GREENIE WATCH -- by Dr. John Ray

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

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

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30 June, 2019

How Dengue Fever Could Spread in a Warming World

This would probably be true to a degree IF the globe warms more.

But like most Leftist writing, the story below tells only half the story. I come from an area in the Australian tropics -- far North Queensland -- where Dengue and Ross river virus are endemic. So how come neither disease is common in the population there?

Its because of something that the Green/Left routinely ignore: People react to problems. They don't let problems just go on. And in this case public health measures work pretty well. Local authorities in the tropics react to mosquito-borne virus outbreaks in two ways.

1). They spray bodies of water where mosquitoes breed and thus kill them before they can fly.

2). They mount publicity campaigns to alert people to the dangers of mosquitoes breeding -- so that households too avoid creating conditions where mosquitoes can breed.

Neither strategy is completely sucessful but it is successful enough. Despite being born and bred in the tropics I have never had either Dengue or Ross river virus.

So if Dengue does spread to new areas, the control strategies are well known

Climate change is poised to increase the spread of dengue fever, which is common in parts of the world with warmer climates like Brazil and India, a new study warns.

Worldwide each year, there are 100 million cases of dengue infections severe enough to cause symptoms, which may include fever, debilitating joint pain and internal bleeding. There are an estimated 10,000 deaths from dengue — also nicknamed breakbone fever — which is transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes that also spread Zika and chikungunya.

The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Microbiology, found a likelihood for significant expansion of dengue in the southeastern United States, coastal areas of China and Japan, as well as to inland regions of Australia.

Oliver Brady, an assistant professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a co-author on the paper, said that the research predicts more people in the United States will be at risk in coming years.

Globally, the study estimated that more than two billion additional people could be at risk for dengue in 2080, compared with 2015 under a warming scenario roughly representative of the world’s current emissions trajectory. That increase largely comes from population growth in areas already at high risk for the disease, as well as the expansion of dengue’s range.

To estimate the future spread of the disease, Dr. Brady and his colleagues took data on mosquito behavior and projections on urbanization (one type of Aedes mosquito that spreads the disease is especially prevalent in cities) and combined them with three different climate scenarios to model what might happen in 2020, 2050 and 2080. Under all three scenarios the spread of dengue increased.

But how much the world warms has a significant impact on the spread of the disease.

The research, Dr. Brady said, “hints at the idea that if we do control emissions better, we could stop or at least limit this kind of spread.”

Warming temperatures help expand dengue’s range because, in part, as it gets warmer mosquitoes can thrive in more places where they couldn’t previously. Warming temperatures also shorten the time it takes a mosquito to become a biting adult and accelerate the time between when a mosquito picks up a disease and is able to pass it on. The study’s predictions were lower in some areas, particularly Europe, than previous studies. Those studies estimated widespread transmission of the disease on the Continent, while Dr. Brady and his colleagues estimated that its spread in the region would be limited to parts of the Iberian Peninsula and parts of the Mediterranean.

Aedes aegypti is particularly concerning, because, while other mosquito species will bite whatever is convenient, Aedes aegypti prefer to bite humans. Much of the Southeast United States used to be home to mosquito-borne diseases. Malaria was a threat until the middle of the 20th century, when a mosquito-eradication campaign eliminated the disease. But that campaign relied heavily on liberal application of the insecticide DDT, which had a host of harmful environmental effects. In 2018, the Florida Department of Health in Miami-Dade County announced at least one locally acquired occurrence of dengue.

There are limits to the study, cautioned Andrew Comrie, a professor in the department of Geography and Development at the University of Arizona. The paper is a sophisticated use of ecological niche modeling, Dr. Comrie said by email, but it does “not deal with species competition, predation, or potential evolutionary adaptation.” While there is a dengue fever vaccine, it is ineffective for most people. Treatment for the disease focuses on ensuring that the patient gets enough fluids, which can be difficult because of severe nausea and vomiting.

“For a healthy individual dengue is an awful experience that you never forget,” said Josh Idjadi, an associate professor at Eastern Connecticut University who contracted dengue fever in French Polynesia. “For infants and elderly and the infirm, they’re the ones that are going to be at risk.”

SOURCE

California Will Endure Prearranged Power Outages

First World problems in the Golden State are thanks to insane leftist policies.

In California’s last two fire seasons, more than 135 people died, and tens of thousands of homes and businesses were obliterated. This ongoing dynamic has been precipitated by two overriding factors: first, the power lines, conductors, and other equipment of the state’s largest power company, Pacific Gas and Electric, as well as those of other state utility companies, are largely antiquated. Second, years of environmental activism have enabled the largely uncontrolled growth of thousands of acres of dense underbrush and vegetation that can be easily ignited during periods of dry weather or severe winds.

California’s approach to fixing the problem? On May 30, the California Public Utilities Commission gave the green light to PG&E and the other utility companies to cut off electricity — to possibly hundreds of thousands of customers — whenever they deem the fire risk is extremely high.

The reasoning behind this decision was detailed last February, when California’s utility companies filed contingency plans with state regulators in advance of the 2019 wildfire season that began this month. Those plans were submitted after PG&E filed for bankruptcy protection, precipitated by ten of billions of dollars in liability claims from those who bore the brunt of the wildfire devastation. PG&E insisted development in remote areas and climate change were major contributors to wildfires’ severity, but critics asserted the company has not done enough to reduce the risk posed by its equipment. And while the utility stated it will spend as much as $2.3 billion this year to mitigate that risk, the company ultimately admitted that “preventing wildfires outright is likely impossible.”

Thus, PG&E has developed a formula that determines when people will be left without power. As PG&E senior public safety specialist David Hodgkiss explains, “elevated (Tier 2) or extreme (Tier 3)” risk triggering a Red Flag warning will be engendered by humidity below 20%, sustained winds over 25 mph, and winds gusts over 40 mph. Those conditions will be verified by 1,300 weather stations the company plans to install across its customer-service area in central and northern California that serves approximately 40% of the state’s population.

Last October, the utility company implemented what amounts to a trial run of this policy in several small communities in the North Bay and Sierra Foothills. Power was deliberately cut off to nearly 60,000 customers for two days.

Yet as Hodgkiss warns, keeping the power off for only 48 hours may be an optimistic prediction going forward. “Each and every foot of line and piece of conductor needs to be inspected” before restoring it to make sure downed trees or other hazards aren’t impacting power lines, and that some of those inspections take time “especially in a mountainous area,” he explains. “The inspect and patrol is a huge undertaking, but they’ve gotten a lot better at it than last fall. The goal is to complete it within 48 hours and have everything up and running, but that will depend on the event.”

PG&E spokeswoman Alison Talbott was somewhat tone deaf in explaining the company’s position. “Go ahead and be mad at PG&E,” she stated, “but use this as an opportunity to prepare yourself; because an emergency can happen at any time that isn’t fire-related.”

Mad? Fifty-six year old Kallithea Miller isn’t mad. “I could die in my sleep,” said a woman who relies on her refrigerator to keep her insulin cool, as well as a CPAP machine to maintain her breathing during the night. “It’s scaring the hell out of me.”

It should. As Hodgkiss noted, PG&E will “ideally” begin alerting public-safety agencies 48 hours in advance of a blackout, and then begin getting warnings out to the public via social media and news outlets 24 hours prior to an outage.

Ideally? California’s track record of “ideal” (read: wholly inadequate) solutions for real-world problems is the stuff of legend.

Nonetheless, the epicenter of progressive ideology and radical environmentalism must get its act together. After years of neglect, the U.S. Forest Service and the state’s Cal Fire agency are thinning forests, clearing brush, and setting controlled burns on more acres than they have in quite some time. Unsurprisingly, the effort required Gov. Gavin Newsom to exempt such projects from environmental review. The U.S. Forest Service has also announced a plan to “streamline” federal regulations.

Unfortunately, the current effort only marginally addresses the problem. State officials estimate approximately 15 million acres of wilderness need to be overhauled, yet the U.S. Forest Service plans to treat only 220,000 acres, and Cal Fire can only handle 45,000 acres. “We’re not going to solve the problem (right away),” said Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at UC Berkeley. “But there’s hope of making a difference in the next two decades.”

Two decades? “Power outrages are characteristic of Third World countries,” Victor Davis Hanson writes. “Here in California we are advised to brace for lots of them, given that our antiquated grid apparently contributes to brush fires on hot days. As a native, I do not remember a single instance of our 20th-century state utilities shutting down service in the manner that they now routinely promise.”

Those promises come with a steep price attached. Calistoga is one of the towns that went dark last October. When it did, city officials claim communications with PG&E broke down, leaving them hard-pressed to get vulnerable residents in three mobile-home parks medical attention. In addition, schools closed and hospitals postponed surgeries. At the 18-room Calistoga Inn, power went out in the middle of the dinner rush, and owner Michael Dunsford estimated the lost revenue, combined with cleaning out his refrigerators and issuing refunds to hotel customers, cost him about $15,000.

Yet as columnists Russell Gold and Katherine Blunt reveal, it gets worse. “PG&E said it generally wouldn’t cover losses due to intentional blackouts — regulations don’t require it to — though it would consider claims case-by-case,” they explain. “It declined to say whether it has ever compensated anyone for such claims.”

In short, Californians are on their own. Even the San Francisco Chronicle acknowledges as much. They advise Californians to buy portable generators, solar roof-top panels, or a $6,700 Tesla Powerwall battery — as if ordinary people in the state with the highest income-tax rates in the nation have such disposable income — after they’re finished paying the sixth highest electric bills. State Sen. Bill Dodd (D-Napa) has also proposed a bill to fix the problem on the wrong of the equation, with a plan to secure backup systems for those who need power for medical reasons. “The last thing we want to do is have a situation like that hurting people,” Dodd said. “This is all new to everybody.”

This is not new. California has had rolling blackouts for more than two decades. What is new? “No U.S. utility has ever blacked out so many people on purpose,” Gold and Blunt state.

Until now — and for the foreseeable future.

SOURCE

Democratic presidential candidates avoided using the term climate change for more alarming phrases, like “climate chaos,” during Thursday night’s primary debate

“Well, first of all, I don’t even call it climate change, it’s a climate crisis,” Democratic California Sen. Kamala Harris said the debate.

“It represents and existential threat to us as a species,” Harris said. “And the fact that we have a president of the United States who has embraced science fiction over science fact will be to our collective peril.”

Democratic California Rep. Eric Swalwell used the phrase “climate chaos” in his closing debate remarks, echoing language used by environmental activists pushing for aggressive global warming policies. “This is the generation that will end climate chaos.” Swalwell said.

Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign tweeted out during the debate that “we must combat our climate crisis and take on the fossil fuel industry.” Sanders, who also partook in the debate, supports the Green New Deal, which calls for a massive government takeover to “green” the economy.

Instead of spending trillions of dollars on misguided wars and weapons of mass destruction, we must combat our climate crisis and take on the fossil fuel industry. We need a Green New Deal. #DemDebate2 — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) June 28, 2019

Scientists use climate change or global warming to describe human impacts on global average temperature, not activist talking points. Despite this, two major media outlets changed their editorial policies this year to use “emergency” or “crisis” instead of climate change.

SOURCE

Contrary to Global Warming Predictions, Great Lakes At Record-High Water Levels

Lake MichiganIt is a truism that any observed change in nature will be blamed by some experts on global warming (aka “climate change”, “climate crisis”, “climate emergency”).

When the Great Lakes water levels were unusually low from approximately 2000 through 2012 or so, this was pointed to as evidence that global warming was causing the Great Lakes to dry up.

Take for example this 2012 article from National Geographic, which was accompanied by this startling photo:

The accompanying text called this the “lake bottom” as if Lake Michigan (which averages 279 feet deep) had somehow dried up.

Then in a matter of two years, low lake levels were replaced with high lake levels. The cause (analysis here) was a combination of unusually high precipitation (contrary to global warming theory) and an unusually cold winter that caused the lakes to mostly freeze over, reducing evaporation.

Now, as of this month (June 2019), ALL of the Great Lakes have reached record-high levels.

Time To Change The Story

So, how shall global warming alarmists explain this observational defiance of their predictions?

Simple! They just invoke “climate weirding” and claim that the climate emergency has caused water levels to become more erratic, to see-saw, to become more variable!

The trouble is that there is no good evidence in the last 100 years that this is happening.

This plot of the four major lake systems (Huron and Michigan are at the same level, connected at the Straits of Mackinac) shows no increased variability since levels have been accurately monitored (data from NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory):

This is just one more example of how unscientific many global warming claims have become. Both weather and climate are nonlinear dynamical systems, capable of producing changes without any ‘forcing’ from increasing CO2 or the Sun. Change is normal.

What is abnormal is blaming every change in nature we don’t like on human activities. That’s what happened in medieval times, when witches were blamed for storms, droughts, etc.

One would hope we progressed beyond that mentality.

SOURCE

EcoFascists: The new totalitarians

Melbourne University’s new vice-chancellor, Duncan Maskell, wants to “reach out” and “build partnerships” with the business sector. It may be harder than he thinks. Potential donors might catch up with what the university’s Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute (MSSI) is advocating. MSSI Director, Professor Brendan Gleeson, has just co-authored with staffer Dr Sam Alexander a book Degrowth in the Suburbs: A Radical Urban Imaginary.[1]

The book calls for the overthrow of capitalism en route to a mightily shrunken non–consumerist “eco-socialism”. MSSI cites reviews of the book as a “beacon of hope” for a “a tantalizing and realistic suburban future”, as the authors guide us “through the calamities of the Anthropocene”. MSSI last March also published an update by the Gleeson/Alexander duo, “showcasing new and exciting sustainability knowledge”.[2] The authors respectfully quote Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto of 1848. But they argue for a decarbonised Australia which for radicalism makes Marx and Engels seem mild as maiden aunts:

Attempting to take control of the state may not necessarily be the best way to initiate the transition to a just and sustainable degrowth economy, for even a socialist state may find itself locked into unsustainable growth just as capitalism is.

and

A revolutionary consciousness must precede the revolution. If governments will not lead this process, it arguably follows that social movements might have to change the world without (at first) taking state power… [3]

The authors note that Australian householders to the 1950s did a lot of backyard food-growing, dress-making and furniture-making, and DIY building:

This ‘urban peasantry’ declined however in the Post-War Boom, as the rise of mass consumer capitalism enabled households to purchase goods previously produced within the household. We contend that any degrowth or post-capitalist transition may well see the re-emergence of an ‘urban peasantry’ in this sense, albeit one shaped by different times and concerns.

The more pain for citizens the better, apparently, to “shake people awake”:

In our view, it is better that citizens are not in fact protected from every disruptive situation, given that encounter with crisis can play an essential consciousness-raising role. (175).

They say,

Ultimately, the solution to crisis is crisis: a massive suspension of capitalism as prelude to a new economic and social dispensation…To liberate human prospect, we must cast down not defend the burning barricades of a dying modernity. (15-16)

They extol Cubans for food production in backyards, turning “crisis into opportunity”. The post-2007 Greek debt crisis also furnishes them insights “into ways of dealing positively with challenging and turbulent times”. I’m surprised they haven‘t also cited socialist Venezuela’s shining example of degrowth. They say that living standards, despite degrowth, can be propped up by voluntary sharing and gifting. But they caution the middle classes that “access to expensive handbags through sharing schemes is not progressive if it merely entrenches consumer culture.”

Richard di Natale’s Green’s Party, they say, “has begun to recognize the need for a post-growth economy, even though it treads very carefully knowing that it must not alienate a voting constituency that is still developing a post-growth consciousness” (180). I don’t think di Natale will thank them for that insight.

In one of the sickening clichés of the Gleeson/Alexander academic style – dating back eight years to Alexander’s Ph.D. thesis — the authors time-travel to 2038 and discover what a success their policies have been (145).[4] Large fossil-fuel companies are nationalized in a near “war time mobilization” and their workers handed a job guarantee in renewables (167).

Graffiti daubers in 2038 instead write inspirational slogans: “Graffiti art sprayed all over Melbourne captured the spirit best: ‘I have a little; you have nothing; therefore, we have a little’” (154). Suburbanites share food from their vegie plots, eschew distant holidays (local trips show “hidden delights” within reach of a borrowed electric car), mend their own clothes, eat vegetarian and fertilise their backyard plots with nutrients from their composting toilets. “As old attitudes die, it is now broadly accepted that a civilized society in an era of water scarcity should not defecate into potable water…” they write (158).

“Tiny houses” on wheels proliferate on idle driveways and spare rooms are opened to boarders. Homesteaders enjoy sewing, baking bread and brewing beer. (Home-brewed cider and port feature in Alexander’s previous yurts-and-jam-jar imaginings). People spend their leisure on “low-impact creative activity like music or art, home-based production, or sport. (164)”. But many sport fields get converted to cropping, which is tough on the likes of AFL fans who initially create “instances of social conflict” until won over by Gleeson and Alexander’s insights (159).

The elderly purr along on electric bikes, and neighborhoods share ‘electric cargo bikes” capable of dropping multiple kids at school. The ‘vast majority’ of city people do some food-growing and bee-keeping in their welcome new roles as “urban peasantry”. They convert train-line verges to chicken and goat farms and former car parks to aquaculture. With so much physical work, people need less public health care, “freeing up more of the public purse for the energy transition” (160).

The ambience at MSSI hasn’t changed much since I last checked them out four years ago. Those earlier pieces — The joy of yurts and jam-jar glassware, Melbourne Uni’s watermelon patch, and A book without peer — can be read by following the links.

MSSI is now running a whole project on eco-socialism’s “Great Resettlement” of the suburbs after we cut loose from our “fatal addiction” to oil, gas and coal. Just for starters, Gleeson/Alexander are now agitating for a top marginal tax rate of “90 per cent or more”,[5] wealth taxes “to systematically transfer 3 per cent of private wealth [do they mean per annum?] from the richest to the poorest” and estate taxes of 90 per cent or more “to ensure the laws of inheritance and bequest do not create a class system of entrenched wealth and entrenched poverty.” In their view, Australia should give a guaranteed living wage to every permanent resident and a “job guarantee” involving the state as employer of last resort (193-4).

The book says the “working class struggle” (91) should involve, of course, a giant increase in State control for a “wholesale eco-socialist transition” (174). There would be “vastly increased democratic planning and perhaps even some rationing of key resources to ensure distributive equity” (195). State and community banks would monopolise most mortgages and use the profits to fund a guaranteed right to public housing (191), with socialization of property per se likely later down the track (190).

To prepare the masses for this Gleesonian world of degrowth, grassroots education campaigns would get special importance and the arts sector would weave “emotionally convincing” narratives about anti-consumerism (195) – — except maybe for climate tragic Cate Blanchett; her portfolio includes a $6m Sussex mansion.

In the book’s sole flash of common sense, the authors say, “Electric cars are still on the rise, but progress is slow as few households can afford them, and their ecological credentials remain dubious in many respects” (164-65).

You may be wondering about this Sustainable Society Institute. It’s not some rogue element of the campus in a reefer-strewn Carlton hideaway but an interdisciplinary Melbourne University standard-bearer. It has a “diverse and vibrant Advisory Board of experts, leaders and champions of sustainability.” They include Nobelist Peter Doherty and the president, no less, of the university’s professorial board, Rachel Webster.

Housed in the architecture faculty , it has a staff of 21 including four professors, 6-7 PhDs and 10 administrators. There goes about $3m salaries a year in tax and fees, let alone costs of MSSI delegations to annual UN climate gabfests. MSSI purports to produce high impact publications, post-grad research and public debate – although the only debates there are among green-leftists. MSSI has staff exchanges with Germany’s far-left Potsdam Climate Impact Institute, which has helped lure Germany into a crippling energy shortage.

Check out MSSI’s “diverse and vibrant advisory board of experts, leaders and champions of sustainability.” Chair is Melbourne’s deputy mayor Arron Wood, a graduate of the Climate Leadership program run by globe-trotting, CO2-belching Al Gore. Other members include John Bradley, State Environment Department head and previously CEO of power distributor Energy Networks; and various green group leaders like Katerina Gaita, CEO of “Climate for Change”. She’s a fellow Al Gore graduate and daughter of Romulus My Father author Raimond Gaita with whom she shared the jolliest green family chinwags at the Wheeler Centre

The MSSI board, apart from some vested interests, also bulges with corporate high-flyers of the capitalist imperium targeted for destruction by MSSI. These barons and duchesses of a dying order include Rosemary Bissett, sustainability head of National Australia Bank; Gerard Brown, corporate affairs head of ANZ Bank; and Victoria McKenzie-McHarg, strategy manager at Bank Australia. She boasts of leading the campaign to replace Hazelwood power station and stopping another Victorian coal-fired power project going ahead, plus there was her role in the women-in-climate change seminar. Then there’s Adam Fennessy, EY consultancies’ government strategy partner and ex-head of Victoria’s Environment Department. No green lobby would be replete without big emitter Qantas, and MSSI has Megan Flynn, listed as Qantas group environment and carbon strategy manager.[3] Sadly for Qantas, Gleeson’s post-capitalist and climate-friendly world will be a no-fly zone.

Last week Melbourne University’s council and its academics combined to put out an improved free speech policy, not before time as the Institute of Public Affairs audit last year cited some nasty incidents:

Conservative students launched a membership drive and a posse of Melbourne University academics cried ‘Racists!’ and had the conservative students thrown off campus. Former Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella was shouted down and physically confronted during a guest lecture at the University of Melbourne.

The Gleeson-Alexander “array of revolutionary reforms” includes a scenario “to create (or re-create) a ‘free press’” (p194-5). I hope they don’t have a tax or fee-financed bunyip version of Pravda in mind.

Associate Professor (climate politics) Peter Christoff is a long-time MSSI executive committee member. He’s publicly called for legislation imposing “substantial fines” and “bans” to silence conservative commentators of the Andrew Bolt/Alan Jones ilk. This was a contrast to last week’s university policy to promote “critical and free enquiry, informed intellectual discourse and public debate within the University and in the wider society”. Christoff was addressing a 2012 university seminar aptly titled Law vs Desire: Will Force or Obedience Save the Planet? His draconian sanctions were, as per my transcribing from 20 minutes in,

based on the fact that unchecked climate denialism over time would cause loss of freedom and rights, the death of thousands of humans, the loss of entire cultures, effectively genocide , extinctions…

The legislation to be contemplated might be roughly framed around things like Holocaust Denial legislation which already exists in 17 countries, focused on the criminalisation of those who public condone, deny or trivialise crimes of genocide or crimes against humanity…

“The [fifth] objection [to his proposal] is that this is simply unworkable, inquisitorial, having the perverse effect of increased attraction to banned ideas and their martyrs. It will depend on the application of such law. If it is selective and well focused, with substantial fines and perhaps bans on certain broadcasters and individuals whom I will not name, who stray from the dominant science without any defensible cause, it would have a disciplinary effect on public debate. There still would be plenty of room for peer reviewed scientific revisionism and public debate around it, but the trivial confusion that is being deliberately generated would be done away with, and that is a very important thing at the moment.

His proposal was heard with equanimity by the panel comprising Professor Helen Sullivan, Director of the University’s Centre for Public Policy (introducer); MSSI’s Professor Robyn Eckersley; activist Dave Kerin and Professor of Rhetoric Marianne Constable (University California, Berkeley). The young audience showed no negative reaction. Compere was the university’s Dr Juliet Rogers, now a Senior Lecturer in Criminology. (Her Melbourne Law School PhD was on ‘Fantasies of Female Circumcision: Flesh, Law and Freedom Through Psychoanalysis’).

Professor Sullivan, summing up at 1.54.20, says Christoff’s contribution is useful

“just about how you might start to use the law and possibility of the law, to generate a sense of resistance and generate people out of a passivity. I would not want to think Peter’s contribution was off the point; it is ‘in there’ and may be part of the mix and something we need to be thinking about.”

One of three comments on the youtube seminar page reads: “A highly distinguished, diverse group of intelligent human beings openly discussing hard topics to help humanity navigate our way through these hard times with a sense of justice, democracy and reason.” Another begs to differ: “Just listened here to a group of academic Eco-[authoritarians] who all are embracing the biggest scientific swindle of all time. Fascinating insight into lunatics.”

Christoff and Eckersley in 2014 co-wrote a chapter in the Christoff-edited book “Four Degrees of Global Warming, Australia in a Hot World”.[6] They reached the following “Conclusion” (p201):

The American political scientist Chalmers Johnston called 9/11 and the continuing War on Terror ‘blowback’, caused by United States’ imperial foreign and defence policies from the 1950s to the start of the century. If we do realise a Four Degree World…we will have cause to call the results for Australia ‘climate’ blowback or ‘carbon’ blowback.

It seems disrespectful to 3000 murdered Americans to suggest that the attack was America’s fault, or “blowback”.

Here’s more Gleeson/Alexander book extracts, free speech indeed (Trigger warning for snowflakes):

# “A massive, disruptive adjustment to the human world is inevitable. The next world is already dawning. Humanity will surely survive to see it…capitalism will not…it will collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions. (15)

# Their recipe for suburban reform is for “radicals and progressives – indeed all who experience a sense of care and responsibility for viable human futures – to loudly indict a dying but still lethal capitalism for its crimes against human and natural prospects.” (204)

# Eco-warrior David Holmgren, writing in the book’s Foreword: “The global economy is a Ponzi scheme of fake wealth that will inevitably follow the trajectory of previous bubbles in the history of capitalism – but this time, the tightening grip of resource depletion and other limits will make this boom cycle the final one for global capitalism.’ Holmgren says he found the Mad Max movie the “primary intellectual reference point” about the energy-scarce future. (vi)

The co-authors argue that we should not “callously close borders”, as we need to take in not just (so far mythical) climate refugees but invite the world’s poor in general for reasons of “solidarity and compassion”.

“We must oppose the tide of scapegoat racism that seems to be driving the wave of populist nationalism that today calls for the closing of borders at a time when we must be opening our hearts” (18-19).

Concurrently, somehow, the state should enforce constantly reducing resource availability, such as 3 per cent a year, to ensure degrowth plus justice and sustainability (184).

They quote Slavoj Zizek, their oft-cited Slovenian philosopher, describing the capitalist economy as “a beast that can not be controlled”. It must, however, be brought to heel before it propels humanity, and all we presume to govern, into the abyss, they add (9). Zizek is a particularly odd fish.[7]

Their war-cry: “We should raise an infernal racket about the narcosis that has settled in the dying hours of capitalism. Sleepers awake! We have the right to imagine and create a more enlightened world. To work…in the suburbs, now.” (205-6)

Back in the real world, bike and vegetable-friendly co-author Alexander, who lives gas-free, says he has draped his home with solar panels to produce six times more electricity than he draws from the grid (1kWh per person per day). His annual bill is zero. “None of this has required wearing hairshirts of living in a cave without lights,” he says (120), overlooking how much his free electricity is subsidized by taxpayers, renters and non-solar householders.

Maybe the authors will win the 2020 economics Nobel with their proposal for suburban currencies.[8] Puckle Street forex traders ought to give my Flemington dollars a good rate against their Moonee Ponds buck.

I’ve visited some nice universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Chicago, Bologna and Padua. But maybe tourists should give Melbourne University’s Sustainability Institute a miss — unless, like visitors to Hogarth’s Bedlam, they enjoy observing lunatics going about their strange business.

SOURCE

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

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28 June, 2019

UN report on global warming warns of "climate apartheid" between rich and poor

This is all perfectly logical if we assume that a couple of degrees warming is going to affect anything much. But will it? The population outside the tropics are not be going to be bothered by a couple of degrees warming.

People in the tropics already live in temperatures way above the global average so why should people in more temperate climes experience difficulty with a slightly warmer environment?

The very hottest territories may experience out-movement but that is a problem for their neighbors only. There is no reason to expect any significant global effect

The UN has published a new report detailing the dangers of climate change, with a particular focus on how it will shape the issue of poverty in the coming decades. It paints a grim picture for not just those suffering in the current day, but the millions upon millions that will be pushed into poverty as a result of a changing climate, which also has the potential to upend democracy and human rights.

The new report echoes the sentiments of past climate reports published by the UN, calling on governments to do more than the steps laid out in the Paris Agreement in order to limit warming to levels considered safe. These have highlighted the issues of climate refugees, diminishing natural resources and extreme weather events, but the latest puts the spotlight on inequality between rich and poor, and how global warming threatens to widen the divide.

"Even if current targets are met, tens of millions will be impoverished, leading to widespread displacement and hunger," said the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and report author Philip Alston. "Climate change threatens to undo the last 50 years of progress in development, global health, and poverty reduction. It could push more than 120 million more people into poverty by 2030 and will have the most severe impact in poor countries, regions, and the places poor people live and work."

The report leans on figures from the World Bank and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change among others, and in part imagines a world a few decades down the track with 2° C (3.6° F) of warming above pre-industrial levels. It says this could see 100 to 400 million more people at risk of hunger and 1 to 2 billion without access to adequate water. Crop yields could drop by 30 percent by 2080, while malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat stress could cause an additional 250,000 deaths per year by 2030.

It also points out the discrepancies in carbon emissions coming from the poor, who will suffer the most, and the wealthy, who will suffer less. The 3.5 billion people making up the poorer half of the world's population are responsible for only 10 percent of these emissions, while the wealthiest 10 percent contribute half. Strikingly, a person in the richest one percent is responsible for 175 times more carbon emissions than somebody in the bottom 10 percent.

"Perversely, while people in poverty are responsible for just a fraction of global emissions, they will bear the brunt of climate change, and have the least capacity to protect themselves," Alston said. "We risk a 'climate apartheid' scenario where the wealthy pay to escape overheating, hunger, and conflict while the rest of the world is left to suffer."

Equally important as the issues of food security, housing and water, the report says, is the threat to democracy and the rule of law. It says the anticipated mass migrations of people forced to either starve or move will "pose immense and unprecedented challenges to governance" and likely stimulate "nationalist, xenophobic, racist and other responses."

"In such a setting, civil and political rights will be highly vulnerable," Alston said. "Most human rights bodies have barely begun to grapple with what climate change portends for human rights, and it remains one on a long laundry list of 'issues', despite the extraordinarily short time to avoid catastrophic consequences. As a full-blown crisis that threatens the human rights of vast numbers of people bears down, the usual piecemeal, issue-by-issue human rights methodology is woefully insufficient."

SOURCE

G20 members at odds over climate change for summit meeting - sources

G20 negotiators are wrangling over the wording of a summit communique on combatting climate change, with the United States pushing to downgrade the language against European opposition, according to sources and drafts of the text.

The arguments are a reprise of tussles over global warming that have stymied talks in multilateral forums since U.S. President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of a landmark agreement to limit the effects of climate change.

The latest draft, seen by Reuters, includes language supporting implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement, and saying the accord signed by 200 nations is "irreversible".

An earlier draft, also seen by Reuters, did not include such language at the insistence of the United States, two sources familiar with the discussions over the communique told Reuters.

Further changes to the communique are likely before the final adoption of the text on Saturday by Group of 20 leaders in Osaka for this week's summit, but the inclusion of stronger language came as French President Emmanuel Macron said France will not accept a text that does not mention the Paris agreement.

"If we don't talk about the Paris Agreement and if we don't get an agreement on it amongst the 20 members in the room, we are no longer capable of defending our climate change goals and France will not be part of this," he said in Tokyo on Wednesday before heading to Osaka.

France was one of the main drivers behind the Paris accord and the French parliament is now debating an energy bill that targets net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

"Negotiations on the topic of climate will be especially difficult this time," a German government official said on Wednesday.

Nations in Paris agreed to limit the global average rise from pre-industrial temperatures to well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Current policies, though, put the world on track for at least a 3C rise by the end of the century, according to a United Nations report in 2016.

Investors managing more than $34 trillion (26.8 trillion pounds) in assets, nearly half the world's invested capital, piled pressure on G20 leaders on Wednesday, demanding urgent action from governments on climate change.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday also urged G20 countries to back more ambitious climate goals, among other international initiatives.

Summit host Japan has been criticized for backing the continued use of coal for power generation, one of the biggest sources of gas emissions that cause global warming.

SOURCE

California Air Resources Board Evades Public Oversight

California taxpayers have long been aware that politicians and bureaucrats need watching. Accordingly, the 1967 Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act implements a provision of the California Constitution declaring that “the meetings of public bodies and the writings of public officials and agencies shall be open to public scrutiny.” The Act also mandates open meetings for state agencies, board, and commissions, but this mandate does not always prevail. As Katy Grimes of the California Globe reports, the Omnibus Resources Trailer Bill for 2019-20 contains language exempting a commission of the California Air Resources Board and CalEPA from the Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act. And as Grimes notes “this isn’t the first time the ARB has found itself exempted from the Open Meetings Act.”

In 2012, CARB boss Mary Nichols teamed with Assembly Speaker John Perez to exempt the ARB from the open meetings act. Senate Bill 2018 “specifically exempted CARB from open meeting rules in upcoming cap-and-trade auctions, allowing CARB’s Western Climate Initiative, Inc. to manage carbon trading auctions without any public scrutiny.”

As it happens, Mary Nichols is a lawyer, not a scientist, and has never seen a regulation she didn’t like. She left CARB in 1983 and ran Tom Bradley’s gubernatorial campaign in 1986. Bradley lost and Nichols became director of Norman Lear’s People for the American Way and founded the Los Angeles office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, where she served as a senior attorney. During the Clinton administration, Nichols worked for the federal EPA as Assistant Administrator of Air and Radiation, followed by a stint with the Environment Now Foundation.

Nichols returned to CARB in 2007 at the request of Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Nichols championed AB 32, the “Global Warming Solutions Act,” with a host of new regulations and restrictions. Gov. Jerry Brown reappointed Nichols in 2011, and on her watch CARB operates with a budget of more than $860 million. That is a lot of power for a regulatory zealot who never has to face the voters and seeks to keep her mammoth agency off-limits to public scrutiny. Whatever Nichols is trying to hide can’t be good for California taxpayers.

SOURCE

Wind And Solar Are Already Costing You Money (And You May Not Even Know It)

It is a safe argument that once we quarry the cement required, mine and refine the steel and aluminum, and dig up the rare earth minerals that every wind turbine requires, Industrial Wind Turbines cannot even be considered green.

Yet at least 23 states require that their electric utilities obtain some portion of the electricity they sell from renewable sources. In all cases in our nation, they mean wind and solar farms.

In most cases this energy costs at least three times more than conventional fossil fuel power plants.

Were they not subsidized by the Federal government (your taxes) and often state subsidies for these sources of power, they would cost 6 to 7 times more than natural gas and coal. When wind and solar costs are folded into your electricity bill, it is raised considerably for most Americans.

The argument in favor of these state-enforced Renewable Energy Standards is that they encourage competition with fossil fuel power plants.

This is actually the equivalent of forcing people to eat in an expensive restaurant when they could get a fine meal at a mid-priced family restaurant; the government will pick up part of the bill at the expensive restaurant making it only 50% more expensive instead of twice the price.

It is helpful to understand where America gets its energy. The United States Energy Information Agency is happy to oblige us with the data.

Natural gas plants supply 34% of our electricity, coal plants 30%, hydroelectric power plants supply 7%, nuclear power plants supply 20%, and as stated above, 6% is from wind and solar installations.

Where every single one of these installations exists energy to your home cost more than it would without it.

The homeowner must pay the price for the government’s belief that it is doing something beneficial for the environment or the Earth’s temperature.

Well speaking of competition, let’s assume that carbon dioxide does have a role in determining the temperature of our planet. Then let’s look at the other known factors that impact our planet’s temperature.

They include reflectivity of dark earth as compared to snow; evaporation of water; condensation; reflectivity of clouds; Infrared Radiation by water; methane content of air; other greenhouse gases; gross movement of air; deep ocean currents; salinity of the oceans; deforestation; crop growth; cities; volcanoes; highways; strength of the Earth’s magnetic field; strength of the sun’s magnetic field; solar storms; solar ultra-violet light; cosmic rays; the solar wind; the location of the earth within our galaxy, the Milky Way; cloud cover leading to warmer nights.

This is just a partial list. Do we have your attention yet?

Is there any doubt that all these factors are important? The real secret is that the best climatologists do not thoroughly understand them.

Our government is willing to force you to pay more for your energy on their wrongheaded knowledge of a single variable, carbon dioxide. This writer believes it is not even remotely involved in the planet’s thermostat.

All of the increases in living expenses associated with renewable energy are a disproportionate toll on low-income families.

The term ‘energy poor’ has arisen to describe households forced to spend more than 10% of their income to cover energy costs.

In the US, the government subsidizes all home solar installations so those who do not install them are paying their tax money to those who do.

The only winner in the renewable energy sweepstakes is Big Government. Under the guise of ‘saving the planet’, governments are now in a position where they can micromanage entire economies.

The socialist movement paints a picture of a utopian future in which a benevolent and infallible government oversees all aspects of energy and the economy.

Hopefully, most of us will recognize the absurdity of such a failed political philosophy before it is too late.

SOURCE

How to Create a Country with no Heart

By Viv Forbes

What happened to Australia's once-bipartisan policies favouring decentralisation? Why is every proposal to develop an outback mine, dam, irrigation scheme or a real power station now labelled "controversial" by the ABC and opposed by the ALP/Greens?

This coastal-city focus and the hostility to new outback industry (except for wind/solar toys) has surely reached its zenith with the recent state budget for Queensland.

The population of coastal and metropolitan Queensland is surging with baby-boom retirees, welfare recipients, grey nomads, tourists, overseas students, migrants and winter refugees. But the outback is dying with lagging industry and many aging farmers retiring to the coast. We are creating a country with no heart.

The growing urban and seaside population needs power, water and food.

However two critical power-water-food infrastructure projects that have been on the drawing boards for decades did not even rate a mention in the state budget - an expansion of coal-fired power at Kogan Creek and a water supply dam at Nathan Gorge.

The current policy of all major parties is cluttering the countryside with piddling subsidised intermittent power producers like solar panels and wind turbines plus their expensive network of roads and transmission lines. This is inflating electricity prices, and future generations will see this bi-partisan energy policy as a disastrous blunder. It is also a mistake to encourage or subsidise private electricity cartels and put politicians, not engineers, in charge of power generation.

The Kogan Creek power station with its adjacent coal mine was opened in 2007. It is connected to the National Grid and integrated with local gas-fired and solar supplies. It was always planned to add another generating unit at Kogan Creek, but twelve long years have passed with no action.

Kogan Creek is crucial to maintaining a stable power supply to eastern Australia. This was demonstrated recently when a fault temporarily shut down Kogan Creek. The National Grid was barely maintained for about 30 minutes by the battery in SA until other base load generators could be started. With the likely 7 month closure of one damaged generating unit at Loy Yang power station, East Australian electricity supplies are now even more precarious.

Moreover, with the complete failure of the $105M Kogan solar booster and delays to other solar plants in this area which were to be connected to the grid, the duplication of Kogan Creek is urgently needed.

Coal produces reliable low-cost electricity from a concentrated area with less real environmental damage than gas, wind or solar. These low density energy sources need much more land to collect equivalent continuous energy from a wide area of bores, pipelines, turbines and solar collectors plus their backup generators, connecting roads and transmission lines.

Most CSG wells also need to pump salt water from each bore before the gas will flow. Even if costly processes are used to extract fresh water from this salt water, brines are left behind and must be stored safely. This evil-genie of salt should be left in its underground lair and disturbed as little as possible.

It is becoming clear that that CO2 does NOT drive global warming. Even if it did, when careful life-of-project studies are done for all of Qld energy sources, coal and hydro look likely to have the lowest carbon footprint with the least environmental harm (and they do not slice, dice or fry birds and bats).

The surface disruption from an open cut coal mine is 100% and it shocks the senses. However, it recovers 100% of concentrated energy from a small area of land - far less than is permanently sterilised by roads and schools, and there is no intention of restoring them. Even if the open cut was abandoned at the end of mine life, slow but relentless natural healing would immediately start. However, instead of treating the final void as an expensive liability to be refilled with overburden, it should be seen as an asset to be contoured as a pleasant lake or used for burial of the growing mountains of urban waste.

The need to conserve more water is also urgent. Nathan Gorge has been known as an ideal dam site for 50 years, but still nothing is done. The site and catchment make it likely to be a high-yielding, cost-efficient dam. It is vital to the continuing development of the Surat and southern Bowen Basins and its water could be used for irrigation, power generation or fed into the Condamine/Darling River in droughts.

Kogan and Nathan are decentralising projects that could provide community insurance for blackouts, floods and droughts.

It is the outback that produces most of Australia's food, minerals, energy, water, exports and jobs. And it produces serious income for state governments addicted to ever-rising taxes and royalties.

Anti-development policies, land-use sterilisation, climate alarmism and green law-fare are destroying the future for our kids and grandkids. Current policies will stack-and-pack the coasts and major cities leaving a depopulated outback to uncontrolled floods and droughts, lantana and woody-weeds, wild cats and dogs, wild fires, feral pigs and the occasional park ranger or tourist bus.

SOURCE

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

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

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27 June, 2019

Eliminating fossil fuels would risk a descent into darkness

Inventiveness plus boldness equals progress. Liberal “activists” who want to revolutionize the nation’s energy resources demonstrate political moxie, but if their campaign to substitute renewable sources for fossil fuels — oil and gas — succeeds it will take more than happy thoughts to keep the lights on.

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York City, pledges to donate $500 million to a campaign to shutter the nation’s remaining coal-fired power plants by 2030. The billionaire told the Class of ‘19 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology the other day that his Bloomberg Philanthropies, in partnership with the Sierra Club, played a role in closing 289 coal-fired plants — half of the nation’s existing power plants — since 2011. He says he’ll try to pull the plug on the rest, all to save the planet from the changing climate.

“Building on the success of the Beyond Coal campaign, I’m committing $500 million to launch @BeyondCarbon the largest-ever coordinated campaign to tackle the worst climate crisis our country has ever seen, Mr. Bloomberg tweeted last week. “This is the fight of our time.” The money will be spent primarily on funding environmental organizations adept at lobbying government officials to go “green.” He aims to take out clean-burning natural gas power plants as well. “By the time they are built, they’ll be out of date because renewable will be cheaper,” he told the graduates.

The sometime Democrat joins other party notables in their quixotic crusade to rid the world of fossil fuels, thus avoiding the combustion that climate alarmists contend produces global warming. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s $30 trillion Green New Deal, Joe Biden’s $5 trillion Clean Energy Revolution, Jay Inslee’s $3 trillion Global Climate Mobilization dream of a world powered by windmills, solar panels and other carbon-free technologies, all in hopes of preventing the thermometer from rising a fraction of a degree by the year 2100.

You don’t need a degree in advanced mathematics from MIT to see that the numbers don’t add up. Despite a generation of obsession with climate issues, most U.S. electricity is still generated by fossil fuels. Natural gas produces 35.1 percent of the kilowattage, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and coal is responsible for 27.4 percent.

In contrast, all the sunshine, windmills and waterwheels that climate fanatics are banking on to keep wheels of progress turning, generate only 17.1 percent of the nation’s electricity. About 7 percent comes from water over the dams. Wind and solar contribute 6.6 percent and 1.6 percent. The fossils generate the rest.

If fossil-fuel power plants are to go the way of the clipper ships over the next decade, something must replace them. Going solely solar would require installing solar panels over an area of land nearly the size of West Virginia. Generating just 20 percent of U.S. energy needs from wind would require mounting turbines on an area encompassing land the size of New Hampshire and Vermont. About 900 hydroelectric plants were demolished between 1990 and 2015 owing to opposition from environmentalists outraged by harm to fish ecosystems. Nuclear plants would get similarly rough treatment at the hands of fanatics frightened by the prospect of nuclear power.

Solar and wind power flit across the landscape intermittently, requiring an alternate source, like coal or gas, to make electricity when nature takes a break. Environmentally friendly Europeans find that a lack of reliable backup when nature takes that break increases the risk of electrical grid failures. German engineering, as good as it is, has not been able to eliminate the effect of “green” politics, which would replace fossil and nuclear power with renewables. The result is 172,000 localized blackouts in Germany in 2017.

Poverty was a constant companion of humanity until modern times. The proportion of people worldwide living in poverty was cut in half between 1990 and 2010, according to the World Bank, an achievement unprecedented in human history. It was the result of a rapid boost in global energy production — up 43 percent during that period, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Nearly 81 percent of that power was generated by fossil fuels, such as oil and gas.

A billion people around the globe still suffer extreme energy poverty, with no access to electricity. Everyone gets a hint of what that means when storms knock out the power, and everything in the house stops. Fumbling occasionally for candles is a mere inconvenience, but life beyond carbon — entirely dependent on sunshine and a breeze — would be insanity.

SOURCE

Polar Bear Numbers Could Have Quadrupled

Researcher says attempts to silence her have failed

Polar bear numbers could easily exceed 40,000, up from a low point of 10,000 or fewer in the 1960s.

In The Polar Bear Catastrophe that Never Happened, a book published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Dr Susan Crockford uses the latest data as well as revisiting some of the absurd values used in official estimates, and concludes that polar bears are actually thriving:

My scientific estimates make perfect sense and they tally with what the Inuit and other Arctic residents are seeing on the ground. Almost everywhere polar bears come into contact with people, they are much more common than they used to be. It’s a wonderful conservation success story.”

Crockford also describes how, despite the good news, polar bear specialists have consistently tried to low-ball polar bear population figures.

They have also engaged in a relentless smear campaign in an attempt to silence her in order to protect the story of a polar bear catastrophe, and the funding that comes with it.

A few unscrupulous people have been trying to destroy my reputation”, she says. “But the facts are against them, and they have failed”.

SOURCE

Those who believe in the existence of adequate non-fossil alternatives essential to achieve a “carbon-neutral” U.S. — much less global — energy balance anytime soon, or at any cost, are dreadfully misguided

Nevertheless, there are very understandable reasons why such delusions continue to persist.

One reason behind this facetious fantasy has resulted from massively funded “renewable energy” industry subsidy-seeking propaganda campaigns.

Another is due to great successes of ideological anti-fossil activists in conflating carbon dioxide emissions with “climate pollution,” polar bear perils, and virtually any other “crisis” de jour.

A third, and one that I find particularly disturbing, is because even information sources we should expect to trust, continue to perpetuate a disingenuous and dangerous myth that non-fossil “alternatives” can meet any truly significant U.S. energy needs.

In preparing for this article, I checked data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) with a very basic question. I simply wanted to confirm exactly how much U.S. energy is supplied by wind and solar systems.

The stock answer I got back was that we get “11% of our electricity from renewable sources.”

But that wasn’t what I asked.

Rather, I wanted to know how much total energy (always measured in BTUs) comes from wind and solar, respectively, (not just electricity which constitutes only 37 percent of total energy consumption.)

I also hadn’t asked about “renewables,” of which wind and solar are relative bit players within that 11 percent of 37 percent.

Determined digging unearthed some well-buried facts that are important to know about.

First, 80 percent of all U.S. energy comes from fossil sources, with another 8.6 percent contributed by nuclear. Of that remaining “renewable” 11 percent, nearly half (a whopping 45 percent) comes from CO2-emitting biofuels.

While wind reportedly accounts for only 2.4 percent of total U.S. energy, I believe that even this paltry amount exaggeratedly conflates energy payed for through preferential production tax credit subsidies versus energy consumed to meet actual demands.

Having offered this caveat, wind is still credited with providing a relatively piddling 21.3 percent of the 11% total renewable contributions.

In comparison, hydropower — a true renewable and reliable source that environmental activists love to hate, produces, more than wind (25.1 percent) and releases no CO2.

Solar energy is even more anemic than wind, providing 6 percent of renewable sources, less than 1 percent of total U.S. energy.

Wind and solar are not only pitifully puny sources, they are also enormously costly and unreliable.

A dirty little secret is what the wind industry refers to “generating capacities” which are typically nowhere close to the best-case 10-15% average total outputs we might actually expect to get.

Building more will place them in increasingly marginal and worse wind sites.

Intermittent utility-scale wind and solar power won’t ever replace fossil and hydropower. This is because balancing out the power grids on a second-to-second basis requires an equal and reliable amount of spinning reserve power that’s immediately available to kick in when the wind isn’t blowing or clouds cover the Sun.

Most often these spinning reserves are provided by coal or natural gas-fueled turbines operated in the most inefficient way possible. Balancing a grid, requires repeatedly cranking up — throttling down — a turbine; much like driving a car in stop-and-go traffic.

Also consider that constructing a two-megawatt wind turbine requires about 260 tons of steel which, in turn, requires about 300 tons of iron ore processed by about 170 tons of coking coal which is transported by fossil fuel. It will never generate as much energy payback during its short 15-year or less operating lifetime as was invested in building it.

Nevertheless, don’t expect any of these painful realities to be factored into competing liberal green electioneering fantasies.

Leading presidential energy free lunch candidate Joe Biden has proposed a sweeping “Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice.”

As sample goals, on his first day in office, Biden will ask Congress to pass an “enforcement mechanism” requiring “clear legally-binding emission reductions” aimed at attaining net zero-carbon emissions by 2050.

As president, Biden will establish “a target of reducing the carbon footprint of U.S. buildings 50 percent by 2035.” The federal government will apply zoning “as a tool to battle climate change” by altering local regulations to eliminate urban sprawl by forcing more people to live closer to public transportation.

A President Biden would ban new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters, as well as conserve 30 percent of America’s lands and waters by 2030.

Rigorous Biden fuel economy standards will ensure that all future light- and- medium-duty vehicles are electrified, and taxpayers will also finance a half-million charging outlets by the end of 2030.

Be assured that those ubiquitous charging stations — and most particularly the ignorance behind them — would wind up charging the nation and public a whole lot more than we can possibly imagine.

SOURCE

Oregon GOP Won’t Return Until Expensive Carbon Tax Bill Is Scrapped

One of the runaway Oregon Republican senators said they won’t return to the state until the “inefficient, complicated, and expensive” carbon tax is scrapped and a bipartisan solution is found.

Oregon State Senator Tim Knopp appeared on “Fox and Friends” Tuesday morning from an undisclosed location as he and other 11 Republicans remain in hiding to block the looming climate change legislation – all while the state police were authorized by Democratic Gov. Kate Brown to round them up.

He said that the Republican walkout was warranted given the damage the legislation would inflict upon the people of Oregon but stressed that they too want to combat climate change.

“We do want to take action on climate change but this was a carbon tax and one of the most inefficient, complicated, and expensive ways to address [the reduction of] carbon dioxide emissions.”

“All we’re saying is it shouldn’t cost thousands of manufacturing jobs, raise the gas tax by 20 cents a gallon to start out with, and raise natural gas prices for people who heat their home by almost 50 percent. We think there’s a better way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and so we’re holding out and the only way we could do that and stop this vote is by not providing a quorum for Democrats to roll over us,” he added.

The bill would limit greenhouse gas emissions and auction pollution allowances for carbon that businesses want to emit, with a lowering cap.

The bill would reduce emissions to 45 percent below 1990 levels by 2035 and 80 percent by 2050. Critics say it will hurt the business community and exacerbate a divide between the liberal, urban areas and rural parts of the state.

Knopp confirmed that the state police is indeed after the runaway Republicans, with the police superintendent being “firm” on him in asking for his return.

“I politely declined his offer and he indicated that at any time he would be prepared to facilitate my return to the capital,” the lawmaker said.

The state senator said that the bill the Democrats are pushing for doesn’t address the real sources of carbon emissions, including the forest fires that are ruining the state, and the fact that people in Republican districts are opposed to it.

“When you tell them what it actually does and not just go with talking points about it being clean energy jobs, people are very opposed to it, and statewide I think they would be too. One of the things we’ve said is, if you’re so confident that people want this, let’s refer it to the people of Oregon, let’s let them debate it and let’s let them vote on it which we have that process here in Oregon,” he said.

If Oregon adopts the legislation, it would be the second state after California to adopt such a policy, raising questions whether the legislation is more beneficial to the state of California rather than Oregon.

“The state of California needs more carbon credits and so really this is a great deal for the state of California, not so great of a deal for Oregon and small businesses and the people who get their livelihood,” Knopp said.

“There’s a factory that makes paper towels … with 2,000 blue collar jobs, union jobs, and that plant right now is at risk because of this bill and we just find that unacceptable and we’re going to stand with these people, and fight as long as we possibly can and we hope to win,” he added, noting that they are likely to remain in hiding until June 30th at midnight, the date when the legislative session constitutionally ends.

SOURCE

City of Sydney climate debate a microcosm of political decline

Chris Kenny

We have shrunk from a lively public square as a clearing house for the issues of the day into darkened silos of hate-filled barbs, cultivated on social media and thrown into a new public debate that doesn't so much seek to win contests over ideas but to shout down, silence and demonise opponents.

A little example of how sad this has become played out this week in the Sydney City Council where a motion was passed declaring a climate emergency in the NSW capital. The Sydney councillors happily took to the Town Hall steps displaying a "climate emergency" banner and waving flags - apparently sharing their delight about drawing attention to our impending doom.

The motion they passed was nonsensical and alarmist. It accused a federal government committed to the Paris climate targets of presiding over a "climate disaster" and warned of heatwaves and rising sea levels creating chaos in the Pacific as it declared an official "climate emergency" in concert with other activist groups and organisations worldwide.

A Liberal Party councillor, Craig Chung, pointed out how ludicrous the motion was and tried to amend it. When his amendments were rejected, he voted for the motion regardless. On Sky News' The Kenny Report yesterday I asked him why.

"The language is absurd, this was the fundamentalist Clover (Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore) at her best, using alarmist language and warning us that the world is going to end," Chung said.

"The reality is that I'm a Liberal councillor in the city of Sydney, the majority of the seats are taken up by the Clover climate fundamentalists and while the language that she uses is completely alarmist and is completely catastrophising what is going on, some of the contents of that motion are things that we really need to address, and if I want to sit at the table, if I want to be there taking part in the policy debate, I've got to get a seat at the table."

This seemed worrying; Chung knew the motion was ill-founded but went along it all the same. It sounded like he was dragooned into it. It seemed inappropriate for him to support a motion he knew was nonsensical just to fit in.

"This Left group, they love to preach the idea of free speech and being inclusive," Chung explained, "but I tell you what the moment you don't get involved in their motions and the moment you cut yourself out, you get called all sorts of names, last night I was called a flat-earther and a coal lugger despite the fact I do think we need to take some action.

"The gallery was full of people, Clover supporters, all of these people who were absolutely jeering me and cheering Clover. I moved an amendment, that was absolutely jeered by the gallery there, an amendment that took out the language of the warnings and catastrophising and moved an amendment that said we need to do this and we need to do it rationally and calmly. But that was voted down unanimously.

"We're not talking just about the Clover Moore people, we are talking about the Labor Left rump that are there as well, these are people who absolutely don't want to hear from anybody else."

Chung should be strong enough to stand up to this sort of political grandstanding and argue and vote for what he believes is right. But however courageous or timid he might be, it can be no excuse for his opponents.

"That's the way the city of Sydney runs, that's the way Clover Moore runs business there, this is a closed shop for Clover Moore. This is about her preaching to her choir, about getting a headline, but actually offering no solutions," Chung said.

So this councillor voted for a motion that condemns the federal government for doing nothing (something Chung knows is false) and spreads alarmist fearmongering (something Chung abhors).

"I know that some people will criticise me for (supporting the motion) but at the same time, if I don't do that I'm never going to get a seat at the table, I'm just going to have slogans thrown at me and abuse thrown at me, I need to be able to stay at that table to maintain a rational debate."

Nobody should give in to bullies, it only encourages them. But I fear this pointless debate in Sydney's Town Hall tells us much about the deterioration of our national political discussion.

SOURCE

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

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

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26 June, 2019

How Warm And Cold Periods Correlate With Solar Activity, Not CO2 Levels

The climate of the Earth has been constantly changing during its entire 4.6-billion-year history. Variations in our planet’s average temperature due to natural causes have ranged over a span of 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

Most of the periodic temperature increases and decreases observed in human history are consistent with variations in the output of energy from our Sun.

The mild heating and cooling periods seen since 1900 (each less than 2 degrees Fahrenheit) reflect changes in solar activity. The temperature of the Earth has never been constant.

Continental positions determine the distribution and circulation of heat on Earth and have a major impact on our planet’s long term climate.

As little as 70 years ago if a child or adult made note of the fact that our current continents could be fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, they were laughed at; but in the1950s scientists proved that our continents had historically resided in different places on the globe.

Sometimes the continents were near the equator, sometimes near the poles, sometimes they merged into a single land mass.

The largest changes take place over time periods of 20 to 100 million years. These changes, both gradual and catastrophic are associated with continental motions due to plate tectonics or continental drift.

Periodic changes in the Earth’s orbit also influence how energy that the Earth receives from the sun is distributed, resulting in our current era of recurring Ice Ages.

The Earth is now experiencing the high-temperature end of the latest Ice Age cycle. Both deep-sea sediment and ice core samples show that ice ages take place every 22,000 years.

The Earth’s axis wobbles around a tilt angle of zero degrees in a cycle that requires 22,000 years to complete. At one end of the cycle the North Pole faces the Sun in the winter, while at the other end, the North Pole faces the Sun in the summer.

The tilt angle relative to the sun also varies over a 41,000-year cycle. The annual orbit of the Earth around the Sun cycles between circular and elliptical every 100,000 years.

These are called Milankovitch cycles for the Serbian scientist who discovered them a century ago. Man’s presence and activities are insignificant compared to natural cycles.

Most of the warming and cooling trends observed during human history operate on time scales of a ten to a thousand years resulting in temperature shifts spanning a range of about seven degrees Fahrenheit.

They arise from changes in the output of energy and radiation from our Sun, according to long-term and short-term cycles of solar activity.

These cycles, have been documented using the recorded history of sunspots, aurora observations, radio-carbon dating techniques, and changes in solar radiance.

Changes in solar activity affect the stream of electrons, protons, and alpha particles emitted by the Sun which are called the solar wind.

These changes have been observable in the form of auroras and more recently in the disruption of radio communications and electromagnetic devices.

Changes in average global temperature since 1900 are much more consistent with oscillations in solar activity and the average amount of energy that we receive from the sun than they are with the exponential increase in fossil fuel emissions.

The Earth’s temperature increased from 1880 to 1935 as the Little Ice Age ended. It decreased from 1935 to 1980 and increased from 1980 to 1990 and has since leveled off.

Temperatures did not continuously and dramatically increase to mirror the increasing CO2 emissions.

SOURCE

World’s 76 Best Tide Gauges Show ‘Negligible’ Sea Level Rise

A new scientific paper affirms “all the long-term-trend (LTT) tide gauges of the world consistently show a negligible acceleration since the time they started recording in the late 1800s/early 1900s” and there is “no sign of climate models predicted sharply warming and accelerating sea level rise.”

An accurate determination of sea level rise acceleration trends requires at least 100 years of data due to the natural (60- to 80-year) oscillations that could bias the results depending on the start and end dates.

There are 88 world tide gauges with a record length of at least 100 years in the psmsl.org database. Of those, 76 have no data quality issues.

The average rate of sea level rise for these 76 global-scale tide gauges is just 0.337 millimeters per year (mm/yr), and the acceleration is a “negligible” 0.007 mm/yr².

Thus, the average rate of sea level rise for the world’s best long-term-trend (LTT) tide gauges amounts to about 3½ centimeters per century.

Further, the relatively high (2 to 3 mm/yr) local rates of sea level rise in the studied region (the Mexican Caribbean) were determined to be primarily associated with land subsidence.

This affirms the conclusion (Piecuch et al., 2018) that geological processes, or vertical land motions, are more influential than climate-related processes in establishing local relative sea level trends.

These results once again serve to undermine the model-based claims that the world’s seas are sharply rising and accelerating due to CO2-induced global warming.

SOURCE

EU Drops Climate Change to a Mere Footnote at Summit

A push by most European Union nations for the world’s biggest economic bloc to go carbon-neutral by 2050 was dropped to a footnote at a summit on Thursday after fierce resistance from Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary.

France and Germany had led efforts for the 28-member EU to lead by example in setting an ambitious new climate goal ahead of U.N. climate talks in September that U.S. President Donald Trump has abandoned.

But unanimity was needed, and last-ditch persuasion efforts in what diplomats described as “impassioned” talks that dragged on for four hours failed to ease fears among the central and eastern European states, including Estonia, that it would hurt economies like theirs dependent on nuclear power and coal.

EU leaders called on the European Investment Bank (EIB) to increase climate funding and acknowledged vast differences in the continent’s energy mix, but Poland remained unmoved.

“We need concrete things on the table,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said. “What additional money could be allotted to Poland so that we do not end up in an offside trap?”

In an unusual move that nevertheless sends a strong signal to businesses, 24 of the EU leaders chose instead to reflect support for the mid-century goal as a footnote in their final statement:

“For a large majority of member states, climate neutrality must be achieved by 2050.”

SOURCE

Combined-Cycle Natural Gas Power Beats Everything Else

Combined-cycle natural gas power plants offer lower cost electricity than anything else, especially renewables, the true costs of which are never counted.

Our friends at the Institute of Energy Research have come out with a study that finally examines the true costs of renewables, including their impacts on the efficiencies of other energy sources. The Energy Information Administration has long studied the "levelized costs of electricit" or LCOE of different sources of power but hasn't accounted for all the hidden subsidies, which often take the form of indirect costs on other electricity producers. Combined-cycle natural gas power plants typically come out best anyway, but the spread is minimized by failure to consider these indirect costs. This latest study does address them and natural gas comes out way ahead.

The focus of the study was to compare the costs of new energy generators with existing, across the entire spectrum, and existing generators are far more efficient than either solar or wind. New combined-cycle natural gas power plants also come out as especially efficient.

This to say it is the cheapest source new electricity generation and it runs about 35-40% less expensive than wind or solar. The key to understanding why is in the word "dispatchable." Solar and wind demand dispatchable energy backup when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow. Therefore, every solar and wind farm demands redundancy, which is always inefficient.

Think of it this way. Imagine there is such a thing as a completely solar-powered car. It will transport you whenever the sun shines and another 20 miles or so when it stops shining. Let's say it costs you $30,000. It works fine around town on sunny days. It costs you $500 per month to buy and nothing to operate except for minimal maintenance.

But, if you want a car that works after dark, when its's snowing or that will safely take you a 150 miles to visit your daughter, you need a second vehicle that is usable when you need it - a car that runs on gas or something comparable. The solar car would save you lots of gasoline and maintenance and make your dispatchable car last a lot longer, but you'd be paying twice as much in capital costs at the outset. More to the point, the value of your dispatchable vehicle would be steadily depreciating regardless of the miles driven and you'd be paying a whole lot more per mile to drive it. Your solar car would make your other car much more expensive at the same time that your capital costs doubled.

That, in essence, is the problem with renewables from an economic perspective; they only add to the cost and save nothing. They drive down the efficiency of everything. Here's how the IER study explains it:

What is the levelized cost of electricity? The Energy Information Administration (EIA) defines it as "the cost (in real dollars) of building and operating a generating plant over an assumed financial life and duty cycle." But EIA's Annual Energy Outlook and similar LCOE reports focus only on new generation resources, while ignoring the cost of electricity from existing generation resources.

[W]e estimate existing combined-cycle (CC) gas power plants can generate electricity at an average LCOE of $36 per MWh, whereas we project the LCOE of a new CC gas plant to be $50 per MWh.

[We calculate] the costs that non-dispatchable wind and solar generation resources impose on the dispatchable generation resources which are required to remain in service but are forced to generate less in combination with them. Non-dispatchable means that the level of output from wind and solar resources depends on factors beyond our control and cannot be relied upon to follow load fluctuations nor consistently perform during peak loads. Wind and solar resources increase the LCOE of dispatchable resources they cannot replace by reducing their utilization rates without reducing their fixed costs, resulting in a levelized fixed cost increase.

Our calculations estimate that the "imposed cost" of wind generation is about $24 per MWh (of wind generation) when we model the cost against new CC gas generation it might displace, and the imposed cost of solar generation is about $21 per MWh (of solar generation) when we model the CC and combustion turbine (CT) gas generation it might displace.

See what I mean? Renewables are no bargain for anyone. They're like the second car that was going to save you so much money but left you with two car loans and less money in your pocket.

SOURCE

City of Sydney to declare a climate emergency in face of national inaction

Just showboating

Sydney, the largest city in a country acutely vulnerable to global warming, moved on Friday to declare a climate emergency, joining hundreds of local governments around the world in calling for urgent steps to combat the crisis, some in the face of inaction by national politicians.

The declaration does not include any major new actions. But Mayor Clover Moore said it was important that Sydney, which has already made ambitious pledges to reduce greenhouse emissions, raise its voice in a global demand for action.

"Cities need to show leadership, especially when you're not getting that leadership from the national government," Moore said.

Amanda McKenzie, chief executive of the Climate Council, a research center, said Sydney's declaration - which the City Council is expected to easily approve - underlined "just how serious the climate change issue is." "It is a genuine crisis," she said. "Sydney has responded in an appropriate way."

Australia, home to some of the most extreme natural environments on the planet, is recovering from the hottest summer on record - a season of raging wildfires, burning fruit on trees, and crippling drought in farming regions.

But in national elections last month, voters rejected the major party calling for stronger action on climate change, delivering a surprise victory to the incumbent conservative government, which has resisted proposals to sharply reduce carbon emissions.

The conservative coalition was propelled to victory in part by support in the state of Queensland, where the state government cleared the way this month for a fiercely contested coal mine.

SOURCE

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

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

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25 June, 2019

The CO2 Hockey Stick is an artifact of CO2 "leakage" from ice cores

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

Willis Eshenbach's graph of Mauna Loa and Ice Core CO2 data.

The above graph is certainly convincing evidence of a remarkably rapid increase of atmospheric CO2 since 1800. Note how there is a very good match between the most recent ice core data and the actual measurements made at Mount Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Note also that Mauna Loa measurements have been confirmed at other observatories around the world, such as Cape Grim in Tasmania. There can certainly be little doubt about the accuracy of the data after about 1950.

About ten years ago I saw the Law Dome data, now included in the above graph, which all but convinced me that something very serious and unprecedented was happening to CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere so I started looking further afield to find other data and other arguments which would either support or cast doubt on this view.

The data prior to about 1700 looks almost too good to be true because it is so very flat and smooth. Perhaps something else is going on. It has been pointed out (notably by Murray Salby, the guy who was fired by Macquarie University) that, maybe, over time, the CO2 trapped in bubbles in ice cores can diffuse between different layers, so smoothing any ups and down of its variation over time.

Then I found out about stomata at (https://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/stomata.html).

Recent stomata studies show that CO2 was variable and the average CO2 concentrations have been significantly higher during the Holocene Interglacial Period than are indicated by the ice core record.

Stomata are the tiny "mouths" in leaves through which a plant absorbs its "food", CO2. When concentrations of CO2 are high the plant needs fewer stomata to obtain the required amount of CO2 and when low the opposite is the case. Hence fossil leaves provide an alternative proxy to ice cores for ancient CO2 concentrations. As we can see in the diagram, the two do not match. The stomata densities indicate that CO2 levels were both higher and more variable during the last 1000 years than indicated in the upper diagram. There are two conflicting stories. It's a "he said, she said" situation.

A further piece of information is the Bomb Test Curve:

The Bomb Test Curve shows the injection and subsequent decay of radioactive CO2 in the atmosphere caused by the atomic bomb tests of the1960s (image: Hakanomono).

There is a mathematical description in TFC, Chapter 13. Suffice to say here that we can conclude that residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere is only 10 years and that less than 20 percent of recent increases in atmospheric CO2 are anthropogenic in origin, the rest comes out of the deep ocean in regions of upwelling. It follows that the ice core graph indicates that either there has been a dramatic recent change in deep ocean circulation or there is something wrong with the ice core proxy CO2 methodology and the stomata data is correct.

SOURCE

Observations on the Alliance for Market Solutions' "Conservative" Case for a Carbon Tax

Executive Summary

The Alliance for Market Solutions (AMS) has proposed a tax on "carbon" (emissions of greenhouse gases, or GHG) as a "market-oriented solution to one of America's most pressing economic challenges: . . . reducing carbon pollution." It is among the more prominent of the proposals for a carbon tax now drawing attention from policymakers and observers. This proposed carbon tax is described and intended by AMS to be "revenue neutral" and part of a policy shift away from a regulatory regime for reductions in GHG emissions, a shift that AMS argues would improve economic efficiency.

Those arguments are problematic. Despite the AMS focus on reducing GHG emissions as a policy addressing a negative environmental (climate) externality and despite the AMS claim to be "motivated by our respect for science," the actual proposal is not based on any references to actual climate phenomena, a calculation of the magnitude of a purported GHG externality, or an analysis of the climate effects of the proposed tax.

Instead, AMS references, in passing, the dire climate predictions in two recent reports, respectively from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the federal government. These reports assume a future path for atmospheric GHG concentrations that is unrealistic in the extreme, and both are inconsistent with the findings in the peer-reviewed literature and the actual evidence on climate phenomena.

Instead of being structured as a correction for a market inefficiency, the AMS carbon tax much more centrally can be seen as a financing mechanism for a series of tax reductions (or extensions) preferred by AMS: "All revenue from a carbon tax should be used to reduce other, more distortionary taxes that hinder economic growth, including taxes on earnings and income."

Most of the AMS tax reductions are extensions of current tax provisions now scheduled to end, or delays of scheduled increases, analyzed under a "current law" rather than a "current policy" orientation. A "current law" perspective is wholly legitimate and applied often in serious analyses, but in the context of the AMS proposal for a revenue-neutral carbon tax, the "current policy" assumption is far more realistic-in my view-because the current tax policies are unlikely actually to be allowed to lapse.

In short, the proposed AMS carbon tax is independent of any actual environmental parameters, despite its central asserted justification as a climate policy. Instead, it is a device intended to avoid a large increase in the budget deficit in the next 10-year budget window, as AMS admits more or less explicitly.

Because AMS does not ground its carbon tax proposal on a discussion of actual climate phenomena, an analysis of the magnitude of an assumed GHG externality, or a quantification of the environmental effects of its proposed carbon tax, the magnitude of its tax to a significant degree would be arbitrary, driven by AMS's preferred tax policies and the purported goal of revenue neutrality.

In other words, it is clear that AMS is advocating whatever carbon tax is needed to make its various preferred policies (e.g., extending the 2017 tax cuts after 2025) "revenue neutral," while assuming that adoption of the carbon tax would not be accompanied with any new spending in a congressional bargaining equilibrium.

It is clear also that the AMS "climate" justification for its carbon tax is secondary, as the proposed tax would reduce temperatures in 2100 by 0.015øC under assumptions highly favorable toward the AMS climate policy stance, a figure smaller than the standard deviation of the surface temperature record by an order of magnitude.

That it is revenue rather than any "climate" parameters that is the central focus of the AMS proposal is illustrated by the AMS "2018 Year-End Report":

SOURCE

Reforming State Utility Regulation

Utility regulation facilitates recovery on invested capital and provides a utility with a return on that investment. This is an arrangement that would never develop in a market atmosphere where profits are dependent on satisfying consumer demand without regard for the amount of money invested in meeting that demand.

The flaws in this regulatory system are now highlighted by the current drive to close coal-fired power plants and replace the generating capacity with renewable sources of power. The system of utility regulation already creates a natural bias for capital investment as it is and current public policy increases this mal-investment and less-than-optimum use of capital.

Under the current regulations electric utilities can abandon a still useful power plant while collecting the remaining capital and earning a profit on that book value. One alternative is to install expensive carbon capture processes on an existing generator, again satisfying the regulatory incentive to make large capital outlays and increasing profits.

The non-market, policy-driven investment in renewable energy that is to replace coal generation is another investment opportunity. Worse, renewable generation requires additional investment in a large amount of quick-acting back-up natural gas-fired generation.

When we look for solutions to counter this regulatory-created incentive to overinvest in generation assets, we should not focus on tinkering with state regulation but seek ways to free market forces to enact utility reforms. We can never know exactly how a market in electricity will evolve, but we have examples in other sectors of the economy providing direction. In an untampered market an enterprise seeks to minimize capital not maximize it as with regulation. Competition is the key to rational behavior. Already in lightly regulated wholesale power markets a healthy rivalry between power generators is forcing prices down to marginal costs.

To some extent market incentives to hold down costs exist in certain states where consumers have a choice for electricity suppliers. A utility that does not have captive customers for the underlying electricity commodity behaves differently. When recovery of capital losses is no longer near guarantee under regulation, wiser investments follow.

Even with customer choice for the energy itself we still have the monopoly on the electricity delivery system itself. Too often policy makers have turned to mandatory common carriage as remedy for monopoly-owned networks. This route to reform is unnecessary and tramples on property rights. Removing defined utility territories or franchises will allow neighboring utilities to encroach on the areas served by badly-run incumbent utilities.

The argument against this is that it involves duplication of the wiring infrastructure. However, there would be little of this when the incumbent utility that is losing customers realizes the competitor is taking its customers. The loser can salvage some of his cost by selling or renting his wires to the aggressive energy provider.

SOURCE

Cuomo's `renewable' fiasco

Gov. Cuomo keeps raising his renewable-energy goals, but the reality is that New York is actually losing ground when it comes to how much of its power is generated by "clean" plants.

The Empire Center's Ken Girardin recently broke the news that the state last year generated slightly less electricity from renewable sources (wind, hydroelectric and solar) than it did in 2017.

Maybe that's why Cuomo is shifting from a goal of "50 by 30" - having half New York's power come from renewables by 2030 - to a "70 by 30" benchmark: He figures greens can be fooled by talk.

Never mind that the state has yet to meet the 30 percent target it set back in 2010, which it was supposed to reach four years ago.

Nor that the feds are phasing out their subsidies for wind and solar, making it even harder (and more expensive) for those industries to grow.

Nor that communities across the state are nixing proposals for giant wind and solar "farms" - which has forced the governor to push for offshore wind farms, the most expensive single way to generate electricity.

In fact, most of New York's "renewable" energy comes from hydropower, which is tough to scale up. Plus, alternative energy faces a growing transmission problem: You have to get the electricity to the customers, which means major new power lines to connect new solar and wind plants to the grid.

Oh, and the same forces that fight new power plants "in my back yard," also stand in the way of new power lines.

Not to mention that wind and solar don't reliably generate electricity at the times of peak demand - which means you need carbon-based backup plants or you're going to have blackouts.

Final problem: Thanks to Cuomo, the two Indian Point nuclear plants are to shut down this year and next. That will knock a giant hole in the state's non-fossil-fuel electricity generation, and most of the replacement power is sure to come from gas and oil plants.

No wonder the gov keeps talking about his goals for 2030: Even with a fourth term, he'll be out of office when his failure becomes unmistakable.

SOURCE

Power without earning it: How the Greens plan to push their extreme left-wing agendas on Australians - to ban private schools, oppose free speech and legalise drugs

If the Greens had their way, conservative media opinions would be banned, drugs such as ecstasy legalised and private schools phased out.

While the hard-left political party doesn't win elections, it continues to share the balance of power in the Australian Parliament, putting it in a position to shape national laws.

The Greens are unlikely to ever win government in their own right - scoring just 10.4 per cent of lower house votes at last month's federal election.

This was a minuscule increase from the 10.23 per cent share they received in 2016 as they campaigned in May to ban coal-fired power stations within 11 years.

However, the Greens still remain ambitious, with the party's founder Bob Brown in 2011 predicting it would one day replace Labor as Australia's major party on the left.

Before that supposedly happens, the Greens have their sights set on holding the balance of power in the Senate within three years - forcing whichever major party is in government to adopt their agenda to get laws passed.

And it's no secret - the party's leader Richard Di Natale declared this as the party's goal this week.

He claimed a 0.17 percentage point increase in their primary vote as a sign of political success, even though their Senate numbers remained at nine.

'If we repeat this result in 2022, we'll see an extra three senators returned and we'll see the Greens with sole balance of power in the Senate based on these numbers,' Senator Di Natale told Sky News earlier this month.

Griffith University politics lecturer Dr Paul Williams said the Greens had an outside chance of having a crossbench monopoly in the upper house of federal Parliament.

'It's errantly possible that they could have solely the balance of power,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

After the 2010 election, the Greens were able to impose a hated carbon tax on Australia, following the failure of former prime minister Julia Gillard's Labor Party to win a majority in the House of Representatives.

A minor party in the Senate, however, hasn't had the balance of power to itself for almost two decades.

This was during an era when the centre-left Australian Democrats successfully demanded that fruit and vegetables be exempted from the GST, as proposed by a Liberal-National Party government.

Dr Williams said the fracturing of the minor party vote made that a big ask for the Greens in the Senate by 2022.

'I can't see a time when they'll only be Greens, Labor and the L-NP,' he said.

In recent weeks, Senator Di Natale has declared his support for press freedom following Australian Federal Police raids on the ABC and the Canberra home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst.

Three months ago, however, the Victorian senator told supporters at Brunswick, in Melbourne's inner-north, he would seek to ban conservative commentators, ranging from Sydney radio 2GB broadcaster Alan Jones to Sky News hosts Andrew Bolt and Chris Kenny.

'We're going to make sure we've got laws that regulate our media, so that if people like Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones and Chris Kenny - and I could go on and on and on and on - if they want to use hate speech to divide the community, then they're going to be held to account for that hate speech,' he said.

Dr Williams said the Greens and Labor both wanted more press regulation, however impractical that may be, because they were suspicious of conservative-leaning media outlets.

'Given that Alan Jones dominates the airwaves, I'm not sure how you'd regulate that,' he said.

SOURCE

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

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

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24 June, 2019

Renewables and austerity can't decarbonise

The need for realism about carbon dioxide targets

If the British government declared the abolition of sin by 2050, commentators would be rightly cynical. The announcement last week that Britain will enact a net-zero carbon target for 2050 was instead welcomed, especially by “faith leaders”. Yet without specifying how it is to be achieved, setting this target is about as wishful as pledging to eliminate sin. It is not just a matter of cost – although £1 trillion is not small change (if you had been spending a pound a second and had now reached £1 trillion, you would have had to start when Neanderthals were still on the scene).

Too many Tories think that going green means getting into lucrative bed with the crony-capitalist wind and solar industries, putting profit-seeking lipstick on a subsidy-dependent pig. But this is a futile strategy, politically as well as practically.

In Britain last year, generously using the Final Energy Consumption metric, 4 per cent of energy came from wind and solar, 3 per cent from nuclear and less than 1 per cent from hydro, the three zero-carbon sources. The common misconception that wind and solar are bigger contributors comes from forgetting that electricity is just 20 per cent of energy: the rest is heat, transport and industry.

So eliminating carbon dioxide from the energy sector has hardly begun, yet the cost is already huge and bearing down especially on poorer people, while, as Professor Dieter Helm of Oxford University has pointed out, industry is voting with its feet and taking its emissions to China and elsewhere. It was not true that Britain did without coal recently: a grid interconnector was bringing electricity from Dutch coal-fired power stations, and industry was burning coal imported from Russia. (I hereby declare my indirect interest in a Northumberland coal mine.)

Even if we could figure out a way to run aeroplanes on electricity, or to use less coal to make steel (it takes a heap of coal to make a wind turbine), and even if we were to find a way to make solar and wind power available on demand, there just is not enough space either on land or sea to power and heat the British economy from these low-density sources, not without ruining the entire countryside: a point frequently made by the late Sir David MacKay, chief scientist at the Department of Energy.

The “extinction” protesters say we can do without meat, or foreign holidays. To Tories flirting with this kind of energy rationing policy, good luck at the ballot box – look what has happened recently in Australia, France and America to politicians who promised to push up energy prices to save the climate.

The people in denial in this debate are the ones who think we could reach a 2050 net-zero target with a mixture of renewable energy and hair-shirt austerity. Nor is nuclear ready to help without massive public subsidy. Fortunately, there may be another way, one that Boris Johnson should seize to put clear turquoise water between himself and green dreamers.

For the foreseeable future, fossil fuels will be crucial to sustaining civilisation. A way must be found to use oil and gas, but capture their carbon dioxide emissions – and have the industry do something more than signal its regret; to be part of the solution, rather than most of the problem. The technology for sequestering carbon dioxide, still hopeless a few years ago, is now progressing in Norway, Canada and Texas. Britain has a golden opportunity because the North Sea oil industry has left a network of pipes and wells ideal for injecting carbon dioxide into rocks, where it slowly dissolves. Government is on the hook for some of the decommissioning cost anyway.

What is needed, though, is not some taxpayer-funded boondoggle to pick a winner in carbon capture – because that approach usually picks the most politically well-connected loser instead – but the setting up of a market mechanism to discover innovative technologies.

Professors Stuart Haszeldine of Edinburgh University and Myles Allen of Oxford University argue that government should make all fossil energy producers and importers pay a small but increasing fee per tonne of carbon dioxide, not into the insatiable maw of the Treasury, nor into vague tree-planting scams, but into actual carbon-capture projects that work. Fierce competition would ensue to deliver technologies that capture and, crucially, store carbon for the least cost.

If Boris Johnson becomes prime minister and adopts such a policy, he can look the opposition in the eye and say: “Unlike you, I have a plan for how we might just get to net-zero. It uses the market, encourages innovation, does not hit the poor or reward the rich, and puts the obligation where it should be: on the fossil-fuel industry.”

SOURCE

Growing evidence of wind farms’ horrific toll on wildlife: This time from India

Eagles, hawks, bats – these are among the most prominently cited avian wildlife regularly slaughtered by industrial-sized wind-power facilities that – thanks to taxpayer subsidies and state renewable-energy mandates — continue to spread like wildfire across rural America.

The affliction is by no means restricted to the United States, however. A new study sheds light on the carnage giant wind turbines are inflicting on wildlife in India. Researchers at the Indian Institute for Science at Bengaluru studied bird and lizard populations at three wind turbine sites in Western Ghats. They found that the mass killing of avian predators by wind turbines is having a “ripple effect” across the food chain, with lizards and small mammals adjusting to substantially reduced numbers of predators in the sky.

Wind Turbines: The New “Apex Predator”

As reported by the Daily Mail last November (and otherwise largely ignored by the media), researchers in India found almost four times fewer buzzards, hawks, and kites in areas with wind farms – a loss of about 75%. Startled by the data, scientists are now referring to wind turbines as “the new apex predator.”

In areas without wind turbines about 19 birds were spotted every three hours, while in areas with the spinning blades the number dropped to five. Fewer winged predators have been good news for the fan-throated lizard, a species found only in certain areas of the Indian Sub-Continent. The lizard is usually easy pickings for hawks, buzzards, and other birds, but with their numbers reduced by the wind turbines, the lizard’s numbers are multiplying.

“We have known from many studies that wind turbines kill birds and bats. They kill them and disrupt their movement. But we took that one step further and discovered that it affects lizards, too,” study coauthor Maria Thaker told the Daily Mail.

“Every time a top predator is removed or added, unexpected effect trickle through the ecosystem,” she added. “What is actually happening here is that wind turbines are akin to adding a top predator to the ecosystem.”

The study, which was published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, compared populations of raptors and lizards on a plateau that has had a wind farm on it for about 20 years to an adjacent valley that has no turbines.

“Humankind’s Most Pervasive Influence on the Natural World”

A recent study by an international team of scientists found the decline of apex predators is” arguably humankind’s most pervasive influence on the natural world.”

None of this is of any real concern to green groups, such as the World Wildlife Fund, who parrot the party line that the real threat to wildlife is “climate change,” not industrial-scale wind facilities and giant solar arrays they have been supporting for decades.

While India has made great strides in electrification in recent years, much still needs to be done. According to official data, “only 1,417 of India’s 18,452 villages or 7.3% of the total, have 100% household connectivity, and about 31% are still in the dark,” Forbes reported last year.

India’s future should not be dependent on interment, unreliable, unaffordable, and, as we now know, environmentally destructive wind power.

SOURCE

Having hitched their wagon to the unicorn of climate catastrophe, the Democrat candidates for president are caught between a rock and a very hard place

Each of these twenty contenders has to try to stand out from the crowd and they will not do that by saying “oh wait, climate change is not a problem.” But the shriller they get the less likely they are to defeat President Trump. This panic festival will be fun to watch.

Presumably Bernie Sanders had the lead going in. He has the big machine that almost upset Clinton. He would be perfect. At the risk of being crass and cruel I am reminded of a famous Gary Larson cartoon. The dog is trying to entice the cat into the dryer with a sign that says “cat fud.” The cat is looking in and the dog is saying “oh please, oh please.” That is how I feel about Sanders opposing Trump. (For the record I have and love both cats and dogs, but I also like Larson.)

But there are more of course. I have already written about “Beto’s two-headed climate change fallacy.” My esteemed colleague and sometime co-author Paul Driessen just did “Reality bites Joe Biden’s “clean energy revolution”” which is a truly fun read.

What would really be fun is if we could rush through a Constitutional amendment allowing AOC to run for president. But I digress.

What is this mob of candidates to do? Presumably they will roll to the left, distancing themselves ever further from the American people. At which point we find the President sitting in an unexpected place — in the center!

So when does this climate circus begin? Or will it?

Aussie skeptic Jo Nova put it best:

“There are a billion sensible reasons the Democrats don’t want a climate debate

And it’s not because they’d lose debating science. There’s no chance they would debate science every candidate already agrees there is a climate emergency de facto, or they’d be thrown out of the party. So, any debate would start with “what should we do” and instantly turn into a high risk competition to outbid each other. Who can promise more, squander more, or cry bigger tears on stage on cue?”

The Democrat candidate debates are about to begin. Will the climate issue rise, or fall, or be swept under the rug?

Reportedly this is the largest number of one party presidential candidates in American history! Here are the latest debate lineups. I do not see a 10 person debate getting anywhere fast, so this is just the beginning of the beginning.

SOURCE

La Transition Énergétique: “Pointless, Costly and Unfair”

A top French economist has slammed his country’s attempts to decarbonise its economy. `Professor Rémy Prud’homme accuses the government of wasting money on schemes that will make almost no difference to the climate and will cause great harm to the poor.

France already has relatively low carbon dioxide emissions because it gets most of its electricity from low-carbon sources like nuclear and hydro. But despite this the French government has embarked on a programme of building renewables. As Professor Prud’homme explains:

“We are spending billions to switch from reliable low-carbon nuclear power to unreliable low-carbon renewables. This will almost certainly increase our carbon dioxide emissions rather than reduce them.”

And the policies put in place are hitting the poor very hard, particularly those living in rural areas.

“The government is forcing up the price of energy everywhere. There are some subsidy schemes to reduce the impact on the poorest, but these cannot do nearly enough to soften the blow, as the Gilets Jaunes protests have shown us.”

The protests, now in their thirtieth week, and in which more than 4000 people have been injured, began as a demonstration against fuel price increases imposed as part of the government’s decarbonisation drive.

SOURCE

Australia: New reef envoy Warren Entsch takes aim at 'coaching' of kids over climate change

The new Special Envoy for the Great Barrier Reef has declared the World Heritage site doesn't need "saving", while taking a swipe at climate change activists for "indoctrinating" school students who protest the issue in Australia.

Queensland MP Warren Entsch, who was appointed to the new role on Sunday, acknowledged climate change was a challenge for the reef, but said his priority is to reduce plastic in Australia's oceans.

But Mr Entsch said he was unmoved by student climate protesters who frequently targeted his electorate office, saying he had witnessed adults "coaching" some of the young people involved ahead of visiting his office.

"They're frightening the living hell out of kids. It's like child abuse and I think they should be held accountable," he told SBS News on Tuesday. He said "hostile" and "dishonest" activists were "giving kids nightmares because they don't believe there's a future".

Climate strikers have targeted the outspoken MP who represents the electorate of Leichhardt which covers Cairns and far north Queensland.

"One of them was almost in tears, as far as she was concerned the reef was dead in 10 years ... They only spoke in slogans 'save the reef', 'stop Adani' and '100 per cent renewables by 2030'."

He said Australia needed "solutions not slogans" around climate change.

But he dismissed the idea the Great Barrier Reef was facing any kind of existential threat, instead declaring his mission is to reduce the amount of plastic in Australia's oceans.

"We don't need to 'save the reef'. The reef is functioning well. There are lots of challenges. We need to continue to manage it and meet all those challenges," he said.

He nominated curbing plastics in the oceans as the main challenge he hoped to address as envoy, committing to a national policy on plastics.

SOURCE

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

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

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3 June, 2019

Watch: Skeptical scientist wins rare New York City climate debate against warmist scientist – Audience flips from warmist views to skeptical after debate

The Soho Forum, Published on May 6, 2019

Resolution: There is little or no rigorous evidence that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are causing dangerous global warming and threatening life on the planet.

For the affirmative:

Craig Idso is the founder, former president, and currently chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. The Center was founded in 1998 as a non-profit public charity dedicated to discovering and disseminating scientific information pertaining to the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide enrichment on climate and the biosphere.

Dr. Idso’s research has appeared many times in peer-reviewed journals, and is the author or coauthor of several books, including The Many Benefits of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment (Vales Lake Publishing, LLC, 2011), CO2, Global Warming and Coral Reefs (Vales Lake Publishing, LLC, 2009).

Dr. Idso also serves as an adjunct scholar for the Cato Institute and as a policy advisor for the CO2Coalition, the Heartland Institute and the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow.

For the negative:

Jeffrey Bennett is an astrophysicist and educator. He has focused his career on math and science literacy. He is the lead author of bestselling college textbooks in astronomy, astrobiology, mathematics, and statistics, and of critically acclaimed books for the general public on topics including Einstein’s theory of relativity, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the importance of math to our everyday lives.

Other career highlights include serving two years as a Visiting Senior Scientist at NASA Headquarters, proposing and helping to develop the Voyage Scale Model Solar System that resides on the National Mall in Washington, DC, and creating the freeTotality app that has helped tens of thousands of people learn how to view a total solar eclipse.

His book A Global Warming Primeris posted freely online at www.globalwarmingprimer.com.

Moderator: "We have the final vote. The yes vote on the resolution that there is no evidence that's causing dangerous global warming: It began at 24% (of the skeptical yes vote supporting that position) and it went up to 46% (after the debate). So [skeptical argument] gained 22% points. That's the number to beat (46%).

The no resolution (warmist position) started at 29%. It went up to 41% or up 11 points." The winner of the debate is skeptical scientist Dr. Craig Idso with his resolution asserting that "There is little or no rigorous evidence that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are causing dangerous global warming and threatening life on the planet."

Flashback 2007: Scientific Smackdown: Skeptics Voted The Clear Winners Against Global Warming Believers in Heated NYC Debate – RealClimate.org’s Gavin Schmidt appeared so demoralized that he mused that debates equally split between believers of a climate ‘crisis’ and scientific skeptics are probably not “worthwhile” to ever agree to again.

A Red Team review of climate crisis assertions

Gavin Schmidt’s spat with Steve Koonin underscores why we need to debate climate change

Paul Driessen

Various scientists, politicians and activists have long insisted that the United States and world must end fossil fuel use to prevent dangerous manmade global warming, climate change and extreme weather disasters. They say “the science is settled” and the time to act is now.

Many other experts have pointed out that these dire threats are the product of hypotheses and computer models that are largely contradicted by actual observations and historic records for temperatures, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, droughts, Arctic and Antarctic ice fluctuations, and rates of sea level rise. They note that Earth and humanity have been through Pleistocene ice ages and a Little Ice Age, Roman and medieval warm periods, prolonged droughts and other events that greenhouse gas theory cannot explain – and so far will not try to explain.

Call these experts “manmade climate crisis skeptics.” They say no drastic measures on energy should be taken unless and until these contradictions are fully addressed by open, robust discussions that climate crisis advocates refuse to have. “If your evidence for a crisis is so solid,” the skeptics argue, “you should be happy to lay it on the table, subject it to scrutiny, question our experts, and let us question your experts – rigorously.”

No debate, no proof of a manmade crisis – then no taxing, shackling or eliminating fossil fuel use.

The impasse has led to calls for a Red Team exercise or Presidential Committee on Climate Science to review and evaluate the climate models, reports, and evidence for and against the hypothesis that human carbon dioxide and methane emissions are responsible for a seemingly endless list of temperature, weather, ice, plant and animal conditions, fluctuations and catastrophes in recent decades.

Steven Koonin is a physicist, New York University’s professor, director of NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, and former Obama Undersecretary for Science at the US Department of Energy. A true scientist who is committed to the scientific method (proving hypotheses with actual evidence and reproducible experiments), he originated the idea of conducting a Red Team exercise.

Dr. Koonin recently gave a videotaped talk at Purdue University on the need for that exercise. He acknowledged that a lot of the government reports on climate issues are correct or accurate. However, he also said he wouldn’t be urging a Red Team exercise if he didn’t think the reports contain “misleading crucial aspects.” Some reports, he suggested, seem to be “written more to persuade than to inform.”

Based on his “thirty years’ experience in providing advice to policy makers about science,” he observed, “that’s not where we want to be. It’s OK to write an advocacy document, but not one bearing the mantle of science. I believe the reports have that problem.”

His Purdue talk focused on “the disconnect between what the reports actually say and the public/political dialog.” A Red Team exercise, on the other hand, would “point out exactly how the reports promote that disconnect” – by failing to provide historical or quantitative context, for example, or ignoring economic impacts of constraining fossil fuel use. His observations make eminent sense.

Gavin Schmidt took issue with Koonin’s comments – and weighed in with a critique on the RealClimate climate crisis website that he launched and manages. Dr. Schmidt is a British climatologist, climate modeler, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, and supporter of manmade climate crisis ideas.

Dr. Koonin has now responded to Dr. Schmidt – in a fascinating point-by-point rebuttal posted on WattsUpWithThat.com, the internet’s most visited “climate skeptic” website.

Anyone interested in this vitally important debate – over climate change, fossil fuels, a Red Team exercise, and the future of industrialized society and modern living standards – should read and ponder Koonin’s response ... and the hundreds of comments that follow.

These government reports – or at least their executive summaries – are being read, interpreted or misinterpreted, and used by journalists, activists, regulators, educators and politicians to drive the dominant (and dominating) climate chaos narrative ... and justify a drastic overhaul of our energy sector, economy, manufacturing base, living standards, and rights to make our own personal choices about what cars we can drive and how far, whether we can fly for business or pleasure, what kinds of homes we can live in and where, what kinds of food we can eat, and numerous other fundamental issues.

One additional fundamental issue, of course, is that China, India and other rapidly growing economies are building fossil fuel power plants, factories and vehicles at a furious pace – and have no intention of slowing, much less stopping or reversing, their programs. As a result, their CO2 emissions now dwarf US emissions and in fact now total almost 62% of global emissions. So even total elimination of US fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions would have zero effect on atmospheric CO2 levels.

With that much at stake, we darned well better have solid, evidence-based science to support claims that we face ... or are already in the midst of ... an unprecedented climate cataclysm, of our own making, that threatens civilization, wildlife and planet. So far, all we have are fear-inducing computer models, headlines, highly questionable reports from US, EU and UN government agencies, unbending assertions that the science is settled, steadfast refusals to debate any of this – and nothing else.

The NYU professor begins his rebuttal by saying he is “grateful for [Schmidt’s] attention and comments, as I’m always trying to improve my presentations. It seems that I failed to get my points across in some crucial places, so I’ve got work to do.” But he will not let Schmidt’s unwarranted criticism go unchallenged.

As Dr. Koonin points out, his Purdue discussions of “modeling challenges and deficiencies, temperature extremes, sea level rise, hurricanes, economic impacts, and the challenge of effective mitigation were all based upon what’s in the reports themselves, the refereed literature, or widely acknowledged data. So I’m not surprised that [Schmidt] ‘sees absolutely nothing new here.’ However, much of my [student] audience was wide-eyed and, I hope, inspired to investigate further on their own.”

Dr. Schmidt apparently does not agree – and yet tarnishes his rebuttal with nitpicking criticisms and by frequently misquoting or misinterpreting Dr. Koonin’s remarks at Purdue, sometimes with an abundance of snark and, one gets the impression, at other times with intention or even malice aforethought, to make Koonin look bad.

Koonin concludes with the spot-on observation that many of the reports “continue to paint a demonstrably deficient picture of the science [of climate change]. The scientific community needs to fix that, both to better inform the decision makers and also to bolster the integrity of the people and institutions that produce the reports. A Red Team exercise would go a long way toward that end.”

President Trump needs to launch that exercise, via a Climate Change Committee or similar program. If he fails to do so, it will be only a matter of time before our country and lives are shackled by intrusive, intolerant, economically and environmentally destructive Green New Deal regimes.

Read the Koonin commentary, watch the video, and read the comments (such as Tom Abbott, June 17, at 7:00 pm and Geoff Sherrington at 5:18 pm). You’ll learn a lot – more than alarmists want you to know.

Via email

Trump EPA finalizes rollback of key Obama climate rule that targeted coal plants

The Trump administration Wednesday issued a new rule that cuts carbon emissions from power plants by less than half of what experts say is needed to avoid catastrophic global warming.

The Affordable Clean Energy rule, issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, represents the Trump administration’s most significant action to unwind federal regulations aimed at addressing climate change. At the EPA on Wednesday, Trump’s top aides, Republican lawmakers and state business leaders celebrated it as proof that the president had delivered for his constituents in coal country.

“That means cleaner and more affordable energy for the American public,” said EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, addressing a group that included coal miners from Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Under the Trump rule, utilities are expected to cut emissions 35 percent below 2005 levels by the end of the next decade. But to avoid global average temperatures from rising beyond 2 degrees Celsius, the U.S. electricity sector would need to cut its emissions 74 percent, according to the International Energy Agency.

Unlike the Obama administration’s 2015 Clean Power Plan, the new rule does not set specific greenhouse gas emissions cuts for each state. Instead, it allows state regulators to determine how utilities can improve efficiency and will not force companies to switch from coal to lower-carbon energy sources.

But market forces have already prompted many utilities to cut back on coal.

DTE Chairman and CEO Gerry Anderson, whose Detroit-based utility has pledged to cut its carbon output 80 percent by 2040, said the new regulation won’t affect the decision to shutter 14 of its 18 coal-fired units by the end of the decade. “The industry’s in motion, and it’s got its own life,” Anderson said in an interview. “We’re moving on, and the rest of the industry is in a similar direction.”

Critics of the Trump rule argue that because it doesn’t require a move away from coal, some utilities will leave their plants open for longer, producing more pollution. They also say the new rule will result in even more confusion as states set their own climate agendas.

While liberal states are adopting ambitious climate policies, more conservative ones might not allow power companies to pass on carbon-free investment costs to customers if there’s no federal mandate to cut emissions.

Either way, the U.S. power sector is on track to surpass the Trump emissions projections, which amount to about one-third less than 2005 levels. Last year, utilities had lowered their emissions by 27 percent, and many companies plan to go even further, cutting carbon dioxide in half by 2030.

SOURCE

The Growing Drive To Destroy The Beef Industry

The American beef industry has long been a tasty target of the environmentalists and their allies in the animal rights movement. To understand the reason is to know that protecting the environment is not the goal, rather the excuse in a determined drive for global power. Their selected tactic is to control the land, water, energy, and population of the Earth. To achieve these ends requires, among other things, the destruction of private property rights and elimination of every individual’s ability to make personal lifestyle choices, including personal diet.

Of course, no totalitarian-bound movement would ever put their purpose in such direct terms. That’s where the environmental protection excuse comes in. Instead, American cattle producers are simply assured that no one wants to harm their industry, just make it safer for the environment. The gun industry might recognize that such assurance sounds a bit familiar. Same source, same tactics, same goals.

So the offered solution to “fix” the beef industry is “sustainable certification”. All the cattle growers have to do, they are assured, is follow a few simple rules and all will be fine, peaceful and profitable. Enter the players: the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (GRSB), and the U.S, Department of Agriculture.

First, let’s reveal the Sustainablists’ stated problems with the beef industry. What’s not sustainable about raising beef? According to the environmental “experts”, there are ten reasons why the meat industry does not meet sustainable standards:

* Deforestation – the claim is that farm animals require considerably more land than crops to produce food. The World Hunger Program calculated that if the land was used to grow grain and soy instead of cattle the land could provide a vegan diet to 6 billion people. Do you get that – a vegan diet! The fact is, most grazing land in the U.S. cannot be used for growing food crops because the soil wouldn’t sustain crops.

* Fresh Water – they claim that the America diet requires 4,200 gallons of water per day, including animal drinking water, irrigation of crops, processing, washing, etc. Whereas a vegan diet only requires 300 gallons per day. Apparently they don’t plan to irrigate the land to grow wheat or to wash the vegetables.

* Waste Disposal – factory farms house hundreds of thousands of animals that produce waste. They claim these giant livestock farms produce more than 130 times the amount of waste humans do. The interesting thing about this detail is that the actual sustainable policies they are enforcing to fix this problem destroy the small family farms in favor of the very giant corporate factory farms they profess to oppose. In addition, those global corporations which join the Green cabal have the ability to ignore many of the “sustainable” restrictions, unlike the small, family farms that are much better at protecting the environment on their own.

* Energy Consumption - For the steak to end up on your plate, say the Greens, the cow has to consume massive amounts of energy along the way as the cattle are transported thousands of miles to slaughter, market, and refrigerate. And let’s not forget, the meat must then be cooked! Well this transportation argument is a direct result of the existence of a limited few packing companies in cahoots with the Green Lords that dictate the market as they work against a more decentralized, local industry. Meanwhile, last time I checked, Tofurkey – made from soy -- also has to be cooked!

* Food Productivity – say the Greens, food productivity of farmland is falling behind the population and the only option, besides cutting the population, is to cut back on meat consumption and convert grazing lands to food crops. As noted in point 1, most grazing land cannot be converted. Everything dealing with the sustainable argument is based on some unseen crisis. Yet we do not have a world-wide food shortage or pending famine. In fact, the media is persistently reporting “price-depressing crop surpluses.” The only places where such shortages may exist are in totalitarian societies where government is controlling food production and supplies – kind of like the Green’s plan for sustainable beef.

* Global Warming – here we go! Say the Greens, global warming is driven by energy consumption and cows are energy guzzlers. But there’s more to the story. Cow flatulence! A single dairy cow, they claim, produces an average of 75 kilos of methane annually. Meanwhile, environmentalists want to return the rangelands to historic species, including buffalo. And a buffalo, grazing on the same grass on the same lands would emit about the same amount of methane. It’s a non-issue.

* Loss of Biodiversity – What are some of the examples the Greens give for loss of biodiversity? Poaching and black market sale of bushmeat including everything from elephants and chimpanzees to birds??? Please explain what this has to do with the American cattle industry – other than a pure hatred of anyone who eats meat of any kind. And that, of course, is the argument from the animal rights/vegan wing of the Green movement that is leading the assault on cattle.

* Grassland Destruction – apparently this is based on the Green premise that domesticated animals like cows replaced bison and antelope, which, in turn, caused a loss of biodiversity of species. I’ve got two pieces of news for you. First, the Native Americans so revered by the Greens, hunted bison before the white man arrived. Take a trip to Bozeman, Montana and see the cliff where they used to run entire herds to their death, not just selectively choosing a few to eat. Second, the Greens, not the cattle ranchers, forced the reintroduction of wolves, and that has caused a near annihilation of the antelope and elk herds.

*Soil Erosion – the Greens claim that U.S. pastureland is overgrazed, causing soil erosion. In truth, a great many of today’s cattlemen are third and fourth generation on their land. Those ranches could not have existed for over a hundred years if they were so careless in taking care of the land. It is vital to their survival to assure the land stays in good shape. Of course, an environmentalist who has never worked a ranch or farm and rarely comes out of his New York high-rise might not know that.

* Lifestyle Disease – this is my favorite of the reasons why beef is supposedly unsustainable. In short, it’s because of stupid people! This one is blamed on “excessive” consumption of meat, combined with environmental pollution and “lack of exercise” leading to strokes, cancer, diabetes and heart attacks. So it’s the beef industries fault that people eat too much and refuse to exercise. The solution – ban meat consumption. Yet, doctors are now realizing that meat eating is not the problem, carbs are.

So, these are the ten main reasons why it’s charged that beef is unsustainable and must be ruled, regulated and frankly, eliminated. These are charges brought by anti-beef vegans who want all beef consumption stopped. In cahoots, are global Sustainablists who seek to stop the private ownership and use of land, all hiding under the blanket excuse of environmental protection.

To bring the cattle industry into line with this world view the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has accepted the imposition of the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, which is heavily influenced, if not controlled, by the World Wildlife Fund, one of the top three most powerful environmental organizations in the world and a leader in the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), which basically sets the rules for global environmental policy. This is the same World Wildlife Fund that issued a report saying, “Meat consumption is devastating some of the world’s most valuable and vulnerable regions, due to the vast amount of land needed to produce animal feed.” The report went on to say that, to save the Earth, it was vital that we change human consumption habits away from meat. As pointed out earlier, the fact is most land used for grazing isn’t capable of growing crops for food. Further, to have the WWF involved in any part of the beef industry is simply suicidal.

It’s interesting to note that the “Principles for Sustainable Beef Farming,” issued for the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef by the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Working Group (SAI), follow the exact guidelines originally presented in the United Nations’ Agenda 21/ Sustainable Development blueprint. Agenda 21 divided these into three categories including, Social Equity, Economic Prosperity and Ecological Integrity. Using almost identical terms, the SAI plan for Sustainable Beef uses the following headings for each section of its plan: Economic Sustainability, Social Sustainability, and Environmental Sustainability.

Under Social Sustainability are such items as Human Rights, Worker Environment, Business Integrity, and Worker Competence (that means that workers are required to have the proper, acceptable sustainable attitudes and beliefs). Under the heading Environmental Sustainability are Climate Change, Waste, and Biodiversity, for the reasons already discussed.

Regulations using these principles impose a political agenda that ignores the fact that smaller, independent cattle growers have proven to be the best stewards of their own land and that for decades have produced the highest grade of beef product in the world. Instead, to continue to produce they will be required to submit to centralized control by regulations that will never end and will always increase in costs and needless waste of manpower.

To follow the sustainable rules and be officially certified, the cattle growers must agree to have much of the use of their land reduced to provide for wildlife habitat. There are strict controls over water use and grazing areas. This forces the growers to have smaller herds, making the process more expensive and economically unviable for the industry. In addition, there is a new layer of industry and government inspectors, creating a massive bureaucratic overreach, causing yet more costs for the growers.

The Roundtable rules are now enforced through the packing companies. You see, the cattlemen actually have no direct market. Instead, they first bring their product to feedlots for final preparation. The feedlots then sell the cattle to the packers. The packers are the ones who then have direct contact with stores, restaurants and other entities that actually buy the beef. The packers are a major force in the Roundtable, working side by side with the WWF, and so dictate the rules to the feedlots to comply with sustainable certification for the cattle they will buy from the growers. If the beef they obtain isn’t grown according to the sustainable beef principles then the packers refuse to buy it. That has quickly put smaller feedlots out of business. Consequently, it also destroys the cattle growers who rely on the feedlots to take their product.

There are only four main packing companies in the United States. These are Cargill, Tysons, JBS and Marfrig. These packers have already successfully taken control of the hog and poultry industries. Tysons is now raising its chickens in China to ship here. JBS and Marfrig are both from Brazil. It’s interesting to note that one of their first tactics was to remove the country of origin labeling from the packaging so that consumers have no idea where their product is coming from. So as the packers force their expensive, unnecessary, and unworkable sustainable certification on American cattlemen, they are systematically bringing in cheaper product from other countries that don’t necessarily adhere to strict, sanitary, safe production American producers are known for. As a result, there is a noticeable rise in news reports of recalls of diseased chicken and beef in American grocery stores.

Some cattle growers have tried to fight back by creating new packing companies to compete and provide an honest market. However, the costs to do so are huge, as high as $50 million. One such company called Northern Beef Packers was formed, using all the latest state of the art, high-grade processing. The four established packers reacted by drastically reducing their prices to the grocers, thereby destroying any hope of establishing a market for the new packing company.

This then is the situation that is threatening the American beef industry. If one reads the documents and statements from the World Wildlife Fund, the United Nations Environment Program and others involved, it is not hard to realize that the true goal is not to produce a better grade of beef, but to ban it altogether. The question must then be asked, why is the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association allowing this to happen, and indeed, is joining with the Sustainable Beef Roundtable to force these policies on their members?

The answer is actually quite tragic. American ranchers, farmers and livestock growers have been targets of the environmental and animal rights movements for years. They are beaten down. Like the rest of us they just want to be left alone to work their farms and herds like their forefathers have done for more than a century. But the pressure is growing day by day. So, they have come to believe that if they just go along – put the sustainable label on their product -- then this pressure will stop. In short, they see it as a pressure valve.

The reality is it’s not going to go away because the goal is not environmental protection, rather the destruction of their industry and control through what the UN calls the reorganization of human society. The attack has now grown to major proportions with the Green New Deal. Beef eaters have no place in the sustainable paradise of city apartment dwellers who accept government controls to choose for them what they are permitted to eat.

There are efforts to fight back. A group of cattlemen has organized under the banner of R-CALF (Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund) and they have managed to slow the Sustainable capture of the industry. But the packers’ control of the industry is a major roadblock if the cattlemen can’t reach their market. R-CALF has filed Abuse of Conduct suits to shed light on the anti-trust activities of the monopoly tactics of the packers.

However, the beef industry cannot recover on its own. There must be outrage from the consumers who are facing higher prices, possible inferior meat, and the danger of disease because of this sustainable tyranny. If you want the right to your own food choices instead of the dictatorship of radical Greens, then get mad. Demand that “Country of Origin” labels be put on all beef products so you know where your food comes from. Demand that the Department of Agriculture rejects this sustainable myth and protects the American free market that has always provided superior products.

The so-called sustainable policy is not a free market. It is a government-sanctioned monopoly that is just short of a criminal enterprise. Stand with American farmers and cattlemen. If Americans don’t fight back now we will lose the freedom to our own dinner plates in the name of sustainable lies.

SOURCE

Climate activists are the establishment, not the underdogs

Comment from Australia

These well-to-do campaigners would happily make ordinary people’s lives harder.

On the eve of the Australian election last month, the righteous anger of modern politics turned to violence when a man was stabbed with a corkscrew.

His assailant, Steven Economides, is a senior 62-year-old partner at KPMG who lives in the Sydney suburb of Balgowlah Heights where the average three-room house costs around £1.5million.

The victim of this white-collar crime was a volunteer campaigner for former prime minister Tony Abbott, who stands accused of indifference to the future of the planet. Abbott was seeking re-election as MP for Warringah. Economides was a supporter of Abbott’s rival, independent Zali Steggall, whose call for real action on climate change is said to have won the seat.

Today’s typical Australian eco-warrior is affluent, educated and smug. These people are to be found in fashionable suburbs, frequently close to the water. They drive European cars, fly north in the winter and despair at the suburban bogans and their seeming indifference to the Greatest Ethical Challenge of Our Time.

The world looks somewhat different from the Galilee Basin in Central Queensland, where a proposal to develop Australia’s largest coal mine has raised hopes of economic activity and jobs.

The Carmichael Mine would be built by the Indian company Adani and would feed the increasing demand for coal-fired electricity generation in the sub-continent, the quickest and cheapest way to provide reliable power to a nation in which 18,000 villages still lack electricity.

The development has been frustrated by the largest and most sophisticated anti-development campaign Australia has seen.

The site of the mine is inherently unlovable, flat scrubby grazing land, plagued by drought, 400km inland on the edge of the outback. The campaigners responded by linking the development to the campaign to save the Great Barrier Reef. A powerful coalition of green groups, including Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, launched deceptive campaigns to persuade the public that the mine was ‘near’ or even ‘in the heart of’ the reef. In reality, the mine will be further from the reef than the North York Moors are from London

In its form, the strategy is little different from the campaign that successfully stopped the development of hydro-electricity in the early 1980s and turned tree-hugging into a professional enterprise in Australia.

The campaign to stop the construction of the Franklin Dam on the Gordon River was led by a young environmental activist named Bob Brown who supplied 16mm movies of pristine wilderness to television stations as a ‘weapon of conservation’ and instructed activists to put on jackets and ties in preparation for media interviews.

Brown turned the Franklin into an internationally recognised icon with the help of the support of David Bellamy. The turning point for the Franklin campaign came when the opposition Labor Party came on board, turning it into an election issue that would help it gain votes in inner-city electorates on the mainland.

Bob Hawke’s victory at the 1983 election came despite a swing against Labor in Tasmania, where the workers were less concerned about the loss of native habitat than they were about the loss of jobs.

It was the start of Labor’s uncomfortable alliance with green politics that hastened its estrangement from working Australians and remains a nagging source of tension between the party’s industrial and intellectual wings.

Some 36 years later, the environmental movement pinned its hopes on a Labor victory in the recent election to stigmatise coal in the same way it had effectively ended the development of hydro-electricity.

Queensland’s state Labor government was caught in a bind. Approving the mine would have risked the loss of inner-Brisbane seats to the Greens. Blocking it would lose it seats in central and far-north Queensland.

Queensland premier Anastasia Palaszczuk decided to stall, relying on the ability of the public service to procrastinate, hoping that an incoming Labor government in Canberra would take the decision from her, or that the backers of the Adani mine might pack up and go home.

Palaszczuk badly underestimated the strength of the popular revolt building in the regions and the suburbs. Nor had she foreseen that the Coalition would grant federal approval for the project days before calling a federal election, thus putting the pressure on Labor.

There was a growing resistance to the sanctimonious campaign driven by activists from the south who put parading their virtue above other people’s jobs.

The arrival of Brown’s Stop Adani protest at Easter served only to cement the anger of local people. The procession of SUVs and well-appointed camper vans arriving from the south was met with a counter protest by local people driving utes and tractors.

The anger expressed at the ballot box was devastating for Labor, which received just 27 per cent of the vote in Queensland, its lowest share of the state vote since the federation in 1901.

It took the state government a matter of days to absorb the message and make a swift about-face. Premier Palaszczuk ordered her bureaucrats to stop stalling, giving them three weeks to make their decision.

Late last week her environment minister announced that the project was approved and preliminary construction began at the weekend.

The Adani approval is a considerable setback for Big Eco, the international coalition of activists which had invested heavily in turning a simple mine approval into the last stand for coal. Tens of millions of dollars was spent on lawfare to stymie the approvals process and shareholder activism aimed at starving the project of funds.

It is becoming harder for Big Eco to pretend that it is the underdog, bravely fighting against bully-boy corporations. It is becoming clear that the very opposite is true.

Increasingly, the activists have the upper hand. They are well-funded, ruthless and professional. They are in cahoots with media professionals who mix in the same circles and adopt the same assumptions, but are estranged from their fellow Australians.

The Adani campaign has sharpened the battle lines. The climate-change debate is not a contest between science and ignorance, belief and denial, or good and evil. It is a clash between those rich enough to enjoy the luxury of projecting their virtue and those who simply want to get on with the job.

SOURCE

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

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

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21 June, 2019

The Plastic We 'Recycle' Is Actually Horrible for the Environment

You can't win

When you drop your plastic waste into the recycling bin, it most likely makes its way around the world, where it can pose a health and security risk to developing countries, according to a new Guardian report.

The planet is getting buried under plastic: beaches are littered with it, sea life is choking on it, and a new report finds that we're even drinking a credit-card-size amount of plastic every week from our drinking water. Needless to say, recycling is a good idea.

Until it's done wrong. That plastic bottle that you drop into a recycling bin on the streets of New York isn't always broken down and crafted into a brand-new product. Sometimes, it ends up across the world in someone's backyard, taking its place among scores of supermarket bags and snack pouches. [In Photos: The World's 10 Most Polluted Places]

The U.S. ships about 1 million tons of plastic waste overseas every year. Much of that plastic used to end up in China, where it was recycled — that is, until the country abruptly stopped most of the plastic waste imports in 2017. Now, a good part of U.S. plastic waste is shipped to the world's poorest countries for recycling, including Bangladesh, Laos, Ethiopia and Senegal, the Guardian reported.

Last year, about 68,000 shipping containers' worth of plastic recycling waste from the U.S. were shipped to developing countries, which mismanage over 70% of their own plastic waste, they wrote. For example, Malaysia dumps or improperly disposes 55% of its own plastic waste, yet it receives more U.S. recyclables than any other country, they wrote. What's more, an estimated 20% to 70% of plastic waste that goes to recycling facilities worldwide is unusable and discarded as trash, according to the report.

Beyond just having to live among the trash that litters their beaches and streets, the increasing number of plastic processing facilities that are popping up in these countries is posing health risks to citizens who live among contaminated water supplies and the smell of plastic fumes, they wrote.

SOURCE

Leftist Agenda and Climate Change Linked by Indoctrination Tactics

Joe Bastardi

Why is the same age group that helped to tear down the Iron Curtain now advocating for policies that would reduce freedoms?

As a meteorologist in the private sector, wherein success is largely determined by forecasting skill, I cannot afford to be wrong. I was taught that studying the past helps one predict the future. This is the origin of my involvement in the climate debate, since the “worst ever” bloviating we see today can easily be challenged through examination of the past.

My politics are simple. I believe one should have as much freedom as possible to enjoy life, liberty, and pursue happiness. In my opinion, the role of government is to establish standards to maximize these freedoms. I assume no one has anything against life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I also assume there is a large population of young people who are concerned about the future.

There is a striking difference between young people in this country today and the young people in the Eastern Bloc who actively worked to overthrow the communist chains that enslaved them in the 20th century. Young people 35 years ago yearned for the freedoms they saw in the West — the very ideals a growing movement in this country seeks to overturn. The US was a beacon of light to that generation, but now the same age group wishes to dim that very light.

Why do people now seek to push the West into a system in which government controls information? I believe it’s because of a lack of countering information that’s fair and balanced.

The issue at play is using climate as a means to an end. The crucial swing generation and those growing into it (the 6-19-year-olds of today) have only been exposed to a drumbeat meant to indoctrinate them. Indoctrination is a crucial aspect of totalitarian systems and comes about with a media working in tandem with a political agenda and an education system designed to feed one side of an issue. This is very similar to the same system that the young people in the Eastern Bloc worked so hard to get rid of, as many from those countries will tell you.

Check out this book that is being used in some elementary schools. In my opinion, it is pure indoctrination.

It was in part written by an author who wrote Do Fish Fart?

What do you say to an eight-year-old who comes home with this book?

If people knew and understood the power of the state in controlling information, they would be skeptical of what they are being told about changes in climate.

CO2 occupies 0.04 percent (.0004) of the atmosphere. Man’s contribution is ¼ that, or .0001 of the atmosphere.

The U.S. contributes 15% (.000015) to that .0001. Since this has occurred in the past 45 years, the yearly contribution from the U.S. is .00000033. The average state enacting Paris-accord-type agreements contributes .0000000066. This is all to save .01°C. But as Gina McCarthy said when questioned about that figure, that’s not the real value of the EPAs intention. Her exact quote from her 2015 Senate hearing (in which she did not know the percentage of CO2 in the air): “The value of this rule is not measured in [temperature reduction]. It is measured in strong domestic action, which can actually trigger global action to address what is a necessary action.”

The cost of such plans has been estimated at $93 trillion over 10 years by the American Action Forum. But do people who are buying into it know that? Do they know the physical properties of CO2 that limit its effects? Dr. Will Happer, who is chairing the president’s climate-change panel, certainly does, and it’s the reason for his stance on CO2 as a net benefit to the planet. It’s not a tipping-point prospect; instead, it’s a diminishing return, similar to putting extra coats of paint on a surface — because the bands it absorbs radiation in are essentially saturated already (it’s a very narrow window).

Besides, given the variation in both in the known history of the planet, can anyone tell you what the ideal planetary temperature is? Or the ideal CO2 level? The agenda means economic hardship for the U.S. I believe young people today are buying into this only because they are indoctrinated into a single way of thinking in the absence of opposing information.

When you hear only one point of view, there is plenty of reason to be skeptical, as people escaping from socialist societies will tell you.

SOURCE

Without Mining There Is No 'Green Revolution'

The recent threats by Beijing to cut off American access to critical mineral imports have many Americans wondering why our politicians have allowed the United States to become so overly dependent on China for these valued resources in the first place.

Today, the United States is 90% dependent on China and Russia for many vital “rare earth minerals.”

The main reason for our overreliance on nations such as China for these minerals is not that we are running out of these resources here at home. The National Mining Association estimates that we have at least $5 trillion of recoverable mineral resources.

The U.S. Geological Survey reports that we still have about 86% of key mineral resources such as copper and zinc remaining in the ground, waiting to be mined. These resources aren’t on environmentally sensitive lands, such as national parks, but on the millions of acres of federal, state and private lands.

The mining isn’t happening because of extremely prohibitive environmental rules and a permitting process that can take five to 10 years to open a new mine. Green groups simply resist almost all new drilling.

What they may not realize is that the de facto mining prohibitions jeopardize the “green energy revolution” that liberals so desperately are seeking.

How is this for rich irony: To make renewable energy at all technologically plausible will require massive increases in the supply of rare earth and critical minerals. Without these valuable metals, there will not be more efficient 21st-century batteries for electric cars or modern solar panels. Kiss the Green New Deal and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ utopian vision of 100% renewable energy goodbye.

Yet, for decades now, environmentalists have erected every possible barrier to mining for critical minerals here in America — which we have in great abundance.

Search far and wide through the grandiose Green New Deal plans and you will not find any call for additional domestic mining for battery-operated electric vehicles and electrified mass transportation systems, nor the underlying energy infrastructure.

Thanks to the extreme environmentalists, we import from unfriendly and repressive governments the critical minerals needed to produce rechargeable batteries (lithium and cobalt), wind turbine motors (dysprosium), thin films for solar power (tellurium) and miniature sensors that manage the performance of electric vehicles (yttrium).

Another irony in the left’s anti-mining crusade is that these same groups have long boasted that by eliminating our need for fossil fuels, America won’t rely on cartels such as OPEC that have in the past held our nation hostage to wild price swings and embargoes. Greens also complain that fossil fuel dependence requires a multibillion-dollar military presence in the Middle East and around the world to ensure supply. Now we can substitute OPEC with China and Russia.

Here is one simple but telling example of the shortsightedness of the “no mining” position of the environmentalists. Current electric vehicles can use up to 10 times more copper than fossil fuel vehicles. Then, additional copper wire networks will be needed to attach convenient battery chargers throughout public spaces and along roads and highways. Do we really want this entire transportation infrastructure to be dependent on China and Russia?

Of course, it is not just green energy development that will be imperiled by our mining restrictions folly. Innovation and research on new lightweight metals and alloys — such as those used in life-saving medical devices and tiny cameras in smartphones — could also become stalled if foreign prices rise prohibitively.

Also, because our mining laws (the ones that don’t prohibit mining outright) protect the environment far more than those in places such as China and Africa, by importing these minerals, we are contributing to global environmental degradation.

So, there you have it. The “keep it in the ground” movement demanded by environmentalists against use of almost all of America’s bountiful energy and mineral resources is blocking a green future and a safer planet. Do they know this? Do they care?

SOURCE

Climate change won’t be reversed in our lifetimes

The priority for governments should be to mitigate adverse effects.

In recent years, the public’s awareness of climate change has been growing by the day. Increased media coverage and protests by groups like Extinction Rebellion have captured a great deal of attention and persuaded many of the need for action.

Greater public engagement on climate change is certainly a welcome development. But there are also a growing number of myths and misconceptions that have come to underpin much of the debate.

There seems to be a commonly held impression that if Western nations like Germany and Britain reduce their net CO2 emissions to zero, climate change can be tackled in a relatively short period of time. For instance, it is not uncommon to hear that weather-related disasters – whether it is tornados in the United States, floods in Britain or bushfires in Australia – could have been avoided if only we had been taking stronger action against climate change.

In reality, even if humanity accomplished the Herculean task of reducing net global emissions to zero, a lot of damage has already been done which would not be immediately reversed. According to NASA, it could still take centuries for climate change to slow down.

Moreover, when you take a deeper look into the global-emissions data, emissions are projected to continue rising for the foreseeable future, despite the Kyoto Protocol and the much-heralded 2016 Paris Climate Accords treaty. Various organisations, including the OECD and Climate Action Tracker, project that global emissions will continue on their uptrend well past 2050, as developing nations continue to industrialise and raise their standards of living.

The unfortunate truth is that even if Western nations meet their pledges to reduce their emissions in line with the Paris accord – or to net zero, as Britain has just pledged – it is highly unlikely that there will be any meaningful reversal of the current effects of climate change within most of our lifetimes.

None of this is to say that climate change should not be addressed. But the top priority for governments around the world should be climate-change mitigation. As global CO2 emissions are guaranteed to rise, regardless of any unilateral action Western countries might take, governments need to invest in research, development and infrastructure in order to prepare for the worst effects of this.

Action on climate change needs to be built on a sound foundation of scientific facts and empirical data about what is actually happening to CO2 levels and the planet, not on the myths that have sadly become commonplace in the climate-change debate.

SOURCE

Australia: Company warns of $1b wound from gas royalty hike by Queensland government

A major coal-seam gas operation predicts that the Queensland government’s shock move to lift royalties will cost it at least $1 billion more over the lifetime of a project.

The initial modelling from Arrow Energy, which is proposing a 27-year project, comes amid acrimonious debate about whether the gas sector should be paying more to Queenslanders.

Arrow is proposing a project based in the Surat Basin in southern Queensland that it estimates would employ 1000 people, churn out 5 trillion cubic feet of gas and require $10 billion in capital expenditure.

It is so symbolic that Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk described the project as a “vote of confidence in Queensland as a resources investment destination”.

While it was not threatening to cancel the work because of the rise, Arrow pointed out that its shareholders Shell and PetroChina were yet to make the final investment decision on going ahead.

SOURCE

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

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

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20 June, 2019

Heatwaves could become more common and 'smash' temperature records in many parts of the world if climate change is not curbed, study claims

Yes. It's logical that if temperatures rise globally they will also rise in at least some locations. But will they rise globally? They are at present falling globally.

And a rise of one or two degrees would not mean much. There are already people living in very hot locations, much hotter than the present global average, e.g 40C. is common at Marble Bar in Australia

Current global warming rates will see large swathes of the world subjected to record-breaking high temperatures every year as the planet continues to swelter.

A study by Australian meteorologists has found that record-breaking heat events are occurring more regularly and will progressively get more common.

The poorest nations will be hardest hit, with 67 per cent of less economically robust countries having a record temperature every year until the end of the century.

Greenhouse gas emissions, at their current rate, will cause record high temperatures in more than half (58 per cent) of the world.

One in ten regions will also 'smash' previous monthly records by more than 1°C (1.8°F).

This sweating world is portrayed in a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change as the result of 22 different reports.

However, curing the world of a plague of heatwaves could be accomplished if carbon emissions are cut, the study authors claim.

The Paris Agreement has laid out clear guidelines for nations to try and cut their emissions in order to limit global warming.

It lays out two targets, which involve a maximum limit on rising temperatures , of two degrees and 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

If targets for 2020 are met then the number drops dramatically to just 14 per cent of the world experiencing record-breaking weather every year.

'The impact of emissions reductions on the total number of monthly records set is stark,' the authors wrote in the study.

'The benefits of reducing emissions, in terms of both reducing the pace at which high temperature records are set and restricting the magnitude by which records are broken, are very clear.'

Countries close to the equator, where the world's temperatures are always highest, will experience 24 monthly records broken every decade.

This falls to just three records every ten years under the low emissions version of events.

SOURCE

The Climate Jamboree Comes To The UK

The Guardian reports that the next ‘critical’ summit on the ‘climate crisis’ is to be held in the UK. Apparently, we beat the Italians to it. We are indeed truly blessed. The world will be watching:

"The UK is to host a critical global summit on the climate crisis at the end of 2020, at which the world’s 190 nations must commit to deep cuts in emissions.

It will be the most significant UN climate summit since the Paris deal was struck in 2015, when countries made pledges to curb emissions. But these pledges would only keep global heating to a 3C rise, which would bring devastating heatwaves and extreme weather."

This is our big chance to put the ball in motion and save the planet from the Three Degrees. Johnson (or whoever is PM at the time) better not fluff it. We’ll still be in the EU of course, so Britain will be told what to say and do at the conference by Brussels bureaucrats anyway. They’ll probably wheel in a decrepit looking former PM to talk about her stunning ‘legacy’ of zero emissions too – and the BBC will edit out the sniggering in Mandarin which will be heard in the background.

SOURCE

Merchants of Drought

A journal called Scientific American (or ScAm for short) hosts the latest blog from Kate Marvel, claiming that the “Hot Planet” is “Creeping toward permanent drought.” The subtitle is “Both trees and climate models are telling us the same frightening story”. Most of the text is her usual substance-free emotional wittering: “The smell—a peppery sweetness, pine without Christmas—is what I remember when I think of home”, so I won’t bother to quote much of it, but here is the final paragraph:

"From my office in New York, I can look at these future projections and see California dancing from dry to wet and back again, until there is no again and it settles in to permanent drought. If the trees survive us, they may live to tell of a time where the grass turned brown, the map turned brown, and it was a long time before it was ever green again."

The “future projections” link here goes to a story from a few years ago when the “permanent drought” scare was at its peak, being promoted by the media and climate fraudster Peter Gleick. Since then, California’s reservoirs have filled up and the “permanent drought” is now a subject for ridicule at sceptical blogs. So it is surprising that anyone would try to resurrect this fake news again.

Here’s a graph from a paper in Nature showing the fraction of the earth suffering from drought over the last 30 years. The different colours show different drought intensities on a 5-point scale from “abnormally dry” (D0, yellow) to “exceptional drought” (D4, dark red). It shows little change; if anything, a slight decrease in drought:

For the USA, there is a graph of the amount of drought on the EPA website, showing that there’s no trend and the worst period of drought was in the “dust bowl” era of the 1930s:

Finally, there is the latest IPCC report, SR15, published last autumn, which has this to say:

Is it possible that Marvel is unaware of all this evidence, and has never thought to look for it? Or is she well aware of it, and simply lying to the public about the approaching “permanent drought”? Either way, it’s an astonishing illustration of the dishonesty of the climate movement and the media organisations such as ScAm that publish this drivel.

Other climate scientists, of course, are quite aware of the falsehood of Marvel’s claims. In any normal, honest field of science, this pseudoscience would be exposed by others in the field. But in the institutionally dishonest field of climate science, the opposite happens. Bogus claims are promoted and described as “wonderful”:

SOURCE

High school climate indoctrination using AP environment textbooks

Jordan Peterson, a worldwide pop-culture self-help phenomenon and University of Toronto psychology professor, has repeatedly warned that “Liberal colleges aren’t about education; they’re about political activism.” It is widely believed and experienced by conservatives that our universities are doing more to indoctrinate our students than truly educate. What many people do not realize is the same thing is being done in our public K-12 schools.

I am one of nine elected directors on the school board in the Hollidaysburg Area School District in central Pennsylvania. Among other responsibilities, school boards are charged with approving their districts’ textbooks and curricula. In most cases, the books are rubber-stamped “yes” by the boards.

When my board placed approval of the Exploring Environmental Science for A.P book on the agenda for our meeting, I knew the voters in my district would want me to know what I was voting for, so I went into the administration office to look at the book. (There is a sheet in the book that you have to sign before you look at it. A day before the board meeting, my name was the only one on the list, even though it had been on display for the required 30 days.)

Since I didn’t have time to read a 500-page book in one afternoon, I went to the sections I knew could be the most problematic — that is, ideologically biased.

What did I find?

“Passive solar power is extremely efficient.” Well, yes, technically that is true. But it’s not the whole “efficiency” story, is it? What about the draining of tax resources through tax credits offered to direct consumer behavior to buy solar panels? That isn’t mentioned, because that is an economic and political question, which was not addressed (more on that later!)

What about nuclear power? A very clean and efficient source of energy? One recommendation in the book for the teacher to “educate” the class about nuclear was for the students to watch a YouTube video on the Chernobyl disaster. What better way to scare students regarding the development and use of nuclear energy? Does this put the use of nuclear power properly in perspective? Yet this is an advanced placement science book.

The book’s description of hydraulic fracturing — commonly referred to as “fracking” — was also charged with descriptors meant to frighten the reader, explaining the dangerous nature of the chemicals used in the fracking fluids. There was no balanced, equally emotive language used to describe the revolutionary development of this process, which a hundred years ago was not even imagined.

We have been told repeatedly over the past 100 years that we would run out of fossil fuels by the end of our or our children’s lifetimes. Fracking has enabled the world to have access to a whole new reserve of abundant and cleaner energy. I would think reasonable people would want to celebrate this instead of scare people about a made-up nightmare scenario about fracking fluids.

In one section of the teacher’s edition, it states that the goals of the section are to make the students understand that “humans play a significant role in the changing climate” and that “what is now inevitable climate change can be slowed by implementing drastic greenhouse gas reductions.” Of course, there is no mention of the untold millions who will suffer by a significant decline in their disposable income due to rising energy costs and the necessary increases in taxes.

The beginning of one chapter starts with this quote: “Coal plant smokestacks that dirty the air and alter the climate will be replaced by solar panels on our rooftops and wind turbines turning gracefully in the distance.” Does that sound like something that belongs in a science book?

The facts, ma’am, only the facts!

The book discusses the high cost of converting to renewable energy as our primary resource and recommends raising taxes as a solution! Remember, this is a science book, not a public policy or economics book! The book does not discuss the downside or opportunity cost of raising taxes to achieve objectives that many reasonable people deem to be of dubious value. The impression is clear: renewables = good; fossil fuels = bad. How about the opposite view that renewables = limited value; fossil fuels = unprecedented prosperity and the best human health in the history of the world.

This is not science. This is propaganda disguised as facts for impressionable teenage minds.

SOURCE

Poor timing for Al Gore’s climate panic poppycock

In politics, timing is crucial. And thus it was with the unfortunately timed participation of former US vice-president Al Gore in the Queensland government-sponsored Climate Week earlier this month.

According to the blurb, “Climate Week QLD 2019 will showcase how the state is transitioning to a low-carbon, clean-growth economy and building a community of action to address climate change.”

Occurring as it did after the unexpected victory of the Morrison government, Gore’s pronouncements during the week about the perils of climate change — let’s face it, he easily wins the gold medal in the boy-who-cried-wolf category when it comes to climate-induced apocalypses — were particularly jarring.

As for that photographed pose of Gore and Deputy Premier Jackie Trad cuddling up to each other, it’s probably best not to comment.

It would have been fun to be a fly on the wall when the planning for this gala week occurred. The expectation would have been that Labor would win the federal election, with the clear message that the public was demanding “real action on climate change” — so the motto goes. Reference would have been made to Bill Shorten’s plans to reduce emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 and for 50 per cent of electricity to be generated by renewable energy sources.

The Queensland government would endorse these targets while arguing for more ambitious ones. Reference would be made to the Palaszczuk government’s pledge for the state to reach net zero emissions by 2050. Without doubt, Big Al would be supportive.

Of course, the Great Barrier Reef would need to be a central part of the story. And the potential for the final rejection of the Adani project would complete a very satisfactory week of positive, vote-winning news items for the Queensland government.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why anyone would give Gore the time of day. After all, he is not a trained scientist; he appears to make a living from concocting scary climate stories.

While he was in Queensland, he was offering up some more whoppers. Maybe he thought the appearance fee he received — estimated to be $320,000, paid for by Queensland taxpayers — necessitated the delivery of some sensational unsubstantiated claims.

To tell an audience that the choice is between Adani and the Great Barrier Reef is puerile and misinformed. To suggest that India is now sourcing 60 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources is just plain wrong — out by a factor of four to five. And these statements come on top of the many falsehoods Gore has peddled in the past. These include:

* In 2006, he claimed that the planet would reach a “point of no return” in 10 years.

* In the same year, he predicted that sea levels would rise by 20 feet (just over 6m) “in the near future”.

* In 2008, he claimed that the north polar cap would be completely ice-free within five years.

* In 2011, he claimed that polar bears would soon become close to extinction (their number has been rising).

Presumably, these faulty predictions were known to the organising committee as well as to the key politicians — Annastacia Palaszczuk, Trad and Environment Minister Leeanne Enoch — who supported the shindig. But Gore is a name and his discredited propaganda doesn’t prevent him from being a regular invitee to the annual conferences of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Recall that the last one was held in Poland during a particularly cold weather snap.

So now that Gore has left town on his private jet — no doubt some sort of carbon offsets were arranged — state governments and the renewable energy industry, in particular, are in the process of reconsidering their approach to climate change and their interaction with the federal Coalition government.

There is no doubt that most of the renewable energy players were devastated by the May 18 election result. Their hopes, in descending order, were: Labor victory; defeat of Energy Minister Angus Taylor in his seat of Hume in NSW; and the appointment of anyone but Taylor as the next energy minister.

These hopes have been completely dashed.

A vitriolic, misleading and well-funded campaign was waged against Taylor, including the dredging up of snippets from his successful commercial past that were intended to cast doubt on his integrity — indeed, suitability for high office.

In the end, the self-serving, mean-spirited attempt to damage Taylor completely backfired and he was returned to parliament with a swing towards him. Not only does he remain the Energy Minister but his areas of responsibilities have been expanded to include emissions reduction.

One of the problems for the mendicant renewable energy players in dealing with Taylor is that he is just too smart and commercially experienced. He understands the industry like the back of his hand and is happy to query the sometimes faulty advice he receives from the bureaucracy.

He knows that claims that renewable energy-sourced electricity is now cheaper than coal-fired electricity are not correct and that Australia’s electricity generation mix will involve a range of technologies in the future.

He is committed to increasing supply and promoting greater competition to drive down prices. These measures are in line with the recommendations of the report of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission on retail electricity prices.

The renewable energy players will be forced to stand on their own two feet — for a change — and will need to adjust to the new reliability standards that come into play on July 1. Penalties are being imposed on far-flung installations and contributions are expected to fund the additional grid infrastructure required to hook up new wind and solar farms.

The salad days are over for the renewable energy industry, a situation ironically made worse in Queensland by the (temporarily stalled) requirement to use licensed electricians for the installations of large-scale solar farms.

The Palaszczuk government may be committed to a “low-carbon, green growth economy”, but that pales next to its devotion to trade unions.

As for the big energy companies, which also were hoping for a federal Labor win and had geared up accordingly, it’s time for a radical rethink.

Their campaign against the “big stick” legislation — the legislation contains a great deal more, with forced divestment the final option — is being quietly shelved. Co-operation with the Coalition government is now the name of the game.

Next year, Big Al should be able to stay at home. Indeed, next year there may not even be a Climate Week QLD — the state’s taxpayers deserve a break.

In the meantime the Adani project, unsurprisingly, has been given the go-ahead.

SOURCE

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

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

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19 June, 2019

Shutting down middle and blue-collar America

From Biden to Warren, Democrat president wannabes push job-killing pseudo-green policies

Paul Driessen

Vocal activists increasingly drive Democrat Party positions across the public policy spectrum. Print, television, social and click-bait media generally support them, while permitting little debate on liberal proposals or their potential ramifications. Even semi-moderate Joe Biden has been pressured into shifting or flipping his positions on abortion, energy, climate change and other issues, to satisfy far-left factions.

Their policy prescriptions often find ready acceptance in coastal, urban, academic, media and big government circles. But factory workers, blue collar families and Middle America better pay very close attention to how climate change scare stories and proposed Green New Deal programs will impact their energy costs and reliability, jobs, living standards, mobility and personal choices. Warning signs abound.

Reflecting heavy dependence on wind and solar power, German and British electricity prices are already three to four times higher than what the vast majority of American households currently pay – and rising. The exorbitant prices have largely shuttered the UK’s aluminum industry and what’s left of its steel industry. Combined with ever-tougher carbon dioxide emission limits, factory operating costs similarly “threaten the very existence” of Germany’s automobile industry, Volkswagen’s CEO laments.

Nearly 350,000 German families have had their electricity cut off because they cannot afford to pay their power bills. German families and businesses had to cope with 172,000 localized blackouts in 2017. The country has banned fracking (hydraulic fracturing) and imports US coal and Russian natural gas.

In Britain more than 3,000 elderly people die every year because they cannot heat their homes properly, exposing them to constant chilly temperatures that make them more likely to contract and succumb to respiratory or heart disease. The situation is likely to get even worse. In stark contrast, abundant natural gas supplies from the fracking revolution have driven prices down in the USA, saving some 11,000 American lives each winter, according to a recent National Bureau of Economic Research study.

Multiple widespread blackouts over a three-month period in South Australia were caused by the elimination of coal-fired power, 52% reliance on wind turbines, storms, grid instability, and an inability to predict weather conditions or peak power demand. In May 2019, they helped persuade Aussie voters to replace their climate-obsessed government with a conservative coalition that supports fossil fuels.

China, India and other overseas aluminum, steel and vehicle exporters to the EU and US face no climate-driven energy price or emission obstacles. The Paris Climate Agreement does not obligate them to reduce their fossil fuel use or emissions for decades to come, if ever. Indeed, China’s annual increase in “greenhouse gas” emissions is greater than Australia’s total annual nationwide emissions!

Asia’s total GHG emissions now dwarf the USA’s. So even total, painful, job-killing, economy-shackling elimination of US fossil fuels would do nothing to end the steady rise in atmospheric CO2 levels.

Unfortunately, these hard realities have had no effect on people or companies that expect to benefit politically or financially from legislated energy upheavals rooted in manmade climate change alarmism.

New Mexico recently joined California and Hawaii in mandating “renewable” electricity: 50% by 2030, 80% by 2040 and 100% by 2050. Despite the absence of any state mandate, the Northern Indiana Public Service Company wants to replace 1,850 megawatts of affordable 24/7 coal-based electricity with 1,650 MW of expensive, intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar, plus 1,500 MW of backup batteries.

Modern factories, offices, hospitals, schools, households and cities cannot function or survive on starvation energy diets like these. Moreover, claims that wind, solar and battery technologies are clean, climate-friendly, renewable and sustainable are little more than useful fairy tales.

Wind and solar energy are certainly renewable and perpetual. However, the massive amounts of land and raw materials required to harness, store and utilize that energy certainly are not. And many rare earth elements, lithium, cadmium, cobalt and other high-tech metals are extracted and processed by Chinese companies under zero to minimal child labor, fair wage, worker safety and environmental standards.

But all this generally gets swept under the rug, while tsunamis of climate chaos scare stories terrorize children and even a lot of adults into believing human civilization, wildlife and even our planet face annihilation in less than twenty years, unless the world quickly rids itself of fossil fuels.

From Kamala Harris to Bernie Sanders, and now Joe Biden, every Democrat presidential candidate supports some version of the Green New Deal and would have us believe its authoritarian edicts and multi-trillion-dollar price tag are affordable and necessary.

Helping to drive this narrative is billionaire and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg – proud owner of twelve houses, a private jet and helicopter, and a fleet of pricey cars. He intends to give the Sierra Club and other activist groups $500 million to conduct new campaigns to eradicate coal power and block construction of natural gas-fired generators that would otherwise replace coal-fired plants.

In fact, no sooner is one example of climate nonsense debunked, than another dozen take its place.

After decades of frightening visitors with tall tales that Glacier National Park glaciers would all melt away by 2020 or soon thereafter, park rangers are finally acknowledging that the Grinnell, Jackson and other glaciers have actually been growing since 2010. They are now (quietly) removing signs, videos and brochures that featured the (Al) Gorey claims about catastrophic (Michael) Mann-made global warming.

Even the Washington Post has acknowledged that the number of violent (F4-5) tornadoes has declined 40% between the 1950-1984 period and 1985-2018 interval – with not one violent tornado recorded in the USA in 2018, for the first time in history. The United States also enjoyed a record 12-year absence of Category 3-5 hurricanes making landfall, between Wilma in 2005 and Harvey in 2017. Overall, actual evidence shows no upward trend in extreme weather, floods, droughts or sea level rise.

So now we’re being told plant and animal species are disappearing 100 times faster than historic rates, because of manmade climate change – and a million or more are at risk of extinction … out of some eight million that a new UN report claims exist on Earth. There are serious problems with this latest hysteria.

Scientists have actually identified and named only 1.8 million plant and animal species. The other 6.2 million “have no names, have never been identified,” and exist only as bits and bytes in computer models and fear-mongering reports and news stories, forestry ecologist and Greenpeace cofounder Dr. Patrick Moore observed during recent testimony before the House Water, Oceans and Wildlife Subcommittee.

Only 800 or so species have gone extinct in the last five centuries, Dr. Moore added – and most of them were victims of cats, rats, foxes and other invasive species introduced by European colonizers, or on small islands where native species had no defenses and could not escape.

Assuming this pattern will be repeated on a global scale, across entire continents, because of climate change, for a mythical 8 million species ... and plugging those assumptions into computer programs ... isn’t science. It’s garbage – designed and intended to justify eliminating the fossil fuels that provide over 80% of the energy that the United States and world use to produce food, jobs, health and prosperity.

We’re also supposed to swallow pseudo-scientific claims that “surging levels” of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide are creating dangerous hybrid puffer fish, making salmon unable to detect danger, making sharks right-handed and unable to hunt, making Arctic plants “too tall,” making coffee growing impossible in many countries, causing pigs to get skinnier, turning Earth into a super-heated Venus, causing the demise of tropical birds, and many other fearsome stories of White Walkers and Days after Tomorrow.

Sadly, all too many people soak up this nonsense like sponges. (Unkind comedians might suggest they have the brain cells of a sponge.) But to have these tales ... and the voters and politicians who believe and propagate them ... drive our energy and economic policies would be the cruelest joke of all.

Via email

Place blame for recent tornadoes where It belongs

Tragically, there is nothing unique about the number or severity of more than 55 devastating tornadoes that tore through the outskirts of Kansas City, swept through Indiana and Ohio, and stretched eastward from Idaho and Colorado across eight states late last month.

Nor, unfortunately, is there anything unique regarding all-too-alluring temptations for some politicos to blame such events on “climate change,” a term that has come to replace “global warming” in name only.

Flash back to Al Gore lamenting during a June 2013 Rhode Island energy and environment conference following a destructive Moore, Oklahoma twister that scientists “won’t let us yet” link tornadoes to climate change. Gore claimed that shoddy historical statistics resulted in failures to connect “these record-breaking tornadoes and the climate crisis.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., wasted no time attributing this latest raft of tornadoes to climate change after a hazard warning was issued for Washington, D.C. The New York Democrat immediately released an Instagram video. “The climate crisis is real y’all,” she said. “Guess we’re at casual tornadoes in growing regions of the country?”

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez added, “Other regions deal with wildfires, tornadoes, droughts, etc. But ALL of these threats will be increasing in intensity as climate crisis grows and we fail to act appropriately.”

Democratic 2020 presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., blamed climate change for two tornadoes that hit eastern Alabama. Sanders posted a May 28 statement on his Senate Facebook account. Sanders wrote:

“This is insane: As Oklahoma and Arkansas face catastrophic flooding, and Ohio and Indiana reel from tornados, Trump is trying to undermine the very science that proves climate change is real. We need policy based on facts, not rightwing ideology.”

So okay. Let’s review some real scientific facts.

For starters, the 2019 tornado season wasn’t a result of unusually warm spring temperatures, but rather, just the opposite conditions.

As explained by meteorologist Dr. Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama, tornado conditions exist only when cool and warm air masses collide. Writing in Fox News, he notes that the perfect conditions for this existed this year after winter has refused to lose its grip on the western United States.

May temperatures across the nation were close to 2 degrees Fahrenheit below normal. In addition, atypical snow conditions extended from Northern Michigan through Colorado to the Sierra of California into late May. Together, these circumstances produced a persistently lingering cold air mass.

Tornadoes occur when severe thunderstorms known as supercells create spiraling updrafts causing strong wind shear at the boundaries between colliding warm and cold air masses. The warm air rotates upwards at increasing speeds until it punches through the colder air layer.

However, thunderstorms rarely produce tornadoes, and lacking cold air protagonists, they are virtually unknown altogether in hot and humid tropical regions.

Every year, springtime thunderstorms in Central and Southeast U.S. have plenty of warm, moist air to draw on from the Gulf of Mexico. This year, a large field of cold air hung around longer than usual.

Roy Spencer notes that a very slow U.S. warming trend in recent decades has been accompanied by fewer of these cold springtime air masses over the West. According to National Weather Service statistics, the long-term trend of strong (EF3) to violent (EF5) tornadoes has been decidedly downward, with 2018 experiencing record low activity.

This year’s spike in tornadoes is made far more dramatic in comparison with 2018 which was the first year recorded without a single violent tornado since record-keeping first began during the late 1800s.

Last year also experienced near-lows in terms of overall tornado damage.

The only better ones were 2017, 2016, and 2015.

Although NOAA reported a slow decline in tornado frequencies between 1954 and 2012, the actual annual numbers — those of weaker ones in particular — are uncertain prior to the advent of radar-detection technology.

Nevertheless, Patrick Marsh, a Storm Prediction Center meteorologist, reported that outbreaks of 50 or more tornadoes really aren’t uncommon, having happened 63 times in U.S. history. There are even three instances of more than 100 twisters in single years.

Roy Spencer reminds us once again not to conflate three decade or- longer climate cycles with seasonal weather which naturally varies from year to year. He writes, “The alarmist claims of AOC, Gore, and Sanders are not just speculative; they are opposed by our observations and by meteorological theory.”

As for that all too ever popular Trump-blaming mantra, perhaps he instead deserves some credit for making America’s very recent climate great again. According to the U.S. Natural Hazard statistics, last year also witnessed a below 30-year average in deaths caused not only by tornadoes, but also from hurricanes, flooding and summer overheating.

On the other hand, don’t count on the president getting cut any cool-headed climate slack either way. Staunch critics will probably still complain that the U.S. experienced a rise in deaths due to extra cold and long winter weather.

SOURCE

Climate security confusion abounds

The news media has been reporting what looks like a conflict within the Trump Administration, over the national security implications of climate change. Supposedly the conflict is between military and intelligence reports describing serious security implications and the Administrations position that climate change is not a serious threat.

There may in fact be no conflict. Here is how I see it. Hypothetical security vulnerability is the big confusion!

The military has a practice called “vulnerability analysis” in which a facility, region or system is assessed via a hypothetical thought experiment. The hypothesis can be extreme and often is. I have done a few that were completely unrealistic, but these analyses can still be useful.

These climate alarmist military and intelligence reports are just this sort of vulnerability analysis. They are all of this logical form:

“Suppose an extreme case of climate change happens, what adverse security effects might it cause?”

Approached in this way it is no surprise that many facilities, regions and systems are classified as vulnerable to some form of hypothetical extreme climate change or other (there being so many).

There are certainly regions that would be hard hit by extreme droughts, naval bases unprepared for fantastic sea level rise, airfields that would be damaged by catastrophic floods, etc. in the endless list of hypothetical extreme climate change impacts it might be hard to find one that had no security implications.

The point is that these hypothetical vulnerability analyses are in no sense realistic threat assessments. Not if these myriad extreme climate changes are not going to occur, and there is no reason to think that they will.

This is the Trump Administration’s position. Actionable national security threat assessments are based on what is actually happening or very likely to happen. They are never based on speculation, worst case scenarios, etc.

That these are not threat assessments calling for actual action needs to be made clear. As extreme hypothesis vulnerability analyses they might be okay.

The difference between a real threat assessment and a hypothetical vulnerability assessment is a huge confusion. (Confusion is my field.)

Note that we have pretty much the same deep confusion with the National Climate Assessment. The authors were specifically instructed to look at worst case scenarios, which are not a basis for action. Unfortunately these hypothetical scenarios were reported as real predictions, in part because some people actually believe them.

In the case of the IPCC’s October 2018 report that has generated the “climate crisis” or “climate emergency” scare, the confusion is different. The Paris Accord has targets that range from 2 degrees C of warming down to 1.5 degrees. The IPCC was tasked with saying what that difference looked like as far as the computer models were concerned.

Predictably the IPCC reported that there would be more damage with 2 degrees than with 1.5 degrees. But the differences were relatively small, certainly not catastrophic, which is why 2 degrees is still the target. They also said that hitting the 1.5 degree target would be very difficult.

In the “climate crisis” scare these small differences have morphed into 1.5 degrees of warming being the threshold to catastrophe. There is no basis for this whatever in the IPCC report, but the political stampede is on, led by the Green New Deal.

In short, climate change policy is a sea of confusion, especially with regard to national security.

SOURCE

Saving elk with coal mine reclamation

Contrary to what radical environmentalists would have you believe, rural property owners care deeply about the environment.

They’ve lived on their property oftentimes for generations. They see more wildlife in a year than many city dwellers may see in an entire lifetime.

Thus it’s sad to see when leftists, the vast majority urbanites, impugn their character as being callous toward the environment.

In episode 2 of CFACT’s “Conservation Nation” YouTube series, host Gabriella Hoffman interviews Leon Boyd and his volunteers who have been working to make reclaimed coal fields in Virginia suitable habitat for growing numbers of elk.

Private landowners have leased land to create habitat, while local volunteers and visitors from far and wide come to lend a helping hand with their efforts. Even the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals, and Energy has pitched in, allowing for these formerly-mined lands to be used for conservation purposes.

The program has been so successful that from 2014 to 2019, the elk herd has actually grown from 71 elk to now around 200. A stunning free-market success story, thanks to Leon’s and his volunteers’ work with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.

In the video, Leon Boyd explains how the region has been working hard to recover from Obama’s disastrous “war on coal” – an ill-conceived political effort that hammered many hard working folks.

Notes Leon, “Southwest Virginia has thrived on coal for so many years and depended on coal, and with the last few years with the coal and the gas industry being on a downturn and a lot of jobs lost from our area and people leaving, by having the elk and the deer in places that we’re trying to put together, we see a lot folks travel here now to spend the weekend and either ride the trails or birdwatch or just wildlife enthusiasts out here seeing whatever may be on the properties.”

The mantra of the green agenda for America’s forests and wilderness is “don’t touch!” But history tells us that environmental solutions are best fostered when humans are empowered with market incentives and strong protections of their property rights — not when they are prohibited from having any interaction with the natural world whatsoever.

SOURCE

Skeptical Australian Radio commentator slammed over climate change remarks on TV science panel

That weed Karoly has been a Warmist from wayback. He is far from an unbiased scientist. Note that all he points to is raised levels of CO2. But nobody disputes that. What about the global temperature? Is that rising? Crickets. (It's falling). Typical Greenie deviousness

His argument that Australia is contributing more than its "fair share" of global warming is also faulty. What he is referring to is again CO2 emissions. And skeptics see CO2 as being primarily plant food -- which it undoubtedly is -- and not as any significant influence on global temperature. There have been long periods when CO2 has shot up while temperatuers remained stable -- the 30 relatively recent years of 1945 to 1975, for instance. Karoly has his head in an unmentionable place

Alan Jones copped an absolute roasting on tonight’s episode of Q&A — despite not even being on the panel.

The radio shock jock was slammed by a panel of science experts for downplaying human impact on climate change, after he said we only contribute three per cent to greenhouse gas emissions during his own Q&A appearance last month.

“I saw the radio commentator Alan Jones on TV recently, and he said that 0.04 per cent of the world’s atmosphere is CO2,” the questioner said. “‘Three per cent of that human beings create around the world, and of that, 1.3 per cent is created by Australians’. Is that correct, and if so, is human activity really making a difference?”

Professor David Karoly, an Australian atmospheric scientist based at CSIRO, bluntly responded: “Not everything Jones says is factually accurate.”

Prof Karoly said that, while it’s correct that 0.04 per cent of the world’s atmosphere is carbon dioxide, Jones’ statistics around humans causing climate change — and the role Australians specifically play — is completely false.

“I am a climate scientist, and Alan Jones is wrong. The reason he’s wrong is because we know that yes, the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere is 400 parts per million … and that corresponds to about 0.04 per cent.

“All his other numbers were wrong. We know that carbon dioxide concentration 100 years ago was about 280 parts per million, or 0.028 per cent, but it’s grown 120 parts per million — or about 40 per cent — and that 40 per cent increase is due to human activity. We know that for absolute certain.” [Real scientists never know anything for absolute certain]

In other words, Prof Karoly was saying we’ve technically increased greenhouse gases by 40 per cent, not the three per cent figure Jones used.

The scientist also slammed the radio host for implying that Australians contribute a negligible amount to global warming.

“Australians have contributed about 1.5 per cent. Now that sounds like a small amount, but Australia only makes up 0.3 per cent of the population, and we’re contributing 1.5 per cent roughly of greenhouse gases,” said Prof Karoly. “So is it fair that 0.3 per cent of the global population has contributed 1.5 per cent? We’ve contributed much more than our fair share.”

Particle physicist Brian Cox said people think the climate is overly “simple”, which is a big part of the problem. “But actually, the climate is extremely complicated. These models are very, very complicated and constantly evolving.

“I think many people assume you can just work out what the climate’s going to do, like it’s common sense. But it’s actually a very complex system.” [Too complex to support any firm prediction, in fact]

SOURCE

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

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

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18 June, 2019

Lord Monckton accuses the Pope of supporting genocide – And says Carbon dioxide is NOT a ‘satanic gas’

An open letter to His Holiness Pope Francis about the weather, by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley – Former advisor to UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and a clever Latinist

Christopherus Monachorum Brencleiensis servus Servi servorum Dei Servi servorum Dei salutem pluriman dat.

Now that the amiable British habit of talking about the weather – like so much that originates in these inventive islands – has been adopted worldwide, perhaps I may sound a respectful cautionary note.

A few days ago, at yet another meeting about global warming, er, climate change, um, climate disruption, aargh, climate emergency at the elegant palace of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican gardens, Your Holiness saw fit to stray from the missio canonica of the successors of St Peter, which is to uphold the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Faith.

Your Holiness is reported as having told chief executives of oil companies and investment houses that inflicting heavy taxes on their corporate emissions of the satanic gas carbon dioxide was “essential” to prevent dangerous “global warming”. With respect, that was off message.

What is more, Your Holiness proclaimed that “we have collectively failed to listen to the fruits of scientific analysis, and doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain.”

Well, I have listened carefully, and I can inform Your Holiness that science is divided on the climate question. A small number of totalitarian profiteers of doom in various self-serving national academies have issued pompous statements about it, but a large number of papers from reputable scientists, and a larger amount of hard data, suggest that global warming is and will continue to be a non-event.

Consider the warming from 1850-2011. It was just 0.75 degrees, equivalent to 1 degree of warming in response to doubled CO2 concentration. That is less than a third of the 3.35 degrees that is the totalitarian scientists’ grossly inflated midrange prediction.

The totalitarians got the science wrong. They made a strikingly elementary error of physics. They forgot the Sun was shining. So they misallocated the feedback response to the Sun, erroneously counting it as part of the feedback response to greenhouse gases. Their predictions should be one-third of their current midrange estimates.

What that means, Your Holiness, is that the global warming that will happen between now and the exhaustion of accessible resources of coal, oil and gas will be small, slow, harmless and net-beneficial.

The same cannot be said of the insane policies currently being inflicted upon the world’s blameless population by crazed Western extremists, now unwisely supported by Your Holiness.

Why has Your Holiness never spoken out in condemnation of the World Bank, which, from 2010 onward, refused and still refuses – citing global warming as their rationale – to lend to developing countries so that they can build coal-fired power stations? This dismal institution has decided that from this year it will not lend for oil or gas projects either, for the same reason.

And what is the effect of this wicked policy? Let me repeat the figures I gave recently here. According to the International Energy Agency, 1.3 billion people – one in six worldwide – has no access to electrical power, even though the Agency defines “access” as the ability to turn on no more than one 60-Watt lightbulb for an average of just four hours a day.

The World Health Organization estimates that 4.3 million people die every year from particulate pollution in open cooking fires because they have no mains electricity or gas, and that another 500,000 women die in childbirth each year because they have no electricity. These are just a small fraction of the tens of millions who die in developing countries each year because they cannot so much as turn on a light.

In darkest sub-Saharan Africa, where there is hardly any electricity, life expectancy is about 65 years, compared with 80 years in the electrified West. And it’s no good telling third-world countries they should install solar panels and windfarms: the electricity produced by these boondoggles is up to five times costlier than proper electricity from coal-fired power stations. They can’t afford it (and nor, come to that, can we).

A few more scientific facts. First, sea level, the mother of all scares. The sea is not rising at a rate equivalent to 33 cm/century, as the totalitarians claim. It is rising at only 11 cm/century.

Floods? Schumds. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, neither the frequency nor the intensity of flooding has changed or will change as a result of global warming.

Droughts, then? The most comprehensive survey ever conducted, just five years ago, showed that in the previous 35 years the percentage of global land area under drought had declined.

Food production? Output of all staple crops is increasing rapidly worldwide. Warmer weather is good for them, because they breathe in carbon dioxide. CO2 is not a satanic gas. It is plant food.

Forest fires? The acreages destroyed in forest fires have been declining worldwide for 30 years.

Hurricanes, tropical cyclones and tornadoes? All in decline. Why? Because warmer weather reduces the temperature differentials that power such storms.

Deaths from extreme weather? Over the past 100 years, the number of weather-related deaths has plummeted worldwide. What is more, research for the EU Commission found – to the unelected Kommissars’ horror – that in the next 100 years deaths from global warming will be comfortably outstripped by lives saved from cold weather. More people will live than will die if the world continues to warm, because warm weather is better than cold weather.

Cuddly polar bears? They’re not cuddly, but there are now thought to be 35,000 of them, compared with just 5000 in the 1940s. Hardly the profile of a species at imminent threat of extinction.

Given the egregious lack of evidence for harm caused by warmer weather, and the overwhelming evidence that current global-warming policies are killing tens of millions, I invite Your Holiness to speak up for the poor who are poor, and dying, because the policies Your Holiness imprudently advocates are not just scientifically unjustifiable, not just theologically off message. They are – not to put too fine a point on it – actually genocidal.

SOURCE

Markets can handle climate change

Despite the concern about manmade climate change, surprisingly little attention is paid to emerging technology that could extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into useful products like petrochemicals and synthetic fuels.

Top-down policy solutions like carbon taxes and the recently defeated “Green New Deal” plausibly could reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, but, as with all government mandates, would be costly to implement and would undoubtedly generate unintended consequences that do more harm than good.

While environmental lobbyists push their favorite plans for doing something — anything — to avert catastrophe, the private sector is quietly finding innovative ways to limit the rise in the average global temperature to 1.5 degrees centigrade (compared to pre-industrial times).

According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 100 billion to 1,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide must be removed from the atmosphere this century to meet that warming target. At first glance, extracting carbon might seem like a pipe dream, but a process for doing just that is nearing commercialization.

Three startup companies seeking to deploy direct-air-capture systems have attracted substantial capital since global emissions hit a new high last year. One of the startups, a Canada-based company, has raised $68 million in private equity from investors, including multibillionaire Bill Gates, the venture arms of oil companies Chevron and Occidental Petroleum, the mining company BHP Billiton, several equity firms, and private family foundations.

While the precise technologies being developed vary among the startups, they all share the basic concept of giant fans pulling air across a contact surface that binds with carbon-dioxide molecules. The contact material is then heated to unbind the carbon dioxide so that it can be collected and used. The Canadian firm is developing a process for using carbon dioxide to achieve industrial-scale production of synthetic fuel.

A Switzerland startup has raised $50.1 million and now operates 14 plants around the world. A New York-based company has raised $42 million and is in the middle of further fundraising.

Until recently, extracting one ton of carbon cost $600 to $700 per ton, but the Canadian company says its process can reduce the cost to less than $100. It expects further cost reductions as the systems are deployed and the manufacturing process scales up. The company plans to announce the sites of two commercial direct-air-capture plants later this year. It says facilities can be placed in any country and in any climate.

While other ways of reducing carbon dioxide are possible — for instance, planting more trees and storing carbon in topsoil or the sea — direct-air-capture plants offer cost-effective options, though an estimated 20 or 30 very large facilities would be needed to pull 5 billion to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the air every year.

While converting carbon dioxide into synthetic fuel itself requires considerable energy, the process could be powered with renewables to reduce its cost. Any carbon dioxide remaining after conversion would be pumped underground into geologic formations and depleted oil and gas wells.

Global consumption of fossil fuels is increasing, especially in India, China and other industrializing nations, along with atmospheric carbon dioxide. But environmental alarmists tend to forget that CO2 has benefits as well as costs. It is essential for plant life, and more of it promises to raise global crop yields, thereby increasing food production. Nowadays, CO2 is being piped directly from a petroleum refinery in Holland to grow roses in a nearby greenhouse.

The bottom line is that the information that price signals transmit about climate change supplies alert entrepreneurs with incentives to search for innovative ways to adapt to projected rising sea levels, droughts, wildfires and other predicted disasters. It is often better for governments to do nothing, especially if what they do is impose new taxes and heavy-handed regulations to address perceived collective-action problems.

But government inaction doesn’t mean that nothing will be done. Figuring out ways to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is just one of many examples showing that, left to their own devices, market processes can discover solutions that even well-intended policymakers predictably miss.

SOURCE

Biden Not Alone: All Dem Climate Policies Are Plagiarized

Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., tells Capitol Hill reporters in Washington Wednesday, Sept. 23, 1987 that he is quitting his campaign disclosures that he committed plagiarism. Mrs. Jill Biden, his wife stands beside him. (AP Photo/John Duricka)
Besides his obvious affinity for plagiarism, it should be no surprise that Joe Biden stole his ideas for dealing with climate change. He couldn't possibly have any of his own. He doesn't have anywhere near the background or, to be honest, the intelligence to comprehend the necessary physics and chemistry. He could barely make it through law school (without plagiarizing). And, all apologies to attorneys, a Ph.D. in physics or chemistry is somewhat more of a heavy lift than an LLD.

Undoubtedly it was the former vice president's staff that placed the stolen material in the unwitting candidate's hands. (One can only wonder how long this clueless crew will last.) But they weren't alone, I would wager. The process was probably similar to virtually every other politician in our government with a very few exceptions, like Rand Paul, who is an ophthalmologist and we can assume made it through a number of upper-level science courses. The rest of our pols are simply relying on what others tell them and, even more, of course, what's popular—the very opposite of science.

Nevertheless, the myriad Democratic presidential aspirants are all busy trying to out-green each other, oblivious to the actual situation on that ground known as Earth. Facts don't matter. Armageddon is twelve years away or, in Biden's case (or his "researchers"), coming to us by 2050. I wonder if any of them have read anything by Denmark's Bjorn Lomborg—a longtime genuine climate researcher—who wrote in the New York Post only last week:

Ever notice how, in the last decade or so, we quietly stopped just having storms and started having “extreme weather events”? It feels like no temperature drop or seasonal downpour is too small for the media to slap a scary name on it and issue minute-by-minute warnings. Well, now some news outlets and campaigners are trying to do the exact same thing for climate change itself.
“Global warming” isn’t scary enough to push through the expensive bills campaigners want. Instead of “climate change,” The Guardian has now decided to call it “climate emergency.” And the British newspaper isn’t alone: Democratic presidential candidates including Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris use similar language, as does Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

What the Democratic candidates are doing is exploiting climate for political gain and actually hurting the environment in the process, not to mention the economy. Not only is their approach anti-science, but it is also a dumbing down of our culture, especially our all-too-gullible young people who already have had their brains drilled by a ridiculously biased educational system.

The candidates and everybody else—especially AOC—might want to have a look at another Lomborg column in the Australian: "A mountain of money won't change the climate."

As for plagiarism, as a professional writer for fifty years, you can assume I'm not very fond of it. I would rather flunk my Wasserman test than vote for Joe Biden—or listen to a word he says for that matter. In fact, I won't listen to or read the words of any plagiarist (like that creep on the Scarborough show and the historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose) for even one minute. It's an unforgivable sin for me.

But on the general subject, the great (not LATE) Tom Lehrer had the last word in his immortal "Lobachevsky." (Click and play, if you haven't heard it. And if you have, I know you will want to hear it again. Who wouldn't?)

Plagiarize, Let no one else's work evade your eyes, Remember why the good lord made your eyes, So don't shade your eyes, But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize - Only be sure always to call it please "research."

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How NPR, Washington Post, Bloomberg and other media botched reporting on EPA’s ‘ban’ of 12 ‘bee-killing’ neonicotinoid insecticides

If recent headlines are the measure, advocacy groups making a case that bees are endangered because of the misuse of pesticides just scored a significant victory. On May 20, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that after a 6-year-long legal battle with anti-pesticide activists, it endorsed a voluntary withdrawal of 12 insecticides by a group of agri-chemical companies that a coalition of environmental groups had blamed for causing health problems in bees.

George Kimbrell, Center for Food Safety legal director and lead counsel in the case against the EPA, immediately claimed that that the settlement represented a massive victory in support of his claims that neonics are ‘harmful’ and ‘toxic’ chemicals. According to a post on the CFS site:

[The] cancellation of these …. pesticides is a hard-won battle and landmark step in the right direction,’ said …. Kimbrell …. ‘But the war on toxics continues: We will continue to fight vigilantly to protect our planet, bees, and the environment from these and similar dangerous toxins.

Facts aside—we will address that—Kimbrell’s casting of the court agreement as a victory for anti-pesticide campaigners was the narrative angle adopted by much of the media. According to reports that flooded the Internet, from the Washington Post to fringe activist sites, the EPA ‘banned’ 12 ‘dangerous’ neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides that environmental activists blame for bee health issues.

Unsurprisingly, CFS acolytes like Care2 crowed in its headline and blog about the success in bringing American regulators to heel. VICTORY! EPA Cancels 12 Bee-Killing Pesticides, Care2 wrote on its activist social community site:

The environmentalists, food safety organizations and beekeepers spent the last 6 years holding the EPA accountable for its lack of diligence in preventing or addressing bee Colony Collapse Disorder and to demand that the EPA protect livelihoods, rural economies and the environment.

Most mainstream media outlets parroted the CFS line. Business Insider’s Aria Bendix told readers, The US just banned 12 pesticides that are like nicotine for bees. Bloomberg reported, EPA Curbs Use of 12 Bee-Harming Pesticides. According to Washington Post energy reporter Dino Grandoni,”EPA now blocks a dozen products containing pesticides thought harmful to bees. The respected publication The Scientist headlined its article, EPA Cancels Registrations for 12 Neonicotinoid Pesticides, noting in the first line:

Out of concern for bees, the Environmental Protection Agency announced on May 20 that the registrations for 12 neonicotinoid-based products used as pesticides in agriculture would be canceled…

But not one of those articles, or dozens of others in news sites across the world, accurately represented what the EPA actually said or the actions that it took.

What did the EPA say and do

The EPA brokered a settlement between activists and companies that manufactured the pesticides: Syngenta, Valent and Bayer. As the agency noted to the GLP in an email, this action amounted to a voluntary withdrawal by the manufacturers; there was no ‘cancellation’ initiated by EPA and no ‘blocking’ of products as has been widely claimed.

The EPA also rejected the claim made by Kimbrell that the 12 neonicotinoid insecticides pose significant harm to bees as The Scientist and many other media outlets claimed; in fact in an email exchange with the Genetic Literacy Project, the agency took pains to underscore that no research supported that allegation.

There are two approaches for cancelling pesticide registrations under federal law: voluntary cancellation of a pesticide product or use and pesticide cancellation under EPA’s own initiative. Voluntary cancellations are by far the most common. Cancellation under EPA’s own initiative [which did not occur in this case] begins when the Agency has identified unreasonable adverse effects from registered uses, and the registrants have not made necessary changes (to the extent changes are possible) to the terms and conditions of the registration to address the unreasonable adverse effects. EPA has not identified unreasonable adverse effects associated with the 12 voluntarily cancelled products.

Biased or botched representations from fringe environmental groups is standard operating practice. That’s not surprising. After all, these professional protestors often promote an ideological agenda even if it conflicts with science. They sometimes do get the science right, but often the bottom line is whether its position on an issue serves its institutional interests, helps with fund raising or otherwise stirs its activist base.

But here’s the disappointing twist: Many reputable journalists and globally respected news organizations fumbled the story as well, acting more like enablers rather than skeptical inquirers with a commitment to truth, ideology be damned. Perhaps that is ‘old school.’ In this case, many journalists parroted the claims in news releases sent out by anti-pesticide ideologues, such as CFS, distorting what the EPA and the presiding judge actually decided in this case.

Celebratory comments from Kimbrell aside, an expensive multi-year court battle initiated by environmental activists to try to force the EPA to ban or heavily restrict neonicotinoids on the basis of their alleged harm ended with a whimper—an affirmation by the judge in the case that there is no evidence that the pesticides cause demonstrable harm. No ban was ordered. The ‘perpetrating’ companies voluntarily agreed to halt the marketing of 12 of the least used neoncotinoids that they sold in the US.

A balanced reading of the EPA’s action is that the brokered settlement was a major blow to activist anti-neonicotinoid efforts. The voluntary agreement was reached on the basis of what amounted to a technical process violation: the EPA had failed to consult other federal agencies in what is a truly byzantine process before it originally approved 59 neonic insecticides. The various companies involved in the settlement agreed to withdraw 12 of the approved neonics. Two aren’t even sold in the US and five were never commercialized. Most of the rest are barely in use. The court pointedly rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that neonics threaten pollinators. The effective impact on the companies and on farmers who rely on these insecticides: essentially zero.

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We Shouldn't Be Surprised Renewables Make Energy Expensive Since That's Always Been The Greens' Goal

It's a feature, not a bug

Michael Shellenberger

The Green Party’s success in last weekend’s European elections will likely result in demands to expand and extend decades-old subsidies to renewables.

Like a lot of people, I used to think that subsidies to promote the switch from fossil fuels to solar and wind would be a one-time thing. Once a solar or wind farm was built, I thought, it would produce electricity forever, without further subsidy, because sunlight and wind are free. Renewables would thus allow a “sustainable” and even “circular” economy without waste or mining because everything would be recycled.

But it turns out that only nuclear can produce sufficient clean energy to power a circular economy.

That’s partly because nuclear plants have seen their efficiency increase dramatically. Nuclear plants used to operate for just 50% of the year. Now, thanks to greater experience in operations and maintenance, they operate 93% of the year.

Nuclear plants were expected to run for 40 years, but thanks to greater experience, they’re expected to run for 80. And simple changes to equipment allowed the amount of power produced by existing nuclear plants in the US to increase the equivalent of adding eight full-sized reactors.

By contrast, the output of solar panels declines one percent every year, for inherently physical reasons, and they as well as wind turbines are replaced roughly every two decades.

As for circularity, solar panels and wind turbines are rarely recycled because the energy and labor required to do so are much more expensive than just buying raw materials.

As a result, the vast majority of solar panels and wind turbines are either sent to landfills or join the global electronic waste stream where they are dumped on poor communities in developing nations.

And that’s just at the level of the solar and wind equipment. At a societal level, the value of energy from solar and wind declines the more of it we add to the electrical grid.

The underlying reason is physical. Solar and wind produce too much energy when we don’t need it and not enough when we do.

In 2013, a German economist predicted that the economic value of solar would drop by a whopping 50% when it became just 15% of electricity and that the value of wind would decline 40% once it rose to 30% of electricity.

Six years later, the evidence that solar and wind are increasing electricity prices in the real world, often without reducing emissions, is piling up.

In 2017, The Los Angeles Times reported that California’s electricity prices had risen sharply, and hinted it might have to do with the deployment of renewables.

In 2018, I reported that renewables had contributed to electricity prices rising 50% in Germany and five times more in California than in the rest of the US despite generating just 17% of the state’s electricity.

And in April, a research institute at the University of Chicago led by a former Obama administration economist found solar and wind were making electricity significantly more expensive across the United States.

The cost to consumers of renewables has been staggeringly high.

Two weeks ago, Der Spiegel reported that Germany spent $36 billion per year on renewables over the last five years, and yet only increased the share of electricity from solar and wind by 10 percentage points.

It’s been a similar story in the US. "All in all,” wrote the University of Chicago economists, “consumers in the 29 states had paid $125.2 billion more for electricity than they would have in the absence of the policy."

Some renewable energy advocates protest that more evidence is needed to prove that it is renewables and not some hidden factor that is making electricity expensive.

But there is a growing consensus among economists and independent analysts that solar and wind are indeed making electricity more expensive for two reasons: they are unreliable, thus requiring 100% back-up, and energy-dilute, thus requiring extensive land, transmission lines, and mining.

After The Los Angeles Times failed to plainly connect the dots between California’s simultaneous rise in electricity prices and renewables, a leading economist with the University of California pointed out the obvious.

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

Renewables Are For Degrowth

We shouldn’t be surprised that renewables are making energy expensive. For as long as Greens have been advocating renewables they have viewed their high cost as a feature, not a bug.

Environmentalists have for decades argued that energy is too cheap and must be made more expensive in order to protect the environment.

Greens viewed energy as the source of humankind’s destruction of the natural world and sought to restrict energy supplies in order to slow and eventually reverse the destruction.

Indeed, the reason environmentalists turned against nuclear energy in the 1960s was that it was cheap and effectively infinite.

In the early 1970s, the Sierra Club’s Executive Director advocated scaring the public about nuclear to increase regulations to make it more expensive. And that’s what his organization, and many others, proceeded to do over the next four decades.

But Greens got the relationship between energy and the environment backward.

As people consume higher levels of energy the overall environmental impact is overwhelmingly positive, not negative. As we consume greater amounts of energy we can live in cities, stop using wood as fuel, and afford to have fewer children.

And as humans use more energy for agriculture in the form of tractors and fertilizers, we are able to grow more food on less land, allowing marginal lands to return to grasslands, forests, and wildlife.

Over time, rising electricity consumption, such as for high-speed trains in population-dense places like Europe and Asia, drives the transition from fossil fuels to zero-emissions nuclear.

Engineers and other critics of renewables often assume Greens are simply misinformed. Many if not most of them are. I certainly was.

Few university environmental studies students today, for example, ever learn of the mostly positive relationship between rising energy consumption and environmental protection.

Fewer learn that the energy density of the fuel, whether wood, coal, sunlight, wind or uranium, determine energy’s environmental impact.

Because sunlight is energy-dilute, solar panels are the most extractive of all energy resources, requiring 17 times the resources as nuclear while returning just 2% the energy invested.

But the ideologically-driven leadership of European Greens and American environmentalists knows renewables make energy expensive and view raising energy prices as a high priority.

In 1994, then-Vice President Al Gore pushed an energy tax as a central plank in the Clinton administration’s environmental agenda, which later evolved into a complicated and corrupt “cap and trade” proposal. Such taxes hurt the poor the most and were wildly unpopular.

As energy taxes failed politically, environmentalists in the US and Greens in Europe focused instead on subsidizing or mandating renewables.

At bottom, renewables make electricity expensive by returning so little energy relative to the energy invested. For instance, solar panels with storage deliver just 1.6 times as much energy as is invested as compared to the 75 times more energy delivered with nuclear.

Greens and environmentalists also seek to make food, another form of energy, more expensive. They do so by making agriculture more labor-intensive, land-intensive, and resource-intensive.

Moving to organics, as Greens demand, and away from synthetic fertilizer to manure, would require doubling the amount of land required for agriculture. Currently, humans use a whopping 38% of the ice-free surface of the earth for agriculture.

Moving to organics would thus decimate the 15% of the ice-free surface of the Earth that humans have to date protected for wildlife conservation, and destroy much beyond that, too.

Making farming more labor-intensive would take humankind back toward an agrarian economy where far more people work in farming, and everybody is much poorer.

Unlike the original New Deal, a Green New Deal would thus result in what Greens call “de-growth,” not growth.

The idea of de-growth came out of efforts by Malthusian Greens in the 1960s and 70s to persuade developing nations to cede control of their natural resources to Earth scientists under the auspices of the United Nations.

Originally the Green Party in Britain advocated “deindustrialization, a return to living in small peasant communities, the sterilization of women and an end to all immigration.”

It was only in the last decade that Greens started insisting that the renewables transition would “create jobs” as part of a Green New Deal.

What they rarely mention is that the jobs are usually low-paying and low-skill, like spreading low-yield solar and wind collectors across landscapes, or collecting and spreading manure at organic farms.

Circling Down

There is a perfect fit between the abstract physical theories, economic predictions, and real-world effects of renewables.

It was predictable that energy-dilute renewable fuels like sunlight and wind would require far more land than either fossil fuels or nuclear, and they do.

It was predictable that renewables with such a low return-on-energy-invested would fail to produce enough energy to make recycling worthwhile, and they have.

And it was predictable that such unreliable technologies would make energy so expensive, and they did.

Consider that while our high-energy economy can produce solar panels and wind turbines, a low-energy economy cannot.

Imagine solar panels powering the mining, trucks, and factories needed to manufacture solar panels. There would hardly be any energy left over for society’s other needs.

In that sense, the renewables-powered economy is circular, but not in a way that produces abundant energy for infinite recycling.

Rather, renewables-powered economies are circular in the sense of spiraling downward, as in a drain, or like a snake eating its tail until there is nothing left.

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

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17 June, 2019

Syrup Is as Canadian as a Maple Leaf. That Could Change With the Climate

Another NYT scare below. It is highly likely that the changing seasons noted below are part of a natural fluctuation. Nobody is even trying to correlate the changes with CO2 levels. And even if there is a real decline in syrup production, it's not going to bother anybody much. Most syrup sold is ersatz, a factory product. We read: "In the United States, consumers generally prefer imitation syrups, likely because of the significantly lower cost and sweeter flavour"

UPDATE: It seems that the "decline" fears did not work out. We read: "Maple syrup production rises, despite shorter season. US maple syrup production increased slightly this year, even though the sap-collecting season was shorter than last year’s, the US Department of Agriculture said. The country produced 4.2 million gallons, up 1 percent from 2018."

A growing body of research suggests that warming temperatures linked to climate change may significantly shrink the range where it’s possible to make maple syrup.

In fact, climate change is already making things more volatile for syrup producers. In 2012, maple production fell by 54 percent in Ontario and by 12.5 percent in Canada overall, according to data from the Canadian government, because of an unusually warm spring.

Canada produces roughly 70 percent of the world’s maple syrup. That was worth about $370 million in 2017.

Warm weather can hurt syrup production because the process depends on specific temperature conditions: daytime highs above freezing with nighttime lows below freezing. This specific variation?—?which tends to happen as winter turns to spring, and fall into winter?—?causes pressure differences in the trees that allow the sap to flow. And it’s the sap that the farmers boil to create maple syrup.

To release the sap, maple producers make a small hole in the tree and insert a tap that allows it to spill out. But there’s only a small window of time when conditions are right.

“You’re really only talking six to eight weeks,” said Mark Isselhardt, a sugar maple expert at the University of Vermont. “Everyday that you don’t get sap flow has the potential to really impact the total yield for that operation.”

But because of climate change, some years those key temperatures are more elusive.

Instead of six or eight weeks to produce syrup in 2012, the Fultons had just 13 days. “We started the 8th of March and finished the 21st of March,” Mrs. Fulton-Deugo said.

“That type of condition will happen more often and it can have an impact like the impact it had in 2012,” said Daniel Houle, a biologist at the Quebec Ministry of Forests, Wildlife and Parks.

In addition to the shorter tapping window, spring is also arriving earlier. The phenomenon is called season creep and it means that fall ends later as well.

That creates more headaches for producers, and not only in Canada, because the timing of putting in taps is crucial. “I’m in my sixties,” said Helen Thomas, executive director of the New York Maple Producers Association and a syrup producer. “When I was a kid, my dad had the rule that you tapped around March 15th.” This year, they were tapping in late January.

Production techniques, though, are thoroughly modern. For now, that has helped the farm to adapt.

While many imagine sap collecting into metal buckets attached to trees, the Fultons and most other syrup producers now use plastic taps connected to long lines of food-grade plastic tubing. The tubes zigzag through acres of forest from tree to tree before pouring out into a collection tank. Because the system is cleaner than older methods, it allows producers to tap earlier without fear that the trees will plug the holes, the way a scab covers a cut, before the sap begins to flow. On the Fulton’s sugarbush, the taps were in the trees weeks before the sap ran.

To help coax the sap out of the trees, producers use vacuum pumps. “We’ve seen that you get basically double the amount of sap when you use vacuum,” Mr. Isselhardt said.

But the weather conditions still need to be right. And, of course, you still need trees.

Maples need to be about 40 years old before they can be tapped, though they don’t come into their prime, according to Ms. Thomas, until they’re about 90 years old. “If I planted maple trees today, it would be my grandchildren that would be harvesting the sap from them,” she said.

But a recent study suggests that the changing climate is a threat to that process of growth and renewal. Andrew B. Reinmann, an ecologist at the City University of New York, along with colleagues at Boston University and the United States Department of Agriculture, looked at what happens to trees when snowpack declines.

Snowpack is important because, when temperatures dip, it acts as a blanket over the ground that prevents the soil, and the tree roots that reside in it, from freezing. By scraping off snow from some of the forest plots at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire during the first four to six weeks of winter, Dr. Reinmann and his colleagues were able to mimic the delayed snowfall that is predicted by century’s end in the National Climate Assessment.

“After the first year of snow removal, growth rates of the sugar maple trees declined by 40 percent or so, and growth rates remained suppressed between 40 and 55 percent below their growth rates prior to the start of the experiments,” Dr. Reinmann said.

Dr. Reinmann has also been running a separate experiment where he heats up the soils to see if the increase in warmer temperatures linked to an earlier spring would offset losses from frost damage. So far, his results suggest that it doesn’t.

Diane M. Kuehn, a professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, has researched the perceptions of climate change by maple syrup producers. “What I heard frequently from people was that they’re not concerned about themselves during their lifetime,” she said, “But they are concerned about future generations and their families.”

SOURCE

75 Conservative Groups Oppose ‘Any Carbon Tax’ Days After Mitt Romney Was Reportedly ‘Looking At’ One

Dozens of conservative groups signed an open letter opposed to “any carbon tax” bill that Congress might consider.
The letter comes after Republican Utah Sen. Mitt Romney told reporters he was “looking at” a carbon tax bill.
“A carbon tax increases the cost of everything Americans buy and lowers Americans’ effective take home pay,” conservative groups wrote.

Seventy-five conservative groups signed a public letter to Congress opposing “any carbon tax” days after reports that Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney openly considered backing carbon tax bill.

“We oppose any carbon tax,” conservative groups, led by Americans for Tax Reform, wrote in their letter, which was published online Monday morning.

While the letter is not specifically aimed at Romney, it’s meant to warn Republicans that their conservative base is not in favor of taxing carbon dioxide emissions. (RELATED: Mike Bloomberg Devotes $500 Million To Ending Coal Industry, Influencing 2020 Elections)

Only a few GOP lawmakers have backed carbon tax legislation, but there’s been a growing lobbying effort by some groups to get Republicans to back a carbon tax as a way to fight global warming.

Big corporations, including oil and gas companies, have increasingly embraced a carbon tax. Exact proposals vary, but supporters often push carbon taxes in exchange for tax cuts elsewhere, fewer regulations or a liability shield against climate change lawsuits.

U.S. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) speaks at a news conference about the Tobacco to 21 Act, which would raise the minimum age to buy tobacco products and e-cigarettes to 21, on Capitol Hill
U.S. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) speaks at news conference about the Tobacco to 21 Act, which would raise the minimum age to buy tobacco products and e-cigarettes to 21, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., May 8, 2019. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein.

Romney recently told E&E News he was “looking at” carbon tax legislation put forward by Delaware Democratic Sen. Chris Coons — the same legislation Coons co-sponsored with former Arizona GOP Sen. Jeff Flake in 2018.

“Taxes have never been my intent, but we’ll see what he has to say,” Romney said. “I would very much like to see us reduce our carbon emissions globally, and we’ll see if this might help.”

Romney’s remarks got a strong response from conservative activists opposed to carbon taxes, which they say will hit working-class Americans hardest and do little, if anything, to fight global warming.

“It isn’t surprising that a man with a car elevator in his garage would consider supporting a tax that would hurt the working man while benefiting the money changers in the financial temples of Wall Street,” Dan Kish, distinguished senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research (IER), told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Romney’s office said Romney has not committed to any legislation to tax CO2 emissions. Though if Romney did embrace such a policy, it would stand in stark contrast to his 2012 presidential run when he railed against the Obama administration’s “war on coal.”

“Senator Romney is listening and having discussions with many of his colleagues about various proposals, and he hasn’t committed to any legislation,” Romney spokeswoman Liz Johnson told TheDCNF.

Americans for Tax Reform Founder and President Norquist speaks during an on-stage interview with The Atlantic's Senior Editor Thompson at The Atlantic Economy Summit in Washington
Americans for Tax Reform Founder and President Grover Norquist (L) speaks during an on-stage interview with The Atlantic’s Senior Editor Derek Thompson at The Atlantic Economy Summit in Washington March 18, 2014. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst.

Even with GOP support, a carbon tax bill is not expected to pass Congress or get signed into law by President Donald Trump. Conservative activists, however, see carbon tax legislation as an ever-present enticement for moderate Republicans looking to score political points with liberals.

“A carbon tax increases the cost of everything Americans buy and lowers Americans’ effective take home pay. A carbon tax increases the power, cost, and intrusiveness of the government in our lives,” conservative groups wrote to lawmakers Monday.

So far, GOP-sponsored carbon tax bills gone nowhere in Congress. Legislation introduced by Coons and Flake last Congress gained little traction, and a carbon tax bill introduced by former Florida Rep. Carlos Curbelo fizzled out after he lost his 2018 re-election bid.

SOURCE

Reality bites Joe Biden’s “Clean Energy Revolution”

Tallying its huge impacts on our energy, industries, living standards and personal freedoms

Paul Driessen

Presidential candidate Joe Biden recently announced his “Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice.” While it might be viewed as a Green New Deal Lite, the plan would inflict enormous economic, environmental and societal pain on most of the nation, for no climate benefits.

First, as I’ve pointed out here and elsewhere, Mr. Biden’s “climate emergency” exists in computer models and alarmist reports, but not in the Real World windows. Tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, floods, melting ice and rising seas are no more frequent or severe than humanity has experienced many times before.

Before we destroy our energy and economic system, we need to see solid, irrefutable proof that we face an actual climate crisis – and be able to debate and cross examine those who make such claims. So far, instead of a debate, climate crisis skeptics just get vilified and threatened with prosecution.

Second, anytime you hear the term “environmental justice,” you know someone is trying to create a new category of victims, sow more discord along racial and economic lines, and punish someone new in the name of “justice.” While we still have pockets of pollution, America’s cars, air and water have been cleaned up dramatically since 1970. Moreover, the best way to prevent, survive and recover from any disaster is to have the energy, wealth and technologies that fossil fuels continue to make possible.

Third, there’s nothing clean, green, renewable or sustainable about wind, solar or battery power. Those technologies require enormous amounts of land, concrete, steel and other raw materials – and many of their most critical materials are extracted and processed using child labor and near-slave wages for adults, with few or no workplace safety rules, and with horrific impacts on land, air and water quality.

Fourth, the Biden plan would cost many times the “$1.7 trillion in federal funds over ten years” that his talking points use to entice voters: dollars, lost jobs, lower living standards and fewer freedoms.

The former VP would rejoin the Paris climate treaty; reverse many Trump corporate tax cuts; seek or impose multiple mandates, “enforcement mechanisms” and “legally binding” emission reductions; and at some point demand cap-and-trade schemes and/or taxes on what he likes to call “carbon emissions.”

That term is intended to suggest dirty soot coming out of smoke stacks. The actual emissions are carbon dioxide, the life-giving gas that humans and animals exhale, and plants use to grow and produce oxygen. The more CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere, the better and faster crop, forest and grassland plants grow.

Mr. Biden would also impose tariffs on “carbon-intensive” goods imported from countries that “fail to meet their climate obligations.” That will quickly affect just about everything we eat, drink, drive, do and use – because his plan would soon make it difficult for America to grow or produce much of anything ... and China, India and other rapidly developing countries are not about to reduce their fossil fuel use.

Every Biden Plan provision would increase the cost of living and of doing business. The folks he hobnobs with – who will write, implement and enforce these rules ... and bankroll his election campaign – won’t much notice or mind the soaring prices. But middle and blue-collar classes certainly will.

Other components of the Biden Green New Deal multiply those impacts and costs.

* His ultimate goal is to rapidly replace America’s fossil fuels with industrial wind and solar facilities – to provide electricity for factories, hospitals, homes, offices, data centers, vehicles and countless other uses.

Modern industrialized societies simply cannot function on expensive, intermittent, weather-dependent electricity. As Germany, Britain, Spain, Australia and other countries have shown, that kind of energy eliminates 3-4 times more jobs than it creates – especially in factories and assembly lines, which cannot operate with repeated electricity interruptions ... and cannot compete with foreign companies that get affordable 24/7/365 coal-based electricity and pay their workers far less than $15, $25 or $45 per hour.

* “Rigorous new fuel economy standards” would speed the rate at which 100% of all cars and light trucks become electric.

This program would be supported by “more than 500,000 new public charging outlets by the end of 2030,” to augment private charging stations in homes and neighborhoods – paid or subsidized by taxpayers. It would also require upgrading home and neighborhood electrical systems to provide far more power for rapid vehicle charging, and longer hours of peak demand. Another trillion dollars?

Extending mileage for (much more expensive) electric vehicles would mean lighter, smaller cars ... and thus thousands of additional deaths and millions of additional serious injuries. Dollar costs would soar. But how do we quantify the cost of injury and death tolls?

* Federal tax and environmental laws, subsidies and other incentives would be used to persuade counties and communities to “to battle climate change” by altering their zoning and other regulations “to eliminate sprawl and allow for denser, more affordable housing near public transit.”

This would significantly impact suburban living and property values. And packing more people into more apartment buildings would likely mean diseases spread more rapidly and to more people.

* Other federal programs would provide subsidies and incentives for home and business owners to reduce “the carbon footprint” of US buildings 50% by 2035. battery disposal?

This could involve retrofitting them for improved energy efficiency and/or replacing gas furnaces with electric heat or heat pumps – or just tearing down and replacing entire buildings. More trillions of dollars.

* The Biden plan would also ban new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters.

This would lock up vast quantities of valuable, vitally needed fuel. It would replace tens of billions of dollars of annual federal and state government bonus, rent, royalty and tax revenue with tens of billions in subsidies for pseudo-renewable energy. It would eliminate millions of jobs in the petroleum and petrochemical industries, in numerous companies that rely on those industries, and in countless sectors of local and state economies that depend on all that public land energy activity and revenue.

* Finally, a new transcontinental high-speed (electricity-powered) rail system would connect the coasts – or at least a couple of cities on each coast – for a few trillion dollars and with a lot of eminent domain.

This is California’s costly “bullet train to nowhere” on steroids. It would bypass numerous towns and cities, marginalizing many of them and destroying trillions of dollars in property values – especially if his rail system is intended to replace or significantly reduce air travel and long distance driving.

The cumulative electricity demand for all these Biden Green New Deal programs would be at least double what the United States currently generates. It would mean wind turbines and solar panels on scales that few can even imagine ... especially as they are installed in less and less windy and sunny areas. And if all this power is to be backed up by batteries – since coal and gas-fired backup power generators would be eliminated – we would need billions of batteries ... and thus even more land and raw materials.

Exactly how many turbines, panels and batteries? On how many millions of acres? Made from how many billions of tons of metals and concrete? Extracted from how many trillions of tons of ore? In the USA or overseas, in someone else’s backyard? Under what child labor and environmental standards?

After banning oil and gas permitting, would Mr. Biden open other federal lands to exploration, mining and processing for the rare earth and other materials these massive “renewable” energy systems will require? That would certainly create new industries and jobs. Or will America just have to be 100% dependent on Chinese and other foreign suppliers for all these technologies?

All of this smells of eco-fascism: state control of companies and production, government control of our lives, and silencing and punishing anyone who challenges climate crisis claims or green energy agendas.

Perhaps Mr. Biden can address all these issues – at his next town hall meeting or press conference. Indeed, the time to discuss these issues is NOW. Before we get snow-jobbed and railroaded into actions we will sorely regret. Or maybe those of us who realize how insane all of this is will just have to opt out -- and establish Biden-free zones and climate sanctuary states where none of his policies and restrictions apply.

Via email


Pollen is getting worse, and climate change is the culprit

The claims below are nearly right. Current higher levels of CO2 are good for plants so they send out more pollen. But while CO2 levels continue to rise, global temperatures are not rising

For millions of people, high pollen counts are a perennial woe, and one that has kicked into high gear in the Boston area recently. But pollen seasons are getting longer and more intense, as allergy sufferers will surely attest, a trend specialists have linked to global warming.

“There’s really good research showing that allergy seasons are getting more severe, and more people are developing allergies, because of climate change,” said Dr. John Costa, medical director of the allergy clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere provide plants with more food, making them larger and leading to more pollen, sniffling, and sneezing, research has shown.

Jennifer M. Albertine, a visiting lecturer in environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College, grew timothy grass in a greenhouse with elevated carbon dioxide and ozone levels to try to simulate what might happen to the common pollen producer if carbon dioxide levels increased to 800 parts per million, roughly double what they are now.

The plants produced about 2.5 times as much pollen. “It’s plant food, right? So when you have more carbon dioxide, the plants are going to grow bigger,” she said. “And when you have bigger plants, you have more pollen.”

Making matters worse were April’s record rains, which allowed grass and vegetation to flourish.

In the past few weeks, pollen counts have increased because it has been dry, Costa said. Rain weighs down pollen, sending it to the ground. In dry, gusty weather, pollen flies into the air.

So rain offers a reprieve, but at a cost. “We will pay for it eventually,” Costa said.

The gender of trees also plays a role, said Naomi Cottrell, principal of the Boston landscape architecture firm Crowley Cottrell.

For years, cities and towns asked landscape architects to avoid planting female trees, which bear fruit or seed pods that can litter sidewalks and muck up car windshields. Instead they planted male trees, which emit pollen.

Male trees have become so prevalent that plant nurseries, bowing to supply and demand, overwhelmingly stock male saplings, Cottrell said.

In the meantime, pollen will continue to wreak havoc on allergies. Dr. Andrew MacGinnitie, clinical director of the Boston Children’s Hospital division of immunology, provided a few pointers — limit exposure by closing the windows and turning on the air conditioning, which can filter out pollen; shower before bed to wash the accumulated pollen away; and take an over-the-counter antihistamine, or use a nasal spray.

SOURCE

The environment is too important to be left to eco-warriors

Australia's Noel Pearson below draws on his consultive Aboriginal culture to argue that environmental issues should be resolved in a non-confrontaional way. He makes a powerful case against current Greenie behaviour. What he overlooks is that the Greenies WANT confrontation. They get their kicks out of parading as more righteous, more caring and wiser. It fulfils ego needs for them.

You can see that in the way they immediately dream up a new issue as soon as they get their way on their previous issue. Nothing satisfies them. Nothing can satisfy them. Their lives would be dull and empty without their campaigns. We are not dealing with psychologically whole people where Greenie campaigners are concerned

Can a cause for the right succeed in the long run if it is pursued through unrighteous means? Can causes for the good be selective in their adherence to science? Or do righteous ends justify unrighteous means?

This is the crisis confronting environmentalism. It suffered a grievous loss at the federal election and the Adani red line is broken. This may be a crisis of legitimacy. The question is whether political environmentalism is turning off voters and hardening attitudes against the necessary effective policies to secure future sustainability. Are the means employed by political environmentalism destroying the possibility of Australia achieving the desired end of sustainability through consensus? Or is consensus unnecessary because the morally right end means the maxim “by any means necessary” applies?

Political environmentalism is undermining the cause of sustainability because short-term expediency and tactical opportunism is trumping long-term strategic consensus-building. Environmentalism has degenerated into the binary of cultural war when it needs to transcend such wars. Its leaders have led the movement into a zero-sum game, where political victory in one battlefield is countered by loss in another.

We should first explain what we mean by causes for the right.

Political parties seeking power in government are not in the business of the right. Electoral politics are by definition ruthless, with few holds barred. Lies, half-truths, fake news, negative advertising and dirt files are part of the repertoire of power in politics. One party’s Mediscare is the other party’s retiree tax.

Former Labor NSW state secretary and federal minister Graham Richardson captured the ethos of politics in his memoir Whatever It Takes. Noble and ignoble things are achieved by marshalling political power.

While causes for power are amoral, there are causes for the right. Civil rights and the anti-apartheid movement are examples. Emancipation and antislavery are even older precedents. Such causes mobilise the political process and power for good ends. Conservation is such a cause. Few would dispute it is a moral duty of humankind regardless of political affiliation and preference.

Causes for the truth must be ethical, otherwise they suffer damage. Moral integrity is the great currency of righteous movements, but the political environmentalists have jeopardised the cause of conservation by allowing it to descend into the hyper-partisan battlefield of culture and politics.

It is exposed to the 51-49 per cent risk. When your party wins 51, then you may win tactical victories, but when it is 49 you have put your cause in peril. This is what has happened to Adani after the election.

I want to allege five profound mistakes the political environmentalists are making in Australia:

First, they are alienating the lower classes in their droves. This is the lesson of the 2019 election. The political environmentalists pushed climate policies that worked for the post-material middle class, but cared less about the economically precarious. More than the costs, it is the movement’s superior cultural attitude that pisses off the lower classes in such a visceral way.

Second, they are alienating indigenous peoples by pushing the costs of conservation on to those who have not created the crisis. Indigenous leaders such as Marcia Langton and Warren Mundine have highlighted the green lockup of indigenous lands from development.

These groups manipulate and exploit divisions within landowner communities. They divide and rule the same as mining companies do, setting up puppets that favour their agenda. We saw this in the campaign against the Kimberley Land Council. We see it in Cape York in relation to Wild Rivers and blanket World Heritage listing proposals.

Traditional owners supported conservation goals and helped create by agreement new national parks and other conservation tenures. But the political environmentalists are never satisfied. They want everything locked up.

They are making enemies of the country’s largest landowners because they use electoral leverage with governments to subjugate land rights. If they are alienating the land rights movement, which is more aligned to conservation than other sectors, what does that say about them?

A third problem is they are at the forefront of deploying so-called “new power” in their public campaigns. Through the diffusion of social media and decentralised campaigning, green groups began to seriously challenge the “old power”. GetUp co-founder Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms explain this development in their 2018 book New Power.

Breaking the old power monopoly is welcome; however, the dilemmas of social media and its susceptibility to manipulation and its effects on civil society and democratic governance are troubling. Twitter and Facebook have just created online mob behaviour. Hardly platforms for moral causes.

And the political environmentalists have used the new power to promote conservation and climate change action in as cynical a way as the forces against which they are pitted. Getup and Sleeping Giants use the same tools of manipulation as deliberately as Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica.

A fourth problem is the political environmentalists are highly selective in their adherence to science, and in so doing bring science into disrepute in public policy debates. Who really believed the black-throated finch was the environmental issue of Adani? The poor critters were used as a proxy for opposition to coalmining.

Why the charade? The Queensland Labor government should have been honest with the public and said: the policy question we face is whether the Galilee Basin should be opened up to coalmining in the context of its contribution to the crisis of global warming. But because they wanted to walk two sides of the street at once — intimating to greenies they did not support Adani while intimating to regional workers that they supported coalmining — they did not bring the crux policy question to a head and provide their answer to it.

They lacked the courage of their convictions and simply did not have the leadership to untie the Gordian knot that expanded coalmining in the Galilee Basin represents. And now the May 18 loss sees them stampeding over the poor birds and anything else standing in the way of their electoral prospects next year.

The stances environmental groups take in relation to any number of issues — nuclear energy and aquaculture, for example — evince a selective adherence to science.

Does not environmental science tell us about the interconnectivity of the planet, and if nuclear power is used in Europe, Asia and the Americas, and contributes to lower carbon emissions, why is the debate on nuclear power not on the basis of science and the mitigation of risks associated with nuclear energy, instead of a green version of obscurantism?

The proponents of safer nuclear waste disposal in Australia (which included the late Bob Hawke) have got a point that is worth subjecting to science rather than outright prohibition. While the case for domestic nuclear power may not be strong, it is a substantial source of energy throughout the world, and as a uranium producer we are obliged to consider our role in the management of its waste. There are strong geopolitical arguments in favour of Australia assuming this responsibility and mitigating the large risks involved, which we are better placed to carry than most other countries. After all, it is the greenies who tell us the planet is one and national boundaries are environmentally meaningless.

The fifth and most fundamental problem is the political environmentalists have aligned environmentalism with socialism rather than conservatism. Another way of saying this is they have aligned environmentalism with progressivism rather than conservatism.

There is a fundamental philosophical problem at the heart of contemporary environmentalism. I do not mean in respect of the appreciation of the natural environment. I mean in respect of where our motive must come from in order to conserve the good things we have been bequeathed from our ancestors for the benefit of our future unborn.

This is the motive that is unanswered by the utilitarian calculations of liberals and socialists. Not everything is about price. Conservatives understand that some things are valuable because they are priceless.

English conservative philosopher Roger Scruton’s 2012 book Green Philosophy is the starting point for a new conservative approach to conservation. The approach is old — about stewardship and our responsibility to bequeath to future generations the gifts we received from our ancestors — but its application to the environmental crises facing our homelands, including global warming, is new. The climate obscurantists who are in the same binary as the political environmentalists and who think themselves conservatives should read Scruton. They should be the first to understand the conservation in conservatism but, alas, cultural war has caused a degeneration on all sides.

Progressive socialists don’t know what Scruton is referring to: oikophilia, the love of home that speaks to people’s connection with their environment, which animates their responsibilities. Instead, they propose large schemes, imposed from above by state diktat, while doing violence to the most important engine of conservation: the local connection of communities with their environment, and their concern to leave their descendants what their ancestors left for them. Progressives are more concerned with environmental posturing, cutting the correct moral gesture, being seen to be more enlightened and selfless, in contrast to the deplorables and knuckle-draggers.

The green leaders all want to be the next Bob Brown, renowned for their own Franklin Dam or Wet Tropics. They trample over politically weaker communities such as Queensland property owners uncompensated for tree-clearing restrictions that underwrote our Kyoto target in the 2000s. It was John Howard’s federal government and Peter Beattie’s state government that dispossessed these landowners without proper compensation.

Indigenous landowners are another politically weaker community that are ridden roughshod over by political environmentalists.

The folly of all of this is now surely clear. What can be done?

Ever since Richardson alighted on the strategy of garnering the environmental vote, Labor began outsourcing its environmental policy integrity to the political environmentalists. This yielded electoral returns in 1987 and 1990 but ultimately led to Labor bleeding market share to the Greens and being held hostage to political environmentalism. Labor’s environmental credibility came from environmental group endorsements after adopting their policies and acquiescing to their demands.

Rather than undertaking the principal responsibility of government, coming up with policies that balance development with environmental sustainability, it did preference deals with the political environmentalists. Environmental groups became experts at marginal seat politics, turning 2 to 3 per cent of the environment vote to win 51 per cent victories for their pet campaigns.

The hook-up with GetUp is the apotheosis of Labor’s dalliance with political environmentalism. What electorate is not going to be suspicious of the next bunch of out-of-towners hectoring them about how to vote next time? GetUp was Bill Shorten’s long game at mobilising AstroTurf activism and it has all ended in tears.

Labor must define its own environmental credentials in its own right, not as an alliance with the Greens or as the lapdog of a certain environmental milieu. Watching Jackie Trad squirm as Queensland Environment Minister Leeanne Enoch approved the Adani mine this week told the whole sorry story. Labor can no longer walk two sides of the street at once. It worked for Annastacia Palaszczuk in 2017 but not for Shorten in 2019. Voters might be fooled once, but not all the time.

To develop environmental policies free from deal-making with the political environmentalists, Labor must balance human society and environmental sustainability. The last thing the environment portfolio needs is a progressive from an inner-city seat, surrounded by a milieu of political environmentalists. Labor needs to take environment policy back to first principles and get its philosophy right first.

The environment is too important to be left to the political environmentalists.

SOURCE

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

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16 June, 2019

What Trump's new ethanol rules mean for you

Trump has just been on a tour in Iowa in which he takes credit for loosening restrictions on the use of ethanol in gasoline. The move will be of huge benefit to Iowa corn farmers so will undoubtedly shore up Trump's vote in the next election. And putting more ethanol in your tank will cost you slightly less than using pure gasoline. But you will also get less mileage out of a fill-up.

So who loses from the new rules? All Americans. America should not be growing corn at all, other than for inclusion in dinners. Import restrictions, tariffs, are the only thing keeping corn farming alive in America. Corn is the principal feedstock for making sugar in America. And sugar is the main feedstock for making ethanol. And making sugar out of corn is absurd. You can make it for half the price out of sugarcane -- which is a very widely distributed tropical crop.

Americans would have sugar at half the price if imports of it were allowed from Brazil, the Caribbean and many other places around the world. Ethanol would be REALLY cheap if you made it from Brazilian sugar or imported it directly from the very efficient Brazilian distilleries.

And there is no strategic argument for America to be self-sufficient in sugar production. There are major supliers close by and all are well protected by American military power. You can grow sugarcane in almost the whole of central and South America, rainfall permitting. Australia too is a major sugar from sugarcane producer.

It is a considerable irony that Trump is being a Greenie in all this. He justifies his facilitating of domestic ethanol production as the use of a "renewable" resource, which it certainly is. You grow it. And Greenies never care about the cost of anything.

But there is no conceivable chance of anything changing. No politician would risk alienating all those Iowa votes

At the end of May, the Trump administration announced it would allow for the year-round sale of gasoline with higher concentrations of ethanol.

That action addressed a rule the Environmental Protection Agency had in place preventing the sale of so-called E15 fuel, which contains 15 percent ethanol and 85 percent gasoline, between June 1 and Sept. 15. The purpose was to prevent air pollution and curb dependence on foreign petroleum, but the ban has stopped some retailers from selling E15 at all because of the need to change out pumps.

One benefit is that gas prices could come down. As previously reported by FOX Business, E15 is typically priced about 5 to 10 cents cheaper than regular gasoline.

“Now in the summer months when consumers are driving more and oil companies usually jack up their prices,” Iowa Renewable Fuels Association executive director Monte Shaw said in a statement to FOX Business, adding that the new statute will allow drivers to save money at the pump.

According to the Renewable Fuels Association, E15 was approved for use in model year 2001 and newer vehicles by the EPA in 2012. The group says 90 percent of cars on the road are approved to run on E15.

Shaw previously noted that E15 has been in high demand where it is offered. E10, however, is still the default regular fuel sold across most of the country.

The move is also a boon to corn farmers, since corn is widely used to make ethanol domestically. Allowing for the year-round sale of E15 will give farmers more avenues to sell corn, which could bolster revenue especially when prices are low.

SOURCE

Canada is poised to join a growing list of places where single-use plastic items have been banned

Canada, following precedent set by the European Union, is poised to join a growing list of places where single-use plastic items have been banned. Though the government hasn’t specified which items will actually be outlawed in 2021, according to The Guardian, “bottles, plastic bags, and straws” are being considered.

First, they came for the bags. Then, they came for the straws, but perhaps instead of looking for other common products to ban, we should look at what these regulations actually do.

Of course, plastic bans aren’t just restricted to Europe and Canada.

Plastic bag bans have come to California and New York, and to a number of cities in the United States. The bans are typically aimed at grocery stores and other businesses that give out the bags to customers to carry out purchased items.

The bag bans are billed as a means to reduce waste and pollution by forcing Americans to bring reusable bags to stores.

However, it turns out that not only are those bans an inconvenience, they also have questionable positive benefits for the environment—and may actually be making things worse.

A recent study by University of Sydney economist Rebecca Taylor in Australia established that bans on plastic shopping bags change behavior; namely, people used fewer plastic shopping bags as the sources dried up.

However, people didn’t stop using plastic bags as a whole. Instead of reusing plastic bags as trash can liners, for example, customers purchased garbage bags to make up for the lost supply.

In areas with the shopping bag bans, there was a huge upsurge in the purchase of 4-gallon bags. These bags are typically thicker than the thin plastic shopping bags and use more plastic.

“What I found was that sales of garbage bags actually skyrocketed after plastic grocery bags were banned,” Taylor said in an interview with National Public Radio. “ … so, about 30% of the plastic that was eliminated by the ban comes back in the form of thicker garbage bags.”

In addition, a plastic bag ban causes a jump in the use of paper bags—creating, according to the study, about 80 million pounds of additional paper bag trash a year.

That may seem like a reasonable trade-off. After all, paper bags are biodegradable, right?

Yes, but the process of manufacturing those bags is still quite intensive, and there’s evidence that paper bags are actually worse for the environment, according to some studies.

Not surprisingly, some big-government nannies want to ban, or at least curtail, the use of paper bags also, for good measure.

As for the environmentally-friendly reusable bags, studies have found that they create few “green” benefits. Worse, they are often highly unsanitary.

Plastic bags are, of course, not the only plastic items that cities are trying to do away with. An even less useful crusade, this one against plastic straws, has been gaining steam as well.

The straw ban, which started in Seattle and has moved on to other cities, has largely been fueled by an informal survey by a 9-year-old activist and the mistaken notion the U.S. is causing plastic buildup in the oceans.

Again, the ban is ineffective or useless at best. It ends up being little more than an inconvenience for those who now have to suffer through soggy, melting paper straws that taste like a used paper towel halfway through a drink.

There are certainly worse laws and petty tyrannies to suffer under than bans on plastic bags. Nevertheless, it’s ironic that a progressive “utopia” such as San Francisco is waging war on plastic grocery bags, with a total ban looming in the near future, even as it is literally covered in trash, hypodermic needles, and human waste.

Our zeal to fix First World problems is also coming at the expense of not stopping re-emerging Third World problems.

That said, Americans live in a wealthy society, in which we have the luxury of making economic sacrifices to improve our environment. Local polities are free to eliminate plastic bags and straws—or other such things—as they see fit.

However, it’s telling that so many of these movements are based on little more than environmentalist virtue-signaling, and create additional hassles, rather than effective measures to make our communities better or cleaner.

SOURCE

Warmists believe in the tooth fairy

Bjorn Lomborg

What will be the solution to climate change? It would be very nice to be able to point confidently to a single technology. In fact, many people do. They say the answer to climate change has already arrived in the form of, say, wind turbines or solar panels, and we just need to build more of their favoured technology to achieve a so-called “energy transition” from fossil fuels to renewables.

This idea that we already have the needed technology is so pervasive that before we can establish what the solution to climate change really looks like, we first need to dismantle the faulty idea that we have the solution already.

The reality is, today, solar and wind energy together deliver only about 1 per cent of global energy. The International Energy Agency estimates that even by 2040 these will cover a little more than 4 per cent of global energy.

One of the world’s leading energy researchers, Czech-Canadian Vaclav Smil, has said: “The great hope for a quick and sweeping transition to renewable energy is wishful thinking.”

Former US vice-president Al Gore’s chief scientific adviser, Jim Hansen, who put global warming on the agenda back in 1988, agreed, saying: “Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”

How has such a fundamental misunderstanding become so firmly entrenched at the centre of climate policy debate? Partly through self-interest. Many private companies — from Vestas to Tesla — have an interest in making us believe the solution is simply to buy lots of their products.

And partly because, as any good political strategist will tell you, it’s impossible to get people engaged in a problem without offering a solution.

There are a lot of political and activist groups that coalesce support around the idea that climate change can be solved with more green energy and less fossil fuels. But we need to remember that we don’t emit CO2 to annoy environmentalists. It is the by-product of today’s immense availability of power, which provides everything we need and demand from modern society: heat, cold, transport, electricity and food.

The link is strong and clear: if you have access to lots of cheap energy, this typically means you’ve escaped poverty, you will live a long life, you have access to a good education and healthcare, you won’t starve to death or die from easily curable diseases. These are manifestly good things, which is why the world has spent the past two centuries ensuring more and more people can access lots of energy.

In 1800, almost all energy was renewable. Humanity used energy from draught animals ploughing fields and pulling carts and from firewood heating hearths and homes. And almost everyone put in long hours of harsh, backbreaking labour. Studies from Sweden suggest that 80 per cent of energy came from wood, with animals and humans each providing about half of the rest. Wind and water provided crucial ship transport and flour milling but rarely much more — in Germany, this provided only 1.5 per cent of all energy.

After this, coal, then oil, gas and finally nuclear power were transformative in helping humanity. These gave us the ability to achieve much more with much less labour. At the end of the 19th century, human labour made up 94 per cent of all industrial work in the US. Today, it constitutes only 8 per cent.

Yet humanity has actually never experienced an “energy transition” — a shift from one set of energy sources to another set. Rather, we have added more and more. When the world first discovered coal, we didn’t stop using wood. In fact, global wood consumption has kept increasing during the past two centuries, and since 1850 coal has kept increasing, too. The same is true with oil, gas, hydropower and nuclear.

The only consistent development shift during the past centuries is the relative move away from renewables: in 1800 they provided about 94 per cent of all energy in the world, dropping to about 14 per cent by 1971 and flattening out from there. In 2017, after almost three decades of intense climate policies, the world still received 14.2 per cent of its energy from renewables (not only wind and solar but also hydro and biomass). This is not surprising: renewables have two big problems.

First, they take up an amazing amount of space that often replaces nature. To replace a 1ha gas-fired power plant, society needs 73ha of solar panels, 239ha of onshore wind turbines or an unbelievable 6000ha of biomass.

Second — and most important — solar and wind power are intermittent or unreliable. Solar energy isn’t produced when it is overcast or at night. Wind energy isn’t produced when there is little or no wind. We often hear that wind and solar energy are cheaper than fossil fuels, but at best that is true only when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. It is deeply misleading to compare the energy cost of wind or solar to fossil fuels only when it is windy and sunny.

What’s more, because modern society requires 24-hour power, even when solar or wind is introduced, it’s still necessary to pay for back-up service from fossil fuels (for when there’s no wind or sun), only these are now more expensive because fossil fuels have fewer hours to back the capital investment. And batteries are nowhere near ready to help solar and wind energy last longer. In the US, total battery storage could power the nation for only 14 seconds.

But fixing global warming is not mostly about cutting Australian emissions. It is about finding a way to cut global emissions: from China, India, the US, all of Europe and the rest of the world. Furthermore, it is not only about fixing where we get our electricity from as electricity constitutes about only a quarter of global emissions.

There is a focus on emissions from electricity because although it is very hard to end our reliance on fossil fuels and solutions are far from effective, it’s actually easier and further ahead than the other sectors: agriculture (24 per cent of emissions), manufacturing (21 per cent), transport (14 per cent), buildings (6 per cent) and other (10 per cent).

Right now, our solutions to climate change are failing. We may feel as if we’re doing a lot, but the reality is we are mostly tinkering at the margins, often with incredibly ineffective policies.

The EU has already set up an emissions trading system, putting caps on how much CO2 the electricity sector emits. This means that when Germany or Denmark puts up solar panels or wind turbines with expensive subsidies, it doesn’t cut one single tonne of CO2. Every tonne of CO2 avoided there simply means the price on the ETS declines slightly, making it cheaper for, say, Polish coal to emit that much more CO2. While the EU likes to point to its green achievements, more than two-thirds of its energy still comes from fossil fuels. Nuclear energy contributes 13 per cent of CO2-free energy and renewables 15 per cent. And even this figure of 15 per cent is dubious.

Most people think renewables are overwhelmingly made up of solar and wind. Nothing could be further from the truth. Solar and wind contributed only 2.4 per cent of the EU total energy demand in 2017, according to the latest numbers from the International Energy Agency. Another 1.7 per cent came from hydro and 0.4 per cent from geothermal energy.

In comparison, 10 per cent — more than two-thirds of all the renewable energy in the EU — comes from the world’s oldest energy source: wood.

The EU adopts the fictitious position that biomass such as wood pellets produce no CO2 at all. The truth is wood emits more CO2 per kilowatt hour than even coal, mostly because its combustion is less effective. The EU position assumes that felled forests will be replanted, with each new sapling eventually soaking up all the burned CO2. But forests often are not replaced, in which case CO2 emissions are permanent and large, and even under optimal conditions the wood burned today will become CO2-neutral only towards or after the end of the century.

Moreover, reliance on burning American forests in EU stoves leads to “biodiversity loss, deforestation and forest degradation”, according to a European Commission report. This shows the EU’s climate “achievement” — of increasing its use of renewables — is mostly deceptive, and the vast part of it is unsustainable.

But climate policy is non-existent or failing even more markedly in the rest of the world for a very simple reason: more energy means more income, longer lives, less disease and more education. Typically, the cheapest way to achieve this is through coal. The International Energy Agency’s newest report finds that when adjusting for the unreliability of solar and wind, existing coal will be cheaper than new solar and wind everywhere at least until 2040, and dramatically so in the EU. This simple fact is the reason we do not yet have a solution to global warming: green energy mostly can’t yet compete globally with fossil fuels. Campaigners casually suggest we can capture CO2 and store it underground, disregarding the reality that even capturing a slim 15 per cent of emissions would require infrastructure larger than the world’s biggest $US2 trillion industry, the oil industry, which took 100 years and an incredibly profitable product to create.

Promises to populate the world with electric cars have failed just as spectacularly, despite unprecedented subsidies. Today, fewer than 0.3 per cent of all cars are electric, and even if we could reach 200 million electric cars in 2040, the IEA estimates this would reduce emissions by less than 1 per cent. That is why, in the face of years of failure, politicians have continued doing one thing: making ever bigger promises.

The promises made in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and in the Kyoto Treaty in 1997 fell apart. A new study of the promises made under the Paris Agreement finds that of almost 200 signatories, only 17 countries — the likes of Samoa and Algeria — are living up to them, and these are succeeding mostly because they promised so little. But even if every country did everything promised in the Paris Agreement, the emission cuts by 2030 would add up to only 1 per cent of what would be needed to keep temperature rises under 2C.

Failure has not made politicians more careful. If anything, they have doubled down on making nice-sounding promises, even ones that are objectively ludicrous with zero chance of happening. The German promise to phase out coal in 2038, for example, is described by Smil as “completely unrealistic”.

Politicians across the world happily promise to emit net zero CO2 by 2050, knowing they will be long retired from politics when those vows are broken. Achieving this will be almost impossibly expensive, likely provoking “yellow vest” street riots long before their conclusion. After New Zealand made its 2050 zero emissions promise, the government commissioned a report on the costs. This found that achieving this goal in the most cost-effective manner (which strains credulity because policy seldom if ever manages to be cost efficient) would cost more than last year’s entire national budget on social security, welfare, health, education, police, courts, defence, environment and every other part of government combined. Each and every year.

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres is inviting all heads of state to New York next September to promise jointly to cut global emissions to zero by 2050. To see exactly how unrealistic this is, look at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s five policy scenarios for the 21st century. The most optimistic “sustainable” scenario puts on green-tinted glasses to envisage a world in which the rich countries happily accept having their energy availability cut in half and people in the poor world accept they will never catch up even to half of rich-world energy availability.

Despite such heroic and far-fetched assumptions, this scenario expects the world to get only one-fifth of its energy from renewables by 2050. In this wonder-scenario, global emissions will be 10 per cent above what they are today. And of course all other, more realistic scenarios find 2050 emissions much higher.

The belief that we already have the solutions is a delusion on a planetary scale. It may be comforting to tell ourselves that global warming is effectively solved. It’s dangerous because it leads to us taking at face value promises and vows that have no chance of being enacted. And it is reckless because it stops us from focusing on what we need to do instead.

If we do care to fix climate, we need to change course. This was clearly shown by 27 of the world’s top climate economists and three Nobel laureates who looked at the whole gamut of climate solutions for Copenhagen Consensus.

If we keep doing what we’ve done so far and make more promises to cut carbon in ineffective ways such as subsidising wind and solar, each dollar spent will avoid only 3c of climate damage.

The Nobel laureates and climate economists found investing in green innovation is the best investment. To see why, think back to the 1960s and 70s when the world worried about mass starvation, epitomised by recurrent famines. If we had adopted today’s approach to climate, we’d have asked everyone (especially the rich) just to eat less while we sent small amounts of food from rich countries to poor. It didn’t succeed.

What did work was the Green Revolution. Through practical innovation — irrigation, fertiliser, pesticides and plant breeding — the Green Revolution increased world grain production by an astonishing 250 per cent between 1950 and 1984, raising the calorie intake of the world’s poorest people and reducing the incidence of serious famines.

Instead of tinkering around the edges, innovation tackled the problem head-on. Instead of asking people to do less with less, innovation offered the ability to produce more with less. Would-be catastrophes have regularly been pushed aside throughout human history because of innovation and technological development.

In general, investment in long-term innovation is woefully underfunded because it is hard for private investors to capture the full benefits of their innovations. If you discover a new technology that during the next 40 years becomes the foundation for a new, cheap green energy source, that is great for the world but your patent will have run out long before that happens. Therefore we can’t rely solely on private innovation. (This is true in medicine and many other areas where governments regularly invest huge sums into basic research, some of which eventually results in amazing breakthroughs.)

The best example in climate is the 10-year $US10 billion public investment into shale gas in the US. While it wasn’t intended as climate policy, it led the way for a surge in production of cheap gas, which outcompeted a significant part of US coal consumption. Because gas emits about half the CO2 of coal, the US has reduced emissions more than any other country in the past 10 years.

The evidence created by specialist climate economists for Copenhagen Consensus showed that a substantial increase in green R&D could do much more than any carbon-cutting promises. If we could help innovate the price of low or zero CO2 energy down below fossil fuels, not only rich Australians but also Indians, Chinese and everyone else would switch. Right now, unfortunately, the world is spending ever less on low-carbon research and development. Since the 80s, spending has slid from 0.06 per cent to less than 0.03 per cent of gross domestic product in the OECD.

There is a compelling case to do a lot more. The Nobel laureates looking at all the evidence for Copenhagen Consensus concluded that we should aim to reach about 0.2 per cent of global GDP — or about six times more than today. This could be funded by a low and moderately rising carbon tax (giving businesses an incentive to cut emissions but not telling them how to do it) and would set us on a pathway to resolving climate change.

On the sidelines of Paris in 2015, Tony Abbott, the prime minister at the time, US president Barack Obama and philanthropist Bill Gates promised to double green energy R&D by 2020 — much less than what the Nobel laureates suggest but at least a start. The government is not living up to this promise: since 2015, Australian investment has fallen from 0.02 per cent of GDP to 0.01 per cent in 2016 and 2017, the latest years for which the International Energy Agency has data.

Investing dramatically more into green energy R&D means we can start looking for lots of solutions. It could mean better solar and wind, combined with batteries. We certainly should research those areas further (rather than erecting masses more inefficient solar panels and wind turbines today). But we also need to focus on exploring fusion, fission, water splitting and many other ideas.

Craig Venter, the biotechnologist and geneticist who led the first draft sequence of the human genome, argues for research into an algae, grown on the ocean surface, that produces oil. Because it simply converts sunlight and CO2 to oil, burning it will be CO2-free. It is far from cost-effective now, but researching this and many other solutions is not only cheap but offers our best opportunity to find real breakthrough technologies.

If we could make alternative technologies cheaper than fossil fuels, we wouldn’t have to force (or subsidise) anyone to stop burning coal and oil. Everyone would shift to the cheaper and cleaner alternatives.

Nobody can predict with certainty whether the breakthrough technology will be algae, solar and batteries, fusion or something else altogether. Finding the solution could take a decade or it could take four. But we do know that we certainly won’t solve climate change with the current approach of making big promises and investing in inefficiency.

Climate economists for Copenhagen Consensus calculated the returns to society from investing in green energy R&D as $11 for every dollar invested — more than 500 times more effective than current EU climate policies.

Those who claim we already have a solution to climate change are right in only one sense: humanity has no shortage of capacity for innovation. It needs to be unleashed.

SOURCE

Outgoing British PM pledges to pass law to eliminate UK greenhouse gas emissions by 2050

A lot of silliness. Passing a law will not make anything happen. Unless concrete actions are taken to reduce carbon, the law will be a dead letter. Passing laws that actually do something will be a lot harder and may never be seen

In one of her final acts as British prime minister, Theresa May pledged Wednesday to pass legislation that will commit the United Kingdom to eliminating its contribution to climate change by 2050, the first country in the Group of Seven advanced economies to do so.

May said that Britain will enact in law a commitment to produce net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, one of the most ambitious targets in the world.

"This country led the world in innovation during the Industrial Revolution, and now we must lead the world to a cleaner, greener form of growth," May said.

Environmental groups welcomed the announcement but raised concerns about how, exactly, Britain plans to meet these targets.

Major protests in the United Kingdom, including by children skipping school to march through cities, have helped push the issue of climate change to the top of the political agenda.

A campaign group called Extinction Rebellion has also organized several high-profile protests, leading to more than 1,000 arrests. One of its demonstrations included a "die in" at the Natural History Museum, where hundreds of demonstrators lay down in a big hall below a skeleton of a blue whale to raise awareness of predicted mass-extinction events caused by humans.

May is keen to cement a legacy beyond Brexit in her final weeks as prime minister. She resigned as party leader Friday and will officially step down as head of government once her successor is found, mostly likely in late July.

"It's clear this is a legacy issue, and it really is a tremendous legacy for her to leave behind," said Bob Ward, policy director for the London-based Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

The UK has demonstrated that it knows how to rapidly decarbonize its energy mix. Ward said that since 1990, Britain's greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by 44 percent while the economy grew by more than 75 percent.

One of the main factors is the phasing out of coal. Last month, Britain went for two weeks without using coal to generate power, the first time it's done so since the late 19th century.

But achieving the new targets will require profound change - the current policy is to reduce emissions by 80 percent by 2050. Philip Hammond, the finance secretary, said that meeting the change could cost 1 trillion pounds, leaving less money for public services such as schools and hospitals, according to a letter leaked to the Financial Times.

The new law highlights the stark contrast between the UK and the United States administrations over their approaches to climate change. Speaking alongside President Trump at their joint news conference last week, May said that in talks with Trump, she "set out the UK's approach to tackling climate change and our continued support for the Paris agreement."

Trump has previously called climate change a "hoax" and announced his intention to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord.

Trump told Britain's ITV broadcaster last week that he was pressed on the issue by Prince Charles, who has long been outspoken about the environment. Trump said he told Charles that "the United States right now has among the cleanest climates."

Analysts said the legislation could go through within a week or so, since it can be done through an amendment to the 2008 Climate Change Act.

Greenpeace UK said it was a "big moment" in the fight against climate change, but the group also raised concerns about loopholes that could mean Britain would achieve its goal partly through international carbon credits, which Greenpeace argued could shift the burden to developing nations.

Doug Parr, chief scientist for Greenpeace UK, said in a statement: "As the birthplace of the industrial revolution, it is right that the UK is the world's first major economy to commit to completely end its contribution to climate change, but trying to shift the burden to developing nations through International Carbon Credits undermines that commitment. This type of offsetting has a history of failure and is not, according the government's climate advisers, cost efficient."

The decision "fires the starting gun for a fundamental transformation of our economy," Parr said. "The government must immediately upgrade our electricity, construction, heating, agriculture and transport systems. They must cancel the Heathrow 3rd runway and road-building plans, and invest public money and provide significant policy support to protect communities, workers and the planet."

Several of the politicians seeking to replace May as prime minister have come out with strong positions on tackling climate change. Boris Johnson, the current favorite, has written several newspaper articles in support of the environment.

Ward, the climate change expert, said none of the candidates hoping to be the next prime minister are likely to speak out against the target, not least because it's seen as an important issue for younger voters.

"You won't see any of the Tory leadership hopefuls speaking out against this," he said. "That creates a sense of political stability, at least. It's not about whether we should get to the 2050 target, it will be a discussion about the best way of doing it."

SOURCE

Pete Buttigieg: ‘The Time Has Come to Treat Climate Disruption as the Security Issue That It Is’

Clever Pete has loaded the latest jargon: "Climate Disruption". No evidence that he knows anything more though

Mayor Pete Buttigieg is calling for treating “climate disruption” as a national security issue.

Speaking at the Iowa Democratic Party Hall of Fame event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Sunday, Buttigieg said Republicans don’t own national security.

“Don’t let anybody tell you that they own national security, not when their vision of security goes no further than putting up a wall from sea to shining sea, because that’s not going to help with cyber security. That’s not going to help with election security. That’s not going to help us name and confront the violent white nationalism that presents a clear and present threat to our country,” he said.

“I don’t have to tell Cedar Rapids that the time has come to treat climate disruption as the security issue that it is, which is why we should not only rejoin the Paris Accords, we ought to have a Pittsburgh summit to bring together American cities and communities to do something about the issue with federal support,” Buttigieg added.

He said freedom and patriotism are not conservative-only values.

“Freedom is not a conservative value. It is an American value, and while our Republican friends like to talk about freedom like it’s theirs alone, we know that freedom includes economic freedom, and you’re not free if you don’t have a living wage in this country. The GOP has sacrificed its ability to claim to be the party of freedom, especially when we see an attack on women’s reproductive freedom that all of us, especially men, ought to be standing up to defend,” Buttigieg said.

“And yes, here in Iowa, where you turned heads around the nation 10 years ago, we know that you’re not free if some county clerk gets to tell you who you ought to marry based on their idea of their religion,” he said.

“Freedom’s not a conservative value. Patriotism’s not a conservative only value, and God does not belong to any political party, least of all the one that produced this current president,” Buttigieg said.

SOURCE

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

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14 June, 2019

‘Frightening’ number of plant extinctions found in global survey. Study shows 571 species wiped out, and scientists say figure is likely to be big underestimate

Some people are easily frightened, it seems. No details or reasoning are given to show why it is frightening so it seems we are reading nothing more than yet another screech of Greenie emotionalism. If they had named just one lost species that is/was important to humankind they might have had a case -- but they do not. Why? Because there have been no important losses, obviously. They would be all over it if there were such a loss.

I have commented on the Daily Mail version of this report a couple of days ago. It is the Guardian version below. I also append the journal abstract at the bottom of the Guardian article -- which is VERY interesting. But we will get to that.

The reason I am reopening this matter is that I want to make clear how grossly unscientific the study is. I am pointing in particular at the egregious claim that: "the plant extinction rate was 500 times greater now than before the industrial revolution". How do they know? How do they know what the plant extinction rate was before the industrial revolution? Unless they have got a fully operational Tardis, there is no way they CAN know.

To know that they would have to be able to point to a study like theirs which was conducted in (say) the 18th century. There is no such study. Even if there were a good species count available from 18th century England, how do we know how typical events in England were? England has never been typical of anything as far as I can see. So there is an excellent chance that they were not typical at all. The whole claim is pure bunk, pure guesswork. And if they are relying on the fossil record, they are no better off. The most prominent thing about the fossil record is the "gaps" in it.

Interestingly, they do NOT repeat their hysterical claim in the journal abstract. Where they could have said: "at 500 times the rate of background extinction", they in fact wrote: "at a higher rate than background extinction", which is not nearly as crazy. So we have yet another example of crooked Greenie "science". We all know that there is no such thing as a happy Greenie and I am fast coming to the view that there is no such thing as an honest Greenie. Exterminate! (With apologies to "Dr. Who")

Human destruction of the living world is causing a “frightening” number of plant extinctions, according to scientists who have completed the first global analysis of the issue.

They found 571 species had definitely been wiped out since 1750 but with knowledge of many plant species still very limited the true number is likely to be much higher. The researchers said the plant extinction rate was 500 times greater now than before the industrial revolution, and this was also likely to be an underestimate.

“Plants underpin all life on Earth,” said Dr Eimear Nic Lughadha, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, who was part of the team. “They provide the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat, as well as making up the backbone of the world’s ecosystems – so plant extinction is bad news for all species.”

The number of plants that have disappeared from the wild is more than twice the number of extinct birds, mammals and amphibians combined. The new figure is also four times the number of extinct plants recorded in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list.

“It is way more than we knew and way more than should have gone extinct,” said Dr Maria Vorontsova, also at Kew. “It is frightening not just because of the 571 number but because I think that is a gross underestimate.”

She said the true extinction rate for plants could easily be orders of magnitude higher than that reported in the study, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. There are thousands of “living dead” plant species, where the last survivors have no chance of reproducing because, for example, only one sex remains or the big animals needed to spread their seeds are extinct.

It takes many years to be sure a plant has been wiped out, meaning there are many species awaiting formal confirmation. “How are you going to check the entirety of the Amazon for your lost plant?” Vorontsova said. And some plant species may have gone extinct before ever being discovered. Botanists find about 2,000 new species a year.

The main cause of the extinctions is the destruction of natural habitats by human activities, such as cutting down forests and converting land into fields for farming.....

SOURCE

Global dataset shows geography and life form predict modern plant extinction and rediscovery

Aelys M. Humphreys et al.

Abstract

Most people can name a mammal or bird that has become extinct in recent centuries, but few can name a recently extinct plant. We present a comprehensive, global analysis of modern extinction in plants. Almost 600?species have become extinct, at a higher rate than background extinction, but almost as many have been erroneously declared extinct and then been rediscovered. Reports of extinction on islands, in the tropics and of shrubs, trees or species with narrow ranges are least likely to be refuted by rediscovery. Plant extinctions endanger other organisms, ecosystems and human well-being, and must be understood for effective conservation planning.

Nature Ecology & Evolution (2019)

Trudeau's plastic ban cites 9-year-old kid's website | Ezra Levant

On last night's episode of The Ezra Levant Show, we traced the origin of Justin Trudeau's extraordinary plastics ban claim that 37 million Canadians are throwing out 57 million plastic straws every day.

National park quietly removed warning that glaciers ‘will all be gone’ by 2020 after years of heavy snowfall

Glacier National Park quietly removed a visitor center sign saying its iconic glaciers will disappear by 2020 due to climate change.

Several winters of heavy snowfall threw off climate model projections the glaciers would all disappear by 2020, according to federal officials.

A blogger first noticed the signage change and noted other signs warning of “impending glacier disappearance have been replaced.”
The National Park Service (NPS) quietly removed a visitor center sign saying the glaciers at Glacier National Park would disappear by 2020 due to climate change.

As it turns out, higher-than-average snowfall in recent years upended computer model projections from the early 2000s that NPS based its claim glaciers “will all be gone by the year 2020,” federal officials said.

“Glacier retreat in Glacier National Park speeds up and slows down with fluctuations in the local climate,” the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which monitors Glacier National Park, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Those signs were based on the observation prior to 2010 that glaciers were shrinking more quickly than a computer model predicted they would,” USGS said. “Subsequently, larger than average snowfall over several winters slowed down that retreat rate and the 2020 date used in the NPS display does not apply anymore.”

NPS updated signs at the St. Mary Visitor Center glacier exhibit over the winter. Sign changes meant the display warning glaciers would all disappear by 2020 now says: “When they completely disappear, however, will depend on how and when we act.”

Hikers trek through snow along the Highline Trail in Glacier National Park, Montana
Fred Longheart (R) and Marjory McClaren of Kalispell, Montana hike through snow along the Highline Trail in Glacier National Park, Montana August 24, 2011. REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight.

The total area of Glacier National Park covered in its iconic glaciers shrank 70% from the 1850s to 2015, according to USGS. Melting began at the end of the so-called Little Ice Age when scientists believe 146 glaciers covered the region, opposed to just 26 in 2019. (RELATED: EPA Dealt A Huge Blow To The ‘Resistance’ By Reassigning A Top Bureaucrat)

USGS still says on its website glaciers could all disappear sometime between 2030 and 2080, depending on how much warming occurs. As recent years demonstrate, however, glacial melt can be slowed by heavy winter snowfall.

“The overall picture remains the same, however, and that picture is that the glaciers all continue to retreat,” USGS said.

Blogger Roger Roots first noted the signage change in a blog post published Thursday on the website Watts Up With That. Roots was able to compare the signs to film and photographs he had taken on previous visits.

“As recently as September 2018 the diorama displayed a sign saying GNP’s glaciers were expected to disappear completely by 2020,” Roots wrote. “The ‘gone by 2020’ claims were repeated in the New York Times, National Geographic, and other international news sources.”

Roots also noted another sign had been changed from 2030 had also been changed to be more “nuanced.” Roots put up a $5,000 bet that Glacier National Park would still have glaciers in 2030.

“Almost everywhere, the Park’s specific claims of impending glacier disappearance have been replaced with more nuanced messaging indicating that everyone agrees that the glaciers are melting,” Roots wrote.

“Now the Park Service is scrambling to remove the signs without their visitors noticing,” Roots posted on his Facebook wall, along with video footage showing the sign changes.

The Park Service works closely with USGS to understand glacial melt and the information it puts on informational signs. NPS, however, does not notify the public when it adds or changes signage.

“There are currently 26 glaciers in the park. Scientific models project that many will no longer meet the size criteria used to define a glacier sometime between 2030 and 2080,” NPS said in a statement to TheDCNF.

SOURCE

Chuck Schumer: ‘No Threat Poses a Greater Danger to Our Planet Than That of Climate Change’

Chuckie will say anything that benefits his party

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D.-N.Y.) went to the floor of the Senate on Wednesday to express his view that “no threat poses a greater danger to our planet than climate change” and that President Donald Trump is something like “a member of the Flat Earth Society” on this issue.

“On the climate, as I have said so many times, no threat poses a greater danger to our planet than that of climate change,” said Schumer.

“The last 5 years have been the warmest on record,” he said. “There is more carbon dioxide in the air than any point in human history.”

Schumer made reference to a conversation that President Donald Trump had with Prince Charles of Great Britain earlier this week about climate change.

“Just yesterday, President Trump once again--not based on fact, based on whim, as he so often acts--voiced a dangerous skepticism about climate change while meeting with Prince Charles,” Schumer said.

As reported by The Guardian: “Prince Charles spent 75 minutes longer than scheduled trying to convince Donald Trump of the dangers of global heating, but the president still insisted the US was “clean” and blamed other nations for the crisis.”

Appearing on Britain’s ITV, Trump summarized the conversation, The Guardian reported.

“He is really into climate change and I think that’s great. What he really wants and what he really feels warmly about is the future. He wants to make sure future generations have climate that is good climate, as opposed to a disaster, and I agree,” Trump said.

“I did say, ‘Well, the United States right now has among the cleanest climates there are based on all statistics,’” said Trump. “And it’s even getting better because I agree with that we want the best water, the cleanest water. It’s crystal clean, has to be crystal clean clear.”

“China, India, Russia, many other nations, they have not very good air, not very good water, and the sense of pollution,” Trump said. “If you go to certain cities … you can’t even breathe, and now that air is going up … They don’t do the responsibility.”

On the Senate floor Wednesday, Sen. Schumer suggested Trump is “a member of the Flat Earth Society” when it comes to climate change.

“The President is sort of, on climate, a member of the Flat Earth Society, just denying the facts,” said Schumer. “It would be as if Columbus sailed, and the President still said the earth is flat. That is how he is acting on climate.”

Here is the text of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s statements about climate change on the Senate floor on Wednesday:

Sen. Charles Schumer: “Mr. President, on the climate, as I have said so many times, no threat poses a greater danger to our planet than that of climate change. The last 5 years have been the warmest on record. There is more carbon dioxide in the air than any point in human history. Our children and grandchildren will live with the consequences of the decisions we make today. We need all hands on deck--the Federal Government, local governments, municipalities, corporate leaders, global efforts--if we are to meet the challenges of climate change head-on, but for years our government has been too slow to act and more often than not we have done nothing or very little.

Just yesterday, President Trump once again--not based on fact, based on whim, as he so often acts--voiced a dangerous skepticism about climate change while meeting with Prince Charles.

Now, one of the biggest reasons for the slow progress on climate policy has been the oppressive grip of Big Oil, Big Gas, and Big Coal, on our political system. They spent untold millions to debunk climate science and torpedo climate legislation. One of the largest perpetrators has been the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which never reveals its donors and has acted all too often as a front for Big Oil.

Recently, as public support for action upon climate change has grown even more overwhelming, the chamber is starting to sing a different tune. They have launched a campaign for cleaner energy sources. They have added a new section to their website, “Addressing Climate Change.” They now even say that, on this issue, “inaction is not an option.” Well, I could not agree more; inaction is not an option, but color me skeptical about the chamber.

I hope to see the chamber follow its public stance with real action, but until I do, I fear this change is merely cosmetic. All too often, the big oil and big coal companies don't act themselves, although some do, but they let the chamber do their dirty work for them. So today Sheldon Whitehouse and I, along with a number of our colleagues, will be sending a letter to the chamber, calling on them to speak out against the administration's effort to undermine the “National Climate Assessment.”

It is not enough to simply say: Oh, well, it is a problem. Inaction is not an option. They must do something concrete. This is a concrete action we are proposing that will make a difference. I read in today's New York Times that companies are now beginning to plan for how climate change will cost them more money in the next 5 years. They don't think it is no problem. They don't think it is a 30-year problem.

These companies and their interest in their profits--that is how they should be interested, although I would like to see them a little more interested in workers and communities and climate. These companies, for their own bottom lines, are saying climate change is real, and we better do something.

Well, one way the chamber can move things along is to speak out against this administration in its efforts to undermine the “National Climate Assessment.” For years, this study has been the gold standard for climate research within our government. It is not partisan. It is factual; it is based on science; and it assesses the long-term threats to climate change.

The President is sort of, on climate, a member of the Flat Earth Society, just denying the facts. It would be as if Columbus sailed, and the President still said the earth is flat. That is how he is acting on climate. Well, the Chamber ought to break with that. They ought to let science and facts determine how we act.

This is a moment when the Chamber could actually use its influence to convince the administration to reverse course. If the business community said this, it would make a big difference. So this is a moment. Let's see if the chamber really wants to prove that they are for climate change. Let's see. Let's see. If they don't, we ask their members who say they believe in climate--and who are even planning for the problems we face--to put pressure on them to do it. Let's hope.

Let's hope.

SOURCE

'Stop Traveling,' Say Climate Alarmists

If you're flying or riding cruise ships, you're destroying the planet and future people.

The ideology that permeates the Center-Left is supposed to be “progressive.” Yet the policies that come from these supposedly forward-thinking elites push our culture into a mindset that dwells on crisis, decline, rationing, and mediocrity — all of which drags us backwards.

Recent polling reflects the wide embrace of socialism that redistributes wealth to all regardless of effort or work and centers on “investment” through government control that is characteristic of shortage, corruption, and even illness. In Venezuela, its citizens are emaciated from the lack of food. There’s no fuel, and showers are even a luxury. But socialism is the new darling of the losing Left.

Medicare for All will guarantee government-controlled health insurance that, in other nations, has proven to result in excessively long waits for services and limited access to innovation and top-quality health care and medicines. The open-border approach to immigration is turning some U.S. cities into landscapes that feature the rise of measles, tuberculosis, mumps, polio, the bubonic plague, and widespread illicit drug use in massive homeless camps.

But, again, the intelligentsia on the Center-Left declare The Progressive Way to be that which protects the rights of all for a future of bliss.

The same crowd is angrily fighting the War on Climate Change. This group is composed of entitled, guilt-driven individuals who operate on the wrong-headed belief that authentic progress, mobility, and achievement are mutually exclusive to good stewardship of environmental resources that are changing and resilient. In other words, if you believe that the best for individuals is self-reliance, the honor and dignity of work, or wealth and mobility that comes with personal responsibility, you’re dangerous. To “progressives,” the best way “forward” is to ensure scarcity and minimalism because humanity is the enemy.

Look no further than the recent New York Times article informing the masses that an individual enjoying air travel of 2,500 miles will be responsible for melting 32 square feet of Arctic ice. The same piece features this assertion from the University of Tennessee’s Professor John Nolt: “The average American causes through his/her greenhouse gas emissions the serious suffering and/or deaths of two future people.” Nolt’s analysis is based on his calculations that the average American generates about 16 metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent a year.

And, if you’re someone who likes cruises, you’re the biggest offender. Compared to flying by jet, those who sail around on even the most efficient cruise ships are supposedly belching out three or four times more CO2 per passenger mile, says Bryan Comer, a researcher at the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation.

The message of the NYT’s piece: Either buy carbon offsets at “carbon kiosks” available at airports like San Francisco’s to assuage your guilt or just don’t travel by plane and surely get off those cruise ships. When asking just how harmful one vacation might be, the article’s author, Andy Newman, wrote with dread, “You can’t see the face of the unnamed future person whose coastal village you will have helped submerge.”

This entire mindset is so very sad — to see generations of otherwise intellectual beings mired in fear that the very breath they exhale, containing carbon dioxide, is poisoning our planet. While indoctrinated to view humanity as the enemy, a life of limitations is demanded. Because the curriculum of our modern culture equates progress with destruction — all with little if any mention of the massive climate changes and continental shifts that occurred prior to the world’s population growth or burning fossil fuels with the advent of the combustible engine — many are convinced that development can’t occur with a sustainable community or that advancement can happen without apocalypse.

On Friday, an article looking at “apocalypse anxiety” noted the biblical doomsday scenario — Judgment Day after the war to end all wars on earth with a returning Messiah who would divide humanity into believers for heavenly reward and non-believers to a damned eternal separation. For many modern folks, this age-old belief has now been replaced with a climate catastrophe. As the alternative online news site, Metro.co.UK published, the return of Christ is seen as “unlikely” to be the End of Days but is now replaced by another end-of-the-world scenario. “We are absolutely sure doomsday will come when climate change melts the ice caps and rising seas swallow our civilisation. And if that doesn’t happen, a killer computer will wipe us off the planet — as long as we manage to survive the inevitable nuclear war, alien invasion or global pandemic.”

The greatness of humanity is being eclipsed by the angst and fear of “progressive” politics, which is moving us into a disgruntled mediocrity. Instead, let’s choose to believe in greatness and make true progress while stewarding our wonderful planet.

SOURCE

Australia: Amazing what the threat of losing power does for your political values: Queensland APPROVES the Adani mine - after voters slammed Labor for putting climate change ahead of 10,000 jobs

Adani has won the final approval it needs to construct its new coal mine in central Queensland. The approval comes after former Labor leader Bill Shorten's refusal to endorse the mine saw the party suffer a massive swing against them at the federal election.

Queensland's environment department has signed off on the company's plan to manage groundwater on and around its Galilee basin mine site.

Adani promised an immediate start to construction once the last approval was in hand.

In a statement, the environment department said it had approved the most recent version of the plan, which Adani submitted just a day ago. 'Adani submitted its most recent version of the plan, addressing the department's feedback, yesterday,' the department said. 'The (plan's) assessment has been rigorous and based on the best available science.'

The approval commits Adani to additional measures to safeguard and monitor water sources.

Some water experts claim Adani has grossly underestimated the mine's impacts on underground, and fear the effects of its permit to pump water out of the mine to allow for the safe extraction of coal.

Hydrologists from four Australian universities issued a joint report earlier this week, saying Adani's water science was 'severely flawed'. They warned the mine could have a such a dramatic effect on groundwater levels that the ancient Doongmabulla Springs Complex, 8km from the edge of Adani's mining lease, could permanently dry up.

That would spell death for the plant and animal species that rely on the springs for survival, one of those experts, Flinders University hydrogeology professor Adrian Werner said.

Prof Werner also warned of dire consequences for the Carmichael River which flows through the mine site, saying it would be cut off from its flood plain and could be robbed of groundwater that keeps the river flowing for much of the year.

Before Thursday's decision, a former state government water chief said Adani's plan would have irrefutable consequences for underground water sources in an area that's heavily dependent on them. 'We're looking at extraction of four Sydney Harbours out of underground systems. That's a huge amount of water,' he told ABC radio.

'We see politicians put their hands on their hearts and tell Queenslanders that we're managing our groundwater resources sustainably.'They don't know ... the Queensland government doesn't have a clue what's happening in terms of how underground water is being managed.'

SOURCE

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

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

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

13 June, 2019

Will global warming endanger the U.S. corn belt, a key source of calories for the growing global population (?)

It would be more accurate to say that American corn is a major source of calories for American internal combustion engines. It has virtually nothing to do with feeding the world. Only 17% of the crop is exported, mostly to Mexico and Japan.

Africa has a variety of climates but Africans mostly live on self-grown corn in the form of "mealie pap". They don't rely on American corn.

And the experiment described below is stupid. To expose a cultivar designed for a cold climate to unusually high temperatures is simply irrelevant. Corn is grown all around the world in a variety of climates, mostly warm. Some cultivars grown in India, for instance, are very heat tolerant -- up to 35° C.

So in the event of global warming, farmers would just have to order seed of a more heat tolerant cultivar. If the Midwest warmed up a bit, use of tropical cultivars would probably INCREASE production

The article below also ignores other factors of production. CO2 is a plant food so more CO2 in the air would also increase corn production. And a warmer world would be more rainy, which again favours plant growth. Farmers might have to look more to their drainage but that is a lot better than suffering drought, which is the current most common problem for corn farmers. Corn likes a lot of water.

So if you look at the full picture, a warmer world would be most likely to lead to a GLUT of corn, not a shortage. It never ceases to amaze me how dishonest Warmist articles are. Is there such a thing as an honest Warmist?

It’s a bitter cold March morning in Ames, Iowa, and the sprawling cornfields outside of town are buried beneath a couple of inches of ice and snow. But it’s hot and humid inside the custom-built grow chambers on the campus of Iowa State University.

Blindingly bright lights beat down on a trio of squares, each containing close to 7,000 pounds (3,175 kilograms) of soil, sunk five feet (1.5 meters) into the floor. The steady churning of fans, ensuring air circulation and uniform temperatures throughout the room, echoes off the walls. Every few inches, a suite of infrared thermometers and moisture sensors track the microclimates surrounding the leaves of the plants.

Inside these growth chambers, it’s the future. And Jerry Hatfield, an affable agronomist who heads the US Department of Agriculture’s National Laboratory for Agriculture and the Environment, doesn’t like what he sees.

“Either we’re going to change the crops that we produce or we’re going to have to think about how we genetically manipulate that plant to have a higher tolerance to higher temperature.”
Three years ago, Hatfield used the growth chambers to find out how local crops would perform under the temperatures predicted for the region in 2100, which are expected to rise roughly 4 °C on average, or about 7.2 °F. He simulated a growing season, from April 1 through October 30, for three different strains of corn used by farmers in the area. In one chamber, Hatfield started the temperature at just around 50 °F (10 °C) to mimic conditions in early April, raised it well above 100 °F (38 °C) to simulate the hot summer days (as high as 114 °F in the chamber with 2100 conditions), and then brought it back down again for autumn. In a second chamber, he simulated the region’s current, cooler climate norms.

The differences between the plants in the two chambers were stark. While the leaves looked the same, the impact of that extra 7.2 °F was far worse than projected by even the most pessimistic scientific literature. The number of corn kernels per plant plummeted, in some cases by 84%. Some plants produced no kernels at all.

It was just the first in a series of alarming results. In the months that followed, Hatfield and his colleagues simulated the rising temperatures and altered rainfall patterns expected to hit the wheat fields of Salina, Kansas, as soon as 2050. Yields fell as much as 30% with low precipitation and as much as 70% with the combination of high temperatures and low precipitation expected in the decades ahead.

To date, it’s been relatively easy for American farmers to shrug off climate change. After all, under the most optimistic models, projected US yields for corn and soybeans?—?which are grown on 75% of the arable land in the Midwest?—?are actually expected to increase through 2050, thanks to warmer weather that will benefit the relatively cool northern climes. But after that, if Hatfield is right, yields will fall off a cliff, devastating farmers and leaving much of the world hungrier.

By 2050, the world’s population is expected to grow to 9.7 billion. As living standards and diets also improve around the world, food production will have to increase by 50% at a time when climate change will help make both sub-Saharan African and East Asia unable to meet their own needs without imports. Already US corn and soybeans account for 17% of the world’s caloric output. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization projects that American exports of corn must almost triple by 2050 to meet the shortfall, while US soy exports would have to rise by more than 50%. All this extra food has to be grown without using significantly more land. That means it’s going to be all about yield?—?the productivity of the crop.

And that is what has Hatfield so worried. A growing body of scientific literature suggests that climate change is likely to decimate yields unless we can find new ways to help plants cope with the droughts, vast temperature fluctuations, and other extreme weather that’s likely to become commonplace in the decades ahead.

“If something isn’t done, we will see major drops in production across large areas of the corn belt and Great Plains,” Hatfield says. “Either we’re going to change the crops that we produce or we’re going to have to think about how we genetically manipulate that plant to have a higher tolerance to higher temperature.”

SOURCE

That's creepy Joe Biden hoping for some action

Biofuels Don't Lower Gas Price or Emissions, Report Finds

A federal program requiring the use of corn-based ethanol and biodiesel in gasoline supplies hasn’t lowered pump prices or significantly reduced greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Gasoline prices outside of the corn-rich Midwest likely rose by a few pennies a gallon at the pump because of the Renewable Fuel Standard, while falling slightly in areas with ethanol plants, the GAO said in a report posted online Monday. The pump price effects likely diminished over time. Refiners benefited from installing equipment for the fuel-blending requirement “that, over time, reduced refining costs for gasoline,” according to the report.

In addition, the GAO found that “most of the experts we interviewed generally agreed that to date the RFS has likely had a limited effect, if any, on greenhouse gas emissions.” That’s due to the continued reliance on corn-based ethanol, instead of more advanced cellulosic biofuels that use agricultural waste but haven’t shown a great deal of commercial viability.

The report was commissioned at the request of U.S. Senator James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican and a cosponsor of bills to reduce or eliminate the mandate.

Contentious Law

The 2005 law that required annually increasing use of biofuels has been contentious, not only among agricultural and oil-refining states, but also for government agencies. Last year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published a report saying corn-based ethanol and soybean-based biodiesel is hurting water quality, and the program may be boosting the number of acres being planted for biofuels.

In April, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released a study that found corn-based ethanol’s greenhouse gas emissions were 39% lower than gasoline over the entire life cycle, from the initial production of raw materials to its processing and eventual combustion in vehicles.

USDA disagreed with the GAO report’s conclusion that the program has had limited effects on reducing emissions. It also told GAO that its “conclusion that the RFS likely had modest impacts on gasoline prices should be augmented by a discussion of the volatility of gasoline prices,” according to the report.

The Renewable Fuels Association, an industry trade group, criticized the findings of the GAO report, citing USDA’s study and that it also stands “by research that indicates savings at the fuel pump.”

SOURCE

White House poised to relax mileage standards, rebuffing automakers and setting up probable fight with California

A last-minute push by automakers appears unlikely to sway the Trump administration from abandoning President Barack Obama’s signature climate policy to improve mileage standards for cars and light trucks, two government officials said Friday.

The administration’s plan to freeze federal fuel-efficiency requirements for six years and end California’s authority to set its own standards has injected uncertainty into the auto market and raised the prospect of a drawn-out legal fight between federal officials and the nation’s biggest state.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department are poised to finalize a proposal this summer that would set federal car standards at roughly 37 miles per gallon, rather than raising them to nearly 51 miles per gallon for 2025 models. The rule would also revoke California’s existing waiver to set its own rules under the Clean Air Act, a practice the federal government has sanctioned for decades.

On Thursday, 17 U.S. and foreign firms sent a letter to both President Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), urging them to “resurrect” talks to avoid harming the industry and American consumers. They warn that only a nationally agreed-upon set of rules would avert “an extended period of litigation and instability, which could prove as untenable as the current program.”

But White House officials rebuffed the automakers’ request Thursday, saying there was no prospect of further negotiation with the California Air Resources Board (CARB). The two government officials, who were briefed on the discussions, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

“As we acknowledged earlier this year, CARB failed to put forward a productive alternative, and we are moving forward to finalize a rule with the goal of promoting safer, cleaner and more affordable vehicles,” said White House spokesman Judd Deere in an email.

Administration officials say that the nation needs to readjust the emissions targets because consumers prefer bigger and less fuel-efficient vehicles than regulators initially envisioned and that keeping them in place will spur Americans to drive older, less safe vehicles.

But California leaders show no signs of budging.

“Despite the White House’s rejection of the automakers’ appeal, we stand with those automakers, other states, and environmental leaders in pushing for one national standard — one that doesn’t backtrack on the progress states like California have made in protecting the climate and our kids’ health,” Newsom said in a statement Friday.

In 2009, the Obama administration reached an agreement with automakers and officials in California to establish the first-ever carbon standards for the vehicles. Limiting cars’ carbon output and improving fuel efficiency reduces the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, helping to curb the pace of climate change.

[Experts question if lower gas mileage actually saves lives]

In February, CARB officials said the administration had broken off communications before Christmas and had neither responded to the state’s proposals nor offered one of its own.

An aide to California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) said that the state was still committed to defending the standards that California, automakers and the federal government agreed to back in 2009. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have signed on to adopting whatever tailpipe standards California sets.

In their letter to the California governor, the automakers wrote, “We know that reaching an agreement has been challenging, but the stakes are too high and the benefits too important to accept the status quo.”

Trump officials have often framed their deregulatory agenda as an effort to create more certainty for U.S. businesses and to hand more power back to individual states instead of the federal government.

But some critics argue that the administration’s tailpipe proposal would accomplish neither of those goals. California’s power to set its own standards dates to 1967 legislation and has been reaffirmed every time Congress amended the law.

“The Trump EPA’s profoundly cynical version of states’ rights does not include the fundamental rights of states — long guaranteed under the Clean Air Act — to protect millions of residents from harmful tailpipe pollution,” said Chester France, a consultant for the Environmental Defense Fund and a former EPA official.

Critics say the proposed freeze would benefit the oil and gas industry and cost consumers more at the pump. They also warn that a legal battle with California could result in a sweeping upheaval in the nation’s automotive market, should carmakers eventually have to meet different standards in different states.

One major carmaker, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, did not sign the industry’s letters for another round of negotiations. In a statement, the automaker said its position had not changed since last fall, when an executive testified that the company is “in favor of ongoing fuel economy improvements in the fleet” but that policymakers needed to factor in the “realities” of how the auto market had changed over time.

White House officials had lobbied automakers in late February to back whatever rule the administration finalizes, according to multiple senior administration officials, and brought some of the firms back on an individual basis to solicit additional feedback. But as it became clear that the administration was forging ahead with its original plan, many manufacturers decided to make a more public statement.

Sen. Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, urged the industry to work directly with California given the administration’s stance.

“While it is not unhelpful that the automobile industry sent this letter, we are now in the 11th hour, and I fear it won’t be long before the rubber meets the road and the administration’s reckless rollback is finalized,” he said.

Bill Becker, president of Becker Environmental Consulting, said in an email that the “Hail Mary” pass from the industry won’t make a difference.

“The automakers’ efforts are too little and too late to stop the Trump administration from eviscerating the Obama clean car standards,” Becker said. “The Trump proposal, if adopted, will contribute to tens of thousands of premature deaths and millions of incidences of serious illnesses, undermine states’ compliance with the Clean Air Act, and impose serious impacts on businesses.”

SOURCE

Great Lakes Reveal a Fatal Flaw in Climate Change ‘Science’

Lake Erie and Lake Superior — two of the five that make up the Great Lakes — broke records for water levels this May. Lakes Michigan and Huron could follow suit.

Naturally, climate change is getting the blame. “We are undoubtedly observing the effects of a warming climate in the Great Lakes,” says Richard Rood, a University of Michigan climate scientist.

But just a few years ago, climate scientists were insisting that a warming climate would cause water levels to decline.

In 2008, Science Daily reported on a study that attributed the decline in Great Lakes water levels to global warming. The researchers who conducted the study said that the drop “raised concern because the declines are consistent with many climate change predictions.”

In 2009, Columbia University’s Earth Institute informed us that “most climate models suggest that we may see declines in lake levels over the next 100 years; one suggests that we may see declines of up to 8.2 feet.”

In 2011, the Union of Concern Scientists said that “scientists expect water levels in the Great Lakes to drop in both summer and winter, with the greatest declines occurring in Lakes Huron and Michigan.”

In 2013, the Natural Resources Defense Council said that “it’s no secret that, partially due to climate change, the water levels in the Great Lakes are getting very low.”

That same year, Think Progress reported that “Several different climate models for the Great Lakes region all predict that lake levels will decline over the next century.”

Since the Great Lakes account for 21% of the world’s surface fresh water, these stories were all wrapped in doom-and-gloom scenarios about the impact on drinking water, shipping, recreation, and so on.

The very next year, however, water levels started rising.

So what are scientists saying now? Simple. They’re now claiming that the fall and rise of Great Lakes’ water levels are due to climate change.

“Climate change is driving rapid shifts between high and low water levels on the Great Lakes,” is the new “consensus.”

The truth, of course, is that water levels in the Great Lakes vary over time. And, as a matter of fact, they varied far more in the past than they do now. A U.S. Geological Survey notes that “prehistoric levels exceed modern-day fluctuations.”

It says that “Prehistoric variations in lake levels have exceeded by as much as a factor of 2 (that is, more than 3 meters) the 1.6-meter fluctuation that spanned the 1964 low level and the 1985-87 high level.”

And, as anyone who’s ever lived near the Great Lakes knows, the lakes themselves were formed in the wake a massive change in the earth’s climate — when the glaciers receded at the end of the Ice Age roughly 14,000 years ago.

So if the lakes’ huge fluctuations in the past weren’t caused by mankind’s burning fossil fuels, why are scientists so convinced that the far more minor changes happening today are?

The reason is simple. Climate scientists can blame anything they want on global warming. The climate models are imprecise enough that no matter what is happening they can point to it as proof that man-made climate change is happening. Too much rain, too little rain, bitterly cold winters, mild winters, more snow, less snow, rising water levels, falling water levels — they can attribute “climate change” as a cause of it all.

But if nothing can disprove a theory, and every event, no matter how contradictory, is proof that the theory is valid, is that really science? Sounds more like a religion to us.

SOURCE

Former Obama Official Blames Central American Migration on ‘Climate Crisis’

Just another dummy

Former Obama official Patrick Gaspard in a panel discussion on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopolous” blamed Central American migration on the “climate crisis.”

Gaspard, who is currently president of the Open Society Foundation and once served as Obama’s White House political affairs director, said President Donald Trump was “falsely hyping a deal that was struck some months ago that we know is probably insufficient to the challenge.”

“Let’s be clear about what’s really happening here. I know Americans through the news media are focused on Mexico and this challenge, but this story is really not about Mexico. It’s about migrants who are coming from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, from the Northern Triangle, and they are a very different class of migrants than we saw in years past,” he said.

“You used to have lone Mexican men who would come, find work, send money back home. That’s not what you have now. You have whole families that are coming as a consequence of pressures of climate shifts in the Northern Triangle,” Gaspard said.

He said the president should be working with countries in that region to fight climate change.

“We have a five-year drought there now and precipitation that’s moving to other parts of the region. Any president of the U.S. should be working with Mexico and with that region to mitigate the climate crisis and the crisis also in some of the human rights oppressions that exist in those countries. We should be partnering with Mexico now, not making idle threats and lifting up deals that will do nothing to mitigate the crisis,” Gaspard said.

SOURCE

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

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

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

12 June, 2019

More than 500 species of plants have disappeared in the past 250 years potentially robbing us of sources for future drugs, new research reveals

Only 500? I think it was a million last time I heard. Nobody knows in reality. In 2016, scientists reported that 1 trillion species are estimated to be on Earth currently with only one-thousandth of one percent described. But 500 extinctions is reasonable for the time period concerned.   On some estimates 99% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. Extinctions are a regular natural occurrence.

And no extinction has yet been shown to be important to humans. Most recently extinct species have closely related or similar extant species. The banded trinity, for instance, has dozens of similar species in Asia and elsewhere

The shocking number of plant species that have gone extinct in the past 250 years have been revealed by a new study.

Experts found that 500 species - more than twice the number of birds, mammals and amphibians recorded as extinct - are no longer found on Earth.

Around two species of plants go extinct every year - although the true figure is likely to be even higher as plants may be disappearing before they are even discovered, the researchers said.

Scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and Stockholm University analysed all plant extinction records worldwide to arrive at the figure.

One plant - the banded trinity - has not been seen since turning up in a field in Chicago in 1916.

Others include the Chile sandalwood, a tree that grew on the Juan Fernandez Islands between Chile and Easter island and was heavily exploited for its scent.

Another is the St Helena olive, first discovered in 1805 on the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic.

One lone elderly tree survived until 1994 and two more were propagated from cuttings, but they succumbed to a termite attack and fungal infections in 2003.

The research brought together data from fieldwork, literature and herbarium specimens.

It showed how many plant species have gone extinct, what they are, where they have disappeared from and what lessons can be learned to stop future extinction.

The study found that 571 plant species have disappeared in the last two and a half centuries - four times more than the current listing of extinct plants.

The figure is also more than twice the number of birds, mammals and amphibians recorded as extinct - a combined total of 217 species.

Dr Aelys M Humphreys, assistant professor at the Department of Ecology, Environment and Plant Sciences at Stockholm University, said: ‘Most people can name a mammal or bird that has become extinct in recent centuries, but few can name an extinct plant.

‘This study is the first time we have an overview of what plants have already become extinct, where they have disappeared from, and how quickly this is happening.

‘We hear a lot about the number of species facing extinction, but these figures are for plants that we’ve already lost, so provide an unprecedented window into plant extinction in modern times.’

The scientists found that plant extinction is happening as much as 500 times faster than ‘natural’ background rates of extinction - the normal rate of loss in earth’s history before human intervention.

Islands, areas in the tropics and areas with a Mediterranean climate were found to have the highest rates of extinction.

The research suggested that the increase in plant extinction rates could be due to the same factors that are documented as threats to many surviving plants - change of land use resulting in the fragmentation and destruction of native vegetation, particularly range-restricted species.

Dr Eimear Nic Lughadha, co-author and conservation scientist at Kew said: ‘Plants underpin all life on earth, they provide the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat, as well as making up the backbone of the world’s ecosystems - so plant extinction is bad news for all species.

‘This new understanding of plant extinction will help us predict (and try to prevent) future extinctions of plants, as well as other organisms.

‘Millions of other species depend on plants for their survival, humans included, so knowing which plants we are losing and from where will feed back into conservation programmes targeting other organisms as well.”

Commenting on the research, Dr Rob Salguero-Gómez, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, said: ‘Plants underpin and provide key resources to entire ecosystems worldwide.

‘However, much of the effort to quantify the loss of species diversity worldwide has focused on charismatic species such as mammals and birds. Understanding how much, where, and how plant species are being lost is of paramount importance, not only for ecologists but also for human societies.

‘We depend on plants directly for food, shade and construction materials, and indirectly for ‘ecosystem services’ such as carbon fixation, oxygen creation, and even improvement in human mental health through enjoying green spaces.’

The full findings of the study were published in the journal Nature, Ecology & Evolution.

SOURCE

State of the Climate 2018: Global Warming Is Not Accelerating

A slippery report by the WMO notwithstanding

The World Meteorological Organisation is misleading the public by suggesting that global warming and its impacts are accelerating. In fact, since 2016 global average temperature has continued to decline.

That’s according to Norwegian Professor Ole Humlum, whose annual review of the world’s climate is published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Last week, the WMO issued its own review of the climate, which insinuated that global warming was worsening. However, Professor Humlum points out that the data tells a very different story:

“Reading the WMO report, you would think that global warming was getting worse. But in fact it is carefully worded to give a false impression. The data are far more suggestive of an improvement than a deterioration.”

And the lack of anything to be alarmed about is clear across a range of measures, says Professor Humlum:

“After the warm year of 2016, temperatures last year continued to fall back to levels of the so-called warming “pause” of 2000-2015. There is no sign of any acceleration in global temperature, hurricanes or sea-level rise. These empirical observations show no sign of acceleration whatsoever.”

Professor Humlum’s key findings:

* In 2018, the average global surface temperature continued a gradual descent towards the level characterising the years before the strong 2015–16 El Niño episode.

* Since 2004, when the Argo floats came into operation, the global oceans above 1900m depth have on average warmed somewhat. The maximum warming (between the surface and 120 m depth) mainly affects oceans near the equator, where the incoming solar radiation is at a maximum. In contrast, net cooling has been pronounced for the North Atlantic since 2004.

* Data from tide gauges all over the world suggest an average global sea-level rise of 1– 1.5 mm/year, while the satellite record suggests a rise of about 3.2 mm/year. The large difference between the two data sets still has no broadly accepted explanation.

* The Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent has undergone important local and regional variations from year to year. The overall global tendency since 1972, however, is for overall stable snow extent.

* Tropical storm and hurricane accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) values since 1970 have displayed large variations from year to year, but no overall trend towards either lower or higher activity. The same applies for the number of hurricane landfalls in the continental United States, for which the record begins in 1851.

SOURCE

The only child known to have been born and raised inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone now a happy, healthy college student approaching her 20th birthday

More evidence that it is only really high levels of radiation that are dangerous to you

A healthy young Ukrainian

Mariyka Sovenko, now 19, was born to mother Lydia and husband Mikhail deep inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone in 1999 - a decade after the disaster.

Her birth was initially covered up by the Ukrainian authorities, embarrassed that some people were still living inside the deeply irradiated zone, but details have resurfaced as interest in the disaster has peaked thanks to the Sky Atlantic series.

Though Mariyka does not feature in the series, for many in Ukraine her life marks one of the defining chapters of the ongoing saga.

Lydia and husband Mikhail, who was a firefighter called to reactor 4 on the night of the explosion in 1986, had refused to leave the exclusion zone because they were not offered evacuation housing by the Soviet Union.

Lydia had not realised she was pregnant until she gave birth with Mikhail's help - who cut his daughter's umbilical chord before giving her a wash.

Once news of Mariyka's birth spread, Lydia recalled being treated 'like a criminal' for giving birth at Chernobyl and refusing to budge from one of the only family homes in the zone.

But she continued to raise Mariyka there, ignoring government health warnings that she was putting her daughter in mortal danger as young Marikya drank milk from a cow grazing on irradiated pastures and swam in streams where the fish sent Geiger counters bleeping wildly.

Rumours swirled and by the time her daughter was five, Lydia - then in her mid-40s - was forced to respond: 'If people think she is a mutant, or has two heads, they are quite wrong. 'She is a lovely child who is absolutely healthy as far as we can see.'

Interviewed in 2006 she said she was lonely with no playmates in a zone where visitors without a special reason were banned. She said: 'I wish there was just one other kid here. I would show him or her around my house and the village – we could have real fun together.'

Her parents continued to face pressure form the authorities to move but their tumbledown house remained Mariyka's home as she grew up – although from the age of seven she had to live outside Chernobyl in term time to attend school.

Now as Chernobyl once again captures headlines, Mariyka spoke to the Sunday Express newspaper.

Now aged 19, she is a student at a leading higher education institution and hopes to work in the hospitality industry. To pay for her studies she works in a fashionable bar.

She is reluctant to talk about her past but confirmed she is healthy, telling the Sunday Express: 'I am doing well, I am working. I'm providing for myself. This is it.'

Though Mariyka now lives and works outside the exclusion zone, she occasionally obtains a permit to visit her mother - now aged 66 - who still lives and works there.

Her mother confirmed that Mariyka is healthy, and is known to be 'proud' of her daughter's success in getting on in life after her unique start.

Her health and success - confirmed by her mother and friends - comes as the nature of Chernobyl is fighting back against the appalling nuclear decimation it suffered 43 years ago.

Wildlife is teeming in the area with elk, deer, wild boar and wolves thriving as well as rare wild birds and flowers, some of them from the Red Book.

As her mother, now 66, has said: 'People here believe that Mariyka is a symbol of Chernobyl's renaissance, a sign from God which they interpret as a blessing to live here, and that life is coming back to this blighted place.'

SOURCE

Canada’s Carbon Taxation: It’s Worse Than Thought

A prominent economist says that Canada’s carbon tax regime, introduced last year, has been a complete mess. In a new paper published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Robert Lyman explains how a theoretically sound approach to addressing CO2 emissions has turned out to be worse than critics have feared.

“Carbon pricing should be the most economically efficient way to deal with CO2 emissions”, says Lyman. “But the Canadian government has turned a simple idea into a dog’s breakfast.”

The problems encountered range from the use of rates that are unrelated to the cost of global warming, and varying widely across different provinces, and a staggering array of “complementary measures” that have made administration unnecessarily difficult. Moreover, it is not even clear that the carbon tax regime is constitutional – three provinces have launched challenges in the courts, and two more are likely to follow suit.

Lyman says that the carbon tax regime in Canada therefore faces an uncertain future:

“The way carbon taxes have been dealt with in Canada is almost the opposite of how it should have been done. It has been complex, inefficient and damaging to the economic prospects of the country. The government is going to have to think again”.

SOURCE

Australia: Green eco-warriors are killing off tourism because visitors think the Great Barrier Reef is dead

The Greenie lies never stop

Queensland's tourism industry is facing a recession as an increasing amount of tourists shun the Great Barrier Reef.

Reef cruise operators and tourism experts have seen a downturn in the amount of interest the once popular destination is receiving.

They argue claims made by environmental groups and eco-warriors that the reef is dying are detrimental to the industry.

Cairns-based Coral Expeditions commercial director Jeff Gillies said the overall negative perception of reef health has 'definitely affected the downturn in reef tourism'.

Former Cairns mayor Kevin Byrne agreed. He told The Australian 'our tourism industry here is pretty well static, if not in recession.

'We now have the monumental task of convincing people to come to the Great Barrier Reef. As a living organism, it is in wonderful shape and people need to be proud enough to stand up and say it'.

SOURCE

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

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

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11 June, 2019

Current U.S. floods are needlesly wasting valuable water

Some current headlines: Record floods affect Midwest states; Louisiana floods one of the worst recent US disasters; Torrential Rain Slams Parts of East Coast with Historic Flooding; Flooding from melting snow overwhelms Midwest; At Least 20 Dead in Historic West Virginia Flooding; Massive Flooding and Torrential Rain Slam Central Texas, Again

By David Wojick

Our National Environmental Policy is to let nature take its course and that is exactly what is happening with this catastrophic flooding. Blame Congress, not climate change. The dams that would stop this flooding were designed in the 1960’s but they were never built because of the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). It is that simple. We are flooding ourselves.

The colossal irony is that a lot of this flooding is in drought prone places. So the water that is hurting us is actually very valuable, if we could store it, which is just what dams do. We are flooding ourselves with valuable water. How stupid is that?

I am reading the news coverage of this terrible tragedy and there is not the slightest hint that it was preventable, which it most surely was. And I am not referring to getting people out of the way by prohibiting living where floods can occur, which is the absurd green solution. We know how to stop these floods, we are just not doing it.

It is not a matter of building monster dams on major rivers. On the contrary it means building a lot of small to medium sized dams on the many tributaries the feed these big rivers. Catch and hold the water in small amounts over a large area, releasing it slowly, even usefully, as in irrigation and hydro power.

By pure coincidence I was there when the U.S. Flood Control Program was killed. As a junior civil engineer I was working my way through graduate school in philosophy of science by helping to design the needed dams.

But NEPA said that we were to minimize “environmental impact.” As it happens, stopping destructive floods is a major environmental impact, a good one in my view, but we were basically barred from interfering with the floods. We were messing with nature and that was now prohibited. I am not making this up.

I am pretty sure that the people who wanted to protect nature, whatever that means, did not think they were protecting destructive floods, but that is what happened. Or maybe some of them did understand that. After all, the green answer to floods is to get out of the way, right? Let the waters roll.

We were denounced as “public enemy number one” by Supreme Court Justice Douglas, in Playboy Magazine no less. This may not sound like much today but the greens were just getting started on their quest for world domination and it hit hard at the time. Senior engineers that I greatly respected quit in disgrace after many decades of service.

The point is that these awful floods do not have to happen. I cannot say it simpler than that. We know how to stop these floods and we can use the water when we do. We are flooding ourselves in valuable water.

SOURCE

Mike Hulme speaks out

One way in which the climate debate has changed in the last year or so is the emergence of a kind of “climate death cult”. This was always there in the background (see this comment from Andy West on my previous post) but recently has come into the mainstream media, with widespread talk of “extinction” and bogus claims of an “emergency“.

The latest example is a “paper” by two Australian members of the death cult, saying that there’s a good chance of human civilisation coming to end. Needless to say, these two con-men, David Spratt and Ian Dunlop, are both cashing on the cult with books to sell, and of course the UK media is giving them huge publicity and raising no questions.

But what is perhaps even worse is the response – or lack of – from the climate science community. As far as I am aware, not a single UK climate scientist has explicitly called out this bullshit, even though David Rose has specifically asked them about it. One of those Rose asked is promoting his vacuous graphics, while another seems to be too busy attacking Donald Trump.

I have found one climate scientist, Ryan Maue, who seems to care about disinformation being fed to the public and is prepared to call it out. What a pity that we don’t have any climate scientists with courage and integrity here in the UK.

So let’s hear it for Mike Hulme, formerly a climate scientist at UEA, but now working on the sociology and politics side of things in the Geography Department at Cambridge. He’s a man of conscience, honesty and integrity, who wrote a very good book called Why we disagree about climate change, where, for example, he acknowledges that his own political views influenced his views on climate change.

Hulme has written an article on his blog, Am I a denier, a human extinction denier? As well as challenging the extinction/emergency narrative, he plays with the ‘denier’ label. Below are a couple of excerpts, but please go to his site and read his whole article.

"There has been a lot of talk recently about climate change and extinction.

It is undoubtedly the case that species go extinct. And sometimes large numbers of species disappear together in mass events caused by the same physical stresses. It is also true that at some point in the future the human species will go extinct, or at the least evolve into a new species partly of our own making.

Yet I resist the current mood of ‘extinctionism’ which pervades the new public discourse around climate change. Talking about the future in this way is counter-productive. And it does a disservice to development, justice, peace-making and humanitarian projects being undertaken around the world today.

A denier is a person who denies something, “… who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by the majority of scientific or historical evidence.” If I do not believe that climate change will drive the human species to extinction, does that make me an extinction denier? For I do not believe that there is good scientific or historical evidence that climate change will lead to human extinction…

This rise in extinction rhetoric in (largely) English-speaking societies over the past 12 months is in part linked to the IPCC’s Special Report on 1.5C Warming published last October. The slogan “we have only 12 years left” has somehow been extracted from this Report and feeds the rise of climate clocks such as this one from the Human Impact Lab in Montreal. But the IPCC Report offers neither scientific nor historical evidence for human extinction.

From this extinction fear arises the “panic” that Greta Thunberg has called for. Panic demands a response and one response is to declare an emergency. ‘Climate emergencies’ are now being declared in jurisdictions ranging from universities, the British Parliament and several local authorities in the UK.

But the rhetoric of extinction and emergency does not adequately describe the situation we find ourselves in. Declaring a climate emergency implies the possibility of time-limited radical and decisive action that can end the emergency. But climate change is not like this. The historical trajectory of human expansion, western imperialism and technological development has created climate change as a new condition of human existence rather than as a path to extinction."

SOURCE

British weirdness

Seriously attempting the impossible at great cost

Having failed miserably to render the United Kingdom as a colony of the EU via her white flag surrender treaty, aka the Withdrawal Agreement, Theresa May is now seemingly intent on securing her poisonous, destructive legacy by alternative means.

According to the Financial Times, she intends to introduce legislation via a statutory instrument obliging Britain to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050, instead of the 80% reduction required by law in the Climate Change Act 2008. The recommendation, offered up by the lunatics at the Committee on Climate Change, will cost the UK at least £50 billion a year, 1 billion pounds a week. The ‘ambitious’ target would require heating to be almost entirely decarbonised, leaving households having to replace gas boilers with alternatives such as heat pumps, which cost “three times more”, significant changes to farming practices and a total ban on petrol and diesel cars by 2050, along with a tenfold increase in electric charging points. Homeowners would also need to spend thousands or tens of thousands of pounds on insulation. This is according to a letter sent to May by Phillip Hammond, the Chancellor. Hammond also advises that unless other countries follow suit, then “key industries” – such as the steel industry – would become economically uncompetitive or dependent on permanent government support.

But the Maybot Dancing Queen Brexit Terminator is apparently very keen to introduce the legislation:

Mrs May, whose tenure as prime minister will end next month, is hoping the carbon emissions legislation will be one of her most important legacies after she leaves office.

Liz Truss, chief secretary to the Treasury, recently urged Number 10 to hold off on the decision until a new prime minister is in place.

However, it is understood that Mrs May is set to introduce the legislation by June 11, according to Whitehall officials. This would require her to introduce a “statutory instrument”, a form of secondary legislation, to tweak the existing 2008 Climate Change Act.

Just when you thought Britain’s worst ever Prime Minister couldn’t get even worse and inflict even more damage upon the country she has pretended to lead for three years. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the leadership front-runner, Boris Johnson, has apparently gone Green loco too by promising to do exactly the same thing if he becomes PM:

SOURCE

Debunked: Temperature records defy attempt to blame Japan heat wave on global warming

Climate alarmists have published a paper claiming record high temperatures in Japan last July “would never have happened” without global warming. A media article summarizing the paper and its claim appeared at the very top of a Google News search for “global warming” on May 30. The claim, however, is refuted by recorded temperature data.

The authors of the alarmist paper devised a computer model that concluded a summer heat wave would have almost no chance of getting as hot as last July’s Japan heat wave in the absence of global warming. The model did not rule out that natural extreme summer heat waves could occur, and found natural factors were a significant factor in the July 2018 heat wave. However, the model was programmed to add an extra layer of heat, due to global warming, to summer heat waves.

Alarmists can always add 1 degree Celsius – or whatever their latest claim is regarding the extent of human-caused global warming – to any temperature record and claim global warming is responsible. For a high-temperature record, alarmists can tack on that 1 degree Celsius and claim the full extent of the high temperature record would not have occurred without global warming. But historical temperature records defy that simple, lazy approach.

Climate scientist John Christy showed in 2016 congressional testimony that the number of high temperature records in the United States peaked in the 1930s and has been steadily declining ever since. It would be an amazing coincidence if U.S. high temperature trends somehow defied global trends for all of the past 80 years. Indeed, scientists with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change have shown little or no evidence for any increasing frequency of summer temperature records globally.

Anthropogenic global warming theory itself predicts that most of the temperature impact of human-caused warming will occur during winter and in nighttime temperatures. As a result, the lazy practice of adding 1 degree Celsius to all summer high temperatures should really be adding just a fraction of 1 degree Celsius if people want to take that lazy route. However, objective data show the frequency of high temperature records has declined or, at worst, remained unaffected since the early 20th century. So claiming global warming must have been responsible for Japan’s July 2018 high temperature records defies objective data trends.

SOURCE

Science’s Untold Scandal: Professional Societies’ Sell Out on Climate Change

When we started our careers, it was considered an honor to be a member of professional societies that helped practitioners keep up with the latest developments in their fields through relevant meetings and publications. Senior author Dr. Jay Lehr had the privilege of leading one of these societies long ago.

But things are different now. Whether it be chemistry, physics, geology or engineering, many of the world’s primary professional societies have changed from being paragons of technical virtue to opportunistic groups focused on maximizing their members’ financial gains in support of the climate scare, the world’s greatest science fraud.

In particular, they continue to promote the groundless hypothesis that carbon dioxide emitted as a result of mankind’s use of fossil fuels is leading to environmental catastrophe. You have been hearing about it for the past decade and more, with 21 candidates for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in the next election promoting some form of a Green New Deal—a plan to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and replace them with wind and solar power thereby returning society to the lifestyle of the 1880s.

Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, wrote in 1994 that radical greens had taken over the organization after the fall of the Berlin Wall, leaving him no choice but to resign. The takeover of environmental institutions by extremists is now almost complete, the most important of which may be the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

President Donald Trump is aggressively trying to win back the EPA in the best interests of the nation, but it is an uphill battle as the climate cult has also taken control of academia, political parties, and governments themselves.

An example of how professional societies have apparently been hijacked by extremists concerns the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta, Canada (APEGA). Allan MacRae, a prominent long-time member of APEGA, was named to receive its most distinguished lifetime achievement award in 2019.

Then APEGA staff learned that MacRae had written publicly about the damage done to humanity and the environment by radical greens. APEGA leadership strongly condemned his comments and his award was withdrawn. It led MacRae to write “Hypothesis: Radical Greens are the Great Killers of Our Age,” which explains the APEGA award withdrawal and to support his contention that radical greens have done enormous harm to humanity and the environment with their destructive, misguided policies. MacRae writes, “APEGA refused to discuss the evidence, and baselessly claimed the moral high ground.”

One commenter responding to MacRae’s essay posed a question, the answer to which tells an important story: “How did the Greens get control of APEGA?” Another commenter answered:

The same way they have taken over every other professional organization. The actual members are too busy building their careers and actually working in the field to spend much time worrying about the day to day operation of the organization. As a result, they are taken over by lawyers and activists whose interest is in pushing their own agenda, not advancing science for humanity.

Another reader commented:

“The long march through the Institutions” as proposed by the Frankfurt school back in the 1930s was launched knowing it would be a generations long policy. Here we are three generations on and they have now taken control of all the western institutions as planned. The socialists do not stop just because their prime construct, the USSR failed in 1990. They regard that failure as simply work in progress. The climate as a tool which can never be tamed, was a genuine piece of strategic genius by the COGS (constantly offended green socialists). They will not stop. The destruction of humanity is too big a prize, they view this activity as pressing the Earth’s reset button.

The same thing is happening in the United States, where feathers were really ruffled at the American Physical Society (APS) when Dr. Hal Lewis, emeritus professor of Physics at the University of California, sent his resignation letter to the Society after being a member for 67 years.

In his letter, he described the joy of working with brilliant physicists for decades, when no one expected to get rich in this field. Lewis explained how studies done within the society had effective oversight that enabled members to stake their reputations on the work of the organization. He said that has all now changed.

Open dialogue has disappeared and all organization policies follow the new politics of the organization leadership rather than the membership. It is apparently focused on the money that accrues to the organization and its members by going along with popular concerns.

Lewis’ letter can be found here. A telling quote from that letter follows:

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone that has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents which lay it bare.

Lewis went on to state that he recruited over 200 members of APS to oppose the new APS policy that fully supports the global warming fraud. Their request for a hearing on the issue was completely ignored.

On March 31, 2019, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) issued a press release announcing the launch of The Climate Solutions Community, a broad committee to identify viable solutions to mitigate, adapt, and become resilient to the effects of climate change.

They totally buy into the dangerous man-made climate change hypothesis with no consideration of alternative points of view. AIChE’s description of their efforts highlight the fact that employment can be gained for their members as a result of the climate scare.

The Geological Society of America (GSA) has fallen into the same trap. In April 2015, GSA issued a Position Statement asserting that:

Human activities (mainly greenhouse-gas emissions) are the dominant cause of the rapid warming since the middle 1900s (IPCC, 2013). If the upward trend in greenhouse-gas concentrations continues, the projected global climate change by the end of the twenty first century will result in significant impacts on humans and other species.

The GSA backs up the statement with vague evidence from paleoclimates and offers their full support for the reports of the widely discredited United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

As is evident from the process described on the GSA Position Statement FAQs web page, the full membership of GSA is not polled after the development of Position Statements. Consequently, it is unknown what fraction of the membership actually support the final statement. However, clearly, GSA leadership recognize that such a position offers employment to many of their members trained in geology.

The lockstep march of professional societies in support of climate alarmism has been going on for years. For example, fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) and a leading Canadian energy expert, the late “Archie” Robertson of Deep River, Ontario, explained in the April 28, 2006, edition of the National Post what happened in Canada:

To claim that the IPCC-2001 assessment was “supported by the Royal Society of Canada” is stretching the truth. Prior to last year’s Montreal conference, the president of the Royal Society of London, whose manner of promoting Kyoto has been criticized, drafted a resolution in favour and circulated it to other academies of science inviting co-signing. The Canadian Academy of Science is one of three academies within the Royal Society of Canada (the other are from the humanities). The president of the RSC, not a member of the Academy of Science, received the invitation. He considered it consistent with the position of the great majority of scientists, as repeatedly but erroneously claimed by Kyoto proponents, and so signed it. The resolution was not referred to the Academy of Science for comment, not even to its council or president (I learned this when, as a member of the Academy of Science, I inquired into the basis for the RSC supporting the resolution).

A similar episode happened in the United States and Russia concerning The Royal Society initiative. Pronouncements from other science bodies are often just the opinions of the groups’ executives or committees specifically appointed by the executive. The rank and file scientist members are rarely consulted at all.

Past IPCC lead author Dr. Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained the problems with a previous National Academy of Sciences report here and concluded: “there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them.”

All of this seriously damages the image of these once-respected professional societies in the eyes of both the public and the membership.

The climate cult that has taken over the environmental movement has never been about the environment. It has always been a mechanism to advance socialism, grow government, reduce individual rights, reduce human population, and ignore the human suffering and environmental damage their policies cause. Activists promoting this anti-human, anti-environment agenda appear to suffer emotional and psychological problems which they seem to deal with by attempting to make others miserable.

On April 27, 1961, at a speech in New York City, President John F. Kennedy said:

We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence – on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.

Those words describe socialism, a system sold as Utopia. It appears that a yearning for Utopia never dies, because it springs from innate spiritual qualities of humanity. But as we have seen in every instance of national-scale socialist “Utopias” such as Cuba, China, Russia, and Venezuela, the result is inevitably suffering, scarcity, environmental degradation, oppression, and death. Truth, reason, and logic are the first values sacrificed along the way. Professional Societies must stop supporting it.

SOURCE

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

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

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10 June, 2019

Why Scientists Who Know Climate Change Isn’t Causing Extreme Weather Stay Quiet

This week in Vancouver, Prime Minister Trudeau said the federal carbon tax, a key pillar in his government’s climate policy, will help protect Canadians from extreme weather.

“Extreme weather events are extraordinarily expensive for Canadians, our communities and our economy,” he said, citing the recent tornadoes in Ottawa and wildfires in Western Canada. “That’s why we need to act.”

While members of the media may nod along to such claims, the evidence paints a different story.

Roger Pielke Jr. is a scientist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who, up until a few years ago, did world-leading research on climate change and extreme weather.

He found convincing evidence that climate change was not leading to higher rates of weather-related damages worldwide, once you correct for increasing population and wealth.

He also helped convene major academic panels to survey the evidence and communicate the near-unanimous scientific consensus on this topic to policymakers.

For his efforts, Pielke was subjected to a vicious, well-funded smear campaign backed by, among others, the Obama White House and leading Democratic congressmen, culminating in his decision in 2015 to quit the field.

A year ago, Pielke told the story to an audience at the University of Minnesota. His presentation was recently circulated on Twitter. With so much misinformation nowadays about supposed climate emergencies, it’s worth reviewing carefully.

Pielke’s public presentation begins with a recounting of his rise and fall in the field.

As a young researcher in tropical storms and climate-related damages, he reached the pinnacle of the academic community and helped organize the so-called Hohenkammer Consensus Statement, named after the German town where 32 of the leading scientists in the field gathered in 2006 to sort out the evidence.

They concluded that trends toward rising climate damages were mainly due to increased population and economic activity in the path of storms, that it was not currently possible to determine the portion of damages attributable to greenhouse gases, and that they didn’t expect that situation to change in the near future.

Shortly thereafter, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its 2007 report, largely agreeing with the Hohenkammer Consensus, while cherry-picking one unpublished study (and highlighting it in the Summary for Policymakers) that suggested a link between greenhouse gases and storm-related damages.

But the author of that study — who just happened to be the same IPCC lead author who injected it into the report — later admitted his claim was incorrect, and when the study was finally published, denied the connection.

In 2012, the IPCC Special Report on Extreme Weather came out and echoed the Hohenkammer Consensus, concluding that once you adjust for population growth and economic changes, there is no statistical connection between climate change and measures of weather-related damages.

In 2013, Pielke testified to the United States Congress and relayed the IPCC findings.

Shortly thereafter, Obama’s science advisor John Holdren accused him of misleading Congress and launched a lengthy but ill-informed attack on Pielke, which prompted congressional Democrats to open an investigation into Pielke’s sources of funding (which quickly fizzled amid benign conclusions).

Meanwhile, heavily funded left-wing groups succeeded in getting him fired from a popular internet news platform. In 2015 Pielke quit the climate field.

So where did the science end up?

In the second half of his talk, Pielke reviews the science as found in the most recent (2013) IPCC Assessment Report, the 2018 U.S. National Climate Assessment, and the most up-to-date scientific data and literature. Nothing substantial has changed.

Globally there’s no clear evidence of trends and patterns in extreme events such as droughts, hurricanes, and floods. Some regions experience more, some less and some no trend.

Limitations of data and inconsistencies in patterns prevent confident claims about global trends one way or another. There’s no trend in U.S. hurricane landfall frequency or intensity.

If anything, the past 50 years has been relatively quiet. There’s no trend in hurricane-related flooding in the U.S. Nor is there evidence of an increase in floods globally.

Since 1965, more parts of the U.S. have seen a decrease in flooding than have seen an increase. And from 1940 to today, flood damage as a percentage of GDP has fallen to less than 0.05 percent per year from about 0.2 percent.

And on it goes. There’s no trend in U.S. tornado damage (in fact, 2012 to 2017 was below average). There’s no trend in global droughts. Cold snaps in the U.S. are down but, unexpectedly, so are heatwaves.

The bottom line is there’s no solid connection between climate change and the major indicators of extreme weather, despite Trudeau’s claims to the contrary.

The continual claim of such a link is misinformation employed for political and rhetorical purposes. Powerful people get away with it because so few people know what the numbers show.

Many scientists who know better remain silent. And the few who push back against the propaganda, such as Roger Pielke Jr., find themselves on the receiving end of abuse and career-threatening attacks, even though they have all the science in their corner.

Something has gotten scary and extreme, but it isn’t the weather.

SOURCE

'We All Owe Al Gore An Apology': More People See Climate Change In Record Flooding

If you predict that the normal will happen you have a 100% chance of being right

Angel Portillo doesn't think about climate change much. It's not that he doesn't care. He's just got other things to worry about. Climate change seems so far away, so big.

Lately though, Portillo says he's been thinking about it more often.

Standing on the banks of a swollen and surging Arkansas River, just upriver from a cluster of flooded businesses and homes, it's easy to see why.

"Stuff like this," he says, nodding at the frothy brown waters, "all of the tornadoes that have been happening - it just doesn't seem like a coincidence, you know?"

A string of natural disasters has hit the central U.S. in recent weeks. Tornadoes have devastated communities, tearing up trees and homes. Record rainfall has prevented countless farmers in America's breadbasket from planting crops. Rising rivers continue to flood fields, inundate homes and threaten aging levees from Iowa to Mississippi.

And while none of these events can be directly attributed to climate change, extreme rains are happening more frequently in many parts of the U.S. and that trend is expected to continue as the Earth continues to warm.

For many of the people living in the affected areas, the connection feels clear.

"I think climate change is affecting the world right now and we should probably start doing something," says Lucero Silva, watching the cresting river in Russellville, Arkansas.

"Somebody at my office told me, 'We all owe Al Gore an apology,'" says Breigh Hardman, standing on a bridge over the Arkansas River in nearby Fort Smith. Gore's 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth spurred both activism around global warming and opposition to it.

"It just tells us we got to come to a conclusion — not to get crazy — about global warming," says Matt Breiner, watching the river further upstream near downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma.

NPR asked nearly two dozen people in Oklahoma and Arkansas who were experiencing the ongoing flooding about their thoughts on climate change. All of them said they believed that the climate was changing, even if they didn't directly associate the raining and floods with it, or agree on the cause. (Six people said they believed God was driving the change.)

SOURCE

A 2m Rise In Sea Level By 2100 Is Physically Impossible

Written by Nils-Axel Mörner

There are physical laws setting the frames of possible rate of sea level rise, rate of ice melting and thermal expansion of water

As true scientists, we must provide statements and estimates that respect those frames. Ignoring the frames, and you are in the pink field of nonsense.

Recently (and just in time of the EU election in Europe), a paper has appeared, which surely represents another visit to the “pink field of nonsense”. The paper is written by a well-known group of IPCC/AGW proponents (Bamber et al., 2019).

Significantly, there is not a single reference to observational facts in nature itself, documenting a diverging reality.

The paper was published in the PNAS journal, notorious for publishing anything in favour of scaremongering data with wild exaggerations on temperature rise, sea level rise and ice melting. The paper was edited by Rahmsdorf and accepted by
Schnellnhuber, both notorious proponents for the IGCP/AGW ideas. This means that the paper, in fact, was not peer reviewed but “pal reviewed”. Again, typical actions for persons operating “in the pink field of nonsense”

The central message from the strongly twisted statements presented by Bamber et al. in the PNAS journal (May 2019), is, and I quote:

"We find that a global total SLR exceeding 2 m by 2100 lies within the 90% uncertainty bound"

A rise in sea level by 2 m in 80 years would imply a rate of sea level rise of 25.0 mm/yr. This is far into the pink field of nonsense, way beyond the frames of realistic sea level changes.

At the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary (11,700 BP), ice melted at a higher rate than ever before or after during the last 30,000 years. And there were huge ice caps to melt. Still, the rate of sea level rise was not more than about 10,0 mm/yr (at the most 12.5 mm/yr); i.e. 50% of what Bamber et al. now claim.

This is a clear manifestation of the level of nonsense, and the total ignorance by the authors of physical laws and observational facts.

Obviously, they have an agenda to propagate for ideas keeping human fear alive. With fear you can twist the human heart in whatever direction wanted. But this is very far from acceptable scientific principles.

Let us put the paper by Bamber et al. in the file of statements to ignore and forget.

SOURCE

Patagonia Ice Sheets Thicker Than Previously Thought, Study Finds

After conducting a comprehensive, seven-year survey of Patagonia, glaciologists from the University of California, Irvine and partner institutions in Argentina and Chile have concluded that the ice sheets in this vast region of South America are considerably more massive than expected.

Through a combination of ground observations and airborne gravity and radar sounding methods, the scientists created the most complete ice density map of the area to date and found that some glaciers are as much as a mile (1,600 meters) thick.

Their findings were published today in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“We did not think the ice fields on the Patagonian plateau could be quite that substantial,” said co-author Eric Rignot, Donald Bren Professor and chair of Earth system science at UCI.

“As a result of this multinational research project, we found that—added together—the northern and southern portions of Patagonia clearly hold more ice than anticipated, roughly 40 times the ice volume of the European Alps.”

Patagonia is home to the largest ice fields in the Southern Hemisphere outside Antarctica, and its glaciers are among the fastest-moving in the world.

Surface elevation observations from satellite radar altimetry and optical imagery have shown that most of the ice slabs in the region have been thinning rapidly over the past four decades.

The contribution to global sea level rise from their melting has increased at an accelerating pace during that time.

Study co-author M. Gabriela Lenzano, a researcher with Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council, said the results will “help the scientific community better explain the interactions and consequences of ice sheet dynamics and climate on this cold environment—and the impact on communities and ecosystems downstream.”

With more precise knowledge of the size and shape of the glaciers in this highly protected region—much of which is contained in one of the world’s largest national park systems—researchers and planners will be able to more accurately model the effects of global warming and plan for potential disruptions in freshwater resources that serve its inhabitants.

“This is why having accurate maps of the ice thickness is a priority,” said lead author Romain Millan, who was a UCI graduate student in Earth system science for the bulk of this research project and is now a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute of Environmental Geosciences in Grenoble, France. “It is fundamental to get the right contours and depth of the glacial valleys; otherwise, simulations of glacier retreat will always be wrong.”

The difficulty in quantifying bed elevation and thickness has limited scientists’ ability to predict the region’s potential contribution to sea level rise; model glacier dynamics in response to climate change; study the impacts on freshwater resources; or prepare against such hazards as lake outburst flooding, which occurs when a dam containing a glacial lake fails.

Past attempts to gauge the total heft of the ice have fallen short because traditional sounding techniques were limited to the shallowest sections of the ice field.

Another obstacle has been the temperate nature of Patagonian ice. The frozen water in the glaciers is near its melting point from the top to the bottom; the higher water content makes this kind of ice more difficult to measure with radar.

To overcome these challenges, the scientists took to the skies, flying over broad stretches of terrain in helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft equipped with gravimeters, devices that can determine the ice volume by reading changes in Earth’s gravitational field.

The addition of data collected by glaciologists from Chile’s Center for Scientific Studies, who had mapped ice thickness with low-frequency airborne radar sounding since 2002, was instrumental in creating a more comprehensive description of the area’s conditions.

“This research has been enhanced and successfully completed thanks to our collaboration with the Rignot group at UCI and our Argentinean colleagues, with whom we have worked at both sides of the southern Patagonia ice field—disregarding the political border that divides the region,” said co-author Andrés Rivera of the Chilean center.

SOURCE

Australia: Big new wind farm heavily opposed

Proponents of the southern hemisphere’s largest wind farm say it is a “game changer” for energy security and prices, but are facing community headwinds as fierce as the Roaring Forties it seeks to harness.

The $1.6 billion project is proposed by Hong Kong-based UPC Renewables for two sites in Tasmania’s northwest, Robbins Island and Jim’s Plain, with a 170km transmission line to connect it to the grid.

Chief executive Anton Rohner said if the company’s vision was fully realised, it would combine with Tasmania’s hydro storages and proposed new Marinus interconnector under Bass Strait to substantially address Australia’s energy woes.

“It is an absolute game changer for not just Tasmania, but for Victoria, South Australia and NSW,” he said. “It works beautifully with the (state’s) hydro scheme.

“Our power can be used to pump hydro or to effectively hold the (hydro) electricity. Being able to provide a dispatchable renewable energy — 1000MW — through the Marinus link to the mainland is worth everything … More supply leads to cheaper energy for everyone.”

However, the project faces local and federal regulatory hurdles and unrest about the citing of both the Robbins Island wind farms and the transmission line.

Some living near the 9900ha Robbins Island are concerned about the noise and aesthetics of up to 200 wind turbines, and their impact on thousands of resident and migratory shorebirds, some critically endangered.

Mr Rohner said expert studies using tracking devices showed the birds generally flew around the periphery of the island, not over it, but this was contested by some locals and BirdLife Tasmania.

“The area around the island at low tide is around 100 sq km of exposed mudflat and wetland and it supports more migratory shorebirds than the rest of Tasmania combined,” said Eric Woehler, the BirdLife convener. “We know from work that has been done … that some of the migratory shore birds fly across the island.

“Those radio tracking studies have only been done for one species. We have no information about the extent or frequency of flights across the island for the 20 or so (other) species. Birds that are already critically endangered run the real risk of flying into some of these turbines.”

Dr Woehler and some locals fear a walled causeway to the island, as part of the project, would interrupt tidal flows, damaging the vital sandflat ecosystems.

“What they are proposing is going to kill this beautiful wetland area that is absolutely amazing,” said resident Colleen Murfitt.

Mr Rohner and the owners of the island, the Hammond Wagyu beef farming family, said expert modelling suggested several bridge sections in the causeway would avoid adverse impacts.

“We are cattle people, we love the environment,” said Alex Hammond. “Part of our brand, which sells our beef around the world, is that we are in the cleanest, greenest area in the world. “So we certainly don’t want to do anything to impact on that.”

The transmission line that is taking the power to the grid near Sheffield is causing outrage among some farmers, tourism operators and residents who fear a significant scar on the landscape and compulsory acquisition of land.

Beef farmer and vegetable grower Darren Gibson said the 60m-wide corridor appeared set to blight the southern and eastern boundaries of his Nietta farm, ending his plans for a tourism development.

“Having six transmission lines cutting across the beautiful views we have here, of snow-capped mountains, just isn’t going to cut it for high-end tourists — it’s ruined our plans,” he said.

Mr Rohner conceded that the company had mishandled public engagement on the transmission line, which was being revised.

He hoped the new plan would avoid crossing the Leven Canyon tourist attraction, an issue of major concern.

Circular Head Mayor Daryl Quilliam said the “vast majority” of locals were “very excited” about and supportive of the project and the jobs and economic stimulus it would bring.

SOURCE

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9 June, 2019

Dirty Rotten Climate Scandals

Tony Thomas writes from Australia:

Shakespeare’s monster, Caliban, dreamed of clouds opening to show riches ready to drop upon him. Climate scientists don’t have to dream about it – honors, awards and cash prizes rain down in torrents. Other scientists try to help humanity, but while climate scientists may kid themselves and others that they share that goal, their practical intent is to raise energy costs and harm nations’ energy efficiency via renewables. While they posture as planet-savers in white coats, some of them pocket awards of half-million dollars, even a million, and notch up more career-enhancing medals than a North Korean general.

A couple of local prizes are the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science ($A250,000) for ex-President of the Australian Academy of Science Kurt Lambeck last October, and in January UNSW Professor John Church pocketed a $A320,000 half-share of the 400,000 Euro BBVA Prize.

Both have done science work of international repute and their reputations in their specialist fields are deservedly high. However, Lambeck is a long-standing smiter of “deniers” and Church propagates via the ABC such lurid scenarios as this: “… if the world’s carbon emissions continue unmitigated, a threshold will be crossed which will lead to the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet. This, with melts from glaciers and ice in Antarctica will lead to a sea level rise in the order of seven metres.”

There are many mickey-mouse awards in Australia for climate science and I’d be amazed if any post-doc climate person hasn’t won a gong. It’s particularly obnoxious that even schoolkids are incited to compete for climate awards by regurgitating climate doomism.

On the global stage, my tally of warmist cash awards to US climate doomsayer Paul R. Ehrlich is about $US2.6 million. For the climate scare’s originator, ex-NASA scaremonger James Hansen, about $US2 million. These rewards are not for getting anything right – their doom deadlines have proven to be utter tripe.

If you’re a climate scientist you can blot your copybook horribly but the prizes keep coming. You might not have heard of California’s Dr Peter H. Gleick, but read on. He’s been creaming it with prizes lately, $US100,000 from Israel’s Boris Mints Institute in April for the “Strategic Global Challenge of Fresh Water” and the Carl Sagan Prize last year for “researchers who have contributed mightily to the public understanding and appreciation of science.” He’s scored more than 30 honors and awards all-up including a $US500,000 MacArthur “Genius” award for 2003.

Nice work, Gleick, but you’re the same man who in 2012 raided e-documents from the minor sceptic thinktank Heartland Institute. Its CEO Joe Bast said that Gleick “impersonated a board member of the Heartland Institute, stole his identity by creating a fake email address, and proceeded to use that fake email address to steal documents that were prepared for a board meeting. He read those documents, concluded that there was no smoking gun in them, and then forged a two-page memo.” Gleick denied forging the document. The forgery, among other fabrications, showed Heartland receiving $US200,000 from the Koch brothers’ Foundation, when the reality was a mere $US25,000, and even that sum was actually for a health-care study.

Gleick confessed he committed the thefts because he believed Heartland was preventing a “rational debate” on global warming, even though he had refused a Heartland invitation to a fee-paid after-dinner debate shortly before he stole the documents. Gleick said

“in a serious lapse of my own professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received … materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name…I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues…My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists .., and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved. Nevertheless I deeply regret my own actions in this case. I offer my personal apologies to all those affected.”

As for Heartland being “well-funded”, its budget that year was $US4.4 million, of which maybe a third went on climate work, funding one conference, a blog and half a dozen climate reports. That compares with, say, WWF’s current budget in the US of $US230 million (Heartland’s, $US6 million), or the Australian Conservation Foundation’s current $A14 million.

The ironies about the much-honored Gleick didn’t stop there. In 2011 he was founding chairman of a science ethics committee of the 60,000-member American Geophysical Union (AGU) and he immediately resigned membership when outed by Heartland. AGU president Mike McPhaden issued a toe-curling statement. The global community of earth and space scientists, he said, had

witnessed the shocking fall from grace of an accomplished AGU member who betrayed the principles of scientific integrity. In doing so he compromised AGU’s credibility as a scientific society, weakened the public’s trust in scientists, and produced fresh fuel for the unproductive and seemingly endless ideological firestorm surrounding the reality of the Earth’s changing climate.

His transgression … is a tragedy that requires us to stop and reflect on what we value as scientists and how we want to be perceived by the public… It is the responsibility of every scientist to safeguard that trust.

This has been one of the most trying times for me as president of AGU… How different it is than celebrating the news of a new discovery … These rare and sad occasions remind us that our actions reverberate through a global scientific community and that we must remain committed as individuals and as a society to the highest standards of scientific integrity in the pursuit of our goals.

Within three weeks of Gleick’s confession, I kid you not, water tech company Xylem awarded him a “Water Hero” award. Thereafter he won a Lifetime Achievement Award from a Silicon Valley Water Group (2013), was honoured by the Guardian newspaper in 2014 as a world top-ten water guru, and in 2015 he received the Leadership and Achievement Award from the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. The same year he received an Environmental Education Award from the Bay Institute. The major Carl Sagan and BMI Prizes followed in 2018 and 2019. Transgressions by warmist scientists are soon forgotten and readily forgiven.

While the Gleick case is one of horror, other climate-award material goes into the comedy file. The Climategate emails exposed two of the climate world’s top “experts”, Phil Jones and Mike Mann, horse-trading for new honors for themselves, via reciprocal recommendations. Jones, at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, ran the HADCRUT4 global temperature data series underpinning the IPCC warming scare. He managed to literally lose raw data (failure to back-up) and hid incriminating emails subject to FOI demands.[1] Michael Mann authored the infamous “Hockey Stick” paper used as a logo by the 2001 IPCC report as proving current warming is CO2-caused and unprecedented in the past 1000 years. Mann’s paper also managed to ‘disappear’ the Medieval warming[2] and the 300-year Little Ice Age to 1850. Mann’s sceptic foe, Mark Steyn, published an entire 320-page book, A Disgrace to the Profession comprising rejections of Mann’s findings, not by sceptics but by orthodox climate scientists. [3]

Here are two climateers at work. (emails from 4/12/2007). Mann to Jones:

By the way, I am still looking into nominating you for an American Geophysical Union award; I’ve been told that the Ewing medal wouldn’t be the right one. Let me know if you have any particular options you’d like me to investigate…

Jones selects his own award:

As for the American Geophysical Union—just getting one of their Fellowships would be fine.

Mann then lets Jones know that he (Mann) himself happens to lack a Fellowship of the AGU and adds in brackets, “(Wink)” to inspire Jones to do something about it. (pp105, 118).

The matey honors system at the AGU continues to this day. The selection committee last year for the AGU’s annual $US25,000 Climate Communication Prize (won by Mann last year) included prominent warmists Katharine Hayhoe, Stefan Rahmstorf, Richard Somerville and Kevin Trenberth. Recipients included the same Katharine Hayhoe (2014), Stefan Rahmstorf (2017), Richard Somerville (2015) and Kevin Trenberth (2013). A network clearly operates. Winners Gavin Schmidt (2011), Mann (2018) and Rahmstorf (2017) jointly contribute to their realclimate.org blog. The AGU seems aware of incestuousness and has these unusual guidelines for the prize-winner selection:

Nominators and potential nominees…are urged to restrain from contacting members of their respective award selection committee while the AGU nomination and selection process is in progress…Persistent or frequent contact on topics related to the award nomination could potentially be viewed as an attempt to influence…

In the big global league, climate bureaucrat Christiana “Tinkerbell” Figueres, who oversaw the 2015 Paris pseudo-agreement from her UN perch, staggers under the weight of honors. They include the Shackleton Medal, the Grand Medal of the City of Paris, the Legion of Honor, the German Great Cross of Merit, the Guardian Medal of Honor, the 2015 Hero of El Pais award, the Global Thinker Award, Four Freedoms Award and the Solar Champion Award from the woke folk of California. Quite a haul considering she still can’t distinguish between weather and climate. She achieved perpetual quotability with this ripper from February 2015, in an official UN press release:

This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.

A champagne socialist from the top end of town in Costa Rica, she views a halt to growth in the West with equanimity: “Industrialised countries must stop growing — that’s fine. But developing countries must continue to grow their economy in order to bring their people out of poverty…”

Paul R. Ehrlich, now 87, has been showered with lucrative prizes. He has spent the past 50 years making horrific predictions about planetary and human doom. None of these have remotely been fulfilled, such as his 1969 prediction of disastrous global famine by 1975, requiring compulsory birth control via sterilising agents in food and water.

As a close-to-my-home example, he gave an address at Perth’s Murdoch University on October 2, 1985, concluding that unless Western countries went into wealth-sharing with the Third World, there would be lethal consequences for civilisation such that “the handful of human beings that survive the resultant collapse may, if they are lucky, be able to eke out a livelihood hunting and gathering.” He warned that by 2000, we could have a billion people perishing from hunger, with those famines leading in turn to a thermonuclear war that “could extinguish civilisation”. He continues to this day to be sought out by the media for yet more doomsday mayhem.

Ehrlich big-money prizes for ecological brilliance have included

# 1990: MacArthur Fellows “Genius Grant”, currently $US625,000. At the time the award range was $US155,000 to $US600,000. Ehrlich would have been at the high end.

# 1990: Sweden’s Crafoord (OK) Prize, currently $US745,000. He shared the award with biologist E.O.Wilson. As a guesstimate, $US200,000-plus at the time.

# 1993: Heinz Foundation Award, $US250,000

# 1993; The Volvo Environmental Prize. Currently $US170,000.

# 1998: Tyler Prize, $US200,000.

# 1998: Heineken Prize, $US200,000

# 1999: Asahi Glass’s Blue Planet Prize, 50 million yen (about $US420,000 at the time).

# 2009: Ramon Margalef Prize, 80,000 Euros (about $US110,000 at the time).

# 2013: BBVA Frontiers Award, 400,000 Euros (about $US530,000 at the time).

Total, about $US2.6m ($A3.75m).

James Hansen is known as the father of the CO2/global warming campaign. He produced, concurrently with Syukuro Manabe, the first crude computer models of C02 warming. The successor models despite decades of ‘refinements’ continue to significantly exaggerate actual warming.[4] Hansen’s cash awards total about $US1.5m, including $US800,000 from Taiwan’s Tang Foundation last year. The Tang citation read

Undaunted by the gravity of high government and the powerful doubts of business, this former NASA climate scientist attended a government hearing in 1988 … His brave, farsighted testimony before congress has since been known as the Hansen Hearing.

The reality was that the 1988 hearing was stage-managed by his pal and Democrat senator Tim Wirth. Wirth timed it for the predicted hottest summer day in Washington, and he also sabotaged the building’s air conditioning to ensure everyone would be sweating for the TV cameras.

Hansen while at NASA in 2001 accepted a $US250,000 award from Theresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Democrat luminary John Kerry. In 2004 Hansen endorsed John Kerry as presidential candidate, a doubly contentious act as he was still a government NASA director. Hansen at NASA also admitted in a 2003 issue of Natural Science that the use of “extreme scenarios” to dramatize climate change “may have been appropriate at one time” to drive the public’s attention to the issue. He’s referred to coal trains as “death trains” (annoying Holocaust survivors) and was arrested twice at climate demonstrations.
Among his windfalls:

# 2001: Heinz Award: $US250,000

#2007: Dan David Prize: $US330,000

# 2008: PNC Bank Common Wealth Award: $US50,000

# 2010: Sophie Prize: $US100,000

# 2012: Stephen Schneider Award: $US10,000

# 2016: BBVA Award: $US450,000

# 2018: Taiwan’s Tang Prize. $US800,000.

Total $US1.99m.

Climate and environment prizes, honors and awards have flowed to those who are not merely catastrophists but million-dollar fraudsters. Canada’s Maurice Strong, for instance, built some of his huge wealth from stockmarket insider deals and oil developments. He was the godfather of the global environment from when he organised the 1972 Stockholm Environment Conference. He was founder and executive director of the UN Environmental Program which joined forces with the World Meteorological Organisation to create the IPCC. He chaired the 1992 Rio summit and openly advocated for world governance under the UN, financed by a 0.5 per cent tax on global finance to raise $US1.5 trillion a year.

In his 1999 autobiography, Strong predicted that in 2031 nation states will implode, with a breakdown of international order, food and energy scarcity, more climate deaths than from WW1 and WW2, and Americans dying like flies from heat because there is no electricity for air conditioners. Global population falls to the level of 2001, “a consequence, yes, of death and destruction – but in the end a glimmer of hope for the future of our species and its potential for regeneration,” he wrote.[5]

In 2005 the FBI, investigating the Iraq “Oil for Food” program’s prolific corruption, turned up a 1997 cheque to Strong for $US998,000 from a corrupt South Korean businessman who later proved to be a bagman for Saddam Hussein. Strong in 1997 was working for UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, and had organised the UN’s Kyoto climate treaty that same year. When the cheque came to light, Strong lit out for Beijing (China has no extradition treaty with the US) and lived out his days there, still honoured as an honorary professor at three Chinese universities. He said later, “I didn’t just run away to China, I already had an apartment here.”

In 2003, just two years before the cheque scandal went public, the US National Academy of Sciences gave Strong its highest honor, its Public Welfare Medal, for “extraordinary use of science for the public good”. This was its first-ever Medal award to a non-US citizen. “Very few individuals have contributed so much to the path toward a sane and sensible future for world society,” the Academy said. “He is an idealist who is truly a citizen of the world.”

He was “very special guest of honor” at the 2012 Rio second climate summit. When he died in 2015, the esteem continued with Canada’s governor-general attending his funeral. No attempt was ever made to prosecute Strong over the cheque.

Strong’s 50 or more honors (apart from his 52 honorary doctorates) included Commander of the Golden Ark (Netherlands), Order of the Southern Cross (Brazil), Order of the Polar Star (Sweden) and Companion of the Order of Canada. In his Beijing era he got a Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Medal.

Cataloguing all the climate prize stuff going on would involve an essay the size of the Encyclopaedia Britannia. I need to wash my dog so I’ll stop here. To all past and future climate prize winners, my sincere congratulations.

SOURCE

Atmospheric CO2 soars to record highs

It does not synchronize with temperature so there is no problem

An alarming rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels has been revealed, showing the world is edging closer to triggering “catastrophic and irreversible” global warming.

American scientific agency National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released new results on Tuesday that show CO2 levels have continued to rapidly rise this year.

The average for May peaked at 414.7 parts per million (ppm) at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory.

The 2019 peak value was 3.5ppm higher than the 411.2ppm peak in May 2018 and marks the second-highest annual jump on record, according to NOAA.

Scientists have warned for years that concentrations of more than 450ppm risk triggering extreme weather events and temperature rises of 2C.

Environmentalist Bill McKiben reacted to the report by calling it “legit scary”.

“(The) single most important stat on the planet: CO2 rose 3.5 parts per million last year,” he said. (The) second highest annual rise on record.”

Climate scientist Peter Gleick also expressed alarm at the rising CO2 levels in a recent tweet.

“Atmospheric CO2 levels have now reached 415ppm. The last time humans experienced levels this high was … never. Human didn’t exist.”

He posted a graph showing the dramatic rise in CO2 levels since the emergence of humans on the planet.

The impact we’ve made is unmissable.

Monthly CO2 values at Mauna Loa first breached the 400ppm threshold in 2014.

“It’s critically important to have these accurate, long-term measurements of CO2 in order to understand how quickly fossil fuel pollution is changing our climate,” Pieter Tans, senior scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Division, said.

“These are measurements of the real atmosphere.

“They do not depend on any models, but they help us verify climate model projections which, if anything, have underestimated the rapid pace of climate change being observed.”

The rise of CO2 in the atmosphere was accelerating, NOAA said.

The report came as India experienced a devastating heatwave, which has been partly blamed on climate change.

Temperatures passed 50 degrees Celsius in northern India this week as an unrelenting heatwave triggered warnings of water shortages and heat stroke.

The thermometer hit 50.6 degrees Celsius in the Rajasthan desert city of Churu, the weather department said.

All of Rajasthan suffered in severe heat, with several cities hitting maximum temperatures above 47 Celsius.

The heatwave is part of a trend of rising temperatures in India, the Independent reported.

Last year was the sixth warmest since national record-keeping started in 1901.

Environmental researcher Hem Dholakia said it was evidence of a clear change.

“Science as well as our subjective experiences has made it unequivocally clear that longer, hotter and deadlier summers are poised to become the norm due to climate change,” he wrote last month.

Students have staged strikes around the world in recent weeks to demand action on climate change.

The strikes were inspired by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg who has become a global figurehead since protesting outside Sweden’s parliament in 2018.

The climate change activist, who has 668,000 followers on Twitter, recently wrote of her concern the emissions rate was still rising.

“People always tell me and the other millions of school strikers that we should be proud of ourselves for what we have accomplished,” Greta wrote.

“But the only thing that we need to look at is the emission curve. And I’m sorry, but it’s still rising. That curve is the only thing we should look at.

“Every time we make a decision we should ask ourselves; how will this decision affect that curve?” Greta added. “We should no longer measure our wealth and success in the graph that shows economic growth but in the curve that shows the emissions of greenhouse gases.

“We should no longer only ask: ‘Have we got enough money to go through with this?’ but also: ‘Have we got enough of the carbon budget to spare to go through with this?’ That should and must become the centre of our new currency.”

Climate change was also discussed during US President Donald Trump’s meeting with Prince Charles.

The Prince of Wales spent 75 minutes longer than scheduled trying to convince Mr Trump of the dangers of climate change.

Mr Trump told ITV’s Good Morning Britain he had been due to meet Prince Charles for 15 minutes during his visit but the talk went on for 90 minutes. The Prince did “most of the talking” during that discussion, the Guardian reported.

Mr Trump insisted the US was “clean” and blamed other nations for the crisis.

“I did say, ‘Well, the United States right now has among the cleanest climates there are based on all statistics’. And it’s even getting better because I agree with that we want the best water, the cleanest water. It’s crystal clean, has to be crystal clean clear,” Mr Trump explained.

Asked if he accepted the science on climate change, the President responded by saying: “I believe there’s a change in weather, and I think it changes both ways.

“Don’t forget, it used to be called global warming, that wasn’t working, then it was called climate change. Now it’s actually called extreme weather because with extreme weather you can’t miss.”

SOURCE

Romney 'looking at' carbon tax legislation

Still a RINO

Sen. Mitt Romney said Wednesday he was considering co-sponsoring a carbon tax bill with Delaware Democrat Cris Coons.

Romney told E&E News he's considering the proposal which would put a $15-per-metric-ton fee on carbon emissions.

"Taxes have never been my intent, but we'll see what he has to say," Romney said. "I would very much like to see us reduce our carbon emissions globally, and we'll see if this might help."

There are still a handful of GOP carbon tax supporters left in the House after the Democratic wave of the 2018 midterms, but Romney — if he does co-sponsor the bill — would be the only Republican senator openly supporting the idea.

For Romney, who has taken some heat for his relative moderation in some wings of the GOP, it would be another step away from President Trump, who denies climate science.

Romney, who has previously said he wants to work on climate change issues, but has not committed to backing the measure.

SOURCE

The eco phonies: Mobile phones are doing untold harm to the planet but green campaigners can't live without them

They were brandished in their tens of thousands during Extinction Rebellion’s recent protests. At anti-fracking rallies they were waved defiantly in the faces of the police and security guards.

No self-respecting eco-warrior can go without their shiny, up-to-date smartphone.

How else could they film their marches and share them on social media, or stay abreast of the latest howls of outrage on Twitter about the destruction of the planet?

Unfortunately, there is a terrible irony about Apple’s iPhone and its Android rival becoming the tools of environmental protest. For they are a big part of the problem, too. More than 50 million tonnes of ‘e-waste’, the term for discarded electronics products, is now generated every year.

And that is rising at an alarming rate: by 2020, five billion people will have a mobile phone — with many slaves to an immensely wasteful industry that cynically pressures them to buy a new version when the old one is perfectly good.

The phones aren’t just aluminium, plastic and glass, they contain precious materials which are in limited global supply: gold and copper in the wiring, silver and platinum for the main printed circuit board, lithium in the batteries, cobalt and aluminium.

Some of these materials come with a devastating price — one that reveals the hypocrisy at the heart of today’s eco-brigade.

Take tantalum, a hard metal named after the mythological character Tantalus. Because the metal is almost impossible to corrode, it plays a major part in making electronic devices smaller.

The biggest supplier of tantalum is Rwanda and its resources helped to fund parts of the Second Congo War, one of the bloodiest conflicts since World War II. Both sides used children and slaves to mine it.

Even into the 21st century, children aged seven were paid just £1.50 a week to go down narrow tunnels in the Democratic Republic of Congo — the world’s second largest source of tantalum — and chip away at river beds that are at constant risk of collapse.

In 2014, Apple announced it would no longer use tantalum from war zones. But human rights campaigners would like to see the same pledge made for gold, tin, cobalt and tungsten.

As for rare earth metals — a collection of elements found in the Earth’s crust — most come from Inner Mongolia, a semi-autonomous region of China, where by-products from mining (much for mobile phones) have produced a toxic lake described as one of the most polluted places on the planet.

In the nearby industrial city of Baotou, the air is filled with a relentless odour of sulphur.

The frightening body of water is surrounded by pipes and is three times as radioactive as normal background radiation.

It has rendered nearby fields toxic, forcing many locals to abandon their homes.

Uncomfortable with the technology industry’s reputation as an environmental menace, Apple is stepping up its efforts to recycle phones — enlisting a giant robot named Daisy to separate out its various metals to be recycled. So far, there are two Daisies, wrenching apart iPhones at plants in Texas and the Netherlands.

Its large grey robotic arm moves at speed, twisting and turning a mobile phone in its grip, then systematically pulls it apart.

Of 1.5 billion iPhones sold since they were first unveiled by Apple’s founder Steve Jobs in 2007, it is estimated that 700 million are currently in use.

So when they are junked for a new model, there is an awful lot of jettisoned plastic and metal.

Many of the valuable metals such as gold are only in tiny quantities — but they all add up. Depending on the model, a ton of iPhones would deliver 100 to 300 times more gold than a ton of gold ore — and six times more silver than a ton of silver ore.

Mining expert David Michaud has estimated that 37 million tons of rock had to be mined to produce the first billion iPhones. Shockingly, to produce a single device requires mining 34kg of ore, and using 100 litres of water and 20 grammes of cyanide (used to extract gold from the ore).

Recycling a TV made in the 1970s would have yielded little more than half a dozen basic materials.

A typical mobile phone contains 62 different metals of varying degrees of rarity and preciousness.

This is where Daisy comes in.

For every 100,000 iPhones, Daisy and Apple’s other recycling robot can potentially recover 3,300lb of aluminium, 2.4lb of gold, 13.9lb of silver, 70lb of rare earth elements, 183lb of tungsten, 2,200lb of copper, 64lb of tin, 1,740lb of cobalt and 3,086lb of steel.

These are among 14 materials (plus glass, lithium, tantalum and plastics) that Apple is concentrating on in its recycling drive.

Daisy has a 21st century Heath Robinson feel to it. It’s actually four robots joined together and is about 30ft by 10ft and surrounded by plexiglass. It has three or four human staff who feed iPhones into a funnel at one end and remove the separate bits from various chutes at the other end.

Daisy uses visual recognition technology to identify any of 15 (out of a total of 21) versions of the iPhone, inserting them into various slots. It then punches out the screws holding each phone together and pulls it apart.

The robot can dismantle all but the most seriously smashed up iPhones. Each phone takes three to four minutes to dismantle.

The separated materials are crushed to dust and smelted, then used in new products.

Critics have dismissed Daisy as a publicity stunt. If Apple is serious about saving the planet, they say, it should make phones that don’t need to be replaced so often.

(Apple says its phones last longer than their rivals and they are trying to refurbish more phones — nearly 8 million last year — so fewer need to be recycled).

It says its ultimate goal is to make all its products from renewable or recycled materials.

Environmental campaigners have applauded Apple for going in the right direction.

But one only needs to look in the cramped, dangerous holes in Africa — where children as young as six slave away, mining for precious metals that often end up in our phones — to see that.

SOURCE

A proposed Australian coalmine and its Leftist enemy

For a politician on the make, there is no better place to be than Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium on State of Origin night.

Jackie Trad was there on Wednesday, lapping up the hospitality in the National Rugby League’s well-appointed viewing box. So was her boss, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, and Trad’s friend and mentor Anthony Albanese, a lonesome Blue among all those one-eyed Queenslanders.

But as willing as the football was in the famed “cauldron”, it had nothing on what has been playing out inside the state Labor government since that other boilover, the May 18 federal election.

Queensland swung harder against the ALP than any other mainland state, with voters in its regions and on the suburban fringes of Brisbane rejecting Bill Shorten’s big-spending and high-taxing agenda with a vehemence that delivered two additional seats to the Coalition, taking it to a high-water 23 of the 30 up for grabs north of the Tweed.

This is where Trad comes in. She holds far more than the purse strings as Deputy Premier and Treasurer to Palaszczuk. As leader of the parliamentary Left, Trad also controls the numbers in the caucus and state cabinet; she revels in her reputation as being the power behind the throne, the driving force in a government that was cruising until federal Labor came a cropper, and which now threatens to be consumed by recriminations over its drift to the left and the electorate’s brutal verdict last month on that positioning.

Sharp-tongued, vigorous and whip-smart, 47-year-old Trad is the face of progressive politics in Queensland. She is as inner city as you can get, holding the state seat of South Brisbane in the area in which she grew up, the daughter of Lebanese migrants who spoke Arabic at home. Where Palaszczuk, a product of the ALP’s right wing, is reserved and cautious, seemingly lofty in wielding power, Trad has worked in the weeds, championing formerly lost causes for state Labor such as abortion law reform and tree clearance controls on farmers. Admirers and detractors alike acknowledge her zeal. But if there is one issue that has bedevilled Labor at both the state and federal levels in Queensland it is the Adani coalmine, the pressure point where demands for action on climate change intersect with real-world concerns about jobs and investment.

Shorten dithered, sending a message to green-minded voters in latte land in central Sydney and Melbourne that Labor was leery of the planned project, while assuring struggling regional communities in Queensland that it wouldn’t stand in the way of the new open-cut mine if it won state approval.

That’s the trouble with trying to walk both sides of the street: you get hit by a bus.

Adani became emblematic of federal Labor’s disconnect from its traditional blue-collar base and those “quiet Australians” who broke for Scott Morrison, an epic misjudgment of the mood of the nation. Albanese’s test as Shorten’s successor as Opposition Leader will be to craft a new narrative to reconcile — or at least neutralise — this lethal paradigm for the ALP.

That means there is no avoiding Queensland for Albo.

When Kevin Rudd won handsomely in 2007, it was on the back of picking up 15 seats in his home state. Labor went into that election with only six MPs from Queensland, the same precarious position in which it now finds itself. It was also in power at the state level under another female premier, Anna Bligh.

A woman of the Left, she headed a government in which the Right factions notionally had the numbers but where Bligh unambiguously called the shots. The situation couldn’t be more different today as Palaszczuk, aligned with the Australian Workers Union-backed Labor Forum group, moves to reposition her party with an eye to the state election locked in for October next year, to usher in an expansion of the parliamentary term from three years to four.

If Labor’s base vote is anything like last month’s dismal 26.68 per cent federal showing in Queensland, Palaszczuk’s two-term outfit will be toast. In that event, the ALP would hold office in only two states, Victoria and Western Australia, making the road back for Albanese all the more arduous.

No pressure, then, as Trad prepares to hand down her second state budget on Tuesday. The infrastructure cash that she had counted on from a Shorten government is in the wind, GST revenue is down, and stamp duty will take a hit from the softening Brisbane property market. Queensland, she claims, is being dudded by the Prime Minister of $840 million in funding for the National Disability Insurance Scheme and, oh yes, the time bomb of the Adani approval is ticking louder than ever, with the state environment agency due to sign off on the critical groundwater management plan for the mine two days after the budget is released.

For the first time in her fast and seemingly assured rise, Trad is feeling the blowtorch. The complex challenges she faces embody some of those confronting Labor at the federal level. In addition to massaging a set of books that is drowning in red ink — Queensland’s gross debt was forecast in last year’s budget to hit an eye-watering $83 billion over the forward estimates — she must hold the line in her marginal seat against the Greens now that the Liberal National Party has announced it will preference them over her.

The list goes on. She needs to contain the factional tensions that have erupted in the state caucus since the federal election to preserve her leadership ambitions; accommodate heavy spending on health, education and other services plus the ballooning wage bill mandated by the government’s cosiness with the public sector unions; and address the nagging suspicion in Labor ranks that so much she has worked for and represents is out of step with what voters actually want.

Then there is Adani. It all comes back to Adani.

Rightly or wrongly, Trad is seen as the architect of the state Labor government’s woefully inept handling of the project and its Indian proponent, the Adani ports, shipping and energy conglomerate. Her critics say it has been a case of “Jackie first”, with Trad putting her survival in South Brisbane ahead of the interests of the state and, yes, the Labor government to get the mine up and running in economically battered central-west Queensland.

The spiel is that she went rogue, not for the first time, to deploy the Left’s numbers in cabinet and her command of the machinery of government to drag the chain, if not block the mine. Trad rejects this, telling Inquirer: “I would say that criticism is from people who have an unrealistic view of what happened in cabinet and don’t actually understand what happened in the government … I would probably suggest or back my hunch these are people who are unprepared to put their names to such comments, these are people who are so out of the loop but think that their relevance is far more than it actually is.”

Still, the government’s approach to Adani is mystifying. The mine has been in the works for eight years as the linchpin to develop a vast new coalfield in the Galilee Basin, 1000km northwest of Brisbane. The investment was initially welcomed by Bligh, who predicted ore would be rolling out by 2014, backed by the LNP when it came to power under Campbell Newman, and embraced so enthusiastically by Palaszczuk that on a trade mission to India in March 2017 she met the company’s billionaire owner, Gautam Adani, and urged him to buy into food production and renewable energy projects in Queensland.

Adani believed it had a commitment from the Premier to waive state royalties worth $320m in the start-up phase, and to support its bid for a $1bn loan from the federal government’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility to build a rail link to port.

But then something extraordinary happened. In the last week of May 2017, Trad came out publicly against the “royalties holiday”, citing an election commitment that no public money would go into the mine, which had to stack up financially and meet environmental standards. This was in line with the position of the federal party.

Trad’s intervention had been preceded by a devastating media leak. Emerging from a meeting with then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in Brisbane on May 17, Palaszczuk was blindsided by a question from an ABC reporter on the supposedly secret royalties deal. Her office was incensed, blaming Trad for the breach.

After an emergency cabinet meeting on May 26, Palaszczuk, Trad and Curtis Pitt, the state treasurer at the time, announced a revamp of the tax regime to cover all future greenfield mine developments, capturing Adani. “There will be no royalty holiday for the Adani Carmichael mine,” the Premier insisted. Any deferred royalties would be paid with interest after a security deposit was stumped up by the company concerned. But there was a kicker.

“Consistent with our election commitments, cabinet has determined that any NAIF funding needs to be between the federal government and Adani,” Trad said in the joint media statement. This seemed unremarkable: under NAIF rules the federal money is dispensed to a loan recipient by the state, which has no financial exposure to the transaction. On May 29, Pitt declared that Queensland “would not stand in the way” of those arrangements for Adani.

Only later would the penny drop. Beset by anti-Adani protests during the opening phase of the 2017 state election campaign, Palaszczuk performed a backflip and said the government would veto the NAIF loan, citing a purported conflict of interest involving her then partner, who had consulted on the project. By then, Adani was a word Trad could barely bring herself to utter in public. Witness this exchange with The Australian’s Sarah Elks from May 2017:

Q: “Can I just ask you personally, can you state your support for the Adani Carmichael coalmine?

Trad: “Like every other member of this government, I support resource sector jobs. I know how important they are for our regions, for our regional economies and I know how important they are for the economy of Queensland.”

Q: Is there a reason why you can’t say you support that project in particular?

Trad took a question from another reporter.

Fast forward to the hushed aftermath for Labor of its election drubbing three Saturdays ago. Having initially played down the impact of Adani on the result in Queensland, Palaszczuk did another about-face, declaring she was “fed up” with the delays in the environmental approvals process and it would be fast-tracked by the state co-ordinator-general. If, as expected, the groundwater plan is ticked off next Thursday, the company is geared up to begin full-scale site works within weeks.

Trad took to social media last Sunday to clear the air on Adani, complaining the issue had been “weaponised” by the political Right and the Left. “For those opposed to the mine it has taken on the status of the only test of commitment to action on climate change,” she wrote on Facebook.

“For those supportive of the mine, this project is the only proof of a commitment to resource sector jobs in regional Queensland communities. Both arguments are exaggerated and wrong. And we now find ourselves divided.”

SOURCE

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

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

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7 June, 2019

Climate Change Anti-Trump Protesters Leave Streets Of London Littered With Trash And Signs

Typical Leftist elitism. They think that some "little people" will pick up after them

Thousands of left-wing protesters took to the streets of London to protest President Donald Trump’s state visit and while they appear to have an edge on their American counterparts when it comes to creativity, the demonstrators have proven to be every bit as hypocritical, preaching about the environment while leaving piles of trash for others to clean up.

Feminists, environmentalists, peace activists, trade unionists and others turned out to express their anger over Trump’s lavish royal welcome, crowding the government district as the president met Prime Minister Theresa May, the Associated Press reported.

By the way, what’s not getting nearly as much attention is that thousands turned out in support of President Trump, as well. “We love Trump!” the friendlies can be heard chanting.

Having served their purpose, mounds of protest signs were left behind — it seems the left in England have yet to learn the lesson liberals in the states got from the tea party, that being that hand-made signs look more authentic than professional made signs that give away the moneyed leftist institutions driving the protests.

The great irony here is that many who oppose Trump do so out of concern for the environment.

During the protests Jeremy Corbyn, the leftist leader of the Labour Party, ranted about climate change, which he believes Trump doesn’t take seriously, and about being more accepting of illegal immigration.

“Can we stop treating people who travel for a place of safety, escape from oppression, from climate change-induced degradation or economic poverty to try to make their contribution to the world — don’t treat them as enemies, treat them as fellow human beings and citizens of this planet who deserve our support, our sympathy and our understanding,” Corbyn said, according to the Daily Mail.

Corbyn declined an invitation to attend Monday’s state banquet for the president at Buckingham Palace, but sought a meeting with Trump, according to the AP. The president turned him down, calling Corbyn “somewhat of a negative force.”

“He wanted to meet today or tomorrow and I decided I would not do that,” President Trump reportedly said.

And while many of the protesters held signs about the environment and were lectured by Corbyn, the lesson didn’t take.

The spectacle was summed up well in a tweet from the deputy political editor for the Daily Mail, who called it a “load of lefty crap.”

SOURCE

Question for Climate Panel: What About the Thawing of Long-Frozen Microbes Buried in Permafrost?

Bureaucrat waffles in reply. I would have replied that the only evidence for it is anecdotal

Of all the pressing problems in the world, here's another one to put on the list -- or not.

At a hearing of the House intelligence committee Wednesday, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) asked a climate change panel about the risk of prehistoric germs coming out of hibernation:

"As the globe heats up, scientists assess that long-frozen microbes buried in the permafrost will be exposed, potentially carrying diseases to which no living human has natural resistance," Speier said.

She noted that in 2016 in Siberia, a 12-year-old boy died and 20 more were sickened by anthrax after a 75-year-old reindeer carcass thawed during a heatwave, infecting the local water supply.

She asked about the burden that "prehistoric germs" could place on local health systems and how they could impact our military readiness.

"Thank you. That's a really good question," Dr. Rod Schoonover, a State Department analyst on national security and climate change, responded. "It's actually a really good illustration of a class of national security problems that I think of in terms of climate-linked surprise," he said.

"If you had assessed ahead of time what the risk from thawing caribou from the permafrost would be, no one would have an answer, but once it presents itself, it makes sense."

He continued:

And so, I don't really know what the level of exposure is, and I would look to the scientific assessment on the prevalence of that. One of the things that it is sometimes hard to do is to separate anecdote from trend.

But emergent diseases, or re-emergent diseases, from previously -- from frozen permafrost, for example, provided, I think, if it were recent enough -- if it goes back too far, it might not have the degree of infectibility on human beings.

But I'm speculating there. But I do believe that there is probably some emergent risk for humans and animals that humans depend on.

SOURCE

France to propose new tax on flights in Europe

The airline sector is coming under increasing pressure from so-called "flight shamers" and climate change activists who point to the industry's large carbon footprint.

France on Thursday will propose a new tax on flights in Europe to encourage travellers to switch to less polluting forms of transport, a source in the transport ministry told AFP.

The airline sector is coming under increasing pressure from so-called "flight shamers" and climate change activists who point to the industry's large carbon footprint.

The French government will propose that the European Union adopt a new tax on air travel, which could be in the form of an extra levy on fuel or tickets, or changes to the European carbon emissions trading system.

"Different charges could be considered to reinforce the principle of 'polluter pays' and France believes that they should be weighed up in order to find the best way of doing it," the source said on Wednesday.

"Given the scale of the climate challenge, France believes that we need to go further and more quickly," the source added.

The UN's International Civil Aviation Organization estimates commercial flying is responsible for two percent of global CO2 emissions and EU figures show it as the most polluting form of transport per kilometre (mile) travelled.

But the head of airline industry body IATA, Alexandre de Juniac, defended his members at an annual meeting of the organisation in South Korea this week.

He acknowledged that the sector was under pressure to act, but said that the public was unaware of efforts being made by the industry, including the use of new fuel-efficient airliners and biofuels.

He also criticised the idea of new "green taxes" which he said were normally collected by governments and used for non-environmental ends.

The industry is likely to fight against any new taxes in Europe given that it is already subject to the EU carbon emissions trading system and, from 2020, to a new global mechanism called the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA).

Calls to boycott air travel have grown in recent years in step with growing awareness about the dangers of climate change.

"Flygskam", or flight shame, has become a buzz word in Sweden in reference to the guilt felt over the environmental effects of flying, with more and more young Swedes opting to travel by train to ease their consciences.

Spearheading the movement for trains-over-planes is Sweden's Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate school striker who refuses to fly and travelled by rail to the World Economic Forum in Davos this year.

French President Emmanuel Macron is also keen to boost his own green credentials, having suffered an embarrassing resignation of his star environment minister last year who accused the head of state of failing to act.

The French Green party also surged in last month's European Parliament election, finishing third behind Macron's centrist Republic on the Move party and the far-right National Rally.

Macron's record of persuading his EU partners to adopt new taxes is mixed, however, after he failed to convince them to create a new EU-wide levy on internet and technology groups such as Apple and Amazon.

SOURCE

Trump: “It Used to be Called ‘Global Warming’…with ‘Extreme Weather,’ You Can’t Miss”

Asked if he believes in climate change, President Donald Trump told “Good Morning Britain” Host Piers Morgan that he believes in weather change.

“Do you personally believe in climate change?” Morgan asked Trump in an interview Tuesday during Trump’s visit to the U.K.

“I believe that there is a change in weather. And, I think it changes both ways,” Trump responded, reminding Morgan that climate activists used to make the specific claim that the planet was warming. But, now, they invoke the broader term, “extreme weather,” which includes all types of weather events, such as tornados and hurricanes:

“I believe that there is a change in weather. And, I think it changes both ways.

“Don’t forget: it used to be called ‘global warming’ – that wasn’t working. Then, it was called ‘climate change.’ Now, it’s actually called ‘extreme weather’ - because, with ‘extreme weather,’ you can’t miss.

“Look, we have a thing now with tornados. I don’t remember tornados in the U.S. to the extent. But, then, when you look back, 40 years ago we had the worst tornado binge that we’ve ever had. In the 1890’s, we had our worst hurricanes, and I would say we’ve had some very bad hurricanes.”

SOURCE

Biden Plagiarizes His 'Green' Homework

His climate plan for "revolution" and "justice" didn't properly cite his sources.

Maybe you really can’t teach an old dog news tricks, but you would think that after aborting his 1988 presidential campaign over accusations of plagiarism, Joe Biden would be exceedingly cautious about repeating history. But no.

National Review reports:

Former vice president Joe Biden, who currently enjoys a hefty lead over his opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination, released his plan to combat climate change on Tuesday and was promptly accused of plagiarizing parts of the proposal.

The sections in question appeared to lift language from documents published by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions and the Blue Green Alliance. The vice president of the progressive group CREDO, Josh Nelson, noted the double language Tuesday morning, pointing out that passages from Biden’s plan nearly mirror sentences from a 2017 letter the Blue Green Alliance sent to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

The Biden campaign responded to the controversy by insisting the drafters had simply forgotten to include citations.

This goof was profoundly foolish. It may have been a lowly staffer to blame, but Biden is way out in front of the field of 482 Democrat presidential candidates, and he’s weighing in on one of the Left’s most sacred issues. At age 76, Biden should know better, and he should hire better people. Either way, it does not recommend him for the top office in the land.

As for the proposal itself, the video rollout is titled “Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution & Environmental Justice,” which tells you about all you need to know — this is leftist tyranny packaged as the way to save the planet.

Not surprisingly, Biden’s plan is still not radical enough for climate alarmists, who slam his reliance on nuclear power and a “too late” 2050 deadline for reducing net carbon emissions to zero. Plagiarism is really the least of Biden’s sins. The root problem with the entire ecofascist movement was aptly summed up by Reason’s Christian Britschgi: These leftists have “a near limitless faith in the ability of government to reorganize the economy.” That’s red, not green.

SOURCE

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

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

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6 June, 2019

'Thirty years from complete catastrophe': Admiral claims human civilisation will end as we know it in 2050

Prophecies of doom are as old as the hills, and they are always wrong. And theres no science in this one. Warmer oceans would mean more rain -- with vast beneficial effects. But they say a warmer earth will be in drought -- "desertification". They haven't got a blind clue. Though you may be consoled to hear that their "report" was endorsed by former Australian defence chief Admiral Chris Barrie. It takes an admiral ....

And a couple of degrees of warming would do nothing. I was born and bred in the tropics -- where temperatures were often up to ten degrees warmer than the global average. And our civilization was unaffected. Though we did drink a lot of cold beer

There is a high likelihood that human civilisation as we know it will come to an end by 2050.

That's according to a policy paper, Existential Climate-related security risk, which predicts more than half of world's population will face lethal heat conditions beyond the threshold of human survivability.

It says desertification could be severe in southern Africa, the southern Mediterranean, west Asia, the Middle East, inland Australia and across the south-western United States.

The report said a number of ecosystems, including coral reef, the Amazon rainforest and the Arctic, will collapse by 2050.

'Even for 2C of warming, more than a billion people may need to be relocated and in high-end scenarios, the scale of destruction is beyond our capacity to model, with a high likelihood of human civilisation coming to an end,' it said.

These scenarios were presented by David Spratt, the research director for Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration in Melbourne, and Ian Dunlop, former chairman of the Australian Coal Association and chair of the Australian Greenhouse Office Experts Group on Emissions Trading.

They said the social consequences of climate change range from 'increased religious fervor to outright chaos.'

'The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities,' they warned.

'Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible.'

They have presented scenarios for three periods from 2020 to 2030, 2030 to 2050 and 2050. According to their report, by 2030 policy-makers will fail to act on evidence and prevent growing greenhouse gas emissions.

'While sea levels have risen 0.5 metres by 2050, the increase may be 2 to 3 metres by 2100, and it is understood from historical analogues that seas may eventually rise by more than 25 metres,' the report said.

'Thirty-five percent of the global land area, and 55 percent of the global population, are subject to more than 20 days a year of lethal heat conditions, beyond the threshold of human survivability.'

SOURCE

Biden's Greenie scam

If Joe Biden had been inclined to take a middle-of-the-road approach toward climate change, he’s abandoned it, judging by the proposal he unveiled Tuesday — an aggressive $1.7-trillion, 10-year plan to combat warming that goes considerably further than the environmental agenda of the Obama White House.

Climate change got relatively little attention in the 2016 campaign. By contrast, this year, there is almost a race by Democratic candidates to outdo one another in environmental ambition.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee argues that climate action must take precedence over everything else and has styled himself as the climate candidate. He calls for the U.S. to have an economy running 100% on renewable energy by 2035. Beto O’Rourke, trying to regain some forward motion in a seemingly stalled campaign, turned hard to climate action and swore off any fossil-fuel related campaign money after activists took note of all the oil industry workers who have donated to him.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders echoed the sentiment of many in the party at last weekend’s California Democratic Party convention when he declared that “we have got to make it clear that when the future of the planet is at stake, there is no ‘middle ground.’” The remark was a shot at Biden after a campaign aide to the former vice president suggested to Reuters last month that a middle ground on climate was exactly what Biden sought.

No one in the Biden campaign is saying that now.

In joining the scrum of prominent 2020 hopefuls who have made far-reaching climate action a central focus of their campaign, Biden, the front-runner for the party’s nomination, proposed cutting emissions of greenhouse gases to zero by 2050, a goal set out in the Green New Deal, the policy framework championed by the most progressive Democrats.

He proposed getting to that goal with an agenda that includes far-reaching and potentially economically disruptive “enforcement mechanisms” on industry, as well as trade penalties for other countries that cheat on climate commitments. And he proposed raising corporate taxes to help pay for the program.

Biden’s plan also nods to one of his signature personal and political causes — Amtrak. It includes a call to “spark the second great railroad revolution” by reinvesting in California’s high-speed rail project, doubling the speed of existing fast trains in the Northeast, and ultimately expanding the network of such rail nationwide.

“We should become the innovative place in the world for the change that has to take place if we are going to survive,” Biden said at a campaign stop in Berlin, N.H.

The ambition and scope of his blueprint rival those of candidates to his left, including a plan presented Tuesday by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who proposes to spend $2 trillion over 10 years to speed the transition to a clean-energy economy and trigger a “green manufacturing boom.”

She would pay for the plan with a previously unveiled tax on corporate profits over $100 million. She embraces a 2050 zero-emissions goal globally but says projected U.S. emissions would have to be cut to zero by 2030 to meet that goal.

“I’m betting on American science,” Warren said at a campaign stop in Detroit. “I’m betting on American ingenuity. I’m betting on American workers to get us to a point where we can fight back against climate change and save this planet.”

The flood of plans reflects the urgency with which Democratic voters now consider an issue that long has been an afterthought in presidential elections.

President Trump’s abandonment of the Paris agreement on climate change and his dismantling of Obama-era climate protections — coupled with stepped-up warnings from scientists worldwide that time to address warming is fast running out — has galvanized the Democratic Party around climate. More than 90% of Democrats support the Green New Deal, according to a poll released last month by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Six in 10 voters overall are now worried about global warming.

Most of the proposals the 2020 hopefuls have unveiled would reinstate the aggressive fuel mileage standards that Trump scrapped over the fierce objections and legal threats of California, reorient federal agencies toward climate action, and restore strict limits on methane pollution abandoned by Trump.

“Everyone is tripping over each other to be greener than the next guy,” said David Victor, a professor of international relations at UC San Diego and contributor to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The Sunrise Movement, an advocacy group pressuring 2020 hopefuls to back the Green New Deal, declared the Biden plan “a huge win,” even as it joined other progressive groups in vowing to push the former vice president to go further.

The Biden plan still includes some signature centrist components, such as embracing nuclear energy as one way of weaning the economy off oil, coal and other fossil fuels. It also calls for investment in “carbon sequestration” — technology that sucks greenhouse gases from the air and repurposes or buries them — an approach many environmentalists warn will slow the transition away from fossil fuels.

The inclusion of those elements concerned Niklas Hohne, an author of studies for the U.N. panel and co-founder of NewClimate Institute, a German think tank. But, like Sunrise, he said the Biden plan would take the U.S. far down the field toward meeting the global climate commitments Trump disavowed.

“Joe Biden’s climate plan is definitely ambitious,” he said. “The corner piece of achieving net zero emissions no later than 2050 is an ambitious goal, in particular if implemented through milestones with an enforcement mechanism.” Hohne says such mechanisms have proven key in countries that are succeeding in making serious progress toward the climate goals agreed to in Paris.

Biden’s plan calls for an enforcement mechanism to be passed by Congress and enacted by 2025. It would be based on the principle that “polluters must bear the full cost of the carbon pollution they are emitting,” according to the campaign.

“Our economy must achieve ambitious reductions in emissions economy-wide instead of having just a few sectors carry the burden of change,” the Biden plan says.

The plan leaves open the possibility that the goals could be enforced by using a carbon tax, which many economists see as the most efficient way to transform the economy from one based heavily on fossil fuels to one powered by renewable sources.

“The plan nowhere explicitly says carbon tax, cap and trade, carbon pricing — the things economists like myself would say are absolutely essential to achieving these reductions,” said Robert Stavins, a professor of energy and economic development at Harvard University. “It sounds like that is what he is referring to, but it has become too politically dangerous for them to say it.”

Biden’s more progressive rivals also avoid such language in their plans.

Even so, the Biden proposal, like the others, would almost certainly be met with a hostile reception in a Senate that has a strong chance of remaining under GOP control after the 2020 elections.

That has led some to argue that many of the climate goals set by the candidates could be achieved by toughening the existing regulatory system without the politically debilitating fight over imposing a broad new tax.

It is not just Congress that could prove a tough hurdle in implementing any of the plans. The U.S. would also need to nudge the rest of the world along, and reclaiming America’s place as a leader in climate action could prove extremely difficult after Trump abandoned that role.

Even as Biden vowed to leverage his deep experience in foreign affairs to reestablish the alliances, experts warned the toolbox available to him or any Democratic president would be limited.

“Our credibility on this problem has eroded because of the flakiness of the White House,” said UC San Diego’s Victor. “How do we get China to participate with us now? None of these plans really say.”

SOURCE

Economists Have Been “Useful Idiots” for the Green Socialists

In the old Soviet Union, the Communists allegedly used[1] the term “useful idiot” to describe Westerners whose naïve political views furthered the Soviet agenda, even though these Westerners didn’t realize that they were being exploited in such fashion. It is in this context that I confidently declare that American economists have been useful idiots for the green socialists pushing extreme climate change policies. The radical environmentalists were quite happy to embrace the economic concepts of “Pigovian negative externalities” and a carbon tax in the past, but now that it is impossible for economic science to endorse their desired agenda, the activists have discarded the entire field as hopelessly out of touch. Economists who still support a carbon tax and other climate “mitigation policies” should be aware of the bigger picture.

Using the UN’s Own Document to Defeat the Climate Change Agenda
I have been making this case for years. For example, back in 2014 I used the latest (and still most recent) UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report to show that the then-popular climate change target of 2 degrees Celsius of warming could not be justified by the research summarized in the report. In other words, I used the UN’s own report to show that the popular climate change “cures” would be worse than the disease.

Yet even though they had spent years berating the critics of government action as “climate deniers” who rejected the “consensus science,” in this case—once they realized that the economic models of climate change wouldn’t support aggressive intervention—the environmental activists all of a sudden began pointing out all the things that the UN-endorsed studies left out. Rather than summarizing the cutting edge knowledge on climate science and mitigation policies, the IPCC document turned into a bunch of misleading nonsense that would give ammunition to deniers.

Nobel Laureate Inconveniently Blows Up the Paris Agreement
Last fall, we had another demonstration of the chasm between the actual research and the media/political treatment: William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on climate change, on the same weekend that the UN released a “special report” advising governments on how to try to limit global warming to as little as 1.5 degrees Celsius.

There was just one little problem: Nordhaus’ Nobel-winning work clearly showed that the UN’s goal was insane. According to his model, it would literally be better for governments around the world to do nothing about climate change, rather than enact policies limiting warming to 1.5°C. Rather than aiming for a 1.5°C target, Nordhaus’ most recent model runs indicated that the “optimal” amount of warming to allow was closer to 3.5°C. (To an outsider this might not seem like a huge discrepancy, but it is absolutely gigantic in the context of the climate change policy debate. Many activists would confidently predict that even 2.5°C of warming would spell disaster for our grandchildren.)

Ah, but I got the best confirmation of my quixotic position just last week, when the Guardian ran an editorial with this subtitle (my highlighting):

Does everybody see that? The people at the Guardian already know what the policy answers are, without needing any help from the economists.

Conclusion

My economist colleagues who continue to urge for a “carbon tax swap deal” in order to get rid of “onerous top-down regulations” and enact a simple “price on carbon” are fooling themselves. Whether it’s in a ballot initiative in Washington State—literally designed by an environmental economist, or in the wonky columns of Vox’s climate expert, in the political calculus of Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, or in the FAQ on the Green New Deal itself, the environmental activists in US politics are making it quite clear that they will not settle for such half-measures.

Market-friendly economists chiming in on the American political scene should stop being useful idiots for the green socialists. Whatever the possible merits of a theoretical carbon tax package—in which a regressive hike in energy prices is matched dollar-for-dollar with corporate income tax cuts, and decades of special-interest favoring regulations are thrown out the window in the zeal for efficiency—this is all a moot point. If market-friendly economists succeed in getting their readers to hold their noses and support a carbon tax, they will all learn quite quickly that the deal has been altered.

[1] The use of the term “useful idiots” has been attributed to Lenin, but apparently that link is disputed.

SOURCE

Climate change scare stories reach the point of psychological TERRORISM… while scientists blame the fear on the “climate crisis”

The corporate media cartels have become hubs of hatred and “journo-terrorism” that targets the psyche of the masses. The quack science hoax of so-called “climate change” is used to terrorize the public into believing that their planet will somehow be destroyed by carbon dioxide — the very molecule that has been rapidly re-greening the Earth over the past four decades, according to NASA.

Now, a new round of “science” has been studying the mental stress of the victims of this psychological terrorism pushed by the dishonest media, and they’ve reached an even more bizarre conclusion. Scientists now claim that climate change is causing “mental anguish” among humans. Seriously.

Of course, the real source of the mental anguish is the lies and panic propaganda of the corporate media and the pathetic scientific establishment which has figured out that if you want more government grant money, you have to conduct “research” that identifies some new crisis to be blamed on climate change. In fact, the very phrase “climate change” isn’t scary enough yet to achieve the desired goal of mass mental terrorism, so media outlets around the world are now ordering their obedient writers to start using the phrase “climate crisis.”

And if you don’t believe there’s a “climate crisis,” then you will of course be banned from all online platforms, just like Apple recently banned Natural News, claiming our content failed to mirror the “scientific consensus” on topics like climate science.

And there you have it: All news outlets, researchers and individual voices are now required to panic over the climate, or you will be banned and silenced. This is what so-called “climate change” has come to: a dangerous CULT of quackery and left-wing lunacy. Like all cults, those who are deeply embedded in the cult demand that everyone else join their cult or be forever silenced.

The very same people who believe in a “climate crisis,” by the way, are the kind of people who cut off their own penis and scrotum using a scalpel in an effort to become a “nullo” — a gender-neutral, obedient “progressive” who exhibits no reproductive organs whatsoever. This, we are told, is the ultimately expression of tolerance and progress.

Or maybe, perhaps, all these lunatics are just f##king insane, and they spend their lives terrorizing each other over make-believe fear scenarios in order to achieve some illusion of self-importance as they desperately try to navigate a world that makes no sense to them because the rational portions of their brains have been short-circuited with fear, hatred and social engineering propaganda. The zombie apocalypse is here, and the zombies are the libtards who have proven themselves to be utterly incapable of independent thought.

If only they would all cut off their own balls, we could have this entire surge of lunacy self-eliminated in just one generation of “progressivism,” via the laws of natural selection.

SOURCE

Facts vs. fearmongering in Australia

Forget GetUp, It’s Corporate Climate Bullies We Should Fear

If there was a gold medal for corporate climate change hypocrisy, the American company Ben & Jerry’s Holdings Inc. would be hard to beat.

Ben & Jerry’s is a wholly owned subsidiary of the giant foreign multinational corporation Unilever, and during the recent Federal election they ran a marketing campaign: “Let’s make sure Climate is the #1 election issue in Australia”.

Their advertising campaign was full of the typical climate lies and deceptions, with this foreign multinational effectively calling for Australians to vote for Labor and The Greens.

However, the first thing that anyone that really wants to ‘vote for the climate’ should do is to stop buying Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

Firstly, dairy cows are one of Australia’s largest single sources of Co2 emissions. In fact, Australia’s herd of dairy cows (nine million tonnes) emit more Co2 than the Liddell coal-fired power station (around 7.5 million tonnes) does.

Therefore, you are part of the climate cult that believes we can stop bad weather, it should be just as important to you that dairy products (including ice-cream) come off the menu, as it is to close down coal-fired power stations.

Secondly, the manufacturing, distribution and retailing of ice-cream products are highly energy intensive, especially since frozen Ben & Jerry’s ice cream must be kept at temperatures of -10°F (-23°C) throughout the distribution chain.

Thirdly, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is manufactured in the USA and it has to be shipped in special refrigerated transport all the way to Australia (thank you fossil fuels).

Advertising gurus at foreign multinational corporations like Ben & Jerry’s are playing with fire.

With their deceptive, misleading and breathtakingly hypocritical advertising campaign, they are holding hands with anti-capitalists that would seek to destroy them at first opportunity.

They are effectively feeding the crocodile, hoping it will eat them last.

But in the meantime, what a better way for the sanctimonious to virtue signal on the climate (and those opposed to hypocrisy and foreign interference in Australian election campaigns) – give up buying imported foreign-made Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream.

SOURCE

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

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

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5 June, 2019

New England: In the Great Marsh and other coastal wetlands, climate change is harming delicate ecosystems

We read: "the waters from the coast out into the Gulf of Maine have been warming faster than nearly any other body of water on the planet". So its some sort of local warming we are looking at, not global warming

ROWLEY - Navigating an unusually high tide through the submerged channels of the Great Marsh, Hillary Sullivan cut the engine and let her skiff drift onto a mud bank. She plopped into the mire, sloshing shin-deep in the brackish water, and pointed to an increasing threat.

There, a few feet from where she stood in the muck, a gouge had formed where a mud bank gave way, a telltale sign of how rising sea levels and pollution are slowly but steadily eroding one of New England's most vital coastal ecosystems.

"We're seeing a lot more of this slumping and cracking of the mud, which destroys the stability of the marsh," said Sullivan, a research scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center who has spent years observing the changes in the Great Marsh, which stretches from the Crane Wildlife Refuge in Ipswich and Essex north to Newburyport and into New Hampshire, the longest continuous coastal wetlands in New England.

"We need to save these vital ecosystems before it's too late."

Wetlands such as these are also crucial buffers against the damaging effects of rising sea levels from climate change. Yet the very forces unleashed by global warming are pounding away at the Great Marsh and other saltwater wetlands: higher tides - more than 8 inches here over the past century - and a 20?percent increase in precipitation over roughly the same period.

Fueled by more powerful storms, such as the succession of nor'easters that pummeled the region in recent winters, rising tides have intensified coastal erosion and threatened beachside properties. On Plum Island, a thin, 11-mile-long barrier of sand, a series of winter storms in 2013 destroyed six homes and damaged dozens of others. More storms last year washed away dunes, flooded 20 homes, and left about 10 others at risk of falling into the ocean.

Moreover, the waters from the coast out into the Gulf of Maine have been warming faster than nearly any other body of water on the planet. That, combined with runoff from septic systems and other human-made pollution, has led to sharp declines of native species and the rise of invasive animals and plants, such as green crabs and reeds known as phragmites.

As a result, the native cord grass that pokes through the shallow water is becoming more top-heavy as its roots weaken, Sullivan's team has found.

In concentrated areas where the team has simulated the changes it expects to come from further coastal development, it has measured a 40?percent decline in the submerged roots of the cord grass. Those changes are destabilizing the banks, making it harder for other species to survive. For example, the population of Mummichog, a small killifish that's an important source of food for flounder and other larger fish, has fallen by half in recent years.

"The population crashed after the mud in the creek started to fracture," said Justin Lesser, a PhD student working with Sullivan. "They lost access to where they would feed."

Other salt marshes in New England, including those on outer Cape Cod and in Narragansett Bay, are showing similar signs of distress, undermining their ability to protect more developed coastal areas from rising sea levels and increasing precipitation that scientists expect to only accelerate in the coming decades. A 2018 report from the state government about the effect of climate change on Massachusetts projected seas rising by as much as 10.5 feet and annual precipitation increasing up to 16?percent by the end of the century.

"A healthy marsh is intricately linked to the health of our coastal waters," said Robert Buchsbaum, a staff scientist at Mass Audubon who has spent years studying the Great Marsh and other wetlands.

Salt marshes not only provide a buffer against coastal storms, they serve as a filter for pollutants, a nursery for juvenile fish, and a habitat for shellfish, migratory birds, and other species. But around the world, salt marshes have been transformed by rising seas and increasing coastal development; Massachusetts, for example, has lost about half of its marshland to dredging and fill of wetlands and other human-made changes to the environment.

Seawalls, which now line more than a quarter of the state's 1,500-mile shoreline, also make it harder for salt marshes to cope with rising seas. Without the impediments, the marshes would naturally migrate further inland. Instead, they are increasingly submerged all the time, upsetting the delicate balance between the tidal cycle of drying and inundation, scientists say.

"The result [of these changes] will be a further loss of wetlands, with devastating impacts for fisheries," said Jack Clarke, a spokesman for Mass Audubon and a member of the state's Special Commission on Coastal Erosion. "Upland areas will also suffer, as the ability of marshes to absorb stormwater as natural sponges will be severely diminished."

The Great Marsh has actually fared better than similar coastal wetlands because of limits on development in the area.

Still, the most visible effect of the changes occurring here may be in the amount of water that lingers after high tides and storms, known as "marsh pooling."

This has degraded the mud banks, where much of the ecosystem thrives, and has hurt plant life that needs time to dry out and birds that nest in drier areas. The pooling is exacerbated by human-made barriers to the natural ebb and flow of water, such as dams, roads, and culverts.

"The Great Marsh is the coastal jewel of New England, and we have an opportunity to get out in front of the impacts and keep it from being degraded, as have other systems in the country," said Chris Hilke, senior manager of climate adaptation and resilience at the National Wildlife Federation, which has received millions of dollars in federal grants to study and help protect the Great Marsh from climate change.

For longtime residents, such as Michael Morris, who owned a cottage on Plum Island for more than a decade, the changes to the Great Marsh are far from abstract.

After the onslaught of storms in 2013, he and his neighbors formed a group called Storm Surge to urge state and federal officials to take the threats of climate change more seriously and help residents adapt. A few years later, with seas rising faster, he decided it was time to sell his two-bedroom cottage - at a loss.

"When there's a disaster like what we experienced, property values plummet," said Morris, chairman of Storm Surge.

As he has watched the landscape change in recent years, with phragmites replacing the natural grass and tunnelling crabs weakening the mud banks, he worries about the future.

"We're just on the cusp of things about to happen," he said.

SOURCE

'Flight shame' has Swedes rethinking air travel

Saddled with long dark winters at home, Swedes have for decades been frequent flyers seeking out sunnier climes, but a growing number are changing their ways because of air travel’s impact on the climate.

Flygskam, or flight shame, has become a buzz word referring to feeling guilt over the environmental effects of flying, contributing to a trend that has more and more Swedes, mainly young, opting to travel by train to ease their conscience.

Spearheading the movement for trains-over-planes is Sweden’s own Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate school striker who refuses to fly, travelling by rail to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and the climate summit in Katowice, Poland.

A growing number of public figures have vowed to #stayontheground, including Swedish television skiing commentator Bjorn Ferry who said last year he would only travel to competitions by train.

And 250 people working in the film industry signed a recent article in the country’s biggest daily Dagens Nyheter calling for Swedish film producers to limit shoots abroad.

An anonymous Swedish Instagram account created in December has been shaming social media profiles and influencers for promoting trips to far-flung destinations, racking up more than 60,000 followers.

“I’m certainly affected by my surroundings and (flight shame) has affected how I view flying,” Viktoria Hellstrom, a 27-year-old political science student in Stockholm, said.

Last summer, she took the train to Italy, even though the friends she was meeting there went by plane, as that would have been her second flight within a few weeks.

“The only way I could justify going there was if I took the train,” she said.

The Scandinavian country’s location far north – it is 4,000km from the northernmost town of Kiruna to France’s Cote d’Azur – as well as its robust standard of living, the popularity of charter trips and the rise of low-cost airlines have all contributed to making Swedes big flyers.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg last year found that Swedes’ per capita emissions from flying between 1990 and 2017 were five times the global average.

Emissions from Swedes’ international air travel have soared 61% since 1990, their study said.

Swedes’ concerns rely on solid data: The Swedish Meteorological Institute said last week that the average annual temperature was rising twice as fast in the country as the global average.

In March, the World Wildlife Foundation published a survey indicating that nearly one in five Swedes had chosen to travel by rail rather than by air in order to minimise their environmental impact.

The trend was most noticeable among women and young people, it said.

Meanwhile, a survey published recently in Sweden’s leading travel magazine Vagabond said 64% of those who travelled abroad less last year did so because of climate reasons.

National rail operator SJ reported a 21% boost in business travel this winter, and the government has announced plans to reintroduce night trains to major European cities before the end of its mandate in 2022.

The number of domestic flight passengers was projected to be down by 3.2% in 2018, the transport authority said in its latest figures from September, though the number of passengers on international flights rose 4%.

So far the “flight shame” trend hasn’t had the same traction among Sweden’s neighbours, although Finland has spawned its own version of the expression, calling it “lentohapea”.

Other parts of the developed world may not have a word that’s quite as catchy – making do with #flyingless or #stopflying – but average CO2 emissions of 285g per air kilometre, compared with 158 for cars and 14 for trains, have given many pause.

Fausta Gabola, a French-Italian student in Paris, is no longer sure that she should take up an offer to study in Australia on a scholarship.

“It’s my dream to go there,” she said. “I applied without thinking too much about it and now I have a dilemma. I would feel like a hypocrite if I went.”

French political scientist Mathilde Szuba said any no-fly decision effectively puts distant countries out of reach.

“There is no easy substitute for flying,” she said. “You can’t go to faraway places without taking the plane.”

Back in Sweden, some experts say that changing travel patterns are not always a direct result of “flight shame”.

Frida Hylander, a Swedish psychologist, said shame, and the fear of being shamed, was a powerful motivator, but she also cautioned against overstating its importance.

Other factors were at play, Hylander said, citing as an example Sweden’s unusually hot summer last year which caused massive wildfires and may have sparked wider concerns about climate change.

“You should exercise caution when pointing to one single factor,” Hylander said.

A new flight tax introduced in April 2018 may also have played a role, she said, as well as the bankruptcy of regional airline NextJet, which led to the closure of a number of domestic flight routes for several months. – AFP Relaxnews

SOURCE

The Phony Case For Electric Cars

In an editorial published last week, Bloomberg (the news site, not the former mayor) declares that the only way cities can “dramatically improve air quality and extend lives shortened by pollution” is to follow the lead of places like Amsterdam and “ban (non-electric) cars.”

“Cities should offer up-front incentives to buy zero-emission cars, for instance, as well as non-financial benefits such as parking vouchers. Higher taxes on petrol and diesel cars — whether via congestion tolls or at the pump — will encourage drivers to switch and offset some of the costs of the transition,” the editorial board says.

They go on, and on, with policy advice, including more public transit options, charging stations, electric taxies and buses and “underground skating pods.”

There’s nothing wrong with underground staking pods, whatever those are, so long as they’re privately funded and operated.

But the entire premise of the Bloomberg editorial is wrong. Flat out wrong. Provably wrong.

The truth is that every city in America has made massive improvements in air quality over the past several decades — progress that was made without any help from electric buses, cars or taxis, and while “gas guzzlers” continued to dominate domestic car sales. Air quality in most places today is above, or well above, the government’s standards for safety.

Don’t believe it? Then go to the official government source for such information: The Environmental Protection Agency. It’s been tracking pollution levels for decades, whether it’s smog, carbon monoxide, or dust. Even in California, smog levels have declined sharply over the years.

And while pollution levels have been steadily declining, the number of miles driven has vastly increased — it’s up 50% since 1990. What’s more, car buyers have, over these years, been flocking to trucks and SUVs and away from passenger cars.

How is it possible that the air is vastly cleaner? Because new cars are more efficient and less polluting. And as the fleet of cars turns over, air pollution levels steadily decline.

Yet news outlets like Bloomberg continue to peddle the myth that air pollution is terrible and getting worse, and that the only way to clean the air is by taking draconian actions like forcing people into cars they don’t want or modes of transportation that don’t meet their needs.

Worse, they perpetuate the lie that electric cars are zero emission. They aren’t. While the cars themselves don’t emit pollution, the electricity that powers them does. So increasing demand for electricity means more pollution from the power plants — many of which run on coal — that fuel these “zero emission” vehicles.

Even when it comes to fighting climate change, electric cars aren’t necessarily better than their gas-powered brethren.

A report from the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute calculated the CO2 emissions from plug-in electrics based on the energy sources used to generate electricity, and then translated that into a miles-per-gallon equivalent.

They found that an electric car recharged by a coal-fired plant produces as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered car that gets 29 miles per gallon. A plug-in recharged by a natural gas-powered plant is like driving a car that gets 58 miles per gallon. Given the energy mix in the U.S., the average plug-in produces as much CO2 as a conventional car that gets 55.4 miles per gallon.

In other words, not zero emissions.

SOURCE

There Is No Evidence Weather Is Increasingly Threatening to Human Lives

Climate isn’t the same as weather — unless, of course, weather happens to be politically useful. In that case, weather portends climate apocalypse.

So warns Elizabeth Warren as she surveyed Iowan rainstorms, which she claims, like tornadoes and floods, are more frequent and severe. “Different parts of the country deal with different climate issues,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-Malthusia, cautioned as she too warned of extreme tornadoes. “But ALL of these threats will be increasing in intensity as climate crisis grows and we fail to act appropriately.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., recently sent a fundraising email warning Democrats that climate change was causing “growing mega-fires, extremely destructive hurricanes, and horrific flooding” which put “American lives are at stake.”

Even if we pretend that passing a bazillion-dollar authoritarian Green New Deal would do anything to change the climate, there is no real-world evidence that today’s weather is increasingly threatening to human lives. By every quantifiable measure, in fact, we’re much safer despite the cataclysmal framing of every weather-related event.

How many of those taken in by alarmism realize that deaths from extreme weather have dropped somewhere around 99.9 percent since the 1920s? Heat and cold can still be killer, but thanks to increasingly reliable and affordable heating and cooling systems, and others luxuries of the age, the vast majority of Americans will never have to fear the climate in any genuine way.

Since 1980, death caused by all natural disasters and heat and cold is somewhere under 0.5 percent.

It’s true that 2019 has seen a spike in tornadoes, but mostly because 2018 was the first year recorded without a single violent tornado in the United States. Tornadoes killed 10 Americans in 2018, the fewest since we started keeping track of these things in 1875, only four years after the nefarious combustion engine was invented.

There has also been a long-term decline in the cost of tornado damage, as well. In 2018, we experienced near-lows in this regard. The only better years were 2017, 2016 and 2015.

After a few devastating hurricanes around a decade ago, we were similarly warned that it was a prelude to endless storms and ecological disaster. This was followed by nine years without a single major hurricane in the United States.

According to the U.S. Natural Hazard Statistics, in fact, 2018 saw below the 30-year average in deaths not only by tornadoes and hurricanes (way under average) but also from heat, flooding and lighting. We did experience a slight rise in deaths due to cold.

Pointing out these sort of things usually elicits the same reaction: Why do you knuckle-dragging troglodytes hate science? Well, because science’s predictive abilities on most things, but especially climate, has been atrocious. But mostly because science is being used as a cudgel to push leftist policy prescriptions without considering economic tradeoffs, societal reality or morality.

There are two things in this debate that we can predict with near certitude: First, that modern technology will continue to allow human beings to adapt to organic and anthropogenic changes in the environment. Second, that human beings will never surrender the wealth and safety that technology has and continues to afford them.

People who deny these realities are as clueless as any “denier” of science. Which brings me back to Democrats.

There have been a number of stories predicting that 2020 will finally be the year politicians start making climate change an important issue. One can only imagine these reporters started their jobs last week.

It’s true that a number of Democrats presidential hopefuls have taken “no fossil fuel money” pledges — as if they were going to get any of that cash anyway — as they spew carbon into the atmosphere searching for another bad-weather photo-op. Kevin Curtis, executive director of NRDC Action Fund, told BuzzFeed News that all of this was “really wicked cool.”

The 2018 midterm elections, adds Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, are when “climate change was beginning, for the first time, to play a significant role in a few races across the country.”

A poll conducted by that very same Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that even for the most left-wing voters, climate change — an imminent planetary tragedy that threatens the existence of all humanity and most animal species — ranked third on the list of most important issues. It ranked 17th among all voters, behind things like border security, tax reform and terrorism.

Maybe one day the electorate will finally buy in. Climate change, though, didn’t even make a blip on exit polls of 2018. Which is why Democrats keep ratcheting up the hysteria over every environmental tragedy.

“Climate chaos is here,” declares Merkley, “but it’s not too late to act.” Remember: When disaster is perpetually 10 years away, it’s never too late to send Democrats some of your money.

SOURCE

New Video: What Rising CO2 Means for Global Food Security

On May 1, the CO2 Coalition held a briefing at the Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, D.C. on climate and food production to highlight What Rising CO2 Means for Global Food Security, the newest White Paper by the CO2 Coalition.

The speaker was Dr. Craig Idso, agronomist, climatologist and principal researcher for this White Paper. The moderator was Dr. Caleb Rossiter, climate statistician and executive director of the CO2 Coalition.

Food security is one of the most pressing problems facing us today. Advances in farm technology and know-how will continue to increase production, but it will still be a challenge to feed the world's growing population, especially as diets improve with rising income. Fortunately, carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting, non-toxic gas that is created when fossil fuels are converted into energy, is a powerful plant food.

The CO2 added to the air has already "greened" the planet: since 1900, it has increased crop production on the order of 15 to 30 percent, and satellite imagery shows that deserts are even shrinking in places as new plants encroach on their edges.
Enhancements in CO2 will help lift hundreds of millions of people out of hunger and malnutrition. The analysis of the latest research in What Rising CO2 Means for Global Food Security shows that this effect will only improve as carbon dioxide continues to rise from four one-hundredths of one percent of the atmosphere today to, perhaps, six one-hundredths of one percent in 50 years.

The video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_foyJr7mh4

The CO2 Coalition was established in 2015 as a 501(c)(3) for the purpose of educating thought leaders, policy makers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy. The Coalition seeks to engage in an informed and dispassionate discussion of climate change, humans' role in the climate system, the limitations of climate models, and the consequences of mandated reductions in CO2 emissions.

Visit us at www.co2coalition.org

Via email: info@co2coalition.org

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

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

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4 June, 2019

India weather: Temperature passes 50C Celsius in northern India

The 50 degree reading appears to be from one place in Rajasthan. But Rajasthan is mainly a big desert and extraordinary readings from such places are routine. Australia's Marble Bar is similar. The late Monsoon is probably behind a lot of the heat. And the Monsoon is often not on time.

Perhaps of particular interest is the following quote from an academic journal article published by the Royal Meteorological society (My caps.):

"Rainfall and temperature data during the period 1901–1982 are studied for the northwest Indian region consisting of the meteorological subdivisions of Punjab, Haryana, west Rajasthan, east Rajasthan and west Madhya Pradesh. The results indicate a DECREASING trend in the mean annual surface air temperature"

So the recent high temperatures are probably part of a long term oscillation. It doesn't take much research to blow Greenie misrepresentations out of the water

Temperatures passed 50 degrees Celsius in northern India as an unrelenting heatwave triggered warnings of water shortages and heatstroke.

The thermometer hit 50.6 degrees Celsius in the Rajasthan desert city of Churu over the weekend, the weather department said.

All of Rajasthan suffered in severe heat with several cities hitting maximum temperatures above 47 Celsius.

In May 2016, Phalodi in Rajasthan recorded India’s highest-ever temperature of 51 Celsius.

The Indian Meteorological Department said severe heat could stay for up to a week across Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh states.

Several deaths from heatstroke have already been recorded.

About 200 million people live in northern India.

A red alert severe heat warning has been issued in the capital New Delhi as temperatures passed 46 Celsius, and residents were advised not to go out during the hottest hours of the day.

Even in the hill state of Himachal Pradesh, where many wealthy Indians go to escape the summer heat, temperatures reached 44.9 Celsius in Una.

Several major cities, led by Chennai, have reported fears of water shortages as lakes and rivers start to dry up.

In the western state of Maharashtra, farmers struggled to find water for thirsty animals and crops.

“We have to source water tankers from nearby villages as water reserves, lakes and rivers have dried up,” said Rajesh Chandrakant, a resident of Beed, one of the worst-hit districts.

“Farmers only get water every three days for their livestock.” Raghunath Tonde, a farmer with a family of seven, said the area has suffered worsening shortages for five years. “There is no drinking water available for days on end and we get one tanker every three days for the entire village,” Tonde told AFP. “We are scared for our lives and livelihood,” he added.

The Hindustan Times newspaper said many Beed residents had stopped washing and cleaning clothes due to the water shortage.

More than 40 per cent of India faces drought this year, experts from Gandhinagar city’s Indian Institute of Technology, warned last month.

The annual monsoon — which normally brings much needed rain to South Asia — is running a week behind schedule and is only expected to hit India’s southern tip on June 6, the weather department said.

And private forecaster Skymet has said there will be less rain than average this year.

The Indian peninsula has seen a drastic change in rainfall patterns over the past decade, marked by frequent droughts, floods and sudden storms.

SOURCE

Climate change is a political loser

When voters catch on to being insulted and scorned

First came Donald Trump’s stunning victory in 2016, after a campaign in which he rejected the “scientific consensus” on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW), and proved true to his rhetoric by withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords. Then a few years later, France was rocked by the “yellow vests” movement that started with protests against a tax on fuel that President Emmanuel Macron, in true globalist technocratic fashion, proposed as a way to “nudge” the masses into using less of the carbon-based energy allegedly heating the planet. And now comes Australia, where contrary to the predictions of the globalist elite, the anti-carbon progressive who had proposed job-killing regulations to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030, failed to defeat the conservative incumbent who would rather save jobs than “save the planet.”

Climate change is looking like a losing election issue.

The global technocrats, for whom Climate Change has been one of those “crises” that progressives “never let go to waste,” no doubt are wishing they could “dissolve the people” rather than change the government through democratic elections. Persuading free citizens with arguments based on fact, or with appeals to their interests, is difficult when your “crisis” is nothing more than a politicized hypothesis based on appeals to authority, rigged computer simulations, and apocalyptic predictions laced with insults to the skeptics’ intelligence and morals.

The politicians should have seen the signs of global warming’s declining utility as an electoral scare-tactic. In the U.S., “climate change” for years has ranked low on the list of issues voters are concerned about. Before last year’s midterm elections, in a Gallup Poll “climate change” ranked next to last of 12 issues that voters judged “extremely/very important,” just above investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Of course, people will tell a pollster they’re “concerned” and think “something should be done” about climate change, because they’ve been told that’s what the “right” people think. But when it comes to election day, most will vote for a growing economy, wage increases, more jobs, lower taxes, and fewer federal Nurse Ratcheds trying to cram more social or environmental “justice” pills down their throats.

Moreover, we’ve had decades now of hysterical predictions followed by “never mind” when they are belied by facts, along with the vicious demonization and ostracization of scientists who question the dominant narrative of CAGW. The hypocrisy of this very unscientific demand for unquestioned obeisance not to a scientific fact, but to a working hypothesis has now become blatantly obvious. Real science, which is usually reluctant to claim it’s “settled,” works quite the opposite. As philosopher Karl Popper defined it, “The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.”

Has the CAGW crowd ever displayed this skeptical zeal that is fundamental to the progress of science? Or demonstrated what theoretical physicist Richard Feynman called “a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards . . . to report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.” How does this principle of scientific ethics and integrity square with calling sceptics “deniers,” a despicable comparison to Holocaust denial? Or with bogus stats like “97% of scientists” agree with anthropogenic global warming, a factoid redolent of television ads, and exploded numerous times?

Even a layman with practical wisdom can see that the purveyors of “climate change” who make such ad hominem attacks and invent a “consensus” are up to no good. There’s also the hinky marketing decision to switch “global warming” to “climate change” ––a substitution forced by the two-decades hiatus in significant rises in temperatures even as emissions of CO2 increased by gigatons. Or there’s the implicit claim that CO2, which makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere, can override the sun as the prime factor in global climate change. Selling that is going to require a much more definite and complete, truly scientific, not “sciency,” explanation of how global climate, with its numerous systems and sub-systems and intricate feedback-loops, works before we gouge the world’s economy for trillions of dollars.

The fact is, too much of global warming science is still speculative and provisional, while the gaps in knowledge, such as the precise role of water vapor, are filled with assumptions that when plugged into a computer simulation, just happen always to confirm the CAGW hypothesis. Other questionable practices, from manipulated weather-station data, to graphs designed to “hide the decline” in temperatures over time, are more evidence that something other than real science is at work. So too does the media’s silencing of counter-arguments and contrary evidence that challenge the CAGW orthodoxy.

For example, climatologist Judith Curry, chair emerita of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has questioned the narrative that CO2 increases consistently track with temperature increases. As City Journal’s Guy Sorman reports, Curry “tells me, for example, that between 1910 and 1940, the planet warmed during a climatic episode that resembles our own, down to the degree. The warming can’t be blamed on industry, she argues, because back then, most of the carbon-dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels were small. In fact, Curry says, ‘almost half of the warming observed in the twentieth century came about in the first half of the century, before carbon-dioxide emissions became large.’”

If we had an honest media reporting both sides of the debate instead of shilling for one, we would hear more about such challenges to the consensus, and more reexamination of the empirical evidence presented as support for its claims. Instead, the executive summaries––i.e. selectively edited––of research from the International Panel on Climate Change are widely and breathlessly reported, despite the long record of computer-model projections of future temperatures being out of line with actual temperature data.

Finally, the most damning evidence of CAGW’s duplicity is that even if it was correct, all the expensive solutions to the problem ballyhooed at Global Warming, Inc. conventions like the Paris Climate Accords would not even begin to solve the problem. As environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg points out in the Wall Street Journal:

The IPCC says carbon emissions need to peak right now and fall rapidly to avert catastrophe. Models actually reveal that to achieve the 2.7-degree goal the world must stop all fossil fuel use in less than four years. Yet the International Energy Agency estimates that in 2040 fossil fuels will still meet three-quarters of world energy needs, even if the Paris agreement is fully implemented. The U.N. body responsible for the accord estimates that if every country fulfills every pledge by 2030, CO2 emissions will be cut by 60 billion tons by 2030. That’s less than 1% of what is needed to keep temperature rises below 2.7 degrees. And achieving even that fraction would be vastly expensive—reducing world-wide growth $1 trillion to $2 trillion each year by 2030.

Indeed, the weaknesses of the CAGW consensus suggests not a scientific activity, but a nature-worship cult attached to a lucrative scam that is worth billions in research grants and green-energy pork ($359 billion in 2014). Or maybe a mental illness, as geologist Dr. Norman Page surmises:

A very large majority of establishment academic climate scientists have succumbed to a virulent infectious disease – the CO2 Derangement Syndrome. Those afflicted by this syndrome present with a spectrum of symptoms. The first is an almost total inability to recognize the most obvious Millennial and 60 year emergent patterns which are trivially obvious in solar activity and global temperature data.

In other words, focused as they are on the “Satanic mills” of the industrial age, the wicked destroyer of the planet for the last 150 years, they ignore the longer patterns of climate change associated with the sun.

The political operatives of the technocratic global elite might think average voters are “smelly Wal-Mart shoppers,” “irredeemable deplorables,” “bitter clingers,” or as one Australian journalist said of the voters who rejected the left’s anti-carbon proposals, “morons.” But after several decades of global warming hype and hysteria, voters can see the hypocrisy of champagne socialists supporting polices that they can easily afford, but will hurt the poor and working class, and devastate the developing world that needs cheap energy for its economies to flourish and provide their peoples with the basic comforts of life like electricity. They see the King-Kong carbon footprints left behind by global elites, and the clean-energy taxes, subsidies, and regulations that harm the economy and take money out of their wallets. And more important, the people know when they are being insulted and scorned because they dare to question their “bright” betters about “settled science.”

Perhaps these recent elections signal that people across the globe have had enough of our internationalist self-appointed Platonic “Guardians” and their “noble lies.” Perhaps citizen autonomy and self-rule are making a comeback. Let’s hope so.

SOURCE

The myth of the green wave

No, the EU elections were not a huge boost for environmentalism.

The EU elections last week produced an apparent surge of support for greens across Europe. Parties from the Greens-European Free Alliance (EFA), the EU grouping the UK Green Party belongs to, increased their vote share across the continent by 3.1 percentage points to 10.8 per cent, taking 69 seats in the European Parliament.

This was a ‘response to the accelerating climate crisis that was the same in the UK and right across Europe’, Green Party MP Caroline Lucas told the Guardian. But perhaps the organic champagne had gone to her head. Lucas’s psephology is no better than her grasp of climate science.

It is true that the centre of gravity of EU politics is shifting away from the centre-left, represented by the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), and the dominant centre-right, represented by the European People’s Party (EPP). These two groups have long held the balance of power, but failed collectively to secure over 50 per cent of the vote this time around.

But the main beneficiaries of this shift have been the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) group, which increased its vote share by four percentage points and gained an extra 38 seats, and the right-wing Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group, which came from nothing to gain 8.7 per cent of the vote and 58 seats. In the context of these continued gains, green progress seems somewhat modest.

Moreover, EFA gains masked losses in Sweden, Spain and Austria, and its total loss of seats in Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary and Estonia leaves the EFA without representatives from 12 of the 28 member states of the EU. Far from reflecting voters concerns from ‘right across Europe’, then, the EFA’s truly remarkable successes in Germany (an increase of nine seats), France (an increase of six seats) and the UK (an increase of five seats) actually reflect a marked geographic split on climate issues within the EU. It seems environmentalism is a north-west European preoccupation.

What’s more, there are deep divisions within these more green nations. This is summed up by one of the slogans of the gilets jaunes, who have been protesting against French president Emmanuel Macron and his burdensome green taxes for six months now: ‘The government talks about the end of the world – we are worried about the end of the month.’ Greens tend to be drawn from wealthier constituencies, in which substantial increases in the cost of living, caused by green policies, are yet to dent disposable incomes. Scepticism of economic growth comes very easily to wealthier people.

Similarly, in Germany, the spectacular expense of the country’s ambitious Energiewende project – aimed at transitioning the country to a low-cost, low-carbon energy supply – is matched only by its spectacular failure. More than 340,000 German households are now disconnected from the electricity supply annually as rising prices push families into ‘energy poverty’. Once a pioneer of climate policies, German politicians are now looking to put the brakes on Wende.

In the UK, unlike France, climate policy has had little to do with our own deepening political crisis. But the indifference that mainstream politicians show to rising energy costs probably hasn’t helped. Regardless, the longstanding cross-party consensus on climate change looks set to persist. Recently, MPs stated their intention to make the UK a ‘net-zero carbon’ economy by 2050. The only opposition to this came from greens, who characteristically said it did not go far enough.

Green MEP Molly Scott Cato backed the Extinction Rebellion protest movement at the end of last year. She argued that direct action was now needed because a ‘powerful alliance of wealthy individuals and multinational corporations, backed by complicit politicians, has subverted the political process and blocked action’. But climate-change orthodoxy has held sway over UK politics for years, with each party claiming that their rivals do not go far enough, thereby depriving voters of a meaningful choice on climate issues. In this sense, hardline greens, despite claiming to rage against the establishment, are just the sharp end of establishment politics.

Where more radical green policies have failed to get off the ground, it is because they have collided with political reality. No doubt Extinction Rebellion protesters and unhinged Green MEPs are sincere in their convictions, but they have failed to convince everyone else. Eliminating CO2 emissions by 2025 – as greens demand – would require a transformation of the economy and people’s lifestyles so radical it is inconceivable that it could be achieved without guns and tanks on Britain’s streets. The backlash would be cataclysmic. Greens fail to acknowledge how unpopular eco-austerity is, but the mainstream is being made to take notice.

This isn’t just happening in Europe. Across the world, it appears that extreme green policies simply cannot survive contact with democracy. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s much-hyped ‘Green New Deal’ is not popular with most US voters. In Australia, the Labor Party just fought and lost a General Election on the issue of climate change. Canada looks set to throw out prime minister Justin Traudeau and his green agenda at its General Election in October.

None of this is to say that climate change is off the agenda. Politicians across the West still seem keen on pursuing a form of eco-austerity. But national governments, hit by crises of legitimacy, are at least being made to think twice. The pursuit of environmentalist policies has always been done via supranational institutions beyond democratic control. But now those policies and those institutions are being called into question. They have placed burdens on ordinary people, and environmentalism has started to become a political liability in certain places.

As a result, the green vote seems to have decoupled from the mainstream. As political leaders have had to deal more and more with the protests of agitated voters, greens have become increasingly frustrated and extreme. Mainstream EU politics cannot sustain the demands of the greens if it is to head off assaults from increasingly Eurosceptic nationalist movements. Political leaders must bring the business of politics back to the needs and wants of ordinary people, not the lofty utopian notions of environmentalists.

SOURCE

Tesla’s horror year continues as another car mysteriously catches fire

Tesla’s horror year has gone from bad to worse with images of another one of its electric cars charred following a fire — this time while apparently plugged in to one of the electric car maker’s own high-powered charging stations in Belgium.

Belgian media have published images and are reported on the latest fire involving a Model S, one that required a 24-hour water bath to tame the heat and ensure no flare-ups from the potent lithium-ion battery packs.

The fire reportedly happened in Antwerp on Saturday night, resulting in a severely damaged car and a Supercharger station that was partially melted.

It is the latest high profile fire involving Tesla, which has previously argued its cars are less likely than petrol-fuelled vehicles to catch fire.

The Belgium Tesla fire comes as the company’s shares slumped to a two-and-a-half-year low, the dropping market capitalisation slashing billions off boss Elon Musk’s personal wealth.

Tesla’s share price is less than half the US$420 Elon Musk tweeted the company could be taken over at in August 2018, a tweet that led to a US$20 million fine from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which deemed his statement was “false and misleading”.

There has been a number of unexplained Tesla fires.
There has been a number of unexplained Tesla fires.Source:Supplied

It continues a long-running stock market trend of the electric car maker dropping in value, with repeated massive losses — and subsequent capital raising exercises — taking their toll on investor confidence.

Tesla has also come under fire for its ambitious autonomous vehicle claims and a questionable business model that many investors are now feeling nervous about.

While some analysts still have strong buy recommendations on Tesla stock, more are running for the exit doors, suggesting owners sell up, presumably before things get worse.

SOURCE

In the war on waste, could the hanky be making a comeback?

As a long-term handkerchief user, I rather warm to this idea

In the year 2019, nothing puts one at risk of an audible "tut tut" quite like the public presentation of a single-use product.

Whether it's the rustle of a thin plastic bag on the street ("Do they buy their asparagus at some sort of back alley supermarket?"), to the guilty possession of a disposable coffee cup ("Why haven't they brought a keep cup? Or fashioned a mug out of their bare hands?"), there is a uniquely modern tinge of shame – call it Reucassel Regret – that now comes with failing to make a sustainable choice.

Jokes aside, moving towards reusable items is, of course, good for the planet. So, one can hardly begrudge the early flickers of a trend that is sure to make your gran quite happy: the resurgence of the handkerchief.

As cold and flu season hits, more people seem to be carrying hankies. Before you ask: No, I have no data to back this up. I haven't been papping snotty-nosed strangers in cafes, or polling people in doctors' waiting rooms. But, I am just saying that it seems like hankies are happening. They are around. People are using them.

And, those people are onto something. Used tissues are not recyclable, and facial tissues made out of recycled materials are pretty rare because it can be difficult to make them soft enough (unlike toilet paper and paper towel, of which there are recycled varieties a plenty). It has been estimated that Australians use 273,000 tonnes of tissue product (including toilet paper) each year.

    Hanky use is a natural progression from other 'cool' sustainability movements which require a committed laundry schedule.

While there are some more sustainable options out there – cheeky toilet paper subscription service Who Gives a Crap sells "forest-friendly" tissues made from bamboo, and (if you were feeling particularly diligent) you could also compost your old snotty nose napkins – the reality is that most tissues end up in landfill, where they will take an extremely long time to biodegrade because of the additives used to make them stronger. Hence, hankies.

But will this cool behaviour actually just leave you with a cold? With nine million cases of the cold and flu in Australia each year, you have to wonder if hankies are as hygienic as tissues.

Dr Kirsty Short, influenza virologist at the University of Queensland, says she is not aware of any research directly comparing the germiness of tissues and handkerchiefs, but warns the influenza virus can survive on both for 12 hours.

"Probably the most important thing is washing your hands after using a tissue or hanky to ensure you don't spread the virus to other surfaces," she says, adding that, once transferred onto a plastic surface, for example, the virus can survive for up to 48 hours.

Dr Harry Nespolon, president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, says he has not personally noticed any uptake in handkerchief use among his patients. He would generally recommend people with a cold or flu use tissues.

"There's no doubt tissues are the preferred way to go because you do dispose of them after you use them," he says. "But there's a question about disposing of them properly; just leaving them on a table or desk is not the right way to dispose of them, putting them in the bin is the right thing to do."

However, Dr Nespolon says the main issue for the spread of bugs is what happens after you blow your nose, adding there is no reason why rubbing a used hanky rather than a fresh tissue on the nose would prolong an infection.

To reduce the chance of giving your cold to someone else, Dr Nespolon recommends measures such as washing your hands after you've blown your nose (ideally with disinfectant), covering your mouth when you cough, staying away from work when you're sick, and not keeping used tissues or hankies in a pocket with other items, like your mobile phone.

SOURCE

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

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3 June, 2019

Socialists Ruin the Environment

The extreme Left may hawk the Green New Deal, but its track record is woefully poor.

The steady drumbeat of speculation about the “i-word” (impeachment) has pushed America’s political mindset away from the s-word: socialism. But it’ll be back soon, wrapped in the cloak of “climate change.” Despite what’s predicted to be a “near-normal” hurricane season beginning this weekend, much of the nation is still reeling from the wild weather of recent weeks — which is always a good time for blaming our free-enterprise system.

We all know that weather is beyond human control, but that hasn’t stopped leftists from insisting we can change this through government mandates that reduce our dependence on carbon-based energy and force us into other lifestyle corrections. Climate change was among several pet issues radical Democrats sought to address when they took over the House in last year’s midterm elections, and the Green New Deal is their most obvious effort. Never mind that not a single Democrat senator had the guts to vote for this colossally asinine legislation when the opportunity arose. But there are still a number of true believers out there in the House, and parts of the legislation could certainly find their way into other bills.

Those who’ve lived it have written at length about the dangers of socialism as an economic system, but what was lost in the initial assessment and commentary on the GND was the environmental track record of nations often considered to be leaders in green.

For example, North Korea has its fans among the Radical Green because its carbon output per capita is barely one-fourth that of its capitalist neighbor to the south. If one doesn’t mind the starvation and repression, North Korea comes across as an environmental paradise — at least until one sees the nighttime satellite images of a light-free nation and the daytime images of extensive deforestation.

And North Korea isn’t an outlier among communist nations. Writing at National Review, Shawn Regan, a research fellow at the nonprofit Property and Environment Research Center, makes the case that socialism, practiced in the style of the Green New Deal, has a “dismal environmental legacy.” As Soviet-era communism began to collapse three decades ago, the West could see firsthand the “massive ‘tragedy of the commons’” in the former Soviet Union and its onetime Eastern European satellite nations. Mass starvation killed millions. And then there was Chernobyl, which is now the subject of an HBO miniseries revealing just how calloused and deceptive Soviet officials were in the lead-up to and cover-up of that disaster.

The Communist Chinese are the world’s worst current offenders. Residents of Beijing must often wear masks to even breathe in the smog-laden city. And yet American leftists are content to take China’s pinky swears about reducing emissions for deals like the Paris Agreement.

Yet our own government doesn’t escape scrutiny. The military, federally owned power plants, and agricultural policies have despoiled their share of our landscape over the decades. Even the EPA dumped millions of gallons of toxic sludge into a Colorado river.

On the other hand, the U.S. has built a sanitary infrastructure to eradicate most water-borne disease and restricted unfettered private property rights in favor of generally (but not always) reasonable environmental regulations. Public outcry eliminated most of the automobile smog from our big-city skies and wanton dumping of industrial wastes into our waterways, and created entrepreneurial opportunities for satisfying both private and public interests. One of the many advantages of our capitalist system is how nimbly it can address such issues as they occur.

As for the Green New Deal, its mandates and red tape would create prosperity for a connected class of bureaucrats and rent-seekers, while the rest of us are met with energy costs that have “necessarily skyrocketed,” to paraphrase a former president. The GND would thus be a GRD (Green Raw Deal) for all but a privileged few.

Environmental, economic, and ultimately societal — the destruction of our nation would be complete if the proponents of the GND ever truly got their way. Socialism’s awful economic legacy is well documented, but its environmental legacy is one the Left would love to keep under wraps.

SOURCE

Sorry, Democrats, There Is No Climate Chaos

Climate isn’t the same as weather — unless, of course, weather happens to be politically useful. In that case, weather portends climate apocalypse.

So warns Elizabeth Warren as she surveyed Iowan rainstorms, which she claims, like tornadoes and floods, are more frequent and severe. “Different parts of the country deal with different climate issues,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-Malthusia, cautioned as she too warned of extreme tornadoes. “But ALL of these threats will be increasing in intensity as climate crisis grows and we fail to act appropriately.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., recently sent a fundraising email warning Democrats that climate change was causing “growing mega-fires, extremely destructive hurricanes, and horrific flooding” which put “American lives are at stake.”

Even if we pretend that passing a bazillion-dollar authoritarian Green New Deal would do anything to change the climate, there is no real-world evidence that today’s weather is increasingly threatening to human lives. By every quantifiable measure, in fact, we’re much safer despite the cataclysmal framing of every weather-related event.

How many of those taken in by alarmism realize that deaths from extreme weather have dropped somewhere around 99.9 percent since the 1920s? Heat and cold can still be killer, but thanks to increasingly reliable and affordable heating and cooling systems, and others luxuries of the age, the vast majority of Americans will never have to fear the climate in any genuine way.

Since 1980, death caused by all natural disasters and heat and cold is somewhere under 0.5 percent.

It’s true that 2019 has seen a spike in tornadoes, but mostly because 2018 was the first year recorded without a single violent tornado in the United States. Tornadoes killed 10 Americans in 2018, the fewest since we started keeping track of these things in 1875, only four years after the nefarious combustion engine was invented.

There has also been a long-term decline in the cost of tornado damage, as well. In 2018, we experienced near-lows in this regard. The only better years were 2017, 2016 and 2015.

After a few devastating hurricanes around a decade ago, we were similarly warned that it was a prelude to endless storms and ecological disaster. This was followed by nine years without a single major hurricane in the United States.

According to the U.S. Natural Hazard Statistics, in fact, 2018 saw below the 30-year average in deaths not only by tornadoes and hurricanes (way under average) but also from heat, flooding and lighting. We did experience a slight rise in deaths due to cold.

Pointing out these sort of things usually elicits the same reaction: Why do you knuckle-dragging troglodytes hate science? Well, because science’s predictive abilities on most things, but especially climate, has been atrocious. But mostly because science is being used as a cudgel to push leftist policy prescriptions without considering economic tradeoffs, societal reality or morality.

There are two things in this debate that we can predict with near certitude: First, that modern technology will continue to allow human beings to adapt to organic and anthropogenic changes in the environment. Second, that human beings will never surrender the wealth and safety that technology has and continues to afford them.

People who deny these realities are as clueless as any “denier” of science. Which brings me back to Democrats.

There have been a number of stories predicting that 2020 will finally be the year politicians start making climate change an important issue. One can only imagine these reporters started their jobs last week.

It’s true that a number of Democrats presidential hopefuls have taken “no fossil fuel money” pledges — as if they were going to get any of that cash anyway — as they spew carbon into the atmosphere searching for another bad-weather photo-op. Kevin Curtis, executive director of NRDC Action Fund, told BuzzFeed News that all of this was “really wicked cool.”

The 2018 midterm elections, adds Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, are when “climate change was beginning, for the first time, to play a significant role in a few races across the country.”

A poll conducted by that very same Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that even for the most left-wing voters, climate change — an imminent planetary tragedy that threatens the existence of all humanity and most animal species — ranked third on the list of most important issues. It ranked 17th among all voters, behind things like border security, tax reform and terrorism.

Maybe one day the electorate will finally buy in. Climate change, though, didn’t even make a blip on exit polls of 2018. Which is why Democrats keep ratcheting up the hysteria over every environmental tragedy.

“Climate chaos is here,” declares Merkley, “but it’s not too late to act.” Remember: When disaster is perpetually 10 years away, it’s never too late to send Democrats some of your money.

SOURCE

Green Policies Turned California A Charred Black

More than half of California’s roughly 105 million acres are owned by the federal and state governments. It is on these sprawling parcels that the wildfires tend to rage before devouring private land, homes, and businesses.

Public lands “have proved far more vulnerable to forest fires than properties owned by private groups,” Hoover Institution scholar Richard Epstein wrote in California’s Forest Fire Tragedy. “Private lands are managed with the goals of conservation and production. The management of public lands has been buffeted by legislative schemes driven by strong ideological commitments.”

The loudest voices assign blame for the fires to man-made climate change. But the human activity primarily responsible for the destructive spread of wildfires is public policy favoring burned timber over harvested timber. While maybe well-intended, laws inspired by the 1970s environmentalist movement, which is determined to make sure saw blades and trees never meet, have stoked the furnaces.

Rep. Tom McClintock, one of the few Republicans remaining in California’s congressional delegation, explained during a House floor speech last fall that “excess timber comes out of the forest one way or the other. It is either carried out, or it burns out. But it comes out.”

When excess timber was harvested in another era, he added, “we had healthy, resilient forests and we had thriving prosperous communities.” Timber sales from federal lands, said McClintock, generated revenue for local California communities and created thousands of jobs.

Given the extensive fire coverage in the media, it would be easy to believe we’re living in unprecedented times. Yet the number of all U.S. wildfires has remained “roughly constant” since the 1970s, a 2015 Reason Foundation policy brief tells us. What has increased, and sharply every year over the past three decades, is the area burned by wildfires. The average size of each wildfire more than doubled over that period.

The report’s author, Julian Morris, says “climatic factors cannot explain the pattern of fires observed over the past century.” Then there has to be another cause. Though it’s politically incorrect to agree with President Trump, he wasn’t wrong when he tweeted about the “gross mismanagement of the forests” being a factor in the fires.

Proper management of forests has to include tree-thinning, though not clear-cutting, and controlled-burns on public lands, as well as the removal of dead, diseased, and already-burned trees, which is oddly not allowed. Those 129 million dead trees in the state that can’t be hauled out are kindling to feed the next fires.

Of course forests aren’t the only acreage burning in California. Fires in Southern California roar through scrub brush, driven by hot Santa Ana winds, especially in areas where the brush has not been appropriately cleared. In many cases, brushy areas are scorched by fires that began in government-controlled forests.

“Wildfires have no boundaries,” Cal Fire Deputy Director Mike Mohler told PRI.

While state and national policymakers have been busy for decades searching out still another source of man-made pollution to eliminate, they have allowed a natural source to grow into a nearly uncontrollable monster. Maybe they’ve been distracted. As California and federal officials have taken “immense” steps “to stop, for example, tailpipe emissions,” says Epstein, both have been slow to rethink logging policy and other management strategies. The result has been a wave of wildfires that have produced far more pollution in California than automobile exhaust.

Policy changes are desperately needed, but as long as policymakers are able to get away with blaming the problem on climate change, and focus their thinking on what to do after lives and property have been destroyed, California will continue to be consumed by fire.

SOURCE

GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

Four current articles below

Labor’s Shayne Neumann backs Adani, says party must get behind coal mining

Labor frontbencher Shayne Neumann says he would be happy for more coal mining, including the $2 billion Adani Carmichael coalmine, to take place in Queensland if it generates jobs.

“I’m happy for more mining generally to take place, can I just say in Queensland,” he told Sky News on Sunday morning.

“As long as these things are done in an environmentally safe way and as long as it stacks up environmentally, commercially, and I’ve said all along and Labor’s said all along there shouldn’t be any federal government funding towards it.”

Mr Neumann’s comments clash with those made by new Labor leader Anthony Albanese, who last week continued to question the economics around the Adani mine and said the markets would ultimately decide.

Construction is expected to start on Adani within weeks, after Queensland’s environment department approved its plan to protect the endangered black-throated finch.

The final barrier to the controversial mine in the Galilee Basin, in central Queensland, is approval of the company’s groundwater management plan, which will be decided on June 13.

Mr Neumann said the Adani coal mine will be a “good” thing for Queensland, because it will bring jobs and economic development to the state.

“Well, if it brings jobs to Queensland of course it’s good,” Mr Neumann said.

“There’s a couple of steps to go. The Queensland government’s looking like its taking through a process that involves getting advice from Geoscience Australia, from CSIRO. There’s a groundwater management plan that they’re working with Adani in relation to. My understanding is that process will be completed in June sometime. And if jobs arise from this and if the proposal of Adani stacks up, if the environmental concerns are addressed by the Queensland government, if that’s the case then it brings jobs in Queensland then of course it’s good for Queensland.

“If there’s jobs and if there’s economic development and financial security it’s essential to North Queenslanders.”

.@ShayneNeumannMP on the Adani coal mine: If jobs arrive from this, Adani's proposals stack up, and if the environmental concerns are addressed by the Queensland government then, of course, it's a good thing.

Mr Neumann said Labor had to be supportive of the mining industry in Queensland if the party wanted to win the next election. He said the party needs to “listen to the voice” of central and regional Queenslanders.

“Royalties underpin the Queensland government budget and they will when the budget is announced very shortly. So it’s important. It’s not just in mining, it’s tourism, it’s service industries, it’s primary production. These things are important.”

Mr Neumann said the party needs to rebuild and reconnect with the state.

“We just can’t think that we can win government when we’re giving away 20 seats to the LNP, it’s a reminder that Queensland is the third biggest state in terms of population. The number of seats we have in federal parliament, in Queensland for example is almost equivalent to Tasmania, South Australia, and Western Australia combined. It’s a great reminder to us that we’ve got to do better in Queensland if we think we can win government.”

Mr Neumann wouldn’t speculate on what portfolio he would be given when Labor announces its frontbench reshuffle later today.

SOURCE

Morrison win boosts support for climate solutions, not slogans

On the second anniversary of Donald Trump’s decision to pull the US from the Paris Agreement, the world is becoming more polarised on climate change action.

The re-election of the Morrison government and the rejection of Labor’s Paris-plus agenda follow a pattern now familiar in the US, Brazil and parts of Europe.

The outcome means there will be no further financial support from Australia for the Green Climate Fund, a centrepiece of the Paris Agreement to help developing nations. Carryover permits from the Kyoto process will be used to meet our Paris targets and business will not need international carbon trading permits.

A returned Morrison government preserves the status quo and provides further evidence of the difficult political path of meeting, let alone expanding on, the Paris Agreement.

The news from Europe and elsewhere is mixed. A promised clean energy transition in Germany is faltering over its high cost and failure to reduce emissions, and investment in renewable energy has stalled across the EU, where major wind companies are in financial trouble.

The EU elections punished centre-focused parties, delivering strong gains to the Greens at one extreme and nationalist leaders at the other. The makeup of the new European parliament may make it easier for the EU to deliver a strengthened climate program.

But in India a landslide election victory by President Narendra Modi promises an acceleration of that country’s modernisation, which will draw much of its energy from coal. Brazil also has prioritised development over conservation. And China, the biggest emitter, remains the driving force and banker for new coal-fired power station developments around the world.

As Trump prepares to make good his promise to complete the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the spotlight has turned to the credibility of the science that underpins the call to climate action.

A front-page article in The New York Times on Monday reports: “In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr Trump’s hard-line views on other nations” — leaving the Paris deal and insisting climate be deleted from communiques issued by world leaders on issues such as the Arctic.

“And, in what could be Mr Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests,”the article says.

The Trump administration wants science advisers to shorten the horizon on climate predictions to 2040 rather than the turn of the century and not to include worst-case scenarios, which the UN report already considers to be unlikely. After months of wrangling, former Princeton professor William Happer has been promoted to chair a climate review panel, causing alarm among climate activists.

Australia’s election result has been projected at least in part as a Hi-Vis revolution that will act as a safety valve to defuse the sort of community tensions that have erupted in France as regional centres rebelled over the expensive climate demands of the capital.

In Australia, the division has been between jobs-hungry coal centres in Queensland and NSW and demands for action from wealthy urban electorates.

As the coal centres celebrate their win, momentum is building behind a grassroots movement to bolster demands for change and broaden the UN agenda past climate to biodiversity and sustainable development. The schools strike movement that has been organised behind the figurehead of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg is one high-profile example.

A concerted push to build a mass movement of civil disobedience under the banner Extinction Rebellion is likely to be a more potent expression of the frustrations being felt by climate groups. For long-time climate activists such as British writer George Monbiot, Extinction Rebellion is a natural precursor to system change.

“The political class is chaotic, unwilling and, in isolation, strategically incapable of addressing even short-term crises, let alone a vast existential predicament,” Monbiot says.

Superficially at least the movement is getting results. Britain, preoccupied by Brexit, has declared a climate emergency, which protest groups believe has put the country on to a warlike footing. The declaration was made after a protracted series of protests by Extinction Rebellion that aimed to paralyse the City of London.

There has been a couple of Extinction Rebellion protests in Australia. Thousands have marched or “played dead” in protests in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Hundreds are gathering at meetings in regional centres to bolster a protest movement that claims to be decentralised and without formal leadership.

The goal of Extinction Rebellion is to install a nonpartisan citizens assembly to reshape the global economy. Members of the assembly would be selected at random and educated by expert scientists, the group says.

Extinction Rebellion projects a crisis with a pitch that is calculated to alarm. “We are in the middle of an ecological crisis,” the group says.

“Our course is set for mass species extinction, and societal collapse. Our future looks bleak and our children are not safe.”

It is a message falling on fertile ground. Queensland MP Warren Entsch says he has experienced first hand the passions surrounding the Great Barrier Reef, which for many has become a proxy for climate change. Entsch asked Scott Morrison to be appointed envoy to defuse two of the hottest environmental issues, plastics and the reef.

“I met with a lot of young people who had been counselled by local activists on what to say,” Entsch tells Inquirer. “Some were so scared about the situation they were moved almost to tears, but none of them had actually seen the Great Barrier Reef.”

Entsch arranged for briefings from marine biologists and reef operators to give them another perspective but says they were quite hostile to alternative views.

“What concerned me the most was that all the kids could do was quote slogans,” he says. “In my view it was almost akin to child abuse.”

Entsch says he has been inspired by the actions of 11-year-old Molly Steer, who had rejected advances from activists to head the school strike movement in Australia. Instead, Steer has focused on plastic straws. “Molly is not into slogans, just solutions,” Entsch says.

SOURCE

Build dams or we damn farmers to unrelenting hardship

By Graham Richardson -- a big wheel in the Labor Party

If you live in one of our great cities you probably know nothing of the drought gripping large chunks of eastern Australia. You can still go down to the shops safe in the knowledge the butcher will have the meat you want and the fruiterer will stock the fruit and veg required for a healthy diet.

A touch of reality forced its way into my head yesterday when I interviewed Nationals leader Michael McCormack. This bloke really cares about the people he represents and you could almost hear the pain in his voice as he talked about the struggles of the farming communities he tries to protect and foster. In the driest continent it beggars belief to think no new dams have been built here in more than three decades. While I remain a strong supporter of protecting our natural beauty, I can no longer handle the idea that saving a rare frog should hamper our citizens getting safe, clean water.

The trend is to rely on saltwater conversion facilities. They are expensive to build and run. Last time I looked, this is a pretty big country and there ought to be the space for a few more dams. Anyone who has turned on a tap in Adelaide knows I am on the right track. Water policy caters for environment-friendly flows, and that seems to outweigh concerns for those people who rely on our rivers for drinking water as well.

The Nationals have made the running on this, but I wonder how keen they will be when they tell a group of Australians their homes and their way of life will be flooded and washed away. I can recall the efforts of a past Queensland government to dam the Mary River. The people in the valley there started a revolution that saw the authorities beat a hasty retreat.

Maybe it just seems like it but droughts seem to take our country in their arid grip more often than they did in the past. Eastern Australia has had a few showers but the constant rain for days on end required to break a drought of the dimension we are experiencing has not come. As a counterpoint to this, though, Townsville has just survived the worst flooding in its history. As Dorothea Mackellar wrote, this is a country that produces “droughts and flooding rains”. Whenever I think of these phenomena, I find my admiration for our farmers and graziers expanding rapidly.

While I rarely find myself agreeing with Barnaby Joyce, he, like McCormack, has long been a champion of building more dams in a country that just lost interest in building them after the last one was built more than three decades ago. There is no cheap way to provide extra water for drinking or agriculture. Once there has been a maximised allowance of water to be taken from our rivers, we have nothing to fall back on.

Labor has no real history of making water policy front and centre and the Liberals have not given it much prominence either. When the crunch comes, it has to be conceded the Nationals have grimly hung on to a policy that the major parties have ignored. But now water policy has, if you will pardon the pun, gone mainstream.

SOURCE

Coal royalties will not be increased in next Queensland budget

The recent pro-coal vote in the Federal election has got the State Leftists running scared

Coal royalties would not be increased in Queensland's next budget “in exchange” for millions of dollars in contributions from mining giants to a regional infrastructure fund, Treasurer Jackie Trad has promised.

Ms Trad, the deputy premier, said she met with "some of the biggest coal miners in Queensland" on Wednesday to devise a strategy to boost regional infrastructure, without increasing the rate of royalties.

The move could save coal companies as much as a billion dollars a year, Queensland Resources Council chief executive Ian Macfarlane said.

The announcement comes days after Ms Trad said she would not speculate on a change to the rate of royalties before the June budget was handed down.

“I have put on the table a period of time in which royalties would not change here in Queensland in exchange for ... a bit more of a contribution by companies into this fund,” Ms Trad said.

“So, a three-year freeze on any changes to Queensland's royalty regime, but I want these companies to think about making an additional contribution through this fund to the regional communities in which they operate."

Mr Macfarlane welcomed the freeze and said he would spend the next 24 hours speaking with about 150 gas, coal and mineral companies to decide whether to accept the deal. “It is the Treasurer's offer, we are prepared to consider it,” he said.

The government would contribute $30 million to start the infrastructure fund.

Ms Trad said she hoped miners would chip in $70 million to bring the fund to $100 million, but stressed the contributions were voluntary.

"I want to put on record the fact that many mining companies already contribute quite significantly to the local communities in which they operate. "That is their social licence. But we know that regional Queensland is still doing it quite tough and we can make a bit more of a contribution if we work together."

Mr Macfarlane said companies already gave “tens of millions of dollars” to regional community groups.

The rate of royalties, set in each state budget, had not increased in seven years, Ms Trad said.

Adani has until the end of June to settle its royalties agreement with the government for its controversial central Queensland mine to go ahead.

Adani Australia chief executive Lucas Dow said all mining companies wanted was a "stable" mining royalties regime. When asked whether the Carmichael mine would still be viable if coal royalties were increased in the budget, Mr Dow said: "Certainly, our position would be that we think it would be unwise to increase royalties."

Opposition Leader Deb Frecklington said the regional infrastructure fund was a dressed-up mining tax and accused the state government of trying to kill off new coal mines – even though contributions to the fund were voluntary.

“Queenslanders won’t be fooled by Jackie Trad, who today told the resources industry that her new mining tax was voluntary, but if they didn’t pay it, Labor will raise mining royalties anyway,” Ms Frecklington said.

“Queensland Labor is already getting an extra $1 billion dollar from coal royalties. They should be investing more of that into infrastructure.

“These mining companies are already bound by community service obligations and this is quite simply double-dipping.”

Mr Macfarlane said if the Treasurer had raised the rate of royalties by 2 per cent, it could have cost mining companies an extra billion dollars a year.

SOURCE

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

Extinction Rebellion threatens 10-day Heathrow protest if government doesn't drop airport expansion plans

Extinction Rebellion is planning a 10-day summer holiday protest at Heathrow if the Government does not cancel all expansion plans for the airport.

In a statement on its website the group, which caused major disruption in London earlier this year during a series of protests, said: "Extinction Rebellion demands the Government begins to act on its declaration of a Climate and Environment Emergency by cancelling all Heathrow expansion.

"On June 18, we plan to carry out nonviolent direct action to ensure Heathrow Authorities close the airport for the day, to create a "pause" in recognition of the genocidal impact of high carbon activities, such as flying, upon the natural world.

"If the Government does not cancel all Heathrow expansion, Extinction Rebellion will act to shut the airport down for up to 10 days from July 1."

The group said it is "in the consultancy stage with its members on the proposed action". It added: "This is not about targeting the public, but holding the Government to their duty to take leadership on the climate and ecological emergency.

"The addition of the planned third runway would make Heathrow the single biggest carbon emitter in the UK; to expand the airport at this critical point in history would be madness.

"We understand the action will cause disruption to a great number of holiday makers, however we believe that it is necessary given the prospect of far greater disruption caused by ecological and societal collapse, if we don't act now. Holidaymakers are being given advance notice to change travel plans."

Drones could be used by Extinction Rebellion to halt flights at Heathrow Airport, a spokesman for the group has confirmed.

The plan was revealed in a leaked consultation document shared between group members.

SOURCE

Elizabeth Warren: U.S. Chamber Should ‘Change Its Name to Chamber of Carbon’

Why not? Carbon is no problem. We are all made of it

On Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) attacked the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) for failing to support her environmental agenda.

Warren, a presidential hopeful, took to Twitter to accuse the organizations of trying to prevent Congress from “saving our planet”:

“What do the @USChamber and @ShopFloorNAM have in common? They’re 2 of corporate America’s top lobbying groups. And they’re both leading the charge to stop Congress from combatting the climate crisis and saving our planet.

She also accused the Chamber of Commerce of funding a “misleading” study that President Trump used as justification for withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017 - and suggested it change its name to the “Chamber of Carbon”:

“The @USChamber has supported Trump Admin efforts to roll back the Clean Power Plan and funded a misleading study that @realDonaldTrump used to justify withdrawing from the Paris Agreement. It might as well change its name to the #ChamberOfCarbon.”

She charged the National Association of Manufacturers with “fighting the transition to a clean energy economy”:

“@ShopFloorNAM has repeatedly opposed federal action on the climate crisis – and worked to protect Big Oil by supporting Arctic and offshore oil drilling and fighting the transition to a clean energy economy. #ManufacturedFacts.”

Warren's next two tweets implicated the companies that do businesses with the two organizations, and urged them to “put people over profits” by cutting ties with groups like "the #ChamberOfCarbon":

“This is bigger than 2 anti-climate lobbying groups – it’s also about the companies (many of which have made public commitments to fight climate change) that support them. They're putting their reputations – and our communities – at risk.”

“If the companies that belong to the @USChamber and @ShopFloorNAM really support efforts to #ActOnClimate, they should put people over profits and stop funneling money to the #ChamberOfCarbon and other anti-climate lobbying groups.”

SOURCE

US Should Shield Itself Against Geopolitical Energy Shocks, Open Drilling Near ANWR

Despite America breaking records in oil production, consumers paid more for gasoline this spring, serving as a reminder that supply isn’t the only factor affecting oil prices. Oil production by OPEC members recently fell to a four-year low. At nearly the same time, oil sanctions were imposed against Venezuela and sanctions against Iranian oil exports were tightened, sending shockwaves rippling through the world market.

The lesson for policymakers to take from recent gas pump price shocks is that, unless the nation is fully able to draw upon all of its energy resources when needed, American consumers will remain at the mercy of geopolitical currents. That means that we must begin the initial stages of exploring untapped areas right now. Energy development is not as simple as flipping a switch. It’s a long process that involves many steps such as seismological surveys, obtaining mineral rights and securing permits before the drilling phase can even begin.

One of the more geologically promising prospects is known as the “1002 Area,” a small plot of land only about the size of a large city airport located on a coastal plain between the Arctic Ocean and the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Concentrated beneath this modest patch of ground lies an astounding 10.4 billion barrels of oil, according to an estimate by the U.S. Geological Survey. At peak production, the 1002 Area would be capable of producing 1.45 million barrels a day, the U.S. Energy Information Administration calculates. To put that figure in perspective, the United States imported an average of 869,000 barrels per day of crude from Saudi Arabia in 2018.

The capability of untapped resources such as the 1002 Area to help replace oil imported from the world’s more politically volatile areas would convey substantial benefits. The nation would strengthen its national security as well as its energy security while gaining a hedge against oil price spikes that are so often a by-product of turmoil in regional flashpoints. Additional oil sources also mean that American petroleum product exports can continue to bring economic vitality to our economy.

The experience of oil production at nearby Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope suggests that natural resources would be developed safely without harm to the environment. Prior to production, which began there in 1977 when construction of the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline was completed, activists claimed that oil production would wreak environmental havoc. They argued that oil development would decimate the Porcupine caribou herd living within the habitat. But that’s not what happened.

More than 40 years and 12.6 billion barrels of oil later, the Prudhoe Bay oil fields remain the largest in North America and currently boast more than 800 actively producing oil wells. And yet by 2017, the Porcupine caribou herd had grown to record high numbers – roughly twice the size of what they had been in 2001 – prompting a regional biologist to remark, “We might have just recorded the largest number for this herd since modern scientific monitoring started in the 1970s.” The good stewardship and continuous advances applied to safety technology and practices in Prudhoe Bay and the North Slope can be extended to the 1002 Area together with new learnings.

Congress passed a law with bipartisan support in 2017 ending a drilling moratorium and directing the Department of the Interior to establish a program for the leasing, development, production, and transportation of oil and natural gas along the coastal plain of the ANWR where the 1002 Area is located.

Meanwhile, in a “greener than thou” competition among presidential candidates, Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) joined Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) in introducing legislation that would block all drilling near ANWR. The bill would amend the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to bar the Department of the Interior from issuing oil and gas leases in the area. This is the same position advocated by the left fringe “Keep It In the Ground” movement, whose adherents not only campaign against the extraction of any fossil fuel but actively oppose any fossil fuel-related project, including pipelines, rail transportation, refineries, energy exploration and so on. Adopting “Keep It In the Ground” policies would cause U.S household energy expenditures to jump by $4,550 on average by 2040, according to a 2017 OnLocation study.

The nation needs more, not fewer, sources of energy to protect the economy and its citizens. Now is not the time for posturing to curry political favor among moneyed environmental donors. To the extent that America can tap its energy resources when geopolitical events present challenges, we can remain virtually impervious to them. Going forward with developing Alaska’s 1002 Area is a prudent first step.

SOURCE

Court Tosses 2015 WOTUS Rule

In redefining "waters of the United States," the Obama Administration failed to follow the Administrative Procedure Act.

Last night, in Texas v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a federal district court in Texas held that the Obama Administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act when it adopted a revised definition of "waters of the United States" in 2015, and remanded the so-called WOTUS rule back to the federal agencies from whence it came.

The definition of "waters of the United States" is of particular importance because it defines the scope of federal regulatory jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act (CWA). In short, the CWA prohibits the discharge of materials into "navigable waters" without a federal permit, and the Act defines "navigable waters" as "waters of the United States." A broader definition means that more activities that take place on or near such "waters" are subject to federal regulation.

The precise scope of CWA jurisdiction has been the subject of litigation and legal wrangling for decades. In 2015, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Environmental Protection Agency sought to bring greater certainty to CWA regulation with a new, fairly broad definition of "waters of the United States"—the so-called WOTUS rule. Yet because this rule adopted an expansive interpretation of "waters of the United States," numerous states, industry organizations, and property rights groups sued.

Much of the debate over the 2015 WOTUS rule focuses on whether the Obama Administration asserted federal regulatory jurisdiction beyond the scope of what the CWA authorizes or the Constitution permits. Yet Judge Hanks did not need to reach such questions to throw out the rule.

In promulgating the 2015 rule, the Army Corps and EPA failed to comply with the basic requirements of notice-and-comment rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). Specifically, Judge Hanks noted, key aspects of the final rule were not a "logical outgrowth" of the initial regulatory proposal published in the Federal Register and the public was never given the opportunity to comment on a key study that was "instrumental" in the final regulation adopted by the EPA and Army Corps.

According to Judge Hanks:

the Final Rule violated the APA's notice-and-comment requirements by deviating from the Proposed Rule in a way that interested parties could not have reasonably anticipated. Instead of continuing to use ecologic and hydrologic criteria to define "adjacent waters" as originally proposed, the summary judgment evidence reflects that the Final Rule abandoned this approach and switched to the use of distance-based criteria. . . . This shift in terminology and approach led to the promulgation of a Final Rule that was different in kind and degree from the concept announced in the Proposed Rule.

Specifically, the Proposed Rule defined "adjacent waters" based on the presence of a "hydrologic connection" with a Categorically Covered Water or a Categorically Covered Water's "influence [on] the ecological processes and plant and animal community structure" of a potentially covered water. . . . The
summary judgment evidence reflects that commentators to the Proposed Rule spent months evaluating the merits of this definition. However, in contrast, the Final Rule defined "adjacent waters" by proximity to Categorically Covered Waters. . . .

The Final Rule also violated the APA by preventing interested parties from commenting on the studies that served as the technical basis for the rule. As the courts have held, "[a]n agency commits serious procedural error when it fails to reveal portions of the technical basis for a proposed rule in time to allow for meaningful commentary." Owner-Operator Indep. Drivers Ass'n v. Fed. Motor Carrier Safety Admin., 494 F.3d 188, 199 (D.C. Cir. 2007). Indeed, it is a "fairly obvious proposition that studies upon which an agency relies in promulgating a rule must be made available during the rulemaking in order to afford interested persons meaningful notice and an opportunity for comment." Am. Radio Relay League, Inc. v. FCC, 524 F.3d 227, 237 (D.C. Cir. 2008). "The most critical factual material that is used to support the agency's position on review must have been made public in the proceeding and exposed to refutation." Air Transp. Ass'n of Am. v. FAA, 169 F.3d 1, 7 (D.C. Cir. 1999).

Here, the Agencies failed to give commentators an opportunity to refute the most critical factual material used to support the Final Rule—the Final Connectivity Report. Indeed, the summary judgment record establishes that the Final Connectivity Report was the technical basis for the Final Rule and was instrumental in determining what changes were to be made to the definition of the phrase WOTUS. . . .

Texas v. U.S. EPA is one of three challenges to the 2015 WOTUS rule pending in federal court. As Greenwire notes, there are other suits pending in federal court in North Dakota and Ohio. In addition, the Trump Administration is at work on its own revised WOTUS definition, which aims to increase regulatory certainty without significantly expanding federal regulatory jurisdiction. No doubt this WOTUS rewrite, when final, will be a target of litigation too. In the meantime, the Obama Administration's WOTUS rule in enjoined in half of the nation, and is now in force in the rest.

SOURCE

Our annual coffee scare

We seem to get these around once a year -- generally followed by a glut. See here (Scroll down)

Australian coffee-drinkers could soon pay $7 for a flat white because coffee farming has become so unsustainable, one industry expert has claimed.

Mark Dundon, 57, co-owns Seven Seeds cafe in Carlton, an inner-north suburb of Melbourne, and has been a part of the cafe scene for 18 years. He says climate change is making it harder for farmers in South America and South-East Asia to grow coffee and once they sell their product to major companies, the price they receive is often below the production costs.

He believes the price of coffee could explode because producers are abandoning the industry for better work. 'Coffee is going to become really expensive - maybe $7 a cup. There'll be a shortfall, prices will spike and cafes will go out of business,' Mr Dundon told The Sydney Morning Herald.

Mr Dundon believes people will be forced to change their coffee habits to drinking two cups a week rather than two or three a day. He said the entire coffee-drinking culture is likely to change and cafes will employ less staff to help cut costs.

The cafe boss said climate change is making it extremely difficult for farmers who are turning away from the industry in droves. 'They will look at avocados, bananas, coca, depending on where they are, or they'll just walk off the farm and sell cigarette lighters in Bogotá,' he said.

Most coffee is grown in poor countries with the biggest producers being Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia and Indonesia. Out of around 25 million coffee farmers, the vast majority, are small and own only a hectare or two of trees.

The biggest importers of coffee from these countries are the US and Germany, who purchase the product for well under the production cost.

Companies within the US and Germany, such as Nestlé and Starbucks Corporation, dictate the price they will pay for the coffee leaving farmers struggling to survive.

Future coffee traders are looking to lock in low prices for coffee before the small farmers have had a chance to grow it, so they are already far behind before they've started production.

The current system hugely benefits large corporations by maintaining a supply of cheap, mass-market coffee.

Small farmers are finding the coffee industry unsustainable and they don't have the power to set their own prices or access companies who will pay more for better quality coffee.

'The price is the lowest it's ever been. Farmers don't see a future in coffee. If farmers don't get more for their efforts, the industry is at risk,' Mr Dundon said.

SOURCE

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

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

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IN BRIEF

Home (Index page)

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here. It shows that we actually live in an era of remarkable temperature stability.

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.

"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Theoretically, the effect of added CO2 in the atmosphere should be instant. It allegedly works by bouncing electromagnetic radiation around and electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. But there has been no instant effect. Temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.

Antarctica is GAINING mass

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion

Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

The plight of the bumblebee -- an egregious example of crooked "science"

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Fossil fuels are 100% organic, are made with solar energy, and when burned produce mostly CO2 and H2O, the 2 most important foods for life.

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below

WISDOM:

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered, than answers that can’t be questioned.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, Physicist

“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

UNRELIABLE SCIENCE:

(1). “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness… “The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of ‘significance’ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale…Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent…” (Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet, in The Lancet, 11 April, 2015, Vol 385, “Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?”)

(2). “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement" -- Karl Popper

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

A Warmist backs down: "No one knows exactly how far rising carbon concentrations affect temperatures" -- Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

The frequency of hurricanes has markedly DECLINED in recent years

Here's how that "97% consensus" figure was arrived at

97% of scientists want to get another research grant

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

To Greenies, Genghis Khan was a good guy, believe it or not. They love that he killed so many people.

Greenie antisemitism

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

Comparing climate alarmist Hansen to Cassandra is WRONG. Cassandra's (Greek mythology) dire prophecies were never believed but were always right. Hansen's dire prophecies are usually believed but are always wrong (Prof. Laurence Gould, U of Hartford, CT)

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

UPDATE to the above: It seems that I am a true prophet

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

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

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Help keep the planet Green! Maximize your CO2 and CH4 output!

Global Warming=More Life; Global Cooling=More Death.

The inconvenient truth about biological effects of "Ocean Acidification"

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is maximum 4%.

Cook the crook who cooks the books

The great and fraudulent scare about lead

How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The "precautionary principle" is a favourite Greenie idea -- but isn't that what George Bush was doing when he invaded Iraq? Wasn't that a precaution against Saddam getting or having any WMDs? So Greenies all agree with the Iraq intervention? If not, why not?

A classic example of how the sensationalist media distort science to create climate panic is here.

There is a very readable summary of the "Hockey Stick" fraud here

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: "The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Relying on the popular wisdom can even hurt you personally: "The scientific consensus of a quarter-century ago turned into the arthritic nightmare of today."

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.

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