who will abet their global warming agenda.

In New York City, Bill de Blasio’s administration has filed a federal suit against a number of fossil fuel companies based on their alleged role in precipitating climate change. According to the suit, “The city seeks to shift the costs of protecting the city from climate change impacts back onto the companies that have done nearly all they could to create this existential threat.”

BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell are the defendants in this case, and the lawsuit alleges these companies have produced more than 11% of the entire world’s industry-based methane and carbon pollution — “since the dawn of the industrial revolution,” the suit adds.

The plaintiffs further allege that Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York in 2012, killing 53 people statewide and costing more than $19 billion in damages, was precipitated by global warming and that these companies should not only pay for that damage, but the city’s future resiliency upgrades. In a further burst of fiscal insanity given New York city’s looming pension disaster, de Blasio, along with pension fund board members Public Advocate Letitia James and Comptroller Scott Stringer, are calling on those funds to divest from fossil fuel companies over the next five years.

A New York Post editorial takes this effort to task, calling the suit a “ridiculous assault on the fossil-fuel industry that powers our city and whose earnings support retired city workers.” It further illuminates the depths of de Blasio’s hypocrisy, noting that while he’s suing to recoup the costs of building up the city’s defenses in areas most prone to flooding during hurricanes, he is also “encouraging more residential development all along the city’s waterfront.”

“Then, too, it would be nice to see the mayor practicing what he preaches,” the paper adds. “Will he ever stop taking his caravan of gas-guzzling SUVs to his Park Slope gym? How about canceling his flights around the country in support of his progressive agenda?”

As it is with most “do as I say, not as I do” progressives, the answers are no and no.

In California, the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Imperial Beach, along with San Mateo, Santa Cruz and Marin Counties, are attempting the same gambit, based on the same ideologically driven pseudo-science. Yet New Yorkers should take note: as Wall Street Journal columnist Andrew Scurria explains, Exxon is flipping the script on this political hackery, “highlighting past bond disclosures in which its government critics suggested they couldn’t predict whether and when sea levels would rise.” In fact, “The company filed court papers in Texas on Monday seeking to force government officials to answer questions under oath about those statements.”

Columnist Katy Grimes illuminates the implications, writing, “These greedy municipal cheaters are now caught between two significant, self-imposed frauds: Either their lawsuits are fraudulent, or their bond offerings are.”

Scurria cites San Francisco as an example of a city trying to have it both ways, noting that the lawsuit it filed spoke to “imminent risk of catastrophic storm surge flooding,” while a general obligation bond offering made last year stated the city “is unable to predict whether sea-level or rise or other impacts of climate change … will occur.”

Santa Cruz County was equally hypocritical. In its lawsuit it insisted it has been experiencing more frequent and severe droughts, heat waves and wildfires, while facing a 98% chance of a “devastating three-foot flood — by 2050. Yet last year’s bond offering cited as risk factors "unpredictable climatic conditions, such as flood, droughts and destructive storms.”

Exxon believes these contradictions constitute fraud. “Each of the municipalities warned that imminent sea level rise presented a substantial threat to its jurisdiction and laid blame for this purported injury at the feet of energy companies,” Exxon stated. “Notwithstanding their claims of imminent, allegedly near-certain harm, none of the municipalities disclosed to investors such risks in their respective bond offerings.”

Nonetheless, these progressive fraudsters have their advocates. CNN columnist Jeffrey Sachs embraces the typically tiresome “evil corporation” stance, insisting these companies “have known for decades that their product is dangerous for the planet, but they relentlessly hid the evidence, stoking confusion rather than solutions,” he writes with regard to New York’s “bold” bid for “climate safety and justice.” “Through individual company efforts to support climate denialism and confusion, and through relentless and reckless lobbying by the US Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, the companies launched a full-blown assault on climate science to stop or delay the shift to renewable energy.”

Sachs also insists fossil fuels are entirely unnecessary: “New York can go green and electric by midcentury through electric vehicles, electricity-powered public transit, and electric heat pumps for buildings, powered by electricity from wind, solar and hydroelectric power.”

In a better world, these fossil fuel companies would call Sachs’ and his ecofascist allies’ bluff. Instead of abiding by New York City’s “road map” of reducing global warming emissions as much as 80% by 2050, or California’s 2006 legislation calling for the same reduction (a target one study concluded the state would “badly miss” only seven years later), perhaps these “climate destroyers” might voluntarily agree to stop selling their products in both places far earlier. Perhaps as early as five years from now, or sooner. After all, if global warming is as critical an issue as these leftist politicians make it out to be, it only seems right to combat it as quickly as possible. Make it incumbent on those same politicians, many of whom use “shakedown lawsuits against certain politically incorrect industries and businesses, designed to force acquiescence to leftist political policies” as Grimes puts it, to explain to the public why ruining a state’s economy in California, or undermining New York City’s pension funding, is a small price to pay for “settled science” that is anything but.

One might hazard a guess that even the most progressive New Yorkers, already reeling from a subway system in a state of emergency, or their equally progressive Californian counterparts, facing the financial collapse of Gov. Jerry Brown’s beloved “bullet train,” might be less than enthused by the consequences of such zealotry, such as skyrocketing gas prices — while gas still remains available. They might even decide it’s time for the progressive political class to “walk the global warming walk” — literally — as opposed to riding around in large carbon-spewing vehicles, or living in energy-consuming residences far larger than those of their constituents.

“The idea that oil companies might sue public servants personally in an attempt to intimidate them from protecting their communities and environment is abhorrent but consistent with their prior behavior,” San Mateo County counsel John Beiers said. “We will not be intimidated.”

One suspects that the companies who still provide Americans with the overwhelming majority of their energy needs won’t be intimidated either.

SOURCE

Australia: Miserable Greens would deny us all that we hold dear and cherish

By GRAHAM RICHARDSON, former Labor party numbers man. He eventually discovered that there is no such thing as a happy Greenie. Their demands are insatiable

There was a time when the Greens were all that their name suggests they should be. They were passionate about our environment and they fought really hard to protect Australia’s forests.

I was proud to be their ally in the noble endeavour of protecting rainforests and old-growth forests. I placed more than 20 per cent of Tasmania into World Heritage and, despite resolute opposition from the Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland, I managed to list the rainforests of the Daintree region and the far north on the World Heritage register as well. Sadly, it did not take too long for me to realise that I could never do enough for them. No matter how much I achieved, they were always disappointed.

The Helsham inquiry was set up to finally settle which Tasmanian forests were to be protected. Many learned conservationists were disappointed at its outcome and I set about undoing the inquiry’s final report. It took a three-day cabinet meeting that grew pretty heated at times before a very close vote overturned that report. I was ecstatic and raced to share the news of this huge win for Tasmanian forests’ preservation. I rang Bob Brown, who could only express his disappointment at the cabinet not going far enough. The Greens could never be satisfied. For them it was all or nothing.

Brown, despite everything, was a tremendous voice for the environment and by far the best leader the Greens have had. The Greens began their life in Australia as a mainly Tasmanian group. They were able to export their fervour to the mainland on the back of an environmental purist in Brown.

He was never seen as a politician on the make or consumed by personal ambition. He projected decency and Australians responded. The Greens were able to achieve a national vote of 10 per cent very, very quickly. The problem is that they have never been able to increase that number.

They are stuck at 10 per cent because they no longer have the Greens purity of a Bob Brown. Since they stopped worrying about the trees and adopted the mantle of the true party of the left in Australia, they limited their horizons and seem determined to remain a minor party.

Sure, they will win inner-city seats in the parliament and if the Liberals think that the short-term gain of Labor losing a by-election in the seat of Batman in Victoria is more important than keeping out a Greens member who believes in everything the Liberals don’t, then the Greens will secure that victory in the next few months. The Greens will no doubt trumpet this as a major win and predict they will march on to greater glories. They won’t, of course. As long as they lean as far to the left as they do at present, they will remain on the fringes of power. They can rattle their sabres in the Senate and have a minor role in shaping legislation but real power will continue to elude them.

As long as they are determined to push issues that not only alienate the bulk of Australians but infuriate them as well, then their campaigns will fall on deaf ears and blind eyes. One of the first indications that the Greens have fundamental difficulties in accepting the way the great majority of Australians live was when now-vanquished Queensland Green Larissa Waters took on the cause of changing the toys our children play with. She wanted to ban Barbie dolls because they were gender-specific. Little girls have played with dolls since the Son of God played on the wing for Jerusalem. I have managed to live my 68 years seeing absolutely nothing wrong with little girls playing with dolls. And even if I am accused of being a truly dreadful person, I readily concede that I would not have been comfortable with my son playing with dolls. Fortunately, he never did.

On the last day at my son’s school last month, there was a Christmas carols evening with a religious theme held at St Andrew’s Anglican Cathedral in Sydney. Silent Night still sounds like a wonderful song to me and the children and their parents had a terrific time. The harmonies, the musicianship and the most brilliant music teachers brought songs we had all been familiar with since we were children to life yet again. This was a great Christmas celebration following a great Christmas tradition. The Greens don’t want us to have these celebrations.

Tasmanian senator Nick McKim and a few of his mates drew up a non-denominational card to be sent out at Christmas. Why do these miserable bastards want to attack how we play and what we celebrate? The tradition of sending Christmas cards has been breaking down for some years. As a kid I remember my family received and sent a hundred cards. Now it is only a few. The Greens, though, should not read into the decline in cards anything about celebrating Christmas itself. That tradition is alive and kicking. The Greens can only stand outside the mainstream if they continue to deride it.

Today’s leader of the Greens, Richard Di Natale, surprised no one this week when, in line with the black-armband view of history they peddle, he called for Australia Day to be moved away from the commemoration of the landing of the First Fleet at Botany Bay. Again, he stands against what a huge majority of Australians want and believe in.

I was at the harbour in 1988 when the 200th anniversary was being commemorated. There were so many boats, from the workers’ tinnies to the billionaires’ luxury yachts, out that day that there was very little space on the water. Australians voted with their feet and came out in their millions to be a part of it. The Greens will never dampen the way we feel about Australia Day.

Di Natale said his party would take it up with their representatives in local government. As far as most of us are concerned, this will merely mean that a few nuttier councils will lose their right to conduct citizenship ceremonies on this day. By the way, the number of people who seek to have their Australian citizenship conferred on Australia Day itself speaks volumes for the popularity of the day.

Australia Day can be a time when we celebrate the wonderful country in which we live and renew our vows to do better with indigenous health and education.

We cannot roll over and allow the Greens to tell us how to live and what to think.

SOURCE

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

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19 January, 2018

The big if

The writers below admit that their predictions are a big if so one wonders why they bother making them. Its all just modelling silliness anyway. And when have models ever got it right?

Two years ago this week, the world came together in Paris to sign a landmark agreement aimed at stopping the Earth's temperature from rising dangerously high.

But according to a new report from Climate Tracker, an independent research group, we're way off track to hit the target laid out in the Paris climate agreement.

The Paris Agreement pushed member nations to curb their greenhouse gas emissions, like carbon dioxide and methane, in order to keep global temperatures from increasing more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Each country submitted its own plan for reducing emissions that cause our atmosphere to trap more heat.

But if all of the signatories fulfill their pledges — and that's a big if — global temperatures will still increase by 3.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, according to Climate Tracker's latest report.

President Donald Trump has pledged to pull the US out of the agreement, claiming it hurts US manufacturing — but that process that will take several years. If the US does leave, it will be the only country in the world not signed on.

What could happen if the planet exceeds the 2-degree limit

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), if global temperature rise exceeds 2 degrees Celsius, climate-related risks like wildfires, sea level rise, and crop failure will be magnified.

The 2-degree limit was first established in a working paper by an economist — not a climate scientist — in the 1970s, but it has proved to be a useful rallying point for the international community.

Scientists have outlined how continued emissions could lead to the complete loss of ice sheets in Greenland over the next few centuries, which could cause sea levels to rise by 7 meters, or over 21 feet, submerging populated coastal cities like New York and Miami. In certain regions, moving past the 2-degree limit could cause average crop yields to be 25% lower — and those effects only increase the warmer it gets.

It's important to note, however, that modeling climate change is a highly complex process with many variables, so these effects are a matter of probabilities, not an absolute certainty.

The US' potential withdrawal would add 0.3 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100

Climate Tracker's report calculates that the US's withdrawal from the Paris agreement would add approximately 0.3 degrees Celsius of warming to its projections for the year 2100.

And while the report notes that carbon dioxide emissions have flattened over recent years, it's too soon to say that global emissions have peaked. Climate Tracker predicts that greenhouse gas emissions will grow between 9% and 13% from 2020-2030 based on current trends.

In order to hit the targets laid out by the Paris agreement, global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak around 2020 then rapidly fall.

But there are some positive signs. Climate Tracker estimates that policies implemented in 2017 reduced their global temperature predictions by 0.2 degrees Celsius over 2016 projections. And India and China — two of the fastest-growing economies in the world — have made significant headway in reducing the growth rate of their greenhouse gas emissions.

Nonetheless, Climate Tracker predicts emissions in India will grow approximately 7% between 2020-2030, and China's will rise 51% in the same period.

The report notes, however, that climate modeling is a tricky business with a lot of room for error.

A study published by Nature earlier this month estimates that the world will be 15% hotter in 2100 than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — whose work formed the basis of the Paris agreement goals — projected, based on a new set of calculations.

This new research suggests humans will probably have to reduce emissions even more steeply to avoid crossing the thresholds agreed to in Paris.

SOURCE

Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere ‘significant but not alarming’

More rubbish talk about what they admit is an unknown

Alarmist projections of how sensitive Earth’s climate is to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been proved wrong by new research published today in Nature.

The paper said there was a less than one-in-40 chance of climate sensitivity being greater than 4C, renewing hope it would be possible to avoid global warming exceeding the Paris target of 2C.

Climate sensitivity, the amount of warming caused by a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, is hotly contested. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has published estimates ranging from 1.5C to 4.5C.

Other scientists have said climate sensitivity could be as low as 1C because other factors had played a greater role in recent warming than had been acknowledged by climate models.

Scientists in Britain said they had used new techniques to narrow the range to between 2.2C and 3.4C.

The latest Nature paper found the most likely outcome would be 2.8C, with 66 per cent confidence limits. The findings are consistent with the IPCC “likely” range of 2.2C-3.4C.

Announcing the results, Nature said “analysis suggests that extremely high estimates of this sensitivity can be ruled out’’. So, too, could estimates below 1.5C.

Peter Cox from the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Science at the University of Exeter used a new method to calculate climate sensitivity based on the observed historical variability in temperature rather than the warming trend itself.

Earlier attempts had focused on the historical warming record or reconstructions of past climates. “We use an ensemble of climate models to define an emergent relationship between ECS (equilibrium climate sensitivity) and a theoretically informed metric of global temperature variability,” the new paper said.

“This metric of variability can also be calculated from observational records of global warming, which enables tighter constraints to be placed on ECS,” it said.

The new methodology reduced the probability of equilibrium climate sensitivity being less than 1.5C to less than 3 per cent, and the probability of it exceeding 4.5C to less than 1 per cent.

The Nature paper said ECS remained one of the most important unknowns in climate change science.

ECS is defined as the global mean warming that would occur if the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration were instantly doubled and the climate were then brought to equilibrium with that new level of CO2.

Estimates of ECS play an important role in global agreements to combat climate change.

SOURCE

Head of Int'l. Energy Agency: Electric Cars Won't Overtake Traditional Cars Any Time Soon

At a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on Tuesday, Faith Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, was asked for his views about the "electrification" of transportation.

"The number of electric cars will grow," Birol told the panel. "But our numbers show that, even two decades from now, the biggest chunk of the cars we are running will be the existing internal combustion engines, the traditional cars."

Birol said he expects the number of electric cars to grow in places such as Europe and China, where there is a lot of incentive and subsidies to produce them.

"And with the declining costs of batteries for electric cars, plus the very generous government subsidies in some countries, we see the electric cars are increasing substantially," Birol said.

Birol said despite the proliferation of electric cars in some countries, the demand for oil will continue to grow.

"The cars are not the biggest part of the oil-demand growth," he explained. "Oil demand today in the world is driven by trucks, jets, ships and, most important, (the) petrochemical industry. Even though there will be a lot of electric cars coming into markets, running in the streets of the world, we will still see that there is a need for new oil production."

Birol said the anticipated growth in oil demand and production "is definitely good news for the U.S. economy."

He noted that the U.s. production of natural gas from fracking "is going to bring a lot of energy to the markets," and he expects the U.S. to be the largest liquified natural gas exporter in the world by 2020.

But what's good for the United States may adversely affect oil producers in the Middle East:

"[I]f I had to pinpoint one vulnerability in our world, in terms of oil and gas, it is the following," Birol said. "Many countries in Middle East, and also some major eastern European countries -- their economies are single-product economies -- oil and, in some cases, gas.

"When the price of these commodities go down, or, as we just discussed ... the electric cars one day become a major, major part of transportation, they may seriously suffer -- their economies. And they are not -- they are not prepared for that.

"Their entire economy, social life, is based on oil revenues. This is a major vulnerability, especially today, when the oil prices will be, we expect, more and more volatile, and technology may make big surprises. Therefore, the -- as International Energy Agency, we are going to focus, in our next outlook -- World Energy Outlook -- these vulnerabilities of these countries."

SOURCE

LAPD Blew $10 Million On A Fleet Of Electric BMWs It Doesn’t Use

The Los Angeles Police Department purchased a pricey fleet of electric BMWs last year, but most of them are either being misused or not used at all, according to a Los Angeles CBS affiliate investigation.

BMW delivered one hundred electric cars to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) every three years through a program designed to make the department green, yet many of those vehicles are either sitting idle or officers are using them as a type of show-and-tell throughout the community.

“It’s all a part of saving the Earth, going green … quite frankly, to try and save money for the community and the taxpayers,” LAPD Deputy Chief Jorge Villegas told a reporter with CBS Los Angeles. The program, which began in April 2016, has apparently turned into a money burner.

The investigation also found that most of the electric cars have only been used for a few thousand miles from the beginning of the project until August 2017.

One reporter watched as a commanding officer with the LAPD’s fiscal operations took a zero-emission vehicle out for a spin to get a manicure. Officer Annemarie Sauer spent more than an hour inside the nail salon before walking out with a manicurist and gesturing toward where the BMW was parked.

“First of all, if they’re going to be using $10 million of our money, or basically leasing $10 million of equipment, they ought to have a damn plan!” local political watchdog Jack Humphreville told CBS. “Isn’t that just a tremendous waste of money?”

The move to amp up the city’s electric vehicle fleet comes as Democratic lawmakers in California aim to force commuters into Teslas and other electric vehicles.

Assemblyman Phil Ting, for instance, floated the idea last year to introduce a bill in January 2018 that would ban the sale of produced after 2040. The Democrat said California drivers must adopt electric vehicles if the state is going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

SOURCE

The inconvenient truth is that catastrophists are wrong

Comment from Australia

It should come as a great relief to know the freezing temperatures recently experienced in the northern hemisphere do not signal an end to global warming.

Imagine if mankind’s increasingly costly attempts to arrest CO2 emissions were unnecessary. That the misallocation of productive resources, prolonging the misery of the world’s most vulnerable people, was nothing more than a cynical ideological exercise?

Hopefully, those global warming doubters in Florida watching frozen iguanas falling stiff from the trees now know that while they were freezing, according to Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, little old Penrith in Sydney, Australia, was the warmest spot on the planet, recording its highest temperature ever, having “broken the all-time maximum temperature record for … the Sydney metropolitan area”.

Well, perhaps in all that excitement the bureau can be forgiven for overlooking the fact Penrith Lakes started recording temperatures only in 1995 and for missing a much higher temperature recorded in nearby Richmond in 1939. But they were right. It was hot.

In a hurried piece in Fairfax publications, the Climate Council of Australia’s Will Steffen throws hot water on any misconceptions that may have been drawn from abnormal snowfalls in Britain, Switzerland and Japan, the record-breaking cold snap in Canada and the US, and the expansion of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet.

He says: “Terms like ‘global warming’ and the mental images they trigger can be misleading when people attempt to understand what is happening to the climate. A far better term is ‘climate disruption’, which captures the real nature of the vast array of changes, many of them abrupt and unexpected, that are occurring.”

So fire and ice, it’s to be expected.

Of course you won’t be surprised to learn Steffen claims “the climate disruption we are increasingly experiencing is not natural. It is caused by the heat-trapping gases we humans are pouring into the atmosphere primarily by the burning of coal, oil and gas.”

On the day Steffen’s opinion piece appeared, this newspaper republished Matt Ridley’s article in The Times claiming “the Earth is very slowly slipping back into a proper ice age”. This confirms research by Henrik Svensmark, Australia’s David Evans and others, who correlated low solar activity (fewer sunspots) and increased cloud cover (as modulated by cosmic rays), with a cooling climate.

Indeed, last year scientists submitted 120 papers linking historical and modern climate change to variations in solar activity.

Steffen wasn’t among them. He says: “Whole ecosystems are succumbing to (human-induced) climate disruption. In 2016 unusually dry and hot conditions triggered massive fires in Tasmania’s World Heritage forests, while ocean circulation patterns have moved unprecedented underwater heatwaves around the world, driving the tragic coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef.’’

Yet the chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Russell Reichelt, dismisses many of the claims that he says “misrepresent the extent and impact of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.”

Peter Ridd from James Cook University goes further, saying: “We can no longer trust the scientific organisations like the ARC (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.”

Steffen’s work could fit this description. He spends much time pushing eco-catastrophism. “Climate disruption” he says “brings growing risks of large-scale migration and conflict as people, particularly the most vulnerable, are forced to deal with increasingly difficult conditions where they live. Some security analysts warn that climate disruption will dwarf terrorism and other conventional threats if present trends continue or worsen.

“Had enough of climate disruption? Then let’s leave our 20th-century thinking behind and get on with the job of rapidly building innovative, clever, carbon-neutral 21st-century societies.”

But Ridley questions the influence of carbon dioxide. He reminds us that: “In 1895 the Swede, Svante Arrhenius, one of the scientists who first championed the greenhouse theory, suggested that the ice retreated because carbon dioxide levels rose, and advanced because they fell. If this was true, then industrial emissions could head off the next ice age. There is indeed a correlation in the ice cores between temperature and carbon dioxide, but inconveniently it is the wrong way round: carbon dioxide follows rather than leads temperature downward when the ice returns.”

But where would manmade global warming “science” be if it relied on just facts? For decades, climate science has been plagued by scandals, deceit and the confessions of whistleblowers.

Penrith’s hyped recording is not new. Scientist and long-time BOM critic Jennifer Marohasy has been calling for an audit and urging Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg “to inform the World Meteorological Organisation that the temperatures recorded by our bureau are not consistent with calibration, nor any international standard”, and, to “direct the bureau to desist from announcing new record hot days”.

Still, institutionalised data bias is a handy default for radical-left eco-catastrophists who have a tendency to extract worst-case scenarios from every weather event.

But despite their best efforts, in the public’s eyes their story is wearing thin. There have been too many false predictions and unwarranted alarmism. People are wising up to the reality that climate science has become an unfalsifiable ideology and resent having their moral conscience questioned should they disagree.

If Ridley is right and the earth is slowly slipping back into a proper ice age, it will be literally cold comfort, not to mention lethal, to keep passing it off as climate disruption.

To survive such an event, our successors will need a plentiful supply of cheap, reliable energy, impossible given today’s intelligentsia’s religious objection to low-cost fossil and nuclear fuels.

It’s not carbon dioxide that threatens us with extinction but blind ideology dressed up as science.

SOURCE

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

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

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18 January, 2018

New York City sues Shell, ExxonMobil and other oil companies over sea level rise

The "damage" they quote from global warming is the expense of defending the city from sea level rise. Problem: There has been no overall sea level rise in the vicinity of NYC in the 21st century. Sea levels have just bobbed up and down. So the lawsuit is based on hypothetical future rises rather than on present reality. Note that CO2 has continued to rise to unprecedented levels over the 21st century but it has not affected the sea level at all so the whole basis of the lawsuit is moot

The New York City government is suing the world’s five largest publicly traded oil companies, seeking to hold them responsible for present and future damage to the city from climate change.

The suit, filed Tuesday against BP, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, claims the companies together produced 11 percent of all of global-warming gases through the oil and gas products they have sold over the years. It also charges that the companies and the industry they are part of have known for some time about the consequences but sought to obscure them.

New York charges in the lawsuit that it is “spending billions of dollars” to protect its coastlines, its infrastructure and its citizens from climate warming.

“To deal with what the future will inevitably bring, the City must build sea walls, levees, dunes, and other coastal armament, and elevate and harden a vast array of City-owned structures, properties, and parks along its coastline,” the lawsuit says. “The costs of these largely unfunded projects run to many billions of dollars and far exceed the City’s resources.”

The suit does not specify precisely how much money it is asking for from the oil companies in what it calls “compensatory damages,” saying that should be established in the case.

At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio focused on the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, calling it “a tragedy wrought by the actions of the fossil fuel companies.” He detailed the 44 people who died in New York as a result of Sandy, as well as the estimated $19 billion in damage it caused. “That is the face of climate change,” de Blasio said. “That is what it means in human and real terms.”

SOURCE

Six Decades of Glacial ADVANCE in the Western Ross Sea, Antarctica

Paper Reviewed: Fountain, A.G., Glenn, B. and Scambos, T.A. 2017. The changing extent of the glaciers along the western Ross Sea, Antarctica. Geology 45: 927-930.

Climate alarmists have long anticipated Earth's polar regions to symbolize the proverbial canary in the coal mine when it comes to witnessing the impacts of CO2-induced climate change. In these high latitudes, temperatures are predicted to warm so fast and to such a degree so as to cause unprecedented melting of ice that even the most ardent of climate skeptics would be forced to concede the verity of global warming theory. Consequently, researchers pay close attention to changes in climate in both the Arctic and Antarctic.

The most recent work in this regard comes from the scientific team of Fountain et al. (2017), who analyzed changes in glacier extent along the western Ross Sea in Antarctica over the past 60 years. More specifically, using digital scans of paper maps based on aerial imagery acquired by the U.S. Geological Survey, along with modern-day satellite imagery from a variety of platforms, the authors digitized a total of 49 maps and images from which they calculated changes in the terminus positions, ice speed, calving rates and ice front advance and retreat rates from 34 glaciers in this region over the period 1955-2015.

In discussing their findings, Fountain et al. report that "no significant spatial or temporal patterns of terminus position, flow speed, or calving emerged, implying that the conditions associated with ice tongue stability are unchanged," at least over the past six decades. However, they also report that "the net change for all the glaciers, weighted by glacier width at the grounding line, has been [one of] advance" (emphasis added) with an average rate of increase of +12 ± 88 m yr-1 (see Figure 1 below).

In pointing out the significance of the above findings, it is important to note that, over a period of time in which the bulk of the modern rise in atmospheric CO2 has occurred, not only have the majority of glaciers from this large region of Antarctica not retreated, they have collectively grown! This stark reality stands in direct contrast to climate-alarmist predictions for this region; and it reveals that if there is any canary in the coal mine to be seen, it is in the failure of global warming predictions/theory to match real-world observations. What will it take for climate alarmists to concede this fact?

SOURCE

Frigid cold is why we need dependable energy

Cheap, abundant coal is key to national security, warm homes and wintertime survival

By Tom Harris

Recent record-setting low temperatures have underscored the creature comfort and often life-saving importance of abundant, reliable, affordable energy. They also reminded us how appropriate it was that America’s 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) emphasizes energy security – and was released on December 18, three days before this extra chilly winter officially began.

This first Trump Administration NSS identifies four vital national interests. Two of them – “promoting American prosperity” and “advancing American influence” – require that the United States “take advantage of our wealth in domestic resources.” However, America is no longer taking full advantage of one of its most important of its domestic resources: its vast coal reserves, the largest of any nation on Earth.

Testifying November 28 in Charleston, West Virginia, at the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) public hearing on repealing the Clean Power Plan, Robert E. Murray, president and CEO of Murray Energy Corp., summarized the bleak state of affairs.

“Prior to the election of President Obama,” Murray noted, “52% of America’s electricity was generated from coal, and this rate was much higher in the Midwest. That percentage of coal generation declined under the Obama Administration to 30%. Under the Obama Administration, and its so-called Clean Power Plan, over 400 coal-fired generating plants totaling over 100,000 megawatts of capacity were closed, with no proven environmental benefit whatsoever.”

Much of this was driven by Obama’s determination to be seen as contributing to “arresting climate change,” to quote from his 2015 NSS, by mandating severe reductions of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from power plants. Unbelievably, this NSS listed “climate change” ahead of “major energy market disruptions” in its list of “top strategic risks to our interests.”

That made no sense. Climate is, and always will be, variable. There is nothing we can do to stop it. And many scientists do not support the hypothesis that our CO2 emissions will cause dangerous climate change.

Regardless, recent climate change has been unremarkable. It is certainly not “unprecedented,” and it clearly does not constitute a national security threat by comparison to a lack of affordable, reliable energy to power the nation and its military, and export to world markets. President Donald Trump was right to make only passing reference to climate change in the 2017 NSS.

Even in the unlikely event that CO2 emissions were or became a problem, developing countries are the source of most of the world’s emissions, and China alone currently emits about twice as much the USA. Those nations are not about to follow Obama’s lead. They understand that they must continue building coal-fired power plants at an aggressive pace, to meet their growing electricity needs.

Even the New York Times admitted that “As Beijing joins climate fight, Chinese companies build coal plants” (July 1, 2017).

“Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal, according to tallies compiled by Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin…. Overall, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent.”

Similarly, India’s heavy reliance on coal will continue even in 2047, according to the June 16, 2017 report “Energizing India,” by the National Institute for Transforming India (NTTI) and Institute of Energy Economics, Japan (IEEJ). Coal is forecast to rise from its 2012 46% of India’s total energy mix to 50% in 2047 in the “business as usual scenario.” Even in an “ambitious” scenario in which renewables supply 12% of India’s primary energy (in 2012 it was 3%), coal still accounts for 42% of India’s energy mix.

The authors of the NTTI/IEEJ report state, “India would like to use its abundant coal reserves as it provides a cheap source of energy and ensures energy security as well.” Simply put, coal is essential if the rest of India’s population is to gain access to electricity and rise up out of abject poverty. Even today, some 240 million Indians (nearly seven times the population of Canada!) still do not have electricity.

India and these analysts are right, of course. So it is a welcome development that Trump is promoting a resurgence of the American coal industry.

Obama’s dedication to the climate scare contributed significantly to coal’s tragic decline in America. Besides the impact of his Clean Power Plan, a rule that will hopefully be withdrawn very soon, coal has been hammered as a result of a 2015 EPA rule that limits plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide emissions from new coal-fired power stations. The result is that the U.S. can no longer build modern, clean, efficient coal plants to replace older stations, as is happening in China, India and even Europe. Here’s why:

The 2015 EPA rule, titled “Standards of Performance for Greenhouse Gas Emissions From New, Modified, and Reconstructed Stationary Sources: Electric Generating Units,” limits CO2 emissions on new coal-fired stations to 1,400 pounds per megawatt-hour of electricity generated. When releasing the new standard, the EPA asserted that it “is the performance achievable by a [supercritical pulverized coal] unit capturing about 20 percent of its carbon pollution.” This is irrational.

CO2 is no more pollution than is water vapour, the major greenhouse gas in Earth’s atmosphere. By calling the gas “carbon,” the Obama EPA deliberately and falsely encouraged the public to think of it as something dirty, like graphite and soot, which really are carbon. Calling CO2 by its proper name, carbon dioxide, would have helped people remember that it is an invisible, odourless gas that we exhale and is essential to plant photosynthesis. Mr. Obama apparently did not want people to remember that.

Moreover, the technology of CO2 capture on a full-scale power plant is still a technological fantasy. So in reality, the EPA was actually banning even the most modern, most efficient, least polluting, supercritical coal-fired stations – because even their CO2 emissions are at least 20% above the arbitrary EPA limit.

Speaking at the November 9, 2017 America First Energy Conference in Houston, Texas, keynote speaker Joe Leimkuhler, vice president of drilling for Louisiana-based LLOG Exploration, showed that America has 22.1% of the world’s proven coal reserves, more than any other country, and enough to last for 381 years at current consumption rates.

So it is a tragedy that America can no longer build modern coal-fired power stations to replace its aging fleet. Clearly, the rule limiting CO2 emissions from new coal-fired power stations must be cancelled as soon as possible.

The climate scare has also impeded coal’s development in the USA by restricting its export. In particular, Asia would be a huge market for inexpensive American coal if sufficient U.S. export facilities were available. But, again, thanks largely to the climate scare contributing to the blocking of construction of coal export terminals, America exports only about as much coal as does Poland.

To ensure energy security, especially when demand soars during bitterly cold spells and heat waves, and to “restore America’s advantages in the world and build upon our country’s great strengths” (quoting from the NSS fact sheets), the U.S. must expand its fleet of coal-fired power stations and build coal export facilities as quickly as possible. To make that possible, the Trump administration must do everything in its power to thoroughly debunk the climate alarm that has so crippled coal’s development.

Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition. He writes from Ontario, a province that seriously damaged its economy by banning all coal-fired power generation.

Via email

Fake Environmental Lawsuits Drive Up California Home Prices

A state Senate committee in Sacramento recently found that the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) does little to hinder state projects. It wasn’t asking the right question. Had its survey reached out to the non-governmental sector, the findings would have been far different. Private developments, especially residential housing projects, are significantly harmed by CEQA and the extra costs, delays, and uncertainties imposed by its environmental impact reporting requirements, explains Independent Institute Research Fellow Adam Summers, in an op-ed for the Orange Counter Register.

Tellingly, few lawsuits filed under CEQA are initiated by environmental groups. Nor do the plaintiffs who sue developers under that law seem particularly motivated by environmental concerns. According to a 2016 study, “about 14,000 housing units were targeted by CEQA lawsuits in Southern California from 2013-2015, 98 percent of which were in ‘infill’ areas surrounded by existing development, not in open space or more rural land that is much more likely to be environmentally sensitive,” writes Summers.

It’s not lost on Gov. Jerry Brown that CEQA lawsuits are a weapon of NIMBYism directed against the interests of the larger community. Brown, along with past California governors Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gray Davis, Pete Wilson, and George Deukmejian, have decried the proliferation of anti-development lawsuits under CEQA, a law Gov. Ronald Reagan signed into law in 1970. As Summers notes, CEQA is hardly the only roadblock to affordable housing in the Golden State—other regulations and costs also play a detrimental role. But until Sacramento reforms it—or better yet, relegates it to the scrap heap of history—little hope can be held that California developers will create enough housing supply to keep up with the growing demand.

SOURCE

"Green" South Australia relies on a fleet of diesel generators to keep the lights on

Britain does too. Diesels put out a lot of particulate pollution -- as in clouds of blue smoke -- but that's OK apparently. Anybody who expects rationality from Greenies will be sadly disappointed

SCORCHING temperatures of 41C for Adelaide on both Thursday and Friday have triggered a warning of low power reserves, as the State Government puts its diesel generators on standby.

The Bureau for Meteorology says Adelaide faces a maximum 37C today and last night upped its predictions to 41C on both Thursday and Friday.

The Australian Energy Market Operator is now warning of an elevated blackout risk for SA on Thursday evening. But AEMO and the Government stress it doesn’t mean blackouts will occur.

AEMO has a three-stage system to warn states of emerging blackout risks. The “lack of reserve 1” notice issued on Tuesday is the lowest alert level, meaning blackouts could occur if there were unexpected problems with infrastructure or demand was higher than expected.

Operators of the state’s largest power station, the gas-fired plant on Torrens Island, have previously warned it is nearing the end of its practical life and losing reliability.

Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis said he was ready to respond to the heat with measures in Labor’s energy plan, including flicking on emergency diesel generators.

“We will, of course, monitor the situation and be ready to use our new ministerial powers of direction over the market or our state-owned power plant if required,” he said.

“That is considered very unlikely at this stage. We launched our energy plan to boost local power supply and improve grid security, and importantly, the independent market operator has said that our plan has put SA in a good position this summer.”

The period of blackout risk is from 5.30pm to 6pm Thursday — the crossover point where workplaces and factories are still consuming large amounts of power as some workers return home to switch on airconditioners and appliances. It also often coincides with a drop off in production from wind farms and solar panels.

AEMO figures indicate SA will use all the energy generated within its borders as demand peaks on Thursday afternoon, while imports from Victoria ensure extra supply is available.

SA’s only other low reserve warning of the summer was in early December and is heading into its highest electricity demand period of the year, with temperatures rising and many workplaces and factories firing back up after the new year break. With a state election in March, the Government faces a political test of its energy plan. The statewide blackout in September 2016 was followed by a forced outage in February last year, in which 90,000 homes and businesses were temporarily shut down.

SOURCE

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

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

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17 January, 2018

Blatant Blue State hypocrisy

From energy and spending, to climate and debate – silencing all dissenting voices is essential

Paul Driessen

You’ve got to admire the full frontal audacity of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio, and their union and pressure group comrades in arms. Their hypocrisy, fraud and tyranny are boundless, especially on fiscal, energy and climate change issues.

Amid the seventh year of a “New York is open for business” advertising campaign that has spent $354 million thus far, they are presiding over tax and regulatory regimes, mountains of debt, intransigent public sector unions, anti-nuclear, anti-fossil fuel energy policies that are anything but business friendly – and press conferences that promise more of the same for state businesses, taxpayers and pensioners.

As Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn notes, Cuomo and his fellow warriors against Trump and Republicans will do almost anything – “except address the root problem by lowering their taxes and spending. Because to do so would require taking on the public unions that drive much of state spending and debt, and are the key constituency of the 21st-century Democratic Party.”

Across the river in New Jersey, unions resist any reforms to their payrolls or pensions just as fiercely. The NJ pension system is already $90-billion short of what it needs to pay future benefits, says the Manhattan Institute. The state will collect some $35 billion in 2018 taxes, but any new revenue will go to pension payouts and spending on new government programs. Connecticut is in the same boat.

Meanwhile, electricity prices continue to climb: In New York 18.8 cents per kilowatt-hour for families, 15.0 cents for the businesses the state is so eager to attract, and 6.2 cents for its few industries. In Jersey, 14.7, 11.4 and 9.6 cents, respectively. In Connecticut, a whopping 21.3, 16.8 and 13.5 cents per kWh!

On the Left Coast, similarly exorbitant electricity rates pummel California businesses, families, factories, farms, hospitals and schools – while neighborhoods confront monstrous mudslides, resulting from winter rains in the wake of fiery hillside-denuding conflagrations. The fires and floods have destroyed nearly 9,000 homes, killed over 60 people, and devastated entire forests and neighborhoods.

Golden State forests have 129 million dead trees, and enough dry brush to fill LA Memorial Coliseum several times. But state regulators, environmentalists and judges make it impossible to remove any. It’s more “natural,” “sustainable” and “climate friendly” to have it erupt in 1,400 to 2,200 degree F infernos.

Compare those fiscal and environmental train wrecks to results thus far of the deregulation, tax reduction, pro-fossil fuel policies of President Trump and congressional Republicans: new jobs, higher wages, nice bonuses, a coming repatriation of trillions of now overseas dollars to fuel new investment and innovation, the lowest black unemployment since recordkeeping began, and the DJIA stock market reaching a record high of 25,575 January 11, following a record 92 closing highs since President Trump was elected.

Compare that to Nobel Prize winning Blue economist Paul Krugman’s dire prediction after the election: the markets will crash and “never” recover, amid a long “global recession.” Meanwhile, multi-multi-millionaire Nancy Pelosi belittled the $1,000 bonuses as “crumbs.” Tell that to families bringing in $25,000 to $50,000 a year. The House Minority Leader is completely out of touch with average families.

The Democrats need bogeymen, scapegoats, distractions – to deflect attention away from this lunacy. That’s the best way to explain the Cuomo and De Blasio press stunts this past week.

Rather than confronting public sector unions and rabid greens – or supporting onshore and offshore drilling and fracking that would create jobs and improve economies in poor counties far from Albany and Manhattan, generate tax revenues, and reduce electricity prices – the gov railed against the new $10,000 cap on how much of their state and local taxes “the rich” NY residents can deduct on their federal forms.

Mr. Cuomo proposes to transform personal income taxes into corporate payroll taxes, or even charitable deductions! California is trying the same ploy. Friendly IRS auditors will be busy shutting that down.

Meanwhile, Mayor De Blasio went on a rant against fossil fuels – announcing that the city is suing five major oil companies for billions of dollars in “climate damages,” and insisting that the Big Apple must divest its police, teacher and other public pensions from any and all fossil fuel stocks.

Energy stocks are leading the latest US stock market rally, fossil fuels will continue providing 75-80% of US and global energy for decades to come, resurgent economies overseas are booming thanks to coal, oil and natural gas, and forecasters are predicting $80-per-barrel oil in 2018, as demand surges. So Liberal Logic says it’s time to divest from fossil fuels – and maybe switch to ideologically sympatico holdings, like subsidized wind turbines or booming economies like Argentina, Venezuela and North Korea.

Greenhouse gas emissions produced disasters like Superstorm Sandy, De Blasio railed. “I remember those days. I remember how desperate it was, how much fear and confusion there was. This tragedy was wrought by the actions of fossil fuel companies.” Now New York needs $20 billion “to build resilience against rising seas, more powerful storms and hotter temperatures.”

Nice try, Mr. Mayor. But blaming sub-hurricane-strength Sandy for the actions and incompetence of city and state officials won’t cut it. As environmental consultant Pat Moffitt and I explained in great detail in a three-part series (here, here and here) several months after the storm pounded the NYC area, fossil fuels and GHGs had zero to do with the damages – any more than they did for Harvey, Irma or other storms.

They likewise played no role in California’s wildfires and mudslides, despite Governor Jerry Brown’s scapegoating insistence that GHG emissions are responsible for that too. It’s all self-serving fraud.

Fuel oil and natural gas got millions of New Yorkers and New Englanders through the recent record cold snap, while wind turbines froze up, solar panels went AWOL, and Al Gore blamed the cold on global warming! But who are we to argue with Hizzoner da Mare about fossil fuels, dangerous manmade climate change, Sandy or divestment? He might sic his RICO attack dogs on us again.

Indeed, such prosecutions are part and parcel of the new leftist-fascist world order, under which partisans, politicians and professors shut down debate, impose uniform thinking, decree corporate policy, and even punish intolerable contrarian views with physical violence when those views threaten their “safe spaces.”

It’s not yet as dicey as getting into a Moscow elevator. But one climate doomsayer wants to ship climate chaos skeptics to a Kerguelen Island gulag off Antarctica, where he probably assumes they could watch the entire continent melt – from GHG emissions, if not from the volcanoes and magma beneath its ice.

Antifa leftist-fascists have learned well from their predecessors and contemporaries, but are now employing their technological prowess as well. Google and Facebook use clever algorithms to steer searches and help liberal news and views reach audiences, while conservative perspectives get shunted to the “back pages.” Google now displays “fact checks” next to Daily Caller and other conservative views, though not with liberal leaning stories; Snopes says its fake news, but others say it’s absolutely true.

Twitter allegedly uses “shadow banning” algorithms to make users think their tweets have been posted, when in fact they’ve been sent to cyber oblivion. And talk show host Dennis Prager is suing YouTube for using “restricted mode filtering” to keep PragerU educational videos from reaching audiences. The LA Times and other liberal papers won’t even publish letters to the editor challenging climate alarmism.

Former Colorado Democratic Governor Richard Lamm would instantly recognize these tyrannical tactics. In 2005, Mr. Lamm said they were integral parts of an eight-step program to “destroy America.” (This audio of the talk on YouTube must have escaped their censors.)

The future of our free speech and other democratic safeguards and institutions is at stake. So is the future of sound, evidence-based science, on climate and other topics – and of reliable, affordable energy.

Blue State officials, unions and activists may be delighted with how their agenda is “progressing.” The rest of the United States … and world … are not so happy.

Via email

Benny Peiser & Matt Ridley: Bad Weather Is No Reason for Climate Alarm

Events such as hurricanes and wildfires are too often blamed on our slowly warming, slightly wetter planet

Two weeks ago, President Donald Trump greeted the cold snap that was gripping much of the U.S. by tweeting, “Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming.” He was criticized for confusing weather with climate. But he’s hardly alone in making this mistake, as we have seen in coverage of the most destructive weather-related events of 2017.

The past year was filled with bad weather news, much of it tragic, with whole communities even now still struggling to recover. Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, and Hurricane Irma struck Florida and Puerto Rico after devastating other Caribbean islands. Wildfires torched the dry expanses of Napa and Ventura counties in California, and Australia experienced severe heat waves.

It has become routine for the media, politicians and activists to link such awful events with climate change. The basic claim is that the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is causing more extreme weather of every kind—more droughts, floods and hurricanes. This comes in addition to concerns that a rise in global temperatures will have potentially dire effects in the long term on polar ice and sea levels.

By looking at the world as a whole, however, and at long-term trends (climate) rather than at short-term events (weather), we can better test the claims that 2017 was an unusual weather year and that weather is getting more extreme as the world warms. This global and long-term view also puts other possible threats from climate change in perspective.

While the U.S. witnessed record damages in 2017, the rest of the world was actually hit by far fewer natural disasters than usual. On average, the globe suffers some 325 catastrophic natural disasters a year, but last year (through November) they were down to around 250, according to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at the University of Leuven in Belgium. A third fewer people were killed by climate-related hazards, according to the Centre’s International Disaster Database.

As for major weather events and the most prominent indicators of long-term climate trends, here is a rough scorecard for 2017:

Temperature: The past three years have set global records for high temperatures, partly thanks to the recurring warm-water El Ni?o cycle in the Pacific Ocean. Moreover, temperatures have been at historic highs since 2000, with 16 of the 17 warmest years on record. But average surface temperatures have dropped by a half degree Celsius since the El Ni?o peak in 2016, according to the UK’s Met Office, and are now almost back to pre-El Ni?o levels.

Though temperatures have increased, the rise is not accelerating and has fallen short of the most authoritative projections. In 1990, the first assessment report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that temperatures would rise at the rate of 0.3 degree Celsius per decade, equivalent to 3 degrees Celsius (or 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) a century. In fact, temperatures have risen since 1990 at between 0.121 and 0.198 degrees Celsius per decade, depending on which of the best data sets is used—that is, at a third to two-thirds of the rate projected by the IPCC.

Hurricanes: In August, Harvey made landfall near Corpus Christi as a Category 4 storm, ending a record 12-year period without a major U.S. hurricanes. Last year’s Atlantic hurricane season was particularly hyperactive, ranking as the seventh most intense Atlantic season since records began in 1851.

But cyclones (as hurricanes are known elsewhere) are found in all three tropical oceans, and globally the Accumulated Cyclone Energy index—which measures the combined intensity and duration of these storms—is currently running 20% below its long-term average. In fact, the index for 2017 was less than half of normal cyclone activity for the Southern Hemisphere.

SOURCE

Global warming scientists not completely honest

At least some of the global warming scientists are a little honest, for they do use terms like “on record” when making their claims about global warming. They are not completely honest, because they do not reveal just how long records have been kept, or that many methods have changed over the years on how things are measured, nor do they say that they have new discoveries and just add them to the mix. So, just how accurate are their records?

When speaking about the fires in Montana, at least some do use “on record,” which is written down and not handed down from generation to generation in verbal form, which can change with each telling.

It is nice when they do admit that fire suppression has added to making fires far greater than they would have been. If this is the case, maybe it is time we allow the fires to go until they burn themselves out. I know this is a bit out of line, for now we have permanent structures and not like the Indians that could move quickly to escape the fires. Yet there must be a balance in this, not always tipped to one direction or the other.

The scientists push wind and solar. Neither of them is always reliable and both use coal or natural gas generation for a backup at this time. These two backup electric resources may not be around if not enough folks support them. Maybe the government will take them over. Also, no one speaks about how dirty it is to build solar-panels. What of the batteries they propose? Batteries do wear out. What do we do with them when their time is over, as they are dirty? Both use materials that are mined. They are against mining, but then I reckon mining is OK if it helps their cause.

No one speaks about how long these alternate sources of power will require subsidies in the way of tax breaks and the like, nor how long the power company will have to pay higher rates for their power which is passed along to Montana's most vulnerable: the poor and elderly, which will require more power assistance.

So the cycle goes.

SOURCE

End of a free ride for electric cars?

In 2018, Australia's roads are plagued with problems: the long-term decline in the road death toll has slowed, congestion is tipped to increase and long commutes are linked to poor mental health.

And now a multi-billion-dollar road funding black hole looms.

It's caused by the growing popularity of fuel-efficient cars, prompting a multi-generational reset to national roads policy which will change how you pay to drive.

For the people who rely most on their vehicles, that means trouble.

Australians are big users of roads, and they pay for the privilege … even if most don't know exactly how.

Car is by far the most common way to get to work. About two out of three travel to work this way. And that number is increasing — it's up by more than half a million since 2011.

Behind the wheel, pulling out from your garage onto the street, it might seem like access to roads is free.

But the average vehicle is actually charged more than $1,300 by state and federal governments each year, according to information from the Productivity Commission.

That's on top of fees paid directly for toll roads or parking.

The largest component is fuel excise — the tax paid on every litre of petrol, of about 40 cents — which goes to the Federal Government.

All up, governments spend approximately the same amount of money on road infrastructure as they receive from drivers.

At more than $12 billion of new engineering work done for the public sector per year, it's greater than the spending on energy, telecommunications and water combined.

But even with today's road outlays, the cost of congestion — which covers environmental, health and social impacts, plus what you could be spending your time on otherwise — is tipped to increase more than 5 per cent annually over the next 15 years in a recent report by Deloitte.

Fuel excise means — for most drivers at least — the more they drive, the more they pay.

However, low-emission vehicles are letting some drivers get away charge-free.

The CSIRO has predicted revenue coming from fuel excise will drop by almost half by 2050.

Urban Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher argues the current road funding system has "some features that don't seem very fair".

If you are able to buy a $125,000 Tesla, the amount you pay through fuel excise to use the roads is zero.

"If you're buying a 10-year-old Commodore, the amount you're paying is effectively four-and-a-half cents per kilometre."

The Federal Government is looking at ways to more closely link how people use the roads with what they pay.

Mr Fletcher will soon announce the terms of reference of the formal review into this concept, known as "road pricing" or "road user charging", and similar trials for trucks are earmarked for 2018.

The ultimate solution might link how much drivers pay to their car's GPS tracker. Instead of a rough fuel-based taxation method, the result would be accurate to the metre: the further you drive, the more tax you pay.

In a trial in the US state of Oregon, all drivers were charged one-and-a-half US cents per mile — no matter how fuel efficient their car was.

An overhaul of road funding such as this would require support from the states.

SOURCE

Explaining ice ages

Matt Ridley

Orbital wobbles, carbon dioxide and dust all seem to contribute
An expanded version of my recent Times column on ice ages:

Record cold in America has brought temperatures as low as minus 44C in North Dakota, frozen sharks in Massachusetts and iguanas falling from trees in Florida. Al Gore blames global warming, citing one scientist to the effect that this is “exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis”. Others beg to differ: Kevin Trenberth, of America’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research, insists that “winter storms are a manifestation of winter, not climate change”.

Forty-five years ago a run of cold winters caused a “global cooling” scare. “A global deterioration of the climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilised mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon,” read a letter to President Nixon in 1972 from two scientists reporting the views of 42 “top” colleagues. “The cooling has natural causes and falls within the rank of the processes which caused the last ice age.” The administration replied that it was “seized of the matter”.

In the years that followed, newspapers, magazines and television documentaries rushed to sensationalise the coming ice age. The CIA reported a “growing consensus among leading climatologists that the world is undergoing a cooling trend”. The broadcaster Magnus Magnusson pronounced on a BBC Horizon episode that “unless we learn otherwise, it will be prudent to suppose that the next ice age could begin to bite at any time”.

Newsweek ran a cover story that read, in part: “The central fact is that, after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the Earth seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.”

This alarm about global cooling has largely been forgotten in the age of global warming, but it has not entirely gone away. Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University has suggested that a quiescent sun presages another Little Ice Age like that of 1300-1850. I’m not persuaded. Yet the argument that the world is slowly slipping back into a proper ice age after 10,000 years of balmy warmth is in essence true. Most interglacial periods, or times without large ice sheets, last about that long, and ice cores from Greenland show that each of the past three millennia was cooler than the one before.

However, those ice cores, and others from Antarctica, can now put our minds to rest. They reveal that interglacials start abruptly with sudden and rapid warming but end gradually with many thousands of years of slow and erratic cooling. They have also begun to clarify the cause. It is a story that reminds us how vulnerable our civilisation is. If we aspire to keep the show on the road for another 10,000 years, we will have to understand ice ages.

Burning coal, Arrhenius said, was therefore a good thing: “By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates.”

There is indeed a correlation in the ice cores between temperature and carbon dioxide. There is less CO2 in the air when the world is colder and more when it is warmer. An ice core from Vostok in Antarctica found in the late 1990s that CO2 is in lock-step with temperature -- more CO2, warmer; less CO2, colder. As Al Gore put it sarcastically in his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, looking at the Vostok graphs: “Did they ever fit together? Most ridiculous thing I ever heard.” So Arrhenius was right? Is CO2 level the driver of ice ages?
Well, not so fast. Inconveniently, the correlation implies causation the wrong way round: at the end of an interglacial, such as the Eemian period, over 100,000 years ago, carbon dioxide levels remain high for many thousands of years while temperature fell steadily. Eventually CO2 followed temperature downward. Here is a chart showing that. If carbon dioxide was a powerful cause, it would not show such a pattern. The world could not cool down while CO2 remained high.
In any case, what causes the carbon dioxide levels to rise and fall? In 1990 the oceanographer John Martin came up with an ingenious explanation. During ice ages, there is lots of dust blowing around the world, because the continents are dry and glaciers are grinding rocks. Some of that dust falls in the ocean, where its iron-rich composition fertilizes plankton blooms, whose increased photosynthesis draws down the carbon dioxide from the air. When the dust stops falling, the plankton blooms fail and the carbon dioxide levels rise, warming the planet again.

Neat. But almost certainly too simplistic. We now know, from Antarctic ice cores, that in each interglacial, rapid warming began when CO2 levels were very low. Temperature and carbon dioxide rise together, and there is no evidence for a pulse of CO2 before any warming starts, if anything the reverse. Well, all right, said scientists, but carbon dioxide is a feedback factor – an amplifier. Something else starts the warming, but carbon dioxide reinforces it. Yet the ice cores show that in each interglacial cooling returned when CO2 levels were very high and they remained high for tens of thousands of years as the cooling continued. Even as a feedback, carbon dioxide looks feeble.

Here is an essay by Willis Eschenbach discussing this issue. He comes to five conclusions as to why CO2 cannot be the main driver and why the feedback effect is probably small:

The correspondence with log(CO2) is slightly worse than that with CO2. The CO2 change is about what we’d expect from oceanic degassing. CO2 lags temperature in the record. Temperature Granger-causes CO2, not the other way round. And (proof by contradiction) IF the CO2 were controlling temperature the climate sensitivity would be seven degrees per doubling, for which there is no evidence.

Now, the standard response from AGW supporters is that the CO2, when it comes along, is some kind of positive feedback that makes the temperature rise more than it would be otherwise. Is this possible? I would say sure, it’s possible … but that we have no evidence that that is the case. In fact, the changes in CO2 at the end of the last ice age argue that there is no such feedback. You can see in Figure 1 that the temperatures rise and then stabilize, while the CO2 keeps on rising. The same is shown in more detail in the Greenland ice core data, where it is clear that the temperature fell slightly while the CO2 continued to rise.

As I said, this does not negate the possibility that CO2 played a small part. Further inquiry into that angle is not encouraging, however. If we assume that the CO2 is giving 3° per doubling of warming per the IPCC hypothesis, then the problem is that raises the rate of thermal outgassing up to 17 ppmv per degree of warming instead of 15 ppmv. This is in the wrong direction, given that the cited value in the literature is lower at 12.5 ppmv
So what does cause ice ages to come and go?

A Serbian scientist named Milutin Milankovich, writing in 1941, published a lengthy book called “Canon of Insolation of the Earth and Its Application to the Problem of the Ice Ages”. He argued that ice ages and interglacials were caused by changes in the orbit of the Earth around the sun. These changes, known as eccentricity, obliquity and precession, sometimes combined to increase the relative warmth of northern hemisphere summers, melting ice caps in North America and Eurasia and spreading warmth worldwide. This, said Milankovich, was “the hitherto missing link between celestial mechanics and geology”.

The northern hemisphere matters because no matter how warm the southern summer gets, Antarctica, being at much higher latitude, stays cold and (reflective) white.

In 1976 Nicholas Shackleton, a Cambridge physicist, and his colleagues published a paper called “Variations in the Earth’s Orbit – Pacemaker of the Ice Ages” with evidence from deep-sea cores of cycles in the warming and cooling of the Earth over the past half million years which fitted Milankovich’s orbital wobbles.

In a brilliant insight, Shackleton had realised that sediments taken from the ocean floor and analysed for different isotopes of oxygen could serve as a proxy for climate. The lighter isotopes of oxygen evaporated more readily from the sea, and therefore were more likely to fall as snow and get stuck on ice caps in cold periods, returning to the sea when the ice melted. So the relative concentration of the lighter isotopes in sea-floor sediments were a sort of thermometer.

Precession, which decides whether the Earth is closer to the sun in July or in January, is on a 23,000-year cycle; obliquity, which decides how tilted the axis of the Earth is and therefore how warm the summer is, is on a 41,000-year cycle; and eccentricity, which decides how rounded or elongated the Earth’s orbit is and therefore how close to the sun the planet gets, is on a 100,000-year cycle. When these combine to make a “great summer” in the north, the ice caps shrink.

Game, set and match to Milankovich? Not quite. The Antarctic ice cores, going back 800,000 years, then revealed that there were some great summers when the Milankovich wobbles should have produced an interglacial warming, but did not. To explain these “missing interglacials”, a recent paper in Geoscience Frontiers by Ralph Ellis and Michael Palmer argues we need carbon dioxide back on the stage, not as a greenhouse gas but as plant food.

The argument goes like this. Colder oceans evaporate less moisture and rainfall decreases. At the depth of the last ice age, Africa suffered long mega-droughts; only small pockets of rainforest remained. Crucially, the longer an ice age lasts, the more carbon dioxide is dissolved in the cold oceans. When the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere drops below 200 parts per million (0.02 per cent), plants struggle to grow at all, especially at high altitudes. Deserts expand. Dust storms grow more frequent and larger. In the Antarctic ice cores, dust increased markedly whenever carbon dioxide levels got below 200 ppm. The dust would have begun to accumulate on the ice caps, especially those of Eurasia and North America, which were close to deserts. Next time a Milankovich great summer came along, and the ice caps began to melt, the ice would have grown dirtier and dirtier, years of deposited dust coming together as the ice shrank. The darker ice would have absorbed more heat from the sun and a runaway process of collapsing ice caps would have begun.

Here is an extract from the paper:

A more logical explanation for the inverse correlation between dust and CO2can be seen through the effect that CO2 concentrations have on plant life. Fig. 8 also shows that CO2 levels during each ice-age came all the way down to 190–180 ppm, and that is approaching dangerously low levels for C3 photosynthesis-pathway plant life. CO2 is a vital component of the atmosphere because it is an essential plant food, and without CO2 all plants die. In her comprehensive analysis of plant responses to reduced CO2 concentrations, Gerhart says of this fundamental issue:

It is clear that modern C3 plant genotypes grown at low CO2 (180–200 ppm) exhibit severe reductions in photosynthesis, survival, growth, and reproduction … Such findings beg the question of how glacial plants survived during low CO2 periods … Studies have shown that the average biomass production of modern C3 plants is reduced by approximately 50% when grown at low (180–220 ppm) CO2, when other conditions are optimal … (The abortion of all flower buds) suggested that 150 ppm CO2 may be near the threshold for successful completion of the life cycle in some C3 species (Gerhart and Ward, 2010 Section II).

It is clear that a number of plant species would have been under considerable stress when world CO2 concentrations reduced to 200 or 190 ppm during the glacial maximum, especially if moisture levels in those regions were low (Gerhart and Ward, 2010; Pinto et al., 2014). And palaeontological discoveries at the La Brea tar pits in southern California have confirmed this, where oxygen and carbon isotopic analysis of preserved juniperus wood dating from 50 kyr ago through to the Holocene interglacial has shown that: ‘glacial trees were undergoing carbon starvation’ (Ward et al., 2005). And yet these stresses and biomass reductions do not appear to become lethal until CO2 concentrations reach 150 ppm, which the glacial maximums did not achieve - unless we add altitude and reducing CO2 partial pressures into the equation.

All of human civilisation happened in an interglacial period, with a relatively stable climate, plentiful rainfall and high enough levels of carbon dioxide to allow the vigorous growth of plants. Agriculture was probably impossible before then, and without its hugely expanded energy supply, none of the subsequent flowering of human culture would have happened.

That interglacial will end. Today the northern summer sunshine is again slightly weaker than the southern. In a few tens of thousands of years, our descendants will probably be struggling with volatile weather, dust storms and air that cannot support many crops. But that is a very long way off, and by then technology should be more advanced, unless we prevent it developing. The key will be energy. With plentiful and cheap energy our successors could thrive even in a future ice age, growing crops, watering deserts, maintaining rainforests and even melting ice caps.

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 January, 2018

Washington Governor Claims ‘Just 59 Days’ To Save Children From Global Warming

What's eating fools like this? Don't they know how absurd they will look in the near future?

Washington state’s Democratic Governor Jay Inslee warned there was “just 59 days” to save future generations from “an endless cycle of crop-killing droughts one year, and rivers spilling their banks the next.”

Inslee went on a lengthy Twitter rant in efforts to convince the state legislature to pass legislation to tax carbon dioxide emissions. Washington residents voted down Inslee’s last carbon tax plan by a wide margin in 2016.

The state legislature’s session ends in 59 days, on March 8. Democrats have a slim majority in both state legislative chambers.

Inslee wants lawmakers to pass a tax on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and industrial facilities.

The plan could raise household electricity prices five percent, and gas prices by about 10 percent, according to official estimates.

SOURCE

Sir Porritt's Island of Climate Criminals

Tony Thomas

The Kerguelen islands are horridly cold and windy specks near the Antarctic, populated by a few score of French scientists and several thousand sheep. But to a leading British green group, Forum for the Future, it has enormous potential as an internationally-run penal colony for global warming sceptics.

The Forum's founder-director is Jonathon Porritt, 67, Eton- and Oxford-bred Chancellor of Keele University, adviser to Prince Charles, and Green Party activist. [1] The Forum's fancy for Kerguelen can be found in its 76-page report "Climate Futures - Responses to Climate Change in 2030", written in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard, a company which should know better. This scenario, one of five, involves the naughty world delaying the reduction of emissions, for which we must all suffer. The document even conjures a fictional climate criminal and imagines him being deported to Kerguelen in 2028. He is Jean-Claude Bertillon, leader of the No Climate Change Party in Canada, "convicted of denying the existence of climate change".

The report actually fantasises three penal colonies which, from the context, must be for for climate criminals. The other two are Britain's frosty South Georgia[2] and the South Island of New Zealand. [Extreme ignorance there. The South Island is idyllic] Written in 2008, the document attempts to show how CO2 emissions will wreck the planet within a couple of decades unless civilisation turns away from the sins of consumerism and economic growth. As we are now almost half-way to the 2030 forecast date it is possible to get a handle on how the Forum's timeline is working out, and perhaps to gain an inkling of any substance to the report’s assertion that our descendants will look back on us with the same disgust we reserve for the slave-owners of yesteryear.

The authors — and Porritt himself — long for an eco-catastrophe that would eliminate all public doubts about climate doom. Their manifesto says,

"Because of a chilling lack of confidence in our leaders . our only hope would be for an isolated, serious pre-taste of climate change to happen soon enough for the political and behavioral response to have a useful impact.”

This is probably wishful thinking, as Porritt, founder director of Forum for the Future and chair of the UK's Sustainable Development Commission, pointed out:

`I have occasionally fantasised about a low mortality-count scenario where a Force Six hurricane takes out Miami, but with plenty of warning so the entire city is evacuated with zero loss of life. The insurance industry in America would collapse because this could be a $50-60 billion climate-related `natural' disaster. The industry wouldn't be able to cope with that. There would be knock-on pain throughout the global economy, massive, traumatic dislocation. This would act as enough of an injection of physical reality, coupled with financial consequences for leaders to say: `Ok, we've got it now. This isn't just about some nasty effects on poor countries: this is devastating for our entire model of progress.' The response to that would be a negotiated transition towards a very low-carbon global economy that builds increased prosperity for people in more equitable and sustainable ways.'"

The report says its five scenarios are all possible, based on “a review of the current science” and “input from scores of experts.” In all five scenarios global warming and extreme weather are, of course, far worse and more perilous than even the 2007 IPCC report suggested.[3] Here are some of its prescribed green correctives:

Expensive, state-funded information campaigns reinforce the need for changes to lifestyles and aim to keep the mandate for state intervention strong. Inevitably parallels are drawn between this and the authoritarian state propaganda of the twentieth century.

"`Climate crime' is a social faux pas everywhere, but in some countries it is a crime to publicly question the existence of anthropogenic climate change or to propose actions that could in some way contribute to climate change.

"It is very rare to come across dissenting voices with any real power, but resistance to overly strong state intervention is occasionally violent. The media in some countries has been permitted to discuss whether the single focus on resolving climate change means that other equally important or inter-linked issues are being ignored." (Report's emphasis, not mine)

Meanwhile,

"in some countries a licence is now required to have children and these are awarded according to a points system. Climate-friendly behaviour means points.

"It is not unusual for governments to monitor household energy consumption in real time, with warnings sent to homes that exceed their quotas. For example, citizens could be told to turn off certain appliances such as washing machines or kettles or even have them switched off remotely."

In 2014 Harvard luminary Naomi Oreskes forecast the extinction of all Australians amid climate woes. The Future Forum is more moderate, envisaging merely the abandonment of waterless central Australia, a "collapse of Australian agriculture", and a "particularly toxic" combination of drought and recession.[4]

In what the Forum authors call "alarming reading", Australia's Friends of the Earth climate experts predict the disappearance of Arctic summer ice by 2013, "almost a century earlier than suggested by the IPCC". The actual 2013 minimum was about five million square kilometres of sea ice, and it was a bit more than that last year.

The authors let slip some of the green's secret tradecraft, in terms of their projected advances in fostering ever-creeping state control under the smokescreen of controlling emissions:

"In most cases this has happened gradually, ratcheting up over time, with citizens surrendering control of their lives piecemeal rather than all at once, as trading regimes, international law, lifestyles and business have responded to the growing environmental crisis. And so in 2030, greenhouse gas emissions are beginning to decline, but the cost to individual liberty has been great."

One is hardly surprised to find such a green-minded document citing Cuba as a beacon of hope for quality of life. But also Nicaragua and Bhutan?

There is the distinct possibility that non-western development paths could gain greater credence. At one extreme, the development strategies adopted today by Cuba, Bhutan, Nicaragua or Thailand could be the pioneers of future diversity. Here, new priorities, particularly around `quality of life', have sidelined many aspects of traditional western development models.

Here are some snippets from the scenarios.

2009-18: Global depression and harrowing malnutrition are caused by high oil and commodity prices. In 2017, "authorities (are) warned to prepare for a `suicide epidemic' in the US caused by the Depression." [Reality: Dow Jones index now at record levels and oil prices relatively low.]

2018: Reunification of Korea with Pyongyang as the capital. [Great work, Kim Jong-un!]

2020: The year of no winter in the northern hemisphere.
[Right now, the US and Europe are blanketed by extreme cold and snowfalls].

2022: Oil hits US$400 a barrel [current price: US$60],[5] making world trade and air travel prohibitively expensive. The carbon price makes carbon "one of the most important and expensive commodities in the world today". [In reality the carbon futures price has collapsed to about US$8 a tonne. Labor's Rudd-Gillard carbon price was about $A23.]

2026: NATO has defined breaking the 2020 Beijing Climate Change Agreement as an attack on all its members, to be defended by military force.

2029: Planned permanent settlement of the Antarctic Peninsula, taking people from climate-stressed countries. Styled as the first true global community, its population is projected to be 3.5 million by 2040.

2030: Waterless Oklahoma has been abandoned. Texas becomes independent [so much for the Civil War of 1861-65].

2030: "The US president launches a re-election campaign with a populist speech entitled `What is the Point of the UN?' after a debate in New York descends into factional chaos." [Donald Trump last month beat the forecaste by 13 years].

Some predictions in the document are quite good, albeit easy ones. Try these:

2026: Supercomputer Alf-8 correctly predicts general strike in France. [Well, doh!]

2012-30: China is accused of lying and cheating on its emissions pledges.

The document's part-hidden agenda is propaganda for the lunatic "simplicity movement" in which everyone returns to an idyll of backyard vegetables and disdain for material things, such as cars and toasters. For example, in 2022 "a general retailer in the UK announces that it has sold more wool for home use than manufactured knitwear for the first time in its history." In other words, won’t it be wonderful when we all have to knit our own clothes.[6] [7]

The authors also take for another run the failed Club of Rome's 1972 "Limits to Growth" diagnosis: “Prices for raw materials are very high and getting higher, having major impacts on manufacturing processes and the world economy. Proposals have been tabled for commercial mining ventures on the moon. The world is in a deadly race to develop new processes before resources run out completely.”

In a passage obviously written by academics, the academics become the heroes of the future: "Communications like the `world wide internet' have fragmented. A small group of academics preserve a global network, their dream to `re-unite' the world."

The report's best prediction, undoubtedly, is for an upsurge in rent-a-bikes. I counted four of those yellow oBikes on my dog-walking path just this morning.

Tony Thomas's book of essays, That's Debatable - 60 Years in Print, is available here

[1] One of his predecessors as Keele Chancellor was Princess Margaret (1962-86).

[2] South Georgia's national day each September 4 is dedicated to the Patagonian toothfish.

[3] "The scenarios are based on wide research and consultation and a rigorous methodology."

[4] The 2017 reality: Australia's winter grain harvest last year was down 40% on 2016, which had smashed records by 30%. World crop production hit a record, thanks partly to higher CO2 levels and mild long-term warming. Wheat production, for example, was at a record 750 million metric tonnes.

[5] In 2008, when the report was written, oil was at US$150 a barrel

[6] I tried knitting during train trips to school at age 14 but my outputs were never successful.

[7] A nest of "simplicity" people currently push the same line at Melbourne University's Sustainable Society Institute. The green-infested Australian Academy of Science hosted a Fenner conference for zero-growthers in 2014, some of them advocating 90% cuts to Australia living standards.

SOURCE

Go on, California — blow up your lousy zoning laws

Some rare sense from Boston:

GO ON, CALIFORNIA. Do it. Blow up the zoning laws that choke off new housing and force chefs, nursing assistants, and college professors to live in their cars.

A state senator from San Francisco recently filed legislation to sweep away minimum-parking requirements, limits on density, and certain other restrictions on residential housing construction within a half-mile of a train station and a quarter-mile of stops on high-frequency bus routes. Senator Scott Wiener’s bill would promote bigger, taller new buildings in transit-rich urban areas across California.

The bill may be the biggest environmental boon, the best job creator, and the greatest strike against inequality that anyone’s proposed in the United States in decades.

Ease up on zoning limits, and private developers — with their own money — will create millions of new units in urban areas, absorbing the influx of tech and finance bros, freeing up homes for everyone else, and creating lots of construction jobs along the way. Make room for more people in some of the world’s most economically productive metro areas, and the whole country benefits.

Thriving cities need room to grow. According to a new report by the real-estate website Trulia, two-thirds of homes in San Francisco are now valued at $1 million or more, up from 22 percent since 2012. In the Boston area, the situation isn’t that dire — yet — but the percentage of homes with million-dollar values has nearly doubled in five years.

In the rare event Wiener’s bill passes, it might just persuade pricey enclaves around the country, including Eastern Massachusetts, that the cure for a housing crisis doesn’t have to be complex.

Recently, Governor Charlie Baker proposed a modest housing package, including a grant program for cities and towns that ease their zoning, plus modest legislation that would allow local government bodies to approve denser home construction by a simple majority, rather than a two-thirds vote. There have been other efforts on Beacon Hill to loosen up zoning rules statewide — for instance, by designating areas where developers can build housing without seeking special permission and by giving people freer rein to carve granny apartments out of existing houses — but progress has been slow. The House in particular has protected the ability of cities and towns to say no.

Meanwhile, even some people who consider themselves housing advocates are in thrall to the left-wing version of climate-change denial: the belief that building more units pushes prices up, not down. At last year’s state Democratic convention, a band of progressives tried — and, blessedly, failed — to change the party platform to remove language supporting market-rate housing. (Rule of thumb: If your plan to lower housing costs depends on overthrowing the laws of capitalism, it’s not a plan at all.)

In California, opponents of Wiener’s bill argue, predictably, that he’s shilling for developers and, more imaginatively, that the bill serves a white-supremacist agenda. But any suggestion that today’s zoning promotes equity is nothing short of astonishing.

Zoning has an ugly history. In a startling book entitled “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,” author Richard Rothstein details the thousands of steps that federal, state, and local officials took over decades to keep African-Americans from moving into white areas. When courts invalidated explicit racial zoning, cities and towns from coast to coast imposed codes that restricted the construction of multifamily housing — a more legally defensible way to keep supposed undesirables out.

Today, we justify zoning as a way of protecting schools and homes from slaughterhouses and chemical plants. Fair enough. But having long ago vanquished genuine nuisances, upscale homeowners have moved on to fighting threats like height and shadows. When people are offered the chance to tell other people what they can and can’t do with their property, it’s too tempting to turn down.

Many of the most beloved neighborhoods in the Boston area were built before the advent of zoning, and they didn’t need it to develop as nicely as they did. And once neighborhood groups decide that stricter is better, it’s hard to stop — which is why vast areas of Greater Boston cannot legally be rebuilt under current zoning.

California’s housing problems are like ours, but only more so. Population growth there has been far faster, and many of the land-use laws there are stricter. As a result, housing prices out there have spiraled much farther out of control.

On the upside, if and when the government legalizes more housing construction, the housing market will respond quickly. In the year since California eased restrictions on granny flats, the number of applications to build the units in Los Angeles has risen 20-fold. Now the Golden State has a chance to do something far bolder.

Come on, California. Don’t be shy.

SOURCE

True & Staggering Cost of Intermittent & Unreliable Wind Power – Unplugged

The total cost of attempting to incorporate intermittent, unreliable and chaotic wind power into a grid designed around stable, controllable, dispatchable power generation is utterly staggering.

In those places attempting to run on sunshine and breezes, grid managers are forced to regularly intervene, compelling the owners of conventional fossil-fuelled generation plant (coal and gas) to burn fuel and remain online, even when the wind is blowing which, due to the subsidies provided to wind power, prevents them from dispatching power to the grid and earning revenue from doing so. Compensating the owners of coal and gas-fired plant for burning fuel for no commercially defined purpose (other than keeping the grid from collapsing) has a cost.

The alternative to these massive ‘capacity payments’ is simply allowing the chaotic delivery of wind power to destroy the stability of otherwise reliable grids, outright.

There are 3 electricity essentials – that the power source and its delivery to homes and businesses be: 1) reliable; 2) secure; and 3) affordable. Wind power – a wholly weather dependent power source, that can’t be stored (save at the margins in the odd, insanely expensive Tesla battery) and costs 3-4 times the cost of conventional power – scores NIL on all three counts.

Over time, STT has sought to pull together fairly technical aspects of power generation in an effort to demonstrate the patent nonsense of wind power.

We’ve attempted to cover the engineering and economics of trying to add a chaotic power source to a grid designed around narrow physical tolerances; and which requires constant second-by-second management to deliver that which – until wind power entered the equation – we all largely took for granted.

More HERE

Battling Climate Change from the Back Seat of an S.U.V.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has filed suit against big oil companies for their part in climate change, but he regularly rides around town in an S.U.V. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Purring in the mild winter day, a small armada of S.U.V.s was parked Thursday morning along 42nd Street outside the New York Public Library. Inside was Mayor Bill de Blasio, at an interfaith prayer breakfast that went on for quite a while.

By divine right of mayoralty, or someone, 13 vehicles waited at the curb in a no-standing zone, among them four black S.U.V.s (three Chevy Suburbans and one Yukon XL) an ambulance, a huge E.M.S. vehicle and a police school safety van. The engines on those big boys were running while the mayor was inside, for about two hours.

At least one of the S.U.V.s had Taxi and Limousine Commission plates. It may not have been part of the official mayoral entourage, but its dashboard was anointed with the holiest of government oils: a police placard giving it license to park where unblessed mortals cannot.

One day earlier, Mr. de Blasio announced that the city would sue five big oil companies for the hardships and costs inflicted on New York by climate change. For an archipelago city with 520 miles of coastline, rising seas are no joke. Among the targets of the suits was Exxon Mobil, whose own scientists found, as most scientists have, that climate change was real and that human behavior was contributing to it. Even so, Exxon supported organizations that attacked those very conclusions. In the suit, New York follows the lead of governments around the Bay Area in California that have filed similar cases.

Whatever the merits of the suit, Mr. de Blasio and his predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg, are the very embodiment of a possible line of defense by the oil companies. Namely, that it wasn’t the oil companies that created the greenhouse gases, but society in general — companies and individuals who used oil to generate electricity, or for transportation.

Many mornings, Mr. De Blasio is driven 11 miles to his gym in Park Slope, Brooklyn, from the official mayor’s residence on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Gracie Mansion.

Former Mayor Bloomberg, a billionaire, rode the subway most days. On the other hand, Mr. Bloomberg routinely splurged on carbon usage by deploying his personal fleet of carbon-inefficient private jets and helicopters for long-distance travel. He would use them to fly to a weekend home in Bermuda, for instance, or to Europe. In an episode so rich you could choke on it, Mr. Bloomberg brought an entourage aboard his personal Falcon 900 to Copenhagen, at a cost in carbon emissions that was 37 times more than if the group had flown commercial.

The reason for the trip? Mr. Bloomberg was speaking at a conference on climate change.

In New York, the police regard S.U.V.s as the most prudent for moving and protecting the mayor, and no one should begrudge any officials the security they need to carry out the work they do on behalf of the public. That goes for their recreation, at least for mayors, who put in long hours. At some point, every last one of them winds up splutteringly frayed or fried, so getting to a favorite gym probably helps keep Mr. de Blasio from losing his mind.

Just because it is easier to deplore hypocrisy in others than in ourselves does not make any of us immune to it. Hypocrisy is more widely practiced by humans than any creed. Mr. Bloomberg’s health department wanted restaurants to cut sodium from their recipes but he was known to shake salt on slices of pizza and saltine crackers.

Mr. de Blasio has made populism work for him politically, but apparently too much righteous posturing can be a strain on the middle-aged back. Within a five-minute walk of the 42nd Street Library are 13 subway lines that fan out to virtually every corner of the city. Still, Mayor de Blasio hopped into one of the S.U.V.s leaving the library — a relatively efficient hybrid model, his spokesman pointed out. “The mayor uses public transit as much as his schedule allows, and we’re always looking to use it more,” Eric Phillips, the spokesman, said.

When was the last time?

December 11, Mr. Phillips said.

In the afternoon, WBUR aired an interview with the mayor by Meghna Chakrabarti about Mr. de Blasio’s climate actions, which, besides the lawsuit, include a proposal to divest the city’s pension investments in fossil fuel companies. These weren’t political stunts, the mayor said, arguing that the lawsuit was akin to suits against tobacco companies.

Wouldn’t it be better to keep stocks in those companies and have a voice in changing them, the host asked.

“I think you have to vote with your feet sometimes,” Mr. de Blasio replied.

No kidding.

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 January, 2018

Warming and the Search for Climate Justice for the Poor

A slight temperature rise is THE big problem for the poor? It might hurt the Filipino farmer below somewhat, who looks like he is harvesting sugar-cane, but how come he is not sitting in the air-conditioned cabin of a big mechanical harvester? THAT is the real issue.

There are many things the poor need before they need to worry about the climate. Such as cheap electricity, cheap petroleum products and a government that is repealing laws and regulations rather than adding to them. That canecutter could be sitting in an airconditioned cabin and harvesting 100 times more cane than he is now if only his government had long ago decided to sit on its hands. China did it with resounding success so the way ahead for the poor of the 3rd world is clear. And it has nothing to do with climate

A far-reaching report being drafted by the United Nations' authoritative climate science panel explores in comprehensive detail the environmental justice, poverty and other human rights challenges facing the world as it pursues the urgent and daunting goals of the Paris Agreement.

"In a 1.5 degree Celsius warmer world"—a world we're likely to see by mid-century without a global transformation in the next decade, the latest version of the draft report says—"those most at risk will be individuals and communities experiencing multidimensional poverty, persistent vulnerabilities and various forms of deprivation and disadvantage."

To help protect them, it calls for policies "guided by concerns for equity and fairness and enhanced support for eradicating poverty and reducing inequalities."

In scope, scale and detail—but also in its careful attention to questions of ethics and justice—this report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a landmark work in progress.

The emerging report is more than 800 pages long, heavily footnoted and packed with graphics and sidebars. It lays out as never before "an assessment of current knowledge of the extent and interlinkages of the global environmental, economic, financial, social and technical conditions that a 1.5 degree Celsius warmer world represents." It takes on "complex ethics questions" that demand "interdisciplinary research and reflection."

How, it asks, will a 1.5 degree warmer world impact the human rights of the dispossessed, "including their rights to water, shelter, food, health and life? How will it affect the rights of the urban and rural poor, indigenous communities, women, children, the elderly and people with disabilities?"

The draft report gauges how the half-degree gap from 1.5 to 2 degrees of warming "amounts to a greater likelihood of drought, flooding, resource depletion, conflict and forced migration."

It notes that even if all the nations achieve their Paris pledges, the result will be worldwide emissions in 2030 that already lock in 1.5 degrees of warming by the end of this century. The temperature barrier would likely be broken by mid-century, as Reuters noted in first reporting on the draft study. Even the 2 degree target eventually would fall unless emissions are brought to zero, the IPCC and other agencies have repeatedly warned.

Either way, the outlook is dire, especially for the poor.

"The risks to human societies through impacts on health, livelihood, food and water security, human security and infrastructure are higher with 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming compared to today, and higher still with 2 degrees Celsius global warming compared with 1.5 degrees," the draft concludes.

"These risks are greatest for people facing multiple forms of poverty, inequality and marginalization; people in coastal communities and those dependent on agriculture; poor urban residents; and communities displaced from their homes."

Suitable pathways forward, the report said, must square the circle of energy use and sustainable development—not an easy task, but one that would pay off with a cleaner environment, better health, prospering ecosystems and other benefits. There would be risks for poverty, hunger and access to energy; those must be "alleviated by redistributive measures."
How to Move Forward?

The focus on justice and fairness is enlisted to press for substantial transformations of the energy landscape as emissions from fossil fuels are eliminated and changes in land management, among other steps, are pressed hard.

On the one hand, these remedies "are put at risk by high population growth, low economic development, and limited efforts to reduce energy demand," the report says. On the other hand, the solutions cannot be allowed to burden the poor.

SOURCE

IPCC says Paris goal is a crock

Bar a concerted global effort to reduce emissions and remove carbon from the atmosphere, the world is highly likely to exceed the most ambitious climate goal set by the Paris Agreement by the 2040s, according to a leaked draft of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report obtained by Reuters.

The IPCC is expected to release the final version of their highly anticipated Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C in October. The preliminary version obtained by Reuters was submitted to a small group of experts and government officials for review and was not meant for public release.

Every few years, the IPCC publishes an Assessment Report containing the available research about the current state of climate change. This year’s special report is the first focused on what is possibly the Paris Agreement’s most controversial climate goal: limiting global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

Though some countries are in strong support of taking action to ensure the world meets this climate goal, research has shown that we are highly unlikely to do so.

The draft of the special report obtained by Reuters seems to confirm this low probability of success: “There is very high risk that […] global warming will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels [should emissions continue at the current pace].”

The draft also states that meeting the climate goal would require an “unprecedented” leap from fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy and extensive reforms everywhere from industry to agriculture.

Additionally, while curbing global temperatures would help reduce some of the worst impacts of climate change, including sea level rise and droughts, it would not be enough to protect the planet’s most fragile ecosystems, including polar ice caps and coral reefs.

Political Motives?

While the findings currently included in the report confirm what the public may consider the worst-case scenario, scientists who have read the report are not surprised by its contents.

“The report is unexceptional,” Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics at the University of Cambridge, told Futurism. “It was already clear to every climate scientist that a 1.5 degrees Celsius warming limit would be breached by 2050 (in fact, probably much earlier) in the absence of drastic carbon capture measures.”

Gabriel Marty, a climate change analyst and former U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) delegate for France, told Futurism that it’s too soon to speculate on the content of the final report.

However, once it is released, he said readers should note the treatment of the uncertainties and risks of the so-called “bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)” technologies designed to suck carbon emissions out of the atmosphere.

“The risks associated [with heavily relying on these technologies] must be clearly outlined,” said Marty. “They do not exist yet, the scale that would be needed would be enormous, and the adverse impacts on land and water resources would likely be huge.”

According to sources familiar with the IPCC’s proceedings, the panel has been criticized in the past for being too coy about the limitations of BECCS and for understating their risks in order to present the 2 degrees Celsius target as “still viable.”

Wadhams also mentioned the possibility that the IPCC’s hesitation to release the special report itself could be politically motivated.

“The IPCC has long since become a political rather than a scientific organization, so their secretiveness and sensitivity about a perfectly ordinary report has some political motive,” he told Futurism.

"“A lot could still change between now and the final version.”"

Roz Pidcock, head of communications for the IPCC Working Group 1, told Futurism that that’s not the case. She said the fact that the special report is currently confidential has nothing to do with a lack of transparency on the part of the panel — they simply aren’t finished with it yet.

“All of the expert and government review comments that come in over the next few weeks are taken on board […] Just to give an idea of what that involves, the first draft of this report received 12,895 comments from nearly 500 expert reviewers around the world,” said Pidcock. “A lot could still change between now and the final version.”

We will need to wait until October for the IPCC’s final take on the viability of the extremely ambitious 1.5 degrees Celsius limit, but whatever the contents of the report, we can’t let it discourage us from taking the strongest action possible to prevent further damage to our planet.

SOURCE

The 'bomb cyclone' and Dems' energy disaster

A convergence of weather patterns created the nor'easter that brought frigid temperatures and snow to the eastern U.S. from Mississippi to Maine.

That "bomb cyclone" also exposed a perfect storm of President Obama's failed energy policies that threatens disastrous consequences for the nation.

Brutal cold strained the electric power grid. Utilities relying on natural gas for power generation clamored for supplies as fuel was diverted to heat homes and businesses. Further, a lack of pipelines created a bottleneck for delivering gas to power plants.

PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator serving 65 million people in the East, reports coal provided 40 percent of its power in the latest cold snap.

Recall that the Obama administration aggressively sought to eliminate coal from the nation's fuel mix. Unlike natural gas or renewables, which Obama favored, utilities can stockpile coal for immediate use when demand soars.

The Trump administration understands this, and the plan put forward by Energy Secretary Rick Perry appropriately prices coal against natural gas so utilities have the flexibility they need to ensure energy grid security.

On another energy front, the Northeast is heavily dependent on fuel oil for home heating, and the frigid temperatures left suppliers scrambling to meet demand.

But Obama-era policies on renewable fuels threaten the very existence of independent refiners in the Northeast.

WND has reported on the EPA's Rube Goldberg system for trading ethanol credits, known as RINs. Independent refiners are forced to spend millions under a compliance scheme that benefits speculators at the expense of energy producers and consumers.

Reforming the previous administration's renewable fuel mandate will ensure a steady supply of fuel oil for the Northeast without constructing one new pipeline, since the fuel will continue to be produced where it's consumed.

These are just two (extremely timely) examples of Obama policies that weakened America's energy security and endangered grid security. But there's more to the story.

Barack Obama declared war not only on coal - he wanted to phase out the use of all so-called fossil fuels under the banner of "environmentalism."

At one time, environmentalists promoted the use of natural gas, touting it as a clean-burning fuel. No more. The new green orthodoxy says it contributes to global warming and therefore must be banned.

Like his policies on Iran, Israel, immigration, health care, taxes, trade and regulation, President Trump's energy policies are a 180-degree reversal of Obama's.

The Trump administration understands that America's prosperity and security are intrinsically linked to energy. The administration's National Security Strategy identifies Energy Dominance as a pillar supporting national security.

President Trump has opened the oil and gas reserves lying off the nation's shores and in the Arctic hinterlands for production, and has plans to make more than 98 percent of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and gas resources in federal offshore areas available for future exploration and development.

It's time to understand the agenda of the radical environmentalists in the Democratic Party, an agenda they will never admit openly.

President Donald Trump has spared us from it. Last year he began and this year he will continue to undo the damage it has done to our nation and economy.

In November, it will be up to us to keep control of Congress so we can Make America Great Again

SOURCE

Now it's a "climate crisis"

Remember when global warming meant the planet was supposed to, well, warm up? Temperatures would rise, and all manner of ecological calamity would ensue?

Me too. So it was surprising to find myself shivering, like other Americans, through several days of arctic chill and extreme cold, only to hear Al Gore blame it on global warming.

He didn’t use the W-word, though. “It’s bitter cold in parts of the U.S., but climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann explains that’s exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis,” Mr. Gore tweeted on Jan. 4.

See, it’s a “climate crisis” now. But it’s hard to blame him for trying some rebranding. After all, prediction after prediction has come to naught. But no matter: Like other doomsday prophets, Mr. Gore just acts like the last missed deadline didn’t happen and comes up with a new one.

Which is why it’s important to remind ourselves of what Mr. Gore has said in the past. Consider, for example, how he said global warming would cause the north polar ice cap to be completely free of ice within five years. When did he say that? Nine years ago.

News flash: The Arctic still has ice. Indeed, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, “ice growth during November 2017 averaged 30,900 square miles per day.” Oops.

So how about the evidence for the latest cold snap? Mr. Gore’s source, Michael Mann, says the ultra-chilly temps we’ve been enduring are “precisely the sort of extreme winter weather we expect because of climate change.” As the planet warms, he says, we’ll see more cold snaps and “bomb cyclones.”

Seems counter-intuitive, but Mr. Mann suggests this is because warming is “causing the jet stream to meander in a particular pattern” that leads to these cold spells.

I use the word “suggests,” however, because this is simply a theory — one that other scientists are not sold on. (Mr. Gore and the rest of the climate-crisis crowd often act like their ideas are universally accepted — that the scientific community is in complete agreement with them. But there is more room for doubt and disagreement than they care to admit.)

Just ask Kevin Trenberth, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Winter storms are a manifestation of winter, not climate change,” he recently told The Daily Caller. “The Arctic is greatly affected by climate change, and it has a feedback effect — but not in winter.”

Even if Mr. Gore and Mr. Mann are correct about the link between global warming and cold snaps, the record works against them there, too. “The frequency of cold waves have decreased during the past 50 years, not increased,” University of Washington climatologist Cliff Mass says. “That alone shows that such claims are baseless.”

The term “bomb cyclone” is new to most of us, but it’s been around for a while. Climatologist Judith Curry recently told the Caller that it was coined almost 40 years ago by Fred Sanders of MIT, who spent a lot of time studying such storms. Moreover, there are about 50 or 60 bomb cyclones every year, but most of them occur too far out to sea for us to notice.

Al Gore and his fellow travelers may have trouble admitting that they could be wrong. But their never-look-back crusade isn’t helping scientific research.

“It is very disappointing that members of my profession are making such obviously bogus claims,” Cliff Mass said. “It hurts the science, it hurts the credibility of climate scientists, and weakens our ability to be taken seriously by society.”

That’s what happens, though, when we bend facts to fit theories — and not the other way around. And remember, Al, as the old song goes, “Baby, it’s cold outside!”

SOURCE

Phony Prophets Painting Fake Pictures to Produce an Alternate Global Warming Reality?

On Twitter December 28, President Trump wrote: "In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year's Eve on record. Perhaps we 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. Bundle up!"

Predictably, social media lit up with comments by agitated alarmists who apparently believe everything, including the gas problem their great uncle had during Christmas dinner, is caused by global warming. They won't be happy until the Earth freezes over and everyone dies.

They must have missed the news that Escambia County Florida had nearly two inches of snow on December 10, Erie, Pennsylvania just broke a 59-year-old snowfall record and International Falls, Minnesota had a record-breaking 37 degrees below zero Christmas week. This happened thanks to a phenomenon scientists call a "Rossby wave" -- not global warming -- whereby Alaska blows it's arctic air south while simultaneously "inhaling" warm air from the tropics. We get a break from the cold while folks in the Lower 48 get to experience what living in Alaska is like without buying a plane ticket.

You're welcome.

Besides record-breaking cold, alarmists ignore that snowfall has increased for more than a century.

Up here in my little slice of paradise, researchers were recently shocked that the snowfall has doubled on Mt. Hunter in the Alaska range since the mid-1800s. In that same time frame, southcentral Alaska has experienced a 117 percent increase in winter snowfall and a 49 percent increase in summer snowfall. In addition, from 1950 to 2011, many coastal Alaskan towns have experienced winter snow increases ranging from 26 percent in Yakutat to 67 percent in Kodiak.

On December 6, 2017, in the Chugach mountains I call home, Thompson Pass, experienced one of history's most intense snowfalls at a rate of 10 inches per hour. That's a record even for Thompson Pass which often gets between 600 to 900 inches of snow per year.

Additionally, the sea ice improved this year.

The Anchorage Daily News reports that Alaska's "cool late-summer weather over the central Arctic Ocean helped preserve sea ice, slowing its melting enough to rank this year's annual ice minimum as only the eighth lowest in the satellite record, far from the worst it's been."

Record cold. Record snow. Recovering sea ice. But, things are not always as they appear. The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology announced in February 2017 they are investigating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for alleged climate data manipulation after whistleblowers stepped forward, including Dr. John Bates, former principal scientist at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville North Carolina who claims NOAA scientists put a "thumb on the scale" to favor their global warming argument.

Maybe this is not about science at all. Maybe it's more about phony prophets painting fake pictures to produce an alternate reality.

Alarmists are not interested in the indisputable evidence the Earth goes through cyclical periods of cooling and warming. The Earth experienced periods of glaciation, then melting, long before the construction of Al Gore's energy-devouring Nashville home and Leonardo DiCaprio's excessive use of private jets.

Gore said the Arctic would be ice free by 2014 and the guy that Democrats call a "prophet," James Hansen, former director of NASA's Godard Institute for Space Studies, predicted the Arctic ice would melt by the end of 2017.

Oops.

Hansen recently published a paper suggesting we are now on the brink of a short ice age caused by.wait for it.global warming. He claims global temperatures are an "unreliable diagnostic of planetary condition as the ice melt increases" and predicts "large scale regional cooling by mid-century" for the North Atlantic and Southern oceans.

Obviously, climate alarmists have the same answer for every weather pattern, so the rest of us normal folks should forget them and focus on reality. Right about now, a little global warming sounds nice as we dream of white sandy beaches, not the white powdery stuff outside our windows waiting to be shoveled.

SOURCE

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

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

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

14 January, 2018

Cold Facts on the Globe’s Hottest Years (?)

Annenberg fact checking is often recognizably biased so the presentation below has to be taken with a grain of salt. So let me supply some salt

But first let me congratulate author Vanessa Schipani on a scholarly piece of work. It's nice to have a detailed discussion of the numbers for a change. And she does concede in the end that the "hottest year" talk so beloved of Warmists is pretty meaningless, which is pleasing.

So she says that it is the long-term trend whch we have to focus on. So far, so good.

But a trend by itself tells you very little. The interesting question is what causes the trend. On (rubbery) NOAA figures there has been a slight trend over the last 150 years but are the details of that trend favourable to the global warming theory? They are not. So we have to move on to matters that Vanessa does not consider. In particular, was the trend in temperature matched by a trend in CO2 levels? That the two trends do coincide is the essence of the global warming theory.

To examine the question, we have to ask what are our start and finish points of any trend we want to examine. It is an old truth of chartmanship that you can prove almost anything by a judicious selection of start and finish points. Every such decision will have a degree of arbitrariness but some are less arbitrary than othrers.

During my research career I did a lot of factor analysis, generally principal components analysis. I even remember centroid analysis! And you can generally get quite a few factors out of a modern analysis. But how do you decide which factors are likely to be important? A very common procedure is to look for the "natural break" in an ordered series of eigenvalues -- sometimes called a "scree test". And looking at any series of numbers can involve a decision of that nature.

So, in the case of the terrestrial temperature series we can see on a number of occasions such "natural breaks". One of them is, quite simply, the 21st century. The 21st century temperatures bob up and down but display no overall trend. There is NO global warming in the 21st century so the trend up to that time appears to have run its course. It is certainly true that El Nino pushed up temperatures in 2015 and 2016 but El Nino is not a product of anthropogenic global warming and its influence has by now just about petered out, leaving the 2017 temperature very close to the pre El Nino average, which gives us temperature stasis back.

And note that CO2 levels did NOT rise during the El Nino warming event. I monitored the CO2 figures from both Cape Grim and Mauna Loa right from the onset of the warming -- beginning roughly in August 2015. And I noted that the 400ppm peak had been reached BEFORE that warming event and then plateaued during the warming event. There was no rise in CO2 levels accompanying the rise in temperature. So the temperature rise COULD NOT have been caused by a CO2 rise -- because there was no CO2 rise. And it's now in the journals that CO2 levels plateaued in 2015 and 2016.

So El Nino did not merely contribute "part" of the 2015/2016 warming event, it contributed the WHOLE of it. So if we remove the influence of El Nino, we can see that there has been NO anthropogenic global warming for the whole of this century. The levels of CO2 have influenced nothing. Warmist theory is wrong

Sen. James Inhofe misleadingly claimed that the statistics behind the globe’s likely hottest years on record — 2014, 2015 and 2016 — were “meaningless” because the temperature increases were “well within the margin of error.” Taking into account the margins of error, there’s still a long-term warming trend.

Inhofe, a longtime skeptic of human-caused climate change, made his claim Jan. 3 on the Senate floor.

Inhofe, Jan. 3: The Obama administration touted 2014, 2015, and 2016 as the hottest years on record. But the increases are well within the margin of error. In 2016, NOAA said the Earth warmed by 0.04 degrees Celsius, and the British Government pegged it at 0.01 Celsius. However, the margin of error is 0.1 degree, not 0.01. So it is all statistically meaningless and below the doom-and-gloom temperature predictions from all the various models from consensus scientists.

Since Inhofe cites data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the British government, we’ll concentrate on their analyses.

According to NOAA, 2016 was the warmest year on record for the globe since record keeping began in 1880; 2015 ranked the second warmest year and 2014 the third warmest. There are uncertainties in those rankings, however.

As we explained in 2015 when then-President Obama proclaimed 2014 “the planet’s warmest year on record,” such a definitive claim is problematic. For instance, while NOAA found then that 2014 had the highest probability of being the warmest, there remained statistical odds that other years could have held that distinction. But as we explained, scientists are more concerned with long-term trends than any given year.

And 2017 is on track to be another warm year. On Dec. 18, NOAA said 2017 could end up being the third warmest on record, based on data for January to November. NOAA spokesman Brady Philips told us the agency will release information on the year as a whole on Jan. 18.

NOAA ranks years by looking at how much their average temperatures differ from the 20th century average — what scientists call a temperature anomaly.

Based on the agency’s analysis, the average temperature for 2016 was 0.94 degrees Celsius (1.69 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 20th century average of 13.9 C (56.9 F). The margin of error for 2016 was plus-or-minus 0.15 C (0.27 F).

NOAA explains that a margin of error takes into account the “inherent level of uncertainty” that comes with “[e]valuating the temperature of the entire planet.”

The agency adds that the reported temperature anomaly — 0.94 C in the case of 2016 — “is not an exact measurement; instead it is the central — and most likely — value within a range of possible values.”

For example, that range, or margin of error, would be 0.79 C (1.42 F) to 1.09 C (1.96 F) for 2016. Scientists at NOAA are 95 percent certain the temperature anomaly for 2016, or for any given year, will fall within the margin of error.

As Inhofe notes, NOAA scientists found that the average temperature for 2015 was 0.04 C less than 2016’s at 0.90 C (1.62 F) above the 20th century norm. The margin of error for 2015 was plus-or-minus 0.08 C (0.14 F), which means the range for 2015 is between 0.82 C (1.48 F) and 0.98 C (1.76 F).

The difference between 2015 and 2014, however, was wider. The average temperature for 2014 was 0.74 C (1.33 F) above the 20th century mean, or 0.16 C (0.29 F) less than 2015. The range for 2014 is between 0.59 C (1.06 F) and 0.89 C (1.60 F).

So the margins of error for these three years do overlap. When we requested evidence from Inhofe’s office, spokeswoman Leacy Burke sent us links to articles that reiterate the senator’s claim that the temperature increase in 2016 was within a margin of error – meaning, again, that while 2016 is most likely the warmest on record, other years that fall within that margin, including 2015 and 2014, could be the warmest. Still that doesn’t mean the statistics are “meaningless.” Over the long haul, data show an increasing trend, as the chart below shows.

“Overall, the global annual temperature has increased at an average rate of 0.07°C (0.13°F) per decade since 1880 and at an average rate of 0.17°C (0.31°F) per decade since 1970,” says NOAA.

Similar to NOAA, the U.K.’s Met Office, the country’s national weather service, reported that 2016 “was one of the warmest two years on record, nominally exceeding the record temperature of 2015.” The agency also found that 2014 likely ranked the third warmest year.

Both NOAA and the Met Office note that human-caused global warming isn’t the only force behind the record temperatures.

Peter Stott, then the acting director of the Met Office Hadley Centre, said: “A particularly strong El Ni?o event contributed about 0.2C to the annual average for 2016, which was about 1.1C above the long term average from 1850 to 1900.” El Ni?o is a naturally occurring interaction between the atmosphere and ocean that is linked to periodic warming.

Stott added, “However, the main contributor to warming over the last 150 years is human influence on climate from increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

The Met Office’s numbers differ slightly from NOAA’s, in part, because the agency uses a different reference point.

NOAA ranks years based on how much their average temperatures differ from the 20th century norm. The Met Office uses the temperature average between 1850 and 1900 or between 1961 and 1990.

Using that latter reference point, the Met Office found 2016’s temperature anomaly to be 0.77 C, plus-or-minus 0.1 C, which was only 0.01 more than 2015’s temperature anomaly.

So Inhofe is right that the British government’s margins of error for 2016 and 2015 overlap.

But Grahame Madge, a spokesman for the Met Office, explained in an email to us why it’s important to look at the long-term trend — not just the difference between two years, as Inhofe did.

Madge, Jan. 6: When looking at global temperature rise it helps to look at the way the stats and figures are framed. For example, 2016 was the warmest year since pre-industrial times. However, it was only marginally warmer than the previous year, which was also a record. When viewed as parallel years, however, they really stand out in the long-term record. … We try to focus on the long term when presenting information. You can make a desert seem like a lush wetland if you only show the oasis.

NOAA also explains the difference between looking at single years versus the long-term trend: “As more and more data builds a long-term series, there is less and less influence of single ‘outliers’ on the overall trend, making the long-term trend even more certain than the individual points along it.”

In other words, if scientists found that the globe had just one year with an exceptionally high temperature average, they may not be convinced that global warming is occurring. But if data show that the planet has experienced a number of record warm years in a row, it suggests the warming trend is real.

In fact, NOAA says there’s only a 0.0125 percent chance of seeing three outliers in a row — and the Earth has seen many more record warm years than three.

NOAA writes that 2016 “marks the fifth time in the 21st century a new record high annual temperature has been set (along with 2005, 2010, 2014, and 2015) and also marks the 40th consecutive year (since 1977) that the annual temperature has been above the 20th century average.”

So while Inhofe was right that the margins of error for temperature measurements in recent years overlap, that doesn’t negate a long-term warming trend or render the temperature anomalies “meaningless.”

SOURCE

The BBC have been forced to retract one of their blatantly false claims about climate change, following a complaint by the GWPF

But even the retraction is unfounded

The BBC have accepted Lord Lawson’s complaint that they made a serious factual error in claiming that reindeers were in “steep decline” because of climate change.

The alarming claim that reindeer populations across Northern Russia were “in steep decline because of climate change”, was made during the first episode of the recent BBC 2 series: Russia with Simon Reeve.

Writing to the BBC Complaints department, Lord Lawson pointed out that according to a 2016 study, 17 out of 19 sub-populations of Eurasian Reindeer were now either increasing in number, or had a stable population trend.

The BBC have now accepted this evidence, and have published a correction which reads: “This programme suggested that many reindeer populations are in steep decline because of climate change. It would have been more accurate to say that many reindeer populations are threatened by it.”

Indeed it would have been less inaccurate, given that the claim is blatantly false. However, even the claim that they are “threatened” is highly questionable given their growing populations.

The false alarm highlights the BBC’s habitual attempts to exaggerate the consequences of climate change and to ignore scientific evidence that contradicts climate alarmism.

SOURCE

NYC Mayor to sue “Big Oil” for causing Hurricane Sandy

A face of hate. Hate just oozes out of de Blasio

Many people still foolishly blame things like lightning strikes, tornadoes, tsunamis and hurricanes on the random vagaries of fate or simply describe them as acts of God. But not the intrepid Mayor of New York City, who apparently also doubles as a sleuth in his spare time. He’s been investigating the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy for half a decade now, seeking out the cause of the storm. And now he’s cracked the case, determining that the lethal storm which wrecked large parts of the northeast was caused by a coalition of five energy companies. And by God, he’s suing them over it.

Not being happy with that form of retribution, Bill de Blasio is going one step further. He’s going to move immediately* to divest the city’s massive pension funds from any investments in the fossil fuel industry, depriving them of cash. (Politico)

Mayor Bill de Blasio will sue the country’s five biggest oil companies alleging climate change and global warming led to Hurricane Sandy and its catastrophic fallout and the companies should pay for the city’s resiliency upgrades.

The de Blasio administration will announce Wednesday that the city will sue for reparations and force the companies to pay for the city’s resiliency efforts, which have taken years to complete since 2012, when the storm devastated the city, killing 53 people across the state costing more than $19 billion.

The mayor will also call on several of the city’s pension funds to divest from oil companies, two sources with knowledge of the announcement confirmed to POLITICO.

So the mayor thinks he can go to court and prove that not only is global warming in general responsible for changes in climate, but that the activities of these five specific companies were directly and primarily linked to that specific storm and they should be held accountable. That’s going to make for some interesting opening arguments in court, particularly since Sandy was one of the rare exceptions in a record-setting nine year stretch when no major hurricanes made landfall in the United States.

Further, if he’s blaming global warming for the intensity of hurricanes (which we can certainly discuss) then the oil companies scored a massive fail. Sandy never made it above Category 2 the entire time it was tracked (“Major” hurricanes start at category 3) and when it came ashore in New York and New Jersey it had maximum sustained winds of 80 mph. That’s the absolute bottom end of a category 1 storm, and if it had dropped six miles per hour further in the final hour it would have come ashore as a tropical storm.

What made Sandy one of the most costly and dangerous hurricanes seen in the northeast in modern times wasn’t that it was a particularly large or powerful storm. It was a question of where it struck, as well as when. That region is woefully unprepared for any major storm surge, mostly because big storms this far north are so rare. It was so expensive and deadly because it flooded one of the most densely populated areas in the country where you find some of the most expensive real estate. Hurricane Sandy was a tragedy, but it wasn’t a particularly large storm at all. It just took an unusual but not totally unknown route. (In 1938, long before we were creating so many greenhouse gasses and in fact were still worried about global cooling, a category 5 struck the same area and basically leveled everything, killing somewhere between 600 to 800 people.)

But wait, you might say. Bill de Blasio also mentioned higher sea levels due to global warming! Yep. He sure did. But the most alarming statistics show that global sea levels have risen 2.6? over the past thirty years. That’s two and a half inches. The storm surge from Sandy was six feet. And it hit during high tide under a full moon which made the high tide 20% higher than average. If global cooling had made sea levels drop an entire foot rather than going up two inches and that same storm hit, New York and New Jersey would still have been just as flooded.

In short… just how dumb is this lawsuit? Would any lawyer really take it on? (Sorry. That’s a silly question. If you got enough money to cover their fees you can find a lawyer to take almost any case.)

As for the pension divestment situation, I’m not going to spend a lot of time on that. New York State (as opposed to the city) tried the same thing under the urging of Governor Cuomo (who would also like to impress liberals around the country so he can run for President) and it was soundly rejected by his comptroller. The same is likely to happen for the city unless the people running the pension fund are looking to commit financial suicide. For more on why that’s a foolish, politically motivated stunt, you can read this response from Linda Kelly, senior vice president and general counsel of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). For additional information on how fossil fuel divestment could kill New York City’s pension funds, check out this report from Divestment Facts.

The bottom line is that this is all a political stunt by a Democrat desperately trying to draw national attention to himself so he can run for President. And the worst part is that it’s a particularly stupid stunt. No court in the land would touch this case with a ten foot pole unless they can find a particularly “woke” venue, after which it would be overturned by saner heads.

SOURCE

Keeping Fossil Fuels Underground Makes No Sense

What would happen if climateers succeed in their campaign to keep fossil fuels in the ground?

The experience of Walt Disney World in Orlando more than 40 years ago provides some answers. In 1973, two years after it opened, plans to expand Disney World beyond the original theme park were jeopardized when war broke out in the Middle East. An oil embargo was placed on Western countries, and President Nixon introduced gasoline rationing and price controls that lasted for nearly a decade under three U.S. presidents: Nixon, Ford and Carter. For a resort that received the majority of its visitors by car, the price controls and rationing were nothing short of a disaster. Attendance at the Magic Kingdom crashed, and Disney's share price fell by more than half.

It wasn't just Disney World and Florida tourism that suffered from the spike in gasoline prices. Areas from Chicago to Houston to Los Angeles to Phoenix experienced a similar crash, with motorists lining up for hours to fill their cars with gasoline. Businesses and construction projects suffered, factories closed and several million Americans lost their jobs during the 1973-1975 recession that was largely the result of the shock of higher energy prices.

In time, the economy returned to normal. So, too, did energy markets when President Reagan finally abolished all price controls on oil and gas in 1981. And, eventually, thanks largely to the shale revolution, U.S. oil production in recent years has risen to near record levels, resulting in a sharp decline in oil imports (the lowest in nearly 50 years as a share of oil consumed) along with much cheaper gasoline.

For the average American, energy has never been more affordable. As a share of total consumer spending, Americans spent less than 4 percent on energy during each of the last two years, the lowest in history. Today the U.S. leads the world in oil and gas production, and we are more energy secure and competitive in international markets. None of this would have been possible without the Shale Revolution and the increase in energy production.

But these gains may be in peril. If those opposed to oil and gas drilling get their way, we could experience an upheaval in energy markets similar to what happened during the embargo of the 1970s.

While the arguments in favor of oil and natural gas are well-known, restricting their production in the United States would be tragic. In contrast to fossil fuels, solar and wind energy are carbon-free and their share of the nation's energy will grow in the years ahead, but these renewables contribute only marginally to U.S. energy supplies. Combined, solar and wind, according to the Energy Information Administration, supply only a little more than 3 percent of the energy Americans use today. And EIA estimates that solar and wind power together will provide less than 10 percent of America's energy in 2050. In contrast, oil and natural gas supply more than two-thirds of the nation's energy and the EIA forecasts that share will continue through 2050 and beyond.

What's conveniently ignored by many environmentalists is that natural gas is essential for the growth of solar and wind power, since it's needed as a back-up fuel on days when the weather is not cooperating. A 1,000-megawatt gas plant releases less than half the amount of carbon dioxide as a coal plant of the same size. As a result of the continuing shift from coal to gas at power plants, U.S. carbon emissions from electricity production are now the lowest in nearly 30 years. Replacing additional coal plants will reduce emissions even more. The reality is that the U.S. is a world leader in the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions due to the increased use of natural gas.

The world needs more oil and gas, not less. Yet environmentalists want to shut down production. Despite the demand for energy, decades-old bans on oil and gas production are still in place in large parts of the American West and offshore. President Trump recently proposed opening up 90 percent of the oil and gas that lies beneath the Outer Continental Shelf, but the leasing of offshore tracts is many years away. Meanwhile, New York State and Maryland have clamped bans on hydraulic fracking for oil and gas, and the regional Delaware Valley Basin Commission is considering a plan to prohibit the use of fracking in the Marcellus shale that underlies part of Pennsylvania.

Today's energy challenge for the U.S. is to remain competitive in global markets for oil and gas. "Keep-it-in-the-ground" environmentalists who want to halt U.S. production ignore the effects such a radical approach would have on the U.S. economy and environment. Even environmentalists should welcome the transition from coal to natural gas and reconsider their infatuation with renewables and efforts to keep fossil fuels in the ground. U.S. energy policy should encourage investment in oil and gas, not because they already meet most of our energy needs but because they're affordable and reliable and essential for stability in the century ahead. Keeping fossils fuels in the ground is a nonsensical idea that would amount to a self-imposed energy shock that would risk taking us back to the 1970s.

SOURCE

Greenie obsessions behind disgraceful Bundy case

In a stunning development further underscoring the corruption that exists at the highest levels of the federal government, U.S. District Judge Gloria M. Navarro threw out felony conspiracy and weapons charges against rancher Cliven Bundy, sons Ammon and Ryan, and co-defendant Ryan Payne. “The government’s conduct in this case was indeed outrageous,” Navarro explained. “There has been flagrant misconduct, substantial prejudice and no lesser remedy is sufficient.”

How outrageous? Navarro dismissed the case “with prejudice” — meaning the government cannot try the case again on the same charges. And in a 30-minute explanation, the Barack Obama-appointed jurist ripped the conduct of the prosecutors and the FBI. She blasted the Nevada U.S. Attorney’s Office for willful violations of due process that included several misrepresentations to both defense attorneys and the court that showed “a reckless disregard for the constitutional obligation to seek and provide evidence.”

She was also troubled by the prosecutors’ “failure to look beyond the FBI file,” which she characterized as an “intentional abdication of its responsibility,” and wondered aloud how the FBI itself “inexplicably placed” or “perhaps hid” a tactical operations log referring to the presence of snipers outside Bundy’s home on a “thumb drive inside a vehicle for three years.”

Navarro also blasted prosecutors’ assertions that they weren’t aware such documents could help the defendants as “grossly shocking.” “The government was well aware of theories of self-defense, provocation and intimidation,” Navarro stated. “Here the prosecution has minimized the extent of prosecutorial misconduct.”

The seeds for Monday’s decision were sown on Dec. 20, when Navarro declared a mistrial in the case, citing six specific pieces of “potentially exculpatory” evidence the Nevada U.S. Attorney’s Office failed to disclose. They included records and maps of government surveillance; the presence of government snipers; FBI logs about pre-standoff ranch activity; reports about misconduct committed by Bureau of Land Management agents; and law-enforcement assessments going back to 2012 stating the Bundys posed no threat.

All six items were favorable to the defense and could have changed the outcome of the trial. Withholding them violated the Brady Rule, named after the 1963 Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland, where the Court’s majority ruled that failure to disclose such evidence violates a defendant’s right to due process. Navarro made it clear she agreed, despite former Acting Nevada U.S. Attorney and lead prosecutor Steven Myhre’s insistence no malfeasance was involved. “Failure to turn over such evidence violates due process,” she stated last month. “A fair trial at this point is impossible.”

It gets worse. Navarro’s ruling didn’t take into account an 18-page memo written by Special Agent and lead investigator Larry Wooten alleging that “prosecutors in the Bundy ranch standoff trial covered up misconduct by law-enforcement agents who engaged in ‘likely policy, ethical and legal violations,’” Arizona Republic reported. Wooten claimed he “routinely observed … a widespread pattern of bad judgment, lack of discipline, incredible bias, unprofessionalism and misconduct” by government agents involved in the armed standoff between them and Bundy occurring 2014.

That standoff was largely precipitated by Bundy himself. It involved a dispute about grazing rights between Bundy and the federal government. The government rightly claimed Bundy owed public land use fees for decades of grazing his cattle on government land beginning in 1993, but Bundy refused to pay a sum that, between charges and fines, exceeded $1 million. He also ignored three court orders obtained by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in 1998, 1999 and 2013 requiring him to move his cattle off the disputed land.

In 2014, BLM agents working with the FBI attempted to impound Bundy’s cattle, and an armed standoff between the government and the defendants, who were backed by dozens of armed followers and militiamen, ensued. After a week, Bundy called it off, but he and the other defendants were charged with several offenses.

Thus, Bundy is no “hero.” Nonetheless, the incident highlighted Constitution-based questions that remain unanswered regarding the federal government’s right to claim vast swaths of territory in several states. In Bundy’s case, since the federal government owns 80% of Nevada, he would have been hard-pressed to graze his cattle anywhere else.

Moreover, some of the behavior demonstrated by BLM agents cannot be ignored. In addition to the aforementioned comments, Wooten’s report reveals they called Bundy and his supporters “deplorables,” “rednecks” and “idiots,” and demonstrated clear prejudice toward “the defendants, their supporters, and Mormons,” while implementing “the most intrusive, oppressive, large scale, and militaristic trespass cattle impound possible.”

The charges against the men also hinted at persecution rather than prosecution. Aside from obstruction, conspiracy, extortion and weapons charges, the government sought “five counts of criminal forfeiture which upon conviction would require forfeiture of property derived from the proceeds of the crimes totaling at least $3 million, as well as the firearms and ammunition possessed and used on April 12, 2014.”

In short, the government wanted to take almost everything the Bundys owned.

Even the conspiracy charges were iffy. Bundy sought help from his supporters because he claimed FBI snipers had surrounded his house. (And that’s never happened before?) “Justice Department lawyers scoffed at this claim in prior trials involving the standoff but newly-released documents confirm that snipers were in place prior to the Bundy’s call for help,” reveals columnist James Board.

And it wasn’t just the Bundys who were targeted. As The Intercept exposed last May, undercover FBI agents spent eight months in five states posing as filmmakers trying to build criminal cases against the rancher and many of his supporters.

Nineteen men were ultimately charged with multiple felony counts. The first trial took place last February. A mistrial was declared after jurors were deadlocked on most of the charges against six defendants, with two being found guilty of weapons and obstruction violations. When the other four were retried, two were acquitted on all charges, and the other two on most charges, and the jury again deadlocked on the remaining charges. Six other participants took plea deals.

The remaining trial, which includes two more Bundy brothers, David and Melvin, is slated to begin in Nevada next month. Ryan Bundy hopes the judge will set all the remaining defendants free. “The government has acted wrongly from the get-go,” he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Environmentalists, many of whom would like ranchers completely removed from government land, were furious with the decision. “These federal agencies have been patient and cautious to a fault in their prosecution of the Bundys and their accomplices,” wrote Erik Molvar, executive director of Western Watersheds Project, an environmental conservation organization. “It’s long past time to stop playing games with the prosecution of federal crimes, and instead lay all the facts on the table and let the judicial system work.”

The ones “playing games” were government officials, and the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility opened an investigation in December that will scrutinize the efforts of Myhre and two veteran Assistant U.S. attorneys, Daniel Schiess and Nadia Ahmed.

Unfortunately, in a reality that reeks of privilege, penalties for prosecutorial misconduct, even conduct as egregious as this, range from a reprimand to a suspension. In a better nation, there would be a better remedy — as in prosecuting the prosecutors.

SOURCE

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

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12 January, 2018

The truly alarming scale of the global ocean plastic crisis laid bare by Storm Eleanor

A big moan from Britain about floating plastic below. Inevitably, they want "us" to do something about it. I am going to be most unpopular and mention what DOES need to be done about it: We need to dissuade Africans from using their rivers as a dump. Rivers are the basic African waste disposal facility. And what goes in the rivers ends up in the oceans. Western countries by contrast are very fussy about proper disposal of their rubbish. Floating plastic waste in the Atlantic is an AFRICAN problem, not "our" problem

The only thing "we" could do is to set up barriers at the mouths of the African rivers which would catch the rubbish before it went out to sea. Nothing as realistic as that is likely to happen, however. It would undoubtedly be "racist", of course

The masses of plastic dumped on the beaches of Cornwall by Storm Eleanor throws into stark relief the global crisis being caused by human rubbish in the world’s oceans.

As the storm passed, pictures emerged of the picturesque Cornish coast left strewn with waste and its rockpools clogged with plastic.

In recent years rising demand for single-use items such as food wrapping and bottled water has helped lead to us producing more plastic in the last decade than in the previous century.

Fleeting conveniences such as disposable coffee cups can outlive their use in minutes, but take up to 450 years to degrade once discarded. The result is the world’s oceans are now choking with billions of tonnes of plastic.

Public awareness of the impact of plastic waste has been growing in recent years, helped in particular by the graphic portrayal of its effect on the marine environment

SOURCE

'Raw Water'? Natural Isn't Synonymous With Better

Selling Americans the snake oil of "raw water" is the absurd conclusion of rabid environmentalism. It is a good way of contractingt giardia and other water-borne parasitic diseases. It would be great fun to see Greenie knowalls getting their just reward in the form of such diseases

A recently introduced product fad hitting store shelves might just prove to be the death of you. Popping up across the country and marketed as yet another “healthy” product in that genre of back-to-nature lifestyle craze — “raw water.” Using pseudo science and earthy, holistic jargon, these start-ups are even putting snake oil salesmen to shame. So what is raw water? Essentially, it is the raw milk trend only now applied to drinking water. You see, unfiltered, untreated water is better for one’s health because it is free from the polluted tampering of mankind and is therefore more “natural.” As an individual in a Live Water marketing campaign exclaims, “A surge of energy and peacefulness entered my being.”

These new companies claim to have tapped into ancient water sources untouched by human industry, and for a mere $16 a bottle you yourself can experience this rawest of water. But wait; there’s more. While this latest “nature” fad may sound funny, it is far from it. The Centers for Disease Control’s chief of Waterborne Disease Prevention, Vincent Hill, warns, “If you’re not filtering it, if you’re not disinfecting it, then you are creating a risk for yourself or anybody you give the water to of diseases and other illnesses that can come from the water.”

It is truly ironic that in the developed world, where scientific knowledge and developments have proven to raise living standards, life expectancy and quality of life, there are those who choose to vilify and distort these achievements as problematic, unhealthy and even dangerous, in order to sell Americans on the flawed concept that human technology equates to the unnatural and therefore unhealthy living. Meanwhile, much of the developing world is plagued with diseases that would have been easily avoided but for the lack of access to clean water technologies.

SOURCE

Utilities Coast-to-Coast Announce Customer Rate Cuts Due to Tax Reform

From Washington, DC to Washington state, utility companies are crediting passage of Republicans’ Tax Cut and Jobs Act for their plans to lower their retail customers’ monthly bills.

Company press releases announcing the rate-cut plans specifically cite “the decrease in the Corporate Tax Rate from 35 percent to 21 percent” as the reason for reducing energy rates.

The utility companies that have reported plans to cut rates, thus far, include:

Pepco plans to lower the bills of 296,000 electric customers in the District of Columbia,

Pepco and Delmava Power plan to pass on savings to their 500,000 electric customers in Delaware and Maryland and approximately 129,000 natural gas delivery customers in northern Delaware,

Baltimore Gas & Electric is passing on $82 million worth of tax savings, which it says will reduce the average customer’s monthly combined natural gas and electric by $4.27,

Pacific Power, which provides electricity to 740,000 customers in Washington, Oregon and California, announced a yet-to-be-determined rate cut due to lower corporate tax rate,

Rocky Mountain Power announced plans a rate reduction, which it says “will take several months to calculate” to its 1.1 million customers in Utah, Wyoming and Idaho,

Commonwealth Edison Company (ComEd) is passing on $200 million worth of tax savings to its four million customers in northern Illinois. “Residential customer can expect to see an estimated $2-$3 decrease on their monthly bill related to the tax reduction,” the utility says.

All rate cuts are dependent upon the approval of their respective state public service and commerce commissions.

SOURCE

Success: EPA set to reduce staff 50% in Trump's first term

The Environmental Protection Agency, seen by President Trump as a bloated bureaucratic whale, is on schedule to fulfill his promise to reduce its staff nearly in half by the end of his first term mostly through retirements, not cuts, according to officials.

The EPA Tuesday provided to Secrets its first year staff results which show that the agency is below levels not seen since former President Reagan’s administration.

And if just those slated to retire by early 2021 leave, Administrator Scott Pruitt and his team will have reduced a staff of nearly 15,000, to below 8,000, or a reduction of 47 percent.

“We’re proud to report that we’re reducing the size of government, protecting taxpayer dollars and staying true to our core mission of protecting the environment,” Pruitt said in a statement

As of January 3, 2018, the EPA has 14,162 employees.

The last time EPA was at an actual employment level of 14,440 was in fiscal year 1988 when Reagan was president.

23 percent of EPA employees can retire with full benefits and another 4 percent can retire at the end of 2018.

Additionally, another 20 percent of EPA employees will be eligible for retirement in the next five years.

Taken together, 47 percent of the EPA will be eligible to retire with full benefits in the next 5 years.

Said an EPA official, “We're happy to be at Reagan-level employment numbers and the future retirements shows a preview of how low we could get during this administration. It would be fair to say anywhere from 25 to 47 percent of EPA could retire during this administration.”

Pruitt has used buyouts to spur some of the changes and attractive retirement benefits have also led many to leave the agency. He also instituted a hiring freeze.

Under Pruitt, the agency has gone the “back to basics” of protecting the environment while shucking former President Obama’s political agenda focused heavily on climate change.

SOURCE

Carbon trading is the great green gamble

Comment from Australia

It was dubbed the fraud of the century. A multi-billion-euro carbon trading sting which a French judge described as “unprecedented in the history of financial crimes”.

Investigators say a group defrauded billions of euros by purchasing emission allowances on the European market from abroad, using a complex network of shell companies and offshore accounts in Latvia, Cyprus and Hong Kong.

Because the allowances were purchased outside Europe, they were not subject to the European Union’s 19.6 per cent value added tax. According to French reports, frontmen acting as brokers then resold the allowances in Europe, taxes included. But instead of handing the VAT over to the correct authorities, gang members pocketed the cash to use in future trades.

The money was laundered before it was reinvested by placing it in a bank in China, where it was then handed over to businesses or transformed into playing chips at casinos.

French businessman Arnaud Mimran was sentenced last year to eight years in prison and fined €1 million ($1.5m) for his part in the 2008 swindle.

His co-mastermind, Israeli Sami Sweid, was gunned down in a motor scooter drive-by shooting before the trial commenced. Other gang members have fled to Israel in a bid to escape French justice.

The great carbon trading tax heist came in the heady days immediately before the global financial crisis, which swamped the world’s financial markets and crushed the nascent European carbon market.

It is one of many crimes that have dogged an industry which claims to have been founded on the highest of ideals: to help save the planet from climate change.

And it is one of the reasons that federal government attempts to allow Australian businesses to access international carbon dioxide emissions permits have been savaged by former prime minister Tony Abbott and his supporters.

Debate about the use of international permits rests on a series of assumptions: that action on climate change must be taken, that co-ordinated international action will be more cost-effective than countries acting alone, and that the international carbon trading community has finally got its act together.

The great French-Israeli carbon tax heist fits neatly into Interpol warnings about carbon trading markets issued in 2013.

“Unlike traditional commodities, which at some time during the course of their market exchange must be physically delivered to someone, carbon credits do not represent a physical commodity but instead have been described as a legal fiction that is poorly understood by many sellers, buyers and traders,” Interpol warns.

“This lack of understanding makes carbon trading particularly vulnerable to fraud and other illegal activity.

“Carbon markets, like other financial markets, are also at risk of exploitation by criminals due to the large amount of money invested, the immaturity of the regulations and lack of oversight and transparency.”

The international police agency listed the potential illegal activities including the tax scam played out in the French-Israeli heist.

The warning list comprises of:

* Fraudulent manipulation of measurements to claim more carbon credits from a project than were actually obtained.

* Sale of carbon credits that either do not exist or belong to someone else.

* False or misleading claims with respect to the environmental or financial benefits of carbon market investments.

* Exploitation of weak regulations in the carbon market to commit financial crimes, such as money laundering, securities fraud or tax fraud.

* Computer hacking/phishing to steal carbon credits, and theft of personal information.

However, despite the worrying criminal concerns, the biggest failings of the European carbon market have been by design.

Over-allocation of permits at a time of weakened economic activity following the global financial crisis saw prices plunge to a fraction of what was considered necessary to force businesses to change their greenhouse gas emitting ways.

Nonetheless, the industry has regrouped with revised rules, fresh markets and the first signs of a new attempt at international co-operation.

The Turnbull government signalled its intention to allow Australian businesses to buy international permits to cover their carbon dioxide emissions liabilities when releasing the final report of last year’s review of climate change policies on December 19.

“As flagged in 2015, the review considered the role of international units and as a result the government has now given in-principle support for their use,” according to Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg.

“The final decision on the timing and appropriate quantity and quality limits will be taken by 2020 following further consultation and detailed analysis.”

Industry has welcomed the move.

Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox says business has been advocating for access to international credits as a cost-effective way to achieve Australia’s commitments under the Paris climate change agreement.

“It makes absolutely no sense to rule out this option by insisting that our commitments can only be fulfilled within our borders,” Willox says.

David Byers, interim chief executive of the Minerals Council of Australia, says it is “an important step forward in developing a long-term sustainable approach to climate change policy’’.

Byers says access to international carbon units will give Australia more avenues for reducing emissions, including supporting carbon abatement projects in developing countries, such as reducing deforestation, combating illegal logging and restoring coastal and marine environments.

“This will ensure our emissions reduction efforts are environmentally effective and economically efficient, helping to meet Australia’s Paris commitments at the lowest cost,” Byers says.

“This is critical for securing long-term investment in the Australian resources sector.”

Abbott says his position on international carbon credits remains the same as it was when he was prime minister and Liberal Party leader.

“I don’t support carbon trading which is a carbon tax under a different name and I certainly don’t support overseas carbon credits being available to Australian businesses,” Abbott tells The Australian. “That just means that Aussie consumers end up shovelling our money to foreign carbon traders and we all know the potential for rorts there.”

Abbott’s concerns are shared by many green groups, which have reached the conclusion they were comprehensively outmanoeuvred by big business on carbon trading in the past. Their preference is now for strict carbon pricing at such a high level that it forces companies to change behaviour.

There are signs, however, that carbon trading is returning to international favour. After years of painful negotiation, the European Parliament and EU governments have agreed to reforms to put the market on a more solid foundation. Excess permits have been cancelled and a reserve system introduced to stop the market becoming saturated.

China has launched an emissions trading system that brings together existing regional schemes covering the power sector. Electricity accounts for almost half of China’s emissions, which means the new market is already bigger than the entire EU scheme.

A new Carbon Pricing in the Americas initiative was launched in Paris in December. It may eventually link emissions trading schemes in Canada, Colombia, Chile and Mexico, and include individual US states such as California and Washington. In total, there are now 42 national and 25 sub-national jurisdictions putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions, eight of which were launched last year.

Some commentators are saying that for the first time it looks as if a “global coalition for carbon pricing”, which was advocated at the 2015 Paris summit by former French president Francois Hollande, is a real possibility.

But not everyone thinks a linked global trading system is a good idea.

In an article in Nature magazine last March, Jessica Green from New York University argued a global network of cap-and-trade systems would deliver greater complexity and fewer emissions cuts. At this point, Green warns, carbon trading is more a political fix than an effective way to mitigate climate change.

“Without stringent caps and careful management, cap-and-trade systems have scant effect on net emissions,” she says.

Green argues that policymakers should first limit links to other markets. Carbon trading policies should be designed to avoid over-allocation and ensure rising prices. And policymakers should eliminate loopholes that limit the environmental effectiveness of cap and trade, she says.

“The worst possible outcome of linked markets is a set of policies that appear to address climate change but allow emissions to continue to rise,” Green says.

In theory, linking markets together should promote trading, smooth financial flows and lower the overall cost of reducing emissions. But Green believes the reality is more complicated.

“Initial attempts to join up trading schemes in Europe and in California and Quebec have led to price crashes and volatility, not stability,” she says.

Opening the way for international permits would certainly undercut the carbon farming market nurtured by the federal government’s Emissions Reduction Fund. The price of carbon abatement under the ERF achieved an average price of $13.08 per tonne, much higher than international prices but still considered too low to build a significant domestic offsets industry.

David Hone, chief climate change adviser for Royal Dutch Shell, says price volatility has been a curse for the international market. Over 20 years more than 8000 projects had been registered, representing some $US300 billion ($382bn) of clean energy and emissions reduction investment under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol. About 1.6 billion certificates are now virtually worthless.

“One estimate claims that the CDM has had a material impact on global emissions, with reductions of nearly 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2014, or 1 per cent of global emissions,” Hone says. “But the CDM has been fraught with problems, the most dramatic being a substantial fall in demand for the emissions reductions that it offers.”

This had led to the collapse of many project developers, the failure of hundreds of projects and a backlog of certificates that could still be issued for further trading.

“A great deal of time, money and political capital has been invested in getting the CDM to where it stands today, so not surprisingly there is some ill feeling over its demise and some attempts to recoup losses before moving on to something new,” Hone says.

Fraud and incompetence has made carbon trading a buyers’ market, which makes international permits attractive to companies wanting to offset emissions at least cost. The buyers’ market makes cheap international permits an obvious attraction for companies seeking a least-cost way to cover their emissions liabilities as the Paris Agreement goals tighten.

Australia’s political focus is firmly driven by runaway electricity prices. International permits may have a role to play.

But the withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement makes a truly international market more difficult to achieve. Fraud and cross-border swindles can only add further heat to the climate change conundrum.

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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11 January, 2018

Warning: wild lands of Scotland ‘irrevocably damaged’ by push for wind power

The retiring head of the body representing Scotland’s climbers and hillwalkers has condemned as “unsustainable” the growth of wind farms on wild land across the country.

David Gibson is to step down as chief executive officer of Mountaineering Scotland in March, after 11 years leading the group of 14,000 members.

He said that thought Mountaineering Scotland had won several battles against intrusive wind farms it had also lost others and some areas of the Highlands were now “irrevocably damaged”.

“The vast majority of the public have never been near the mountains so they have no real idea of the damage that wind farms can do the the landscape,” said Mr Gibson.

“It is not sustainable for the First minister or [national tourism body] VisitScotland to trumpet Scotland as the best country in the world to visit while these large wind farms are being built on such a scale.

“And there are two dozen more in the pipeline of concern because of their size and positioning.

“There have already been too many windfarms constructed – or will be built – that have irrevocably damaged the landscape, or will do when they are constructed.”

Mr Gibson singled out the Creag Riabhach Wind Farm to be developed on a site on the Altnaharra Estate in Sutherland, and the Stronelairg wind in the Monadhliath mountains to the east of Fort Augustus, as examples of schemes that would “wreck the landscape”.

Danish billionaire Anders Povlsen had sought a judicial review through his company Wildland into the decision to allow the 22-turbine Creag Riabhach wind farm to be developed, but lost at the Court of Session in Edinburgh during the summer.

Creag Riabhach was the first such project to have been approved in a designated wild land area since the ministers adopted a revised planning framework in 2014.

The rules were devised to protect the country’s most rugged and beautiful landscapes, but campaigners have said they fall short.

“It has been very challenging taking on Scottish Government policy and big business like SSE when we only have a £500,000 budget for the entire organisation,” added Mr Gibson.

“It has all been done on a shoestring. The mountains have changed considerably over the last 20 years – then there were no wind farms on them.

“The Government has never sat down and consulted on spatial planning policy for wind farms.

“I think they have now come some way in regards to National Scenic Areas to protect them against wind farms. I would like to see that extended to wild land.”

Mr Gibson, 65 added that he planned to spend his retirement exploring more of Scotland’s hills and Mountaineering Scotland is in much better shape than when he joined it.

He added they had won some battles and attempted to “protect mountaineers’ rights to enjoy their sport – particularly at times when some people have been calling for them to be closed after certain tragedies”.

A government spokesman said wind power and other renewables were already playing a crucial role in meeting Scotland’s move towards a low-carbon future.

He added: “However, we also have clear policies to ensure developments only go ahead in the right places and Scottish planning policy now provides additional protection for our National Parks and National Scenic Areas and the impacts on wild land are now formally considered as a material factor in determining planning decisions, where relevant.”

SOURCE

Repairing the Damage to Children Caused by Climate Alarmists: A letter from Ross McKitrick

It seems the high school students mentioned here om January 1st sent their 5 questions to other distinguished climate authorities, not least to Ross McKitrick and to Richard Lindzen. Both have made their replies public. Here is the one from McKitrick:

'In late 2017 I was contacted by a group of students at a high school in Europe asking if I would answer some questions on climate change for a project they were working on. Here are the questions they asked, and the answers I gave them.

1. What is behind global warming? Over the last 150 years there have been influences due to strengthening solar output, land-use changes, increased greenhouse gases and natural variability, among other things. The dominant school of thought in climatology is that rising greenhouse gas levels explain most of the overall warming trend since the 1950s. There are good reasons to support this, although the climate system is too complex to assume the matter is settled. The mechanisms by which the sun affects the climate are not well understood, nor are the mechanisms behind clouds, ocean-atmosphere interactions and other basic processes. The relative lack of warming in the tropical troposphere and over the South Pole are not easily explained under the theory that greenhouse gas levels dominate the climate system.

2. What can we do to prevent global warming? If it is a natural process, nothing. If it is mainly due to rising greenhouse gas levels we need to ask instead whether we would want to prevent it. It would require complete cessation of fossil fuel use, which would cause intolerable economic and social costs and would only yield small changes in the time path of global warming for the next century or more. Even large-scale emission reductions (such as under the Paris and Kyoto treaties) would only cause a small slowdown in the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2100, so any benefits from such policies are likewise tiny, yet the costs would be enormous. The small warming that took place since the early 20th century was largely beneficial, and the astonishing social and economic benefits associated with cheap fossil energy far outweighed any problems it might have created. It is likely that this will be true over the next century as well.

3. If we don't do anything about it, how does it affect us and our descendants? Humans flourish in every climate on earth from the tropics to the polar regions. We are very adaptable. The only issue is whether changes take place so quickly that we cannot adapt, but history shows this to be a rare situation. Climate processes are slow, and if the climate models are correct, the changes are gradual and predictable. People can adapt to warming conditions more easily than to cooling conditions. The IPCC predicted that over the next hundred years, changes in economies and technology will have a much larger effect on peoples' lives than changes in climate.

4. What will happen in the future, and what are the alternatives for us, if the Earth becomes unlivable? There is no chance that greenhouse gases will make the Earth unlivable. If an asteroid hits, or another ice age begins, or something like that, then we face catastrophe. But the question essentially asks, what happens if we all die? The answer is, we all die. 2

5. How can we save Earth if it isn't too late? To ask the question is to reveal that you greatly overestimate your size in relation to the Earth. We could not ruin the Earth even if we tried, nor could we save it if it faced ruin. Our planet is a remarkably adaptable and robust home. We don't live in a giant china shop where everything is fragile and breakable, it's more like a playground where everything is made to withstand considerable wear and tear. Over the Earth's history the amount of CO2 in the air has typically been 2-10 times higher than at present yet the plants, animals and oceans flourished. Much of the past half million years have been ice age conditions which wiped out life on the northern continents, yet it always came back as soon as the ice retreated. If you take the view that the ordinary human pursuit of prosperity and happiness will somehow destroy the planet you will end up adopting an anti-human outlook. This is both a scientific and an ethical error. Set your sights on a more modest scale, by trying to be a good citizen and be helpful to the people around you, and you will make much better decisions than if you are thinking in terms of faraway abstract categories like saving the Earth.

Good luck with your studies.'

SOURCE

Global Cooling Expected For 2018 …Warming Projection May Be One Of The Great Scientific Blunders Of Modern Times

Global warming scientists continue struggling to find an explanation for the nearly 2 decades long global warming pause that has taken hold of the planet since the late 1990s.

The most recent temperature spike was due to the natural El Nino event at the equatorial Pacific, and that has disappeared over the last months. Alarmists claim that the global temperature is still 0.5°C above normal, yet it’s been so for the past 20 years!

Cooling signs abound

The search to explain the unexpected lack of warming is about to get a little tougher as 2018 is poised to see a further cooling across the globe. Signs of this cool-off are showing up in Greenland, the Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland and all across the northern hemisphere. A huge swath of North America has started 2018 with record cold.

La Nina to persist until spring

Another major reason cooler global surface temperatures are expected in 2018 is the now strengthening La Nina event taking place as equatorial Pacific surface temperatures have plummeted by 1-2°C since June of this year. This means that global cooling lies ahead for the planet in the months ahead. The latest forecast sees La Nina conditions extending into next spring:

There is a lag of about 6 months between the ocean surface temperature and satellite global lower troposphere temperatures. That means the la Nina low forecast for January, 2018, will start showing up in the temperatures by late spring (NH).

Cooling Pacific and Indian Ocean far more signficant

Alarmists also like hollering about the current unusual warmth at the poles. But veteran meteorologist Joe Bastardi tweets here that the “warmth” at the poles is not what we need to be looking at, writing that “far more significant” is the cooler area from the Indian ocean through Africa, the Atlantic, South America and the Pacific.

Cooling where it’s warm and humid a bigger deal in future global temp considerations.”

In a nutshell, a cool square kilometer over the equatorial Pacific far outweighs a warm square kilometer over the North Pole. All that red coloring scientists like to use to make the poles look hot is mostly hype.

Solar activity near 200-year low

In the current solar cycle 24 sunspot activity is now at the lowest level in almost 200 years. In the early 1800s the Earth found itself in the grips of the Dalton Minimum, a cold period with similarly low solar activity:

The accumulated sunspot anomaly from the mean of the previous 23 cycles – 107 months into the cycle.

A number of distinguished scientists and dozens of scientific publications warn that the planet may in fact be entering a period of global cooling. There were 7 such papers in 2017 alone.

One of the great scientific blunders of modern times

The upcoming solar cycle 25 also is expected to be a weak one, which bodes ill for the planet for the next 10 to 15 years. The current solar cycle 24 is the third weakest since the systematic observation of solar cycle activity began in 1755. Only solar cycles no. 5 and 6 (1798 – 1823 during the Dalton Minimum) were weaker.

As the above chart shows, weak solar cycles are linked to cool periods and come in bunches, alternating with the warm solar cycle bunches. It’s little wonder that the last 100 years have seen a warming, as cycles 17-23 were all above normal. If the pattern holds, cycle 26, and possibly even cycle 27, will also be below normal, which points to a cooling 21st century.

Ironically policymakers, in typical inept fashion, may be erroneously preparing societies for the completely wrong scenario and thus be unwittingly committing one of the great scientific blunders of modern times.

SOURCE

GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

South Australia planning to build the world’s largest thermal solar plant

Will someone save South Australians from their crazy Green/Left government? They have got a big battery that peters out in only a matter of minutes and windmills that fall over in South Australian wind and now they are going to get something that other people have been trying to make work for many years. Solar thermal just does not work as advertised. They sometimes even use more energy than they produce and require huge subsidies to keep working. The Ivanpah plant in California and the Abengoa experiment in Spain are cases in point

Following the success of the world’s largest battery, South Australia is aiming to build the world’s largest thermal solar plant.

SolarReserve’s $650 million, 150 megawatt Aurora solar thermal plant has received state development approval.

Construction of the facility will begin this year.

South Australian acting energy minister Chris Picton called the project a welcome development for the state.

"It's fantastic that SolarReserve has received development approval to move forward with this world-leading project that will deliver clean, dispatchable renewable energy to supply our electrified rail, hospitals and schools," Mr Picton said

“South Australia is fast becoming a global centre for the development of renewable energy with storage, with a range of other projects set to come online over the next few years.”
Advertisement

Commenting on the latest approvals, SolarReserve chief executive Kevin Smith said it is a major milestone.

“It is a significant step in the development of the Aurora solar thermal power station, which will bring clean power generation technology to South Australia,” Mr Smith said.

The Clean Energy Council executive general manager Natalie Collard told Fairfax Media, "the price that the government will pay for power is remarkably low, considering solar thermal is a very young technology in Australia.

"The state has taken a series of positive steps towards greater energy independence which are really starting to pay off. And it has already met its target of 50 per cent renewable energy almost a decade early," she said.

“South Australia is providing the rest of the country a glimpse of a renewable energy future. Our electricity system is rapidly moving towards one which will be smarter and cleaner, with a range of technologies providing high-tech, reliable, lower-cost power."

The power plant will be able to generate 500-gigawatt hours of energy annually, providing power to around 90,000 homes, with eight hours of full load storage.

Once constructed, the facility will be the world’s largest single-tower solar thermal power plant.

It works by using multiple heliostats - which are in essence turning mirrors - to focus solar energy onto a single central tower.

This tower uses molten salt technology to store this heat, which it can later use to create steam to turn a turbine and generate electricity when needed.

The plant will displace the equivalent of 200,000 tonnes of CO2 annually.

Australia has two other large-scale solar thermal plants, a 44-megawatt plant at Kogan Creek in Queensland, and a small 9.3-megawatt facility built to support AGL’s Liddell coal-fired power plant in NSW, although neither is a single-tower style of thermal solar plant.

South Australia drew international focus late last year when, in a partnership with Tesla, it installed the world's largest single battery unit, capable of powering 30,000 homes.

The new plant will be located 30 kilometres north of Port Augusta, in South Australia.

SOURCE

Global cooling: It's official!

The oceans are gradually losing the heat they accumulated in the years of El Nino

THERE’S no doubt last year was hot but eyebrows have been raised following a dump of climate data. Globally the world actually cooled slightly.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology’s (BoM) 2017 annual climate statement, released on Wednesday, the world got slightly cooler last year compared to 2016.

But put away dreams of skiing down the Blue Mountains or snow gently falling in Brisbane’s CBD — 2016 was the hottest year globally on record, temperatures are still well above average and 2017 will go down as Australia’s third warmest year in history.

Climate researchers have said Australia remains “vulnerable” to the effects of climate change and only “political inertia” was preventing concrete steps being taken to tackle the issue head-on.

The BoM’s Head of Climate Monitoring, Dr Karl Braganza, said the national mean temperature in 2107 was 0.95C warmer than average.

“Despite the lack of an El Nino — which is normally associated with our hottest years — 2017 was still characterised by very warm temperatures,” he said.

SOURCE

Erratic weather: with both record highs and lows

Not much of a story in that for Warmists

The drop-dead bats of Sydney’s summer shocker have joined the frozen lizards of Florida as proof positive the weather gods have gone crazy.

With Donald Trump calling for a bit more global warming, Australia can only dream of getting a dose of America’s current Arctic chill.

It’s a steep learning curve. Climate change can now make things hotter and colder simultaneously, with the strangest of natural results.

As temperatures plunge in the US, frozen sharks have washed ashore after drowning because water had frozen in their gills. In the usually balmy, tropical southern panhandle of Florida, iguanas have fallen out of palm trees frozen solid. The reptiles were still capable of being thawed if placed into the sun.

In Australia, it has been a similar story but opposite.

As temperatures soared to an eight-decade high of 47.3C in western Sydney this week hundreds of bats fell out of trees dead in Campbelltown, literally cooked alive. News of the brain-fried flying foxes travelled around the world.

Australian fruit bats at home

Heat-affected bats fell out of the trees in Sydney in 1790 also. Yes. 1790, not 1970. Australia has always had episodes of extreme heat in summer

Given such shocking extremes it can be difficult to maintain perspective.

But even the Bureau of Meteorology’s head of climate monitoring, Karl Braganza, admitted yesterday it was not unusual for Australia to have the hottest city temperature in the world at this time of year, as it did this week.

The coincidence of the northern hemisphere winter with summer across the equator will see to that.

But BoM says its homogenised national temperatures are continuing to creep ahead, confirming concerns about a gradually warming world.

At the end of the day, however, weather is still the weather and climate, climate.

Current extreme events are not unprecedented and the fashion for “attribution science” to decide if they are more or less likely to occur does not change that.

Natural variation is still not fully understood. Unless you are prepared, as London columnist Matt Ridley controversially has been, to take the really, really long view.

Ridley concedes the world is slowly slipping back into a proper ice age after 10,000 years of balmy warmth.

But he says where interglacials start abruptly with sudden and rapid warming they end gradually with many thousands of years of slow and erratic cooling.

In geological terms it’s a sure bet another ice age is on its way.

When it does come, maybe in many thousands of years’ time, some things will remain the same.

It’s just the bats, the sharks and humans who really will have reason to complain about the weather.

SOURCE

Australian East Coast Narrowly Avoids a Widespread Blackout – Thanks to Coal

The spare coal capacity which saved the day during the heatwave will soon no longer be available.

Energy giant AGL plans to shutter its NSW based Liddell coal plant by 2022. They have so far refused federal government entreaties to keep the plant open. AGL plans to divert future investment towards government subsidised renewable projects.

WHY wouldn’t AGL shut down Liddell coal-fired power when global warming theory obsessed politicians are shelling out billions upon billions of taxpayers money to fund the unreliable energy, corporate rent-seeking, subsidy-sucking renewables scam.

I do hope “save the planet” greens and climate freaks suffer their fair share of zero electricity in high-demand times. Or, maybe it will take one of their relatives or loved ones to die of heatstroke or freezing cold for them to quit the collective climate change hysteria that is hurting the poor and destroying economies.

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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 January, 2018

The Bottom of the Ocean Is Sinking

The work noted below got its results by comparing an approximation to an estimate so is doubly guesswork. And since the decline found consisted of only eight hundredths of one inch we must allow for it being no more than an error of measurement

So I don't think I really have to mention it but the article is a crock in other ways too. Where are the "melting ice sheets and glaciers" that they refer to? 96% of the earth's glacial ice is in Antarctica and that is GAINING mass overall, not melting.

And if the earth's oceans are "swelling", we should be seeing big sea level rises. But in lots of places worldwide sea levels are FALLING (e.g. here). It is only very dubious "corrections" for isostatic movements in Northern Europe that turn the falls into apparent rises

And that the isostatic adjustments are a crock is shown by the fact that there are substantial sea level falls even in isostatically stable parts of the world

Below is the raw sea level record from Stockholm, Sweden, showing a steady fall. No wonder they called on isostatic assumptions to "correct" it!

The ice age ended long ago. Assuming isostatic rebound from it still in the 21st century is totally implausible.

The whole article simply depends on conventional assumptions which are not supported by the evidence

The bottom of the ocean is more of a "sunken place" than it used to be.

In recent decades, melting ice sheets and glaciers driven by climate change are swelling Earth's oceans. And along with all that water comes an unexpected consequence — the weight of the additional liquid is pressing down on the seafloor, causing it to sink.

Consequently, measurements and predictions of sea-level rise may have been incorrect since 1993, underestimating the growing volume of water in the oceans due to the receding bottom, according to a new study.

Scientists have long known that Earth's crust, or outer layer, is elastic: Earlier research revealed how Earth's surface warps in response to tidal movements that redistribute masses of water; and 2017's Hurricane Harvey dumped so much water on Texas that the ground dropped 0.8 inches (2 centimeters), the Atlantic reported.

In the new investigation, researchers looked at more long-term impacts to the seafloor. They evaluated how much the shape of the ocean bottom may have changed between 1993 and 2014, taking into account the amount of water added to the ocean from liquid formerly locked up on land as ice. Previous research into seafloor stretching had omitted that extra water, the scientists wrote in the study.

To do that, they reviewed approximations of mass loss on land, as ice melted and drained into the oceans, and compared that to estimates of sea volume changes. They found that around the world for two decades, ocean basins deformed an average of 0.004 inches (0.1 millimeter) per year, with a total deformation of 0.08 inches (2 mm).

However, there were distinct regional patterns to the seafloor's bending and stretching, and the amount of sag in certain parts of the ocean bottom could be significantly higher — as much as 0.04 inches (1 mm) per year in the Arctic Ocean, for a total of 0.8 inches (20 mm), the study authors reported.

As a result, satellite assessments of sea-level change — which don't account for a sinking ocean bottom — could be underestimating the amount that seas are rising by 8 percent, according to the study.

The accuracy of future sea-level estimates could be notably improved if the sinking of the ocean floor were incorporated into the calculations, "either based on modeled estimates of ocean mass change, as was done in this study, or using more direct observations," the scientists concluded.

SOURCE

Pope Francis: Global Warming Is ‘Consequence of Human Activity’

He's just a typical "liberation" priest from South America. When he steps outside religion to involve himself in secular issues he has neither authority nor expertise and creates disrespect for the church. After pedophile priests, does the church really need a Leftist Pope?

Pope Francis took a strong stand on anthropogenic climate change Monday, telling a gathering of diplomats in the Vatican that global warming is a result of human action.

We must not “downplay the importance of our own responsibility in interaction with nature,” Francis told the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See. “Climate changes, with the global rise in temperatures and their devastating effects, are also a consequence of human activity.”

In his statement, Pope Francis went beyond earlier declarations that seemed to exclude the Church taking a formal stand on questions of climate science.

In his 2015 teaching letter on the environment, Laudato Si, the Pope explicitly declared that “the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions or to replace politics.”

In the same text, Francis said that he was encouraging debate rather than trying to impose his own understanding of environmental concerns.

“On many concrete questions,” he wrote, “the Church has no reason to offer a definitive opinion; she knows that honest debate must be encouraged among experts, while respecting divergent views.”

Francis also said it is necessary to create “a social debate” in which of those involved in any way can explain their problems and “have access to adequate and reliable information in order to make decisions for the common good,” something rarely seen in contemporary discussions of climate change that tend to exclude climate change skeptics.

Nonetheless, with the passage of time, Pope Francis has seemed to take an ever more decided stance behind the notion of manmade global warming, while sending signals that there was not much room for debate on the issue.

In November 2016, the Pope called climate change skeptics to an “ecological conversion,” while denouncing what he believed to be a “weak reaction” from governments to the climate crisis. He also criticized “the ease with which well-founded scientific opinion about the state of our planet is disregarded.”

On that occasion, the Pope also said that politicians had been “distracted” in implementing important measures to curb carbon emissions and blamed the sluggish adoption of COP21 protocols on “an economy which seek profit above all else.”

“Never before has there been such a clear need for science to be at the service of a new global ecological equilibrium,” Francis told his audience, while painting a picture of a world on the verge of “ecological collapse” and a “consequent increase of poverty and social exclusion.”

In his address to diplomats Monday, Francis continued along a similar vein, stressing the duty to leave “a more beautiful and livable world” to future generations and “to work, in the light of the commitments agreed upon in Paris in 2015, for the reduction of gas emissions that harm the atmosphere and human health.”

SOURCE

Exxon Prepares To Sue California Cities, Says They Contradict Themselves On Climate Change

ExxonMobil is apparently planning to sue the California cities and counties that have sued it over climate change, alleging they must be lying in their lawsuits or misleading potential investors in bond offerings. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown)

Some government officials in California are hypocrites pushing a political agenda that involves using private lawyers to sue and demonize ExxonMobil, the company is now arguing in a Texas state court.

On Jan. 8, Exxon took the first step towards suing those who orchestrated climate change lawsuits in California by asking the Tarrant County District Court to allow it to question an assortment of government officials and a Hagens Berman lawyer. The company says those local officials are talking out of both sides of their mouths - blaming Exxon for an impending flooding disaster while not disclosing that alleged threat to possible investors in their bond offerings.

In 2017, the counties of Marin, Santa Cruz and San Mateo and the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz and Imperial Beach filed suit against dozens of energy companies, including Exxon and 17 other Texas-based businesses, over climate change. The company has previously been targeted by the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York.

“It is reasonable to infer that the municipalities brought these lawsuits not because of a bona fide belief in any tortious conduct by the defendants or actual damage to their jurisdictions, but instead to coerce ExxonMobil and others operating in the Texas energy sector to adopt policies aligned with those favored by local politicians in California,” attorneys for the company wrote.

In doing so, they must have lied to potential investors in their respective bond offerings, the company claims.

Statements made to potential investors contradict allegations made by the municipalities when they sued the energy industry, the filing says. For example:

-San Mateo County’s complaint says it is “particularly vulnerable to sea level rise” and that there is a 93% chance the county experiences a “devastating” flood before 2050. However, bond offerings in 2014 and 2016 noted that the county “is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur";

More HERE

It’s All Over: German Parties Agree To Scrap Legally Binding 2020 Climate Target

Germany’s would-be coalition partners have agreed to drop an ambitious plan to lower carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, two sources told Reuters on Monday — a potential embarrassment for Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Negotiators for her conservative bloc and the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) told Reuters the parties had agreed in exploratory talks on forming a government that the targeted cut in emissions could no longer be achieved by 2020.

Instead, they would aim to hit the 40 percent target in the early 2020s, the sources said, adding that both parties are still sticking to their goal of achieving a 55 percent cut in emissions by 2030.

The deal would represent something of a u-turn by Merkel, who has long presented herself as an advocate for climate protection policies on the international stage.

SOURCE

Australia's Green Party: A rabble without a cause

The Greens have been heavily infiltrated by old Trots. Both Rhiannon and Bandt are former members of Trotskyite organizations. Trots are the heavy haters among Leftists

The similarity between the words “progress” and “progressive” is one of the great curiosities of modern politics. Could perchance the two be related?

The meaning of the noun progress is clear enough, having served as a statement of political intent since the dawn of democracy. Progressive, on the other hand, is an adjective struggling to give coherence to a succession of exotic causes, many of which are likely to send us backwards.

Which leads us to the Greens, a party easily bored by the prosaic challenges of government — balancing budgets, defending borders, efficient service delivery, that sort of thing. How will the party fill its working day, now the battle of the rainbow has been won?

No amount of pink champagne could hide the Greens’ disappointment when the changes to the Marriage Act were agreed. It must have hurt like Hades to see a Liberal prime minister lapping up the applause. Even worse, with such a potent issue now off the agenda, the Greens are beginning to look like a rabble without a cause. In the fickle world of progressive politics, that is the quickest way to irrelevance.

Adam Bandt was less than exuberant when the Marriage Act amendments were passed. It wasn’t victory, he told parliament, merely “a watershed moment”. It was “not the end and not the beginning” since equality “will continue to elude us well after this bill is enshrined in law”.

What on earth could he mean? We were led to believe that the right to be joined in secular matrimony was la cause du siecle, the fulfilment of the promise of liberte, egalite et fraternite, not to mention sorority, and that once the legislation was passed we would finally be able to hold up our heads as members of a civilised nation.

But no, says Bandt, it is just “a step on a long, winding path towards justice”.

“We must remember that we are only dismantling one part of a system that bombards LGBTIQ people from every angle with a message that they are different,” he said.

A long, winding path towards justice is an essential element of the progressive narrative. Another is the dark past and bloody struggle, and Bandt made sure there was one of those as well.

“We must remember that every step towards equality for LGBTIQ Australians has been paid for with pain and sometimes blood — the blood of queer Australians and their allies who took to the streets to stand up for their rights, only to be batted down by batons and fists,” said Bandt, reaching for the cliche bowl. Australian lesbians and gays had faced “hundreds of years of persecution”; had been “callously murdered for daring to be who they are”; “innocent blood was spilt”; it was “an unspeakable tragedy”; the horrors of which “many of us can only imagine”.

A postal plebiscite, scrupulously conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and bloodless as far as we can tell, seems a tame ending to such an epic struggle. It is little wonder Bandt felt obliged to denounce this dastardly democratic act. It was a “final humiliation ... a cruel twist”. How so? Because “the fundamental rights of a minority were decided by the very majority that oppressed them for so long”.

It seems unlikely that sex will return to being simply an activity rather than a political cause. The Greens have invested too much in these boutique human rights to give it away, even if their search for aggrieved minorities is yielding diminishing returns.

The Greens’ next big cause is not immediately clear. The Labor Party has stolen their pitch on climate change, and it seems only a matter of time before the federal ALP turns its back on coal altogether. Labor is well on its way to embracing Palestine. The Greens lost the moral high ground on asylum-seekers eight years ago, when the toll of drownings became too big too ignore.

The struggle to carve out a constituency in a crowded market for minor parties is a challenge for Green parties across the democratic world. In Germany, the Greens finished in sixth place in last September’s federal election as they struggled to hold their own against Die Linke, a left-wing populist party. Green parties are struggling for members in Britain and France too. In Australia, Richard Di Natale’s strategy of leaning towards the mainstream is in trouble. The Greens failed to maintain double-digit support for much of last year.

A convincing by-election victory in the Victorian state seat of Northcote late last year and the strong possibility that the Greens could win the federal Victorian seat of Batman in the event of a by-election show the party’s resilience, but highlight its dilemma.

It can clearly hold its own in demographically exceptional enclaves where university lecturers outnumber plumbers, but if its support nationally is to rise beyond 10 per cent it needs wider appeal.

The party’s internal tensions are strongest in NSW, where the Left Renewal faction is in open revolt against the federal leadership.

“Talk about misreading the portents of our times,” Hall Greenland wrote recently on his blog Watermelon Papers. “Social democracy everywhere shifts to the left and the Australian Greens parliamentary leadership decides to go in the opposite direction.”

Greenland says Labor has stolen the march on renewable energy and urges the party to keep the ecological “crisis” at the centre of its agenda. His vision for the future for the party is two-speed: an “activist extra-parliamentarianism” — an ugly word for an ugly concept — while using parliament for “carrying popular causes”.

In the absence of any other viable radical progressive minor party, the Greens clearly cannot be written off. The apparent drought of moral crusades should not fool us into thinking that progressive politics is likely to become any less fruitier.

After all, there is one thing we know for certain: when the next batty progressive cause arrives, it will catch the centre-right by complete surprise. It will make the mistake of assuming that the cause will collapse under the weight of its own craziness, failing once again to recognise that the unopposed absurdity of today becomes the conventional wisdom of tomorrow.

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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9 January, 2018

UK to end 140 years of coal power by 2025

This is amusing. The article below skates over what they use to replace coal when the sun isn't shining (normal in Britain) and the wind isn't blowing. They use gas mostly but also have a great fleet of diesel generators and also burn wood. And both those latter emit MORE CO2 than coal. Another example of the Green/Left being borderline insane

Britain will end its use of coal in power plants by 2025 after more than 140 years burning the fossil fuel.

The Government confirmed that its 2015 pledge to phase out coal-fired power within a decade would move ahead under a new rule that limits the ‘carbon-intensity’ of power plants.

The limit will allow thermal power plants that use lower-carbon gas to act as back-up generation, but coal plants will be forced to close unless they are fitted with carbon capture technology.

Coal-fired power has dwindled in recent years due to the rising tax on carbon emissions to curb greenhouse gases and the boom in renewable energy.

In 2017 coal-fired power made up just 2pc of the UK’s electricity mix, down from 9pc in 2016 and 22pc in 2015. Meanwhile, low-carbon options such as renewable energy and nuclear power make up more than half of the electricity system.

Last year was also the first time Britain used no coal-fired power at all over a 24-hour period, according to National Grid data.

In order to meet the UK’s legally binding climate change targets Government has set an emission limit of up to 450 grammes of CO2 for each kilowatt hour of electricity produced to squeeze out the remaining coal plants.

However, experts have warned that despite the 2025 cut-off Britain’s six remaining coal plants could still enjoy an 11th-hour revival by scooping up contracts to generate power during the winter.

Hannah Martin, from Greenpeace UK, warned that the carbon-heavy fossil fuel should be replaced with clean technologies “well before the 2025 deadline” if the UK hopes to remain a global leader in tackling climate change.

Sam Bright, an energy lawyer at ClientEarth, said Government’s efforts should go well beyond coal plants and include polluting gas-fired power plants too.

“The Government has kept to its commitment to phase out unabated coal generation by 2025, but we aren't convinced that this alone merits its claims to global leadership. Not only are other countries imposing more ambitious sunset dates, we are concerned that the door is left wide open for investments in new, long-term gas capacity, locking us into another generation of fossil fuel power,” he said.

“We need to see the clearest possible messages from Government on what the clean energy future will look like - beyond coal has to mean beyond gas too,” he added.

SOURCE

Histrionics are what the Green/Left do

The effusions below are about Britain's National Health Service but are just as absurd as the various Greenie panics

The biofuel crony capitalist revolving door

Ex-Grassley aide will now help Big Corn and Big Biodiesel retain their mandates and subsidies

Paul Driessen

Yet another congressional aide is about to pass through Washington’s infamous revolving door to a lucrative private sector position. Kurt Kovarik, legislative director for Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), will become vice president of federal affairs for the National Biodiesel Board.

To grow and prosper, this industry relies on subsidies and mandates that require steadily increasing volumes of diesel fuel from crops and other sources. As the NBB said in a press release, Kovarik’s “decades of experience in the Senate will serve us well, as we navigate federal policy issues that most affect our industry.” His work on energy and tax legislation, familiarity with the key players in Washington and knowledge of biofuels “are all reasons we are so happy to have him on our team.”

Translated into common English, Kovarik will help keep mandates in place and revenues flowing into biodiesel coffers – even as justifications for its special treatment become less persuasive, claims about its supposed benefits are found wanting, and harmful effects on taxpayers and consumers become obvious.

Indeed, like corn ethanol, biodiesel is just one more federal program that has become a perpetual fixture, all but immune from any revisions or reductions. That’s because powerful special interests band together to block any such attempts – and make major campaign contributions to friendly legislators.

Meanwhile, consumer interests adversely affected by the rules are too diverse, poorly organized and ill-funded to mount an effective campaign against the “renewable fuels” industry.

Thus, when the Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed a minuscule reduction in the total volume of corn ethanol required for blending into gasoline, the biodiesel lobby rose up united in righteous indignation against the idea – even though biodiesel was not being affected.

The legislatively created industries always take Ben Franklin’s warning to heart: “We must indeed all hang together,” Franklin said just before signing the Declaration of Independence in 1776, “or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Billions of dollars are at stake for biofuel industries, and they will not fail to aid one another. Nor will they deviate from the narrative that plant-based fuels will somehow save Earth and humanity from the alleged ravages of planet-warming fossil fuels, even as developing nations burn more oil, natural gas and coal every year – and the Northern Hemisphere suffers through another nasty, frigid winter.

Biofuels from corn, oil palm, soybean or algae require vast expanses of land – dozens or hundreds of times more land than is needed to produce equivalent amounts of energy from coal, oil or natural gas. That land once was or could now be wildlife habitat – and the direct and indirect effects on wildlife populations are often profound, especially when Indonesian and other forests are sacrificed on Gaia’s altar to establish oil palm plantations for illusory “sustainable, renewable” energy.

The same widespread land and wildlife impacts result from erecting wind turbine and solar panel facilities – to generate expensive, unreliable, weather-dependent electricity … and build (coal or gas-fueled) backup generators, to provide electricity the 75% of the time when there is insufficient sun or wind.

Biofuels also require prodigious volumes of water, and in most cases huge amounts of fertilizers, pesticides and fossil fuel energy. And when biofuels are burned in vehicles or fuel cells for electricity generation, they emit enormous quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2). In fact, across their full planting, harvesting, conversion and use cycle, biofuels emit just as much carbon dioxide as fossil fuels.

All that extra CO2 is good for forest, grassland, crop and other plants – and recent studies confirm that CO2 is greening our planet, by helping plants grow faster and better. That this CO2 is also causing “dangerous manmade climate change” is increasingly in doubt, despite what climate doomsayers continue to claim). The assertion that crop-based biofuels are “sustainable” is not supported by evidence.

In reality – as scientist, engineer, former MIT professor and energy analyst Peter Huber observes in his book, Hard Green: Saving the environment from the environmentalists: A conservative manifesto – the best, greenest, most ecologically sound, most sustainable fuels are those that get the most energy per pound of material that must be mined, trucked, pumped, pipelined and burned.

Supposedly “renewable” energy sources do not pass this simple test. But in liberal policy, media and regulatory circles, they are routinely exempt from the criticism, calumny and punishment so regularly meted out to fossil fuels and companies that produce them.

For poor developing countries, renewable-only energy policies demanded or imposed by World Bank, EU, environmentalist and other interests perpetuate poverty, joblessness, disease and malnutrition, ensuring nasty, brutish and short lives. Such policies are immoral, genocidal, and properly detested by nations determined to bring health and prosperity to their people.

Thanks to fracking and modern exploration and production technologies, the world still has decades or even centuries of natural gas, oil and coal. For a world that still depends on these fuels for 85% of its total energy, that is good news. It’s even better news for the future, when humanity will still need fossil fuels for over 75% of a 28% larger total energy supply in 2040, according to the Energy Information Agency.

Fossil fuels (as well as nuclear and hydroelectric power) should be embraced, not excoriated, and used with pride until energy sources just as reliable and affordable are discovered someday in the future.

It likewise makes little sense to promote biodiesel and corn ethanol while also advocating electric cars. That approach not only increases the demand for reliable, affordable electricity generation – an increasingly impossible dream if we are supposed to rely more and more on wind and solar electricity.

It exacerbates problems resulting from mandates that require blending ever more ethanol into decreasing supplies of gasoline for fewer internal combustion engines: eg, having so much ethanol in gasoline for those engines that gaskets are damaged and warrantees are voided, and fraud problems associated with RINs (Renewable Identification Numbers) used to ensure compliance with renewable fuel standards.

Plant-based fuels that enrich regional biofuel interests increasingly cause multiple other problems for refiners that provide nearly 90% of vehicle fuels: gasoline and conventional diesel. Under pressure from Big Biofuel and corn-state senators, EPA raised its 2018 biofuel requirement to 19.3 billion gallons, a huge increase from its 16.3 billion gallon mandate in 2014. That means smaller, independent refiners will be unable to blend enough ethanol into their gasoline to meet the mandate – and will have to buy RINs, at inflated and unpredictable prices, to comply artificially with the impossible blending requirement.

As the Wall Street Journal notes, Dallas-based HollyFrontier Corp. must spend over $300 million per year on RINs, forcing it freeze hiring, defer capital expenditures and investment, penalize its blue-collar workers, and transfer massive wealth from refiners to ethanol producers, who still demand more.

The absurd situation caused Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) to copy corn-state senators on hostage taking. (They held up EPA nominees until the agency caved in on ethanol.) Mr. Cruz is preventing action on the Agriculture Department nominee who would control a lot of biofuel money, until a compromise can be worked out between biofuel and conventional petroleum fuels. He secured a meeting but so far no deal.

Under fascist-style socialism, the government doesn’t own companies outright; it merely decrees how they must operate, what they must produce, who pays and who benefits. That’s where U.S. biofuel policies have taken America’s energy sector. It’s time to reform these policies – to reflect today’s economic, climate, oil depletion and oil import realities – and set a time certain for ethanol and biofuel mandates to expire. Let real free enterprise operate, instead of crony-corporatist government decrees.

Via email

Trump proposes massive expansion of oil drilling

The Trump administration wants to open up nearly all the country’s offshore areas for oil drilling, leasing areas off places like Florida and California for the first time in decades, and reversing an Obama-era policy.

Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke announced that his department is planning the largest number of oil-lease sales in US history starting next year. It would open up 90 per cent of offshore land for drilling as part of a five-year plan. It reverses an Obama-era plan that would have kept only 6 per cent of the same acres available for drilling.

“We’re going to become the strongest energy superpower,” Mr Zinke said in a call with reporters. “We certainly have the assets to do that.”

Oil-industry groups and their supporters who want more access to domestic oil lands are cheering the move.

“Expanding access to additional offshore reserves allows the United States to better understand where production potential exists and where capital should be invested,” Dan Naatz, senior vice president of government relations and political affairs at the independent Petroleum Association of America said in a statement.

“Although this is just the first step in a long process, today’s proposal is exactly the signal industry needs to drive this work forward.”

But the proposal is already meeting broad opposition including from some Republicans. Florida Governor Rick Scott said ahead of Interior’s announcement that he opposes opening drilling off of Florida, and he has support from environmental groups and the tourism industry.

“It’s absolutely radical,” said Diane Hoskins, climate and energy campaign director at Oceana, an environmental group focusing on the world’s oceans and an opponent of expanded coastal drilling. “Expanding offshore drilling threatens the livelihood and the coastal economies that rely on a healthy ocean.”

Mr Zinke pledged to work with states and other stakeholders, emphasising in his announcement that the plan isn’t final. The department is planning public meetings around the country starting in less than two weeks, with the intent of taking public comments and finalising new rules by the autumn of 2019. The plan would be in effect for five years, into 2024.

The effort to open up more drilling areas comes in part from President Donald Trump’s order in the (northern) spring to overhaul rules and encourage more domestic energy production. While oil and fuel prices, and exploration have fallen dramatically from a few years ago, the administration’s philosophy is to lower costs for domestic drillers to help them compete against global rivals.

SOURCE

Piers Akerman: Australia’s energy security is the greatest threat to our survival

THE greatest threat to our security is not Islamic State, it’s not African gangs, it’s not even the drug-addled Islamist idiots targeting pedestrians.

No, the clear and present danger to the nation comes from the failure to ensure our own energy security.

Australia is the ninth-largest energy producer in the world with massive renewable and non-renewable energy resources yet it can’t guarantee energy supply to its industries and domestic users.

This is a failure of policy at both state and federal levels caused by supine subservience to the faddish global warmers.

Forget renewables and batteries, like South Australia, which relies on huge diesel back-up or the pie-in-the-sky pumped hydro that requires more power than it produces to keep its reserves ready.

We just aren’t tapping our reliable coal or uranium reserves as we should be.

That’s why we must rely on imported fuel to exist as a nation and why we are hostage to others.

Not only are we heavily dependent on imported refined petroleum products and crude oil to meet day-to-day demands, we rely on foreign ships to deliver this economy-sustaining energy and we aren’t meeting our international obligation to hold a 90-day supply in reserve.

We are the only nation that doesn’t meet this International Energy Agency reserve threshold and we hold less than half the required fuel volumes.

We invest around $30 billion a year in defence but that’s meaningless if we can’t provide necessary energy security.

A recent study estimated that the less than 45-day reserve of fuel would mean that food supply transport would run for about nine days, pharmaceutical supplies would be hit in three and the military might have fuel for 17.

One of the legends of the Australian maritime industry, Captain Harry Mansson, pointed out even the name Australian National Line — ANL — has been sold to French interests and is headquartered in Marseilles.

Captain Mansson has suggested that Australia move towards becoming independent of foreign transporters by purchasing four second-hand Very Large Crude Carriers of about 300,000 DWT each, about five years old and with European-standard accommodation for our Australian crews, with the promised union acceptances before anything is finalised.

He said such ships average about 15 years of unrestricted trade, so the five-year age would give us 10 years with the four ships alone. Allowing one month for a round trip they would make 48 trips annually between them, carrying some 14 million tonnes of fuel, which is about 41 per cent of the total.

Unfortunately, his attempts to communicate with the government have been frustrated whereas Opposition leader Bill Shorten has opened a dialogue.

This is interesting but don’t expect too much from Shorten who is reliant for survival on the votes of the militant Maritime Union of Australia, whose totally unrealistic demands on wages and conditions for its members were instrumental in killing Australian commercial shipping.

Captain Mansson said that as we are an island nation it is critical that Australia has its own flagged fleet in times of crisis, on which we can rely to handle our crucial imports.

Notwithstanding the history of the bloody-minded maritime unions, Shorten is determined to make political capital with his calls for a new Australian shipping industry.

“It was for these economic, national security and environmental reasons that the former federal Labor government was so determined to rebuild Australia’s shipping industry following years of neglect,” he told Mansson.

“For Australian shipping companies the package included a zero tax rate, more generous accelerated depreciation arrangements, rollover relief for selected capital assets, new tax incentives to employ Australian seafarers and an exemption from the Royalty Withholding Tax for ‘bareboat’ leased vessels.

“To further strengthen the local industry, an International Shipping Register was created, allowing operators of Australian-flagged vessels to employ mixed Australian and foreign crews on internationally agreed rates and conditions.

“These measures were based on the extensive reform programs that had already been implemented by other maritime nations including the United Kingdom, Japan, China and Denmark.

“Importantly, Labor’s changes did not preclude the use of foreign vessels. They simply required firms needing to move freight between Australian ports to first seek out an Australian operator. When none were available, foreign vessels could be used so long as they paid Australian-level wages on domestic sectors.

“However, for Labor’s suite of reforms to work, they needed time. Unfortunately, even before they took effect the Coalition sought to undermine them. Their attacks were calculated to create uncertainty and doubt in the minds of those considering investing in the Australian industry as to the durability of the regulatory changes and the new tax incentives.

All of us want to reduce the cost of doing business in Australia — but not at any cost. Particularly if that cost is the destruction of a strategically significant industry and the loss of a highly skilled workforce — and that’s precisely what the Coalition’s 2015 legislation would have done. The legislation put ideology ahead of the national interest.”

National interest was never foremost in the minds of those running the union movement however, as the sabotage of war matériel and undermining of the war effort during WWII demonstrated.

Unless we act to provide security for fuel we will be unable to access the resources the health industry relies on; food production and distribution would halt, few businesses could operate.

Personal and public transport wouldn’t function, defence force operations would be severely restricted. Our society would be paralysed.

We cannot afford to be held hostage by the union movement as we have been in the past or by foreign interests.

The Coalition must demonstrate leadership now and present a realistic strategy for energy independence.

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 January, 2018

Men Resist Green Behavior as Unmanly

Probably because it is. It is emotional rather than logical.

Feminists routinely claim that the environment is a feminist issue. There's a whole Wikipedia article on it. So for the authors below to have shown anything new, they would have to have established that there was no prior polarization between the sexes on environmental issues. They did not do that, probably because they could not.

So their research was just more of the superficial and biased rubbish that we routinely get from Leftist psychologists. I have commented on a lot of it over the years.

And I am amused that the article appeared in the "Unscientific American" -- as conservatives often call it. How appropriate!

A surprising reason for resistance to environmental goods and habits

Women have long surpassed men in the arena of environmental action; across age groups and countries, females tend to live a more eco-friendly lifestyle. Compared to men, women litter less, recycle more, and leave a smaller carbon footprint. Some researchers have suggested that personality differences, such as women’s prioritization of altruism, may help to explain this gender gap in green behavior.

Our own research suggests an additional possibility: men may shun eco-friendly behavior because of what it conveys about their masculinity. It’s not that men don’t care about the environment. But they also tend to want to feel macho, and they worry that eco-friendly behaviors might brand them as feminine.

The research, conducted with three other colleagues, consisted of seven experiments involving more than 2,000 American and Chinese participants. We showed that there is a psychological link between eco-friendliness and perceptions of femininity. Due to this “green-feminine stereotype,” both men and women judged eco-friendly products, behaviors, and consumers as more feminine than their non-green counterparts. In one experiment, participants of both sexes described an individual who brought a reusable canvas bag to the grocery store as more feminine than someone who used a plastic bag—regardless of whether the shopper was a male or female. In another experiment, participants perceived themselves to be more feminine after recalling a time when they did something good versus bad for the environment.

Men may eschew green products and behaviors to avoid feeling feminine. In one study, we threatened the masculinity of male participants by showing them a pink gift card with a floral design and asking them to imagine using the card to purchase three products (lamp, backpack, and batteries). Compared to men shown a standard gift card, threatened men were more likely to choose the non-green rather than green version of each item. The idea that emasculated men try to reassert their masculinity through non-environmentally-friendly choices suggests that in addition to littering, wasting water, or using too much electricity, one could harm the environment merely by making men feel feminine.

Ironically, although men are often considered to be less sensitive than women, they seem to be particularly sensitive when it comes to perceptions of their gender identity. In fact, a previous study suggests that men find it to be more difficult than women to choose between masculine and feminine versions of everyday food and household items and will usually change their preferences to be more manly when allowed time to think about their decisions. Something as simple as holding a purse, ordering a colorful drink, or talking in a high voice can lead to social harm, so men tend to keep a sharp eye out for any of these potential snares.

So what can pro-environmental marketers do to buffer against the threat posed to men by the green-feminine stereotype? First, eco-friendly marketing messages and materials can be designed to affirm men’s masculinity and give them the confidence to overcome their fear of being judged as feminine when engaging in green behaviors. For example, in one experiment, men who received feedback affirming their masculinity were more interested in purchasing an eco-friendly version of a cleaning product. Men who feel secure in their manhood are more comfortable going green.

Second, green products and organizations can be marketed as more “Men”-vironmentally-friendly, with more masculine fonts, colors, words, and images used in the branding. To illustrate, men in one experiment were more likely to donate to a green non-profit with a masculine logo (black and dark blue colors featuring a howling wolf, with the name “Wilderness Rangers” in a bold font) than one with a traditional logo (green and light tan colors featuring a tree, with the name “Friends of Nature” in a frilly font). And in a field study conducted at a BMW dealership in China, male customers were more interested in a hybrid vehicle after viewing a print ad featuring a masculine term in the model’s description than when viewing the traditional print ad.

Together, these findings highlight how the green-feminine stereotype inhibits men from taking eco-friendly actions, and suggest that masculine affirmation and masculine branding may be effective in narrowing the gender gap in environmentalism. Make the man feel manly, and he’s more likely to go green.

SOURCE

Trump’s EPA Has Cleaned Up Seven Of The Most Toxic Sites In The US

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) partly or completely cleaned seven of the most toxic land sites, called Superfund sites, in the U.S. in 2017, according to the EPA.

Of the seven sites designated for cleanup, three were completely cleansed, while four others still require some work. The cleanup effort is a significant improvement over the year prior when the EPA completely cleaned one Superfund site and parts of another.

“We have made it a priority to get these sites cleaned up faster and in the right way,” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said in a statement. “By creating a streamlined task force and making major remedy decisions that hold potentially responsible parties accountable for cleanup, the Superfund program is carrying out the agency’s mission of protecting human health and the environment more every day.”

The gains Pruitt’s EPA made are part of a list of 21 contaminated sites that need “immediate and intense attention” out of more than 1,300 Superfund sites nationwide.

Pruitt has been criticized recently for rolling back environmental regulations and reducing his agency’s scope and reach. Undoing rules put in place by the Obama administration, Pruitt has reduced regulatory burdens on industries and put the environment and public health at risk, The Washington Post reports.

Pruitt says he is allowing more of a local voice when it comes to development and taking a stewardship-focused, rather than preventative, view of the relationship between the environment and industry.

“The last administration talked about putting up fences. [They said,] ‘Let’s not develop, we’re not going to use the natural resources to feed the world and power the world.’ I think that’s wrong,” Pruitt told WaPo. “I think our focus should be on using our natural resources — with environmental stewardship in mind. … We can be about jobs and growth and be good stewards of our environment. The last several years we’ve been told we can’t do both.”

SOURCE

Washington Post Pollutes Scott Pruitt's EPA

According to the newspaper, the EPA is "one of Trump's most powerful tools." Actually, it was Obama's.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is without a doubt one of the most all-around hated members of President Donald Trump’s team. The reason? Under Pruitt’s predecessor, Gina McCarthy, environmental protection was merely a misnomer. The overarching goal was to circumvent Congress by legislating essentially from Barack Obama’s desk. For the Left, this was a desirable exploitation of power that helped fulfill an agenda. Therefore, Pruitt’s federalist-inspired ideology and leadership came under immense scrutiny, which began before he even took the reins.

Now, after a year’s worth of regulatory rollbacks, a Washington Post article laments on “How Scott Pruitt turned the EPA into one of Trump’s most powerful tools.” The title alone is laughable and entirely backwards, as implies that it is Pruitt, not McCarthy, who turned the agency into a power-hungry leviathan. The story itself explains that Pruitt did nothing of the sort.

The Post reports, “In legal maneuvers and executive actions, in public speeches and closed-door meetings with industry groups, [Pruitt] has moved to shrink the agency’s reach, alter its focus, and pause or reverse numerous environmental rules. The effect has been to steer the EPA in the direction sought by those being regulated.” Amazingly, the Post goes on to make a baffling comparison between Pruitt and McCarthy: “The two share something in common: a willingness to use the agency’s broad executive authority to act unilaterally.”

We can’t recall the Post ever making such a big deal out of McCarthy’s abuse of power. In other words, what the media believes wasn’t a problem under McCarthy is today exceedingly dangerous. After all, as the Post writes, “Pruitt has begun to dismantle former president Barack Obama’s environmental legacy, halting the agency’s efforts to combat climate change and to shift the nation away from its reliance on fossil fuels.” Besides, how can anyone possibly draw comparisons between a person who oversteps her role with unconstitutional rules and another who wants things done in a legal manner?

The fact of the matter is, the EPA was one of Barack Obama’s most powerful weapons in his quest to fundamentally transform America. If the Post’s lousy headline is meant to suggest that Pruitt is one of Trump’s most effective team members in returning toward limited government, then yes. But if it’s implying Pruitt is as power-hungry and corrupt as Obama and his EPA administrator, then absolutely not. The EPA needs to be brought back to an equilibrium, which is what Pruitt is doing. And kudos to him for doing so amidst the unfair treatment and the dirt being thrown at him.

SOURCE

The ozone layer is HEALING: Hole over Antarctica is closing thanks to a worldwide ban on the damaging chemicals, NASA confirms

They've said that before but then along came 2015 with the hole bigger than ever. It just fluctuates naturally, that's all

A hole in the ozone layer that appeared above Antarctica in the 1980s has shrunk thanks to a worldwide ban on damaging chemicals, Nasa has confirmed.

Research found that levels of ozone-damaging chlorine are rapidly declining in the planet's atmosphere, a direct indicator that Earth's protective layer is on the mend.

Last year, satellite images seemed to show that the ozone hole had begun to close up, with some scientists suggesting it could fully recover by 2060.

Until now it was not clear if this was the result of the Montreal protocol, a 1989 initiative to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals called chloro-flurocarbons (CFCs).

During the 1980s researchers spotted a hole forming in the protective layer, which many blamed on global usage of chemicals called chloro-flurocarbons (CFCs).

CFC's were widely used in aerosols, fridges, air conditioning and packing materials until they were phased out as part of the Montreal protocol in 1989.

They are broken down by the Sun's ultraviolet radiation when they rise into the stratosphere, releasing chlorine atoms that destroy ozone molecules.

The new study satellite readings of the chemical composition of atmosphere to find that the hole in the ozone layer is decreasing in size thanks to a drop in CFC levels.

'All of this is evidence that the Montreal Protocol is working - the chlorine is decreasing in the Antarctic stratosphere, and the ozone destruction is decreasing along with it,' the researchers, led by Dr Susan Strahan of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, wrote.

Earth's ozone layer acts like a sunscreen, shielding the planet from potentially harmful UV radiation that can cause skin cancer, cataracts, and damage wildlife.

Ozone depletion occurs in cold temperatures, meaning it varies with the weather year-on-year, making changes over time difficult to study.

Previous research has used statistical analyses of changes in the ozone hole's size to argue that ozone depletion is decreasing.

But the new study used Aura readings of the chemical composition of the hole, finding that the hole is decreasing in size thanks to a drop in atmospheric CFC levels.

Ozone-damaging chlorine concentrations over the Antarctic are declining at a rate of 25 parts-per-trillion each year, equivalent to 0.8 per cent, the study found.

This resulted in a 20 per cent drop in ozone destruction since the Montreal protocol came into effect.

'CFCs have lifetimes from 50 to 100 years, so they linger in the atmosphere for a very long time,' said study coauthor Dr Anne Douglass.

'As far as the ozone hole being gone, we're looking at 2060 or 2080. And even then there might still be a small hole.'

SOURCE

EPA approves $900m rare earths mine in Central Australia despite radioactive risk

A proposed $900 million rare earths mine in Central Australia has been recommended for approval by the Northern Territory Environment Protection Authority (EPA), after an assessment process lasting more than two years.

Arafura Resources' Nolans Project at Aileron, 135 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs, would mine rare earth materials such as neodymium and praseodymium, used to manufacture strong magnets for wind turbines and electric vehicles.

The EPA identified several long-term environmental risks and impacts with the project, but found they could be managed.

"There will have to be a high level of operational management control for this project over a couple of generations, and there'll have to be a high level of regulatory scrutiny, there's no two ways about that," EPA chairman Paul Vogel said.

The primary risks include the permanent storage of naturally occurring radioactive material onsite and the use of significant groundwater resources over the 35 to 55-year lifespan of the project.

Mr Vogel said he understood public concern about such issues, and the effectiveness of the EPA to effectively monitor them, but said the authority was better placed to provide sufficient oversight.

"That's something that we've drawn attention to with government already, saying that we need to be adequately resourced ... to ensure that these facilities are adequately regulated over time," he said.

It is estimated the project will use 2.7 gigalitres of groundwater a year, and the EPA has recommended aquifer levels and water usage be monitored in real-time with data made available to the public.

"This includes using very conservative triggers for both water quality and quantity and condition of vegetation that are embedded in adaptive management plans, so that we don't reach a point where you've got some irreversible change to the environment," Mr Vogel said.

Radioactive material to be stored in dams
The EPA also recommended best-practice mine closure and progressive rehabilitation practices be adhered to, but noted that uncertainty remains around the significant environmental impacts over the life of the project.

Arafura Resources Sustainability manager Brian Fowler said the low level radioactive material produced in the processing of rare earth material would be stored onsite in purpose-built dams.

"We're very confident those dams will secure those radioactive elements now and into the future," he said.

"They will not be a threat to the environment and they won't provide a threat to public health, and quite frankly, they are relatively stable in a normal environmental setting."

Mr Fowler said the approval of the EPA was a significant milestone for the project, which began 10 years ago.

"What it'll enable us to do now is to go forward and do our detailed mine planning which will then lead us to financial investment decision in the late part of this year with a view to then starting construction, assuming we can attract the required financing, in 2019," he said.

The company said the project would create an investment of about $900 million in Central Australia, as well as 250 to 300 permanent jobs.

Mr Fowler said the company intended to target local people for employment where possible, with the view to creating intergenerational change in the community.

"We understand that there'll be significant challenges in doing that, but when you've got a mine life that contemplates 35 to 55 years, it gives you the opportunity to do lots of planning and work with stakeholders to ensure those benefits are realised," 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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7 January, 2018

Michael Mann says bitter cold is consistent with global warming

It probably is and the reasoning he gives in the article excerpted below is plausible. The professional Warmists at NOAA, however, predicted a WARM winter: Another failure of their theory and its appurtenant models.

Mann is however not abashed by yet another failed prediction. He "explains" it. His explanation is however what in science is known as an "ad hoc" explanation and just about any data can be explained "ad hoc". In plain language it is known as "being wise after the event".

In science, however, the need for an a hoc explanation is seen as damaging to the theory and requiring revision of the theory. And it normally takes only a few failures of theory predictions for the theory to be discarded altogether. With global warming, however, NOTHING is ever taken as damaging to the theory. And in the philosophy of science an unfalsifiable theory is regarded as not being an empirical statement. It can only be a statement of faith.

The US East Coast is experiencing an “old-fashioned” winter, with plenty of cold weather and some heavy snowfall in certain places. Listening to climate contrarians like President Donald Trump, you might think this constitutes the death knell for concern over human-caused climate change.

Yet, what we were witnessing play out is in fact very much consistent with our expectations of the response of weather dynamics to human-caused climate change.

Dr. Michael Mann on Extreme Weather: “We Predicted This Long Ago”

Let’s start with the record five-plus feet of snowfall accumulation in Erie, Pennsylvania, in late December. Does this disprove global warming? “Exactly the opposite,” explains my colleague, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University.

Global warming is leading to later freeze-up of the Great Lakes and warmer lake temperatures. It is the collision of cold Arctic air with relatively warm unfrozen lake water in early winter that causes lake effect snows in the first place. The warmer those lake temperatures, the more moisture in the air, and the greater potential for lake effect snows. Not surprisingly, we see a long-term increase in lake effect snowfalls as temperatures have warmed during the last century

SOURCE

More evidence that Michael Mann is not a scientist

He ignores the facts below (known from over five years ago) in his pontifications -- even those facts are central to the "hockeystick" claim he is best known for

As many readers are probably aware, there has been an important new posting at Climate Audit about the Yamal affair. This posting is an attempt to set out the whole story of Yamal. It reworks an article I did in 2009 and incorporates new developments since that time.

The story of Michael Mann's Hockey Stick reconstruction, its statistical bias and the influence of the bristlecone pines is well known. Steve McIntyre's research into the other reconstructions of the temperatures of the last millennium has received less publicity, however.

The bristlecone pines that created the shape of the Hockey Stick graph are used in nearly every millennial temperature reconstruction around today, but there are also a handful of other tree ring series that are nearly as common and just as influential on the results. Back at the start of McIntyre's research into the area of paleoclimate, one of the most significant of these was called Polar Urals, a chronology first published by Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. At the time, it was used in pretty much every temperature reconstruction around. In his paper, Briffa made the startling claim that the coldest year of the millennium was AD 1032, a statement that, if true, would have completely overturned the idea of the Medieval Warm Period. It is not hard to see why paleoclimatologists found the series so alluring.

Some of McIntyre's research into Polar Urals deserves a story in its own right, but it is one that will have to wait for another day. We can pick up the narrative again in 2005, when McIntyre discovered that an update to the Polar Urals series had been collected in 1999. Through a contact he was able to obtain a copy of the revised series. Remarkably, in the update the eleventh century appeared to be much warmer than in the original - in fact it was higher even than the twentieth century. This must have been a severe blow to paleoclimatologists, a supposition that is borne out by what happened next, or rather what didn't: the update to the Polar Urals was not published, it was not archived and it was almost never seen again.

SOURCE

SCIENTISTS: Global Warming Is Not Causing Harsh Winter Weather

Record snowfall, a “bomb cyclone” and cold Arctic air have once again stirred up the debate over global warming’s impact on winter weather.

Some climate scientists are pointing the finger at manmade global warming as a culprit behind recent wintry weather, but there’s not a lot of evidence or agreement that global warming is currently driving extreme cold and snow.

Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann authored a blog post for the Climate Reality Project, former Vice President Al Gore’s group, claiming what’s happening is “precisely the sort of extreme winter weather we expect because of climate change.” Mann’s argument is that we can expect more “bomb cyclones” and cold snaps as the planet warms.

But Mann, who often invokes the “consensus” on global warming, seems out of step with the evidence on this issue. Kevin Trenberth, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said “winter storms are a manifestation of winter, not climate change.”

“The Arctic is greatly affected by climate change and it has a feedback effect – but not in winter,” Trenberth told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “It is not a cause but a part of climate change.”

“Such claims make no sense and are inconsistent with observations and the best science,” University of Washington climatologist Cliff Mass said of claims made by Mann and others. “The frequency of cold waves have decreased during the past fifty years, not increased. That alone shows that such claims are baseless.”

“And on a personal note, it is very disappointing that members of my profession are making such obviously bogus claims,” Mass said. “It hurts the science, it hurts the credibility of climate scientists, and weakens our ability to be taken seriously by society.”

Colder Is Warmer

Every winter seems to reignite the global warming debate. Things got intense in 2014 when former White House science czar John Holdren put out a video where he claimed that year’s “polar vortex” was actually a sign of global warming.

Holdren’s video was largely based on research by Rutgers University scientist Jennifer Francis, which claims that warming in the Arctic is making the jet stream more wobbly, making cold snaps and nor’easter storms more frequent.

Holdren later admitted that his video was based on his “personal opinion” of the science, but the argument is still used every time cold Arctic air pours down through the lower 48 states.

SOURCE

Carbon Loophole: Why Is Wood Burning Counted as Green Energy?

A loophole in carbon-accounting rules is spurring a boom in burning wood pellets in European power plants. The result has been a surge in logging, particularly in the U.S. South, and new doubts about whether Europe can meet its commitments under the Paris accord.

It was once one of Europe’s largest coal-burning power stations. Now, after replacing coal in its boilers with wood pellets shipped from the U.S. South, the Drax Power Station in Britain claims to be the largest carbon-saving project in Europe. About 23 million tons of carbon dioxide goes up its stacks each year. But because new trees will be planted in the cut forests, the company says the Drax plant is carbon-neutral.

There is one problem. Ecologists say that the claims of carbon neutrality, which are accepted by the European Union and the British government, do not stand up to scrutiny. The forests of North Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi — as well as those in Europe — are being destroyed to sustain a European fantasy about renewable energy. And with many power plants in Europe and elsewhere starting to replace coal with wood, the question of who is right is becoming ever more important.

Since 2009, the 28 nations of the European Union have embarked on a dramatic switch to generating power from renewable energy. While most of the good-news headlines have been about the rise of wind and solar, much of the new “green” power has actually come from burning wood in converted coal power stations.

Wood burning is booming from Britain to Romania. Much of the timber is sourced locally, which is raising serious concerns among European environmentalists about whether every tree cut down for burning is truly replaced by a new one. But Drax’s giant wood-burning boilers are fueled almost entirely by 6.5 million tons of wood pellets shipped annually across the Atlantic.

In September, some 200 scientists wrote to the EU insisting that “bioenergy [from forest biomass] is not carbon-neutral” and calling for tighter rules to protect forests and their carbon. Yet just a month later, EU ministers rubber-stamped the existing carbon accounting rules, reaffirming that the burning of wood pellets is renewable energy.

Under the terms of both the UN Paris climate agreement and Europe’s internal rules, carbon losses from forests supplying power stations should be declared as changes to the carbon storage capacity of forest landscapes. But such changes are seldom reported in national inventories. And there is no system either within the EU or at the UN for reporting actual changes in carbon stocks on land, so the carbon is not accounted for at either end — when trees are cut, or when the wood is burned.

Wood burning is turning into a major loophole in controlling carbon emissions. The U.S. could be the next country to take advantage. A federal spending bill that passed the House of Representatives earlier this year directed the Environmental Protection Agency to establish policies “that reflect the carbon neutrality of biomass” and to “encourage private investment throughout the forest biomass supply chain,” paving the way for a boom in American pellet burning.

Logs await processing at a wood pellet plant in Bardejov, Slovakia. An estimated 10 million cubic meters of wood is logged each year from the country's forests.
Logs await processing at a wood pellet plant in Bardejov, Slovakia. An estimated 10 million cubic meters of wood is logged each year from the country's forests. FRED PEARCE/YALE E360

I have tracked these developments for the past two years; first traveling with Drax to see its U.S. pellet operation, and then investigating the criticisms leveled by European and U.S. forest campaigners. The debate is not clear-cut. Burning wood may be close to carbon neutral in some situations, such as where it is clear that cut trees are replaced with the same trees, one for one; but in others it can emit even more carbon than coal. The trouble is that regulators are ill-placed to tell the difference, which will only be clear decades after the presumed emissions have been tallied — or not — in national carbon inventories.

The one certainty is that if things do not go according to plan, Europe’s promises for meeting its Paris climate commitments will go up in smoke. And the U.S.’s own CO2 emissions could resume their upward path even quicker than President Donald Trump intends.

Europe’s forests have for centuries been cut for household fuel and, in the past century, for local heating plants. But what is happening now is on a very different scale. The change has been fueled by new technology that converts timber into wood pellets that have been heated to remove moisture and compressed, which makes long-distance transportation practical and economic.

Roughly half the cut wood in the EU is now being burned to generate electricity or for heating. And there is growing evidence that the logging is damaging forests and reducing their ability to store carbon.

One region at risk is the Carpathian Mountains, stretching from Austria to Romania. It contains the continent’s largest surviving old-growth forests outside Russia, which are home to up to half the continent’s brown bears, wolves, and lynx.

Widespread illegal logging has been reported in Romania, with the timber exported for burning in power stations in Austria and Germany.

In Romania, Greenpeace and the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) have reported widespread illegal logging, with much of the timber exported for burning in power stations in Austria and Germany. The EIA has accused Schweighofer, a company owned by one of Austria’s richest families, of processing illegally-harvested wood from Romania. Its investigator Susanne Breitkopf told me there is “a clear link between illegal logging in Romania and the EU wood pellet market.” The company says it “makes all possible efforts” to keep illegal timber out of its supply chain.

SOURCE

WINNING: Interior Department rescinds all Obama-era climate policies

So long. Farewell. Auf wiedersehen. Goodbye

Just before Christmas, the Interior Department quietly rescinded an array of policies designed to elevate climate change and conservation in decisions on managing public lands, waters and wildlife. Order 3360, signed by Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt, explains that the policies were rescinded because they were “potential burdens” to energy development.

The order echoes earlier mandates from President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to Interior’s 70,000 employees: Prioritize energy development and de-emphasize climate change and conservation. The order is another in a long string of examples of science and conservation taking a backseat to industry’s wishes at the Interior Department under Zinke.

The sweeping order, which Bernhardt signed Dec. 22., affects a department that manages a fifth of the nation’s land, 19 percent of U.S. energy supplies and most of the water in the 12 Western states. It fulfills a high-profile executive order by Trump and a secretarial order from Zinke, both announced in March. Interior did not publicize the order but posted it on its website with other secretarial orders. The Interior Department refused to answer questions about order 3360 on Thursday. “Sorry, nobody is available for you,” Heather Swift, the department spokesperson, wrote in an email.

Environmental groups were surprised that the agency failed to tout the policy decisions. “We’ve been waiting for it. We thought they would do it with some sort of great pride,” said Nada Culver, who directs the Wilderness Society’s BLM action center.

The Bureau of Land Management last week did announce a related policy change that makes it easier for companies to develop oil and gas in core sage grouse habitats that were protected in 2015 as part of an unprecedented conservation initiative. The BLM replaced six instructional memoranda that direct field staff on how to manage 67 million acres of prime sage grouse habitat across 10 Western states. Among other things, the new instructions relieve BLM staff from the requirement that they prioritize drilling outside of prime sagebrush habitat areas.

David Hayes, President Barack Obama’s then-deputy secretary of Interior, said the policy rescissions were very significant because these policies guided the agency’s field staff in how to manage the nation’s vast resources at a time when climate change is already impacting public lands in many ways. “It would be irresponsible as land managers not to take into account these risks, such as drought, fire, invasive species, potential sea level rise, storm surge impacts, wildlife impacts — all of which already are being felt,” Hayes said.

In his March order, Zinke directed staff to scour their agencies to find policies that hamper energy development.

A report published by the Interior Department in October outlined dozens of policy changes in the works to remove barriers to energy development. The report says that even some of the nation’s most treasured areas — including national monuments, national conservation lands and wild and scenic rivers — won’t be spared from Trump administration efforts to promote energy development.

The new order, which was effective immediately and does not require congressional approval, stems from Zinke’s March directive. It did not specify how the rescinded policies hindered energy or what policies, if any, will take their place.

Among the policies erased by the December order was the climate change chapter of the Interior Department’s manual. This chapter stated that it was the department’s policy to “adapt to the challenges posed by climate change to its mission, programs, operations, and personnel. The Department will use the best available science to increase understanding of climate change impacts, inform decision-making, and coordinate an appropriate response to impacts on land, water, wildlife, cultural and tribal resources, and other assets.”

This 2012 policy required national parks and other public lands to consider climate change when developing resource management plans and when permitting various activities. It instructed them to consult the departments’ new Climate Science Centers and Landscape Conservation Cooperatives so they can be guided by the best science available. The policy responded to a 2009 executive order by Obama, which Trump rescinded in March.

Joel Clement, who was the Interior Departments top climate change official before he quit in October, was a main architect of the policy. He says it gave agencies the authority to plan for the myriad of challenges public lands face from climate change. Without the policy they no longer have clear authority. “All of these agencies will fail at their missions if they don’t plan for the impacts of climate change,” Clement said.

Another policy erased by Bernhardt’s order was a chapter added in 2015 that encouraged land managers to look beyond the small parcels of land impacted by a single project when considering mitigation. Instead, it asked them to see how mitigation efforts fit into the conservation goals for larger areas surrounding the projects. This applied to permitting various activities such as mining, drilling for oil or building a solar power plant. The BLM, National Park Service or Fish and Wildlife Service would require the company to first avoid and minimize any impacts to natural resources. If impacts were unavoidable, a company would have to “compensate” by designing a mitigation project that would have to reflect broader conservation goals. For instance, if they had to fill in a wetland or build a road through sagebrush habitat, they’d have to invest in restoration projects that replaced the habitat lost.

Hayes said traditionally land managers only looked at the areas impacted by the project or perhaps inside the borders of their own park or refuge. But because climate change is impacting resources across large regions, it became important to start managing across jurisdictional boundaries. The department set up 8 regional Climate Science Centers and 22 Landscape Conservation Cooperatives to help land managers study how the broad impacts of climate change should impact their work. (The Trump administration has proposed slashing funding the Climate Science Centers and eliminating the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives, but so far Congress has continued to fund both.)

The new order also rescinded BLM’s 2016 mitigation manual and mitigation handbook. These policies guidelines built on the principles of the Interior Department’s mitigation policy and were much more detailed and specific to the kinds of projects BLM authorizes. The handbook both describes how to assess the impacts projects will have on natural resources and outlines how to devise mitigation projects to offset those impacts. BLM is the agency that manages the nation’s energy resources on public lands, including those overseen by the Forest Service.

The agencies are still legally required under the National Environmental Policy Act to mitigate the harmful effects of development and consider climate change. Now they’ve been told not to let climate change considerations or mitigation burden energy development. And they have no guidebook to help them navigate these competing mandates. That confusion could leave the door open for a lot of lawsuits. “That takes you down a very dangerous road for other resources and uses of public lands,” Culver said. “I think it’s going to make the situation worse both for the resources on the ground and for whatever projects they approve.”

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 January, 2018

New study identifies thermometer for global ocean

It should be noted that this is an estimate of ocean heat, not a direct measure of it and that no attempt seems to have been made to validate the estimates -- by repeating the study with (say) Arctic cores.

For what it is worth however the study should be disappointing to Warmists. An estimated temperature rise of only one tenth of one degree over the last 50 years is way below what Warmists normally talk about. Note that 50 years ago is roughly when Warmists claim anthropogenic global warming started

There's a new way to measure the average temperature of the ocean thanks to researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. In an article published in the Jan. 4, 2018, issue of the journal Nature, geoscientist Jeff Severinghaus and colleagues at Scripps Oceanography and institutions in Switzerland and Japan detailed their ground-breaking approach.

Determining changes in the average temperature of the entire world's ocean has proven to be a nearly impossible task due to the distribution of different water masses. Each layer of water can have drastically different temperatures, so determining the average over the entirety of the ocean's surface and depths presents a challenge.

Severinghaus and colleagues were able to bypass these obstacles by determining the value indirectly. Instead of measuring water temperature, they determined the ratio of noble gases in the atmosphere, which are in direct relation to the ocean's temperature.

"This method is a radically new way to measure change in total ocean heat," said Severinghaus. "It takes advantage of the fact that the atmosphere is well-mixed, so a single measurement anywhere in the world can give you the answer."

In the study, the scientists measured values of the noble gases argon, krypton, and xenon in air bubbles captured inside ice in Antarctica. As the oceans warm, krypton and xenon are released into the atmosphere in known quantities. The ratio of these gases in the atmosphere therefore allows for the calculation of average global ocean temperature.

Measurements were taken from ice samples collected during the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide coring project, of which Severinghaus is a leader. Over the course of six field seasons in Antarctica, a drill removed ice in cylindrical samples 3.7 meters (just under 9 feet) in length. The final sample was taken at a depth of 3,405 meters (over 11,000 feet) in 2011. This record spans nearly 100,000 years and the age of the layers can be determined to within 50 years. Earth's atmosphere mixes on a scale of weeks to months, so a measurement of these air bubbles gives what is essentially a global average. For this study, scientists focused on samples 8,000 to 22,000 years old, and collected data in increments averaging 250 years in resolution.

New insights into the glaciation cycles that occurred on Earth long before humans began affecting the temperature of the atmosphere and oceans are now possible using the technique of measuring noble gas quantities. The study determined that the average global ocean temperature at the peak of the most recent ice age was 0.9 ?C (33.6 ?F). The modern ocean's average temperature is 3.5 ?C (38.3 ?F). The incremental measurements between these data points provide an understanding of the global climate never before possible.

"The reason this study is so exciting is that previous methods of reconstructing ocean heat content have very large age uncertainties, [which] smooths out the more subtle features of the record," said co-author Sarah Shackleton, a graduate student in the Severinghaus lab at Scripps. "Because WAIS Divide is so well dated, this is the first time that we've been able to see these subtle features in the record of the deglaciation. This helps us better understand the processes that control changes in ocean heat content."

"Our precision is about 0.2 ?C (0.4 ?F) now, and the warming of the past 50 years is only about 0.1 ?C," he said, adding that advanced equipment can provide more precise measurements, allowing scientists to use this technique to track the current warming trend in the world's oceans.

SOURCE

The End of the Ocean Acidification Scare for Corals

Paper Reviewed: McCulloch, M.T., D'Olivo, J.P., Falter, J., Holcomb, M. and Trotter, J.A. 2017. Coral calcification in a changing world and the interactive dynamics of pH and DIC upregulation. Nature Communications 8: 15686, DOI:10.1038/ncomms15686.

The global increase in the atmosphere's CO2 content has been hypothesized to possess the potential to harm coral reefs directly. By inducing changes in ocean water chemistry that can lead to reductions in the calcium carbonate saturation state of seawater (?), it has been predicted that elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 may reduce rates of coral calcification, possibly leading to slower-growing -- and, therefore, weaker -- coral skeletons, and in some cases even death. Such projections, however, often fail to account for the fact that coral calcification is a biologically mediated process, and that out in the real world, living organisms tend to find a way to meet and overcome the many challenges they face, and coral calcification in response to ocean acidification is no exception, as evidenced by findings published in the recent analysis of McCulloch et al. (2017).

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, this team of five researchers developed geochemical proxies (?11B and B/Ca) from Porites corals located on (1) Davis Reef, a mid-shelf reef located east-northeast of Townsville, Queensland, Australia in the central Great Barrier Reef, and (2) Coral Bay, which is part of the Ningaloo Reef coastal fringing system of Western Australia, in order to obtain seasonal records of dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) and pH of the corals' calcifying fluid (cf) at these locations for the period 2007-2012. And what did those records reveal?

As shown in the figure below, coral colonies from both reef locations "exhibit strong seasonal changes in pHcf, from ~8.3 during summer to ~8.5 during winter," which "represents an elevation in pHcf relative to ambient seawater of ~0.4 pH units together with a relatively large seasonal range in pHcf of ~0.2 units." These observations, in the words of McCulloch et al., "are in stark contrast to the far more muted changes based on laboratory-controlled experiments" (as shown in the dashed black line on the figure), which laboratory-based values are "an order of magnitude smaller than those actually observed in reef environments."

With respect to DICcf (also depicted in Figure 1), McCulloch et al. report that the "highest DICcf (~ x 3.2 seawater) is found during summer, consistent with thermal/light enhancement of metabolically (zooxanthellae) derived carbon, while the highest pHcf (~8.5) occurs in winter during periods of low DICcf (~ x 2 seawater)."

The proxy records also revealed that coral DICcf was inversely related (r2 ~ 0.9) to pHcf. Commenting on this relationship, the marine scientists say it "indicate[s] that the coral is actively maintaining both high (~x 4 to x 6 seawater) and relatively stable (within ± 10% of mean) levels of elevated ?cf year-round." Or, as they explain it another way, "we have now identified the key functional characteristics of chemically controlled calcification in reef-building coral. The seasonally varying supply of summer-enhanced metabolic DICcf is accompanied by dynamic out-of-phase upregulation of coral pHcf. These parameters acting together maintain elevated but near-constant levels of carbonate saturation state (?cf) of the coral's calcifying fluid, the key driver of calcification."

The implications of the above findings are enormous, for they reveal that "pHcf upregulation occurs largely independent of changes in seawater carbonate chemistry, and hence ocean acidification," demonstrating "the ability of the coral to 'control' what is arguably one of its most fundamental physiological processes, the growth of its skeleton within which it lives." Furthermore, McCulloch et al. say their work presents "major ramifications for the interpretation of the large number of experiments that have reported a strong sensitivity of coral calcification to increasing ocean acidification," explaining that "an inherent limitation of many of these experiments is that they were generally conducted under conditions of fixed seawater pHsw and/or temperature, light, nutrients, and little water motion, hence conditions that are not conducive to reproducing the natural interactive effects between pHcf and DICcf that we have documented here." Given as much, they conclude that "since the interactive dynamics of pHcf and DICcf upregulation do not appear to be properly simulated under the short-term conditions generally imposed by such artificial experiments, the relevance of their commonly reported finding of reduced coral calcification with reduced seawater pH must now be questioned."

And so it appears that alarmist claims of near-future coral reef dissolution, courtesy of the ever-hyped ocean acidification hypothesis, have themselves dissolved away thanks to the seminal work of McCulloch et al. Clearly, the world's corals are much more resilient to changes in their environment than acidification alarmists have claimed them to be.

SOURCE

Environmentalists freak out over Trump’s repeal of rule which never went into effect

The green energy, “keep it in the ground” folks are off to a bad start in 2018. It turns out that another one of Barack Obama’s signature “achievements” in energy regulation, the one which would heavily regulate fracking on federal lands, is going away. Given what a dirty word “fracking” has become in liberal circles, this is causing all manner of outrage on the left. There’s only one catch here… the rule in question never even went into effect for even a single day. (Washington Times)

The Obama administration’s 2015 fracking rule was never actually implemented, thanks to an ongoing court battle, and it apparently never will be.

The Interior Department published a final rule Friday in the Federal Register repealing immediately the hydraulic-fracturing regulation on federal lands, saying that “we believe it imposes administrative burdens and compliance costs that are not justified.”

The previous fracking rule was already moribund after a federal judge in Wyoming struck it down in June 2016 in response to a four-state lawsuit, holding that the Bureau of Land Management had overstepped its authority by acting without congressional approval.

Under Obama, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had been fighting the lower court ruling every step of the way. The 10th Circuit had given them until January 12th to file their next appeal and keep the case going. But now that the new rules have come out and the regulation under discussion has disappeared, the point is moot and the case has collapsed in upon itself.

That’s a sensible approach since each state already sets their own rules regarding fracking. If the residents of certain states (such as New York, sadly) wish to elect leaders who ban fracking and miss out on that sort of economic opportunity, that’s up to them. As the Trump administration is pointing out, that’s why it’s best left up to the states. Meanwhile, other states such as Pennsylvania are seeing an employment boom and rising personal wealth for people who lease out their land for energy development. And after many years of this, the Keystone State doesn’t seem to have fallen into a black hole.

Meanwhile, on a somewhat related note, do you recall how we finally got the Dakota Access Pipeline approved and finished? You might be wondering how that’s working out for the people of North Dakota. The Wall Street Journal looked into the question (subscription required) and found that things are coming up roses.

In just six months of service, the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline has boosted North Dakota’s economy and energy sector, helping lower transportation costs for energy companies and increase oil production by 78,000 barrels per day in October from September — the biggest-ever monthly rise. As a result, the state had an unemployment rate of 2.3% in November, while revenue climbed by about $43.5 million in the first five months since the pipeline came online.

That’s the result for a pipeline which only occupies space inside the United States. We’re still seeing too many delays on international pipeline work thanks to ongoing court challenges. And do you know what that means for shipping volumes? Environmentalists will probably cheer and tell you that less oil is being moved, but that’s not the case. It just means that more and more of it is moving by train. According to Reuters, Canadian crude-by-rail exports to the United States hit a six-month high of 137,000 barrels per day in October and it’s not slowing down. They’d better hope those trains are smarter than some of our recent passenger rail service lines or they’ll be wishing they had more pipelines in operation.

SOURCE

Little Ireland being bullied over climate by EU

Ireland is facing a fine of €75 million each year if 16% of its energy doesn’t come from renewable-energy sources by 2020, such as solar panels and wind turbines.

EU member states have committed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030.

Currently, Ireland is one of four member states that are predicted to miss their emissions target.

Varadkar said there will be a “big focus” on climate change by his government this year, and over the next ten years “to enable us to meet our commitments which we are not meeting at the moment”.

He said:

In fact from 2020 onwards we’re heading into some pretty major fines for not meeting our obligations. I would rather spend money now on meeting our commitments than on fines from 2020 onwards.

In an interview with TheJournal.ie, Environment Minister Denis Naughten admitted that the Ireland’s progress on the 2020 emissions targets has been disappointing.

Attending a climate summit in Paris last year, Naughten reaffirmed Ireland’s commitment to the global objectives set down by the Paris Agreement to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions.

“I am going to get us as close as possible to the target,” he told TheJournal.ie, stating that despite missing the 20% reduction for 2020, he hopes to hit the 30% reduction mark in 2030.

The bigger issue for the minister is the renewable energy targets, said Naughten.

The current trajectory puts Ireland at 13% so far, but if we fail to hit these targets, the country face annualised fines from the European Union, explained the minister.

SOURCE

Failed Polar Bear Predictions Have Climate Change Community In A Panic

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.

This has left many folks unhappy about the toppling of this important global warming icon but ironically, consensus polar bear experts and climate scientists (and their supporters) were the ones who set up the polar bear as a proxy for AGW in the first place.

I published my professional criticisms on the failed predictions of the polar bear conservation community in a professional online scientific preprint journal, which has now been downloaded almost 2,000 times (Crockford 2017; Crockford and Geist 2017).

My paper demonstrates that the polar bear/seaice decline hypothesis, particularly the one developed by Steven Amstrup, is a failure. I’m not the only one who thinks so, as emails obtained from the US Fish and Wildlife Service show. The argument the paper lays out and the facts it presents have not been challenged by any one of the consensus polar bear experts who object to it so strenuously. Instead, they have chosen to misrepresent my work, and publicly belittle my credentials and scientific integrity in the published literature (Harvey et al. 2017) and online.

Harvey and colleagues suggest in their paper that I and others use polar bears as a proxy for AGW as part of a deliberate plan to undermine the public’s confidence in global warming. Harvey et al. state:

“…the main strategy of denier blogs is therefore to focus on topics that are showy and in which it is therefore easy to generate public interest. These topics are used as “proxies” for AGW in general; in other words, they represent keystone dominoes that are strategically placed in front of many hundreds of others, each representing a separate line of evidence for AGW. By appearing to knock over the keystone domino, audiences targeted by the communication may assume all other dominoes are toppled in a form of “dismissal by association.”

I do not recall ever stating or implying that if polar bear predictions of doom were wrong, then general climate change models must also be wrong. But if any other bloggers have done so, they can hardly be blamed.

A bit of reflection shows it was the climate science community itself — in collaboration with Arctic researchers and the media — who by the year 2000 set the polar bear up as an icon for catastrophic global warming. They made the polar bear a proxy for AGW.

Al Gore used the polar bears on an ice flow image to seal global warming icon status for the polar bear in his 2007 movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

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 January, 2018

China halts production of 500 car models

The climate bigots are interpreting this as an obeisance to their pathetic little cult. It is no such thing. China has REAL pollution problems -- with particulate pollution from coal-burning furnaces etc. THAT is what the leadership is desperate to get down

China is suspending the production of more than 500 car models that do not meet its fuel economy standards, several automakers confirmed Tuesday, the latest move by Beijing to reduce emissions in the world's largest auto market and take the lead in battling climate change.

The official Chinese news agency Xinhua said in a report Sunday that the suspension, effective Monday, would affect both domestic carmakers and foreign joint ventures like FAW-Volkswagen and Beijing Benz. No end date was given.

The move was expected to affect a small share of car manufacturing in China, where 28 million vehicles were produced in 2016. China has dozens of small-scale automakers some producing just a few hundred cars a year and the central government has tried to consolidate its auto industry, a factor that most likely also played a role in the suspension.

Still, the measure pointed to a mounting willingness by China to test forceful antipollution policies and assume a leading role in the fight against climate change, experts said. The country, which for years prioritised economic growth over environmental protection and now produces more than a quarter of the world's human-caused greenhouse gases, has emerged as an unlikely bastion of climate action after President Donald Trump's rejection of the Paris climate agreement.

Chinese leaders are under intense pressure to rein in dangerous air pollution, a hot-button issue in China, where thick smog has at times forced schools and businesses to temporarily shut down. Late last month, China said it was going ahead with plans to create the world's largest carbon market, giving Chinese power companies a financial incentive to operate more cleanly.

"They're sending a signal to everybody that this is for real," said Michael Dunne, president of Dunne Automotive, a Hong Kong-based consultancy on China's clean car market. "This shows their emissions standards have teeth."

The Chinese government has already become the world's biggest supporter of electric cars, offering automakers numerous incentives for producing so-called new energy vehicles. Those incentives are set to decrease by 2020, to be replaced by quotas for the number of clean cars automakers must sell. That has spurred global automakers to pick up the pace in their shift toward battery-powered cars.

The fact that Chinese automakers like the state-run giant Dongfeng Motor Corp. did not appear to be spared "shows that the government is not playing favourites in trying to meet their goals," said Bruce M. Belzowski, managing director of the Automotive Futures group at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.

The Chinese government had long held back from aggressive emissions standards to allow its own automakers to catch up with the latest clean car technology. But that is changing, with the government setting increasingly stringent tailpipe rules.

The latest development "is a testimony to how quickly their own automakers have evolved," Dunne said. "They're saying: We're ready to play this game."

Foreign automakers were still tallying the effect of the suspension on Tuesday. Volkswagen, General Motors, Honda and other foreign automakers in China referred queries on specific numbers to their Asia offices. Rebecca Kiehne of BMW, which runs the BMW Brilliance joint venture in China, said the company was not yet prepared to comment.

Han Tjan, a spokesman for Daimler, said production would not be affected at its Beijing Benz joint venture with the Chinese car manufacturer BAIC Motor Corp. The only car covered by the suspension was a high-end E-Class model the venture has not manufactured since 2016, he said.

Whatever the consequences, global automakers will have no choice but to meet the increasingly stringent government policies in China, said Michelle Krebs, an analyst at the AutoTrader Group.

"The simple fact that China is the biggest market means automakers will be accommodating," she said.

SOURCE

Alarmists Trumpet ‘Global Warming’ amid Record Cold Temperatures

If the climate worked the way global warming theory says it does, we should have been getting ever milder winters. Nothing like that has happened. Atmospheric CO2 has been steadily increasing and is now well above what was one said to be a critical level -- but the climate has not followed suit

Climate change alarmists continue to preach the dogma of global warming in a textbook case of cognitive dissonance, despite record low temperatures in different points around the globe.
This past week, Buffalo and Watertown, New York, registered their coldest week in recorded weather history. Boston, too, is set to tie its record of seven straight days with temperatures remaining below 20 degrees, reports Weather.com, which has not been seen in Beantown for exactly 100 years—since the week ending January 4, 1918. Flint, Michigan, set its all-time record-low temperature for December of 18 degrees below zero last Thursday morning.

North American cities too numerous to mention have been setting records for daily low temperatures, as the gelid weather wave shows its impressive staying power. For instance, the National Weather Service reported a temperature of minus 15 F in Omaha on Sunday, breaking a record low dating back to 1884.

So what is going on?

During the summer period, mainstream media offer an ongoing stream of reports of how climate change is causing higher temperatures and severe weather, yet when temperatures drop to record lows in wintertime, they write them off as normal cyclical weather phenomena.

“Deadly heat waves are going to be a much bigger problem in the coming decades,” warned CNN in a report last June, “becoming more frequent and occurring over a much greater portion of the planet.”

“Extreme heat waves,” CNN continued, “are frequently cited as one of the most direct effects of man-made climate change.”

As Australian science writer Joanne Nova quipped, for the radical climate crowd, “extreme cold is just weather but all heat waves are climate change.” While heat waves and extreme weather events are routinely pointed to as indicators of global warming trends, the coldest weather in over a century is simply brushed off as “natural variability.”

Or as J. Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia, sarcastically described the record-low temperatures, “What we are seeing right now in the United States is just, … well… wait for it… ‘winter.’”

Shepherd’s inconsistent use of cold and warm imply that cold is not just a lack of heat; it’s something fundamentally different, Nova wrote. “Heat, after all, can prove human attribution, but cold cannot prove the opposite.”

USA Today ran a defensive piece titled “It’s cold outside, but that doesn’t mean climate change isn’t real.” The article cited authorities pointing to other points of the globe that are experiencing warmer than average temperatures, in a bid to relativize the cold spell.

The ironic thing is, of course, that when the media speak of unusually hot weather as a sign of global warming, they never seem to look for places where it is unusually cold to show nature’s balance.

Meanwhile, USA Today also cited Shepherd, who stated that daily or weekly weather patterns “say nothing about longer term climate change,” something one never hears during the summer months when news outlets are falling over themselves to point to “yet another” indication that burning fossil fuels is making the earth a hotter place.

Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Michigan, claimed that the recent record-cold weather is not only happening despite global warming, but, indeed, “at least in part” because of it.

Overpeck’s theory is that a loss of Arctic ice has allowed more heat to transfer from the ocean to the atmosphere, causing a weakening of the polar vortex winds over the Arctic. As a result, more freezing Arctic air is swooping further south, he proposes.

“That is due to the warming of the Arctic, which in turn is due to human emissions of greenhouse gases and primarily burning of fossil fuels,” Overpeck declared.

In other words, all weather behavior—whether colder or warmer—becomes a confirmation that manmade global warming is real.

Or, as Dinesh D’Souza tweeted, “Since heat & cold are both taken as confirmation of global warming, what, if anything, can disprove this supposedly scientific hypothesis?”

SOURCE

Global Warming Predictions, Especially About the Future, is Really Hard

In an article entitled, Al Gore’s Prediction For December 2017 Was Way, WAY Off The Mark, Andrew West outlines some of the scare mongering spouted by The High Priest of the Chruch of the Warming Globe, Al Gore. Scare mongering did I say? Yes, but I think that's putting it mildly what Gore has done. I would add lying, profiteering, scamming and fraud to that list. West goes on to say:

"Just how bad were some of Gore’s predictions? Well, for starters, he believed that the North Pole would be completely devoid of ice by today." “NINE YEARS AGO THIS MONTH— Al Gore predicted the North Polar Ice Cap would be completely ice free in five years.”

“Gore made the prediction to a German audience in 2008. He told them that ‘the entire North ‘polarized’ cap will disappear in 5 years.’

“In January 2006, Al Gore posited ‘within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return’ and ‘a true planetary emergency’ due to global warming.”

And in the process he's managed to enrich himself immensly. Apparently he didn't think the emergency was so great he should stop trying to get more money, or not live in massive energy sucking "$9 million beach front home in Montecito, [California]. Guess Al is not really afraid of sinking into the sea."

And we're shocked his prediction have been wrong?

Here's Anant Goel's discription of this massively expensive, disgustingly fraudlent scam by the world's biggest con artist of all time:

"Al Gore has a meltdown and despairs as his climate change alarmism fails with the general public. His worst fears are now being realized as he fails to become the planet's first climate Billionaire. This is my dream - that maybe one day we will get to see Al Gore grilled like this on the hundreds of millions of dollars he has made out of Global Warming

Dr. Don Easterbrook is a climate scientist who stated - seven years before Al Gore and the UNIPCC shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize on their Global Warming predictions - stating the world would be cooling, not warming, and he was right. As for these predictions he stated:

“When we check their projections against what actually happened in that time interval, they’re not even close. They’re off by a full degree in one decade, which is huge. That’s more than the entire amount of warming we’ve had in the past century. So their models have failed just miserably, nowhere near close. And maybe it’s luck, who knows, but mine have been right on the button,”

Then there's loony Prince Charlie. It's no wonder the Queen of England keeps holding on to the throne. In July of 2009 he predicted we only have 96 months to save world from burning up. Well, there's only six months left to his prediction. I wonder what the odds on a bet would be in Las Vegas that his prediction is going to fail?

In an effort to justify his loony ideas this guy - whose lived a life of luxury and privilege while never making any of the changes in his life he's been demanding of others - claims "the price of capitalism and consumerism is just too high"........ Blaming capitalism should be the first warning sign to anyone who pays attention to these loony leftist greenies there's something wrong with what they're saying.

But these two loons - albeit the most famous of the Sky is Falling crowd - are not alone.   The number of loons and loony predictions of a global warming catostrophe are Legion.

A massive list of failed predictors and their predictions appeared on Anthony Watts' website Watts ip With That, in the article, Some Failed Climate Predictions, which are far too numerous to list here, so please take the time to peruse this amazing list.

We have to get this once and for all. Anyone promoting Anthropogenic Climate Change is either deliberately being fradulent, a semi-pagan secular green fanatic, or is as dumb as tree moss.

I think that sums it up nicely. Have a good day!

SOURCE

Climate Expert James Hansen: New York Will Have Vanished Underwater by Midnight!

Say goodbye to Lower Manhattan, everybody! By midnight tonight, it will be gone forever—drowned by the melting icecaps of the disappearing Arctic.

Obviously this will be quite sad for people who live in New York. But it will be a tremendous vindication for the expertise of James Hansen, the former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) who saw this disaster coming as far back as 2008.

In the highly unlikely event that James Hansen is proved wrong and New Yorkers wake up tomorrow morning to find their city unsubmerged it could prove somewhat embarrassing. Not so much for Hansen, perhaps, who appears to have no sense of embarrassment or shame. But definitely—or so you’d hope—for all the politicians, environmental activists, teachers and so on who have spent the last few decades giving so much credence to his experty expertise.

It was Hansen, remember, who basically launched the whole global warming scare. Hansen was the guy who in 1988 declared at a packed congressional hearing, as sweat visibly poured from his brow, that “the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements.”

Though this claim was disowned by his former supervisor Dr. John Theon who felt that Hansen had “embarrassed NASA”, it was swallowed lock stock and barrel by most of the world’s media, and a good many of its politicians, with consequences we are ruing to this day.

The great physicist and mathematician Dr. Freeman Dyson once said, “The person who is really responsible for this overestimate of global warming is Jim Hansen. He consistently exaggerates all the dangers. … Hansen has turned his science into ideology.”

So let’s hope, for the sake of Hansen’s credibility—and for the sake of all those who pinned their faith and their policymaking decisions on his expertise—that New York is underwater tomorrow.

Otherwise, Hansen and his people will have an awful lot of explaining and apologizing to do. Or so you’d hope…

SOURCE

Australia: Former PM resisting carbon trading

Malcolm Turnbull is facing a backlash over his energy policy as conservative MPs including Tony Abbott condemn a proposal to allow power companies to meet emissions targets by buying permits from overseas as a “carbon tax” by stealth.

Mr Abbott has slammed the government’s in-principle support for including international carbon credits in Australia’s energy policy, arguing that the move will see Australian businesses and consumers shovelling money to foreign carbon traders, with huge potential for rorts.

Energy and Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg announced the new stance on carbon credits when releasing the final report of his 2017 review of climate change policies on December 19.

“As flagged in 2015, the review considered the role of international units and as a result the government has now given in-principle support for their use,” he said. “The final decision on the timing and appropriate quantity and quality limits will be taken by 2020 following further consultation and detailed analysis.”

Carbon credit schemes reward carbon abatement projects, such as tree planting in developing countries, potentially allowing Australian energy companies to buy the credits from the tree-planters to offset their own emissions. Business groups have strongly backed the move, arguing that there is no reason to waste efforts on higher-cost domestic abatement options when credible, less expensive alternatives are available abroad.

Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly has joined Mr Abbott in voicing strong opposition to the government’s move, while the Nationals’ George Christensen has previously expressed concerns about the international trading of carbon credits.

Mr Abbott said his position on international carbon credits remained the same as it had been when he was prime minister and party leader.

“I don’t support carbon trading, which is a carbon tax under a different name, and I certainly don’t support overseas carbon credits being available to Australian businesses,” he told The Australian. “That just means that Aussie consumers end up shovelling our money to foreign carbon traders, and we all know the potential for rorts there.”

Mr Frydenberg hit back last night, saying the role of international carbon credits had been on the table since Mr Abbott’s government announced in 2015 Australia’s Paris commitment.

‘’Since then we have conducted a major climate review in which industry groups representing energy intensive businesses across the economy including the BCA, AiG and the Minerals Council have made it very clear they strongly support the use of international permits," he said. “It is worth noting that Mr Abbott’s position on international permits is closer to the Greens than that of Australia’s big employers.”

In recent days, the Prime Minister has hailed his government’s national energy guarantee as a “real breakthrough” and key achievement in 2017.

Although the government won support for the guarantee in the Coalition partyroom, the latest development in the policy has inflamed the internal divisions that in 2009 saw Mr Abbott overthrow Mr Turnbull as opposition leader.

Mr Kelly said international carbon credits would put an extra cost burden on Australian businesses that would not be borne by competitors in countries such as China, the US and India.

“We’d be doing this at a time when every Australian business that uses energy is under enormous international competitive pressure through the higher cost of energy and with the company tax cuts in the US,” Mr Kelly said.

“Businesses in Australia are going to be struggling to compete internationally without us effectively putting on a further new green tax, forcing them to buy pieces of paper from overseas.”

Mr Kelly said the Abbott opposition’s criticisms of the Gillard government’s policy in 2011 remained relevant. “All those arguments are just as relevant today as they were back then,” he said, likening international carbon offset schemes to someone saying they were going to go on a diet over Christmas, but continuing to eat and paying a “diet offset”.

“You keep eating and someone from the Third World gets paid to starve,” he said.

Sky News commentator and former Abbott chief of staff Peta Credlin dubbed the timing of the announcement last month as a “getting out the trash” move, given it was released the day after the mid-year economic and fiscal update and the day of Mr Turnbull’s cabinet reshuffle.

In December 2010, Europol revealed it had arrested more than 100 people connected with carbon offset fraud, with links to organised crime networks in Europe and the Middle East. Consequently, trading volumes on Europe’s carbon market fell by 90 per cent, with a loss to European taxpayers of $6.6 billion.

In 2011, now Foreign Minister Julie Bishop wrote an opinion article attacking the then Gillard government’s policy of support for international carbon credits.

“It is naive at best for the prime minister to assume that such a scheme will emerge, given the clear signals internationally that major emitting nations are moving away from trading in carbon credits,” Ms Bishop wrote.

“Of more concern is that Julia Gillard appears blithely or wilfully unconcerned about the fraud and criminal activity that has beset trading in carbon credits.”

Asked whether her views had changed, and whether she supported the Turnbull government’s policy of in-principle support, Ms Bishop said in 2011 there had been widespread allegations of fraud in relation to international carbon credits.

“Since then, an international framework has been established through the Paris Agreement which provides unprecedented transparency, accountability and global co-operation on governance issues,” she said.

“The government is working to reduce emissions and meet our international obligations under the Paris Agreement through a broad range of emissions reduction policies and initiatives.

“We support, in principle, the use of international permits as part of our comprehensive suite of 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

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

3 January, 2018

Australia: High tide at Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour

You can see that if the sea is rising, it's not rising very much. More evidence that the alarmist figures put out by the climate bigots are a crock. Al Gore prophecies rises of several metres

There has in fact been some rise over the 128-year-long tide gauge record. Since 1886 it indicates a long-term rate of sea-level rise of two and a half inches (6.5cm) a century. That's hardly enough to knock anybody off their horse.

But wait! There's more! Here is a plot of the rise:

You can see that the sea level has been plateaued since 1950 -- exactly the time that the climate bigots say global warming began. So NONE of the rise was due to global warming. The small amount of global warming we appear to have had in recent decades did not shift the sea level one iota. Fun!

Laugh of the day: A quarter of the world could become a DESERT if global warming increases by just 2?C

Who do these assholes think they are kidding? A warmer world would be a WETTER world. Surely I don't have to spell out how rain works? The guff below is just more modelling stupidity. One wonders what planet their models are supposed to be matching

An increase of just 2°C (3.6°F) in global temperatures could make the world considerably drier and more desert-like, new research has warned.

More than a quarter of the world's land surface, home to more than 1.5 billion people, would become more arid and droughts and wildfires could be widespread.

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) would dramatically reduce the percentage of the Earth's surface affected, scientists found.

'Aridification would emerge over 20 to 30 per cent of the world's land surface by the time the global temperature change reaches 2?C (3.6?F)', said Dr Manoj Joshi from the University of East Anglia's School of Environmental Sciences and one of the study's co-authors.

The research team studied projections from 27 global climate models and identified areas of the world where aridity will substantially change.

The areas most affected areas are parts of South East Asia, Southern Europe, Southern Africa, Central America and Southern Australia.

These areas are home to more than 20 per cent of the world's population - that's over 1.5 billion people.

The study looked at the current rate of global temperature increase and compared it to data from before the industrial revolution.

The world has already warmed by 1°C (1.8°F) since then.

Dr Chang-Eui Park, a co-author of the study from the Southern University of Science and Technology in China said another way to look at the potential changes is as a 'continuous moderate drought'.

SOURCE

Will we run out of CHOCOLATE? Experts predict treat will disappear in 30 years because cacao plants are perishing in the warm climate

Ya gotta laugh. The climate bigots trot this scare out once a year, roughly. And they always leave out half the story, such as the fertilizing effect of more CO2 and more rain in a warmer world

Cacao beans are grown in many parts of the world -- Peru, Equador, Bolivia, Brazil, Bali, Fiji etc. So it is obviously not hard to plant more of it elsewhere if one particular country falls short. There has in fact been a recent big success in growing cacao in my home State of Queensland

And the guff below is just another Warmist prophecy anyway. The supply of cacao beans at present is in glut -- so much so that prices have dropped by a third

Experts predict the world could run out of chocolate within 40 years because cacao plants are struggling to survive in warmer climates.

The trees can only grow within approximately 20 degrees north and south of the Equator - and they thrive under specific conditions such as high humidity and abundant rain.

But a temperature rise of just 2.1C over the next 30 years caused by global warming is set to wreak havoc for the plants - and in turn the worldwide chocolate industry, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

As the mercury rises and squeezes more water out of soil and plants, scientists believe it is unlikely that rainfall will increase enough to offset the moisture loss.

That means cacao production areas are set to be pushed thousands of feet uphill into mountainous terrain which is carefully preserved for wildlife by 2050.

Officials in countries such as Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana - which produce more than half of the world's chocolate - will face an agonising dilemma over whether to maintain the world's supply of chocolate or to save their dying ecosystems.

Last year experts predicted that the world was heading for a 'chocolate deficit' as shoppers in developing countries snapped up more of the sweet treat.

The typical Western consumer eats an average of 286 chocolate bars a year - more if they are from Belgium, the research titled Destruction by Chocolate found.

For 286 bars, producers need to plant 10 cacao trees to make the cocoa and the butter - the key ingredients in the production of chocolate.

Since the 1990s, more than a billion people from China, Indonesia, India, Brazil and the former Soviet Union have entered the market for cocoa.

Despite the increased demand, supply has not kept up and stockpiles of cocoa are said to be falling.

Doug Hawkins, from London-based research firm Hardman Agribusiness, said production of cocoa is under strain as farming methods have not changed for hundreds of years.

He said: 'Unlike other tree crops that have benefited from the development of modern, high yielding cultivars and crop management techniques to realise their genetic potential, more than 90 per cent of the global cocoa crop is produced by smallholders on subsistence farms with unimproved planting material.'

Some reports suggest cocoa growers in the world's top producer country, Ivory Coast, have resorted to illegally farming protected forests to meet demand - what Mr Hawkins calls 'destruction by chocolate'.

He said: 'All the indicators are that we could be looking at a chocolate deficit of 100,000 tonnes a year in the next few years.'

SOURCE

Humans are good, after all

Greenies hate people but they have just come up with the thought that they need humans to control global warming:

Curbing climate change

Study finds strong rationale for the human factor

Humans may be the dominant cause of global temperature rise, but they may also be a crucial factor in helping to reduce it, according to a new study that for the first time builds a novel model to measure the effects of behavior on climate.

Drawing from both social psychology and climate science, the new model investigates how human behavioral changes evolve in response to extreme climate events and affect global temperature change.

The model accounts for the dynamic feedbacks that occur naturally in the Earth's climate system -- temperature projections determine the likelihood of extreme weather events, which in turn influence human behavior. Human behavioral changes, such as installing solar panels or investing in public transportation, alter greenhouse gas emissions, which change the global temperature and thus the frequency of extreme events, leading to new behaviors, and the cycle continues.

Combining climate projections and social processes, the model predicts global temperature change ranging from 3.4 to 6.2°C by 2100, compared to 4.9°C from the climate model alone.

Due to the complexity of physical processes, climate models have uncertainties in global temperature prediction. The new model found that temperature uncertainty associated with the social component was of a similar magnitude to that of the physical processes, which implies that a better understanding of the human social component is important but often overlooked.

The model found that long-term, less easily reversed behavioral changes, such as insulating homes or purchasing hybrid cars, had by far the most impact in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and thus reducing climate change, versus more short-term adjustments, such as adjusting thermostats or driving fewer miles.

The results, published today in the journal Nature Climate Change, demonstrate the importance of factoring human behavior into models of climate change.

"A better understanding of the human perception of risk from climate change and the behavioral responses are key to curbing future climate change," said lead author Brian Beckage, a professor of plant biology and computer science at the University of Vermont.

The paper was a result of combined efforts of the joint Working Group on Human Risk Perception and Climate Change at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) at the University of Maryland. Both institutes are supported by the National Science Foundation. The Working Group of about a dozen scientists from a variety of disciplines, including biology, psychology, geography, and mathematics, has been researching the questions surrounding human risk perception and climate change since 2013.

"It is easy to lose confidence in the capacity for societies to make sufficient changes to reduce future temperatures. When we started this project, we simply wanted to address the question as to whether there was any rational basis for 'hope' -- that is a rational basis to expect that human behavioral changes can sufficiently impact climate to significantly reduce future global temperatures," said NIMBioS Director Louis J. Gross, who co-authored the paper and co-organized the Working Group.

"Climate models can easily make assumptions about reductions in future greenhouse gas emissions and project the implications, but they do this with no rational basis for human responses," Gross said. "The key result from this paper is that there is indeed some rational basis for hope."

That basis for hope can be the foundation which communities can build on in adopting policies to reduce emissions, said co-author Katherine Lacasse, an assistant professor of psychology at Rhode Island College.

"We may notice more hurricanes and heat waves than usual and become concerned about climate change, but we don't always know the best ways to reduce our emissions," Lacasse said. "Programs or policies that help reduce the cost and difficulty of making long-term changes or that bring in whole communities to make long-term changes together can help support people to take big steps that have a meaningful impact on the climate."

SOURCE

Al Gore’s climate change predictions IMPLODE as everybody realizes the North Pole didn’t completely melt

For some people, it doesn’t matter how often former Vice President Al Gore has been wrong in his dire predictions of planetary demise, thanks to human-caused “global warming” and “climate change.” They’ll believe him no matter what, until the day they die (from natural causes, of course, not from planetary demise due to “global warming” and “climate change”).

But for those of you who like and appreciate honesty from politicians and public figures, you have long given up any hope that Gore is anything other than a hapless, feckless Alt-Left partisan when it comes to his environmental activism.

That said, our job is to set the record straight, which is why we found it prudent to remind our readers that roughly nine years ago today, Gore predicted that many of you were going to be swallowed up by rising sea waters caused from tons of melting ice.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen.

In January 2006, Al Gore claimed that “within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return” and “a true planetary emergency” due to human-caused global warming.

Again in 2009, Gore told an audience in Copenhagen, Denmark, that there was a “75 percent chance” that during “some summer months” the “polar ice cap” would disappear completely within “five years.”

The claims were tied to his widely-debunked 2006 “documentary” An Inconvenient Truth, in which he won a very politically motivated Nobel Peace Prize. (Remember when Obama won a Nobel after just a few months in office based not on any accomplishments but on what the committee ‘hoped’ he would accomplish?)

As for Gore, nothing this man has said would happen as regards to the earth warming and slipping closer to self-destruction has come true. Nothing.

But that didn’t stop him from releasing a follow-up film to his original ‘documentary’ earlier this year called, An Inconvenient Sequel. “Sooner or later, climate deniers in the GOP will have to confront their willful blindness to the climate crisis,” Gore tweeted.

Right. Perhaps “sooner or later” climate-change and environmental hoaxers will have to confront the fact that most of us are onto them and no longer believe the lies. (Related: U.N. official actually ADMITS that ‘global warming’ is a scam designed to ‘change world’s economic model.’)

And with good reason. Not only has Gore’s wild claims of doomsday been debunked, so have other so-called environmental experts who have similarly predicted doom and gloom.

They include Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, a longtime environmental icon and author of the 1968 book “The Population Bomb.”

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Ehrlich confidently predicted in a 1970 issue of Mademoiselle, as reported by Investors Business Daily. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.”

He further claimed to readers of The Progressive that same year that between 1980 and 1989, 4 billion people including 65 million Americans would be vanquished in the “Great Die-Off.”

In a 1969 essay called “Eco-Catastrophe!” he wrote that “most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born.”

The fact is, scare-mongers like Ehrlich have cried “Wolf!” so many times that few people believe them anymore. Gore is on that list.

So, too, is S. Dillon Ripley, longtime head of the Smithsonian Institute, who was once cited by Sen. Gaylord Nelson in Look magazine decades ago that, within 25 years, “between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

And so on.

To underscore Gore’s bogus predictions, there is now a cycle of global cooling, not warming, and sea ice and polar ice caps are growing, not receding.

Here are some constants: The climate is always changing, the weather is not the same as climate, and everything Al Gore says about both is wrong.

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 January, 2018

Australia's greenhouse gas emissions increase for third consecutive year

These figures are very dodgy. There is no way such a figure could be directly measured. They are estimated by adding together the amount of cement produced, the amount of coal mined and the number of sheep farting etc. There are many ways that could be inaccurate. Such figures could be fairly good at enabling year to year comparison but fluctuating commodity prices are a big influence on Australia's economic activity so are probably much less accurate than world figures, where losses and gains are more likely to average out

And what does it matter anyway? Belief in global warming is just climate bigotry -- impervious to any evidence about its truth or falsity

New Environment Department figures shows gas emissions grew by 0.7 per cent last financial year, which has been blamed on an increase in gas production and exports.

That comes after a 0.8 per cent increase during the 2015/16 financial year, which was accompanied with a warning Australia was not on track to meet its 2030 emissions reduction target.

But Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg said the latest data showed the Federal Government was expected to achieve its 2020 climate change target reduction of 294 million tonnes compared to 2000 levels.

In a statement, Mr Frydenberg said Australia was, "[continuing] to close the gap on the 2030 target" despite the annual increase in gas emissions.

"Australia beat its first Kyoto Protocol target by 128 million tonnes of emissions, and updated data released today by the Department of Environment and Energy shows Australia's emissions are now at their lowest level in 28 years on a per capita and GDP basis," Mr Frydenberg said.

Opposition energy spokesman Mark Butler said the Government's revised emissions targets for 2030 would only be 5 per cent below 2005 levels.

"Ignoring land sector emissions, 2030 emissions are projected to be almost 10 per cent higher than 2005 levels," Mr Butler said.

The Environment Department's long-awaited review of climate change policy found Australia accounted for 1.3 per cent of global carbon emissions.

Mr Frydenberg said the report proved the Federal Government had the right mix of policies to meet climate change goals, while also securing reliable and affordable power supply.

He said the emissions reduction fund was now, "one of the world's largest domestic carbon offset markets" with more than 191 million tonnes of abatement secured with an average of price of $11.90 per tonne.

The department report also considered the role of international emissions trading, with the Federal Government now giving "in-principle support".

This would allow businesses that have low emissions to sell excess usage to other organisations that have higher pollution rates, which may help reduce compliance costs.

"The final decision on the timing and appropriate quantity and quality limits will be taken by 2020 following further consultation and detailed analysis," Mr Frydenberg said.

Climate Council chief executive Amanda Mackenzie said the latest figures showed Australia risked becoming, "the global climate laggard".

SOURCE

Some evidence that the official global warming figures are fake

Great Lakes total ice cover, 12/30/15: 0.6%
Great Lakes total ice cover, 12/29/16: 2.9%
Great Lakes total ice cover, 12/30/17: 14.8%

SOURCE

Insane unreliables: to cost 10,000 Euros per household

First we need to recognise that capacity is nowhere near the same as average delivered power. I think the figure for what is currently delivered is closer to 20-30% of capacity, so the actual capacity will be lower. But it gets worse, because it gets even lower the higher the % of unreliables. Because whereas it is now cheap conventional that gets turned off when there is excess power, if you were insane enough to get rid of conventionals then much of the time it is expensive unreliables would be turned off because unreliables were producing too much … and much of the time industry and consumers would be turned off as they produce too little. So the available capacity from unreliables would be much smaller.

However if we assume a 25% delivery for convenience, the above graph suggests the cost per W per person of unreliables is 0.018*1000/0.25 = 74cent/kwh per person. On average a household of 2.5people consumes about 400w. So that yearly cost of unreliables for a household if anyone were mad enough to go for 100% unreliables appears to be around

74 * 0.4 * 24 * 365 = ~2600 Euros per Household

This is however the direct cost. But as raw materials and manufacturing costs are all directly related then the cost will be higher. A while back I wrote about The Enerconic multiplier (expanded later in the The Enerconic or society energy multiplier). This provides the useful figure that energy is reused in society about 4x. As such, if everyone we sourced goods and services were to adopt the same crazy policy of 100% unreliables, I can work out the cost per household as

2600 x 4 = ~10,000 Euros.

With an average EU salary of 17640, an average wage single earner household will be spending 56% of their salary solely on extra costs incurred by this crazy policy. Of course, not every country is mad enough to go along with this insanity. So, the effect at the moment is that it is cheaper to produce things in countries who have not been infected with the madness. Thus in addition to seeing large cost increases, there is also a steady drain of jobs abroad. That will depress EU economies & hence wages until it has much the same effect as if we were all being taxed an additional ~ 56%. But there is one small issue here. The average tax rate in the EU is 40%. So between the increase costs for unreliables and massive government taxes (also added to the cost of unreliables) there is frankly very little left.

There is however one ray of hope … as the UK isn’t in the Euro, and with the Italian financial crisis looming, the cost of unrelieables in Euros will be much smaller (… I’m just joking, the green parasites suck us dry whatever the currency).

But can you now see why I call this policy insane? The direct cost is massive, but the indirect cost is totally bonkers and would leave all of us with almost no personal salary – or more likely, we’d end up being able to afford to purchase a fraction of what we do now. We will all be a lot lot poorer. It is total bonkers and if politicians were mad enough to push it through would cause those countries adopting it to descend into an economic decline heading toward third world status. And with that I would like to wish you all …

SOURCE

Why China's Freezing: A well-meaning anti-pollution push turned into a debacle

China is suffering from a frigid winter, but it can't blame Mother Nature alone. Late last week, following a widespread uproar, officials reversed a policy banning some provinces from using coal for heat -- which had the inadvertent but predictable effect of leaving large swathes of the country freezing cold.

China's government has been keen to reduce air-pollution levels, which are quite literally off the charts. State media rejoiced last month when data showed that China was only the second-most polluted developing country, behind India. With health concerns rising, and middle-class anger swelling, the coal ban was a well-meaning attempt to address the problem.

Unfortunately, it made no sense. China generates almost 70 percent of its electricity from coal. Households buy it from vendors pushing carts, while metal refiners use it on a huge scale to power their plants. Any attempt to reduce this consumption would require serious investment in alternatives and a gradual phase-in. Instead, officials simply mandated the cuts, with little in the way of preparation.

This led to a scramble for natural gas, one obvious alternative. But a lack of inventory, distribution and ready output caused a supply crunch. Production has risen by only 9.7 percent this year, with total consumption up 14.6 percent -- not nearly enough to make up for the cuts in coal. Officials are expecting a shortage of up to 20 percent this winter. Prices in some areas have doubled. In Tianjin, near Beijing, they're up 74 percent.

Making matters worse, the ban has brought major industries to a near-standstill. Mills in the key steel regions of Tangshan and Hebei were operating at 80 percent of capacity in September; now rates are as low as 43 percent. Aluminum and other heavy industries are facing severe production limits through March 15, a mandated slowdown that could weigh heavily on gross domestic product.

The public backlash has been swift. With millions of homes left with insufficient energy for cooking and heating, anger on social media grew so fierce that the government soon reversed course. Last week, the Ministry of Environmental Protection told local officials in 28 cities to ease coal restrictions and take measures to stabilize prices and supplies.

All this was a perfectly foreseeable outcome to imposing steep cuts on the country's primary source of heating and electricity without any alternative in place. So what happened?

On one level, it's another example of how China's bureaucracy can sometimes subordinate common sense to centrally mandated goals. In an analogous episode a few years back, a hurriedly constructed school track meant to impress a government official came out as a rectangle, leading to instant social-media infamy.

But the coal debacle also reflects a deeper problem. A country of 1.4 billion simply can't change its energy mix overnight. China has made great strides in encouraging alternative fuels, but continued progress will require good planning, not just investment. Natural gas, which the government hopes will meet its residential energy needs, is widely available globally, yet China's pipelines aren't ready to transport it. Many of the country's solar farms are sitting idle for similar reasons.

Solving such problems is easier said than done. But rather than making heavy-handed decrees, China should be thinking about market-based reforms such as carbon taxes, while working to improve infrastructure for alternative energies. A more transparent policy-making process would also help. There's a reason that major public investments and policy changes usually require things like comment periods or impact reports. Such formalities lead to better regulation and reduce the risk of technocrats making well-meaning mistakes.

A common refrain from China bulls is that democracy is too slow in solving problems. As anyone who has visited an American airport or subway system in recent years can attest, there's some merit to this argument. But while central planning may seem more efficient at times, far more often it leads to predictable foul-ups -- with all-too-costly results.

SOURCE

Hollywood tries to save the Earth, but moviegoers aren’t buying eco-messages anymore

Climate change got its close-up in 2017. A gaggle of films either name-checked Al Gore’s biggest fear or built their narratives around it.

The timing, in theory, couldn’t be better for Hollywood bean counters: Three major hurricanes. Massive fires in the West. Record-setting chills. Media reports routinely connected the disasters with a warming planet.

Yet audiences stayed away from films influenced by eco-concerns. Far, far away.

Think “Blade Runner 2049,” “Geostorm,” “Downsizing,” “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” and “mother!” They all flopped, some in spectacular fashion.

Mr. Gore’s sequel to his documentary smash “An Inconvenient Truth” paid the most attention to climate change, of course. The 2006 original scored with audiences and Oscar voters, earning best documentary honors. The sequel snared a fraction of the first film’s tally: $3 million versus $24 million. That’s despite massive media attention, mostly fawning reviews and promotion from eco-conscious stars such as Paul McCartney, Bono and Pharrell Williams.

Documentaries rarely make serious coin at the box office, but the drop was massive.

“Geostorm” promised B-movie thrills with a tale of the Earth’s weather run amok. Audiences typically adore disaster films — the cheesier, the better. So what happened? The movie raked in $33 million from a reported $120 million budget.

“Downsizing,” a rare flop from director Alexander Payne (“About Schmidt”), envisioned a future in which people can shrink themselves to the height of a grapefruit. That fueled some cheeky social commentary and a recurring message about the world’s dwindling resources.

“Mother!” and “Blade Runner 2049” touched on climate change in more subtle ways.

Is there a connection among the flops, or is Hollywood circa 2017 more unpredictable than ever?

Justin Haskins, executive editor at the right-leaning, free-market Heartland Institute, said Hollywood insiders remain fixated on saving the planet.

“They believe climate change will bring people to the movies,” Mr. Haskins said. “That’s wildly out of touch with how moviegoers feel about the issue.”

A Pew Research survey this year found that “the environment” does not rank among the top 10 public policy concerns of most Americans, trailing behind “terrorism,” “the economy,” “education” and “jobs,” among others.

Mr. Haskins said it wasn’t always this way. Hits such as “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The Day After Tomorrow,” the 2004 film that dove directly into climate change fears, touched a nerve. The box office receipts proved it. “Tomorrow” hauled in $186 million despite tepid reviews.

At the time, audiences were genuinely scared about what climate change could mean to the planet, he said. Time passed, though, and many of the frightening predictions made by Mr. Gore and like-minded activists didn’t come to fruition.

“They stopped believing the problem was as serious as what Al Gore was saying,” Mr. Haskins said.

Is it any wonder climate change alarmism isn’t an easy sell at the cineplex?

Doug Stone, president of Box Office Analyst, doesn’t see a connection between the failing films and their climate change elements.

“You need to look at each individual film,” Mr. Stone said. “‘Mother!’ was really well-liked by critics but hated by anyone who went to see it.”

“Blade Runner 2049” underperformed because of its length (164 minutes) and the confusion it caused for those who didn’t know the original by heart, he said.

The marketing team behind “Downsizing” may have hurt the film as much as the content, Mr. Stone said. Paramount Pictures pitched the Matt Damon feature as a comedy despite its somber presentation. That kind of bait-and-switch tactic often backfires, especially with social media providing near-instant word-of-mouth results.

The movie’s marketing team also kept the climate change elements out of its initial trailers.

“They knew they had a picture that was difficult to sell,” Mr. Stone said.

Could it be that the aforementioned filmmakers let their artistry wane while sending a message? Mr. Payne, the Oscar winner behind celebrated movies such as “Sideways” and “The Descendants,” co-wrote “Downsizing.” The new film lacks the zip and humor of his previous efforts, which focused on entertainment first and foremost.

Director David Zucker of “Airplane!” fame suggested as much after the failure of his conservative comedy “An American Carol” in 2008.

But Mr. Stone suggests that’s not always the case and points to two 2017 films as proof: “Get Out” and “The Big Sick” both had something to say about racism in America. Each overperformed at the box office and may even nab an Oscar nomination or two next month.

Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot and a fiery critic of global warming alarmism, sees the films’ collective failures differently. Mr. Morano calls the box office failures a disconnect between show business and its consumers.

“Hollywood is finding out that the climate scare continues to be nothing more than a big yawn for the public,” Mr. Morano said. “Lecturing the public on climate change is boring, and ticket receipts prove this.”

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 January, 2018

Judith Curry gets it right

She might also be describing bigots but she is certainly describing most Greenies

There are five attributes of ideologues:

1. Absence of doubt
2. Intolerance of debate
3. Appeal to authority
4. A desire to convince others of the ideological “truth”
5. A willingness to punish those that don’t concur

In the climate communication world, it has become very trendy to wear your political ideology on your sleeve. How many ‘climate science communicators’ can you name that have at least 4 of the above attributes of ideologues with regards to climate change?

SOURCE

Bill Nye is having a wet dream

He says Blue States Will ‘Impose Economic Sanctions’ Against Climate Change-Denying States. I think he has finally lost his marbles

Friday on MSNBC, climate activist Bill Nye warned conservatives to “watch out,” saying progressive blue states will “address climate change” on their own.

Nye said, “Only 40 percent of people in the U.S. think that Congress should be addressing this and that’s because certain conservative groups, especially from the fossil fuel industry, have been very successful in introducing the idea that scientific uncertainty, plus or minus two percent, is the same as plus or minus 100 percent.”

He continued, “There’s a lot of emphasis from conservatives on what are writ-large states rights. Just watch out, conservatives, if states rights include California, Illinois, New York — these places that, where people voted in a progressive fashion — watch out if all those places start to address climate change and then impose economic sanctions, either overtly or by default, on places that have not embraced the work that needs to be done. Then you’ll end up with this states rights working the other way.”

He added, “We’ve got to remind people that we’re all in this together. The people I think about all the time are what are eloquently stated as the hillbillies. We want to engage everybody. Not working to address climate change is in no one’s best interest. It is not in the best interest, especially of your children and grandchildren. A couple of times you mentioned that I am against the president and so on. I’m not especially against the president. I just think he’s gotten himself surrounded by people who are willing to mortgage the future, to let the people who are coming into the workforce now pay for the future.

SOURCE

What needs to happen before electric cars take over the world

A lot

The electric-car future is still missing some pieces. Some crucial raw materials are scarce. There are not enough places to recharge. Battery-powered cars still cost thousands of dollars more than many petrol vehicles.

Here's a look at what needs to happen before electric cars take over the world.

The cost of building motors and components will have to continue to decrease

Electric cars will go mainstream when the cost of the motor and other components that make the car go forward - the powertrain - is the same or below as owning a car that burns petrol or diesel. How soon that day arrives is almost solely a function of the price of batteries.

The average price of a conventional powertrain is $US6000 ($7700), compared with $16,000 for an electric car powertrain.

Battery prices, measured by the power they produce, have fallen by more than half since 2011, according to analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The unexpectedly rapid drop in prices has sped up the timetable.

Merrill Lynch analysts now expect electric vehicles will be cheaper to own in the United States by 2024. Just a year ago, they estimated it would take until 2030.

One reason battery costs are falling is that manufacturers are ramping up production. The greater the supply, the lower the price.

There must be a steady, affordable supply of the resources required to make batteries

Carmakers are racing to secure the essential ingredients in batteries like cobalt, lithium and graphite. They need to avoid shortages that would drive prices too high, making electric vehicles unaffordable.

But manufacturers are also dealing with a geopolitical dimension. The world's reserves of lithium, a crucial ingredient in the most common kind of electric car battery, are in China, Bolivia and Chile. As demand surges, China could deploy its natural resources as a diplomatic cudgel the same way that Saudi Arabia uses oil.

More charging stations will need to be built, and they'll need to charge faster

Even when people can buy an electric car for the same price or less than a petrol model, they face another problem: where to plug it in. And they will not want to wait all day for the car to recharge.

Electric cars will become commonplace once there is a dense network of high-voltage charging stations where drivers can refill their batteries in the time it takes to use the restroom and drink a cup of coffee. At the moment, a cross-country drive in an electric car is an adventure. The average range of an electric vehicle on full charge is about 305 kilometres, compares with more than 600 for petrol.

But an array of startups and established companies like ABB are busy installing charging stations around the world, and they are on their way to becoming commonplace. There are already about 16,000 public charging stations in the United States alone, up from a few hundred in 2010. That compares with about 112,000 petrol stations.

Surprisingly, Volkswagen's emissions scandal has accelerated the rollout. As part of its settlement with diesel owners in the United States who bought cars with illegal software, Volkswagen agreed to spend $US2 billion to promote electric cars and build infrastructure. Electrify America, a company established to invest the settlement money, plans to install more than 2000 fast chargers in the US by mid-2019 in a first phase, with thousands more to follow.

Drivers will have to shed their attachment to the sound, smell and feel of petrol-powered engines

One of the biggest barriers for electric vehicles is psychological. People are used to internal combustion engines and the sensations that go with them - the odour of the fuel, the shifting of the transmission, the sound of the engine as the car accelerates.

Electric cars have a different personality that people need to get their heads around before they will buy one.

They may be pleasantly surprised. The physics of electric motors give them exceptional acceleration. A $US135,000 Tesla S clocked by Motor Trend magazine went from 0 to 97 kph faster than Ferraris, Lamborghinis or Porsches which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more.

Electric cars are quiet, nearly vibration free and they do not smell like petrol or exhaust. They do not need oil changes. They cost less to operate. Electric cars hug the road because heavy battery packs, typically arrayed underneath the passenger compartment, provide low centres of gravity and high stability.

"There is no question that an electric car gives you significantly better performance," Stafford said. "I don't think the mainstream driver is going to understand that unless they experience it."

SOURCE

Global Cooling! But This Isn't a Schadenfreude Moment

By Rich Kozlovich

Andrew West published an article entitled, Deadly Temperatures Are Set To Invade America…Are You Safe? on December 28, 2017 saying:

"All good hoaxes must come to an end, and this week’s frigid and dangerous arctic blast may be another nail in the coffin for the “global warming” charlatans. The idea that the entire globe is somehow filling with greenhouse gasses, thusly heating the planet up to the point of no return, is patently absurd. Even the liberal science community believed 30 years ago that this process would likely cause a mini ice age, before dramatically shifting to their current hangup regarding an increase in temperature. The reason for this abrupt change was not some scientific breakthrough, rather, the idea that the earth could become uninhabitable via heat is a much more profound problem."

Unfortunately, this isn't a schadenfreude moment. You love to smugly say "I told you so", when arrogant, smarmy leftists look down their noses at everyone and declare any who disagree with them as enemies of humanity, flat Earthers, deniers, and more in their efforts to impose a totally destructive economic plan on the world based on the Kyoto Accords. A scientifically fraudulent plan with the real goal of creating a scheme of worldwide governance under the United Nations. Even a past president of France, Jacques Chirac acknowledged the Kyoto Accord was the first step in global governance.

However, this cooling trend is what many of us who've been on the right side of this issue from the beginning has been expecting for some time: The potential for another solar minimum, and they're deadly!

The last minimum was during what's called the Dalton Minimum, which was another low sun spot period starting "about 1790 to 1830 or 1796 to 1820, corresponding to the period solar cycle 4 to solar cycle 7." "Like the Maunder Minimum, 1645 - 1715, and Sporer Minimum 1460 -1550, the Dalton Minimum coincided with a period of lower-than-average global temperatures. During that period, there was a variation of temperature of about 1 °C in Germany."

Some are claiming the cause for that cooling was a result of volcanism - and while that may have been a contributing factor - the fact of the matter is the cooling temperatures and solar minimum patterns are solid evidence, and that pattern is playing out right now.

But here's something to think about. There's no consistent pattern as to how long these minimums go on. The Maunder Minimum started in "about 1645 and continuing to about 1715", about 70 years, and if the Dalton minimum started in 1790 and lasted until 1830, that was 40 years, if it lasted, as some claim, from 1796 until 1820, that was a mere 24 years. But no matter - there was only about a 75 to 85 year period where temperatures rose to level better suited to human and animal survival during that either 175 or 185 year period.

Let's understand this - over the last 1000 years it's been the cold that's been deadly, not the warming. The warm periods were periods where agriculture, humans and animals flourished, including the Roman Warming Period from approximately 250 BC to AD 400.

A thousand years ago that age, now known as the Medieval Warming Period from 800 to 1400 AD, it was substantially warmer than it is today. Although there are those who claim - through the use of Climate Proxy records this warming period wasn't universal. Proxy records like tree ring counting, but is that reliable?

As a result of Biffa's offerings - tree ring counting that supplied evidence in support of what's now being called the "fraudulent" Hockey Stick Graph - we now know it isn't.

We now know that not only can it be unreliable, it can be manipulated to get the results the researcher wants, all of which Anthony Watts covers quite well in his December 4, 2009 article, Jo Nova finds the Medieval Warm Period. It's also interesting no one questioned the universality of that warming period until it interfered with the Warmist’s claims, especially since in Mann's Hockey Stick Graph the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age completely disappear.

The Medieval Warming period ended with what's called the Little Ice Age - 1300 to about 1850 - which forced the Vikings who lived there for about 300 years to abandon Greenland and return to Iceland. Greenland really was green over a large section of the Southern region. It's also known from the historical records they're agricultural practises were the same as those practiced in Norway and Iceland. They had to leave because they could no longer maintain those practises. Because cold kills! And every warming period humanity has experience has been beneficial.

In the paper, The `Hockey Stick': A New Low in Climate Science by John L. Daly he outlines the time lines in this way:

Medieval Warm Period (AD 700 - 1300)
Sporer Minimum' cool period (AD 1300 - 1500)
Brief climatic warming (AD 1500 - 1560)
Little Ice Age (`Maunder Minimum') (AD 1560 - 1830)

(Editor's note: I think he must be melding the Maunder and Dalton Minimums in this time frame. One thing we all have to acknowledge is the exact time frames for all of this is malleable, which can be a source for controversy, but the fact these eras existed isn't disputable. RK)

Brief warmer period (AD 1830 - 1870)
Brief cool period (AD 1870 - 1910)
20th century warm period (AD 1910 - 2000)

He goes on to say:

"As to what caused these two major climatic events, the most probable candidate is the variable sun, particularly with respect to the Little Ice Age. This is because we have direct observations of sunspot counts going back to 1600 AD, which allows us to compare variations in the sun with variations to global climate. Fig.2 shows how the sun has changed over time, the radiation being greatest during a sunspot maximum and least during a sunspot minimum, both recurring on an 11-year cycle."

All the claims about Anthropogenic Climate Change are based on two foundations. The Hockey Stick Graph, which is now being challenged by more and more scientists, including those who previously adhered to this tenet of green religion, and computer models, all of which are failing or have failed, which is why I call that Game Boy science.

There are three things Warminsts leave out of these models that actually have something to do with climate: The decadal cycles of the oceans currents, the sun's cycles and the number one component of our atmosphere which actually does hold warmth - water vapor! Why are they left out? Because these are natural components of climate and mankind can't be blamed.

Computer models are an important part of science as it allows scientists to test new ideas quickly, then change the parameters to see what comes out, allowing for more speculation. But speculation isn't science! It’s a component of science which can allows for shortcuts in deciding what areas they need to pay attention to in order to do real science. Science based on actual observation, not speculation.

We're hearing all these claims of Anthropogenic Climate Change and disaster, but we should be asking this: Why did these hystarians opt out of the phrase, Anthropogenic Global Warming and choose Anthropogenic Climate Change instead? They knew their claims were unraveling! It was also clear the "climate deniers" weren't walking away from the evidence of their fraud so they had to find a way to make whatever temperatures changes which might occur the fault of mankind, and most importantly - capitalism - and especially the capitalists of the United States.

But their efforts are failing so rapidly even Al Gore won't be able to further enrich himself with the scam. The biggest reason is the Internet! Finally, those who've opposed all the fraudulent claims put out by that neo-pagan secular religion known as Environmentalism, had a platform - an international platform - to challenge these people. A platform the media would have never given them. That's why the Kyoto Protocol never passed, and that piece of junk science known as the Montreal Protocol would have never been passed if the Internet existed then.

What I would like to know is when are these fraudsters going to be charged with a crime? The Global Warming scam is a fraud paid for by the American taxpayer. And the last time I looked: Fraud is a crime!

There are a five questions everyone has to ask.

1. Was it substantially warming during the Medieval Warming period than it is now? The answer is yes!

2. If the answer is yes, and it is, then we have to ask: What caused that warming period and what caused the Roman Warming Period? Answer: Those periods of warming must have been naturally occurring.

3. If those warming periods were naturally occurring why shouldn't we believe any warming occurring now (which stopped over 20 years ago) isn't naturally occurring? Answer: We shouldn't

4. If it was substantially warmer during both the Roman and Medeival Warming periods did any of the disasters they're predicting for today occur then? Answer: There's absolutely nothing in the historical record to show any of these disasters occurred then.

5. If these disasters didn't occur then, when it was substantially warmer, why should we believe any of these disasters will occur today. The answer is - we shouldn't!

We're going through another period of little or no sun spot activity. Does that mean another solar minimum? No one knows for sure, but it seems historically and scientifically probable. It's hard to feel schadenfreude when that happens - because cold kills!

SOURCE

Repairing the Damage to Children Caused by Climate Alarmists: a letter from Ken Haapala

Anyone on the look-out for materials, ideas, approaches that could help repair the emotional and intellectual damage caused to children (and vulnerable adults) by climate alarmists? This letter from Ken Haapala of SEPP seems to me to be a good contribution in the right direction:

'Letter to Dr Singer from students in Denmark asking important questions:

We are starting a project next week and the topic is "change". We have chosen the subtopic "global warming"
Do you have the time to answer a few questions in writing?
1. What is behind global warming?
2. What can we do to prevent global warming?
3. If we don't do anything about it, how does it affect us and our descendants?
4. What will happen in the future, and what are the alternatives for us, if the Earth becomes unlivable?
5. How can we save Earth if it isn't too late?

RESPONSE

Dear Students:

Dr. Singer was not available to answer your questions. I have worked with him for the past seven years, and he approved this response to you.

You ask some very good questions, which require answers with some detail. Science advances by asking good questions, providing answers that may or may not be correct (guesses), then testing the guesses against all hard evidence, that may or may not support it. If the strongest evidence does not support the guess (the hypothesis), then the guess must be discarded or changed.

The climate has been warming and cooling for hundreds of millions of years. For over two million years, the globe has usually been cold, with long ice ages interrupted by short warm periods of 10 to 15 thousand years. We live in one such warm period of about 10,000 years. The longer periods of cooling (and shorter periods of warming) have been explained as resulting from a changing of the orbit and tilt of the globe in relation to the sun, known as the Milankovitch cycles.

Within the generally-warm past 10,000 years, there has been shorter periods of modest warming and cooling. During a warming period, agriculture began and with it, civilization. The most recent cooling period is known as the Little Ice Age. It occurred between about 1300 to 1850 and was very hard for those living in Northern Europe and China, where we have written records. In Europe, many died from starvation and associated diseases because crops did not ripen. The Nordic settlements in Greenland were wiped out. Great storms occurred in the North Sea, killing thousands of people living in the low countries. It is thought this cooling period was caused by a weaker intensity of the sun, which resulted in increasing cloudiness and corresponding cooling.

Understanding what is behind the current warming of the last century or so, requires a complete understanding of what created periods of warming and cooling over the past 10,000 years, which we do not have. The earth’s climate is extremely complex. It can be described as the result of two fluids in motion interacting with the land. The fluids move in response to the heat generated daily by the sun.

One of the fluids is the ocean, which transports heat on the surface from the tropics to the poles, where it escapes into the atmosphere and to space. A famous surface ocean flow is the Gulf Stream, which keeps Northern Europe much warmer than the corresponding latitudes of Canada. The other fluid is the atmosphere, which transports heat from the surface to the upper troposphere by convection, from which heat can escape to space by radiation. We simply do not understand the movements of fluids sufficiently well to explain exactly how these systems work.

Adding to the complexity is the rotation of the earth, which changes the intensity of solar energy hitting any specific location on the globe. That varies both daily and seasonally, which adds to the ever-changing motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. It may take hundreds of years before these complex motions are fully understood.

In answer to your question: What is behind global warming? We simply do not know in detail, but can guess, then look at the evidence.

Over 100 years ago, scientists wondered why the surface of the earth does not cool as rapidly at night, as many thought it should. An explanation, since then well tested, is that some gases in the atmosphere delay the transport of heat from the surface to space, keeping the earth warmer at night. These gases are called greenhouse gases, the most important of which is water vapor. Deserts, with low atmospheric water vapor, cool more rapidly at night than humid areas at comparable latitude.

A lesser greenhouse gas is carbon dioxide which humans emit by burning fossil fuels. But research by different laboratories have shown that adding carbon dioxide to today’s atmosphere will cause only a small warming, nothing to fear.

Prior to the time when satellite measurements began (1979), the surface thermometers that indicated warming were largely on land, mostly located in the US, Western Europe, and other Westernized areas. The coverage was not global. Surface temperatures may indicate what is occurring in the atmosphere, but are influenced by many other human activities such as building cities, land clearing, and farming. For over 38 years, we have had the benefit of accurate temperature measurements from satellites that cover nearly all the earth, including oceans.

Meanwhile, computer models, known as General Circulation Models, have been used with relatively little success. Built into them is the assumption that the slight warming caused by CO2 will be amplified into a much greater warming due to water vapor. The principles of the scientific method demand that real data from observations be used, and for a computer model to be valid, it must reproduce the observed data. Any warming caused by increased greenhouse gases will be stronger in the atmosphere than on the surface.

Satellite measurements of temperature trends in the atmosphere have been studied intensely, including even tiny corrections for drifting orbits. Furthermore, the temperature trends are double-checked by using four different sets of atmospheric temperature measurements, taken with different instruments, carried by weather balloons; and all closely agree. Now stretching over 38 years, these show a modest warming trend.

From this evidence, we can conclude that: unless compelling evidence indicates otherwise, the warming influence of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, has been greatly overestimated; efforts to reduce greenhouse gases will not prevent global warming; carbon dioxide-caused warming will be modest; and the Earth will not become unlivable from carbon dioxide warming. Life began on this planet when the atmosphere was far richer in carbon dioxide, and far poorer in oxygen, than it is today.

Starting in 1972, Landsat satellites have been taking images of the earth. They show that the earth is greening with increasing carbon dioxide, becoming richer for life. Thousands of experiments show food crops grow better in atmospheres richer in carbon dioxide than the atmosphere today. Indoor plant nurseries routinely increase the carbon dioxide concentration of their air to three to four times that of today’s atmosphere.

Through the wonder of photosynthesis, using energy from the sun, green plants convert carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and carbohydrates (food). All plants and complex animals depend on this food. We should praise carbon dioxide, not fear it.

To directly answer your questions:

What is behind global warming? We don’t know exactly, but based on evidence, greenhouse gases are not the main cause.

What can we do to prevent global warming? Nothing. The main cause is natural variation, which we cannot prevent.

If we don't do anything about it, how does it affect us and our descendants? You and your descendants will live in a world richer in carbon dioxide, which is a benefit to plants, the environment, and humanity.

What will happen in the future, and what are the alternatives for us, if the Earth becomes unlivable? Life began on earth with the atmosphere many times richer in carbon dioxide than today. The earth will not become unlivable from carbon dioxide-caused warming.

How can we save Earth if it isn't too late? The earth does not need saving, but it needs good stewards. You can help by not polluting with trash, not wasting energy, and living healthy lives.

SOURCE

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

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

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BACKGROUND

Home (Index page)

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts

"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Yet temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried

Antarctica is GAINING mass

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion

Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

The plight of the bumblebee -- an egregious example of crooked "science"

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below

WISDOM:

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." --- Richard P. Feynman.

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement" -- Karl Popper

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

A Warmist backs down: "No one knows exactly how far rising carbon concentrations affect temperatures" -- Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

The frequency of hurricanes has markedly DECLINED in recent years

Here's how that "97% consensus" figure was arrived at

97% of scientists want to get another research grant

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

To Greenies, Genghis Khan was a good guy, believe it or not. They love that he killed so many people.

Greenie antisemitism

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

Comparing climate alarmist Hansen to Cassandra is WRONG. Cassandra's (Greek mythology) dire prophecies were never believed but were always right. Hansen's dire prophecies are usually believed but are always wrong (Prof. Laurence Gould, U of Hartford, CT)

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

UPDATE to the above: It seems that I am a true prophet

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

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

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Help keep the planet Green! Maximize your CO2 and CH4 output!

Global Warming=More Life; Global Cooling=More Death.

The inconvenient truth about biological effects of "Ocean Acidification"

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is maximum 4%.

Cook the crook who cooks the books

The great and fraudulent scare about lead

How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The "precautionary principle" is a favourite Greenie idea -- but isn't that what George Bush was doing when he invaded Iraq? Wasn't that a precaution against Saddam getting or having any WMDs? So Greenies all agree with the Iraq intervention? If not, why not?

A classic example of how the sensationalist media distort science to create climate panic is here.

There is a very readable summary of the "Hockey Stick" fraud here

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: "The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Relying on the popular wisdom can even hurt you personally: "The scientific consensus of a quarter-century ago turned into the arthritic nightmare of today."

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

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