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, 2020

Green wave batters Emmanuel Macron in local elections as his centrist party suffers humiliating loss to socialist alliance with eco warriors

A Green wave proved disastrous for French president Emmanuel Macron tonight as his party suffered significant loses in municipal elections.

An alliance between ecological candidates and traditional Left-wing ones saw Mr Macron’s candidates swept away.

Among the biggest winners was Anne Hidalgo, who was re-elected Socialist Mayor of Paris for a second term of six years.

Exit polls on Sunday night suggested she has won with 50.2 per cent of votes, in front of the conservative Republicans candidate Rachida Dati on 32 per cent.

Agnès Buzyn, the former health minister and candidate for Mr Macron’s LREM party (The Republic on the Move!) was pushed into third place, with only 16 per cent.

Ms Hidalgo’s comfortable win was the result of an alliance with Greens leader David Belliard, of the Europe Ecology-Greens.

Ms Hidalgo has pledged to continue her ambitious programme to cut pollution, encourage cycling and expand green spaces, while pedestrianising more of Paris.

Exit polls in major cities including Strasbourg and Lyon suggested that they had been won outright by the Greens.

France was holding the second round of municipal elections in 5,000 towns and cities on Sunday – one which were postponed because of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Voters chose mayors and municipal councillors at polling stations operating under strict hygiene rules.

Face masks and hand gel were all made available, and those voting had to stay one metre apart.

The spread of Covid-19 has slowed significantly in France, following nearly 200,000 confirmed cases and 29,781 deaths. By 5pm on Sunday, voter participation was at just 34.67 per cent, compared to 38 per cent in March.

This is much lower than the participation rates during the 2014 municipal elections when it was already above 50 per cent at 5pm.

The polls are seen as a key political indicator ahead of the 2022 French presidential election.

Paris is a major battleground, because the mayor will oversee the 2024 Olympics.

Mr Macron’s three-year-old centrist party fielded municipal candidates for the first time but lacks deep rooted support.

His government has faced criticism during the pandemic over mask shortages, testing capacity and a lack of medical equipment.

Despite this, Mr Macron’s prime minister, Edouard Philippe, won the post of Mayor in his hometown of Le Havre on Sunday night.

A government reshuffle is expected to be carried out by Mr Macron in the wake of Sunday’s result.

Opinion polls currently show Mr Macron’s popularity rating is hovering around 40 per cent – higher than before the virus outbreak.

The anti-immigration, far-right National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, was focusing on consolidating its 2014 results, when candidates backed by the party won in 12 towns.

SOURCE

CMIP6 Climate Models Producing 50% More Surface Warming than Observations since 1979

Those who defend climate model predictions often produce plots of observed surface temperature compared to the models which show very good agreement. Setting aside the debate over the continuing adjustments to the surface temperature record which produce ever-increasing warming trends, let’s look at how the most recent (CMIP6) models are doing compared to the latest version of the observations (however good those are).

First, I’d like to explain how some authors get such good agreement between the models and observations. Here are the two “techniques” they use that most annoy me.

They look at long periods of time, say the last 100+ years. This improves the apparent agreement because most of that period was before there was substantial forcing of the climate system by increasing CO2.

They plot anomalies about a common reference period, but do not show trend lines. Or, if they show trends lines, they do not start them at the same point at the beginning of the record. When you do this, the discrepancy between models and observations is split in half, with the discrepancy in the latter half of the record having the opposite sign of the discrepancy in the early part of the record. They say, “See? The observed temperatures in the last few decades nearly match the models!”

In the following plot (which will be included in a report I am doing for the Global Warming Policy Foundation) I avoid both of those problems. During the period of strongest greenhouse gas forcing (since 1979), the latest CMIP6 models reveal 50% more net surface warming from 1979 up to April 2020 (+1.08 deg. C) than do the observations (+0.72 deg. C).

Note I have accounted for the trends being somewhat nonlinear, using a 2nd order polynomial fit to all three time series. Next, I have adjusted the CMIP time series vertically so that their polynomial fit lines are coaligned with the observations in 1979. I believe this is the most honest and meaningful way to intercompare the warming trends in different datasets.
As others have noted, it appears the CMIP6 models are producing even more warming than the CMIP5 models did… although the KNMI Climate Explorer website (from which all of the data was downloaded) has only 13 models archived so far.

SOURCE

A Drowned World? The Latest False Alarm About The Climate

Bjorn Lomborg has an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Examining the Latest False Alarm on Climate, ($)” which contains a helpful illustration of the way the media uses studies to whip up anxiety around one of their pet projects.

In the piece, he discusses a spate of recent startling headlines all of which suggest that, in his words, “Rising sea levels from climate change could flood 187 million people out of their homes.”

This claim has its origin in a paper published all the way back in 2011, and when you actually read the paper, you see that it needed to make some pretty questionable assumptions in order to arrive at that figure.

As Lomborg explains, the paper found that “187 million could be forced to move in the unlikely event that, in the next 80 years, no one does anything to adapt to dramatic rises in sea level.”

In other words, in order for their projection to make sense, the paper’s authors had to take worst-case climate scenarios (which are already questionable) projected out over a century and then disregard what we know about actual human behavior.

If sea-levels rise as much as these authors are claiming (which is, once again, not certain), leading to significant coastal flooding, one hundred eighty-seven million people — not to mention their governments — aren’t just going to sit there until they’re neck-deep in water.

What would actually happen, says Lomborg, is we would deal with those problems as they arise.

We have more know-how and technology than ever to build dikes, surge barriers and dams, expand beaches and construct dunes, make ecosystem-based barriers like mangrove buffers, improve building codes and construction techniques, and use land planning and hazard mapping to minimize flooding.

The one hundred eighty-seven million displaced people headline, then, is a canard, based on dubiously applied data, whose object it is to frighten you into signing onto a sprawling environmentalist program.

While flooding will likely be a serious problem over the next 80 years, as it is in many parts of the world today, targeted policies and spending could go a long way towards reducing their human and financial costs.

They’re also more likely to be successful than the beef-and-airplane bans our mainstream media overlords have in mind.

SOURCE

Amid the lockdowns, mining saves the Australian economy

The global economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic has sliced almost $7 billion from the value of Australia's key resource and energy exports in three months, with warnings of bigger hits next financial year.

But new forecasts from the Industry Department, released on Monday, show the iron ore sector will defy the coronavirus gloom with high prices and surging exports to help it offset the broader economic weakness.

In its June quarterly outlook report, the department's office of the chief economist forecasts total resource and energy exports to reach a record $292.7 billion in 2019-20 before falling to $263.2 billion.

In March, the department predicted $299.3 billion in commodity exports this financial year and then $276.1 billion in 2020-21.

The department said overall resource and energy exports had been resilient in the face of the pandemic recession, noting earnings from the sector were 50 per cent higher than during the global financial crisis.

"These forecasts come with significant risks: a second outbreak of COVID-19, another surge in trade tensions, or an unexpectedly slow global recovery," it said. "But on balance it remains likely that Australia's resources and energy sector will once again buffer the Australian economy against external headwinds."

Holding up resource exports is iron ore with $102.7 billion worth expected to be shipped this financial year. This was an upgrade on the March forecasts. Gold, which is touching all-time highs as investors seek to protect themselves, is also remaining strong with exports tipped to hit $27.4 billion this year. The department had expected gold exports to fall to $21 billion next year but now thinks they will rise to $32 billion.

But energy exports, on the back of falling demand and prices, are tipped to fall away.

Thermal coal exports are forecast to edge down to $16 billion next financial year from a downwardly revised $20 billion in 2019-20.

LNG exports, which in March were expected to reach $48.6 billion this year and $44.2 billion in 2020-21, are now forecast to make $47 billion and $35 billion respectively. LNG prices are closely tied to oil prices, which remain extremely low.

Overall energy exports have been downgraded by $58.5 billion for the next two years since the March forecast.

While the mining sector contributed growth through the first three months of the year, the department noted that none of this came from the coal sector.

"In the coming year, it is likely that this sector will make a much smaller contribution to GDP growth, as low prices and mine closures and cutbacks impact on the sector’s output," it said.

The department said that while resource export volumes had climbed by 4.6 per cent over the past year, energy volumes were down by 2.5 per cent, with warnings they were likely to stagnate over the coming two years.

SOURCE

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

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

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29 June, 2020

Green Haste Will Trash The Promise Of Hydrogen

Desperate policy makers trying to reach Net Zero targets that are unaffordable and infeasible are rushing into the premature adoption of hydrogen as a last ditch attempt to save the current agenda.

Faced with the task of eliminating carbon dioxide emissions while sustaining economic growth, the UK government, like others around the world, is promoting hydrogen as an energy carrier for sectors of the economy such as heavy transport and peak winter heating that are extremely difficult to decarbonize.

The wisdom of this policy, with a special focus on the United Kingdom, is addressed in a new historical and technical study published today by the GWPF.

The study concludes that current enthusiasm is a desperate measure that will jeopardise the long-term promise of hydrogen for the sake of short-term political optics.

Because of the accelerated timetable required by arbitrary targets, it is necessary to manufacture hydrogen via two expensive and energetically inefficient commodity production processes, the electrolysis of water, and the reforming of natural gas.

Electrolysis is extremely expensive, and the reforming of methane emits carbon dioxide and so requires Carbon Capture and Sequestration, which is not only costly but unproven at the required scale. Both these commodity processes imply high levels of fresh water consumption.

The prudent approach, obvious since the 1970s and still the official long-range policy of the government of Japan, is to aim for hydrogen production by the thermal decomposition of sea water employing advanced nuclear reactors, which alone might conceivably make hydrogen cheap. This is, however, very difficult chemical and nuclear engineering, and its realisation lies well into the future.

The paper also notes that hasty introduction will not give enough time for safe societal adjustment to the inherent dangers of a fugitive and readily ignited gas that has a strong tendency to technical detonation (combustion with a supersonic combustion frontier). The learning experience could be needlessly painful and deadly.

Dr John Constable, author of the study, said:

“Hydrogen has genuine long term potential as a universal energy carrier to supplement electricity, but current methods of production are hugely expensive and will stress fresh water supplies. Target-driven haste is already resulting in accidents. Counterproductive and naive policies are compromising the hydrogen future.

SOURCE

CO2 no threat to oceans

For the past three decades the public has been taught by the news media and the folks who make a living composing mathematical equations they claim to simulate how our planets climate operates, that our oceans are in jeopardy.

They have all told you one of the biggest falsehoods in human history. They say that carbon dioxide, the only reason man can inhabit Earth, is actually causing the planet to heat up to a dangerous level and the oceans will become unlivable for marine life. There is no proof of these lies whatever. Civilization has generally been most prosperous under warmer than colder conditions. We do know that as many as nine times more folks perish from excessive cold than excessive heat. The oceans are in fact prospering with more CO2 overhead. Be that as it may much of the public has bought the scare.

Regardless of what scientists on the right side of the issue come up with to thwart the misinformation, they are drowned out by the media and the well financed climate modelers on whom governments around the world have showered countless billions of dollars.

Little of the true reality supported by science has succeeded in winning over the world’s governments to scientific reality. Now comes along biologist Jim Steele of the CO2 Coalition and former Research Director of San Francisco State’s Sierra Nevada’s Field Campus to drop a blockbuster of truly new knowledge. He has proven how our Oceans, all of them, are benefitting enormously by the increase in carbon dioxide which man’s industrialization has produced. The global warming scaremongers have falsely preached that additional carbon dioxide could lower the pH of the oceans to where they become acidic, killing off ocean life. This is in fact physically and chemically   impossible, and now we can better understand the enormous benefits CO2 is bringing to the oceans

The Ocean “acidification” from carbon dioxide emissions preached by the scaremongers would require an impossible ten-fold decrease in the alkalinity of surface waters. Even if atmospheric CO2 concentrations triple from today’s four percent of one percent, which would take about 600 years, today’s surface pH of 8.2 would plateau at 7.8, still well above neutral 7.

Ocean health has improved as a result of greater CO2, as it feeds phytoplankton that stimulates the oceans food chain. CO2 allows phytoplankton such as algae, bacteria, and seaweed to feed the rest of the open ocean food chain. As carbon dioxide moves through this food web, much of it sinks or is transported away from the surface. A high surface pH allows the ocean to store 50 times more CO2 than the atmosphere. Digestion of carbon at lower depths allows for storage there for centuries. Periodic upwelling recycles carbon and nutrients from deep ocean waters to sunlit surface waters. Upwelling injects far more ancient CO2 into the surface than diffuses there from atmospheric CO2. Upwelling at first lowers surface pH, but then stimulates photosynthesis, which raises surface pH. It is a necessary process to generate bursts of life that sustain many ocean life forms.

When CO2 enters ocean water, it creates a bicarbonate ion plus a hydrogen ion, resulting in a slight decrease in pH. However, photosynthesis requires CO2. So marine organisms convert bicarbonate and hydrogen ions into usable CO2, and pH rises again. Contrary to popular claims that rising CO2 leads to shell disintegration, slightly lower pH does not stop marine organisms from using carbonate ions in building their shells.

The concentration of atmospheric CO2 is governed by the balance between stored carbon and CO2 released back to the atmosphere. On land, carbon is continuously stored as organic material in living and dead organisms, with some carbon eventually buried in sediments. During the last major glaciation, expanding glaciers destroyed much of the northern hemisphere’s forests and reduced the earth’s ability to store terrestrial carbon. Just as deforestation does today, that loss of forests should have increased atmospheric CO2. Instead, atmospheric CO2 decreased! It appears that the missing CO2 was stored in the ocean.

Across the earth’s upwelling regions, ocean surface pH is primarily affected by the upwelling of ancient stored carbon, rather than human activities . The ocean surface is seldom in equilibrium with the atmosphere. Recent upwelling of subsurface carbon typically raises surface concentrations of CO2 to 1000 ppm and temporarily lowers surface pH. Upwelling of old carbon and other nutrients then stimulates photosynthesis in phytoplankton and sea grasses, which then reduces pH.

It is now esmated that 90 percent of the difference in pH between surface waters and deeper waters results from downward movement of ocean life. When transformed into organic matter, CO2 can be rapidly exported downwards. For example, anchovy and sardine fecal pellets sink 780 meters in a day. Tiny diatoms, which account for half of the ocean’s photosynthesis, are believed to sink at rates over 500 meters per day because of their dense silica shells.

Upwelling is a vital dynamic that brings carbon and nutrients, otherwise sequestered in the ocean’s depths, back to the surface. Although there may be negative consequences of low-pH and low-oxygen upwelled waters, without upwelling of low-pH waters, global marine productivity would be greatly reduced.

In the political arena of climate change, crucial factors are misleadingly ignored by those claiming that rising CO2 leads to shell disintegration. First, shells of living organisms are protected by organic tissues that insulate the shells from changes in ocean chemistry. Mollusk shells are typically covered by a periostracum. This allows mollusks to thrive near low pH volcanic vents, or in acidic freshwater, or when buried in low pH sediments. Coral skeletons are protected by their layer of living coral polyps. When shell-forming organisms die they lose that layer of protective tissue and their shells or skeletons may indeed dissolve. However, dissolution also releases carbonate ions, which buffers the surrounding waters and inhibits any further change in pH.

Slightly lower pH does not stop ocean organisms from converting bicarbonate ions into shell- building carbonate ions. Some climate modelers incorrectly suggest that a small drop in pH will inhibit shell-building in marine organisms.

The ability to make shells despite experiencing atmospheric CO2 much higher than today has been preserved in massive deposits of calcium carbonate shells.

So what is the bottom line, the take home to share with friends. The oceans will not become acidic — CO2 enriches all life in the ocean. There is no evidence to suggest that the oceans are becoming less of a great habitat for marine life due to rising atmospheric CO2.

CO2 is quickly consumed by photosynthesizing bacteria, plankton and algae. Greater productivity allows more organic carbon to be exported to depths where it can be sequestered for hundreds to thousands of years. It is highly likely that the recent increased productivity and increased sequestration of carbon has offset any pH effects from added atmospheric CO2.

So now you have one more of the fraudulent global warming scares put to rest.

SOURCE

Bernie’s Green New Deal to go 100 percent renewable in 10 years would destroy America

Are the American people about to vote to destroy the way of life?

If socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) is elected, his utopian promise to implement a 10-year Soviet-style Gosplan to end oil and gas consumption —the Green New Deal—will radically transform the U.S. economy, and possibly leave America in the dark and cold.

The plan, according to Sanders’ website, calls for “[r]eaching 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonization of the economy by 2050 at latest – consistent with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change goals – by expanding the existing federal Power Marketing Administrations to build new solar, wind, and geothermal energy sources.”

All sources of non-renewable energy accounting for 62 percent of the electricity grid would need to be replaced. No more coal, natural gas or petroleum based electricity generation. Those aren’t renewable.

In addition, 19 percent of the grid via nuclear power would come to an end, too, even though it doesn’t emit carbon. New nuclear plant construction would cease under the Sanders plan.

Every building including 129 million households would all have to be upgraded to no longer emit any carbon.

Home heating and hot water heaters via natural gas and oil would all have to be replaced. So would all of your stoves if they run on fire. Are you ready for winter yet?

Every car and truck—more than 250 million—that runs on gasoline and diesel would have to be replaced.

Convenient air travel would have to be banned.

The oil, coal and gas industries will be eliminated.

To get across the country, you’d probably have to take a train. Overseas? Hope you got your sea legs.

This is a dagger pointed at the heart of Middle America. Do you commute to work in a car? Do you live in a single family home? Can you afford tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars of upgrades for your home? How about a new electric car? Does that fit in your budget?

Work in the energy industry? Drive trucks for a living? Not any more. It’s job retraining camp for you.

The Green New Deal would change everything, compelling millions of Americans to probably move to warmer areas to survive as the federal government unilaterally ends the industrial revolution — the reason we’re such a prosperous species — with a radical revolution of its own.

The U.S. emits about 5.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year as of 2017, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency: 45 percent from petroleum, 29 percent from natural gas and 26 percent from coal.

Of the portion of emissions devoted to natural gas, 1.47 billion metric tons a year, only 506 million is from electricity generation. The rest is from heating homes in the winter, making hot water, cooking food and the like

And then there’s the rest of the world — another 30 billion metric tons a year or so — which of course the plan fails to specify how much of that the U.S. will have to subsidize, too, in order to reach the goal of cutting emissions in half globally by 2030 outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the United Nations.

That’s right. To get it done, we have to work out a cooperative plan with China, Russia, Europe and the rest of the world to halve carbon-based production that they need to keep their billions of peoples fed and warm in the winter.

How do we intend to persuade the world to commit economic suicide? Even if some sort of agreement could somehow be made, it would surely be a tyrannical scheme to arrest economic development, sacrificing an entire generation of opportunity and innovation on the altar of radical environmentalism.

This would set back economic progress for decades or longer and crash the global economy and dislodge hundreds of millions of careers.

There are also opportunity costs to be considered. What technological innovations, say in the fields of carbon capture, might have been achieved if the economy had kept growing the way it was before we willingly turned the lights out? What improvements to our lives will be foregone in the pursuit of a utopia?

In 2020, Americans will have a choice to make about which future they want to raise their children in. One where the government dictates allowances and rations resources, forces you to rebuild your homes and every other building in the country under Bernie Sanders, or one where Americans keep their liberty and the freedom to harness the gifts God gave humans to keep the economy growing.

SOURCE

Seattle’s NHL Stadium Renamed Climate Pledge Arena, To Immediate Mockery

Perhaps fearing attack by a leftist mob, or being violently targeted for a new CHOP, CHAZ, or CHwhatever zone, Amazon announced yesterday it is changing the name of Seattle’s KeyArena to Climate Pledge Arena. Yes, really. The arena hosts the WNBA’s Seattle Storm women’s basketball team and will host Seattle’s incoming NHL hockey team.

“I’m excited to announce that Amazon has bought the naming rights to the historic Seattle arena previously known as KeyArena,” said Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos on Instagram. “Instead of calling it Amazon Arena, we’re naming it Climate Pledge Arena as a regular reminder of the urgent need for climate action. It will be the first net zero carbon certified arena in the world, generate zero waste from operations and events, and use reclaimed rainwater in the ice system to create the greenest ice in the NHL.”

The arena is in downtown Seattle, just a few blocks from the sea. If climate change is such an existential crisis, won’t the rising seas wash the arena away soon, anyway? So why bother paying for naming rights?

The decision to rename the arena Climate Pledge Arena drew immediate laughter and mockery. Proposed nicknames for arena include:

Phony Pledge Arena
Virtue Signal Arena
Pixie Dust Arena
Gore Court
Greenwash Arena
The Unicorn Center
Poseur Arena
Chicken Little Arena
Bedwetter Arena
Climate Hypocrisy Arena

Feel free to note your favorite in the Comments s

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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28 June, 2020

Facts Vs. Fearmongering

Swedish supermarket chain Coop has announced it will be creating new “sustainability” labels for all of its food products, including their climate impact.

The Swedish company announced the new labels, which will be accessed on electronic devices by scanning a bar code. Coop compared the sustainability labels to ingredients labels, a practice the company began as early as 1946.

“Many of our members and customers today are looking for guidance on how to make sustainable choices in stores, which is why we will begin to show how each individual has affected the earth’s resources, climate, and society,” Coop CEO Magnus Johansson said in a press release.

“We want to change the food industry so that we become even more sustainable and we hope, of course, that the entire industry will follow us in this initiative,” Johansson added.
The company said the sustainability score will be determined by ten different ratings, including whether products are locally sourced and their claimed impact on climate change.

“A commodity may have a small climate imprint, but at the same time, a major negative impact on the local population’s life and work environment in production. For us at Coop, it is important to show several aspects of a product’s impact,” Charlotta Szczepanowski, Coop’s Head of Sustainability and Quality, said.

Coop’s proposal has been supported by major American politicians in the past including Democratic Senator Kamala Harris, who said last year that she backed climate impact labels on food.

“I’ve always believed that we should, you know, expand what’s on those cans of those things you buy in the grocery store,” Harris said. She added: “We should expand the list. And included in that should be a measure of the impact on the environment.”

Others, such as those involved with the European Commission’s Farm to Fork (F2F) Strategy, have stated that the public should not only consider eating a more vegetable-based diet but also consider alternative forms of protein such as insects.
Swedish academic and behavioral scientist Magnus Söderlund shocked many last year when he floated the idea of cannibalism as a climate-saving idea.

SOURCE

28 June, 2020

Extinction Rebellion activists launch new political party - by SHOP-LIFTING trolleys of food from a London Sainsbury's 'because poverty sucks'

A group of Extinction Rebellion activists launched their new political party in London today by shoplifting from a supermarket 'because poverty sucks'.

Five members of the new Beyond Politics party walked out of a Sainsbury's store in Camden with trolleys laden with food.

They claimed it was an attempt to highlight the instability of food distribution and supplies globally.

The group were not stopped by staff, though two activists did clash with security guards.

They had earlier used a loudspeaker to proclaim that they were giving away free food.

The activists also put stickers on food items that read: 'New lower price: free. Because poverty sucks'.

The 'supermarket sweep' is the first in a series of stunts that will end with an event in central London on July 25.

Beyond Politics has chosen shocking pink as their launch colour.

Discussing the stunt, party member Benedict McGorty said: 'I'm not stealing food, I'm 'gift-aiding' it. We are changing the rules because the rules are plain wrong. This is not against Sainsbury's but the profiteering of a basic human need.'

The group believe that the climate emergency and political failures have led to dwindling global food supplies.

A spokesperson for the new party said: 'While the government gives billions to its corporate buddies, millions of families don't have enough money just to feed their kids.

'We want to establish a participatory democracy. We want to engage everyone and for people to be able to have their say. The current political system is incapable of making the structural changes necessary. We need a complete transformation of politics.'

Beyond Politics' founders say that the current political system is corrupt and failing.

They want to hand power to ordinary people through citizens' assemblies, and plan to field candidates across the country for future local, regional and national election.

To start with, north London activist Valerie Brown will stand for mayor of London at next year's election.

Extinction Rebellion's co-founder Roger Hallam is a driving force behind the party. He told the Guardian: 'We are seeing complete incompetence of the governing class. There have been 20,000 unnecessary deaths from Covid. The crowning glory is the inability of the political class to respond to the extinction of the human race.'

Hallam says he is assisting with design and organisational work for the new political party and insists that it is separate from the Extinction Rebellion movement.

SOURCE

Green Thumbs Down

FreedomWorks Foundation's Regulatory Action Center (RAC) has published an issue brief on the environmental regulations the Trump administration has rolled back. You can read the paper excerpted below or in its entirety in the attachment at the bottom of this post or HERE.

One of the main features of the Obama administration was its ruthlessly efficient use of the regulatory state. President Obama famously said that if Congress refused to act, he would employ “his pen and his phone” to get the job done. There was perhaps no area of public policy that embodied this approach more than the environment.

The Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was busy during their eight years. In terms of cumulative cost, they surpassed every other agency. After the administration rolled out of town, the Obama EPA had accounted for 187 finalized regulations, totaling just over $344 billion in regulatory costs, and almost 33 million paperwork hours to do so. The administration certainly earned its “regulation nation” moniker.

This regulation nation spanned all aspects of the environment, from what gets emitted to the air, to what can be done on certain lands, and even as minute as what is considered a “navigable water.” The wide-reaching and ever-expanding nature of EPA’s authority impacted families and businesses across the United States, causing unnecessary burdens.

These burdens naturally led to resentment and anger towards unelected bureaucrats thinking they knew best and could tell Americans of all stripes how to live. After Donald Trump was elected on a platform running against the Obama environmental agenda, his administration came in poised to deliver the promised change of the campaign trail.

The administration promised to repeal at least two regulations for every new one implemented. President Trump appointed reform-minded Administrator Scott Pruitt to head the EPA and other cabinet officials dedicated to this promise. In almost three and a half years, the administration has not disappointed.

As we come to the end of the first Trump administration, this piece explores the history behind some of the most destructive regulations addressed by the administration. It also analyzes the impact of scaling them back and why it was so important to do so. Just as the Obama administration left no corner of the earth untouched by regulation, the pendulum eventually swung back. The air, sea, and land are all more free today because of it.

SOURCE

EPA biofuel mandates don’t make sense

Did you know that adding corn into oil based gasoline actually increases the cost of that gas over non-blended gasoline?

How about the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency’s own data shows that refiners had to rely on 481 million gallons of foreign fuel to meet the EPA’s Renewable Fuel Standard mandate in the United States in 2019? America achieves energy independence, yet is still compelled by outdated federal rules to buy foreign fuel to meet an arbitrary mandate.

And just one more, did you know that the National Wildlife Federation wrote a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency supporting reducing ethanol blending requirements due to the findings in an EPA produced, “comprehensive report to Congress in 2018 that outlined the negative environmental impacts of biofuel production.”

And yet in spite of the environmental harm, increased cost (estimated at $1.80 more per gallon for bio-diesel), and the reliance on foreign producers of biofuels, the EPA persists in a misguided effort to push ethanol production standards which exceed what is known as the “blendwall” or the amount of ethanol that can currently be blended into the domestic gasoline supply.

These overly aggressive mandates force our nation’s oil refiners to purchase compliant fuel from foreign companies to achieve Renewable Fuel Standard compliance increasing our national trade deficit.

To put this in even simpler terms, the EPA is forcing U.S. companies to buy foreign produced bio-mass fuels in order to meet an artificial government created quota, and ethanol isn’t even good for the environment.

President Trump has been at the forefront of cutting absurd and harmful regulations and has doubled down on this effort as our nation enters into an economic recovery phase after the devastating job losses due to the shutdowns caused by the reaction to the Chinese-originated virus.

In a May 19, 2020 Cabinet meeting the President said, “With millions of Americans forced out of work by the virus, it’s more important than ever to remove burdens that destroy American jobs.”

He continued by instructing his Cabinet officials to use emergency authority to speed up regulation cuts or move forward with “new rules that will create jobs and prosperity and get rid of unnecessary rules and regulations.”

These are pretty clear instructions directly from the President to his Cabinet Secretaries, including EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler.

Right now, due to the COVID-19 economic downturn, many U.S. oil producers have turned off the spigot for the foreseeable future due to oil price instability, yet, domestic oil refiners are having to not only cut the amount of oil-based fuel used in gasoline to meet RFS rules but pay foreign refiners to import more fuel partially made from food.

What’s more, the virus crisis has caused the United Nations to estimate that 42 million to 66 million more children worldwide could fall into extreme poverty, noting that in 2019 some 386 million children were already in extreme poverty. And yet, somehow the regulators at the EPA continue to insist that America’s cars burn food rather than fuel, ensuring that acres upon acres of corn and soybeans which could have been exported to feed those who through no fault of their own find themselves in danger of starvation.

Only in Washington, D.C. could people charged with protecting the environment think that it is a good idea to mandate a product that hurts the environment, costs more money, and has to be imported, while shifting food production away from feeding starving people. It is enough to make you cry.

SOURCE

Australia's Drought-Ending Rains Restore Critically Endangered Woodlands

Panic about their survival neglected their long history of bouncing back. They are fire-adapted

In box gum grassy woodlands, widely spaced eucalypts tower over carpets of wildflowers, lush native grasses and groves of flowering wattles. It's no wonder some early landscape paintings depicting Australian farm life are inspired by this ecosystem.

But box gum grassy woodlands are critically endangered. These woodlands grow on highly productive agricultural country, from southern Queensland, along inland slopes and tablelands, into Victoria.

Many are degraded or cleared for farming. As a result, less than 5% of the woodlands remain in good condition. What remains often grows on private land such as farms, and public lands such as cemeteries or traveling stock routes.

Very little is protected in public conservation reserves. And the recent drought and record breaking heat caused these woodlands to stop growing and flowering.

But after Queensland's recent drought-breaking rain earlier this year, we surveyed private farmland and found many dried-out woodlands in the northernmost areas transformed into flower-filled, park-like landscapes.

And landholders even came across rarely seen marsupials, such as the southern spotted-tail quoll.

These surveys were part of the Australian government's Environmental Stewardship Program, a long-term cooperative conservation model with private landholders. It started in 2007 and will run for 19 years.

We found huge increases in previously declining native wildflowers and grasses on the private farmland. Many trees assumed to be dying began resprouting, such as McKie's stringybark (Eucalyptus mckieana), which is listed as a vulnerable species.

This newfound plant diversity is the result of seeds and tubers (underground storage organs providing energy and nutrients for regrowth) lying dormant in the soil after wildflowers bloomed in earlier seasons. The dormant seeds and tubers were ready to spring into life with the right seasonal conditions.

For example, Queensland Herbarium surveys early last year, during the drought, looked at a 20 meter (65 feet) by 20 meter plot and found only six native grass and wildflower species on one property. After this year's rain, we found 59 species in the same plot, including many species of perennial grass (three species jumped to 20 species post rain), native bluebells and many species of native daisies.

On another property with only 11 recorded species, more than 60 species sprouted after the extensive rains.

In areas where grazing and farming continued as normal (the paired "control" sites), the plots had only around half the number of plant species as areas managed for conservation.

Spotting Rare Marsupials

Landowners also reported several unusual sightings of animals on their farms after the rains. Stewardship program surveyors later identified them as two species of rare and endangered native carnivorous marsupials: the southern spotted-tailed quoll (mainland Australia's largest carnivorous marsupial) and the brush-tailed phascogale.

The population status of both these species in southern Queensland is unknown. The brush-tailed phascogale is elusive and rarely detected, while the southern spotted-tailed quolls are listed as endangered under federal legislation.

Until those sightings, there were no recent records of southern spotted-tailed quolls in the local area.

These unusual wildlife sightings are valuable for monitoring and evaluation. They tell us what's thriving, declining or surviving, compared to the first surveys for the stewardship program ten years ago.

Sightings are also a promising signal for the improving condition of the property and its surrounding landscape.

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, 2020

Covid-19 has led to a pandemic of plastic pollution

As the world produces more protective equipment—and gorges on takeaways—pity the oceans

THE THAMES has always been a reflector of the times, says Lara Maiklem, a London “mudlark”. Ms Maiklem spends her days on the river’s foreshore foraging for history’s detritus, from Roman pottery to Victorian clay pipes. She can tell the time of year, she says, just by the type of rubbish she has to sift through: champagne bottles during the first week of January; footballs in summer. The year 2020 has left its own mark. Since the coronavirus reached Britain the mud has sprouted a crop of latex gloves.

In February, half a world away, Gary Stokes docked his boat on Hong Kong’s isolated Soko Island. Soko’s beaches are where OceansAsia, the conservation organisation he runs, sporadically records levels of plastic pollution. Mr Stokes says he is all too accustomed to finding the jetsam the modern world throws up, such as plastic drinks bottles and supermarket carrier-bags. But what he documented that day made news across Hong Kong: 70 surgical facemasks on a 100-metre stretch of beach. Having cleaned it up, he went back four days later. Like a stubborn weed, the masks had returned.

Whether on the foreshore of the Thames or the deserted beaches of Soko, the planet is awash with pandemic plastic. Data are hard to come by but, for example, consumption of single-use plastic may have grown by 250-300% in America since the coronavirus took hold, says Antonis Mavropoulos of the International Solid Waste Association (ISWA), which represents recycling bodies in 102 countries. Much of that increase is down to demand for products designed to keep covid-19 at bay, including masks, visors and gloves. According to a forecast from Grand View Research, the global disposable-mask market will grow from an estimated $800m in 2019 to $166bn in 2020.

Staggering though such figures are, personal protection is only part of the story. Lockdowns have also led to a boom in e-commerce. In March, as parts of America and Europe shut up shop, some 2.5bn customers are reckoned to have visited Amazon’s website, a 65% increase on last year. In China, more than 25% of physical goods were bought online during the first quarter of the year, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a think-tank in Washington, DC.

Much of what is bought online comes wrapped in plastic—and the bad kind at that. Goods are often packaged in plastic comprising several layers. That keeps the contents safe in aeroplane holds and on delivery lorries. It also makes it nearly impossible to recycle the plastic. At the same time, the locked-down masses have been consuming home deliveries from restaurants in record numbers. First-quarter sales at Uber Eats, one of America’s biggest restaurant-delivery apps, for example, rose by 54% year on year. Every extra portion of curry, or pot of garlic dip, means more plastic waste.

If the public’s increasing appetite for single-use plastic worries environmentalists, then so too does its diminishing inclination to recycle materials that can be reused. In Athens, for example, there has been a 150% increase in the amount of plastic found in the general-waste stream, says Mr Mavropoulos. Anecdotal evidence from ISWA members suggests this is a worldwide trend. An unwillingness to recycle might be explained by people’s nervousness about venturing out to put waste in recycling bins. Or it might just be that lockdowns have put more pressing matters into their minds, prompting a slip in their diligence.

Covid-19 has led to a glut in plastic waste in other ways. For one, the pandemic caused a crash in the oil price. Because petroleum is a major constituent of most plastics, they became cheaper to produce, says David Xi of the University of Warwick. That in turn gave firms less incentive to use the recycled stuff. But the growth of plastic rubbish is mainly caused by the fact that municipalities around the world have curtailed their recycling schemes. Collections have been cut back and plants have been shut over fears about spreading the contagion. Worries about contaminated rubbish have also made some refuse collectors and sorters nervous about going into work (the virus can survive for about 72 hours on plastic).

All of which means that much of the plastic produced this year is ending up either in landfill sites or being incinerated. Both could store up future problems. Landfills, especially in poor countries, are often little more than open dumps. They are responsible for some of the biggest leakages of plastics into oceans, says Mr Mavropoulos. Because the material is light, it is easily swept by rain or wind into waterways.

Incineration is not much better. Again, particularly in the developing world where facilities can be shoddy, not only can burning plastics create toxins, but it also often fails to obliterate the plastic, leaving considerable levels of nano- and micro-particles. These can both be emitted into the atmosphere, where they can cause cancers, or leach into groundwater and eventually into oceans.

There is no academic consensus on whether plastics in the oceans, once they are broken down by salt and sun into micro-particles, are particularly dangerous to animals. Polymers, on which plastics are based, are chemically inert, although some additives can be toxic. But given the huge natural experiment now under way, researchers may soon have a clearer idea. “We are only just starting to understand the potential impacts of nanoparticles and the way in which they can penetrate into living cells in marine organisms as well,” says Dan Parsons, director of the Energy and Environment Institute at the University of Hull. “Plastic nanomaterials released into the environment could be the asbestos of the seas.”

Indeed, like the virus itself, pandemic-era plastic pollution is hitting the poor hardest, says Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme. In low-income countries, 93% of waste goes into open dumps, she says. And where there are incinerators, they tend to be of low quality. Even in rich countries, the poor are more likely to live closer to facilities that deal with rubbish, says Ms Andersen.

There are good reasons why the public has turned to plastics, says Mr Parsons: “People know that it protects them” from the coronavirus. Not only that, points out Ms Andersen, it is hardly fair to blame manufacturers for producing environmentally unfriendly protective equipment—or consumers for buying it—given the global scramble to obtain the materials needed to make the masks and visors that keep health workers and others safe. And a world in which less plastic is produced would not necessarily be a greener one. Because the material is light, it often causes lower emissions when it is transported than alternatives do.

But what worries Mr Parsons is that years spent trying to change the public’s attitude towards single-use plastic might now be lost. Preliminary findings from research his team has conducted suggest that the public has reverted to its earlier insouciance about plastic waste. The pandemic has already encouraged the rolling back of anti-plastic legislation, such as taxes on single-use grocery bags in some American states, or a ban on plastic straws in Britain. Ironically, that may even help the climate. But just as covid-19 has scarred families and harmed livelihoods across the world, its effect on the planet will linger, too, in the world’s landfills and oceans.

SOURCE

Green investing is red hot but its impact is underwhelming

Publicly traded firms are directly responsible for only a modest share of greenhouse-gas emissions

INTEREST IN CLIMATE change was once a rarity in high finance; the preserve of boutique investment houses and pokey back-offices in the large asset-management firms. Now it is all the rage. Pressure from regulators and clients, as well as the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, has made green investment red hot. The trend could be a force for good in the fight to reduce climate change. But there is a limit as to how much it can do.

In order to see how much of the world’s emissions might be amenable to investor-led action The Economist analysed emissions disclosures from over 5,000 publicly listed companies. The number of companies making such disclosures has been rising steadily. Those disclosures differentiate between the emissions that companies make directly (called “scope-one” emissions) and “scope-two” emissions which are produced by the companies which provide them with energy, mostly in the form of electricity. To look at the total emissions we considered only scope one, since adding in scope two leads to double-counting.

As you would expect, the largest emissions come from companies that burn fossil fuels in the normal course of their business: those that run fossil-fuel power stations, or fleets of aircraft or steelworks. In Europe ArcelorMittal is the biggest emitter because steelmaking requires the burning of coal. In America the biggest is ExxonMobil, which unlike many large companies produces much of the electricity and heat that it uses itself. Using the emissions disclosed by these companies, we estimated emissions for non-disclosing firms on the basis of those disclosed by similar firms in the same sector with comparable revenues. Given that a firm’s decision whether to disclose and its emissions intensity may not be independent, this step could introduce error.

Totting everything up reveals that each year publicly traded companies emit greenhouse gases equivalent to 10bn tonnes of carbon dioxide from their operations. Perhaps a quarter of those are produced by listed firms that are majority-owned by governments. That leaves eight gigatonnes of emissions that stockmarkets can influence directly. That is 14% of the world’s total emissions, or 19% of emissions related to energy use and industrial processes. (Those estimates undercount oil emissions. If you add those from the oil sold by institutionally controlled energy firms, part of what is called “scope three” emissions, then the proportions increase to 23% and 32%, respectively.) Thus fund managers have some influence over a big slice of the economy, but many emissions occur outside the firms they control. They cannot directly influence the bosses of state-controlled Chinese coal-fired power plants or Middle Eastern oil and gas producers. The role that financial services can play in fighting climate change must not be misunderstood or overstated.

SOURCE

New Climate Poll, Same Results: People Concerned, But Not Very Much

Every few months one polling firm or another releases a survey asking people if they would like action on climate change. And survey after survey says people would – if action is not too costly or disruptive. A new Pew Research Center poll is being hyped by the Washington Post and other Establishment-Left media, but it does nothing to change the equation.

A June 23 survey conducted by the reports a majority of respondents say they are concerned about climate change along with other environmental issues, and that government should do more to prevent climate change.

As with other such surveys, however, the more important question is where their concern about climate ranks in relation to other issues and, crucially, how much they will personally be willing to pay to fight climate change. The Pew Poll doesn’t ask these question, but others have and the answers are enlightening.

If you ask the public about almost any potential concern that is frequently in the headlines, poll respondents will say government should do more to fix the problem. Indeed, when surveys ask whether crime, economic growth, education, health care, immigration, jobs, retirement, taxes, terrorism, and similar issues are important – and whether government should do more to solve these problems – majorities consistently say yes. However, what we really need to know is how important each issue is relative to other matters of concern. In a world of limited resources and limited voter attention, government must focus on what the public is most concerned about and what will motivate people when they go to the polls.

In this regard, climate change consistently ranks at or near the bottom on the list of public concerns. For example, a United Nations poll surveying more than 7 million respondents from 195 countries asked participants to rank 16 priorities. Quality education ranked first and “Action Taken on Climate Change” ranked dead last.

The results of a survey conducted by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2019 are similar. Survey participants were asked, “How important are the following issues to you personally?” Options included climate change, the economy, gun policy, health care, immigration, and renewable energy. Climate change came in second-to-last among adults and third-to-last among teens in the number of people rating it as either “extremely” or “very” important. The only category that consistently ranked lower than climate change was “renewable energy.”

The new Pew poll touted by the Washington Post misleadingly asks if people think government should tax the fossil fuel industry, or spend more on renewable energy sources, or impose tougher emission restrictions on power plants and automobiles to fight climate change. Significant majorities of respondents say yes, yet the survey attaches no dollar figures to any of these policies. When people think something will cost them nothing, they want it, but the number of takers declines sharply as the costs go up.

However, a 2017 University of Chicago and Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs research poll; a 2015 survey conducted by The New York Times, Stanford University, and Resources for the Future; and the 2019 Post/Kaiser poll found the public wants to fight climate change only if it can be done for free or at very little cost. Even a climate realist like me was surprised by how little money people are willing to spend to fight the mythical climate crisis!

More than half (60 percent) of Post/Kaiser survey respondents said they believed the world had less than 10 years to prevent the worst effects of climate change. Despite this, 51 percent of those surveyed would be “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed to paying a $2 monthly tax on U.S. residential electric bills to pay for the fight against climate change. Similarly, 61 percent would reject a 10-cents-per-gallon increase in the gasoline tax to fight climate change.

The number of respondents opposed to hikes in electricity costs and gas taxes rose sharply when the proposed fees were increased: 71 percent oppose a $10 monthly tax on U.S. residential electric bills, and 74 percent oppose increasing the gas tax by 25 cents per gallon. These relatively modest cost increases are far below what it would cost the average household to pay for the Green New Deal (GND), or even the GND-lite carbon tax proposals being offered by a very few liberal Republicans in Congress.

In the end, the so-called climate crisis may concern many people in the abstract, but relatively few people rank it high compared to other public policy issues of concern, and fewer still are willing to pay very much to fight climate change. That’s the important truth public polling firms should note.

SOURCE

Bayer to keep selling Roundup in Australia, will fight local lawsuits

Bayer will keep selling glyphosate-based weed sprays in Australia and fight litigation here against its product Roundup, despite agreeing to pay more than $US10 billion ($14.6 billion) to settle thousands of claims in the US alleging it causes cancer.

Executives from the company's United States and Australian operations vigorously defended glyphosate weed sprays in an early morning media call on Thursday, saying the product was safe to use and backed by a large body of scientific evidence around the world collected over many decades.

"What I want to make clear is we continue to proudly stand behind the safety and utility of our products, and our commitment to offer them to farmers and other users in Australia and around the world," said Brett Begemann, chief operating officer at Bayer’s crop science division.

"The decision to resolve these cases was driven by our desire to bring greater certainty to farmers we serve every day," he said.

Mr Begemann said the settlement came with a big expense, but was the "right decision" for Bayer and its stakeholders. The settlement would also enable Bayer to return its focus to work on the development of new agricultural products to protect crops.

Two class actions have already been launched against Roundup in Australia and are in their early stages.

Roundup is the biggest selling glyphosate-based weedspray in the world and is used extensively by farmers in various agricultural segments to kill weeds. It is also used by commercial gardeners and home gardeners.

Roundup is owned by Bayer, after the German company bought the US agrochemical company Monsanto in 2018. Monsanto invented and manufactured Roundup for decades, which meant that Bayer inherited the legal claims against Roundup with the 2018 deal.

"Let me be clear that the settlement in the United States has no bearing on glyphosate proceedings in any other jurisdiction. Bayer will actively defend any and all claims concerning Roundup brought against it in Australian courts...we're fully committed to these crucial weed control technologies and that commitment’s unwavering," Mr Begemann said.

The coronavirus pandemic was a key reminder of the importance of agriculture, food and science to the world, he said.

"We'll continue to sell Roundup and other glyphosate-based products to our loyal customer base," he said.

"There's a really strong consensus around the world that glyphosate does not cause cancer and is not carcinogenic. No regulator in the world has ever indicated they've seen any of that," he said.

Joerg Ellmanns, Bayer’s crop science country divisional head for Australia and New Zealand, said glyphosate weed sprays were a "cornerstone" of Australian agriculture, and the company had no plans to change its marketing of glyphosate products in this country.

Mr Ellmanns said sales of Bayer's glyphosate weed sprays in Australia were performing strongly. "We believe it's essential for Australian agriculture," he said.

Shortly after Bayer bought Monsanto a California court awarded $US289 million to school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, who claimed that glyphosate caused his cancer. The monetary award was later reduced and Bayer appealed the verdict.

In Australia, the first class action launched against Bayer over Roundup was led by a Melbourne gardener, who blamed his non-Hodgkin lymphoma, diagnosed in 2011, on his use of Roundup. The case was launched last 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

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

25 June, 2020

UK Environment Official Claims Britain Isn’t Wet And Rainy

Dr. Benny Peiser

The head of the government’s Environment Agency is claiming that the UK is no longer a wet and rainy country and is urging us to turn off taps and take showers rather than baths to save water.

Sir James Bevan, CEO of the Agency, is backing a report, The Great British Rain Paradox, which warns of potential water shortages in the UK in years to come. The report claims that the major factor for this is climate change.

In its foreword, Sir James says:

‘Climate change is causing long spells of dry weather that are putting our water resources under increased pressure. May 2020 has been the driest on record and exceptionally dry weather across the southeast between 2017 and 2019 led to some of the lowest groundwater levels we have ever seen.’

These claims have no basis in fact. Official Met Office data shows that the UK has actually been getting wetter in recent decades.

What is particularly noticeable in England and Wales is the absence of severe drought years in recent decades.
May 2020 certainly was not the driest on record either – in the UK as a whole, it was only the ninth driest since records started in 1862. The driest May was in 1896. Analysis of regional rainfall data also fails to support Sir James’s claims.

Nor does the claim of exceptionally dry weather in the South East of England stand up to scrutiny. Met Office data proves that rainfall there between 2017 and 2019 was close to average.
There are undoubtedly good reasons why water shortages may occur in the future, such as population growth and increased demands.

Spurious claims about climate change will simply serve to draw attention away from these very real issues and the failure to expand storage and deal with water leaks.

This is not the first time Sir James has been caught playing fast and loose with the facts to support a political agenda. He should apologize and issue a correction.

SOURCE

If We Unquestioningly ‘Follow The Science,’ It Leads Us Nowhere

Surely one of the more embarrassing moments in Anderson Cooper’s career as the host of his CNN nightly show was the night back in May when he brought in 17-year-old Greta Thunberg as a star interview for a CNN Town Hall — not on the climate crisis, for which Thunberg has been famously treated as an expert of sorts, but on the COVID-19 crisis.

The link between COVID-19 and climate change is a little unclear, so presumably Cooper and Town Hall co-host Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s medical expert, thought Thunberg would bring some special wisdom and insight to the virus crisis.

The only advice from Thunberg, however, was to urge everyone to “follow the science” as suggested by Cooper, who seemed to be appealing to the 17-year-old for confirmation of his views:

“This is a time, it seems, that the global scientific community is so critically important and we’re really seeing how important it is to follow the science.”

Thunberg took that soft handoff from Cooper as one might expect — as confirmation of her claim that we should also be following the science on climate change.

“People are starting to realize that we are actually depending on science and that we need to listen to scientists and experts. And I really hope that stays,” she said, adding that she also hoped it will apply to other crises “such as the climate crisis and the environmental crisis.”

When it comes to COVID-19, however, Thunberg seemed to have missed some of the science she said we should all be following.

She suggested it was misinformation to believe initial reports that COVID-19 affected only the elderly. “During any crisis, it is always the most vulnerable people who are hit the hardest, and that is children,” she proclaimed.

“Yes, this does affect elderly people a lot, but we also have to remember that this is also a children’s rights crisis because children are the most vulnerable in societies. Children do get the virus and they also spread it.”

The actual science shows, as we all now know, that children are not the hardest hit, nor are they the most vulnerable.

Children are in “extremely low risk” of getting the disease and when they do get it they are more likely to be asymptomatic. Few have died.

Welcome to FP Comment’s 22nd annual Junk Science Week, guided by our standard definition: Junk science occurs when scientific facts are distorted, the risk is exaggerated and the science adapted and warped by politics and ideology to serve another agenda.

Both CNN and Thunberg are manifestations thereof.

Whether the politicization of science is more widespread today is unanswerable, but it seems fair to conclude that there have been few signs of retreat.

As we shall explore later this week, peer-review regimes continue to fail, correlations are propelled into causation, health risks converted into draconian legislation.

Calls to follow the science are heard almost daily from politicians and activists — and many scientists. But what are they advocating?

When a politician declares “I believe in the science” (as per U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren), it’s akin to admitting a lack of knowledge about the science behind whatever policy is being promulgated.

And what if, as is too often the case, the science politicians are following is tainted and falls into the great science world where deliberate distortions and exaggerations — even fabrications — are common?

Lest anyone believe that doesn’t happen, it’s worth recalling the famous words of Stephen Schneider, the late Stanford University climate scientist who — along with many others over the years — saw fudging and fakery as the proper role of scientists.

“On the one hand,” said Schneider, “as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

There is one area of science where a small blow — or maybe it will prove to be large — has been dealt to the “scary scenarios” that have driven climate policy over much of the past two decades.

That scenario is the work of the UN climate agency — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — which produced a so-called “business-as-usual” scenario implying that without drastic action to curb carbon emissions the world would plunge into economic and environmental hell.

Guelph University’s Ross McKitrick outlines on this page today that the official UN climate scenario known as RCP8.5 — cited by media and others to describe climate change risk — is a form of junk science based on assorted wrong-headed assumptions, including impossible projections of carbon emissions increases.

McKitrick concludes: “If we want to avoid the RCP8.5 future scenario all we have to do is stop feeding it into climate models because that’s the only place it exists.”

If we just unquestioningly “follow the science,” that’s where it seems to be leading, to places that don’t exist, to nowhere.

SOURCE

E&E Alarmist Article on Facebook's Climate Model "Fact-checking" Needs Its Own Fact-Checking

E&E News today published a news story backing the opinions of a partisan climate alarmist group that acts as a censor for opposing opinions on Facebook.

Dr. Caleb Stewart Rossiter, a climate statistician who directs the CO2 Coalition of climate scientists and energy economists that is fighting the censorship, responded that it is the E&E article that desperately needs fact-checking:

"About the only thing that is accurate in this opinion piece masquerading as news story is this statement: 'climate models, which are the foundation used to craft many carbon regulations.' Climate models indeed are the only thing justifying the array of mandates and subsidies for wind and solar power that are making energy prices four times as high as they should be."

Dr. Rossiter noted that the UN's own reports show that there has been no statistically significant increase in rates of sea-level rise, hurricanes, droughts, and other extreme weather during the era since 1950, when industrial CO2 could first have affected global temperature. (see Climate Statistics 101.

Said Rossiter,

"Why do Facebook's censors go after anything we write about climate models? Because these models are the weak link in the alarmist narrative. These rough estimates based on pre-programmed warming assumptions continue to run three times too hot compared to actual temperature data." (see On Climate Sensitivity).

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

Australia: Leftist leader's letter to PM Scott Morrison to outline climate compromise

Labor leader Anthony Albanese has urged the Prime Minister to end the climate wars in a letter outlining a new bipartisan approach on energy policy that’s being dubbed “a surrender note” by critics.

In an olive branch, Mr Albanese has written to the PM urging the Morrison government to find an energy policy that both sides of politics can support and then get on with legislating it.

The Labor leader said that the ALP would not “seek a specific model” for the bipartisan energy policy as long as it could be scalable to different emissions targets of a future government.

After the Prime Minister spruiked the benefits of bipartisanship during the COVID-19 crisis with Labor state premiers, Mr Albanese is urging the Prime Minister to embrace a new deal on energy policy.

“As we address the greatest health and economic crisis we have seen for generations, it is only by working together that we can deliver the leadership Australian businesses and families are rightly crying out for,’’ Mr Albanese writes.

“It is my sincere hope that you carefully consider and accept this genuine offer.”

Previously, Labor had offered to back the National Energy Guarantee, which the Liberal Party put on ice two years ago during the leadership revolt that toppled Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister.

Whether it’s the carbon tax, the National Energy Guarantee or the emissions reduction scheme, successive governments have tried and failed to deliver a détente in the energy policy space.

While the brawls have toppled prime ministers and political leaders, experts insist the real losers are voters who are paying more for energy as businesses refuse to invest because of the uncertainty.

Business leaders have consistently warned that Australia’s energy prices for electricity and gas are higher than they should be as a result of the policy vacuum in the climate change space.

The new negotiating position was ticked off by the shadow cabinet recently, following negotiations between the Left faction’s Mark Butler and the Right faction’s pro-coal frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon.

Last year, Mr Albanese carpeted Mr Fitzgibbon in the shadow cabinet over his public call for a “sensible settlement’’ with the Liberal Party on climate change targets.

The brawl prompted Mr Butler to announce he would be announcing a “climate change emergency’’ in parliament, which critics complained was “a crock of sh*t.”

In February, Mr Albanese announced that a Labor Government would adopt a target of net zero emissions by 2050.

In his letter to the Prime Minister, Mr Albanese has also offered to support the development and use of Carbon Capture Storage methodologies for the creation of Australian carbon credit units to be available for Emission Reduction Fund auctions.

This is despite the Labor Party insisting it remains opposed to the taxpayer funded Emissions Reduction Fund on the grounds it is an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds.

But while the bipartisan approach has been endorsed by the shadow cabinet, it’s likely to sharpen the differences between the ALP and the Greens and could alarm some inner-city MPs.

“We’ve taken ourselves hostage and now we’re sending the PM a surrender note,’’ a Labor MP quipped.

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, 2020

Buying the farm vote with carbon credits

Man caused climate change is probably the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on society. While much of the public with little science education has been conned by the media and well financed model builders into believing the arrogant idea that man controls the thermostat of planet Earth, it is in fact a political not a scientific issue. It is not about saving the planet.

The Climate change movement is political ideology. The socialist leaders of the movement believe that the world and all people in it should be controlled by a massive government. To these people capitalism and free markets are the enemy. Personal freedom and democracy are evil.

Essentially the entire Democratic Party has tied itself to this movement and will stop at nothing to bring the country to the sadistic utopia they see in socialism. Sadly they are joined by many in the Republican Party as well.

America’s agriculture community has largely resisted this damaging ideology.

Now they are going after America’s farmers and ranchers by proposing to give them money for what they naturally do, draw upon photosynthesis to utilize carbon dioxide to grow their crops and forests, and ask those who raise our meat to capture their flatulence. They are trying to push them into the global warming hysteria camp and buy their votes in the next election along the way.

A legislative bill has been introduced this month directing the US Department of Agriculture to help farmers, ranchers and landowners use carbon dioxide absorbing practices to generate carbon credits gaining access to revenue from the greenhouse gas offset credit market.

It is really a cruel joke when one realizes the last established values for decreasing carbon dioxide was $3 a ton. Time and effort to make such a calculation would cost folks more than that.

Hopefully the legislation will not pass, but if it does the USDA, once the greatest supporter of agriculture but now too often controlled by deep staters, will reject creating required protocols to qualify for this pitiful vote bribery.

Tom Harris of the International Climate Science Coalition said “That Congress wants to help farmers and ranchers during this difficult time is great, but just help them directly. Don’t create a program that gives them financial support for doing something to promote the nonsensical effort to stop climate change.

Terigi Ciccione, author of the new book, The Hitchhiker’s Journey Through Climate Change, said “the Dems have laid a trap, put a little cheese on the mousetrap, and when the two faced Republicans embrace it with bipartisan love for the farmers, the Dems will spring their Trojan Horse trap much like Lucy telling Charlie Brown this time she will really hold the football steady “.

It is crazy to think we are even debating the idea of limiting CO2 at a huge cost to society, when we should actually be promoting more CO2. This shows how persuasive the pro global warming movement has been with their sales pitch, organization and propaganda. We should actually be doing the opposite of what they are hyping. The global warming argument fails for lack of any real scientific observable evidence. We should not regulate, nor tax CO2, but rather put more of it into the atmosphere.

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, who now spends his time battling the lies put forth by the organization he founded to save whales and harp seals, predicts the day will come when we will be crushing limestone to put its carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

There is only 1/10,000 of a percent more CO2 in the atmosphere now than there was 260 years ago. The socialist alarmists are desperately telling us this threatens to plunge the earth into catastrophe.

In total, CO2 comprises only .04 percent of our atmosphere and is a very weak greenhouse gas with no impact on the Earth’s temperature as compared to the real players, the sun, the oceans, clouds, vegetation and such. Yet when it comes to biological processes, like plant photosynthesis, small amounts of CO2 do make a wonderful difference.

SOURCE

Ireland's Green Manifesto

Only 8% of the Irish public believe that tackling climate change should be the next government’s top priority, according to the results of an MRBI opinion poll published last week.

This low percentage didn’t stop Fine Gael and Fianna Fail caving into the Green Party’s very far-reaching demand that we cut our carbon emissions in half over the next 10 years.

The capitulation raises questions about the nature of Irish democracy. So does the largely uncritical coverage that the Green Party agenda receives.

Even during the general election, it was obvious that climate change was not a big issue for voters. Commentators and politicians noted it was rarely raised on the doorsteps.

This was despite enormous media coverage of the issue, with RTE basically campaigning about it for months.

Thousands of schoolchildren had been taking part in climate strikes and we even had a children’s parliament, which took over the Dail chamber for a day to discuss the matter. The environmental campaigner Greta Thunberg seemed to be never off our screens.

Last summer, the Fine Gael government published a climate action plan, promising to reduce carbon emissions by an average of 3% a year by 2030.

Every other day we seemed to have a new UN report issuing dire warnings of impending environmental doom.

Here in Ireland an environmental expert, Professor Peter Thorne of NUI Maynooth, warned that, at some stage in the coming decades, a catastrophic storm during high tide would leave thousands of properties and landmark buildings in Dublin underwater, with significant flooding in the city center.

Despite all these warnings, voters still couldn’t be persuaded to put climate change at the top of their concerns. Yet this didn’t stop politicians going right ahead and making it the top priority of the next government.

Of all the commitments in the new program for government, none is as radical as the promise to cut carbon emissions by 7% a year for the next 10 years, and not 3% as first promised — a target that was already considered very ambitious and expensive.

What has been notable since the program was published last week is how little discussion there has been of how much the 7% commitment is going to cost us, and whether it has a proper democratic mandate.

The only real debate seems to be among the 3,000-plus membership of Green Party itself, with its Extinction Rebellion wing opposing the deal on the grounds that it doesn’t go far enough.

Unless more than two-thirds of these members approve the program, it’s back to the drawing board for the political parties, and maybe another election.

Perhaps we should have another election anyway because if you are going to do something so huge and radical, it should have broad support and be properly debated.

If you told people upfront that the commitment on climate would cost tens of billions of euros, inhibit economic growth, and that households would be asked to pay tens of thousands on electric cars and retrofitting their houses, we would have Instant Rebellion.

But we have been told none of this. A radical commitment has been slipped in as though it is the most reasonable proposal in the world.

It’s time for a proper debate, one in which we hear from a broad range of climate experts, engineers, and economists, who represent a range of views, and not simply those who meet with RTE approval, such as Professor John Sweeney of NUI Maynooth’s geography department.

He seems to be the go-to guy for RTE on all things climate, yet I cannot remember hearing a journalist ask him a single hard question.

We are invited to believe that when Sweeney speaks, it is not simply the voice of one expert, but that of science itself, and that everything he says is indisputable.

In fact, climate models seem to be a lot like those epidemiological ones we’ve been hearing so much about. They involve lots of different assumptions and their predictions range over a wide spectrum.

Although we know more about climate than we did about Covid-19 a few months ago, even the UN itself, and its Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, makes a range of predictions about temperature increases and sea-level rises over the coming decades.

At a minimum, when Sweeney is on a TV or radio show, he needs to be asked which projection he himself believes in and if he is focusing on the worst ones.

Occasionally, he should have to debate with another expert who does not believe in the upper-end predictions.

But is that even permitted any more? Are you now banned from the Irish airwaves if you believe in the lower-end predictions for temperature rises and sea-level increases?

Quite aside from that, we need to hear far more from engineers, because they are the ones who will have to deliver the conversion from fossil-fuel energy to green energy over the next decade.

Do they think the wholesale switch promised by the program for government is feasible? What about the promised reductions in carbon emitted by transport, never mind agriculture?

And we can’t hear only from engineers approved by the Green Party. We must have a range of opinions.

Then there is the cost. A report from the Irish Academy of Engineering in November 2016 estimated that a 30% cut in emissions by 2030 — just about feasible, in their view — would cost €35bn at an absolute minimum.

Yet cutting it by 50%, the new commitment, would presumably cost far more and be even less feasible from a practical point of view.

Economists need to tell us what the 7% a year cut will cost households. How much will we need to pay in higher carbon taxes, and in other charges, to fund all this?

Retrofitting our homes to make them more energy-efficient would cost the average household between €30,000 and €80,000, according to one estimate.

The program for government envisages 600,000 homes doing this over the next decade. Then we also have to consider how the Green Party’s agenda might harm economic growth.

Why aren’t politicians, experts, and commentators all over the airwaves asking these questions? Why do we get to hear only a narrow range of voices? That isn’t healthy. A radical green agenda is being imposed on us without our true consent.

A properly democratic country would allow debate so that voters could then make informed choices. What we are being served up instead amounts to little more than Green Party propaganda.

SOURCE

Netflix’s ‘The Politician’ Turns Climate Change Into A Hot Mess

Even though this is 2020, we apparently need to talk more about elections. At least, that’s what The Politician would have us believe.

We’re still more than four months away from November, but the Netflix series is determined to remind us of everything we hate about election season. Namely, it’s once again filled with lies, smug liberals, and countless scandals.

The new season, which premiered June 19, follows Payton Hobart (Ben Platt) still on his quest to one day become President of the United States.

This time, he plans to run for State Senator of New York’s 27th District against longtime incumbent Dede Standish (Judith Light). As the election continues, scandals start flying as both sides are determined to win at seemingly any cost.

Considering this is New York, it is shoved with progressive politics to the point where the term “right-wing” is used as a pejorative.

Both candidates are overtly liberal, but Payton goes above and beyond by running on a single issue: climate change.

He pushes it as a spearheading platform to reel in young voters, but it really becomes an excuse for the show to remind us we’re all going to die in ten years.

Within seven episodes, climate change is referred to as a “climate catastrophe that threatens all of civilization as we know it” as well as the “greatest long-term threat to human existence.”

Payton lays it all down in the season premiere “New York State of Mind” as he gives a speech at a climate rally.

Payton: Now, listen. Every one of us here today knows that we are in a generational fight that will determine our species’ future on this planet. But politicians like Dede Standish…they cannot accept our urgency to clean up this mess, because if they did, they would have to admit that they are the ones who made it! Well, Senator Standish, if you are listening today, I do not want my children and grandchildren living in a New York City with 20-foot sea walls holding back a dying ocean on a scorched Earth with tens of millions of climate refugees…

Infinity: No. No.

Payton: And fascist governments around the globe are committing wholesale genocide while we fight for dwindling supplies of food and water! That is where this world is heading if we continue to do nothing, Dede Standish. And when you say that we can’t afford to take action, I say this: It’s because of your generation’s policies that my generation has no other choice!

…Netflix’s The Politician continues to display the rapid decline of standards and politics on television. But what else is new?

After watching this episode, I came away with one thought: the entire season is completely fact-free and based solely on hyped-up emotion, worst-case scenarios (that only dim-witted 20-something liberals believe), and some of the worst propaganda talking points outside a climate rally.

SOURCE

Alarmists Falsely Blame Climate Change for Localized Warming in Detroit

At the top of Google News search results today for “climate change,” a climate-activist meteorologist wrote an article attributing 3.3 degrees Fahrenheit of warming in Detroit over the past 50 years to global warming. A quick look at relevant evidence shows the claim is more alarmist hype than scientific fact.

Meteorologist Paul Gross, citing a graph produced by the climate activist group Climate Central, reports a summer warming trend in Detroit since 1970 of approximately 3.3 degrees, with most of the summer warming occurring at night.

While this data may or may not be accurate, attributing it to “climate warming” is likely wrong.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) records show Michigan as a whole has warmed an average approximately 2 degrees – not 3.3 degrees – since the beginning of the 20th century.

Also, the largest spike in warming occurred from the 1930’s through the 1950’s, with the vast majority of warming occurring during the spring and winter, when such warming is welcomed, as opposed to the summer.

Indeed, NOAA reports a declining trend “of hot days (maximum temperature above 90°F) and no overall trend in warm nights (minimum temperature above 70°F)” for Michigan.

As Climate at a Glance: U.S. Temperatures reports, NOAA’s 30-year U.S. temperature trend for the upper Mid-West – including Michigan – is undergoing a modest cooling trend. Also, NOAA’s Climate Reference Network, its high-quality network of temperature stations throughout the United States, shows no warming trend across the United States since the network became operational in 2005.

Assuming Gross is correct that Detroit has experienced more warming than other places—indeed a non-typical temperature trend since 1970—one should look at factors other than anthropogenic global warming as the cause of the anomalous temperature trend. The most likely cause is the urban heat island effect, caused by Detroit’s substantial industrialization and development, rather than global warming.

The urban heat island effect would explain why Detroit’s temperature increase is almost entirely due to an increase in summertime nighttime warming. As explained in Climate at a Glance: Urban Heat Islands, heat absorbed by concrete and other impervious surfaces during the day in urban areas is slowly released into the atmosphere at night, resulting in disproportionate increases in nighttime low temperatures.

Before Gross pointed his finger at climate change as an explanation for Detroit’s idiosyncratic temperature trend, he should have considered countervailing national and state temperature trends, as well as other localized factors that would better explain the anomalous temperature increase in Detroit.

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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23 June, 2020

Greens promote child slave labor and ecological destruction

Why don’t African black lives and ecological values matter? or impacts in and beyond Virginia?

Paul Driessen

The US Supreme Court recently ruled 7-2 to reverse a lower court ruling that had invalidated a permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which will bring West Virginia natural gas to Virginia and North Carolina, for home heating, factory power, electricity generation and manufacturing petrochemical feedstocks.

Environmentalists had claimed the US Forest Service had no authority to issue the permit, because a 0.1-mile (530-foot) segment would cross 600 feet below the 2,200-mile-long Appalachian Trail, which is administered by the National Park Service. Justice Thomas’s majority opinion scuttled that assertion.

Pipeline project developers Dominion Resources and Duke Energy should receive the USFS and other permits relatively soon – and have the pipeline in operation by early 2022 – unless a Biden administration takes over in 2021 (with AOC as woke climate and energy advisor to Biden and Democrats) and imposes Green New Deal bans on drilling, fracking, pipelines, and eventually any use of natural gas, oil and coal.

Meanwhile, environmentalist groups plan more lawsuits. They insist the pipeline would put rivers and streams at risk of increased sedimentation, scar pristine landscapes, and harm sensitive species.

These plans and assertions underscore how inflexible they have become in opposing any US fossil fuel use. How incapable of recognizing or rationally discussing the far greater human and ecological impacts from energy systems they favor. How reliant on blatant double standards and mob rule, instead of on rational, cohesive, persuasive discussion.

Barely a few years ago, the Sierra Club and allied groups gladly took $187 million and more from Michael Bloomberg, natural gas producers and other financiers to wage their War on Coal. Having closed down most US coal mines and power plants, they then turned gas from a “climate friendly bridge fuel” to evil incarnate. Today they to end fossil fuel use nationwide. Via delusion, incantation and cancellation of debate, they have convinced themselves that wind, solar, battery and biofuel “alternatives” are somehow “clean, green, renewable and sustainable.” Reality says otherwise.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline will be underground, mostly invisible beneath a grassy right-of-way. Any sedimentation will occur during short term construction operations, when some wildlife will be scared off or displaced for a spell. Any threat to sensitive species, even in the event of a leak, will be minimal.

In stark contrast, their preferred energy systems will have massive, permanent impacts – in Virginia and far beyond its borders. Virginia solar panels will blanket more than eight times the land area of Washington, DC. Hundreds of 850-foot-tall bird-killing wind turbines will create an enormous obstacle course for whales, ships and planes off the Virginia Beach coast. Many thousands of 1,200-pound batteries will provide backup power to replace coal and solar for a sunless, windless day or two.

Hundreds of miles of new transmission lines will soar into the sky and snake across the countryside. Just bringing wind-based electricity from West Virginia to Blacksburg, Roanoke and Lynchburg, Virginia – and solar energy from all those Virginia panels to Staunton and Harrisonburg – will require several new transmission lines across the Appalachian Trail. Not 600 feet below it; right across it.

But somehow, we and our courts are supposed to believe, all these enormous industrial facilities – and the blasting, tree clearing, machinery, noise and other impacts associated with building and maintaining them – will cause no stream sedimentation, landscape scarring or harm to sensitive species.

In reality, the radical greens, utility companies and Democrats promoting these projects under the Virginia “Clean” Economy Act will simply demand that courts ignore the arguments they raised and environmental laws they cited when they raged against coal and gas power plants and the pipelines and transmission lines associated with them. They’ll demand that citizen groups opposed to these monstrous wind, solar and battery complexes be thrown out of court. They’ll want the same double standards applied nationally.

Eliminating fossil fuels would mean America would have to replace 100% of its gasoline and all its oil and natural gas feed stocks for pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, paints, synthetic fibers, fertilizers – and plastics for cell phones, computers, car bodies, packaging, wind turbine blades, solar panel films and countless other products. That would require turning some 700 million acres of food crop and habitat land (four times the land area of Texas) into biofuel corn, sugarcane and canola plantations for ethanol and biodiesel.

More extreme versions of the Green New Deal would eliminate coal, gas and nuclear electricity and backup power, gas for home heating, coal and gas for factories, and internal combustion vehicles. We’d replace it all with wind or solar – and use wind or solar on good days to generate enough extra electricity to charge batteries for seven windless, sunless days. That’s 8.5 billion megawatts – twice what we used in 2018!

We’d need some 75 billion solar panels ... or 4.2 million 1.8-MW onshore wind turbines ... or 320,000 10-MW offshore wind turbines ... and some 3.5 billion 100-kWh backup batteries. The concrete, steel, copper, lithium, rare earth elements, aluminum, cobalt, plastic and other materials to build them would require vastly more mining and manufacturing than the world has ever seen – nearly all of it with fossil fuels.

Environmentalists oppose almost all mining anywhere in the United States, and even by US companies operating overseas under rigorous Western rules. That means essential metals and minerals get mined and processed in places like Baotou, Inner Mongolia, Bolivia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly under Chinese control, under minimal to nonexistent labor, wage, environmental, reclamation, and worker health and safety regulations. The mining and industrial areas have become vast toxic wastelands.

For cobalt alone, over 40,000 Congolese children, as young as four years old, slave away alongside their parents in mines, for a dollar a day, risking cave-ins and being exposed constantly to filthy, toxic, radioactive mud, dust, water and air. That’s today – for today’s battery, solar panel and wind turbine needs. Imagine how many would be needed to serve the Green New Deal. 400,000 perhaps? 4,000,000?

China alone will soon have 200 times more coal-fired generation than Virginia will be shutting down. During 2020, says consulting company Wood Mackenzie, Europe and the United States will close down 22,000 megawatts of coal-fired power capacity – even as Asia opens 49,000 megawatts of new coal-fired power plants, on top of those it already has and in addition to its growing fleet of gas-fired units.

China is building or financing numerous coal and gas power plants in Africa and Asia. India already has hundreds of coal-fired units and is building or planning 400 more. China and India are also building or planning hundreds of new airports, and putting millions of new cars and trucks on their roads. That (plus the GND mining, processing and manufacturing) means, even if Virginia or the entire USA eliminated all fossil fuel use tomorrow – it wouldn’t make an iota of difference for global carbon dioxide levels.

These environmental and human rights travesties can happen only under a system of rampant double standards: the same kinds that excoriate and ban religious services and funerals, anti-lockdown protests and Trump rallies – while permitting, excusing and praising Black Lives Matter marches that have too often turned into anti-police mobs, riots, looting, arson, beatings, and murders of people like David Dorn and Patrick Underwood, whose also precious black lives certainly haven’t mattered much to this crowd.

They also require that the woke Campus Cancel Culture spread its intolerant, authoritarian rule to our cities, media, social media, and even legislative bodies and courts – to instill constant anger and anarchy, and silence, defame and punish anyone who dares to offer nuanced or contrarian viewpoints. Every victory brings new demands, with no accountability for the mayhem and destruction they inflict.

Why should rural, poor, minority and working class families and communities have to accept the ecological, health and economic damages inflicted in pursuit of this pseudo-renewable energy utopia? Why should Africans, Asians and Latin Americans have to accept slave status to advance this agenda?

The situation is coming to a head. Let’s hope the now-silent majority can restore law, order, civil debate, thoughtful reflection on our complex history, and rational resolution of these thorny problems.

Via email

Energy density and the electric car charging dilemma

Given all the hype over renewable sources to generate intermittent electricity, the numbers from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) support none of the biased hype. Fossil fuels dominate the energy mix today and are projected to do so for at lest a decade as shown in the figure below.

Yet over the past four decades billions have been spent on solar, wind, corn and other biofuels, not to mention electric cars which I will cover shortly. The result of all this investment been only a modest gain in market share. Part of this is the amazing number of other lifestyle products derived from petroleum. EIA has calculated that they number over 6000. An added disadvantage is that renewables have no role in the military, or for airlines, cruise ships or supertankers.

While conspiracy theorists may prefer to believe that big oil, coal and nuclear have stifled the growth of renewables, it is not so. Only coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear can satisfy the four energy imperatives, power density, energy density, cost and scale. Renewables fall woefully short of meeting these requirements.

The biggest impediment to the growth of electricity generated by wind and solar is the newly coined Ciccione/Lehr Rule of Thumb which states “All wind and solar power on the electric grid must be backed up by an equal or greater amount of fossil fuel power running on standby 100% of the time” It has been described in detail in numerous previous articles by this author at CFACT.org.

Let’s turn our attention to the most over looked source of energy coming to the fore daily, that which powers so-called electric cars. California plans to have over 25 million such vehicles in the not too distant future. The utility companies have thus far had little to say about the alarming cost projections or the certain increased rates that will be required to charge their customers. It is not just the total amount of electricity required but the transmission lines and fast charging capacity that must be built at existing filling stations. Neither wind or solar can support any of it.

A Canadian engineer recently ran the numbers involved in the switchover to electric vehicles and concluded that in order to match the 2000 cars that a typical filling station can service in a busy 12 hours, the filling station would require 600, 50 watt chargers at an estimated cost of $24 million and a supply of 30 megawatts of power from the grid which would be enough to power 20,000 homes. Unlike home recharging stations, these would be operating at peak usage hours where the rates are the highest. Can you spell brownout and blackout. Basically new grids will need to be built at the cost of billions.

No-one likely thinks about the fact that it can take between 30 minutes and 8 hours to recharge a vehicle, depending on it being empty or just topping off. They will need lounge areas, holding areas for vehicles completed but waiting for owners to return from shopping or dining.

There is no question that electric vehicles have some positive attributes, low refueling costs, no air pollutants at the point of use and quiet operation, but are they actually clean anEnergy density and the electric car charging dilemmad green as their marketing insists. They have no tailpipes, as we know, on the car, but immense exhausts miles away. Aren’t they really coal or natural gas cars? They are certainly not wind and solar cars .

Regardless of their promise they continue to be hampered by their long standing drawbacks, extra costs, limited range, slow recharge rates, lack of recharging stations and a relatively short battery life with a high replacement cost against the life cycle of the average internal combustion engined car.

Although the modern lithium-ion battery is four times better than the old lead-acid battery, gasoline holds 80 times the energy density. The great lithium-ion battery in your cell phones weighs less than an ounce while the Tesla battery weighs 1000 pounds.

Do we still think electric cars are the wave of the future?

SOURCE

America leads the world in pollution reduction

The constant hammering by the left at climate change is driven by a desire to destroy the very foundations that drive our economy. How can one come to any other conclusion when wAmerica leads the world in pollution reductione look at these charts? Guess who leads the world in the reduction of ocean pollution?

THE USA. Look at China, the worlds biggest polluter. Now look at Carbon emissions, Who is one of the greenest countries on the planet?

The USA. So why are we being subjected to a collective guilt trip on destroying the planet, when, if what they say is true, it’s large areas of the rest of the world that is doing it?
Does it even phase them that prosperity leads to better living conditions?

America leads the world in pollution reduction 1Here is the reason. Its not a concern about CO2 destroying the planet. How could it be when our capitalistic system has developed a way to reduce that for those that fear it? And guess what, there are more things that can be done that would ENHANCE, not destroy our way of life in this matter. So why would anyone hammer the USA?. Because its not the real agenda. They know darn well that though climate change is down on the list of most importance to most people, there is a bloc of INDOCTRIANATED VOTERS, that have no idea that their country is the leader because of its system, that can turn an election. We have enough swing states that if you have a bloc voting on their fears because they believe their country and way of life is evil, you get pushed over the edge. That bloc has no idea on the exact statistics, whether you believe CO2 is the devil or not. They are unaware that the USA is doing its share, in fact, more than our share if this is the real matter.

But it is not. Like so many things, there are informational predatory practices designed to prey on people to sway them, with no regard for other sides of the issue. They know few will actually look. So they hide information and push a missive to achieve another goal to seek a mass group think, where there is no dissent. Those very tactics are an attack on our way of life. So what can this possibly be driven by? And here is what is so maddening.

They seek to destroy the very system that could actually get rid of this if it was a problem. The problem now is not the climate, it’s the perception that an atmospheric apocalypse is on the way and you must in essence, commit economic suicide to stop it. Yet if that’s true, the USA is doing our part to stop that.

Simple logic dictates that if our way of life is leading the world in this matter. While a socialist/communist giant like China is at the bottom, why would anyone want to destroy the very nation leading the way and move toward a system that does not? The real reason can not be, for most, a true concern for climate, but instead to push the perception that we are not a force for good in the world, and that our way of life must be dismantled. They claim its for the good of the world, but it’s the opposite. This nation better wake up to the idea that this has very little to with science, but ulterior motives that run counter to what made this nation the envy of the world. Which if climate change was the real issue, the US already is in that matter!

SOURCE

Mining lobby increases its virtue signalling

Australia's peak mining lobby group will release a road map on Monday to cut carbon emissions as it throws its support behind the Paris Agreement.

The Minerals Council of Australia wants to use clean energy and electric vehicles at mines across the country.

"This is a time for action, instead of vague virtue-signalling about future ambitions without the courage to outline concrete plans," chief executive Tania Constable told The Australian on Monday.

The three-year plan is expected to help Australia's major mining companies compete while calming community concerns on climate change.

Ms Constable said climate change posed risks and opportunities for the sector with sustained action needed to dampen its effects.

The federal government is currently designing its technology investment blueprint to entice funding in gas, hydro and hydrogen energy as a way to cut carbon emissions.

SOURCE

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

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

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

22 June, 2020

Pro-Abortion Biden Says Climate Change Damaging Unborn Children

The NYT article appears too be referring to the Bekkar et al. study. One notes that Bekkar et al considered only 68 out of 1831 relevant articles. One wonders what the other articles said and whether or not their conclusions influenced their inclusion in the survey. There is much room for biased inclusion in such studies.

They also comment that "Accurate comparisons of risk were limited by differences in study design, exposure measurement, population demographics, and seasonality."

So the conclusions are very shaky, particularly when we note that the effects in studies of this sort are very weak. Most of the articles will have reported effects that explain only a tiny amount of the variance -- so could easily have been influenced by extraneous factors

The media should launch a thorough investigation into determining whether Joe Biden has any brains at all. “Yes, but he talks a lot,” Biden defenders might say. “You can’t talk if you don’t have brains.”

Well, like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz reminds us, “Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking.”

Exhibit A in the case for no brains for Biden comes via a tweet that Biden posted responding to New York Times climate change reporter Hiroko Tabuchi.

Researchers looked at data from studies covering more than 32 million births from 2007 to 2019. Women exposed to high temperatures or air pollution are more likely to have premature, underweight or stillborn babies, a look at 32 million U.S. births found.

Biden’s reply was unintentionally hilarious.

Climate change is linked to increased pregnancy risks — and heartbreakingly, Black mothers are being hit the hardest. As President, I'll work every day to tackle the climate crisis head-on and root out injustice. Because they are intertwined

Protecting mothers and unborn babies is important, but Biden does not support the most fundamental of all protections: a right to life. Quite the opposite, he supports the so-called “right” to abort an unborn baby. And, to use Biden’s words, “heartbreakingly” black mothers and unborn babies are hit the hardest by abortions.

Since 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, approximately 20 million unborn black babies have been aborted in America.

Though abortions hurt families of every race and culture, statistics indicate that abortions disproportionately hurt the African American community. Census data indicates that African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population, but they have nearly 40 percent of all abortions. And New York City health statistics indicate that more African American babies are aborted in the city than are born each year.

Does Biden realize the idiocy of his statement? How can you be for aborting babies and saving them at the same time?

He promised to end the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits taxpayer-funded abortions in Medicaid. He also said one of his first acts as president would be to restore funding to Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion chain in America.

In March, he even suggested using taxpayer funds for abortions as a solution to overpopulation in poor countries. Then, in April, he went so far as to call the killing of unborn babies an “essential medical service” during the coronavirus pandemic.

I can recall the slippery slope argument of pro-lifers when Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. They warned that eventually, abortion would be used to control populations, as they were already doing in China. The pro-life lobby was ridiculed for saying such nonsense. Through the years, everything that the pro-life lobby has warned about — including killing babies up to the moment they’re born — was dismissed as the ranting of lunatics.

Biden is looking to shamelessly pander to those who think abortion is a religion. He hit the trifecta by also pandering to blacks and greens. It’s like he has a checklist of groups that he has to reassure with every public utterance.

And yes, that’s brainless.

SOURCE

IPCC’s core hypothesis is dead

by Ed Berry, PhD, Atmospheric Physics, CCM

1. Introduction

1.1 IPCC’s claims are based on invalid hypothesis
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [1] bases all its climate claims on its core hypothesis. This hypothesis has three parts:

Natural carbon emissions remained constant after 1750.
Natural carbon emissions support a CO2 level of 280 ppm.
Human carbon emissions caused all the CO2 increase above 280 ppm.

IPCC claims its core hypothesis is true and concludes without scientific validation:

“With a very high level of confidence, the increase in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning and those arising from land use change are the dominant cause of the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.”

“The removal of human-emitted CO2 from the atmosphere by natural processes will take a few hundred thousand years (high confidence).”

The truth is IPCC’s “high level of confidence” vanishes because it assumes incorrectly that IPCC’s core hypothesis is true.

1.2 What this paper does

Simple observation of IPCC’s report [1] shows IPCC’s human carbon cycle does not agree with its natural carbon cycle. IPCC’s own Figure 6.1 shows something is wrong with IPCC’s human carbon cycle.

To test the above observation, this paper derives a “Physics” carbon cycle model that uses only one simple hypothesis:

Outflow equals level divided by response time, herein called e-time.

This hypothesis is used in many scientific and engineering models. Even IPCC uses this hypothesis in several places. It is the simplest possible hypothesis for carbon cycle models.

This simple hypothesis is compatible with all applicable physical and chemical laws. This simple hypothesis shows it is possible and preferable to calculate the natural and human carbon cycles separately. The results of the separate calculations can be added together to produce the total carbon cycle.

IPCC’s carbon cycle model has four key reservoirs: land, atmosphere, surface ocean, and deep ocean. IPCC’s data show carbon levels for each reservoir and the flows between the reservoirs for both natural and human carbon cycles. IPCC’s data for its natural carbon cycle is not perfect but it may be the best data we have. IPCC says its natural carbon cycle data is good to about 20 percent accuracy.

This paper calculates the six e-times for IPCC’s natural carbon cycle data by simply dividing levels by their outflows. Why six? Because the atmosphere and surface ocean have two outflows while the land and deep ocean have only one. With these six e-times, the Physics carbon cycle model is complete, and it exactly replicates IPCC’s data for its natural carbon cycle.

Then this paper calculates the human carbon cycle model. This model begins with all reservoirs empty and inserts IPCC’s data for annual human carbon emissions into the atmosphere. In each model year, the Physics model lets human carbon flow between the reservoirs according the e-times defined by IPCC’s natural carbon cycle.

This simple calculation shows the “true” human carbon cycle because it requires human carbon to obey the same physical rules as IPCC’s natural carbon cycle. However, this “true” human carbon cycle differs significantly from IPCC’s claimed human carbon cycle.

The fact that IPCC’s human carbon cycle is significantly different from the true human carbon cycle – that corresponds to IPCC’s natural carbon cycle – proves IPCC’s human carbon cycle is invalid. IPCC treats human and natural carbon differently, which is unphysical.

Inspection of IPCC’s data shows IPCC did NOT derive its human carbon cycle from its data for the natural carbon cycle or from any data at all. IPCC forced its human carbon cycle to match its core hypothesis without any consideration of IPCC’s natural carbon cycle data.

Therefore, IPCC’s human carbon cycle has no basis in science. Put politely, IPCC’s human carbon cycle is a fraud.

This conclusion is independent of whether IPCC’s natural carbon cycle or the Physics natural carbon cycle properly represent the unknown true natural carbon cycle. All models are approximations to reality.

All that matters here is that the Physics model properly represents IPCC’s natural carbon cycle. Therefore, the Physics model properly calculates IPCC’s true human carbon cycle. This is sufficient to prove IPCC’s human carbon cycle is a fraud and that IPCC’s core hypothesis is false.

All three parts of IPCC’s core hypothesis listed in Section 1.1 are false. There is no other testable hypothesis to replace IPCC’s failed core hypothesis.

The political implications of IPCC’s scientific fraud are significant. IPCC told the world that its human carbon cycle was valid. IPCC’s fraud negates all its claims about human-caused climate change. IPCC’s fraud negates all IPCC’s so-called scientific papers that incorrectly assume IPCC’s core hypothesis is true. All such “scientific” papers are wrong.

Henceforth, no true scientist can claim or assume that natural carbon emissions stayed constant after 1750 and human carbon emissions caused all the increase in atmospheric CO2 above 280 ppm.

SOURCE

No, Google, Climate Change Is Not Killing Americans, It Is Saving Them

At the top of Google News searches this morning for “climate change” is an article titled, “Climate Change Is Killing Americans. Health Departments Aren’t Equipped to Respond.” The article, published by Columbia Journalism Investigations and the far-left British tabloid The Guardian, claims “a rise in dangerous heat in the United States” is causing a dramatic rise in climate-related deaths. However, just the opposite is the case, as objective evidence proves warmer temperatures are reducing deaths in America and around the world.

The Columbia article claims, “In contrast to a viral pandemic, like the one caused by the novel coronavirus, this [the asserted rise in heatwaves] is a quiet, insidious threat with no end point.” The article provides, as an illustrative example, the story of an Arizona man who lived alone, in isolation, in his rural desert home. When people hadn’t heard from him for three weeks, police checked on his home and found his dead body. His air conditioner had broken down and it was 99 degrees. An autopsy ruled “heat exposure” as his cause of death.

The premise of the Columbia article is that global warming caused the high summer temperatures in the Arizona desert that caused the man to die. As if Arizona was a cool, temperate, refreshing summer oasis prior to global warming causing the Arizona desert to begin getting hot in the summer just 50 years ago. People with common sense know better.

If you don’t trust your common sense, we can look at objective evidence. As shown in Climate at a Glance: U.S. Temperatures, there has been no warming in the United States since at least 2005, which is when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration implemented its most precise-ever temperature network throughout the United States. It seems rather odd that Columbia would publish an article claiming “Climate Change Is Killing Americans” by virtue of higher temperatures when there has been no increase in American temperatures for at least the past 15 years.

Also, scientists report cold temperatures cause more deaths than warm temperatures. In a peer-reviewed study published in the prestigious medical journal Lancet, researchers found that colder-than-ideal temperatures kill 20 times more people globally than warmer-than-ideal temperatures. That includes the United States, where the U.S. Centers for Disease Control report far more Americans die each day during the cold winter months than during the warm summer months. Therefore, even if temperatures were warming in the United States, any such climate change would save the lives of far more people than would die because of the warmer temperatures.

It is a shame that Google doesn’t “fact check” itself to avoid promoting clearly deceitful alarmist articles as top results for climate change “news.”

SOURCE

Rooftop solar power law acts as subsidy for the wealthy

A policy meant to encourage more rooftop solar power generation could be costing all ratepayers and subsidizing the affluent.

The policy —net metering— allows consumers to offset their electric bill with electricity generated from rooftop solar panels. When the solar panels produce more electricity than the home is using, excess electricity is put back onto the grid. The meter “spins” backward, deducting the electricity generated from the resident’s bill. Homeowners pay only for the net amount their meter records, hence the name “net metering.”

Under Missouri law, net metering customers are paid at the retail electricity rate for the power they generate. However, retail electricity prices include more than just generation. Transmission and distribution costs, among other items, are included in a ratepayer’s retail electricity price. In Missouri, only about a third of the retail price is from electricity generation costs.

When net metering customers are paid retail rates, they receive payments not just for the electricity they produce but also the parts of retail rates that are used to maintain the electric grid, which they neither provide nor maintain. But the costs of providing and maintaining transmission and distribution infrastructure don’t disappear—utilities pass on the costs of net metering programs to other customers through higher rates.

The costs passed on to other customers can be quite high. According to research by the Brookings Institute, if a net metering customer zeroes out their monthly bill entirely, they shift $45 to $70 onto regular customers. Before reforms were enacted in 2016, net metering customers in Arizona shifted over $9 million in annual costs onto regular customers. Net metering customers in Nevada received a roughly $500 annual subsidy from regular customers; reforms in 2017 lowered that dollar amount, but only slightly.

Moreover, this cost shift has regressive effects. A survey by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that solar panel owners have incomes 50 percent higher than the median income of households that don’t own solar panels. Asking lower-income earners to subsidize wealthier solar panel owners is hardly an ideal policy.

So what can be done about this problem? One solution is to compensate net metering customers at wholesale, not retail, prices. Net metering customers would be paid the costs the utility saves by not generating this electricity, which would not include the many other costs—transmission, distribution, administration, etc.—that the retail rate includes. This approach better reflects the value of the electricity produced and doesn’t lead to such drastic cost shifting. Alternatively, an additional monthly fee could be charged to net metering customers to offset retail price overcompensation, as Kansas has done.

Rooftop solar power has room for growth in Missouri, but current net metering laws unfairly reward those with solar panels and punish those without. Missouri should consider altering the net metering policy to make it fairer for all ratepayers.

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, 2020

Natural Variability Behind West Antarctic Warming—Media Silent

DAVID WHITEHOUSE

Ten days ago the journal Science issued an embargoed press release about a forthcoming paper that suggested the warming observed in West Antarctica was due to natural climatic variability.

West Antarctica has always been looked on by alarmists as being the southern example of polar temperature amplification – a phenomenon predicted by most climate change models.

The Arctic temperature amplification is very apparent so there must be an Antarctic equivalent, and there it is.

But while scientists have been well aware that Antarctica is warming asymmetrically, with West Antarctica experiencing more than East Antarctica and frequently attributed to climate change, the underlying causes of this phenomenon have been poorly understood, and the suggestion that West Antarctica may be experiencing natural warming has been suggested before though not taken up very enthusiastically, if at all.

This new paper, “The internal origin of the west-east asymmetry of Antarctic climate change”, expresses the dilemma well.

In explaining the asymmetry, it suggests factors such as atmosphere-ocean feedbacks along the coast of West Antarctica and the shape of the Antarctic terrain combine to create a pattern of upper troposphere circulation over the West Antarctic subcontinent that flows opposite to the Earth’s rotation.

Fig. 2: Two leading modes of the annual-mean Antarctic surface temperature and their characteristics from 1958 to 2012 in the CMIP5 historical simulations. Source: Sang-Yoon Jun et al., 2020

The researchers conclude,

The current west-east asymmetry of Antarctic surface climate change is undoubtedly of natural origin because no external factors (e.g., orbital or anthropogenic factors) contribute to the asymmetric mode.”

They add that the consistent pattern of warmer sea surface temperatures over the Amundsen and Bellingshausen Antarctic seas suggests that regional sea surface temperature anomalies around Antarctica are a driving factor behind the continent’s asymmetrical warming.

Paleoclimate datasets revealed variability in surface air temperatures spanning multiple decades, suggesting climate fluctuations in the tropics, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, may also contribute to the discrepancies in warming rates between both subcontinents.

Overall, it’s a fascinating paper especially given the concern about the region’s ice decline leading to present and future sea-level change. But unless you look at two or three specialized outlets you won’t have heard about it.

The embargoed information from the Science journal is normally released four days before the embargo is lifted on Thursday evening UK time.

Thousands of journalists around the world see it as Science along with Nature are the world’s leading science journals. So why is it that no mainstream news media covered this important story? It’s not as though there were any other pressing environment stories to eclipse it.

What it demonstrates is the asymmetry in environment and science reporting. If the story confirms the dire news that anthropogenic climate change affects everything and is visible anywhere it’s much more likely to be trumpeted by the mainstream media than if it explains some of the climatic changes we see is due to mother nature.

Not every change we see is attributable to human influence. We still have to deal with the consequences.

Accurate knowledge is the first step because if we don’t understand the cause of particular climatic changes we will waste a lot of time and effort combatting things we never caused and have no power to influence.

SOURCE

Virginia’s latest folly — offshore wind power

As reported in an earlier article, Virginia’s green electric power plan calls for 5,000 MW of offshore wind generating capacity to be built in the next decade or so. This is a huge amount given that the worldwide total is just around 15,000 MW. We are talking about something like 800 giant windmills, embedded in the ocean floor and sticking hundreds of feet into the air above the water. They will be on the order of one and a half times taller than the Washington Monument, which is really tall.

Two features make this offshore wind plan a folly — too little wind and too much wind. Let’s look at too little wind first.

The proposed site is around 30 miles offshore of the giant Norfolk naval complex. Sites are usually much closer in than this, but maybe the Navy told them to keep their distance. Or perhaps they are out beyond the very busy shipping lanes. Every ship from Central and South America, or the southeast U.S., headed for ports from Baltimore north to Canada, passes through this area. This in itself is a concern but not one we are looking at now.

The problem is that this area frequently gets periods of a week or more when the wind is too low to generate any power. These are winds of 10 mph or less. Normal wind turbines require sustained wind of 33 mph or more to generate full power. Some new models with giant blades can do full power at just 23 mph. But neither generates much of anything at 10 mph. It is not a matter of no wind; low wind is enough.

Weather records for Norfolk show just such an event last year, with the low wind period being August 17-23. The wind never measured over 10 mph for the entire 7 days.

To make matters worse, when these low wind periods occur in summer they often include very high temperatures. In the event cited above the high temperatures were in the upper 80’s and low 90’s. Away from the ocean, temperatures were even higher. Both Richmond and Washington DC saw high temperatures in the mid to upper 90’s for most of this week long period.

These high temperatures create the greatest need for electricity, called peak demand. Combining peak demand with no wind power means this huge, expensive wind facility does nothing when electricity is most needed. Some other form of power generation will have to be standing by to do what the 5,000 MW of useless offshore wind power cannot do.

There is no provision for this duplication of generating capacity in the Virginia plan. If it is not there when needed, then a prolonged blackout is the only option.

Week long periods of no generation low wind occur fairly often in the Norfolk area, perhaps once every few years. In a hot summer they may occur more than once. But there are also many shorter periods of low wind, with a high need for electricity, that occur more frequently. Then too there are no doubt longer periods of low wind that occur less frequently. At the one in fifty year frequency we might get a month or more of low wind. I see no evidence that these possibilities have been addressed in the Virginia plan.

On the high wind side we have hurricanes.

This area could be called hurricane alley because many storms turn north in the Caribbean and run up the American coast. Southern Virginia and northern North Carolina actually stick out into this flow. That is where these tall towers will be.

Category five hurricanes have sustained winds over 156 mph with gusts that can exceed 200 mph. To date no offshore wind towers have been designed to withstand these sorts of winds. Most have been built in Europe where hurricanes do not occur. The force of the wind is a function of the square of the wind speed, so a 160 mph wind is four times as destructive as an 80 mph wind.

In fact the US Energy Department recently announced a new research program to look into whether a hurricane proof design is even possible. Here’s how DOE puts it:

“Although hurricanes and the damage they can cause remain difficult to predict, with current R&D, the Energy Department is taking steps to alleviate potential risks to offshore wind systems that will eventually be deployed in the southeastern and mid-Atlantic regions.“

DOE puts a positive spin on it but it seems clear that we are in no position to build massive hurricane proof offshore wind facilities today. DOE says “eventually” and even that may be wishful thinking.

One thing certain is that if Virginia goes ahead, in effect playing chicken with cat 5 storms, these hundreds of towers will have to be far stronger than standard European designs. Stronger means more expensive. The standard cost is around $1.5 million per MW, which would be $7.5 billion in Virginia’s case. If hurricane proofing doubles the cost that puts a monstrous $15 billion at risk of destruction.

Conclusion: The Virginia plan is calling for a massive and incredibly expensive offshore wind generating facility, at high risk of failure, that will produce no power whatever when it is needed most.

Surely this is folly.

SOURCE

Scottish Government’s failure to meet carbon emission target blamed on Cold Weather

I’m not making it up, this is a genuine headline run by the heraldscotland.com on June 16, 2020…

THE FAILURE of the Scottish Government to meet its own climate emissions target –net zero by 2045– has been blamed on the “beast from the east” bringing cold weather to the nation in 2018, reads the opening lines of the article.

According to statistics published yesterday, emissions in the power sector from fossil fuels actually increased by 51 per cent to 2.6 gigawatts from 2017-2018, with overall source emissions rising 1.5 per cent over the same period.

Scotland’s Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham said the annual increase is “certainly disappointing” and stressed that the bar has been “intentionally been set to provide an extremely stretching pathway to net zero”.

Cunningham put the increase in emissions from 2017 to 2018 down to “changes to the national energy mix and freezing temperatures from the beast from the east during the early months of 2018” which led to “a rise in emissions from energy supply and heating use for buildings.”

She added: “While emissions reductions were seen in all other sectors including transport, industry and agriculture, during 2018 the overall effect was a 1.5 per cent increase and we expect a substantial part of that was driven by the cold weather.”

Oh what a twisted, illogical mess these poor environmentalists have gone and made for themselves. Rising carbon dioxide levels are delivering catastrophic heating, goes their rhetoric — yet CO2 emissions are rising because folks need to heat their homes in order to stave off the record cold.

If this warped ideology wasn’t restricting our ability to prepare for what’s really coming then I’d surely piss myself laughing.

In addition, it appears that 2019 and 2020 aren’t looking too hot for these delusional carbon-(the backbone of all life)-hating hippies either. Chilly conditions in 2019 have tossed another spanner into the works, and now, thanks to the COVID-19 debacle, the low emission plans for the cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee have all been put on hold.

Despite all of these major setbacks, the Scottish Government “remains absolutely committed to ending Scotland’s emissions contribution by 2045” with a 75 per cent reduction target by 2030.

Cunningham concluded: “Covid-19 means that our starting position has most definitely changed, but our ambitions have not. We are committed to delivering a green recovery from this pandemic.”

In other words, the BS goes on.

And will continue to go on.

Until the returning COLD TIMES render large parts of the mid-latitudes uninhabitable and people begin burning whatever the hell they can find to keep themselves warm (I recommend Greta Thunberg’s book, “No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference”).

SOURCE

See the Slideshow AOC Tried, and Failed, to Censor

By Caleb Rossiter

This is my slide show and 20-minute talk that Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Chellie Pingree tried to censor at the LibertyCon 2020 conference in Washington, D.C.

They wrote to sponsors of the event, including Google and Facebook, and asked them not to fund any event with an appearance by "climate deniers" from the CO2 Coalition.

LibertyCon indeed lost some sponsorship, but because of its commitment to the free exchange of ideas still invited me back to speak in 2020. This is the talk I had prepared, before the coronavirus crisis forced the cancellation of the conference.

As background to this topic, I suggest that you watch the CO2 Coalition's "CO2-Minute" video, "Carbon Dioxide: Part of a Greener Future."

Now, on to the talk! Click the link to watch the slideshow Climate Statistics 101.

Via 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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19 June, 2020

Failing Cities and States use Climate Change Lawsuits as Fiscal Escape Hatch

Cities and states are suing energy companies in a desperate attempt to erase their poor spending choices. Local officials argue oil and gas companies contribute to climate change and must be held accountable, but beneath this façade, leftist politicians are trying to win the lawsuit lottery to stave off fiscal insolvency.

Government officials keep pursuing these suits because they can’t figure out how to fix the budget deficits they have created. Suing big corporations in friendly jurisdictions is an escape hatch to avoid the repercussions of decades of wasteful spending. Unfortunately, these efforts hurt the wallets of everyday Americans who have money invested in energy companies, and if successful, energy costs would likely rise across America.

Analyzing the legal actions taken by various localities show they are trying to make a quick buck. Over and over, states and cities make unprovable and exaggerated claims contradicting Supreme Court precedent. Sometimes the mask slips and officials even admit that the suits are really about generating revenue.

Local officials claim climate change will soon devastate their cities in legal filings, but argue the opposite when money is on the line. Horace Cooper, a senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, describes this hypocrisy.

"It seems the left hand isn't watching what the far-left hand is up to. San Mateo County, California, for example, claims in its lawsuit against the energy industry that there's a 93% risk

of a devastating climate-change-related flood by 2050. Yet its municipal bond offering to potential investors dismissively notes that it's ‘unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur.’”

San Francisco city officials made similarly apocalyptic arguments in their lawsuit, only to claim climate science was uncertain when trying to win over investors. City leaders were either lying about the devastating impacts of climate change or tricking investors into buying property that would soon be underwater. Thankfully, a federal judge threw out the San Francisco’s case writing, "The court will stay its hand in favor of solutions by the legislative and executive branches."

The Supreme Court reached an identical conclusion in 2011, finding 8-0 that the judiciary doesn’t have the authority to regulate emissions because the Clean Air Act gave regulatory powers to Congress and the EPA. Congress can change the law to make energy companies' activity illegal, but the courts can't.

So why are localities filing dishonest suits attempting to penalize legal activity? Because local officials have spent years running up deficits on pet projects and now need to generate revenue before they go belly up.

Public records reveal the leaders of Rhode Island view lawsuits against energy companies, as a way to prevent spending cuts. Janet Coit, director of the Department of Environmental Management, says suing oil and gas companies is meant to generate a "sustainable funding stream." Coit's comments show the real purpose of climate change suits, to bail out politicians who have made unwise choices for years and are now feeling the heat.

Rhode Island is a prime example of spending run amok, as state officials have accumulated a structural deficit projected at $4.1 million for the 2019-2020 fiscal year. Instead of addressing government excess, Rhode Island's governor ignored the deficit in her January State of State address.

A similar cycle is playing out in other jurisdictions, all governed by irresponsible leftist leaders. New York was facing an annual deficit between six and eight billion before COVID-19 hit because of an unwise minimum wage increase coupled with Medicaid expansion. State officials tried to fill this gap by suing Exxon Mobil but were humiliated in court. New York City leaders are picking up where the state left off by suing several energy companies for the alleged impacts of climate change.

Oakland's finance director was particularly blunt about why the city was running a deficit, "We believe expenditures are growing faster than revenues. We do believe this continues to have a lot of pressures on our core city services." The city's politicians racked up deficits of over $100 million, and now the same politicians are suing energy companies to make up for their poor choices. The same process is occurring in Baltimore and Boulder where cash-strapped cities, run into the ground over generations of leftwing governance, are hoping to win the judicial jackpot.

Cities and states that have racked up debt because of profligate spending are trying to avoid spending cuts. Local officials are playing the lawsuit lottery by filing exaggerated and meritless claims against energy companies in hopes of finding a sympathetic judge. Instead of dragging energy companies to court and threatening to punish the consumer for city officials’ irresponsibility, these bureaucrats need to focus on repairing their fiscal health.

SOURCE

Nuclear Power Is Crucial To Our National Security

The world is facing a time of great uncertainty. Amidst a pandemic, a global recession, and immense civil unrest, we are seeing global democracy also come under attack. China is using the current state of the world as an opportunity to continue their imperialist prospects by cracking down on the formerly autonomous city of Hong Kong and creeping into India.

The EU has been reluctant to condemn China for its actions in Hong Kong and its role in allowing COVID-19 spread. This leaves the United States with great responsibility, standing as the lone maverick against despotism. The question now becomes: what can we do and how do we protect ourselves? A huge part of the answer is energy independence, particularly a stable nuclear power supply.

Nuclear power is all around an incredible energy source. For one, it is very scalable, accounting for about 20% of the nation’s energy supply. This is due to the immense power produced each time a plant is fired up. One single uranium fuel pellet is capable of providing as much power as one metric ton of coal or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas. This also makes nuclear the perfect energy source when disaster strikes and the grid needs more power. Furthermore, nuclear power emits zero CO2 to produce, making it the largest clean energy source in the country. In addition to these baseline benefits, we need a stable supply for our navy operations.

The Navy currently operates 101 nuclear reactors that power our aircraft carriers and submarines. Due to the concentration of fuel in each uranium pellet, ships can operate for 20 years without refueling. This gives us an unprecedented advantage on the seas. This advantage helps keep America, and much of the world, safe from the perils of oppressive regimes and bad actors.

Unfortunately, this key advantage is at risk of being lost. The pandemic and recession have only weakened our commercial nuclear energy suppliers and many will be on the brink of shutting down soon. The breakdown of the commercial nuclear energy industry threatens our Navy’s access to research, development, and uranium fuel. This is occurring while China and Russia are in the process of ramping up their nuclear energy industries. To make matters worse, our uranium supply chain is deeply problematic.

Most of the uranium fuel supply for nuclear reactors in the US came from domestic sources in the late 1960s and early to mid-1970s. Since then, however, the amount of domestically sourced uranium has been on the sharp decline and today it accounts for only a fraction of our supply. Though much of our uranium fuel comes from stable democracies like Australia and Canada, there is still a good portion coming from Russia and China.

It is clear that we must reinvigorate the commercial nuclear energy sector and rethink the way we obtain uranium. For starters, we can remove the archaic and overbearing regulatory barriers that are currently in place that don’t provide a net societal benefit. For example, regulations should be based on calculated risk and safety rather than arbitrary numbers like they are based on today. No nuclear project should take over a decade to approve.

Additionally, the Department of Energy should fulfill their contracts dating back to the 1990s with energy companies and begin collecting nuclear waste in a national repository. Because the DOE failed to do so, temporary storage of nuclear waste costs the taxpayers $2 million per day, making the national repository the most economical action for both energy companies and the taxpayer. The government should also embrace public-private partnerships to carry out important advanced nuclear research in order to meet the needs of both the public and private sectors.

Lastly, we need to obtain our uranium more responsibly and establish a national uranium stockpile. By authorizing more domestic uranium development and obtaining the rest from allies like Canada and Australia, we will shrink the global influence of countries like Russia while also ensuring our national security interests are addressed.

Nuclear power is crucial to our national security interests. Without it, we lose military strength and weaken American energy dominance. Scaling back regulations, reestablishing the national nuclear repository, and obtaining responsibly sourced uranium will translate to renewed investor confidence in nuclear power. Investments in nuclear power in the private sector will revitalize our commercial nuclear energy industry and, in turn, allow our Navy to retain their major advantage.

The United States is exceptional. We need to protect it for generations to come by embracing nuclear power again.

SOURCE

Coronavirus: Inflated pandemic estimates weaken climate forecasts

Australia: Tony Abbott’s suspicion that climate change modelling was “absolute crap” soon will resonate more broadly — so spectacularly bad was expert modelling of the spread and lethality of the coronavirus, faith in all modelling must surely suffer.

Why trust the experts to forecast the climate decades into the future when they were so wrong about a disease related to the common cold?

Official coronavirus and climate change modelling share catastrophic predictions. Unfortunately for virus modellers, reality dawned a lot sooner and it has delivered an F for fail.

The pandemic has damaged the credibility of “experts” and highlighted the limits of “the science” and the misplaced hubris of the political class.

On whatever measure you choose — deaths, infections, rate of transmission — the epidemiological models that convinced governments to take a sledgehammer to their economies, now mired in unrest, have proved scandalously pessimistic and out by orders of magnitude.

We were told the virus’s spread would be “exponential”. It wasn’t; transmission was falling before mandatory lockdowns scared the daylights out of people.

The infection fatality rate, we were told, would be about 1 per cent; it’s closer to 0.2 per cent, akin to a severe flu.

Apparently, lifting lockdowns early would see cases surge; they haven’t. And we were all vulnerable — but most weren’t; the median age of death is well over 80. Driving is more dangerous. At least half of deaths globally have been in aged-care homes, which were already locked down. We understood you could catch COVID-19 again — also wrong. We closed schools and wore masks, but the evidence we needed to do so is scant.

The raw numbers speak for themselves. The death toll globally is on track to be smaller than the flu pandemics of the 1950s and 60s, when the world’s population was less than half that today.

Indeed, if you put the number of global deaths last year, this year, and next year (about 60 million each year) on a simple column chart you’ll struggle to see the impact of COVID-19.

Future historians will be shocked at the disproportionate response. At least they will chuckle at SAGE, the acronym for the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, the expert panel advising the British government, which has presided over the worst performance of any country.

But it wasn’t only the British. Experts in Sweden warned 100,000 would die by June if it didn’t lock down as the rest of Europe had, yet fewer than 5000 were lost. Experts said 420,000 might die in Japan without a hard lockdown. Fewer than 950 did.

Our own experts at the Doherty Institute said 5000 intensive care unit beds would be required, even with strict isolation and social distancing; fewer than 50 were needed. For anyone here who is worried about a second wave of COVID-19, we’re still waiting on the first one.

Climate modelling was struggling even before the pandemic, given the planet has warmed about half as much as forecast by the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in back 1990.

“Almost the entire alarm about global warming is based on model predictions. If you just look at the last 30 to 40 years of data, nothing spectacular has happened, there’s no sign temperature increase is accelerating,” says Benny Peiser, founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London.

It’s remarkable we put so much faith in expert models, given their history of failure. The Club of Rome in 1972 notoriously forecast that growth would collapse as the world’s resources ran out, ignoring human ingenuity and the shale revolution.

Financial models failed to account for — indeed they probably facilitated — the global financial crisis. And as almost every utterance by a central bank governor since has reminded us, economists struggle to know what happened last month, let alone forecast the impact of a policy change tomorrow.

“In the late 1990s, models suggested the entire Great Barrier Reef would bleach every year by 2020, but in the last 15 years parts of the reef have bleached on only three occasions, with each event affecting only one-third of the reef,” says physicist Peter Ridd, a former professor of James Cook University.

It’s remarkable we put so much faith in climate modelling, given it is a far more complex task. “Climate sensitivity” — the size and speed of the response of global temperatures to a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — is harder to predict than a spreading virus. Even if we knew it, drawing implications about future economic growth is even more heroic.

“The big mistake that’s clearly been made is the failure to systematically appraise the models that underpin policy with actual data,” notes Gordon Hughes, a former professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, speaking on a panel about the pitfalls of mathematical modelling last month.

By April, we knew the coronavirus was not as dangerous as feared yet modellers and governments doubled down on the catastrophe narrative. It’s almost July and people in our capitals are wearing masks in their own cars.

How can we avoid the hysteria next time? It won’t be easy. All the incentives are stacked in favour of dodgy doomsday modelling; apocalyptic scenarios allow politicians to increase their power and appear caring. Public health experts enjoy more prestige. And some of the media naturally prefer models with horrifying forecasts to draw eyeballs.

Humans have a natural tendency to focus on extremes — what psychologists call a “negativity bias”. Models are almost cartoons, highly simplified versions of reality. History has proved a better guide to the future. It’s a pity we’re wasting resources on a royal commission into the bushfires. How and why authorities have overreacted so much, and how we can avoid doing so again, would be a better line of inquiry.

SOURCE

Australian Left prepared to streamline environmental approvals for major projects

A pleasant surprise. The conservatives are stressing this too

Labor is willing to fast-track approvals for major projects including mines and infrastructure in a new sign the Morrison government could reach a deal in Parliament to streamline environmental safeguards.

Labor environment spokeswoman Terri Butler backed the case for speedier decisions on big investments, declaring "every delayed decision is a delayed job" when projects deserved to go ahead.

The stance raises the prospect of an agreement between Labor and the Coalition on changes to environmental law after Prime Minister Scott Morrison this week said he would fix the regime in the name of creating jobs.

But Ms Butler blamed the government for allowing delays to blow out since the Coalition took power at the 2013 election with a pledge to cut red tape.

"They've been in government for seven years. Every delayed decision is a delayed job, a delay in getting a project kicked off and in getting jobs created," she said.

"Where an approval can be given to a project, where the project meets the environmental tests, where the environment can be protected, then that's not something that should be delayed."

Mr Morrison has opened negotiations with state and territory leaders to reach bilateral agreements that cut some of the duplication between the levels of government, potentially leaving more power with the states.

The idea has triggered warnings from environmental groups but the government is promising not to weaken safeguards and is not proposing detailed changes until it receives a review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act next month.

Ms Butler said Labor wanted faster decisions where it was safe to do so, where environmental protections were upheld and where decisions were made well.

"What we don't want is reducing decision-making times through having shoddier, under-resourced decisions," she said.

"If you rush a decision and you stuff it up, then that exposes you to litigation."

Ms Butler said Labor would support bilateral agreements between federal and state governments to reach the Prime Minister's ambition of "single-touch" approvals but said this could not sacrifice federal responsibility.

"The starting point has got to be that for matters of national environmental significance there always has to be a role for the commonwealth," she said.

Labor calculates that 86 per cent of project decisions were made on time under the EPBC Act in 2012 but this fell to 60 per cent in 2019.

The Gillard government attempted a single regime but dropped the idea after intense criticism from environmental groups and concerns that it could not achieve uniform rules for all states and territories. The Abbott government also sought to create a "one stop shop" for decisions.

Mr Morrison has revived those ambitions in national cabinet in the name of creating jobs during the recovery from the coronavirus crisis, but he is yet to receive the EPBC review by former competition regulator Graeme Samuel.

Labor is open to the idea of bilateral agreements on approvals to achieve faster decisions but Ms Butler said this would depend on the details, which would have to be made public.

Ms Butler also said Labor was open to the idea of amending the EPBC Act itself but only if it improved environmental protections when the country faced an "extinction crisis".

"Some wags, who don't like any form of regulation, will try to oppose this as a contest between jobs and the environment but of course that's ridiculous, because so many of our jobs depend on the environment," she said.

"Yes, I will be very interested to see what Graeme Samuel says about improving the EPBC Act, but it's got to have the twin focus of jobs and protecting the environment."

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here 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, 2020

Pesky snowpack in Montana

It takes months to fully clear winter’s snow at Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road, located in northern Montana, and the last big hurdle is an area known as ‘Big Drift’ where the pack reaches 40-80 ft annually.

The pack is at the higher-end of that range this year, but as weather.com and the National Park Service (NPS) desperately reassures us — this is still within the norm and a trend of increasing snowpack (which has been the case over the past few years) in no way disproves our beloved global warming theory.

But isn’t this the same NPS that for almost two decades warned the world that glaciers at Glacier National Park would be gone by the year 2020? The same NPS that went to the trouble of erecting signs across all of its visitor centers to serve as some 2020 doomsday countdown? Embarrassingly for these spineless, bandwagon frauds, that deadline of doom is about to uneventfully pass and the service has rather sheepishly pulled all ‘2020 signs’ from its displays after the computer models it relied upon from the early 2000s, which convincingly foretold of unending glacial retreat, turned out to be catastrophically inaccurate.

The ‘Big Drift’ is located just east of Logan Pass, at an elevation of 6,646 feet, where crews arrived on Friday to tackle the monster snowpack.

And while the AGW cabal continue to erase their past prophetic failures from the history books, one of their most infamous was that “snow would become a thing of the past” — and yet here we are:

Those extreme-environmentalists and disproven-scientists behind Montana’s snow-less predictions should have taken that Going-to-the-Sun Road a long time ago–because it’s the Sun and the Sun alone that changes Earth’s climate.

Every great civilization of the past acknowledged the Sun’s power, and they all worshiped it as a God. The Egyptians called it “Ra”, the Minoans “Ariadne”, and the Romans “Sol”.

Today, we humans consider ourselves the most powerful body in the solar system. Perhaps our recent technological advances and achievements have given rise to a sense of all-conquering self-confidence. But the Sun, as we call it, ended every one of those great civilizations of the past, and it will take down our modern one, too–and not in some raging fiery explosion but by a mere dimming of its energy known as the Grand Solar Minimum.

The COLD TIMES are returning, the lower-latitudes are once again REFREEZING, all in line with historically low solar activity, cloud-nucleating Cosmic Rays, and a meridional jet stream flow.

Even NASA agrees, in part, with their forecast for this upcoming solar cycle (25) seeing it as “the weakest of the past 200 years,” with the agency correlating previous solar shutdowns to prolonged periods of global cooling here.

SOURCE

UK: Electric cars are only cost-effective after five years – even with a £6,000 subsidy

The biggest stumbling block for drivers is the price of a new electric car

It takes almost five years to recover the higher purchase price of an electric car in savings from lower running costs, even with a proposed new subsidy, new research has found.

Last week it emerged that the Prime Minister is mulling a plan to give petrol and diesel car drivers up to £6,000 if they make the switch to an electric vehicle.

But even with this incentive, it would take on average four years and nine months for drivers to get a financial benefit from switching, according to research by price comparison website GoCompare. On running costs alone, electric vehicles work out £680.55 cheaper per year.

The biggest stumbling block is the price of a new electric car. For example, a brand new Ford Fiesta – the most popular car in Britain – costs £15,770. An electric alternative such as the Reanult Zoe – one of the cheapest electric vehicles on the market – is £25,000, leaving drivers £9,320 out of pocket, or £3,320 worse off after the £6,000 subsidy....

SOURCE

Black vs. Green: Black Americans Fight Climate Measures That Increase Energy Costs

While I don’t often find myself agreeing with Jesse Jackson, I applaud his support of a pipeline to bring affordable natural gas to the predominantly minority and low-income farming community of Pembroke Township, Illinois.

As a black conservative who opposes Jackson on issues from racial preferences to economic policy to protecting our ballots from needless risks under the guise of voting rights, I think he’s courageous for breaking with the liberal establishment and radical environmentalists to help this struggling community benefit from affordable energy.

Rising above the political fringe, Jackson said about hooking up the rural community south of Chicago to natural gas: “This is our work – fighting poverty and connecting people.”

President Donald Trump has prioritized both increasing the supply of domestic energy and building out pipelines and other infrastructure to deliver it. Doing so creates jobs and ensures access to the most affordable energy available. This is especially important for low-income households where high energy bills raise the prospect of “energy poverty” – having to forego even the most basic necessities such as food and new clothing to keep lights on and homes warm.

With around 70% of black households having just a single parent, the affordable energy issue should be important to the reverend and the president.

But this pro-energy/pro-people agenda is criticized by environmentalists and their liberal allies. They seem to think no price is too high when it comes to fighting “climate change.” They are happy to block projects involving fossil fuels like natural gas, oil and coal – even if it is to the detriment of black Americans who have supported them politically.

Pembroke Township is far from alone. There are many minority and low-income communities that would benefit from affordable fossil fuel energy. Yet the necessary infrastructure to provide them with reliable, abundant and cheap fuel is often blocked by activists – sometimes under the pretenses of “protecting” them!

In some cases – like the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) that would run from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina – critics have effectively prioritized scenic trails for affluent hikers over jobs and upward mobility for struggling black families. Even liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sided with the ACP in a recent decision that gave the U.S. Forest Service the authority to allow the ACP to run underneath the Appalachian Trail.

But troubles remain for the ACP in Buckingham County, Virginia. Environmentalists have recruited local black community leaders to help block a proposed ACP pumping station based on “environmental justice” claims. I imagine that, if the ACP is killed and those same black leaders later go looking for help for their community, their environmentalist “friends” will be long gone.

That’s why Jackson’s voice in Pembroke Township is so important. While supporting an alternative energy approach, he also thinks it must be balanced against the needs of people – especially when natural gas is the most affordable option. “When we move to another form of energy, that’s fine by me, I support that,” he said, “but – in the meantime – you cannot put the black farmers on hold until that day comes.”

Even Al Sharpton – whom I agree with less than Jackson – supports natural gas, saying that “people in communities of color should not pay the brunt of suffering through cold winters.”

Yet some on the left would apparently rather dictate to black people than listen to them.

Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, gets to the root of the problem. He said liberals pay too much attention to environmental activists while taking the black community for granted. “People are debating these issues in some instances without consultation with the leaders of the African-American communities and neighborhoods affected by these issues,” he said.

Not in our name. Not when the stakes are our economic survival.

SOURCE

Australian Bushfires: Fire experts downplay reduction burns

I would like to know what else is as effective

NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro wants landowners to have more access to national parks for hazard reduction burns but fire experts warn that while prescribed burning can reduce bushfire risk it is not the solution

In a late submission to the Berejiklian government's bushfire inquiry, Mr Barilaro - who is also the minister for disaster recovery - said "now is the time for significant change and action" over fires. "We cannot afford to be complacent or waste the opportunity for reform," Mr Barilaro said.

His submission, one of 1000 made to the six month state-based inquiry into the devastating bushfire season that killed 25 people, also calls for cattle grazing to be used as a fire prevention method.

Mr Barilaro's submission said hazard reduction and traditional ecological burns are "under-utilised" and burn activities should be "prioritised to a level appropriate for the risk".

"Where there is great risk due to weather, fuel load, population etc the intensity of the burn activities should increase," the submission stated.

It also says "inadequate access to public land, including wilderness areas of national parks, creates unnecessary barriers to bushfire prevention activities".

However a separate, national inquiry into the recent bushfire season, the Royal Commission into National Natural Hazard Arrangements, heard on Tuesday from three top fire analysts who said that reducing fuel loads needed careful planning to ensure hazards did not actually increase if landscapes became more fire prone.

"One of the primary motivations for changing fire behaviour by manipulating fuel is to increase the potential for active suppression of the fire," Ross Bradstock, head of the University of Wollongong's Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires, said.

"So by reducing fire intensity, for example, and reducing the rate of spread [and] reducing ember propagation, you are increasing the chance that people can get in there and work safely and suppress the fire."

Professor Bradstock said there was clear evidence "the more you treat, the lower the risk" of house loss from fire, with the greatest benefit coming from burning near residential areas rather than in distant bushland. The practice, though, was more expensive given the resources needed to ensure fires remain controlled.

"If you want the most cost-effective strategy for protecting those assets or mitigating risk to those assets, then treatment in close proximity appears to be the best option at this stage based on the evidence," he said.

The royal commission heard that while hazard reduction burning was an important approach to curbing fire risks, it also needed significant funding commitments.

Kevin Tolhurst, an associate professor with the University of Melbourne's Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, said "a lot of case studies [show] that areas that have been burnt one or two years previously, have a dramatic impact on the spread of fire."

Over time, though, the bush grows back and "by the time you get to 10 or 11 years, the effect is largely gone".

David Bowman, a professor with the University of Tasmania's School of Natural Sciences, said some landscapes, particularly tall, wet forests, were not amenable to fuel-reduction efforts and yet, with the wrong weather conditions, "could burn terribly intensively".

"So prescribed burning is generally, we're talking about grassy systems, savannas, woodlands and dry sclerophyll forests, where we have this classical accumulation of fuel that can be burnt and maintained in different states and quite simple vegetation structures," Professor Bowman 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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17 June, 2020

Driller charged over contamination in ‘Gasland’ town

Over harmless methane emissions

Cabot Oil Gas Corp. was charged Monday, June 15, 2020, following a grand jury investigation that found the company failed to fix faulty gas wells in Dimock and surrounding communities that leaked methane into residential water supplies.

An energy company faces felony charges that it polluted residential water wells in a Pennsylvania community that has long been a battleground in the national debate over natural gas drilling and fracking.

Houston-based Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. was charged Monday following a grand jury investigation that found the company has failed to fix faulty gas wells that are leaking methane into residential water supplies in Dimock and surrounding communities.

The company has racked up hundreds of civil violations since 2007, and it has been banned from drilling in a 9-square-mile area of Dimock.

“We find that, over a period of many years, and despite mounting evidence, Cabot Oil & Gas failed to acknowledge and correct conduct that polluted Pennsylvania water through stray gas migration,” the grand jury wrote, criticizing Cabot’s “long-term indifference to the damage it caused to the environment and citizens of Susquehanna County.”

The Pennsylvania attorney general’s office charged Cabot with a total of 15 criminal counts, including illegal discharge of industrial wastes and unlawful conduct under the state’s Clean Streams Law. Maximum fines are $50,000 or $25,000, depending on the count.

“Cabot took shortcuts that broke the law, damaged our environment, harming our water supplies and endangering Pennsylvanians. They put their bottom line ahead of the health and safety of our neighbors,” Attorney General Josh Shapiro said in a video statement.

Cabot said it would respond once it had fully reviewed the charges, but that it values “community commitment and environmental compliance.”

“Cabot will continue to work constructively with regulators, political representatives, and most importantly our neighbors in Pennsylvania to be responsible stewards of natural resources and the environment,” Cabot said in a written statement.

The company has long insisted the gas in Dimock’s aquifer is naturally occurring, saying its pre-drill testing of thousands of private water wells in the area show a high percentage with methane. The grand jury asserted that Cabot’s initial sampling of wells and groundwater did not include tests for methane. State environmental regulators eventually determined that Cabot’s drilling and fracking operations leaked explosive levels of methane into private water supplies.

It was an exploding water well on New Year’s Day 2009 that first aroused public attention in Dimock, a patchwork of homes and farms about 150 miles (241 kilometers) north of Philadelphia.

Residents said they suffered ill health effects from the contamination of their water with methane and drilling chemicals, including nausea, dizziness, skin rashes, impaired vision and breathing difficulties. Property values plummeted, too, they said.

Methane is not known to be harmful to ingest, but at high concentrations it’s flammable and, if it escapes into enclosed areas, can cause asphyxiation.

Homeowners sued and later settled with the company.

One resident, Eric Roos, told the grand jury in 2019 that he wants to move, but can’t. “I don’t know who will buy my house now. How can I leave?” he said, according to the grand jury’s report.

Dimock resident Ray Kemble, who has long publicly denounced Cabot and is currently battling it in court, welcomed the news that it faces criminal charges.

“I’m ecstatic, man. I feel vindicated now,” he told The Associated Press. Kemble, who says his water supply was ruined by Cabot, said he wants the company shut down.

The contamination in Dimock became the subject of fierce debate among pro- and anti-drilling forces. An Emmy Award-winning 2010 documentary, “Gasland,” showed residents lighting their tap water on fire. Drilling supporters have long accused Dimock residents of seeking money and attention.

The criminal charges against Cabot stem from a two-year grand jury investigation into Pennsylvania’s huge Marcellus Shale gas industry. Last week, Shapiro’s office announced a deal with another company, Range Resources Corp., Pennsylvania’s most active shale gas driller, to plead no contest to environmental crimes over its handling of contamination at a pair of well sites in the southwestern part of the state.

Shapiro said Monday that the grand jury’s ongoing probe “will result in more criminal charges.”

Unlike Range, he said, Cabot “continues to abdicate their responsibility.”

“Cabot knows what they’ve done. The residents of the commonwealth whose lives have been impacted know what Cabot has done. The game that Cabot continues to play, risking the lives of people across the commonwealth for a profit, well, that cannot go on any longer,” he said.

SOURCE

Could entomophagy end U.S. and African protein shortages?

Paul Driessen

Nearly two centuries ago, amid a fungal infestation that destroyed Irish potato crops and brought famine, starvation, death, and the emigration of countless men, women and children, Gulliver’s Travels author Dr. Jonathon Swift offered “A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick.”

Dr. Swift suggested that children too young to work could be eaten in place of potatoes. As he explained, “a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust.” Surely, he said, this is preferable to aborting unborn or murdering newly born children.

Of course, his proposal was only in jest, a sly response to the callous disregard many of his countrymen displayed toward the Irish tragedy and the plight of poor families throughout the United Kingdom.

Today, despite enormous advances in seeds, fertilizers, irrigation, mechanized equipment, pest control and agricultural practices, famine still stalks dozens of countries, especially in Africa. Millions still live on the edge of starvation, all too often kept there by despicable government agencies, pressure groups and financiers that despise modern agriculture, promote “agro-ecology” and even oppose Golden Rice.

Africa’s poverty, malnutrition, despair and premature death have been made even worse this year by one of the worst plagues of desert locusts in memory. Swarms numbering in the billions descended on East Africa, which was completely unprepared to cope with them. The first swarms unleashed even larger second and third waves, with swarms larger than Manhattan.

The insatiable insects are devouring millions of square miles of crops, pasture lands, gardens and forests, creating massive food shortages that could cause hundreds of thousands of deaths from starvation.

Meanwhile, coronavirus outbreaks among workers forced meat packing plants to close. Wendy’s took burgers off the menu at many locations, and the fast food chain’s customers are again asking “where’s the beef?” – echoing the iconic television commercials from 35 years ago. Pork is also in short supply, even as American pork shipments to China quadrupled in recent months. Chicken too is scarce.

But now we may have a fortuitous alignment of the stars, a happy confluence of events, wherein a modest proposal for abundant food in the form of locusts could benefit the hungry “publicks” of two continents.

Up to now, we have had an unhappy confluence of sick ideologies: the belief that too many people are a cancer on the Earth, depleting fossil fuels that are destroying our climate and planet, and ignoring what former Obama science advisor John Holdren insisted was a vital need for modern societies to de-develop, de-industrialize, and dictate to still-poor countries how much they will be permitted to develop.

The ideologies have forced too many Africans to continue living primitive subsistence lifestyles or pack into impoverished cities that lack basic energy, water, roadway, communication, refrigeration, hospital, sanitation, and employment opportunities. The locust plagues could turn this awful situation around.

Enormous nets strung between two trucks or airplanes could harvest millions of locusts at a time. Thousands could be employed constructing and operating food processing facilities, hauling insects to them, running them through roasting ovens and freeze drying machines, packing and shipping the finished delicacies to hungry families around Africa and North America, and teaching people to savor them.

Thousands more jobs could be created managing the new export and import businesses. Commercial airliners sidelined by COVID would be rejuvenated. Millions of people could go almost overnight from hunger to enjoying what Popular Science magazine has described as delicious, nutritious food, rich in protein and all nine amino acids essential for human development.

The new meat substitutes would give entirely new meanings to “in-flight meals.”

There is yet another benefit. These activities and facilities would require reliable, affordable electricity, on a far larger scale than can possibly be provided by wind turbines and solar panels. They will require coal, gas, nuclear and hydroelectric power plants. However, environmentalist pressure groups, UN agencies, the World Bank and multilateral (anti)development banks have been telling Africans that wind and solar power must be their energy future. They and the EU clearly won’t finance those power plants.

But perhaps Chinese agencies and companies will finance and build them, as they have in many other countries – often under exploitative, extortionist loan arrangements, to be sure. The projects could also be incentivized by a desire to resurrect China’s tarnished reputation for having unleashed the Wuhan virus on unsuspecting nations. They might also secure special prices on locust products that would be right at home in China’s wet markets and on its television equivalent to “Bizarre Food” with Andrew Zimmern.

Popular Science expresses deep concern that “raising cattle requires a lot of space and water, and more room for cattle means less [sic] trees, which in turn means a diminished natural capacity of the planet to process carbon dioxide.” Its writers clearly have no clue that modern non-organic farming with biotech crops enables fewer farmers to raise more crops, from less land, with less water and fewer pesticides, than any other farming methods in history – or that cattle typically graze on lands that have limited value for growing crops. They obviously have not read any of my reports and articles about the monumental impacts that wind, solar, battery and biofuel technologies have on farm, scenic and wildlife habitat lands.

Instead, PopSci cites a 2013 report by the ever-helpful UN Food and Agriculture Organization, which has worked for years with radical environmentalist groups to oppose modern farming, biotech and even hybrid seeds, synthetic insecticides and fertilizers, and even mechanized equipment like tractors. PopSci and the FAO extol the virtues of “entomophagy,” a fancy progressive term for eating bugs, not beef.

Indeed, they say, this could be “the answer humanity is looking for.” (If that’s the answer, it must have been a very foolish question.) The FAO report offers techniques for processing “edible insects” into tasty consumable products that can improve people’s diets and livelihoods, create thriving local businesses, and even promote “inclusion of women.” It has sections on overcoming the yuck factor and setting up industrial-scale processing operations. (I should have known the FAO would be ahead of me on that.)

The FAO study says bugs can have twice as much protein as beef and 1.5 times as much as fish and poultry. PopSci sings the praises of grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, ants and mealworms – whole or powdered – as snacks, desserts, guacamole or entire meals.

Mealworms have “an earthy flavor, similar to mushrooms or beets,” says Joseph Yoon, chef and founder of Brooklyn Bugs, a “catering company and education platform” in New York that serves an entire menu featuring insects. You can add them to brownies – or toss some salt on sautéed mealworms to get “protein-boosted potato chips.”

Since they are committed to saving the planet from fossil fuels, climate change, big corporations and modern technologies, people attending the next UN climate confab in November 2021 in Glasgow should expect to dine on an entire smorgasbord of tasty locusts and other bugs. Perhaps they can be paired with haggis, Scotland’s savory traditional pudding of bone broth, sheep heart, liver and lungs, onion, oatmeal, suet and spices, cooked together in the animal’s stomach.

Back here in the States, for the same reason, those delectable African locusts could figure prominently at the upcoming Democratic National convention in Wisconsin’s Brew City this August. They would pair very nicely with those pilsner beers that made Milwaukee famous.

Personally, though, I’ll stick with hearty beef, lamb, chicken, ribs – and really big bugs: shrimp, lobster, crabs and crawfish – served up at the Republican National Convention, accompanied by a good IPA.

Via email

Reality Is Gradually Catching Up To Green Energy

If you dutifully read your U.S. mainstream media, you undoubtedly have the impression that “clean” and “green” energy is rapidly sweeping all before it, and soon will supplant fossil fuels in powering our economy. After all, many major states, including California and New York, have mandated some form of “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, or in some cases even earlier. That’s only 30 years away. And reports are everywhere that investment in “renewables,” particularly wind and solar energy, continues to soar. For example, from Reuters in January we have “U.S. clean energy investment hits new record despite Trump administration views.”   In the New York Times on May 13 it’s “In a First, Renewable Energy Is Poised to Eclipse Coal in U.S.”   The final victory of wind and solar over the evil fossil fuels must then be right around the corner.

Actually, that’s all a myth. The inherent high cost and unreliability of wind and solar energy mean that they are highly unlikely ever to be more than niche players in the overall energy picture. Politicians claim progressive virtue by commissioning vast farms of wind turbines and solar panels, at taxpayer or ratepayer expense, without anyone ever figuring out — or even addressing — how these things can run a fully functioning electrical grid without complete fossil fuel backup. And the electrical grid is the easy part. How about airplanes? How about steel mills? I’m looking for someone to demonstrate that this “net zero” thing is something more than a ridiculous fantasy, but I can’t find it.

To stay grounded in reality, there is no better source than the multiple-times-weekly email from the Global Warming Policy Foundation. If you do not already receive these emails, you can go here to subscribe. As is typical, today’s email searches out back pages and specialized sources to bring us multiple pieces showing green energy running into its inevitable wall, with no known way to get past. (Full disclosure: I am on the Board of the GWPF’s American affiliate.)

We go first to green energy champion Germany, where Bloomberg reports on June 5 that “Germany’s Green Power Finance Is Becoming Unaffordable.”   Excerpt:

The German program that’s spurred the nation’s switch to green power is buckling under the weight of surging costs and needs an urgent fix. That’s the assessment of one of the scheme’s chief designers, Hans Josef Fell. . . . Yet the system’s increasing costs have become glaring in the during the coronavirus pandemic, the veteran Green Party lawmaker said. High and guaranteed payments made to investors in clean power plants are the problem Fell said in an interview.

It seems that to get its wind and solar facilities built, Germany put in place guaranteed payments to producers that would kick in if market prices for power were insufficient. The guaranteed payments are divvied up and added to consumer electricity bills. This year, with prices for alternative fossil fuels plummeting, the guaranteed payments are projected to come in at some 26 billion euros — which is around $100 per month for every German household, on top of electricity prices that were already about triple the U.S. average. Of course, Chancellor Merkel is proposing a “fix,” which is a government bailout as part of a supposed coronavirus relief package. That may work for a little while. Then what?

Also from Germany, we have a piece from the Financial Times of June 8 with the headline “Environmentalists on back foot as Germany’s newest coal plant opens.”   What?? — Opening a new coal power plant right in the midst of a transition away from fossil fuels?? What happened here is that they are closing all their nuclear plants, and they need something that works all the time, unlike the wind and the solar. Just in January, Germany enacted legislation to completely phase out coal power generation by 2038; and then in May, they went right ahead and opened this new Dateln 4 coal plant. The Financial Times piece quotes Greenpeace activist Lisa Göldner as calling the new plant a “climate crime.” Meanwhile, the crew members of a barge bringing coal to the plant are described as “whooping and whistling in mockery” at environmental protesters seeking to block the opening of the plant.

The fact is that Germany has nowhere further to go by building more wind and solar facilities. When the wind blows on a sunny day, they already have more power than they can use, and they are forced to give it away to Poland (or even pay the Poles to take it). On a calm night, no matter how much wind and solar they build, it all produces nothing. Without the coal plant, the lights go out. Talk about climate virtue all they want, but no one has yet even begun to work on a solution to get past this hurdle.

Which brings me to the most important piece in the GWPF email, from Cambridge Professor Michael Kelly, appearing in something called CapX on June 8, with the headline “Until we get a proper roadmap, Net Zero is a goal without a plan.”   Kelly makes the point that seems to me obvious, but that somehow has slipped past the New York Times and all the rest of the MSM, which is that if wind and solar energy are ever going to surpass niche status, there is a gigantic engineering problem to solve. Somebody has to engineer an electrical system based on the intermittent sources that works 24/7/365. But in fact, even as major states and countries have piously proclaimed commitment to “net zero” energy, nobody has even started the engineering project. And as soon as you start to consider the question, you quickly realize that the whole endeavor is almost certainly impossible. As an example, Kelly addresses batteries:

Take batteries. It is estimated that current battery manufacturing capabilities will need to be in the order of 500-700 times bigger than now to support an all-electric global transport system. The materials needed just to allow the UK to transition to all electric transport involve amounts of materials equal to 200% the annual global production of cobalt, 75% of lithium carbonate, 100% of neodymium and 50% of copper. Scaling by a factor of 50 for the world transport, and you see what is now a showstopper. The materials demands just for batteries are beyond known reserves. Would one be prepared to dredge the ocean floor at very large scale for some of the material? Should securing the reserves not be a first priority?

And that’s just one of the issues. Others include vast costs constituting a multiple of current energy costs; the environmental impact of mining and transporting huge amounts of materials; need for vast amounts of rare elements, far beyond known world reserves; incredibly huge amounts of material to recycle when facilities wear out; and on and on.

Read enough of this stuff and you gradually realize that almost everything you read about supposed solutions to climate change is completely delusional.

SOURCE

Australia: Investors face pressure over miner set to destroy Aboriginal artefacts

It's almost automatic for Aborigines to stand in the way of development projects. The role of white Leftists in the background probably explains most of it

The world’s largest asset manager and a top superannuation fund are facing pressure to explain investments in a Chinese conglomerate set to destroy ancient Aboriginal artefacts at a coalmine in regional NSW.

China Shenhua Energy, the world's largest thermal coalminer, is planning to construct an open-cut mine next to the Liverpool plains near Gunnedah in the "food bowl" of the state.

The mine has been fiercely opposed by the site's traditional owners, the Gomeroi people, who fear it will lead to destruction of historic and culturally significant artefacts including grinding grooves showing markings of ancient warriors sharpening spears for battle, burial sites and sacred trees.

Funds management giant BlackRock, which manages more than $10 trillion in assets including substantial amounts of Australian retirement savings and money for the Future Fund, has billions of dollars invested in China Shenhua Energy, records show.

CBUS, the $54 billion super fund for construction industry workers, also confirmed a small investment in the firm, which is majority controlled by the Chinese government.

Failures by mining companies to preserve Indigenous artefacts have come into sharp focus after resources giant Rio Tinto last month decimated a 46,000-year-old site in Western Australia against the wishes of its traditional owners.

The Rio blast sparked an emergency Senate inquiry into how state and federal laws protect Aboriginal heritage.

There has also been rising scrutiny in the investment world over responsible and sustainable investing and best strategies for lifting corporate environment, social and governance standards.

The Gomeroi people last month filed submissions in the Federal Court against federal environment minister Sussan Ley in an attempt to overturn the mine's 2015 approval.

Gomeroi woman Dolly Talbott called on major institutional investors to boost transparency about where they put their clients' money.

"If you believe in preserving and looking after sacred sites, they need to know where they’re putting their money and what these companies are doing."

She said all Australians should be angered about cultural artefacts that will be destroyed if the mine proceeds, which include ceremonial corridors, burial sites and other items.

"Our direct ancestors are buried out there. You don’t go and blow up European burial sites so why should they be able to do that to us?" she said.

CBUS confirmed it owns around $4.5 million worth of shares in the company through a passive index fund.

The fund said it was considering divesting its stake as part of its broader climate change strategy and would ask its investment managers to incorporate First Nations heritage issues into engagement strategies.

"The sacred sites of our First Nations Peoples should be protected," CBUS head of responsible investment Nicole Bradford said.

BlackRock has positioned itself as a leader in socially responsible investing and last year pledged to reduce its holdings of thermal coal. The firm's founder, Larry Fink, has also been a prominent supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Market Forces campaigner Will van de Pol said the outrage over Rio Tinto's blasting should serve as a reminder for super funds about the role they play in actively managing investments.

"The Western Australia example should serve as a turning point that should have come long ago," Mr van de Pol said. "But at least from now on, we need to see super funds ensuring that that sort of destruction never happens again on their watch."

"As a firm committed to racial equality, we must also consider where racial disparity exists in our own organisations and not tolerate our shortcomings," Mr Fink said in a public letter on May 31.

An archaeological report commissioned by China Shenhua Energy said it could preserve roughly half of the more than 60 significant artefacts identified by adding fencing or moving them to another location.

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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16 June, 2020

Study: As Sea Levels Rise, Island ‘Drowning’ Is Not Inevitable

Coral reef islands across the world could naturally adapt to survive the impact of rising sea levels, according to new research.

The increased flooding caused by the changing global climate has been predicted to render such communities – where sandy or gravel islands sit on top of coral reef platforms – uninhabitable within decades.

However, an international study led by the University of Plymouth (UK) suggests that perceived fate is far from a foregone conclusion.

The research, published in Science Advances, for the first time uses numerical modeling of island morphology alongside physical model experiments to simulate how reef islands – which provide the only habitable land in atoll nations – can respond when sea levels rise.

The results show that islands composed of gravel material can evolve in the face of overtopping waves, with sediment from the beach face being transferred to the island’s surface.

This means the island’s crest is being raised as sea level rises, with scientists saying such natural adaptation may provide an alternative future that can potentially support near-term habitability, albeit with additional management challenges, possibly involving sediment nourishment, mobile infrastructure, and flood-proof housing.

The research was led by Gerd Masselink, Professor of Coastal Geomorphology in Plymouth, working with colleagues at the University of Auckland (New Zealand) and Simon Fraser University (Canada).

Professor Masselink, who heads Plymouth’s Coastal Processes Research Group, said:

“In the face of climate change and sea-level rise, coral reef islands are among the most vulnerable coastal environments on the planet. Previous research into the future habitability of these islands typically considers them inert structures unable to adjust to rising sea level. Invariably, these studies predict significantly increased risk of coastal flooding and island inundation, and the concept of ‘island loss’ has become entrenched in discourses regarding the future of coral reef island communities. In turn, this has led to attention being focused on either building structural coastal defenses or the exodus of island communities, with limited consideration of alternative adaptation strategies.

“It is important to realize that these coral reef islands have developed over hundreds to thousands of years as a result of energetic wave conditions removing material from the reef structure and depositing the material towards the back of reef platforms, thereby creating islands. The height of their surface is actually determined by the most energetic wave conditions, therefore overtopping, flooding, and island inundation are necessary, albeit inconvenient and sometimes hazardous, processes required for island maintenance.”

Co-author Professor Paul Kench, currently Dean of Science at Simon Fraser University, Canada, said:

“The model provides a step-change in our ability to simulate future island responses to sea-level rise and better resolve what the on-ground transformations will look like for island communities. Importantly, our results suggest that island drowning within the next few decades is not universally inevitable. Understanding how islands will physically change due to sea-level rise provides alternative options for island communities to deal with the consequences of climate change. It is important to stress there is no one-size-fits-all strategy that will be viable for all island communities – but neither are all islands doomed.”

For the research, scientists created a scale model of Fatato Island, part of the Funafuti Atoll in Tuvalu, and placed it in the Coastal Ocean and Sediment Transport (COAST) Lab at the University of Plymouth.

It was then subjected to a series of experiments designed to simulate predicted sea level rises with the results showing that the island’s crest rose with the rising sea level while retreating inland, as a result of water overwashing the island and depositing sediment on the island’s surface.

SOURCE

New Climate Summary Debunks Ocean Acidification Scare

The oceans are not acidic, and more carbon dioxide is stimulating phytoplankton growth and marine life, reports a new summary published at ClimateAtAGlance.com. The new summary: Climate at a Glance: Ocean Acidification, documents that carbon dioxide’s benefits to marine life are similar to how more atmospheric carbon dioxide stimulates terrestrial plant growth and benefits life on the land.

The new summary documents that the ocean is far from acidic. A pH of 7 is considered neutral, with anything below 7 considered acidic. Ocean pH averages 8.1, which is alkaline rather than acidic.

To the extent computer models speculate (but have not verified) a decline in ocean pH since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, that estimated drop is only from pH 8.2 to 8.1 since 1750. This is hardly alarming or detrimental to marine life.

By contrast, a new white paper from scientists at the CO2 Coalition, Ocean Health – Is there an “Acidification” problem?, documents that ocean health is improved rather than harmed by more carbon dioxide. CO2 is food for phytoplankton that forms the foundation of the marine food chain. Also, studies show marine life thrive and enhance their growth rates in elevated CO2 conditions.

SOURCE

Fresh Proof Nature, Not Humans, Drives CO2 Levels

Statistical analysis of official data from the Mauna Loa Observatory of atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) reveals Nature, not humans determines the concentration of this trace gas.

Variances in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are shown to be well correlated with changes in the seasons, phases of the moon and El Niño events rather than human industrial activity.

No studies by climatologists endorsed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) address these factors.

Figure 1 shows the atmospheric CO2 concentration measured weekly at the Mauna Loa Observatory (see Ref.1) for the period 29 March 1958 to 30 May 2020. The Observatory is at Latitude 19.54° North, Longitude 155.57° West, Elevation 3397 metres. It is on the northern slope of Mauna Loa, an active volcano on the island of Hawaii in the mid-North Pacific Ocean.

The series shows a regular seasonal variation superimposed on an upward trend. The linear trend for the whole period of 62 years was 1.58 ppm per annum. For the 3-year period March 29, 1958 to 1961, the rate was 0.55 ppm pa.

For the 3-year period May 2017 to 2020, the rate had steadily increased to 2.91 ppm pa, more than five times greater than 60 years earlier. The acceleration in the rate of generation of CO2 over the time of the measurements is attributed to an increase in biogenic CO2 in response to the gradual increase in temperature since the end of the Little Ice Age.

Justification for this claim can be seen in a comparison between the dearth of life at the cold Poles and the profusion of life, in a myriad of forms, in the warm Equatorial zone. Life forms flourish with greater temperature.

As there were missing values in the time sequence, interpolation was applied using a third order polynomial fit to adjoining data strings and a ‘weekly’ time interval of 7.02416 days, that is, one fifty second part of a year, for the following analysis of the CO2 concentration time series. The original time series consisted of 3173 values while the interpolated time series consisted of 3233 values at a uniform ‘weekly’ interval.

The amplitude of the seasonal variation ranged from 5.9 ppm early in the series to 9.3 ppm in the later part of the series, changing from year to year in an irregular fashion but clearly increasing in amplitude over time. The maximum in the seasonal variation occurred on average in mid-May at the start of Summer while the minimum occurred at the end of September, just prior to Winter.

It is attributed to the Summer sunshine causing an increase in photosynthesis which absorbs CO2 resulting in the fall in CO2 concentration. The decay of vegetation in the cold of Winter releases CO2 resulting in a rise in the CO2 concentration.

That is, the concentration is decreasing during the heat of Summer and increasing during the cool of Winter putting it at odds with the UN IPCC claim that an increase in CO2 concentration causes a temperature increase.

SOURCE

Australian kids as young as eight in public schools are told to study eco-warrior Greta Thunberg's speeches and spread her climate change message

Lesson plans telling primary school students to study climate activist Greta Thunberg and spread her message have been found on the NSW Education Department website.

The unapproved material on the official website was aimed at children between Years 3 and 5.

The material, in a lesson plan since taken down, asked students to watch and study a Thunberg speech.

'Read about Greta and the transcript of her speech … What is the key message?' the lesson plan prompted.

'What techniques does Greta use … Can you now state what needs to change and why?' the plan asked.

The lesson plan asked students to conduct an 'energy audit' of their school to find areas where change is needed.

The revelation prompted swift criticism from education researcher Kevin Donnelly who called the material 'indoctrination'.

'The great shame is education is no longer about being impartial or objective … it is about indoctrinating students,' he told The Daily Telegraph.

The lesson plan had a guidebook to go with it telling students that school air-conditioning adds 20,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases every year.

The NSW school system was heavily criticised last year during the so-called Climate Strike for allowing climate activists to indoctrinate impressionable young children.

Thousands of school children truanted school to take part in the Climate Strike street protests.

One father pulled his son out of a state primary school in Bilambil, northern NSW, at the time after he was asked to 'dress like a hippy' by his teacher.

Matt Karlos, 38, took his 10-year-old son Max out, saying the teachers were making the kids terrified for the future and scaring them with climate change.

'The ideologies were in his face all the time,' Mr Karlos said.

In September, Alan Jones accused teachers of brainwashing vulnerable children.

The former 2GB radio host pointed to a report which claimed children under the age of 10 were experiencing anxiety from the climate change debate.

'Young people are going to be concerned, they believe their teachers, they actually think that they're at school and what they're being told is true,' he said.

'The notion of using children in all of this is scandalous and the politics of climate change has become poisonous.'

In February last year, former NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes warned students and teachers they would be punished if they skipped school to join the climate strike rallies. 'School children, on school days, should be at school,' he said at the time.

Greta Thunberg's Twitter account responded, saying her followers didn't care. 'Ok. We hear you. And we don't care. Your statement belongs in a museum,' Ms Thunberg's Twitter account tweeted.

A spokesman from the NSW Education Department said they would investigate how the Thunberg lesson plans made it onto the official website. 'This web page was published without approval. We will have the web page taken down and reviewed,' 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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15 June, 2020

Genome-edited crops help farmers and environment

The agriculture bill before the House of Lords today offers a chance for plant breeders to make safer, more productive crops that need fewer chemicals. Britain has a long track record of safe and efficient plant breeding but the industry is unable to use the latest techniques because of a rogue decision by the European Union in 2018.

A proposed amendment to the bill would allow the government to consult on whether to use the same definition of a genetically modified organism (GMO) as most of the rest of the world. Doing so would exempt 90 per cent of crops produced by the new and precise method known as genome editing.

Genome editing does none of the things the opponents of GMOs have objected to. It does not introduce foreign genetic material from another species. It does not produce plants that could not have arisen naturally. It does not require large companies.

Here is how it would work in a real example. British sugar-beet farmers are seeing a decline in yields since the banning of neonicotinoid pesticides. Aphids are increasingly infecting the crops with viruses. Other European countries dealt with this problem by making an exception from the neonic ban for their sugar-beet farmers; we did not. However, researchers have found natural varieties of the plant with natural mutations that make sugar beet virus-resistant. They want to induce these precise mutations in varieties that thrive in British conditions.

Traditional plant breeding, by back-crossing and selection, can achieve this but it will take years. Genome editing could achieve it in weeks. Then farmers could grow sugar beet with no introduced DNA and less need for insecticides.

Almost all European plant scientists are united in bafflement and opposition to a highly political judgment by the European Court of Justice in 2018 that departed from the international definition of GMOs to include genome-edited plants, while exempting the far less predictable process of bombarding seeds with gamma rays to induce mutations. It made no sense, scientifically or economically, and went against the advice of its own advocate-general. Britain has a chance to change that definition once it is outside the EU.

If the government permits itself to consult on making this simple change we may see a gold rush of plant breeding projects to this country, generating employment while making crops more competitive, wildlife-friendly, nutrient-rich and with fewer emissions. If we donâ€™t, our farmers will be stuck with more chemicals, less biodiversity and uncompetitive crops.

SOURCE

Mangrove malarkey

The Weather Channel published an article on its website Wednesday claiming global warming threatens the extinction of mangrove trees – which rely on warm temperatures to live – within 30 years.

Common sense and scientific evidence reveal that the Weather Channel’s alarmist claim is preposterous.

Mangroves Love Heat, Salty Water

Mangrove trees grow along shorelines in saltwater or brackish water. They provide many ecological benefits, including filtering water pollution, anchoring shoreline soil, and providing breeding grounds and host environments for many marine species.

Mangroves are very susceptible to frost events and therefore are limited to the tropics and subtropics. There are no coastlines that are too warm for them, as they grow throughout the tropics and thrive even along the equator on all three continents that span the equator.

Mangroves Currently Expanding Their Range

Recent scientific research shows warming temperatures allow mangrove trees to grow larger and more rapidly, and also for mangrove forests to expand their ranges.

A recent study in the peer-reviewed Journal of Ecology reports, “As freeze events decline with climate change, mangroves expand their range to higher latitudes….”

The Journal of Ecology study also mangroves dramatically increase their growth and concentrations under warmer conditions.

“We found that chronic warming doubled plant height and accelerated the expansion of mangrove into salt marsh vegetation, as indicated by a six-fold greater increase in mangrove cover in warmed plots compared to ambient temperature plots,” the study found.

That’s right, mangrove cover increased six-fold under warmer temperatures!

The study also found warmer temperatures facilitated elevation gain, with mangroves migrating further inland from the shore, “driven by increased mangrove root production in warmed plots.”

Dubious Alarmism

How, then, does the Weather Channel claim global warming threatens to make mangroves go extinct within 30 years?

The Weather Channel cited a very dubious alarmist study regarding mangroves and sea-level rise, and then further misrepresented the dubious study to make it appear even more alarmist.

One could call the Weather Channel’s (mis)representations bad science, but even that would likely be too kind.

Stationary Ranges?

In the study cited by the Weather Channel, modelers attempted to discern the pace of mangrove migration 10,000 years ago when the global sea level dramatically rose.

The modelers then forecast that mangrove forests can migrate to higher elevations at a speed of no more than 7 millimeters (0.27 inches) of sea-level rise per year.

Anybody who lives near mangroves knows mangrove forests can migrate much faster than that. Mangrove roots can spring up from the soil several feet from the trunk of the host mangrove tree.

Moreover, mangrove seed pods float on the water and can, therefore, take root at the same pace with the rising waters and tides.

Accordingly, mangrove forests can easily keep up with rising sea level, and can certainly migrate more than 0.27 inches of sea-level rise per year.

SOURCE

Official Tornado Data Exposes More Al Gore Lies

In two articles published this past week here at Climate Realism, we showed how Al Gore’s predictions about melting glaciers in Glacier National Park and disappearing snows at Mt. Kilimanjaro have proven spectacularly wrong.

Those were the only two concrete predictions Gore made with a definitive timeline prior to today in his book, An Inconvenient Truth.

Gore failed on both accounts. But those weren’t Gore’s only spectacular embarrassments. Let’s take a look at what Gore claimed about tornadoes.

On page 86 in An Inconvenient Truth, Gore claimed, “in 2004, the all-time record for tornadoes in the United States was broken.”

Worse than his two failed predictions, this one is a flat-out lie. And it was a flat-out lie when Gore asserted it. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been meticulously keeping tornado records going back 65 years, to 1954.

As shown in the NOAA graph reproduced below, there were 600 tornadoes in 2004. Prior to 2004, however, there were six different years in which NOAA documented more than 600 tornadoes.

Gore’s statement was a lie the second he made it.

Even more embarrassingly for Gore, the NOAA graph likely undercounted tornadoes during the mid-1950s through the late 20th century.

That is because advanced radar in recent years has enabled scientists to identify tornadoes in the middle of nowhere that previously would not have been counted.

As a result, it is likely that there were well more than six years between 1954 and 2004 with more tornadoes than Gore’s ‘all-time-record year’ of 2004.

SOURCE

Now’s our chance to rebuild Australia

But it would require Greenies to compromise

It’s the greatest issue of our times, eclipsing even the War on Terror. As measured by the disruption and economic misery, the coronavirus pandemic is having a bigger impact than any event since World War II. And while more Australians will die each year from, say, cancer than from COVID-19, the precautions that shuttered large parts of the economy racked up debts that will hobble our recovery for years to come.

Coronavirus is disrupting the way we think, and it is resetting our priorities. In previous eras, such a contagion would have been interpreted as an act of God. Indeed, the clergy would have proclaimed that all this misery was divine retribution for humanity’s wickedness: “Repent now, lest the Lord wreak further havoc upon your wretched souls!”

Yes, well, humanity might have been able to conveniently blame God for disease, pestilence and famine in the past, but less so now. These days we are more scientific in our thinking and fairer minded in our search for a cause. I think most Australians are open-minded about where coronavirus began and how it spread. It may have come from Wuhan’s wet markets, but we are content to wait and see what the evidence suggests.

Today the cause of a natural calamity of this scale is likely to be attributed to a wilful disrespect for the environment – which, when you think about it, is a form of wickedness that demands contrition and personal change. Early in the virus’s spread there were attempts to make such a link: experts would talk about how mankind’s encroachment into native forests brings us into closer contact with wild animals, thus increasing the risk of cross-species infection.

Summer’s bushfires and the preceding drought were a case in point, too: both were “obviously” the result of climate change, exacerbated by the intransigence of denialists and vested interests. There is no doubt that during the bushfires most Australians supported action to mitigate the effects of global warming. But then came coronavirus, and our national priorities were reset. Out-of-control global warming by 2030, let alone by 2050, does not exert the same immediate threat to our lives as does the prospect of contracting coronavirus or losing our jobs.

Yet while our priorities are being reset, we have an opportunity: this is our chance to rebuild Australia in a way that is sustainable, that focuses on industries without trashing the environment, that delivers energy solutions without exacerbating global warming. Conversely, the urgency for action on climate change must now be viewed through other lenses such as the need for rebuilding the economy, strengthening the health system, delivering supply chain sovereignty, and perhaps shoring up alliances.

It’s a big agenda, and requires both climate change sceptics and environmentalists to make concessions. Maybe gas is a reasonable resource to exploit until renewables can deliver baseload power? Maybe acquiescing to global demand for coal is sustaining an industry that causes long-term damage to the environment? Maybe we should be having the discussion (again) about nuclear power? Maybe living in the suburbs and commuting to an inner-city job is an outdated concept?

Sometimes, adversaries are so fixated on winning that any concession is regarded as a loss. The way forward, I believe, involves both sides acknowledging that there is a better Australia to be built in the years to come, and that this will require concessions. And, more to the point, I don’t believe I am being overly optimistic in my hopes for the future.

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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14 June, 2020

Global Warming: Facebook Thinks Its Opinion Is Better Than Yours

Hyperpartisan “Fact-checkers” Appear to Find a Video Loophole in the 2019 Policy Change of Not Blocking Opinion Pieces

The CO2 Coalition of climate scientists today published a Science & Policy Brief by Dr. Patrick Michaels, formerly the president of the association of state climatologists and an expert reviewer and author for the UN’s climate change agency, about the recent censorship by Facebook of his three-million view appearance on the Life, Liberty & Levin television show.

“Facebook Thinks its Opinion is Better than Yours” provides a detailed scientific response, with links to all relevant documents, to the “false” label placed by Facebook in May on Dr. Michaels’ expert opinion that about half of the one degree Celsius global warming since 1900 is natural, with the other half being human-caused, from emissions of carbon dioxide. As the Science & Policy Brief notes, Dr. Michaels’ opinion is shared by the UN’s climate change agency.

A “false” label on Facebook creates a “shadow ban” that blocks distribution and advertisement.

In 2019 Facebook, relying on a group called Climate Feedback as its “fact-checker,” similarly censored an op-ed on computer models of the climate that was published in the Washington Examiner by Dr. Michaels and the CO2 Coalition’s executive director, former statistics professor Caleb Rossiter. After a detailed appeal to CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Dr. Michaels and Dr. Rossiter, Facebook removed the label and adopted a new policy of not submitting op-eds to “fact-checking.”

“There are two issues we are asking Mr. Zuckerberg to address in this new case,” said Dr. Rossiter. “First, Climate Feedback is taking advantage of the lack of clarity in Facebook’s definition of ‘opinion’ that will not be subject to censorship. Why should spoken opinions about scientific judgment be censored when written ones are not? Second, why is Facebook still relying on Eric Michelman’s alarmist Climate Feedback? As Dr. Michaels shows in the Brief, this group has a long history as a biased ‘goon squad’ whose climate science claims are sloppy and weak

SOURCE

Batteries not a sustainable backup for wind and solar: Safety, health & cost

In this second and concluding part on backing up inconsistent wind and solar energy with battery storage, we give these same instructions to the Governors, Utility, and Industry captains. They will joyfully receive the mega-billion dollar contracts for the solar and wind plants. They will be supercharged with storage batteries and they will fail with spectacular short falls, short of tripling customer costs. We also extend this warning signal to the delusional virtue-signaling do-gooders and Sierra Club hypocrites in hiding, who are all well over their ski tips on these misadventures.

The government has approved a billion dollar solar energy facility in the Mohave Desert 30 miles from Las Vegas. Warren Buffett has signed a contract to buy the energy from it for his energy company at a price of 4 cents per Kw for 25 years based on the costs estimated for the facility at, $1,000,000,000. When you get to the end of this article and see the costs we estimate for the solar facility, if it is ever completed, (which is doubtful), you will no doubt break out laughing . But the citizens of Las Vegas will not be laughing. They will be crying as they see their electric bills triple.Batteries not a sustainable backup for wind and solar — Part II: Safety, health & cost

For the same cost we estimate for the Gemini Solar plant, Mr. Buffett and friends could build a nuclear power plant on less ground in the Mohave Desert that would produce four times more energy that would be fully reliable and the safest for mankind and the environment. Nuclear power plant costs have increased to the level of our solar plant estimate due to the exorbitant costs and risks of decade-long licensing restrictions and litigations. Lithium ion batteries in the desert will never have an equal safety assurance.

In Part I of this series, we demonstrated the planet-scale environmental destruction done in the name of “save the planet:” first by switching to wind and solar power then made all the worse by the addition of storage batteries. In this concluding Part II, we demonstrate the health and safety risks to the public resulting from the addition of these lithium-ion storage batteries. We also look at their cost impact that the taxpayers and customers will have to bear. Perhaps we can inspire Michael Moore to make a sequel to his outstanding movie “THE PLANET FOR THE HUMANS” to bring these real costs out in the open.

Here’s what we are talking about. Figure 1 is an illustration of a typical electrical generating plant. In item A, we have a fossil plant providing power to the homes and business shown as item D. The idea now is to add a solar or wind plant, item B, to replace a portion of the power when the wind is blowing, or the sun is shining, thus “reducing” the fossil-fuels burned by item A for a few hours a day. But because solar and wind are intermittent and unreliable, item A cannot be turned off. Instead, it is powered down and kept running on standby in case it has to be brought back to full power in a few seconds to prevent a blackout. In this standby mode, item A is still burning about 90-95% of the same fuel and still producing about the same CO2 and pollutants as if the wind/solar plants were not there.

Now the sought-after goal is to try to eliminate the item A generator altogether and have the sun/wind first charge the item C batteries and, at the same time, produce some electricity for the customers, item D. When they are fully charged, the sun/wind will provide electricity to item D customers. The item C batteries would ideally provide the back up so the fossil plant can be eliminated. But what if there’s no wind or sun for several days and batteries are good for 2, 3 mBatteries not a sustainable backup for wind and solar — Part II: Safety, health & cost 1aybe 4 hours a day? Meanwhile. The homes, businesses, offices, hospitals still need electricity to be safe and stay alive. So, we have all of the ingredients for the formerly famous Rube Goldberg to find an engineering solution with one of his strange complex machines.

But it doesn’t end here? Looking at Figure 2, we are reminded of the many warnings we have seen and heard on the use, storage, and safe disposal of electric lithium-ion batteries.

Safety and health concerns. In Engineering school, we were taught about Murphy’s Law! If anything can go wrong, it will, and at the worst time, and in the worst direction. If you need a reminder, here are some headlines from around the world.

· Bloomberg,[ii] “Another lithium-ion battery has exploded, this time at an energy-storage complex in the US By Brian Eckhouse and Mark Chediak. April 23, 2019, updated on April 24, 2019: Battery exploded at plant in Arizona; two others were shut. Arizona utility regulator calls for ‘thorough investigation.” “At least 21 fires had Batteries not a sustainable backup for wind and solar — Part II: Safety, health & cost 2already occurred at battery projects in South Korea, according to Bloomberg NEF. But this latest one, erupting on Friday at a facility owned by a Pinnacle West Capital Corp. utility in Surprise, Arizona, marked the first time it has happened in America since batteries took off globally.”

From around the world

    South Korea: 3-years ago passed new regulation “To Strengthen Battery Safety Rules After 7 Fires.” From this one web page, you see the many reports on the fire and explosion records in S. Korea related to Lithium-Ion Batteries. Especially check out the YouTube videos.[iii]

    Switzerland: [iv] May 17, 2018, “Swiss prosecutors investigate fatal Tesla crash, suspect ‘thermal runaway’ of battery.”Batteries not a sustainable backup for wind and solar —

    The USA, some recent events:

_ “Massive Lithium-Ion Battery Fire/Explosion Shows Challenges of Renewable Energy Storage” (apnews.com January 29. 2019)[v]

_ “Lithium-ion Battery Energy Storage Systems – The risks and how to manage them.” [vi]

_ “Hearing Aid Battery Technology Advances and Cautions,” [vii] and phones[viii]

_Examining Lithium-Ion Battery Explosions, Stamford University, May 26, 2017[ix]

    Lithium-ion Safety Concerns[x]

    Safety is a relative term, and in these many articles, it’s used in comparative terms, such as “to make it safer,” or “to improve safety.” It is repeated so often by the many authors that they seem compelled to convince us that the Lithium-Ion batteries are safe.

Electrical utility storage batteries are not unique, and all are built with the same underlying architecture. For example, the latest/most powerful Tesla battery, 102KWh, is made up of about 8,200 individual batteries, each a bit larger than a standard A-A. They are bundled and sealed into a subunit with a cooling system added for safety. Eight or 12 or any number of these subunits are then stacked and connected to make up the required working units. This illustrative 102KWh Tesla battery measures about 7 foot by 4 foot by 7 inches and weighs about 1,200 lbs.

Batteries not a sustainable backup for wind and solar — Part II: Safety, health & cost 4They are costly. For a typical application, say a 450 MW plant, and 1,500MWh, you would need about 16,000 of these Tesla batteries for a total battery weight of about 10,000 tons plus the housings, structures, connecting, and controlling equipment. Then depending on how they are used/cycled, they may need replacement every 3 to 4 years. If we assume 3.5 services years and a plant is designed for 25-year service life, a total of more than 110,000 of these batteries will be needed. Then comes the question, is Tesla using the Gillette model for the sale of the installation batteries, then make a fortune off the subsequent spare batteries?

Let’s do some arithmetic: using Tesla[xi] and IAEA data, table 5.1[xii] here’s what we get for the estimated 25 year life cycle cost (cost of equipment, installation plus fixed and variable operation and maintenance.).

We could provide the cost of electricity by about $2.5 Billion. Then, if we add the solar panel, the cost increases by a factor of two to $5 Billion. If we then add a battery backup, the cost goes up by more than three times to about $8 billion.

Let’s wrap up this insanity. For this one typical plant, we have more than tripled the cost of electricity so that batteries can be used as back up to solar power for a few hours per day. Our industry leaders have doubled-tripled their sales, our politicians got re-elected, our delusional do-gooders are feeling noble, and what did we get for it?

    · Maybe, a 0 % reduction in fossil fuel burned
    · Maybe, a 0 % reduction in CO2 and pollution
    · We lost about 3,000 to 4,000 acres of farmlands and wilderness
    · We have increased the strip-mines by a factor of 10
    · We have increased the environmental damage, reduced public safety, and increased toxicity risk by a factor of 10, or more?

Why? Why the wasted money

Why? The destroyed environment

Why? The increased health and safety risks

Why? Why?

We have all witnessed gigantic cost over runs on government projects, but overrunning the cost 8 fold may be a record. We are quite certain of our numbers.

SOURCE

Another Step for Transparency at EPA

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced yesterday changes they’re making to regulations promulgated under the Clean Air Act. This new reform would ensure that the public would be informed of the costs and benefits of regulations under consideration. In a statement, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said, “Today’s proposed action corrects another dishonest accounting method the previous administration used to justify costly, ineffective regulations.”

Sadly, you did not misread that first paragraph. Up until this point, there was no requirement that the EPA inform the public of the costs and benefits of a proposed regulation. This created massive uncertainty for families and businesses. The only people who could truly understand how regulations might realistically impact them and their finances are those who have the time, money, and resources to do the firsthand research.

This represents the elitist nature of federal regulations. Until recently, EPA operated under a framework they also did not have to disclose the methods they used to come to scientific conclusions. Any first year college student would tell you that publishing a methodology is key to any scientifically reputable study. Findings must be replicable. Thankfully, EPA is in the process of finalizing a rule to minimize the use of “secret science” in their rulemaking. It’s so odd that the same people who oppose both sets of rulemakings are the ones that also claim to be “the party of science.”

Perhaps most importantly, this will allow bureaucrats to be held more accountable by the American people. When the EPA proposes a rulemaking, they invite the public to comment on it, ostensibly to give them a voice in the process. The lack of transparency to this point has hindered their ability to have that voice. They cannot comment on the costs and benefits, nor can they challenge the methods by which the agency came to its conclusions. It was kept behind closed doors by unelected bureaucrats paid with our taxpayer dollars.

This lack of transparency is especially disturbing when you consider the enforcement actions agencies can bring against you. The EPA actually has its own dedicated SWAT team. FreedomWorks Foundation has documented how regulatory agencies like the EPA, and others, can take your property for falling out of compliance with these rules. The least they can do is to provide as much information available to you about them. Yet, these agencies who pretend these rules are so important seem very intent on making sure you can’t understand or comply with them even if you wanted to.

These efforts to increase transparency date back to 2018 and have been a consistent theme of the Trump administration. We don’t only need to regulate less, but we also need to regulate smarter and more openly. Disclosing cost-benefit analyses and methodologies are great first steps in making sure the regulatory state is more efficient and actually serves the people instead of seeking to entrap them.

SOURCE

‘CO2 levels’ and your ‘carbon footprint’ — NOT the problem you’ve been told

Last year a student at a nearby university complained she couldn’t focus in class; she was convinced high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) were the cause. The entire building was immediately evacuated and tested for “toxic levels of this dangerous gas.” After determining the CO2 levels were less than 500 parts-per-million (ppm), the classroom air was considered “safe” and classes again resumed.

Recently, this same school advertised that you can now “offset carbon emissions from previously completed university-funded ground-transportation and air travel trips” — by filling out a “travel carbon offsets” form, available in their “Sustainability Office.” Plus, this school is offering a course on “how to lower your carbon footprint.”

National Association of Scholars is planning a meeting to discuss indoor CO2 levels, because they “may reach levels harmful to cognition by the end of this century, and the best way to prevent this hidden consequence of climate change is to reduce fossil fuel emissions.” A publication this week in Nature Climate Change states that “government policies and human activity data, due to decreases in travel during forced COVID-19 confinements, have decreased daily global CO2 emissions by ~17% to ~25% by early April 2020, compared with mean 2019 levels.”

As I read this nonsense in the news every day, I feel like screaming: “This nonsensical obsession with CO2 and the ‘carbon footprint’ is absolute insanity! Where has common sense gone?” Doesn’t anyone remember — from grade school and high school biology — what they learned about plant photosynthesis requiring CO2 and all animals requiring oxygen (O2) and exhaling CO2? Life on this planet is carbon-based; if we were not carbon-based, the next available tetrahedral element (having four chemical bonds) in Mendeleev’s Periodic Chart is silicon — in which case we would be able to live on the sun’s surface!

CO2 levels in our lungs reach ~40,000-50,000 ppm, which causes us to inhale our next breath. One of the first things medical students learn in respiratory physiology — is that the carotid body (small cluster of chemoreceptor cells, located at bifurcation of the common carotid artery running along both sides of neck) detects changes in arterial blood flow pO2 (partial pressure of oxygen), pCO2, blood pH, and temperature. When the blood pCO2 reaches a critical level, this message is quickly sent to the medulla oblongata in the brainstem, which then sends signals our diaphragm to breathe; more O2 is needed, and excessive CO2 must be expelled.

The human breathing reflex is controlled by blood CO2 levels, not O2 levels. Too little CO2, which can happen from hyperventilating, leads to respiratory alkalosis. This is called hyperventilation syndrome — usually brought on by stress and anxiety. Symptoms include light-headedness; tingling in the fingers, toes and face; and chest pain; sometimes people fear they’re having a heart attack. Treatment for hyperventilation syndrome is to breathe into a paper bag, which increases your blood CO2 back to normal.

As the only physician on a commercial airlines cross-country flight, I was asked to examine a ~35-year-old woman who thought she was having a heart attack; the obvious diagnosis was hyperventilation syndrome (due to anxiety of meeting her inlaws for the first time). I had her breathe intermittently into a paper bag to increase her blood pCO2 levels; within ~20 minutes she was no longer symptomatic. Had no physician been on that flight, they would have diverted the aircraft to St. Louis to a waiting ambulance, rather than proceeding to Portland, OR, the scheduled destination.

Breathing is automatic (controlled by our autonomic nervous system) — meaning that we don’t think about it; it “just happens” about 16 times a minute. This is one of God’s many miracles in all animals with lungs. Heart rate, kidney blood flow, and digestion of our food — are other examples of autonomic-nervous-system regulation that constantly functions while we don’t think about it.

Today’s global atmospheric CO2 levels are about 415 ppm; at these levels CO2 remains a limiting factor for growth of farm crops and trees. Plants today are “at least 25% CO2-starved.” In fact, standard procedures for commercial greenhouse growers are to elevate CO2 to 800_-1200 ppm; this enhances growth and yield ~20-50%. Indoor air routinely ranges between 500 and 2,000 ppm of CO2. Submarines regularly operate with ambient CO2 levels between 2,000 and 5,000 ppm.

In past ages, ice-core data suggest CO2 levels have been as high as 10,000-15,000 ppm (this was before humans; in fact, before mammals evolved), and plant life flourished. In recent times, “normal” CO2 ranges between ~150-180 ppm during Glacial Periods and ~280-300 ppm during Inter-Glacial Periods. Industrialization during the past 130 years has probably increased global atmospheric CO2 levels by ~135 ppm, which has improved crop growth.

To paraphrase Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski (Chair, Scientific Council of Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection; Warsaw, Poland) who testified before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in 2004: “The basis — of most conclusions by United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on anthropogenic (man-made) causes, and their projections of climatic change — relies on the assumption that low levels of CO2 in the pre-industrial atmosphere represent the ‘normal’ baseline. From glaciological studies, we know this assumption is false. Therefore, IPCC projections should not be used for national and global economic planning and governmental policy.”

The atmospheric impact of CO2 on climate is overstated. Since the Little Ice Age (1300-1860), Earth has been warming naturally. As temperatures rise, CO2 in the liquid phase (oceans) moves to the gaseous phase (air); we learn this in introductory chemistry. Hence, rising global atmospheric temperatures cause CO2 to increase — not the other way around!

“Carbon emissions” and “carbon footprint” as causes of global warming are nothing more than scaremongering buzzwords — created by global warming alarmists, insincere environmentalists, certain manipulative dishonest politicians, and misinformed journalists. Earth has undergone climate change and local severe weather since its formation ~4.54 billion years ago. Causes of natural variations in climate include: solar activity; cloud type and amount; radiative forcing and insolation (amount of sunlight absorbed vs amount radiated back into space); Earth’s rotation and interplay between its atmosphere and oceans; variations in precession, eccentricity and axial tilt of our planet; gravitational pull of other planets of substantial mass (especially Jupiter); and volcanic eruptions both on land and underwater.

CO2 is an odorless, tasteless, invisible non-polluting gas on which all life on Earth depends. “Smoke” from factory chimneys usually represents water vapor, not CO2. Dirty industrial fossil-fuel pollution is, of course, undesirable and causes health problems. However, many scientific lines of evidence — including geological history and basic radiation-transfer physics — show that anthropogenic CO2 emissions have negligible influence on climate, in comparison to the natural factors listed above.\

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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12 June, 2020

In supporting 'Land Grab' bill, Republicans unwittingly support socialism

Many Republicans in Congress made political hay by labeling the Green New Deal as "socialism." Surprisingly, too many of these same Republicans are now the leading supporters of a major piece of socialist legislation. Unlike the Green New Deal, which was defeated in the Senate with 57 votes against and none in favor (with 43 Democrats voting present), the Senate is on the verge of passing the Great America Outdoors Act with Republican support, plus almost unanimous Democratic support.

What makes the bill socialist policy? Socialism means a lot of things to people today but has historically been defined as government ownership of the means of production. Land is an indispensable means of production. The Great America Outdoors Act would socialize private land on an unprecedented scale. In the rest of this article, I'll call it the Land Grab bill.
The Land Grab bill contains two titles. The first would spend $9.5 billion over five years to reduce the backlog of maintenance and restoration on existing federal lands. That should be a clue that the federal government is not good at taking care of what it owns.

The second title is the overtly socialist part. It would dramatically increase the rate of government acquisition of private land and make it permanent. Currently, Congress makes annual appropriations for federal, state, and local acquisition under the authority of the Land and Water Conservation Fund of 1965.

Land socialism, as practiced since the Land and Water Conservation Fund became law, is a peculiar kind of socialism. Traditionally, when the means of production are socialized, production is intended to continue. For instance, when Britain nationalized steel mills and coal mines in the 1950s, they continued producing steel and coal (although in practice, production tended to go down, and then down some more). But when the four federal land agencies — the Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management — buy private land, the purpose is to take it out of production and "preserve" it.

In short, modern land socialism perversely locks up the means of production.

Private property is a necessary condition of freedom and limited government. Among types of private property, land ownership has always been considered the most or among the most important for maintaining freedom and limited government. The United States already has far too much socialized land. The federal government owns 640 million acres or 28% of the country's total acreage. In the 11 Western states and Alaska, the four federal land agencies control more than 50% of the land. Some rural counties are more than 90% federally owned, and many more are more than 75%.

The consequences of all this government land are just what you'd expect from socialism. The environmental condition of the vast Western, federal estate ranges from fair to poor to dismal. The economic effects are uniformly dismal. Rural counties with lots of federal land (which are exempt from property taxes) struggle as resource producers are pushed off the land.

This environmental and economic devastation will only get worse as $900 million in annual funding from the Land Grab bill eventually buys millions and millions of acres of private land. But socialists care much more about power than about the environment or the economy.

It's, therefore, no surprise that 44 of the 47 Democrats in the Senate are co-sponsors of the Land Grab bill. But it is shocking that the main sponsor and 14 co-sponsors are Republicans, including several who opposed the Green New Deal because of its socialist character.

To take only one example, Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, the main sponsor, wrote in a March 2019 op-ed that the Green New Deal is a "thinly veiled attempt to implement the radical left’s socialist agenda."

In light of this statement, it appears that Gardner only opposes socialism when it is politically expedient. Because he and 15 other Republicans support the Land Grab bill and because it also enjoys majority support in the House, it is almost guaranteed to become law. The only hope now of stopping enactment is if some of the Senate Republican sponsors and President Trump wake up.

In his 2019 State of the Union address, Trump vowed that "America will never be a socialist country." But the president was hornswoggled at a secret White House meeting in early March into supporting the bill on the preposterous grounds that it would help several endangered senators get reelected.

At this point, the Land Grab bill is so close to Senate passage that the best strategy for Senate Republicans and the president is to support amendments that will make it less toxic. These include: a five-year sunset; requiring that state and local governments approve any future land acquisitions in their jurisdictions; a prohibition on the use of eminent domain; and a budget offset to pay for all the new spending.

SOURCE

How Virginia’s Green New Deal Will Add to Residents’ COVID-19 Costs

While many Virginia residents are still reeling from the effects of COVID-19, their elected officials from Gov. Ralph Northam on down are increasing their financial burdens with radical Green New Deal-style programs, energy policy analysts say.

Renewable energy mandates and restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions recently signed into law by Northam, a Democrat, are economically and scientifically unsound, these critics argue.

Supporters, however, counter that the new environmental regulations are needed to put Virginia “on the path to clean energy” and help the state combat climate change.

The “Virginia Clean Economy Act” creates renewable standards that, for example, require Dominion Energy Virginia to be 100% carbon-free by 2045 and Appalachian Power to be 100% carbon-free by 2050.

The new law also says that almost all of the state’s coal-fired power plants must be closed by 2024.

The legislation was the result of “extensive stakeholder input and incorporates environmental justice concepts related to the Green New Deal,” the governor’s office said in April.

Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates free-market policies, argues that with the Virginia General Assembly’s shift this year from Republican to Democratic control, green energy initiatives became a top priority for newly elected lawmakers at the expense of energy consumers.

“This whole situation is a stark reminder that elections have consequences,” Pyle said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “The Democratic-controlled Legislature and the governor hid behind the coronavirus pandemic to sneak Green New Deal-type schemes into law that will dramatically increase energy prices for all Virginians.”

“Gov. Northam continues to rely on flawed models and cites questionable evidence in support of this government makeover of Virginia’s electricity options. When Virginians see their utility bills get higher in the future, they can look back to this moment and thank him,” Pyle said.

The Green New Deal refers to congressional resolutions introduced in February 2019 that call for a “10-year mobilization effort” to end the use of fossil fuels in the U.S.

Pyle’s observation that “elections have consequences” also applies to Virginia’s recently passed Clean Energy and Community Flood Preparedness Act, which positions the Commonwealth to join a multistate “cap and trade” program limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

When Republicans held the majority in the General Assembly, they imposed budgetary restrictions that prevented the state’s Department of Environmental Quality from allocating funds to participate in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a compact among New England and Mid-Atlantic states. Dating to 2009, the cooperative effort currently includes 10 states: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

When the budgetary restrictions that Virginia Republicans put in place last year expire in July, the Northam administration can begin to rework regulations to accommodate the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and prepare Virginia to become a full member in 2021.

RGGI applies only to those power plants—more than 30 in Virginia—that generate over 25 megawatts. The Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, a Virginia thank tank that advocates less regulation and more economic freedom, reproduced a map from the Department of Environmental Quality showing which plants would have to comply with RGGI.

Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, contends that Northam’s decision to move Virginia into the initiative when unemployment was spiking and businesses were struggling to reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates how out of touch the political class is with average Americans.

“Virginia could hardly have picked a worse time to join RGGI,” Cohen told The Daily Signal in an email, adding:

Everywhere RGGI has gone, higher electricity prices have followed. In Virginia’s case, however, membership will coincide with trying to recover from the self-imposed economic collapse of the statewide lockdown. At a time when millions have lost their jobs, many of them from small businesses that may never reopen, Gov. Northam and his supporters in the General Assembly are knowingly adding to the burdens of families trying to recover from the COVID-19 lockdown.

It is a direct assault on the disposable incomes of the state’s most vulnerable residents by an out-of-touch political elite. Absurdly, with natural gas abundant, reliable, and cheap, the governor chooses this moment to hitch Virginia’s fortunes to taxpayer-subsidized wind and solar power, which are intermittent, unreliable, and expensive.

Under cap-and-trade measures, government officials put an upper limit or “cap” on the amount of carbon dioxide emissions that power plants are allowed to emit, but also create “allowances” within interstate auctions that may be traded back and forth among companies subjected to the CO2 caps.

The idea behind cap-and-trade is to provide energy companies with financial incentives to reduce emissions. Companies that meet or exceed emissions targets then may sell any excess allowances to companies that have not done so.

David Stevenson, director of the Center for Energy Competitiveness at the Caesar Rodney Institute in Delaware, authored a paper for the Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science that found non-RGGI states such as Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Texas had “lower overall price increases” than states that joined RGGI.

Stevenson also wrote another paper that argues the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative could be unconstitutional under a legal theory known as the “dormant commerce clause,” since RGGI states spur higher electricity costs in states that aren’t part of the compact.

“State laws and regulations that interfere with, or discriminate against interstate commerce violate the U.S. Constitution,” he writes. “It is time to take RGGI to federal court.”

In testimony in February, Stevenson told a Pennsylvania House committee that increased natural gas production in the state already had reduced carbon dioxide emissions.

“You are probably looking at a billion dollars a year in allowance costs,” he said, describing how costly and counterproductive joining RGGI could be. “It will grow over the years, but the average over the next 10 years will be about a billion dollars a year.”

Stevenson testified as part of a hearing on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and related legislation that would prevent Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, from entering into the compact without legislative approval. Wolf issued an executive order in February instructing Pennsylvania’s environmental agency to join RGGI.

Mark Mathis, founder of the nonprofit Citizens’ Alliance for Responsible Energy, produced a video encouraging Pennsylvania residents to keep their state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

Mathis, also president of the Clear Energy Alliance, describes in the video how RGGI raises energy costs where it is implemented and warns that the governor and other policymakers could damage Pennsylvania’s economic prospects if they move the state into the compact.

Virginia’s regulatory authorities have provided testimony and public statements describing how such greenhouse gas restrictions would inflate energy prices across the state.

RGGI could cost ratepayers between $3.3 and $5.9 billion in the first decade and increase average electricity bills between $7 and $12 per month, officials with the State Corporation Commission, whose powers include regulating utilities, testified during a House of Delegates hearing.

Randy Randol, who analyzes energy and environmental issues for the Virginia Tea Party, describes the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative as a regressive tax on the “most economically depressed areas of Virginia,” since it will cut into disposable incomes.

“This will make it even harder for people already struggling to get their head above water during COVID-19,” Randol said. “This is the worst time ever to raise energy prices.”

The Daily Signal sought comment from Northam’s press secretary, Alena Yarmosky, in response to energy analysts who criticized the governor’s green energy initiatives. The Daily Signal also asked when Northam expects Virginia to become a full participant in RGGI.

Yarmosky had not responded by publication time.

However, Ann Regn, communications director for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, did respond to The Daily Signal’s inquiry about costs associated with entering RGGI and how those costs might burden residents already struggling during the pandemic.

“We can’t address the COVID issue, but prior economic modeling that was conducted for [the Department of Environmental Quality] indicates the total cost associated with Virginia’s participation in RGGI is marginal at worst,” Regn said in an email in late May. “Start-up expenses for the state are minimal and the ongoing costs of the RGGI program are funded out of auction revenues.”

Regn said Virginia will become a full participant in RGGI beginning Jan. 1, and that the state must impose restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions to address climate change.

“The new laws are the first step in reducing CO2 emissions, which will begin to mitigate the impacts of climate change to Virginia,” she said.

SOURCE

‘Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome’: top climate scientists

More prophecy from an old master of false prophecy

The world’s most eminent climate scientists and biologists believe we’re headed for the collapse of civilisation, and it may already be too late to change course.

Australia’s top climate scientist says “we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse” of civilisation, which may now be inevitable because 9 of the 15 known global climate tipping points that regulate the state of the planet have been activated.

Steffen says it would take 30 years at best (more likely 40-60 years) to transition to net zero emissions, but when it comes to tipping points such as Arctic sea ice we could have already run out of time.

Evidence shows we will also lose control of the tipping points for the Amazon rainforest, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and the Greenland ice sheet in much less time than it’s going to take us to get to net zero emissions, Steffen says.

“Given the momentum in both the Earth and human systems, and the growing difference between the ‘reaction time’ needed to steer humanity towards a more sustainable future, and the ‘intervention time’ left to avert a range of catastrophes in both the physical climate system (e.g., melting of Arctic sea ice) and the biosphere (e.g., loss of the Great Barrier Reef), we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse,” said Steffen.

“That is, the intervention time we have left has, in many cases, shrunk to levels that are shorter than the time it would take to transition to a more sustainable system.

“The fact that many of the features of the Earth System that are being damaged or lost constitute ‘tipping points’ that could well link to form a ‘tipping cascade’ raises the ultimate question: Have we already lost control of the system? Is collapse now inevitable?”

This is not a unique view – leading Stanford University biologists, who were first to reveal that we are already experiencing the sixth mass extinction on Earth, released new research this week showing species extinctions are accelerating in an unprecedented manner, which may be a tipping point for the collapse of human civilisation.

Also in the past week research emerged showing the world’s major food baskets will experience more extreme droughts than previously forecast, with southern Australia among the worst hit globally.

Steffen used the metaphor of the Titanic in one of his recent talks to describe how we may cross tipping points faster than the time it would take us to react to get our impact on the climate under control.

“If the Titanic realises that it’s in trouble and it has about 5km that it needs to slow and steer the ship, but it’s only 3km away from the iceberg, it’s already doomed,” he said.

‘This is an existential threat to civilization’
Steffen, along with some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists, laid out our predicament in the starkest possible terms in a piece for the journal Nature at the end of last year.

They found that 9 of the 15 known Earth tipping elements that regulate the state of the planet had been activated, and there was now scientific support for declaring a state of planetary emergency. These tipping points can trigger abrupt carbon release back into the atmosphere, such as the release of carbon dioxide and methane caused by the irreversible thawing of the Arctic permafrost.

“If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping point cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization,” they wrote.

“No amount of economic cost–benefit analysis is going to help us. We need to change our approach to the climate problem.

“The evidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the situation are acute.”

Steffen is also the lead author of the heavily cited 2018 paper, Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene, where he found that “even if the Paris Accord target of a 1.5°C to 2°C rise in temperature is met, we cannot exclude the risk that a cascade of feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway.”

Steffen is a global authority on the subject of tipping points, which are prone to sudden shifts if they get pushed hard enough by a changing climate, and could take the trajectory of the system out of human control. Further warming would become self-sustaining due to system feedbacks and their mutual interaction.

Steffen describes it like a row of dominos and his concern is we are already at the point of no return, knocking over the first couple of dominos which could lead to a cascade knocking over the whole row.

“Some of these we think are vulnerable in the temperature range we’re entering into now,” said Steffen.

“If we get those starting to tip we could get the whole row of dominos tipping and take us to a much hotter climate even if we get our emissions down.”

Even the notoriously conservative United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found that already with the 1.1°C of warming we have had to date, there was a moderate risk of tipping some of these – and the risk increased as the temperatures increased.

Steffen believes we are committed to at least a 1.5°C temperature rise given the momentum in the economic and climate system, but we still have a shot at staying under 2°C with urgent action.

SOURCE

Global cooling!

If this drop had been a rise it would have "proved" global warming

Icy blast hits Australia as temperatures drop to their coldest in 75 years in some parts of the country – and it's only going to get worse

Temperatures have plummeted below zero across South Australia, with one part of the state shivering through its coldest June morning in 75 years.

A record low of 0.9 degrees was recorded at the West Terrace weather station at Adelaide hills, the coldest overnight temperature since 24 June 1944.

However the rest of Australia is being lashed with rain, and the wet weather isn't disappearing anytime soon.

The weather was so cold in Adelaide on Wednesday morning wet clothing was producing steam outside

The Perisher Valley in NSW reached a low of -6.6C on Tuesday morning with snow showers expected for alpine regions in NSW and Victoria at the weekend.

Snow is also forecast to hit the New South Wales alps at the weekend.

In the top end, Darwin will continue through the dry season with high temperatures of around 32C with sunny days and blue skies.

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, 2020

Undercover Investigation - Minneapolis Riot Was Preplanned

We have sources imbedded within these groups to get to the bottom of where all this leftist radicalization is coming from. We got their plans, manuals, intercepted internal communications, and have recordings of their zoom chats.

What you are about to see is part of a two year undercover investigation into the leftist radicalization imbedded within the climate justice movement that contributed to the riots in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In this first video, we are going to show how the Sunrise Movement played a preemptive role in carrying out the mayhem, taking advantage of George Floyd's death and using it as a trigger point, to further push their Green New Deal agenda and promoting the abolition of the police.

We didn’t expect to find organizers radicalizing middle school and high school children teaching them military tactics and preparation for high risk actions. Some of these tactics include escalation provocation techniques, blocking freeway traffic, and how to get arrested bogging-down law enforcement in the name of destroying capitalism to make way for the Green New Deal.

What some parents may have though were innocent youth organizations genuinely fostered and ran by children are actually top-down monolithic structures with private intelligence, military contractors, and foreign interests influencing children to carry out their subversive objectives.

The events that erupted in Minneapolis, Minnesota were not a spontaneous reaction to the murder of George Floyd. These were well planned events anticipating some perfect trigger point to bring about the “new normal” - a world without police, without borders, without industry, without wealth, without private property, without an economy - a world based on communist ideals imbedded within the Green New Deal.

The Green New Deal is not about climate change, it is about climate justice - a radical new ideology hellbent on destroying western civilization under the false pretense that white supremacy is the leading cause of climate change, social injustice and all problems globally.

The organizers of these Youth Non-government Organizations, or Youngos, embellish white supremacy as a systemic problem, hyper-focusing on statistically rare instances of racial inequality and injustice, while ignoring great strides of progress the United States has made over the past century towards equal opportunity and criminal justice reform. However, in order to normalize radical policies put forth by the Green New Deal, crises have to be capitalized on to further their agenda while destroying the great accomplishments of civil rights movements of the past.

SOURCE

A Plastic-Cup Toast to Oil and Gas

As states begin to reopen and bundles of sun-pale, previously isolated Americans pour out of their homes seeking to lap up an abundance of Covid-killing UV rays at parks, pool parties and protests across the country, it’s time to give a nod to the oil and gas industry for delivering to us the many spittle-protecting plexi-glass partitions, painted warning/closure signs in our parks, PPE of every kind, and medical equipment that are providing us the necessary protection through the ‘duck and cover’, ‘phase 2’ period of the re-opening of the U.S. economy. Regardless of one’s opinion about the various re-opening strategies (and there are many opinions), there is no question that without the diligent and on-going work of the men and women of the industry from extraction to transportation to refining of our nation’s oil and gas resources, our lives have been made better during this grueling lock-down period.

As I returned to the west coast from one of the most prolific shale plays in the US (in my gasoline-fueled car with rubber tires), I was struck by the juxtaposition of the deep disdain many in this part of the country have for the oil and gas industry, on one hand, while simultaneously surrounding and covering themselves with every kind of petroleum-based product, to avoid the statistically unlikely event of contracting or transmitting ‘the corona’, on the other hand.

On both coasts, the impact of the products derived from the oil and gas industry on our lives has never been so visibly ubiquitous to the public, nor so plainly positive. Without these products, America and the world would be hesitant to get back to normal economic and social activity. While many love to hate the industry, it’s impossible to ignore its positive impact throughout our lives. Whether it’s the computer screens through which many now participate in Zoom meetings to our virtual happy hours with friends on Facebook, or our Netflix binge-watching, life is made better because of oil and gas. Whether it’s the face shields and gloves our ER docs and nursing staff are wearing in emergency rooms, or the PPE our dentists are wearing while finally cleaning our teeth, life is made better because of oil and gas. As countless diners pick up their delicious carry-out meals packed in all sorts of oil and gas industry-derived packaging, cutlery, straws and libation-filled cups, it is clear life is made better because of oil and gas.

So while we anxiously await the return of our collective pre-Covid lives…and they will return …let us take a moment to acknowledge in big and small ways that our lives are decisively better because of the men and women of the oil and gas industry. A simple thank you would be brilliant, and I’ll bet even appreciated.

SOURCE

Reining In The Green Bureaucracy

It took about 13 months and 15 days to construct the Empire State Building in New York City, which opened in 1931 on 34th street in midtown Manhattan.

At 1,250 feet and 102 stories, it was the tallest building in the world until 1970, when the Twin Towers in downtown eclipsed it.

It took 11 years to construct the Freedom Tower, which opened 2014 adjacent to where the Twin Towers once stood. At 1,300 feet, this skyscraper took nearly ten times longer to construct.

This comparison and countless other examples are the key reason that President Trump last week signed an executive order for federal agencies to shorten environmental reviews for construction of highways, mines, pipelines, and other projects on federal lands as the nation continues to suffer economically during the Covid-19 emergency.

Modern-day construction of infrastructure takes too long and becomes too expensive due, at least in part, to mandated, multi-layered bureaucratic reviews.

Laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act require agencies to conduct multi-step, detailed reviews of the potential impact of construction projects on the environment.

The executive order is a continuation of efforts by the president going back three years to streamline these regulatory reviews in order to speed up projects, lower their costs, and strengthen the economy.

NEPA has been on the books since 1970. Such laws are necessary and warranted, yet many anti-development and Green groups have historically used them not to ensure adequate reviews and safeguards, but to stop human progress and modernization.

Litigation also reaps a financial bonanza for trial lawyers, who also are politically influential.

The Interstate Highway System, built in the 1950s, is one of the greatest public work achievements in history, a crown jewel of President Eisenhower’s administration.

It is fully embraced by millions of Americans who drive on it, and integral to the economy. Imagine trying to build that system today? It is unimaginable, with a multitude of agencies and laws involved.

The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) in 2009, which passed to help the nation recover from the Great Recession, provides a salient modern contrast.

This $787 billion undertaking (which was big money at the time) was sold as an infrastructure bill that would bring “shovel-ready projects” to completion and create jobs.

It did little, absent a small portion that was used for highway and bridge repair. President Obama later acknowledged that “‘shovel-ready’ was not as shovel-ready as we expected.”

President Trump’s latest executive order does not repeal NEPA or any other statute. It cannot. Rather, it is about administering such laws in a more balanced and efficient manner, which is a discussion worth having, especially now.

The Trump administration has been pushing the debate over the costs and benefits of environmental laws and processes affecting construction and job creation, especially now as the nation grapples with economic collapse from the pandemic with millions of Americans out of work.

Sadly, millions of unemployed Americans will have no sympathy from extremist Green groups and politicians who, right on key, assume the worst from streamlining environmental regulations.

A comment by Christy Goldfuss of the Center for American Progress was a revealing example.

Goldfuss headed President Obama’s Council on Environmental Quality, and said the Trump administration is “trying to divert attention away (sic) from the crisis of racial injustice happening around the country by giving agency leads the excuse to ram through polluting projects that will prop up the dying fossil fuel industry while destroying the very same communities that are dying at higher rates from Covid-19 and police violence as well.”

Ms. Goldfuss’s attempt to connect streamlining of environmental reviews to racial politics is a vile non-sequitur designed to exacerbate division. It’s also an example of the impossibility of having an honest debate about anything in this country.

Notice further her mention of “prop[ing] up the dying fossil fuel industry.” There’s the real rub for green activists.

Killing fossil fuels is the key ingredient in transforming America in ways that will make us poorer and more dependent on the government for sustenance, which ultimately empowers people influencing and running the government.

The Trump administration’s efforts to streamline bureaucratic oversight and litigation to construct and repair infrastructure is not zero-sum anti-environment, despite the hysteria from the usual suspects.

We need not return to the days when a skyscraper or major bridge crossing could be built in a year; but when it takes up to a decade and longer, then the environmental process needs fixing to ensure a sensible, cost-effective balance.

SOURCE

Mass. Attorney General Admits Intention To Ban Fossil Fuels

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey called on the state’s Department of Public Utilities to investigate “the future of the natural gas industry” in Massachusetts this week, alleging that the use of the fuel didn’t align with the state’s 2050 climate goals.

While such a claim is confusing, considering the role of natural gas in mitigating carbon emissions and the state’s significant reliance on the fuel, it was made all the more shocking by Attorney General Healey’s reasoning:

    “In order to combat the climate crisis and meet our clean energy goals, we must transition away from fossil fuels and change the way gas utilities do business in our state,” Attorney General Healey said. “We want the DPU to take a close look at the future of the natural gas industry in Massachusetts and make the policy and structural changes we need to ensure a clean energy future that is safe, reliable, and fair.” (emphasis added)

With that statement, the attorney general just said the quiet part out loud.

Admittedly, Healey has made statements in support of a “clean energy transition” before, but this serves as the starkest example of her true intention: banning fossil fuels by using whatever tools are available to her.

This intention is most notable in how it relates to Healey’s lawsuit against ExxonMobil.

Filing suit against the company in October 2019, the attorney general claimed that her office brought the lawsuit on the basis of the company’s alleged “deceptive marketing” and “campaign to mislead both consumers and investors.”

Attorney General Healey’s most recent comment, however, underscores that the lawsuit is, in reality, an attempt to stop the company from producing oil and natural gas.

In fact, the Massachusetts complaint even hints at her true motivation, with Healey stating:

    “The gravity of ExxonMobil’s historic and continuing unlawful actions cannot be overstated; the world lost forty critical years to develop and deploy new technologies that would allow an orderly transition away from fossil fuels,” (emphasis added)

This is further bolstered by other efforts undertaken by the Massachusetts attorney general’s office.

For example, in a December 2017 hearing on Attorney General Healey’s investigation into ExxonMobil, the counsel from the attorney general’s office stated that the company should include climate warnings on all of its advertising – including on gas pumps.

Massachusetts Relies on Natural Gas

In addition to exposing her true intentions, Healey’s call for an investigation into Massachusetts natural gas utilities and lawsuits against companies like ExxonMobil could have devastating effects for the state, which heavily relies on the fuel.

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), Massachusetts generates 67 percent of its electricity from natural gas.

EIA also states that “more than half of the households in the state rely on natural gas as their primary energy source for home heating” – a crucial resource in a state that experiences very cold winters.

Yet there is fierce opposition to natural gas pipelines and other infrastructure from politicians like Healey and environmental activists, which has resulted in the stalling of new pipeline development in the region.

This opposition comes at a price. When temperatures dropped in 2018 and faced with limited supply due to pipeline constrictions, the state was forced to import natural gas from Russia – an action Healey said she prefers when compared to using domestically produced natural gas transported via pipeline.

In short, Attorney General Healey’s recent comment shows her true intention is to ban oil and natural gas use in the state, even if that means bringing unfounded allegations against producers or relying on foreign adversaries like Russia to keep the lights on.

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, 2020

No One Knows What’s Going To Happen

THE best prophet, Thomas Hobbes once wrote, is the best guesser. That would seem to be the last word on our capacity to predict the future: We can’t.

But it is a truth humans have never been able to accept. People facing immediate danger want to hear an authoritative voice they can draw assurance from; they want to be told what will occur, how they should prepare, and that all will be well. We are not well designed, it seems, to live in uncertainty. Rousseau exaggerated only slightly when he said that when things are truly important, we prefer to be wrong than to believe nothing at all.

The history of humanity is the history of impatience. Not only do we want knowledge of the future, we want it when we want it. The Book of Job condemns as prideful this desire for immediate attention. Speaking out of the whirlwind, God makes it clear that he is not a vending machine. He shows his face and reveals his plans when the time is ripe, not when the mood strikes us. We must learn to wait upon the Lord, the Bible tells us. Good luck with that, Job no doubt grumbled.

When the gods are silent, human beings take things into their own hands. In religions where the divine was thought to inscribe its messages in the natural world, specialists were taught to take auspices from the disposition of stars in the sky, from decks of cards, dice, a pile of sticks, a candle flame, a bowl of oily water, or the liver of some poor sheep. With these materials, battles could be planned, plagues predicted and bad marriages avoided.

In those places where the gods were thought to communicate verbally with humans, oracles and prophets were designated to provide answers on demand. The most highly revered oracles in the ancient Greek world were the high priestesses at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. To respond to a petitioner who had placed a question before her, the priestess would enter the inner sanctum and seat herself on a tripod erected over a crevice in the ground, out of which inebriating gases were thought to rise.

These fumes paralyzed her rational faculties and put her in a trance of receptivity that allowed the god Apollo to speak through her in cryptic remarks and riddles. These would be interpreted by a second figure, the prophet, who answered the grateful petitioner in poetry or prose. It was a very successful startup and made Delphi a wealthy town.

Prophets today are less flamboyant. Former prime ministers do not, as a rule, sniff drugs before appearing on CNN. They sit meekly in the green room sipping mineral water before being called on to announce our fate. Augurs have given up on sheep livers and replaced them with big data and statistical modeling. The wonder is that we still cry out for their help, given that the future is full of surprises.

Professional forecasters know this about the future, which is why in the small print of their reports they lay out all the assumptions that went into the forecast and the degree of statistical confidence one might have in particular estimates, given the data and research methods used. But harried journalists and public officials don’t read or comprehend the footnotes, and with the public baying for information, they understandably pass on the most striking estimates just to get through the day.

Ancient augurs and prophets were in high-risk professions. When their predictions failed to materialize, many were executed by sovereigns or pulled apart by mobs. We see a bloodless version of this reaction today in the public’s declining confidence in both the news media and the government.

Take a banal example: snowstorms and school closings. A half century ago, when meteorological forecasting was less sophisticated, parents and children would not learn that classes were canceled until the storm began and it was announced on radio and television that very morning. We lived in harmless uncertainty, which for kids was thrilling.

We live in a state of radical uncertainty. The first step is to accept it.

When snowflakes fell they even looked like manna from heaven.

Today, mayors and school superintendents, putting their faith in the meteorologists, routinely announce closings a day or more in advance. If the storm fails to arrive, though, they are sharply criticized by parents who lost a day of work or had to find day care.

And if an unforeseen storm paralyzes the city, leaving streets unsalted and children stranded at school, the reaction is far worse. More than one mayor has lost a re-election bid because of failed prophecies, victim of our collective overconfidence in human foresight.

Our addiction to economic forecasting is far more consequential. Here the footnotes really do matter but politicians and the press encourage magical thinking.

The candidate declares, My plan will create 205,000 new jobs, raise the Dow 317 points and lower the price of gasoline 15 cents. Two years later, the gloating headline reads: The President’s Unkept Promises. Stagnant growth, a bear market and war in the Middle East make re-election unlikely.

Never mind that declining global demand slowed growth, that Wall Street is a drama queen and that a freakish tanker collision set off the war. A failed presidency is declared. And so the press and the public turn to fresher faces - who of course offer the same absurdly precise predictions. Not for nothing did Gore Vidal call us the United States of Amnesia.

The public square is thick today with augurs and prophets claiming to foresee the post-Covid world to come. I, myself, who find sundown something of a surprise every evening, have been pursued by foreign journalists asking what the pandemic will mean for the American presidential election, populism, the prospects of socialism, race relations, economic growth, higher education, New York City politics and more. And they seem awfully put out when I say I have no idea. You know your lines, just say them.

I understand their position. With daily life frozen, there are fewer newsworthy events to be reported on and debated. Yet columns must be written, and the 24/7 cable news machine must be fed. Only so much time can be spent on the day’s (hair-raising) news conferences or laying blame for decisions made in the past or sentimental stories on how people are coping. So journalists’ attention turns toward the future.

But the post-Covid future doesn’t exist. It will exist only after we have made it.

Religious prophecy is rational, on the assumption that the future is in the gods’ hands, not ours. Believers can be confident that what the gods say through the oracles’ mouth or inscribe in offal will come to pass, independent of our actions. But if we don’t believe in such deities, we have no reason to ask what will happen to us. We should ask only what we want to happen, and how to make it happen, given the constraints of the moment.

Apart from the actual biology of the coronavirus - which we are only beginning to understand - nothing is predestined. How many people fall ill with it depends on how they behave, how we test them, how we treat them and how lucky we are in developing a vaccine.

The result of those decisions will then limit the choices about reopening that employers, mayors, university presidents and sports club owners are facing. Their decisions will then feed back into our own decisions, including whom we choose for president this November. And the results of that election will have the largest impact on what the next four years will hold.

The pandemic has brought home just how great a responsibility we bear toward the future, and also how inadequate our knowledge is for making wise decisions and anticipating consequences. Perhaps that is why our prophets and augurs can’t keep up with the demand for foresight.

At some level, people must be thinking that the more they learn about what is predetermined, the more control they will have. This is an illusion. Human beings want to feel that they are on a power walk into the future, when in fact we are always just tapping our canes on the pavement in the fog.

A dose of humility would do us good in the present moment. It might also help reconcile us to the radical uncertainty in which we are always living. Let us retire our prophets and augurs. And let us stop asking health specialists and public officials for confident projections they are in no position to make - and stop being disappointed when the ones we force out of them turn out to be wrong. (A shift from daily to weekly news conferences and reports would be a small step toward sobriety.)

We worsen the situation by focusing our attention on litigating the past and demanding certainty about the future. We must accept what we are, in any case, condemned to do in life: tap and step, tap and step, tap and step . . . .

SOURCE

Bill McKibben Caught Lying About Wind and Solar Costs

In a Los Angeles Times editorial, climate activist Bill McKibben claims, “In the last 10 years, engineers have driven the price of sun and wind power down below coal.” This is a falsehood that climate activists frequently tell, but here is the truth.

What McKibben doesn’t disclose is that he’s only counting the price of wind and solar on days when they are operating at peak capacity, while ignoring their capital costs. Also, he is calculating the costs of operating traditional electric power plants when they are operating at less than peak efficiency, due to their need to regulate wind and solar’s ever-fluctuating power supply.

McKibben also conveniently fails to count the tremendous subsidies wind and solar power receive from the government. Indeed, without government subsidies and mandates, wind and solar power would largely be a boutique power supply for the wealthy. As Climate Realism notes, “Wind and solar power receive substantially more subsidies than conventional energy sources. Wind power by itself receives more source-specific government subsidies than all conventional energy sources combined. Solar power by itself also receives more source-specific government subsidies than all conventional energy sources combined.”

An analysis by the Institute of Energy Research, “The Levelized Cost Of Electricity From Existing Generation Resources,” reports, “Continuing to operate existing coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear plants provides a cheaper source of electricity than replacing them with new plants or renewable sources of power like wind or solar.”

Ultimately, if wind and solar power were less expensive than coal, they would dominate world electricity production. The fact that wind and solar produce so little of the world’s electricity mix is proof positive that they are substantially more expensive than conventional energy.

You don’t need to pass laws and twist people’s arms to incentivize them to not throw away their money. On the other hand, you do need to pass laws and twist people’s arms to make them foolishly waste their money. That is what activists like Bill McKibben seek to do.

SOURCE

An Inconvenient Truth: Gore Proven Spectacularly Wrong on Snows of Kilimanjaro

In his 2006 book, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore asserted there would be no more snows on Mt. Kilimanjaro by the year 2016. To the contrary, Mt. Kilimanjaro, located just 205 miles from the equator in Tanzania, continues to host huge, year-round glaciers and snowfall on a regular basis. In fact, today’s eight-day weather forecast for Mt. Kilimanjaro, provided by weather.com via Google, shows a forecast of snow every day for the foreseeable future.

On page 45 of his 2006 book, Gore writes, “Another friend, Dr. Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University, is the world’s leading expert on mountain glaciers. Here he is at the top of Kilimanjaro in 2000 with the pitiful last remnants of one of its great glaciers. He predicts that within 10 years there will be no more ‘Snows of Kilimanjaro.’”

However, the website www.just-kilimanjaro.com reports the snow-capped mountain peak continues to exist “with permanent glaciers covering its entire tip.”

The website www.deeperafrica.com reports similar year-round snow. “Ice and snow can be found year-round on the mountain’s upper reaches. There are massive glaciers, ice fields, and towering walls of ice that blaze in the equatorial sun,” the website reports.

SOURCE

Al Gore Falsely Claims Fossil Fuels Raise Coronavirus Death Rate

Al Gore falsely attempted to blame fossil fuels for raising the coronavirus death rate during a February 27 MSNBC interview. In reality, economic prosperity brought by the use of abundant, affordable fossil fuels results in lower death rates from viruses and epidemics. Also, viruses like influenza and COVID-19 thrive in cold climate conditions and are inhibited by warmer temperatures.

“This climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic are linked in some ways,” Gore said on MSNBC, as reported by The Hill. “The preconditions that raise the death rate from COVID-19, a great many of them, are accentuated, made worse by the fossil fuel pollution.”

Scientists have long known that cold temperatures are a key factor in the annual death toll for influenza, which kills an average of approximately 36,000 Americans per year.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) documents that flu season ramps up when the weather turns cold, and then peters out when warm temperatures return. According to CDC, “influenza activity often begins to increase in October. Most of the time flu activity peaks between December and February, although activity can last as late as May.”

According to Harvard University researchers, “In the southern hemisphere, however, where winter comes during our summer months, the flu season falls between June and September. In other words, wherever there is winter, there is flu. In fact, even its name, “influenza” may be a reference to its original Italian name, influenza di freddo, meaning “influence of the cold”.

“[A]t least in regions that have a winter season, the influenza virus survives longer in cold, dry air, so it has a greater chance of infecting another person,” the Harvard researchers added.

Scientists are still learning about COVID-19, but preliminary evidence indicates warmer temperatures have either minor or significant impacts reducing the spread and harm of coronavirus. Warmer temperatures certainly do not make COVID-19 worse.

According to a publication released by Harvard Medical School, a recent study by the National Academies of Sciences “found that in laboratory settings, higher temperatures and higher levels of humidity decreased survival of the COVID-19 coronavirus.” The scientists are currently attempting to determine whether this will also be the case in natural environments outside the laboratory.

In fact, cold temperatures kill many more people – for a variety of reasons – than warm or hot temperatures.

In an article published in the Southern Medical Journal in 2004, W. R. Keatinge and G. C. Donaldson noted, “Cold-related deaths are far more numerous than heat-related deaths in the United States, Europe, and almost all countries outside the tropics, and almost all of them are due to common illnesses that are increased by cold.”

More recently in a study published in the Lancet in 2015, researchers examined health data from 384 locations in 13 countries, accounting for more than 74 million deaths, and found cold weather, directly or indirectly, killed 1,700% more people than warm or hot weather.

In his MSNBC interview, Gore doubled down on his reckless assertions. He attempted to link fossil fuels to high asthma rates, which he claimed are made worse by the coronavirus. However, even as air pollution in the United States has consistently and sharply declined since the 1970s, asthma rates have increased substantially. This contradicts the assertion that air pollution causes asthma.

As explained by researcher Joel Schwartz in his paper, “Facts Not Fear on Air Pollution,” the incidence of asthma rose 75 percent from 1980 to 1996, and nearly doubled for children. However, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency documents that air pollution has declined 74 percent since the 1970’s, over the same time period that asthma worsened.

In the end, climate change is neither causing nor exacerbating any identifiable illness or disease, be it COVID-19 or anything else. To the extent a modestly warming planet may impact COVID-19, the impact is almost certainly to reduce the spread of the disease and save many human lives.

SOURCE

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

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

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9 June, 2020

The Green New Deal dress rehearsal

The Covid-19 lockdown as a blueprint for a permanent economic shutdown to ‘save the Earth’

Paul Driessen

More than 1.4 million cases of Wuhan Coronavirus and 106,000 deaths in the United States alone have accompanied stay-home lockdowns, businesses bankruptcies, over 40 million unemployed workers, plummeting tax revenues and unprecedented debt. Ongoing rioting, vandalism, arson and looting are compounding problems for many cities and minority communities.

But where many see disaster, others see opportunity. Some want to use the crises to enact laws and welfare programs they could never get otherwise. More ambitious activists see the lockdown as a blueprint or dress rehearsal for a total energy, economic and lifestyle transformation to “save the planet.” If three months of Covid lockdowns can reduce fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions, they argue, permanent fossil fuel bans are possible, essential and should be undertaken immediately.

Five years ago, former UN official Christiana Figueres said the real goal of climate actions was to “intentionally transform the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years” – and replace it with socialist-environmentalist global governance. More recently, she said post-Corona economic stimulus packages should be used to “kick-start” investments “in low-carbon infrastructure projects that will create jobs and put the world on a safer, fairer, more resilient path.” Others want to use climate change as a pretext for dictating how global wealth and resources will be redistributed.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff is on the same page. The Green New Deal “wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” he said in May 2019. It was “a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” Presidential candidate Joe Biden and other leading Democrats have endorsed the GND.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres believes “the pandemic could create an opportunity to rebuild the global economy along more sustainable lines.” His environment chief thinks COVID-19 presents “a chance to do capitalism differently.” The UN Green Climate Fund says it “offers an opportunity to direct finances towards bolstering climate action” and “re-launch[ing] economies on low-emission, climate-resilient trajectories,” to control climate and weather and prevent massive extinctions.

In short, echoing former Obama science advisor John Holdren, they want the United States and other modern societies to de-develop and de-industrialize, establish low-consumption life styles that ensure “more equitable distribution of wealth,” and tell poor countries how much “ecologically feasible” development they will be permitted to pursue.

Perhaps most important, these “visionary” ruling elites will be in charge. They will define what is clean, green, renewable, sustainable, ecologically feasible, safer, fairer, more resilient. They will demand less travel, trade and commerce – for the masses. They will live quite well, while telling today’s oilfield and factory workers their industries must disappear and they must be content with minimum-wage jobs installing, maintaining and dismantling wind turbines and solar panels made overseas.

Fans and implementers of Covid-19 lockdowns have been oblivious to the economic, societal and human devastation caused by the lockdowns: not just economic losses, depleted savings and ruined dreams, but millions of cases of depression, drug addiction, alcoholism, domestic violence, obesity, stroke, heart attack, thousands of deaths from these causes, and suicide and murder attributable to the lockdowns.

Add to that millions of future or still uncounted deaths and disabilities from missed biopsies, skipped cancer screenings and chemotherapy, missed early treatments for stroke and heart-attack patients, and organ transplants simply not performed – because “non-essential” medicine was closed down, people lost their health insurance, or patients were afraid to go to clinics and emergency rooms.

Many hospitals, clinics and practices lost so much money that they may have to close their doors. The cumulative long-term impact from that on healthcare, life spans, and death tolls among obese, diabetic, elderly and severely ill patients could be enormous. These human costs will take years to manifest themselves and be calculated. Indeed, the ultimate cost of the lockdown could be worse than the virus.

We still do not have reliable data on Covid infections, cases and deaths – and don’t know whether deaths were due to Corona, or merely associated with the virus and primarily due to age or serious underlying health problems. We don’t even know how many vulnerable elderly people died from Covid complications inflicted on them by decisions by New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and other officials to force nursing homes to accept recovering Corona patients and keep Covid-infected staff working in those facilities.

All this is from lockdowns lasting several months. Suggestions that we “transform” our economy with expensive, unreliable, weather dependent energy – and endure energy, employment, healthcare and other deprivations in perpetuity – border on homicidal insanity. They would postpone or eliminate any economic recovery, result in unimaginable misery and death in now-developed countries – and condemn tens of millions of people in still impoverished nations to horrible suffering, disease, starvation and death.

As to saving the planet and ensuring “ecologically feasible” development, GND energy systems would be vastly more devastating to scenic areas, habitats and wildlife – and to human health and welfare – than any likely effects from manmade portions of future climate changes or weather events.

As Michael Moore’s new film, “Planet of the Humans,” dramatically demonstrates, wind, solar, battery and biofuel technologies are the antithesis of clean, green, renewable and sustainable. Even worse, the ecological devastation it documents is happening in a world that is still 81% dependent on oil, natural gas and coal, 4% on nuclear and 7% on hydroelectric. The impacts and species losses would be orders of magnitude greater if we were 100% dependent on pseudo-renewable energy sources.

Adopting UN-AOC energy prescriptions would require literally millions of 800-foot-tall wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of half-ton batteries, thousands of biofuel plantations and clear-cut forests, billions of battery-powered vehicles, and thousands of new and expanded mines to provide tens of billions of tons more metals and minerals. The ecological impacts would reach every corner of every continent. Hundreds of bird, bat, reptile and mammalian species would disappear. Household, hospital, school, business and factory electricity costs would skyrocket. Jobs and industries would vanish.

Those prescriptions would also make the United States enormously dependent on China, not just for medical devices and pharmaceutical components – but for metals, raw materials and component parts needed in wind turbines, solar panels, backup power batteries, and defense, aerospace and high-technology applications. And all that mining and manufacturing, in Asia and other distant lands, would require fossil fuels, at levels far beyond anything seen in history, under minimal to nonexistent pollution, workplace safety and human rights laws, accompanied by prodigious emissions of carbon dioxide.

Fans and implementers of GND transformations are willfully oblivious of these realities. They refuse to discuss them or allow others to discuss them – because to do so would destroy their phony “saving the planet” narrative and quest for total control over our lives, livelihoods, living standards and liberties.

No wonder the UN-AOC-environmentalist crowd went ballistic over Moore’s film. YouTube yanked the movie from its viewing platform, and “mainstream” media, social media, search engines and information sites are now engaging in blatant censorship on climate, energy and environmental issues.

An increasingly activist, liberal media complex also wants to dictate and control what people see, hear, say and think on race relations, medicine and virtually every other political topic. From the NY Times and Washington Post, to Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube and Wikipedia, platforms that should be forums for robust debate instead are used to dictate what is true or false, permissible or banned.

US, EU and UN green new deals are just one component of the battle for our future. Corona lockdowns should serve as a bitter taste of what could come – not as a dress rehearsal or blueprint for it.

Via email

Book review: “Natural” asks the wrong question

Alan Levinovitz begins Natural: How faith in nature’s goodness leads to harmful fads, unjust laws, and flawed science by asking the question, “How can we live in harmony with nature?” A better question might be, “Should we?”

Levinovitz spends the rest of the book showing how attempts to “live in harmony with nature” have created havoc in our society. He seeks to convince us that “natural” itself is but a social construct that lacks real definition. More specifically, this “scholar of religion” asserts that “natural” is a religious term – and that is the primary flaw in his analysis.

“Natural” in this context means “holy,” and thus to the believer, unnatural (everything else) is unholy – whether you are speaking of childbirth, legal principles, or the food we eat. Wherever the term “natural” is used to describe a favored practice, there is, Levinovitz would have you believe, a religious foundation.

But it is paganism (a term he ignores) that has at its heart the recognition of the divine in nature. A true religious scholar would know there is a massive gulf between worship of the creation (nature) and worship of the Creator.

Levinovitz sees himself as an enlightened soul, one who knows that the best future for humanity and nature must be built on dialogue and evidence, “not taboos and zealotry.” Those who “wrap their rhetoric in the mantle of ‘what’s natural,’ he says, tend to be propagandists, bigots, demagogues, and marketers.”

High on Levinovitz’s list of debunkable myths is that of “natural childbirth,” which he rightly notes is fraught with dangers both for humans and members of the animal kingdom. A better standard, he suggests, is to prevent the transformation of childbirth into a dehumanizing experience, infused with fear and drained of symbolic power. After all, he reminds us, “nature gave birth to humanity.”

Or take “natural vanilla” versus artificial vanilla, about 85 percent of which today is derived from petrochemicals. “Natural” vanilla is extracted from orchids and was initially meticulously processed by Mayans in a four-step process involving killing, sweating, drying, and conditioning over a period of 8 to 10 months. Eventually, growers began artificially inseminating the orchid flowers, a highly labor-intensive practice that can hardly be described as “natural.”

Levinovitz dislodges the myth that noble savages lived in harmony with nature and suggests that our environmental crises are better
solved with technology than nostalgia. Citing the work of anthropologist Shepard Krech, Levinovitz points to tribes that slaughtered entire herds of buffalo and left the carcasses to rot. Slavery, rape, and torture were also common in many Native American cultures.

The central weakness of this book is Levinovitz’s assault on “the natural order” and later on “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” He speaks of the “myth” that humanity “fell” from a state of nature (perfection) as in reality a state of ignorance but laments that evolving societies have classified those living in more primitive cultures as subhuman and thus worthy of treating as pack animals.

Seizing upon a strange speech by one 19th Century preacher (Henry Drummond), who called out hermit crabs for “failing to live by nature’s laws” (by “borrowing” mollusk shells), Levinovitz juxtaposes the values of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who asserted that science is the realm of descriptive authority while claiming that religion and secular ethics deal only with normative truths.

This viewpoint naturally leads to a deconstruction of the Declaration of Independence. Levinovitz argues that Jefferson followed the writings of the Swiss scholar Jean Jacques Burlamaqui in presuming that “natural” is a synonym for “rational,” hence that the law of Nature (and Nature’s God) is clearly discernible through reason.

Levinovitz disagrees, lamenting that the “very idea of ‘natural laws’ ordained by God invites haphazard conversions of the is of the natural world’s regularities into the ought of politics and religion.”

Levinovitz next challenges the concept of “the invisible hand” of Adam Smith, using as his foil a man who calls meat “the original bitcoin.” He cites a comment from a former Securities and Exchange Commission chair who saw his mission as allowing “the natural interplay of market forces to shape markets according to the demands of investors.”

But Levinovitz asserts that this “religious” worldview on markets belies the fact that “the benevolent design of Nature rarely works out in practice,” even though Smith assails monopolies for working against the common good (including elevating the real price of goods). He sees social Darwinism as the bastard child of the invisible hand and notes that social Darwinists lacked sympathy for the less fit.

While social Darwinism gave rise to the eugenics movement, which sought to eliminate “the unfit” from society, Levinovitz says many so-called social Darwinists merely picked and chose whatever biological principles happened to best fit their economic ideologies. But does not Levinovitz follow after these pickers and choosers when he rebukes as a religious construct the idea that transgender women have any unfair advantages over biological women?

In closing, Levinovitz admits that his skepticism about faith in nature’s goodness had become its own kind of faith, a photonegative of the false ideology he sought to discredit. His conclusion is that natural is neither good nor evil but rather a meaningless construct often exploited by advertisers, whether for healthful supplements or childbirth.

His solution is to see the problem as ideological monoculture in which disobedience to the stated norms is sacrilege. He proposes instead a polycultural approach that cultivates diversity, yet he admits that “I am more philosophically confused about nature than I was when I began.” Thus he embraces uncertainty as humility – and sees humility as a sacred concept.

After tediously following Levinovitz’s circular journey, there is some value in this book despite its ambiguities. Natural has (perhaps unwittingly) questioned traditional pagan and animist and quasi-religious ways of looking at the world and demythologized the very concept of “natural” – which he sees in many cases as little more than a sales pitch. In so doing, he demonstrates that faith in natural goodness belies the wisdom that comes from science, economics, and other intellectual disciplines.

But what is truly missing here is the distinction between the natural and the divine – that living in harmony with God is far more important than living in harmony with nature. Indeed, the Apostle Paul states clearly (I Corinthians 2:14) that “the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

Thus, Levinovitz does not truly grasp the concepts of the law of Nature and the invisible hand, for it is not NATURE’s goodness – but God’s – that is transformative.

Levinovitz thus has laid the foundation for debunking a society based on the premise that enriching oneself requires taking advantage of others. A far better template is the win-win approach that asks the question, how can we serve one another, which is the same question as “How can we live in harmony with the Divine?”

SOURCE

It’s time to follow Mexico and pull the plug on “renewables”

The only things ‘inevitable’ about the ‘transition’ to wind and solar are rocketing electricity prices and unstable power grids.

The only things ‘inevitable’ about the ‘transition’ to wind and solar are rocketing electricity prices and unstable power grids. Recognizing that industrial wind and solar electricity bring little to no value to electrical grids, Mexico is moving to avoid the higher electrical prices experienced by Germany, Denmark, Great Britain, South Australia, California, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and other governments that have heavily subsidized their supply of intermittent electricity. Time for California to follow the lead of our Southern neighbor and pull the plug on renewable subsidies.

To stop continuous increases in the cost of electricity, Mexico stepped up to the plate and pulled the plug on subsidy dependent intermittent power from wind and solar that has been driving up the cost of electricity for its financially challenged population. The Mexican government has taken a stand that has sent renewable energy rent seekers into a tailspin.

Does California have the leadership mettle to reverse decades of price increases for electricity?

Based on what Newsom did in San Francisco, maybe not. Governor Newsom was the San Francisco Mayor for eight years. In 2003, Newsom was elected the 42nd Mayor of San Francisco, becoming the city’s youngest mayor in a century. Newsom was re-elected in 2007. In the event our leadership does nothing to curtail continuous increases in the cost of electricity, this California Political Review article America’s Havana – Thousands Say Ciao to San Francisco may be a preview of the outlook for the entire state under current leadership.

Hopefully, Newsom could deliver such a message. I, as a Toastmaster graduate, focus on the number of “ahs” from public speakers. Governor Newsom starts almost every sentence with an “ah”, so much so that it’s so distracting that I have stopped listening to his COVID-19 updates and wait for a condensed summary from the news broadcasters. When you listen to his next pandemic update, focus on all those “ahs” and you’ll understand!

For decades, California’s bizarre laws and regulations and subsides for “green” renewables have driven up the cost of electricity for its 40 million residents. It’s time for California to reverse that upward trend that gotten prices for electricity in California are already fifty percent higher than the national average for residents, and double the national average for commercial, and are projected to go even higher.

With the shuttering of Pacific Gas & Electric’s Diablo Canyon’s Nuclear 2,160 megawatts in 2024 and Los Angeles’ Mayor Garcetti’s desire for the forthcoming closures of three natural gas-powered plants that have been generating continuously uninterruptible electricity. Our elected officials seem to be oblivious to the fact that the State has no plans for electricity generating capacity to replace what’s going to be lost. Further, that “green” electricity from wind and solar is only intermittent, as neither generates when the wind is not blowing, and when the sun’s not shining.

Since California is currently unable to generate sufficient electricity in-state to meet demand, the state is forced by its own policies to import more electricity than any other state, an outcome that is not in the financial interest of any California resident. Without any known state-fostered plans to rebuild with more in-state power generation, California continues to shut down its safely functioning nuclear and natural gas electricity generation plants!

With this path forward, in the event other states cannot generate enough electricity to export to California to replace what’s being lost by shutting down the last nuclear plant and three natural gas plants in California, it’s lights out for California’s future. Who knows how high they will go as the state continues its importing appetite for expensive electricity?

Never mentioned by the green leadership is the worldwide ecological destruction from the mining of precious minerals to support renewables that leave lands uninhabitable and worthless for plants and trees. Renewable taxpayer handouts have stripped landscapes worldwide. Left in the wake of intermittent electricity farms and subsidized biomass-fueled power plants is cynical at best, and mercenary in their ability to destroy nature’s ability to alleviate the coronavirus via cleaner air.

During this global pandemic, dependence on China for rare earth minerals, which solar panels and wind turbines are useless without, renewable electricity a costly as well as dirty proposition.

Renewables make no sense when the entire world is sick. Only using Warren Buffet’s logic does chaotic wind power bring financial wealth when Mr. Buffett said: “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That is the only reasons to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

The subsidies for “green” electricity has driven up California’s cost of electricity to be among the most expensive in America, and with decades of bizarre laws and regulations that have contributed to California being a complex regulatory state, Joel Kotlin from NewGeogrpahy summarized the future in the state in his article: The Coronavirus means millennials are more screwed than ever.

As America recovers from the COVID-19 shelter-in-place mandates, California cannot rid itself from the continuing and state-prescribed high costs of energy that other states are not shackled by, and those elected California officials are doing nothing to effectively and forever resolve the causes of the high energy costs that severely limit the state’s economic base and its potential for improvement.

It’s time for California to align Mexico’s leadership bold move and pull the plug on intermittent renewables as the state needs is continuous uninterruptable electricity that’s reliable and affordable, more than ever.

SOURCE

New Study: Climate Impact Of Cattle Grazing Overestimated

The climate impact of grass-fed cattle may have been exaggerated as scientists find emissions of a powerful greenhouse gas from certain types of pasture are lower than previously thought.

Researchers from Rothamsted Research found urine from animals reared on pasture where white clover grows – a plant commonly sown onto grazing land to reduce the need for additional nitrogen fertilizer – results in just over half the amount of nitrous oxide previously assumed by scientists to be released.

Nitrous oxide is a potent greenhouse gas some 265 times more harmful than CO2 and can account for 40% of beef supply chain emissions.

Co-author of the study, Dr. Laura Cardenas said:

    Due to technical and logistical challenges, field experiments which measure losses of nitrous oxide from soils usually add livestock faeces and urine they have sourced from other farms or other parts of the farm, meaning that the emissions captured do not necessarily represent the true emissions generated by the animals consuming the pasture.”

Writing in the journal Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Environment, the team report how they created a near ‘closed’ system whereby the circular flow of nitrogen from the soil to forage to cattle and, ultimately, back to soil again, could be monitored.

Lead author of the study, Dr. Graham McAuliffe and colleagues had previously discovered system-wide reductions of greenhouse gas emissions associated with the inclusion of white clover in a pasture.

This conclusion was primarily driven by a lack of need for ammonium nitrate fertilizer, whose production and application create greenhouse gases.

According to Dr. Cardenas, further research is required to explain the detailed mechanisms behind the observed complementarity between white clover and high sugar grasses – but that the data points towards an effect of sowing clover on the soil’s microbes.

    The evidence suggests that including white clover amongst high sugar grass decreases the abundance of microbial genes associated with nitrous oxide production compared with microbial communities observed under just high sugar grass.”

As the UK wants to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by mid-century, improving our understanding of greenhouse gas emissions and mitigation potentials has never been more important, she added.

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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8 June, 2020

Solar’s Cheaper Than Coal — Great, So We’ve Beaten Climate Change Then, Right?

By Tim Worstall

It’s not necessary for us to actually agree with the following statement in order for us to derive a logical conclusion from it. After all, we might demur a little about whether solar really is cheaper than coal, or ponder on whether simple cost per watt is quite the right way to measure between continuous and variable electricity sources. However, if we do take this seriously then we are able to derive a useful logical conclusion from it:

Building new solar power projects would generate cheaper electricity than running most of the world’s existing coal power plants, according to a global renewable energy report.

New figures have revealed that more than half of the world’s coal plants could be undercut by the falling cost of new large-scale solar projects, which are now more than 80% cheaper to build than in 2010.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena) has found that up to 1,200 gigawatts of the world’s existing coal capacity could cost more to run than the cost of new utility-scale solar plants.

If energy companies replaced only their most expensive coal plants with new solar power projects or onshore wind farms, totalling 500 GW globally, they could save up to $23bn (£18bn) every year and wipe out 5% of last year’s total global carbon emissions, according to Irena.

Excellent, we’ve beaten climate change then.

For recall what the original prognosis was. That we’d carry on fuelling an ever growing industrialised society through the use of fossil fuels. More, in the worst scenario (what is now RCP8.5) we’d run out of conventional oil and gas and so turn back to the more emmittive coal. Now we’re being told that we’re simply not going to do that. Solar is cheaper. So, logically enough, people are going to install solar. Why wouldn’t people install the cheaper option?

This logic goes on to tell us that what we needed to do in order to beat climate change was get the cost of non-fossil energy sources down below those of fossil. Which, as above, we’ve done. We can now sit back and allow normal human greed to drive the rest of the process. After all, there is no one at all who favours fossil because they love clouds of black smoke now, is there?

Future energy installations will be solar, driven by pure capitalistic greed, and we’re done. We don't have to overturn industrial society – or capitalism – itself. We’ve solved the problem without doing that.

Which leads to two further pieces of logical deduction. There are those who insist that we must still overturn that capitalism, that industrial society to beat climate change. Even though we’ve already, as the figures above show, solved the problem. A possible deduction from this is that they don’t believe the above numbers and our response to that must be, but, but, don’t you believe the science, deniers? The other would be that they’re – as they have been all along – just looking for a reason to over turn capitalism and any old thing will do there. For it really is true. If we’ve made non-fossil fuel energy generation cheaper than fossil then we really have already beaten climate change. No more need be done.

SOURCE

Governors Need Relief from Renewable Fuel Mandates During Crisis

Many industries are suffering under mandates that need to be lifted to help the recovery efforts in the wake of the coronavirus economic epidemic. On April 15, 2020, Govs. Greg Abott of Texas, John Bel Edwards of Louisiana, Gary Herbert of Utah, Mark Gordon of Wyoming, and Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler to request some regulatory relief from disruptions in the oil market caused by the government shutdowns and other economic impacts of the coronavirus.

The governors made a compelling case for the Trump Administration to suspend a mandate that will crush the domestic oil refineries if allowed to stand. In the letter, the governors cited the law that allows a “waiver of the renewable volume obligation (RVO) under the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS)” because of “severe economic hardship.” This is clearly a time of severe economic hardship with tens of millions of unemployed Americans and faced with a potential economic recession currently and going forward.

The governors are correct to demand the government take a hard look at the economic distress of American refineries and figuring out how the impact of “costs associated with the recent tripling in the price of renewable identification numbers (RINs)” will destroy domestic refiners. It clearly will, which is why these governors are trying to protect refineries and jobs from an unnecessary government mandate. The EPA needs to immediately grant this waiver to allow the domestic oil industry to get back on its feet.

The EPA should have been granting waivers even before this crisis but there is no reason why the Trump Administration should not follow the March 13, 2020, declaration of a national emergency with targeted waivers. Under the law, the EPA is designated the power to set the levels of biofuels for the next few years while factoring in likely fuel consumption to calculate a percentage of ethanol that each gallon of gas must be added by refineries. Mario Loyola, Sr. Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, explained the next steps in The Atlantic on November 23, 2019, “to create a credit-trading scheme, each new gallon of pure renewable biofuel is assigned a unique renewable identification number. That ‘RIN’ becomes a tradable credit when that gallon of biofuel is blended with enough regular gasoline to meet the RFS.” A waiver will help small refineries suffering today.

Although it is true that refiners will need to purchase a smaller number of RINs because of lower demand, the mandated renewable volume obligation was an unachievable 11.56 percent before the crisis. With the crisis, the cost of compliance is even more difficult. These mandates take cash from refiners who don’t have cash for operations, because of the crash in demand with Americans traveling far less. Derrick Morgan, senior vice president of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) told Bloomberg, “we’re just looking for compliance costs to get back in line, during this time of severe economic harm to the refining industry.” Refineries are bleeding cash the mandate puts some small refiners in danger of going bankrupt.

The supporters of biofuels admit that ethanol will continue to be 10 percent of the supply of gas. A waiver will grant relief from compliance costs at a time when refineries barely have enough cash flow to support operations. Forcing them to pay for RINs will crush them. Consider this cost while demand for gas is down about 50 percent while RIN costs are up over 300 percent. The same amount of ethanol will be blended regardless of the mandate.

While the refineries are subject to the free market laws of supply and demand, the biofuel producers are granted a government-mandated market. Thanks to crashing oil prices and government mandates, two North American refiners have already become a casualty of the coronavirus economic recession. If the Trump EPA does not issue a waiver, the result will be a push for higher-priced foreign biofuels, paid for by struggling refineries, to be used in the U.S. fuel supply.

Low demand has put U.S. refineries in a tough economic position. The lack of a waiver will make the problem worse and hammer small refineries struggling to stay afloat. The EPA should grant the request of the five governors for a waiver in order to prevent damage to the critical energy infrastructure of this nation while saving thousands of American jobs.

SOURCE

Can making food from CO2 help our planet?

There have been times over the past couple of months when fretting about the carbon footprint of the food we eat has seemed like a bit of a luxury. When you’re staring at an empty supermarket shelf for the third time in a week, it can be hard being green.

But Covid-19 hasn’t changed the fact that the world’s food systems, and the planet that supports them, have never been under greater strain. Population growth, coupled with escalating demand for meat and dairy — which together account for more than 50 per cent of food?related greenhouse gases, and 80 per cent of all agricultural land use — means the race is on to find more sustainable sources of protein.

Plant-based imitation meats, edible insects, lab-cultured beef and the “chickenless egg” are some of the alternatives already in the frame. The Chicago-based company Nature’s Fynd makes protein using microbes found in the volcanic springs of Yellowstone Park.

An even more radical solution, however, is one now being proposed by a biotech start-up in Finland called Solar Foods: a protein powder made from CO2 in the air we breathe.

“To make the powder, we use a method called gas fermentation, which can be compared in many ways to making beer,” says Pasi Vainikka, the company’s chief executive. “But instead of yeast, we use naturally occurring single-cell organisms called hydrogenotrophs, which require hydrogen and CO2 to grow.

“We put some of these organisms in a fermenter along with a solution containing a small amount of mineral salts, and then we add small bubbles of hydrogen — which we get by splitting water using renewable energy — and CO2, which we capture from the air. The bacteria eat the hydrogen for energy and the CO2 for carbon, and they multiply and grow. As the liquid grows thicker, we continuously draw some of it off and then dry this out to make the protein powder.”

The resulting powder, called Solein, has a protein content of about 65 per cent — on a par with dried soya. It can be incorporated into bread, pasta, drinks and plant-based dairy and meat alternatives and its only byproducts are oxygen and a small amount of water. When we speak on the phone, Vainikka has just cooked up a round of Solein patties. In the long term, he adds, it could also provide the amino acid platform for growing cultured meat.

Plants make protein from CO2 too, of course. But unlike arable farming, Solar Foods’ process isn’t subject to climate, seasons or crop failure. It doesn’t require the use of fertilisers or pesticides and it requires a fraction of the water. According to analysis by Hanna Tuomisto, associate professor of sustainable food systems at Helsinki University, it has a carbon footprint per kilo five times smaller than plant protein and 100 times smaller than beef. And it can be cultivated in just a matter of hours.

The real challenge, says Vainikka, a bioenergy specialist who oversaw Finland’s largest sustainable energy research initiative, is scaling production. “At the moment, the cost of production is around €30 per kilo of pure protein. With further scaling and cheaper electricity, it would be possible to bring that cost down to a handful of euros a kilo — then you’d be in the window of plant-based proteins today.”

Now Solar Foods is seeking €15m to build a plant 100 times bigger than its micro-brewery-sized operation. If all goes according to plan, the first Solein-based products will hit the market in 2022.

The concept of carbon recycling was first explored by Nasa in the 1960s, as a means of feeding astronauts on the longest-distance missions. It wasn’t entertained as a serious alternative to agriculture at the time, however, because there was no commercial or environmental imperative. Chemical fertilisers had just been invented, intensive farming was flourishing and “climate change” was just a speck on the horizon. People simply didn’t see the need.

Half a century later, that Nasa research has inspired physicist and biotech entrepreneur Lisa Dyson to co-found Air Protein, a start-up in Berkeley, California, that’s now rivalling Solar Foods.

“If we’re going to feed 10 billion people by 2050, we’ve got to ask, ‘Where’s all the land going to come from?’” says Dyson. “How better to explore making food in a resource-constrained way than looking at how you’d do it on a spaceship? How do you grow food as efficiently and quickly as possible?”

Air Protein launched in 2019, with backing from private investors and the US Department of Energy. Last November, the company debuted what it described as “the world’s first air?based meat”: a CO2-derived piece of protein with the taste and texture of chicken. Samples weren’t available at the time of writing so I can’t vouch for the flavour, but in pictures, at least, it certainly has the appearance of poultry.

“We were able to get good flavour and texture, but we haven’t solved all the problems yet,” says Dyson. A team of chefs and food scientists is now working on formulas for air-based “beef”, “pork” and “seafood”, although no launch date for these products has yet been confirmed.

A UK pioneer in carbon recycling is Deep Branch Biotech. Based at the University of Nottingham, in the East Midlands, the start-up has been recognised by the Forbes 30 under 30 list for turning industrial CO2 emissions into feed for fish and poultry.

“It’s great as an individual to make the choice to not eat meat but as a society it’s naive to assume that everyone will do that,” says chief executive Peter Rowe. “We’ve chosen to focus on the animal feed market — rather than protein for human consumption — because that’s currently where the biggest pull for really high-quality protein is.

“At the moment, [the UK’s livestock industry] sources all its soy and most of its fish meal from South America. By making feed production local [and] regional, we can reduce the carbon intensity of that feed in a multitude of ways.”

Earlier this year, Deep Branch launched a pilot in partnership with Drax, the biggest power station in the UK.

“We were willing to work with Drax’s renewable energy plant in Yorkshire, because it uses biomass that’s carbon neutral at the point of generation — but I personally wouldn’t want to work, say, with an oil refinery,” says Rowe. “We don’t want to be seen to be propping up unsustainable industries.”

As Rowe acknowledges, the sourcing of CO2 can be contentious. Solar Foods refuses to partner with industrial emitters on principle. Instead, the company harvests all its CO2 from the air using its own direct-capture technology. “We don’t want to be there to greenwash carbon emissions from fossil resources,” says Vainikka. “And not being reliant on industrial emissions means we are free to go anywhere.”

Industrial CO2 emissions are already used for carbonating fizzy drinks. And they could soon play a part in making spirits too.

Air Vodka is a new “carbon-negative” spirit from New York made with industrial CO2 emissions captured from businesses around the state. Currently shortlisted for the $20m XPrize — which recognises innovations in carbon-conversion technology — it is the result of a catalytic process that its creator, Air Company, ultimately hopes to employ in making a variety of ethanol-based products including perfume, cleaning products and fuel.

I got hold of a bottle, though, and it tastes exactly as you’d expect: crisp, slightly sweet, but otherwise of not very much at all. Is the carbon-negative martini the cocktail of the future? Who knows?

More pressing, perhaps, is whether air-based protein could ever offer a viable solution to the mounting problems faced by our planet.

“Yes, ideas like [air-based protein] have a part to play, but must be placed into a much bigger picture about supply and demand, coupled with the food system, which is what really needs transforming,” says Guy Poppy, food systems expert and ecology professor at the University of Southampton.

The problem for any novel form of protein, he adds, is the scaling necessary to provide an alternative to the livestock industry. “A change in demand for animal-based proteins will help environmental health and provide direct and indirect benefits to human health, but the supply of such proteins will remain a challenge, especially in the current food system.”

I ask Vainikka if he feels optimistic: “We aren’t optimists,” he says, “but we aren’t pessimists either. What we are is possibilists. What we want to demonstrate is that there are opportunities and technologies that can take us forward. We want to empower people to make a good choice. But then it’s up to them to choose.”

SOURCE

Record June Gains for Greenland Ice Sheet

On the back of substantial surface mass balance (SMB) gains over the past few years, the Greenland ice sheet looks set to continue that trend of GROWTH in 2020 (not that you’d know it if all you read is the MSM).

Data-driven FACTS reveal vast regions to the southwest are currently GAINING RECORD LEVELS of snow & ice. Never before in June has the Greenland ice sheet grown by more than 4 Gigatons in a single day, until now that is–according to Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) data going back to 1981.

Here are the latest measurements (from June 3, 2020):

Greenland’s SMB (polarportal.dk).

I’ve just given you the irrefutable facts, yet the mainstream has chosen to run with headlines like this one, from Un-scientificamerican.com: “High Temperatures Set Off Major Greenland Ice Melt—Again“

One passage from the article (dated June 3) relays the exact opposite of what the actual data reveals: “With temperatures nearly 20 degrees Fahrenheit higher than usual in some areas, the southern part of the ice sheet is melting at its highest rate this season.”

The obfuscation is clear, and pathetic. But what’s far more troubling is how the sheeple have fallen for the ruse.

Now, in addition, and at the risk of further upsetting those agenda-pushing elites, this trend of INCREASING snow mass isn’t just confined to Greenland. No, the entire Northern Hemisphere is witnessing one of its snowiest seasons on record, according to the Finish Meteorological Institute (FMI).

The FMI’s Total Snow Mass for the Northern Hemisphere chart reveals levels of powder have held appropriately 500 Gigatons above the 1982-2012 average during the second half of the season as winter encroaches ever-further into spring/summer:

The COLD TIMES are returning in line with historically low solar activity, cloud-nucleating Cosmic Rays, and a meridional jet stream flow.

Even NASA agrees, in part at least, with their forecast for this upcoming solar cycle (25) seeing it as “the weakest of the past 200 years,” with the agency correlating previous solar shutdowns to prolonged periods of global cooling here.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here 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, 2020

Flooding disproportionately harms black neighborhoods

It probably does but the claim that the flooding is caused by climate change is pure assertion

When Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas in 2017, the neighborhood that suffered the worst flood damage was a section of southwest Houston where 49% of the residents are nonwhite.

When Hurricane Katrina hit southeast Louisiana in 2005, the damage was the most extensive in the region's African American neighborhoods.

Of the seven ZIP codes that suffered the costliest flood damage from Katrina, four of them had populations that were at least 75% black, government records show.

Flooding in the U.S. disproportionately harms African American neighborhoods, an E&E News analysis of federal flood insurance payments shows.

The concentration of flood damage in urban areas with large black populations may contrast to images of hurricanes hitting affluent coastal areas and riverine floods swamping rural, largely white communities.

But urban flooding and its disproportionate impact on minorities and low-income residents are becoming a growing concern as climate change intensifies floods. At the same time, urban development is creating more impervious surfaces in cities, and aging municipal sewer systems are overwhelmed by the increasing water.

"The [flood] risk to the nation is concentrated in the metro areas," flood expert Doug Plasencia said yesterday at a national conference on flooding. "Socially vulnerable populations add to the complexity."

A major concern about flooding in cities is that the residents who are most vulnerable — those who live in the lowest-lying areas or in neighborhoods without green space to absorb water — are often poor and members of minority groups.

"The reality is that you typically find in our floodplains many of society's vulnerable populations," Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, said at the conference yesterday. "When you look at the entire urban community, there are profound impacts due to urban flooding that go beyond physical property damage [and include] the risk of injury and loss of life."

Urban flooding has the potential to exacerbate the racial inequality that is an undercurrent of the nationwide protests over the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a black man in custody by Minneapolis police. Some protesters have denounced broad and persistent societal inequalities including the disproportionate number of blacks dying from COVID-19.

Climate-related issues also can have disparate impacts.

"Urban flooding is a growing source of significant economic loss, social disruption and housing inequality," Texas A&M University flood expert Sam Brody told yesterday's flood conference.

Research has shown that in states such as Illinois and Michigan, the costliest flood damage occurs in Chicago and Detroit — major cities with large black populations.

A report published in March 2019 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that while urban flooding affects a wide range of demographics, it is most harmful to minorities, low-income residents, and others without the resources to handle the damage and disruption.

"While severe storms fall on the rich and poor alike, the capacity to respond to and recover from flooding is much lower in socially vulnerable populations that even in the best of times are struggling to function," the report concluded.

In Houston, the researchers found that "the poorest residents are most likely to live on the lowest-lying land, and so are most subjected to higher flood exposure."

In Chicago, residents of a middle-income black neighborhood told researchers that they "receive less flood protection and are given lower priority."

The study was requested by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in an effort to understand the causes and impacts of urban flooding.

A 2018 report on urban flooding by the University of Maryland and Texas A&M's Galveston campus found that many city sewer systems "are in poor condition" and unable to handle excess water from rainfall or river overflows.

Flood damage is "especially problematic in low-lying urban areas, where stormwater infrastructure deterioration, population growth, and development have accelerated over the last several decades," the study found.

E&E News analyzed $31 billion in claims for flood damage paid by FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program between January 2010 and August 2019 and the ZIP codes in which the flood damage occurred.

The analysis found that nearly 20% of the claim dollars were paid in ZIP codes where at least one-quarter of the residents are black.

Those ZIP codes, however, made up only 13% of the U.S. population, suggesting that flooding disproportionately affects neighborhoods with a substantial black population.

The disparity was particularly acute in Louisiana when Hurricane Katrina notoriously destroyed many black neighborhoods such as New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward.

E&E News analyzed flood insurance payments related to Katrina and found that homeowners in just seven ZIP codes received nearly half of the $13 billion in flood claims. Four of those ZIP codes had populations that were at least 79% black, E&E News found.

The flood insurance data does not include properties that were damaged by floods but were not insured. Many people who live in flood zones do not have flood insurance.

"Urban flooding definitely merits national attention," said Berginnis of the floodplain association. "We are going to have worsening urban flooding problems due to development and climate change."

SOURCE

Vatican steps up push for green policies

At a time when jobs and growth have never been more critical, especially for the poor, the Vatican has stepped up its involvement in economics.

But it has lurched further left, stepping up its push for green policies and redistribution.

The church has launched a year-long celebration of Pope Francis’s controversial green encyclical Laudato si’ (Praise Be) to mark its fifth anniversary.

In that treatise the Pope called for “enforceable international agreements” and “globally regulatory norms” to cut Greenhouse gas emissions. He also advocated extending international bureaucratic control to re-slicing the economic pie, not enlarging it

“The time has come to accept decreased growth in some parts of the world, in order to provide resources for other places to experience healthy growth,’’ the encyclical said. It advocated “stronger and more efficiently organised international institutions” with functionaries appointed by agreement among nations, and “empowered to impose sanctions”.

As part of the Laudato si commemorations, Pope Francis is staging a three-day seminar for 2000 “young economists, entrepreneurs and change-makers’’ from 115 countries in Assisi in November. The Vatican has also launched new environmental awards and is hosting online webinars under the theme “The Economy of Francesco …moving towards a post-covid better world.’’

The May webinar featured British economist Kate Raworth, who will be a keynote speaker at Assisi. Answering questions online, Professor Raworth, a senior research associate at Oxford University’s Environment Change Institute, recommended that young people commit to “living within a 1.5deg world’’ (limiting global warming to within 1.5C). Doing so, she said, would involve steps such as going vegan, using public transport instead of cars, limiting long distance flying to once every 7 or 8 years and short haul flights to once every 2 or three years, downscaling the size of their homes and buying clothes only once a year.

Professor Raworth is the creator of the “doughnut model’’ of economics, which advocates limiting economic GDP growth within “social and planetary boundaries’’. She describes herself as a “renegade economist’’.

Other speakers in Assisi will be Nobel prize winning economists, Amartya Sen from India and Muhammad Yunus from Bangladesh. Both are specialists in development economics. UN adviser and Bernie Sanders backer Jeffrey Sachs, who is a regular Vatican adviser despite his outspoken support for population control and abortion, is another keynote speaker. He believes the Assisi event will be “world changing and exciting’’ for coming generations at a time young people were striking for the sake of the climate. Others keynote speakers will include ecofeminist, anti-free trade campaigner and agricultural economist Vandana Shiva from India and Canadian professor Jennifer Nedelsky, who specialises in feminist theory, legal theory and human rights.

In his Pentecost address on Sunday, Pope Francis urged nations emerging from COVID-19 to “end the pandemic of poverty’’ in the world. “When we come out of this pandemic, we will no longer be able to do what we have been doing, how we have been doing it,’’ he said. “No, everything will be different. All the suffering will have been useless if we do not build together a more just, more equitable, more Christian society, not in name, but in reality, a reality that leads us to Christian behaviour.

“If we do not work to end the pandemic of poverty in the world … this time will have been in vain. From the great trials of humanity, including the pandemic, we emerge either better or worse. We do not come out the same.’’

But the key to reducing poverty and rescuing those who had “fallen through the cracks’’ was pro-growth policies to encourage investment and jobs – not socialism and redistribution -- Australian economist Judith Sloan, a commentator for The Australian, pointed out.

“Growing the economic pie and opportunities to participate in the workforce are the ways to provide for those in need,’’ Professor Sloan said. Social justice demanded sound, rational policies to address the serious economic problems facing the world post-pandemic.

The “Economy of Francesco’’ and Laudato Si also raise the question: why is the Vatican meddling in economics to such an extent?

Christian moral teaching has long set out broad principles to be applied in wider society -- respect for life, the dignity of human beings, care for God’s creation, fair pay and conditions for workers, and a preferential option for the poor. But the church has traditionally left it to secular authorities to determine the prudential means for achieving the common good.

Laudato Si and the big-tax, low growth policies of most of those leading the “Economy of Francesco’’ process blur the demarcation between church and state, crossing the line between God and Caesar in a way that would, ironically, endanger the wellbeing of those most in need.

As Margaret Thatcher said: “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions–he had money as well.’’

SOURCE

The Dangers of Scientific Censorship—on Climate and COVID

Excuse me for wandering somewhat afield, as I’m prone to do, but I think that this stellar piece by the notorious Los Angeles Times begs for clarification. Let me say right upfront: I understand that the corona virus is a deadly killer. It likes to pick on the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions and compromised immune systems. I do not underestimate the seriousness of the current pandemic in any way.

But please recall it was the august LA Times editorial board that, a few years ago, pompously declared, “We will no longer entertain submissions of opinion by scientists (or lay-folk) advancing contrarian positions in the climate change controversy.” Why? Because the editorial board agreed with those who had (arbitrarily and capriciously, I would argue) declared the debate over. Other media would soon follow suit. And shame on those that did.

But back to the present: Several tenured virology professors at Stanford hold contrarian views in certain respects to the conventional CDC and NIH official positions. Their departure from convention may in some sense help explain the internal review undertaken by the university.

The LA Times writer indulges in a little gratuitous editorial comment that at one time was verboten in a legitimate news story, accusing the professors of “… publicizing research that has been corrupted by speed, sloppiness and opacity.”

Would that she and her colleagues applied this very same standard when publishing the results of research that advocates for the catastrophic anthropogenic climate-change narrative. Far, far too many of these studies involve computer modeling that is arcane, and deliberately so. They are shielded from public scrutiny so that a qualified, independent third party is denied the opportunity to verify the results. And that is paraded about as science?

So what is the offense of the three Stanford researchers? It is surveying for the presence of antibodies to the COVID virus that seem to indicate many in the population at large have been infected by the virus but did not present with typical symptoms of cough, fever, and chest pains, and so went undiagnosed. If true, the important finding would suggest that far more people have been infected than officially counted, and consequently the effective death rate from contracting may be far less than previously believed. This finding would also tend to undercut the official position that the overall death rate is somewhere in the range of 1.5%.

Never mind the reasonable assumption that a walking cohort of silent carriers would help explain the sudden and otherwise somewhat mysterious speed of its spread around the globe, once the virus had escaped from the confines of Pandora’s Box in Wuhan, China. The officially sanctioned authorities, represented by the two officials constantly at the President’s side during the daily White House press briefings held until recently, have consistently taken a dim view of any alternatives that depart from their own mode of thinking. First, we are instructed: Don’t wear a mask. Now by all means wear one out in public. Gloves good, now gloves bad.

No wonder a wondering public would tend to lose faith in what the media tell it. NIH can also be understood as “Not Invented Here” without any significant loss of accuracy. Who are these interlopers that dare intrude at our party?

So what is the Washington medical establishment to do about insubordination out on the West Coast? They forthwith sic the Stanford University administration on the three offending professors because the academic bean-counters on campus get the message they are living under the implied threat of the federal agencies canceling millions in research grants. Those boys know how to play rough when they deem it necessary.

Surely somewhere in the middle of this highly politicized crisis lie key elements of the truth. Does it not seem obvious that every time the President has offered his candid layman’s opinion about an established drug like HClQ that has been around for more than 50 years and is routinely prescribed for treatment of malaria and lupus and generally without serious side effect, the immediate response of the media is to blow their collective tops? If Trump says “white” they will say “black.” And vice versa.

It’s a good thing the 18th-century English doctor Edward Jenner did not have a CDC and the US mainstream media around in his day. If he had, he might never have discovered the smallpox vaccine. Before the arrival of the vaccine, that recurrent plague reportedly killed a whopping 30% of those unfortunate enough to contract the disease.

SOURCE

Peter Ridd’s Fight For Academic Freedom In Climate Science

This week the Federal Court appeal hearing took place for the case of Peter Ridd, Australian scientist, who was fired by his university after he had criticized Great Barrier Reef science.

Australian scientist and journalist Jennifer Marohasy is following the case closely and reports about the latest chapter in this sad saga:

To be truly curious we must confess our ignorance. The person who knows everything would have no reason to question, no need to experiment.

If they went in search of evidence, it could only be to confirm what they already knew to be true. Knowledge then would be something that conferred prestige, rather than something to be built upon.

It was because of Peter Ridd that I had to know if all the coral reefs off Bowen were dead, or not. I went looking for mudflats with a Gloucester Island backdrop after the first judgment was handed down, which was back last April 2019.

Of course, Peter was cleared by Judge Vasta in the Federal Court of all the misconduct charges that had resulted in his sacking. Yet the University appealed, and that appeal was heard this last week.

The university appealed because the modern Australian university can’t let a comprehensive win by a dissident professor go unchallenged.

The modern university is all about prestige, and they probably thought that eventually, Peter would run out of money, the money needed to defend himself in the courts. But they don’t know Peter, or the team backing him.

Yesterday Peter thanked both the Union and also the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) for their support.

Peter also wrote:

    The Federal Court appeal hearing is over, and the lawyers have done their work. We now wait, possibly for some months, for the three judges to make the decision. In essence the appeal was about defining the limits of academic freedom, and what a university scientist can say, and how he or she might be allowed to say it.

    For example, was I allowed to say that due to systemic lack of quality assurance, scientific results from Great Barrier Reef science institutions was untrustworthy?

    JCU said I was not, [not] even if I believed it to be true.
    I am certainly not ashamed of anything I said, how I said it, or of my motivation.

    Irrespective of the outcome of the appeal, I can now focus on other matters.

    First, I will work tirelessly to raise the problem of hopeless quality assurance of the science of the GBR, including the effect of climate change on the reef. I am hoping that the Senate Inquiry will come out of Covid hibernation soon. I will also be pushing AIMS to release their missing 15 years of coral growth data, and JCU to release its buried report on possible fraud at its coral reef centre. It is shameful the contempt with which these institutions treat the people of the region.

    Second, I will work with those agricultural organisations that show a determination to fight, which is sadly far from all of them, to demonstrate that the recent unfair regulations on Queensland farmers are based on shoddy science.

    Third: I will work to encourage governments at both state and federal level to force universities to behave like genuine universities and not the glossy public relations companies that they have become. Governments must mandate the introduction of genuine and enforceable guidelines on academic freedom such as those outlined in the Commonwealth governments (unimplemented) review by ex-High Court judge, Robert French.

My IPA colleague Gideon Rozner has an important article in The Australian newspaper that provides much more context. The piece includes comment that:

    The Ridd case has resonated around Australia — and has attracted significant attention worldwide — for good reason. It confirms what many people have suspected for a long time: Australia’s universities are no longer institutions encouraging the rigorous exercise of intellectual freedom and the scientific method in pursuit of truth. Instead, they are now corporatist bureaucracies that rigidly enforce an unquestioning orthodoxy and are capable of hounding out anyone who strays outside their rigid groupthink.

    JCU is attempting to severely limit the intellectual freedom of a professor working at the university to question the quality of scientific research conducted by other academics at the institution. In other words, JCU is trying to curtail a critical function that goes to the core mission of universities: to engage in free intellectual inquiry via free and open, if often robust, debate. It is an absurd but inevitable consequence of universities seeking taxpayer-funded research grants, not truth.

    Worse still, it is taxpayers who are funding JCU’s court case. Following a Freedom of Information request by the Institute of Public Affairs, the university was forced to reveal that up until July last year, it had already spent $630,000 in legal fees. It would be safe to assume that university’s legal costs would have at least doubled since that time. The barrister who JCU employed in the Federal Court this week was Bret Walker SC, one of Australia’s most eminent lawyers. Barristers of his standing can command fees of $20,000 to $30,000 a day. And all of this is happening at the same time as the vice-chancellor of the university, Sandra Harding — who earns at least $975,000 a year — complains about the impact of government funding cuts.

    While Australian taxpayers are funding the university’s efforts to shut down freedom of speech, Ridd’s legal costs are paid for by him, his wife and voluntary donations from the public. As yet, neither the federal nor the Queensland Education Minister has publicly commented on whether JCU is appropriately spending taxpayers’ money and, so far, both have refused to intervene in the case.

Gideon Rozner is tireless and has also put together a fascinating 3-part podcast providing background into Peter Ridd’s fight for academic freedom. He interviewed me for this series.

The saga will continue for the next few years, whatever the judges decide. As will my interest in all things to do with the Great Barrier Reef.

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

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

4 June, 2020

NASA scientist Dr. Kate Marvel links ‘climate change’ to ‘white supremacy’ – ‘We’ll never head off climate catastrophe without dismantling white supremacy’

Since white supremacy is as big a myth as global warming it is no surprise that someone goofy enough to believe in the one should be goofy enough to believe in the other. How does white supremacy fit in with China? Are whites supreme over the Chinese? The Chinese certainly don't think so.

But there is a real issue here. White supremacists are a Leftist boogeyman that they use to scare one-another. There are undoubtedly some people who think that whites have achieved more in some fields than have other races but where are the examples of such beliefs driving current politics? White supremacy is just not a current political issue.

Leftists of course think that Mr Trump is a white supremacist, despite him never having said anything to that effect and despite his long history of getting on well with blacks. But Leftists don't need evidence. They believe what their ragged emotions require them to believe.

Trump with Rosa Parks and Muhammad Ali

Another NASA climate scientist has revealed their charged politics and waded into racially charged linkages between “climate justice” and “racial justice.” and “white supremacy.” NASA’s Dr. Kate Marvel declared on June 1: “Climate justice and racial justice are the same thing, and we’ll never head off climate catastrophe without dismantling white supremacy.” Marvel is an Associate Research Scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City.

In 2018, Marvel (katherine.d.marvel@nasa.gov) replied “DAMN RIGHT” when she tweeted out a Newsweek article titled: “Science Should Be A Feminist Institution.”

According to a 2018 article at Think Progress, “Marvel said she admires what Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement activists are doing with appeals to support a Green New Deal.” According to Marvel: “What I do admire about that is the fact they are using new language. It’s not just, ‘Look at the sad polar bear,” Marvel said. “This is not talking about climate change like it’s this isolated issue. It’s talking about it in the context of all these other things that people care about. And I think that’s absolutely the right way to look at it,” she said.

SOURCE

Green Electricity Delusions

With global warming the alleged science is so complicated that nobody, including the global warming scientists, can really understand what is going on. Green electricity, mostly solar and wind, is different. It’s relatively clear cut. No supercomputers spewing out terabytes of confusing data are needed.

Green electricity is quite useless. The latest trend in green electricity is wind or solar with battery backup. This green electricity costs about nine times more than the fossil fuel electricity it displaces. The true cost is hidden from the public by hidden subsidies and fake accounting. (My book, Dumb Energy, goes into great analytical detail.)

Green electricity is ineffective for preventing climate change. The climate change alarmists James Hansen and Michael Shellenberger make the case forcefully in this video. Hansen is the most important and most famous scientist warning against climate change. His followers consider him to be the greatest authority on the dangers of climate change. He calls wind and solar energy a “grotesque idea” and a “fantasy.”

It’s true that we won’t run out of wind or sunshine. That doesn’t mean that wind and sunshine are effective tools for making electricity. They aren’t. The exhaustion of fossil fuels has been predicted many times. The current situation is that fossil fuels are in great over supply and the prices have crashed to low levels. Natural gas, currently the most economical fossil fuel for generating electricity, is painfully cheap and is being extensively exported from the United States to other countries. Natural gas from wells, not served by pipelines to take it to market, is burned or flared to get rid of it. Only the more valuable oil is kept. Thanks to fracking, we have plenty of natural gas for the next 100-years.

Promoters of quack medicine sell various pills guaranteed to improve your memory or your sex life. Green energy is quackery too. It is promoted by green organizations like the Sierra Club. At one time the Sierra Club was a harmless club of backpackers and bird watchers. But it was taken over by ideologues driven by the delusion that modern society is a destructive fraud that must be rescued by the adoption of green principles. These armchair green commandos are math handicapped. They regularly propose policies that make no sense. The green commandos pontificate confidently without real understanding.

Coal is an excellent fuel for generating electricity. Unlike natural gas or oil, coal has limited uses other than generating electricity. The Sierra Club hates coal because it competes successfully against their beloved green wind and solar. No lie is too outrageous as long as it is useful for discrediting coal. The Sierra Club uses trick photography to make it look like coal plants emit clouds of black smoke. The trick is to photograph clean white clouds of “steam” with the sun behind the plant. That makes the harmless white clouds look black. The exhaust products are composed of water vapor and carbon dioxide with very little pollution. As the exhaust mixes with the cool air, it condenses into a white cloud of clean water droplets commonly called steam.

In modern coal plants, almost all pollution is scrubbed away before the exhaust goes into the smokestack.

Residential rooftop solar energy is an uneconomic method for generating electricity but it sounds convincing to the naïve. Rooftop solar panels lack economy of scale. These small installations generate electricity for about three times more per kilowatt hour than the large-scale utility installations. The homeowner reduces his consumption of grid electricity, reducing his electric bill. Excess solar electricity is sold back to the utility, often at a price far higher than the cost of wholesale electricity. The beauty of this scheme is that if the rules are sufficiently rigged in favor of the homeowner, it is possible for the homeowner to save money. No one could complain if the homeowner disconnected from the electric utility. But no one is disconnecting unless they live off grid. The utility is expected to maintain a power line to the home and maintain excess generating capacity to take over supplying electricity if it is cloudy or it is nighttime. The true cost of maintaining this backup service, exclusive of any electricity sales, is around $100 per month, but utilities commonly charge only around $10 or $15 a month for a connection before the first kilowatt hour is sold. Every kilowatt hour of utility electricity displaced by solar costs the utility gross profit. If the utility is forced to buy the homeowner’s electricity at retail rates the utility may end up paying much more than the reasonable wholesale cost of the electricity. In some places the homeowner is even allowed to bank excess solar electricity and draw it at a later time. The utility doesn’t have a bank where it can store electricity. In short, rooftop solar is a scheme of making everyone else subsidize the homeowner. The homeowner is under the delusion that he has discovered cheaper electricity. It is cheaper only because everyone else bears the cost.

The crippling weakness of wind or solar electricity is their intermittent and erratic nature. A fossil-fuel generating plant can be fired up as needed and throttled up and down as the consumption of electricity changes. Wind or solar generates electricity according to the vagaries of the weather. The grid operators, except in extreme circumstances, are required to accept all the green electricity presented. In order to do this, fossil-fuel plants have to seesaw their output to compensate for the erratic wind or solar. Wind and solar plants can’t replace fossil-fuel plants for the simple reason that at times the wind and solar plants are not generating electricity. You must have enough fossil fuel along with hydro and nuclear to carry the full load. The consequence is that the system has to continue to maintain and pay for its traditional plants regardless of how much wind and solar is added to the grid. The only economic contribution of wind or solar is to reduce fuel consumption in the fossil-fuel plants during times when wind or solar electricity is being generated. The proper cost comparison is to compare the cost of green electricity versus the marginal cost (fuel) of operating the fossil-fuel plants. Natural-gas plants have a fuel cost of about $15 per megawatt hour. Wind or solar with battery backup costs about $130 per megawatt hour. For grid stability reasons new wind and solar plants are being equipped with battery storage, greatly increasing the cost. Without the battery backup wind or solar electricity costs around $75 per megawatt hour. To be clear, the electricity supplied by wind or solar at $75 to $130 per megawatt hour (not counting subsidies) could be generated in existing fossil fuel plants for $15 per megawatt hour.

Why the various states and the federal government continue to pursue, mandate, and subsidize green electricity is a mystery best explained by psychiatrists and students of propaganda.

SOURCE

Covid-19 Crisis Will Only Intensify Global Dominance Of Fossil Fuels

China is about one month ahead of the United States in exiting the Covid-19 shutdown. That country’s rush-hour traffic jams now equal or exceeded pre-lockdown levels, even in Wuhan. This quick reversal happened despite claims that telecommuting would “change everything,” especially old-fashioned commuting and, thus, oil demand.

At a global level, the pandemic didn’t change the fact that oil powers 97 percent of transportation. All commerce requires moving materials, food, finished goods, and people. Thus the oil used by planes, trains, and automobiles serves as the fuel gauge for the economy. The reaction to the coronavirus was, effectively, an x-ray of this reality.

The March lockdowns, which kept so many people and goods from moving anywhere, crushed global oil demand by 30 percent. Shortly thereafter, data showed that global GDP had collapsed by nearly 10 percent. Now that U.S. gasoline demand is starting to rise, many claim we are headed for a long, slow rise back to pre-crisis levels of congestion and oil use. But perhaps not.

Consider the view that communications will now replace commutes—an idea dating to the dawn of the Internet and even to the dawn of telegraphy. But most of what most people do at work requires showing up, not video conferencing. And, by now, many Zoom-weary people have rediscovered that in-person meetings are not only more time-efficient but also reveal important cues that get lost in flat, tiled images. Teleconferencing will surely continue, and grow, but post-Covid, most people will still travel to work. This is because we’ll rediscover that “ideas have sex,” to borrow zoologist Matt Ridley’s expression. Centuries of experience show that innovation, inspiration, and commerce happen with close, regular human interaction.

There is one thing the pandemic will change and that’s the trend to cram employees closer together in open-plan offices, and simultaneously reduce air-exchanges in buildings to make them more energy-efficient. More space between employees and more (clean) air will boost electricity demand in the summer and heat in the winter. Meantime, in the travel sector, reservations for fuel-guzzling recreational vehicles are reporting all-time highs. That mirrors a trend seen after 9/11, when Americans bypassed foreign vacations for domestic ones, traveling to those destinations mainly by cars, which use more energy per passenger mile than aircraft.

Then there are the other energy-related trends that predate the coronavirus crisis but will now likely accelerate. Young professionals, for example, were already moving to the suburbs. Odds are that the urban exodus will only intensify, with many baby boomers joining in. Car commuting and suburbia are essentially synonymous. As for mass transit, in post-recovery China, ridership remains down some 30 to 50 percent. Absent massive subsidies, travel by (crowded) mass transit—at least as we knew it—might be finished.

An agriculture-labor shortage is another pre-Covid trend that figures to continue. Those proposing that unemployed citizens pick crops are, to put it gently, naïve. Urban dwellers abandoned such tasks within days when France tried it earlier this year. Picking crops is a skill. A solution is coming from automated harvesting and robotic fruit-picking technologies that are just now becoming viable—but mechanized labor always uses more energy. And machines that operate all day in the fields will likely burn oil; even Tesla batteries aren’t nearly good enough for widespread use there.

Finally, the virus has exposed geopolitical supply-chain vulnerabilities that will accelerate the reshoring of manufacturing. For energy accountants the implications are obvious; it takes three to four times more energy to produce a dollar of industrial GDP than a dollar of services-related activity. In recent years, much of our national efficiency gains came from off-shoring energy-intensive industries.

In 1776, Adam Smith pointed out in The Wealth of Nations that prosperity is anchored in “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” That truth remains unchanged and is also relevant for Silicon Valley. Even digital “exchange” is anchored in energy-using physical machinery. Each person-hour of streaming video uses—in the network, not on the desktop—about as much fuel as taking a four-mile train commute. Tens of millions of students attending school online are guzzling massive amounts of power-plant electrons.

No doubt, we’ll soon get back to pre-Covid debates about how best to fuel cars and power plants. But in an age of cheap oil, will a recession-riddled world show the same tolerance for subsidizing expensive alternatives like wind or solar?

SOURCE

Paper bags are back

Woolworths is Australia's biggest retailer

Woolworths shoppers across the country will now be able to carry out their groceries in paper bags for the first time in four decades.

From today, all Woolies stores will offer customers the option of a paper bag option alongside reusable carry bags.

The old-school bags are being rolled out after a successful trial in 20 stores late last year and to meet increased demand from customers for easily recyclable bag options.

In decades gone by, paper bags were a common sight in Australian supermarkets, but they haven’t been widely available in most stores for around 40 years.

The new bags are made from 70 per cent recycled paper and will be sold for 20 cents each, while Woolies’ existing reusable plastic bags, foldable bags and Bag for Good options will also still be available at the checkout.

They will be able to hold up to 6kg of grocery items per bag, and are made from responsibly sourced paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

There are plans to offer the paper bags to online customers for home delivery and pick-up in the future.

Woolworths Supermarkets managing director Claire Peters said the bags were already proving to be a hit with shoppers. “While the vast majority of our customers bring their own bags, we know customers sometimes drop by a store unplanned or can forget their bags when they’re on the run,” Ms Peters said.

“For some time, customers have told us they’d like the option of a strong paper bag option, so we’re pleased to now offer that choice at our checkouts, alongside our existing reusable plastic bags.

“These paper bags resonated really well with customers when we trialled them in 20 stores last year and we expect to see a positive response from the customers who’ve been asking for this option nationwide.”

Meanwhile, each Bag for Good costs 99 cents but can be replaced free of charge if it is damaged, no matter when it was purchased.

The proceeds from those bag sales go to the Woolworths Junior Landcare Grants program.

Woolies’ reusable bags cost 15 cents each, are made from at least 80 per cent recycled plastics and can be returned to the store, along with other soft plastics, for recycling in REDcycle bins.

And in another major bag shake-up, shoppers will have an eco-friendly alternative for holding their fruit and veg, with reusable nylon plastic bags launching today.

They will cost $4 for a three-pack, are compatible with Woolies checkout scales and can be found in the fresh produce section at all Woolworths Metros and selected Woolies stores.

Woolworths began phasing out single-use plastic shopping bags in 2018, and the company claims since then, more than six billion of them have been removed from circulation, with just 15 per cent of customers now purchasing new bags when doing their grocery shop.

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, 2020

Summary of Scientific Research: CO2 IMPROVES Ocean Health

Summary of Scientific Research: CO2 Improves Ocean Health
The CO2 Coalition of climate scientists today released a White Paper analyzing decades of peer-reviewed research on the impact on the oceans of carbon dioxide emissions from the conversion of fossil fuels to energy. Ocean Health - Is there an "Acidification" problem? concludes that CO2 is an important plankton food that enriches sea life, and that the term "ocean acidification" is highly misleading.

The principal researcher for the paper is biologist Jim Steele. A member of the CO2 Coalition, Steele is the recently retired director of San Francisco State University's Sierra Nevada field campus, a position he held for over 25 years.

The acidity or alkalinity of sea water is described by its pH level. At a representative ocean surface temperature of 25 degrees Celsius, water is acidic at a pH less than 7 and alkaline if pH is greater than 7. Seawater is naturally alkaline at 8.2. Steele reports a scientific consensus that even if atmospheric CO2 concentrations were to rise from today's four percent of one percent to 10 percent of one percent (over about 250 years at current rates), ocean pH would fall only to 7.8, still well above neutral for all ocean surface waters, and stabilize there.

Steele cautioned that "much of the policy debate on pH levels is based on mathematical modeling rather than field data, so a better understanding of the biological dynamics through on-site research is key."

The White Paper reveals that the term "ocean acidification" was invented to scare citizens into opposing the use of fossil fuels, which power 80 percent of the U.S. and world economies. It also shows that carbon dioxide is a vital part of ocean health and the ocean food web, because additional CO2 input allows marine life to thrive. The foundation of the ocean food web is phytoplankton, which includes organisms such as microscopic plants and bacteria. These organisms require CO2 to make their food through photosynthesis.

CO2 Coalition chair Patrick Moore, a noted ecologist and a former top-ranking Greenpeace official, said that, "This paper details the powerful cycle that takes surface carbon down to the depths for lengthy periods, before upwelling to enrich surface life again. Shells and marine species thrive in widely varying pH levels, making the so-called acidification crisis yet another cynical example of propaganda masquerading as science. As with fears of polar bear extinction, frequencies of hurricanes, length of droughts, and 'accelerating' sea-level rise, the specter of 'ocean acidification' has no basis in the scientific data."

The White Paper is available for download here:
Ocean Health - Is there an "Acidification" problem?

From The CO2 Coalition [info@co2coalition.org]

A glut of new coal-fired power stations endangers China’s green ambitions

China is home to half the world’s coal-fired power stations, the most polluting type of generator. Their share of the country’s electricity market is shrinking as nuclear plants and renewables slowly elbow them off the grid. But Chinese investors and local governments are still keen on them. Last year coal-fired generating capacity expanded in China by 37gw (factoring in plant closures)—more than the amount by which it grew globally. China has been relaxing curbs on building such plants. That suggests more to come.

Work on many of the new coal-fired stations began after the central government gave local officials greater freedom to approve construction at the end of 2014. The aim was to cut red tape, not to ramp up the burning of coal. But it resulted in a blizzard of new permits. Within about a year provinces had approved enough new plants to expand China’s coal-powered generating capacity by a quarter.

China does not need a lot more power. Its economy is growing less energy-intensive as it relies less on manufacturing and construction. Lately coal-power plants have been able to sell less than half the electricity they are able to produce, down from 60% a decade ago. But local governments see any big construction project as a potential boost to growth. Some also have coal-mining industries to protect.

In 2016, recognising its mistake, the central government began clawing back the authority it had devolved to the provinces. But it worried that halting projects would threaten local economies, so it allowed many of those under way to proceed. Soon it began to relax curbs on the approval of new stations. In January China had 135gw of coal-power capacity either permitted or under construction, says Global Energy Monitor, an ngo in San Francisco. That is equal to about half the total coal-power capacity in America.

The new power stations will not be put to full use. They will face fierce competition from renewable energy. China’s capacity for producing this is also growing fast. Plants using coal risk limits on their output imposed by governments to improve air quality. Instead of increasing the total amount of electricity China gets from coal, new stations may simply pinch operating hours from existing ones.

That would be a problem for power-firms’ balance sheets. But the world may also suffer. China’s targets to reduce carbon emissions remain too low. The economic blow it has suffered as a result of covid-19 will deter it from making new pledges that could restrain its freedom to boost growth with the help of large and dirty building-projects. The glut of underused, debt-laden power stations could further weaken China’s emissions-cutting resolve.

The big state-owned firms that operate coal-burning generators are also being relied upon by the government to produce much of China’s renewable energy, notes Lauri Myllyvirta of the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. But they would rather not hasten the closure of carbon-spewing power stations that they had intended to keep working for a good three decades

SOURCE

Sun unleashes biggest flare since 2017. Is our star waking up?

More warming?

On Friday morning (May 29), our star fired off its strongest flare since October 2017, an eruption spotted by NASA's sun-watching Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).

Solar flares are bursts of radiation that originate from sunspots, temporary dark and relatively cool patches on the solar surface that boast very strong magnetic fields. Scientists classify strong flares into three categories: C, M and X. Each class is 10 times more powerful than the one beneath it; M flares are 10 times stronger than C flares, but 10 times weaker than X-class events.

Today's flare was an M-class eruption, so it was no monster. (And it wasn't aimed at Earth, so there's no chance of supercharged auroras from a potential associated coronal mass ejection of solar plasma.) But the outburst could still be a sign that the sun is ramping up to a more active phase of its 11-year activity cycle, NASA officials said. If that's the case, the most recent such cycle, known as Solar Cycle 24, may already have come to an end.

Scientists peg the start of new cycles at "solar minimum," the time when the sun sports the fewest sunspots and the least activity.

"However, it takes at least six months of solar observations and sunspot-counting after a minimum to know when it's occurred," NASA officials wrote today in an update announcing SDO's flare detection.

"Because that minimum is defined by the lowest number of sunspots in a cycle, scientists need to see the numbers consistently rising before they can determine when exactly they were at the bottom," the officials added. "That means solar minimum is an instance only recognizable in hindsight: It could take six to 12 months after the fact to confirm when minimum has actually passed."

So, stay tuned! More observations should tell us if we're already in Solar Cycle 25.

SOURCE

Push to bring back Australia's lost oyster reefs

This is one environmental progran that makes sense -- if the costs can be curtailed

Australia's southern states had their own version of a Great Barrier Reef until it was erased almost entirely by the middle of last century.

Before European settlement, the flat oyster reef ecosystem that dominated southern waters lay like a wreath around the coastline in bays, inlets and harbours. But with the oyster beds harvested for food or broken up to be used in cement, these reefs were made functionally extinct.

Now scientists, recreational fishers, conservationists and local governments are calling for government funding to bring the reefs back. They say previous public investment in reef restoration has exceeded expectations and expanding it will be a cheap, quick and effective regional jobs stimulus.

What's more, bringing back an ecosystem from extinction to the point where it could regrow itself would be a world-first, James Cook University marine biologist Ian McLeod said.

"The reefs act as a catalyst for a new food chain … [they] support lots of fish and all sorts of marine life, seagrass, worms and crabs," Dr McLeod said.

"It's surprising how well things have been going" with the handful of installations already established, he said. Reefs have been rebuilt over recent years in places such as Victoria's Port Phillip Bay, South Australia's Gulf St Vincent, Western Australia's Oyster Harbour and Port Stephens in NSW.

Oysters, and the mussels that proliferate among them, cannot naturally recolonise without help. Since their natural habitat was removed, bays have silted over and they need a bedrock to cling on. However, it's an easy fix.

The only requirement is some quarried limestone, concrete or compressed old shells harvested from restaurants to serve as a bedrock, seeded with oyster sprat and dropped overboard.

The Nature Conservancy is leading the campaign for funding. With $100 million, 60 reefs – about a third of the natural range of shellfish reefs – could be brought back, generating 850 jobs in construction, fisheries and service industries, it said.

"The reefs come back like a miracle ecosystem and provide a huge environmental benefit," said Nature Conservancy Australia director Rich Gilmore.

"There's huge water quality benefits. Each oyster filters about 150 litres of water a day. And then there's the fish benefits too. One hectare of oyster reef can create 375 kilograms of fish a year."

Mr Gilmore said the pilot reef installations had met with "no community opposition, but have overwhelming community support".

Recreational Fishing Alliance of NSW president Stan Konstantaras said restoring oyster reefs was a "no-brainer".

"More habitat equals more fish," Mr Konstantaras said. "Places like Botany Bay have suffered huge amounts of habitat degradation … everywhere has been modified by development. Every estuary on the coast would benefit from having an oyster reef."

Dr McLeod said the world was at "peak oyster industry" when Australia was settled, with vast oyster industries in New York and London quickly harvesting all their native shellfish beds for food.

The same thing happened to Australia's flat oyster, which once flourished from Sydney to Tasmania and Perth, and the Sydney Rock oyster, which lives from around Noosa to Sydney. Limestone oyster reefs in bays and estuaries were also busted up and hauled ashore once Australia had exhausted its land-based limestone resources to make mortar and cement.

By the time the Second World War rolled around, the flat oyster reefs were gone.

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, 2020

NASA climate scientist: ‘Race justice & climate justice are one & the same: Oppressive extractive plutocracies that colonize & kill black bodies & colonize & kill our planet are one & the same’

A genuine nut. The very sweeping linking of disparate phenomena is very similar to schizophrenic thought-disorder. What he is talking about seems identifiable but only by way of an interpretive act on the part of the readrer. What, for instance, are "oppressive extractive plutocracies"? It is not a normal category of some subset of reality but, if anything, it probably means mining companies. And it is true that mining does occasionally lead to deaths.

But how are mining companies "Killing" the planet? They do not do that so once again we have to add our own meaning to make any sense of it. His writing is just about as alien from normal scientific discourse as one could imagine. There are no defined entities. All one can get from it is an impressions of diffuse anger

A NASA Jet Propulsion Lab climate scientist has linked race and climate issues during the racial protests sweeping the nation. NASA’s Peter Kalmus wrote:

“Here’s why race justice and climate justice are one & the same: The oppressive extractive plutocracies that colonize and kill black bodies and colonize and kill our planet are one and the same.”

Kalmus (peter.m.kalmus@jpl.nasa.gov) was responding to the protests and riots springing up across the country in the wake of allegations of racism in law enforcement. Kalmus added: “They’d literally rather have a race war than charge even one cop for murdering an innocent black man.”

Kalmus website describes himself as “a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. I use satellite data and models to study the rapidly changing Earth, focusing on boundary layer clouds and ecological forecasting.”

“My awareness of climate breakdown reached the point where I had no choice but to respond in some meaningful way,” Kalmus writes at his website. “Global warming is happening with a rapidity that leaves me speechless,” he explained. Kalmus’ claims he “uses about 1/10th the fossil fuels of the American average.” Kalmus is a member of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union.

In his 2018 article, “Thoughts on Climate Action From a Scientist Who Gave Up Flying,” Kalmus wrote of how “tears poured down” when he thought about the calamity of man-made climate change.

“In order to embrace what’s coming next, I had to let go of what went before. My grief was like the leap of a trapeze artist, letting go of one trapeze, flying through space, and catching the next one. There were times when tears poured down. I mourned the world I’d known my whole life. I mourned my children’s future. I mourned how avoidable this all was. I mourned the strange and hard reality, and I mourned waking up. I mourned every blow struck in anger, and I mourned every bullet fired. I mourned all the species that are leaving us, never to return. I mourned this whole beautiful Earth. But then, through these tears, I accepted reality as it is. Somehow, on the far side of the tears, I found the strength to go forward.”

Kalmus envisioned a climate-friendly world where “there is no war, no crime, hatred, or negativity.” [Yeah, right!]

SOURCE

Alarmist queen Hayhoe takedown by Friends of Science

If Greta Thunberg is an alarmist princess then Katherine Hayhoe is the queen of climate alarmism, at least in the U.S. and Canada. She was the de facto spokesperson for the atrocious third National Climate Assessment. After that she started doing bogus “Here’s what is going to happen to you” climate studies for various states and cities. Making big bucks scaring people.

Last year Hayhoe delivered a doomsday forecast to the Province of Alberta, Canada, and here our story begins. Alberta is home to the Friends of Science Society (FOSS), one of Canada’s top skeptical organizations. FOSS has now produced a 77 page takedown report, shredding Hayhoe’s so-called study in detail. It is an elegant critical work, with implications far beyond Canada.

The topic is technical but it is written for policy makers. The plain English table of contents gives the flavor and shows the scope, with 37 succinct chapters. There are even chapters titled “What is “Climate Change”?” and “What is a Climate Model?” In the same vein Hayhoe’s report is arrogantly titled “Alberta’s Climate Future” so the FOSS takedown is “Facts versus Fortune Telling”.

There are lots of data issues, especially since the Hayhoe report uses truncated trends. The FOSS rebuttal does a lot of longer term analysis.

Another big issue is that the Hayhoe report is based on so-called “downscaling” of hot climate models. This means taking huge crude regional results and interpolating questionable local details. Hayhoe bills herself as an “atmospheric scientist” but her Ph.D. work was on downscaling, which is just computer science. It is fitting that she is now in a university Political Science department, as her work is certainly political.

What Hayhoe ignores is the fact that different global climate models give wildly different regional projections. I recall when the first U.S. National Climate Assessment came out; it used two major models, the Canadian and the British Hadley. For the North Central region one projected a 160% increase in rainfall, while the other gave a 60% decrease. Swamp or desert! Obviously this junk is no good for policy making.

Here is the Friends of Science condensed summary:

“This review shows how Hayhoe & Stoner misinform, how they did not use all available information, how they cultivate alarm regarding Black Swan events, while ignoring counter trends and evidence of cycles. Their report style demonstrates a false, absolute certainty, of knowledge, where due qualification of assumptions and other influences can alter results as reported. Facts and evidence, not fortune-telling, should guide public policy on climate and energy.”

Here are some more specific and telling FOSS findings:

“Hayhoe & Stoner’s “Alberta’s Climate Future” report fails in a number of ways. The report ignores climate cycles and instead forecasts continuing linear temperature increases based on global climate models, even when local trends may be quite different. The report only addresses trends from 1950, ignoring much warmer conditions in the past in the Province.”

“More concerning, “Alberta’s Climate Future” is based on the use of unreasonably unlikely scenarios, such as Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. This computer simulation is a very extreme projection of the future where the world goes back to using more than five times the coal than is used today. Most mainstream scientists believe the RCP8.5 scenario to be a critically flawed benchmark for forecasting future climate.”

“Hayhoe & Stoner make bold and unverified statements such as: “extreme high and low temperatures are projected to increase exponentially” without justification. The report creates alarm with discredited references to natural “Black Swan” events, ascribing human caused climate change as the driver of floods and fires.”

There is a great deal more criticism, which is worth looking at. FOSS really does a job on Queen Hayhoe’s so-called research.

The Friends of Science takedown is a model for critical analysis of alarmist pseudoscientific hype. The deeply flawed Hayhoe report is not unusual. On the contrary it is typical of climate alarmism — computer based, on selected data, presenting speculative scary conclusions as facts.

SOURCE

No, Climate Change Is NOT Making Trees Shorter

Among the top Google News results this morning for “climate change” is a National Public Radio (NPR) article with the headline, “Climate Change and Deforestation Mean Earth’s Trees Are Younger and Shorter.” The article’s title and desired message to casual Internet surfers is that warmer temperatures stunt tree height and make trees shorter. In reality, the article merely (mis)reports on a study asserting that deforestation is resulting in younger forests with trees that have yet to reach their full height. Fashion NPR’s fake tree-height scare as click-bait misrepresenting sound science.

As scientists have repeatedly documented, more atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming are assisting trees grow taller and more rapidly. NPR references an article in Science finding that a variety of factors are putting pressure on old-growth forests worldwide. These factors include logging, clear-cutting, and land-use changes. After deforestation removes disproportionately old-growth forests, the remaining trees and forests tend to be younger. Younger forests don’t have as many very tall trees as older forests. Thus, the authors of the Science article claimed deforestation leads to younger forests, in which tree size will be shorter than fully mature trees in older forests.

The authors of the Science study noted this, while asserting that climate change may be causing an increase in forest fires. Drought is the climate factor that would impact forest fires, yet objective data and even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report there is no documented evidence that climate change in increasing the frequency or severity of drought. In fact, as documented in Climate at a Glance: Drought, objective data show a decline in drought as our planet modestly warms.

Accordingly, the only asserted link between climate change and forest fires – drought – does not exist. Even if such a link did exist, the result would be that climate change hypothetically causes more forest fires, not that climate change is making trees shorter.

Shame on you, NPR, for deliberately misrepresenting scientific facts.

SOURCE

The Reassuring Facts About The Climate In 2019

2019 saw the continuation of many climate trends, most of them unalarming and even reassuring. That’s the conclusion of a new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

According to the author, Professor Ole Humlum, although there has been a gentle warming in the last 40 years, storm activity is unchanged and snow cover remains stable. And while sea ice has declined, much of this may be natural variation.

“This report focuses on empirical observations and not on climate modelling speculations, says Professor Humlum. “We should therefore be greatly reassured by what these data are telling us”.

Professor Humlum also points out that new data on rising ocean temperatures raise interesting questions about the source of the heat.

“We can detect a great deal of heat rising from the bottom of the oceans. This obviously cannot be anything to do with human activity. So although people say the oceans are warming, in reality there is still much to learn.”

And Professor Humlum points out that where there is ignorance, it is always wise to be cautious.

“We have learned in recent months about the potentially high cost of leaping to conclusions. We must take more care in our response to small changes in the climate.”

SOURCE

1 June, 2020

Destroying the Environment to Save It

Paul Driessen

“We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” The infamous Vietnam era quotation may or may not have been uttered by an anonymous US Army major. It may have been misquoted, revised, apocryphal or invented. But it quickly morphed into an anti-war mantra that reflected the frustrations many felt.

For Virginians and others forced to travel the “clean, green, renewable, sustainable” energy path, it will redound in modern politics as “We had to destroy the environment in order to save it.”

For example, weeks after Governor Ralph Northam signed a “Clean Economy Act” that had been rushed through a partisan Democrat legislature, Dominion Energy Virginia announced it would reach “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To do so, the utility company will raise family, business, hospital and school electricity bills by 3% every year for the next ten years – as they and state and local governments struggle to climb out of the financial holes created by the ongoing Coronavirus lockdown.

Just as bad, renewable energy mandates and commitments from the new law and Dominion’s “integrated resource plan” will have major adverse impacts on Virginia and world environmental values. In reality, Virginia’s new “clean” economy exists only in fantasy land – and only if we ignore CO2 emissions, air and water pollution, and other “clean energy” environmental degradation around the world.

Dominion Energy plans to expand the state’s offshore wind, onshore solar and battery storage capacity by some 24,000 megawatts of new “renewable” energy by 2035, and far more after that. It will retain just 9,700 MW of existing natural gas generation, and only through 2045, build no new gas-fired units, and retire 6,200 megawatts of coal-fired generation. This will reduce in-state carbon dioxide emissions, but certainly won’t do so globally. The company intends to keep its four existing nuclear units operating.

To “replace” some of its abundant, reliable, affordable fossil fuel electricity, Dominion intends to build at least 31,400 megawatts of expensive, unreliable solar capacity by 2045. The company estimates that will require a land area some 25% larger than 250,000-acre Fairfax County, west of Washington, DC. That means Dominion Energy’s new solar facilities will blanket 490 square miles (313,600 acres) of beautiful croplands, scenic areas and habitats that now teem with wildlife.

That’s almost half the land area of Rhode Island, eight times the District of Columbia, 14 times more land than all Fairfax County parks combined – blanketed by imported solar panels. Still more land will be torn up for access roads and new transmission lines. All this is just for Dominion Energy’s solar panels.

The panels will actually generate electricity maybe 20-25% of the year, once you factor in nighttime hours, cloudy days, and times when the sun is not bright enough to generate more than trifling electricity.

Dominion and other Virginia utility companies also plan to import and install 430 monstrous 850-foot-tall offshore wind turbines – and tens of thousands of half-ton battery packs, to provide backup power for at least a few hours or days when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The batteries will prevent the economy from shutting down even more completely during each outage than it has during the Corona lockdown. Similar policies across America will impact hundreds of millions of acres.

Most of these solar panels, wind turbines and batteries – or their components, or the metals and minerals required to manufacture those components – will likely come from China or from Chinese-owned operations in Africa, Asia and Latin America ... under mining, air and water pollution, workplace safety, fair wage, child labor, mined land reclamation, manufacturing and other laws and standards that would get US companies unmasked, vilified, sued, fined and shut down in a heartbeat.

But it is those minimal to nonexistent laws and regulations that govern most of the companies and operations that will supply the “clean” technologies that will soon blight Virginia landscapes and serve the new “clean” Virginia economy. As Michael Moore observes in his new film, Planet of the Humans, other states that opt for “clean” energy will face the same realities.

Thus far, no one has produced even a rough estimate of how much concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, lithium, cobalt, silica, rare earth metals and countless other materials will be needed. All will require gigantic heavy equipment and prodigious amounts of fossil fuels to blast and haul away billions of tons of rocky overburden; extract, crush and process tens of millions of tons of ores, using acids, toxic chemicals and other means to refine the ores; smelt concentrates into metals; manufacture all the millions of tons of components; and haul, assemble and install the panels, turbines, batteries and transmission lines, setting them on top of tens of thousands of tons of concrete and rebar.

No one has tallied the oil, natural gas and coal fuel requirements for doing all this “Virginia Clean Economy” work – nor the greenhouse gases and actual pollutants that will be emitted in the process.

Nothing about this is clean, green, renewable or sustainable. But neither Dominion Energy nor Virginia government officials have said anything about any of this, nor about which countries will host the mining and other activities, under what environmental and human rights standards.

Will Virginians ever get a full accounting? Just because all of this will happen far beyond Virginia’s borders does not mean we can ignore the global environmental impacts. Or that we can ignore the health, safety and well-being of children and parents in those distant mines, processing plants and factories.

This is the perfect time to observe the environmentalist creed: think globally, act locally. Will that be done?

Will Dominion and Virginia require that all these raw materials and wind, solar and battery components be responsibly sourced? Will it require independently verified certifications that none of them involve child labor, and all are produced in compliance with US and Virginia laws, regulations and ethical codes for workplace safety, fair wages, air and water pollution, wildlife preservation, cancer prevention and mined lands reclamation? Will they tally up all the fossil fuels consumed, and pollutants emitted, in the process?

SOURCE

Fracking insanity

The coronavirus won't destroy America's energy industry. But Democrats might.

Progressive lawmakers like Senator Bernie Sanders have long called for a nationwide ban on fracking. But even Joe Biden, the "moderate" Democratic apparent nominee, recently seemed to embrace this radical idea.

The oil and gas industry has already taken a big blow to the gut. Because of reduced demand caused by lockdown orders nationwide and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, the unthinkable happened in April when an oil futures contract sank into negative territory. In my home state of Colorado, hundreds of wells have been abandoned and many small operators are struggling to stay afloat.

Already shattered by COVID-19 lockdowns, our economy can't afford another shock. But that's precisely what a fracking ban would deliver in the form of mass layoffs and skyrocketing energy costs.

To make matters worse, a fracking ban would reverse America’s ascendance to energy independence and once again jeopardize our national security. This policy would cause problems in the best of circumstances. In the wake of a global pandemic, it could wreak havoc.

Thanks in part to fracking, the energy industry has done wonders for the U.S. economy. Oil and natural gas firms support over 10 million American jobs, nearly 6 percent of the nation's total employment. The energy industry also supports over $1 trillion in annual economic activity and accounts for almost 8 percent of U.S. GDP.

A fracking ban would reverse these gains and then some. Banning fracking and drilling on federal lands and offshore territory as promised by would trigger a recession, according to a 2019 study by OnLocation. All told, a fracking ban would reduce cumulative GDP by $7 trillion over the next decade.

Such a policy would eliminate 7.5 million jobs in 2022 alone, a job loss rate nearly three times higher than the Great Recession's worst year. These layoffs would disproportionately affect blue-collar workers. Over 3 million workers in Texas, California, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio could lose their jobs in a single year.

Any shock to the energy industry would reverberate throughout an economy already on life support. Consider agriculture. Farmers rely on natural gas to make fertilizer, and on gasoline and diesel to power their equipment. Under a fracking ban, farms could lose 43 percent of their income by 2030, or $25 billion each year. The cost of farming wheat could spike 64 percent, and the cost of farming corn 54 percent. Farmers would pass these costs onto consumers in the form of higher prices.

A fracking ban would also send energy prices through the roof. Residential natural gas prices could jump almost 60 percent, and electricity prices could climb nearly 20 percent per family annually. Meanwhile, it could cost 15 percent more to fill up your gas tank or heat your home with oil. All told, a fracking ban could cost American households more than $5,000 per year.

To make matters worse, a fracking ban would compromise national security. America currently leads the world in gas and oil development. In less than a decade, a fracking ban would force the United States to rely on foreign suppliers for 40 percent of its oil and 30 percent of its natural gas. This reliance on imported products could leave the United States at the mercy of hostile foreign nations like Russia and the Middle East members of OPEC.

Unfortunately, America wouldn't gain much from these sacrifices. Contrary to what some environmentalists claim, fracking doesn't impede public health. At least 23-peer reviewed studies, 10 research institutions, and 17 government agencies have reached this conclusion.

Thanks to COVID-19, the United States is already facing an economic crisis perhaps worse than the Great Recession. Banning oil and gas development, which could trigger a recession on its own, is fracking insane.

SOURCE

Colorado River Water Woes Are Real — But Not Climate Related

Unless greenhouse-gas emissions are drastically reduced, the already shrinking Colorado River could shrink another 31% by 2050, two scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) warned in a recent study published in the online journal Science.

The study, “Colorado River Flow Dwindles as Warming-Driven as Loss of Reflective Snow Energizes Evaporation,” was written by P.C.D. Milly and K.A. Dunne. It appeared in Science on Feb. 20, 2020.

In the arid and semi-arid West, water has always been a prized commodity. As the region’s population has grown, so too has the demand for water.

Deciding who gets how much of this scarce resource has marked water-management disputes in the West since the late 19th century.

Snowfall rates along the course of Colorado can vary greatly from year to year, leaving the 40 million people it serves in doubt over how much water will flow down the river.

In other words, dealing with the mighty Colorado, the river that cuts through the Grand Canyon, has always been a challenge.

Using computer simulations of the Colorado River Basin, the two USGS researchers determined that, on average, a regional temperature increase of 1.4 degrees Celsius over the last century reduced the annual amount of water flowing through the West’s largest river by more than 11%.

To forecast the river’s future, the two researchers combined their simulations with climate models (yes, those) that predict temperature increases under purely hypothetical greenhouse-gas emissions scenarios.

In other words, all we have to do is curb atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide by reducing our use of fossil fuels, and the Colorado River will live happily ever after. Or so their argument goes.

Evapotranspiration and an Unwelcome Intruder

“Writing in the American Spectator (May 21), Greg Wachler points out that “evapotranspiration has robbed the river of vast quantities of water because public land managers have allowed forests to grow unnaturally clogged with too many trees – the same bad management that caused 100 million acres of catastrophic fires in the last 20 years.”

“Water evaporates from the trees before ever hitting the ground, much less the river,” he explains. “The Bureau of Reclamation has estimated that the Colorado River loses almost four million acre-feet per year from evapotranspiration…”

Wachler is president of the Natural Resources Group and is the former head of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources.

In addition to overgrowth of forests managed, or mismanaged, by federal agencies, the Colorado has another tormentor: Tamarisk, an invasive and non-native species.

A deciduous shrub or small tree, tamarisk (also known as salt cedar) originated in Eurasia. Tamarisk has taken root in almost half the river systems in the U.S. and is causing trouble everywhere it spreads.

“Tamarisk is among nature’s thirstiest plants, lowering water tables and drying up springs, wetlands, and riparian areas. One tree can drink more than 200 gallons of water per day, and they often grow in stands of up to 3,000 trees per acre,” Wachler says. “Tamarisk now covers nearly two million acres of river banks.”

Given what is known about the thirsty non-native species, Wachler calculates that the approximately 6 billion tamarisk trees nationwide consume an astounding 1.2 trillion gallons of water a day.

“If replaced by the native cottonwood and willow vegetation (which in their natural density consume less than a fourth of the water), 75 percent of the water would remain in the rivers – nearly a trillion gallons per day,” he says.

Private Conservation to the Rescue

The harm wrought by the tamarisk has been known for decades, but the agencies responsible for managing the millions of acres of federal land in the West have done little to address the problem.

Of necessity, that task has fallen to practitioners of private conservation, most notably Grand Junction, CO-based non-profit RiversEdge West (formerly the Tamarisk Coalition).

But with an annual budget of under $4 million, RiversEdge West can restore less than 2,000 acres of riverbank a year. Still, Wachler notes, that far surpasses what they feds have done.

Our sad experience with the lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic is a grim reminder of how public policy based on dubious models can go astray. This is true whether the models deal with the climate or with a virus.

SOURCE

Australia: Science and free speech under challenge from Greenie correctness

A court case this week in front of three judges of the Federal Court was a further stage in Peter Ridd’s fight for freedom of speech on climate change. The case, James Cook University v Peter Vincent Ridd, has enormous significance for the future of Australia’s universities and scientific institutions.

Ridd’s case is a dramatic illustration of the free speech crisis in Australian universities, not least around matters as politically and emotionally charged as climate change. It will determine, in effect, whether universities have the ability to censor opinions that threaten their sources of funding. It is one of the most important cases for intellectual freedom in the history of Australian jurisprudence.

The Ridd case has resonated around Australia — and has attracted significant attention worldwide — for good reason. It confirms what many people have suspected for a long time: Australia’s universities are no longer institutions encouraging the rigorous exercise of intellectual freedom and the scientific method in pursuit of truth. Instead, they are now corporatist bureaucracies that rigidly enforce an unquestioning orthodoxy, and are capable of hounding out anyone who strays outside their rigid groupthink.

JCU is attempting to severely limit the intellectual freedom of a professor working at the university to question the quality of scientific research conducted by other academics at the institution. In other words, JCU is trying to curtail a critical function that goes to the core mission of universities: to engage in free intellectual inquiry via free and open, if often robust, debate. It is an absurd but inevitable consequence of universities seeking taxpayer-funded research grants, not truth.

Worse still, it is taxpayers who are funding JCU’s court case. Following a Freedom of Information request by the Institute of Public Affairs, the university was forced to reveal that up until July last year, it had already spent $630,000 in legal fees. It would be safe to assume that university’s legal costs would have at least doubled since that time. The barrister who JCU employed in the Federal Court this week was Bret Walker SC, one of Australia’s most eminent lawyers. Barristers of his standing can command fees of $20,000 to $30,000 a day. And all of this is happening at the same time as the vice-chancellor of the university, Sandra Harding — who earns at least $975,000 a year — complains about the impact of government funding cuts.

While Australian taxpayers are funding the university’s efforts to shut down freedom of speech, Ridd’s legal costs are paid for by him, his wife and voluntary donations from the public. As yet, neither the federal nor the Queensland Education Minister has publicly commented on whether JCU is appropriately spending taxpayers’ money and, so far, both have refused to intervene in the case.

Ridd describes himself as a “luke-warmist”. “I think carbon dioxide will have a small effect on the Earth’s temperature,” he told an IPA podcast recently. “But it won’t be dangerous.” He has been studying the Great Barrier Reef since the early 1980s and was even, at one point, president of his local chapter of the Wildlife Preservation Society.

But Ridd is sceptical about the conventional wisdom that the Great Barrier Reef is dying because of climate change. “I don’t think the reef is in any particular trouble at all,” he says. “In fact, I think it’s probably one of the best protected ecosystems in the world and virtually pristine.”

The problems Ridd’s views cause for JCU are obvious. The university claims to be a leading institution when it comes to reef science, and has several joint ventures with taxpayer-funded bodies such as the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence in Coral Reef Studies.

Ridd challenged his sacking in the Federal Circuit Court on the basis that the university’s enterprise agreement (which determined his employment conditions) specifically guaranteed his right to “pursue critical and open inquiry”, “express unpopular or controversial views”, and even “express opinions about the operations of JCU and higher education policy more generally”. In September last year, Ridd won his case as the court found he had been unlawfully sacked and he was awarded $1.2m in damages and compensation for lost earnings.

The case in the Federal Court this week was an appeal by JCU against that decision. At issue was whether the intellectual freedom clauses in the enterprise agreement covering JCU staff protected his criticism of quality assurance issues in reef science at the university. The university alleges that in going public with his concerns that organisations such as the ARC Centre “cannot be trusted” on reef science, Ridd committed several breaches of the university’s staff code of conduct, with its vague, faintly Orwellian requirements to act “collegiately”, and to “uphold the integrity and good reputation of the university”.

In other words, even though the enterprise agreement specifically declared that staff had the right to intellectual freedom, it was for the university to determine the limits of what that freedom actually permitted. If it is accepted, it will be the death knell of free intellectual inquiry in Australia’s universities. As Ridd’s barrister, Stuart Wood QC, said to the Federal Court: “If you can’t say that certain science cannot be trusted because it is ‘discourteous’ and ‘not collegial’, then you cannot call out scientific misconduct and fraud. It’s not just the end of academic freedom, it’s the end of the scientific method. At that point, JCU ceases to be a university and becomes a public relations outfit.”

An academic who doesn’t have the ability to challenge the research findings of their colleagues because those questions threaten the university’s funding doesn’t have intellectual freedom. And if academics know they could get sacked, as Ridd was, for asking uncomfortable questions, they will stop asking uncomfortable questions.

Academics should of course be open to criticism — particularly for some of their more outlandish conclusions — but as a matter of public policy it is vital that universities be places where bad ideas can be expressed as well as good ones. The difference between the former and the latter should be resolved by free and open debate, not opaque “disciplinary processes”. We may not like what university professors say, but a strong university sector requires that we defend to the death their right to say it.

It is up to the Federal Court now to decide exactly how far universities can go to censor and sack their staff. But in Ridd, James Cook University has one professor who will not go quietly.

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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BACKGROUND

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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To be continued ....
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