GREENIE WATCH MIRROR The CRU graph. Note that it is calibrated in tenths of a degree Celsius and that even that tiny amount of warming started long before the late 20th century. The horizontal line is totally arbitrary, just a visual trick. The whole graph would be a horizontal line if it were calibrated in whole degrees -- thus showing ZERO warming

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 blogspot version of this blog is HERE. The Blogroll. My Home Page. Email John Ray here. Other mirror sites: Dissecting Leftism. For a list of backups viewable at times when the main blog is "down", see here. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing) See here or here for the archives of this site
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31 May, 2017

Early Collapse of Arctic Sea Ice Is Another Ominous Sign of Rapid Warming (?)

After reading the heading above, you would be forgiven for believing that the Arctic ice as a whole is shrinking.  On careful reading below, however, we find that it is only a few bits of the Arctic that are collapsing.  The Arctic as a whole is no more melted than it was in 1940

Temperatures and other features over the Arctic are highly varied so the Warmists can always cherrypick some bit that suits their propaganda


Earth's already-beleaguered northern icecap suffered another blow this month with the early collapse of a barrier that kept some of Arctic's most durable ice in place.

The ice arch across the Nares Strait, which separates Greenland from Ellesmere Island in Canada's far northeast, gave way two months earlier than usual, said Laurence Dyke, a paleoglaciologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

"On May 10, this arch disintegrated, leaving the oldest and thickest sea ice in the Arctic vulnerable to being swept south where it will melt away," Dyke told Seeker. "Over the last two weeks, the area of broken ice has expanded massively to the north, and lots of Arctic sea ice is flowing southwards through the Nares Strait."

The channel and the Lincoln Sea, at the northern tip of Greenland, are normally covered by a sheet of ice several meters thick until around July, Dyke said. Usually, ice sheets that cover the strait are anchored to land and don't move, blocking the passage of sea ice through the strait.

But as heat-trapping fossil-fuel emissions like carbon dioxide build up in the atmosphere, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. And this year, land-anchored ice in the strait failed to form amid the record warmth and record low sea ice coverage recorded across the Arctic. That left only an arch of ice at the northern end of the strait, where it joined the Lincoln Sea — the structure that gave way earlier this month.

"This is especially important as the Lincoln Sea contains the last bastion of old, thick multi-year sea ice," Dyke said.

The Nares Strait is the smaller of two passages that can funnel ice from that area toward the Atlantic.

The Fram Strait, on the east side of Greenland, carries "significantly more," said Twila Moon, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado — "But every little bit counts."

And the loss of multi-year ice is already a chronic problem in the Arctic. It forms the heart of next year's sea ice and provides habitat for whales, seals, and birds.

"It's also playing a role to reduce the amount of heat the ocean can take in during the summer," Moon said. If less ice is floating on the surface of the Arctic ocean, the dark-colored sea will absorb more of the Sun's energy — "and of course, more heat in the ocean reduces our sea ice further, and we get a runaway effect."

"Each of these small events adds up, and they're not good news," she added.

This year's event isn't unprecedented: Something similar happened in 2007. But when that occurred, "that led to the largest flux of Arctic Sea ice through Nares Strait in at least the last 15 years," Dyke said.

"Multi-year ice has been steadily declining over the last two decades, and this early break-up will surely destroy another large portion of it," he said.

Since sea ice is floating in water already, its melting doesn't add to sea-level rise — which a recent study suggests has accelerated dramatically since the 1990s. But the warming of the surrounding oceans is already starting to eat away at the miles of ice that cover Greenland.

SOURCE





Open letter to President Trump: Please Exit the Paris Climate Treaty

Are you are still wondering whether to Exit Paris? Overseas and US officials, environmentalists and bureaucrats urge you to Remain. But you promised voters you would Exit. Please keep your promises.

Exit Paris isn’t about the environment. It’s about letting us utilize our fossil fuel energy to create jobs, rebuild our economy, and Make America Great Again. It’s about avoiding immense transfer payments from the USA to foreign governments, bureaucrats and parties unaccountable to Trump-voting taxpayers.

Worse, even if the USA Remains, and the repulsive payments flow, Paris offers no help in removing real air pollutants. Carbon dioxide isn’t one of them, by the way: it’s plant food, not poison.

Exit Paris: Business

Some high profile American companies recently signed a note urging Remain. Follow the money. Many leaders of those companies didn’t support your election and voted Hillary. And they expect to get billions from us taxpayers and consumers, for locking up our fossil fuels and switching to renewable energy.

We who voted Trump, your base, want Exit. Just as you promised.

Remain, so that we maintain markets for American energy technologies? Some companies will make off like bandits. The rest of us will get skewered. Global buyers of energy systems understand the benefits of America’s world-beating fossil technologies. They understand the life-cycle value of after-sales support poorly delivered by our international competitors. Trust Chinese warranties? We don’t either.

Why ask corporations about Remain or Exit Paris? They pass Remain-driven energy costs on to consumers. Instead, ask consumers about ever-increasing energy bills. You’ll get a different answer.

Corporations have shareholders in the USA, of course, and some of them elected you. But corporations also have European shareholders. Corporations there must survive political economies aligned with Paris’s unaccountable bureaucratic control of energy, jobs, economic growth and living standards. You have to choose: shareholders, entrepreneurs, consumers and families – or rent seekers and bureaucrats.

Renewable energy lobbyists, Obama holdovers – and misguided souls in your own administration – say Remain, to keep a seat at the table. That’s nonsense. Businesses were flogged by the past administration and no longer recognize their obligations to shareholders, much less to societies they are supposed to serve with reliable, affordable power that creates and preserves jobs.

Those companies responded to incentives in a massively hostile American political economy. Those hostilities represent decades-long campaigns by anti-energy groups that got rich while claiming to represent shareholders, and by foreign governments seeking transfer payments. You promised change.

Exit Paris: Group of Seven

Mr. President, you’ll be pressured mightily at the G7 to Remain Paris. Hugely-invested and conflicted world leaders will give you no peace. Your delegation will hound you. Keep your Exit staff close. Why?

Because America got snookered into signing the Arctic Council’s May 11, 2017, Fairbanks Declaration. Now the same pro-Remain forces will claim America wants that language. What language?

Start with Perambulatory Paragraphs 8 & 9: “Reaffirming the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the need for their realization by 2030.” And this: “U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 13.a: Implement the commitment undertaken by developed country parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to a goal of mobilizing jointly $100 billion annually by 2020 from all sources to address the needs of developing countries in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation, and fully operationalize the Green Climate Fund through its capitalization as soon as possible.”

They want to take our money, while they shackle our economy. But there’s more.

 Paragraph 31 (p. 6): “…we welcome the updated assessment of Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic, note with concern its findings, and adopt its recommendations.…The Arctic states, permanent participants, and observers to the Arctic Council, should individually and collectively lead global efforts for an early, ambitious, and full implementation of the Paris COP21 Agreement….”

Your State Department Obama-carry-overs slipped this one past their boss, Secretary Tillerson – and you, by extension. This is where the real art of the deal comes in. Take a leadership role and terminate this. Don’t get sandbagged. Don’t sandbag the people who voted for you. Resist the pressures you’ll face in Sicily. Anything but Exit Paris undermines your credibility and betrays voter trust and America’s future.

Exit Paris: Diplomacy

One reason cited to Remain Paris and Remain UNFCCC and their climate treaties is to “avoid diplomatic blowback.” There certainly will be that, but it’s a cost far more easily borne than the sum of what we paid yesterday and will be told we must pay tomorrow in lost energy, jobs and money. Follow the money:

Emerging nations want the USA to Remain because they expect billions in cash from us every year – plus free technology transfers – at US corporate, taxpayer and consumer expense. Advanced countries want us to Remain because we will inadvertently fund and sign onto programs that they use to seize ever-greater bureaucratic control over energy, resources, jobs and living standards, within their own borders and ours.

The Chinese want us to Remain because it protects access to our market for energy technologies. Do you believe Chinese press releases and speeches that claim they are switching massively to renewable energy? Neither do we. But we see them building more coal-fired power plants in China, Africa and elsewhere.

Europeans want us to Remain in Paris to ensure that our fossil fuels, energy prices, economy, jobs, living standards and ability to compete globally are as shackled by climate insanity as theirs already are.

Some say Remain Paris for a seat at the table. Will the planet otherwise forget American leadership? Better that the deal crumbles without us making huge transfer payments and shackling our economy. Even better is that you lead America and the world back from the climate hysteria precipice.

Anti-America, anti-energy forces unite at the UN and its UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Its director, Ambassador Espinosa of Mexico, spoke recently at Georgetown University – to advocate greater bureaucratic control over energy, natural resources, jobs, living standards and human lives. The past administration was in lock-step with this. You should absolutely be against every part of it.

Exit Paris: Science

Paris is a horrible idea, since unassailable empirical evidence demonstrates that: Carbon dioxide makes plants grow faster and better. Atmospheric CO2 levels trail rather than lead warming. Water vapor is a much more potent greenhouse gas. Thanks to carbon dioxide, agricultural productivity has increased over recent decades by over $3.2 trillion. Scientists project up to $10 trillion more in improved crop yields over the coming decades.

Climate science is absolutely not settled. Smart scientists who support you prove there’s no credible path to climate cataclysm due to fossil fuel use and CO2 increases. Doomsayers have gotten rich by peddling false, alarmist, anti-scientific claims, while the rest of us have suffered. This must not continue.

To support Exit Paris, you should reverse the absurd, scientifically unsupportable claim that carbon dioxide “endangers” our welfare. Doing that will substantially remove the ability of subsequent administrations to restore policies that demonize fossil fuels and CO2. Many of the policies addressed and corrected by your recent environmental Executive Order are vulnerable until the endangerment finding disappears. Much of the mischief and job killing of the last eight years can be laid at that doorstep.

Exit Paris, because even outgoing EPA officials admit it will not noticeably affect Earth’s temperature.

Exit Paris: US Politics

Paris intentionally provides for ever-tightening restrictions on American citizens and businesses – thus far with no vote by us or the Senate. Who rewrote our Constitution to allow a president, in his final days in office, to impose such a far reaching treaty on us without our advice, consent, approval or vote?

If you need Exit support of fellow elected officials or a constitutional avenue, submit Remain Paris to the Senate. The measure will crash on that rocky shore, giving you all the support you need to Exit Paris.

Your voters heard you promise to Exit Paris. The support you still enjoy from your voters is because we see that you are keeping your promises. Keep this one, too, Mr. President.

Please Exit Paris. Those who voted for you will remember and approve. Those who detest and resist you will still detest and resist you if you Remain.

Thank you for considering our heartfelt analysis.

Sincerely,

Paul K. Driessen and Mark J. Carr

Via email






A reply to a miserable Greenie moan

THE MOAN:  “Beginning with the Memorial Day weekend and throughout the summer, Americans will spend their hard-earned dollars traveling to visit family, friends, and the great outdoors. Meanwhile, Big Oil will be making huge profits off of these travel expenditures on fuel, while at the same time fighting for decreased public health and climate-change protections.”

The American Automobile Association predicts that 39.3 million Americans will hit the open road this Memorial Day weekend, a million more this year than last. Affordable, reliable, widely available gasoline and diesel is a big reason. And maybe Americans feel energy-liberated by the current Administration.

While we wait for the anti-energy, glass-emptying Center for American Progress (not Prosperity) to psychologically retool, the rest of us can be optimistic.

Get happy. Summer beckons. Not only bike and hike but also drive, bus, train, and fly to a better environment–your self-selected environment.

The automobile is environmentalism-on-wheels. The open road is freedom to escape the concrete for the great beyond. Mountains, rivers, hills, forests, even beautiful green golf courses–it is all a drive away. (And if it makes you happy CAP, those ‘huge profits’ of “Big Oil’ are a few years absent.)

Each year, MasterResource celebrates the beginning of the peak-driving season knowing that our free-market philosophy is about energy abundance and affordability and reliability. And there is little to apologize for. When is the last time you got a bad tank of gasoline, anyway?

Oil, gas, and coal have been and continue to be technologically transformed into super-clean energy resources. Carbon-based energies are growing more abundant, not less. And energy/climate alarmism is losing steam on all fronts (except the shouting).

The real energy sustainability problem is statism, not free consumer choice. As Matt Ridley concluded: “There is little doubt that the damage being done by climate-change policies currently exceeds the damage being done by climate change.” As Alex Epstein is telling each one of us to tell our neighbors: I Love Fossil Fuels.

Energy is the master resource. Motorized transportation is freedom-of-movement. So, like that old Shell commercial said, Let’s Go!

SOURCE






L.A.’s promise to join the Paris Agreement is a wee bit presumptuous

Symbolic politics only

This week, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti tweeted that if the United States dropped from the deal, the city would sign on.
Just one problem, Garcetti: That’s not really a thing.

The legal infrastructure of the Paris Agreement doesn’t technically allow for cities to join, although cities and businesses have made big commitments to cut emissions alongside the agreement.

Political gimmicks aside, the mayor’s pledge shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. As Adam Rogers writes in Wired, Garcetti has mentioned joining Paris before.

California has actively framed itself as the head of the opposition to Trump’s takedown of progressive policies, and some in the state — like state Sen. Kevin De León, a Democrat — have also floated whether California could officially join the pact.

SOURCE







The Possible Reasons Big Corporations Are So Eager for Trump to Break His Promise on Paris Climate Deal

European countries and major corporations are pressuring President Donald Trump to remain in the Paris climate agreement despite his promises on the campaign trail to withdraw the United States from the Obama-era deal that never gained congressional approval.

The Trump administration so far is sticking with being undecided—at least until Trump returns to the United States from his first foreign trip, where on Friday, he’s meeting with Group of Seven ally countries, which support the agreement.

Back home, the pressure is growing from multinational corporations, even the energy sector, which have opposed stricter limitations on carbon.

Exxon Mobil Corp., once run by Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, Royal Dutch Shell, and BP are urging the administration to remain in the agreement. Meanwhile, coal mining company Cloud Peak Energy urged the administration to remain.

“BP and Shell are European companies and it’s impossible to do business in Europe without towing the political line,” Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Signal. He added that for oil and gas companies, “the only way to get the price of gas back up is to kill coal. The Paris Agreement kills fossil fuels, but it kills coal first.”

Ebell was part of Trump’s transition team overseeing the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute sponsored an ad showing Trump during the campaign saying, “We are going to cancel the Paris climate agreement and stop all payments of the United States tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.”

While corporate support might seem surprising, it’s very much the same old story for large companies seeking an advantage over smaller competitors, said Katie Tubb, a policy analyst with The Heritage Foundation.

“Big business and big government often go hand-in-hand. Big businesses generally can absorb and adapt to the costs of complying with burdensome regulation, of which Paris is a wellspring,” Tubb told The Daily Signal. “Smaller companies have a much harder time complying, which means less competition for big business. This is especially true if big business can influence the substance of regulations to favor themselves or freeze out competitors. I think in other cases; these large companies are just looking for PR points.”

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry led the United States into the Paris climate change agreement, along with 170 other countries. The agreement commits member countries to shift their energy industries away from fossil fuels and toward green energy.

Two dozen major U.S. companies—including Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, the Hartford, Levi Strauss, PG&E, and Morgan Stanley—sent an open letter to Trump published in The New York Times and other newspapers across the country, urging him to remain in the deal. The letter says:

By requiring action by developed and developing countries alike, the agreement ensures a more balanced global effort, reducing the risk of competitive imbalances for U.S. companies … By expanding markets for innovative clean technologies, the agreement generates jobs and economic growth. U.S. companies are well positioned to lead in these markets.

U.S. business is best served by a stable and practical framework facilitating an effective and balanced global response. The Paris Agreement provides such a framework. As other countries invest in advanced technologies and move forward with the Paris Agreement, we believe the United States can best exercise global leadership and advance U.S. interests by remaining a full partner in this vital global effort.

Generally, larger energy companies have an advantage under the climate deal, said Fred Palmer, senior fellow for energy and climate at the Heartland Institute.

“Follow the money,” Palmer told The Daily Signal. “There are companies that want to game the system of using [carbon dioxide] as a currency to make money.”

After meetings at the Vatican earlier this week, Tillerson said, “The president indicated we’re still thinking about that, that he hasn’t made a final decision.”

Ahead of the G7 meeting, Trump chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, the director of the White House National Economic Council, told a pool reporter Friday that the president is weighing both sides.

“I think he’s leaning to understand the European position. Look, as you know from the U.S., there’s very strong views on both sides,” Cohn said. “He also knows that Paris has important meaning to many of the European leaders. And he wants to clearly hear what the European leaders have to say.”

Ebell warned that if the administration seeks to make a deal to stay in the agreement, perhaps with a lower commitment than the Obama administration pledged, then a future president could simply increase the U.S. commitment. That’s why, Ebell said, it’s best for the United States to get out.

“Obviously foreign leaders don’t care what Trump promised voters in the campaign,” Ebell said.

To be sure, many U.S. business groups oppose the Paris Agreement, such as the Industrial Energy Consumers of America—which represents manufacturers and other larger energy-using businesses—that wrote an April 24 letter to administration officials. The letter said:

We are the ones who eventually bear the costs of government imposed [greenhouse gas] reduction schemes. At the same time, we are often already economically disadvantaged, as compared to global competitors who are subsidized or protected by their governments.

Given the above concerns, IECA fails to see the benefit of the Paris Climate Accord. And, the long-term implications of the Paris Climate Accord, which includes greater future [greenhouse gas] reduction requirements, raises serious competitiveness and job implications for [energy-intensive, trade-exposed] industries.

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   main.html or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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30 May, 2017

Climate Scientists Trying To Discredit Trump’s EPA Chief End Up Proving Him Right

That good ol' selective quotation again

A study meant to debunk a claim made by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt in his confirmation hearing ended up doing the opposite — it proved him right.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Nature, found that Pruitt’s claim of a “leveling off of warming” over the past two decades is unsupported by satellite-derived temperature data, which measures the lowest few miles of the atmosphere.

Researchers supposed debunking of Pruitt, however, centers on a selectively quoted line from his testimony, which cuts out the administrator’s reference to the global warming “hiatus.”

Scientists have been debating the “hiatus” in warming for years, trying to parse out its causes and, in some cases, if it’s due to bad measurements in surface temperature readings. But the “hiatus” is extremely apparent in satellite temperature readings, stretching for about two decades.

 “Mr. Pruitt claimed that ‘over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming,’” reads the study, quoting Pruitt’s confirmation hearing testimony from January.

But Pruitt actually said: “over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming, which some scientists refer to as the ‘hiatus.’”

Pruitt was clearly referring to the “hiatus,” or lack of significant warming, in the satellite temperature record that started in the late 1990s and continued until the recent El Nino began in 2015.

“This study seems to be an unwarranted kneejerk reaction to Pruitt’s ‘leveling off’ of warming comment,” Dr. Roy Spencer, a climate scientist who operates one of the satellite datasets relied upon by the study, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“But Pruitt’s comment in testimony wasn’t that precise, and it’s true that the previous warming became much weaker and approached zero over a period of approximately 20 years until the 2015-16 warm El Nino event,” Spencer said.

Pruitt has come under attack from environmentalists and some scientists for his comments on global warming. Most recently, opponents criticized Pruitt for saying that he didn’t believe carbon dioxide was the main driver of recent warming.

Major media outlets, including The Washington Post, picked up this new study’s results, criticizing Pruitt and his management at the EPA. WaPo reported, “Scientists just published an entire study refuting Scott Pruitt on climate change.”

Researchers found that “the tropospheric warming from 1979 to 2016 is unprecedented relative to internally generated temperature trends on the 38-year timescale,” according to the study.

Based on what Pruitt actually told Congress in January, however, the study essentially proves that he was correct.

Meteorologist Ryan Maue pointed out on Twitter that data presented in the study shows a slowdown in warming in the last 20 years. Maue also noted how authors used several studies on the “hiatus” in their citations, but refused to use the term in the study.

The study’s authors used climate models to show the warming trend in satellite data couldn’t be explained by natural warming, which excludes man-made greenhouse gases.

SOURCE






Bad news for Warmists: North Pole ice cap the same thickness as 1940

By Thomas Lifson

The apocalyptic religion of global warming/climate change stumbled upon the best animal mascot nag since Smokey the Bear when someone snapped a photo of a polar bear on an ice floe. Of course, polar bears are great swimmers, so the notion that a poor bear could be stranded on the last piece of ice remaining from the North Pole melt-off is absurd. But the religious frenzy of the Warmists holds such a myth as sacred, so the picture became its icon of compassion for cute furry objects of pity, the victims of the very carbon dioxide upon which its metabolism depends.

Now comes the worst possible news: the North Pole is not melting. Realclimatescience.com reports:

The Danish Meteorological Institute reports that Arctic sea ice is about two meters thick.

In 1940, Arctic sea ice was also about two meters thick.

Arctic sea ice is about the same thickness as 75 years ago, but because people are constantly being lied to about climate by government scientists, they carry the same misconceptions which people had 60 years ago.

In 1958, the New York Times reported that Arctic ice was about two meters thick, and that people carry a popular misconception that the ice is much thicker than it is. They also predicted an ice-free Arctic within one generation.

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






Nipping a legal problem in the bud

Consult with all affected parties, to ensure informed endangered species and pesticide policies

Paul Driessen

One of my recent articles predicted that the Fish & Wildlife Service’s endangered species designation for the rusty patched bumblebee would lead to its being used to delay or block construction projects and pesticide use on hundreds of millions of acres of US farmland. The abuses have already begun.

Projects in Minnesota and elsewhere have been delayed, while people tried to ascertain that no bees were actually nesting in the areas. Now a federal district court judge has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency failed to consult with the FWS before approving 59 products containing neonicotinoid pesticides that are used primarily as seed coatings for corn, canola, cotton, potato, sugar beet and other crops.

As crops bud and grow, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt must nip this problem in the bud. Thankfully, Judge Maxine Chesney has given them the means to do so.

The Endangered Species Act requires that EPA determine whether a pesticide “may affect” a listed species, she noted, and consult with the FWS and National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS, which has no conceivable role in protecting domesticated or wild bees), before approving the 59 products, which contain the neonics clothianidin or thiamethoxam. So EPA must consult with the agencies and determine that the insecticides would have “no effect” on the species or establish stricter guidelines for using them.

The Center for Food Safety and a couple of beekeepers initiated their lawsuit to toughen restrictions on or ban use of the 59 pesticide products, because of alleged risks to bees and other pollinators. Pesticide manufacturers, their CropLife America trade association, and various farmers and beekeepers argued that these “neonic” insecticides are safe for bees, and no new measures or restrictions are needed.

Properly done, consultation would evaluate the conflicting claims and ensure more informed policies. During the Obama Administration, those consultations would likely have involved only the EPA, FWS and NMFS, where many analysts have anti-pesticide views, along with the anti-insecticide plaintiffs. The industry and other parties who intervened in the lawsuit would likely have been excluded or ignored.

But those interveners certainly bring essential expertise. So do farmers, other beekeepers, the Department of Agriculture, scientists who have been studying neonic and other threats to honeybees, and wild bee experts like Sam Droege in the Interior Department’s US Geological Survey.

Truly informed policies and regulations must involve all such experts, as well as parties who will be most affected by any EPA-DOI decisions: construction companies and unions, local government officials, conventional farmers who rely on neonics to protect their crops – and beekeepers who increasingly understand that honeybee colony losses in recent years were due to natural pests and pathogens, and that alternative pesticides are actually more harmful to bees than neonics.

Extensive studies have concluded that the actual cause of bee die-offs and “colony collapse disorders” has been a toxic mix of tiny pests (parasitic Varroa destructor mites, phorid flies, Nosema ceranae gut fungus, tobacco ringspot virus and deformed wing virus) – as well as chemicals used by beekeepers trying to control these beehive infestations. These diseases and pathogens can easily spread to wild bees.

Field studies involving crops where bees forage for pollen have consistently found no observable adverse effects on honeybees resulting from exposures to properly applied neonic seed coatings. The studies assessed neonic residues from bees and hives under actual pollinating/pollen-gathering conditions; they found that pesticide residues were well below levels that can adversely affect bees – and that neonics “did not cause any detrimental effects on the development or reproduction” of honeybee and wild bee species.

That should not be surprising. Coating seeds ensures that neonic pesticides are absorbed into plant tissues – and thus target only pests that actually feed on the crops. This reduces or eliminates the need to spray crops with much larger quantities of neonicotinoid, pyrethroid or other pesticides that definitely can kill birds, bats and beneficial insects that inhabit or visit the fields or are impacted by accidental “over-sprays.” Even organic farming can harm bees, as it often employs powerful, toxic “natural” chemicals (like copper sulfate) and spraying with live Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) bacteria.

Laboratory studies consistently overdose bees with pesticides, under conditions that do not come close to approximating what bees encounter in forests, grasslands or croplands. That makes their findings highly questionable to useless for devising responsible, science-based regulations.

These realities help explain the sudden attention to wild bees. When the hullabaloo over honeybee deaths and “colony collapse disorder” supposedly caused by pesticides (especially neonics) collapsed like a house of cards, eco-activists began raising alarums over wild bees species. That’s because so little is known that their latest “no wild bees – no food or flowers” claims cannot yet be refuted as convincingly as were claims about domesticated honeybees that have been bred and studied for centuries.

The FWS and Interior Department clearly opened a Pandora’s Box when they decided to list the rusty patched bumblebee as endangered (rather than merely threatened). That bee’s historic range covers nearly 4 million acres, scattered in unknown segments among 378 million acres across 13 Northeastern and Midwestern states. Other species that anti-pesticide activists want added to the endangered list (yellow-banded, western and Franklin’s bumblebees) were found historically in small areas scattered over more than a billion acres in 40 US states. Some nest in the ground; others in trees.

If environmentalists succeed in getting these endangered designations – especially coupled with a narrow consultation process – they could delay, block or bankrupt power lines, bridges, highways, pipelines, housing developments, wastewater treatment plants, plowing operations and other projects all over the USA. Non-organic farming, neonic-treated seeds, and other pesticide use could be particularly vulnerable.

The actual environmental benefits would be minimal – or profoundly negative, as farmers are forced to use other insecticides or switch to land-intensive organic methods. Additional ironies abound.

The constant environmentalist, court, news media and government agency attention to bees and pesticides is hard to understand in the context of policies that promote, mandate and subsidize large-scale wind turbine installations – while ignoring or exempting their impacts on raptors and other birds, bats, and even whales (NMFS should investigate that) and human health.

Meanwhile, extensive monoculture corn and canola plantations (to produce feed stocks for ethanol and biodiesel production) replace millions of acres of food crop and wildlife habitat lands, while using vast quantities of water, fertilizer and energy to replace the oil, coal and natural gas that rabid greens want kept in the ground. These biofuel operations reduce biodiversity and the numbers and varieties of flowering plants on which wild bee species depend. In addition, over their life cycles ethanol and biodiesel generate more carbon dioxide than fossil fuels per Btu of energy produced (see here, here and here).

Broad-based consultations are therefore essential, to ensure that all these topics are addressed by experts and affected parties who can help evaluate the science and policy implications for domesticated and wild bees, as well as for farming, construction, jobs, families and other species.

They must assess not just the alleged risks of using neonics, but also the risks of not using them, risks associated with having to use other classes of pesticides, and risks that could be reduced or eliminated by using modern neonic seed coatings. They should focus on replicable, evidence-based, field-tested science, not laboratory studies; balance agricultural, consumer and environmental needs; and consider bees in the context of how we protect (or don’t protect) other valuable wildlife species.

These steps would help restore science and common sense to policy and regulatory processes – and serve as a foundation for adjusting the Endangered Species Act to minimize regulatory and litigation excesses.

Via email





Climate change litigation growing rapidly, says global study

Researchers identified hundreds of climate change-related lawsuits filed in 24 countries, many of them seeking to hold governments accountable for existing climate-related legal commitments. Map is from their report

A new global study has found that the number of lawsuits involving climate change has tripled since 2014, with the United States leading the way. Researchers identified 654 U.S. lawsuits—three times more than the rest of the world combined. Many of the suits, which are usually filed by individuals or nongovernmental organizations, seek to hold governments accountable for existing climate-related legal commitments. The study was done by the United Nations Environment Program and Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

Around 177 countries recognize the right of citizens to a clean and healthy environment, and courts are increasingly being asked to define the implications of this right in relation to climate change.

"Judicial decisions around the world show that many courts have the authority, and the willingness, to hold governments to account for climate change," said Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Burger said that in the United States, litigation has been "absolutely essential" to advancing solutions to climate change, from the first, successful, lawsuit demanding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulate greenhouse gas emissions, to a recent lawsuit claiming that citizens have a constitutional right to a stable climate system. "Similar litigation all over the world will continue to push governments and corporations to address the most pressing environmental challenge of our times," he said.

"The science can stand up in a court of law, and governments need to make sure their responses to the problem do too," said Erik Solheim, head of UN Environment. As litigation has grown, it has addressed a widening scope of activities, ranging from coastal development and infrastructure planning to resource extraction. The scope of individual suits is also growing in ambition, says the report.

Some suits outside the United States have already had results. Among other things, the report describes how, in September 2015, a Pakistani lawyer's case against the government for failure to carry out the National Climate Change Policy of 2012 resulted in the government designating action points within several ministries, and the creation of a commission to monitor progress.

The report predicts that more litigation will originate in developing countries, where people are expected to suffer many of the worst effects of shifting climate. The report also predicts more human-rights cases filed by "climate refugees," coming as a direct result of climate-driven migration, resettlement and disaster recovery. By 2050 climate change could, according to some estimates, displace up to 1 billion people. That number could soar higher later in the century if global warming is not kept under 2 degrees Celsius, relative to pre-industrial levels, say some.

International organizations including the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees have already acknowledged the need to address the plights of people displaced by changing climate. But there is yet no international agreement on the rights of such displaced persons, nor on the obligations of countries to respect them.

Technology will not suffice to address coming problems, say the authors; laws and policies must be part of any strategy. They say that because of the Paris Agreement, plaintiffs can now argue in some jurisdictions that their governments' political statements must be backed up by concrete measures to mitigate climate change.

SOURCE




A secretive EPA in Australia

NSW home owners could be living near contaminated land without knowing because the state's environmental watchdog has failed to disclose the information, a government review has found.

The NSW Environmental Protection Authority told the review it decided not to declare all contaminated residential sites because it could "affect the valuation of a property".

The report was led by Macquarie University Professor Mark Taylor who found the EPA failed to make the information public even when the "contamination is significant enough to warrant regulation".

While the EPA is committed to declaring contamination on and near commercial and industrial land, the review found it "generally does not declare off-site residential land to avoid unnecessarily blighting that land and causing undue concern".

The review continues to say the EPA first determines if the contamination poses health or environmental risks before it decides to disclose the information to residents.

The review found two examples where off-site residential properties near "significantly contaminated" sites were not declared to affected residents and no reason was provided why in the EPA's briefing notes.

The EPA says in the report it is investigating the matter.

The environmental watchdog has committed to a revised declaration process, which will assure a more "standardised approach", but decisions to declare or not declare the contamination will continue to be made on a "case-by-case basis", the report says.

However, the EPA will not declare all contaminated sites that are deemed "significant enough to warrant regulation".

In a statement released on Sunday, the EPA says if the contaminated site poses an impact on neighbouring properties, it's up to the council to reveal that information and in cases of significantly contaminated sites, the information is "added to the public record, published in the Government Gazette, notification is provided to the landowner, polluter, land occupier and local council or authority".

"Local authorities are then tasked to record this information on property planning certificates issued under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act," the EPA said in the statement.

The environmental watchdog noted NSW had some of the strictest reporting requirements in Australia, and "human health and the environment are the priority".

"Property value never overrides the EPA's protection of human health and the environment regarding significantly contaminated sites," the EPA 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   main.html 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 May, 2017

An ignorant Australian Greenie

I put up yesterday some arrogant, elitist comments from an Australian Greenie.  The Greenie, Dayne Pratzky, also uttered  some ignorant Leftist stereotypes about the USA. Because it is rich and powerful, all Leftists hate the USA.  Even American Leftists do. A conservative American  reader was rightly incensed at the unbalanced comments.  And has replied to them.  First the comments then the reply:

“I’m a custodian of society, we all are. If you don’t want to live in a gun-filled and drug-filled society like America, you’ve got to fight to keep Australia the way it is now.”

We are a country of 326 million of which 325 million are not criminals. There are a lot of drug users but by far the majority of the population are not drug addicts. We become alarmed when 100 people in a small state overdose on illegal and tainted drugs. I will not miss nor will I grieve for  these misfits but I will support trying to protect the citizens from these drugs. Pharmaceutical companies continue to find ways to make life more comfortable but leave it to some to find the drug world a place to retreat into to avoid all of life's responsibilities.

Our constitution makes it very clear that the forefathers had a built in fear of government, to the extent that they wrote in a single demand that citizens would never be disarmed so as to safeguard against powerful people strong arming the removal of all rights. Many people miss the fact that such freedoms come with responsibility as well as risks of abuse. People own guns for all kinds of reasons, some for pleasure, some for protection, some for crime.

We are a long way from armed uprising but the possibility remains in the minds of government people. Almost every state in the Union has more armed citizens than the entire standing army and you can bet that even the army would not stand on the side of a tyrant government. Every citizen has at least one bullet, it is called a vote.

Our second amendment does not endorse crime, rather crime uses what ever advantage it can gain. Drugs are another issue but it is people that use drugs that make the issue.  Our country is under siege both from in and from without. It will always be that way as long as there is big profit in drugs.

In summary........it is people like Pratzky that our constitution protects us from.




Trump will cause the planet to fry

That's a defensible conclusion if you accept Warmist assumptions but it is presented as more than theory.  We read below for instance: "America contributes so much to rising temperatures".  Does it?  It contributes a lot of CO2 but CO2 rises and temperature rises don't synchronize

Earth is likely to reach more dangerous levels of warming even sooner if the U.S. retreats from its pledge to cut carbon dioxide pollution, scientists said. That's because America contributes so much to rising temperatures.

President Donald Trump, who once proclaimed global warming a Chinese hoax, said in a tweet Saturday that he would make his "final decision" next week on whether the United States stays in or leaves the 2015 Paris climate change accord in which nearly every nation agreed to curb its greenhouse gas emissions.

Global leaders, at a summit in Sicily, have urged him to stay. Earlier in the week, Pope Francis made that case with a gift of his papal encyclical on the environment when Trump visited the Vatican.

In an attempt to understand what could happen to the planet if the U.S. pulls out of Paris, The Associated Press consulted with more than two dozen climate scientists and analyzed a special computer model scenario designed to calculate potential effects.

Scientists said it would worsen an already bad problem and make it far more difficult to prevent crossing a dangerous global temperature threshold.

Calculations suggest it could result in emissions of up to 3 billion tons of additional carbon dioxide in the air a year. When it adds up year after year, scientists said that is enough to melt ice sheets faster, raise seas higher and trigger more extreme weather.

"If we lag, the noose tightens," said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Climatic Change.

One expert group ran a worst-case computer simulation of what would happen if the U.S. does not curb emissions, but other nations do meet their targets. It found that America would add as much as half a degree of warming (0.3 degrees Celsius) to the globe by the end of century.

Scientists are split on how reasonable and likely that scenario is.

Many said because of cheap natural gas that displaces coal and growing adoption of renewable energy sources, it is unlikely that the U.S. would stop reducing its carbon pollution even if it abandoned the accord, so the effect would likely be smaller.

Others say it could be worse because other countries might follow a U.S. exit, leading to more emissions from both the U.S. and the rest.

Another computer simulation team put the effect of the U.S. pulling out somewhere between 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.18 to 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit).

One of the few scientists who plays down the harm of the U.S. possibly leaving the agreement is Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the scientist credited with coming up with the 2 degree goal.

"Ten years ago (a U.S. exit) would have shocked the planet," Schellnhuber said. "Today if the U.S. really chooses to leave the Paris agreement, the world will move on with building a clean and secure future."

Not so, said Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe: "There will be ripple effects from the United States' choices across the world."

SOURCE






Is This Really the Worst Ever?
   
As summer approaches, let’s look at some comparisons and talk hurricanes. Let’s look at the past 10 summers.

Much of the U.S. is around 1 degree Fahrenheit above normal on average. Now take a look at the summers of the 1930s.

While there are some places 0.5-1 F below normal, much of the nation’s midsection is 2-4 F above normal, which means arguably it was warmer then than the past 10 summers. The point is that when it comes to extremes, it looks worse in the 1930s.

Now keep in mind that we have had a lot of urban sprawl over the last 30 years. The South is much more populated. The satellite era of temperatures started in the late 1970s, so the same measuring techniques used today may have made the 1930s even hotter. We only know how hot it was based on thermometers.

Satellites see all, which is one of my arguments as to why comparing temperatures over 120 years becomes a red herring since there was no way to measure temperatures the way we do now back in decades like the 1930s. Still, it has warmed in the past 30 years. I am not arguing that point. But saying it’s the warmest in 120 years when you did not measure temperatures the same way is questionable at best. And certainly the “worst ever” missives have reason for skepticism.

Let’s move to precipitation — and keep in mind, we had three major drought years in the past 10 in the nation’s midsection, But, lo and behold, the 10-year summer rain totals show nothing so extreme.

Doesn’t look that bad. What’s more, there is a lot of wet weather in the nation’s midsection where we can grow food to feed people. Looks more like a blessing than a curse.

For the record, the latest percentage of the nation covered by drought is at the lowest point ever recorded since this measuring tool was started in 2000.

Another case of climate extremes? Yeah. Extremely beneficial. Keep in mind that Florida in the last 10 years is above normal and one or two tropical systems could reverse the current dry area very quickly.

Now to the 1930s.

And you wonder why there was a dust bowl? Yes, it’s partly because of agricultural practices then, but this is flat out harsh!

The drought severity index reflects that. Now here’s something important: When you look at precipitation totals in the Southwest, they are not that far below normal. Yet the drought severity is greater, because when there is little rain on average, very slight deviations below normal will make the index in that area, relative to the area, greater. The evaporation rates are much higher also, so two inches below normal where there should be 10 inches of rain is a lot bigger deal than two inches below normal where there should be 60 inches. But let me concede the Southwest.

The fact is the heartland of the country where we grow food has been in great shape overall. You can’t have perfect weather everywhere; it’s inherent in nature to have conflict. “Average” can be a misnomer, occurring rarely, as the average is made up of the back and forth that one is likely to see in the weather and climate. To be that dry in the Southwest, it had to be compared to a 30-year average that must have been wetter at times. As you saw this past winter, wet can return very quickly.

But again, look at the drought severity of the 1930s.

So are the current times really as bad as it’s ever been, especially when one considers where the drought has occurred?

What about hurricanes? On the Saffir-Simpson scale, there have been no major hurricanes since 2005 to hit the U.S. Look at the 1930s.

That was followed by this in the ‘40s and '50s. So when was it worse?

By the way, if you want to take a look at the upcoming hurricane season — and I do think there is a good chance of a major hit — check out our forecast here.

You know, when I was younger, my dad used to always say to me: “Joe, you would not believe how bad the weather was in the '30s, '40s and 50s.” I used to think, “Yeah right,” but I was bored with the weather so much that I went back and looked … and looked … and looked. And I found myself looking at events I still have trouble believing happened. So when someone says, “This is the worst ever,” believe me, there are plenty of examples of events and patterns that look comparable, and in many cases beyond what people say about today.

SOURCE.  (See the original for links, graphics etc.)





Farmer Faces $2.8 Million Fine For Plowing His Own Field

A California farmer is facing a $2.8 million fine for failing to get a permit to plow his own field.

John Duarte bought 450 acres of land near Modesto in 2012 and is now being sued by the federal government for plowing near areas the government considers to be "waters of the United States."

USA Today reports:

A farmer faces trial in federal court this summer and a $2.8 million fine for failing to get a permit to plow his field and plant wheat in Tehama County.

A lawyer for Duarte Nursery said the case is important because it could set a precedent requiring other farmers to obtain costly, time-consuming permits just to plow.

"The case is the first time that we're aware of that says you need to get a (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) permit to plow to grow crops," said Anthony Francois, a lawyer for the Pacific Legal Foundation. The libertarian-leaning nonprofit fights for private property rights and limited government.

 "We're not going to produce much food under those kinds of regulations," Francois said.

The case will head to trial in August. The government claims that Duarte violated the Clean Water Act because he did not obtain a permit to work near the wetlands.

Francois, the attorney for Duarte, said farmers plowing their fields are exempt from federal rules.

Duarte plowed to a depth of between 4 and 7 inches.

SOURCE






Trump Must Resist Pressure From Foreign Leaders to Cave in on Global Warming

As National Public Radio reported last week, “President Trump is expected to face pressure from European Union leaders … to keep the U.S. in the Paris Climate Treaty.”

Leaders from those foreign nations should prepare for disappointment.

The start of the G-7 summit, held in the swanky coastal town of Taormina, located on the island of Sicily, just happens to be the one-year anniversary of Trump’s famous energy policy speech in Bismarck, North Dakota.

Then-candidate Trump made clear that his administration would “cancel the Paris climate agreement,” both because it was bad for America and because it violated our nation’s laws:

President [Barack] Obama entered the United States into the Paris climate accord unilaterally and without the permission of Congress. This agreement gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much our energy and how much we use right here in America. So foreign bureaucrats are gonna be controlling what we’re using and what we’re doing on our land in our country. No way. No way.

A lot can change in 365 days, but the fundamental flaws of the Paris Agreement that Trump identified have not.

Speaking to NPR’s Ari Shapiro last week, Royal Dutch Shell CEO Ben van Beurden rightly noted that “[o]f course it is the U.S.’s sovereign decision” on whether to pull out of the Paris Agreement.

America is a geographically diverse and expansive nation, which makes comprehensive global regulatory schemes difficult to implement without massive disruption.

In fact, during a recent speech in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Trump said “it is estimated that for compliance with the [Paris Agreement] could ultimately shrink America’s [gross domestic product] by $2.5 trillion … ”

The numbers get even worse, according to Heritage Foundation research.

By 2035, household electricity expenditures will increase between 13 to 20 percent, family of four income loss will exceed $20,000, and there will be more than 200,000 fewer manufacturing jobs due to the “policies adapted from domestic regulations emphasized in the Paris Agreement [that] will affect a variety of aspects of the American economy.”

According to the National Conference on State Legislatures, 21 states have either voluntary renewable energy standards or no standards, and 20 of those voted for Trump last November. Trump also won manufacturing states with mandatory renewable standards—states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

Many of those voters found their voice in Trump.

Shell’s van Beurden told NPR that pulling out of the Paris Agreement would put the United States “off-site for such an important societal debate” and strongly implied that it would undermine America’s ability to “have a strong, meaningful, and impactful voice at all tables around the world.”

Of course, we have seen what happens when an American president kowtows to global elites in an effort to be heard and loved.

During his infamous apology tour, Obama told a group of foreign leaders that “with my election and the early decisions that we’ve made, that you’re starting to see some restoration of America’s standing in the world.”

He apologized to the Europeans for the “times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”

Trump’s election was a repudiation of that approach.

The path forward for the Trump administration is clear, and it begins with following through on the president’s pledge to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

Doing so would restore certainty for America’s job creators and make it more difficult for future administrations to abuse the global warming agreement and advance destructive policy initiatives.

Enduring policy victories are the foundation upon which legacies are built.

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   main.html or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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




28 May, 2017

Trump refuses to get in line for climate deal

President Trump dug in his heels last night over committing America to the climate deal signed by President Obama, citing fears that such an agreement could threaten US jobs.

On the first day of a two-day meeting of the G7 leaders at Taormina in Sicily, the host, Paolo Gentiloni, the Italian prime minister, said that the US leader had yet to be convinced not to back out of the Paris Accord, which seeks to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Gary Cohn, Mr Trump’s economic adviser, said that Mr Trump had stuck to prioritising American jobs, which he believes are threatened by moving to clean energy. He said that the president “wants to do the right thing for the environment, he cares about the environment but he also cares very much about creating jobs for American workers”.

After the first round of talks, Mr Gentiloni said: “We are hopeful that the US will want to participate and we hope there are positive decisions in the coming days or weeks.”

Mr Cohn hinted that the president might yet be convinced, saying after the session that the president felt “much, much more knowledgeable” on the topic than he did previously. He said that Mr Trump had told the G7 leaders that the environment was “very, very important” to him and that he had even cited environmental awards that he had received.

The drafting of a diluted final G7 declaration, which is expected to acknowledge the climate battle, has been hampered by the absence from the summit of Kenneth Juster, Mr Trump’s international economic policy adviser, who has reportedly stepped down and been replaced by his deputy.

SOURCE




Trump’s Budget and the environment

It’s been described as a “slap in the face,” “slaughter,” “a punitive … assault on science, the environment, and indeed the planet.”

Aside from being inappropriate and irresponsible, these remarks are how some in the policy world and media have depicted cuts to global warming spending in President Donald Trump’s first budget proposal.

People seem to have forgotten—or perhaps never noticed—just how much the government spends on direct climate programs.

Trump’s budget proposal does in fact eliminate or cut a number of climate programs. But you don’t have to scratch too far beneath the surface to realize there are legitimate justifications for doing so.

Even if the federal budget won’t be balanced on the back of eliminated climate programs, there are a number of basic problems with government climate spending.

1. Quite simply, there are a lot of global warming programs.

For all the Obama administration’s emphasis on global warming as an issue, the Government Accountability Office’s December 2016 assessment found only partial improvement in program management and could not yet determine if government standards showed whether programs were being effective, as they had only just been implemented.

The Government Accountability Office noted in 2009 that “the federal government’s emerging adaptation activities were carried out in an ad hoc manner and were not well coordinated across federal agencies, let alone with state and local governments.”

At least 18 federal agencies administer climate change activities, costing at least $77 billion between fiscal years 2008 and 2013, according to the Congressional Research Service.

2. Most of the money goes to green tech rather than science.   

If these technologies are economically viable, there will be plenty of private sector capital available to develop them. Hardworking taxpayers shouldn’t have to dump money into speculative or failing technology companies or pad the bottom lines of successful ones.

The Department of Energy is notorious for spending on research, development, demonstration, and commercialization of technologies like wind, solar, geothermal, electric vehicles, biofuels, coal carbon capture and sequestration, small nuclear, and batteries.

This has been particularly true in more recent years as a result of the Obama administration’s failed stimulus package, which funneled billions of dollars into energy technologies.

According to the Government Accountability Office, the bulk of federal climate spending has gone to technology development rather than science, wildlife, or international aid.

3. There’s a lot of wasteful spending.

While the Navy’s price per gallon may appear cheap, the actual total cost to the government is much higher.

Despite clear direction from Congress that fuels be cost-competitive, the executive branch camouflaged the costs of the Navy’s biofuel program by subsidizing it through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Commodity Credit Corporation program and the Department of Energy.

There are other much larger boondoggles, too. The Navy spent hundreds of millions of dollars on biofuels to meet a political objective to “jumpstart” a domestic biofuel economy with no strategic advantage for military capabilities.

There are many other equally ridiculous examples, such as an Environmental Protection Agency grant for “green” nail salon concepts in California.

As just one example of wasteful spending, Office of Budget and Management Director Mick Mulvaney highlighted the National Science Foundation’s grant for a global warming musical. (The nearly $700,000 grant was awarded in 2010.)

4. International climate initiatives are fatally flawed.

There are a number of problems with America’s continued participation in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body that has produced international global warming agreements and, most recently, the Paris Protocol.

One would think that an international climate conference aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions would be the perfect opportunity to have a teleconference to show some good faith. But instead, government officials from around the world fly to lavish venues while telling you to buy hybrids and eat less meat.

Each year, the result is the same: symbolic commitments that shame industrialization and the use of fossil fuels with little to no actual impact on the climate.

Furthermore, the Palestinian Authority’s participation in the Paris Protocol should be cause enough to halt funding as Congress has stipulated under current law.

As the Trump budget proposes, the U.S. should also end funding to the quasi-scientific body behind the Paris Protocol—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This panel’s studies have been subject to bias, manipula­tion, and poor data.

5. There are major problems and gaps in climate science.

The fact is, climate modeling is at this point an inexact science. Models have proven to be inaccurate, and regulatory cost-benefit accounting metrics based on them are indefensible.

It is thus no surprise that massive government policies like the Paris Protocol and Clean Power Plan are demonstrably ineffective in addressing global temperatures.

There are many areas of disagreement and uncertainty among climate scientists, not to mention biologists, meteorologists, oceanographers, economists, and others with relevant expertise.

Exacerbating this is the role the federal government has played in toxifying the scientific debate on global warming. Rather than fostering scientific discovery in a field that is a mere few decades old, the federal government appears to have expressed bias in funding science that supports federal climate policies.

Science that challenges the current narrative is pilloried in the press and labeled “denialism,” whereas an intellectually honest approach would seek to understand and improve the science.

The debate is not improved by demands for RICO investigations or anti-science statements castigating those with different opinions as part of the “flat earth society” with their “heads in the sand,” and encouraging people to “find the deniers near you—and call them out today.”

We don’t need more spending on iterative studies telling us that coffee could be more expensive and snakes bigger thanks to global warming. We need better modeling, better understanding of basic science, more data, and a better, transparent discussion on climate science and climate policies.

Even after the president’s proposed cuts, there is plenty of money left in the federal budget to study and model the climate.

For instance, the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, a division that includes many climate programs within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, would be cut by more than $150 million, but still retain a hefty $324 million.

Let’s also not forget the role that universities, nonprofits, and international organizations play in studying the global climate.

Eliminating wasteful spending, some of which has nothing to do with studying the science at all, is smart management, not an attack on science.

It’s time to end the boondoggles and hold the federal government’s climate science activities to the same standards of rationality and cost effectiveness as other government spending.

SOURCE







Major Exxon Investor Warns Shareholders Not to Give Into Global Warming Hysteria

An activist-led measure at Exxon Mobil Corp.’s next annual meeting addressing global warming could financially wipe out the company’s largest shareholders, one long-time Exxon shareholder said.

BlackRock and Vanguard Group are toying with the idea of supporting an investor-created proposal that would force Exxon to measure how regulations limiting greenhouse gasses could impact the value of the company’s oil assets, sources told The Wall Street Journal Thursday.

The measure is receiving intense scrutiny from shareholders who worry Exxon could get wobbly-kneed in the face of the environmentalist push.

Some analysts believe the measure, if passed, could indicate the full weight and force powerful investors and money managers that are concerned about climate change have on energy companies.

Exxon is opposed to the measure and will find out if Vanguard and BlackRock support the measure at the company’s annual meeting on May 31.

But Steve Milloy, a lawyer-statistician and climate skeptic, believes Exxon’s shareholders are flirting with the devil.

Coal companies know what happens when shareholders entertain measures that could potentially affect their financial bottom line, said Milloy, a global warming skeptic and founder of the website JunkScience.com.

“It’s kind of ironic that you have a president who wants to roll back regulations against oil producers, yet companies like Exxon want more rules to be heaped on them,” said Milloy, an Exxon shareholder who will speak in opposition to the measure at the meeting next week.

Milloy has been advocating the oil producer end its support for a national carbon tax, rebuke the Paris Agreement on climate change, and discontinue funding climate research

“The threat would have been hypothetical no more than five years ago,” he added, “but the threat is real now. Shareholders get zeroed out because of all of this global warming hysteria.”

Climate activist shareholders hold a different view.

Timothy Smith, a director at Walden Asset Management, which backs the Exxon measure, for instance, told reporters that a few short years ago investors were not talking about the effect climate change has on business, but “now the evidence just slaps you in the face.”

BlackRock has not publicly supported the measure.

“No decision has been made regarding our vote at Exxon’s Annual Shareholder Meeting. Our deliberations continue and we look forward to continued engagement with the company,” said Zach Oleksiuk, head of Americas for BlackRock’s investment stewardship group.

Vanguard could be dissuaded from joining the climate crowd if Exxon offers concessions, such as allowing non-employee directors to meet with investors, the sources said. Similar concessions have worked in the past on other measures addressing global warming.

“Directors at any company who don’t engage with those on whose behalf they serve risk losing investor support,” Glenn Booraem, a principal at Vanguard, said in a statement about possible concessions Exxon should consider.

The measure comes as Exxon continues beating off an attorney general-led campaign to force the Texas-based oil producer into turning over decades worth of documents allegedly showing it hid knowledge about global warming from the public.

Much of the crusade against Exxon’s climate history is based on reports from liberal-leaning media outlet InsideClimate News and Columbia University, which claim Exxon has known the risks of global warming for decades but kept such knowledge under wraps.

Milloy, for his part, submitted a resolution in April through a mutual fund he called the Free Enterprise Action Fund, which requests Exxon change its bylaws blocking stockholders from filing resolutions.

His plan came after an activist-led ploy to force Exxon into naming a climatologist to the company’s board of directors. It relented and elected Susan Avery, a former director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Avery, a climate scientist specializing in atmospheric dynamics and climate change, helped the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cobble together climate research. Milloy thinks activists with political views have been undercutting the company’s interests for years.

BlackRock received scorn and relentless criticism at Exxon’s annual meeting last year after it opposed a similar proposal. The group will make the disclosure of climate risks a key point of discussion with Exxon managers this year.

Next week’s investor-led measure hinges on many of Exxon’s largest shareholders, most of whom own about 20 percent of the company, according to Anne Simpson, investment director for sustainability at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System. CalPERS has worked on oil and gas divestment issues in the past.

Simpson added: “At the end of the day, the outcome will turn on what do the big fund managers and mutual funds do.”

SOURCE





The U.S. shale boom will continue to benefit consumers if energy markets are allowed to work

The American energy revolution of the past decade has brought unforeseen economic benefits including billions of dollars in new investments, lower energy costs for Americans and tens of thousands of new jobs.

That energy-driven economic stimulus has been especially powerful in the resource-rich regions in states like North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Texas where innovation and modern technological advancements in shale development have revitalized local economies. And the energy boom has had the deepest and most positive impact in states that have embraced commonsense policies that foster and encourage competition rather than picking winners and losers in the energy marketplace.

Where energy development has been allowed to take hold without onerous over-regulation, the energy sector's successes buffered local and regional economies from many of the devastating effects of the Great Recession. Since the recovery, the shale revolution has affected transformative changes in national and international energy markets, shifting long-held paradigms involving the production, generation and use of energy in America.

We have seen cheaper, domestically produced natural gas push out other sources of energy used to power America's electric grid, leading to more cost savings in states where consumers choose suppliers. In the Midwest, oil refiners invested billions to expand capacity and update facilities to process the significant boom in North American crude oil production.

As we continue to move away from government-imposed limits on the energy sector such as the now-lifted ban on crude oil exports, and move to encourage more overseas shipments of natural gas products, America's energy revolution is even reaching into global energy markets.

The United States exported oil to 26 different countries last year, according to recent Energy Information Administration data, thanks to the government's decision to finally get out of the way of energy markets. Given this newfound access to global energy markets, U.S. oil and gas producers, refiners and processors are rising to the fresh opportunities.

There's no debating the fact that the domestic energy revolution has delivered a powerful economic stimulus to the economy and made American more energy secure than ever before.

The market dynamics driven by this transformation require larger and more fundamental changes in our systems that move oil, natural gas and fuels. Such change can be painful for some. Communities that might not have seen new pipeline development or infrastructure projects in decades need to accommodate these critical improvements. Businesses that rely on decades-old systems need to adjust and modernize.

SOURCE





Australia: The arrogance of a Greenie

"We have to lead the government in what we want"

SO MANY people feel like they can’t make a difference nowadays but not Dayne Pratzky aka the Frackman.

Eight years ago he started a war with the coal seam gas industry that left him financially and emotionally drained but still angry enough to rip out the gas connection in his new house. “I will not have a part of it, I will not be held hostage to the gas industry in cooking and heating,” Pratzky told news.com.au.

Pratzky, who has embraced solar power at home, gained infamy when he appeared in the hit 2015 movie Frackman about his fight against gas companies who wanted to drill on his property in Queensland’s Darling Downs.

While he now lives in Forster in NSW’s Mid North Coast, Pratzky does not think he lost, despite the high price he’s paid for his activism. “I’ve lost eight years of my life, I’ve financially ruined myself and it will take time to get back on my feet but I’ll be back, I’m not finished.”

Pratzky believes he also helped others, and contributed to destroying the onshore gas industry in Australia. Since then the Victorian government has banned all onshore gas exploration and production, and there are delays over projects in NSW and the NT.

“You could say I lost but you could also say I won because the industry’s social licence has been destroyed,” Pratzky said.

“They are losing the PR battle and people don’t trust the oil and gas industry. “There’s no place for it in this country, and I’m proud of that.”

Ultimately Pratzky believes companies will never be a match for passionate people. “They do this for a job, they get paid, go home and do something else. But activists go home and eat and breathe it, that’s why you can’t beat activists because they are doing it because they want to. You can’t beat passion.”

Asked whether he had any regrets, Pratzky reckons he would have gone even harder. “I realise that being a passenger in policy, it’s no way forward,” he said. “We are having things that are not good for us forced down our throats.

“The government doesn’t lead, it follows. We have to lead the government in what we want.”

Far from feeling disempowered, Pratzky believes the rise of social media has enabled people to fight for what they believed in more than ever before. “Now I say if you’re not an activist, you’re just a whinger — there’s no excuse anymore,” Pratzky said.

“You used to have to fight to get yourself in the media, it would have to be a great story for them to get involved, but part of our rise to notoriety was because of social media.

“We had the ability to get the message out and it’s changed society. “You can be a keyboard warrior now, you can write a letter, join a group and educate yourself far easier than before.”

And contrary to what many people think, Pratzky said activists were not the rainbow-clothes wearing, bong smoking rabble they were often made out to be.

Pratzky, a carpenter and builder enjoys pig-shooting, is himself an unlikely activist and he said the social aspect of activism was actually the best part about it.

“The best thing is the people you meet ... they are absolutely phenomenal people, good Aussies, that’s why I stay involved, to help them save their properties,” he said.

“It’s not the ‘usual suspects’, it’s normal people trying to protect their way of life and business.”

Pratzky, who will be sharing his experiences during a talk at the Opera House on Saturday, wants to continue encouraging people to stand up for what they believe in.

“You’ve got to put yourself out there,” he said. “If there’s something wrong in our area, you should know about it,” he said.

“I’m a custodian of society, we all are. If you don’t want to live in a gun-filled and drug-filled society like America, you’ve got to fight to keep Australia the way it is now.”

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   main.html 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 May, 2017

Astonishing news:  wind turbines may have caused the death of 3 whales

Save the whales! Report below from The Times of May 22:



SOURCE





The Pope pressed Trump to help with persecuted Christians in the Middle East?  No such luck.  He harped on about global warming

A strange gospel. Has the Devil got to him? But the report below is from the NYT.  Could it be fake news?

Pope Francis put climate change on the agenda of his first meeting with President Trump on Wednesday, and the subject is likely to come up again and again in the president’s encounters with other world leaders in the coming days.

The pope presented the president with a copy of his influential encyclical on preserving the environment, while in a broader meeting, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, urged Mr. Trump not to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord.

Mr. Trump told his Vatican hosts that he would not make a final decision until after he returned to the United States, despite some expectations that he could announce a decision at the Group of 7 summit meeting in Italy this weekend.

“They were encouraging continued participation,” Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson told reporters about the message from the Vatican. “We had a good exchange on the difficulty of balancing addressing climate change, and insuring that you still have a thriving economy and you can still offer people jobs so they can feed their families.”

In their first encounter, the pope and the president, two men with starkly different worldviews, sought to bridge the chasm between them with a handshake, a private audience and a mutual pledge to work for peace.

They stuck mainly to protocol, avoiding a public reprise of the barbs they aimed at each other during Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign or the pope’s thinly veiled critiques of the new president as a symbol of a dangerously reinvigorated nationalism.

But there was also a sense in the Vatican that Mr. Trump was easier to talk to than his tough language on the campaign trail or his sharp words toward Francis had led them to believe. That could be particularly true on the issue of American participation in the Paris accord, where there are sharply conflicting views inside the West Wing.

Francis left no doubt about his message in the gifts he gave to his guest, notably the essay on the importance of the environment, which stands as a rebuke to the climate change skepticism espoused by Mr. Trump. Francis also presented him with a medallion engraved with the image of an olive tree — “a symbol of peace,” he explained. “We can use peace,” Mr. Trump said. Francis replied, “It is with all hope that you may become an olive tree to make peace.” As he bade the pope farewell, Mr. Trump told him, “I won’t forget what you said.”

For Mr. Trump, who came here after stops in Saudi Arabia and Israel, the visit to the Vatican capped a tour of the ancestral homes of three of the world’s great monotheistic religions. For Francis, who made his own landmark visit to Egypt last month, it was a chance to welcome a second American leader, after President Barack Obama paid his respects in 2014. Unlike that meeting, few expected a meeting of the minds. Pope Francis and Mr. Trump have diametrically opposed views on issues like immigration, climate change and arms sales. Although both appeared determined not to let politics spoil their encounter, their fraught personal history and divergent personal styles made for a loaded backdrop.

In Saudi Arabia, Mr. Trump came with a $110 billion arms deal and was embraced by a royal family eager to improve relations with Washington. In Israel, he expressed America’s solidarity with a close ally and staked his claim as a peacemaker. At the Vatican and elsewhere in Europe, however, Mr. Trump has had to overcome suspicions.

SOURCE






Pocohontas names the no 1 'Threat to Int'l Peace and Security'--Climate Change

North Korea wants to nuke us; ISIS wants to kill us; Mexican drug lords want to addict us; China spies on us, Iran hates us, and Russia interferes in our elections. Those are just a few of the "global threats" outlined by Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

And then there's "climate change," a prime concern of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who raised the issue with Coats at Tuesday's hearing on "global threats."

"The science is unmistakable. Human activities are releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and contributing to climate change," Warren stated.

"A Defense Department report from two years ago observed, 'Global climate change will have wide-ranging implications for U.S. national security interests over the foreseeable future because it will aggravate existing problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions,’ she quoted.

“In short, this DOD report describes climate change as a threat multiplier. Director Coats, do you agree?" Warren asked.

"I don't know if I would describe it as a threat multiplier," Coats responded, noting that his job is to assess the consequences of potential changes in climate as they impact migration and humanitarian issues. He said the science of climate change falls to other federal agencies.

“I think there have always, in the history of the world, been reactions to different climate changes, and this is an issue that continues,” Coats said.

Warren noted again that Defense Department has concluded that climate change exacerbates existing problems: “Do you disagree with any of that?” she asked Coats.

“No I don't disagree,” Coats responded. “I'm simply saying that I think that has been an ongoing issue -- throughout the -- throughout the ages.”

“Well, let me ask the question this way then,” Warren said. “How should we be integrating climate change risks into our national security strategy?”

Coats, haltingly, said: "We should be assessing … the consequences of changes that are relevant to security issues. That should be part of the assessment, and it is.”

“Well,” said a frustrated Warren, “climate change is clearly a threat to international peace and security, and I just think it's critically important that we take this seriously and we adapt accordingly.”

SOURCE






WH Budget Director: Obama Administration Spent Too Much on Climate Change 'and Not Very Efficiently'

White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Tuesday that the previous administration spent too much money on climate change in the past "and not very efficiently."

"Can you characterize the treatment of climate science programs and cuts to those? And do you describe those as a taxpayer waste, if you do not cut them?" a reporter asked Mulvaney.

"You tell me. I think the National Science Foundation last year used your taxpayer money to fund a climate change musical. Do you think that's a waste of your money?" Mulvaney asked.

"What about climate science?" the reporter asked.

"I'll take that as a yes, by the way," Mulvaney said. "So you see my point. What I think you saw happened during the previous administration is the pendulum went too far to one side, where we were spending too much of your money on climate change and not very efficiently."

Mulvaney said while the budget doesn't get rid of programs that focus on climate change, it does target them.

"We don’t get rid of it here. Do we target it? Sure," he said.

"Do a lot of the EPA reductions aimed at reducing the focus on climate science? Yes. Does it meant that we are anti-science? Absolutely not. We're simply trying to get things back in order to where we can look at the folks who pay the taxes, and say, look, yeah, we want to do some climate science, but we're not going to do some of the crazy stuff the previous administration did," Mulvaney said.

SOURCE





Are Microbiologists Climate-Denying Science Haters?

Recently, I gave a seminar on "fake news" to professors and grad students at a large public university. Early in my talk, I polled the audience: "How many of you believe climate change is the world's #1 threat?"

Silence. Not a single person raised his or her hand.

Was I speaking in front of a group of science deniers? The College Republicans? Some fringe libertarian club? No, it was a room full of microbiologists.

How could so many incredibly intelligent people overwhelmingly reject what THE SCIENCE says about climate change? Well, they don't. They just don't see it as big of a threat to the world as other things. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of them felt that antibiotic resistance and pandemic disease were the biggest global threats. One person thought geopolitical instability was the biggest concern.

I told them that I believed poverty was the world's biggest threat. The reason is poverty is the underlying condition that causes so much misery in the world. Consider that 1.3 billion people don't have electricity. And then consider how the lack of that basic necessity -- what the rest of us take completely for granted -- hinders their ability to develop economically and to succeed, let alone to have access to adequate healthcare. If we fix poverty, we could stop easily preventable health problems, such as infectious disease and malnutrition.

Was I booed out of the room? No, the audience understood why I believed what I did. But woe unto you who try to have a similar conversation with climate warriors.

Conservative columnist Bret Stephens, formerly of the Wall Street Journal, landed a new gig at the New York Times. His very first column, "Climate of Complete Certainty," caused much weeping and gnashing of teeth. And probably the rending of garments. What did he say that caused so much outrage?

In a nutshell, his thesis was that certainty often backfires. He used the Hillary Clinton campaign as an example; in his view, certainty of victory was one factor in her defeat. Next, Mr. Stephens drew an analogy with climate science, worrying that the certainty expressed by the most vocal proponents of major climate policy reforms are speaking with a sense of certainty that is not well-founded. He warned against taking imperfect models too seriously and the dangers of hyperbolic doom-mongering.

It often irks me when political commentators write about science, usually because they haven't the foggiest clue what they're talking about. But Mr. Stephens' article used reasonable and cautious language, and to my knowledge, he didn't write anything that was factually incorrect. He simply concluded, as I myself have, that doomsday prophesying is wrong -- and even if it was right, it convinces few people, anyway. (Do the antics of the Westboro Baptist Church change anyone's mind?)

Yet, the reaction was swift and entirely predictable. Vox, whose stated mission is to "explain the news," called Mr. Stephens a "bullshitter." GQ ran the headline, "Bret Stephens Is Why Liberals Have Every Right to Be Dicks." And Wikipedia (whose founder is going to try to solve the problem of fake news) labeled him a "contrarian."

All that because Mr. Stephens warned against speaking hyperbolically. The concept of irony appears to be lost on his critics.

Can Smart People Disagree About the Threat of Climate Change?

What so many in the media (and apparently the climate science community) fail to understand is that people have different values and priorities. Foreign policy analysts are terrified of North Korea. Economists fear Brexit and a Eurozone collapse. Geologists, especially those in the Pacific Northwest, fear a huge earthquake. Experts across the spectrum perceive threats differently, usually magnifying those with which they are most familiar.

That means smart people can accept a common core of facts (such as the reality of anthropogenic global warming) without agreeing on a policy response.

Yet instead of being a place to debate a policy response for complex science issues, the media have chosen to be an extension of the militant Twitterverse. Even if you are just discussing courses of action, you are not allowed to deviate from climate orthodoxy lest you be labeled a science-denying heretic.

Perhaps journalists should spend more time talking to microbiologists.

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   main.html 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 May, 2017

Woof! Peer review in action



MOVE aside quokkas and black swans, Perth is now home to the world’s smartest dog, at least on paper.

Local “academic” Dr Olivia Doll — also known as Staffordshire terrier Ollie — sits on the editorial boards of seven international medical journals and has just been asked to review a research paper on the management of tumours.

Her impressive curriculum vitae lists her current role as senior lecturer at the Subiaco College of Veterinary Science and past associate of the Shenton Park Institute for Canine Refuge Studies — which is code for her earlier life in the dog refuge.

Ollie’s owner, veteran public health expert Mike Daube, decided to test how carefully some journals scrutinised their editorial reviewers, by inventing Dr Doll and making up her credentials.

The five-year-old pooch has managed to dupe a range of publications specialising in drug abuse, psychiatry and respiratory medicine into appointing her to their editorial boards.

Dr Doll has even been fast-tracked to the position of associate editor of the Global Journal of Addiction and Rehabilitation Medicine.

Several journals have published on their websites a supplied photo of Dr Doll, which is actually of a bespectacled Kylie Minogue.

Professor Daube said none of them smelt a rat, despite Dr Doll’s listed research interests in “the benefits of abdominal massage for medium-sized canines” and “the role of domestic canines in promoting optimal mental health in ageing males”.

Today Ollie is being featured in a more reputable publication, the Medical Journal of Australia’s Insight magazine, which is looking at the surge in journals which charge desperate would-be researchers up to $3000 to get their studies published.

“While this started as something lighthearted, I think it is important to expose shams of this kind which prey on the gullible, especially young or naive academics and those from developing countries,” Professor Daube said.

He said the authors would be gutted to know their papers were being reviewed by a dog, who often needed to be offered a treat before she dragged herself in front of the laptop. “It gives all researchers paws for thought,” Professor Daube said.

Dr Doll refused to comment unless she was taken for walkies.

SOURCE





Senator Rand Paul: Say Au Revoir to Paris Climate Agreement

The federal government should be beholden to one authority and one authority alone—our Constitution—and not some U.N. bureaucrats.

It is my duty as a senator to uphold and defend the Constitution. One of my most important responsibilities in this role is to provide advice and consent on treaties, a check and balance on the Executive Branch. It gives us the opportunity to make sure the deals we’re signing up for are good for all Americans.

President Obama wanted to cement his legacy of environmentalism through the Paris Agreement on climate change. Obama also knew the Senate would never ratify the agreement, so he deliberately labeled it as an “executive agreement” to avoid the ratification process and unilaterally pledged the support of the United States with the stroke of a pen.

So what did Obama sign us up for in exchange for maybe reducing global temperature by 0.2°C by 2100? Experts predict that by 2040, the agreement could cost us 6.5 million lost jobs—a number significantly larger than the entire population of Kentucky. It will cost us $3 trillion in lost GDP. For each household, the average annual lost income could be as high as $4,900.

These numbers are jaw dropping. Why can’t we work toward a future that protects both our environment and our jobs? Why did the past administration always force the latter to be a martyr for the former?

Thankfully, President Trump has the opportunity to reverse course on Obama’s mistake.

President Trump has delivered on almost all of his promises to have an America First energy plan. He has directed the EPA to suspend, revise, and rescind certain actions related to the Clean Power Plan. He has removed regulatory roadblocks to American energy independence, including signing the resolution Congress sent him to repeal the Stream Buffer rule. He has also instructed agencies to review existing administrative policies harming domestic energy production.

But there’s one missing piece to being truly America First, something President Trump promised on the campaign trail. He promised he would cancel the Paris Agreement as president. Can we really have an America First energy plan if we are needing to seek the endorsement of the U.N. as we make determinations about our country’s environmental and energy policies? The federal government should be beholden to one authority and one authority alone—our Constitution—and not some U.N. bureaucrats.

I ran for Senate to protect Kentucky jobs and restore the Kentucky coal industry from regulatory overreach. I stood right behind President Trump as he signed the bill I cosponsored to repeal the Stream Buffer rule.

I previously introduced a resolution requiring the Paris Agreement to be considered a treaty needing the Senate’s advice and consent. I am keeping my word to Kentuckians.

That is why I introduced a resolution Monday, with a companion resolution cosponsored by Congressman Andy Barr, calling on President Trump to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, an agreement which experts believe will not actually solve the environmental issues it was intended to address.

We founded our country on a system of checks and balances, and no president should have the unilateral authority to make such significant international commitments without input from Congress.

I look forward to President Trump following through on his promise to exit this agreement.

SOURCE





European Nations Set To Wipe Out Forests To Cheat On CO2 Emissions

It looks like greenwash.  European nations publicly keen to boost their climate credentials by switching to “green” biomass are accused of working behind the scenes to expunge their carbon emissions from burning wood in power stations from national emissions statistics.

“If we don’t measure emissions when trees are cut, we won’t measure them at all,” says Hannah Mowat of FERN, a European NGO working to save the continent’s forests, who has followed the EU negotiations on the issue.

Under international climate treaties such as the Paris Agreement, burning biomass like wood is defined as carbon-neutral, even though it emits as least as much carbon as fossil fuels. The assumption is that new trees will be grown to take up the carbon emitted from the burning.

If countries reduce their forest cover – as a result of harvesting trees for biomass burning or anything else – the carbon loss should show up in national statistics under a complex accounting process known as LULUCF, for Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry.

But measuring carbon stocks on the land and in forests is an inexact science, and critics say the LULUCF rules are wide open to accounting errors.

On 19 June, European environment ministers will set their own rules for LULUCF carbon accounting. How they do this will play an important role in Europe meeting its emissions targets under the Paris Agreement.

But Mowat says that countries with plans to replace coal and nuclear fuel burning with wood are lobbying for rules that will obscure likely resulting emissions.

“France, Austria, Sweden and Finland are fighting tooth and nail to weaken the EU’s rules,” Mowat told New Scientist. “This is because they all plan to significantly increase the amount of trees they cut in the next decade: Finland will increase harvesting by 25 per cent and France by 20 per cent, and they don’t want to count the emissions.”

Government data show that France plans to increase timber harvesting by 12 million cubic metres by 2026.  Finland plans a 15 million cubic metre increase, almost entirely for burning more wood in power stations.

Fewer trees will mean less carbon being soaked up from the atmosphere, too.

Mowat estimates that the reduction in the EU’s total forest carbon sink between now and 2030 is equivalent to the emissions of 100 million cars.

SOURCE





Trump's budget proposal 'savages' climate research, scientists say

Scientists poring over President Trump's proposed 2018 federal budget say it guts funding for climate science.

Under the proposal, the three federal agencies that perform the bulk of that research face dramatic cuts.

David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council said the budget "savages" the agencies' programs, noting dramatic slashes in funding at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Ken Kimmell, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the proposal would "stall out U.S. technological innovation and scientific research, and the country’s capabilities to respond to extreme weather and national security threats."

NASA's Earth science mission faces cuts of 8.7%, according to Chris McEntee, executive director of the American Geophysical Union. Overall, there is a 45% cut in research in the EPA budget, the NRDC said. And NOAA faces a 16% reduction. Cuts were also proposed to the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Department of Energy.

Trump's Office of Management and Budget defended the cuts at a media briefing in Washington, D.C., Tuesday morning: “What I think you saw happen during the previous administration is the pendulum went too far to one side, where we’re spending too much of your money on climate change and not very efficiently," said OMB director Mick Mulvaney.

"We don’t get rid of it here," he said. "Do we target it? Sure. Do a lot of the EPA reductions aim at reducing the focus on climate science? Yes. Does it mean that we are anti-science? Absolutely not. We simply try to get things back in order so we can look at the folks who pay the taxes and say: ‘look, yeah we want to do some climate science but we’re not going to do some of the crazy stuff the previous administration did.' ”

Both Republicans and Democrats have raised concerns about various parts of the budget plan and have indicated they are not using the president’s request as the starting point for drafting a spending bill for next year.

The elimination of five NASA Earth science space missions "were not identified as high priority," according to the budget. Those missions have yielded safeguards to avoid eating toxic shellfish, reduce aviation disruptions and take precautions for unhealthy air quality, to name a few, the Union of Concerned Scientists said. NASA has instructions to "stop looking at Earth and only focus on other planets," Doniger said.

But Acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot disputed the characterization that the space agency was abandoning the mission.

"This budget still includes significant Earth Science efforts, including 18 Earth observing missions in space as well as airborne missions," he said in a prepared speech to NASA employees.

The EPA's program that reports on greenhouse gas levels drops from $95.3 million to $13.6 million, according to the budget. Carbon dioxide and methane are greenhouse gases that are most responsible for global warming.

“This is a budget declaring war on climate change," said Elgie Holstein of the Environmental Defense Fund. "It’s not a particular surprise though it’s deeply disappointing and (with rollback of Clean Power Plan) an abdication of American leadership on climate."

In addition to its 16% overall reduction, NOAA faces deeper cuts to climate and other research programs, McEntee said. The agency provides weather and climate data that protects more than half of all American who live along the coasts, over 2.8 million jobs in ocean reliant industries and coastal property valued in excess of $10 trillion.

"We are concerned that the administration's proposed cuts to research into the Earth system sciences will undermine the continued scientific progress that is so vitally needed to better protect the nation in the future from costly natural disasters," the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) said in a statement.

Last year, the nation endured a whopping 15 separate disasters that each cost at least $1 billion in damages, including tornadoes, drought, and widespread flooding, UCAR said.

Enacting the budget would bring serious repercussions for the U.S. economy and national security and to the ability to protect life and property, UCAR said. "Such funding cuts would be especially unfortunate at a time when the nation is moving to regain its position as the world leader in weather forecasting."

McIntee said: "The President’s FY18 proposal instead charts a course of destructive under-funding for scientific agencies that stimulate the economy, protect public safety, and keep our nation safe and secure."

SOURCE





New maps show the risk of sea level rises to Australian cities

Another Greenie prophecy that will fail like all others before it

SAY sayonara to Sydney airport, farewell to Fremantle and bye to Byron Bay.

A series of maps has graphically illustrated how Australia could be affected by climate change and rising sea levels. And it looks like many of our major towns and cities could be getting a lot soggier.

Hobart Airport would be underwater, Melbourne’s Southbank submerged and the WACA in Perth would be inundated.

Famous sea side resorts like Byron Bay, Port Douglas, Noosa and the Gold Coast are in danger of seeing the sea get a whole lot closer for comfort.

A climate expert has said rising sea levels globally could displace “tens of millions of people”.

The new maps come from Costal Risk Australia run by Western Australia business management consultants NGIS. The data is fished from the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA to show which areas will be at risk from a “business as usual” scenario of a 2 metre sea-level rise by 2100.

Just by putting in your suburb name into the Coastal Risk Australia, you can see if you area is at risk of flooding.

Website co-creator Nathan Eaton said that with more than 80 per cent of Australians living near the coast, it was critical for people to appreciate what rising sea levels in the decades to come could mean for their communities.

However, in some areas its likely even a 2 metre sea rise will be surpassed. Climate scientists have pointed to parts of northern and Western Australia where rises could be higher.

The Torres Strait Islands have experienced regular king tides, an area which rarely got any of the monster tides in the past.

Professor John Church from the University of NSW’S Climate Change Research Centre said flooding to the measure forecast would cause catastrophic problems for many Australians.

“With business as usual emissions, the questions are when, rather than if, we will cross a 2 metre sea level rise,” he told Fairfax. “This scenario would result in major catastrophes and displace many tens of millions of people around the world.”

One of the worst affected areas would be Cairns with vast tracts of the city’s CBD and suburbs at risk from rising sea levels.

But Cairns Mayor Bob Manning said he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over the maps. He said claims Cairns could be under the ocean by the end of the century were “outlandish”.

“I’m someone who takes environmental issues very seriously,” he told the Cairns Post. “But if we’re going to run around every day because some group comes up with some wild or outlandish or extreme prognosis — and we don’t have any verification on it — then we’ll just spend the next so many years going crazy.”

He said the decisions made by the council were based on the “best scientific evidence we’ve got” and that the city worked with the Local Government Association of Queensland’s sea-level adaptation unit.

Earlier this month, climate scientists at the University of Melbourne warned an agreement reached in Paris to hold global average temperatures rise to under 2C above pre industrial levels would inevitably fail.

Last week, US researchers said sea levels driven by global warming were on track to dramatically boost the frequency of coastal flooding worldwide by mid-century, especially in tropical regions.

A 10 -20cm jump in the global ocean watermark by 2050 — a conservative forecast — would double flood risk in high-latitude regions, they reported in the journal Scientific Reports.

Major centres such as Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, along with the European Atlantic coast, would be highly exposed, they found.

But it would only take half as big a jump in ocean levels to double the number of serious flooding incidents in the tropics, including along highly populated river deltas in Asia and Africa.

Even at the low end of this sea rise spectrum, Mumbai, Kochi and Abidjan and many other cities would be significantly affected.

“We are 95 per cent confident that an added 5 — 10 centimetres will more than double the frequency of flooding in the tropics,” lead author Sean Vitousek, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told AFP.

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   main.html 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 May, 2017

Even the Antarctic peninsula is cooling

The Antarctic peninsula is the most Northerly part of Antarctica so by reason of that alone is the warmest part of Antarctica. Additionally, it is known to have a degree of subsurface vulcanism, which warms bits of it even more, so it is the part of Antarctica that Greenies normally talk about.  A glacier breaking off or splitting there gives them erections.  But glacial ice is always splitting off somewhere so what they see proves nothing.  I put up something about peninsula glaciers yesterday.

Implicitly, they tend to generalize a slightly warmer area of the peninsula to Antarctica as a whole and regard what they observe as proof of global warming.  It has long been known however that Antarctica as a whole is cooling so that claim is just the usual Warmist dishonesty. 

The article below, however, rubs salt into the wound.  Not only are a few bits of the Antarctic peninsula not typical of the Antarctic, they are not even typical of the Antarctic peninsula.  The peninsula overall is cooling too!


Recent regional climate cooling on the Antarctic Peninsula and associated impacts on the cryosphere

M. Oliva et al.

Abstract

The Antarctic Peninsula (AP) is often described as a region with one of the largest warming trends on Earth since the 1950s, based on the temperature trend of 0.54 °C/decade during 1951–2011 recorded at Faraday/Vernadsky station. Accordingly, most works describing the evolution of the natural systems in the AP region cite this extreme trend as the underlying cause of their observed changes. However, a recent analysis (Turner et al., 2016) has shown that the regionally stacked temperature record for the last three decades has shifted from a warming trend of 0.32 °C/decade during 1979–1997 to a cooling trend of ? 0.47 °C/decade during 1999–2014. While that study focuses on the period 1979–2014, averaging the data over the entire AP region, we here update and re-assess the spatially-distributed temperature trends and inter-decadal variability from 1950 to 2015, using data from ten stations distributed across the AP region. We show that Faraday/Vernadsky warming trend is an extreme case, circa twice those of the long-term records from other parts of the northern AP. Our results also indicate that the cooling initiated in 1998/1999 has been most significant in the N and NE of the AP and the South Shetland Islands (> 0.5 °C between the two last decades), modest in the Orkney Islands, and absent in the SW of the AP. This recent cooling has already impacted the cryosphere in the northern AP, including slow-down of glacier recession, a shift to surface mass gains of the peripheral glacier and a thinning of the active layer of permafrost in northern AP islands.

Science of The Total Environment. Volume 580, 15 February 2017, Pages 210–223




Temperature hasn't risen in 20 years: latest data

Recently published data from independent meteorologists Dr Ryan Maue of WeatherBELL Analytics and Dr Roy Spencer show that global temperatures have fallen back to about the levels of 20 years ago.

The two scientists use different data sources – one terrestrial, the other from satellites – so the convergence of their findings is particularly significant.

WeatherBELL is a commercial forecaster using land-based climate data, and specialises in providing long and short-term forecasts for the agriculture, energy, hydrology, retail and aviation industries. It has its own computer models, but also accesses information from both the American NOAA and Britain’s Met Office.

According to Dr Maue, global temperatures dropped 0.5 degrees Celsius in April. In the northern hemisphere they plunged a massive one degree. The Global Warming Policy Foundation commented: “As the record 2015–16 El Niño levels off, the global-warming hiatus is back with a vengeance.”

Dr Maue said the fall in temperatures (in degrees Celsius) over the past year are seen in the following variations from the 1981–2010 average:

March 2016     +0.673
April 2016       +0.557
March 2017     +0.558
April 2017       +0.375

The explanation of the temperature pause since 1998 – which contradicts the computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – has been the subject of widespread discussion in academic journals, including the American Geophysical Union journal, Geophysical Research Letters, as well as Climate Dynamics, and the Scientific Report of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. All agree that temperature rises have stalled, but there is no consensus on the cause.

Dr Roy Spencer publishes every month the average global temperature derived from satellite observations. Since 1979, satellites have been sending back to earth data on the temperature of the lower atmosphere, and this data is published by the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) and on Dr Spencer’s website.

The satellite data indicates that average temperatures in April 2017 were 0.27 degrees above the 30-year average from 1981–2010. In the previous month, the data showed that the temperature was just 0.19 degrees above the 30-year average. The IPCC had forecast temperature variations five to 10 times as large.

The UAH chart for the entire period shows that in the 1990s, temperatures remained relatively steady until the large El Niño of 1997–98, and then oscillated around a new higher level until the El Niño of 2015–06, when it rose again, before falling back towards the 30-year average.

Another recent source of climate alarm has been the appearance of a large crack on the Larsen C ice-shelf of the Antarctic Peninsula, which stretches up towards the tip of South America (News Weekly, March 11, 2017).

The ice-shelf is fed by several glaciers, which flow into the sea.

The splitting off of ice-shelves is an entirely natural phenomenon, and is the cause of icebergs, which are common around Antarctica and, historically, have been observed as far north as New Zealand’s South Island. The most recent media report of icebergs being seen off the coast of New Zealand was in 2016. Previously, they had been reported in 2009 and 2006.

Calving of the Larsen C ice-shelf would be the largest recent iceberg to break off from Antarctica, prompting claims that it is caused by global warming or “climate change”.

However, the overall area of sea ice around Antarctica is close to normal for this time of year, and recent research indicates that temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have fallen slightly in recent decades.

Dr Marc Oliva from the Centre for Geographical Studies at the University of Lisbon, with others wrote a recent paper, “Recent regional climate cooling on the Antarctic Peninsula and associated impacts on the cryosphere”, which was published in last February’s issue of Science of the Total Environment.

They looked at the temperature record on the Antarctic Peninsula from 1951 to 2011, using data from 10 weather stations dotted around the peninsula.

Earlier conclusions of warming of Antarctica had been based on the recorded weather at just one station, the Faraday/Vernadsky station, where temperatures had risen by 0.54 degrees per decade, one of the largest warming trends on earth since the 1950s.

“Accordingly, most works describing the evolution of the natural systems in the [Antarctic Peninsula] region cite this extreme trend as the underlying cause of their observed changes.”

However, when data from all 10 stations is considered, a very different picture emerges.

It shows that a more moderate warming trend of 0.32 degrees per decade from 1979–97 was succeeded by a cooling trend of -0.47 degrees per decade in the period 1999–2014.

The figures also show that the most pronounced cooling occurred in the north and northeast of the peninsula, where it lies adjacent to Cape Horn and South America.

The new data contradicts the repeated claims of the IPCC that global warming is causing irrevocable damage to the Antarctic continent.

SOURCE





This green and poisoned land: British river is devastated by toxic tsunami of sludge from a 'green' energy plant receiving thousands in subsidies from the taxpayer

You would struggle to find a lovelier view anywhere than that from Pencefn, a hilltop farm near Tregaron in mid-Wales.

Lush meadows with sheep grazing peacefully roll down towards the valley of the Teifi, renowned for its salmon and sea trout. Close by are the Cambrian Mountains, where the river begins its journey at the limpid Teifi Pools.

But dwarfing the main farm are the towers and tanks of an anaerobic digester. The Government-subsidised 'green guzzler' turns animal excrement, human food waste and specially grown rye into methane gas, which is burnt in a generator to make supposedly environmentally friendly electricity for the National Grid.

Last December, just a few months after it was built, the digester triggered an ecological catastrophe. Unnoticed by the farm's owners, brothers Jim and William Lloyd, a pipe from a storage vat sprang a leak.

Thousands of gallons of black, toxic slime began sliding slowly downhill across those verdant meadows to a nearby stream – a tributary of the Teifi. The result was a poisonous 'tsunami', a flood of putrid sludge that flowed down the stream and into the river for hours. The consequences were devastating, and are likely to last many years.

This week, an investigation by this newspaper has revealed:

I According to local experts, the effects of the spill are so deadly, the river may take years to recover, so ruining the local economy;

l At least 1,000 mature trout and salmon were found dead immediately, but the full toll will be many times higher;

l Poison levels in an eight-mile stretch of the Teifi were so high almost no living things survived;

l The fly-fishing season should be in full swing this month but long stretches of the river are devoid of anglers;

l Lavish Government 'green' levies on fuel bills mean Pencefn's owners – despite being the source of the deadly leak – will continue to reap tens of thousands of pounds in subsidies, while also paying nothing for their own electricity;

l Despite this generous Government support, no official agency checked the plant's design or safety systems before it was built, or monitored its operation;

l The ultimate cause of the leak was shoddily installed plastic pipework – and both firms responsible have now gone into liquidation;

l Although the Pencefn leak is at least the 20th 'serious pollution incident' caused by an anaerobic digester since the beginning of 2015, scores of new ones are being planned across the country – some of the biggest by 'green' tycoon and former 'new age traveller' Dale Vince of Ecotricity, who advises Labour on its energy policy.

The impact of the Teifi spill soon became apparent. Late on Saturday, December 17, locals noticed the river was covered with a foul-smelling, bubbly slick below the town of Tregaron.

Because it was dark, it was not until the following morning that the source was located at the stream flowing down from Pencefn. Local fishing guide Steffan Jones walked the riverbank shortly after. Dead fish were everywhere.

At the confluence with the Pencefn stream he said he could 'clearly see the stain of the effluent about five feet above the river level. The stain had discoloured the bank all the way down to the water. I walked the whole stretch of the contamination – seven or eight miles – and the scale of this disaster was horrifying. It wiped out every living thing in the river for eight miles'.

The slick moved downstream at 5mph, contaminating everything in its path. Residents say that at Llandysul, the most popular angling centre on the Teifi, 30 miles below Tregaron, the river still stank.

Dr Ian Thomas, president of the Llandysul Angling Association, said the timing made matters worse. Mid-December is the peak of the winter spawning season, when salmon and sea trout swim from the ocean to lay eggs in the same pools and eddies where they were spawned. Both the fish and eggs they had laid were poisoned.

'The whole river has been affected, from the estuary to the headwaters,' said Dr Thomas.

Natural Resources Wales (NRW), which deals with pollution, said after the spill it had counted 1,000 mature dead fish. But Dr Thomas said there were many more.

Freshwater biologist Frank Jones said: 'There is still no final estimate from NRW of the total number of fish killed, but it will be a very big figure. Many of the sea trout had not yet spawned, and because they spawn several times in their lifespan this will have a big impact on future generations.

It could be years before they recover.' He said the fish population, especially salmon, had already been declining because of earlier slurry spills into the river. 'Slurry is stored in vast artificial lagoons, many of them well beyond their sell-by date. Sometimes they overflow and the slurry goes into the river.'

Other anaerobic digester leaks have been almost as damaging. In December, the MoS revealed the case of Crouchland Biogas in West Sussex, which has received millions in subsidy yet has operated without planning permission since 2013. It sprang two huge leaks within a year, wrecking the neighbouring farmer's rare-breed sheep and cattle business.

Yet Mr Vince and Ecotricity – who are not connected to Crouchland Biogas – are pressing ahead with the first of many huge anaerobic digesters it wants to build at Sparsholt Agricultural College in Hampshire.

NRW said that it could not comment because its investigation is continuing.

SOURCE






China Claims Methane Hydrates Breakthrough May Lead To Global Energy Revolution

China is talking up its achievement of mining flammable ice for the first time from underneath the South China Sea.

Estimates of the South China Sea’s methane hydrate potential now range as high as 150 billion cubic meters of natural gas equivalent. That’s sufficient to satisfy China’s entire equivalent oil consumption for 50 years.

The fuel-hungry country has been pursuing the energy source, located at the bottom of oceans and in polar regions, for nearly two decades. China’s minister of land and resources, Jiang Daming, said Thursday that the successful collection of the frozen fuel was “a major breakthrough that may lead to a global energy revolution,” according to state media.

Experts agree that flammable ice could be a game changer for the energy industry, similar to the U.S. shale boom. But they caution that big barriers — both technological and environmental — need to be cleared to build an industry around the frozen fuel, which is also known as gas hydrate.

China, the world’s largest energy consumer, isn’t the first country to make headway with flammable ice. Japan drilled into it in the Pacific and extracted gas in 2013 — and then did so again earlier this month. The U.S. government has its own long-running research program into the fuel.

The world’s resources of flammable ice — in which gas is stored in cages of water molecules — are vast. Gas hydrates are estimated to hold more carbon than all the world’s other fossil fuels combined, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

And it’s densely packed: one cubic foot of flammable ice holds 164 cubic feet of regular natural gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Chinese state news agency Xinhua says that makes the fuel a strong contender to replace regular oil and natural gas. But like any fossil fuel, flammable ice raises significant environmental concerns.

Experts worry about the release of methane, a superpotent greenhouse gas with 25 times as much global warming potential as carbon dioxide. And although burning natural gas is cleaner than coal, it still creates carbon emissions.
The fuel source has a lot of potential in China, analysts at Morgan Stanley said Thursday, citing the country’s successful trial and government support to develop the industry.

But commercial production is unlikely in the next three years due to high costs, potential environmental concerns and technological barriers, the analysts said in a research note.

“If there is a real breakthrough,” they wrote, “it could be as significant as the shale revolution in the United States. Under such a bull case scenario, we’d expect a significant increase in offshore exploration and production activities.”

SOURCE




Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy

We urgently need to stop the ecological posturing and invest in gas and nuclear

Viscount Ridley

The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.

You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.

Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.

Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.

Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.

Even in rich countries playing with subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.

If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.

At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area greater than the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfil the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs.

Do not take refuge in the idea that wind turbines could become more efficient. There is a limit to how much energy you can extract from a moving fluid, the Betz limit, and wind turbines are already close to it. Their effectiveness (the load factor, to use the engineering term) is determined by the wind that is available, and that varies at its own sweet will from second to second, day to day, year to year.

As machines, wind turbines are pretty good already; the problem is the wind resource itself, and we cannot change that. It’s a fluctuating stream of low–density energy. Mankind stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good.

As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips.

It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.

A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year (or a smaller number of bigger ones), just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal–mining output.

Forgive me if you have heard this before, but I have a commercial interest in coal. Now it appears that the black stuff also gives me a commercial interest in ‘clean’, green wind power.

The point of running through these numbers is to demonstrate that it is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the late David MacKay pointed out years back, the arithmetic is against such unreliable renewables.

The truth is, if you want to power civilisation with fewer greenhouse gas emissions, then you should focus on shifting power generation, heat and transport to natural gas, the economically recoverable reserves of which — thanks to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — are much more abundant than we dreamed they ever could be. It is also the lowest-emitting of the fossil fuels, so the emissions intensity of our wealth creation can actually fall while our wealth continues to increase. Good.

And let’s put some of that burgeoning wealth in nuclear, fission and fusion, so that it can take over from gas in the second half of this century. That is an engineerable, clean future. Everything else is a political displacement activity, one that is actually counterproductive as a climate policy and, worst of all, shamefully robs the poor to make the rich even richer

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   main.html 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 May, 2017

Another Greenie false prophecy:  Cocoa

The price of chocolate was bound to soar as climate change reduced the cocoa crop, was the wisdom of a few years ago.  An example here. I   rubbished the scare at the time so I am pleased that the latest reports tell of a cocoa GLUT, not a shortage. It's so easy being right when you are contradicting Greenies.  They don't understand and don't care about how the real world works so are always getting it wrong


The supply of cocoa is extremely concentrated. According to data from Euromonitor International, Ivory Coast alone accounts for more than 40pc of global production, while a further 20pc comes from nearby Ghana, which said last month that it had lost out on almost $1bn (£768m) in export earnings due to the fall in prices.

Ivory Coast was named the fastest growing economy in Africa by the IMF in April 2016. How things change. Two weeks ago, the price of cocoa was $1,780 per tonne, its lowest in almost a decade and 45pc lower than in June last year.

Even now, after a minor rally due to political instability caused by last weekend’s mutiny, it is trading at around $2,058 per tonne, still down more than 36pc compared with the prices from less than a year ago.

A convergence of factors have combined to wreak havoc on these still-developing markets.

The first is demand. “For years we were working with a scenario of low supply and high and fast-growing demand, particularly in the new markets of China and India,” says Kristy Leissle, a cocoa marketer for the Twin and Twin trading company and a lecturer on the global chocolate industry at the University of Washington Bothell.

Now, however, that demand is failing to meet expectations. There are similar problems in the mature western markets, too, where a growing trend of health consciousness and anti-sugar lobbying means demand in the West is starting to plateau.

The situation is exacerbated by a more pressing issue, though: massive oversupply. Around 4?million tonnes of cocoa are produced each year, yet this year’s surplus is expected to come in at between 350,000 tonnes and 400,000 tonnes, around 10pc of production.

It marks a dramatic shift from recent years, where the price of cocoa shot up due to fears over the Ebola crisis and then the strongest El Niño, the weather phenomenon that takes place when ocean temperatures rise in the eastern Pacific, in almost two decades.

“El Niño weather tends to be detrimental to the production of cocoa so we had less cocoa produced than we might have done, leading to high prices” says Jonathan Parkman, co-head of agriculture at Marex Spectron, one of the world’s biggest brokers of cocoa.

“This year we have had much better weather, the crops have recovered, but demand has not yet recovered because the fall in prices is yet to feed through to the consumer.”

So what the farmers in West Africa are left with is essentially the worst-case scenario: abundant supply and poor demand.

SOURCE





Antarctic Peninsula ice more stable than previously thought

Glacier flow at the southern Antarctic Peninsula has increased since the 1990s, but a new study has found the change to be only a third of what was recently reported.

An international team of researchers, led by the UK Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds, is the first to map the change in ice speed. The team collated measurements recorded by five different satellites to track changes in the speed of more than 30 glaciers since 1992.

The findings, published today in Geophysical Research Letters, represent the first detailed assessment of changing glacier flow in Western Palmer Land — the southwestern corner of the Antarctic Peninsula.

The new Leeds-led research calls into question a recent study from the University of Bristol that reported a 45 cubic kilometres per year increase in ice loss from the sector. The Leeds research found the increase to be three times smaller.

Lead author Dr Anna Hogg, from Leeds’ School of Earth and Environment, said: “Dramatic changes have been reported in this part of Antarctica, so we took a closer look at how its glaciers have evolved, using 25 years of satellite measurements dating back to the early 1990s.”

The researchers found that between 1992 and 2016, the flow of most of the region’s glaciers increased by between 20 and 30 centimetres per day, equating to an average 13% speedup across the glaciers of Western Palmer Land as a whole.

These measurements provide the first direct evidence that Western Palmer Land is losing ice due to increased glacier flow — a process known as dynamical imbalance.

The team also combined their satellite observations with an ice flow model using data assimilation to fill in gaps where the satellites were unable to produce measurements. This allowed the complete pattern of ice flow to be mapped, revealing that the regions glaciers are now pouring an additional 15 cubic kilometres of ice into the oceans each year compared to the 1990s.

The earlier study reported that the region was losing three times this amount of ice, based on measurements of glacier thinning and mass loss determined from other satellite measurements. The Leeds study casts doubt on that interpretation, because the degree of glacier speedup is far too small.

Study co-author Professor Andrew Shepherd, from Leeds’ School of Earth and Environment, explained: “Although Western Palmer Land holds a lot of ice – enough to raise global sea levels by 20 centimetres – its glaciers can’t be dramatically out of balance, because their speed hasn't changed much over the past 25 years.

"It could have snowed less as well – that would also cause the glaciers to thin and lose mass."

The greatest speedup in flow was observed at glaciers that were grounded at depths more than 300m below the ocean surface.

Dr Hogg said: “We looked at water temperatures in front of the glaciers which have sped up the most, and we found that they flow through deep bedrock channels into the warmest layer of the ocean. This circumpolar deep water, which is relatively warm and salty compared to other parts of the Southern Ocean, has warmed and shoaled in recent decades, and can melt ice at the base of glaciers which reduces friction and allows them to flow more freely.

"With much of Western Palmer Land’s ice mass lying well below sea level, it is important to monitor how remote areas such as this are responding to climate change. Satellites are the perfect tool to do this."

Pierre Potin, ESA’s Manager of the Copernicus Sentinel-1 Mission, which was used in the study, said: “We will continue to use Sentinel-1’s all weather, day-night imaging capability to extend the long term climate data record from European satellites.”

SOURCE






OPEC crying about U.S. shale output

OPEC officials gathering in Vienna on Friday to prepare for next week’s ministerial meeting kept their focus on rising U.S. shale oil production, which has been diluting the price impact of their production cuts.

National representatives from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and officials from several non-members heard a presentation on the outlook for the U.S. industry from Roger Diwan, a Washington-based analyst at IHS Markit Ltd., according to delegates familiar with the matter. Mark Papa, a partner at private equity firm Riverstone Holdings LLC and former boss of shale pioneer EOG Resources Inc., also spoke to the group, delegates said.

Officials at the meeting were relieved that the two outside consultants had estimates for growth in average U.S. crude output of 450,000 to 500,000 barrels a day this year, lower than the 562,000 barrel-a-day forecast from OPEC’s own analysts, said two delegates.

The emphasis on U.S. production underscores the dilemma for OPEC and its allies as they consider whether to extend their cuts beyond June. The producers, who together account for about half the world’s oil supply, have seen the initial price boost from their historic agreement fade as shale companies deployed more rigs and raised the country’s output to the highest since 2015. That recovery could accelerate if they decide on May 25 to prolong the curbs.

IHS’s Diwan presented an estimate that U.S. output this year will be about 500,000 barrels a day higher on average than in 2016, the delegates said, asking not to be identified because the meeting was private. That still means that production at the end of 2017 will be 700,000 to 1 million barrels a day higher than at the start, the delegates said.

That compares with a supply reduction of 1.2 million barrels a day from October levels implemented by OPEC, plus a cut of less than 400,000 barrels a day from non-members.

Papa, who helped create the shale industry more than a decade ago, estimated that average U.S. output would be 450,000 barrels a day higher this year, the delegates said.

SOURCE






Industrial Energy Consumers to White House: "No Benefit" to Paris Agreement

There is “no benefit” to U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement, the Industrial Energy Consumers of America (IECA) argues in a letter sent yesterday to President Donald J. Trump. The IECA is a nonpartisan association of leading manufacturing companies with $1.0 trillion in annual sales, over 2,300 facilities nationwide, and with more than 1.6 million employees worldwide.

Alluding to a recent New York Times op-ed by former Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Ted Halstead, the IECA letter states: “We disagree with those who say that staying in the agreement will spur investment and American competitiveness, create jobs, and ensure access to global markets.”

The IECA is skeptical of climate agreements in general, which typically fail to “provide a level playing field” and actually “create greater uncertainty” for energy intensive, trade exposed (IETE) U.S. firms. IECA President Paul N. Cicio explains:

All costs of reducing GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions, whether imposed on the electric generation sector or the oil and gas sectors, are eventually imposed upon us, the consumer. We are the ones who eventually bear the costs of government imposed GHG reduction schemes. At the same time, we are often already economically disadvantaged, as compared to global competitors who are subsidized or protected by their governments. . . .

IECA is wary of international climate agreements because the U.S. manufacturing sector competes globally, and because other countries do subsidize, and will continue to subsidize and provide advantages to their manufacturing sectors, regardless of any global climate agreements. And, importantly, because the U.S. government does not subsidize U.S. EITE industries, we can become non-competitive in the global marketplace. Global GHG reduction agreements may sound well-intentioned at the macro level, but at the micro level, where we reside, it can create significant uncertainty, risk, and job loss.

The Paris Agreement exemplifies such pitfalls. It will make U.S. manufacturers less competitive vis-à-vis their Chinese and Indian counterparts:

Furthermore, the U.S. commitment under the agreement is significantly more stringent than the commitments undertaken by some of our largest competitors in the global marketplace, many of whom, including China and India, essentially pledged to continue increasing their GHG emissions substantially for the foreseeable future. . . . China’s pledge under the Paris Climate Accord would allow it to actually increase GHG emissions by 117 percent by 2030 before they start reducing.

The IECA also objects to the mode by which President Obama purported to make the United States a party to the Agreement:

Any U.S. commitment to reduce GHG emissions under an international construct should only have been undertaken through the process prescribed in Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution. IECA believes that U.S. participation in any global agreement to reduce GHG emissions, whether such agreements are binding or not, should be submitted to the U.S. Senate for a vote of ratification. Our forefathers made it clear that the checks and balances between the Executive Branch and Congress are essential.

IECA member companies come from a diverse set of industries including chemical, plastics, steel, iron ore, aluminum, paper, food processing, fertilizer, insulation, glass, industrial gases, pharmaceutical, building products, automotive, brewing, independent oil refining, and cement. Lest anyone suppose IECA’s position on the Paris Agreement reflects a lack of commitment to energy efficiency, Mr. Cicio points out:

The manufacturing sector already has an incentive to reduce energy consumption and GHG emissions, it is called global competition. Global competition is relentless and requires EITE industries to reduce energy consumption to be competitive. If we are not globally competitive, we cease to exist. . . .

For a variety of reasons, including a dedication to energy efficiency and energy cost reductions to improve global competitiveness, today’s U.S. manufacturing sector’s GHG emissions are 26 percent below 1973 levels. The industrial sector is the only U.S. sector whose GHG emissions are below 1973 levels.

SOURCE





Bill Nye, the people hater

To be fair, Bill Nye didn’t actually say people should be eliminated by their governments to save the environment and the planet. He did say that there are too many people and parents, at least in the developed world, should be punished for having "too many” children:

The season finale of pop scientist Bill Nye's new Netflix show "Bill Nye Saves the World" suggested that the government should punish people who have too many children, for the sake of the environment.

"The average Nigerian emits 0.1 metric tons of carbon annually," noted Nye's guest, Dr. Travis Rieder. "How many does the average American emit? Sixteen metric tons."

Rieder said Americans having an average of two children are "waaaay more problematic" than Nigerians having seven when it comes to preventing global warming.

"Should we have policies that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?" Nye asked.

“I do think we should at least consider it," Rieder said.

Nye pushed him even further.

"Well, ‘at least consider it' is like, ‘do it,'" he opined.

The other two guests pushed back, however, pointing out that what Nye and Rieder were proposing came dangerously close to the eugenics policies of America's past, which ending up disproportionately targeting poor women and minorities.

Yes, his remarks are perilously close to advocating eugenics. It is a short trip from deciding how many children people should be allowed to have to deciding who gets to have children at all. It bears a striking resemblance to China’s one-child policy, which included sterilization and forced abortion. China’s one-child policy, instituted by the Communist government in the late 1970s to stem rising population, compels couples in urban areas to have just one child and limits couples in rural areas to two children if the first child is a girl, as girls are seen as having lesser value than boys in some parts of the Asian nation. As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized, John Holdren, President Obama’s science adviser, agreed with Bill Nye that too many people were a problem that needed to be dealt with:

This administration supports draconian actions to fight climate change. In 2007, at climate change talks in Vienna, Su Wei, a senior Chinese Foreign Ministry official, boasted that China's one-child policy had reduced China's population at that point by some 300 million human beings, roughly equal to the U.S. population.

Avoiding those 300 million births "means we averted 1.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2005," based on average world per capital emissions of 4.2 tons, he said.

John Holdren, the president's top science adviser, has no quarrel with this barbarism, seeing it as necessary to fight global warming and resource depletion. Even the U.S. Constitution can't stand in his way.

In a previous book, "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment," co-authored with Thomas Malthus fans Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Holdren writes that large families "contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children" and "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility."

On page 837, he writes, it has "been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.

Hillary Clinton’s idol, and founder of Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger, had her particular idea on which children should be allowed to be born. As J. Kenneth Blackwell, writing in the Washington Times, noted, those who chant “black lives matter” obviously exclude the abortion rate of black babies that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and the KKK could only dream of:

138,539 black babies, nearly one baby in three, were killed in the womb in 2010. According to the CDC, between 2007 and 2010, innocent black babies were victimized in nearly 36 percent of the abortion deaths in the United States, though blacks represent only 12.8 percent of the population. Some say the abortion capital of America is New York City. According to LifeSiteNews, the city’s Department of Health reported that in 2012, more black babies were aborted (31,328) than born (24,758). That’s 55.9 percent of black babies killed before birth. Blacks represented 42.4 percent of all abortions.

This is a disturbing and tragic situation that continues unabated and is the fulfillment of Sanger’s dream. As Blackwell also noted:

According to Sanger, “Colored people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated.” She opened her first abortion clinics in inner cities, and it’s no accident that even today, “79 percent of Planned Parenthood’s abortion facilities are located in black or minority neighborhoods.” 

Population control is the tool of tyrants. Whether it is to build a master race or lower carbon dioxide emissions, it is inherently evil in its methods and goals. Ironically, and contrary to Nye’s hypothesis, wealthier societies are healthier societies. Which is better for the environment -- to reduce emissions thanx to natural gas obtained by fracking, or to let families in underdeveloped countries burn animal dung to cook their food and heat their homes? Wealthier societies can afford the technology to clean the air and water without sacrificing human lives.

It is fracking that has produced a boom in the production of natural gas, a fossil fuel, that has produced a significant reduction in the U.S. of so-called “greenhouse gases”. As the Washington Times reported:

White House senior advisor Brian Deese cheered the falling carbon dioxide levels at a Monday press conference without mentioning the outsize role played by natural gas, as the cleaner-burning fuel increasingly overtakes coal in electricity generation.

“For those of you who are not breathlessly following the most recent data that has come out, I would note recent data that we’ve seen suggests or finds that for the first half of 2016, energy sector emissions in the United States are actually down 6 percent from last year, and 15 percent from 2005,” said Mr. Deese. “And they’re at their lowest level in nearly 20 years.”

He said nothing about the U.S. natural gas boom, an omission that critics say has become par for the course as the Obama administration highlights renewable energy and emissions restrictions without acknowledging the role of fracking in natural gas extraction.

“To add dishonesty to injury, his administration is bragging about the reduced CO2 emissions of [the] U.S. industry without crediting the fracking for natural gas, a fossil fuel, that largely caused it,” said Alex Epstein, author of the book “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.”

Carbon dioxide is the basis for all plant and animal life on earth, whether it emanates from the nostrils of Bill Nye or from the children he wishes would not be born. He is lucky his parents didn’t come up with the idea first and eliminate a dangerous source of hot air.

Nightmare scenarios regarding overpopulation have made the rounds since Thomas Malthus predicted in 1798 that overpopulation would outstrip England’s food supply and the British Empire would literally starve to death. Similar nonsense was express in Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) which warned: “In the 1970s, the world will undergo famine -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now.” Today, a major problem America faces is not famine, but obesity.

Malthusian thinking fails to grasp that human beings are the ultimate resource, that with more bodies come more minds that create more ideas. Neither Malthus or Ehrlich could envision the advances in medicine, science, technology, and biotechnology that would tame disease, increase the food supply at exponential rates, find new resources, or create new substitutes.

The view that human beings are inexorably outstripping the globe´s capacity to sustain them is one of the most vivid, powerful, and enduring economic myths of the modern era because the chicken littles who argue it forget one simple fact -- with bodies come minds.

Bill Nye is wrong. We are not cattle that graze until there is no grass. Our species, unlike all others, can consciously apply problem-solving techniques to the project of expanding its resource base. Minds matter economically as much as hands and mouths. And minds arrive only in company with bodies. Be fruitful and multiply.

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   main.html or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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22 May, 2017

A perfect example of Green/Left argumentation

We see below a sustained example of "ad hominem" argument -- argument devoted entirely to discrediting an arguer rather than addressing his arguments.  There is not a single solitary fact or statistic given in support of his belief that the slight temperature rise of last century was due to CO2

Tim Mannello

A recent letter writer makes his case against the seriousness of the many threats of man-made climate change by providing extensive excerpts from a short blog, “Environmentalists Are Dead Wrong.” The author of that blog is Dr. Walter Williams, a proud libertarian economist with a Ph. D. in, yes, Economics, not in climate science.

Dr. Williams has never done any research in climate sciences; therefore he might be expected to have based his analysis on experts in the field. Yet all but one of his citations is to someone outside the field of climate studies. Dr. Williams published his article in LewRockwell.com, which identifies itself as an anti-state, anti-war, pro-market blog founded by two self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalists, Lew Rockwell and Burt Blumert.

As Earth Day approached this year, the article was dutifully picked up by every fossil fuel-funded, man-made change denial site, network and megaphone you can shake a stick at.

The writer’s argument was based on cherry-picked, isolated, exaggerated predictions of a half-dozen scientists in fields almost exclusively unrelated to climate change. With one exception, citations from these sources are from popular magazines (one cited source is Mademoiselle).

They include Dr. George Wald, a biologist specializing in retinal pigmentation; Paul Erlich, a biologist expert on overpopulation; Kenneth Watt, an ecologist with a PhD. D. in Zoology; Gaylord Nelson, a Senator published in Look Magazine who quotes Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, who is an ornithologist; Harrison Brown, a nuclear scientist and geo-chemist predicting the disappearance of copper, lead, zinc, tin, gold and silver (this is called “throwing in the kitchen sink for good measure”); Nigel Calder, himself a critic of climate science and man-made global warming who predicts an impending ice age; David Viner, a climate scientist, (score one for you) whose predictions about the end of snow in Britain have proved to be ridiculous and ill-founded; plus totally irrelevant predictions made in the 1930’s and ’40’s by federal agencies that oil and gas supplies would peak.

Certainly, there must be better arguments against the preponderant conclusions of decades of climatological research affirming and confirming that: 1) “global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now 2) it is a growing threat to society,” 3) greenhouse gases from fossil fuels are isotopically identifiable and they, not any of the other factors that affect the earth’s climate, have had the greatest sustained positive forcing in increasing the average global temperature about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1880’s.” (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center.).

With equal certitude, you’re not going to hear reasonable counter-arguments from deniers. They are interested only in conclusions that support their absolutely cocksure, pre-conceived, ideological anti-government beliefs regardless of the source. Their arguments should not be dignified with the label of pseudo-science; they are certifiable rank idiocy.

Mademoiselle Magazine died in 1991. Maybe we should look to future Glamour or Cosmopolitan features originally written in crayon for authoritative studies on the matter. Alas, deniers never die. They don’t even fade away.

SOURCE





Greenland's ice is at it's highest level on record, but the Fake News Media does not want to report it



SOURCE





A new future for corals

Are coral reefs condemned to disappear? During the first decade of the 21st century, the intensification of cyclones, the phenomenon of coral bleaching due to ocean warming, outbreaks of a coral-eating starfish and coral diseases left us with this fear. But today, scientists are revising their pessimistic forecasts from the previous decade. In fact, recent research works show that, while numerous coral species have indeed been declining for more than 30 years, other are holding firm or even increasing in abundance. Consequently, some reefs have recently managed to recover. 

Expanding coral genera

During a vast international study over fifteen years, IRD researchers and their partners observed the ecological development of seven coral reefs throughout the world: two in the Caribbean, in Belize and in the American Virgin Islands, and five throughout the Indo-Pacific Ocean in Kenya, Taiwan, Hawaii, Moorea and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Consequently, the scientists have shown the increase of certain genera, like the Porites reef corals, real reef builders that can resist temperature rises well.

They have also put these recent changes into perspective with regard to past events recorded in fossil reefs, showing that the abundance and structure of coral populations have already varied greatly over the course of past millennia.

Towards new underwater landscapes

These new data have enabled them to refine their mathematical models and to revise their forecasts for the coming decades. As ocean temperatures continue to rise, a subset of “winning” species will thrive: those that have the greatest heat tolerance, the best population growth rates or the greatest longevity. These species should progressively populate the planet’s reefs, until they dominate them entirely.

Consequently, the underwater landscapes of the future will be very different to the ones that have been known for millennia. However, much remains to be discovered regarding this new coral fauna and its features. One question in particular remains: will these new eco-systems continue to meet the needs of the populations who depend on them?

SOURCE





British retirement fund is betting on "Green" power

I am glad they are not handling my retirement funds.  If asked they would undoubtedly have invested in Solyndra -- ending up losing the lot


Millennials aren’t thinking much about retirement, but climate change is something many of them care deeply about. That’s smart, because by the time they retire, climate change and whatever humans do in the next 30 years to mitigate its effects will almost certainly have transformed the way we live; a transformation that could also have a big impact on their prospects for retirement.

Donald Trump, the US president, signed an executive order in March rolling back his predecessor’s Clean Power Plan, rejecting with a stroke of the pen what one commentator called “the most important thing any nation had ever done to reduce carbon emissions”. Will that alter the long-term picture? We don’t think so. It is not clear what impact it may have, but we believe the long-term future of the global economy is green.

The reasons are political, technological and financial. The cost of generating solar and wind power is becoming cheaper than fossil fuels in many parts of the world. Renewable capacity overtook coal-fired generation for the first time in 2016. China and India, respectively the world’s biggest and third-biggest polluters, have been investing heavily in green energy at home. China is planning to spend £292bn on its domestic green-energy market in the next three years and India’s Central Electricity Authority recently said that no coal-fired power stations will be built over the coming decade beyond those already in the pipeline. It is predicted that renewable-energy capacity in India will overtake that of new fossil fuel plants from 2018.

The energy infrastructure market appears to be heading in the same direction. Once again, where the US appears to be pulling back, China is stepping forward. Not only has it invested in more clean power at home, it is pouring money into developing economies’ energy infrastructure, spending $165bn since 2000. And the focus of that money, while fossil fuels still dominate, may be starting to shift to cleaner sources such as nuclear, hydropower and renewables. China outspent any other country in the world on overseas investments in green technology in 2016.

Closer to home, commitments made in Paris at the global climate talks in 2015 have spurred many businesses into action. Utility companies in almost every EU country pledged in March to phase out coal-fired plants from 2020. These companies are not waiting around for governments to shift the ground under their feet. Those that are not thinking about how to diversify away from heavily polluting fossil fuels will probably face future losses as markets leave them behind and policies penalise them.

For institutional investors with long-term horizons, the debate is not whether there will be a transition to a lower-carbon economy, it is about how quickly it occurs. Pension fund trustees in the UK have spent some time pondering the legalities of climate-related de-risking strategies, and some still are. Now these strategies are becoming an investment imperative. Short-term policy shifts may well have short-term effects. But for millennials saving into pensions for the next 40 to 50 years, the global transition to a low-carbon economy, which appears highly likely, is a more significant trend.

Among the world’s largest institutional investors, whose ranks "Nest" will join in the coming decade, that long-term picture is guiding our thinking. The smart money is being used to signal to businesses that a profound economic change in the way power is generated is happening. This is not about divestment. It is not in our members’ interests for companies to make losses or become unprofitable. But we do need to plan ahead and prepare their portfolios for the evident investment risks and opportunities that climate change and the transition to low carbon represent. That means finding scaleable, cost-effective ways to invest more in those companies that are well positioned for the low-carbon future, investing less in those that are not and engaging where progress can be encouraged.

Over the next 15 years or so, £1.7tn is due to flow into defined contribution pensions in the UK. We believe a significant proportion of those assets will be channelled towards a greener global economy. There may be mixed messages coming from the US at the moment, but the signals from the rest of the world, including the world of finance, are clear.

SOURCE






ENERGY STAR Repeal To Cause Global Depression For Progressive Media

President Trump recently announced the ‘close out‘ of the ENERGY STAR program, and has officially begun the deconstruction of one of the most corrupt federal programs in US history. This effectively ends the decades old mandate requiring that all government agencies purchase only the EPA’s brand of ‘certified’ energy efficiency products and services, opening our government contracting to honest competition for the first time in decades.

This is great news for most Americans, not so much for mainstream media outlets that helped market the EPA’s unique commodity for many years. EPA claims their brand has saved over $430 billion in utility bills since 1992, but can’t explain how the extraordinary energy saving occur or why electric bills would skyrocket from the use of ENERGY STAR products.

Mainstream media can’t report on the repeal of ENERGY STAR program which was the centerpiece of the Clean Energy Economy, because no one wants to talk about the evidence supporting those multi-billion dollar claims of the EPA anymore.

Now the media Resistance movement is anxious to end all dialog on the old Obama energy plan, and begin promoting China’s new action plan “One Belt, One Road” initiative as the path to prosperity.

Imagine the enormous challenge for bureaucrats trying to market this ‘socialist market economy’ program on behalf of the Global elites without the lucrative benefits of the ENERGY STAR brand to prop up your sales pitch.

Don’t be fooled by the current hysteria gripping the media, its only the first signs of severe depression about to set in as media foundations contemplate a future without any influence over the working class, a group they openly revile as deplorable. No amount of money will ever buy back the respect and trust of the American people for the corrupt media and their equally crooked Progressive business partners.

American businesses should stop listening to media moonbats, and start focusing on locating and competing for government contracts in every sub-division of government from the dog catcher to the largest GSA owned buildings in your area. The US government is the largest procurement agency in the world, and no longer under the monopoly control of EPA partnerships backing a European Socialist model of governance for America.

Did the media suddenly forget how China became a super power manufacturing ENERGY STAR brand products for the EPA, which are now mandated for use by government in Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Taiwan, Australia, Switzerland and the European Community but not in the USA anymore. Thank you President Trump!

The EPA claims their ENERGY STAR brand saves 25-50% more electrical energy than identical products, but can provide no proof to support their claims. There is no National Standards for the measurement or verification of electrical energy savings in technologies, government bureaucrats are solely responsible for making those energy-saving claims and our intelligence community apparently provided the only verification on the performance of the EPA’s unique product.

Leading to the question, how was it possible that FBI, NSA and CIA operatives all failed to read the 2014 Senate Report “The Chain of Environmental Command: How a Club of Billionaires and Their Foundations Control the Environmental Movement and Obama’s EPA” and not find any legal issues involving conflicts of interest, self-dealing or fraud under color of authority?

Americans should disregard the media suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome and start to research the millions of jobs and contracting opportunities coming available under President Trump’s Buy American-Hire American agenda. Congress will need time to write and pass new laws to replace decades worth of regulations, and the average citizen has no control over that portion of the process.

Relax! Understand that Progressives have no interest in competing for real jobs, have no skill-sets to create new businesses and they certainly don’t have any products or services of value to sell to our government that could ever compete against those provided by American small business. Now that’s what I call depressing!

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   main.html 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

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




21 May, 2017

How to lie with statistics: Climate change is turning Antarctica GREEN

Choosing your start and finishing points is a great trick when you want to use statistics misleadingly.  Below they have arbitrarily chosen the last 50 years for their calculations.  And their calculations may be correct.  What they don't say is that all the supposedly causative temperature rise happened in the first (approx.) 30 years of that period.

The most recent 20 years have seen no effect, no change -- the famous "hiatus" during which there has been no statistically significant net temperature rise globally.  So if the greening has continued into the last 20 years -- which they imply -- it is NOT due to global warming. Things that don't exist can't cause anything.  If it has NOT continued into the last 20 years it is a finished trend of no current interest.

I note also that their data was obtained from the extreme end of the Antarctic peninsula, and the peninsula as a whole is known to be anomalous to Antarctica as a whole. It shows occasional warming (probably due to subsurface vulcanism) when the great mass of Antarctica is cooling.  The study below is therefore from several viewpoints inadequate to sustain any generalization.  Putting it plainly, it is just another bit of  slippery Warmist propaganda


Few plants live on Antarctica but scientists studying moss have found a sharp increase in biological activity in the last 50 years.

Plant life exists on only 0.3 per cent of Antarctica. However moss is well preserved in chilly sediments.  This offers scientists a way of exploring how plants have responded to such changes.

Scientists gathered data from five ice cores drilled from three islands off the Antarctic Peninsula. They then looked at the top 20cm of each of the cores.

This allowed the scientists to look back over 150 years and explore changes over time. Changes included the amount of moss, and its rate of growth.

They also looked carbon in the plants that indicates how favourable conditions were for photosynthesis at a certain point in time.

The latest study claims the rate of moss growth is now four to five times higher than it was pre-1950.

A team including scientists from the University of Exeter used moss bank cores – which are well preserved in Antarctica's cold conditions – from an area spanning about 400 miles.

They tested five cores from three sites and found major biological changes had occurred over the past 50 years right across the Antarctic Peninsula.

'Temperature increases over roughly the past half century on the Antarctic Peninsula have had a dramatic effect on moss banks growing in the region,' said Dr Matt Amesbury, of the University of Exeter.

'If this continues, and with increasing amounts of ice-free land from continued glacier retreat, the Antarctic Peninsula will be a much greener place in the future.'

Recent climate change on the Antarctic Peninsula is well documented with warming and other changes such as increased precipitation and wind strength.

Weather records mostly began in the 1950s but biological records preserved in moss bank cores can provide a longer-term context about climate change.

The scientists analysed data for the last 150 years, and found clear evidence of 'changepoints' – points in time after which biological activity clearly increased – in the past 50 years.

'The sensitivity of moss growth to past temperature rises suggests that ecosystems will alter rapidly under future warming, leading to major changes in the biology and landscape of this iconic region,' said Professor Dan Charman, who led the research project in Exeter.

'In short, we could see Antarctic greening to parallel well-established observations in the Arctic. 'Although there was variability within our data, the consistency of what we found across different sites was striking.'

The research teams, which included scientists from the University of Cambridge and British Antarctic Survey, say their data indicates that plants and soils will change substantially even with only modest further warming.

The same group of researchers published a study focusing on one site in 2013 and the new research confirms that their unprecedented finding can be applied to a much larger region.

Plant life only exists on about 0.3 per cent of Antarctica, but the findings provide one way of measuring the extent and effects of warming on the continent.

The researchers now plan to examine core records dating back over thousands of years to test how much climate change affected ecosystems before human activity started causing global warming.

The paper, Widespread biological response to rapid warming on the Antarctic Peninsula, is published in the journal Current Biology.

SOURCE.  The academic journal article is "Widespread Biological Response to Rapid Warming on the Antarctic Peninsula"






Coral bleaching not a response to temperature changes

Regional coral responses to climate disturbances and warming is predicted by multivariate stress model and not temperature threshold metrics

Timothy R. McClanahan et al.

Abstract

Oceanic environmental variables derived from satellites are increasingly being used to predict ecosystem states and climate impacts. Despite the concerted efforts to develop metrics and the urgency to inform policy, management plans, and actions, few metrics have been empirically tested with field data for testing their predictive ability, refinement, and eventual implementation as predictive tools. In this study, the abilities of three variations of a thermal threshold index and a multivariate stress model (MSM) were used to predict coral cover and community susceptibility to bleaching based on a compilation of field data from Indian Ocean reefs across the strong thermal anomaly of 1998. Field data included the relative abundance of coral taxa 10 years before the large-scale temperature anomaly, 2 years after (1999–2000), and during the post-bleaching recovery period (2001–2005) were tested against 1) a multivariate model based on 11 environmental variables used to predict stress or environmental exposure (MSM), 2) estimates of the time until the current mean maximum temperature becomes the mean summer condition (TtT), 3) the Cumulative Thermal Stress (CTS) for the full satellite record, and 4) the 1998 Annual Thermal Stress (1998 ATS). The MSM showed significant fit with the post-1998 cover and susceptibility of the coral community taxa (r2?=?0.50 and 0.31, respectively). Temperature threshold indices were highly variable and had relatively weak or no significant relationships with coral cover and susceptibility. The ecosystem response of coral reefs to climatic and other disturbances is more complex than predicted by models based largely on temperature anomalies and thresholds only. This implies heterogeneous environmental causes and responses to climate disturbances and warming and predictive models should consider a more comprehensive multiple parameter approach.

McClanahan, T.R., Maina, J. & Ateweberhan, M. Climatic Change (2015) 131: 607. doi:10.1007/s10584-015-1399-x






"Experts" warn rising sea levels will DOUBLE coastal flooding by 2050, and tropical regions will be hit worst

Just another prophecy derived from "models" that have no known predictive skill

Rising sea levels caused by global warming are set to dramatically boost the frequency of coastal flooding by 2050.

Tropical regions will be the worst hit, and researchers forecast a 10-to-20 centimeter (four-to-eight inch) jump in the global ocean watermark by mid-century.

Major cities along the North American seaboard such as Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles, along with the European Atlantic coast, would be highly exposed, the researchers say.

Up until now, global models of future coastal flooding haven't adequately taken into account the role of waves.

'Most of the data used in earlier studies comes from tidal gauge stations, which are in harbors and protected areas,' said Dr Vitousek, lead author of the study and a climate scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

'They record extreme tide and storm surges, but not waves.'

So to make up for the lack of wave data, Dr Vitousek and his colleagues used computer modelling and a statistical method called extreme value theory.

'We asked the question: with waves factored in, how much sea level rise will it take to double the frequency of flooding?' Said Dr Vitousek.

The researchers found that with waves factored in, it didn't take much sea level rise to double flooding frequency in the future

And, it would only take half as big a jump in ocean levels to double the number of serious flooding incidents in the tropics, including along highly populated river deltas in Asia and Africa.

According to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois in Chicago, even at the low end of sea rise spectrum, coastal cities such as Mumbai, Kochi in India and Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire would be significantly affected.

'We are 95 percent confident that an added 5-to-10 centimetres will more than double the frequency of flooding in the tropics,' study lead author Dr Sean Vitousek, a climate scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told AFP.

He said that small island countries, which are already vulnerable to flooding, would fare far worse.

'An increase in flooding frequency with climate change will challenge the very existence and sustainability of these coastal communities across the globe,' said Dr Vitousek. 

Coastal flooding is caused by severe storms, and it's made worse when conditions of large waves, storm surge and high tides come together.

For example, 2012's Hurricane Sandy in the US caused tens of billion of dollars worth of damage, and 2013's Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines left more than 7,000 people missing or dead - and both of these events saw extreme flooding.

But rising sea levels are also a contributing factor to coastal flooding.

Rising seas are caused by the expansion of warming ocean water and water runoff from melting ice sheets and glaciers.

However, up till now, global models of future coastal flooding haven't adequately taken into account the role of waves.

'Most of the data used in earlier studies comes from tidal gauge stations, which are in harbors and protected areas,' said Dr Vitousek. 'They record extreme tide and storm surges, but not waves.'

So to make up for the lack of wave data, Dr Vitousek and colleagues used computer modelling and a statistical method called extreme value theory.

'We asked the question: with waves factored in, how much sea level rise will it take to double the frequency of flooding?'

The researchers found that with waves factored in, it didn't take much sea level rise to double flooding frequency in the future.

Currently, sea levels are rising by three to four millimetres (0.10 to 0.15 inches) a year, but the rate has increased by about 30 percent over the last decade.

The rate could accelerate even more as continent-sized ice blocs near the North and South poles continue to shed, especially in Antarctica, which Dr Vitousek called the sea level 'wild card.'

If sea levels rise by 25 centimeters by 2050, 'flood levels that occur every 50 years in the tropics would be happening every year or more,' said Dr Vitousek.

But some estimates for sea level rise are even more extreme: The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts global average sea levels will rise by as much as 2.5 metres (98 inches) by 2100.

Global average temperatures have increased by one degree Celsius (1.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since the mid-19th century, with most of that happening in the last 70 years.

The 196-nation Paris Agreement, signed in 2015, calls for capping global warming at well under 2C (3.6F), a goal described by climate scientists as extremely daunting.

SOURCE





Electric vehicles to cost the same as conventional cars by 2018

A Swiss bank knows how to produce much cheaper electric cars?  Elon Musk eat your heart out!  But hey! If you're tired of your SUV and you want instead a compact car that is not practical in cold climates, maybe an electric car is for you.  You could probably tootle around Boca Raton pretty well in one

The cost of owning an electric car will fall to the same level as petrol-powered vehicles next year, according to bold new analysis from UBS which will send shockwaves through the automobile industry.

Experts from the investment bank’s “evidence lab” made the prediction after tearing apart one of the current generation of electric cars to examine the economics of electric vehicles (EVs).

They found that costs of producing EVs were far lower than previously thought but there is still great potential to make further savings, driving down the price of electric cars.

As a result, UBS forecasts that the “total cost of consumer ownership can reach parity with combustion engines from 2018”, with this likely to happen in Europe first.

“This will create an inflexion point for demand,” the analysts said. “We raise our 2025 forecast for EV sales by ~50pc to 14.2m -  14pc of global car sales.”

If the prediction comes to pass, traditional car industry giants could face ruin. Germany’s Volkswagen Group - the world’s biggest car company - is racing to catch up with rivals’ investment levels in electric drivetrains, the components which deliver the power into the wheels, having largely ignored the technology in the past.

UBS’s research was to help understand what it called the “most disruptive car category since the Model T Ford”. The findings are based on its deconstruction of a Chevy Bolt, which it considered to be “the world’s first mass-market EV, with a range of more than 200 miles”.

The 2017 car - which cost $37,000 - was taken apart piece by piece and the parts analysed. UBS said that the Bolt’s electric drive was $4,600 cheaper to produce than thought, “with much cost reduction potential left”.

“We estimate that GM (which produces the Bolt) loses $7,400 in earnings before interest, and tax on every Bolt sold today, mainly due to a lack of scale.”

Tesla’s highly anticipated Model 3 - another small electric vehicle - is expected to lose billionaire Elon Musk’s company $2,800 per car for the base version, according to UBS, but Tesla will break even at an average selling price of $41,000.

The bank predicts this will be achieved as customers opt for higher specification vehicles, making electric cars a viable business proposition, with upmarket EVs likely to be more profitable than mid-range versions.

“Once total cost of ownership parity is reached, mass-brand EVs should also turn profitable,” UBS said.

Although the costs of EVs and current cars will be the same for motorists by 2018, manufacturers will not reach parity until 2023, when they will make 5pc margins on EVs - about equal to the profit on current vehicles.

EVs matching the cost of conventionally fuelled cars sooner than expected will send a seismic shock throughout the sector, from manufacturers right down through their supply chains, with UBS warning “the 'time to get ready' and win in the space shrinks”.

It also warns that the aftermarket for replacement parts could be radically disrupted because electric drivetrains suffer less wear than traditional engines.

“Our detailed analysis of moving and wearing parts has shown that the highly lucrative spare parts business should shrink by ~60pc in the end-game of a 100pc EV world, which is decades away,” UBS said.

It also forecast tech companies grabbing a bigger slice of the industry, with the deconstruction of the Bolt revealing that its electronics content was $4,000 higher than in an internal combustion engines, excluding the battery.

Professor David Bailey, car industry expert at Aston University, said: “If this really is the moment that the car industry reaches parity then the inflexion point is far earlier than anyone was expecting.”

Ian Fletcher, principal automotive analyst at  IHS Markit, added: “We are not going to see the death of diesel or petrol anytime soon but manufacturers are weighing up the investment cost of traditional engines against electric, as well as the levies they face over the emissions of their fleets.”

SOURCE





Chemistry Expert: Carbon Dioxide Can’t Cause Global Warming

by Dr Mark Imisides (Industrial Chemist)

Scarcely a day goes by without us being warned of coastal inundation by rising seas due to global warming.

Why on earth do we attribute any heating of the oceans to carbon dioxide, when there is a far more obvious culprit, and when such a straightforward examination of the thermodynamics render it impossible.

Carbon dioxide, we are told, traps heat that has been irradiated by the oceans, and this warms the oceans and melts the polar ice caps. While this seems a plausible proposition at first glance, when one actually examines it closely a major flaw emerges.

In a nutshell, water takes a lot of energy to heat up, and air doesn’t contain much. In fact, on a volume/volume basis, the ratio of heat capacities is about 3300 to 1. This means that to heat 1 litre of water by 1?C it would take 3300 litres of air that was 2?C hotter, or 1 litre of air that was about 3300?C hotter!

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. If you ran a cold bath and then tried to heat it by putting a dozen heaters in the room, does anyone believe that the water would ever get hot?

The problem gets even stickier when you consider the size of the ocean. Basically, there is too much water and not enough air.

The ocean contains a colossal 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres of water! To heat it, even by a small amount, takes a staggering amount of energy. To heat it by a mere 1?C, for example, an astonishing 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy are required.

Let’s put this amount of energy in perspective. If we all turned off all our appliances and went and lived in caves, and then devoted every coal, nuclear, gas, hydro, wind and solar power plant to just heating the ocean, it would take a breathtaking 32,000 years to heat the ocean by just this 1?C!

In short, our influence on our climate, even if we really tried, is miniscule!

So it makes sense to ask the question – if the ocean were to be heated by ‘greenhouse warming’ of the atmosphere, how hot would the air have to get? If the entire ocean is heated by 1?C, how much would the air have to be heated by to contain enough heat to do the job?

Well, unfortunately for every ton of water there is only a kilogram of air. Taking into account the relative heat capacities and absolute masses, we arrive at the astonishing figure of 4,000?C.

That is, if we wanted to heat the entire ocean by 1?C, and wanted to do it by heating the air above it, we’d have to heat the air to about 4,000?C hotter than the water.

And another problem is that air sits on top of water – how would hot air heat deep into the ocean? Even if the surface warmed, the warm water would just sit on top of the cold water.

Thus, if the ocean were being heated by ‘greenhouse heating’ of the air, we would see a system with enormous thermal lag – for the ocean to be only slightly warmer, the land would have to be substantially warmer, and the air much, much warmer (to create the temperature gradient that would facilitate the transfer of heat from the air to the water).

Therefore any measurable warmth in the ocean would be accompanied by a huge and obvious anomaly in the air temperatures, and we would not have to bother looking at ocean temperatures at all.

So if the air doesn’t contain enough energy to heat the oceans or melt the ice caps, what does?

The earth is tilted on its axis, and this gives us our seasons. When the southern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun, we have more direct sunlight and more of it (longer days). When it is tilted away from the sun, we have less direct sunlight and less of it (shorter days).

The direct result of this is that in summer it is hot and in winter it is cold. In winter we run the heaters in our cars, and in summer the air conditioners. In winter the polar caps freeze over and in summer 60-70% of them melt (about ten million square kilometres). In summer the water is warmer and winter it is cooler (ask any surfer).

All of these changes are directly determined by the amount of sunlight that we get. When the clouds clear and bathe us in sunlight, we don’t take off our jumper because of ‘greenhouse heating’ of the atmosphere, but because of the direct heat caused by the sunlight on our body. The sun’s influence is direct, obvious, and instantaneous.

If the enormous influence of the sun on our climate is so obvious, then, by what act of madness do we look at a variation of a fraction of a percent in any of these variables, and not look to the sun as the cause?

Why on earth (pun intended) do we attribute any heating of the oceans to carbon dioxide, when there is a far more obvious culprit, and when such a straightforward examination of the thermodynamics render it impossible.

SOURCE

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

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   main.html 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

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




19 May, 2017

Western Australia’s catastrophic forest collapse

A thoroughly lazy article below. It does seem to be true that West Australian forests are retreating but the galoots below have no idea why and don't try to find out.  They just chant the tired old mantra of global warming.  But global warming COULD NOT be the cause.  As any number of studies show (e.g. here) increased CO2 in the atmosphere has a GREENING effect, not a browning effect.  The writers below, George Matusick, Giles Hardy and Katinka Ruthrof, are all academics specializing in forest studies so they are quite simply a disgrace to their professions.  It's just a bit of opportunistic Warmist propaganda below. 

Even aside from its building block effects, elevated CO2 reduces transpiration time for plants and makes them less needful of water; Warming oceans give off more water vapor which comes down as rain.  So both CO2 rises and its allegedly associated temperature rises are good for plants.  They certainly don't dry anything out.  So what they say below flies in the face of all the facts.  They are just grant-hungry crooks


Recent, unprecedented, climate-driven forest collapses in Western Australia show us that ecosystem change can be sudden, dramatic and catastrophic. These collapses are a clear signal that we must develop new strategies to mitigate or prevent the future effects of climate change in Australian woodlands and forests. But society’s view of forests is ever-changing: are we willing to understand ecosystems and adapt to changing conditions?

The south west of Western Australia has experienced a long-term climate shift since the early 1970s, resulting in dryer and hotter than average conditions. This shifted baseline, or average, has also led to more frequent extreme events. In 2010, the region experienced the driest and second hottest year on record.

These climate changes have resulted in significant decreases in stream-flow and groundwater levels. For example, formerly permanent streams now stop flowing for considerable periods. Groundwater levels have fallen up to 11 meters in some forested areas, with larger decreases in populated areas. Clearly, soil water reserves have dried out substantially and will likely continue to do so; we are now starting to see the implications of this. Although most of the West Australian society, particularly those in urban environments, may be well-buffered from these changes, ecosystems are not.

The climatic changes occurring in the south west of Western Australia are contributing to deteriorating woodland and forest health. In the past 20 years, insect infestations and fungal diseases have plagued many iconic tree species, including tuart, wandoo, flooded gum, marri, and WA peppermint, increasing their mortality rates. Many of these disorders are likely triggered or incited by changing climate conditions.

In extreme climate conditions, woodland and forest health suffers most. For instance, during the record dry and hot period in 2010 and 2011, large patches of trees throughout the region suddenly collapsed, with little recovery in some areas. Along the coastal plain surrounding Perth, some areas of Banksia woodland suffered losses as high as 70-80%, while over 500 ha of tuart woodland collapsed and over 15,000 ha of exotic pine plantations (~70% north of Perth) were destroyed. In the northern jarrah forest, over 16,000 ha of forest suddenly collapsed, with mortality rates 10.5 times greater than normal.

In several ecosystems, species have died out and not been replaced, permanently shifting vegetation structure and ecosystem function. Some believe that species and ecosystems will transition slowly in response to climate change. But following the extreme conditions experienced in 2010-11, we now know the transition in many West Australian woodlands and forests will likely occur in sudden, catastrophic, step changes. Many species may not have time to adapt.

These often sudden and dramatic shifts in vegetation health, structure and function have profound consequences on associated flora and fauna, including many critically endangered species. The Mediterranean type-ecosystems of the south west were recently named among the top 10 ecosystems most vulnerable to climate-induced tipping points and degradation by a panel of 26 leading Australian ecologists. The region is one of 35 global biodiversity hotspots, harbouring approximately 1500 plant species, most of which aren’t found anywhere else.

SOURCE





Leftists get hysterical about exposure to even very low levels of ionizing radiation.  Are they right?

The example of Japan:

If you were expecting Hiroshima to be uninhabitable for thousands of years, you are (understandably, given the deplorable state of science education) making a whole bunch of errors in your understanding of radiation.

First of all, radiation isn’t magic death cooties. You are radioactive (traces of unstable potassium in your bones). My kitchen is radioactive (traces of unstable uranium in my granite countertop). If you have smoke detectors in your home (and you should) there’s a good chance they are radioactive (americium—quite, quite radioactive, but harmless unless you eat it or inhale it).

When it comes to radiation, the type, intensity, and duration of exposure mean everything.

The Little Boy bomb contained 64 kg (141 lbs) of highly-enriched uranium. What that means is that the government sorted through many, many, many trainloads of naturally occurring uranium ore to separate out the isotope needed for bomb-making. In nature (on Earth) uranium is mostly U238, which has a half life of 4.5 billion years. This extremely long half life means the energy it releases as radiation is spread out over far longer than the age of the universe, and is therefore harmless to life (it would be nearly harmless anyway, because it emits alpha particles that can be stopped by as little as the dead outer layer of your skin). U238 is too stable for use in making bombs. For bombs, you need uranium with much more U235, an isotope with a half life of a mere 700 million years. This means (roughly) that U235 is about 600 times more radioactive than U238, making it so intensely radioactive that…



… you can hold it in your hands with no ill effects at all (the gloves are to keep the metal clean and prevent any dust from making its way into the technician’s lungs or mouth—which would be dangerous).

Uranium is a naturally occurring ore that is more dangerous as a chemical toxin than for its weak radiation. When enriched to 80%, U-235 is weapons grade stuff—far more radioactive—but still not harmful unless ingested.

So, okay. What makes the stuff so dangerous? Well, when you put too much U235 in close proximity and under the right circumstances, you can create a chain reaction in which neutron release astronomically speeds up the decay of the atoms, making it astronomically more radioactive, making all that atomic energy come out astronomically faster. This can give you a lethal dose in a few seconds, or boil water to run a turbine, or go boom—all depending on how tightly and how quickly the atoms all come together.

The Little Boy bomb was little more than a lab experiment stuck in a cowling and hung under an airplane. Only about 1.5% of the uranium fissioned. The remaining 64 kg (141 lbs) went up in the mushroom cloud and spread across the Pacific ocean. Oh no! What have we done to mother Earth???

Not a lot, actually. The ocean already contains uranium. This is Earth, after all, and it’s a rocky planet, and the ocean contains the runoff from the mountains and the soup from hydrothermal vents. Every 20 cubic kilometers of unadulterated seawater already contains the same amount of uranium spilled by the bomb. The ocean contains roughly 1.332 billion cubic kilometers of water, so it already contains 66,600,000 times the amount of uranium released by the bomb. Put another way, the bomb had zero impact on the amount of uranium in the environment. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

But what about the 1.5% that actually fissioned? That’s your nightmare poison, right? Well, yes. Much of it transmuted into a cocktail of highly radioactive scariness, however:

Not all isotopes are equal. After an atomic bomb goes off, the isotopes that hurt people are those with short half lives, not long ones. Isotopes like Niobium-95, Cerium-141, Barium-140 and in particular, Iodine-131 are extremely dangerous because they have half lives of only days. They release all their radiation quickly, so it can do a lot of damage—especially Iodine-131 which can be taken up by the body and transported to the thyroid gland, and Strontium-89 which can be taken up by bones. These fission products are truly monstrous—but they don’t last long. In weeks, they are no longer a reason not to enter the area unprotected. In a year, they are gone. That leaves longer-lived isotopes like Strontium-90 and Cesium-137, both with half-lives of about 30 years. These pose a long term cancer risk, but by now, they are basically gone too. The only effect they impose on today’s world is mucking up highly-precise scientific measurements.

So what’s this thousands of years business? Hysteria and misinformation, that’s what.

I do not, by this answer, mean to downplay the horrors inflicted by the bomb or to imply that radiation isn’t dangerous. It can be, but it can also be extremely helpful. Consider that Japan, first victim of nuclear warfare, entered World War II mostly over control of oil supplies in its South Pacific region of influence. After the war, nuclear power fueled a robust, peaceful economy. Now, Fukushima has the Japanese spooked. They are thinking of retreating from nuclear power. And if they do, it will be a mistake.

Even after Fukushima, the total number of members of the Japanese public killed by the peaceful application of nuclear energy remains 0. Meanwhile, 20,000 Americans die each year due to lung cancer caused by radioactive radon, most of which is dug up and spewed out the smoke stacks of coal-fired power plants. If Japan abandons nuclear instead of upgrading to the newer safer designs now available, they will have to get their power at least partly from coal or natural gas. If they do that, for the first time since the bomb, radiation will start killing large numbers of Japanese.*

The point is, we don’t need to blindly fear nuclear energy. We need to respect it, understand it, and hold those who wield it to a high standard of public scrutiny. Ignorance is what we need to fear.

SOURCE







Hiatus observed in Northern Asia

Does the recent warming hiatus exist over Northern Asia for winter wind chill temperature?

Ying Ma et al.

ABSTRACT

Wind chill temperature (WCT) describes the joint effect of wind velocity and air temperature on exposed body skin and could support policymakers in designing plans to reduce the risks of notably cold and windy weather. This study examined winter WCT over Northern Asia during 1973–2013 by analysing in situ station data. The winter WCT warming rate over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) slowed during 1999–2013 (?0.04?°C?decade?1) compared with that of during 1973–1998 (0.67?°C?decade?1). The winter WCT warming hiatus has also been observed in the remainder of Northern Asia with trends of 1.11?°C?decade?1 during 1973–1998 but ?1.02?°C?decade?1 during 1999–2013, except for the Far East (FE) of Russia, where the winter WCT has continued to heat up during both the earlier period of 1973–1998 (0.54?°C?decade?1) and the recent period of 1999–2013 (0.75?°C?decade?1). The results indicate that the influence of temperature on winter WCT is greater than that of wind speed over Northern Asia. Atmospheric circulation changes associated with air temperature and wind speed were analysed to identify the causes for the warming hiatus of winter WCT over Northern Asia. The distributions of sea-level pressure and 500-hPa height anomalies during 1999–2013 transported cold air from the high latitudes to middle latitudes, resulting in low air temperature over Northern Asia except for the FE of Russia. Over the TP, the increase in wind speed offset the increase in air temperature during 1999–2013. For the FE, the southerly wind from the Western Pacific drove the temperature up during the 1999–2013 period through warm advection.

International Journal of Climatology






Reddit users brutally destroy Bill Nye’s new Netflix science show: ‘This is absolute dog s**t’

Reddit users destroyed Bill Nye’s new Netflix program Tuesday in a thread of a show review that became so popular that it found its way to Reddit’s front page and earned Reddit’s version of a “like” more than 60,000 times.

In recent years, Nye, who is known for his 1990s kids’ science show, has become one of the most outspoken critics of people who disagree that manmade climate change is a fact and “settled science.” He regularly appears on cable news shows to debate the topic of climate change and attempts to discredit and shut down anyone who don’t toe his progressive line.

And according to Reddit users, Nye uses the same tone and style in his newest show, “Bill Nye Saves the World,” which debuted on Netflix in April.

“In this show he simply brings up an issue, tells you which side you should be on, and then makes fun of people on the other side. To make things worst [sic] he does this in the most boring way possible,” Reddit user “Sloth859,” who described himself as a “huge fan” of Nye’s since the age of 10, wrote in a review of the new show.

“He doesn’t properly explain anything, and he misrepresents every opposing view,” the user explained.

Sloth859 went on to share in lengthy paragraphs three instances where Nye appeared mean-spirited and ignored other scientific theories and ideas in order to push a progressive agenda.

The user noted that in one episode on fad dieting, Nye misrepresented paleo dieting as “only eating meat.” In another episode, Nye “shuts down” nuclear energy as an alternate energy source to fossil fuel, arguing that “nobody wants it.”

In a third episode, “Sloth859” slammed Nye for dismissing vinegar as an alternative medicine source simply because it “doesn’t change the pH level of an acidic solution.” The user continued:

He dismiss [sic] the fact that vinegar has been used to treat upset stomach for a long time. How does vinegar treat an upset stomach? Does it actually work, or is it a placebo affect? Does it work in some cases, and not in others? If it does anything, does it just treat a symptom, or does it fix the root cause? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions because he just dismissed it as wrong and only showed me that it doesn’t change the pH level of an acidic solution. Also, there are many foods that are believed to help prevent diseases like fish (for heart health), high fiber breads (for colon cancer), and citrus fruits (for scurvy). A healthy diet and exercise will help prevent cardiovascular disease, and will help reduce your blood pressure among other benefits. So obviously there is some reasoning behind some alternative medicine and practices and to dismiss it all as a whole is stupid.
“I just don’t see the point of this show,” the user concluded the review. “It’s not going to convince anyone that they’re wrong, and it’s definitely not going to entertain anyone.”

Other Reddit users concurred with the sentiment of “Sloth859.”

“This show is everything wrong with the public perception of science. Science isn’t about dismissing critical views, and accepting everything you’re told at face value. It’s about critically analyzing the way the world works and challenging your own beliefs. This show is trash and deserves every piece of criticism it receives,” Reddit user “Daeysheperd” wrote in the top comment.

“It seems that most people, right or left, are in agreeance [sic] that this is absolute dog s**t,” user “zorkzamboni” quipped.

Reddit user “CMPluto” said: “This is my favorite Reddit thread of all time. Never have I seen, on Reddit, so many posters from seemingly many different walks of life, share such agreeement [sic]. Thanks Bill. You’ve become the idiot we don’t deserve, but we may need.”

According to movie and television review website Rotten Tomatoes, Nye’s new show has so far earned a 75 percent approval from professional movie and TV critics, but only a 29 percent approval from people who actually watched it. Rotten Tomatoes’ professional reviews, however, has so far been limited to only eight — six positive and two negative.

Meanwhile, the show has even poorer reviews on Mediacritic, which gave the show a 63 percent approval from professional critics. Audience members, on the other hand, give the show an average rating of 1.7 on a scale of 1-to-10. Among audience reviews, 146 were negative, 27 were positive, and three were mixed.

SOURCE





Deep-Sixing the Paris Agreement
   
You wouldn’t think Al Gore and Donald Trump would have much to talk about, given their political divisions. Yet that’s exactly why the former vice president recently got in touch with President Trump: to urge him not to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

“Paris Agreement” is shorthand for a United Nations pact that the Obama administration joined last year. The agreement requires the countries that join it to submit plans for how they’ll cut greenhouse gas emissions. Not surprisingly, Mr. Gore heavily favors what he calls “a bold and historic agreement.”

You might think Mr. Gore’s plea couldn’t possibly succeed, but Mr. Trump’s decision on this issue isn’t exactly a slam-dunk. It isn’t just Mr. Gore and other environmentalists who think the United States should stay in the agreement. Senior Adviser to the President Jared Kushner, for example, thinks the U.S. should stay. So does Ivanka Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, as well as multinational corporations such as Starbucks and Exxon Mobil.

Some Republican lawmakers also say the United States should remain a party to the deal (albeit with a weakened pledge to cut emissions). The emissions targets aren’t legally binding, after all, so why not keep a seat at the table? No point inflicting diplomatic damage unnecessarily, they argue.

With all due respect, they’re mistaken. Mr. Trump should withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Doing so would underscore a simple truth that needs to be said loud and clear: The agreement is a sham deal, and no amount of pretense or diplomatic wrangling will change that.

To understand why, set aside any preconceived positions, pro or con, on the issue of climate change and look at the deal itself. It’s an extremely costly and ineffective way to address the issue — as even some of its supporters seem to realize.

The stated goal of the Paris Agreement is to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The more than 170 countries that have signed on are supposed to do this by reducing their carbon dioxide emissions and relying more on renewable sources of energy.

The stated goals for the United States, as submitted by the Obama administration, aimed to cut greenhouse gases by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. That’s pretty ambitious. And it won’t be cheap.

As economist Nicolas Loris and UN expert Brett Schaefer recently noted, “The U.S. regulations alone would increase energy costs for U.S. families and businesses, causing an overall average shortfall of nearly 400,000 jobs and total income loss of more than $20,000 for a family of four by the year 2035.”

The cost to the global economy, of course, will be much worse: trillions of dollars over the next 80 years. And here’s the real kicker: Even if every country meets their stated goals (which is very unlikely), it will bring only the most minuscule reduction in warming — so little, quite frankly, that it will hardly be noticeable.

Don’t just take my word for it. Consider what former Secretary of State John Kerry has said: “The fact is that even if every American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels to power their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated all of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions, guess what — that still wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world.”

To call this a flawed deal is the understatement of the year. It’s all pain, no gain. No wonder President Obama didn’t submit the deal to the Senate for approval (as he should have). He must have known lawmakers would reject it.

We still can. If President Trump wants to deliver the kind of economic growth he promised on the campaign trail, it’s time to jettison this bad deal.

SOURCE

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

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   main.html 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

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





18 May, 2017

Thank goodness she had an abortion

We have been spared another misanthropic mess like her.  Her mother was mentally ill so her views are not a big surprise








Dilbert gets it








Climate Changes Activists are the real Science Deniers

The range of predicted future warming is enormous - apocalyptism is unwarranted.

by Oren Cass

The epithet "climate denier," intended to invoke Holocaust denial, has always been tasteless and inapt. Climate change is not like the Holocaust, nor is questioning the accuracy and predictive power of a scientific model like questioning the historical fact of a genocide that murdered 6 million Jews. But climate activists delighted in defining their opposition this way, with help from prominent figures such as Barack Obama, who in 2014 used Twitter to condemn "climate change deniers" and promote a website, run by Organizing for Action (formerly Obama for America), that featured large black-and-white pictures of then-House speaker John Boehner and Senator Marco Rubio atop a green "Climate Change Deniers" banner. "On climate," asked the site's headline, "whose side are you on?"

    For a while, this seemed to work. Framing the climate debate as one between noble keepers of the scientific flame and people akin to Nazis gave the former group license to say almost anything. To the casual observer, even the most egregious exaggeration about climate science could seem reasonable compared with its outright rejection. Thus, Obama's assertion in his 2015 State of the Union address that "no challenge - no challenge - poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change" became widely accepted. When Senator Bernie Sanders warned during a presidential debate that "the scientific community is telling us that if we do not address the global crisis of climate change . . . the planet that we're going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable," he was not laughed off the stage.

    Often, the politicians and pundits targeted with the "denier" label did deserve blame. Ignoring the best available scientific research - an obvious starting point in any other policy debate - was irresponsible or dishonest. Their arguments rarely emerged from any valuable scientific insight, but usually from a fear that acknowledging the scientific basis of climate change would mean accepting radical and costly responses. This was doubly counterproductive: Not only did it grant by default a mainstream foothold to outlandishly overblown climate fears, but also it sidelined and undermined more important and compelling policy-based objections to the activist agenda.

    And then a funny thing happened: "Denial" gave way to those more reasoned arguments. Perhaps the accumulation of scientific evidence changed minds. Perhaps it was only the political reality that sank in. Regardless, opponents of aggressive climate policy mostly stopped questioning whether the climate was warming and whether human activity played a role - the two points of agreement that define the famous "97 percent consensus" of climate scientists - and started explaining why that consensus did not justify costly and ineffective policies.

    This shift in focus from the basic science of climate change to its public-policy implications has been a disaster for climate activists, exposing the flabbiness at the core of their position. Softened by years of punching down at their opponents' worst arguments, they became addicted to asserting that "science says so," and they are now lost when it doesn't.

    When Sanders, back in the Senate, questioned Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt during the latter's confirmation hearing to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, it was the interrogator who couldn't keep his facts straight. Pruitt asserted that "the climate is changing, and human activity contributes to that in some manner," explaining that he had inserted the caveat ("in some manner") because "the ability to measure, with precision, the degree of human activity's impact on the climate is subject to more debate." Pressed by Sanders, he stated again: "The climate is changing, and human activity impacts that."

    Pruitt wanted to discuss "the job of the [EPA] administrator," which he noted was "to carry out the statutes passed by [Congress]." He also agreed that the "EPA has a very important role at regulating the emission of CO2." But Sanders was determined to show that Pruitt rejected the scientific consensus, even if this meant falsifying the contents of that consensus.

Faming the climate debate as one between noble keepers of the scientific flame and people akin to Nazis gave the former group license to say almost anything.

    Sanders claimed that "97 percent of the scientists who wrote articles in peer-reviewed journals believe that human activity is the fundamental reason we are seeing climate change." That is wrong. A survey-of-surveys published last year in Environmental Research Letters reported that prior surveys had found 78 percent of scientists agreeing that "the cause of global warming over the past 150 years was mostly human," 82 percent agreeing that "human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures," and 85 percent agreeing that "anthropogenic greenhouse gases are the dominant driver of recent global warming." Of course, even among those expressing agreement about the "significant" or "dominant" human role, debate would presumably have emerged about whether natural factors accounted for 0, 10, 25, or 50 percent.

    Sanders also claimed that "97 percent of scientists who have written articles for peer-reviewed journals have concluded that climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, and it is already causing devastating problems in our country and around the world." As to the devastating problems, this also is false. He said "the vast majority of scientists are telling us that if we do not get our act together and transform our energy system away from fossil fuel, there is a real question as to the quality of the planet that we are going to be leaving our children and our grandchildren." Also untrue.

In fact, scientists and economists hold widely varying views on the costs that climate change has caused and will cause. Surveys of scientists rarely address social consequences or policy implications. When President Obama tweeted that "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous," even Salon had to acknowledge he was wrong to say "dangerous." Only half of the economists surveyed by NYU's Institute for Policy Integrity in 2015 believed "immediate and drastic action is necessary" on climate change; only 56 percent said that "if nothing is done to limit climate change in the future" it would be a "very serious" problem for the United States; only 41 percent believed "climate change is already having a negative effect on the global economy."

    But the New York Times had categorized the Pruitt nomination under the heading climate change denial, albeit without any support. So when Pruitt testified, Times reporter Coral Davenport tweeted, "#Pruitt on #climate: `Science tells us climate is changing' but says extent of human role is up for debate. False." In her accompanying story, she reported that Pruitt's views were "not consistent with the scientific consensus" as reflected by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Only half of the economists surveyed by NYU's Institute for Policy Integrity in 2015 believed `immediate and drastic action is necessary' on climate change.

    What does the IPCC actually say? While it is "extremely likely that human activities caused more than half of the observed increase in [temperature] from 1951 to 2010," the attribution for the approximately 0.6øC of warming requires wide ranges that are "likely" to be accurate: between 0.5 and 1.3øC for greenhouse gases, between -?0.6 and +?0.1øC for other human activity, and between -?0.1 and +?0.1øC apiece for natural causes and internal variability. For the slower warming observed during the period from 1998 to 2012, the IPCC could offer only low to medium confidence in its explanation.

    So Pruitt's comments were not "False." Indeed, in a later story Davenport's colleague Justin Gillis acknowledged that Pruitt's position was "almost axiomatically true." But, Gillis argued, it remained problematic because

anybody who did not know better might come away thinking there is room to doubt whether humans are the main cause of global warming. Mr. Pruitt did not actually say that, of course.. . . Mr. Pruitt and the other Trump nominees labored to avoid overt denial while signaling to their allies that there is enough doubt to justify inaction on emissions or even rolling back steps the Obama administration took.

    This is the crux of the matter. Statements about climate change are no longer being policed for their accuracy, but rather for the degree to which they help or harm the activist agenda. The Atlantic explains that "the new climate denial is like the old climate denial" because "both are excuses for inaction." Why didn't Sanders ask Pruitt the obvious follow-ups: "Do you see that lack of precision as relevant to the policy choices facing us?" or "Of course, science is always subject to imprecision, but do you believe we should take action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions?" Sanders didn't ask these questions because he had no interest in discussing climate policy, where his own ideas make no sense (including, for instance, banning nuclear power and "bringing climate deniers to justice"). His position rests on the fiction that scientists unanimously agree, and that is where he must make his stand.

    Pruitt's emphasis on the difficulty of measuring, "with precision, the degree of human activity's impact" also crosses a red line for activists, because the precision with which climate models can describe what is happening links directly to the precision with which they can describe what will happen. If scientists do not know exactly how the climate system is behaving now, we might accord less weight to their projections into the distant future.

The precision with which climate models can describe what is happening links directly to the precision with which they can describe what will happen.

    Secretary of State Rex Tillerson hit that tripwire in his own confirmation hearing when he said: "The increase in the greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere are [sic] having an effect; our ability to predict that effect is very limited." Professor Katharine Hayhoe mocked the claim, suggesting that perhaps it would have been correct in the 1800s. "In 2017? Not so much." Professor Michael Mann called it "indefensible." In the Guardian, Dana Nuccitelli concluded, "Functionally [Tillerson] might not be very different than a Secretary of State who outright denies climate change." Mashable's Andrew Freedman warned that Tillerson, Pruitt, and fellow Trump nominee Rick Perry had "moved from outright climate denial to a more subtle, insidious and risky form."

    But as the IPCC emphasizes, the range for future projections remains enormous. The central question is "climate sensitivity" - the amount of warming that accompanies a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. As of its Fifth Assessment Report in 2013, the IPCC could estimate only that this sensitivity is somewhere between 1.5 and 4.5øC. Nor is science narrowing that range. The 2013 assessment actually widened it on the low end, from a 2.0-4.5øC range in the prior assessment. And remember, for any specific level of warming, forecasts vary widely on the subsequent environmental and economic implications.

    At least one might assume that reasonable minds could be allowed to differ on the ultimate question of how well society is likely to cope with the effects of climate change - a political, social, and economic question several degrees removed from anything resembling a scientific consensus. Not so. I addressed these issues in a recent Foreign Affairs essay, in which I called the IPCC "the gold-standard summary," cited it repeatedly, and adopted its estimate that temperatures could rise by 3 to 4øC this century. My essay further embraced the Obama administration's "Social Cost of Carbon" analysis and adopted its high-case model for economic cost. But the essay argued that the likely impact of all this was "manageable" rather than "catastrophic." Mann decried it as "#Koch climate denial propaganda." Eric Holthaus, meteorologist and host of the podcast Our Warm Regards, called it "a master class in modern climate denial."

The scope of viewpoints that constitute "denial" is rapidly expanding to swallow all opposition to favored climate policies. In Scientific American, blogger Peter Dykstra declared "grudgingly admitting the problem while scrambling to avoid addressing it" to be a form of climate denial. Writing in Rolling Stone, Bill McKibben pathetically attempted to introduce the term "Renewables Denial" ("at least as ugly and insidious as its twin sister, Climate Denial") to describe skepticism that wind and solar power can meet the world's energy needs anytime soon.

    At stake are the boundaries of debate in our democratic society, on an issue that the self-appointed enforcers insist is the most important one facing us. The ad hominem "denier" criticism places arguments and their purveyors beyond the pale, unworthy of response. Appealing to a purported "97 percent consensus" asserts that the question has been scientifically answered and policymakers have no business debating it. Such rhetorical techniques are wildly inappropriate where science is in fact, by its own admission, not settled, and especially where science is but one input to a difficult policy question.

Science is but one input to a difficult policy question.

    Fortunately, this nonsense is unsustainable. The Times tried letting people speak for themselves, introducing quotes from twelve of Trump's Cabinet nominees with the summary: "Most of the people President-elect Donald J. Trump has chosen for the top tiers of his administration have expressed doubt that climate change is caused by human activity." But anyone who actually read the quotes discovered that most of them raised no issues with climate science at all.

    In early March, Davenport tried calling Trump appointees "skeptics," rather than "deniers." But Gillis summarized her story, headlined "EPA Head Stacks Agency with Climate Change Skeptics," in a tweet as "Top posts at EPA are being stocked with climate-change denialists." He then acknowledged that the conflicting word choices were no accident and that the Times "cannot seem to achieve internal consistency about what word to use, despite best efforts." That was awkward, though not as awkward as Professor Michael Mann's testimony before the House Science Committee later that month: "I don't believe I called anybody here a denier," he asserted, "yet that's been stated over and over again. So I've been misrepresented quite a bit today." To which Professor Judith Curry, sitting just to his right, responded, "It's in your written testimony." Sure enough, on page 6, Mann referred to "climate science denier Judith Curry," even averring, "I use the term carefully."

    Activists, so eager to bar the gates to the public square and keep their opponents out, have instead locked themselves in. If everyone agrees with the 97 percent consensus, and that consensus does not dictate any particular policy outcome, they have nothing else to say. Perhaps this is for the best. If the extremists from both sides become sufficiently marginalized, a reasoned policy debate might emerge about the real risks of climate change and the cost-effective responses. This would require the media to admit that their "denier" terminology has lost all meaning and to attend equally to the scientifically unsupported statements from both sides.

    It would also require a consistent, scientifically accurate message from the White House. The president should clean up the embarrassing ambiguity and vacuity in his own views. And his administration should make clear that it works from mainstream scientific conclusions. EPA Administrator Pruitt confused matters greatly with comments to CNBC last month that went beyond his testimony about "precision" and "debate" and suggested that human activity was not the primary cause of recent warming. Pruitt had no basis for taking that position, nor does he gain anything from it; even Fox News confronted him. Conversely, an accurate statement of the science would only strengthen his position in defending the policies he seeks to implement. The more he focuses discussion on costs and benefits of EPA actions, the more reasonable he will seem - and the more reasonable he will be.

    For now, though, navigating the climate debate will require translating the phrase "climate denier" to mean "anyone unsympathetic to the most aggressive activists' claims." This apparently includes anyone who acknowledges meaningful uncertainty in climate models, adopts a less-than-catastrophic outlook about the consequences of future warming, or opposes any facet of the activist policy agenda. The activists will be identifiable as the small group continuing to shout "Denier!" The "deniers" will be identifiable as everyone else.

SOURCE

Note:  There was a subsequent rejoinder to the above article by John "consensus" Cook.  Cass replies to that here






Energy investors are underwhelmed by the UK renewable energy market due to a vacuum in policy direction for the industry's future

Not enough gravy under a conservative government

EY's latest attractiveness index has ranked the UK market in the top ten countries globally for new investment - but the advisory firm said the move up from 14th place last year follows major blows in other countries, rather than progress in the UK.

Four years ago the UK market was ranked fourth globally but has steadily fallen down the ranks after a series of political blows to subsidy levels. The exception to the gloomy outlook for renewable energy investment is offshore wind power.

In April the UK kicked off the second round of renewable energy auctions for Contracts for Difference (CfD) subsidies which allocates œ730m of annual funding over three rounds.

The current round includes œ290m which is likely to be scooped up by offshore wind farm developers after driving down costs quicker than expected.

Ben Warren, EY's head of energy corporate finance, said question markets linger over renewable energy targets, subsidies and connections with mainland power markets following Brexit.

"Unfortunately, the likelihood of getting complete answers to those questions before the UK exits the EU are slim," he said.

"The UK continues to underwhelm investors who are waiting to see if future UK policy will support and encourage the renewable energy industry towards a subsidy-free environment, where consumers can benefit from the UK's excellent natural resources for renewable energy," he added.

Emma Pinchbeck, executive director at Renewable UK said the market has managed to deliver smart, modern infrastructure even "in challenging times".

"It is to the industry's credit that this activity has also made the UK a player in the global clean energy transition. The next Government should throw its weight behind renewables if it wants to secure the benefits of being a global leader in this exciting industry," she added.

At the top of the leader board, China and India both usurped the US which fell to third position. China topped the index after announcing plans to spend $363bn (œ280bn) developing renewable power capacity by 2020.

SOURCE





Wind and Solar Energy Haven't Lived Up to Hype

Heck, even the Europeans are starting to doubt the sustainability of these "fantastic" green energy sources

The bad news keeps piling up for what we have been told are superior energy sources. Even European countries, with their strong preference for things that don't work, like socialist government, have begun pulling back from wind as a major energy source, and solar isn't doing so well, either.

German-owned solar panel producer SolarWorld has filed for what it termed "insolvency" in a European court, saying it was "over-indebted" and did not have a "positive going concern prognosis." Translated into the plain language of American business, SolarWorld is filing for bankruptcy.

In America, bankruptcy does not necessarily mean the end for a company, so perhaps "insolvency" is only a temporary detour, but it certainly falls well below the description of a successful company.

Here at home, that raises concerns over the company's U.S. division, SolarWorld America, Inc., which operates a $600 million panel plant in Hillsboro, Oregon. Democrat Gov. Ted Kulongoski praised the plant as an economic development beacon "in the Silicon forest" during a ribbon-cutting ceremony, also attended by Democrats Sen. Ron Wyden and then-Rep. David Wu.

The facility was purchased in 2007 from Japan's Komatsu Group, and by 2012 had collected $57 million in Business Energy Tax Credits from the state. Reports say it now has received $100 million in tax breaks just from state and local governments. It also benefitted from a $4 million grant from Barack Obama's Department of Energy.

SolarWorld notes, however, that despite its problems in Germany, the Hillsboro plant that employs 800 people continues to operate. The question now is how long before the Oregon plant, which its previous owner wanted rid of, joins the infamous Solyndra and Solar Trust green energy fiascos that cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars?

Across the country in Rhode Island a new offshore wind farm just went online last week. The five-turbine farm cost $300 million and currently powers just 2,000 homes, which works out to a bargain-basement price of only $150,000 per household. Ultimately, it is expected to power 17,000 homes, which will substantially lower the cost per home, but progressives and environmentalists believe the price per home isn't important. They believe that "it's the precedent that counts," according to Salon.

The Daily Caller News Foundation calculated the difference in wind and nuclear power by comparing this wind farm with a new nuclear plant, Watts Bar Unit 2, which cost $4.7 billion to build. The important difference is not the price, but the result: The nuclear facility will power 4.5 million homes at a comparatively cheap $1,044 per house.

Even with 17,000 customers, the wind farm is still 17 times more expensive than nuclear. Despite this ridiculous situation, the feds want to use offshore wind to power 23 million homes by 2050. However, Germany has finally been shocked into reality as to the inefficiency of wind power, and now plans to stop building wind facilities.

Further illustrating the calamity of the world's environmental mania is the condition of the environment. The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), which because of its European connection ought to have more credibility with the environmental faction than do Americans who don't buy into the green energy hype, made data public recently that even the most strident greenie ought to consider.

As published by the UK Telegraph, "ever since December temperatures in the Arctic have consistently been lower than minus 20 [degrees]?C. In April the extent of Arctic sea ice was back to where it was in April 13 years ago. Furthermore, whereas in 2008 most of the ice was extremely thin, this year most has been at least two metres thick. The Greenland ice cap last winter increased in volume faster than at any time for years."

The Telegraph goes on to say that "as for those record temperatures brought in 2016 by an exceptionally strong El Ni¤o, the satellites now show that in recent months global temperatures have plummeted by more than 0.6 degrees, just as happened 17 years ago after a similarly strong El Ni¤o had also made 1998 the `hottest year on record.'"

The DMI reported actual measurements of climate information, rather than the results of climate models, which are projections that are mostly, if not always, wrong. The DMI data shows there has been no additional warming for the last 19 years, which is "an inconvenient truth," to environmental zealots.

The shortcomings of wind and solar power and the mounting evidence that fossil fuels have not caused the environment to warm significantly cast doubt on the idea that we need expensive "green" energy. In addition to their high costs, wind and solar energy are inefficient, and not as "green" as advertised. Both cause environmental harm in their construction and operation.

As with most things, the secret to better, cleaner energy is through free market processes, not government force. As technology develops, improvements in how we use fossil fuels make even the dirtiest sources much cleaner and less objectionable. This process may also make wind and solar energy more efficient, and therefore desirable. But until then, wind and solar are more akin to very expensive unicorn dust, and leftists are wrong to redistribute taxpayer dollars to prop it up.

SOURCE





Is Global Warming Data Reliable?

For pundits and the press, it's a given that increases in greenhouse gas emissions have caused an observed increase in global temperatures since the early twentieth century. There are, however, several premises underneath that assumption that don't hold up to scrutiny, according to Independent Institute Research Fellow S. Fred Singer, in a recent op-ed for American Thinker. One goes to the reliability of the data.

Not all data sets are created equal. The apparent warming interval of 1910 to 1942 is based on proxy data from many sources (tree rings, ice cores, etc.) that are consistent with one another, whereas the apparent warming interval of 1977 to 2000 comes from data sources (weather stations, sea temperatures, nighttime marine air-temperatures, microwave sounding units, etc.) that are often inconsistent with one another, according to Singer. The "warming" believed to have occurred during this second interval is therefore likely an erroneous by-product of the data-gathering process.

Consider temperature-gathering at airports. The number of weather stations at airports fell significantly from 1970 to 1995, but the number of weather stations overall fell by even more. As a result, the relative weight of data gathered at airports rose significantly, from 35 percent to 80 percent of all weather stations. During this period, air traffic increased "about 5 percent per year worldwide," Singer writes. Consequently, the "observed" trend of warming from 1977 to 2000 isn't terribly well supported. "Obviously, if there is no warming trend, these demonstrations [cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] fail-and so do their proofs for AGW [anthropogenic global warming]," Singer concludes.

SOURCE

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17 May, 2017

Scott Pruitt signals new post-Obama era at EPA with Alaska's Pebble Mine decision

The Obama administration didn't wage war just on coal. In addition to that hydrocarbon, the Environmental Protection Agency took aim at copper, gold, and another element called molybdenum. But under Trump, the government may make peace with the Periodic Table.

The EPA settled a lawsuit with the Pebble Limited Partnership Friday, reversing a longstanding campaign to stop groundbreaking on a massive copper and gold mine in Alaska's Bristol Bay region. Promising economic news, it signals to industry leaders how Trump's EPA will function.

While the EPA and the Pebble mining company have asked the U.S. District Court in Alaska to drop the lawsuit, despite an emerging narrative, the federal agency has not given industry a free hand in the region.

"The agreement will not guarantee or prejudge a particular outcome," EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt stressed in a statement, "but will provide Pebble a fair process for their permit application and help steer EPA away from costly and time-consuming litigation."

Put another way, Pruitt signaled that the EPA would, you know, start following the rules. Maybe that sounds boring but it represents a radical departure from Obama-era operating procedure.

In a bold and unprecedented move, Obama's EPA issued a preemptive veto of the proposed mining project. Something like 15,000 jobs and $180 million in annual taxes, according to an IHS Global Insight Study, stayed in the ground as a result. The EPA never even gave the company a chance to make its case.

According to emails obtained by the Washington Post through the Freedom of Information Act, EPA officials weren't just enforcing the law, they were coordinating with anti-mine groups to kill the mine. Months before getting involved officially, the EPA was trading emails with Alaskan tribes to coordinate the opposition.

In one Jan. 8, 2010 email, one lawyer literally asked the EPA for "suggestions, revisions or edits" to a petition asking the agency to stop the mine. Other records, WaPo reported, show the EPA accepting scientific assessments from outside groups to incorporate into their environmental review.

No doubt that charming correspondence and collusion will end under Pruitt. But oversight will not. As the Washington Examiner reported Friday, the Pebble company must still apply for a Clean Water Act from the Army Corps of Engineers. In other words, they can restart a lengthy process, one that the Alaska Dispatch News predicts might not even be finished before 2020.

No doubt a lengthy fight is still looming. But for the first time, all parties involved will know that the EPA will at least be fair.

SOURCE






Big Wind Gets Spanked in Michigan

by ROBERT BRYCE   

Citizens in 20 localities rejected wind-power expansion.

Big Wind's lobbyists and promoters love to claim that their projects are being welcomed by rural communities everywhere. The reality is rather different. Last Tuesday, voters in 20 rural towns in Michigan went to the polls and rejected or restricted the expansion of wind energy.

    Furthermore, those same Michigan voters soundly rejected two projects being promoted by the world's largest producer of wind energy, NextEra Energy - which, as I discussed on this site last week, has been suing rural governments in multiple states (two of them in Michigan) while at the same time collecting billions of dollars in federal tax subsidies.

    Big Wind's worst drubbing occurred in Sand Beach Township, in Huron County, where voters approved modifications to a township ordinance that will effectively ban wind development. The vote tally: 413-80. In addition, Lincoln Township voters approved an initiative that will allow it to form its own planning commission, a move that will make it far more difficult for wind projects to be developed in the township. Sand Beach and Lincoln were among 18 townships in Huron County that gunned down Big Wind's expansion plans. (Huron County is about 130 miles due north of Detroit.) Voters in the other 16 townships went to the polls as a group and rejected two projects, including a 60-turbine project proposed by NextEra and a 70-turbine project being pushed by DTE Energy. Both proposals lost by a margin of 63 to 37 percent.

    I recently talked to Kevon Martis. He is the founding director of the Interstate Informed Citizens Coalition, a group based in Blissfield, Mich., that works with rural governments in the Midwest that are resisting the encroachment of Big Wind. He was exultant. "Huron County has more than 400 turbines," Martis said. "If wind energy is so great, why didn't the county voters choose to have more of them?" Martis went on, saying that NextEra and DTE probably spent more than $500,000 on their efforts to get voters to approve their projects while the anti-wind forces "might have spent $3,000 or $4,000."

    Big Wind also lost on ballot questions in Marlette Township in Sanilac County and in Almer Township in Tuscola County. In Marlette, voters approved, by a margin of 53 to 47 percent, a zoning amendment that will toughen an ordinance governing wind-energy projects.

    To be sure, these results haven't been reported by mainstream media. But then, the fact that rural communities from Maine to California are rejecting Big Wind doesn't fit the popular media's narrative that wind energy is "green." The Michigan results expose the fictions being peddled by Big Wind's multitude of lobbyists. Tom Kiernan, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association, who has refused to answer my e-mailed questions regarding the backlash against the wind industry, recently claimed that wind energy "boosts rural American economies in unmatched ways" and that "83 percent of Americans support more wind." In March, Kiernan's AWEA colleague Susan Sloan claimed that "the idea that rural America doesn't want wind power, that's just not what we've experienced."

    The fact that rural communities from Maine to California are rejecting Big Wind doesn't fit the popular media's narrative that wind energy is `green.'

    Perhaps Kiernan and Sloan should visit Almer Township, where voters rejected a NextEra-backed ordinance that would have weakened the town's zoning ordinance. As I noted in these pages last week, Almer is one of five rural governments that have been sued by NextEra since last October. Almer residents, who are defending themselves against NextEra's lawsuit in federal court, voted against the wind giant's proposal by a margin of 55 to 45 percent.

    NextEra can afford its courthouse mugging of small towns like Almer and Hinton, Okla. (population: 3,000), because it is gorging on federal tax subsidies. Between 2008 and 2015, according to a recent report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, NextEra accumulated profits of $21.5 billion but didn't pay a dime in federal income taxes. Nor does it appear that NextEra will be paying federal taxes anytime soon. In its 2016 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company reported $3 billion in tax-credit carryforwards, an increase of $143 million over its 2015 numbers.

    Norm Stephens, a retired schoolteacher who lives in Almer and opposed the project, told me of the vote total, "It's huge. We are sending a message." But he quickly added, "NextEra is not going away. There's too much money involved."

    The vote totals in Michigan add to my ongoing tally of the rural backlash against Big Wind. Thus far this year, 37 government entities in ten states have moved to reject or restrict wind-energy development. More rejections and restrictions are coming.

SOURCE







UK: Wind is an irrelevance to the energy and climate debate

Even after 30 years of huge subsidies, it provides about zero energy

The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.

You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.

Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.

[One critic suggested I should have used the BP numbers instead, which show wind achieving 1.2% in 2014 rather than 0.46%. I chose not to do so mainly because that number is arrived at by falsely exaggerating the actual output of wind farms threefold in order to take into account that wind farms do not waste two-thirds of their energy as heat; also the source is an oil company, which would have given green blobbers a excuse to dismiss it, whereas the IEA is unimpleachable But it's still a very small number, so it makes little difference.]

Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.

Even in rich countries playing with subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.

If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.

At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area [half the size of] the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area [half] the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfil the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs. [para corrected from original.]

Do not take refuge in the idea that wind turbines could become more efficient. There is a limit to how much energy you can extract from a moving fluid, the Betz limit, and wind turbines are already close to it. Their effectiveness (the load factor, to use the engineering term) is determined by the wind that is available, and that varies at its own sweet will from second to second, day to day, year to year.

As machines, wind turbines are pretty good already; the problem is the wind resource itself, and we cannot change that. It’s a fluctuating stream of low–density energy. Mankind stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good.

As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips.

It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.

A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year (or a smaller number of bigger ones), just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal–mining output.

Forgive me if you have heard this before, but I have a commercial interest in coal. Now it appears that the black stuff also gives me a commercial interest in ‘clean’, green wind power.

The point of running through these numbers is to demonstrate that it is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the late David MacKay pointed out years back, the arithmetic is against such unreliable renewables.

MacKay, former chief scientific adviser to the Department of Energy and Climate Change, said in the final interview before his tragic death last year that the idea that renewable energy could power the UK is an “appalling delusion” -- for this reason, that there is not enough land.

The truth is, if you want to power civilisation with fewer greenhouse gas emissions, then you should focus on shifting power generation, heat and transport to natural gas, the economically recoverable reserves of which — thanks to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — are much more abundant than we dreamed they ever could be. It is also the lowest-emitting of the fossil fuels, so the emissions intensity of our wealth creation can actually fall while our wealth continues to increase. Good.

And let’s put some of that burgeoning wealth in nuclear, fission and fusion, so that it can take over from gas in the second half of this century. That is an engineerable, clean future. Everything else is a political displacement activity, one that is actually counterproductive as a climate policy and, worst of all, shamefully robs the poor to make the rich even richer.

SOURCE






Global Warming Claims and the So-Called Consensus Are Betrayals of the Scientific Method

Joseph D'Aleo
   
Crowds marched again for Earth Day. Many were really marching in anger because their candidate lost. Some probably feared what would happen to their benefits when the bloated government bureaucracy is forced to shrink. Others showed the typical march disdain for democracy, which gives them the right to march and protest. Others were deluded into thinking a critical mission they supported to save the planet was threatened.

The book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” was a study of crowd psychology by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841.

It was mentioned by astronomer Carl Sagan, Professor and Director of Cornell University’s Laboratory for Planetary Studies and host of the series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage.”

Sagan explained the scientific method and encouraged critical and skeptical thinking. He emphasized the importance of recognizing the difference between what is considered valid science and what is in reality pseudoscience.

Sagan, like fellow Cornell physicist/lecturer Richard Feynman, argued that when new ideas are offered for consideration, they should be tested by means of skeptical thinking and should stand up to rigorous questioning. Feynman lectured:

"If a theory or proposed law disagrees with experiment (or observation), it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what your name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it."

Sir Karl Popper, an Austrian-British philosopher and professor, is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century. Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method, in favor of empirical falsification: A theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can and should be scrutinized by decisive experiments.

See in this chapter of “Historical Perspectives on Climate Change” (2005) by James R. Fleming, Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Colby College, how the scientific method worked in climate change theories all through history.

That held until politicians with globalist viewpoint were searching for a cause that would drive their globalization goals. The Club of Rome was an organization formed in 1968 consisting of current and former heads of state, UN bureaucrats, high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists and business leaders from around the globe. It raised considerable public attention in 1972 with its report, “The Limits to Growth.” The club states that its mission is “to act as a global catalyst for change through the identification and analysis of the crucial problems facing humanity and the communication of such problems to the most important public and private decision makers as well as to the general public.” In 1991, the club published “The First Global Revolution” in which it decided:

In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming…would fit the bill…It does not matter if this common enemy is “a real one or…one invented for the purpose.

That is when massive investment began into building a case for their cause by funding the UN, global universities, scientists and in government agencies through published work and reports ensuring an alignment around the theory that we are responsible for all bad things that happen and paint them as unprecedented. That investment has exceeded $1 trillion dollars. Meanwhile, instead of engaging and supporting critical thinking and testing of hypothesis, there was a concerted effort to paint anyone not supporting their theory as deniers with not so subtle attempts to liken them to holocaust deniers and those who denied the dangers of cigarettes.

Scientists practicing the scientific method were demonized, stripped where possible of their role in universities and in government agencies. Many have remained silent to keep their position. A few courageous whistleblowers have emerged from the UN, government and universities, but they have been attacked by other scientists and generally ignored by the media, which in many cases are trained in journalism schools that prepare environmental journalists to battle, discredit or deny air-time to any skeptics.

As Ron Arnold wrote in 2015:

You can credit the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), a 501©(3) tax-exempt organization with more than 1,200 member reporters and academics in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and 27 other countries, with the general decline in journalistic standards among environmental journalists.

SEJ has received 119 grants from 35 notorious anti-development foundations, totaling $9.5 million since 1999. With this financial prompting, the SEJ’s stalwarts, including Andrew Revkin (The New York Times), Seth Borenstein (Associated Press), and Suzanne Goldenberg (The Guardian), have led the decline of climate news into ideological warfare.

To many SEJ writers, it is not possible for them to be biased, because issues have only one side: their own.

Associated Press' Borenstein asserted, "The nature of reporting is to get two sides to an issue. But the nature of science reporting is to get what’s really happening.” SEJ thinks whatever isn’t environmental dogma is a lie, as indicated by its incredible reference webpage "Climate Change: A Guide to the Information and Disinformation.“ SEJ writers also promote "false balance,” the notion that giving opposing views concerning climate change any mention at all is not real balance because skeptics are liars paid to undermine the truth, (which) justifies total censorship…. Some go as far as to recommend violence to achieve environmental goals

With the Obama administration’s Machiavellian collusion, reporters who are more environmentalist than journalist now rule the climate beat.

It is increasingly clear as MacKay warned 166 years ago, there is a politically-driven, wrong though popular delusion thanks to the help of complicit media. Earth Day weekend also showed a madness of crowds.

Recall the words of H.L Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

SOURCE





Global Warming Claims and the So-Called Consensus Are Betrayals of the Scientific Method

Until the last strong El Niño brought its normal spike in global temperatures, there was much ado about what was being called a pause of almost 19 years in global temperature rise. Eventually, even the once-professional societies like AMS had to admit to it and had papers published and many panels at annual meetings discussing why the accelerated warming predicted by climate models and the UN IPCC was not occurring even as global CO2 levels continued to rise.



The first efforts made to address this inconvenient truth were to modify the data sets (surface and some balloon and satellite) to bring the data closer into agreement with the models (instead of rethinking the theory and models as Sagan, Feynman and Popper would argue). Then they got the help from El Niño. Note, however, here in this work, we have shown that “Natural Factors involving solar, volcanic and oceanic activity fully explain the Earth’s tropospheric and surface temperatures. And that CO2 plays no significant role.”

This conflicting data had for several years brought an uncomfortable feeling among many believers, what is called “cognitive dissonance,” but most all were able to shake it off, especially when they have so many colleagues riding the same grant gravy trains that benefit from the failing theory or have business financial potential and/or personal political ideologies that the plans to address the so-called catastrophic anthropogenic global warming fits so nicely into.

A fine work over five decades ago, “When Prophecies Fail,” by Leon Festinger, a social psychologist, helps explain how they can do that and why we may not see a widespread rapid return to sanity on global climate change even as the pause resumes and other evidence mounts that the prevailing greenhouse theories are flawed, global warming has ceased and climate change may be largely due to natural variability.

When disconfirmatory (contrary) evidence is presented, Festinger found one condition that often determined whether the belief is discarded or maintained with new fervor by belief with a strongly held belief. That was whether or not the individual believer has social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand strong disconfirming evidence. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, you might expect the belief to be maintained and the believers to attempt to proselytize or persuade non-members that the belief is correct even in the face of data suggesting otherwise.

Today there is a huge “social support” group of grant-toting modelers and researchers, agenda-driven or ratings-driven journalists, environmentalists, pseudo-intellectualists, government agencies and corporations that have realized green is their favorite color and see this as a way to keep green paper flowing into their coffers and pockets. We have farmers who are benefiting from the misplaced focus on alternative fuel from crops, traders and major market firms licking their chops at the prospects of big time money from carbon trading, big oil and alternative energy companies that have realized this is the vector to bigger profits, and the politicians and political activists who see it as a way to accomplish ulterior goals about changing society and increasing their powerbase.

In reality, although there is claimed consensus, scientists and the public are not so convinced. It will only be after the public realizes they have been snookered — or like in the UK, they realize the pains for adhering to the green assault on humanity is insufferable (Brexit was largely due to this) — that the situation may turn on them. We can only hope damage done here is not great or irreparable when that day finally comes.

We have all heard the outrageous claims of the green organizations and the prior administration that “global warming is the greatest peril that humanity faces.” Bill Maher’s recent opinion that perhaps sarin gas was not the most dangerous chemical poison, CO2 is, has them sensing a snake oil salesman situation. Someone needs to inform Maher that every exhaled breathe he takes emits 100 times more CO2 as in the air than he inhaled.

The late great Dr. Michael Crichton, author of the Best Seller “State of Fear” on this topic, said:

“Historically, the claim of consensus is the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming the matter is already settled.”

“Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.”

“Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus” (Galileo, Newton, Einstein, etc.).

He concluded: “There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.” We all miss the man and his work.

By the way, in “Has Science Lost its Way?” Dr. Michael Guillen reported that last year Nature, the prestigious international science journal, published a study revealing that “More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments.”

The inability to confirm research that was published in highly respected, peer-reviewed journals suggests something is very wrong with how science is being done.

They observed one of the issues was that too many scientists are actually never taught the scientific method.

Before scientists do research they ought to look at the work of Sagan, Feynman and Popper. Bad science leads to bad policies. Bad policies harm good people.

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   main.html 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 May, 2017

Obama Kicks Off First Foreign Speech With An Astonishingly False Statement On Global Warming

Former President Barack Obama told those gathered at an agricultural conference that man-made global warming was already impacting agriculture on a global scale, shrinking crop yields and raising food prices.

“Our changing climate is already making it more difficult to produce food,” Obama said at the Seeds & Chips conference in Milan, Italy Tuesday, according to The New York Times.

“We’ve already seen shrinking yields and rising food prices,” the former president said in his first speech outside the U.S. since leaving office in January.

But is global warming already hurting agriculture? There’s not a lot of evidence for that claim.

In fact, 2016 was a record year for crop yields, which have basically doubled since 2007.

Production of wheat, coarse grains and rice hit record levels in 2016, according to United Nations data. Cereal production is set to shrink 0.4 percent in 2017 “from the 2016 record high,” but “supplies are likely to remain large with next season’s cereal ending stocks remaining close to their record high opening levels,” the UN reports.

As for food prices, they’re well below recent highs hit in 2010. UN data shows the inflation-adjusted food index — the average of five commodity price indices — is just below where it was in 1965. the food price index peaked around 1975.

Some scientists predict global warming will shrink crop yields as extreme weather events, like droughts, storms and floods become more common. Crop production may improve marginally over higher latitudes, but countries at mid-and-lower latitudes could see food supplies crumble.

The Guardian reported “across Africa, yields from rain-fed agriculture could decline by as much as 50% by 2020,” summarizing UN findings.

Other experts say global warming, at least in the near-term, will be good for agriculture since increased carbon dioxide will boost plant growth. Current evidence suggests a “global greening” trend from increased CO2 from fossil fuel combustion.

Obama pocketed more than $2.7 million for Tuesday’s speech on how agriculture is contributing to global warming.

Ironically, the former president flew a private jet to Milan where a 14-car convoy and 300-strong police escort awaited him. Obama’s entourage included a helicopter and took up two floors of the more than $9,000 a night Park Hyatt hotel.

Obama’s speech focused on how greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture were on the rise, posing a problem for future development. Obama said “the energy to bring about change” in agriculture will come from ordinary people.

“It’s going to come from parents who are concerned about the impact climate change may have on their child, from business people who say how can we use less energy or waste less resources in making our products,” Obama said. “It’s millions of decisions made individually that have the ability to make changes.”

SOURCE





Tree panic: Seattle Times Climate Change Article is Dead Wrong

By Cliff Mass, Professor, Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle

The big front page story in the Seattle Times today, both online and in print, is about how climate change has caused the death of a 72-year old pine tree in the University of Washington arboretum.  Unfortunately, the underlying premise of the story is false, representing another unfortunate example of exaggerating the impacts of global warming.

The writer of the story, Linda Mapes, could not have been more explicit:

"The cause of death was climate change: steadily warming and drier summers, that stressed the tree in its position atop a droughty knoll"

So, lets check the data and determine the truth.   My first stop was the nice website of the Office of the Washington State Climatologist (OWSC), where they have a tool for plotting climatological data.  Here is the summer (June-August) precipitation for the Seattle Urban Site, about a mile away from the tree in question.   It indicates an upward trend (increasing precipitation) over the period available (1895-2014), not the decline claimed by the article.

Or lets go to the Western Region Climate Center website and plot the precipitation for the same period, considering the entire Puget Sound lowlands (see below) using the NOAA/NWS climate division data set and for June through September.  Very similar to the Seattle Urban Site.  Not much overall trend, but there is some natural variability, with a minor peak in the 70s and 80s.

It is also important to note that summer precipitation is relatively low in our region--most our precipitation arrives in four months from late fall to midwinter. Looking at annual precipitation (see below), we find the same story:  modest upward trend in precipitation.

So the claim that summers in our region are drying is simple false.  Busted.

So what about temperature?  Let's examine the maximum temperature trend at the same Seattle Urban location for summer (June through August).  There is a slight upward trend since 1895 by .05F per decade. Virtually nothing.

 What about the period in which the poor lived (it was planted in 1948)?  As shown below, temperatures actually COOLED during that period.

You get the message, the claim that warming summer temperatures produced by "climate change" somehow killed this pine is simply without support by the facts.

So the bottom line of all this is that the climate record disproves the Seattle Times claim that warming and drying killed that pine tree in the UW arboretum.  There is no factual evidence that climate change ended the 72-year life of that tree.  The fact that a non-native species was planted in a dry location and was not watered in the summer is a more probably explanation.

Why is an important media outlet not checking its facts before publishing such a front page story? Linda Mapes is an excellent writer, who has done great service describing the natural environment of our region.  Why was she compelled to put a climate change spin on a story about the death of a non-native tree?

Now something personal.  Every time I correct misinformation in the media like this, I get savaged by some "environmentalists" and media.  I am accused of being a denier, a skeptic, an instrument of the oil companies, and stuff I could not repeat in this family friendly blog.  Sometimes it is really hurtful.  Charles Mudede of the Stranger is one of worst of the crowd, calling me "dangerous" and out of my mind (see example below).

A postdoc at the UW testified at the Environment Committee of  the Washington State House saying that I was a contrarian voice.  I spoke to her in person a few days later and asked where my science was wrong--she could not name one thing.  But she told me that my truth telling was "aiding" the deniers.  We agreed to disagree.

My efforts do not go unnoticed at the UW, with my department chairman and leadership in the UW Climate Impacts Group telling me of "concerns" with my complaints about hyped stories on oyster deaths and snowpack.    One UW professor told me that although what I was saying was true, I needed to keep quiet because I was helping "the skeptics."  Probably not good for my UW career.

I believe scientists must provide society with the straight truth, without hype or exaggeration, and that we must correct false or misleading information in the media.   It is not our role to provide inaccurate information so that society will "do the right thing."   History is full of tragic examples of deceiving the public to promote the "right thing"--such as weapons of mass destruction claims and the Iraq War.

Global warming forced by increasing greenhouse gases is an extraordinarily serious challenge to our species that will require both mitigation (reducing emissions) and adaptation (preparing ourselves to deal with the inevitable changes).  Society can only make the proper decisions if they have scientists' best projections of what will happen in the future, including the uncertainties.

SOURCE





Top NASA Climate Modeler Admits Predictions Are ‘Mathematically Impossible’

Top American Climatologist, an expert in climate modeling, exposes the fallacy that current climate models provide a realistic or reliable prediction of future climate change. In a 1-2-3 step guide to disposing of the global warming debate Dr. Duane Thresher says successful modeling with modern computers is “mathematically impossible.”

Dr Thresher is among the elite of computer climate modelers. He has performed extensive work in climate proxy modeling at the University of Alaska and the Alfred Wegener Institute, Germany. He earned his PhD in Earth & Environmental Sciences (climate modeling/proxies) from Columbia University and at NASA he worked for Dr. James Hansen, the father of global warming, and Dr. Gavin Schmidt.

Dr Thresher offers his step-by-step guide below:

1. It is fundamentally mathematically impossible for climate models to predict climate.

Chaos Theory’s Butterfly Effect is usually described as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Japan resulting in a hurricane in the Atlantic. This is not artistic hyperbole, this is mathematical reality.

Climate is a quintessential example of this phenomenon.

Unless climate models do the absolutely impossible and account for even a butterfly’s wings flapping, particularly when they are initialized, and then calculate with infinite precision, they can not predict climate.

Climate models are just more complex/chaotic weather models, which have a theoretical maximum predictive ability of just 10 days into the future. Predicting climate decades or even just years into the future is a lie, albeit a useful one for publication and funding.

Qualified climate modelers know all this but almost all won’t publicly admit it out of fear for their careers.

2. Climate proxies are far too inaccurate, unreliable, and sparse to prove anything about past global climate, e.g. that it was colder.

Climate proxies are things like tree rings and ice cores. Given old methods and instruments, even historical climate measurements have to be considered climate proxies.

They are called climate “proxies” because they are substitutes for real climate measurements. Obviously, there are no instruments in these climate proxies so how is it done? The climate measurements have to be inferred from loosely-related characteristics of the proxy, e.g. temperature from tree ring widths. This usually involves primitive modeling or misuse of statistics. It is thus inaccurate and unreliable well beyond what is required for the conclusions drawn.

Climate proxies are very sparse. A single measurement often has to represent thousands of square miles or more, particularly in remote ocean regions, and is usually not representative of that area (e.g. sampled trees are not chosen randomly) or doesn’t even have a knowable bias. A single temperature for the Earth averaged from these measurements is meaningless and absurd.

The reason for using climate proxies is that there is nothing else, which is not a good reason … unless you have to get published or funded.

3. Scientific consensus is not proof of global warming, just publication and funding bias.

Scientific consensus = all published research shows global warming.

Climate model/proxy research that does not show global warming will not get published or funded because of:

Non-publication of negative results (no global warming found)
Fearful self-censorship

Conflict of interest (a need to get results, regardless of validity, that further careers)

Corrupt fanatical unqualified “working” scientists

Censorship by established scientists in a fundamentally-flawed peer review process (peers are all-too-human competitors)

Corruption of climate science overall

SOURCE






Forget Price Caps: UK Climate Policies Will Add Nearly £600 To Energy Bills

Theresa May’s “cap” on energy saves £1.4 billion a year; this will be dwarfed by the additional £7.4 billion a year due to be added to our energy bills under the Climate Change Act

I would defy anyone unfortunate enough to hear the Today programme at 8.10 last Tuesday morning to have made head or tail of an interview in which our Business Secretary, Greg Clark, droned on for 10 minutes with Justin Webb about the Tories’ promise of a “cap” on energy bills. The essence of this flood of deathly jargon was that, thanks to something called the Competition and Markets Authority, this could save 17 million households a total of £1.4 billion a year.

What Clark and Webb never mentioned, of course, were the figures recently published by the Office for Budget Responsibility, showing the soaring cost of those green subsidies and taxes we all pay for through our energy bills. These are officially projected to more than double by the end of this Parliament, from £7.3 billion last year to £14.7 billion, or from £292 a year for each household to £565.

In other words, even if Theresa May’s “cap” on energy saves £1.4 billion a year, this will be dwarfed by the additional £7.4 billion a year due to be added to our bills under the Climate Change Act.

But if you ask any candidates in this make-believe election what they think of those figures, almost certainly they will never have heard of them. If they come to your door, try it.

SOURCE





The end of petrol and diesel cars? All vehicles will be electric by 2025, says expert

Greenie false prophecies never stop

No more petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks will be sold anywhere in the world within eight years. The entire market for land transport will switch to electrification, leading to a collapse of oil prices and the demise of the petroleum industry as we have known it for a century.

This is the futuristic forecast by Stanford University economist Tony Seba. His report, with the deceptively bland title Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030, has gone viral in green circles and is causing spasms of anxiety in the established industries.

Prof Seba’s premise is that people will stop driving altogether. They will switch en masse to self-drive electric vehicles (EVs) that are ten times cheaper to run than fossil-based cars, with a near-zero marginal cost of fuel and an expected lifespan of 1m miles.

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   main.html 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 May, 2017

Oceans are at the 'edge' of losing all oxygen: Event could lead to mass sea life extinction that will last a MILLION years

I could spend time pointing out the leaps of logic committed below but I will simply look at a conventional commentary on the Toarcian event. They predict a repeat of that event

Quote 1:  "The T-OAE has been extensively studied in the past three decades although there is no general consensus about the causes or triggering mechanisms behind this event"

Quote 2: "Results from the Paris Bassin as in other localities indicates that the increasing greenhouse conditions may have caused acidification in the oceans, hampering carbonate bio-mineralisation, and provoking a dramatical loss in the CO2 storage capacity of the oceans."

Quote 2 is very confused.  The statement, "increasing greenhouse conditions may have caused acidification in the oceans' is the opposite of what happens.  Warmer oceans outgas CO2, leading to a reduction in carbonic acid and increased ALKALINITY of the oceans. But from that illogic they do in fact somehow come to a correct conclusion, that warmer oceans carry less CO2.

So, basically nobody understands what caused the Toarcian event and others like it and the degree of confusion in the thinking about it offers little hope of any increased understanding.  We would have to understand the causes of such events to predict them.

The thing that seems to have sent the galoots below off into their voyage of non-sequiturs is the finding that oceanic oxygen content has decreased slightly in the last 50 years.  But that is no surprise.  There was a slight temperature rise over the early  part of that period so we expect the oceans to outgas some O2 over that period.  So the non sequitur indulged in there is to expect that the O2 would continue to fall, which in an extreme would one day give a Toarcian-like end point. 

But will it continue to fall?  Nobody knows.  What we do know is that global temperatures have shown no significant net movement for nearly 20 years, despite a considerable CO2 rise over that period. NASA/GISS Tell us that the global December 2016 temperature anomaly was .77, which was DOWN on December 2015 (1.10)and even slightly down on 2014 (.79).  So the recent trend is downwards, for what that is worth. 

In all the circumstances, then, there is NO WAY we can link Toarcian-like events to anything in the present time.  The scare is nonsense


University of Exeter scientists fear the modern ocean is 'on the edge of anoxia' - when the oceans are depleted of oxygen. And while this dramatic drop in oceanic oxygen comes to a natural end, it takes about a million years.

Scientists believe the modern ocean is 'on the edge of anoxia' - and the Exeter researchers say it is 'critical' to limit carbon emissions to prevent this.

A study last year by researchers from the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research, showed that while the levels of carbon dioxide are increasing, the concentration of oxygen in the oceans is decreasing.

Researchers analysed over 50 years’ worth of data looking at a range of parameters from ocean salinity to temperature. From this, they calculated that over this period, the world’s oceans have lost an average two per cent of their oxygen.

The main process through which the oceans are losing their oxygen is the heating of the water. As oceans warm, they lose their ability to trap dissolved oxygen.

And because the warming is normally contained to the upper levels of the water, it decreases the density of the surface water, preventing it from dropping to the depths and taking oxygen with it.

Studying what happened during the Jurassic period, they found the drop in oxygen causes more organic carbon to be buried in sediment on the ocean floor.

This eventually leads to rising oxygen in the atmosphere which ultimately re-oxygenates the ocean. But it took a million years to get the balance right again.

Lead researcher PhD student Sarah Baker said it was now 'critical' for modern humans to limit carbon emissions to prevent this. She said: 'Once you get into a major event like anoxia, it takes a long time for the Earth's system to rebalance.

'This shows the vital importance of limiting disruption to the carbon cycle to regulate the Earth system and keep it within habitable bounds.'

The researchers studied the Toarcian Oceanic Anoxic Event, which took place 183 million years ago. This was characterised by a major disturbance to the global carbon cycle, depleted oxygen in Earth's oceans and mass extinction of marine life.

Numerical models predicted that increased burial of organic carbon - due to less decomposition and more plant and marine productivity in the warmer, carbon-rich environment - should drive a rise in atmospheric oxygen, causing the end of an anoxic event after one million years.

Testing the theory they examined fossil charcoal samples to see evidence of wildfires - as such fires would be more common in oxygen-rich times.

These were taken at Mochras in Wales and Peniche, Portugal.

They found a period of increased wildfire activity started one million years after the onset of the anoxic event, and lasted for about 800,000 years.

Ms Baker added: 'We argue that this major increase in fire activity was primarily driven by increased atmospheric oxygen.

'Our study provides the first fossil-based evidence that such a change in atmospheric oxygen levels could occur in a period of one million years.'

The increase in fire activity may have also helped end ocean anoxia by burning and reducing the amount of plants on land.

This is because plants can help to erode rocks on the land that contain nutrients needed for marine life - therefore with fewer plants, fewer nutrients are available to be carried to the sea and used to support marine life in the oceans.

Less marine life - that would use oxygen to breathe - would mean less oxygen being used in the oceans, and could therefore help the oceans to build up a higher oxygen content, ending anoxia.

It may therefore be essential to maintain the natural functioning of wildfire activity to help regulate the Earth system in the long-term.

SOURCE




Donald Trump targets the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt

TR was a bit of a nut so that is no offence.  Trump recently signed an executive order directing Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to reassess the size of national monuments designated under the Antiquities Act of 1906. No president has ever reversed another president’s designation of an American national monument. But Trump is threatening to do just that.

I can't tell you how excited I am about this. Many if not most of the problems we have trace their lineage back to PROGRESSIVE Theodore Roosevelt, and in particular, Theodore Roosevelt's abuse of executive orders to get around congress and enact his conservation agenda.

All this Bundy Ranch stuff? Thank you Theodore Roosevelt.  All the land grabs over the last few years? Thank you Theodore Roosevelt. "I gots my pen and my phone, I don't need congress" - Obama. Thank you Theodore Roosevelt.

He was the first one. TR had his pen and phone too. Conservation was arguably the biggest piece of TR's huge government agenda, and he was the first president to issue over 1000 executive orders. No president prior to TR comes even close.

Enter the announcement of Trump's executive order regarding the Antiquities Act. Quick little fact: Who are the two presidents who used (abused) the Antiquities Act the most? FDR and Obama, of course. If only we could get a full-scale repeal of the Antiquities act, that is exactly what we need. With the Antiquities Act, there is no baby in the bathwater, so it is safe to chuck it out the window. The states are more than capable of this work.

I'm not a fan at all of executive orders, they smack of monarchist decrees and we separated away from King George precisely because the "King Thing" is a proven failure. However, we have to recognize the position we are in: much of the garbage of progressivism was born of executive orders, so for the most part only executive orders are going to undo other executive orders. That's just how to get progressivism from our current position.

Hopefully, we see more of this. The sooner we can overturn much of this Theodore Roosevelt-era garbage, the sooner we can put an end to progressivism once and for all. The fact is that we cannot rid ourselves of big government progressivism(in part), until we get past the Antiquities Act and the notion that only big national government is sufficient. I trust the state of Arizona with the Canyon. I trust Tennessee, North Carolina with the Smokies. I trust the state of Oregon with Crater Lake. I trust New York with Niagara. I trust Texas with the Sabine and Crockett forests. I trust Florida with the Everglades. I trust Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, etc etc with the Great Lakes. We do not need big daddy big nanny to do it. Big government does more harm than good. Always.

(As an aside note, I wish I had my own cartoon of a guy with a jackhammer going after the foundation, because that's the proper imagery needed to convey here. TR is the deepest foundation of big government progressivism.)

Politico has this headline: "Teddy Roosevelt Is Rolling Over in His Grave" [Politico describes TR as a conservative.  He was not.  He was for a time a member of the progressive wing of the Republican party but later left to form his own "Progressive" party, popularly known as the "Bull Moose" party]

Good, I want to make them roll more frequently and roll faster. If more progressives are rolling in their graves, that means we're moving toward smaller government. When government loses, the people win.

There's nothing better than that. Progressivism has destroyed way too many people's lives, enough is enough.

SOURCE






Climate – conflict link debunked

The Oxford Martin School hosted a talk yesterday, “Climate violence?” presented by Professor Clionadh Raleigh from the University of Sussex. There is an introduction to her talk here, and the whole thing is available on YouTube:

Andrew Montford (now Deputy Director of GWPF) has a report on the talk.

The talk is about 35 minutes long and is followed by questions and discussion.

Near the beginning she gives her conclusion:

“There is very little evidence to suggest that the conflict and protest patterns that we see across developing countries is in any way correlated to climate change.”

A bit later she says that there is a widespread assumption that conflict occurs naturally under adverse weather conditions, but in fact the opposite occurs – cooperation is far more likely in difficult conditions. But cooperation doesn’t make headline news, so we don’t hear about it in the media.

For similar reasons, I think it is unlikely that the Guardian or the BBC will report on Prof Raleigh’s lecture.

SOURCE





Windmill opposition in Scotland

Anti-windfarm campaigners have warned of a legal challenge if a slimmed-down scheme near Beauly is approved.

The 10-turbine proposal for Kiltarlity follows the Scottish Government’s rejection of a previous 23-tower plan for the same site at Blairmore Farm.

Druim Ba Sustainable Energy’s latest design has been the subject of a public inquiry over the past fortnight after its rejection by Highland Council planners on the grounds of visual intrusion.

The first proposal triggered one of the strongest campaigns of opposition mounted against a Highland windfarm plan.

Objectors said yesterday a judicial review would follow if government ministers consented the new proposal.

They echoed inquiry evidence from a planning expert that it would breach the council’s recently adopted onshore windfarm guidelines because the site is within a no-go zone for large or medium turbines.

Ian Kelly also advised that “approval would severely undermine the public’s confidence in what’s meant to be a plan-led system.”

If the reporter Robert Seaton recommends approval, turbines up to 414ft high could be built barely a mile from homes.

An expert witness for DBSE argued that the structures would not be “overbearing or dominant.”

No-one from DBSE could be contacted yesterday for comment.

Beauly-based anti windfarm campaigner Lyndsey Ward, an observer at the inquiry, said: “There should be no Druim Ba or Cnoc an Eas windfarm. No amount of spinning can alter guidelines that state ‘no scope for medium or large scale turbines’.

“Approval of either would give objectors a secure route to a judicial review.”

SOURCE






Australia: Wood heating contributes to worsening air quality in Melbourne

People are forced to heat their homes in a way they know causes air pollution but are forced to by the high cost of Federal & State climate policies

On Friday morning, air quality tracker AirVisualEarth showed that Melbourne's PM2.5 levels (smoke particles) were higher than those in Shanghai, China.

The EPA issued the warning, saying there would be poor air quality in  with a band of haze over parts of Geelong, Melbourne and the Latrobe Valley.

People at risk include those over 65, children 14 years and younger, pregnant women and those with existing heart or lung conditions. People with asthma should follow their asthma management plan, the EPA said. It warned those at risk to reduce prolonged or heavy physical activity and, where possible, limit the time spent outdoors.

EPA group manager of applied sciences Dr Anthony Boxshall said the plummet in air quality was a result of combination of factors including current weather conditions and an increase in people sparking up wood fire heaters due to the chilly weather.

Stable weather conditions, namely a lack of wind, has resulted in a build-up of PM2.5 in the atmosphere, Dr Boxshall said.

"Our environmental conditions are a combination of everything the environment throws at us and what we throw at the environment," he said.

"Any city produces pollution from cars, factories, homes, trucks and open fires... but we are not seeing any unusual increase in pollution it's the weather system, including the stillness of climate conditions, which are causing the changes in air quality."

In Victoria in November nine people died and thousands were hospitalised due to the world's worst recorded thunderstorm asthma event.

However, Dr Boxshall said this weekend's conditions were completely different to thunderstorm asthma.

"Thunderstorm asthma was pollen which of course isn't a pollutant it's a naturally occurring event this is way less dramatic than that," he said. "That event was an unprecedented and unusual event."

"But we still urge asthmatics to be vigilant and and follow their asthma management plan."

Dr Boxshall added health authorities and hospitals had so far not recorded an increase in people presenting with respiratory problems.  

However, smoke from household wood heaters, motor vehicles and other urban sources have worsened conditions.

PM2.5 particles are tiny fragments, which are up to 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

The EPA has advised anyone with a heart or lung condition to take their medication as prescribed by their doctor.

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   main.html 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 May, 2017

Making a muckle out of a mickle

My heading above is in Scots.  It means making something big out of something little.  It's the expression that leapt to mind when reading "More errors identified in contrarian climate scientists' temperature estimates" from diehard Warmist, Prof. John Abraham.  He has been refuted many times so I see no point in reproducing his effusion, let alone fisking it. His modus operandi is to present as established fact Warmist beliefs, with no supporting references to substantiate them.  He has to do that. Most of them are at best controversial if not outright false. 

Like most Warmists he has to clutch at any straw that might support his beliefs.  And he has found a recent paper that appears to have given him an erection. I reproduce the abstract below.

The paper is not even about global temperatures.  It is about the Arctic only.  It reports minor disagreements in the way the satellite data for the Arctic is presented.  It does not address the fact that the various methods concerned give global temperatures that correlate around .90 and that the disagreements in reported temperatures are in hundredths of a degree.  But, most importantly, all the measurements show the same trend -- global temperatures flatlined for many years with the only rise coinciding with the recent El Nino weather oscillation. Naught for the comfort of Warmists there.


A Comparative Analysis of Data Derived from Orbiting MSU/AMSU Instruments

R. Eric Swanson

Abstract

Spencer and Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) recently introduced a new method to process MSU/AMSU satellite brightness temperature data with their version 6 (v6) data. A comparison of UAH v6 north polar lower stratospheric (TLS) data with that from Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) is presented, indicating a possible bias between 1986 and 1988. Comparing UAH and NOAA Center for Satellite Applications and Research (NOAA) TLS data produces a similar result. An additional analysis utilizing midtropospheric (TMT) data also found a similar bias. Comparing the NOAA TMT data for the May 2016 release against UAH and RSS TMT evidenced another excursion, dated at the middle of 2005, that was corrected in later releases. These comparisons reinforce the concerns expressed by other analysts regarding the merging procedure for UAH v6, repeating similar concerns regarding the earlier UAH v5 products. Any biases in the UAH, RSS, or STAR products would impact the trends calculated for these products and could explain the differences between these trends. Biases in the UAH series would also impact the UAH TLTv6 lower-troposphere product, which is a linear combination of the UAH TMT, tropopause temperature (TTP), and TLS series.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JTECH-D-16-0121.1





A Warmist attempt to be objective



SOURCE





Land, energy and mineral lockdowns

Too many oil, gas, coal, rare earth and other vital resources are still off limits

Paul Driessen

President Trump has directed Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to review recent land withdrawals under the 1906 Antiquities Act, to determine whether some should be reversed or reduced in size.

The review is long overdue. The act was intended to protect areas of historic, prehistoric or scientific value, with areas designated as monuments to be the smallest size compatible with the proper care and management of objects or sites to be protected. The first designation, the 1,347-acre Devils Tower National Monument (NM) respected that intent, as have most designations since then.

However, some were enormous withdrawals; several were made with poor public outreach or inadequate consultation with people who would be most directly and severely affected; 26 of the 27 monuments to be reviewed are over 100,000 acres in size; and the final one involves deficient consultation.

Arguably the two greatest Antiquities Act abuses affected Utah. The 1,880,461-acre Grand Staircase Escalante NM was designated by President Clinton in large part to make billion-dollar coal deposits off limits. Even Utah Governor Michael Levitt did not learn of it until it was a done deal (Chapter Twelve). President Obama designated the 1,351,849-acre Bear Ears monument three weeks before leaving office, many Utahans say to make still more energy resources off limits to exploration and development.

Grand Staircase alone is equal to Delaware and Rhode Island combined. It and Great Bears together are larger than Connecticut. They are far larger than any of the national parks in Utah. And they are in addition to Utah’s five other national monuments, five national parks, four national recreation and conservation areas, thousands of miles of national trails, six national forests, 31 national wilderness areas, and millions of acres in other restrictive land use categories.

Some of these areas truly are unique, beautiful, spectacular. I’ve visited and hiked in many of them in Utah, other western states and Alaska. Our national parks in particular should be protected. But we have gone overboard, and far too many areas have been put in lockdown specifically to block energy and mineral development. Forest Service officials and Sierra Club officers have said so right to my face.

Eastern and Midwestern residents cannot imagine the extent or impact of Federal Government ownership, management and control of lands in the eleven westernmost states and Alaska. While federal agencies own just 0.3% of Connecticut and Iowa, and 0.6% of New York, they own, manage and control 63% of all land in Utah; 61% in Alaska and Idaho; 80% in Nevada; 29% to 53% in the other western states.

That means virtually every revenue-producing, recreational and other activity is regulated, restricted, prohibited or under attack in courts and other venues. No timber cutting in national forests, fostering massive wildfires. No vehicles, wheelchairs, energy or mineral exploration in wilderness and many other areas. Even grazing and watershed management are under assault throughout the West.

All of these restrictive designations should be reviewed by Congress and Executive Branch agencies.

As of 1994, when consulting geologist Courtland Lee and I prepared a detailed analysis, over 410 million acres were effectively off limits to mineral exploration and development. That’s 66% of the nation’s public lands – an area equal to Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming combined. The situation is far worse today – posing a critical public policy problem.

Because of processes unleashed by plate tectonics and other geologic forces, these mountain, desert and other lands contain some of the most highly mineralized rock formations in North America. They almost certainly contain numerous world-class deposits of oil, gas, gold, silver, platinum, molybdenum and rare-earth metals – essential for modern civilization. They wait for us to find them, using modern prospecting technologies that can be carried in airplanes and backpacks, leaving barely a trace – but letting us know what is there, so that we can make informed land management decisions.

Environmentalists claim that even a single mine or oil well in these areas would destroy their wilderness character and ecological value. That is absurd, considering that many of these areas are the size of Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont or even West Virginia. Moreover, unlike wind turbine and solar panel installations across thousands or tens of thousands of acres in perpetuity, modern mines and drill pads are comparatively small – and are restored back to natural conditions when the operations have concluded.

Equally important, wind and solar generate minuscule amounts of electricity, unreliably, at unpredictable times – and require far more land and workers per unit of output – than coal or natural gas. In fact, Coal generated an incredible 7,745 megawatt-hours of electricity per worker; natural gas 3,812 MWH per worker; wind a measly 836 MWH for every employee; and solar an abysmal 98 MWH per worker. That’s part of the reason why oil, gas and coal still provide 80% of America’s and the world’s energy.

America’s national security situation was affected when we depended on often unfriendly foreign sources for oil – before hydraulic fracturing unleashed record production from state and private lands.

Now we are dependent on different, still often unfriendly foreign suppliers for rare earth metals and other raw materials that are essential for smart phones and smart bombs, stealth fighters, digital cameras, computer hard drives, wind turbine magnets, photovoltaic solar panels, hybrid and electric car batteries, compact fluorescent light bulbs, catalytic converters, and countless other modern and future technologies.

China produces 97% of the world’s rare-earth oxides, largely controls world markets, and increasingly uses rare earths in-house, to manufacture products for sale overseas. That means most jobs stay in China, even though the rare earths are mined, processed and turned into finished products under environmental and worker health and safety standards that would get operations shut down instantly in the USA.

However, China’s estimated reserves are only one-third of known global reserves, and much less than that of potential economically producible rare earth resources – many of which could be in the United States. In fact, one of the largest known rare earth deposits is near California’s Mojave Desert. It had been in production, but legal actions, excessive regulations and low foreign prices forced a long suspension of operations, and Molycorp filed for bankruptcy in 2015, citing a heavy debt load and other problems.

That deposit underscores the enormous potential for finding billion-dollar deposits of numerous vital minerals right here in the USA – if we are permitted to look for them.

President Trump’s decisions to review Antiquities Act land closures, ease restrictions on onshore and offshore oil and gas drilling, and end stalemates over the Dakota and Keystone Pipelines are excellent steps in implementing his vision for American job creation and economic revitalization.

The President and Congress could also explore ways to get more oil flowing to the Trans Alaska Pipeline, which needs certain minimal amounts in the pipe for the oil to move during frigid weather. Recent discoveries along the North Slope have helped, and perhaps Prudhoe Bay’s declining oil production can be spurred some more by fracking. Ultimately, though, more Alaskan areas must be opened for drilling, and that will require White House, federal agency and congressional action.

Congress should also take a leadership role, by launching discussions about how much western state land really needs to remain under federal control, and how many of our best energy and mineral prospects really need to be kept off limits. Those land use policies severely affect job creation and economic opportunities for states, communities, families and our nation as a whole, for little environmental benefit.

Modern industrialized civilizations cannot long exist without the vital resources that come out of holes in the ground. Even wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars and internet services require a plethora of metals and other minerals – plus fossil fuel energy to extract those resources and convert them into usable products. It’s time to have a civil conversation about all of this.

Via email






EPA seeks governors’ input in rewriting Obama water rule

The Trump administration is reaching out to state governors for help in rewriting former President Barack Obama’s controversial water pollution rule.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Scott Pruitt, along with acting Assistant Secretary for the Army Douglas Lamont, sent a letter Tuesday to governors asking for their “input and wisdom” on what bodies of water should be regulated by the federal government in the Clean Water Act.

Following an executive order President Trump signed in February, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers are working on a two-step process to rewrite the Obama regulation known as the Clean Water Rule, which asserted federal power over small bodies of water such as wetlands and stream headwaters.

The agencies are first formally repealing that rule, and will then write a new version with a smaller reach to define the jurisdiction of the federal Clean Water Act.
The Trump administration officials said they are prioritizing the role of states throughout the process, something they have accused Obama of not emphasizing.

Thirty-one states — mostly led by Republicans — sued the Obama administration to stop the 2015 rule, joining with business and industry groups.

“EPA is restoring states’ important role in the regulation of water,” Pruitt said in a statement.

“Like President Trump, I believe that we need to work with our state governments to understand what they think is the best way to protect their waters, and what actions they are already taking to do so. We want to return to a regulatory partnership, rather than regulate by executive fiat.”

The Tuesday letter went to the governors of each state and U.S. territory.

“We believe this is an important step in the process prior to proposing regulations that may have implications on federalism,” Pruitt and Lamont wrote.

The February executive order asks the agencies to write their new rule in the framework laid out by the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in Rapanos v. United States, and Pruitt and Lamont told the states they are carrying out that mission.

Scalia said in a 2006 plurality opinion that the Clean Water Act should only cover waterways that are “relatively permanent.”

Scalia’s opinion was only joined by four justices, and subsequent federal court decisions have not relied on that test. So the Obama administration instead followed a separate concurrence by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who concluded that waters with a “significant nexus” to navigable waterways should be covered.

The EPA started the outreach process to states last month in a meeting with state and local environmental regulators, during which EPA officials discussed possible approaches to the new rule under Trump’s executive order.

The administration plans to eventually propose a formal regulation to enforce its new definition, at which point it will invite public comments, making any necessary changes and then make the rule final.

A federal appeals court put a hold on the Obama rule in 2015, blocking its enforcement before it could take effect.

SOURCE






Largest US Solar Panel Maker Files for Bankruptcy After Receiving $206 Million in Subsidies

So much for "Green jobs"

The company once hailed as Europe’s largest solar panel producer filed for bankruptcy Wednesday, blaming cheap Chinese panels for flooding the market.

“The ongoing price erosion and the development of the business” has left the company “over-indebted and thus obliged to file for insolvency proceedings,” SolarWorld, which is also the largest U.S. solar panel maker, said in a statement.

The filing comes after SolarWorld was forced to lay off employees earlier this year. The company employs around 3,000 people, including 800 in Hillsboro, Oregon, and was one of the few German-based solar companies to survive a recent market downturn.

SolarWorld is only the latest bankrupt solar company to blame the Chinese. U.S.-based Suniva Inc. filed for bankruptcy in April, also citing stiff competition from Chinese solar panel makers.

Suniva even asked the Trump administration to increase tariffs on Chinese solar panel imports. SolarWorld backed the call, saying China has found ways to circumvent current tariffs.

“The case of Suniva dramatically demonstrates that the U.S. solar manufacturing industry still suffers from unfair trade,” Juergen Stein, U.S. president of SolarWorld, said in a statement.

“China now has managed to circumvent and violate existing trade defense measures in several ways and again incited a ruinous price race to the bottom, destroying U.S. manufacturing jobs,” Stein said.

Not everyone in the solar industry agrees increased tariffs would be a good thing. The U.S. company Sunnova sent a letter to the U.S. trade commission arguing the “imposition of tariffs on solar cells and panels will significantly harm the U.S. economy by destroying jobs.”

The Obama administration imposed tariffs up to 35 percent on solar panel products imported from certain Chinese manufacturers. The 2014 tariff doesn’t seem to have drastically changed the overall industry’s economics.

The solar industry’s biggest problem is likely the very mechanism that led to its rise: lucrative subsidies.

European subsidies, mostly in Germany, led to a massive expansion of the companies’ green energy industry, but eventually subsidies became their undoing as cheaper solar panels from China began to win out.

Cuts to subsidies in Europe only made things worse for the solar industry, further ensuring cheap Chinese panels would win out. A similar story played out in the U.S. where lucrative federal and state subsidies spurred green energy.

SolarWorld has gotten a whopping $115 million in federal and state grants and tax subsidies since 2012, according to the Union-backed group Good Jobs First. And that’s on top of the nearly $91 million in federal loan guarantees the company got during that time.

SolarWorld lost 80 percent of its stock value after it announced bankruptcy filings Wednesday.

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   main.html or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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





12 May, 2017

Earth could break through a major climate threshold in the next 15 years, scientists warn

More speculation from the usual suspects.  Based as usual on models with no known predictive skill.  Only of interest to true believers

Global temperatures could exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above their pre-industrial levels within the next 15 years, according to a new scientific study, crossing the first threshold under the Paris climate agreement and placing the world at a potentially dangerous level of climate change.

The report comes as climate agreement participants are watching the United States — where the Trump administration is debating whether to withdraw from the Paris accord — and as  scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are working on a special report about the 1.5-degree goal (equivalent to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and the consequences of overshooting it.

That IPCC’s upcoming special report and the increasing urgency about minimizing global warming were one impetus for the study, according to co-author Benjamin Henley, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “We are working on a number of scientific avenues to help inform that report,” he told The Washington Post.

The study focuses on a natural planetary system known as the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, or IPO (it’s also sometimes referred to as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation). It’s an alternating pattern of ocean temperatures that shifts periodically between warm and cool phases, helping to drive temperature and weather patterns all over the world.

During cool, or “negative,” phases, tropical regions of the Pacific Ocean tend to be colder, and the global mean temperature is lower. The system is similar to the El Niño/La Niña cycle, the major difference being that phases of the IPO tend to last much longer — sometimes a decade or more. The phenomenon is believed to be a natural form of climate variability unrelated to human-caused climate change, although it does have the potential to influence the progression of global warming.

For most of the 2000s, the IPO has been in a negative phase, and scientists think its cooling effect has helped to slightly offset the effect of climate change, an explanation for the so-called global warming pause in the first part of the 21st century. As multiple studies have pointed out, this temporary slowdown is consistent with the overall long-term warming trend and in no way suggests that human-induced climate change is not occurring. Rather, this natural variation in the global climate helped to slightly blunt those effects. 

Many scientists believe that the planet is now transitioning back into a positive, or warm, phase, which could amplify, rather than offset, human-caused climate warming. This means we could reach milestone temperature thresholds faster than we would if the IPO had remained in its negative phase. 

That’s the conclusion of the new study, written by Henley and Andrew King of the University of Melbourne. Using model projections of future climate warming under a business-as-usual scenario, they suggest that the Earth could hit the 1.5-degree temperature threshold as early as 2025, while the continuation of the negative phase probably would delay this event until after 2030. 

The exact difference in timing depends on how we define the milestone itself, the researchers point out. We could say we’ve hit the threshold the first year the global mean temperature is 1.5 degrees warmer than it was during the preindustrial era, regardless of how the temperature fluctuates after that point.

Or we could say it has happened when the mean temperature meets this point over the course of a five-year period or longer. Or, because global mean temperature tends to wiggle up and down a bit from one year to the next, we could say it’s the point at which we cross the 1.5-degree threshold and never dip below it again. 

Generally, however, the models suggested it would occur between 2025 and 2029 (most likely around 2026) if the IPO shifts to a positive phase, and around 2031 if it stays in a negative phase. (They were not able to investigate the final scenario, they noted, because it probably will occur much further in the future and the number of IPO phases humans have observed since detailed record-keeping began is not sufficient to inform the model simulations required.)

“The paper emphasizes the way that natural climate variations, like the IPO, can interact with the progression of human-caused global warming,” Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, told The Washington Post. “Therefore, the timing of when we cross certain thresholds depends on the interplay between these two factors.” Meehl was not involved with the new study but has previously published research on the IPO.

And the 2025 date for hitting the 1.5-degree temperature threshold is looking more and more likely. Multiple studies in the past few years suggest that the transition to a positive IPO phase has begun. Henley said there’s some uncertainty about whether that has happened, but other scientists are more confident. Scientists John Fasullo and Kevin Trenberth, also of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, have published research to this effect, and both told The Post that we have been in a positive phase for several years now. 

In fact, Trenberth and Fasullo suggested that the paper’s conclusions have been generally known for some time. They also pointed out that the study has its limitations. Fasullo suggested that the various reasons given for the 1.5-degree temperature threshold are “deficient” for precisely the reason that they’re sensitive to climate variations such as the IPO.

Trenberth said that the 1.5 degrees — as a single, concrete number — is “pretty irrelevant.” He noted that  “it is all of the other things going on when that stage is reached that really matter: the heat waves, wildfires, droughts, extreme rainfalls, etc.”

It’s also unclear, for now, how significant the difference between a positive and negative IPO really is in terms of what the planet would look like under either scenario. The timing difference for hitting the 1.5-degree target is only about five years. At the point when a positive IPO would cause us to cross the threshold, the researchers note that the global temperature under a negative IPO would probably be about 0.2 degrees Celsius cooler. Whether there would be a significant difference in the actual climate effects produced under these different mean temperatures is uncertain. 

It’s also possible that the business-as-usual scenario used in the study won’t come to pass and that the Paris agreement will indeed drive down global emissions enough to push off 1.5 degrees for a longer period of time. (Overall, the accord lists a goal of staying “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.)

But the paper clearly indicates that the 1.5-degree target is fast approaching. In fact, according to Meehl, the paper underscores a point that many climate scientists have been warning about: that we’re increasingly likely to blow past our climate goals, and soon. And with a potential U.S. withdrawal from the Paris accord looming, this scenario is now more likely than ever. 

“Given our rapid approach, one way or another, to the 1.5-degree threshold, the most plausible way to reach it at this point looks like we would have to overshoot and attempt to come back down to it afterward with policies that would significantly reduce emissions going forward,” Meehl suggested. Some scientists have proposed technology that would actually remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thus cooling the climate in the future, but that’s a long way from being a practical solution to climate change.

“I guess the important thing is that policymakers should be aware of just how quickly we are approaching 1.5 degrees, and just realizing the urgency of reducing emissions,” Henley said. “It’s critical to keep pursuing the 1.5-degree goal.” 

SOURCE







Climate and exercise

An amusing study below.  The authors most probably wanted to show that warming made you lax and lethargic.  But they found the opposite. Pesky!

Climate change may alter human physical activity patterns

Nick Obradovich & James H. Fowler

Abstract

Regular physical activity supports healthy human functioning1,?2,?3. Might climate change—by modifying the environmental determinants of human physical activity—alter exercise rates in the future4? Here we conduct an empirical investigation of the relationship between meteorological conditions, physical activity and future climate change. Using data on reported participation in recreational physical activity from over 1.9 million US survey respondents between 2002 and 2012, coupled with daily meteorological data, we show that both cold and acutely hot temperatures, as well as precipitation days, reduce physical activity. We combine our historical estimates with output from 21 climate models and project the possible physical activity effects of future climatic changes by 2050 and 2099. Our projection indicates that warming over the course of this century may increase net recreational physical activity in the United States. Activity may increase most during the winter in northern states and decline most during the summer in southern states.

Nature Human Behaviour 1, Article number: 0097 (2017).
doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0097





Science Unsettled: Why Trump Should Dump The Paris Climate Deal

We keep hearing the "science is settled," yet once again data emerge showing that there has been no appreciable warming now for 19 years. Memo to global warming advocates: People are starting to notice.

Of course, it is pretty clear from the record that temperatures have risen in the past 150 years or so. But that should hardly be surprising, given that the period lasting into the early 19th century was known as the "Little Ice Age."

But more recently, alarms were sounded over the rise in 2015 and 2016 of global temperatures, even though the rise was a result of a temporary phenomenon — the "El Nino" effect of warming seawaters in the Pacific that create higher temperatures and weather disruptions around the world.

As Christopher Booker of the Sunday Telegraph in Britain noted this week, after being repeatedly warned about 2016 being "the hottest year on record," we now have arrived at this: "In recent months global temperatures have plummeted by more than 0.6 degrees: just as happened 17 years ago after a similarly strong El Nino."

By the way, those temperature readings are courtesy of satellites, which provide the most comprehensive and accurate temperature readings of all. Many of the scariest headlines come from far more limited, and localized, temperature readings, which can be deceptive.

Scare headlines about disappearing arctic ice are similarly being shown as overblown if not outright false. The Danish Meteorological Institute reports that since December Arctic temperatures have pretty much been below -20 degrees Celsius. Arctic ice and the Greenland ice cap are both expanding, not shrinking.

Knowing this, it pays to be skeptical of model-based data — not actual measured ones — that suggest a need to spend massive amounts of money to keep a purely hypothetical threat from taking place. It makes no sense.

We've been told that the world will have to spend 2% of GDP, or roughly $1.5 trillion each year, to keep the threat of global warming at bay — even though estimates show that even if everything requested by the Paris Climate Change Accord were done, the effect on global climate would be negligible.

What's galling is that, thanks to the fracking revolution, the U.S. is already sharply cutting its emissions of CO2. In February, the American Interest noted that "U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions hit a 25-year low the first six months of 2016, continuing the progress that the EPA says we made in 2015."

So, temperatures and the output of CO2 are both falling? Meanwhile, recent reporting suggests the models on which the supposed global warming "science" is based have turned out to be highly questionable, unable to predict even past warming — something a model is supposed to be able to do.

As we noted recently, since the 1997 Kyoto Accord, U.S. output of greenhouse gases has plummeted 7.3%, despite U.S. GDP growing by 52% during that time. Our greenhouse gas footprint is shrinking, not growing. Meanwhile, nations such as China and India that are boosting their output of greenhouse gases dramatically remain untouched by any of the recent anti-global warming agreements — including the damaging one that Obama agreed to in Paris in late 2015, but never submitted to the Senate for approval.

Which raises a big question. The Trump administration right now is under intense pressure both here and abroad to remain in Obama's fraudulent Paris climate deal, which, as far as we can tell, is intentionally designed to destroy the U.S. economy and lower Americans' standard of living.

Given the bad science and the enormous costs on which the Paris deal is based, why continue to give it any credence at all?

President Trump should do himself and the U.S. a favor and withdraw from the Paris deal. As the renewed decline in temperatures shows, the only real threat Americans face is an unholy alliance between global bureaucrats and financially corrupted scientists eager for massive amounts of new spending so that they can stay employed. Time to put them all out of business.

SOURCE





Google Asked to Label Anti-Fracking Websites as ‘Fake News’

An oil and gas drilling advocacy group published an open letter to Google asking the search engine giant to consider “purging or demoting” websites spreading misinformation about hydraulic fracturing.

Google rewrote its search engine algorithm to bury “fake news” websites in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Now the industry-funded Texans for Natural Gas wants Google to include anti-fracking websites.

“We believe many of the most prominent anti-fracking websites have content that is misleading, false, or offensive – if not all three,” the group wrote in an open letter to Google published Monday.

“As a result, we urge you to consider purging or demoting these websites from your algorithm, which in turn will encourage a more honest public discussion about hydraulic fracturing, and oil and natural gas development in general,” the group wrote.

Google raters “assess search results — to flag web pages that host hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and what the company calls ‘low-quality’ content,” Bloomberg reported in April.

Google and Facebook both were heavily criticized for allowing “fake news” to taint the presidential election.

Fracking involves injecting large amounts of water, mixed with some chemicals and sand, deep underground to unlock vast reserves of oil and natural gas. The drilling technique sparked an energy boom, but riled up environmentalists who saw it as a threat to the planet.

Texans for Natural Gas argue that environmental groups have put out plenty of false information about fracking.

The Sierra Club, for example, claims on its website that “[f]racking has contaminated the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of Americans.” It cites no evidence to back up this charge.

The Environmental Protection Agency released its final study on fracking’s impacts on groundwater in late 2016, and found no widespread evidence that fracking was contaminating groundwater.

“While the number of identified cases of drinking water contamination is small, the scientific evidence is insufficient to support estimates of the frequency of contamination,” Thomas Burke, the former deputy assistant administrator at EPA, told reporters in December.

In another example, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said fracking was harming newborn babies, pointing to a study he thought found such an association. The 2015 study in question, however, did not make that finding.

Study co-author Dr. Bruce Pitt of the University of Pittsburgh said it’s “important to stress that our study does not say that these pollutants caused the lower birth weights.”

Some environmentalists have gone even further. Sharon Wilson of Earthworks compared fracking to “rape.”

“It is a violation of justice and it is despoiling the land,” Wilson wrote in a 2015 blog post. “Victims usually suffer PTSD.”

“Claims made by the radical environmentalist campaign against hydraulic fracturing are protected by the First Amendment,” Texans for Natural Gas wrote to Google, adding:

Groups that wish to peddle misleading information about oil and natural gas are fully within their rights to do so. Many of the groups engaging in anti-fracking advocacy have devoted significant resources to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and as a result they receive significant web traffic.

But that is no reason for Google to reward such misinformation with its powerful search engine. We urge you consider adding these groups’ websites to your review of fake news and the kinds of content that you do not wish to promote.

SOURCE






Australia: Former PM John Howard says Australia's greatest immediate policy challenge was barely mentioned in the federal budget - the looming energy crisis

FORMER PM John Howard says Australia's greatest immediate policy challenge was barely mentioned in the federal budget - the looming energy crisis.

Speaking at a post-budget business breakfast with former New Zealand PM John Key, Mr Howard described the risk of supply and price rises as scandalous given Australia natural endowments of energy sources.

The nation had 38 per cent of the world's easily recoverable uranium reserves, hundreds of years of coal reserves, was a major natural gas producer and could also produce plenty of solar and wind power, he said.

"That we should be facing a potential energy crisis in the eastern states is a serious condemnation of the political process," he said.

"That gas exploration has been hampered, narrowed, redirected and prohibited by some state governments is a policy scandal of the first order."

He also claimed state governments had overzealously embraced renewable energy targets, leading to a massive increase in costs.

"When my government was defeated in 2007, the renewable energy target was two per cent and it should never have been increased?" he said.

Some major energy users have shut some operations as a result, such as Rio Tinto, while others are threatening to do so, such as Glencore coal boss Peter Freyberg in comments this week.

Mr Howard said Australia was extremely fortunate economically and was approaching a world record of consecutive quarters of growth, but was getting to the "brake linings" and falling behind competitors.

A Senate that was more diverse than in his time made the crucial economic reform needed more difficult to pass, 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   main.html 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 May, 2017

Do some conservatives agree with global warming?

By Charles Tips, Former Science Editor at the University of Texas Press

Yes. This conservative is hoping they are right.

Having followed this since my days as a science editor beginning in the early 70s, I know what the pronouncements have been and I know the science behind it. I’ve seen all the twists and turns depicted in the McKee cartoon shown in Jon Davis' answer.



Here are some indisputable climate facts. They were settled science in the 70s and remain so today.

We are in the Quaternary ice age, 2.6 million years into it
As you can see here, we get an ice age every 155 million years



The first couple of ice ages were of “snowball earth” proportions. Since then, they have lasted at least 30 million years.

We are in the Holocene epoch, an interglacial—11.7 millennia into it

As you can see here, we are the latest in a series of interglacials. Some have lasted a bit shorter than the Holocene, some a bit longer. All start and stop with great rapidity (in climate terms). Most have been warmer than the Holocene despite the lack of heavy industry by our ancestors in the genus Homo.



The periodicity of the above events owes to the Milankovitch cycles, though they have not been worked out to the point we can accurately back-model glaciations

Glacial maxes have featured ice at the latitude of Chicago and Paris a mile thick, three miles thick at the latitude of Montreal or Stockholm

Here are some facts with regard to carbon dioxide and its role in climate.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide, readily absorbed by ice and cold water, during glacial maxes falls to 200 ppm, a level highly stressful to plant life

During interglacials, its release from melting ice and warming oceans raises atmospheric CO2 to the 360 ppm range, still stressful for plant life (plants like it much higher)

The radiative-convective model that says that all things else being equal carbon dioxide and some other gases trap radiative heat in the lower troposphere (our atmosphere) warming our climate to a quantifiable amount had by the 1970s been not settled science but reliable science for almost a century

We are at ~400 ppm now with the portion above 360 ppm thought to largely reflect man’s industrial contribution. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration varies all over the place naturally as you can see in this model.



Note that the Andean-Saharan ice age at the Ordovician-Silurian boundary proceeded despite high (estimated) atmospheric carbon dioxide. Note also that the last cooling at the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary did not reach ice-age proportions.

Significant amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide were being produced at the time as the South Asia and the Australian plates repositioned across the Tethys Ocean, volatilizing massive quantities of calcareous rock.

Answer: Given that glaciations are not healthy for plants and other living things, let’s hope the “scientific consensus” is correct and that we will create enough warming to offset the coming glaciation.

Some scientists are saying we need to jack atmospheric carbon dioxide up to 700 ppm in order to forestall the next glaciation. Others say it is fait accompli. Speaking on behalf of the future of our species, I’d like a little better assurance. Given that the R-C model states that each doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide (all things else being equal, which they seldom are in climate) will produce a degree C rise in mean earth temperature.

I’m guessing it’s going to take at least a couple of doublings or more to minimize the effects of the glacial period likely to arrive anywhere from a couple of decades to a couple of millennia now.

Big However

A couple of big corrections are in order here.

First, science does not proceed by consensus and indeed has not. The overblown notion that a vast majority of climate scientists agree on AGW theory is worse than an overblown notion; it is a fabricated talking point that has been debunked time and time again: '97% Of Climate Scientists Agree' Is 100% Wrong.

Second, AGW theory came and went already, the reason we now talk about “climate change” instead. AGW was a radiative-convective theory but one that claimed that the venerable R-C models were wrong in significant respect.

AGW posited a previously overlooked forcing that would heat the air in the upper troposphere over the tropical latitudes, becoming unstable and tipping over into our atmosphere causing a jump of a degree Centigrade that would then trigger a feedback loop causing a runaway heat spike, all of this by 2004. There was a mechanism, observable effects and a timetable. There were also more than forty predictive models.

The effects were never observed (no heating was detected) and the event did not occur and has shown no sign of occurring since. Only two of the models contained the observed results, and those only at the margins. In short, AGW had no predictive ability and fell flat as a hypothesis.

Recently, this article came out in our most prestigious scientific magazine: "Climate Change Will Not Be Dangerous for a Long Time". Significantly, it’s not written by a climate scientist, but it is not having to weather any attacks from them either. This is your basic PR climbdown saying in effect “we were wrong, and we are back to the old radiative-convective understanding.

I can’t speak for all conservatives, indeed, many buy into the idea of catastrophic warming. But this conservative has been predicting that AGW theory would come to naught since first hearing about it in the late 70s. But the coming return of glaciation that first prompted me to start looking for climate books to publish… still a concern.

SOURCE






Bill Nye, the Population Control Guy Unmasks Anti-Human Bias at Base of Modern Liberal Thought

Apparently, Bill Nye is attempting to “save the world” by controlling its population.

According to Conservative Review, on the season finale of his Netflix series, “Bill Nye Saves the World,” the former children’s show star discussed overpopulation, asking a panel whether or not “we should have policies that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world.”

Bill Nye’s exchange with his panel on population control unmasks and illustrates the anti-human bias at the base of much of modern liberal progressivism. This goes all the way back to people like Paul Ehrlich, who in the 1970s was predicting worldwide population explosion resulting in widespread famine or pestilence and all-around catastrophe, none of which came true.

When you listen to people like Al Gore, Paul Ehrlich, Bill Nye and others, you get the idea that human beings are considered to be a liability to them, a threat to the Earth, and that we would be just fine if we could eliminate most human beings. Christianity, on the other hand, correctly understands that human beings are a resource, not a liability, and that while each human being has one mouth to feed, he or she has two hands, a brain, two feet, two eyes. And each human being brings more to the world than they take from it and additionally every human being is the special creation of God, and God never created a nobody.

The American Family Association weighed in on the topic in the AFA Journal: “Nye isn’t actually a scientist. He has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. He left that field to do stand-up comedy for a while before breaking into showbiz. And apparently, over the years, his basic ideas about science have evolved into something that has nothing to do with science at all, and everything to do with leftist ideology.”

AFA went onto report that Nye and panelist Travis Rieder, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University, “clearly identified children as ‘problems.’ In his concern for the amount of carbon dioxide children emit into the atmosphere, he pushed the idea that those in developed countries should be penalized for having ‘extra kids’ (more than two). Nye also suggests that the U.S. develop policies like those in China that have led to abusive treatment of its citizens, including exorbitant fines, loss of livelihood and forced abortion.”

The maliciousness of an anti-human, anti-baby worldview had been seen for many years in China, home of the compulsory one-child policy—a policy that is, at last, being abandoned.

Every developed country in the world has a declining birth rate, and it is portending a grim future where there are fewer and fewer children and fewer and fewer resources being developed, and it is a result of an anti-Christian, anti-baby, anti-human worldview.

SOURCE





Trump moving slowly on Paris agreement

The changes the Trump administration is expected to make on environmental issues are ambiguous, to say the least. And that’s worrisome. In one sense, we’re seeing welcome results. According to The Washington Post, “EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt decided to replace half of the members on one of its key scientific review boards, while Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is ‘reviewing the charter and charge’ of more than 200 advisory boards, committees and other entities both within and outside his department.”

Contrary to what’s being reported, these moves are neither nefarious nor unforeseen. At the EPA, specifically, “All of the people being dismissed were at the end of serving at least one three-year term, although these terms are often renewed instead of terminated,” the Post explains, later adding, “Members of EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors had been informed twice — in January, before President Barack Obama left office, and then more recently by EPA career staff members — that they would be kept on for another term, adding to their confusion.” Talk about having unrealistic expectations!

Pruitt is shaking things up at the EPA — and that’s good. Moreover, the administration’s revisiting statist mandates like the Clean Power Plan is another promising sign that more needed relief is on the way. That being said, there are serious questions being raised about Barack Obama’s Paris climate accord.

For the record, last year Trump vowed, “We’re going to cancel the Paris climate agreement.” He also stated: “President Obama entered the United States into the Paris climate accords [sic] unilaterally and without the permission of Congress. This agreement gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much our energy and how much we use right here in America. So foreign bureaucrats are going to be controlling what we’re using and what we’re doing on our land in our country. No way.”

He’s right. But whether a formal dismissal actually happens remains speculative. ABC News reports, “The White House has postponed a Tuesday meeting to discuss whether the United States should withdraw from the landmark international climate deal struck in Paris under the Obama administration. The White House said late Monday that the meeting would be rescheduled. This is the second time a meeting of top aides on the issue has been delayed.” Previous reports have indicated that a climate change rift exists between Trump officials, which helps explain the delays. Ivanka Trump, anyone?

Numerous groups are imploring Trump to take the U.S. out of participation. They understand that the Paris accord isn’t just an economic bludgeon; it’s also a gross infringement on the Constitution. If the U.S. were to properly enter such an accord, it’s the Senate’s, not the president’s, duty to make it happen. If Trump backtracks on this issue, not only will the economy and Constitution suffer, but his voters won’t be very accepting of it, either.

SOURCE






Trump's agriculture secretary, Sonny Perdue, declares that 'ethanol is here to stay'

Big corn has a win

For a few moments, President Trump seemed like he might back away from the country's costly ethanol mandate. First, Trump tapped an ethanol opponent to head up the Environmental Protection Agency. Then in February the president plugged market deregulation for the renewable fuel industry instead of government subsidization.

But those hopes officially came crashing down this weekend when U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue fastened a little pin to his jacket lapel that read "Don't mess with the RFS."

Flanked by Sen. Chuck Grassley and Rep. Steve King of Iowa, Perdue doubled down, telling a herd of reporters at a local cattle lot that "ethanol is here to stay, and we're going to work for new technologies to be more efficient."

Despite the negative economic and environmental effects, the federal government will continue the Renewable Fuel Standard, forcing consumers to guzzle gasoline with the blended biofuel. Of course, this is nothing new.

The EPA has long mandated that the corn-based fuel get blended into the country's fuel supply. And right before Thanksgiving last year, the agency announced a new 200 million-gallon increase, requiring 19.28 billion gallons of the renewable fuel be blended with the country's conventional fuel supply.

For anyone who's not a farmer, there's something in that new standard for everyone to hate.

Ethanol production regularly gobbles up as much as 40 percent of the nation's corn crop, making animal feed and human food more expensive as a result. It has boosted fuel costs by as much as $3.4 billion since 2014, according to the EPA's own analysis. And it may actually increase emissions, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Earlier this year some hoped that Trump would end the reign of the so-called ethanol barons, that cartel that's collected tens of billions of dollars in subsidies over the decades. If any Republican could rescue consumers and relieve aggrieved environmentalists, it would've been Trump.

But with a little dime-store pin and a short stump speech, the agriculture secretary has made clear that the costly ethanol mandate is here to stay.

SOURCE






Australians want company tax spent on environment, survey finds

A most amusing "survey" below.  It calls to mind the way "elections" in totalitarian countries usually find 99% support for the dictator. 

Some obviously leading questions were asked.  To what ordinary voter would it occur that company tax in particular should be diverted to fund environmental programs?  It is just a Greenie wet dream.

And the suggestions were put to an undefinable group of people via an automated telephone poll on behalf of the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF).  And they got the resounding result the ACF undoubtedly wanted. If I had designed the questions, the result would show very little support for the environment. 

Not to put to fine a point on it, the findings are garbage.  And nobody actually talked to any of the people surveyed!


Australians have given the thumbs down to Australia's environmental protection in a new survey, which shows a high level of scepticism about the Federal Government's commitment to protecting nature.

The poll has revealed more than two thirds of Australians want a share of company tax spent directly on protecting the environment and more than 76 per cent want a levy imposed on polluting companies to protect reefs, rivers, forests, and wildlife.

Nearly 3,000 people were interviewed for the pre-budget sounding, conducted by market research company ReachTel for the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF).

Six out of 10 said protecting the environment should receive a bigger share of the federal budget, while nearly three quarters said they would support a political party with a policy for "a national plan where nature thrives".

Just 11 per cent thought that nature protection should receive less funding.

Yet spending on environmental programs is in decline and set for further cuts, with conservation groups arguing that protecting the environment is shouldering a disproportionate share of "budget repair".

The environment budget has declined by 20 per cent since the Coalition first came to office in 2013, according to analysis by the ACF, and is projected to decline by 38 per cent on 2013 levels through to 2019.

Over the same period, overall spending is projected to increase by 22 per cent.

The political leanings of those polled in its survey were broadly consistent with the findings of most voting intention surveys.

They translate to a two-party preferred result of 47 per cent Liberal, 53 per cent Labor.

The survey also showed four in 10 Australians thought the Government has "a plan to protect the reefs, rivers, forests, and wildlife for current and future generations".

This was outnumbered by 45 per cent of respondents who disagreed with that statement.

ACF chief executive Kelly O'Shannassy said the poll showed the Federal Government is "completely out of touch with what Australians expect their elected representatives to do".

"The only way for the Prime Minister to restore his credibility on environment and climate change is to reverse cuts and develop a comprehensive national plan to protect nature and move to clean energy," she said.

"The polling shows that Australians support long-term measures that would provide increased funding to protect and restore Australia's reefs, rivers, forests, and wildlife."

The survey results come in the wake of the independent State of the Environment report, released by the Turnbull Government in March.

It found that despite significant improvements on key benchmarks, resources for environmental management and protection were "insufficient".

The State of the Environment Report also said the nation lacks "an overarching national policy that establishes a clear vision for the protection and sustainable management of Australia's environment to the year 2050".

The office of Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg has been contacted for comment.

SOURCE

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

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   main.html 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

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




10 May, 2017

The slight warming observed between 1950-2013 is shown to be up to 80% an urban heat Island effect

Paper Reviewed: Quereda, J., Monton, E., Quereda, V. and Molla, B. 2016. Significant Climate Warming (1950-2013) in the Spanish Mediterranean: Natural Trend or Urban Heat Island (UHI). Tethys 13: 11-20.

Quereda et al. (2016) begin their work by stating that although "it may be accepted that urban heating is of local importance, there is no evidence that it alters the global temperature trend," citing the IPCC (2001). However, they backtrack significantly in this regard throughout their analysis of the subject by stating that "on comparing the temperature of urban areas and rural areas, various researchers have concluded that the urban effect could account for between 40% and 80% of the observed thermal trend in the last few decades," citing the studies of Ren et al. (2007), Yan et al. (2010), and McKitrick and Michaels (2007), who concluded that half of the warming trend observed between 1980 and 2002 could have arisen from changes in land use.

In studying the subject in even more detail over the 1950-2013 period, it was further found that this phenomenon could "account for between 70 and 80% of the recorded warming trend in Western Mediterranean cities." And in light of this discovery, Quereda et al. pose the important question: "are urban areas contributing to the observed warming trend on which climate change is based?" to which they respond by stating that "the answer to be drawn from our analysis is fully affirmative." And so they conclude by stating that "in these Western Mediterranean cities, the Urban Heat Island could account for up to 80% of the recorded warming."

SOURCE






Severe global cooling coming

One prophecy is as good as another in these matters

Experts told Daily Star Online planet Earth is on course for a “Little Age Ice” within the next three years thanks to a cocktail of climate change and low solar activity.

Research shows a natural cooling cycle that occurs every 230 years began in 2014 and will send temperatures plummeting even further by 2019.

Scientists are also expecting a “huge reduction” in solar activity for 33 years between 2020 and 2053 that will cause thermometers to crash.

Both cycles suggest Earth is entering a global cooling cycle that could have devastating consequences for global economy, human life and society as we know it.

If predictions of the world-wide big freeze come true, the plot to 2004 film The Day After Tomorrow would not be far from reality during winter.

During winter, entire major cities – such as London, Paris and New York – would be subjected to sub-zero temperatures, ice and snow for months.

Millions of lives would be at risk of prolonged blackouts, food and electricity shortages and cold-related health problems.

David Dilley, CEO of Global Weather Oscillations, told Daily Star Online global warming and cooling cycles are determined by the gravitational forces of the Earth, moon and sun.

Each cycle lasts around 120,000 years, with sub-cycles of around 230 years.

He said: “We have had five warming cycles since about 900AD, each followed by a dramatic cooling cycle.

“The last global warming cycle ended in 1790 and the year 2020 is 230 following this – thus I have been talking about rapid cooling beginning in 2019.”

He said the oncoming cooling will send temperatures plummeting to lows last seen in the 1940s – when the mercury bottomed out at -21C during winter in the UK.

He said: “Cooling from 2019 into about 2020 to 2021 will bring world temperatures back to where they were in the 1940s through the 1960s.

“The Arctic will freeze solid and rapidly by 2020 and thus allow much more Arctic air to build up and move southward toward Great Britain.

“Expect by the mid to late 2020s that winter temperatures will dip even colder than the 1940s to 1960s.

“This will last for 60 to 100 years and then a gradual warm-up toward the next global warming cycle that will not be as warm as the one we are now coming out of.”

Research from mathematics professor Valentina Zharkova shows that low solar activity could cause global temperatures to dip to their lowest levels for more than 350 years.

Within three years drastic reductions in heat-releases from the sun could drive substantial cooling in Europe, North America and Asia.

From 1650 to 1710, temperatures across much of Europe – including Britain – plunged when the sun entered a quiet phase known as the Maunder Minimum.

Zharkova believes a similarly extreme deep freeze is on the way – triggering new glaciers, blanket sea ice and frozen over rivers and lakes.

She told Daily Star Online: “We did not calculate temperature variations on the Earth, we can only speculate what should happen by relying on the experience of the previous grand-cycle occurred in the 1645-1705 Maunder minimum. “At that time the mini ice age lasted for 60-65 years.

"The forthcoming grand minimum will last for three solar cycles, or 33 years, from 2020 to 2053, as we predicted.

“Because of huge reduction of solar activity it is expected that the terrestrial temperature will be also reduced as it has happened in 17 century.”

Zharkova, of Northumbria University, made the predictions by studying new mathematical models for solar activity.

She claims her models can predict the solar cycle with 97% accuracy, leaving little margin for error.

The Met Office has previously told Daily Star Online that a new mini-ice age is a “worst case scenario”, adding that while temperatures are likely to dip, it will do little to offset man-made global warming.

George Feulner, of the Potsdam Institute on Climate Change Research, agrees with this view, adding: “The expected decrease in global temperature would be 0.1 degrees Celsius at most, compared to about 1.3 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times by the year 2030.”

SOURCE






Defund Climate Change Research to Pay for Pre-Existing Conditions
   
Here’s a novel idea.

Take the billions of dollars that’s going toward what supposedly is a settled science issue — climate change — and use it to create a pool for pre-existing conditions. It is our duty to help those less fortunate and for the government to provide a safety net. So let’s form that safety net, dealing with a known problem today, not a ghost that may or may not be there tomorrow — especially since in the age of fossil fuels human progress has skyrocketed. Do you think medicine would be where it is now without the fossil fuel era?

The rest of the nation would be in the free market for insurance, and combined with tort reform and portability, we may be able to bring the price down.

What has been the cost of fighting climate change? Check out this article in Forbes.

All that money for what? A few molecules of CO2 when the established temperature-CO2 record shows no linkage?

We can’t run from the problems of today, nor can you run from the record of the past. People are much more valuable than a few molecules of CO2.

I doubt the American people approve of billions of dollars being spent on researching whether or not the earth is flat (no offense to Kyrie Irving) or other forms of “settled science.” So for the sake of those suffering from pre-existing conditions, why don’t we take the grant money for climate change research and give it to those who really need it? If it’s “settled science,” then give up the money. You can’t have it both ways! What about investing in our inner cities, another need now? Do climate change researchers need the money more than our sick, poor and needy? I think not. I know not.

SOURCE





EPA dismisses half of key board’s scientific advisers; Interior suspends more than 200 advisory panels

A mournful post below from some well established warmist journalists

Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department are overhauling a slew of outside advisory boards that inform how their agencies assess the science underpinning federal policies, the first step in a broader effort by Republicans to change the way the federal government evaluates the scientific basis for its regulations.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt decided to replace half of the members on one of its key scientific review boards, while Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is “reviewing the charter and charge” of more than 200 advisory boards, committees and other entities both within and outside his department. EPA and Interior officials began informing current members of the move Friday, and notifications continued over the weekend.

Pruitt’s move could significantly change the makeup of the 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors (BOSC), which advises EPA’s prime scientific arm on whether the research it does has sufficient rigor and integrity, and addresses important scientific questions. All of the people being dismissed were at the end of serving at least one three-year term, although these terms are often renewed instead of terminated.

EPA spokesman J.P. Freire said in an email that “no one has been fired or terminated” and that Pruitt had simply decided to bring in fresh advisers. The agency informed the outside academics on Friday that their terms would not be renewed.

“We’re not going to rubber-stamp the last administration’s appointees. Instead, they should participate in the same open competitive process as the rest of the applicant pool,” Freire said. “This approach is what was always intended for the board, and we’re making a clean break with the last administration’s approach.”

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, says he is not convinced carbon dioxide from human activity is the main driver of climate change and wants Congress to weigh in on whether CO2 should be regulated.

Separately, Zinke has postponed all outside committees as he reviews their composition and work. The review will effectively freeze the work of the Bureau of Land Management’s 38 resource advisory councils, along with other panels focused on a sweep of issues, from one assessing the threat of invasive species to the science technical advisory panel for Alaska’s North Slope.

“The Secretary is committed to restoring trust in the Department’s decision-making and that begins with institutionalizing state and local input and ongoing collaboration, particularly in communities surrounding public lands,” Interior spokeswoman Heather Swift said by email Monday. “As the Department concludes its review in the weeks ahead, agencies will notice future meetings to ensure that the Department continues to get the benefit of the views of local communities in all decision-making on public land management.”

Greg Zimmerman, deputy director of the non-partisan advocacy group Center for Western Priorities, said in an interview that “it just doesn’t make any sense they would be canceling meetings as they do this analysis.” BLM’s regional advisory councils include officials from the energy and outdoor recreation industry as well as scientists and conservationists, Zimmerman added. “The only reasonable explanation is they don’t want to be hearing from these folks.”

The moves came as a surprise to the agencies’ outside advisers, with several of them taking to Twitter to announce their suspensions.

John Peter Thompson, who chairs Interior’s Invasive Species Advisory Panel, tweeted Monday that he had been notified that “all activities are suspended subject to review by Depart of Interior.”

Members of EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors had been informed twice — in January, before President Barack Obama left office, and then more recently by EPA career staff members — that they would be kept on for another term, adding to their confusion.

“I was kind of shocked to receive this news,” Robert Richardson, an ecological economist and an associate professor in Michigan State University’s Department of Community Sustainability, said in an interview Sunday.

Richardson, who on Saturday tweeted, “Today, I was Trumped,” said that he was at the end of an initial three-year term but that members traditionally have served two such stints. “I’ve never heard of any circumstance where someone didn’t serve two consecutive terms,” he said, adding that the dismissals gave him “great concern that objective science is being marginalized in this administration.”

Courtney Flint, a professor of natural resource sociology at Utah State University who had served one term on the board, said in an email that she was also surprised to learn that her term would not be renewed, “particularly since I was told that such a renewal was expected.” But she added, “In the broader view, I suppose it is the prerogative of this administration to set the goals of federal agencies and to appoint members to advisory boards.”

Ryan Jackson, Pruitt’s chief of staff, noted in an email that all the board members whose terms are not being renewed could reapply for their positions. “I’m not quite sure why some EPA career staff simply get angry by us opening up the process,” he said. “It seems unprofessional to me.”

Yet Terry F. Yosie, who directed EPA’s Science Advisory Board from 1981 to 1988, noted in an email that the Board of Scientific Counselors does not report directly to the administrator or his office. “It’s quite extraordinary that such a body would receive this level of attention by the Administrator’s office,” he said.

And Rush Holt, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, expressed concern and said he hoped Pruitt reconsidered his decision. “Academic scientists play a critical role in informing policy with scientific research results at every level, including the federal government,” he said.

Pruitt is planning a much broader overhaul of how the agency conducts its scientific analysis, said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Pruitt has been meeting with academics to talk about the matter and putting thought into which areas of investigation warrant attention from the agency’s scientific advisers.

The agency may consider industry scientific experts for some of the board positions as long as these appointments do not pose a conflict of interest, Freire said.

Conservatives have complained for years about EPA’s approach to science, including the input it receives from outside scientific bodies. Both the Board of Scientific Counselors and the 47-member Scientific Advisory Board have come under criticism for bolstering the cause for greater federal regulation.

A majority of the members of the Board of Scientific Counselors have terms expiring this fiscal year, along with the terms of 12 members of the Scientific Advisory Board. GOP lawmakers have frequently criticized the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC)—a committee within the Scientific Advisory Board—for its recommendation that the EPA impose much stricter curbs on smog-forming ozone. The seven-person panel, which is charged under the Clean Air Act to review the scientific basis of all ambient air quality standards, is legally required to have a medical doctor and a member of the National Academy of Sciences as members.

Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), who questions the link between human activity and climate change and has several former aides now working for Pruitt, said in an interview earlier this year that under the new administration, “they’re going to have to start dealing with science, and not rigged science.”

House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) held a hearing on the issue in February, arguing that the Scientific Advisory Board should be expanded to include more non-academics. The panel, which was established in 1978, is primarily made up of academic scientists and other experts who review EPA’s research to ensure that the regulations the agency undertakes have a sound scientific basis.

“The EPA routinely stacks this board with friendly scientists who receive millions of dollars in grants from the federal government,” Smith said at the time. “The conflict of interest here is clear.”

In a budget proposal obtained by The Washington Post last month, the panel’s operating budget is slated for an 84 percent cut — or $542,000 — for fiscal 2018. That money typically covers travel and other expenses for outside experts who attend the board’s public meetings.

The document said the budget cut reflects “an anticipated lower number of peer reviews.”

Joe Arvai, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board who directs the University of Michigan’s Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, said in an email that Pruitt and his colleagues should keep in mind that the board’s membership, just like its standing and ad hoc panels, “already includes credible scientists from industry” and that its “work on agency rulemaking is open to public viewing and comment. So, if diversity of thought and transparency are the administrator’s concerns, his worries are misplaced because the SAB already has these bases covered.

“So, if you ask me, his moves over the weekend — as well as the House bill to reform the SAB — are attempts to use the SAB as a political toy,” Arvai said. “By making these moves, the administrator and members of the House can pander to the president’s base by looking like they’re getting tough on all those pesky ‘liberal scientists.’ But, all else being equal, nothing fundamentally changes about how the SAB operates.”

SOURCE





Why Trump Can and Should Pull Out of Paris Climate Change Agreement

On April 22, 2016, the United States and 170 other countries signed the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, which seeks “to combat climate change and adapt to its effects.”

This international measure commits signatories to shift their energy industries away from fossil fuels that cause “greenhouse gas” emissions, and toward renewal resources like wind and solar power.

Unfortunately, as documented by Heritage Foundation experts, U.S. enactment of regulations to meet benchmarks set by the Paris Accord would likely achieve only “symbolic” gains, while imposing huge costs to the U.S. in the form of fewer American jobs, lower family incomes, and reduced industrial efficiency.

In short, the Paris Agreement is bad for the American economy. What’s worse, the Obama administration’s decision to join it through a unilateral “executive agreement” not involving participation by Congress raised serious legal questions.

By withdrawing the United States from the agreement, President Donald Trump could achieve a win-win—advancing sound American economic policy in a manner that also strengthens respect for the rule of law.

The Current Agreement

What exactly does the Paris Agreement do?

It sets a target of limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by having the signatory governments commit to significantly reducing their global greenhouse gas emissions by “decarbonizing” their economies.

Currently, roughly 80 percent of America’s (and other countries’) energy needs are being met through carbon-based natural resources—mainly coal, natural gas, and oil.

Implementing U.S. regulations to conform to the Paris Agreement’s ideals, as proposed by the Obama administration, would cripple American carbon-based industries and drive up energy costs, harming American workers and consumers.

As Heritage Foundation economists have explained, this agreement’s effects on the U.S. economy and American quality of life would be staggering.

It would result in increased U.S. electricity expenditures of 15-20 percent over the next decade, 400,000 fewer American jobs, a total income loss of over $30,000 for an American family of four, and a loss of over $2.5 trillion in U.S. gross domestic product.

And all this would generate essentially zero environmental benefits.

Presidential Action

Fortunately, the Trump administration is working to prevent these dire economic outcomes by undoing, or simply not enacting the crippling environmental regulations required by the Paris Agreement.

Of particular help was the president’s March 28 executive order, which requires executive agencies to:

…review existing regulations that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources and appropriately suspend, revise, or rescind those that unduly burden the development of domestic energy resources beyond the degree necessary to protect the public interest or otherwise comply with the law.

While this is an encouraging start, the president’s sounds regulatory policy will face potentially serious legal threats unless and until the United States officially withdraws from the Paris Agreement.

Why is this so?

Article 4.2 of the Paris Agreement requires each party to “prepare, communicate and maintain successive nationally determined contributions that it intends to achieve.”

The Obama administration submitted a nationally determined contribution providing that the U.S. would seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

A private party might now sue the government, claiming that the Trump administration’s environmental regulatory changes (including rescinding, changing, or failing to enact rules) violated this U.S. commitment.

Why? Because Article 4.11 of the agreement allows signatories to adjust a nationally determined contribution “with a view to enhancing its level of ambition, in accordance with guidance adopted by the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the parties to this agreement.”

A plaintiff environmental group, for example, might argue that environmental regulatory relief would not “enhance” the Obama administration’s commitment. Rather, the plaintiff might claim that it would undercut that commitment, and therefore violate the Paris Agreement.

Legal Risks

So is this realistic? As even environmental groups seem to recognize, such a suit would have no merit as a matter of well-settled federal law.

That is because the Paris Agreement’s provisions are not “self-executing”—they do not automatically create binding U.S. legal obligations and require the passage of congressional legislation to be made effective.

What’s more, as federal courts have held, it is presumed that a private party does not have “standing” to sue to enforce an international agreement absent specific language in the statute—and there is no such language in the Paris Agreement.

But that would not stop special interest groups from trying to sue. Recent experience shows that even meritless lawsuits challenging new Trump administration policies may succeed.

All that a plaintiff needs to do is find a federal lower court judge, and a favorable U.S. Court of Appeals, that is willing to ignore basic legal principles in order to further a desired policy objective, and the administration might be stopped dead in its tracks.

For example, very recently, multiple federal judges ignored clear statutory language and Supreme Court precedents in blocking President Donald Trump’s executive order that temporarily suspends travel from terrorist safe havens in the Middle East and Africa.

As Heritage Foundation legal scholar Hans von Spakovsky has explained, these unprincipled decisions reflect the fact that there are too many federal judges “who refuse to follow the law and the Constitution, and whose biases and personal views distort their decision-making.”

Accordingly, it cannot be ruled out that baseless challenges to environmental reforms invoking the Paris Agreement might initially (if not ultimately) succeed in some federal courthouse.

And even assuming they failed (as they should), such challenges would absorb scarce public resources and cause delay in implementing sound environmental policies, while creating unwarranted public confusion as to the international “legality” of the administration’s actions.

Furthermore, continued U.S. membership in the Paris Agreement might be cited as an extra public policy “plus factor” in challenges to environmental regulatory reforms, based on federal administrative law, rather than on the agreement.

Such a “plus factor” theory would have no basis in law, but it would further complicate defense of the administration’s actions.

Even aside from the short-term risk of litigation, continued U.S. membership in the Paris Agreement could be cited by some future president as justification for making a regulatory about-face and implementing new rules, which could cripple fossil fuel industries and harm the American economy.

All of these considerations form a strong case in favor of Trump withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement.

Rule of Law Considerations

But U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement raises one final concern, one rooted in respect for the rule of law.

As detailed in the Heritage Guide to the Constitution, the scope of the president’s unilateral power to enter into an executive agreement without any participation from Congress “remains a serious question.”

Moreover, in light of past practice, the Paris Agreement has all the hallmarks of a treaty, such as targets and timetables. Thus, it should have been submitted to the Senate for ratification as a treaty.

The Treaty Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article II, Section 2, Clause 2) requires that two-thirds of senators consent to a proposed treaty. In bypassing the Senate and ignoring this requirement, President Barack Obama displayed contempt for the role of Congress and the democratic process in treaty making.

The president unquestionably has the right to terminate U.S. participation in the Paris Agreement on his own. Promptly exercising that right would benefit the American economy, while also promoting sound principles of law and constitutionalism.

SOURCE

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9 May, 2017

A receding Arctic scare

Inevitably, when even satellite temperatures were showing 2016 as “the hottest year on record”, we were going to be told last winter that the Arctic ice was at its lowest extent ever. Sure enough, before Christmas, a report from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was greeted with such headlines as “Hottest Arctic on record triggers massive ice melt”. In March we had the BBC trumpeting another study that blamed vanishing Arctic ice as the cause of weather which led to the worst-ever smog in Beijing, warning that it “could even threaten the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022”.

But last week we were brought back to earth by the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), as charted by our friend Paul Homewood on his blog Notalotofpeopleknowthat, with the news that ever since December temperatures in the Arctic have consistently been lower than minus 20 C. In April the extent of Arctic sea ice was back to where it was in April 13 years ago. Furthermore, whereas in 2008 most of the ice was extremely thin, this year most has been at least two metres thick. The Greenland ice cap last winter increased in volume faster than at any time for years.

As for those record temperatures brought in 2016 by an exceptionally strong El Niño, the satellites now show that in recent months global temperatures have plummeted by more that 0.6 degrees: just as happened 17 years ago after a similarly strong El Niño had also made 1998 the “hottest year on record”.

This means the global temperature trend has now shown no further warming for 19 years. But the BBC won’t be telling us any of this. And we are still stuck with that insanely damaging Climate Change Act, which in this election will scarcely get a mention.

SOURCE. Homewood post here





Wind Industry Titan Soaks Up Billions in Tax Subsidies

A renewable energy company that is worth $60 billion — and hasn’t paid federal income taxes for the last seven years — is among the country’s largest recipients of federal subsidies. It’s also suing a small Michigan township as it seeks to take advantage of a state law for its financial gain.

NextEra Energy, based in Florida, has filed lawsuits in Michigan against Ellington Township and Almer Township seeking to compel the municipalities to allow its wind turbine towers to be erected. The company has wind farm projects in 19 states and four Canadian provinces and has built more than 8,700 wind turbines in 110 wind farm facilities.

Ellington Township and Almer Township are located in Tuscola County in Michigan’s Thumb region, which has become the state’s battleground over the rollout of industrial wind turbines. NextEra is also seeking a zoning change on the May 2 ballot in neighboring Huron County. A favorable vote could add many more turbine towers to the 473 already there.

The push for additional wind farms in the Thumb is largely due to a Michigan law passed last December that expanded an existing state mandate. The 2016 law increased the percentage of electricity that must be generated by renewable sources from 10 percent to 14 percent. Mandates like this represent an indirect subsidy to companies like NextEra, which also enjoy many direct government subsidies.

NextEra Energy had corporate profits of $21.5 billion from 2008 to 2015. The company paid no federal income taxes on this amount but instead received a net credit of $313 million due to government subsidies.

Almer Township, by comparison, had a general fund budget of $600,000 in 2016.

The analysis of NextEra Energy’s corporate profits and taxes was done by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a center-left nonprofit. It was published in a March 2017 report, “The 35 Percent Corporate Tax Myth; Corporate Tax Avoidance by Fortune 500 Companies, 2008 to 2015.”

The report stated on NextEra Energy: “Deferred tax benefits explain most of the company’s tax benefits.”

NextEra Energy didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

NextEra has received about $1.9 billion in federal grants and tax credits since 2000, according to a March 2015 report by GoodJobsFirst.org, an organization that tracks federal subsidies. NextEra was second only to the energy company Iberdrola in collecting federal subsidies since 2000; Iberdrola has received $2.2 billion.

The federal government does not track its subsidies for renewable energy companies on an annual basis. But the wind industry received $5.9 billion in federal subsidies in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available from the Energy Information Administration.

“NextEra may produce wind energy, but its real business is subsidy mining,” said Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an expert on the energy sector. “Renewables need subsidies because they aren’t economic in the free market. By subsidizing renewables, the wholesale power markets across the country are getting more and more distorted. The result of those distortions is that other electricity generators — and particularly the nuclear energy generators — are now seeking their own subsidies.”

SOURCE





Solar Power: An Environmental Disaster

Solar power is expensive, unreliable and environmentally destructive. So it doesn’t come into being through consumer demand; rather, by government fiat or subsidy. The federal government controls the military, so, sadly, our armed forces have been dragged into the government’s alleged fight against “climate change” to a humiliating degree.

The Minnesota National Guard’s facility at Camp Ripley, Minnesota, is a case in point. Yesterday, an array of public officials hailed the opening of a 60-acre swath of solar panels that will produce a pathetic amount of energy, during the daytime and assuming it isn’t cloudy. My colleague Tom Steward has the story at the American Experiment web site:

Our military used to boast about its fire power. These days the brass brags about its solar power. The Minnesota National Guard has just unveiled the latest weapon in the war on global warming. It’s a 60 acre solar panel farm at Camp Ripley in north central Minnesota. Row upon row of 120,000 solar panels standing in precise military formation, the biggest solar installation at any National Guard base in the country.

But as turns out to be the case more often than not in Minnesota, sunshine proved to be elusive for the occasion.

If we devoted a fraction of that space to a natural gas, coal or nuclear facility we could produce 100 times the energy–even at night time, when people need to turn lights on.

It is sad to see military personnel who should know better, and probably do, mouthing the inane pieties of global warming:

“Camp Ripley is now capable of producing as much energy as it consumes,” said Maj. Gen. Richard C. Nash, adjutant general of the Minnesota National Guard. “We can make a better Minnesota and a better world by joining the worldwide initiative to address the serious challenge of climate change.”

Right. We’d prefer you address the serious military challenge of Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and so on. Tom Steward points out the costly reality:

The project’s astonishing $25 million price tag has led to the utility taking fire from state regulators for overpaying for solar panels and long-term lease with the National Guard. The collateral damage includes the northern Minnesota utility’s residential ratepayers, whose bills will rise as a result of the costly solar farm.

The solar facility can provide electricity for only 1,700 homes, a ridiculously small number, at “full capacity.” But solar installations never reach full capacity, and if it is dark or cloudy, they are irrelevant. No one would argue for ugly 60-acre scars on the landscape based on a cost/benefit analysis.

In Duluth, the best proxy for Camp Ripley, there are an average of 77 sunny days per year. Hey, that is better than one in five! Of course, they don’t have any sunny nights in Duluth, so there’s that.

It was left to Lieutenant Governor Tina Smith (D) to deliver the most mind-numbingly stupid commentary on the occasion:

“With four megastorms in the past seven years in Minnesota, we don’t need any more reminders of the impact of a changing climate on our state,” Smith said. “Projects like you see behind us will be helpful to mitigate some of that damage.”

Perhaps Ms. Smith is unaware that no respectable scientist claims “megastorms” have increased as a result of purported global warming. Perhaps she doesn’t know that hurricanes in the Western Hemisphere–to take just one example–are at a historic low. Perhaps she is unaware that the models on which global warming hysteria is based forecast fewer extreme weather events, not more.

All of that might be excusable ignorance. But Ms. Smith presumably has lived in Minnesota for a while, so she should know that four “megastorms” in seven years is a mild rate. Actually, I don’t recall anything that I would call a megastorm in recent years. Ms. Smith has perhaps forgotten that the really epic storms, like the Halloween Blizzard of 1991, when snow fell faster than I have ever seen before or since, or the tragic Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940, predated the purported era of “climate change.”

But maybe it is irrelevant to point out how wrong the global warming alarmists are, and how severely their uneconomic installations damage the environment. Their doctrine is a religious faith that has nothing to do with science or history, and everything to do with government greed, so rational arguments are wasted on them.

SOURCE






The real threat is ‘Big Environment’

Earth Day, held annually on April 22 since 1970, is the official holiday of Big Environment, the organizations that keep supposedly evil corporations from ruining our “Pale Blue Dot,” as the late, great Carl Sagan once described Earth.

In the early 1990s, I remember seeing people mark the day by cleaning up roadside trash tossed aside by careless motorists. This was useful action by those early environmentalists, but it seems Earth Day is more than that now. Now, it seems like a pagan rite of spring, where we humanize the natural world and deify it at the same time. All the while we elevate ourselves, believing we caused the Earth to change and that we have the power to revive it.

While I’m no expert in climate change, I know the environment is a huge political football. There was a time when environmentalists were on the outside looking in. Now, Big Environment (yes, they’re as big and powerful as Big Oil) seems to be the driving force in politics. Just as they would say about Big Oil, Big Environment is run amok.

While it’s right to think of environmental impact when crafting legislation – so we don’t go back to red-running rivers and smog-filled cities, the very issues the environmental movement rightly sought to fix in the 1970s – some believe the health of the environment should trump every other concern, especially when government faces issues related to population or commercial growth.

We need look no further than our own backyard for examples of Big Environment in action.

Protect South Portland has been intent on ridding the city of its once-thriving oil industry, despite that industry’s importance regionally, nationally and even internationally. The group’s influence a few years ago to pass the Clear Skies Ordinance is now costing city taxpayers millions to defend in court. The law, which bans Canadian oil sands within city limits, is decimating the local oil industry, and impacted companies are, not surprisingly, seeking tax abatements.

I feel especially sorry for those South Portland taxpayers (especially those who voted against the ordinance) who are paying for Big Environment’s appeal to emotion regarding water quality. The likelihood of bursts and spills is too much to risk, pipeline foes say, despite the pipeline being in existence for 75-plus years with nary an errant drip.

Protect South Portland and other groups argue that all oil is bad and “sustainable” alternatives are good. I’m not so sure that’s true. Have you seen what wind power does to the environment? Before windmills dotted Maine’s upland horizon, you would have experienced nothing but wilderness in some areas.

Now, thanks to Big Environment and their powerful friends like U.S. Sen. Angus King, you see massive turbine blades placed atop huge concrete foundations that ruin the mountainous landscape. They’re just plain ugly, noisy, dangerous to birds and taint what makes Maine unique – unbridled wilderness.

If wind power worked, I might look past these sensory impacts. But it doesn’t, because wind, even massive arrays like the one on Mars Hill in eastern Maine, can’t provide enough electricity to make a meaningful dent in energy generation. To illustrate how feeble Maine’s wind capacity is, there would have to be 47 Mars Hill-sized wind farms in each and every county to offset the energy needs of just the homes in Maine; never mind commercial energy needs.

While they aren’t great at discerning fact from fiction, the one thing that Big Environment is good at is filling their coffers. They devise would-be perils to convince us to donate. The recent furor over tar sands (a biased term concocted by Big Environment and parroted by the media) is a fitting local example. How much money did those anti-pipeline groups bring in as a result of their hysteria? To twist a U2 lyric, they remind me of a preacher from the Old-Time Gospel Hour, stealing money from the fearful and easily persuaded.

If the thermometer consistently read 120 degrees in the summer and 60 in the winter, I might join the Big Environment club. But January thaws still come and go; February blizzards blow; mud season and flooding occur in April; flowers still bud in May; August is as intolerable now as when my grandmother was young; apples still ripen in September, and we haul out those winter jackets around Thanksgiving every year. Nature works like clockwork.

I understand Big Environment needs to keep us in perpetual fear of creation’s imminent demise so their cash reserves stay plump, but maybe we should use Earth Day in a different way this year. After collecting that winter’s worth of roadside litter (a truly noble undertaking), spend the day outdoors doing something fun. Nature was created for our enjoyment, not for Big Environment’s political and financial benefit.

SOURCE





Every green initiative imposed  by British politicians has ended in disaster

What a parable for our times the great diesel scandal has been, as councils vie to see which can devise the heaviest taxes on nearly half the cars in Britain because they are powered by nasty, polluting diesel.

This week, it was announced many diesel drivers will soon have to pay fully £24 a day to drive into Central London, while 35 towns across the country are thinking of following suit. Already some councils charge up to £90 more for a permit to park a diesel car.

The roots of this debacle go back to the heyday of Tony Blair’s government, when his chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, became obsessed with the need to fight global warming.

Although he was an expert in ‘surface chemistry’ — roughly speaking, the study of what happens when, for example, a liquid meets a gas — King had no qualifications in climate science.

On one occasion he famously told an environmental audit committee of MPs that the world was warming so dangerously fast that, by the end of this century, the only continent on earth left habitable would be Antarctica.

His light-bulb moment came when he learned that diesel emits less CO2 than petrol. What a brilliant way it would be to save the planet, he thought, to manipulate the tax system to encourage motorists to make the switch — which millions did.

And here we are 15 years later, being told that, as an unexpected side-effect, more than ten million diesel vehicles on Britain’s roads are chucking out so much nitrogen oxide and other toxic pollutants they are being linked to 12,000 premature deaths a year.

This is only the latest in a seemingly endless flow of examples of supposedly ‘green’ government schemes which, one after another, turn out to have been standing common sense on its head, at a cost which is rocketing up by billions of pounds a year.

There may be other competitors for the title of the greatest scandal in Britain today, but this is so crazy that it is time we all woke up to how damagingly mad it has become.

Nine years ago, MPs voted almost unanimously for then Labour minister Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act, thus making Britain the only country in the world committed by law to cut its ‘carbon emissions’ by 80 per cent in just 40 years.

Not one of those politicians bothered to wonder how in practice such an absurdly ambitious target could be met: which is why we have since seen successive governments thrashing about trying to adopt one dotty ‘green’ scheme after another.

Last week, I was asked in conversation: ‘Why is it that almost all these green schemes seem to end up as a fiasco?’ To which I replied: ‘You’ve only got one word wrong there. You can leave out the word “almost”.’

The truth is that every single green scheme the politicians have fallen for has proved to be a total fiasco: failing to achieve any of the results claimed for them and costing us more billions with every year that passes.

Consider the scandal of Drax in Yorkshire, until recently the largest, cleanest, most efficient coal-fired power station in Europe.

Now, thanks to an annual half-a-billion pounds of public subsidy, Drax has been switching from burning coal to millions of tons a year of wood pellets.

Absurdly, these are shipped 3,500 miles to Britain from the U.S., where vast acreages of virgin forest are being felled, supposedly to be replaced with new trees that will eventually soak up all the CO2 emitted by burning them.

Unfortunately, a bright spark has just pointed out in a report for a respected think-tank that it could take a replacement tree hundreds of years to grow to maturity — which would be far too long to have any supposed effect on any climate change. (It should be noted that the former coalition energy minister Chris Huhne, having been released from prison for perverting the course of justice over speeding points, became the European chairman of a firm called Zilkha Biomass, which makes its money supplying wood pellets from North America to Europe.)

The bottom line is that a new report has just confirmed that, far from reducing its CO2 footprint, Drax is now emitting more than it did when it was only burning coal.

Meanwhile, why is Northern Ireland going through its worst political crisis since the end of the Troubles? Because of the collapse of its power-sharing government over another green scheme, the Renewable Heat Incentive.

When businesses discovered that for every £100 they paid for wood chips to heat their offices, warehouses and factories, UK taxpayers would pay them £160 in subsidies, not surprisingly they kept their boilers running round the clock as if there were no tomorrow.

When it was discovered that, by 2020, we will have paid those businesses £1 billion — even to heat buildings left empty for years — this created such a scandal that it brought down the government.

That example made headlines, but the same is happening quietly in the rest of the country, too, where owners of large houses openly boast that they are running their boilers flat out, even in summer, to cash in on the racket which gives them a 60 per cent profit on every £1 they spend on wood chips.

Some of that wood is now coming from clearing priceless ancient woodlands, such as a National Trust estate in Cheshire which the charity plans to turn back into open heathland.

Another scandal created under the same scheme is the way canny developers are plonking down large industrial installations called ‘anaerobic digesters’ in the middle of the English countryside, to turn huge quantities of crops into small quantities of methane for the national gas grid.

Official figures show that, thanks to subsidies costing us more than £200 million a year, 131,000 acres of maize are now being grown to feed the anaerobic digesters, on land formerly used for food crops.

Separately, toxic spills of the ammonia that is used in the process have repeatedly poisoned livestock and fish in nearby fields and rivers.

Then there was the dream of ‘carbon capture and storage’, for which Gordon Brown’s government offered £4 billion for companies to come up with a way of removing CO2 from the coal and gas used to make electricity, and then piping it away for burial in holes under the North Sea.

Only one Scottish power station took up the offer, spending £1 billion before it discovered that it didn’t work.

But even though geologists say it can never work, the Government still talks about it as the only way it can allow coal and gas-fired power plants — which still supply more than half our electricity — to stay in business.

Consider, too, the not-so brilliant idea of bribing motorists to switch to supposedly ‘green’ all-electric cars. So far, this has cost us more than £50 million in subsidies, for the mere 50,000 cars which have been sold, at £25,000 or more a time. This is only a fraction of the 26 million cars on Britain’s roads.

And what gets cynically hidden by the authorities is that much of the electricity used to charge their batteries comes, of course, from fossil fuels. Add in emissions from the manufacturing process and, unsurprisingly, these vehicles give out more CO2 than they are claimed to save.

Yet under the latest ‘carbon budget’, a five-yearly environmental plan nodded through by MPs to meet our commitments under Miliband’s misguided Climate Change Act, they still fondly imagine that, within 13 years, 60 per cent of all Britain’s cars will be electric.

The latest wheeze to catch the attention of gullible politicians has been a mega-project to spend £40 billion on six giant ‘tidal lagoons’ around Britain’s coasts, beginning with one in Swansea Bay, to harness the power of the tide to provide ‘clean, green’ electricity.

This seemed so irresistible to David Cameron and George Osborne that they put it in the Tory manifesto at the last election — and the then chancellor even mentioned it in his Budget speech. Only when the figures were looked at more carefully did they realise how little electricity this would produce. Not only that, it would be the most expensive in the world!

The firm behind the scheme asked the Government to agree to give it a uniquely high subsidy. The project will only work, it said, if the power produced could be sold to the National Grid at a staggering £168 per megawatt hour.

This was well over three times the wholesale price of unsubsidised electricity from coal or gas-fired power stations, and would naturally be paid for by every UK householder through green surcharges on our electricity bills.

As a result of such concerns, a report on tidal energy was commissioned from a former energy minister, Charles Hendry. His objectivity can be guessed at when you learn that he is chairman of the world’s largest offshore wind farm project. Unsurprisingly, he was gung-ho for giving tidal lagoons the go-ahead.

But how can ministers justify proceeding with another pipe dream which, according to some conservationists, apart from its ludicrous cost would inflict serious damage on wading birds, eels and other fish?

This is because the building of gigantic stone tidal barriers miles long interferes with the natural ecosystem. Indeed, this disruption to the natural order is a common problem with schemes which are designed to be good for ‘the environment’. When, for example, the Somerset Levels suffered serious flooding in 2014, it emerged that this was not just a freak of nature.

For 18 years, the local rivers and drainage ditches had not been dredged by the Environment Agency, with the deliberate intention of keeping more water flooding out on to the Levels, to provide a habitat for birds and other wildlife.

One former head of the agency, who previously ran the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, had remarked that she wanted to see ‘a limpet mine’ on every one of the pumping stations which — separately from the dredging — were used to pump out the water channels to prevent flooding.

When the lack of dredging led to the inevitable, and the Levels disastrously flooded for the second time in three years, it not only did £100 million worth of damage to homes and businesses.

With bitter irony, it also resulted in the drowning of huge numbers of the birds, badgers and other creatures the conservationists had wanted to save.

Flooding aside, however, by far the greatest environmental damage, at the greatest cost to our household bills, has been done by the £52 billion so far spent on covering vast areas of our countryside and the sea around our coasts with wind and solar farms, which are now adding £5 billion a year to our electricity bills.

Apart from the way these eyesores have come to dominate parts of our landscape, studies have shown the shocking damage the windmills do to birds and bats, including species such as golden eagles, which are supposed to be protected by law.

Research by the ornithological society SEO/Birdlife suggested that each turbine kills between 110 and 330 birds a year, though the RSPB countered this saying that ‘our own research suggests that a well-located wind farm is unlikely to be causing birds any harm’.

(Conservationists claim the wind industry has a vested interest in covering up the true extent of bird deaths.)

And all this is to produce just 14 per cent of our electricity, available so intermittently that if it wasn’t for those remaining CO2-emitting coal and gas-fired power stations stepping in when the wind wasn’t blowing and the sun wasn’t shining, our lights would have already gone out.

Yet to meet that Climate Change Act target, the Government still dreams of closing down all our remaining fossil-fuel power stations, instead relying on ‘zero-carbon’ electricity from renewables such as wind, sun and wood-burning, and a number of new nuclear power stations, which seem ever less likely to be built after wrangles over funding.

Our politicians have been allowed to get away with all this make-believe for so long that few people noticed some startling figures published a few weeks ago at the time of the Budget, by the Office of Budget Responsibility.

These showed that, over the next five years, the annual cost of all the green taxes and subsidies we shall be paying for is due to rise from £8.97 billion a year to £15.2 billion.

This will bring the five-year total by 2022 to more than £73 billion, far higher than the estimated cost of the HS2 rail project, the most expensive engineering project ever seen in Britain. This equates to £561 a year for every household in the land.

When we consider that colossal sum, most of us may well conclude that our politicians must have gone completely off their heads.

Except that, alas, our MPs live in such a bubble of unreality that few will even have looked at those terrifying figures, let alone at what they are allowing our money to be spent on.

It was exactly a year ago that Theresa May’s joint chief of staff Nick Timothy described the Climate Change Act as ‘a monstrous act of national self-harm’. It is high time his boss realised just how chillingly right he was.

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   main.html or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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8 May, 2017

Splashy ideas get the money -- even if they are wrong

The article below is about medical research but similar results are found in other disciplines -- such as psychology. But global warming is probably the  most spectacular example of what the article discusses -- that scientists are most likely to get funded if they have an exciting idea to present -- but almost all such ideas are eventually found to be wrong.  And saving the planet is a REALLY big idea that yields a golden shower of research grants onto anybody who promotes Warmism.  The data is already in which shows that Warmism is BS but until most scientists come out and say it is BS it will still hold sway.  But for most scientists  concerned, Warmism is their bread and butter so we are going to wait a long time for them to own up


How many times have you encountered a study — on, say, weight loss — that trumpeted one fad, only to see another study discrediting it a week later?

That’s because many medical studies are junk. It’s an open secret in the research community, and it even has a name: “the reproducibility crisis.”

For any study to have legitimacy, it must be replicated, yet only half of medical studies celebrated in newspapers hold water under serious follow-up scrutiny — and about two-thirds of the “sexiest” cutting-edge reports, including the discovery of new genes linked to obesity or mental illness, are later “disconfirmed.”

Though erring is a key part of the scientific process, this level of failure slows scientific progress, wastes time and resources and costs taxpayers excesses of $28 billion a year, writes NPR science correspondent Richard Harris in his book “Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions” (Basic Books).

“When you read something, take it with a grain of salt,” Harris tells The Post. “Even the best science can be misleading, and often what you’re reading is not the best science.”

Take one particularly enraging example: For many years research on breast cancer was conducted on misidentified melanoma cells, which means that thousands of papers published in credible scientific journals were actually studying the wrong cancer. “It’s impossible to know how much this sloppy use of the wrong cells has set back research into breast cancer,” writes Harris.

Modal Trigger

Another study claimed to have invented a blood test that could detect ovarian cancer — which would mean much earlier diagnosis. The research was hailed as a major breakthrough on morning shows and in newspapers. Further scrutiny, though, revealed the only reason the blood test “worked” was because the researchers tested the two batches on two separate days — all the women with ovarian cancer on one day, and without the disease the next. Instead of measuring the differences in the cancer, the blood test had, in fact, measured the day-to-day differences in the machine.

So why are so many tests bogus? Harris has some thoughts.

For one, science is hard. Everything from unconscious bias — the way researchers see their data through the rosy lens of their own theses — to the types of beaker they use or the bedding that they keep mice in can cloud results and derail reproducibility.

Then there is the funding issue. During the heyday of the late ’90s and early aughts, research funding increased until Congress decided to hold funding flat for the next decade, creating an atmosphere of intense, some would say unhealthy, competition among research scientists. Now only 17 percent of grants get funded (compared to a third three decades ago). Add this to the truly terrible job market for post-docs — only 21 percent land tenure track jobs — and there is a greater incentive to publish splashy counterintuitive studies, which have a higher likelihood of being wrong, writes Harris.

One effect of this “pressure to publish” situation is intentional data manipulation, where scientists cherry-pick the information that supports a hypothesis while ignoring the data that doesn’t — an all too common problem in academic research, writes Harris.

“There’s a constant scramble for research dollars. Promotions and tenure depend on making splashy discoveries. There are big rewards for being first, even if the work ultimately fails the test of time,” writes Harris.

‘Promotions and tenure depend on making splashy discoveries. There are big rewards for being first, even if the work ultimately fails the test of time.’
This will only get worse if funding is cut further — something that seems inevitable under proposed federal tax cuts. “It only exacerbates the problems. With so many scientists fighting for a shrinking pool of money, cuts will only make all of these issues worse,” Harris says.

Luckily, there is a growing group of people working to expose the ugly side of how research is done. One of them is Stanford professor John Ioannidis, considered one of the heroes of the reproducibility movement. He’s written extensively on the topic, including a scathing paper titled “Why Most Published Scientific Research Findings Are False.”

He’s found, for example, out of tens of thousands of papers touting discoveries of specific genes linked to everything from depression to obesity, only 1.2 percent had truly positive results. Meanwhile, Dr. Ioannidis followed 49 studies that had been cited at least a thousand times — of which seven had been “flatly contradicted” by further research. This included one that claimed estrogen and progestin benefited women after hysterectomies “when in fact the drug combination increased the risk of heart disease and breast cancer.”

Other organizations like Retraction Watch, which tracks discredited studies in real time, and the Cochrane group, an independent network of researchers that pushes for evidence-based medicine, act as industry watchdogs. There is also an internal push for scientists to make their data public so it’s easier to police bad science.

The public can play a role, too. “If we curb our enthusiasm a bit,” Harris writes, “scientists will be less likely to run headlong after dubious ideas.”

SOURCE





Trump Opens Doors on Oil Exploration, but Deeper Reforms Still Needed

In another move to free up domestic energy supplies, President Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday aimed at lifting the Obama administration’s offshore drilling restrictions.

For decades, bad policies have blocked access to America’s abundance of domestic resources, yet America has still managed to be a global energy leader. Trump’s executive order, “Implementing an America-First Offshore Energy Strategy,” could unleash further success in the energy sector.

The economic potential sitting just off America’s coasts is enormous. The Outer Continental Shelf is awash with natural resources, containing an estimated 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Realizing that potential could create nearly a million American jobs, and the increased energy supplies that would result would put money back into the bank accounts of American families. It would also generate new prospects for investment and job creation, as cheap energy lowers the cost of business operations across all sectors, not just energy.

The federal government has placed various bans on offshore drilling for decades. Last November, the Obama administration’s Department of Interior finalized some of the most restrictive leasing programs to date.

The Interior Department’s final 2017-2022 Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program was best known for the areas it placed off limits, rather than what it made available to lease for energy exploration.

It excluded lease sales in the oil-rich Beaufort or Chukchi seas off the coasts of Alaska, as well as areas off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The Interior Department also restricted opportunities in the Gulf of Mexico and the Cook Inlet off south central Alaska.

Critics of Trump’s decision to free up leasing are making the same arguments they’ve made for years: “Oil prices are too low, so the decision won’t spur more oil exploration. Drilling offshore takes too long, so it’s not going to have any immediate impact.”

But those arguments ignore the biggest drivers of investment. Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis were spot on in writing for The Washington Post, “[L]ocal political considerations and the global energy market are likely to influence future exploration far more than an executive order in Washington.”

While Trump’s executive order will open more doors for exploration, it won’t automatically trigger an energy boom. That’s the way it should be.

Oil prices are long-term and, as history has shown, can increase rather quickly. Industry makes investment decisions looking decades into the future, not simply based on short-term projections.

Although it certainly is possible that low oil prices could prohibit offshore production, that’s a decision for the private sector to consider. Businesses are much better equipped and flexible to deal with changing economic circumstances than shortsighted politicians in Washington.

Another battle cry for of those who oppose offshore drilling is: Do we really want to risk another Deepwater Horizon spill?

The Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010, which caused environmental degradation in the Gulf of Mexico, was a rare and isolated incident, not a result of any systemic problem associated with offshore oil and gas operations.

That’s not to say flaws don’t exist in the current system or that improvements can’t be made.

In fact, after Deepwater Horizon, Congress examined the government-imposed offshore liability cap but never implemented any prudent solution.

Current law states that oil or gas companies do not have to pay more than $75 million in liability costs for accidents they cause—no matter how great the damages.

Additional fees can be paid out of a government-mandated trust fund (the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund), which effectively socializes the risk of offshore oil and gas activities.

Congress should reform the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund and remove the $75 million liability cap, replacing it with a new system that assesses the risks of offshore oil and gas operations and appropriately assigns those risks to industry operators.

A new approach would accurately assign risk to all offshore operations, including exploratory drilling, production, and tanker movements.

Such a system should also hold operators fully liable for their actions and guard against frivolous lawsuits. It should rely on market-based mechanisms and be built around private insurers and professional risk assessors.

Environmental activists aren’t the only ones opposed to Trump’s executive order. Some members of the tourism industry have also voiced concerns about expanded drilling off the Atlantic.

But the energy industry has worked in perfect harmony with other industries. Just look to the Gulf Coast. Every year, residents of the Gulf come to Morgan City, Louisiana, to celebrate the lifeblood of the region’s economy: seafood and oil.

Morgan City’s Shrimp and Petroleum Festival emphasizes “the unique way in which these two seemingly different industries work hand-in-hand culturally and environmentally in this area of the ‘Cajun Coast.’”

While the Deepwater Horizon spill affected all industries in the Gulf Coast, the majority of seafood and tourism companies supported the oil industry throughout the ordeal.

In fact, in many respects, the spill has strengthened the bond between the oil and seafood industry. Shrimpers and fishers were as vocal as anyone in lifting the offshore drilling ban after the spill.

Drilling off the Atlantic coasts could welcome the same symbiotic relationship, which already exists in the Gulf and in the state of Alaska.

Furthermore, states should collect more royalty revenue for offshore production.

Currently, states receive 50 percent of the revenues generated by onshore oil and natural gas production on federal lands, and Congress should apply this allocation offshore as well.

Drilling off states’ coasts and allowing them a larger share of the royalty revenue would encourage more state involvement in drilling decisions.

Offshore drilling would also promote state and local government participation in allocating funds, helping them to close their deficits, enabling coastal restoration and conservation, and shoring up funds for schools.

Trump’s executive order is a welcome step to increasing access to domestic resources, but the back-and-forth of banning resource exploration and then undoing it is a sign that wholesale reform is necessary.

The politicization of the leasing program and the static central planning process that has stifled a dynamic, constantly changing energy market points to the need for legislative action. It is time for a fundamental reconsideration of how the U.S. manages offshore resource development.

Congress should amend the Outer Continental Shelf Leasing Act and get rid of this antiquated, piecemeal leasing approach.

SOURCE






British retirement schemes ignore watchdog’s Greenie  rules

A row is brewing over the failure of pension funds to comply with the environmental requirements of the Pensions Regulator. Local authority funds that hold £217 billion for more than five million employees are failing to address the climate change risk in their investment decisions, experts say.

This could be highly damaging — industry watchdogs and leading fund management groups no longer view climate change provision as an ethical investment choice, but an essential one for safeguarding workers’ savings.

A report by Client Earth, the environmental law organisation, and Share Action, the responsible investment experts, reveals that 80 per cent of local government pension scheme funds failed to cite climate risk in their strategy statements.

SOURCE






Refocusing a Chicago water summit

Proposed EPA budget cuts have activists in dither over wrong issues and imaginary problems

Paul Driessen

President Trump’s proposal to reduce the Environmental Protection Agency’s $8.1-billion budget by $1.6 billion was cut to an $80-million trim in the omnibus spending bill. However, the EPA funding and staff controversy will undoubtedly resume during the next budgetary battles in September.

That’s fueling consternation and con jobs in the heartland. According to press releases, funds for cleaning up the Great Lakes, eliminating lead poisoning, stopping oil pollution and “ensuring justice” for affected groups are “on the chopping block.” Community leaders, government officials, academics and activists will therefore meet May 10-11 in Chicago for a Freshwater Lab Summit, to “engage the public” and map out strategies for preserving Obama environmental staffs, budgets, programs, policies and priorities.

Women, minorities and low-income communities often “bear the brunt of environmental degradation,” say conference organizers, who plan to emphasize “rights” to clean water, “regardless of race, wealth or class.” Speakers include mayors, opponents of oil pipelines and exporting Canadian water to the United States, proponents of sustainability and “environmental climate justice,” and an expert on the role of water sharing and management in “peacemaking, diplomacy and economic equality.”

The summit promises to be lively, somewhat informative, certainly politicized, and likely to energize more of the resistance, rallies, recriminations, rabble rousing, rage, rants and riots that have dominated the U.S. political scene since the November 2016 elections.

Here are a few thoughts that speakers and attendees might want to consider, but most likely will not.

As I’ve noted previously, since EPA was created in 1970, America’s air and water quality have improved dramatically, to the point where most serious pollution concerns are rare and isolated. Cars have eliminated 98% of the pollutants that they emitted 47 years ago. Coal-fired power plants now remove 80- 90% of the mercury, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, particulates and other dangerous substances that used to come out of their stacks. Factories and paper mills have done likewise with air and water emissions.

However, as our laws, technologies, and changed corporate and citizen attitudes resolved most of the chronic environmental problems of yesteryear, EPA and the environmentalist movement set new agendas and priorities. They became ideological, politicized and determined to control what Congress, the states and citizens never intended them to regulate: lingering traces of air pollution, climate change, our entire energy and economic infrastructure, and nearly every rivulet, puddle and other waters of the USA.

The Obama EPA also engaged in illegal experiments on humans; when their results proved that microscopic soot particles are not deadly, the agency ignored the evidence. It also claimed plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide “endangers” America and must be slashed by de-carbonizing and de-industrializing the US economy, under the agency’s Clean Power Plan and social cost of carbon scheme.

It held “listening sessions” in Chicago and other cities where abundant college and other activists could easily testify, but affected miners, factory workers and farmers would have to travel hundreds of miles – and then have their stories and concerns ignored by the regulators. They simply became Collateral Damage in a war on coal and affordable energy that brought green energy poverty to millions.

In the mostly former steel town of Middlebury, Ohio, jobs and people moved out, as dependency, despondency and drugs moved in. In September 2016, this city of 49,000 had 30 heroin overdoses in one week. Many factors played a role in the decline, but EPA’s regulatory warfare was clearly one of them.

Meanwhile, Flint, Michigan’s drinking water was laced with lead, because EPA, state and local officials were too distracted to safeguard what Chicago summiteers view as a basic right to clean water. Prevention and repair funds were spent on climate change and other agendas. Fixing this serious health problem is a high Trump EPA priority; the funds are not going to be deleted, as summit organizers claim.

Out in Colorado, EPA-supervised contractors unleashed a toxic flashflood from the Gold King Mine, contaminating river water for hundreds of miles. EPA waited an entire day before notifying impacted communities. It refused to provide adequate compensation and never punished anyone.

Will the conferees offer compassion and demand environmental justice for all these regulatory victims? Will they demand accountability for the inexcusable derelictions of duty by irresponsible regulators?

When they call for action to block more pipelines, will they even mention that new pipelines are needed to bring oil and natural gas from new fields to refineries and petrochemical plants that provide the fuels and products they use every day? That new pipelines are needed to replace aging pipes that could spring leaks? Or that pipelines are much safer than railway tanker cars and tanker trucks on our highways?

Will summit speaker and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett explain the millions of gallons of untreated wastewater and sewage that his city still discharges into Lake Michigan every year?

In the context of “drastic” budget and personnel reductions proposed for EPA, will the “unprecedented coalition of mayors and community advocates” meeting in Chicago discuss the fact that EPA simply will not require so many people or funds, now that it won’t need a massive bureaucracy to control US lands, waters, farms, factories, energy and economic development, to “stabilize” Earth’s ever-fickle climate?

Staff and funding will still be more than adequate to clean up the Great Lakes, monitor and address drinking water and sewage problems in our cities, ensure that oil and gas pipelines are built and operated safely, and enforce factory and vehicle compliance with pollution standards. Fewer funds and personnel will simply be reallocated from the grand schemes of the Obama years to real remaining problems.

Will the conference recognize that federal regulations alone cost $1.9 trillion per year – prior to the regulatory tsunami of the Obama Administration’s final three months? The eight-year Obama era alone generated over $800 billion of those annual regulatory burdens. EPA alone was responsible for well over $350 billion of the overall bill, based on 2012 data from just the first four years of the Obama presidency.

These regulations – combined with countless thousands of criminal offenses embedded in them – impose an enormous burden on every business, industry, state, community and family in the United States. They are an incalculable drag on job creation, economic growth, family budgets, and the ability of families to meet medical, nutrition, rent, mortgage, college, retirement and other needs. They have an acute and disproportionate impact on poor, minority, single parent and blue-collar families.

They deprive people of their basic civil rights and environmental justice, often for few or no benefits.

Conference participants, community leaders, lawmakers and regulators should worry less about saving the planet, and more about doing their jobs and keeping little problems from becoming big ones. Less about exaggerated, fabricated climate risks, and more about actual pollution and joblessness risks. Less about rights and demands – and more about personal and shared responsibilities.

They should especially emphasize what kids and adults must do to succeed in life: Stay in school, study hard, graduate. Minimize drug and alcohol use. Don’t join gangs or become unwed teen parents. Get and stay married. Be parents, not just sperm or egg donors. Get a job, be on time, work hard, learn new skills, and parlay that experience into better jobs. Save for college or to move into a better neighborhood. Play a positive role in making your current home, neighborhood and school cleaner, safer, better.

President Trump’s election was an equal and opposite reaction to the excesses, abuses and failures by previous administration. Yes, elections do have consequences. The Trump election has brought new visions, agendas, directions and policies for America: rolling back costly, excessive, intrusive regulations; reducing tax burdens; devolving more power and responsibility to states and cities; telling federal agencies to focus on actual remaining problems that should be handled at that level; and persuading more people and communities to take greater responsibility for their own success or failure.

These changes will help bring jobs, opportunities and prosperity back to America. They deserve a fair hearing at the Chicago summit and elsewhere, in civil conversations that truly involve all affected parties.

Via email




Canada rejects Greenie squawks about weed killer

They systematically answer each point the panic merchants have made

Executive Summary

Health Canada's primary objective in regulating pesticides is to protect Canadians' health and their environment. Pesticides must be registered by Health Canada's Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) before they can be imported, sold, or used in Canada. Pesticides must go through rigorous science-based assessments before being approved for sale in Canada.

All registered pesticides must be re-evaluated by the PMRA on a cyclical basis to make sure they continue to meet modern health and environment safety standards and continue to have value. In 2015, the PMRA published the outcome of its extensive re-examination of glyphosate for public comment (PRVD2015-01), which concluded that the products containing glyphosate do not present unacceptable risks to human health or the environment when used according to the revised product label directions.

During this re-examination, the PMRA assessed the potential human health risk of glyphosate from drinking water, food, occupational and bystander exposure, as well as the environmental risk to non-target organisms. Both the active ingredient and formulated products were included in the re-evaluation. The assessment was carried out based on available information provided by the manufacturer of the pesticide, as well as a large volume of published scientific literature, monitoring information (for example, ground water and surface water) and reviews conducted by other regulatory authorities.

The overall finding from the re-examination of glyphosate is highlighted as follows:

Glyphosate is not genotoxic and is unlikely to pose a human cancer risk.

Dietary (food and drinking water) exposure associated with the use of glyphosate is not expected to pose a risk of concern to human health.

Occupational and residential risks associated with the use of glyphosate are not of concern, provided that updated label instructions are followed.

The environmental assessment concluded that spray buffer zones are necessary to mitigate potential risks to non-target species (for example, vegetation near treated areas, aquatic invertebrates and fish) from spray drift.

When used according to revised label directions, glyphosate products are not expected to pose risks of concern to the environment.

All registered glyphosate uses have value for weed control in agriculture and non-agricultural land management.

All comments received during the consultation process were taken into consideration. These comments and new data/information resulted in only minor revisions to the proposed regulatory decision described in PRVD2015-01. Therefore, the PMRA is granting continued registration of products containing glyphosate with requirements of additional label updates to further protect human health and 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   main.html or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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7 May, 2017

A story about the "science guy" who wants to jail climate skeptics

By Elias Fredericks

I grew up on Bill Nye. I looked up to him as a role model and someone who taught me more then my boring 3rd grade teacher could.

Several years ago, my mom brought me with her to a math and science conference in Boston.

Bill Nye was there. However, his workshop was full, which was extremely disappointing to me.

I really wanted to meet my childhood hero, and some greedy old math people are taking that from me!

Well, we were entering an elevator, in a rush to our next workshop, and guess who is there but the Science Guy himself?

I still love Bill Nye as a figure, and always will.

But, wow, was he nasty.

He basically told people to not talk to him, and when they did was extremely dismissive.

He stood in the corner and sulked.

Here was my childhood idol, being a jerk to innocent people probably in the same mindset I was.

It traumatized me.

It was the first time that I realized that my idols were human, and just as Bill was in this case, can be nasty.

SOURCE






Solar Industry Struggles

The Security and Exchange Commission has begun investigating several solar-energy companies due to their alleged failure to disclose to their investors information about canceled contracts and lost customers.

Numerous customer complaints about these companies have been fielded by attorneys general in several states. Common to many of the complaints were stories of various high-pressure sales tactics, which seems to be corroborated by a rather high rate of customers backing out of contracts. SolarCity, which was recently purchased by Tesla, reported that nearly half of its customers were backing out of contracts before solar panels were installed. Another company, Sunrun, cut its growth expectations in half in 2016 from 80% to 40%.

The fledgling solar-energy industry is getting a crash course in market economics, with growing competition both within the industry itself with various new start-ups, as well as the development of more strident regulations in various states.

Despite being propped up by leftists hoping for a “clean energy” revolution, the solar-energy industry is struggling to survive market forces — well-established cheaper fossil fuel industry power and a lack of consumer demand. The Obama administration’s green-energy tactics included heavily subsidizing the failed Solyndra startup, which cost taxpayers more than half a billion dollars with nothing to show for it. That brought negative press for the entire industry. Now with Donald Trump at the helm and his push to deregulate coal and other fossil fuel industries, the viability (and desirability) of “green” energy becomes that much more tenuous.

Competing in the free market is challenging and offers no guarantee of success, but hiding numbers from investors and practicing dubious sales tactics — all while raking in taxpayer money — will only invite further distrust of an industry already struggling to gain broad public acceptance.

SOURCE






The new EPA is putting American workers first

By EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt

When President Trump came to EPA to sign an executive order ending the “war on coal,” he was flanked by Pennsylvania coal miners. Hosting coal miners at EPA headquarters in Washington served as a stark contrast to the past administration, to be sure.

President Trump’s action was a moment in which a promise became an economic reality. As EPA Administrator, I immediately ordered my Agency to comply with the March 28 executive order, and signed four new rules, which included a review of the Clean Power Plan. Relief — and prosperity — is on the way.

The “war on coal” stemmed from the previous administration’s regulations aimed at removing coal from our nation’s energy mix. This approach, sanctioned by EPA and other agencies, divided Americans and strengthened Washington’s grip on our economy. Thankfully, President Trump has made clear: The regulatory assault on American workers is over. We should not have to choose between supporting jobs and supporting the environment.

Now, opponents of President Trump’s new executive order claim that this action means that our federal government is turning its back on a clean environment and regulation altogether. This argument is wrong.

First, the Clean Power Plan was never implemented, and was unable to do a single thing for our environment. Twenty-seven states sued, recognizing the threat this regulation posed to their economies and the rule of law. The Supreme Court granted a stay to halt implementation of the Clean Power Plan.

Rather than take its lumps, the Obama administration still demanded compliance from the states, claiming that the stay was only temporary (a technique that was frequently used by the Agency to extract compliance during litigation). The result was lost jobs and an uncertain regulatory environment, without any environmental gain to show for it.

Second, the Clean Power Plan was expected to yield very little for what it cost the American taxpayer. For the price of American jobs, EPA had promised a reduction of sea level rise by the thickness of two sheets of paper and reduction of atmospheric CO2 concentrations by 0.2 percent by 2100, according to an analysis by the National Economic Research Associates. Emissions growth in China and India, of course, would continue unchecked. This plan put America last.

Third, congressional testimony by my predecessor, former Administrator Gina McCarthy, made it clear that the goal of the Clean Power Plan was far less about achieving a measurable result than it was about providing leadership in the world. The federal government sought to kneecap American workers, while countries like India and China were not held to the same rules.

Americans who want a healthy and clean environment expect lawful, effective and economically sound regulation — the Clean Power Plan failed on all three counts. EPA can and should now focus on getting real results in the fight for clean air, land and water.

President Trump made it clear that we should put America first. We are not going to allow EPA to pick winners and losers through regulation. EPA should work within the framework that Congress has established. And we should provide regulatory certainty and write rules that make sense for the states and the businesses they affect.

The “war on coal” is over. Now EPA can focus on its mission and deliver real results.

SOURCE





Environmentalists or Ecoterrorists? Pipeline Arsonists on the Rise   

The supposedly environmentally friendly crowd is doing an exceptionally atrocious job of proving it. The most recent example of actual environmental malpractice occurred last week in the Midwest, where criminal activists are still trying their best to disrupt the Dakota Access Pipeline. The irony, of course, is that they are wrecking the land they claim to cherish in the process. On Thursday, anti-pipeline knuckleheads in the vicinity of Newell, Iowa, caused a combined $145,000 in damage. That’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. This occurred right around the same time another episode of arson happened in southeast Iowa, and authorities are attempting to establish a link.

For Newell in particular, this is déjà vu. In November, saboteurs went on a multi-million-dollar blitzkrieg. Additionally, this is a theme we’ve seen repeated over and over again. As John Sexton reports, “Last October, fires were also set near Reasnor, Iowa, causing up to $2 million in damage. At the time, the company behind the pipeline offered a $100,000 reward for information on the arson. There had also been a previous arson incident in the same location in August. In March of this year, the company that built the pipeline reported two incidents of sabotage in which someone used a blowtorch to burn a hole in a shut-off valve. One of the incidents happened in Iowa, the other in South Dakota.”

And let’s not forget North Dakota — the epicenter of the ecoterrorists' rage. The recent theatrics in that state has Gov. Doug Burgum seeking $38 million from the federal government to alleviate the financial burden imposed by hypocritical activists. When a movement’s reactions are entirely contradictory to its purported goal, it’s not really a movement so much as it is a tyrannical mob. In other words, they’re quite literally ecofascists.

SOURCE





The First Step in Revoking Obama’s Land Grab

What is done by executive power can be undone by executive power.

Former President Barack Obama began to learn that lesson this Wednesday when President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to conduct a review of all Antiquities Act designations larger than 100,000 acres over the past 30 years.

Specifically, the executive order directs Zinke to consider “the requirements and original objectives of the Act, including the Act’s requirement that reservations of land not exceed ‘the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected’” and whether “designated lands are appropriately classified under the Act as ‘historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, [or] other objects of historic or scientific interest.’”

This wording strongly suggests that Obama’s lame duck decision to designate 1.35 million acres in San Juan County as a national monument will at least be significantly reduced and possibly entirely rescinded.

Some environmental activists may claim that Trump does not have the power to shrink or revoke Obama’s Antiquities Act designations, but these claims are ignorant of both history and the law.

For starters, as University of California Berkeley Law School professor John Yoo and Pacific Legal Foundation Executive Director John Gaziano detailed in a recent legal report, five presidents have significantly reduced four previous monument designations, and no one has ever questioned the legality of those reductions.

Specifically, President Ike Eisenhower reduced the Great Sand Dunes National Monument by 25 percent, President Harry Truman reduced the Santa Rosa Island National Monument by 49 percent, Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Calvin Coolidge collectively reduced the Mount Olympus monument by 49 percent, and Taft reduced the Navajo National Monument by 89 percent.

A current president’s power to alter a previous president’s flows from the text of the statute, which authorizes the president “in his discretion, to declare by public proclamation … national monuments …. the limits of which in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”

As Yoo and Gaziano point out, “there is no temporal limit” on the requirement that a monument must be limited to “the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected” so all presidents must use their ongoing discretion as to whether every monument is the proper size.

“What is done by executive power can be undone by executive power.”

Furthermore, what if a later president determines that an earlier president’s designation was so exceedingly beyond the “smallest area compatible with proper care” that the entire designation was illegal?

Yoo and Gaziano argue that the entire monument designation could be revoked.

Whatever Zinke does end up recommending to Trump—and a preliminary report is due in 45 days on Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument—further executive action will only be the beginning of solving San Juan County’s public lands issues.

Congress will then need to pick up the Public Lands Initiative legislation that was working through the House before Obama derailed the legislative process and pass a commonsense solution that includes real input from local residents.

Only through the legislation can local residents, including the Navajo, be given real power over their land use decisions

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   main.html 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 May, 2017

Huge Antarctic ice shelf crack now has second branch

So what?  It is floating ice.  So whether it cracks or not it will do nothing to the sea level. And the fact noted below that the Antarctic peninsula has warmed a lot more that the rest of the world shows that any warming we are loking at there is local warming not global warming.  The peninsula has known vulcanism so that is the probable cause of the warming

A huge crack in an Antarctic ice shelf now has a new second branch, scientists announced Tuesday. Once the crack completely shears off, it will create one of the largest icebergs ever recorded, one that's larger than the state of Rhode Island.

The main crack in the Larsen C ice shelf is now 110 miles long. The iceberg is most likely to break free within the next few months because of the overwhelming weight the 110 miles of already separated ice is placing on the 12 miles that remains connected to the shelf, said Adrian Luckman of Project MIDAS, a British Antarctic research project that's keeping watch on the ever-growing crack.

That small 12 miles of ice is all that's keeping the nearly 2,000-square-mile piece from floating away, he said.

“While the previous rift tip has not advanced, a new branch of the rift has been initiated," Luckman said in a statement. "This is approximately six miles behind the previous tip, heading toward the ice front."

This is the first significant change to the crack, also known as a rift, since February.  Although the length of the crack has remained steady for several months, it has been steadily widening at rates in excess of three feet per day.

Ice shelves are permanent floating sheets of ice that connect to a land mass, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Studying them is important because they "hold back the glaciers that 'feed' them," Luckman said. "When they disappear, ice can flow faster from the land to the ocean and contribute more quickly to sea-level rise."

Larsen C is approximately 1,100 feet thick and floats on the seas at the edge of West Antarctica, holding back the flow of glaciers that feed into it.

The scientific name for the process of ice breaking off of an ice shelf or glacier is known as "calving."

7 facts on the crack in the Antarctic ice shelf

“When it calves, the Larsen C ice shelf will lose more than 10% of its area to leave the ice front at its most retreated position ever recorded. This event will fundamentally change the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula, " Luckman said.

It's uncertain whether this expected calving event on Larsen C is an effect of climate change or not, although there is good scientific evidence that climate change has caused thinning of the ice shelf, according to Project Midas.

In the past 50 years, the Antarctic Peninsula has experienced extraordinary warming of more than 4 degrees, the European Space Agency said.

SOURCE





The Legal and Economic Case Against the Paris Climate Treaty

President Trump should keep his two-part campaign promise to cancel U.S. participation in the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments to United Nations global warming programs. The Paris Agreement is a costly and ineffectual solution to the alleged climate crisis. It is also plainly a treaty, despite President Obama’s attempt to implement it without the Senate’s advice and consent. Failure to withdraw from the agreement would entrench a constitutionally damaging precedent, set President Trump’s domestic and foreign policies in conflict, and ensure decades of diplomatic blowback.

For those and other reasons, the Paris Agreement imperils both America’s economic future and capacity for self-government.

The Paris Agreement and the 1992 treaty it purports to modify, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, both contain provisions for withdrawal. Concerns about diplomatic blowback if President Trump withdraws from the Agreement or submits it for the Senate’s advice and consent actually confirm the wisdom of exercising one of those options. The Paris Agreement is designed to institutionalize a running campaign of diplomatic blowback unless the U.S. submits to ever-tightening constraints, ratcheting up every five years. If Trump withdraws, any diplomatic blowback would largely be a muted one-off event, without the economic, political, and security costs that staying in the Paris Agreement entails.

To safeguard America’s economic future and capacity for self-government, President Trump should pull out of the Paris Agreement. There are several options for doing so, which are discussed in this paper. Regardless of which option Trump selects, his  administration should make the case for withdrawal based on the following key points:

    The Paris Climate Agreement is a treaty by virtue of its costs and risks, ambition compared to predecessor climate treaties, dependence on subsequent legislation by Congress, intent to affect state laws, U.S. historic practice with regard to multilateral environmental agreements, and other common-sense criteria.

    In America’s constitutional system, treaties must obtain the advice and consent of the Senate before the United States may lawfully join them. President Obama deemed the Paris Agreement to not be a treaty in order to evade constitutional review, which the Agreement almost certainly would not have survived.

    Allowing Obama’s climate coup to stand will set a dangerous precedent that will undermine one of the Constitution’s important checks and balances. It will allow a future president to adopt any treaty he and foreign elites want, without Senate ratification, just by deeming it “not a treaty.”

    The Agreement endangers America’s capacity for self-government. It empowers one administration to make legislative commitments for decades to come, without congressional authorization, and regardless of the outcome of future elections. It would also make U.S. energy policies increasingly unaccountable to voters, and increasingly beholden to the demands of foreign leaders, U.N. bureaucrats, and international pressure groups.

    The United States cannot comply with the Paris Agreement and pursue a pro-growth energy agenda. Affordable, plentiful, reliable energy is the lifeblood of modern economic life. Yet, the Paris Agreement’s central goal is to make fossil fuels, America’s most plentiful and affordable energy source, more expensive across the board. Implementing the agreement’s progressively more restrictive five-year emission-reduction pledges—called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)—would destroy U.S. manufacturing’s energy price edge.

    The Agreement entails more cost and risk than the country is willing to bear. A majority of states have sued to overturn the Obama Environmental Protection Agency’s end-run around Congress, the Clean Power Plan, which is also the centerpiece of the U.S. NDC under the Paris Agreement. Yet, the CPP is only a start. All of Obama’s adopted and proposed climate policies would only achieve about 51 percent of just the first NDC, and the Paris Agreement requires parties to promise more “ambitious” NDCs every five years.

    The Agreement has no democratic legitimacy. President Obama kept mum about climate change during the 2012 elections. Only after being reelected did he unveil a climate agenda featuring an EPA-redesigned electric power system and the most “ambitious” climate agreement in history.

    Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement is a humanitarian imperative. The Agreement will produce no detectable climate benefits. Instead, it will divert trillions of dollars from productive investments that would advance global welfare to political uses. Worse, the Agreement’s mid-century emission-reduction goals cannot be achieved without drastically reducing energy-poor countries’ current access to affordable energy from fossil fuels.

For all the foregoing reasons, President Trump should stick to his campaign promises to end America’s participation in the Paris Climate Agreement and stop payments to the U.N. Green Climate Fund.

SOURCE






Buyer beware: Subsidy-driven solar industry a bubble waiting to burst

Think about this.  TESLA, an electric car company that has yet to make a profit, has the largest market capitalization of any U.S. auto company recently surpassing both Ford and General Motors, and a leading auto company analyst predicts that absent federal government subsidies, the entire market for their product will collapse.

Talk about tulip bubble.

In a separate article, Bloomberg reports that GM expects to earn more than $9 billion this year and analysts predict Ford will generate adjusted profit of about $6.3 billion. On that basis, Tesla is expected to lose more than $950 million.

The largest auto company in the U.S. is valued on the U.S. stock market at approximately $60 billion, they don’t make a profit, and would be devastated if federal and state government subsidies were removed.  As the old television show starring Fran Tarkenton used to say, “That’s Incredible!”

The owner of TESLA, Elon Musk is the primary beneficiary of this government subsidized valuation bubble, but this is not the first industry that Musk has been involved in which receives massive subsidization and is wrapped in controversy.  Musk also owns solar panel company Solar City.

A recent report issued by Americans for Limited Government Foundation chronicled on-going consumer complaints and problems across America due to shady sales and marketing practices that run rampant throughout the highly subsidized solar panel industry.

A Duncanville, Texas, man spent $18,000 on solar panels for his home and was shocked to discover that he only saved $177 on his electricity bill over the course of a full year, not exactly the savings that were promised.

In Arizona, a spokesperson for the state attorney general reported that they have been “flooded” with complaint calls over the failure of a solar installation contractor to actually perform the work after accepting thousands of dollars in payments from more than a thousand customers. It must be noted that Arizona offers state solar tax credits up to 25 percent of total system costs not to exceed $1,000, subsidies which are used as sales tools to convince consumers that solar makes sense.

The Mississippi state Attorney General Jim Hood expressed frustration about the many problems within the solar industry urging:

“Before consumers make a significant investment in a solar system, they should research their options to make sure they are in fact getting cost savings and meeting their goals of environmental sustainability. While there are some exemplary companies, other solar companies are using misleading sale pitches to entice consumers into paying for overpriced PV system agreements or failing to disclose how various subsidies, government programs and rate making practices may affect the future cost of energy for the consumer.”

In another “buyer or lessee beware” moment, The ALG Foundation reports on an Arizona homeowner who installed solar panels under a lease agreement thinking that his home value would be increased, only to discover according to Brian Neugebauer, the real estate agent who helped sell the property that potential buyers were, “scared of the solar lease.”  Neugebauer continued by saying that the homeowner had to “price the house lower than houses without solar to get people interested.”

After the sale rubbing salt in the wound, the homeowner had to convince the solar panel leasing company to approve the purchase after learning that the new owner had a lower credit rating than they allowed.

To be both fair and clear, solar complaints don’t typically revolve around the quality of the products, but instead they center on false financial promises and poor/failed workmanship on installation by solar contractors, along with the alarming discovery that in some cases home values have been impacted negatively and loan options have been unknowingly limited.

Given the levels of government subsidies, commonsense transparency reforms need to be put in place at the state level to help consumers make an informed solar judgment. It is in the interest of both the solar industry and the consumer to ensure that the government subsidy they get doesn’t turn to fools gold for the consumers they entice. Read the full report here.

And when it comes to TESLA stock, let the buyer beware.

SOURCE





Democrat candidate recommends suicide for climate skeptics

Montana’s Democrat nominee for U.S. Congress thinks climate change skeptics should attempt suicide.

“This is something that the entire world needs to address,” said folk musician and House candidate Rob Quist. “If any those of you that feel like this is not a problem, I challenge you to go into your car in your garage, start your car, and see what happens there.”

Unfortunately for Montana Democrats, Quist said that on TV.  In a televised debate.

And he didn’t even get the science right.  Liberals claim the planet is overheating because of carbon dioxide.  Car exhaust kills by poisoning through carbon monoxide.

Needless to say, Quist’s science is decidedly unsettled.

But Quist is not the first Democrat nominee to make light of the deaths of political opponents. He’s also not the first Democrat nominee from Montana to do it.  In fact, he’s not even the first Democrat nominee from Montana to do it in the last four years.

Amanda Curtis held a vigil at the grave of Joe Hill, an infamous Socialist executed in 1915 for murdering a former police officer and his son. She was also Montana’s Democrat nominee for United States Senate in 2014.

Curtis helped organize the event as a member of the “Industrial Workers of the World,” an openly socialist group known for its history of terrorist bombings, including an attempt to assassinate the head of Standard Oil on the day of Hill’s execution.

The IWW’s logo is a black cat, symbolizing sabotage. In 1917 the group had over 150,000 members, but its violent rhetoric and history of terrorism have reduced it to only a few hardcore members today.

Curtis’ local IWW chapter proclaims it is “working to organize the people of Montana into the One Big Union to end wage slavery and eventually end the capitalist system.”

At least Rob Quist isn’t trying to kill people with dynamite.  Maybe Montana Democrats should Google their candidates before nominating them.

SOURCE





India and Pakistan Are Renewing Their Love Affair with Coal

One nation is shirking emissions targets and the other is investing in more coal plants—but with America as a role model, that’s hardly surprising.

Much of the world agrees: burning coal is bad, and we ought to do less of it.

But not everyone sings from that sheet, including Pakistan’s Water and Power Ministry. As part of a large infrastructure investment project with China, it’s committed to spending $15 billion on as many as 12 new coal power plants over the next 15 years. Reuters reports that the figure is almost half of the $33 billion being invested into energy projects as part of the initiative, and that around 75 percent of the extra generation capacity will come from new coal plants.

The government insists that the new plants will use technology to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. But the nation’s minister for planning, development and reform, Ahsan Iqbal, sounds downright Trumpian in his view of the nation's future energy policy: “Pakistan must tap [its] vast underground reserves of 175 billion tonnes of coal, adequate to meet the country’s energy needs for several decades, for powering the country’s economic wheel, creating new jobs, and fighting spiking unemployment and poverty.”

Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports (paywall) that India will fail to meet its own targets to reduce emissions from its coal power plants. India’s struggle to clean up its energy act is well-known. But it’s currently unable to meet its own power demands, so it’s not really that practical to shut down plants—and given that no penalties will be imposed for failing to reduce emissions, there’s little incentive to do so.

To anyone who would criticize the move, Piyush Goyal, India’s power minister, had this to say: “India is not a polluter," he told the Financial Times. "It’s America and the western world that has to first stop polluting.” There’s a grain of truth to that: America and Europe did a lot of coal burning during their development, and now have strong economies to leverage in order to clean up their acts. Developing countries aren’t so lucky. And developed countries still emit far more greenhouse gases per citizen than India and Pakistan. As of 2013 the annual per capita CO2 emissions of India and Pakistan were 1.59 and 0.85 metric tons respectively. In the U.S., the figure is 16.39 metric tons.

The recent trend has been for that figure to fall year-on-year in the U.S., but the Trump administration certainly isn’t making its continuation a priority. Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. coal industry was enjoying an uptick thanks to Trump’s relaxed regulations and reduced production in China. While coal is unlikely to come roaring back in America, there is still scope for the industry to rebound modestly over the coming years.

Indeed, the White House appears to be readying itself to disregard the emissions targets the Obama administration committed to as part of the Paris climate agreement in 2015. Trump’s aides are reported to be increasingly inclined toward quitting the pact—a shift from previous thinking. The New York Times says a decision could rest on a single phrase in the agreement: whether a country’s ability to “adjust” emissions targets can allow for weakening, as well as strengthening, commitments.

That plays directly into Goyal's hands. If the supposed leader of the free world doesn’t think that drastic emissions reduction is a priority, why should India and Pakistan—or any country that believes burning more fossil fuels will enhance economic growth?

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   main.html 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 May, 2017

Greenie hatred of garbage costs Britain heaps

Everything must be recyled according to Greenies.  And in their typically authoritarian way, they have tried to FORCE people to comply -- by limiting the amount of household garbage that the local authority will collect.  So what are people supposed to do with the uncollected garbage?  Their only legal option is to pay extra to have some private operator to collect it. And what he does with it nobody asks. And what do the poor do?  They take it to some rural spot and dump it by the side of the road -- "fly tipping".  So instead of orderly waste disposal you have garbage littered around the landscape -- that has to be picked up eventually anyway, at considerable cost


Fly-tipping and other waste crimes have risen to record levels, costing the country £600 million a year, because of a loophole that allows criminals to set up as licensed rubbish collectors.

The number of people and organisations registered to carry waste has more than doubled in the past decade to 185,000 and few checks are carried out on those involved, research shows. The loophole was exposed when the study’s authors registered a dead dog as a waste carrier and the Environment Agency issued a licence immediately without any identity checks.

Anyone can obtain a licence to transport waste and then advertise a collection service by spending a few minutes filling in an online form and paying £234 to the Environment Agency.

SOURCE





Ecofascist March Is Really About Bullying & Rebellion   

Once again, Washington, DC, was filled with a bunch of yahoos on Saturday — a day that corresponded with Donald Trump’s media-sensationalized 100th day in office. And no, we’re not talking about the lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Though it supposedly wasn’t a direct encore to last weekend’s March for Science Fiction, Saturday’s confab — called the Peoples Climate March — attracted thousands of likeminded activists who view the Trump administration and its vast EPA downsizing as environmental hazards. Temperatures soared into the 90s, which of course many pundits interpreted as an omen. Of course, it could simply have been all that hot air ecofascists spew.

Hillary Clinton called the march an achievement toward “economic justice.” Which is ironic when accounting for the fact thousands and thousands of jobs have been lost because of onerous EPA regulations. According to The Washington Post, some of the march participants' chants included: “Shame, shame, shame!”; “Hey hey, ho ho, Scott Pruitt has got to go!”; “Resistance is here to stay, welcome to your 100th day”; and “The oceans are rising and so are we!” Cute. But as Frank Fleming wryly tweeted, “If there was a march to stop useless marches, I wouldn’t march at it because it wouldn’t accomplish anything.”

Saturday’s gathering of disgruntled individuals is not purely about righteous indignation, either, despite what they claim. It’s about rebelling against limited government and Republican doctrine. Case in point: “Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators are expected to take to the streets Monday in massive May Day events across the USA mostly protesting the policies of President Trump,” USA Today reports. As if they needed yet another march. All these events have another thing in common as well: Most have George Soros' fingerprints all over them. The Peoples Climate March was no exception. All leftist marches are really about centralized government control.

Another irony of these marches: Extreme weather — and we’re talking about a wide range of issues here (droughts, tornadoes hurricanes, etc.) — is basically doing the opposite of what alarmists forewarned. True believers of science and the environment would recognize and celebrate this.

SOURCE





Government help for wind energy in TX?

The very famous Ronald Reagan line is: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”  He wasn’t even a little incorrect.

The lather-rinse-repeat cycle is always the same.  Government champions itself as the answer to a private sector “problem.”  But wait, before we go any further: Nigh always the “problem” government “identifies” – isn’t actually a problem.  Government identifies problems – the way Bernie Madoff’s victims identified good investment guidance.

Now that government has made the determination that it is going to “help” – it bull-in-a-china-shop’s its way into the middle of the private sector.  Creating massive disruption – and crowding out private participants.  The entire market warps and distorts – as it is forced to accommodate this massive interloper.

The results are as awful – as they are predictable.  The examples are limitless.  See: Obamacare.  Or Dodd-Frank.  Or Sarbanes-Oxley.  Or….

Then government – the entity that just demonstrably worsened the situation – declares itself the “solution” to the problems it itself just caused.  And further involves itself in the private sector.  Which further warps the private sector.  Which leads the government to declare itself the “solution”….  Lather, rinse, repeat…ad nauseam.

A prime example of this government inanity – is the energy sector.  Private energy providers have done a magnificent job over the last century-plus maximizing fabulous, low-cost…you know, actual energy – oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, etc.

Then the government decided to “help.”  They started regulating the daylight out of these actual energy sources.  And taxing the daylight out of them (and the rest of us) to fund fake energy sources – the non-energy-producing, uber-expensive likes of wind, solar, ethanol, etc.

This isn’t government picking winners and losers – it’s government picking losers at the expense of winners.  And again reminds us of one of life’s empirical truths: If it’s a good idea – no government money is necessary.  No one needs to subsidize ice cream.

And this is federal government inanity – so it screws up things all across the country.  And individual states have to deal with the fallout from the federal foolishness.  Texas is currently in the midst of this expensive, utterly unnecessary nonsense.

The Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) provides power in the Lone Star State.  In 2009, it in San Patricio County cut a 20-year deal with Papalote Creek II (a subsidiary of E.ON and Sumitomo Matsui Banking Corporation) – to purchase 200 megawatts of wind-generated power.

Enter the original sin: Again, the federal government subsidizes wind “energy” out the wazoo.  Which gets people who would otherwise never try to provide wind power – because it makes zero free market economic sense – trying to provide wind power.   The sector – has begun its government-induced warping.

LCRA understood all this – and built into the contract an out should wind energy prices drop below a certain level.  So they could renegotiate at the new, lower rate.  (Conversely, Papalote Creek II had a similar out should the price rise – and they could renegotiate at the higher rate.)

Thanks to fracking and other private sector innovations in the actual energy sector, all energy prices fell – wind included.  So low, it reached the magic number in the contract – and LCRA exercised their option.

Papalote Creek II refused to enter into resolution arbitration – as the contract they signed required.  A federal judge mandated arbitration – which LCRA won.

Then comes further ridiculousness.  When you’re a hammer – everything looks like a nail.  When you count on government for your very survival – you always run to government when things go awry.  Government-funded Papalone Creek II – looks at the entire world and everything in it through a government-only prism.

Having failed in the Real World private energy sector, government-centric Papalone Creek II went running to government – the courts – to bail them out.  And in an example of the belt-and-suspenders approach – they also went to the Texas legislature looking for another bailout.

Another empirical truth: The answer to too much government – isn’t even more government.

But sadly, bizarrely, a Texas REPUBLICAN state representative is ignoring this empirical truth – and attempting to throw Papalone Creek II that government lifeline.  Behold J.M. Lozano – and his House Concurrent Resolution (HCR) 117.

Actually, it isn’t totally bizarre (though it remains inordinately sad) – Papalone Creek II is in Lozano’s district.  That said, nothing justifies what his bill is attempting to do.

First, it is a terrible idea for any legislature to parachute into the middle of courts – in the middle of cases – and disrupt and distort them.  We have separate government branches for a reason.  Let the judicial branch do – what the judicial branch does.  Unfettered by legislative branch manipulation.

Second, this is legislation attempting an after-the-fact rewrite of the LCRA-Papalone Creek II contract – all to the one-sided benefit of Lozano-district-residing Papalone Creek II.  Which just isn’t cricket – in fact, it’s dirty pool.

HCR 117 isn’t a bill – so much as it is a really bad joke.  Representative Lozano isn’t at all amusing here. Lozano’s legislative colleagues should give his bill no thought, no time – and no quarter.

SOURCE







Bret Stephens Gives Climate-Change Alarmists Advice, and the Left Erupts

Ordinarily when war breaks out between the activist Left and the New York Times, the conservative impulse is not to delve too deeply into the substance of the dispute but rather to inquire about the availability of refreshments: When the Ayatollah and Saddam go to war, what is there to do but rather to inquire about the availability of refreshments: When the Ayatollah and Saddam go to war, what is there to do but put one’s feet up and enjoy the carnage?

    I invoke Islamism advisedly. After Bret Stephens, the Times’ new conservative op-ed columnist, made the mild-mannered and more or less inarguable point that there are details unsettled within the topic of climate change, his many ideological opponents reacted with a mindless fury characteristic of religious zealotry. Someone tweeted at Stephens that he should share the fate of Daniel Pearl, like Stephens a longtime Wall Street Journal writer, who was denounced for being Jewish and beheaded by men acting in Allah’s name. The web of ties between ordinary global-minded progressives and jihadists grows ever more dense: For both groups, American conservatives pose the principal threat to their goals.

    Let’s give credit, though, to the Times’ op-ed editor James Bennet, both for hiring Stephens in the first place — the Times now boasts three right-of-center op-ed columnists, which is more than tokenism — and for standing by his new hire while abuse rained down and some progressives claimed to have canceled their subscriptions. Non-partisan institutions (are you listening, university presidents?) and even the Right should learn this lesson from Bennet’s bracing example: Ignore hecklers. They enjoy veto power only if a cowardly decision-maker grants them that power. After a few days, Stephens’s attackers will move on and find something else to be outraged about.

    Stephens’s column arrives at a moment when, culturally speaking, the fulminating Left is feeling pretty upbeat. Its core stratagem of demanding that conservatives either shut up or be shut down is working frighteningly well. Universities from coast to coast are either allowing leftist groups to cancel conservative speech before it occurs or providing such weak and ambivalent protections for speakers that right-wing ideas are effectively squelched. Using Bill O’Reilly’s alleged sexual misconduct as a pretext, Media Matters managed to get him booted off the air. If Bill Clinton had a political talk show, I think we all know the answer to whether leftist pressure groups would publicly denounce any advertisers that sponsored it.

    Stephens’s perfectly reasonable column amounted to friendly strategic advice for the climate alarmists: “Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts,” he noted, and he was immediately treated as a deplorable imbecile. Think Progress compared him to a Holocaust denier and a KKK official. Nate Silver, whose reputation for being a dispassionate data nerd increasingly seems endangered, denounced the column with a barnyard epithet and posted a tweet in which a Times billboard advertising “Truth” was (sarcastically) juxtaposed with a quotation of Stephens’s unassailable point that “claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science.” “Classic climate change denialism,” thundered Slate. “Climate denial wouldn’t get past my desk,” a New Yorker fact-checker tweeted, as if Stephens denied there is a climate. (Stephens also said human influence on global warming was “indisputable.”) The Guardian, as ever the most grievously wounded of them all, called Stephens a “hippie puncher.”

    The near-lunatic disapproval of Stephens’s first Times column indicates more than just fierce disagreement with the tenor of his remarks, or surprise that an institution that barely bothers to disguise its political inclinations would allow someone like Stephens to make his case. The degree of shrieking, world-coming-to-an-end hysteria Stephens unleashed (from the moment he was hired, even before he had published a word with the Times, social-media users were trying to shame Bennet into reversing the decision) reveals a deep-seated worry within the Left. What if “Shut up” isn’t such a persuasive argument to everyone? If it doesn’t work on fellow liberals today, there is significant danger that it might not work, in future, on university presidents or Fox News Channel. If someone with as much clout as Bennet thinks conservative viewpoints are within “the bounds of reasonable discussion,” the idea could catch on. When two parties are welcome at the debate, winning becomes more challenging.

    To the Left (as to the Islamists), there is little substantive difference between a moral failing and a simple difference of opinion on matters of regnant orthodoxy. Disgusting actions indicating gross moral turpitude on the part of a news anchor are indistinguishable from impure thoughts from a Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist. Liberals don’t see the distinction because they genuinely think holding conservative views makes you a bad person. They think Bennet has invited a blasphemer into their ranks.

    As the media columnist Jack Shafer points out, progressives have a history of going berserk when the Times brings aboard a conservative. Longtime Timesman David Halberstam, apoplectic about the 1973 hiring of former Nixon speechwriter William Safire as a columnist, insisted that Safire’s arguments were out of bounds because he was “a paid manipulator . . . not a man of ideas or politics but rather a man of tricks.” The word “tricks” tells us much; for Halberstam, as with today’s liberals, conservative arguments are so self-evidently lacking in merit that some kind of dark magic must explain their persistence. In Bret Stephens they see a bogeyman. They can’t hear what he’s saying over the sound of their own shrieks.




Leftist State government approves new iron mine in South Australia

No uproar from the Greenies so far.  Maybe they are unaware that magnetite (Fe3O4) is a common iron ore

A $4.5 billion mining project that will create nearly 2,000 jobs during construction has been approved in South Australia.

Iron Road has received a mining lease and development approval for the project on the Eyre Peninsula, which will result in 700 jobs over the 25-year life of the mine.

The South Australian Government said if the company meets the conditions of the approval, the Central Eyre Iron Project would be Australia's largest magnetite mine, estimated to produce 21.5 million tonnes each year.

The project will include the construction of a new 145-kilometre rail link and deep-water port at Cape Hardy, near Tumby Bay.

The port will also be able to be used to export other goods from the region, such as grain.

Premier Jay Weatherill said the rigorous development assessment process considered a wide range of environmental, social and economic impacts on local residents and businesses.

The assessment resulted in 127 conditions that Iron Road will have to meet to proceed with the project.

Conditions include the resolution of land access issues, continuous monitoring and public reporting of dust emissions and noise, and taking measures to prevent any loss of agricultural productivity from surrounding properties.

"If Iron Road meet the conditions of their approval this project will create thousands of jobs and have a significant, lasting impact on our economy," Mr Weatherill said.

"Connecting the Eyre Peninsula to the world's markets through a modern rail link and deep-water port that can be used by other businesses will also enable this important region of our state to grow."

Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis said the project was one of several magnetite projects under development in South Australia.

"There are 14 billion tonnes of magnetite underground in South Australia and the State Government is committed to developing this resource in order to boost exports, create jobs and drive economic activity in regional areas," he said.

"This is an extremely important milestone in the Centre Eyre Iron Project, which is the latest in a pipeline of magnetite projects under development in South Australia.

"If this project proceeds to production, it won't be a sugar hit to our economy, it will deliver 700 jobs over a 25-year mine life."

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   main.html or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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3 May, 2017

Ignorance, intolerance, violence

Using junk science marches, ignorant professors, resistance and violence to drive public policy

Paul Driessen

Recent science and climate marches demonstrated how misinformed, indoctrinated, politicized and anti-Trump these activists are – and how indifferent about condemning millions in industrialized nations and billions in developing countries to green energy poverty. Amid it all, University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole helped illustrate how the marchers became so ignorant, insensitive and intolerant.

It’s always amazed me how frequently academics, journalists, politicians and students confuse poisonous carbon monoxide (CO) with plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide (CO2). But Professor Cole’s April 17 article in The Nation presents unfathomable ignorance from the intellectual class that is “educating” our young people, while displaying and teaching intolerance toward countervailing facts and viewpoints.

Bashar al Assad’s sarin gas attack “consumed the world’s attention,” Prof. Cole intones, but President Trump is committed to releasing hundreds of thousands of tons a day “of a far more deadly gas – carbon dioxide.” Even CO2 that is washed out of the atmosphere “typically goes straight into the oceans,” he continues, “where it turns them acidic,” threatening a “mass die-off of marine life.”

Cole’s polemical nonsense is too extensive to address in full. But these two claims require rebuttal.

A deadly gas? Carbon dioxide is the Miracle Molecule that enables plants to grow and makes all life on Earth possible. Plants absorb CO2 exhaled by humans and animals, and emitted by burning wood, dung, fossil fuels and biofuels – and then release oxygen that people and wildlife need to survive.

Hundreds of studies demonstrate how slightly higher atmospheric CO2 levels (rising from 0.03% a century ago to 0.04% today) are making crop, forest and grassland plants more drought resistant, helping them grow faster and better, and “greening” vast areas that had been brown and barren. Claims that CO2 has replaced the solar and other powerful natural forces that have always controlled Earth’s climate, and is now causing “dangerous manmade climate change,” are not supported by actual planetary evidence.

Marine life thrived when CO2 levels were many times higher during past geologic eras. Far from being or becoming acidic, the oceans are mildly alkaline, and their vast volumes of water will not become acidic from human fossil fuel use: that is, to drop from their current pH of 8.1 into the acidic realm below 7.0 on this logarithmic scale. Oceans may become slightly less alkaline with another century or two of human carbon dioxide emissions, but most marine organisms will be unaffected; others will adapt or evolve.

The science marchers forget that President Trump’s actions are in response to eight Obama years of “highly politicized so-called research on climate,” under grants that “anticipated particular scientific outcomes before funding was provided,” Princeton University physicist Dr. Will Happer told me. Real science “is not based on political agendas, belief systems or computer models. It’s based on evidence – and actual observations have found normal icecap fluctuations, seas rising a foot or less per century, drought cycles little different from the twentieth century, and a decline in major landfalling hurricanes.”

These inconvenient truths contradict the dominant narratives in college classrooms and political circles. Climate alarmists thus demand that they be vilified, banned and silenced, through vile, even violent confrontations if need be – along with other conservative speech on and beyond too many campuses.

It’s as if reality, truth, discussion and debate have become irrelevant where feelings, leftist dogma, climate science or public policies are involved. Even more troubling, it’s as if our culture, education and public forums have been taken over by jack-booted fascists, Mao’s Red Guards, Maduro thugs, and “heroes” like Pavlik Morozov, memorialized by Stalin for betraying his father to the secret police.

Some intolerant protesters may be delicate snowflakes, too easily intimidated, offended or made to feel “unsafe” by conservative or other contrarian thought. However, the near-constant intimidation and threats of expulsion or violence have become a deliberate tactic, used repeatedly to impose speech codes and political agendas – and too often ignored, acquiesced in or supported by professors, administrators and politicians who welcome the silencing of opposition voices or lack the courage to confront  it. During Science March weekend in Huntsville, Alabama, shots were fired into the offices where reality-based climatologist John Christy works. “Mainstream media” and academia coverage was minimal.

They demand diversity of race, language, handicaps, sex, sexual orientation, transgender status and sexual self-identification. They cannot tolerate diversity of thought, speech or faculty and student ideology.

George Mason University economics professor Walter Williams calls it “a spreading cancer,” a re-emerging mentality that gave us loyalty oaths, which today come in the form of demands that faculty members sign “diversity statements, especially as part of hiring and promotion procedures…. The last thing diversity hustlers want is diversity of ideas.” The goal is “political conformity among the faculty indoctrinating our impressionable, intellectually immature young people,” Williams says.

As far-left protest marches, window smashing, limousine burning and physical assaults in Berkeley, Portland, Washington, DC and other cities attest, the cancer is metastasizing – particularly when movements and political groups believe their money, power, influence and control are threatened.

 On the climate front, at stake are $100 billion a year in reparation funds for poor countries, $7 trillion a year for companies that want to build “sustainable low-carbon” energy systems, and boundless power for politicians and bureaucrats who want to control economic growth, livelihoods and living standards. They cannot tolerate “climate deniers,” even those who merely question the extent of human influences, the degree and impact of temperature and climate changes, whether changes will all be bad, or the supposed inability of wildlife and wealthy, technologically advanced societies to adapt to future changes.

Members of this activist, governing and corporate elite also excel at inflating trivial risks and dismissing easy solutions, to advance their agendas and self-interests. For example, as President Trump revises many Obama era environmental rules, activist groups are using other tactics to continue their war on coal.

Dry ash from coal-fired power plants can be used in wallboard and to partially replace sand in high-strength concrete for bridges, roads and buildings. However, regulations, engineering considerations and other factors limited that option and resulted in most wet and dry ash being sent to impoundments that can leak barely detectable pollutants into surface and ground water. Studies have shown that these levels of chromium and other metals pose little risk to humans, but scare campaigns are creating pressure to force utility companies to spend billions of dollars relocating the ash and closing more power plants.

The best solution is likely to leave the ash in place, shore up the coffer dams, put solid clay seals over the deposits, and let them dry out, locking the metals in place. Radical groups demand relocation and seek to bankrupt the utilities – after which they intend to intensify their attacks on natural gas-fired power plants, drilling, fracking, and the factories, petrochemical plants and other industries that use fossil fuels.

In essence, they have brilliantly established a mantra that can ensure victory in every campaign. Whatever they support is safe, sustainable, climate-friendly environmental justice; whatever they oppose is dangerous, unsustainable, ecologically destructive and unjust. End of discussion.

In the process, they are unwilling or unable to recognize two facts. One, cheap, reliable energy improves living standards, saves lives, and supports new technologies and opportunities, with poor families benefitting most. Policies that make energy less accessible and affordable harm the poorest most of all.

Two, fossil fuels have undeniable environmental impacts, but allow us to produce vast amounts of cheap energy from relatively few acres. Replacing those fuels with wind, solar and biofuel energy would require hundreds of millions of acres worldwide that are now cropland or wildlife habitats. Those “eco-friendly” alternatives are actually our least sustainable, most ecologically destructive energy options.

The stakes are too high to let intolerant ideologues continue to control energy policy decisions.

Via email






Soros a major backer of weekend’s Climate March

Liberal billionaire donated to labor groups who came to march

The People’s Climate March on Saturday in the nation’s capital had a powerful billionaire behind it: Democratic Party donor George Soros.

Mr. Soros, who heads the Open Society Foundations, contributed over $36 million between 2000 and 2014 to 18 of the 55 organizations on the march’s steering committee, according to an analysis released Friday by the conservative Media Research Center.

Six of the groups received during that time more than $1 million each: the Center for Community Change, the NAACP, the Natural Resources Defense Council, People’s Action, Public Citizen and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The People’s Climate March, which came a week after another climate-themed anti-Trump event, the March for Science, ran along Pennsylvania Ave. and ended by surrounding the White House in order to “drown out all of the climate-denying nonsense that has been coming out of this administration.”

While some of its partners are climate change organizations like NextGen Climate, founded by top Democratic donor Tom Steyer, the march also was heavily backed by labor unions and social justice groups such as Color of Change, which also is backed by Mr. Soros.

Only three of the six organizations on the steering committee — NRDC, Public Citizen and UCS — “actually have anything climate-related in their individual missions,” the Media Research Center reported.

“The presence of many nonclimate-related organizations leading the march indicated that this climate march (just like the March for Science and the Women’s March) is not about a single issue, but about attacking the new administration,” MRC’s Aly Nielsen said.

She pointed to the march’s “usual checklist of liberal policy priorities,” such as labor union rights, a minimum wage increase and a halt to “attacks on immigrants.”

People’s Climate March organizers made no secret of their antipathy for President Trump, calling for “climate, jobs and justice” as an alternative to “Trump’s disastrous agenda.”
“Trump’s game plan has been to relentlessly attack our communities and shock us into despair,” march organizers said in a post. “It hasn’t worked because our people-powered movement is stronger than he is — together, the resistance stopped his attempts to overturn the Affordable Care Act and stymied his despicable Muslim ban.”

Mr. Soros, a longtime top donor to Democrats and left-wing causes, contributed nearly $10 million to Priorities USA Action, the primary super PAC supporting Mr. Trump’s opponent, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 election cycle, according to Open Secrets.

The march was held on the 100th day of the Trump administration.

SOURCE






Trump Counters Federal Land Grab by Invoking Federalism 

On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced that he was “signing an executive order to end another egregious abuse of federal power and to give that power back to the states and to the people, where it belongs.” The egregious abuse of power he’s referring to revolves around the 1906 Antiquities Act, under which presidents are authorized — with virtually unbridled leeway and zero oversight — to designate huge chunks of land as national monuments.

Not only does this strip power from the states, but it’s also a recipe for abuse because there is nothing to prevent land grabs whose purposes are purely political. Barack Obama was especially guilty of this.

Therefore, Trump has commissioned his “Secretary of the Interior … [to] conduct a review of all Presidential designations or expansions of designations under the Antiquities Act made since January 1, 1996, where the designation covers more than 100,000 acres, where the designation after expansion covers more than 100,000 acres, or where the Secretary determines that the designation or expansion was made without adequate public outreach and coordination with relevant stakeholders.”

As The Daily Signal’s Nicolas Loris notes, what started out as a “law … to prevent the looting of archaeological and Native American structures and objects” has instead “evolved into a federal power tool for making land grabs that cater to special interests.” In fact, The Hill adds, “Under the Antiquities Act, presidents have nearly unlimited power to create national monuments on land the federal government already owns.”

So no wonder, The New York Times reported in December, that “Mr. Obama … designated about 553 million acres as national monuments, more than any of his predecessors.”

Much of the land Obama designated was done so with highly questionable motives. Protecting land is not a bad thing. But that doesn’t make it the federal government’s responsibility to override a state issue. As the executive order states, “Monument designations that result from a lack of public outreach and proper coordination with State, tribal, and local officials and other relevant stakeholders may … create barriers to achieving energy independence, restrict public access to and use of Federal lands, burden State, tribal, and local governments, and otherwise curtail economic growth.” Trump is simply correcting the abuse that took place under Obama’s watch.

SOURCE





Poison for the Mind: The Nation on CO2 and Global Warming

Another debunking of the uninformed Prof. Juan Cole

What’s “a far more deadly gas” than the Sarin that Syrian President Bashar al Assad used to kill his own citizens—prompting President Trump to respond with a missile attack?

Carbon dioxide.

Or so says The Nation. According to “The Other Poison Gas Killing Syrians: Carbon Dioxide Emissions,” by University of Michigan Professor of History Juan Cole, “If Trump and his cronies really cared about children killed by noxious gases, they wouldn’t be trying to spew ever more CO2 into the atmosphere.”

We could laugh at the ignorance of the author, the fact checkers (if any), and the editors. Or we could rage at their dishonesty. Or we could cry at the ignorance of trusting but deceived readers. Maybe we should do all three.

Time for an elementary lesson in toxicology.

A lethal dose of Sarin is about one-half milligram. The average person exhales over one million times as much CO2 per day — about 1.04 kilograms.

If CO2 is “far more deadly” than Sarin, the human race should have perished when the first human took the first breath.

Just a little more about CO2’s toxicity — or, rather, lack thereof.

Occupational exposure standards for CO2 are 0.5% (5,000 ppm) average through a 40-hour work week and 3% (30,000 ppm) for short-term exposure.

But those standards are overcautious. The National Research Council reports, “Data collected on nine nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines indicate an average CO2 concentration of 3,500 ppm [0.35%] with a range of 0–10,600 ppm [0–0.16%], and data collected on 10 nuclear-powered attack submarines indicate an average CO2 concentration of 4,100 ppm [0.41%] with a range of 300–11,300 ppm [0.03–1.1%].” And we trust those submariners with control of nuclear ICBMs.

The breath we exhale contains about 40,000–53,000 ppm (4–5.3%) CO2.

Exposure to CO2 only becomes dangerous to life if prolonged more than a few minutes at (40,000 ppm).

Global average open-air CO2 concentration is about 407 parts per million (ppm) (0.04%).

So open-air CO2 concentration would have to be twelve-and-a-half times what it is today to reach the 40-hour work week standard; 74 times to reach the short-term exposure standard; and 98 times to reach the life-threatening level.

Rising at about 3 ppm per year, it will take 1,531 years to reach the work-week standard; 9,864 to reach the short-term standard; and 13,198 to reach the life-threatening level.

That’s sufficient to expose Professor Cole and The Nation’s gross errors. It should warn us not to trust Cole’s central claims: Human-induced climate change caused the “severest drought in recorded modern Syrian history in 2007–10,” which “made its contribution” to the Syrian civil war, which killed 400,000 people, left 23 million homeless, and made 4 million refugees.

The problem is that the Syrian drought was caused primarily by non-climatic factors.

The Fertile Crescent, which includes Syria, experienced about a 7% decline in winter rainfall since 1930, most before 1980. That leaves only about 3% of the decline during allegedly man-made warming, post-1980. Average annual surface temperature rose by about 0.5 C? since 1930, again about half before 1980. Those are not enough to explain the drought or the conflict over water.

So what did cause them?

From 1930 to 2010, Syria’s population multiplied 11 times, and its industrial and agricultural water use multiplied even more. That meant greatly multiplied water consumption, and hence shortages, regardless of temperature or rainfall.

“Drought” designates not low rainfall but water shortage — which can be caused by decreased rainfall, increased consumption, or accelerated runoff.

Did higher temperature and lower rainfall contribute? Perhaps. But the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded in its 2012 report on extreme weather that it was impossible to demonstrate a connection between global warming and increasing frequency or severity of extreme weather events, including droughts.

Even if global warming contributed somewhat to the rise in temperature and decline in rainfall, that doesn’t mean human activity drove it. IPCC’s computer models simulate warming from rising atmospheric CO2 at double the observed rate, and recent research has found that most, maybe all, of the warming was driven by the El Niño-Southern Oscillation coupled with changes in solar output and the 1977 “Pacific Shift,” not by CO2.

So, at most, human activity contributed only a small fraction of the global warming, therefore only a fraction of the rise in temperature and decline in rainfall in the Fertile Crescent, therefore only a fraction of a fraction of the drought, and therefore only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the conflict over water.

Even the conflict over water pales into insignificance compared with religious and political conflicts as causes of Syria’s civil war, the rise of ISIS, and the consequent refugee crisis.

This isn’t even to mention the benefits of increased CO2, but they are many.

Plants must have it for photosynthesis. Every doubling of it causes an average 35% increase in plant growth efficiency. With more CO2, plants grow better in warmer and cooler weather and in wetter and drier soil, make better use of soil nutrients, and resist diseases and pests better. Consequently, they expand their range and the range of all insects and animals, which depend on them, greening the earth and reducing risks of species extinction.

They also yield more fruit. The result is more food for everything that, directly or indirectly, eats plants. And the poor benefit the most because rising CO2 makes food more affordable.

Professor Cole’s claim that CO2, because it contributes to global warming, is “far more deadly” than Sarin gas is precisely opposite the truth. It is both ludicrous and vicious.

SOURCE





Leading Australian conservative says Australia has 'moral obligation' to supply coal to poorer nations

Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce has defended the proposed Adani coal mine in Queensland, saying Australia has a "moral obligation" to help poorer nations keep their lights on.

The controversial Carmichael mine would be Australia's largest, with Indian company Adani expecting to export 60 million tonnes of coal per year, much of it to India.

Sparring between Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and Q&A host Tony Jones were relieved by the presence of British satirist Armando Iannucci.

Environmental fears, including concerns from graziers that the mine has been granted an unlimited licence to use water, have swirled around the proposal, leading major banks including Westpac and the Commonwealth to distance themselves from it.

Speaking on the ABC's panel program Q&A on Monday night, Mr Joyce would not rule out the government stepping in to provide direct finance to Adani to ensure the mine goes ahead.

"I'm not going to start answering that question, but I suspect not," Mr Joyce said. "The issue is the infrastructure that surrounds it. We're happy to look at that, and we are doing that.

"We've said we're prepared to support the rail link, and we look forward to [it]."

The government has proposed loaning the mining conglomerate $1 billion from the Northern Australia Infrastructure Fund to build a rail line that would transport the coal to ports.

However, the company may have ruled itself ineligible for the criteria of the loan, after declaring such an investment would not be "make or break" for the project.

Mr Joyce said he did not want to create two classes of people - those who can afford power, and those who can't - by refusing the mine.

"I'm going to be a complete economic pragmatist. We have to make sure this economy works. We have to export dollars. One of our largest exports is coal," he said.

"We have to realise we have a moral responsibility to other people in other nations to keep their lights on. They have their right to exist in the 21st century like we do. We can't sort of lord it over people and say 'we prescribe a way of life for you that you can't afford'."

Mr Joyce said the mine would ultimately lead to lower emissions than if people in India used local coal.

"If we decide that we don't want to use Adani - the coal from the Galilee coalfields - to help poor people in India be able to turn on their lights like we do, they're still going to get coal. They're just going to get coal that's 60 percent less efficient, from India," he said.

"So you're actually going to increase your carbon emissions."

Mr Joyce was also quizzed on climate change. He acknowledged human activity had an impact on the phenomenon, but said it was not responsible for "every climatic catastrophe".

"Of course, if human activity is putting greenhouse gases - and it does - into the atmosphere, then of course that has an effect on the climate," he said.

"They [activists] always take the next step and say 'that cyclone was climate change, that bushfire was climate change', everything. And it's not. It's part of the natural path of what happens in the climate all the time, for which part of the effect are greenhouse gases."

Fellow panellist Brian Schmidt, the vice chancellor of Australian National University, said we must take steps over the next 30 years to lessen the impact of climate change.

"You are correct that often any little thing is ascribed to climate change," said Mr Schmidt, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 2011. "But as climate change becomes bigger and bigger, more and more things really are going to relate to that.

"People have, I think, this false belief that it's only going to be two degrees [of warming]. It's only going to be two degrees if we actually really start changing quickly. It could be five, six, seven - we don't know, it's hard to calculate when it becomes really big."

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   main.html 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 May, 2017

Britain's diesel disaster

During the Blair regime in Britain, diesels were "discovered" by Greenies.  They were said to put out less CO2 than other cars.  So under Greenie influence the Blair government put in place various incentives to cause people to buy diesel-powered cars. So there are now around 10 million diesel-powered cars on British roads.

That was from the beginning bizarre.  Who has not driven behind a diesel vehicle and observed it pumping black clouds of particulate matter into the environment from its tailpipe?  Even under the high temperatures of a diesel engine, diesel fuel just does not combust as thoroughly as conventional fuel.  Clever engineering can reduce the problem but not eliminate it. But such was the CO2 paranoia of the Greenies that they were prepared to tolerate particulate pollution as long as CO2 emissions were reduced.

But gradually air pollution in London began to increase. And it is quite bad by now. And there is no doubt that diesel engines made a substantial contribution to that.  So official policy has done a 180 degree turn.  Diesel cars are now anathema. But what to do about those 10 million diesels that Britons had been induced to buy by previous governments?  They could not be banned outright as it would enrage 10 million drivers -- who vote.

So the main policy initiative so far is to ban diesel cars from London unless the driver pays a hefty fee for access to its hallowed streets.  That too provokes outrage but Brits are used to being slugged for all sorts of taxes and charges by the powers that be so we are seeing only the first rumbles of discontent so far.  The charges are however set to increase gradually, with people who take government advice being badly hit.

It's all just another example of how destructive Greenie policies generally are.

There is a big article on the subject here which relates the horror in all its details.




   
Outright lies from the BBC


By Paul Homewood


The Royal Horticultural Society has just published a 45 page report “Gardening in a Changing Climate”. I strongly suspect that most gardeners will get most value out of it by putting it in the compost bin!


It has been written by Dr Eleanor Webster, who is employed by the RHS as a climate scientist. Quite why they feel they should be wasting members fees on a climate scientist is beyond me.


The BBC report gives a feel for the rubbish it contains:


Artificial lawns, plants from arid countries and flower beds designed to cope with floods are among future features of UK gardens outlined in a major new report.


As the world warms and weather patterns shift, the study by the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) concludes that British gardens will need to adapt.


Traditional designs with “immaculate, well-watered lawns” and “Edwardian” borders may be too hard to maintain if the weather becomes more volatile.


The report warns that climate change looks set to bring more extremes and more erratic weather with stronger storms, heavier downpours and more intense heatwaves potentially damaging plants and eroding soil.


But the authors also welcome the prospect of longer growing seasons and say there are new opportunities to use more varied plants in wider areas of the country.


They identify a sharp divide across the UK with climate change bringing contrasting prospects to different regions.


Dr Eleanor Webster, who coordinated the RHS report, told the BBC: “The key thing is that the south of England is going to be hotter and drier throughout the year with some heavy rain showers and then the north of England is going to be certainly milder but it is also going to be wetter in the summer and in the winter.


“The south of England is going to mainly be about water conservation and the north of England is going to be about managing a wet and warm environment.”


The report points to the most recent decade being 0.9C warmer than the period 1961-1990 and to an increase in rainfall over Scotland and the north of England over the past century.


Before we look at the detail, there are two fundamental reasons why this study belongs in the bin:


1) British climate is notoriously volatile, and this volatility on a year to year, month to month, and even day to day basis drowns out any tiny climatic signal that there may be.


Indeed, there is no such thing as a “normal” or “average” climate in Britain.


Gardens have survived decades of this “weather”, and certainly won’t be inconvenienced any climate change.


This can easily be seen in the annual temperature and rainfall records for England:








http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly


2) Gardeners won’t be in the least bit interested in what their descendants might be growing in 50 or 100 years time. So why waste money on this report now?


Let’s now look at some of the claims made in the study. It is worth pointing out that, although it talks of future projections, the report is clear that these things are already occurring.


1) The report warns that climate change looks set to bring more extremes and more erratic weather with stronger storms, heavier downpours


We are back to the “extreme rainfall” myth, so it is time to demolish it once and for all.


Below is an analysis of the wettest months in England since 1910. Contrary to Met Office spin, these were much more common in the past, though we again see the comparative dearth in the 1970s and 80s.


The wettest month of all was December 1914.





http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/datasets/Rainfall/ranked/England.txt


2) The report warns that climate change looks set to bring more intense heatwaves.


To which the answer is Cobblers.





http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly


3) The south of England is going to be hotter and drier throughout the year


The Met Office divides England into two regions.





According to their data, there has been no significant change in day time temperatures in the south, since 1990. There is no evidence whatsoever that temperatures will rise in coming decades.





http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/datasets


Since 1910, annual rainfall has been notable for its volatility.


The wettest year was 1960, and the driest in 1921.


Again, there is absolutely no evidence that the south will become drier.





http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/datasets


4) The north of England is going to be certainly milder but it is also going to be wetter in the summer and in the winter.


As with the south, temperatures show no signs of rising.





http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/datasets


As for rainfall, apart from 2012, which was clearly an outlier, annual rainfall in recent years has not been unusual, and is within the bounds of normal variability.





http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/datasets


5) The scenario for East Anglia envisages an average temperature 5C warmer than now. Lawns will be replaced by synthetic grass.


Downpipes will channel the limited summer rain to underground tanks. Garden centres will precondition plants to become used to drought. And shade will come from almond, peach and olive trees.


East Anglia tends to be the driest corner of the country, and climate alarmists often paint a picture of it turning into a drought ridden dustbowl.


In reality, rainfall patterns there have not changed since 1910.








http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/datasets/Rainfall/date/East_Anglia.txt


Unsurprisingly the BBC give the report top billing, with David Shukman calling it a major new report.


He uncritically lists its findings, apparently under the misapprehension that it is a serious study, and concludes that what we think of as a classic British garden will look very different in the decades ahead.


I only wish I could say the same about the BBC!


RHS-Gardening-in-a-Changing-Climate-Report






Trump to order review of offshore drilling

President Trump will sign an executive order on Friday to reconsider several major Obama-era actions cracking down on offshore drilling.

The aim of the order, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told reporters Thursday, is to consider how to best expand offshore drilling in U.S. waters.

The Trump administration is reversing former President Obama’s December decision to remove most of the Arctic Ocean from the federal drilling program.That move would have blocked drilling in the Arctic for years to come, angering the drilling industry, which has long desired to tap massive stores of oil underneath Arctic waters. 

Zinke said his department will also reopen the Obama administration’s five-year drilling plan, finalized in November, that restricts lease sales for new drilling to only the Gulf of Mexico and waters off south-central Alaska.

Regulators will also reconsider government regulations on activities like seismic testing and will review decisions within the last 10 years to create offshore marine monuments and sanctuaries.

None of these actions mean new drilling in the Arctic or Atlantic is imminent. For one, reviewing the five-year plan is a lengthy process that Zinke predicted could take about two years.

Trump’s order is likely to draw lawsuits as well. The Obama administration insisted the decision to withdraw the Arctic from the drilling program could not be reversed under the law, and that contention has yet to be tested in court.

The order, once signed, will be the second action Trump has taken this week to try to expand oil and gas drilling in the United States. On Wednesday, he signed an order to reconsider 20 years of national monument designations on public lands, a proposal that could eventually open up more federal acreage to energy production. 

On top of Trump’s other energy-related executive orders, this measure “puts us on track for American energy independence,” Zinke said. 

Environmentalists have long fought to prevent drilling in environmentally sensitive areas off the coast of the United States, warning that the threat of a devastating oil spill outweighs the benefits of obtaining energy supplies.    

The Obama administration stripped potential lease sales for the Atlantic and Arctic from its final five-year plan, a regular government drilling blueprint that takes years to put together. 

His decision to remove most of the Arctic from the drilling program was aimed at blocking oil production there indefinitely. It was a step greens urged him to take throughout his presidency and one he issued one month before he left office.

The drilling industry was incensed by the decision. Even though there is no drilling there now — it is too expensive to extract oil in the Arctic, and on-shore oil supplies are so plentiful that suppliers haven’t looked to expand their offshore portfolio — drillers still wanted the opportunity to tap it in the future.

"We are pleased to see this administration prioritizing responsible U.S. energy development and recognizing the benefits it will bring to American consumers and businesses,” American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard said in a statement.

“Developing our abundant offshore energy resources is a critical part of a robust, forward-looking energy policy that will secure our nation’s energy future and strengthen the U.S. energy renaissance," he added.

Environmentalists and Democrats in Congress have begun lambasting Trump’s order before it even comes out.

Twenty-seven senators sent a letter to Zinke on Thursday asking him not to revise the five-year drilling plan, saying Obama’s plan would “protect key industries for our states, such as fishing and tourism, our environment and our climate.”

Green groups pledged vigorous opposition as well.

“This latest executive order is yet another indication that the Trump administration is committed to doubling down on dirty and dangerous oil and gas development, instead of moving America towards clean energy alternatives like offshore wind,” Nancy Pyne, the climate and energy campaign director at Oceana, said in a statement, noting local opposition to drilling. 

Zinke said he will listen to local opinions on drilling before making any decisions on a new plan. 

“As a secretary of Interior, I want to know what our inventory is,” he said.

“It also involves public hearings and the opportunity for the public to vocalize their support or dissent. Not everywhere likes offshore drilling. … That’s part of the process, is to look at that.”

SOURCE




Outdoor Clothing maker loves wilderness

A self-interested campaign?  More wilderness sells more gear?

Outdoor-clothing maker Patagonia hit back at President Trump on Wednesday, threatening to sue over an executive order calling for the Department of the Interior to review national monuments designated during Bill Clinton's, George W. Bush's and Barack Obama's presidencies.

“A president does not have the authority to rescind a National Monument. An attempt to change the boundaries ignores the review process of cultural and historical characteristics and the public input,” Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario said in a statement. “We’re watching the Trump administration’s actions very closely and preparing to take every step necessary, including legal action, to defend our most treasured public landscapes from coast to coast.”

Trump ordered federal officials to review two decades of national monument designations earlier in the day Wednesday, calling them “another egregious abuse of federal power.”

The president framed the order as a way to return power to states and individuals, after former President Obama and his predecessors blocked development on hundreds of millions of acres of federal land and water by creating monuments.
Patagonia said it would "fight with everyone" it has to in order to preserve the Obama administration's designation of tribal lands to form Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.

"We take this as a sign that Trump and his team prefer to cater to fossil fuel interests and state land grabs for unsustainable development, rather than preserve a vital part of our nation's heritage for future generations by protecting federal lands owned by every citizen," the Patagonia statement read.

“As stewards of America’s federal public lands, the Trump administration has an obligation to protect these most special wild places,” Marcario said. “Unfortunately, it seems clear they intend to do the opposite.”

SOURCE






Thoughts on the Public Discourse over Climate Change

by Richard Lindzen

Introduction:

For over 30 years, I have been giving talks on the science of climate change. When, however, I speak to a non-expert audience, and attempt to explain such matters as climate sensitivity, the relation of global mean temperature anomaly to extreme weather, that warming has decreased profoundly for the past 18 years, etc., it is obvious that the audience’s eyes are glazing over. Although I have presented evidence as to why the issue is not a catastrophe and may likely be beneficial, the response is puzzlement. I am typically asked how this is possible. After all, 97% of scientists agree, several of the hottest years on record have occurred during the past 18 years, all sorts of extremes have become more common, polar bears are disappearing, as is arctic ice, etc. In brief, there is overwhelming evidence of warming, etc. I tended to be surprised that anyone could get away with such sophistry or even downright dishonesty, but it is, unfortunately, the case that this was not evident to many of my listeners. I will try in this brief article to explain why such claims are, in fact, evidence of the dishonesty of the alarmist position.

The 97% meme:

This claim is actually a come-down from the 1988 claim on the cover of Newsweek that all scientists agree. In either case, the claim is meant to satisfy the non-expert that he or she has no need to understand the science. Mere agreement with the 97% will indicate that one is a supporter of science and superior to anyone denying disaster. This actually satisfies a psychological need for many people. The claim is made by a number of individuals and there are a number of ways in which the claim is presented. A thorough debunking has been given in the Wall Street Journal by Bast and Spencer. One of the dodges is to poll scientists as to whether they agree that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have increased, that the Earth has been warming (albeit only a little) and that man has played some part. This is, indeed, something almost all of us can agree on, but which has no obvious implication of danger. Nonetheless this is portrayed as support for catastrophism. Other dodges involve looking at a large number of abstracts where only a few actually deal with danger. If among these few, 97% support catastrophism, the 97% is presented as pertaining to the much larger totality of abstracts. One of my favorites is the recent claim in the Christian Science Monitor (a once respected and influential newspaper): “For the record, of the nearly 70,000 peer-reviewed articles on global warming published in 2013 and 2014, four authors rejected the idea that humans are the main drivers of climate change.” I don’t think that it takes an expert to recognize that this claim is a bizarre fantasy for many obvious reasons. Even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (this body, generally referred to as the IPCC is the body created by the UN to provide ‘authoritative’ assessments of manmade climate change) doesn’t agree with the claim.

Despite the above, I am somewhat surprised that it was necessary to use the various shenanigans described above. Since this issue fully emerged in public almost 30 years ago (and was instantly incorporated into the catechism of political correctness), there has been a huge increase in government funding of the area, and the funding has been predicated on the premise of climate catastrophism. By now, most of the people working in this area have entered in response to this funding. Note that governments have essentially a monopoly over the funding in this area. I would expect that the recipients of this funding would feel obligated to support the seriousness of the problem. Certainly, opposition to this would be a suicidal career move for a young academic. Perhaps the studies simply needed to properly phrase their questions so as to achieve levels of agreement for alarm that would be large though perhaps not as large as was required for the 97% meme especially if the respondents are allowed anonymity.

The ‘warmest years on record’ meme:

This simple claim covers a myriad of misconceptions. Under these circumstances, it is sometimes difficult to know where to begin. As in any demonization project, it begins with the ridiculous presumption that any warming whatsoever (and, for that matter, any increase in CO2) is bad, and proof of worse to come. We know that neither of these presumptions is true. People retire to the Sun Belt rather than to the arctic. CO2 is pumped into greenhouses to enhance plant growth. The emphasis on ‘warmest years on record’ appears to have been a response to the observation that the warming episode from about 1978 to 1998 appeared to have ceased and temperatures have remained almost constant since 1998. Of course, if 1998 was the hottest year on record, all the subsequent years will also be among the hottest years on record. None of this contradicts the fact that the warming (ie, the increase of temperature) has ceased. Yet, somehow, many people have been led to believe that both statements cannot be simultaneously true. At best, this assumes a very substantial level of public gullibility. The potential importance of the so-called pause (for all we know, this might not be a pause, and the temperature might even cool), is never mentioned and rarely understood. Its existence means that there is something that is at least comparable to anthropogenic forcing. However, the IPCC attribution of most of the recent (and only the recent) warming episode to man depends on the assumption in models that there is no such competitive process.

The focus on the temperature record, itself, is worth delving into a bit. What exactly is this temperature that is being looked at? It certainly can’t be the average surface temperature. Averaging temperatures from places as disparate as Death Valley and Mount Everest is hardly more meaningful than averaging phone numbers in a telephone book (for those of you who still remember phone books). What is done, instead, is to average what are called temperature anomalies. Here, one takes thirty year averages at each station and records the deviations from this average. These are referred to as anomalies and it is the anomalies that are averaged over the globe. The only attempt I know of to illustrate the steps in this process was by the late Stan Grotch at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Figure 1a shows the scatter plot of the station anomalies. Figure 1b then shows the result of averaging these anomalies. Most scientists would conclude that there was a remarkable degree of cancellation and that the result was almost complete cancellation. However, instead, one stretches the temperature scale by almost a factor of 10 so as to make the minuscule changes in Figure 1b look more significant. The result is shown in Figure 1c. There is quite a lot of random noise in Figure 1c, and this noise is a pretty good indication of the uncertainty of the analysis (roughly +/- 0.2C). The usual presentations show something considerably smoother. Sometimes this is the result of smoothing the record with something called running means. It is also the case that Grotch used data from the UK Meteorological Office which was from land based stations. Including data from the ocean leads to smoother looking series but the absolute accuracy of the data is worse given that the ocean data mixes very different measurement techniques (buckets in old ship data, ship intakes after WW1, satellite measurements of skin temperature (which is quite different from surface temperature), and buoy data).

These issues are summarized in Figure 2 which presents an idealized schematic of the temperature record and its uncertainty. We see very clearly that because the rise ceases in 1998, that this implies that 18 of the 18 warmest years on record (for the schematic presentation) have occurred during the last 18 years. We also see that the uncertainty together with the smallness of the changes offers ample scope for adjustments that dramatically alter the appearance of the record (note that uncertainty is rarely indicated on such graphs).

At this point, one is likely to run into arguments over the minutia of the temperature record, but this would simply amount to muddying the waters so to speak. Nothing can alter the fact that the changes one is speaking about are small.

When all of them are included, the UN IPCC finds that we are just about at the greenhouse forcing of climate that one expects from a doubling of CO2, and the temperature increase has been about 0.8C. If man’s emissions are responsible for all of the temperature change over that past 60 years, this still points to a lower sensitivity (sensitivity, by convention, generally refers to the temperature increase produced by a doubling of CO2 when the system reaches equilibrium) than produced by the least sensitive models (which claim to have sensitivities of from 1.5-4.5C for a doubling of CO2). And, the lower sensitivities are understood to be unproblematic.

However, the IPCC only claims man is responsible for most of the warming. The sensitivity might then be much lower. Of course, the situation is not quite so simple, but calculations do show that for higher sensitivities one has to cancel some (and often quite a lot) of the greenhouse forcing with what was assumed to be unknown aerosol cooling in order for the models to remain consistent with past observations (a recent article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society points out that there are, in fact, quite a number of arbitrary adjustments made to models in order to get some agreement with the past record).

As the aerosol forcing becomes less uncertain, we see that high sensitivities have become untenable. This is entirely consistent with the fact that virtually all models used to predict ‘dangerous’ warming over-predict observed warming after the ‘calibration’ periods. That is to say, observed warming is small compared to what the models upon which concerns are based are predicting. This is illustrated in Figure 4. As I have mentioned, uncertainties allow for substantial adjustments in the temperature record. One rather infamous case involved NOAA’s adjustments in a paper by Karl et al that replace the pause with continued warming. But it was easy to show that even with this adjustment, models continued to show more warming than even the ‘adjusted’ time series showed. Moreover, most papers since have rejected the Karl et al adjustment (which just coincidentally came out with much publicity just before the Paris climate conference).

The third approach is somewhat different. Instead of arguing that the change is not small, it argues that the change is ‘unprecedented.’ This is Michael Mann’s infamous ‘hockey stick.’ Here, Mann used tree rings from bristle cone pines to estimate Northern Hemisphere temperatures back hundreds of years. This was done by calibrating the tree ring data with surface observations for a thirty year period, and using this calibration to estimate temperatures in the distant past in order to eliminate the medieval warm period. Indeed, this reconstruction showed flat temperatures for the past thousand years.

The usual test for such a procedure would be to see how the calibration worked for observations after the calibration period. Unfortunately, the results failed to show the warming found in the surface data. The solution was starkly simple and stupid. The tree ring record was cut off at the end of the calibration period and replaced by the actual surface record. In the Climategate emails (Climategate refers to a huge release of emails from various scientists supporting alarm where the suppression of opposing views, the intimidation of editors, the manipulation of data, etc. were all discussed), this was referred to as Mann’s trick.

The whole point of the above was to make clear that we are not concerned with warming per se, but with how much warming. It is essential to avoid the environmental tendency to regard anything that may be bad in large quantities to be avoided at any level however small. In point of fact small warming is likely to be beneficial on many counts. If you have assimilated the above, you should be able to analyze media presentations like this one to see that amidst all the rhetoric, the author is pretty much saying nothing while even misrepresenting what the IPCC says.

The extreme weather meme:

Every line weather forecaster knows that extreme events occur someplace virtually every day. The present temptation to attribute these normally occurring events to climate change is patently dishonest. Roger Pielke, Jr. actually wrote a book detailing the fact that there is no trend in virtually any extreme event (including tornados, hurricanes, droughts, floods, etc.) with some actually decreasing. Even the UN’s IPCC acknowledges that there is no basis for attributing such events to anthropogenic climate change.

Figure 5. Temperature map for North America.

The situation with respect to extreme temperatures actually contradicts not just observations but basic meteorological theory. Figure 5 shows a map of temperatures for North America on February 27, 2008. Extreme temperatures at any location occur when air motions carry air from the coldest or warmest points on the map. Now, in a warmer climate, it is expected that the temperature difference between the tropics and the high latitudes will decrease. Thus the range of possible extremes will be reduced. More important is the fact that the motions that carry these temperatures arise from a process called baroclinic instability, and this instability derives from the magnitude of the aforementioned temperature difference. Thus, in a warmer world, these winds will be weaker and less capable of carrying extreme temperatures to remote locations. Claims of greater extremes in temperature simply ignore the basic physics, and rely, for their acceptance, on the ignorance of the audience.

The claims of extreme weather transcend the usual use of misleading claims. They often amount to claims for the exact opposite of what is actually occurring. The object of the claims is simply to be as scary as possible, and if that requires claiming the opposite of the true situation, so be it.

Sea level rise:

Globally averaged sea level appears to have been rising at the rate of about 6 inches a century for thousands of years. Until the advent of satellites, sea level was essentially measured with tide gauges which measure the sea level relative to the land level. Unfortunately, the land level is also changing, and as Emery and Aubrey note, tectonics are the major source of change at many locations. Beginning in 1979 we began to use satellites to measure actual sea level. The results were surprisingly close to the previous tide gauge estimates, but slightly higher, but one sees from Wunsch et al (DOI: 10.1175/2007JCLI1840.1) that one is in no position to argue that small differences from changing methodologies represents acceleration. Regardless, the changes are small compared to the claims that suggest disastrous changes. However, even in the early 1980’s advocates of warming alarm like S. Schneider argued that sea level would be an easily appreciated scare tactic. The fact that people like Al Gore and Susan Solomon (former head of the IPCC’s Scientific Assessment) have invested heavily in ocean front property supports the notion that the issue is propagandistic rather than scientific.

Arctic sea ice:

Satellites have been observing arctic (and Antarctic) sea ice since 1979. Every year there is a pronounced annual cycle where the almost complete winter coverage is much reduced each summer. During this period there has been a noticeable downtrend is summer ice in the arctic (with the opposite behavior in the Antarctic), though in recent years, the coverage appears to have stabilized. In terms of climate change, 40 years is, of course, a rather short interval. Still, there have been the inevitable attempts to extrapolate short period trends leading to claims that the arctic should have already reached ice free conditions. Extrapolating short term trends is obviously inappropriate. Extrapolating surface temperature changes from dawn to dusk would lead to a boiling climate in days. This would be silly. The extrapolation of arctic summer ice coverage looks like it might be comparably silly.

Moreover, although the satellite coverage is immensely better than what was previously available, the data is far from perfect. The satellites can confuse ice topped with melt water with ice free regions. In addition, temperature might not be the main cause of reduced sea ice coverage. Summer ice tends to be fragile, and changing winds play an important role in blowing ice out of the arctic sea. Associating changing summer sea ice coverage with climate change is, itself, dubious. Existing climate models hardly unambiguously predict the observed behavior. Predictions for 2100 range from no change to complete disappearance. Thus, it cannot be said that the sea ice behavior confirms any plausible prediction.

It is sometimes noted that concerns for disappearing arctic sea ice were issued in 1922, suggesting that such behavior is not unique to the present. The data used, at that time, came from the neighborhood of Spitzbergen. A marine biologist and climate campaigner has argued that what was described was a local phenomenon, but, despite the claim, the evidence presented by the author is far from conclusive. Among other things, the author was selective in his choice of ‘evidence.’

All one can say, at this point, is that the behavior of arctic sea ice represents one of the numerous interesting phenomena that the earth presents us with, and for which neither the understanding nor the needed records exist. It probably pays to note that melting sea ice does not contribute to sea level rise. Moreover, man has long dreamt of the opening of this Northwest Passage. It is curious that it is now viewed with alarm. Of course, as Mencken noted, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” The environmental movement has elevated this aim well beyond what Mencken noted.

Polar bear meme:

I suspect that Al Gore undertook considerable focus-group research to determine the remarkable effectiveness of the notion that climate change would endanger polar bears. His use of an obviously photo shopped picture of a pathetic polar bear on an ice float suggests this. As Susan Crockford, a specialist in polar bear evolution, points out, there had indeed been a significant decrease in polar bear population in the past due to hunting and earlier due to commercial exploitation of polar bear fur. This has led to successful protective measures and sufficient recovery of polar bear population, that hunting has again been permitted. There is no evidence that changes in summer sea ice have had any adverse impact on polar bear population, and, given that polar bears can swim for over a hundred miles, there seems to be little reason to suppose that it would. Nonetheless, for the small community of polar bear experts, the climate related concerns have presented an obvious attraction.

Ocean acidification:

This is again one of those obscure claims that sounds scary but doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Ever since the acid rain scare, it has been realized that the public responds with alarm to anything with the word ‘acid’ in it. In point of fact, the ocean is basic rather than acidic (ie, its ph is always appreciably higher than 7, and there is no possibility of increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 bringing it down to 7; note that ph is a measure of acidity or basicness: values greater than 7 are basic and less than 7 acid.), and the purported changes simply refer to making the ocean a bit less basic. However, such a more correct description would lack the scare component. As usual, there is so much wrong with this claim that it takes a fairly long article to go over it all. I recommend the following source.

Death of coral reefs:

The alleged death of coral reefs is partly linked to the acidification issue above, and as we see, the linkage is almost opposite to what is claimed. There is also the matter of warming per se leading to coral bleaching. A typical alarmist presentation can be found here.

The article is behind a pay wall, but most universities provide access to Nature. The reasoned response to this paper is provided here.

As Steele, the author of the above, points out, bleaching has common causes other than warming and is far from a death sentence for corals whose capacity to recover is substantial. This article is a bit polemical, but essentially correct.

Global warming as the cause of everything:

As we see from the above, there is a tendency to blame everything unpleasant on global warming. The absurd extent of this tendency is illustrated on the following here. That hasn’t stopped the EPA from using such stuff to claim large health benefits for its climate change policies. Moreover, I fear that with so many claims, there is always the question ‘what about ….?’ Hardly anyone has the time and energy to deal with the huge number of claims. Fortunately, most are self-evidently absurd. Nation magazine recently came up with what is a bit of a champion is this regard.

CO2, it should be noted, is hardly poisonous. On the contrary, it is essential for life on our planet and levels as high as 5000 ppm are considered safe on our submarines and on the space station (current atmospheric levels are around 400 ppm, while, due to our breathing, indoor levels can be much higher). The Nation article is typical in that it makes many bizarre claims in a brief space. It argues that a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus led to temperatures hot enough to melt lead. Of course, no one can claim that the earth is subject to such a runaway, but even on Venus, the hot surface depends primarily on the closeness of Venus to the sun and the existence of a dense sulfuric acid cloud covering the planet. Relatedly, Mars, which also has much more CO2 than the earth, is much further from the sun and very cold. As we have seen many times already, such matters are mere details when one is in the business of scaring the public.

Concluding remarks:

The accumulation of false and/or misleading claims is often referred to as the ‘overwhelming evidence’ for forthcoming catastrophe. Without these claims, one might legitimately ask whether there is any evidence at all.

Despite this, climate change has been the alleged motivation for numerous policies, which, for the most part, seem to have done more harm  than the purported climate change, and have the obvious capacity to do much more. Perhaps the best that can be said for these efforts is that they are acknowledged to have little impact on either CO2 levels or temperatures despite their immense cost. This is relatively good news since there is ample evidence that both changes are likely to be beneficial although the immense waste of money is not.

I haven’t spent much time on the details of the science, but there is one thing that should spark skepticism in any intelligent reader. The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science.’ Such a claim should be a tip-off that something is amiss. After all, science is a mode of inquiry rather than a belief structure.

SOURCE

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1 May, 2017

An old Greenie scare now looks even more ridiculous

Mainly in the '70s Greenies were wailing that the world's known reserves of potassium compounds -- such as potash -- were not enough to last us much longer.  And potassium is needed for bone health.  So we were all in danger of crumbling bones.  Potash is in fact found worldwide.  The "known reserves" were simply what was most cheaply mined.  But then a big discovery of potash in North Africa was announced, which put the "known rserves" up way beyond scare levels.  So the story below is amusing.  It turns out that even Britain has huge amounts of the stuff under the ground that can economically be mined.  Another Greenie scare has turned out to be a total false prophecy.  Your bones are safe

The Queen is among a clutch of landowners set to share a £3.8bn windfall from the largest mine dug in Britain. Dozens of small farmers in North Yorkshire could become multimillionaires thanks to a gigantic deposit of fertiliser a mile below the moors.

Sirius Minerals lifted the lid last week on the riches that will be unlocked for local people and estate owners by its mine. It broke ground on the project in North York Moors national park this year.

The company aims to tap a 70-metre deep seam of polyhalite, a mineral-rich form of potash. The £2.3bn mine is expected to reach peak production in the mid-2020s.

SOURCE





The economic prospects of advanced coal technologies have never seemed so promising

Despite all of the attention given to wind and solar power, the development and deployment of advanced coal technologies may be far more important in shaping our energy future. Consider where world energy use and research is headed. Coal, and other fossil fuels, remain the backbone of the global energy system and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

If the politics of coal have never seemed so anguished, the economic prospects of advanced coal technologies with higher generating efficiencies have never seemed so promising. Not so far into the future, several new coal technologies are expected to come into greater commercial use in the United States. The best known are new pulverized coal combustion systems, operating at increasingly higher temperatures and pressures, and plants with an integrated gasification combined cycle. Increasing the average efficiency rate of the U.S. coal fleet from 33 to 40 percent using these available technologies would reduce coal-plant emissions by between 14 and 21 percent.

And there may yet be cost-cutting breakthroughs in the development of techniques to capture carbon emissions from power plants – both coal and natural gas units -- and use the carbon to produce petrochemicals, plastics and other useful products. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other leading universities are trying to come up with the answers.

Global warming will continue unless all countries reduce carbon emissions. That's because most countries burn coal, which is responsible for about 45 percent of the world's carbon emissions. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that even as coal's share of U.S. electricity generating capacity declines, its world use will rise from about 30 percent today to 50 percent by 2035.

Its environmental impact notwithstanding, coal is a practical energy option for fast-growing economies like China and India, which don't have large natural gas resources. These countries are determined to grow their economies and lift millions of people out of poverty, and do it at the least cost possible.

Given the certainty that coal will continue to play a large and indispensable role in electricity production, the way forward requires the deployment of innovative coal technologies to mitigate carbon emissions.

The World Coal Association says that lifting the average global efficiency rate of coal plants to 40 percent compared to 33 percent today would reduce carbon output by an amount equal to India's annual carbon emissions, which are among the highest in the world. Some coal plants operating with ultra-supercritical technology in Europe and Japan are already achieving efficiencies in the 42 to 46 percent range.

Importantly, higher efficiencies are a critical step toward the use of carbon capture, use and storage technology, without which, it is highly improbable that global carbon emissions can be brought down to acceptable levels.

Despite the challenges, several projects have been launched to develop and test processes for capturing and sequestering carbon. Most of this activity is under way in the United States, and its cost is being shared by government and private industry. For example, NRG Energy is pumping carbon dioxide 80 miles by pipeline from its coal-burning Parish power plant in Texas and using it to extract more oil and natural gas from old wells.

Exxon Mobil is a major partner in a carbon mitigation project that uses fuel cells – devices that generate electricity through chemical reactions. The idea is to connect fuel cells to fossil-fuel plants, so that the fuel cells can generate additional power to make up for the cost of sequestering the carbon.

In Alberta, Canada, a company is injecting carbon captured from a natural gas plant and injecting it into concrete. The process reduces the need for composite material when making concrete and makes it stronger. So far it's been put into use at about 50 concrete plants over the past two years.

And in Mississippi, a Southern Company power plant that burns lignite coal strips out about 65 percent of the carbon from gas emissions, then pumps it to other companies for use in enhanced oil recovery.

The basic attraction of coal remains its low cost and abundance. In the next 10 to 20 years, coal's value is likely to grow, as advanced coal plants, including some retrofitted with carbon capture, meet the world's growing need for energy while helping reduce greenhouse emissions.

SOURCE





Liberals have epic meltdown after NYT columnist suggests science behind climate change isn’t certain

Bret Stephens, one of the New York Times’ newest conservative columnists, endured a wrath of anger from liberals on Friday who proceeded to meltdown after his first column for the Times stated that “climate change” isn’t certain.

The general idea of Stephens’ column was that the science behind “climate change” is not certain — despite claims from climate change alarmists that it is — and that when uncertain science is deemed certain it undermines science as a whole.

“Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong,” Stephens wrote.

“None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power,” he explained.

To put it lightly, liberals and climate change alarmists lost their minds. They proceeded to lambaste Stephens on Twitter:

“literally go f*ck yourself, new york times. go eat dog d*cks,” wrote another user.

All of the outrage over his column, or his assertion that it’s OK to be skeptical of climate change despite those who claim it to be “settled science,” didn’t get past Stephens.

“After 20 months of being harangued by bullying Trump supporters, I’m reminded that the nasty left is no different. Perhaps worse,” he responded.

However, the hate continued to pour in.

“bret if you think that tweet was “nasty” i have some news for you: you’re a sh*thead. a crybaby lil f*ckin weenie. a massive tw*t too,” wrote one journalist.

“Oh no, someone said you should get fired, how dare they insult you for being a huge piece of sh*t, on record, over and over again,” added another Twitter user.

“f*ck you, crybaby,” said yet another.

In response to the outrage, the New York Times tweeted its coverage of climate change to its followers on Friday.

But for many liberals who are afraid to read anything they disagree with, publishing Stephens’ column was the final straw. Many called the Times’ subscription office to cancel their subscription of the paper.

SOURCE






Appeals panel agrees to delay case on coal plant pollution

The Trump administration has successfully delayed a legal fight over enforcing Obama-era restrictions on pollution from coal-fired power plants.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Thursday granted a request from the Environmental Protection Agency to postpone a planned hearing on 2012 rules requiring energy companies to cut emissions of toxic chemicals. Though the regulations are finalized and already in effect, the new administration told the court it intends to rewrite them.

It is the latest in a string of moves by President Donald Trump's appointees to help companies that profit from burning fossil fuels. Trump has pledged to reverse decades of decline in a U.S. coal industry under threat from such cleaner sources of energy as natural gas, wind turbines and solar farms.

SOURCE






Another stupid Greenie prophecy from Australia:  "The Reef will never be the same again"

This is just straight Greenie propaganda, with no regard to all the facts.  The GBR has had some bleaching events lately but it is nothing compared to Bikini Atoll, which had a thermonuclear device exploded above it.  And Bikini coral is thriving again.  If coral on Bikini can survive that, why should not the GBR survive infinitely lesser stressors?

And attributing the isolated bleaching to global warming is just assertion.  They offer no evidence for it.  The best evidence is that it is due to sea-level changes, not ocean warming.

It does seem that the 2015/2016 summer bleaching was repeated in summer this year (2016/2017).  Since water levels change only slowly, that is to be expected. 

And note that, while they are busily attributing the bleaching to global warming, they give not a single number for either the global water temperature or the North Queensland water temperature. 

So let me supply some numbers: NASA/GISS Tell us that the global December 2016 temperature (mid-summer) was .77, which was DOWN on December 2015 (1.10)and even slightly down on 2014 (.79).  So in the period at issue, there was NO global warming.  So the guys below are lying through their teeth.  They say that the bleaching was caused by global warming but there WAS no global warming in the period concerned.

And they also don't give numbers for sea levels in the area.  They are zealously hiding the real cause of the bleaching


THE biggest jewel in Australia’s tourism crown will never look the same again — and to fix it, Australia needs a worldwide hand.

Made up of 3000 individual reef systems, the Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest living organism. It is home to 300 species of coral and a vast array of fish, molluscs, starfish and other marine life.

The Reef also supports a $6 billion tourism industry that provides employment for 69,000 people — all of which is in strife if environmental degradation causes significant, widespread harm.

Already back-to-back coral bleaching episodes have taken their toll, wiping out nearly 600km of coral mostly in the far north.

Caused by rising ocean temperatures that kill food-generating algal organisms inside the coral, no one can say with any confidence that bleaching will not become an annual event.

Even more worrying, scientific data suggests a further two-degree increase in ocean temperatures would wipe-out most of the hard corals.

The man in charge of the Reef Recovery program at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Dr Mark Read, concedes it will never look the same again.

Although some corals will build up a resilience to warmer temperatures, a number of species are facing extinction.

“I think it’s going to end being a real mosaic,” said Dr Read.

“Some parts of the Reef are going to look more classic — hard coral-dominated — that we’re familiar with while other parts will be less dominated by hard coral and more dominated by soft coral and algae.”

While natural habitats are destined to change over time, Dr Read says in the Reef’s case, mankind has contributed to the “current accelerated period of heating” causing coral bleaching.

“We are talking about a global phenomenon,” Dr Read said.

“(Coral bleaching) is happening all around the world where you have hard coral. The Great Barrier Reef has been hit particularly hard, so it’s front of mind.”

Among the strategies being used by his team to aid in the Reef’s recovery, are ensuring activities in the area do not adversely impact the delicate marine environment; tackling the insidious Crown of Thorns starfish; improving water quality and reducing the volume of debris that finds its way into the massive water park.

Together those initiatives will make a difference but Dr Read admits they won’t prevent more episodes of coral bleaching.

“In terms of dealing with the warming per se, that is something that needs to be tackled at that global level,” he said.

“What we do, and what we can do is reduce as many of the direct pressures on the Reef to enhance its capacity to bounce back.”

Those who make a living from the Reef are watching the situation with some trepidation.

Despite chalking up their best tourism season since 1997 in 2016, long-term operators know the back-to-back coral bleaching events that have received global coverage will eventually take their toll.

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   main.html or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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IN BRIEF


Home (Index page)


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

Antarctica is GAINING mass

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.



Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion



Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

The plight of the bumblebee -- an egregious example of crooked "science"

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below


WISDOM:

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." --- Richard P. Feynman.

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement" -- Karl Popper

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.


ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

A Warmist backs down: "No one knows exactly how far rising carbon concentrations affect temperatures" -- Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.


SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

The frequency of hurricanes has markedly DECLINED in recent years

Here's how that "97% consensus" figure was arrived at

97% of scientists want to get another research grant

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

To Greenies, Genghis Khan was a good guy, believe it or not. They love that he killed so many people.

Greenie antisemitism

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

Comparing climate alarmist Hansen to Cassandra is WRONG. Cassandra's (Greek mythology) dire prophecies were never believed but were always right. Hansen's dire prophecies are usually believed but are always wrong (Prof. Laurence Gould, U of Hartford, CT)

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

UPDATE to the above: It seems that I am a true prophet

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

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

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Help keep the planet Green! Maximize your CO2 and CH4 output!

Global Warming=More Life; Global Cooling=More Death.

The inconvenient truth about biological effects of "Ocean Acidification"

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is maximum 4%.

Cook the crook who cooks the books

The great and fraudulent scare about lead


How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The "precautionary principle" is a favourite Greenie idea -- but isn't that what George Bush was doing when he invaded Iraq? Wasn't that a precaution against Saddam getting or having any WMDs? So Greenies all agree with the Iraq intervention? If not, why not?

A classic example of how the sensationalist media distort science to create climate panic is here.

There is a very readable summary of the "Hockey Stick" fraud here

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: "The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Relying on the popular wisdom can even hurt you personally: "The scientific consensus of a quarter-century ago turned into the arthritic nightmare of today."

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.




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