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".


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

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31 May, 2019  

Japan finds a huge cache of scarce rare-earth minerals

Essential to much "Green" technology

Japan looks to replace China as the primary source of critical metals.  Enough rare earth minerals have been found off Japan to last centuries.Rare earths are important materials for green technology, as well as medicine and manufacturing. Where would we be without all of our rare-earth magnets?

Rare earth elements are a set of 17 metals that are integral to our modern lifestyle and efforts to produce ever-greener technologies. The "rare" designation is a bit of a misnomer: It's not that they're not plentiful, but rather that they're found in small concentrations, and are especially difficult to successfully extract since they blend in with and resemble other minerals in the ground.

China currently produces over 90% of the world's supply of rare metals, with seven other countries mining the rest. So though they're not precisely "rare," they are scarce. In 2010, the U.S. Department of energy issued a report that warned of a critical shortage of five of the elements. Now, however, Japan has found a massive deposit of rare earths sufficient to supply the world's needs for hundred of years.

The rare earth metals can be mostly found in the second row from the bottom in the Table of Elements. According to the Rare Earth Technology Alliance, due to the "unique magnetic, luminescent, and electrochemical properties, these elements help make many technologies perform with reduced weight, reduced emissions, and energy consumption; or give them greater efficiency, performance, miniaturization, speed, durability, and thermal stability."

Japan located the rare earths about 1,850 kilometers off the shore of Minamitori Island. Engineers located the minerals in 10-meter-deep cores taken from sea floor sediment. Mapping the cores revealed and area of approximately 2,500 square kilometers containing rare earths.

Japan's engineers estimate there's 16 million tons of rare earths down there. That's five times the amount of the rare earth elements ever mined since 1900. According to Business Insider, there's "enough yttrium to meet the global demand for 780 years, dysprosium for 730 years, europium for 620 years, and terbium for 420 years."

The bad news, of course, is that Japan has to figure out how to extract the minerals from 6-12 feet under the seabed four miles beneath the ocean surface — that's the next step for the country's engineers. The good news is that the location sits squarely within Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone, so their rights to the lucrative discovery will be undisputed.

SOURCE 






Trump to Replace Alarmist Climate Models With Sound Science

The president taps a Princeton scientist to head his new climate-review panel.  

Given the fact that extremist climate-change-prognostication models have been wildly inaccurate, it would be wise to avoid basing any serious environmental policy on them. In fact, anyone interested in following the sound and time-tested scientific method would demand nothing less, and yet the Leftmedia is up in arms over President Donald Trump’s recent decision to do just that. The New York Times blows its climate alarmist’s dog whistle with the headline, “Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science.” Hardly.

The Times fallaciously asserts that “the attack on science is underway,” supposedly evidenced by Trump’s appointment of geologist and former astronaut James Reilly as the director of the United States Geological Survey. And how is Reilly “attacking science”? By insisting upon the practice of sound science. The Times huffs, “Reilly … has ordered that scientific assessments produced by that office use only computer-generated climate models that project impact of climate change through 2040, rather than through the end of the century, as had been done previously.”

In reality, Trump is pushing for the government to return to adhering to sound scientific practice for informing policy decisions, rather than agenda-driven hysterics. James Hewitt, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, explained, “The previous use of inaccurate modeling that focuses on worst-case emissions scenarios [and] that does not reflect real-world conditions needs to be thoroughly reexamined and tested if such information is going to serve as the scientific foundation of nationwide decision-making now and in the future.”

The Trump administration is also creating a new climate-review panel to be headed by respected Princeton University scientist William Happer. Long an outspoken critic of the alarmism surrounding rising CO2 levels, Happer has argued, “The public in general doesn’t realize that from the point of view of geological history, we are in a CO2 famine. … There is no problem from CO2. The world has lots and lots of problems, but increasing CO2 is not one of the problems. So [the Paris accord] dignifies it by getting all these yahoos who don’t know a damn thing about climate saying, ‘This is a problem, and we’re going to solve it.’ All this virtue signaling.”

No more Chicken Little climate alarmism dictating policy. It’s time to return to sound, verifiable scientific practices that don’t elevate worst-case predictions as a means of pushing for ever-more government regulation.

SOURCE 






Gasoline tax propsals versus a carbon tax

There are an increasing number of reports about the business community’s growing support for a carbon tax.  Americans for Carbon Dividends, CERES, and the CEO Climate Dialogue along with several environmental groups are urging Congress to pass legislation that would put a price on carbon—CO2 emissions.

According to Axios, 69% of republicans are concerned that “their party’s position on climate will hurt them with younger voters and 43 % …said that their concern about climate change has increased in the past year.”  David Doniger at the Natural Resources Defense Council told Axios…“They see a rising public demand for action and they’re smart enough to know this extreme denial of the Trump era will not last and may be coming to a halt in 2020.”

Maybe they are right and a turning point has been reached but don’t bet on it.  The recent election in Australia is one piece of evidence.  Voters there had a clear choice between pro-growth policies and policies of higher taxes and income distribution.  Growth won.  One way to test the public’s receptiveness for a carbon tax is for Congress to propose and try to pass something like a 25 or 50 cent increase in the gasoline tax since that would apply directly to CO2 emissions.

The reason for skepticism is the reality of how voters are reacting to proposals to raise state gasoline taxes.  Proposals in Ohio, Missouri, and Minnesota for example have run into to fierce resistance from voters.

A study by two European economists captured the reality well.  Given concerns about climate change, “the option of raising gasoline taxes has received greater consideration in the American public policy debate. …Gasoline tax increases remain nevertheless highly unpopular. Public resistance to them is at least partly explained by their adverse distributional effects. In developed economies …gasoline is generally a necessity good in household consumption. Therefore, gasoline price increases tend to affect the poor more than the wealthy in relative terms. That is, they tend to be regressive.”

While the rhetoric surrounding a carbon tax might initially produce public support, especially given promises returning some proceeds to individuals in the form of cash dividends, the realities of carbon taxes can only be hidden for so long.  The public would soon realize that the taxing mechanism would give Congress another way to feed its spending appetite, would not be as simple and straight forward as promised, and would be gamed by crony capitalists.

So, if Congress can get the public to buy into a gasoline tax increase that would set predicate for moving onto a carbon tax in spite of the fact that it is a scam.  The impact on global CO2 emissions would be trivial since they are increasing as a result of coal fired power units being built by China, India, and other countries while US emissions peaked in 2005.

SOURCE 






Why predictions go wrong

Credentialed authorities are comically bad at predicting the future. But reliable forecasting is possible -- from non-experts

The idea for the most important study ever conducted of expert predictions was sparked in 1984, at a meeting of a National Research Council committee on American-Soviet relations. The psychologist and political scientist Philip E. Tetlock was 30 years old, by far the most junior committee member. He listened intently as other members discussed Soviet intentions and American policies. Renowned experts delivered authoritative predictions, and Tetlock was struck by how many perfectly contradicted one another and were impervious to counterarguments.

Tetlock decided to put expert political and economic predictions to the test. With the Cold War in full swing, he collected forecasts from 284 highly educated experts who averaged more than 12 years of experience in their specialties. To ensure that the predictions were concrete, experts had to give specific probabilities of future events. Tetlock had to collect enough predictions that he could separate lucky and unlucky streaks from true skill. The project lasted 20 years, and comprised 82,361 probability estimates about the future.

The result: The experts were, by and large, horrific forecasters. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, and (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting and bad at long-term forecasting. They were bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that future events were impossible or nearly impossible, 15 percent of them occurred nonetheless. When they declared events to be a sure thing, more than one-quarter of them failed to transpire. As the Danish proverb warns, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Even faced with their results, many experts never admitted systematic flaws in their judgment. When they missed wildly, it was a near miss; if just one little thing had gone differently, they would have nailed it. “There is often a curiously inverse relationship,” Tetlock concluded, “between how well forecasters thought they were doing and how well they did.”

Early predictions in Tetlock’s research pertained to the future of the Soviet Union. Some experts (usually liberals) saw Mikhail Gorbachev as an earnest reformer who would be able to change the Soviet Union and keep it intact for a while, and other experts (usually conservatives) felt that the Soviet Union was immune to reform and losing legitimacy. Both sides were partly right and partly wrong. Gorbachev did bring real reform, opening the Soviet Union to the world and empowering citizens. But those reforms unleashed pent-up forces in the republics outside Russia, where the system had lost legitimacy. The forces blew the Soviet Union apart. Both camps of experts were blindsided by the swift demise of the U.S.S.R.

One subgroup of scholars, however, did manage to see more of what was coming. Unlike Ehrlich and Simon, they were not vested in a single discipline. They took from each argument and integrated apparently contradictory worldviews. They agreed that Gorbachev was a real reformer and that the Soviet Union had lost legitimacy outside Russia. A few of those integrators saw that the end of the Soviet Union was close at hand and that real reforms would be the catalyst.

The integrators outperformed their colleagues in pretty much every way, but especially trounced them on long-term predictions. Eventually, Tetlock bestowed nicknames (borrowed from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin) on the experts he’d observed: The highly specialized hedgehogs knew “one big thing,” while the integrator foxes knew “many little things.”

Hedgehogs are deeply and tightly focused. Some have spent their career studying one problem. Like Ehrlich and Simon, they fashion tidy theories of how the world works based on observations through the single lens of their specialty. Foxes, meanwhile, “draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradiction,” Tetlock wrote. Where hedgehogs represent narrowness, foxes embody breadth.

Incredibly, the hedgehogs performed especially poorly on long-term predictions within their specialty. They got worse as they accumulated experience and credentials in their field. The more information they had to work with, the more easily they could fit any story into their worldview.

Unfortunately, the world’s most prominent specialists are rarely held accountable for their predictions, so we continue to rely on them even when their track records make clear that we should not. One study compiled a decade of annual dollar-to-euro exchange-rate predictions made by 22 international banks: Barclays, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and others. Each year, every bank predicted the end-of-year exchange rate. The banks missed every single change of direction in the exchange rate. In six of the 10 years, the true exchange rate fell outside the entire range of all 22 bank forecasts.

In 2005, tetlock published his results, and they caught the attention of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA, a government organization that supports research on the U.S. intelligence community’s most difficult challenges. In 2011, IARPA launched a four-year prediction tournament in which five researcher-led teams competed. Each team could recruit, train, and experiment however it saw fit. Predictions were due at 9 a.m. every day. The questions were hard: Will a European Union member withdraw by a target date? Will the Nikkei close above 9,500?

Tetlock, along with his wife and collaborator, the psychologist Barbara Mellers, ran a team named the Good Judgment Project. Rather than recruit decorated experts, they issued an open call for volunteers. After a simple screening, they invited 3,200 people to start forecasting. Among those, they identified a small group of the foxiest forecasters—bright people with extremely wide-ranging interests and unusually expansive reading habits, but no particular relevant background—and weighted team forecasts toward their predictions. They destroyed the competition.

Tetlock and Mellers found that not only were the best forecasters foxy as individuals, but they tended to have qualities that made them particularly effective collaborators. They were “curious about, well, really everything,” as one of the top forecasters told me. They crossed disciplines, and viewed their teammates as sources for learning, rather than peers to be convinced. When those foxes were later grouped into much smaller teams—12 members each—they became even more accurate. They outperformed—by a lot—a group of experienced intelligence analysts with access to classified data.

In Tetlock’s 20-year study, both the broad foxes and the narrow hedgehogs were quick to let a successful prediction reinforce their beliefs. But when an outcome took them by surprise, foxes were much more likely to adjust their ideas. Hedgehogs barely budged. Some made authoritative predictions that turned out to be wildly wrong—then updated their theories in the wrong direction. They became even more convinced of the original beliefs that had led them astray. The best forecasters, by contrast, view their own ideas as hypotheses in need of testing. If they make a bet and lose, they embrace the logic of a loss just as they would the reinforcement of a win. This is called, in a word, learning.

SOURCE 







Australia: Adani coalmine in path of more than one endangered species in Queensland



Dilemma:  Approving the mine would cost the State Labor government its deputy leader at the next election and give the seat to the Greens. Premier Annastacia with deputy Jackie Trad (in pink) above

Well fancy that. After months of dithering on Adani’s proposed Carmichael mine in the Galilee Basin and refusing to intervene in an approval process that saw the company frustrated at every turn, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has suddenly found her voice again. And here we were thinking Annastacia had a case of aphasia.

Saying she was “fed up” with the delays, Palaszczuk announced deadlines of May 31 and June 13 for the mine’s bird protection and groundwater management plans respectively. You might say when it comes to the demands of anti-Adani activists, Palaszczuk is desperately trying to give the appearance of not giving a flying finch.

“Well I think everyone’s had a gutful, so that’s why we have moved — why I have moved quickly — to resolve this issue,” she stated.

Notice the nuance? Actually, it was more an extended middle finger to Deputy Premier and Treasurer Jackie Trad, the leader of the dominant left faction which controls Cabinet and has constantly hindered Adani. At a press conference last weekend at the Gold Coast’s Sea World, the pair attempted to portray party unity.

With an election just over a year away, it is not just the government’s future at stake. In 2017, Trad’s formerly safe Labor inner-city seat of South Brisbane suffered an 11.7 per cent swing to the Greens. She holds the seat by only a 3.6 per cent margin thanks to the Liberal National Party’s preferencing Labor over the Greens in 2017 — a decision the LNP has announced it will not be repeating at the next election. Worst still for Trad, the national election showed this Greens incursion has increased, with some federal booths within her seat registering a swing as high as 15 per cent.

In what can only be described as a case of chronic denialism, both Palaszczuk and Trad have denied the delays in the Carmichael mine approval process had anything to do with Labor’s federal election rout in Queensland, “I think the Carmichael mine … was part of that message, but it wasn’t the entire message,” Trad told ABC radio last week.

To reiterate: Adani had planned to begin construction of the mine prior to Christmas last year, but this was delayed when the government ordered an independent review into the company’s environmental management plans for the black-throated finch. “We are now seeing more processes and actions coming in at the eleventh hour when we have been working on this for the best part of 18 months,” said an exasperated Adani mining chief executive, Lucas Dow, in December.

As if intentionally exacerbating this situation, the government rejected Adani’s management plan at the beginning of this month, the Queensland Department of Environment and Science claiming it “did not meet requirements”. This is the same department that last July appointed anti-Adani activist Dr Tim Seelig as an adviser, along with Greens candidates Kirsten Lovejoy and Gary Kane.

But all this has nothing to do with federal Labor’s primary vote in Queensland dropping to 27.3 per cent, right? Wrong. Palaszczuk and Trad have dug a hole for themselves so big it would have inspired Jules Verne, had he still been alive, to write a sequel to Journey to the Centre of the Earth. This bureaucratic and political farce is about protecting an endangered species alright, but it is the squawking Member for South Brisbane the government is concerned about, not the black-throated finch.

The party charade of trying to appease anti-Adani voters in the inner-city while attempting to convince those in the regions it is pro-mining intensified on the eve of the 2017 election. At that time, polling revealed that the Greens led Labor 51 per cent to 49 per cent on a two-party preferred basis in Trad’s seat.

Around the same time, Palaszczuk, to the disbelief of many, announced she had exercised a “veto” not to support an application by Adani for a $1 billion Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility loan. The ostensible basis for this was that she wanted to remove any perception of a conflict of interest, as her then partner, Shaun Drabsch, worked on the application to the NAIF with his employer, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which acted for Adani.

In attempting to defend her arbitrary decision, Palaszczuk cited that she had relied on advice from the Queensland Integrity Commissioner, Dr Nikola Stepanov. But as Jamie Walker of The Australian revealed, the commissioner’s advice was merely that Palaszczuk should exclude herself from Cabinet deliberations concerning the NAIF loan. In fact, ministers had, during a crisis Cabinet meeting five months before the Premier’s announcement, resolved not to support the NAIF loan bid.

Undoubtedly, Palaszczuk had succumbed to pressure from Trad, who later had the chutzpah to criticise the federal government’s NAIF program, saying it “has not yet seen a single dollar go to a Queensland project”. Earlier that year Trad had intervened to scotch Palaszczuk and then Treasurer Curtis Pitt’s agreement with Adani which would have seen royalties limited to $2m annually for the first seven years of the mine’s operation.

“I have never been anti-coal,” Trad told the Australian Financial Review in 2015. “I actually think it’s ridiculous to think we don’t use our natural resources — it’s one of our strengths”. Yet in February this year she told parliament “markets are moving away from thermal coal, communities are moving away from thermal coal, nation states are moving away from thermal coal”.

Translation: inner-city seats are moving away from Labor to the Greens.

“What we need to do as a coal exporter is understand that, and equip our communities with the best possible chance of re-skilling, and that’s why we’re focused on other materials,” she said. Contrast this West End insouciance with the urgency of a group of Labor regional MPs that, as The Courier-Mail reported this week, is threatening to form a sub-caucus.

One wonders how long, were it not for the federal election forcing its hand, the Queensland government was prepared to prolong this debacle. Put simply, it cannot have had a viable exit strategy, for Adani has committed far too much to abandon the project. In the event the government refuses approval, it has, through its intransigence and decisions based on ulterior motives, left itself open to a compensation claim amounting to hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions.

It would be a legal battle that would take years to finalise. Of course, that will affect neither Palaszczuk nor Trad. By then they will be enjoying retirement and a generous taxpayer-funded pension.

Palaszczuk appears destined for Opposition unless she can clear the way for Adani quickly. Of course that would mean Trad would lose her seat, but the Deputy Premier need not despair. After all, there is always re-skilling.

SOURCE  

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

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

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30 May, 2019  

Newest drought scare just another climate scam

Federal bureaucrats are propagating another climate scare this week, claiming their new study shows global warming is causing drought and will soon result in “unprecedented drying.” The underlying data, however, show the bureaucrats are misrepresenting the results of their study.

Headlined by workers at NASA’s Goddard Institute and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the authors acknowledge, “The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report indicates only low confidence in attributing changes in drought” to global warming. The authors then set about to try to change that assessment.

The authors utilized soil moisture measurements and computer models in an attempt to discern connection and causation between global warming and drought. The authors reported drought increased during the early 20th century, some 100 years of global warming ago.

Noting, however, that “a negative trend indicates that the data and [warming] fingerprint are increasingly dissimilar,” the authors acknowledged that “In the middle of the twentieth century, these trends become negative.”

From 1981 through the present, the authors reported, “the signal of greenhouse gas forcing is present but not yet detectable at high confidence.” The signals were so small, the authors acknowledged, that they “are not detectable at the likely level over background noise.”

In summary, the authors found that between 1950 and 1980, the signal was the opposite of what one would expect if global warming causes drought. From 1981 through the present, there was a signal so small that it was indistinguishable from background noise. The only detectable signal connecting warming temperatures and drought was during a period 100 years ago, when temperatures were cooler than today. The warming since then has not caused any detectable drought.

The findings strike a hammer blow against the notion that global warming causes alarming levels of drought, or even any detectable drought at all. People who work at climate change departments for the federal government, however, must keep the notion of a climate crisis alive to preserve their apparent importance and their jobs. So here are a few snippets of how the authors spun the story, according to USA Today:

“’The big thing we learned is that climate change started affecting global patterns of drought in the early 20th century,’” said study co-author Benjamin Cook of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. ‘We expect this pattern to keep emerging as climate change continues.’”

“Lead author Kate Marvel, a climate modeler at Goddard and Columbia University, said, ‘It’s mind boggling. There is a really clear signal of the effects of human greenhouse gases on the hydroclimate.’”

“‘All the models are projecting that you should see unprecedented drying soon, in a lot of places,’” Marvel said.

Actually, we are only seeing unprecedented alarmism, everywhere taxpayer dollars are to be had.

SOURCE 





White House hardens attack on climate hoax

President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term "global warming" into a punch line rather than a prognosis.

Now, after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Trump's hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqu‚ to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

And, in what could be Trump's most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the  science on which climate change policy rests.

As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the Earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.

The administration's prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the Earth's atmosphere could warm by as much as 8 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses, and severe health consequences.

Work on the next report, which is expected to be released in 2021 or 2022, has already begun. But from now on, officials said, such worst-case scenario projections will not automatically be included in the National Climate Assessment or in some other scientific reports produced by the government.

"What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science - to push the science in a direction that's consistent with their politics," said Philip Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government's most recent National Climate Assessment. "It reminds me of the Soviet Union."

In an e-mail, James Hewitt, spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, defended the proposed changes.

"The previous use of inaccurate modeling that focuses on worst-case emissions scenarios, that does not reflect real-world conditions, needs to be thoroughly reexamined and tested if such information is going to serve as the scientific foundation of nationwide decision-making now and in the future," Hewitt said.

However, the goal of political appointees in the Trump administration is not just to change the climate assessment's methodology, which has broad scientific consensus, but also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by William Happer, a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide.

“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the president’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies, said in 2014 in an interview with CNBC.

Mr. Happer’s proposed panel is backed by John R. Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, who brought Mr. Happer into the N.S.C. after an earlier effort to recruit him during the transition.

Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.

Climate scientists are dismissive of Mr. Happer; his former colleagues at Princeton are chagrined. And several White House officials — including Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser — have urged Mr. Trump not to adopt Mr. Happer’s proposal, on the grounds that it would be perceived as a White House attack on science.

Even Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House strategist who views Mr. Happer as “the climate hustler’s worst nightmare — a world-class physicist from the nation’s leading institution of advanced learning, who does not suffer fools gladly,” is apprehensive about what Mr. Happer is trying to do.

“The very idea will start a holy war on cable before 2020,” he said. “Better to win now and introduce the study in the second inaugural address.”

But at a White House meeting on May 1, at which the skeptical advisers made their case, Mr. Trump appeared unpersuaded, people familiar with the meeting said. Mr. Happer, they said, is optimistic that the panel will go forward.

More HERE 






NY’s green new dud

New York produced less electricity from renewable sources in 2018 than it did the year before despite significant intervention by state government.

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Public Service Commission (PSC) in August 2016 ordered utilities and large electricity customers to subsidize new renewable projects by purchasing credits, with an eye toward having half the state’s electricity come from renewables by 2030. Cuomo has recently touted the policy as part of his version of a “Green New Deal,” and hiked the 2030 renewable target to 70 percent.

The PSC doesn’t calculate the total cost of its renewable mandate and utilities are prohibited from showing ratepayers the impact on their bills. But based on the number of RECs utilities must buy and the price at which they were being sold by the state Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA), the mandate will cost about $50 million this year and rise to more than $100 million by 2021.

The New York Independent System Operator, which oversees the wholesale electricity market,  detailed 2018 generation in its annual Power Trends report this month, and it calls into question what New Yorkers are getting for their generosity.

The data show renewable energy generators, including hydroelectric, wind, solar and others, together produced 35,808 gigawatt hours of electricity last year. That amounted to a 2.5 percent drop from 2017. All told, 26.4 percent of generation last year came from renewables, down from 28.0 percent the year before. The numbers don’t reflect the state’s efforts promoting behind-the-meter renewable, such as most solar panel deployments, which reduce demand for power from the grid and aren’t easily quantified. That said, New York customers used more electricity from the grid in 2018 than in 2016 or 2017.

As shown below, the state does not appear to be on the path to reaching Cuomo’s initial 50 percent goal, let alone his more recent 70 percent target. In fact, the state has yet to hit the 30-percent target state regulators set in 2010—hoping to hit it by 2015.

Most of the renewable energy came from the state Power Authority’s Niagara Falls and Massena dams, where annual outputs fluctuate based on weather factors and operational decisions. But when all hydroelectric power is excluded, it reveals less renewable energy (6,763 GWh) was sold on the grid in 2018 than in 2015 (7,064 GWh), before the Clean Energy Standard was adopted.

How could that be? For one thing, the electric grid hasn’t been able to deliver it. NYISO warned state regulators in 2010 that transmission would be an issue if the state wanted to promote wind development, and roughly 70 GWh of wind energy last year had to be “curtailed” because the grid couldn’t move it from its upstate source to where demand was higher.

Still other projects have been stuck on the drawing board because proposals to build solar panel and wind turbine depots in rural upstate regions have met local opposition. The state has taken the unconventional step of using state resources to help renewable-friendly local officials change municipal codes and smooth the way for private developers.

The state’s ham-handed approach to subsidies failed to initially account for the many smaller renewable generators getting state support under a Pataki-era program. One biomass generator went out of business at the end of 2017 because state officials couldn’t, in the interceding 16 months, fold them into the new subsidy regime.

Even when issues with transmission and existing facilities are worked out, the state faces additional headwinds.

New York’s program has relied on a pair of lucrative federal incentives that are now being phased out. Wind projects that break ground after December 31 will no longer be eligible for the Production Tax Credit (PTC), which pays owners a subsidy for each kilowatt-hour generated. The Investment Tax Credit (ITC) that benefits larger solar projects will pay out 30 percent of capital costs on projects built this year before unwinding down to 10 percent in 2021.

Meanwhile, close to two-thirds of the current wind energy capacity (1,162 MW of 1,739 MW) came online prior to 2009. Assuming a 20-year project life expectancy, some facilities will likely need to be replaced before 2030.

All told, New York’s renewable energy policies have never been poised for success.

First, the Cuomo administration has been more interested in tactics–such as building more renewables—than the actual goal of lowering carbon dioxide emissions.

And even that tactic was over-constrained: the PSC explicitly disqualified most hydroelectric power from state subsidies in no small part because it might make greater economic sense to finance a new dam in Quebec than to deploy solar panels in places like snowy Oswego County.

To cite one hypothetical alternative, if the state imposed a broad carbon tax, people and businesses (and perhaps even governments) would have found efficiencies and reduce emissions at the lowest cost. But Cuomo’s “Green New Deal” has never been about any sort of environmental outcomes. That became clear when the Cuomo administration last year took steps to steer construction work on renewable energy projects to building trade unions.

The anemic growth of land-based wind and other renewables will increase pressure on the administration to go big and further subsidize construction of larger wind turbines off Long Island. Unfortunately for ratepayers, offshore wind is the single most expensive type of renewable energy, and the Cuomo administration has already signaled most of the necessary billions will come from electricity customers north of New York City.

SOURCE 






Rejecting Wind and Solar: Deep Green Resistance

Solar panels and wind turbines aren’t made out of nothing. They are made out of metals, plastics, and chemicals. These products have been mined out of the ground, transported, processed, manufactured. Each stage leaves behind a trail of devastation: habitat destruction, water contamination, colonization, toxic waste, slave labor, greenhouse gas emissions, wars, and corporate profits.

Yesterday’s post shared with readers the scary premises and means of the Deep Green Resistance, now the Progressive/Left option to the Green New Deal.

Today’s post shares the DGR’s views on renewables, which this group correctly sees as invasive to the natural world. One wishes that mainstream, Washington, DC-centric environmentalists would wake up to the fact that wind power and solar panels are very invasive to the natural world relative to dense, mineral energies.

Here is the DGR’s views verbatim.

Will Green Technology Save the Planet?

No. Wind turbines, solar PV panels, and the grid itself are all manufactured using cheap energy from fossil fuels. When fossil fuel costs begin to rise such highly manufactured items will simply cease to be feasible.

Solar panels and wind turbines aren’t made out of nothing. They are made out of metals, plastics, and chemicals. These products have been mined out of the ground, transported, processed, manufactured. Each stage leaves behind a trail of devastation: habitat destruction, water contamination, colonization, toxic waste, slave labor, greenhouse gas emissions, wars, and corporate profits.

The basic ingredients for renewables are the same materials that are ubiquitous in industrial products, like cement and aluminum. No one is going to make cement in any quantity without using the energy of fossil fuels. And aluminum? The mining itself is a destructive and toxic nightmare from which riparian communities will not awaken in anything but geologic time.

From beginning to end, so called “renewable energy” and other “green technologies” lead to the destruction of the planet. These technologies are rooted in the same industrial extraction and production processes that have rampaged across the world for the last 150 years.

We are not concerned with slightly reducing the harm caused by industrial civilization; we are interested in stopping that harm completely. Doing so will require dismantling the global industrial economy, which will render impossible the creation of these technologies.


Aren’t renewable energies like solar, wind, and geothermal good for the environment?


No. The majority of electricity that is generated by renewables is used in manufacturing, mining, and other industries that are destroying the planet. Even if the generation of electricity were harmless, the consumption certainly isn’t. Every electrical device, in the process of production, leaves behind the same trail of devastation. Living communities — forests, rivers, oceans — become dead commodities.

The emissions reductions that renewables intend to achieve could be easily accomplished by improving the efficiency of existing coal plants, businesses, and homes, at a much lower cost. Within the context of industrial civilization, this approach makes more sense both economically and environmentally.

That this approach is not being taken shows that the whole renewables industry is nothing but profiteering. It benefits no one other than the investors.


OK, renewable technologies have some impacts, but they’re still better than fossil fuels, right?


Renewable energy technologies are better than fossil fuels in the same sense that a single bullet wound is “better” than two bullet wounds. Both are grievous injuries.

Do you want to shoot the planet once or twice?

The only way out of a double bind is to smash it: to refuse both choices and craft a completely different path. We support neither fossil fuels nor renewable tech.

Even this bullet analogy isn’t completely accurate, since renewable technologies, in some cases, have a worse environmental impact than fossil fuels.

More renewables doesn’t mean less fossil fuel power, or less carbon emissions. The amount of energy generated by renewables has been increasing, but so has the amount generated by fossil fuels. No coal or gas plants have been taken offline as a result of renewables.

Only about 25% of global energy use is in the form of electricity that flows through wires or batteries.  The rest is oil, gas, and other fossil fuel derivatives. Even if all the world’s electricity could be produced without carbon emissions, it would only reduce total emissions by about 25%. And even that would have little meaning, as the amount of energy being used is increasing rapidly.

It’s debatable whether some “renewables” even produce net energy.  The amount of energy used in the mining, manufacturing, research and development, transport, installation, maintenance, grid connection, and disposal of wind turbines and solar panels may be more than they ever produce; claims to the contrary often do not take all the energy inputs into account.  Renewables have been described as a laundering scheme: dirty energy goes in, clean energy comes out.

SOURCE 






Is the Long Renewables Honeymoon Over?

The European renewables industry press, which is usually unequivocally upbeat in its assessments, is currently reporting a broad spectrum of substantial problems in the sector, ranging from bankruptcies and technical problems to tepid policy support and increasing public resistance.

In a fundamentally viable energy generation sector such stories could be regarded as minor perturbations, but in one that has been for decades all but completely insulated from risk by subsidy and other non-market support, it suggests deep-seated structuro-physical weakness.

The German wind turbine manufacturer Senvion S.A., formerly trading under the name of RePower, is currently in financial difficulties. This Hamburg-based firm, which has installed over 1,000 wind turbines in the UK alone, applied to commence self-administered insolvency proceedings in mid-April this year, and is at present sustained by a EUR 100m loan agreement with its lenders and main bond holders. Senvion has delayed both its AGM, which was due to take place on the 23 May, and also the publication of its recent financial results. At the time of writing the company had not yet announced a new timetable.

For nearly eight years, from 2007 to 2015, Senvion was owned by the Indian wind turbine manufacturer, Suzlon, and is now the property of the private equity firm, Centerbridge Partners. It is currently rumoured in the industry press that Centerbridge may now be compelled to cut its losses by making a distressed sale to Asian, probably Chinese, companies seeking a cheap way of acquiring a wind power market toehold in Europe. Western companies are thought to be unlikely to have the appetite for such a purchase, and their reluctance is entirely understandable: as Ed Hoskyns shows in a recent note for GWPF using EurObservER data, the annual installation rates for wind and solar have halved in the EU28 since 2010. Senvion may be the first major company to feel the effects of this downturn, and is certainly large enough for its difficulties to have wide ramifications, with two of its suppliers, FrancEole, which makes towers, and the US company TPI Composites, which makes blades, both being hurt by reduced revenues. Indeed, FrancEole was already in a poor way, and is now reported as being on the verge of liquidation.

Projects that were being supplied by Senvion are also affected, with the building of one, Borkum West 2.2, a 200 MW offshore wind farm, being suspended mid-construction since components due from Senvion have not been delivered on schedule. This delay, which has been front-page news in some circles, must be causing considerable headaches for Borkum West’s developer, Trianel GmbH, which is apparently now seeking to establish direct links with Senvion’s suppliers so that they can complete the project.

Elsewhere in the offshore wind universe, two large and relatively new projects are in the midst of what must be costly repairs involving significant downtime. Having received regulatory approval, the Danish mega-developer Orsted is about to start removing and renovating all 324 blades on the 108-turbine, 389 MW, Duddon Sands wind farm in the UK part of the Irish Sea, a year after problems first became apparent. The machines used, the Siemens 3.6–120, have suffered leading edge erosion, a problem that affects perhaps some 500 turbines in Europe (See “Type Failure or Wear and Tear in European Offshore Wind?”), and requiring the application of a remedial covering to each blade.

Less can be read in the public domain about the repairs about to restart at the gigantic, EU-funded Bard Offshore 1, which is owned by Ocean Breeze Energy GmbH & Co. KG. The project, which commissioned in 2013, has eighty 5 MW turbines, with a total capacity of 400 MW. Bard had already suffered a well-known series of cable failures, and it now transpires that both nacelles and rotors have been undergoing replacement for about two years, though Ocean Breeze is, according to industry press reports, apparently declining to confirm how many turbines are affected. The company’s website gives no information in either German or English that I could find.

There would, then, appear to be a great deal of work in servicing offshore wind installations, but this has not been enough to prevent Offshore Marine Management Ltd (OMM), a UK-based offshore wind contractor, entering into voluntary liquidation after several years of losses. Interestingly, OMM, a relatively small company though prominent in the UK, cited the increasingly “competitive nature” of the sector as a factor underlying its failure, and it seems likely that it was unable to survive the efforts of developers determined to reduce both capital and operational and maintenance costs to the bone (and judging from the failures reported, perhaps into the bone itself). With margins pared thin, costly local suppliers may quite simply be forced out of the market, and regardless of their other merits. Related evidence of this phenomenon, which is clearly global, can be found in the fact that the Danish mega-developer Orsted is now grumbling that the Taiwanese government’s insistence of a high level of local content for its projected 900 MW Changua 1 & 2a offshore wind farms will double the capital cost from approximately £1.6m/MW to about £3m/MW.

One wonders whether this underlying reality was discussed at the recent and apparently robust meeting between the Scottish Government and the offshore wind industry, convened because the Scottish metal manufacturing firm BiFab had not been commissioned to make equipment for the 950 MW Moray East wind farm, a wind farm that has one of the much over-hyped Contracts for Difference at £57.50/MWh. The supply deals had instead been awarded to Lamprell, which is based in the UAE. The Scottish Energy Minister, Paul Wheelhouse, MSP, used the meeting to express “significant frustration” that local firms had been involved to such a small degree hitherto, in spite of repeated promises.

Did Benji Sykes of the Offshore Wind Industry Council, present at the meeting, cite the Taiwanese case and explain to Mr Wheelhouse that something very similar would apply in Scotland, and that if local content was insisted upon, then construction costs would increase substantially and subsidies would also have to be increased to pay for it? Did he explain that there is genuine doubt whether Moray East can be viable at £57.50/MWh, even with low-cost international suppliers, and that local content would certainly not improve that situation? It would seem not. However, he did promise to “work closely” with the Scottish government to “ensure that communities up and down the country reap the economic benefits offshore wind offers”. Mr Wheelhouse has probably heard that before. How much longer will he go on believing it?

So much for the action in the foreground. The backdrop is also sombre. The Crown Estate, which in effect controls offshore wind development in UK territorial waters, has delayed pre-qualification for Round 4 projects until after the summer of 2019, and the German maritime agency, the BSH, has disappointed developers by not assigning new development zones as had been requested. In delay is danger, and the offshore wind industry in general will be deeply concerned at the loss of momentum that may result from these decisions.

Onshore wind is doing no better. The most recent auction for wind contracts in Germany took place in February and was radically undersubscribed, with only 476 MW of a possible 700 MW being awarded, the underlying causes being, it is reported, less favourable planning consent regulations and less generous price support. Senvion itself is described in some reports as being one of the supply chain casualties, alongside the German tower and foundation maker, Ambau GmbH, which has already filed for bankruptcy.

One wonders why these companies were not better prepared. Reductions in subsidy in Germany were inevitable, and the tightening of planning regulations is long overdue and unsurprising. Indeed, it is remarkable that the German public has tolerated for so long such intense development in close proximity to domestic housing. However, some German states are now considering an exclusion zone of 1 km from the nearest turbine, which is still extremely close for structures in excess of 100m, and now heading, believe it or not, to over 200m in overall height. The German people have been patient, but the mood is clearly changing; indeed, the premier manufacturer and developer Enercon has recently been compelled by court order to suspend construction of its 30 MW Wulfershausen wind farm because it had, apparently, breached the local authorities’ requirement that no dwelling should be within a distance ten times tip height.

This less favourable atmosphere is contributing to a general sense that existing onshore wind farms in Germany will not be repowered in great numbers at the end of their lives. About 15 GW of Germany’s onshore wind is now over fifteen years old and the end of the economic lifetime is in sight. But industry sources quoted in the subscription only press suggest that less than a third of this will actually be repowered, much less than had been expected only a few years back. The reasons given for this sudden change in prospects include declining public acceptance, reflected in tougher planning conditions, and falling subsidies.

Meanwhile, in Norway and in its home territory Sweden, Statkraft, Europe’s largest generator of renewable energy, has suspended further onshore wind construction because it would be “very challenging” to develop profitable projects in these areas. They are concentrating on other less resistant markets, such as the United Kingdom, where it has acquired a 250 MW portfolio of projects from Element Power.

But as it happens, things in the UK may prove to be no more promising. It has just dawned on the wind industry that government is actually acting on Amber Rudd’s landmark energy reset speech when Secretary of State for the Department of Energy & Climate Change in November 2015. In that speech Rudd remarked that “we also want intermittent generators to be responsible for the pressures they add to the system”. That of course was only right, but perhaps the industry hoped the intention would never materialise. If that was their expectation they were gravely mistaken. Aurora Energy Research has now released analysis of the regulator, Ofgem’s proposal to reform network charges, the “Targeted Charging Review”, and believes that the proposed changes “could set back subsidy-free renewables by up to five years”. When “unspun” this actually means is that if the regulator removes the hidden subsidy of avoided system costs, imposed by renewables but socialised over all generators, then more of the true cost of renewables will be revealed to the market, making it much less likely that even the most greenwash-thirsty corporate, NGO, or governmental body will sign an extravagant long-term Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with a wind or solar farm. In other words, far from hindering the emergence of subsidy-free renewables, Ofgem’s reforms threaten to give the lie to the subsidy-free claim and show that it was never anything more than an empty PR gambit.

In spite of all this, it is doubtless too soon to say that the game is up for renewables. The industries concerned will fight back, and beg further direct and indirect public assistance while threatening politicians and civil servants with missed climate targets if that support is not forthcoming. In all likelihood they will be to some degree successful. But this will only delay the inevitable. As the depressing news stories summarised above suggest, after decades of public support and de-risking there are still fundamental weaknesses in the renewables industry that go well beyond teething troubles and localised management failure. One explanation, the sole necessary one in my view, is that the physics is against this industry, and that the physics is beginning to tell. It remains only to say that this blog is not licensed to give investment or financial advice.

SOURCE 

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

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29 May, 2019  

Sea Level Rise Touted In New UN IPCC Report Is Mega Scary!

And is totally contradicted by history

For the upcoming  Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) a rate of global mean sea level rise over 1980-2000 is touted faster than during any preceding 20-year period since at least 1000 BCE.

The IPCC witch-doctors are rewriting their sea level narrative, see below for their wording and our comments:

Sea level change over recent decades is unprecedented over the last several millennia (medium confidence) and the rate of global mean sea level rise has increased in recent decades (high confidence).

This is incorrect, as the now emerged lands are full of marine history, and many ancient ports are now several kilometers inland.

Ostia Antica was the harbor city of ancient Rome 2,000 years ago.  It now lies 3 kilometers from the sea.

8,000 years ago, when the sea levels were about 4.5 m above present levels, the shoreline of the South China Sea almost reached Phnom Penh and the Tonle Sap Great Lake. They are now far from the sea.

Over the 20th century, tide gauge-based reconstructions show that global mean sea level has risen by 0.15-0.22 m between 1901 and 2015 (high confidence), and this increase was faster than that of any century since at least 1000 BCE (medium confidence).

This is also incorrect, as the tide gauges that have recorded since the start of the last century, show a completely different story from what is told in subjective reconstructions based on cherry picking.

If mathematics is not an opinion, a 0.15-0.22 m sea level rise 1901 to 2015 translates in a 1.32 to 1.93 mm/yr. of rate of sea level rise. Statistics of long-term-trend (LTT) tide gauges tell us that the naïve average relative rate of rising – a much better measure than a cherry picking also variable in time – is much less than that, at about 0.33 mm/yr.

Coupling the relative sea level rise information with GNSS monitoring of domes nearby the tide gauges, the so-called thermosteric component, or absolute rate of sea level rise, is also about 0.33 mm/yr. This is compatible with a gentle recovery of temperatures from the end of the last little ICE age.

The rate of global mean sea level rise over 1980-2000 was faster than during any preceding 20-year period since at least 1000 BCE (low confidence). Global mean sea level very likely rose on average by 1.2 [0.9-1.7] mm yr-1 over 1901-1990 and 1.7 [1.3-1.9] mm yr-1 over 1901-2015 and 3.1±0.3 mm yr-1 over 1993-2017 (high confidence).

This other wrong statement is an overselling of their alleged satellite global mean sea level (GMSL) measurement, and the mixing up of apples with cherries, comparing subjective interpretations of tide gauge results, with the engineered product GMSL created to show what is not.

No matter what the IPCC witch-doctors say, there is no such a thing like an instantaneous measure of the volume of the ocean waters with nanometric precision.

The truth is that a noisy, almost detrended, satellite altimeter signal has been manipulated in successive rounds of administrative corrections, to represent whatever was needed, with many pathetic excuses. This engineered product should not replace the good tide gauges observations. To be reliable, the GMSL product should match the reading of tide gauges corrected for land subsidence.

In the LTT tide gauges, Figure 1 and 2 two examples, the sea levels have oscillated about the same trend line before 1980, in between 1980 and 1990, or since 1990. No difference of behavior.

Sea level and energy budgets can be consistently closed within uncertainties for the period 1971-2018 (high confidence).

While there are no doubts that products engineered by same “pals”, for sea levels and energy budget, may fit the same narrative, the result at the long-term-trend tide gauge is confirmed by other experimental results. The direct observations of the mean sea levels at the LTT tide gauges, that are spanning more than 100 years in the different ocean basins and seas in the world, suggest negligible acceleration, and rising and falling seas for a much weaker average rate of rising.

While there are no reliable measurements of the mass of ice on land, the more direct measurements of lower troposphere temperatures and ocean temperatures 0-1900m suggest that the average rate of rising is much less  than what is claimed by the IPCC witch-doctors, only based on a circular logic of carefully engineered computational products supporting other carefully engineered computational products, never taking into account what is going on in the real world.

The lack of any significant sea level acceleration and the small average relative rate of rise have been evidenced in many works, such as Beenstock, Reingewertz and Paldor (2012); Beenstock, Felsenstein, Frank, and Reingewertz, (2015); Boretti, (2012a,b); Boretti and Watson (2012); Dean and Houston (2013); Douglas (1992); Douglas and Peltier (2002); Holgate (2007); Houston and Dean (2011); Japan Meteorological Agency (2018); Jevrejeva, Grinsted, Moore and Holgate (2006); Jevrejeva, Moore, Grinsted, and Woodworth (2008); Mörner, (2004); Mörner (2007); Mörner (2010a,b,c); Mörner, (2011a,b); Mörner (2013); Mörner (2016); Okunaka and Hirahara (2016); Parker (2013a,b,c,d,e); Parker, (2014a,b); Parker and Ollier (2015); Parker (2016a,b,c,d,e); Parker and Ollier (2017a,b); Parker (2018a,b,c); Parker and Ollier (2018); Parker, Mörner, and Matlack-Klein (2018); Parker (2019); Scafetta (2014); Schmith, Johansen, and Thejll (2012); Wenzel and Schröter (2010); and finally Wunsch, Ponte and Heimbach (2007), just to name a few. These works should not be ignored.

More HERE 






How humans create as well as destroy species

The effect of human activity on the natural world is profound, and if we want to gain a complete understanding of how it is altering the biosphere, then examining speciation is important.

We know that speciation does exist, and so does human-induced speciation. If we want to use biodiversity as a measure of our impact on the biosphere, then surely speciation needs to be considered.

Speciation can occur rapidly, and is not necessarily slower than extinction, so it is certainly relevant.

It is often said that we are living through one of our planet’s great mass extinction events, and that the cause is humanity. This loss of biodiversity is tragic not only for how it can and will affect our physical well being, but also for how it seems to make the world a poorer place to live in aesthetically and emotionally.

But while human activity can lead to the decline and extinction of species, it can also lead to the emergence of new species. From domestication to the creation of new ecosystems, human activity has proven an effective driver of speciation. But there is little data to quantify this phenomenon, and it is largely overlooked when discussing humanity’s impact on the natural environment.

What separates similar populations into distinct species is, of course, not always clear, but the road to speciation can be understood well enough. When a species becomes divided into different populations that cannot interbreed, and when new selection pressures are apparent, separate populations can begin to develop new traits and make steps towards speciation. Human activity has done much to create barriers to breeding, and to create new selection pressures.

Creating new species

Many of the ways in which humans can drive speciation are the same ways that humans drive extinction. The introduction of species to new habitats is one example. Invasive species can out-compete natives and drive them to extinction. But the new environment in which animals and plants find themselves, and their isolation from other populations, can encourage morphological changes to develop, as well. Data from an Australian study found that 70 percent of introduced plants had developed a new morphological trait over 150 years. On top of that, invasive species introduce new pressures on native species, which can also encourage them to change.

Domestication is perhaps the most obvious way in which humans have promoted genetic diversity. Wolves have been bred into over 400 varieties of domestic dog, and the range of crops bred by humans includes many that can be regarded as totally separate species.

Anthropogenic climate change is altering environments across the globe and creating new selection pressures. There is even evidence to show it has increased biodiversity on mountaintops. Rates of genetic change in populations hunted by humans have been shown to be greater than for populations that are not hunted.

In the future, the possible recreation, or de-extinction, of animals such as the wooly mammoth, and even the movement of organisms to extra-terrestrial bodies such as Mars, could create further opportunities for speciation. There seems no end to humanity’s power as a force for evolution.

So what, if anything, does this mean for conservation?

The effect of human activity on the natural world is profound, and if we want to gain a complete understanding of how it is altering the biosphere, then examining speciation is important. We know that speciation does exist, and so does human-induced speciation. If we want to use biodiversity as a measure of our impact on the biosphere, then surely speciation needs to be considered. Speciation can occur rapidly, and is not necessarily slower than extinction, so it is certainly relevant.

Considering speciation leads us to a number of questions. Should we consider only species loss, or net species loss, when thinking about biodiversity? Can human-induced speciation compensate for human-induced extinctions? If we are creating as many new species as we are destroying, then should we be content? The answer most people would give to this last question is almost certainly ‘no.’

The one property of a species that is not quantifiable in a simple number is the meaning it has for people. When we look at an animal, it is not just its physical properties that are important, but the impression it makes upon us. The very idea of biodiversity has emotional meaning to people, such that any loss of species, even if countered by the introduction of new species, is usually seen as tragic.

What this says about the value we place on a species, and the reasons we value biodiversity, is perhaps something that ought to be discussed.

SOURCE 






Climate And The Fate Of America’s Corn Belt

COLD is the most likely problem

It is a remarkable thing that the U.K. and Irish parliaments were able to hypnotize themselves and pass climate emergency legislation when the southern half of the planet has not warmed at all in 120 years.

For example, this record of Cape Leeuwin (courtesy of Erl Happ), on the southwest corner of the Australian landmass, shows recent January mean maximum temperature back below the 120-year average:


Figure 1: Cape Leeuwin January Mean Maximum Temperature 1897–2019.

The U.K. and Irish parliaments were able to work themselves up into a lather over climate even though parts of the northern hemisphere set new cold records this last winter.

A spike in food prices due to cold weather might get them to see the world as it really is. What is happening in the Corn Belt this season may be enough to burn through the global warming groupthink.

It has been a very wet and cold start to the 2019 growing season in the Corn Belt, with the consequence that a lot of farmers have not been able to get into their fields to plant.

In a normal year, most of the crop would be planted by now. It will now be delayed by a month if it does get planted.

Projections of likely corn production from here rely upon near perfect conditions for the rest of the season.

But as a return to 19th-century level solar activity will mean a return to 19th-century growing conditions, then the other end of the growing season will be shortened as well.

Seed-producers have tuned their product to the longer and warmer growing conditions of the second half of the 20th century, with corn that requires 2,500 growing degree days (GDD) to reach maturity.

If the season looks as if it is going to be short, then farmers might switch to early maturity corn. Another alternative is to switch to soybeans.

Growing conditions last decade were warmer, longer, and safer than a century before.

The chance of a crop being killed off by an early frost before maturity is not insignificant now.

Corn as a source of food for humans in the U.S. has a buffer in the 30% of the crop that goes to the ethanol mandate.

The focus on climate may also go from being a way to thrash the economy with carbon taxes to its impact on food prices. The biblical “years of lean” may be upon us.

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





New Paper: Arctic Sea ‘Ice-Free’ During Early Holocene

By historical standards the present climate is unusually COLD

Biomarker evidence for Arctic-region sea ice coverage in the northern Barents Sea indicates the most extensive sea ice conditions of the last 9,500 years occurred during the 20th century (0 cal yr BP).

In contrast, this region was ice-free with open water conditions during the Early Holocene (9,500-5,800 years ago).

The early Holocene (ca. 9500 – 5800 cal yr BP) … Relatively low IP25 concentrations [a proxy for sea ice presence] with increased brassicasterol abundances indicate reduced seasonal (spring) sea ice cover and longer (warmer) summers with open water conditions suitable for phytoplankton production.

The occurrence of reduced sea ice cover and longer summers is consistent with increased planktic foraminiferal concentrations (reported here and Carstens et al., 1997) and with longer ice-free seasons and a retreated ice margin in the northern Barents Sea (Duplessy et al., 2001) as well as increased phytoplankton production in the northern Fram Strait (Müller et al., 2009).

Reduced spring sea ice cover also indicates the HTM recorded at the sea surface between ca. 9300 and 6500 cal yr BP, which probably results from maximum summer insolation at 78° N.”

Our proposed sea ice scenario suggests that water masses south of the study area were ice free, which agrees with open water conditions observed in the western Barents Sea (Berben et al., 2014) and the West Svalbard margin (Müller et al., 2012) during the early Holocene.

For the West Svalbard margin, Werner et al. (2013) associated high planktic foraminiferal fluxes ca. 8000 cal yr BP to ice-free or seasonally fluctuating sea ice margin conditions.

The PBIP25 index shows the lowest values of the record (0.16 – 0.40) suggesting a period characterized by low or variable seasonal sea ice cover and influenced substantially by open water conditions (Müller et al., 2011).

The late Holocene (ca. 2200 – 0 cal yr BP) is characterized by the highest abundances of IP25 (0.35 µg/g OC)and relatively low (but stable) brassicasterol (12.5 µg/g OC) (Figure 7A-B).).

Consistent with the opposing trends in the IP25 and brassicasterol records, the PBIP25 values reach their highest value (0.87) of the record at ca. 0 cal yr BP. An increase in PBIP25 suggests a further extension in sea ice cover, reflecting Arctic Front conditions (Müller et al., 2011), most similar to modern conditions.

The Early Holocene was about 6-7°C warmer than today in this region (NW Barents Sea).

Another recent reconstruction for this region also indicated the Early Holocene was sea ice free and that modern sea ice conditions are among the most extensive of the last 9,500 years.

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






New Australian Leftist leader still evasive on planned coalmine

Says it is not for him to decide

Anthony Albanese has continued to question the economics around the Adani mine, but says a climate change convoy which enraged Queensland communities was “very unproductive.”

The incoming Opposition Leader today fielded multiple questions about his repeated refusal to back the Adani mine,, despite the issue costing Labor votes in north and central Queensland.

Mr Albanese, who is making his first trip to the Sunshine State today, said this morning the markets would ultimately decide the economic case for Adani and pointed to its history of missing deadlines.

“It’s not up to government to determine that, it’s up to markets themselves,” he told ABC radio.

“One of the things that has occurred over a period of time is that the company has not met a range of timelines that they’ve put forward.

“But we will see what decisions the company make once the approvals are made or not made.”

Climate change and the Adani mine has been labelled key reasons behind Bill Shorten’s disastrous performance in Queensland at the federal election, where Labor only managed a primary vote of over 27 per cent.

One of the key issues was a “climate change convoy” of activists led by former Greens leader Bob Brown which travelled through north and central Queensland protesting Adani.

Several Labor MPs have pointed to the convoy as a factor working against them in the campaign and Mr Albanese poured scorn on the activists this morning. “The truth is that was incredibly provocative and did nothing to advance, in my view, a genuine debate about climate change,” he said. “To reduce it to a debate about a single mine is very unproductive, it does nothing to advance the debate.

“Good policy is about jobs as well as clean energy, as well as making sure we take the community with us … people could do with less yelling and more genuine debate.”

Mr Albanese will be confirmed as Labor leader by his parliamentary colleagues on Thursday, as he will his presumptive deputy Richard Marles.

Energy Minister Angus Taylor said this morning that Mr Albanese had to be clearer if he supported the coal export industry. “Is he going to support them? He seems to be pretty unclear on that,” Mr Taylor told Sky News.

“I’m pleased that he is not saying he’s going to get in the way (of Adani) ... we want to see these industries succeed.”

Mine craft doesn’t add up

Yesterday Mr Albanese has questioned the “economics” of opening up the Galilee Basin to coalmining and refused to publicly support Adani’s $2 billion Carmichael mine, ahead of his visit to Queensland today to win back blue-collar workers.

The inner-Sydney left-wing powerbroker, who previously called into question the future of thermal coal and the feasibility of the Adani project, is facing internal pressure to further distance Labor from the coal industry.

Asked yesterday whether he supported the Adani coalmine, Mr Albanese, who will today visit the northern Brisbane electorate of Longman which Labor lost to the Coalition, said he would “respect the process” but did not endorse jobs for central Queensland.

“There is the other issue with regard to Adani, and indeed to the whole issue of the Galilee coal basin, the issue of the economics of it, the basic cost-benefit ratios,” Mr Albanese said, after being confirmed as the ALP’s 21st leader.

“One of the things, for example, that was put forward, was that it should receive a subsidised railway line. No, I didn’t support subsidisin­g a railway line for a private­-sector operation.”

Labor MPs and candidates in the central and north Queensland seats of Flynn, Capricornia, Dawson­ and Herbert signed petitions before the election calling for the development of the Galilee, a 247,000sq m thermal coal basin in central Queensland with an estimated 27 billion ­tonnes of untapped coal.

Six coalmines in the Galilee Basin have been approved by the state government, which could generate 16,000 jobs and nearly double Australia’s thermal coal production. Mr Albanese faces the task of reversing massive swings in Queensland against Labor at the May 18 election and the loss of two seats, including the Townsville seat of Herbert, which relies on mining to generate jobs and business.

The party’s election failure prompted Queensland’s Labor premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to immediately intervene to end the delays to the approval process of the Adani mine project.

Mr Marles also refused yesterday to throw his support behind the Adani mine but backtracked on comments he made before the election suggesting it would be a “good thing” if global demand for Australian coal collapsed.

“The comments I made earlier this year were tone-deaf and I regret­ them and I was apologising for them within a couple of days of making them,” Mr Marles said. “It failed to acknowledge the significance of every person’s job.”

Resources Minister Matt Canavan lashed Mr Albanese and Mr Marles for refusing to say they supported the Adani coalmine.

“The Labor Party have heard nothing and learned nothing from the election result,” Senator Canavan said. “People voted last week to protect their jobs, protect their futures, but the Labor Party are showing again that they are no longer the party of workers.”

Queensland Resources Council chief executive Ian Macfarlane, a former Coalition resources ministe­r, said Mr Albanese should throw his support behind jobs in central Queensland.

“It doesn’t really matter what Anthony Albanese thinks about viability — that is a decision for the company and its sharehold­ers,” Mr Macfarlane said. “The project will proceed or not on the basis of its commercial viabili­ty and that will be assessed by the company and its shareholders.”

Senator Canavan said he used Mr Marles’s comments — when he said the collapse of coal exports would be a “good thing” — against Labor during the campaign.

The coal and Adani issues helped the Liberal National Party win Herbert and retain Dawson, Capricornia and Flynn, with swings to the government.

The result, which included a statewide primary vote of just 27 per cent, stunned senior Labor figures and prompted the Palasz­czuk state government to demand a fast-tracking of its Adani approvals process, with a decision on the future of the mine to be made within weeks.

SOURCE  

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

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

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28 May, 2019   

How climate change can fuel wars

The article excerpted below is very shifty.  It includes crop losses from COOLING as due to global warming, for instance.  But its main focus is on disruptions caused by drought.  But drought is NOT going to be made worse by Warming. Warming will warm the seas and warmer seas give off more water vapor, which comes down as rain.

Drought is more likely an effect of cooling and they admit that a cooler climate some decades back originated the Sahelian drought.  The Sahel in fact has been recovering in recent decades -- as it should due to the greatly increased CO2 in the air.  High levels of CO2 enable plants to require less water. Look up "stomata" if you don't believe it. 

In summary the actual facts about climate that they produce lead us to the conclusion that the travails in the region are NOT caused by global warming


Fifty years ago the Dar es Salaam camp would have been under several metres of water. In the 1960s Lake Chad was the sixth-largest freshwater lake in the world, an oasis and commercial hub in the arid Sahel. Water and fertile lands were shared by farmers, herders and fisherfolk alike.

The vast lake has shrunk from 25,000 square km to half that area today. In the camp, which the UNHCR (the UN’s refugee agency) helps run, over 12,000 men, women and children huddle in any shade they can find from heat that often reaches 45°C. The camp has no guard towers or walls. Boko Haram fighters are only a few miles away. A tangle of torn tarpaulins and human debris is scattered across the desert. For miles around, baked white sand is dotted with sparse, scraggy trees bristling with inch-long thorns. The sole signs of life are camels pecking at the dry vegetation.

As Mr Ibrahim remembers when the lake stretched over the horizon. “Before the lake began to shrink everything was going normally,” he says. “And now, nothing. We cannot get food to eat.” As the lake receded, people moved towards it, plagued by swarms of tsetse flies. Herdspeople, farmers and fisherfolk competed for access to the shrunken supply of water. Mr Ibrahim had to walk farther and farther to get to the fishing grounds.

Green campaigners and eager headline-writers sometimes oversimplify the link between global warming and war. It is never the sole cause. But several studies suggest that, by increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including floods and droughts, it makes conflict likelier than it would otherwise be. In a meta-analysis carried out in the early 2010s, Solomon Hsiang, then at Princeton University, and Marshall Burke, then at the University of California, Berkeley, found “strong support” for a causal link between climate change and conflict (encompassing everything from interpersonal to large-scale violence). They even tried to quantify the relationship, claiming that each rise in temperature or extreme rainfall by one standard variation increased the frequency of interpersonal violence by 4% and intergroup conflict by 14%.

History offers several examples of climate change appearing to foment mayhem. An examination of Chinese records spanning a millennium found that the vast majority of violent eras were preceded by bouts of COOLER weather. The team behind the study argues that lower temperatures reduced agricultural production, provoking fights over land and food.

Consider Syria. Between 2012 and 2015 three academic papers argued that climate change had been a catalyst or even a primary driver of the civil war. Headlines blamed it for the waves of refugees reaching Europe. The argument was that human emissions had caused or exacerbated a severe drought in Syria in the late 2000s that triggered mass migration from farmland into cities, contributing to tensions which ultimately led to war.

The headlines were too simplistic, as headlines often are. Climate modelling led by Colin Kelley, then at the University of California in Santa Barbara, estimated that greenhouse-gas emissions made the drought twice as likely. That is significant, but need not mean that in the absence of climate change, there would have been no drought and no war. Syrians had many reasons to revolt against their ruler, Bashar al-Assad, a despot from a religious minority who enforced his rule with mass torture.

The conflict around Lake Chad is also a tangled tale. Its roots can be traced back to a deadly drought in the 1970s and 1980s. Many have blamed that drought on industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. But climate models suggest they did not in fact play a big role in the drought. The recurrent failure of monsoon rains was caused by COOLER temperatures in the north Atlantic, which pushed the rains too far south. The cooling was itself caused by a mixture of natural and human factors, notably air pollution above the ocean—a striking reminder that greenhouse-gas emissions are not the only way in which human activity may alter the climate.

A report published this month by Adelphi, a Berlin-based think-tank, shows that *Lake Chad is no longer shrinking*. Its authors examined 20 years of satellite data and found that the southern pool was stable for the duration. The northern pool is still shrinking slightly, but total water storage in the area is increasing, as 80% of the water is held in a subterranean aquifer, which is being replenished, as is moisture in the soil, as the rains have returned.

Despite all these caveats, climate change clearly can play a part in fostering conflict. The Sahel is warming 1.5 times faster than the global average, owing to greenhouse-gas emissions. In future, most models suggest, it will experience more extreme and less predictable rains over shorter seasons. In a region where most people still grow or rear their own food, that could make millions desperate and restless.

Climate models predict that, as global average temperatures rise, dry regions will get drier and wet regions will get wetter, with more extremes and greater variability. Poverty makes it harder for farmers to adapt. Trying something new is always risky—and potentially catastrophic for those with no savings to fall back on. In conflict zones, farmers who once had the means to plant several different crops may only be able to plant one. They end up with all their seeds in one basket. On the shores of Lake Chad, violent clashes between government forces and armed opposition groups have created zones that are off-limits to civilians, says Chitra Nagarajan, a researcher for the Adelphi report, who spent two years conducting surveys in all four littoral countries.

Conflict itself makes the poor even poorer, and more vulnerable to the vagaries of a changing climate. Fearing murder, pastoralists cannot take their herds to places with water and vegetation. The UNHCR’s Mr Condé says that fishermen can no longer go into the deep lake to fish. Government troops block them, and Boko Haram is still on the prowl. Fighters steal farmers’ crops. All the farmers can harvest is wood, which they sell as fuel. In a bitter twist, doing so accelerates desertification, further degrading the land.

SOURCE 






Solar power is NOT the solution for making fertilizer

The ‘next big thing’ in the environmental movement appears to be ammonia, or rather a more efficient way to make it. Australian computer expert Geoff Russell crunches the numbers, and the results are prohibitive



The world produced 200 million tonnes of ammonia last year; or more than three times more ammonia than cattle meat.

This might surprise you if you think of ammonia as some kind of old-fashioned cleaning product your grandmother used to use. But ammonia is at the heart of most fertilisers; so it’s at the start of any modern food chain, including the cattle meat food chain.

Many of Australia’s 77 million hectares of managed pastures will be fertilised with an ammonia-based fertiliser; particularly if used by dairy cattle.

How much land do you have to cover with solar panels to supply electricity to ammonia production lines to make 200 million tonnes of ammonia? That’s the multi-billion dollar question we’ll answer shortly.

Ammonia’s chemical formula is NH3. The N is for nitrogen. How do you measure the amount of protein in any food? Measure the nitrogen and multiply by 6.25 because nitrogen is about 16 percent of any protein.

During the manufacture of ammonia, the nitrogen is plucked from the air and bonded with hydrogen, this is mixed with other stuff to become fertiliser which is then used by plants to make protein; among other things.

Without that 200 million tonnes of fertiliser, our global protein supply would be seriously limited because very few plants can pull nitrogen from the air. Legumes can do it, using special bacteria bound to their roots. But other plants have to rely on getting it from the soil. And once it’s gone, you have to put it back. Hence the need for fertiliser. Alternatively, you can or plant some legumes and wait for them to work their magic.

The processes that produce ammonia using electricity and water typically take about 11 or so megawatt-hours of electricity to produce a tonne of ammonia. Some people reckon this is a terrific application for solar power. I’ll get to the CSIRO breakthrough shortly.

Nyngan is one of Australia’s largest solar plants; covering about 250 hectares and producing about 233 gigawatt-hours of energy annually; a gigawatt is a billion watts.

To make 200 million tonnes of ammonia annually using a bunch of Nyngan-like solar plants, you’d need to build 9,442 Nyngan solar farms covering 2.36 million hectares.

One down, 9,441 to go.

We can of course divide the job up and have 100 countries each building 94 Nyngans. That’s much more manageable and only gives us 93 more Nyngans to build; or another 23,500 hectares to cover in solar panels. Assuming everybody else pulls their weight and covers the rest of the 2.36 million hectares.

But there’s a catch. Did anybody else notice the IPBES report on Biodiversity and ecosystem services?

What was the number one cause of our loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services? Habitat loss and degradation. Think about 2.36 million hectares. Our intensive land use in Australia – our cities – cover about 1.4 million hectares. So 2.36 million is rather a lot… just to make fertiliser.

The CSIRO breakthrough in synthesising ammonia, assuming it can be scaled up, will require just 1.8 million hectares instead of 2.36. They are aiming at 8.5 megawatt-hours per tonne of ammonia rather than 11.

Replacing oil

But of course, the boffins working on ammonia aren’t just interested in ammonia and fertiliser, they have the entire global energy supply in their sights.

The plan is to make ammonia using renewable energy and ship it globally. That’s what the renewable energy super power chant is all about. You can then use the ammonia to power vehicles, either directly or by cracking the NH3 and extracting the hydrogen and using it in fuel cells.

Ammonia has well under half the energy density of oil. So you need to produce two tonnes of ammonia to replace one tonne of oil. The amount of land required to produce oil is tiny; because oil comes in 3D deposits. Oil flows out of holes in the ground and you can think about the power per square meter as the energy flowing from the wells in an area.

Energy expert Vaclav Smil did this kind of calculation and found that power from oil typically achieves rates between 125 and 40,000 watts per square metre (w/m2) of the size of the field. If we calculate the power per square metre (averaged over 24 hours) of Nyngan we get a figure of just over 10 (w/m2), and this drops to about 6 (w/m2) when we use the solar power to make ammonia using the new super-efficient CSIRO method.

Clearly wildlife habitat will take a hammering if this kind of technology really is scaled up to take on oil.

More HERE 






The single-use plastics ban is a load of rubbish

Faced with an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy, our politicians are clutching at straws.

This week, the UK government announced that from April next year, the sale of plastic straws, drink-stirrers and cotton buds will be banned.

The plastic ban follows several years of high-profile, emotive and misleading campaigns on the problem of plastic waste ending up in the oceans. Despite the obvious fact that these little plastic things are quite useful, for environmentalists it seems that there is no problem, real or imagined, that cannot be solved by banning something.

It is extraordinary that as the UK faces perhaps its deepest political and democratic crisis for centuries, politicians are preoccupied with something as petty as the use and disposal of plastic. The ban is the last gasp of a useless, desperate administration.

The policy is all the more striking considering how little plastic waste from Britain actually finds its way into the ocean directly. But thanks to green policies promoting recycling, millions of tonnes of waste are sent for ‘recycling’ overseas. The countries receiving our waste often become overwhelmed and local waste goes unprocessed. As there are fewer environmental regulations in these countries, excess waste can just be burnt or dumped. Three years ago, two-thirds of the UK’s plastic waste was sent to China. But China has since banned imports of foreign waste, while other countries, including Indonesia, Vietnam and Taiwan, have introduced heavy restrictions. This has left exporters of waste, like the UK, with a problem on their hands.

Faced with vast mountains of rubbish of their own making, politicians prefer to pin the blame on the public and their apparently excessive plastic use. But there is no need to resort to a ban on plastic when there are perfectly safe and clean ways to dispose of it.

The simplest method is incineration. The heat can even be used to generate electricity. But green types are the first to whinge the moment an incineration plant is proposed, despite the fact that modern incinerators produce almost no toxic emissions at all. In contrast, recycling – the greens’ preferred method of waste management – is nowhere near as clean or safe. Uncontrolled, accidental fires break out in recycling collection centres around 300 times per year in the UK, spewing thousands of tonnes of thick black smoke into Gaia’s precious skies.

Water-treatment plants can also be upgraded to allow them to better capture plastic and other items. London’s new 25km-long, £4.2 billion Thames Tideway mega-sewer scheme will prevent the discharge of millions of tons of unprocessed sewage into Thames tributaries each year.

A similar investment could be used to create an effective infrastructure for the processing and incineration of plastic waste. But greens object to burning waste because it is incompatible with the so-called ‘circular economy’ – a utopian ambition of environmentalists in which all resources are endlessly recycled and all waste is eliminated. This means that no green billionaire-backed NGOs, no quangos, no UN or EU committees and no weepy BBC documentaries narrated by David Attenborough are going to make the case for incineration, despite its obvious benefits.

More importantly, for the establishment actors engaged in the war on plastic, finding a technical solution to a problem as simple as waste disposal would rob them of their last vestiges of legitimacy. They want to be seen as planet-saving superheroes, as politicians with visions and purpose. Without the crusade against plastic, our politicians would be exposed as pointless, petty-minded bureaucrats.

SOURCE 






The truth about Chernobyl

The shocking truth about the Chernobyl disaster is how FEW people it killed -- despite Greenie panic

In 1995, nine years after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, I spent six months working at the heart of it all. At that time, I was the only Westerner permanently based at the site. The scale of the fallout, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people and affected millions living in designated contamination zones, was massive.

In 1986, following the disaster, the rescue effort was courageous and inspirational. But there was also an inexcusable, criminal cover-up by the Soviet authorities, led by the then leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. The West was also slow to expose the magnitude of the disaster. Undoubtedly, there was an initial hesitation to criticise Gorbachev, as Western leaders were courting him at the time. Following the nuclear disaster of Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania in 1979, Chernobyl was also a hammer blow to the global atomic industry – not least because industry figures had repeatedly and misleadingly claimed that a full nuclear core meltdown could never happen. This downplaying of the disaster led many to distrust the official accounts.

Kate Brown, a professor at MIT, specialising in environmental and nuclear history as well as the Soviet Union, is the latest to cast doubt on the official version of events. Her new book, "Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future", sets out to expose a 33-year cover-up, in which the United Nations was in cahoots with the KGB and Western intelligence agents. This cover-up, she argues, was designed to downplay the horrendous health consequences of the disaster, both to protect the reputation of the Soviet Union and to prevent lawsuits arising in the West against the nuclear industry.

The UN estimates of fatalities were first published in 2005 in the landmark "Chernobyl Forum Report". Its research and publication was led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on behalf of – and endorsed by – eight UN agencies and the governments of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. The report assessed all the epidemiological evidence in a collaborative effort involving hundreds of experts. It found that there had been fewer than 50 deaths directly attributable to radiation from the disaster – there have been a further four deaths directly caused by Chernobyl since the report came out. Almost all of those who died were highly exposed rescue workers, many of whom died within months of the accident. The UN also predicted that there could be up to 9,000 Chernobyl-related deaths from cancer.

In response to the UN’s 2005 report, Greenpeace claimed that the death toll could be as high as 200,000.

"Manual for Survival" sets out to explain this ‘Grand Canyon-sized gap between the UN and Greenpeace estimates of fatalities’. Brown argues that decades after Chernobyl exploded there is still a need for a large-scale, long-term epidemiological study of the consequences of low-level radiation on human health in the affected areas. That may be so. But this does not itself prove a cover-up.

Brown also wants us to believe that after Fukushima blew its top in 2011, scientists told the public that they had no certain knowledge of the damage that could be caused by exposure to low doses of radiation as a result of the accident. Yet she provides no evidence of them claiming ignorance on this subject that is well understood by experts. She also argues that because of our failure to learn the lessons of Chernobyl, we are stuck in an ‘eternal video loop’, with the same scene of nuclear disaster playing over and over again, from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl to Fukushima. She accuses Japan’s scientists in the wake of Fukushima of ‘reproducing the playbook of Soviet officials 25 years before them’ by also downplaying the consequences of the disaster.

But Brown seems to inhabit a parallel universe. If anything, there is unnecessary panic about the supposed impact of low-level radiation. Far from downplaying the consequences of Fukushima, the official response has been overly precautious. An exclusion zone was created around the site, which largely exists today, though the nearby town of Okuma has since been declared safe for residents to return. Professor Geraldine Thomas of Imperial College, London, one of Britain’s leading researchers on the effects of radiation on the human body, told the BBC in 2016 that the radiation levels in the exclusion zone pose little risk to human health: ‘There are plenty of places in the world where you would live with background radiation of at least this level’.

A key case study in Brown’s Chernobyl cover-up theory is the story of Keith Baverstock. Baverstock was one of many courageous scientists and doctors who battled to convince the World Health Organisation (WHO), his employer, that the Chernobyl disaster had resulted in an unexpected outbreak of thyroid cancers among children. They discovered and publicised the fact that radioactive iodine (iodine-131 and caesium-137) was more carcinogenic than was previously thought.

But Brown understates the fact that Baverstock and his colleagues won their battle. The final Chernobyl Forum report of 2005 incorporated their findings. What’s more, Baverstock repeatedly told the media that the biggest cause of health problems among people living in territories affected by low-level radiation was increased anxiety and stress levels, fanned by scaremongering.

Baverstock continued to criticise the Chernobyl Forum after he left WHO. He offers the most considered interrogation of the Chernobyl Forum findings that I have read. Along with his colleague, Dillwyn Williams, Baverstock criticised the conflicted politics behind the Forum and the impact this has on its research. He has pointed out the limits of the existing body of knowledge and called for more intensive research into the long-term effects of Chernobyl. He correctly said that we won’t know for sure the full outcome on human health for decades – the real death toll might still emerge because low-level radiation impacts are difficult to detect. But while Baverstock has advanced important criticisms of the UN’s figures, he has never endorsed Greenpeace’s speculative inflation of the evidence.

In contrast, Brown misrepresents much of what was uncovered by scientists in the wake of Chernobyl. She does so, presumably, in order to back up her claim that the Chernobyl exclusion zones will have to remain abandoned for much longer than anybody expected. (They are being repopulated gradually already.) Her claim is based on a misunderstanding of the science. Brown says it will take between ‘180 and 320 years’ for caesium-137 to disappear from Chernobyl’s forests. But the half-life of cesium-137 is 30 years.

Her misunderstanding is based on an article in Wired, which has since been updated to reflect the science of half-lives more accurately. In other words, Brown is basing her conclusions on secondary sources written by people who failed initially to understand what they had been briefed by scientists. Meanwhile, in the real world, according to Professor Jim Smith of the University of Portsmouth, while the Chernobyl exclusion zone is still contaminated, ‘if we put it on a map of radiation dose worldwide, only the small “hotspots”’ would stand out’.

In the final chapter of Manual for Survival, we finally learn what Brown considers to be a more credible estimate of the total number of existing and expected fatalities from the Chernobyl accident. And once again we see there isn’t any real evidence or credible sources to support her thesis: ‘Off the record, a scientist at the Kyiv All-Union Center for Radiation Medicine put the number of fatalities at 150,000 in Ukraine alone. An official at the Chernobyl plant gave the same number. That range of 35,000 to 150,000 Chernobyl fatalities – not 54 – is the minimum.’ In reality, if even half or one-third of those deaths actually occurred, this would be impossible to hide.

In the end, the shocking truth about Chernobyl is how few people were killed or made ill by the radiation.

SOURCE 






Thanks, Bob Brown, You Helped the Australian Labor Party Lose The Unloseable Election


Greens leader Bob Brown

For an alleged Labor party to put Greenie causes ahead of worker welfare was epic folly.  Coal miners are workers too and they make a good dollar.  Labor now need to divorce themselves from their happy marriage to the Greens

Still trying to figure out how Labor lost another unloseable election? The pollsters got it wrong, the bookies got it wrong, the punters got it wrong the ABC and most of the mainstream media got it wrong. And obviously Bill Shorten got it very wrong.

Bob Hawke got it right when he said, “Never underestimate the intelligence of The Australian voters”. He probably should have added, “Especially in Queensland”, where Labor lost two seats and the LNP shored up their margins even in Peter Dutton’s Dickson, where Labor and GetUp put in a huge effort.

We even saw the spectacle of another ex-Labor PM Paul Keating, shakily urge voters to “drive a stake through his dark political heart”.

Why did they all get it so far off the mark? Well Queenslanders don’t take kindly to a bunch of ratbags from the south telling them how to run their economy and create jobs. So Bob Brown’s Anti-Adani Convoy couldn’t have come at a better time for the LNP. Waving banners shouting “Coal Kills” and “Block Adani” floated like a lead balloon over a State which reaps billions from coal exports.

This folly combined with Shorten’s fence sitting and the Palaszczuk Government’s stalling over issues such as the numbers of a common bush bird, the black-throated finch. Anastacia must be worried she’ll be next.

The LNP increased its vote substantially in the previously very marginal seat of Flynn, which was high on the Labor wish list. Centered on the major coal port of Gladstone and held by Ken O’Dowd since 2010, it also takes in an extensive agriculture and beef area including the North Burnett region.

Rockhampton’s Michelle Landry increased her LNP winning margin in neighbouring Capricornia and in Dawson, centred on Mackay, the so-called Member for Manila, George Christensen, gained another big unexpected win. Further north in Townsville, Labor’s Cathy O’Toole was out-gunned by war veteran LNP candidate, Phillip Thompson. In all these centres, jobs and the economy were major factors.

Combine all that with Labor’s big taxing agenda, its hit at self-funded retirees, negative gearing, Capital GainsTax, the blank cheque it sought for an un-costed, over-ambitious climate policy (including a controversial push for 50 percent electric vehicle sales by 2030), and the result in Queensland and most other States is not surprising.

Add the arrogant advice to retirees and investors from Labor’s Treasury spokesman and candidate for the top job, Chris Bowen, “If you don’t like it, don’t vote Labor”.

Good advice. So the voters said it’s not time to risk Shorten, we’ll stick with Scott Morrison and a stable economy.

Now it looks likely Morrison will gain an absolute majority and enjoy a major opportunity to grow his influence over the coming term.

SOURCE  

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

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

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27 May, 2019  

Humans held responsible for twists and turns of climate change since 1900

The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (the Gulfstream to you) has clearly had a large role in explaining oscillations in our climate.  As such it is something of an alternative to CO2 as an influence. So that is pesky to Warmists.

The authors below, however, have done all sorts of revisions, estimates and modelling which have enabled them to claim that the AMO has in fact done nothing. All the changes are due to human deeds.  So a simple explanation has been swapped for a complex one

When you are a Warmist however you have to ignore a lot.  You even have to ignore the philosophy of science.  One of the basic axioms of science is what some people call Occam's razor:  That a simpler explanation is always to be preferred to a complex one. When we apply that axiom to the explanation put forward by the authors below we have to conclude that their explanation is wrong


While industry and agriculture belched greenhouse gases at an increasing pace through the 20th century, global temperature followed a jagged course, surging for 3 decades starting in 1915, leveling off from the 1950s to the late 1970s, and then resuming its climb. For decades, scientists have chalked up these early swings to the planet’s internal variability—in particular, a climatic pacemaker called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which is characterized by long-term shifts in ocean temperatures. But researchers are increasingly questioning whether the AMO played the dominant role once thought. The oceanic pacemaker seems to be fluttering.

It is now possible to explain the record’s twists and turns almost entirely without the AMO, says Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and lead author of a new study published this month in the Journal of Climate. After correcting for the distinct effects of pollution hazes over land and ocean and for flaws in the temperature record, Haustein and his colleagues calculated that the interplay of greenhouse gases and atmospheric pollution almost singlehandedly shaped 20th century climate. “It’s very unlikely there’s this ocean leprechaun that produces cyclicity that we don’t know about,” Haustein says—which means it is also unlikely that a future cool swing in the AMO will blunt the ongoing human-driven warming.

Others aren’t convinced the “leprechaun” is entirely vanquished. “They are probably right in that [the AMO] is not as big a player globally as has sometimes been thought,” says Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. “But my guess is that they underestimate its role a bit.”

The AMO arose from observations that sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic seem to swing from unusually warm to cold and back over some 20 to 60 years; the ancient climate appears to have had similar swings. Researchers theorized that periodic shifts in the conveyor belt of Atlantic Ocean currents drive this variability. But why the conveyor would regularly speed and slow on its own was a mystery, and the evidence for grand regular oscillations has slowly been eroding, says Gabriele Hegerl, a statistical climatologist at the University of Edinburgh. “Those are harder to defend.”

The new skepticism kicked off with work led by Ben Booth, a climate scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, U.K.. In 2012, he reported in Nature that pollution hazes, or aerosols, began thickening the clouds over the Atlantic in the 1950s, which could have cooled the ocean with little help from an internal oscillation. In the past year, several independent models have yielded similar results. Meanwhile, most global climate models have been unable to reproduce AMO-like oscillations unless researchers include the influence of pollutants, such as soot and sulfates produced by burning fossil fuels, says Amy Clement, a climate scientist at the University of Miami in Florida.

Now, it seems plausible that such human influences, with help from aerosols spewed by volcanic eruptions, drove virtually all 20th century climate change. Haustein and his co-authors tweaked a relatively simple climate model to account for the fact that most pollution originates over land, which heats and cools faster than the ocean—and there’s much more land in the Northern Hemisphere. And they dialed back the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions—a reasonable move, says Booth, who is not affiliated with the study. “We’ve known models respond too strongly to volcanoes.”

The also adjusted the global temperature record to account for a change in how ocean temperatures are measured; during World War II, the British practice of measuring water samples in buckets gave way to systematically warmer U.S. readings of water passing through ships’ intake valves. Past efforts to compensate for that change fell short, Haustein and his team found, so they used data from weather stations on coastlines and islands to correct the record.

As input for the model, the team used greenhouse gas and aerosol records developed for the next U.N. climate report, along with records of historical volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, and El Niño warmings of the Pacific. Comparing the simulated climate with the adjusted temperature record, they found that multidecadal variability could explain only 7% of the record. Instead, soot from industry drove early 20th century warming as it drifted into the Arctic, darkening snow and absorbing sunlight. After World War II, light-reflecting sulfate haze from power plants increased, holding off potential warming from rising greenhouse gases. Then, pollution control arrived during the 1970s, allowing warming to speed ahead.

It’s a compelling portrait, but it could have been substantially different if the team had used other, equally justifiable assumptions about the climate impact of aerosols, Booth says. Trenberth thinks the team’s adjustments had the effect of fitting the model to an uncertain record. “There is considerable wiggle room in just what the actual record is,” he says.

Haustein disputes that the team tailored the model to explain the 20th century warming. “All we did was use available data in the most physically consistent way,” he says. The researchers ran the model from 1500 to 2015, and he says it matches paleoclimate records well, including Europe’s Little Ice Age.

If a grand ocean oscillation isn’t shaping climate, a future ocean cooling is unlikely to buy society time to address global warming. But the demise of the AMO also might make it easier to predict what is in store. “All we’re going to get in the future,” Haustein says, “is what we do.”

SOURCE 






Why resources aren’t ‘natural’ and will never run out

Last week, the World Wildlife Fund proclaimed May 10 to be Europe’s “Overshoot Day,” the day that Europe consumed its portion of Earth’s resources for the year. The WWF, the United Nations, and universities continue to warn that modern society is rapidly depleting our natural resources. But instead, trends show that for all practical purposes, Earth’s resources will never run out.

The World Wildlife Fund proclaims August 1 this year as Earth Overshoot Day, where society will have used “more natural resources than the planet is able to produce in a 12-month period.” They estimate that Overshoot Day for the United States occurred already in March, warning that the US is using four times its share of sustainable global resources.

Overshoot Day is a continuation of the long-running ideology that humans are consuming too much of Earth’s resources. [I commented on that back in the '70s -- JR]
Environmentalist David Suzuki said, “We live in a world of finite resources. Although it may sometimes seem quite big, Earth is really very small?a tiny blue and green oasis of life in a cold universe.” Margaret Beckett, UK Environment Secretary pointed out in 2006, “It is a stark and arresting fact that, since the middle of the 20th century, humankind has consumed more natural resources than in all previous human history.”

Price trends are usually a good indicator of resource scarcity. The World Bank maintains a world commodity price database of 41 commodities from 1960 to present. Inflation-adjusted trends show that from 1960-2015, food prices have declined, agricultural raw material and industrial metal prices have been flat, and energy prices, dominatedWhy resources aren’t ‘natural’ and will never run out by the price of oil, have increased. Commodity prices fluctuate widely from decade to decade, but we don’t see a rising price trend indicating resource exhaustion.

The 1972 international best-selling book Limits to Growth predicted humanity would run out of aluminum by 2027, copper by 2020, gold by 2001, lead by 2036, mercury by 2013, silver by 2014, and zinc by 2022. But today, none of these metals is in historically short supply.

Global production of industrial metals soared from 1960-2014. Annual production levels were up: aluminum (996 percent), copper (417 percent), iron ore (531 percent), lead (343 percent), nickel (455 percent), tin (66 percent), and zinc (348 percent). At the same time, the World Bank industrial metal real price index of these seven metals was flat, down a little more thanWhy resources aren’t ‘natural’ and will never run out 1 one percent by 2015. World reserves of copper, iron ore, lead, and zinc stand near all-time highs. Prices are not rising as predicted by resource-depletion pessimists.

“Natural resources” is a misleading label. The term “natural resources” conveys the naive idea that food, energy, or materials can merely be plucked from a tree or gathered from a field or stream. Raw materials are natural, but resources are created by humans from raw materials.

Consider the miracle of copper refining. Rock containing copper is fragmented by explosions and then loaded onto huge trucks with 240-ton capacity. Each ton of rock contains only 13 pounds of copper. The copper ore then goes through a series of milling machines that grind the rock down to a fine powder. Next the powder goes through a flotation cell, where the copper floats to the top of a solution and is skimmed off, producing 28 percent copper concentrate. Three different furnaces come next, smelting the metal into 98 percent copper. Finally, electrolysis is used in a half-mile-long factory to produce ingots that are 99.99 percent copper. Advancing human technology continues to produce high-quality copper from ores of declining copper concentration.

But aren’t we running out of raw materials to make copper metal and other resources? Most people don’t realize the vast quantity of raw materials available on our planet. Canadian geologist David Brooks estimated that a single average cubic mile of Earth’s crust contains a billion tons of aluminum (from bauxite), over 500 million tons of iron, a million tons of zinc and 600,000 tons of copper.

There are 57 million such square miles of Earth’s land surface and almost triple that area under the surface of the oceans. Of course, only a tiny fraction of metals in Earth’s crust is economically recoverable with today’s technology. Nevertheless, Earth’s supply of raw materials is finite, but vast.

But aren’t we running out of hydrocarbon energy? In 1977, President Jimmy Carter told the nation, “World consumption of oil is still going up. If it were possible to keep it rising during the 1970s and 1980s …we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”

President Carter and his advisors were wrong. Petroleum engineers changed the world with the technological advances of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling. United States daily oil production more than doubled from 5 million barrels in 2008 over 12 million barrels today. US natural gas production also doubled over the last decade.Why resources aren’t ‘natural’ and will never run out 2

From 1980-2017 world petroleum production increased more than 50 percent. But world crude oil reserves increased 150 percent, from 27 years of supply to 46 years of supply at higher production rates. The same doomsayers that continue to forecast resource depletion were certain we had reached peak oil a decade ago.

Today, humanity has the greatest abundance of resources in history. Human ingenuity determines resource availability, not the amount of fruit on a tree or the number of rocks on the ground. Driven by advancing human technology, for all practical purposes, Earth’s resources will never run out.

SOURCE 






Presidential wannabe’s climate Christmas tree

Washington State Governor Jay Inslee wants to be President of the United States. If elected, he wants to increase spending by $9 trillion (that’s “t”) by 2030 to fight climate change.

Gov. Inslee’s not exactly a household name, and it shows. The second-term governor is among two dozen declared Democrats who are running for president and he does not register in this crowded field – meaning he’s polling nationally somewhere between zero and 0.8 percent. Even Andrew Yang, another obscurity running for the job, polls better.

Presumably in an effort to break out of the tenths-of-a-percent digits in polling, Gov. Inslee last week unveiled his $9 trillion “Evergreen Economy” plan to transform the country to achieve a promised “net-zero climate pollution before 2045.” This plan follows his initial proposal for “100% clean standards for electricity, new vehicles and new buildings” by 2030, and phasing out coal power by 2035.

According to the plan, there is no need to worry about any economic dislocation, such as the fossil fuel industry being put out of business and the millions of American households standing to lose their employment. Gov. Inslee promises “a comprehensive suite of 28 policy initiatives” that would “put Americans to work in every community” with 8 million new jobs in ten years. These jobs will be created in “clean manufacturing,” “climate-smart infrastructure” and scientific research that will pay “family supporting wages & benefits.”

Gov. Inslee’s plan prints out to 35 pages that outline his 28 initiatives. Within those pages are more bullet points than ornaments on the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center in New York City.

Let’s give Gov. Inslee some credit: while climate change has become dogma for every Democratic candidate running for president, his plan provides more information than the typical vapid media release of promises from politicians. Rather, his plan is a whole booklet of mostly vapid promises, with some program details like expanding and updating the Weatherization Assistance Program and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

There are two major problems with Gov. Inslee’s “Climate Mission.” First, $9 trillion in additional federal and private sector dollars has to come from somewhere, and there are not enough millionaires and billionaires to come close to paying for this, even if the government confiscated their wealth.

To paraphrase the late Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, a trillion here, a trillion there – pretty soon it adds up to real money. (Sen. Dirksen actually said “billion” back in the 1960s). With the current federal debt at $22 trillion and growing with existing spending and entitlements, it’s hard to know how much longer this spending-and-debt spree can be sustained. All but a handful of politicians from both parties no longer pretend to care about the national debt, so why should Jay Inslee? However, there is a hard reality to the mathematics of financing debt, which is not unlimited.

Gov. Inslee’s plan also would induce or mandate the private sector to spend money, but that is even more impractical since the private economy can’t print money like the federal government does. American industries also have to compete globally with energy producing countries that will continue to use plentiful, lower-cost fossil fuels.  Since Russia and the Middle East do not share Gov. Inslee’s climate change obsession, they will be more than happy to watch him or some other president pursue it.

There is an even bigger, more alarming problem with Gov. Inslee’s climate plan; that is, what if we spent $9 trillion for something completely unnecessary and impractical?

Throughout the Evergreen Plan, Gov. Inslee assumes its necessity and soundness. “We need a president guided by science,” he said, but he offers none in his plan to justify $9 trillion to attempt to turn the nation’s energy sector and infrastructure inside out. For all his stated commitment to “clean” energy, there also is no mention of nuclear, the cleanest energy in use throughout the world today.

Believing in man-made climate change apparently means never having to prove it. The debate is over, the science is settled, we are constantly told. Gov. Inslee all by himself has started a “Climate Movement” where he claims, “[w]e are the first generation to feel the sting of climate change, and we are the last generation that can do something about it. The science is clear – we have a short period of time to act.” But, nowhere does he reference actual science or explain why there is a “short time” remaining. Instead, we are supposed to believe a politician’s 35 pages of promises to painlessly transform and better our lives for another $9 trillion based on a truism.

An honest look at the science of the climate would throw a lot of cold water on a government takeover of the economy to solve something that may not need fixing – or can’t be fixed. Time and again claims by politicians, activists and government-funded scientists about climate change have been either proven wrong or been worthy of serious skepticism.

Examples that demolish climate myths continue to manifest, mostly recently including the now expanding glaciers in Iceland and Greenland, the real cause of wildfires in California, or how the “greenhouse effect” actually works to impact the earth. The list goes on.

The point is, before we commit to trillions of dollars to any endeavor, especially one proposed by an ambitious politician, a lot more debate and scrutiny is warranted

SOURCE 






British police push to prosecute all 1,130 arrested in big Warmist  protests

Scotland Yard is pushing to prosecute all the 1,130 people arrested in the Extinction Rebellion (XR) protest as it called for tougher penalties to deter similar demonstrations.

The Metropolitan Police has set up a dedicated unit of 30 officers to investigate the public order offences allegedly committed by the arrested protesters who range in age from 19 to over 70.

"It is our anticipation that we are putting all of those [arrested] to the Crown Prosecution Service," said Laurence Taylor, deputy assistant commissioner.

If successful, it would be the biggest mass prosecution for civil disobedience for at least 37 years, surpassing the anti-nuclear protests at Upper Heyford in 1982

SOURCE 







Australian election result should force Labor Party to rethink its climate change policies

The Coalition’s stunning re-election victory is obviously a triumph for Prime Minister Scott Morrison. His campaign strategy of making economic management and the Labor Party’s big-target, big-taxing, transformative agenda the key election issues was a spectacular success.

Labor did not win the seats it was expected to, and needed to, to form government, in Victoria, Western Sydney, across Queensland, or in Western Australia.

But the result also suggests that the politics of the nation are being shaped by a new social geography. This is demonstrated, ironically, by the fate of former prime minister Tony Abbott, who lost his seat at an election that arguably vindicated the political strategy he has long promoted for the Liberal Party regarding climate change.

It was Abbott who led the Coalition to a crushing victory over Labor in 2013 by promising to “axe the carbon tax”. But when Malcolm Turnbull lost the prime ministership in August 2018, many commentators blamed his fall on an Abbott-inspired coup by the “hard-right, climate change-denying” faction of the Liberal Party.

As in Wentworth (which the Liberals will struggle to regain) affluent former Liberal voters who live in harbourside parts of Warringah such as Manly and Mosman have turned against the man who they condemn for strangling Australia’s response to climate change.

But what the election result has comprehensively shown is that neither Warringah nor Wentworth is representative of vast swathes of the rest of the nation, especially on climate policy. Wealthy voters who can easily pay higher electricity prices can literally afford to treat climate change as a moral issue requiring action regardless of the cost, and to thereby treat the election as a referendum on the issue.

But these sentiments were clearly not shared across the wider electorate. The centre-piece of Labor’s transformative agenda – its 50 per cent renewable energy target and 45 per cent emission reduction polices – did not translate into the election-swinging advantage in the key seats that pundits anticipated.

In fact, these policies almost certainly proved a liability, given that Morrison’s focus on economic management heavily targeted Bill Shorten’s repeated failure to explain the cost of his energy policies – a point the Prime Minister effectively drove home during the leaders’ debates.

Moreover, Labor’s climate change stance was undoubtedly influential in regional Queensland, where the equivocal attitude Labor displayed to the Adani mine project turned off voters concerned about mining jobs and the long-term future of the coal industry. The overall closeness of the election result suggests that the nation remains divided over climate policy.

But having staked so much on this issue, Labor’s election loss can only be viewed as a repudiation of its “progressive” approach.

Since the recently departed Bob Hawke’s fourth and final election victory in 1990, the Labor Party has only won two federal elections in its own right: the 1993 GST election and the 2007 WorkChoices election.

In both cases, Labor’s victory heavily relied on the political mistakes of the Coalition over tax and industrial relations.

Otherwise, Labor’s near 30-year quest to find an election-winning agenda of its own that can form the basis of Hawke-style sustained electoral success has produced a meagre political harvest.

Unless Labor is prepared to rethink the political mistakes that led it to support climate policies that have greater appeal to well-off elites of Wentworth and Warringah than to the battlers of Penrith and Picton, its electoral prospects will remain bleak.

SOURCE  

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

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26 May, 2019  

Greenie hate

An email to Marc Morano copied to many climate skeptics:


From: Tim Remple tim@remple.us

Date: Thu, May 23, 2019, 20:07

Subject: FUCK YOU! DROP DEAD MOTHERFUCKER!!

Whereas you appeared on public at the recent House Natural Resources Committee, and

Whereas you said things that indicate your guilty of Crimes Against Humanity and Ecocide,

You are hereby official and irrevocably CURSED:

May you live long enough to see the collapse of both the climate and the eco-system on Planet Earth,

May you live long enough that your children and grandchildren likewise see the end of ALL LIFE on Planet Earth,

May they, when they understand what they YOU have done,

Ask you, "How the FUCK could you have done this to us??!!??

And may they then kill you!

May you die by their hand!

Looking them in the eye as THEY end your miserable life!!!!!

Curses are the recourse of people who have no actual power so this should bother nobody. It does however show how deep is the personal inadequacy of the curser.  He desperately needs to  be seen as heroic when he is in fact a nobody.  He has tied his own self-esteem to the climate myth.  To doubt global warming is to insult him personally. A couple of centuries ago he would have been burning witches -- JR.

Joe Bastardi comments:

"Greg Whitestone and David Legates witnessed a PSU climate ethics professor  trembling he was so upset while accusing me of leading to the deaths of millions even as I pointed out graphics that showed climate deaths were plummeting. One chart after another was systematically denied as it showed the opposite.  They are committed zealots and will not listen to reason"

Tim and Ruth Remple are anti-fracking activists who live in Longmont Colorado. That would fit with the email. And a Tim Remple is a Senior Software Engineer at NetApp SolidFire in Longmont, Colorado. Likely the same guy. 

There is further nuttiness from him in a comment here of July 6, 2016. He lives in a fantasy world.  He seems to think that the Nazis are  coming to get him






In Another Reversal, Apple Allows App Countering Climate Alarmism

Apple’s on-again, off-again relationship with an online smartphone application that challenges global warming alarmism is back on.

The app, Inconvenient Facts, is available again in Apple’s App Store, much to the delight of the geologist who inspired it.

“I thought that it was entirely political,” Gregory Wrightstone, author of the book “Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know,” said of Apple’s original ban of the app in March. “I still don’t know, but we are back up and available.”

The book by Wrightstone, who has more than three decades of experience as a geologist, serves as the source of information on the app.

As The Daily Signal previously reported on Apple’s decision to backpedal on offering the app, Wrightstone points out that the board of the California-based tech giant includes former Vice President Al Gore, a leading proponent of the view that mankind’s activities propel dangerous climate change.

Apple initially approved the Inconvenient Facts app for sale on its iPhones on Feb. 3, then reversed itself and pulled the app March 4.

“In their rejection, Apple blamed several factors,” Wrightstone said in an email to The Daily Signal. “One was lack of compelling content. Another was limited functionality and use of the iPhone features.”

“The limited functionality meant that it was an app that could be web-based,” he said. “So, we added the phone component so that you can take a picture using the app and your camera, and we added an I LOVE CO2 banner at the bottom of the photo. My app developer and partner thought that might do the trick.”

The Daily Signal sought comment from Apple’s media relations office by phone and email, but the company had not responded by publication time.

For more than two months, the app remained available to Android users through the Google Play Store, where it has been downloaded about 16,000 times.

Apple reinserted the Inconvenient Facts app into its App Store on May 17, making a total of 60 facts about the climate change debate from Wrightstone’s book available to Apple users as well as Android users.

Complete with data, charts, and videos, the facts challenge the premise of alarmist theories linking man-made carbon dioxide emissions to dangerous levels of global warming or climate change.

Gore’s campaign to convince the public that rising levels of carbon dioxide could trigger catastrophic global warming was the subject of the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and the 2017 follow-up “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.”

The Daily Signal also sought comment from Gore via Delaware-based Carthage Group LLC, with which he is associated, and from the Climate Reality Project, which he founded. Neither organization had responded by publication time.

Users of the app simply tap on it to activate the features, including these “inconvenient facts”:

—“First and foremost, CO2 is plant food.”

—“140-million-year trend of dangerously decreasing CO2.”

—“Recent inconvenient pause of 18 years in warming, despite rise in CO2.”

—“The current warming trend is neither unusual nor unprecedented.”

—“Cold kills far more people than heat every year.”

—“There are more polar bears now than we’ve had for 50 years.”

Information about Wrightstone’s book and the app may be found at inconvenientfacts.xyz and on YouTube and Facebook.

SOURCE 







India’s Coal Output To Grow 4.3% A Year Over Next 10 Years

Fitch Solutions Tuesday said India’s thermal coal output is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 4.3 percent by 2028.

“In absolute volume terms, China and India will have the largest impact on the global coal market balance,” Fitch Solutions Macro Research said in a report.

It further said the surge in Chinese imports that occurred over 2015-2017 as a result of dramatic domestic production curbs was a temporary phenomenon.

“We forecast thermal coal production in China to stagnate at 0.5 percent growth per annum from 2019 onwards, but not decline, as new coal mines in Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces offset mine closures in the rest of the country,” it said.

It further estimates that production by state-owned Coal India (CIL) — which accounts for around 90 percent of domestic output — will underwhelm the government expectations.

“We forecast India’s thermal coal output to grow by an average annual rate of 4.3 percent over 2019-2028,” it said.

Along with weaker Chinese and Indian demand, South Korea and Japan will also see coal consumption slowing down in 2019 due to heightening environmental concerns, it added.

“We maintain our thermal coal price forecast for 2019 at [$85/ton] as our previous belief that prices will be pressured downwards in 2019 due to lower seaborne demand from China and India, while global production will remain buoyant, is playing out,” the report noted.

SOURCE 







EU Top Court Throws Out Climate Lawsuit

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) has rejected a case brought by 10 families against the European Union.

The families claimed that the bloc’s inaction on climate change was harming their homes and livelihoods, lawyers said on Wednesday.

Plaintiffs from the EU, Kenya, and Fiji had filed the case in May of last year, saying climate change had already seriously impacted their lives and damaged their ability to make a living.

The plaintiffs included a family from the German island of Langeoog, who said those living on small islands would be the first to lose their homes to rising sea levels.

There was also a family from the Italian Alps who said that a shorter winter was leading to fewer tourists coming to the region for winter sports, a Swedish reindeer herder, and a Portuguese forester who lost a large portion of his property to wildfires in 2017.

Lawyers for the “People’s Climate Case” have said they will appeal the decision by the ECJ that individuals cannot sue the European Union for its environmental policy.

The judges found that “every individual is likely to be affected one way or another by climate change,” but that this was no legal grounds to file a complaint against the EU.

SOURCE 






James Cook University head in trouble over firing of Prof. Ridd

Ridd is an honest scientist who had the daring to call out fake Greenie science at the university.  So they hate him with a passion.  In an old, old strategy, they thought to protect the Greenie crooks by attacking the whistleblower

If the vice-chancellor of James Cook University thinks she can keep a low profile, she is mistaken. Sandra Harding’s management of the sacking of physics professor Peter Ridd is under the microscope for good reason. The buck stops at the top. And much is at stake, with JCU facing international reputational damage over the scandal, huge legal costs, cost-cutting pressures from falling student numbers and staff discontent.

“The bottom line is Sandra Harding should go,” says a former member of the university’s 15-member governing council. “It’s in the interest of everybody that she retires.” Speaking to The Weekend Australian this week, the former council member says if Harding doesn’t retire, she should be sacked.

Ridd, an esteemed physics professor respected by students and staff, was sacked by JCU using a bogus claim of uncollegial behaviour that was rejected by the Federal Circuit Court last month. He questioned the quality of science about coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef. JCU spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending its right to sack Ridd, rather than encouraging a healthy debate about the claims he made.

So much for JCU being a bastion of academic freedom in the search of the truth. “Ridd is a decent man,” says the former council member who has had a long association with JCU, adding that Ridd did not want this fight. “He never set out to hurt anybody. But he did believe in what he was saying, he had evidence, and it’s proper to call out your colleagues if that is needed, to get to the truth. JCU took the nuclear option against Ridd, and that was crazy.”

Sacking Ridd was squarely a management issue for the VC, but the former council member says that JCU’s governing council should now be far more involved given the fallout from this debacle.

Still in close contact with JCU staff, including academics, the former council member says staff are upset and “whether or not they agree with Ridd is a separate matter. This court case probably cost the university a million bucks, which is money JCU cannot afford.”

The Weekend Australian has been told JCU is cutting about $20 million each year over its forward estimates due to financial pressures because the university is not meeting its own student enrolment targets. The former JCU council member confirms that is “one of the reasons why the staff across campus are very unhappy”.

“They know that there will be further redundancies coming. Those redundancies have already been chosen, but the staff haven’t been told who they are.”

According to the ex-member, the other reason the governing council should be more involved is that “the sacking of Ridd is being watched around the world. It is damaging JCU’s reputation in an area where JCU leads the world. In marine science, JCU is the top dog. To have that reputation damaged is extraordinarily worrying.”

The Weekend Australian also has been told JCU’s governing council has received briefings but otherwise has had little hands-on involvement in the Ridd matter. Given that council members have fiduciary duties similar to board members, some are asking why the governing council is not more involved with issues of reputational damage to JCU and the big bucks spent on court battles with Ridd.

The Weekend Australian sought an interview with Harding. She declined. A spokesman provided some answers by email to a list of questions, and a link to a statement by JCU provost Chris Cocklin after the Federal Circuit Court found against the university last month. The Weekend Australian also rang and left a message with JCU chancellor Bill Tweddell, who chairs the council. He did not return the call.

Though Harding has tried to keep her head down, the focus will remain on her. And it is not just her handling of the Ridd case that is causing consternation. “One of JCU’s current council members has been precluded from taking part in any council discussion involving Ridd because they reckon he has a conflict of interest because he knows one of the lawyers acting for Ridd,” says an insider.

“That’s not a conflict of interest,” he says, clearly frustrated by the erosion of council oversight, adding that “the council member didn’t want to rock the boat, so he has agreed not to attend meetings when the matter is discussed. She (Harding) might fight the battle, but she won’t win the war and there was never a need for the war in the first place. (JCU’s) campus is a very unhappy place right now.”

All this when Harding, in her 60s, might be planning one more career move. Her term as JCU boss expires at the end of 2021. She has been mentioned as a future Queensland governor. Some say she has her sights on one of Australia’s grander Group of Eight universities. But the controversy over her handling of Ridd won’t make either promotion easy.

“This is a significant bump in that road to a bigger and better position,” says one insider, who has been involved in the governance of JCU.

According to the former member of JCU’s governing council, Ridd has more support on campus than he realises, including from fellow academics. Something for Harding to keep in mind.

This month, Ridd told The Weekend Australian that none of his colleagues had defended him publicly. He suggested the need for “kamikaze academics”, academics who are older and established enough to resign in the noble cause of defending academic freedom. A few days later, JCU adjunct associate professor Sheilagh Cronin resigned from her unpaid position at the university. “After reading that, I thought ‘that’s me’,” she told The Weekend Australian this week.

Cronin wrote to Harding, resigning from her role at JCU and outlining her concerns over Ridd’s treatment: “I believe his treatment by yourself and your board is completely contrary to the philosophy of open discussion and debate that should be at the heart of every university. It saddens me that the reputation of JCU is being damaged by the injustice of Professor Ridd’s case.”

Cronin told The Weekend Australian she is also concerned about the scale of money spent on litigation against Ridd, and more still if JCU appeals.

“When the federal government gives us money, we are very closely scrutinised and so we should be. These are precious dollars that could be used elsewhere,” says Cronin, a doctor who has overseen a $23m budget to provide health services through the Western Queensland Primary Health Network. It is the same at JCU, she says, where the governing council has oversight duties.

“I’m not looking for a row with JCU, but I think there is an important principle of openness and transparency when you’re handling taxpayer dollars.”

Cronin is troubled by the lack of introspection at the highest levels of JCU: “They’re putting all the blame on him and they aren’t looking at themselves.”

Cronin has not received a response from Harding.

A few weeks ago, former JCU dean of science John Nicol wrote to each of JCU’s council members expressing his concern that “the university’s reputation as an honest broker in the field of marine science has been trashed”.

“I am writing to express my concern and disappointment at the worldwide unmitigated adverse publicity, which the university management has brought to bear on James Cook University’s fine reputation, through its inaction in ensuring the integrity of all of its research output and its un-conscienable (sic) treatment of Professor Peter Ridd who sought to encourage the university to restore such integrity.”

Nicol concluded his letter to council members as follows: “James Cook University now needs your direct intervention and support.” He has not received a response to his concerns from any council members.

The Weekend Australian asked Harding whether, given the dismal fallout from the Ridd saga, JCU intends to commit to the set of principles about academic freedom recommended by former High Court chief justice Robert French in his recent report to the Morrison government.

Harding had nothing to say. A spokesman referred back to the provost’s April statement, adding this: “JCU strongly supports the principle of academic freedom and notes that the French review found there was … no evidence, on the basis of recent events, which would answer the pejorative description of a ‘free speech crisis’ on campus.”

Pulling a single line from the lengthy French review has further disappointed Harding’s critics. “Harding is making a huge mistake in the way she’s managing this whole issue,” the former council member says of the university’s attempt to justify the Ridd debacle and fob off the French review.

French appealed to university vice-chancellors to embed a culture of academic freedom on their campuses: “A culture powerfully predisposed to the exercise of freedom of speech and academic freedom is ultimately more effective than the most tightly drawn rule. A culture not so disposed will undermine the most emphatic state of principles.”

French’s recommendation for a model code of academic freedom was released by the Morrison government barely two weeks before JCU’s attempt to sack Ridd was rejected by a court at first instance.

Harding might re-read the whole 300-page French review before deciding to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting the respected physics professor in another round of expensive and damaging litigation.

SOURCE  

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

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

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





24 May, 2019  

Illegal ozone-depleting gases traced to rogue factories in eastern China

The science behind the claim that CFCs cause the ozone hole has been drastically revised so it is no surprise that the hole is NOT shrinking.  It oscillates but it was at its biggest in 2015, many years after it was supposed to start shrinking.  So China is doing no harm

Industries in northeastern China have spewed large quantities of an ozone-depleting gas into the atmosphere in violation of an international treaty, global scientists say.

And it’s slowing down the rate of recovery for the hole in the crucial ozone layer.

The ozone layer is a region of Earth’s stratosphere that essentially act as a shield and absorbs most of the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation.

So when scientists discovered in 1985 that there was a hole in it over Antarctica and Australia, it was very unsettling news.

After that, we all got together and banned the use of harmful gases that depleted Earth’s protective layer in the 1987 Montreal Protocol and ever since it has more-or-less been on a slow recovery ever since.

China is a signatory of the Montreal Protocol but it looks as if the country hasn’t been keeping up its end of the bargain.

Since 2013 annual emissions from northeastern China of a banned chemical called CFC-11 have increased by about 7000 tonnes, researchers reported overnight in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.

“This increase accounts for a substantial fraction (at least 40 to 60 per cent) of the global rise in CFC-11 emissions,” they wrote.

Before it was phased out CFC-11, or Chlorofluorocarbon-11, was widely used in the 1970s and 1980s as a refrigerant and to make foam insulation. The chemical is a major cause of ozone depletion.

Ever since the ban, the concentration of the chemical in the atmosphere has been steadily declining but last year startled scientists discovered that the pace of that slowdown dropped by half from 2013 to 2017. Because the chemical does not occur in nature, the change could only have been produced by new emissions.

Using high-frequency atmospheric observations from Gosan, South Korea, and Hateruma, Japan, together with global monitoring data and atmospheric chemical transport model simulations, researchers investigated the likely culprit and have pointed the finger at eastern China.

Reports last year from the Environmental Investigation Agency fingered Chinese foam factories in the coastal province of Shandong and the inland province of Hebei, which surrounds Beijing.

Suspicions were strengthened when authorities subsequently shut down some of these facilities without explanation.

Manufacturers have said they continued to use the banned product because of its better quality and cheaper price.

The New York Times reported that some factories were producing the gas in secret, while other manufacturers said the local governments turned a blind eye.

“It wasn’t entirely a surprise,” said Matthew Rigby, lead author of the study and Reader in Atmospheric Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol.

Paul Fraser, an honorary fellow at Australia’s CSIRO Climate Science Centre and co-author of the paper said while eastern China accounted for about half of the rise in CFC-11, global scientists don’t have the technology in place to monitor large parts of the rest of the world.

Along with other scientists, he presented the data last year to Chinese authorities and is optimistic action will be taken to reduce the harm done by the emissions.

“They were concerned, it was clear I think ... that they were going to tackle this issue,” he told ABC radio this morning.

But as yet, he has not seen or heard any indication that China has begun cracking down on the rogue factories thought to be responsible.

Because scientists have noticed the chemical increase in the atmosphere early, “that gives us a really good chance to make sure they don’t do too much damage,” he said.

But pouring more CFC-11 into the air could also prevent ozone from returning to normal levels, scientists warn.

“If emissions do not decline, it will delay the recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole, possibly for decades,” Mr Fraser said.

Paul Krummel, and expert in atmospheric composition and chemistry at the Climate Science Centre at the CSIRO said research like this was important to keep countries honest.

“This study highlights the importance of undertaking long-term measurements of trace gases like CFC-11 to verify the efficacy of international protocols and treaties,” he said.

SOURCE 






'Authoritative propaganda': Skeptics blast U.N. warning of mass species extinction

A widely touted United Nations report predicting mass species extinction took a beating Wednesday at a House subcommittee hearing, with Republican-called witnesses blasting the claims as “highly exaggerated” and “authoritative propaganda.”

The executive summary released May 6 by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services concluded that “transformative change” was needed to save as many as 1 million species at risk of extinction.

“The evidence is unequivocal. Biodiversity, which is important in its own right and essential for human well-being, is being destroyed by human activities at a rate unprecedented in human history,” Robert Watson, former chairman of IPBES, told the Natural Resources subcommittee on water, oceans and wildlife.

Rep. Jared Huffman, the California Democrat who chairs the subcommittee, said Earth is “currently in what they call the sixth mass extinction, and species are disappearing 100 times faster than historic rates, mostly because of things that we are doing.”

Challenging that premise was Patrick Moore, a former Greenpeace leader, who argued that species extinction has declined in the past century thanks to international efforts. He insisted there was “zero evidence that any such event is occurring now or has even begun to occur.”

“As with the manufactured ‘climate crisis,’ they are using the specter of mass extinction as a fear tactic to scare the public into compliance,” Mr. Moore said in his prepared remarks. “The IPBES itself is an existential threat to sensible policy on biodiversity conservation.”

The result was a feisty hearing in which Mr. Huffman took aim at the credentials of the Republican witnesses and Republicans accused the subcommittee of holding a hearing based on a document that nobody had read.

The report was prepared by 145 authors over three years using 15,000 peer-reviewed publications and 15,000 comments, but the full document remains classified and has yet to be released. A summary was released two weeks ago at a plenary session in Paris.

“Right now, I feel like I’m part of a book club, and we’re going to give opinions on the book, except we’re all making it up because no one has actually read the book,” said Rep. Rob Bishop, Utah Republican. “If you’d actually waited until the report was released and people could look at it, maybe there would be a point at that point that this could be a legitimate hearing.”

The five factors driving the extinction threat are “land and sea use changes; exploitation of organisms; climate change; pollution; and invasive species,” Mr. Huffman said.

“All of these are things we can do something about, but we’re not on track to slow the extinction crisis,” Mr. Huffman said. “We need to do more.”

The “extinction crisis” claim met with skepticism from Rep. Tom McClintock, California Republican, who ticked off previous apocalyptic extinction predictions, including a 1970 warning by a Smithsonian official that 75% to 80% of all animals would be extinct by 1995.

He also challenged the report’s claim of an estimated 8 million animal and planet species, including insects, noting that the International Union for Conservation of Nature has cataloged only 1.8 million. About 800 are known to have gone extinct since 1500.

“You cannot call yourself a scientist if you pretend that there are 6.2 million species that have no names and have never been identified,” said Mr. Moore. “That is not science. That is fiction. Fairy tale stories. And that’s what we’re being told here.”

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano described the report as a politically driven document, “the latest U.N. appeal to give it more power, more scientific authority, more money and more regulatory control.”

“At best, the U.N. science panels represent nothing more than ‘authoritative bureaucracy,’ claiming they hype the problem and then come up with the solution that puts them in charge of ‘solving’ the issue in perpetuity,” Mr. Morano said in his prepared remarks. “A more accurate term for the U.N. than ‘authoritative science’ may be ‘authoritative propaganda.’”

Mr. Huffman fired back at the Republican witnesses by noting that Greenpeace has denied that Mr. Moore is a co-founder, despite a Greenpeace screenshot listing him as one of five founders, and referring to Mr. Morano as a troll.

“I don’t know what inspires someone to make a career out of trolling scientists or monetizing contrarian ideology on the YouTube and Ted Talk circuit, but it’s just a very different kind of conversation than the science-based conversation I think many of us would try to have,” Mr. Huffman said.

No House committee hearing this year would be complete without a climate change row. Republicans took aim at the Green New Deal, the Paris climate agreement and the 97% scientific “consensus,” while Democrats’ witnesses stressed the impact of global warming on species.

“As we’re already observing, climate change is radically changing our weather and moving species’ habitats,” said Defenders of Wildlife’s Jacob Malcom. “Climate change alone is a terrifying transformation of our planet. In combination with the other threats, the damage we have done and are doing is almost unimaginable.”

Mr. Moore argued that most animals that have gone extinct since 1500 were the victims of invasive species such as cats, rats and foxes brought by European colonialists.

“Today, it’s introduced species, especially on islands, where it’s a small area, and a rat can get on an island and eat all the bird’s eggs, and that’s the end of the bird,” Mr. Moore said. “That is the classical situation that has occurred lately.”

Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, the Arizona Democrat who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, lamented the Republicans’ approach to climate change. “There’s not so much climate denial going on in Congress anymore,” said Mr. Grijalva. “It’s climate avoidance — anything to avoid the topic and to avoid doing something serious about it.”

SOURCE 






Environmental indoctrination in our schools

Ever wonder why kids come home from school often sounding as if they had received woefully inadequate instruction in everything from English, history, and civics to mathematics, science, and other traditional fields of learning?

That’s because, in far too many K-12 classes across the country, these subjects have been pushed aside in favor of a curriculum specifically designed to set children on a path toward progressive indoctrination of their impressionable young minds. This is not a new development; it’s been gradually tightening its grip on our education system (public and private) ever since the poisonous progressive ideas of John Dewey and his acolytes started making their way into school curricula during the last century.

Over time, the discipline of history has given way to “social studies,” and the teaching of science has undergone a noticeable politicization.

In their 2017 book, “Deconstructing the Administrative State: The Fight for Liberty,” Emmett McGoarty, Jane Robbins, and Erin Tuttle discuss the battle of ideologies that has lasted over a century and continues today, pitting those who defend the American Experiment and its constitutional structure against those who seek to replace that structure with one that empowers them to implement their ideas with little or no popular input. All three scholars are affiliated with the Washington-based American Principals Project Foundation.

Curse of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)

By hijacking the traditional school curriculum and transforming it into an instrument of indoctrination, progressive educators can mold minds to their hearts’ content. The authors note that many students are subjected to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), written in 2011 under the direction of Achieve, Inc., the same organization that wrote the controversial Common Core national standards for English, arts, and mathematics.

After evaluating the NGSS, the Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank that actually supported Common Core, determined that the NGSS was “inferior” to standards in 20 other states. In physical science, it observed that “it would be impossible to derive a high school physics or chemistry course from the content included in the NGSS.”

Instead of introducing students to the world of scientific inquiry, NGSS seeks to inculcate progressive social values. It does so by striving to “engage” students during classroom instruction by brainwashing them and pressuring them to become active participants in rescuing the planet in accordance with environmentalist dogma.

The NGSS provide targeted goals for what students should know at the end of different grade levels. Quoting directly from the NGSS playbook, the authors cite the NGSS Global Climate Change standards for three grade levels:

By the End of Grade 5: If Earth’s global mean temperature continues to rise, the lives of humans and other organisms will be affected in many different ways.

By the End of Grade 8: Human activities such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels are major factors in in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming). Reducing human vulnerability to whatever climate changes do occur depend (sic) on the understanding of climate science, engineering capabilities and other kinds of knowledge, such as understanding of human behavior and on applying that knowledge wisely in decisions and actions.

By the End of Grade 12: Global climate models are often used to understand the process of climate change because these changes are complex and can occur slowly over Earth’s history. Though the magnitudes of humans’ impacts are greater than they ever have been, so too are humans’ abilities to model predict and manage current and future impacts. Through computer simulations and other studies, important discoveries are still being made about how the ocean, the atmosphere and the biosphere interact and are modified in response to human activities, as well as to changes in human activities. The science and engineering will be essential to both to understanding the possible impacts of global climate change and to informing decisions about how to slow its rate and consequences – for humanity and well as for the rest of the planet.

The underlying assumptions of human-induced climate change are never challenged, nor are students, including those at higher levels, encouraged to consider alternative explanations for climate variability.

Education Establishment’s Relentless Campaign to Adopt NGSS Nationwide

By 2017, 18 states had adopted the NGSS since the standards were completed in 2011. “The remaining states face a relentless campaign from the education establishment to adopt the standards,” McGroarty, Robbins, and Tuttle point out. “For example, the National Association of School Boards of Education (NASBE) has pushed adoption of NGSS by state school boards, which generally exercise authority over state academic standards. Efforts to reject the NGSS face a barrage of ‘export’ reports by the NASBE to refute any objections raised.”

SOURCE 





UK says 100% renewables won’t work

A lot of countries (as well as many U.S. states and utilities) are announcing so-called zero-carbon plans, typically with a target year around 2050. These are often reported as calling for 100% renewable energy, which is wrong.

There is a difference between zero-carbon and 100% renewables, but this is often hidden and unclear. In the new UK plan it is still hidden, but once found it is very clear. Renewables provide just 57% of the energy, which is a lot less than 100%. Perhaps most surprising is that nuclear might provide as much as 38% of the energy!

By way of introduction, the plan comes from the government’s own Committee on Climate Change (CCC), in a report titled “Net-Zero: The UK’s contribution to stopping global warming.” The CCC is the UK’s top climate action planning group.

The surprising numbers occur in an obscure Technical Annex, titled “Integrating variable renewables into the UK electricity system.” As the title suggests, the UK CCC is well aware of the severe limitations that intermittency creates for renewables.

These limitations are succinctly summarized right up front, in the second paragraph of this 17 page Annex. Here is what the CCC says:

“Variable (or ‘intermittent’) renewables – which are weather dependent – are different to other forms of electricity generation, and increased deployment of them could require additional system services. For example, renewables cannot be guaranteed to generate during winter peak demand periods, and renewable output is generally correlated across different sites. Similarly, wind and solar generation can change substantially over periods of just a few hours, requiring non-renewable plants to be held in reserve to meet any sudden shortfall in supply.”

The CCC therefore proposed a mix of zero emission power generating technologies, as follows:

“Our Further Ambition scenario for the power sector sees low-carbon sources providing 100% of power generation in 2050, through a mixture of variable renewables (57%), firm low-carbon power like nuclear or plants fitted with carbon capture and storage (38%) and decarbonised gas such as hydrogen (5%).”

Renewables provide just 57%. A whopping 38% comes from some combination of nuclear and fossil fuel plants fitted with carbon capture and storage (CCS), or perhaps from some unknown new technology. Another 5% comes from decarbonised gas, making fossil fuel use at least 43%.

Of these alternatives, nuclear power is the only proven technology, so it is the only sure bet.

There has been a lot of research on CCS but it may never be feasible. Existing CCS technologies require a major fraction of the power plant’s energy output, making them very expensive. Plus all this extra needed energy would jack fossil fuel use way up.

There is also the huge unresolved environmental issue of safely sticking billions of tons of CO2 down into the ground. Perhaps worst of all, it would violate the Green goal of eliminating fossil fuel use, especially if the full 43% of UK power comes from that hated stuff.

Or they could burn wood and the Annex even suggests this, except they call it “bioenergy,” so maybe it includes Indonesian palm oil. What an environmental disaster that would be! If CCS can be made to work, why not burn readily available coal, oil and gas? In fact Big Oil & Gas are spending nearly a billion dollars on CCS research.

So this plan seems to give the greens a very nasty multiple choice, between nuclear power and continued fossil fuel use and destructive bioenergy. It is hard to say which they like least.

But the CCS zero-carbon is clear, accurate and honest, which is very rare in this policy zone. It should be a lesson for every country, as well as for every U.S. state and utility. 100% renewables will not work, so you have to find a very different way to get to zero carbon emissions. Also, let’s all try being honest about it for a change.

The CCC makes it very clear that zero-carbon will be very difficult. But then, zero-carbon is an insane goal, so it should be hard to get to.

SOURCE 







Australia: Leftist Queensland Premier backflips on Adani coal mine - after Labor's obstruction of the mine cost them the Federal election

The Queensland Labor Premier has demanded action over the Adani coalmine after Labor's federal election defeat.

Annastacia Palaszczuk criticised her own government's delays in approving Australia's biggest mine.

She said federal Labor's loss of core support in the Sunshine State has given her a 'wake-up call.'

Traditional Labor voters deserted their party at the ballot box after Bill Shorten vowed to change the nation and take 'real action' on climate change.

Before the federal election, Ms Palaszczuk promised there would be no political interference in the decision to approve the Adani mine.

But on Wednesday she stood before cameras in a hard hat in Mackay and demanded a meeting between Adani and her own government ministers.

'The community is fed up with the processes, I know I'm fed up with the processes, I know my local members are fed up with the processes,' Ms Palaszczuk said.

'We need some certainty, and we need some timeframes. Enough is enough… the federal election was definitely a wake-up call to everyone.'

Ms Palaszczuk said she understood there was frustration in the community about the lack of a decision on the mine. 'I think everyone's had a gutful of this, frankly,' she said.

The Adani coalmine will provide 1,500 jobs in regional Queensland but building work is on hold pending approval from the regulator, Queensland's Environment Department.  

A Queensland government representative will meet with Adani on Thursday to thrash out a timeline for the Carmichael mine approval process in an attempt to resolve delays that caused a voter backlash.

Ms Palaszczuk intervened to order her state co-ordinator-general to meet with Adani and the independent regulator to fix a timeline and deadline for a decision by Friday. 

Two outstanding environmental management plans, involving the site's Black-Throated Finch habitat and complex groundwater sources, have contributed to delays.

Adani Australia chief executive Lucas Dow said if approvals were not complete within two weeks then the meeting would prove to be just another government 'delaying tactic'.

CFMEU National President Tony Maher welcomed a clear timeline for the project which he said had significant community support on the grounds it would create local jobs.

He said he wanted Adani to confirm how many permanent full-time jobs the mine would generate.

Mackay Conservation Group coordinator Peter McCallum said Queensland's water and wildlife are not put at risk by the project.

SOURCE  

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

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

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






23 May, 2019  

Costly wind power menaces man and nature

The true costs of wind energy are too often (deliberately?) ignored or underestimated

Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris

Wind energy can never replace fossil fuels, despite claims of environmentalists and advocates of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal (GND). It’s not environment-friendly either. Indeed, wind power is hampered by many limitations, including:

* its intermittent and inefficient nature

* insufficient sites with adequate, reliable wind

* acreage required to erect turbines and harness wind

* excessive expenses, many of them rarely mentioned

* dangers to bird and bat populations

* dangers to human health from light flicker and low frequency throbbing noise (infrasound).

* costs, limitations, and health and environmental impacts of batteries and other back-up systems

Wind turbines are highly inefficient. Large industrial wind turbines (IWT) typically produce about 2.5 megawatts of power when wind speed is between about 8 and 25 miles per hour. However, most of the time it’s not, even at the best locations.

Today’s wind farms have a 30–40% average “capacity factor.” That means their average annual output is only 30–40% of “nameplate” capacity, or what they would produce if the wind were blowing 8–25 mph 24/7/365. As we erect more turbines, they must be placed in less optimal locations, and capacity numbers will drop, perhaps dramatically. And no one can predict when they will generate electricity.

When the wind isn’t blowing, the electricity grid cannot provide the energy we need to operate and maintain our standard of living. Today fossil fuels stand ready to step in when wind speeds decline. But under the GND, virtually all fossil fuels would be eliminated, making it impossible to keep the lights on without a major increase in nuclear power, which environmental activists hate even more than fossil fuels.

To generate significant wind energy, facilities must be located where there is steady wind most of the time. Such areas exist along the West Coast of the United States and a strip of the Midwest from the Dakotas to Texas. But 75% of the conterminous 48 states have only half the wind of these locations. Offshore areas have higher wind potential but are be at least three times more expensive to develop.

Perhaps the biggest drawback to relying on wind power is the immense amount of land required. IWTs must be placed far apart so they don’t interfere with each turbine’s “wind capture area.”

In his keynote address at the 2018 America First Energy Conference , Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry explained that generating enough electricity to power just the Houston metropolitan area would require almost 900 square miles of wind turbines. This is six-times more land than an equivalent solar farm of photovoltaic cells, assuming they operate at full efficiency 24/7/365; dozens of times the land required for an equivalent nuclear power plant; and 16 times the size of Washington, DC.

Wind is also much more expensive than existing conventional energy sources. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) claims that wind power can generate electricity for 8¢ per kilowatt-hour (kWh). However, this is based on poor assumptions and glossing over important realities.

It assumes average wind turbine lifetime is 30 years, the same as a conventional fossil fuel power plant. In reality, most turbines last only 15 years, and less offshore. It ignores the cost of backup power. It includes no cost for transmission lines from wind farms to distant cities. Most significantly, it omits subsidies.

A 2016 Utah State University study shows the following extra costs omitted or miscalculated by the EIA for wind power: 15-years not 30-year life expectancies (US 7¢ per kWh), backup power (at least 2.3¢ cents if the back-up is natural gas), transmission costs (2.7¢), government subsidies (23¢). All that means the real cost of wind power is a staggering 43¢ per kilowatt hour! That’s seven times the cost of natural gas-generated electricity! What family, factory, hospital, office, church or school can afford this?

GND promoters would like wind farms everywhere, but even the most supposedly environmentally friendly communities often do not want wind turbines in their own neighborhoods: they spoil the landscape and cause serious environmental impacts, such as killing many birds and bats each year.

In 2013, Loss, Will and Marra estimated that 140,000 to 328,000 birds are killed each year in the contiguous United States by wind turbines. The Audubon Society says that makes wind “the most threatening form of green energy.” Other sources say the death tolls are far higher.

Bat deaths are even worse and potentially more threatening to human health and welfare. Spain’s Save the Eagles International says industrial wind turbines “kill millions of bats & birds, worsening an environmental and epidemiological crisis.” The 2016 study “Multiple mortality events in bats: A global review” reports that since 2000 industrial wind turbines have overtaken all other causes of mass mortality for bats in North America and Europe.

A conservative estimate of bat mortality in the USA is that at least 4 million bats have been killed by wind turbines since 2012. Bats are our primary natural defense in keeping mosquito and crop-damaging insect populations in check. One bat can eat between 500 and 1,000 mosquitoes and other insects in just one hour, or about 6,000 per night.

Fish and wildlife specialists were stunned at the number of dead bats they found at industrial wind turbines in the eastern US. About half were due to barotrauma: a bat only has to come close to a spinning blade, and the pressure change bursts the blood vessels in its lungs.

Save the Eagles explains that killing millions of bats results in billions of extra mosquitoes. It is no coincidence that mosquito populations have increased up to tenfold over the last 50 years, according to long-term mosquito monitoring programs, which also note that increased urbanization and reduced use of insecticides were the main drivers of this change.

Finally, noise generated by wind turbines is akin to that of a helicopter, affecting quality of life and causing serious health problems for people living within a quarter-mile of a turbine. A 2013 Canadian paper reported, “People who live or work in close proximity to IWTs have experienced symptoms that include decreased quality of life, annoyance, stress, sleep disturbance, headache, anxiety, depression and cognitive dysfunction.” Other studies report the same problems.

A woman who was forced out of her Ontario, Canada home said “the problem is not just cyclical audible noise keeping people awake, but also low frequency infrasound, which can travel many kilometres.” The former operator of the Wind Victims Ontario website added, “Infrasound goes right through walls. It pummels your body.” Sherri Lange, CEO of North American Platform Against Wind, says she has “personally received hundreds of phone calls from distressed people who need to vacate their homes.”

Across the world, governments have received tens of thousands of complaints. They rarely even try to address the problems raised. “It is my experience from talking to doctors, researchers and other high-level professionals, that governments seem to be [under the influence of] the industry,” Lange says.

Less frequent but more serious are 192 deaths over the past decade, primarily from massive failures of turbine blades. The deaths have prompted Finland, Bavaria and Scotland to propose legislation that no wind farm be allowed within 1.2 miles (2 kilometers) of any housing.

Many Americans think wind energy is cheap, eco-friendly and wonderful. But that’s because few are ever exposed to the real human, animal, scenic and environmental costs. Green New Deal supporters are counting on people to remain in the dark about these serious problems, to turn their plans into law.

We all need to do more to get the truth out, and confront activists, legislators, regulators and journalists with tough questions and hard realities.

Via email






This Vet Imprisoned for Digging Ponds on His Land Died. Now His Widow Continues the Fight

The name of a Navy veteran may be cleared after he was convicted, fined, and imprisoned for digging ponds in a wooded area near his Montana home, to supply water in case of fire.

The Supreme Court has vacated a lower court ruling against Joe Robertson, who was sent to federal prison and ordered to pay $130,000 in restitution through deductions from his Social Security checks.

Any definitive legal victory for Robertson would be posthumous, since he died March 18 at age 80.

But his lawyers describe the Supreme Court’s action as a “big win” for Robertson’s widow, Carrie, who plans to carry on the fight.

President Barack Obama’s Justice Department had prosecuted Robertson for digging in “navigable waters” without a permit, in violation of the Clean Water Act.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling against Robertson in November 2017 and denied him a rehearing in July 2018.

The Navy veteran’s initial trial at the district court level resulted in a hung jury and a mistrial. He then was convicted after a second district court trial.

Robertson was 78 when he was sentenced in 2016; he completed his 18 months behind bars in late 2017. At the time of his death, he was supposed to be on parole for another 20 months.

In November, he had petitioned the Supreme Court to review his case.

Prior to his conviction, Robertson operated a business that supplied water trucks to Montana firefighters. Because he himself resided in a “fire-prone landscape,” he was concerned for his safety and that of his property, according to his petition to the Supreme Court.

In 2013 and 2014, Robertson had dug a series of ponds close to an unnamed channel near his home, to store water in case of fire. The foot-wide, foot-deep channel carried the equivalent of two to three garden hoses of water flow, his petition explains. 

Robertson argued that he didn’t violate the Clean Water Act because digging the ponds did not discharge any soil into “navigable waters,” since the water flow in the channel didn’t amount to that. The ponds are more than 40 miles away from “the nearest actual navigable water body,” the Jefferson River, the petition says.

On April 15, the Supreme Court vacated the 9th Circuit ruling in response to Robertson’s petition and said his widow, Carrie, could pursue his case and represent his estate. The high court also ordered the 9th Circuit to determine whether the estate may continue to contest the $130,000 in restitution.

Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit, public interest law firm specializing in property rights, represented Robertson in his legal dispute with federal officials.

Tony Francois, a senior attorney with the firm, told The Daily Signal in an email that if the 9th Circuit decides to leave the fine against Robertson’s estate in place in one form or another, the Supreme Court possibly could review long-standing concerns over how the government applies the Clean Water Act.

Robertson’s petition makes the point that some Supreme Court justices have expressed concern over the “vagueness” attached to the term “navigable waters,” and that the dispute over the veteran’s ponds in Montana “offers an ideal vehicle” to resolve uncertainty over the definition of navigable waters. The petition also suggests that the court could void the term.

“The Supreme Court vacated the 9th Circuit’s decision in Joe’s case because of his death,” Francois told The Daily Signal. “It is the usual practice when a criminal defendant dies before his appeal is final for the federal courts to vacate the conviction and dismiss the indictment, regardless of the merits. There is some disagreement among the lower courts how this applies to restitution orders, including amounts paid prior to death.”

Francois added:

Because of Joe’s death, the Supreme Court ordered the 9th Circuit to consider whether the case is moot. We think this means that the court of appeals will have to consider whether all of his restitution obligation should be abated.

If they decide that to be the case, including return of the amount he paid before he died, then that would likely fully resolve the case and it would likely be moot. Joe’s estate would have no further obligations and would get back what he has paid to date.

If the 9th Circuit decides that any of the restitution remains due, including allowing the government to keep the amount he already paid, then we would likely return to the Supreme Court to ask for a substantive review of his convictions. It seems likely that only in that case would the Supreme Court address the Clean Water Act issues.

Congress initially passed the Clean Water Act in 1948, but lawmakers greatly altered and expanded it into the current form with amendments in 1972.

The law “establishes the basic structure for regulating discharges of pollutants into the waters of the United States and regulating quality standards for surface waters,” according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s website.

Under the 1972 amendments, it is illegal to discharge any pollutant from a point source into navigable waters without a permit from the EPA. The Army Corps of Engineers oversees the permitting process and shares enforcement authority with the EPA.

In 2015, the Obama administration implemented its Clean Water Rule, widely known as the Waters of the United States rule or WOTUS rule, which expanded the ability of the EPA and the Corps to regulate bodies of water throughout the country.

The Trump administration has taken steps to withdraw the Obama administration’s rule and replace it with a new one that limits the regulatory reach of federal agencies.

The Daily Signal sought comment for this report from both the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers. Neither agency had responded as of publication time.

Daren Bakst, senior research fellow for agriculture policy at The Heritage Foundation, submitted comments last month to the EPA and the Corps expressing concern that “vague and subjective definitions” attached to the Clean Water Act affect how those agencies enforce the law.

Those imprecise definitions also create great uncertainty for average citizens who must comply with regulations, Bakst said.

Addressing the Trump administration’s proposed rule revising the definition of  “waters of the United States,” Bakst wrote:

In 2004, the General Accounting Office (GAO) highlighted the Corps’ inconsistent enforcement across districts and even asserted that definitions were intentionally left vague. If experts within the agencies are unable to agree if a water is a ‘waters of the United States,’ it is unreasonable to think that a lay person will be able to know that a water is a jurisdictional water.

In fact, if definitions are extremely vague and subjective, and enforcement is inconsistent, there is no way for anyone to know whether some waters are jurisdictional because the answers to those questions depend on the subjective whim of whatever government officials have decided to answer the questions …

Bakst told The Daily Signal in an email that the Robertson case “is a clear and horrifying example of how the vagueness problem with the definition of ‘waters of the United States’ is a major problem.”

“This vagueness problem is just one of the many reasons why the EPA and Corps need to develop a new definition of ‘waters of the United States,’” the Heritage research fellow said. “The definition should be clear and objective, and not allow the agencies to make subjective, after-the-fact determinations as to whether a specific water is regulated.”

Although the Robertson case is far from finished, the Pacific Legal Foundation in a blog describes the Supreme Court’s order moving the case back to the 9th Circuit as a “big win” for the veteran’s widow, Carrie.

“The high court’s decision came via summary disposition, which means it did not issue a written opinion,” the blog says. “But clearly the justices felt the 9th Circuit’s decision was erroneous, or they wouldn’t have granted Joe’s petition, or vacated the 9th Circuit’s decision, after his untimely death.”

SOURCE 






The Idea That There Are Only 100 Harvests Left Is Just A Fantasy

WHEN it comes to science reporting, there are some headlines that are so frequently repeated, so intuitively plausible, so closely aligned to our cultural beliefs, that they can seem like incontrovertible truths.

The general public, and indeed many scientists, may fervently believe that these claims reflect the overwhelming scientific consensus. However, sometimes when you dig a little beyond the surface, the evidence underpinning even the most ubiquitous headlines can seem surprisingly shaky.

Perhaps the best example of such an assertion is that of an impending agricultural Armageddon, caused by decades of irresponsible farming practices that have degraded soils across the planet (or so the press narrative goes).

A quick scan of the headlines reveals that despite the confidence with which these forecasts are proclaimed, the actual timescale to D-Day varies rather widely from story to story. While some report that we have 100 years until the end of our soil’s ability to support farming, citing a University of Sheffield study, others claim that this is a mere 60 years away, referencing a speech at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

Recently, the UK government’s environment secretary even stated that the UK is as little as 30 years away from an “eradication of soil fertility” because we “drench it in chemicals”. If this is indeed a likely end-game scenario, we should probably determine which of these estimates is most plausible as a matter of urgency: 30, 60 or 100 years. So let’s take a closer look at this claim.

Despite dozens of headlines quoting these predictions, surprisingly only one peer-reviewed paper from a scientific journal is ever cited as evidence to back them up. This 2014 study from the University of Sheffield compared the soil quality of a range of sites in the English city, including agricultural, garden and allotment soils.

Now, before we question whether the results of this single, small study can be extrapolated to represent all of England, let alone the whole UK or even the whole world, let us take a look at their findings: basically, some urban soils in Sheffield are higher in carbon and nitrogen than some nearby agricultural ones. OK, but where is the 100-year statistic? It turns out that nowhere in the study was there any calculation, prediction or even passing reference to the claim. None whatsoever. Perhaps not so much shaky evidence to support this assertion as much as non-existent.

“I asked leading soil scientists if they had ever come across such a prediction in published research. Not a single one had”

Maybe this is the result of a typo and the work is in another research paper? After an 8-hour trawl through the academic journals failed to pull up a single study that even attempted to make this calculation, I contacted six leading soil scientists across the world to ask if they had ever come across such a prediction in either the published literature or their work. Not a single one had.

In fact, the words they used to describe this claim were “bold”, “too Malthusian”, “hardly useful”, “almost insulting” and “I have used this in my soil science lectures to show the students to be wary of headlines!”. Ouch.

Does that mean there aren’t real threats to some agricultural soils around the world? Absolutely not. Indeed, all the scientists I spoke to went to great lengths to point these out, where they exist.

However, they also highlighted how incredibly complex the calculations needed to make such predictions would be, based on myriad factors, only some of which can be predicted with any reliability, with generalisations almost impossible. The boring reality is that while soils in some parts of the world might be in decline, others are not.

Furthermore, while agriculture may be one of the factors driving erosion and nutrient depletion, many modern farming practices such as no-till and synthetic fertiliser applications may actually be helping alleviate (rather than drive) this. In fact, according to many objective measures, modern, evidence-based farming techniques are more sustainable than those of an idealised past. Quite a different picture to that painted by the headlines.

Despite the thirst for simple truths in a complicated world, the researchers I contacted agreed that setting such a figure for an agricultural “end-point” would be nigh on impossible, which may explain why no published studies appear to have been able to do so. But this hasn’t stopped the newspapers. Welcome to 2019!

SOURCE 






Back To The Medieval Green World

Greens dream of a zero-emissions world without coal, oil, and natural gas.  They need to think about what they wish for.

First, there would be no mass production of steel without coke from coking coal to remove oxygen from iron ore.

People could cut trees in forests for charcoal to produce pig iron and crude steels, but forests would soon be exhausted.  Coal saved the forests from this fate.

We could produce gold and silver without using mineral hydro-carbons, and with ingenuity, we could probably produce unrefined copper, lead, and tin and alloys like brass and bronze.  But making large quantities of nuclear fuels, cement, aluminum, refined metals, plastics, petro-chemicals, and poly pipes would be impossible.

Making wind turbines and solar panels would also be impossible without fossil fuels.  A wind turbine needs lots of steel plus concrete, carbon fiber, and glass polymers as well as many other refined metals — copper, aluminum, rare earths, zinc, and molybdenum.  Solar panels and batteries need high-purity ingredients — silicon, lead, lithium, nickel, cadmium, zinc, silver, manganese, and graphite, all hard to make in backyard charcoal-fired furnaces.  Transporting, erecting, and maintaining wind and solar farms plus their roads and transmission lines need many pieces of diesel-powered machinery.

Every machine on Earth needs hydro-carbons for engine oil, gear oil, transmission oil, brake fluid, hydraulic oil, and grease.  We could of course use oils from seals, beeswax, and whales for lubrication.  The discovery of petroleum saved the whales from this fate.

Roads would be a challenge without oil-based bitumen.  The Romans made pretty good roads out of cobblestones (this would ease unemployment).  But hard labor would not sit well with aging Baby-Boomers or electronic-era Millennials.

Cars, motor launches, airplanes, iPhones, and CAT scans would be out.  Horses, oxen, sulkies, wooden rowing boats, sailing ships, herbal medicine, and semaphore would have a huge revival.  Some wood-burning steam tractors may still work and wood-gas generators may replace gasoline in some old cars.

This is the return to the “zero-emissions” world that Green extremists have planned for us.

But modern life cannot be supported by a pre-coal and pre-oil economy.  Without reliable electricity and diesel-powered farm machinery and transport trucks, cities are unsustainable.  In Green-topia, 90% of us people will need to go.

SOURCE 







Climate change: Cuttlefish of the Left extend tentacles on climate ‘truth’

Comment from Australia

Fortunately for all of us, the climate isn’t changing as rapidly as the politics and language around it. What started out as global warming was redefined by proponents as climate change, enabling them to pivot from having to explain record cold snaps to including them in the catch-all of change.

Now the political barometer is generating more language shifts. The alarmists, apparently, haven’t seen enough children crying at climate change protests so they want to up the ante. Left-wing newspaper The Guardian (along with The Guardian Australia online) is leading the crusade with a new dictate to staff — they should refer to the climate issue as an emergency, crisis or breakdown.

The paper’s official style guide has been amended saying the phrase “climate change is no longer considered to accurately reflect the seriousness of the ­situation”.

Wow. That is change you can almost believe in.

Up bobbed the phrase immediately in today’s Australian coverage. The Guardian Australia’s political editor Katharine Murphy covered the election fallout in full compliance. “This was an election in large part about the climate emergency, and the field evidence shows Australia in 2019 is deeply divided about the road ahead,” she wrote.

The Guardian is changing language in a brazen attempt to change politics. Later in the story, Murphy went on: “In his concession, Shorten noted that the ­divisions on the climate crisis were etched into Saturday night’s result.”

But a quick check of the transcript reveals a bit of an accuracy issue. Shorten never referred to a climate crisis. He spoke of “climate change” and “climate action” — guess he hadn’t got the memo.

It hardly needs saying this is the epitome of Orwellian. As ­George Orwell wrote in Politics and the Eng­lish Language: “If thought corrupts language then language can also corrupt thought.”

The Guardian doesn’t like the way you are thinking so it is adopting more emotive language to frighten you into its camp.

As Orwell wrote in his seminal essay: “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

And, just like that, you’ll now hear more words such as emergency, crisis and breakdown. Expect ABC reporters to broadcast them, too.

“The Guardian has updated its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world,” the paper said in a statement. “Instead of ‘climate change’, the preferred terms are ‘climate emergency, crisis or breakdown’ and ‘global heating’ is favoured over ‘global warming’, although the original terms are not banned. We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue. The phrase ‘climate change’, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”

Oh, The Guardian is also sceptical about the word sceptic. Apparently it’s not alarmist enough, either. The thought police have dictated that sceptics are now referred to as “climate science deniers” or “climate deniers” — terms that shamelessly echo the disgrace of Holocaust denial.

Even when they don’t have newsprint editions, the green Left is dealing in ink; like spurting cuttlefish, they want to muddy the waters and won’t be denied.

SOURCE  

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

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22 May, 2019  

Greenpeace activists blockade BP headquarters

Just another attention-getting stunt in the usual Greenpeace mode.  BP may well ask: "Why us?".  Like many others, oil and gas is their business

Environment campaigners have shut down BP’s London headquarters in protest at its continued investment in oil and gas.

Greenpeace said that its volunteers arrived at the offices in St James’ Square at 3am and “encased themselves in specially designed, toughened containers weighing several tonnes each, blockading all the HQ’s main entrances and preventing staff from entering the building”.

It said that the protesters had enough food and water to keep the offices closed all week.

The campaign group said that it was demanding that BP “immediately ends all exploration for new oil and gas and switches to investing only in renewable energy”. It argues that companies such as BP have business models “in direct opposition to efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change”.

SOURCE 







Buffett’s bet on oil and gas looks like a hint about the future

What’s Warren Buffett doing with a $US10 billion ($14.5bn) bet on the future of oil and gas, helping old-school Occidental Petroleum buy Anadarko, a US shale leader? For pundits promoting the all-green future, this looks like betting on horse farms circa 1919.

Meanwhile, broad market sentiment is decidedly bearish on hydrocarbons. The oil and gas share of the S&P 500 is at a 40-year low, and the first quarter of 2019 saw the Nasdaq Clean Edge Green Energy Index and “clean tech” exchange-traded funds outperform the S&P.

A week doesn’t pass without a mayor, governor or policymaker joining the headlong rush to pledge or demand a green energy future. Some 100 US cities have made such promises. Hydrocarbons may be the source of 80 per cent of America’s and the world’s energy, but to say they are currently out of favour is a dramatic understatement.

Yet it’s both reasonable and, for contrarian investors, potentially lucrative to ask: what happens if renewables fail to deliver?

The prevailing wisdom has wind and solar, paired with batteries, adding 250 per cent more energy to the world over the next two decades than American shale has added over the past 15 years. Is that realistic? The shale revolution has been the single biggest addition to the world energy supply in the past century. And even bullish green scenarios still see global demand for oil and gas rising, if more slowly.

If the favoured alternatives fall short of delivering what growing economies need, will markets tolerate energy starvation? Not likely. Nations everywhere will turn to hydrocarbons. And just how big could the call on oil and natural gas — and coal, for that matter — become if, say, only half as much green-tech energy gets produced as is now forecast? Keep in mind that a 50 per cent “haircut” would still mean unprecedented growth in green tech.

If the three hydrocarbons were each to supply one-third of such a posited green shortfall, global petroleum output would have to increase by an amount equal to doubling the production of the Permian shale field (Anadarko’s home). And the world supply of liquid natural gas would need to increase by an amount equal to twice Qatar’s current exports, plus coal would have to almost double what the top global exporter, Australia, now ships.

Green forecasters are likely out over their skis. All the predictions assume that emerging economies — the least wealthy nations — will account for nearly three-fourths of total new spending on renewables. That won’t happen unless the promised radical cost reductions occur.

For a bellwether reality check, note that none of the wealthy nations that are parties to the Paris Accord — or any of the poor ones, for that matter — have come close to meeting the green pledges called for. The International Energy Agency says: “Energy demand worldwide (in 2018) grew by … its fastest pace this decade … driven by a robust global economy … with fossil fuels meeting nearly 70 per cent of the growth for the second year running.”

The reason? Using wind, solar and batteries as the primary sources of a nation’s energy supply remains far too expensive. You don’t need science or economics to know that. Simply propose taking away subsidies or mandates, and you’ll unleash the full fury of the green lobby.

Meanwhile, there are already signs that the green vision is losing lustre. Sweden’s big shift to wind power has not only created alarm over inadequate electricity supplies; it’s depressing economic growth and may imperil that nation’s bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics. China, although adept at green virtue-signalling, has quietly restarted massive domestic coal-power construction and is building hundreds of coal plants for emerging economies around the world.

In the US, utilities, furiously but without fanfare, have been adding billions of dollars of massive oil- and natural-gas-burning diesel engines to the grid. Over the past two decades, three times as much grid-class reciprocating engine capacity has been added to the US grid as in the entire half-century before. It’s the only practical way to produce grid-scale electricity fast enough when the wind dies off. Sweden will doubtless be forced to do the same.

A common response to all of the above is to make more electric cars. But even the optimists’ 100-fold growth in electric vehicles wouldn’t displace more than 5 per cent of global oil demand in two decades. Tepid growth in fossil-fuel demand would be more than offset by growing economies’ appetites for air travel and manufactured goods. Goodness knows what would happen if Trump-like economic growth were to take hold in the rest of the developed world. As Mr Buffett knows, the IEA foresees the US supplying nearly three-fourths of the world’s net new demand for oil and gas.

Green advocates can hope to persuade governments — and thus taxpayers — to deploy a huge tax on hydrocarbons to ensure more green construction.

But there’s no chance that wealthy nations will agree to subsidise expensive green tech for the rest of the world. And we know where the Oracle of Omaha has placed a bet.

SOURCE 






Evolution of climate fear

In the lead-up to the latest report warning of a cataclysmic future for the natural world there was a frenzy behind the scenes to make sure it got the world’s attention.

Environment groups were briefed to spread the message that a UN report would be a supercharged affair when it was released this month.

The headline figure would be that one million species faced extinction. Biodiversity on planet Earth was on the road to ruin.

“Protecting biodiversity means protecting mankind because we human beings depend fundamentally on the diversity of the living,” UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay said in announcing the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services report in Paris earlier this month.

For many the report had echoes of the dramatic projections made almost a half-century ago when Paul Ehrlich predicted a “great die-off” in which billions would perish.

In 1970, S. Dillon Ripley, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and an ornithologist and wildlife conservationist, had assessed that before the turn of the 21st century between 75 per cent and 80 per cent of all the species of living animals would be extinct.

There have been questions about exactly how the latest million species extinction figure was arrived at, particularly given that it includes species that will probably never be identified or recorded.

The full global assessment report is yet to be published but the extinction rate appears to have been generated by extrapolating existing threatened species lists into the unknown.

New climate

The real import of the global assessment, however, is the attempt to set biodiversity on to an equal footing in the world politic with climate change.

The next step will be an important meeting scheduled for China next year at which the IPBES is planning to emerge as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change equivalent for nature.

IPBES chairman Sir Robert Watson did not disappoint in setting the tenor of alarm. The overwhelming evidence of the global assessment presented an ominous picture, he said.

The health of ecosystems on which humans and all other species depended was deteriorating more rapidly than ever. Humans were eroding the foundations of their economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide. But it was not too late.

“Through ‘transformative change’, nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably — this is also key to meeting most other global goals,” Watson said.

“By transformative change, we mean a fundamental, system-wide reorganisation across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.”

The punchline mirrors exactly that of the IPCC’s report into the impact of 1.5C warming released late last year to encourage governments to increase their action on climate change.

That report concluded “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society were needed”.

The message is being eagerly embraced by a new generation of activists increasingly persuaded by a resurgent consequentialist notion that, on climate and nature, the ends can justify the means.

Doubtless the natural world has problems. But there is a long history of dire predictions that simply have not come to pass.

More HERE 






A mountain of money won’t change the climate

BJORN LOMBORG

This British parliament declared the other day the planet was facing a “climate emergency”, making the UK the first country to do so after cities such as Los Angeles, London, Vancouver and Basel.

It’s a move that sums up all that is wrong with climate policy: politicians are making grandiose, fearmongering declarations that are divorced from economic ­reality, as well as from what will fix the problem they claim to be addressing. Political rhetoric is cheap but drastic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions remain prohibitively expensive and technologically challenging. After all, emissions cuts have been promised (and mostly not delivered) since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.

Cutting CO2 emissions to net zero by 2050 or much sooner is the ambitious goal being pushed by environmental protesters such as Extinction Rebellion and ­endorsed by politicians around the world, including several US presidential candidates. These protesters and politicians attract a lot of attention, but their pro­posals would incur far higher costs than almost any electorate is willing to pay.

Although opinion polls show that people care about climate change and want to spend a relatively modest amount to fix it, they want more spent on education, health, job opportunities and social support.

Most Americans are willing to pay up to $200 a year to fight climate change; in China, the amount is about $30. Britons are unwilling to cut their driving, flying and meat consumption significantly to combat climate change. And although the German government prioritises climate action so highly that it convened a “climate cabinet”, just one-third of Germans support a controversial proposed tax to ­reduce global warming.

The gulf between politicians and citizens is most apparent in France. The government vowed to cut CO2 emissions sharply by 2050 — but, embarrassingly, there have been almost no meaningful measures by President ­Emmanuel Macron. That’s ­because the “yellow vest” protest movement took to the streets to push back against the government’s fuel price surcharges, which disproportionately hit car-dependent people in rural areas.

France is not alone in neglecting its lofty promises. Recent analysis shows that of the 185 countries that have ratified the 2015 Paris Agreement, only 17 — including Algeria and Samoa — are meeting commitments.

Achieving net-zero emissions wouldn’t just cost a little more than people are willing to pay but an order of magnitude more.

The main economic models ­assessing the EU’s plan to ­reduce emissions by “merely” 80 per cent by 2050, for example, estimate average annual costs of at least $1.4 trillion. And Mexico’s relatively unambitious pledge to cut its emissions by half by 2050 will probably cost 7-15 per cent of GDP.

A report commissioned by New Zealand’s government to study its promise of carbon neutrality by 2050 found that the ­annual cost of meeting this target in 2050 and each subsequent year would be higher than the country’s entire annual budget. Moreover, this estimate assumes that policies are implemented as ­efficiently as possible.

In reality, no government manages to do that — so the cost of becoming carbon neutral could easily double. (The New Zealand government is steaming ahead with its policy regardless.)

The costs of deep emissions cuts are so high because we are all utterly reliant on fossil fuels. Green-energy alternatives, including solar and wind, are generally not ready to compete. As a result, policies forcing people and businesses to shift to immature technologies will slow growth and exacerbate energy poverty.

The world is much further ­behind in its “energy transition” than people realise. Solar and wind together deliver about 1 per cent of global energy, and the International Energy Agency ­estimates this will reach only 4.1 per cent by 2040.

Vaclav Smil, Bill Gates’s favourite energy ­expert, says that “claims of a rapid transition to a zero-carbon society are plain nonsense”, adding that “even a greatly accelerated shift towards renewables would not be able to relegate fossil fuels to minority contributors to the global energy supply … certainly not by 2050”.

Panicky political declarations and climate protests are driven by the widespread belief that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told us we have 12 years left to save the planet. This is at best a fundamental misunderstanding of what the IPCC said.

The panel was asked to establish which policies would be needed to achieve the almost ­impossible target of keeping temperature rises under 1.5C. The IPCC answered that this would indeed be almost impossible, ­requiring a total economic transformation in 12 years.

In fact, the IPCC’s last major report said that if we do nothing to stop climate change, the impact will be equivalent to a reduction in overall incomes of 0.2-2 per cent by the 2070s — similar to the ­effect of one economic recession.

Instead of pursuing costly and unrealistic emission-reduction targets, we should respond to climate change by getting the price of future green energy below that of fossil fuels so that everyone can afford to switch. A true transition requires investment in green-energy research and development.

Copenhagen Consensus previously assembled an expert panel of economists, including three Nobel laureates, to discuss solutions to climate change. The panel concluded that R&D spending on green energy should be dramatically increased, to 0.2 per cent of global GDP. This would be a less economically painful and much more effective way to solve the climate problem.

Declaring a climate emer­gency generates headlines and makes politicians and activists feel better. But empty rhetoric that ignores economic reality and common sense will not help the planet.

SOURCE 






Donald Trump, Jr. with Mark Levin on Green New Deal: ‘It’s Insanity,’ ‘Outright Stupidity’

On his nationally syndicated radio talk show “The Mark Levin Show” on Thursday, host Mark Levin had on his program Donald Trump, Jr. who said that the Green New Deal is “insanity” and “outright stupidity.”

“It’s insanity,” Donald Trump, Jr. said about the Green New Deal proposal. “It’s literally, just outright stupidity. But what’s scary about it, Mark, is that the leading Democratic contenders for the presidency of the United States are all like, ‘Oh, this is wonderful. We have to get onboard.’”

Below is a transcript, in pertinent part, of Mark Levin’s interview with Donald Trump, Jr. from Thursday:

Mark Levin: “Let me ask you one more question. Bernie Sanders, AOC and these folks are pushing this socialist agenda, this Green New Deal. You think the American people are going to support this?”

Donald Trump, Jr.: “Well, listen. Hey, you know what? Like all things, Democrats are good at one thing. They’re good at marketing, okay? Not so good with fact, not so good with numbers, and the reality— I’ve rallied about the Green New Deal because it sounds so wonderful. You know, the only problem is, Mark, it cost $93 trillion, okay? The U.S. government takes in, revenue, six point – you know, six and change trillion dollars a year. So, let’s just round it up and say, in 15 years, if we did nothing other than eliminate farting cows and come up with some miracle transportation that somehow doesn’t use energy to get to Hawaii – because we’re eliminating all air travel – in 15 years we will have paid for the Green New Deal. Now, they say it will somehow pay for itself. But they won’t show any facts how that happens.

“So, it’s insanity. It’s literally, just outright stupidity. But what’s scary about it, Mark, is that the leading Democratic contenders for the presidency of the United States are all like, ‘Oh, this is wonderful. We have to get onboard.’ They don’t have the guts, the gumption, the willingness to even look into or fact check a freshman congresswoman, who, two months ago, didn’t know what the three branches of government are.”

SOURCE 






Climate lies of the Australian Left sealed their Federal election loss

Soon after the election was called I lamented that it might be the dumbest campaign we have ever seen, primarily because of the inanity around climate change. I am sorry to say that prediction turned out to be more accurate than any climate modelling.

But the good news was that voters were smart enough to see through it. Labor and the Greens continually made absurd claims — actually let us call a spade a spade — they told the same lies every day. They said Australia was not taking climate action now; they said they could take action that would stop floods, droughts, bushfires and cyclones; they said these same actions would create jobs and prosperity; and they refused to even countenance putting a cost on them.

Now these same politicians and their army of virtue-signalling barrackers in the media now wonder why they lost the election. The idiocy is beyond comprehension — at least it is entertaining.

As they pack up their placards and wash down their cars after their anti-Adani convoy, the activists are quietly wondering whether they might have helped deliver a Coalition win. A grateful nation applauds them.

And while commentators continue to call for an end to the so-called climate wars they still don’t understand where that settlement will be found. They are right in deducing that only a bipartisan agreement can lead to solid, medium-term arrangements and investment certainty. But they keep looking for that agreement in the wrong place.

Amid the noise of the election fallout yesterday I had the pleasure of hearing a new voice who brought utter clarity to a policy area that has been unnecessarily complicated and divisive. I had long heard that James Stevens was someone to look out for and although I had met him once or twice, I had never had a serious conversation with him.

On Saturday the former chief of staff to South Australian Premier Steven Marshall was elected as the new Liberal member for Sturt, replacing his former boss Christopher Pyne. Stevens is clearly identified as a moderate Liberal but when I interviewed him on The Kenny Report yesterday I was struck by his no-nonsense approach on climate policy.

“I do support our policy position on meeting the Paris targets, I think we should do our fair share as a country but no more than that,” Stevens said. “And we certainly shouldn’t penalise Australian businesses and Australian families by having a disproportionate approach to reducing carbon emissions that just exports our jobs to other countries that aren’t putting the same unnecessary, overly ambitious targets in place.”

At this point I interrupted him to say this was the clearest exposition of this issue I had heard from his party for a long time. He continued.

“All it means is that businesses, particularly in the manufacturing sector, the jobs that are lost in our economy, if we take unnecessary policy positions that increase power prices in an uncompetitive way, those jobs are going to go to countries that are emitting an enormous amount more carbon than we’re emitting here in Australia at the moment. So I don’t understand why even the environmentalists think that we should put ourselves in that position because you’ve got the perverse situation where we are penalising our economy but we’re also penalising the planet. If you consider increasing greenhouse gas emissions to be something that puts the planet in peril, that’s going to be achieved by sending jobs from this country to other countries that are not doing anywhere near what we already are.”

There you have it. It is obvious; it is based on fact rather than emotion; it involves not a hint of climate denial or economic vandalism; just responsible, pragmatic and committed environmental and economic management.

Then this morning we heard some sense spoken by Labor frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon about how Labor must find a way to support climate action as well as the mining sector and the jobs, families and communities it supports. As Fitzgibbon pointed out, this is no more than giving voice to official ALP policy.

We are starting to see how Scott Morrison’s electoral triumph has unleashed an outbreak of intellectual clarity and common sense. The idiocy of the campaign is behind us, the emotive nonsense of the partisans is silenced (for a while at least) and there might be a chance for progress.

The answer is obvious. It is — as it always has needed to be — a bipartisan settlement. But not around reckless or overly ambitious gestures that aim to lead the world.

The major party consensus has to be a simple commitment to the Paris targets. No more, no less. A position Labor has held in the past before it started chasing unicorns. Labor has come back to the global consensus. It is that easy. If the major parties agree on that, the mechanism to deliver it is a doddle.

SOURCE  

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

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

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21 May, 2019  

Chinese researchers find the OPPOSITE of what global warming theory predicts -- in a study of Antarctic ice 1978–2016

They found lots of ups and downs in sea ice extent but a significant trend towards MORE ice. 

They were however mostly interested in what caused the fluctuations, in particular the very low ice cover in February 2011 and the big bounceback the year after.  They attributed it to variations in cloud cover. No mention of CO2

And they found that clouds had a COOLING effect, which is the exact opposite of what global warming theory says.  Warmists say that a warmer climate will produce more clouds -- which it well may do -- but then go on to say that the clouds will produce warming

They also note that trends in the Arctic are very different,  which rules out any global process being involved.  But by definition can you have ANY global process that does not include the poles?


The Contributions of Winter Cloud Anomalies in 2011 to the Summer Sea?Ice Rebound in 2012 in the Antarctic

Yunhe Wang et al.

Abstract

Antarctic sea?ice extent exhibits a modest positive trend in the period of near four decades. In recent years, the fluctuation in Antarctic sea ice has been strengthened, including a decrease toward the lowest sea?ice extent in February 2011 for the period of 1978–2016 and a strong rebound in the summer of 2012. The sea?ice recovery mainly occurs in the Weddell Sea, Bellingshausen Sea, Amundsen Sea, southern Ross Sea, and the eastern Somov Sea. This study offers a new mechanism for this summertime sea?ice rebound. We demonstrate that cloud?fraction anomalies in winter 2011 contributed to the positive Antarctic sea?ice anomaly in summer 2012.

The results show that the negative cloud?fraction anomalies in winter 2011 related to the large?scale atmospheric circulation resulted in a substantial negative surface?radiation budget, which cooled the surface and promoted more sea?ice growth. The sea?ice growth anomalies due to the negative cloud forcing propagated by sea?ice motion vectors from September 2011 to January 2012. The distribution of the sea?ice anomalies corresponded well with the sea?ice concentration anomalies in February 2012 in the Weddell Sea and eastern Somov Sea. Thus, negative cloud?fraction anomalies in winter can play a vital role in the following summer sea?ice distribution.

Introduction

Contrasting to Arctic sea ice, which has decreased in all seasons and at nearly all locations (Comiso et al.,2017; Liu, Lin, Kong, et al., 2016; Liu, Lin, Wang, et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2018), the sea?ice extent (SIE)around Antarctica has displayed a marked seasonal cycle (Polvani & Smith, 2013) and a modest, but statis-tically significant, positive trend since 1979 (Hobbs et al., 2016; Holland, 2014; Simmonds, 2015). Also, different regional trend distributions exist in Antarctic sea?ice with rapid sea?ice loss in the Amundsen Sea and Bellingshausen Sea, while significant and moderate ice gain in the Ross Sea and Weddell Sea, respectively. Large cancellations from different sectors have resulted in a net positive trend in the Antarctic totalSIE (Parkinson & Cavalieri, 2008).However, the causes of the Antarctic sea?ice expansion remain a matter of debate, which could be caused by anthropogenic and natural factors. Some mechanisms have been suggested. Liu and Curry (2010) suggested that increased precipitation in the warming climate is an attributable factor for the current Antarctic sea?icegrowth. In an ice?ocean modeling study, Zhang (2014) suggested that strengthened westerlies increasesea?ice volume by producing more ridged ice, which leads to sea ice more resilient to melting. There wasa hypothesis that increased surface freshwater from the Antarctic continent and enhanced snowfall promotesea?ice expansion by stabilizing the upper water column (Rignot et al., 2013), which increases upper?oceanstratification and suppresses oceanic heat transport (Bintanja et al., 2013; Liu & Curry, 2010). In addition,the dipole pattern of the Pacific sector, combined with increasing sea ice in the Ross Sea and decreasingice in the Bellingshausen Sea, has been ascribed to strengthening the Amundsen Sea low (Clem & Fogt,2015; Fogt et al., 2012; Meehl et al., 2016; Raphael et al., 2016; Turner et al., 2016). Moreover, these sea?ice trend patterns around Antarctica have been attributed to interdecadal variability (Fan et al., 2014;Gagné et al., 2015), sea?surface temperature warming in the tropical Pacific (Clem & Fogt, 2015), andatmospheric intrinsic variability in the Antarctic (Turner et al., 2016

Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 2018, Volume 124, Issue 6






Guardian Concocts Scarier Term For ‘Global Warming’ — Global Heating

Leftist verbal magic again.  They think they can change the nature of a thing by renaming it

The Guardian newspaper has decided to change the name ‘global warming’ because it doesn’t sound scary enough. From now on, the Guardian‘s editor-in-chief Kath Viner has ordered, ‘global warming’ is to be called ‘global heating.’

This, apparently, will more closely reflect the “scale of the climate and wildlife crises” now afflicting Mother Gaia.

The use of the names like ‘climate science denier’ or ‘climate denier’ for ‘climate skeptic’ makes Ms. Viner’s claim that the Guardian is trying to be more ‘scientifically precise and rooted in facts’ look nonsensical.

For a start, it presupposes that ‘climate science’ is a field with a fixed view of how climate works – which simply isn’t true. There are lots of competing theories on what it is that drives climate.

While climate alarmists insist that recent warming is primarily man-made and driven by anthropogenic CO2, many other respected scientists believe it is due to a combination of factors, ranging from solar activity to cycles in the deep ocean.

There is, in essence, no such thing as a ‘climate science denier’ because not even the most ardent skeptic denies the existence of ‘climate science’.

Even more problematic is that use of the word ‘denier’, which implicitly invokes the Holocaust – and in doing so, weirdly and irresponsibly puts ‘being skeptical about anthropogenic global warming’ in the same category as ‘denying that Hitler murdered six million Jews.’

"The next time someone talks about “climate change deniers,” ask them to name one — and tell you just where specifically you can find their words, declaring that climates do not change. You can bet the rent money that they cannot tell you"

There are scientists on both sides of that issue. Presumably, the issue could be debated on the basis of evidence and analysis.

But this has become a political crusade, and political issues tend to be settled by political means, of which demonizing the opposition with catchwords is one.

The Guardian is tacitly admitting that this is not an argument it is capable of winning on the science or indeed the facts. Therefore, it has decided to ramp up the rhetoric instead.

There’s a name for what it’s doing and it’s not ‘journalism’.  The word – just in case Ms. Viner feels like adding it to the Guardian style guide – is ‘propaganda.’

SOURCE 






Ending Obama EPA climate deception

Let’s finally review Endangerment Finding used to justify trillions in climate and energy costs

Paul Driessen

In December 2009, the Obama Environmental Protection Agency issued its Endangerment Finding (EF) – decreeing that carbon dioxide (CO2) and other “greenhouse gases” (GHGs) endanger the health and welfare of Americans. In the process, EPA ignored the incredible economic, health and welfare benefits of fossil fuels – and the fact that (even at just 0.04% of the atmosphere) carbon dioxide is the miracle molecule that enables plants to grow and makes nearly all live on Earth possible.

EPA turned CO2 into a “dangerous pollutant” and ruled that fossil fuels must be eradicated. The agency subsequently used its EF to justify tens of billions of dollars in climate research, anti-fossil fuel regulations, and wind and solar subsidies; President Obama’s signing of the Paris climate treaty; and proposals to spend trillions of dollars a year on Green New Deal (GND) programs.

And yet, despite multiple demands that this be done, there has never been any formal, public review of the EF conclusion or of the secretive process EPA employed to ensure the result of its “analysis” could only be “endangerment” – and no awkward questions or public hearings would get in the way.

Review, transparency and accountability may finally be on the way, however, in the form of potential Executive Branch actions. If they occur – and they certainly should – both are likely to find that there is no valid scientific basis for the EF, and EPA violated important federal procedural rules in rendering its predetermined EF outcome. (One could even say the EF was obtained primarily because of prosecutorial misconduct, a kangaroo court proceeding, and scientific fraud.) Failure to examine and reverse the EF would mean it hangs like Damocles’ sword over the USA, awaiting another climate-focused president.

To the consternation and outrage of climate alarmists, keep-fossil-fuels-in-the-ground radicals, and predictable politicians and pundits, President Trump may soon appoint a Presidential Committee on Climate Change, to review “dangerous manmade climate change” reports by federal agencies.

Meanwhile, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has filed a formal petition with EPA, asking that the agency stop utilizing and relying on the EF – and instead subject the finding to a proper “high level” peer review, as required by the Information Quality Act. The reasoning presented in CEI’s succinct and persuasive petition is compelling. Its main points are these.

* EPA’s Endangerment Finding and the Technical Support Document (TSD) that supposedly justifies it did not meet Information Quality Act (IQA) requirements for how the work should have been done.

* The agency’s evaluation of the then-current climate change and related science was clearly a “highly influential scientific assessment” (HISA), which triggered important IQA and OMB rules governing rulemakings that have “a potential impact of more than $500 million in any year” … or present “novel, controversial or precedent-setting” changes … or would likely raise “significant interagency interest.”

* EPA’s “Clean Power Plan” to shut down coal-fired power plants alone would cost $2.5 billion in annual compliance costs, EPA admitted. Its motor vehicle rules would cost tens of billions. The Paris agreement and GND would add trillions per year in costs to the US economy. All are based on the EF. And all were certainly controversial and generated significant interest by multiple other government agencies.

* EPA deliberately downplayed the significance of its review and decision, ignored the IQA and OMB requirements, and refused to allow citizens, independent energy, climate and health experts, or even scientific and professional societies to nominate potential reviewers or participate in the EF analysis.

* Instead, the agency utilized an entirely internal review process, designed and conducted entirely by its own federal employees. Those employees had substantial conflicts of interest, because they were reviewing their own scientific work; would be writing, implementing and enforcing regulations based on that work; and had jobs and professional status that might be affected by the outcome of their review.

[The review team even summarily dismissed one of EPA’s most senior energy and economic experts, because his probing analyses and comments “do not help the legal or policy case” for the EF decision.]

* EPA never allowed the general public or scientific, energy, health or economic experts to review its draft scientific assessment; never sponsored any public meetings; and never let its internal peer reviewers see any of the public comments that outside experts and organizations submitted to the agency.

* In fact, none of the EPA peer review panel’s questions and responses have ever been made public.

Each of these actions violated specific IQA and OMB peer review guidelines. Indeed, two years after the Endangerment Finding was issued, even EPA’s own Inspector General found that that agency had violated rules governing all of these matters. And yet even then nothing was done to correct them.

The entire Obama EPA process smells like a crooked prosecutor who framed CO2 and was determined to get a conviction. The agency built its entire case on tainted, circumstantial evidence, and testimony from agency officials who had conflicts of interest and their own reasons for wanting CO2 convicted of endangering Americans. EPA reviewers ignored or hid exculpatory evidence and colluded to prevent witnesses for the CO2 defendant from presenting any defense or cross-examining agency witnesses.

A full reexamination now is essential, and not just because the Obama EPA violated every procedural rule in the books. But because EPA ignored volumes of climate science that contradicted its preordained EF finding. Because real-world climate and weather observations consistently contradict alarmist computer models and headlines. Because science is never settled … must never be driven by ideology … and must be reevaluated when new scientific evidence is discovered – or evidence of misbehavior is uncovered.

We know far more about Earth’s climate and have far more and better data than a decade ago. But climatologists still cannot explain why our planet experienced multiple ice ages and interglacial periods, Roman and Medieval warm periods, the Little Ice Age, or Anasazi, Mayan and Dust Bowl droughts.

And yet some of them insist they can accurately predict calamitous temperatures, weather events and extinctions 10, 20, 100 years from now – based on computer models whose temperature predictions are already a degree Fahrenheit above what satellites are measuring … and that rely primarily or solely on carbon dioxide, while downplaying or ignoring fluctuations in solar energy and cosmic ray output, the reflective properties of clouds, El Niño events, ocean current shifts, and other powerful natural forces.

And then, in the face of all that uncertainty and politicized science, they demand that the United States slash or eliminate its fossil fuel use – and that the poorest nations on Earth continue to forego fossil fuel development, and instead remain wracked by joblessness, misery, disease, malnutrition and early death.

Thankfully, poor countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America are building or planning more than 2,000 coal and gas-fueled generating plants. They deserve to be freed from dictatorial carbon-colonialism and eco-manslaughter – and to become as wealthy, healthy and vibrant as modern industrialized nations that also relied on fossil fuels to develop … and are still 80% dependent on those fuels today.

But if those countries are building fossil fuel power plants, driving millions more cars and trucks, and emitting multiple times more CO2 and other GHGs than the United States – why should the USA slash or eliminate its coal, oil and natural gas? Why should we roll back our job creation, living standards, health and welfare, based on the IPCC’s junk science and EPA’s fraudulent Endangerment Finding?

For unfathomable reasons, a few White House advisors still oppose any PCCS or IQA-triggered review of the EF or junk/fraudulent science behind it. Perhaps they are too closely tied to the Deep State or invested financially or ideologically in the $2-trillion-per-year Climate-Industrial Complex. But whatever their reasons, they must be ignored in favor of science and the national interest. Let’s get the job done – now!

Write to President Trump: Ask him to appoint his Presidential Committee on Climate Science – and instruct the EPA to agree to the CEI petition and review the 2009 Endangerment Finding forthwith!

Via email






Five years of the Labour Party's "watermelon" policies would ruin Britain

Take Corbyn’s energy and environment policies, which have been leaked to the press. Here’s the Telegraph‘s take:

Jeremy Corbyn has drawn up plans to take control of Britain’s energy networks in a multi-billion pound power-grab modelled on the nationalisation of Northern Rock.

A leaked Labour party document has revealed plans for a swift and sweeping renationalization of the country’s £62bn energy networks at a price decided by Parliament.

Under the plans the energy companies will fall under the control of a newly formed public body, the National Energy Agency. The quango will control the energy system while operating the high voltage wires. It will also oversee a matrix of so-called “regional energy agencies” that will advance Labour’s plans to tackle climate change.

The agencies will be tasked with sourcing low carbon or renewable sources for 60pc of all energy use by 2030. They will also oversee the rollout of electric vehicle charging networks and new energy storage projects across the country.

Like John Constable at the Global Warming Policy Foundation, I have little sympathy for the big energy companies threatened with nationalization – nor, frankly, with their shareholders.

As Constable points out the UK energy industry is not about the creation of value but is essentially just a form of subsidy farming.

The big energy firms could have resisted. They could have said: “Look. Our job is to generate the power needed to keep the lights on in Britain as cheaply and efficiently as possible. Leave us out of your green politicking.”

But the easy money from rising prices and growing subsidies was just too tempting. Big energy colluded with the government by pretending that rising energy prices had nothing to do with green levies and climate targets.

When everyone finally wakes up to the degree to which their energy bills have been artificially inflated by climate change nonsense, the energy companies are going to be even less popular than they are already.

According to Constable:

It is obvious that energy and climate policies already accounted for a large a fraction of the price in 2014, prices being 17% higher than they would have been in the absence of policies. By 2020 policies were predicted to make prices 37% higher, and 41% higher in 2030.

And that’s just on the current trajectory. It doesn’t require much imagination to appreciate how much more energy bills will soar if Labour gets in and starts erecting still more bat-chomping bird-slicing eco-crucifixes as part of its renewables/low carbon “60pc of all energy use by 2030” target.

Before we start getting too cross about Labour’s watermelon lunacy, though, let’s remind ourselves which party has been in charge of Britain’s energy policy since 2010. The Conservatives.

The Conservatives, in other words, have had nearly ten years in office to demonstrate that on energy, they can be more fiscally responsible, consumer-friendly and evidence-driven than its left wing/green opponents.

Instead, they have bought wholesale into the anti-capitalist, anti-market, anti-science, anti-consumer, anti-freedom green agenda – killing through overregulation the nascent UK fracking industry, pouring more taxpayer subsidies into crony capitalist boondoggles like solar energy and offshore wind.

There are a few politicians who totally get this – from The Brexit Party’s Nigel Farage and UKIP’s Gerard Batten to, in the Conservatives, Liz Truss, Priti Patel, Owen Paterson and Jacob Rees-Mogg (whom I interviewed this week for Breitbart – watch this space!).

I hope these are the kind of people who are in office once the current storm afflicting British politics has blown over.

And let us pray that when that moment comes, we won’t have had to endure an interregnum by Jeremy Corbyn and his watermelon loons beforehand. The birds and the bats and the British countryside, not to mention the UK economy, would never forgive us.

SOURCE 






The recent Australian Federal election: North Queensland MP  reveals how anti-coal extremists of the Left blew their chances in six must-win Queensland seats

Losing the whole of Queensland North of Brisbane was an amazing loss.  And there was no doubt why:  Leftist opposition to new coal mines.  Had they won those seats they would be in government now

Bob Katter has launched a blistering attack against Deputy Opposition Leader Tanya Plibersek, claiming her comments cost Labor the 'unloseable' election.

The maverick MP said the potential future leader of the Labor party was out of touch with Queensland voters, and that her stance against coal mines alienated constituents in the regions.

'Tanya Plibersek ran amok,' the MP for the seat of Kennedy in north Queensland told Sky News.

'She was out there denigrating the coal industry and saying it will phase out. To say that on the eve of an election in which there are six marginal seats in north Queensland in the coal belt is absolutely disastrous.'

The seats in question include Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton's northern Brisbane seat of Dickson and the Townsville-based seat of Herbert.

George Christensen is expected to return to his marginal seat of Dawson while the Coalition also managed to retain the seats of Flynn, Capricornia and Leichhardt.

'The ALP were certain on the polls to take all six seats, but she and a bunch of loud mouthed extremists that have an immense amount of power in the Labor movement... they blew it to smithereens,' Mr Katter said. 

Ms Plibersek has been vocal in her opposition to the Adani coal mine in Queensland.

She previously said Australians 'can't rely on an Indian mining company to bring jobs to central and north Queensland'.

She also said she was sceptical Adani would bring as many jobs to the region as it had promised, and believed backers may have underestimated the impact it could have on the environment.

Labor was accused of alienating their core electorate with policies that were too progressive and divisive on climate change and negative gearing.

Older Australians in particular appeared to turn on Labor over the controversial plan to scrap franking credits for self-funded retirees.

Labor's climate change policy and stance on Adani was at odds with many voters who wanted the new coal mine, which has promised to provide hundreds of jobs in regions struggling against drought and high levels of unemployment.

Liberal Senator Arthur Sinodinos said the result could be partially explained by those opposing the Adani project being seen as anti-jobs.

'Adani became about jobs. It became emblematic of 'we want jobs' and the Bob Brown caravan which went up there to talk about stopping Adani had locals thinking, 'hang on, you are not going to tell us how to live',' he said.

Tax cuts and ministry changes will be Mr Morrison's agenda as the nation awaits the final results of the federal election.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison looks likely to win 77 seats, allowing him to appoint a Speaker and govern in majority.

Out of three close seats listed on the Australian Electoral Commission website on Monday, the Liberals were on track to win Chisholm in Victoria and Bass in Tasmania, with Labor holding the NSW seat of Macquarie.

If the current count trends continue, this will give the Liberals 77 seats in the 151-seat House of Representatives, with Labor on 68 and six crossbenchers.

SOURCE  

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

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

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20 May, 2019  

Does what I eat have an effect on climate change?

The article below from the NYT is too silly for me to reproduce all of it.  It is a sort of hymn for the global warming religion.  You have to believe in "planet-warming greenhouse gases" to take any notice of it. 

But note also below that the do-gooders never miss a chance to condemn "red meat and dairy".  That evil red meat will both ruin your health and destroy the planet.  There's actually nothing bad that red meat will not do. It's a sort of new Puritanism being preached below.  And, like the original Puritanism, its main aim is to stop pleasure and enforce suffering


Yes. The world’s food system is responsible for about one-quarter of the planet-warming greenhouse gases that humans generate each year. That includes raising and harvesting all the plants, animals and animal products we eat — beef, chicken, fish, milk, lentils, kale, corn and more — as well as processing, packaging and shipping food to markets all over the world. If you eat food, you’re part of this system.

HOW EXACTLY DOES FOOD CONTRIBUTE TO GLOBAL WARMING?

Lots of ways. Here are four of the biggest: When forests are cleared to make room for farms and livestock — this happens on a daily basis in some parts of the world — large stores of carbon are released into the atmosphere, which heats up the planet.

When cows, sheep and goats digest their food, they burp up methane, another potent greenhouse gas contributing to climate change. Animal manure and rice paddies are also big methane sources. Finally, fossil fuels are used to operate farm machinery, make fertilizer and ship food around the globe, all of which generate emissions.

WHICH FOODS HAVE THE LARGEST IMPACT?

Meat and dairy, particularly from cows, have an outsize impact, with livestock accounting for around 14.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases each year. That’s roughly the same amount as the emissions from all the cars, trucks, airplanes and ships combined.

A major study published last year in the journal Science calculated the average greenhouse gas emissions associated with different foods: In general, beef and lamb have the biggest climate footprint per gram of protein, while plant-based foods tend to have the smallest impact. Pork and chicken are somewhere in the middle.

Now, these are only averages. Beef raised in the United States generally produces fewer emissions than beef raised in Brazil or Argentina. Certain cheeses can have a larger greenhouse gas impact than a lamb chop. And some experts think these numbers may actually underestimate the impact of deforestation associated with farming and ranching.

But most studies agree with this general hierarchy: Plant-based foods usually have a lower impact than meat, and beef and lamb tend to be the worst offenders by a considerable margin.

IS THERE A SIMPLE FOOD CHOICE I CAN MAKE THAT WOULD REDUCE MY CLIMATE FOOTPRINT?

Consuming less red meat and dairy will typically have the biggest impact for most people in wealthy countries. That doesn’t necessarily mean going vegan. You might just eat less of the foods with the biggest climate footprints, like beef, lamb and cheese. If you’re looking for substitutes, pork, chicken, eggs and mollusks have a smaller footprint. But plant-based foods like beans, pulses, grains and soy tend to be the most climate-friendly options of all.

HOW MUCH WOULD CHANGING MY DIET ACTUALLY HELP?

It varies from person to person. But a number of studies have concluded that people who eat a meat-heavy diet — including much of the population of the United States and Europe — could shrink their food-related footprint by one-third or more by moving to a vegetarian diet. Giving up dairy would reduce those emissions even further.

If you don’t want to go that far, there are still ways to shrink your individual footprint. Just eating less meat and dairy, and more plants, can reduce emissions. Cutting back on red meat in particular can make a surprisingly large difference: According to a World Resources Institute analysis, if the average American replaced a third of the beef he or she eats with pork, poultry or legumes, his or her food-related emissions would still fall by around 13 percent.

Keep in mind that food consumption is often only a small fraction of a person’s total carbon footprint: There’s also driving, flying and home energy use to consider. But dietary changes are often one of the quickest ways for many people to lighten their impact on the planet.

SOURCE 







Joe Biden's Heresy
    
The left is starting to take aim at Democratic front-runner Joe Biden. At a conference this week, liberal activists repeatedly booed when told that Biden wanted to find “middle ground” on climate policy. When an audience member shouted “No middle ground!” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., replied, “No middle ground is right!” and declared “I will be damned if the same politicians who refused to act come back today and say we need a middle-of-the-road approach to save our lives.” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., joined in her criticism, “There is no ‘middle ground’ when it comes to climate policy.”

The left’s issues with the former vice president go far beyond his position on climate policy. To the neo-socialists now driving the debate in the Democratic primary campaign, Biden’s entire approach to politics — reaching across the aisle and forging compromise built on consensus — is anathema.

Biden’s supposed heresy is that he believes in working with Republicans. He says on the stump that Trump is an “aberration” and predicts that if the president is defeated, Republicans will work toward bipartisan reform, which Biden insists is the only way to get anything worthwhile done. “This nation cannot function without generating consensus,” he said in New Hampshire this week.

Well, generating consensus is not what the left wants. It is not simply opposed to Trump. Many liberals believe, as Ocasio-Cortez has put it, that “capitalism is irredeemable.” So for many Democrats, the Obama-Biden approach to governing is now considered too moderate. On climate, they don’t want the government to simply invest in green energy, like President Barack Obama did. They want to spend tens of trillions of dollars to replace every vehicle that uses a combustion engine, bring high-speed rail to every corner of the country, upgrade or replace every building in the United States and eliminate all fossil-fuel energy.

On health care, they no longer make a pretense of promising voters that they can keep their health plans, like Obama did. They openly advocate abolishing private insurance altogether. Biden’s support for a “public option” that would give Americans a choice of buying into a Medicare-like health plan is seen on the left as capitulation. There will be no choices in the brave new world of democratic socialism. We will have government-run health care for all, whether we want it or not.

Of course, Biden is no moderate. He is an old-fashioned, liberal Democrat. But to the Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party, that makes him too far to the right — and too willing to compromise with the far right. I saw Biden’s willingness to do so up close when I worked on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the 1990s. As the ranking Democrat, Biden prided himself on his ability to compromise with committee chairman Jesse Helms, R-N.C., arguably the most uncompromising conservative in the Senate. Together, they passed legislation — the so-called Helms-Biden Act — to reform the United Nations and cut deals to restructure the State Department. “As chairman and ranking member, we passed some of the most significant legislation passed in the last 40 years,” Biden explained during a 2015 speech. He continues to tout his relationship with Helms (who died more than a decade ago) on the stump as an example of how he can work with die-hard conservatives to get things done.

Is this what Democratic primary voters want? Biden’s lead in the national polls suggests it may be. But it is early. After all, at this time in 2015, Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor at the time, appeared to be the front-runner for the Republican nomination and no one was taking Donald Trump seriously. Biden may be ahead for now, but all the energy inside the Democratic Party seems to be with the uncompromising left. It sees Biden standing in the way of its takeover of the Democratic Party. So as his lead in the polls expands, their efforts to stop him — and his heretical calls for compromise — will escalate.

“We have to unify this country,” Biden said at a speech in Iowa earlier this month. “The other side is not my enemy, it’s my opposition.” How sad that has become a controversial statement.

SOURCE 







JEREMY CLARKSON thinks the Greenies don't realize the pleasure that powerful cars can give

As I write, hundreds of men and women with unnecessary hair are blocking up London by staging Kumbaya singalongs and holistic wellness seminars at key intersections. It’s hard to understand what they want, exactly, as their keynote speaker is a girl of about eight who probably still believes in unicorns. But I think it has something to do with climate change and being bored.

Presumably they would very much enjoy the life I’ve been leading for the past couple of months. I lived on an island off the coast of Vietnam where there were no hire cars. So I used a bicycle, and each day would pedal through a jungle, in the sunshine, to the fabulous market where I would buy fresh fish and unusual vegetables.

I’m back in London now and it’s all a huge shock. First of all, you can hear birds singing, which, thanks to the constant horn-blowing, you cannot in Vietnam. And second, instead of a bicycle, I have been getting around in an Audi R8 Performance – the fastest road car to wear those four rings.

There have been beefed-up and hunkered-down versions of the R8 before, and it’s hard to see why the Performance is faster or better. It produces only a little more power than the old Plus. And yet it’s quicker from 0-200km/h than a Porsche 911 Turbo S. With a top speed of 330km/h, it’s faster flat out than a light aircraft.

But it’s not the speed that really matters in this car. It’s the feel of the thing. And that comes from the fact that it uses a V10 engine. Almost all cars these days are turbocharged, and that’s fine. Turbos produce the power and the torque while keeping the polar bears happy. However, comparing a turbocharged engine to a normally aspirated V10 is like comparing a piano to the organ in St Paul’s Cathedral. When you put your foot down in a V10-powered R8, and the double-clutch gearbox works its magic as you rocket down the road in a blizzard of G and thunder, it’s hard not to think, “This is what a supercar is meant to be like”.

I’ll be honest with you. After two months of driving nothing but a bicycle, and with news of those eco-halfwits filling the traffic reports, I did think for the first day or two that cars of this type were a bit stupid and unnecessary. It was hard to watch Sir Attenborough in that new Netflix series, gently castigating us all for messing up his film set, and then go to work in a car that sounds like a volcano.

After a few days, though, normal service was resumed. I began to realise a V10 is better than a bicycle and having fun at 280km/h is more important than having angst about plankton. I began to appreciate the engineering, too. This is a massively powerful car and it makes do with a gearbox that has only seven speeds. Which made me question why my gap-year bicycle needed 21.

And then there was the Audi’s ability to settle down when driving round town. It would glide over speed bumps without scuffing its nose, and would jiggle and wiggle over potholes without transmitting news of the shoddy workmanship to the seat of my pants.

There were one or two irritants, though. They probably thought they were being ever so clever moving the screen from the centre of the dash to the instrument binnacle. But when you turn the wheel to back into a parking space, you can’t see the reversing camera. And the bonnet catch was so stiff you had to take a running jump at the bonnet to get it to close properly. Oh, and an awful lot of stuff is an optional extra – the diamond stitching in the roof lining, for example, costs £2500 ($4700). And how small does your penis have to be before you think, “Yes. I need that in my life”?

The car itself is quite good value. I know this is not a view that would go down well at the holistic wellness seminar, but it is, actually. For a truly fast, viscerally exciting, all-wheel-drive, mid-engined supercar that you really could use every day. There’s just one problem. The whole point of a supercar is that you don’t use it every day. It’s meant to be special. Something you take out only at weekends. So, while I admire the Audi and I liked driving it, I’d always spend a bit more and go for its virtually identical twin sister – the even more viscerally exciting Lamborghini Huracan. Because if you’re going to buy a car that annoys Sir Attenborough, you may as well get one that really annoys him.

SOURCE 






Congress Should Let Electric Vehicle Subsidies Die

With the $7,500 tax credit for electric car buyers already in the phase out period for the two biggest manufacturers – Tesla and GM – it's no surprise that many Democrats in Congress are clamoring to lift the cap and keep the subsidies flowing. Unfortunately, several Republicans are joining the effort, creating unfortunate bipartisan support for a piecemeal version of the crackpot Green New Deal they have been rightly mocking and ridiculing.

The so-called Drive America Forward Act would triple the existing cap on subsidies of 200,000 per manufacturer – massively expanding a program that was always supposed to be temporary and was originally premised on the national security rationale that it would lessen dependence on foreign oil – a now comically anachronistic concern when the United States has become a leading oil exporter.

Moreover, while the Green New Deal is a socialist income leveling exercise in the guise of environmental policy, electric vehicle subsidies use environmental delusion as a cover for a wealth transfer from poor and middle income Americans to the rich who buy electric hobby cars as their third or fourth vehicle.  Voters agree – with a recent poll showing 67 percent do not think their tax dollars should help pay for electric vehicle subsidies.

The Pacific Research Institute looked at IRS data and found that more than half of the electric car buyers claiming the credit make more than $200,000 per year and nearly 80 percent make more than $100,000. Just one percent make $50,000 or less.

There is also a geographic dimension to the wealth redistribution.  The most recent industry data shows that nearly half of all electric vehicles sold in the United States are sold in California, which has its own lavish subsidies at the state level.

A September 2018 NERA Economic Consulting study looked at the economic impact of eliminating the cap and found that the costs outweigh the benefits.  The study finds total household income falling as a consequence of lifting the cap by $7 billion in 2020 and $12 billion in 2035, which is about $50 to $70 per household in lost income every year.

That's a cost of over $50 every year to middle-income Americans to pay for subsidies for rich people in California.

Orrin Hatch, the original sponsor of the bill, explained the logic behind the cap in 2007:

"I want to emphasize that like the tax credits available under current law for hybrid electric vehicles, the tax incentives in the FREEDOM Act are temporary. They are needed in order to help these products over the initial stage of production, when they are quite a bit more expensive than older technology vehicles, to the mass production stage, where economies of scale will drive costs down and the credits will no longer be necessary."

At the time, big subsidies for electric vehicles were justified based on the theory that they were needed to lessen American dependence on foreign oil.  A decade later, America is the largest oil and gas producer in the world and electric vehicles are a mature enough technology that they should be left to succeed or fail on the preference of consumers, not politicians.

Ironically, it is now electric vehicles that are vulnerable to strategic supply disruptions because they require rare earth minerals for their motors and batteries –the production of which is overwhelmingly controlled by China.  Such resources also present moral issues, with the cobalt used for batteries sourced in part from Congo mines worked by children in hazardous conditions.

Meanwhile, gasoline vehicles have become vastly more environmentally friendly and fuel efficient.  In fact, a study last year from the Manhattan Institute found that widespread deployment of electric vehicles would only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1 percent – and would increase emissions of SO2, NOx, and particulate matter.

The bottom line: efforts to raise the cap are a cash grab that will force taxpayers to subsidize wealthy Californians for no presently valid reason.  Congress should let the subsidy phase out as scheduled.

SOURCE 






Australian academic quits in disgust over university sacking of Peter Ridd, a critic of their Greenie policies

A James Cook University associate professor has resigned from her honorary position over the sacking of professor Peter Ridd, who was dismissed after he criticised the institution’s climate change science.

Sheilagh Cronin ­resigned from the unpaid role at the Townsville university in protest and said she was “ashamed” that she had not done so earlier.

A marine physicist who had worked at the university for 30 years, Professor Ridd was censured three times before being sacked last year. He challenged the dismissal in the Federal Court and on April 16 judge Salvatore Vasta found all 17 findings used by the university to justify the sacking were unlawful.

Dr Cronin, an adjunct associate professor with the university’s Mount Isa Centre of Rural and Remote Health and a former president of the Rural Doctors Association of Australia, sent a letter to vice-chancellor Sandra Harding last week outlining her reasons for resigning.

“I am coming to the end of my professional career but my main reason for resigning is my disquiet over the dismissal of the respected physics professor … Peter Ridd,” Dr Cronin wrote. “I believe his treatment by yourself and your board is completely contrary to the philosophy of open discussion and debate that should be at the heart of every university. It saddens me that the reputation of JCU is being damaged by the injustice of Professor Ridd’s case.”

JCU denounced the Federal Court’s decision and stood by its disciplinary processes, but has yet to decide if it will appeal. The university has since declined to comment on the case.

In 2016, Professor Ridd was censured after he emailed a journalist to allege that images of unhealthy coral given to the media by university colleagues were misleading and the photographs were being used to “spin a story” about the impact of climate change. He was censured again in 2017 when he repeated the claims on Sky News and said there was a lack of rigorous quality assurance in terms of the university’s climate change science.

After a third alleged violation of the code of conduct, including allegedly leaking confidential information about the disciplinary process, Professor Ridd was sacked in April last year.

“At the time, it made me feel quite uneasy that they’d sacked someone for questioning the methodology of the research into the Great Barrier Reef,” Dr Cronin said. “But nobody from JCU did anything to support him.”

Dr Cronin, who has never met or spoken to Professor Ridd, said she did not believe the university would take much notice of her resignation, given her association with the university was mostly a title.

“It’s a small protest in support of science and fairness and justice,” she said. “It does make me feel a bit sad because it was an honour to get that (title). “But, equally, people should stand up when they see something like that.”

SOURCE  

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

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

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19 May, 2019  

Satellite information reveals Antarctica ice thinning at ‘extraordinary rate’

This tired old con again.  A key Leftist modus operandi is to tell only half the story, leaving out the bits that contradict  Leftism. It is simple dishonesty designed to deceive people who are not well-informed on poliical issues.

What they ignore here is Zwally's finding that Antactic ice is ON THE WHOLE increasing and that the relatively small area they concentrates on -- West Antarctica -- has substantial sub-surface vulcanism that inevitably causes some melting.  You would melt too if you had a volcano under you


Antarctica is losing ice at a rapid rate, according to new satellite information.

Glaciers are now sliding into the sea because of the warming Southern Ocean as ice vanishes five times faster than it did in the 1990s.

The West Antarctic ice sheet used to be stable a few decades ago, but new evidence shows that up to a quarter of it is now thinning.

In the worst-hit locations, more than 100 metres of ice thickness has been lost.

Completely losing the West Antarctic ice sheet would result in global sea levels rising by about five metres.

This amount of sea level rise would drown coastal cities around the world.

Scientists think sea levels are now rising at the extreme end of what was predicted to happen gradually just a few years ago, and current losses of ice are said to be doubling every decade.

This research has been published in the journal of Geophysical Research Letters.

It describes how scientists used satellites images to compare the sizes of ice sheets from 1992 to 2017 with weather information.

Professor Andy Shepherd, who led the study, said: “From a standing start in the 1990s, thinning has spread inland progressively over the past 25 years — that is rapid in glaciological terms.

“The speed of drawing down ice from an ice sheet used to be spoken of in geological timescales, but that has now been replaced by people’s lifetimes.”

Prof Shepherd also stressed some glaciers, such as the Pine Island and Thwaites glacier basins, are past the halfway point of melting.

This new work should help researchers to more accurately pinpoint where sea levels will rise so appropriate preparations can be made to try and save affected areas.

The underside of glaciers are thought to be melting because the sea is too hot, and not even snowfall can counteract the damage.

Prof Shepherd added: “In parts of Antarctica, the ice sheet has thinned by extraordinary amounts.”

He now thinks West Antarctica melting has caused 5mm of sea level rise since 1992.

He concluded: “Before we had useful satellite measurements from space, most glaciologists thought the polar ice sheets were pretty isolated from climate change and didn’t change rapidly at all. “Now we know that is not true.”

SOURCE 






Democrats back bill to ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2040

Democrats will introduce legislation to mandate zero-emissions vehicles make up all new car sales by 2040. The bill is co-sponsored by three Democrats running for president in 2020 who support the Green New Deal.

“When I take a lungful of air in this moment, it has 30 percent more carbon in it than when I was born,” Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, the bill’s main sponsor told The Huffington Post on Wednesday. “That is a change that has never happened in a single generation of humankind on this planet.”

The bill is co-sponsored by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Kamala Harris of California, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Bernie Sanders of Vermont. California Rep. Mike Levin will introduce a House version of the bill, HuffPo reported.

Harris, Gillibrand and Sanders are running for president in 2020, and all of them co-sponsored the Green New Deal resolution. However, no Democrat voted for the Green New Deal in March when it came up for a vote in the Senate.

Merkley, who also supports the Green New Deal, sees this bill as part of that broad vision of completely greening the U.S. economy. The Green New Deal calls for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions within 10 years and dramatically expanding the welfare state.

“This is just one small contributor to that vision,” Merkley told HuffPo. “But we need to develop the details around many ideas so those ideas are ready to be combined into a larger package.”

“If we can’t get a larger package, but we can get individual pieces like electric cars, buses, better insulation, then we should do that, too,” Merkley said. “We need to push at every level.”

Merkley’s bill would mandate 50 percent of new vehicle sales be zero-emissions vehicles by 2030. Companies can comply with the law by buying credits, which is similar to California’s zero-emission vehicle program that largely benefits electric car makers, like Tesla.

The internal combustion engine has long been a target for environmentalists. Vehicle emissions are a large source of greenhouse gases and pollution, and some countries have already pushed forward with plans to get rid of gas engines.

France and the U.K., for example, plan on banning gas and diesel vehicles by 2040. On a more local level Paris wants to ban gas-and-diesel-powered cars by 2030 and some German cities have also contemplated bans on diesel cars.

Merkley plans to introduce the bill Wednesday, and it’s nearly identical to electric vehicle legislation he introduced last year. The bill is unlikely to pass a Republican-controlled Senate and White House.

HuffPo speculated that gas-powered cars could be taken completely off the road by 2050 based on current vehicle turnover rates.

There are, however, legitimate questions over the feasibility of drastically ramping up electric vehicle sales. Part of the problem is building out all the charging stations needed to keep electric cars moving.

Zero-emission vehicles made up just 1.9 percent of U.S. car sales nationwide, according to the Auto Alliance.

The environmental benefits of electric vehicles also depend on what energy sources are used to generate power and make batteries. Recent studies have found electric cars may not have much of an impact on greenhouse gas emissions.

SOURCE 






Illinois Democrats are staking their claim on green issues

Rep. Sean Casten is laser-focused on carbon emissions. Sen. Tammy Duckworth announced a new push for environmental justice. Sen. Dick Durbin embraced the Paris climate accord at a student climate change rally in Federal Plaza. Rep. Jan Schakowsky joined others at a recent Loop rally criticizing the Trump administration’s plan to slash the Environmental Protection Agency budget. Even Rep. Dan Lipinski, considered one of the most centrist Democrats in the House, is working on a bill that would impose a fee on the carbon content of fuels.

Three months after the Green New Deal was greeted with a mix of shrugs and cheers, laughs and resolve, Illinois Democrats are hasteningto stake their claim on environmental issues. As climate change becomes more important to voters as a campaign issue, it’s clear Illinois politicians are paying attention, trying to find their climate niche and put their stamp on a proposal that blue state voters will support. A recent report from the Pew Research Center noted that 83% of Democrats (compared with 27% of Republicans) view climate change as a major threat to the country.

The Green New Deal has been lambasted by critics as an unrealistic example of liberal pie-in-the-sky dreams. But students at a climate change march last week embraced the proposal, with someone shouting “Green New Deal!” in the middle of Durbin’s short speech to attendees.

Durbin acknowledged that climate change issues have becoming increasingly important at the national, regional and state levels, whether it is funding for Great Lakes restoration or carbon policy. And Illinois’ senior senator pointed out that in key Midwestern swing states, such as Wisconsin and Michigan, residents care about and are paying attention to issues with environmental ramifications. A look at the electoral map for presidential elections shows that means candidates’ policies on climate may play a prominent role in the 2020 race for the White House.

“If you look at the Illinois delegation, and all of the representatives in the Midwest, especially the new members, there is strong support for climate change solutions,” said Howard Learner, executive director of the Environmental Law & Policy Center. “And in particular, the new members are energized and trying to get something done. They want to show that it’s not business as usual.”

For Casten, the freshman representative from Downers Grove who rode criticism of President Donald Trump and his background as a clean-energy business owner to victory in the suburban swing 6th District in the midterms, placing climate issues front and center is of the utmost importance. While he thinks many elements of the Green New Deal oversimplify or do not adequately address critical scientific elements, Casten said it is a good way to jump-start the discussion about climate change.

“We have got to recognize that this problem is way more urgent than we have treated it to this point. And we are darned near out of time to deal with it, and our institutions are moving far too slow given that reality. The Green New Deal, to its great credit, has gotten people to understand that, or at least gotten closer to understanding that point,” Casten said.

The Green New Deal is a set of proposals designed to combat climate change. It aims to set the country on a course to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, foster policies that lead to clean air and water for residents and invest in clean, renewable technologies, businesses and energy sources.

The package, introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York in the House and Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts in the Senate, is a nonbinding resolution, meaning that even if Congress approves it, nothing becomes law. Reps. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, Danny Davis, Mike Quigley and Schakowsky are the only Democrats in Illinois to sign on as co-sponsors in the House

The concept of environmental justice is also in the spotlight at the state level. Activists last month held a small rally along the Chicago River downtown to criticize proposed legislation at the state level they say unfairly targets residents who demonstrate against polluters or the companies that may be planning the expansion of pipelines or projects that will negatively impact a neighborhood’s environment. The activists underscored the need to move toward clean energy sources, protect funding for the EPA at the federal and state levels and resist lobbying forces that are pushing lawmakers in Springfield to make it easier for corporations to expand infrastructure rooted in industries such as coal-fired power plants that contribute to climate change.

Chris Shuttlesworth, who lives in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood, was one of the members of The People’s Lobby group speaking out against the inequities that people in less affluent, minority neighborhoods face. Shuttlesworth said he and his neighbors live with the constant foul smell from nearby landfills. He worries about contaminated groundwater and polluted air because of all the industry, large and small, in his community.

“We need more awareness,” Shuttlesworth said, “and less silence.”

Celeste Flores, with the Lake County branch of the Faith in Place group, also attended the rally to highlight how majority Latino communities in and near Waukegan experience increased levels of childhood asthma and polluted area than their counterparts in other parts of the county.

“It’s not criminal,” Flores said, “to fight for the right to breathe clean air and drink clean water.”

SOURCE 







"Green" de Blasio Humiliated At Trump Tower

It was pure poetic justice that the weather ruined Mayor de Blasio’s latest stunt — turning his plans to preen about his Green New Deal efforts outside Trump Tower into a humiliating debacle inside the building.

Forced indoors by rain, the mayor found his remarks drowned out by lobby music and protesters, some of whom ruined every picture by holding up “Trump 2020” and “Worst Mayor Ever” signs.

It’s justice because de Blasio’s approach is so cynical. The stunt targeted Trump buildings for their greenhouse-gas emissions even though several other edifices — Mount Sinai Medical Center, the Time Warner Center, the MetLife building — have bigger problems by the same standard.

And the standard itself is junk: It only threatens fines in 2030 — 11 years in the future, if buildings don’t refit to cut their emissions. Plus, more than half the city is exempted. Indeed, the scheme effectively targets industries that use a lot of energy, such as tech, media and life sciences — sectors that provide good jobs.

Anyway, the initiative for the law came from the City Council; de Blasio just rushed to take the credit and then to pretend that Trump buildings are particular trouble.

Yet the mayor’s green hypocrisy doesn’t end there. He has also come out against the proposed Williams pipeline, a billion-dollar project to bring natural gas to Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island. Without it, National Grid warns it will immediately have to start refusing new gas customers. And the mayor’s own aides warned last month that nixing the pipeline would increase the city’s reliance on higher-carbon oil — for a net loss in fighting climate change.

De Blasio is claiming that his Green New Deal will somehow make up the difference, but its promised payoffs are years in the future, and he’ll be long gone from office when those promises prove false.

The mayor, in short, is doing nothing about the real issues facing the city, just trying to polish his own image. He totally earned those “Worst Mayor Ever” signs.

SOURCE 






Blowhard Democrats Are Green Phonies

Listening to politicians expound on the imminent dangers of that neologism "climate change" you wonder if any of these people could even pass a high school physics test. Maybe Rand Paul — he's an ophthalmologist. He had to take some chemistry. But most of them?

Nevertheless, the Democratic Party at the moment seems to be in a knockdown, drag-out fight for who can be the greenest of the green and push us forward to a brave new world propelled exclusively by solar and wind energy. Only the strongest (i. e. most slavishly devoted to renewable energy at all costs) will survive.

Bernie and AOC are currently beating Joe Biden over the head about this. Poor Joe is frantically shoring up his "environmental" credentials.

If you don't have a dog in this fight, it's kind of funny, but the least these scientific illiterates might do is read a recent Forbes article (it doesn't take a Ph.D.): "The Reason Renewables Can't Power Modern Civilization Is Because They Were Never Meant To." (I know, many of them don't care about "modern civilization," at least until they have to catch a plane. But hear me out.) Michael Shellenberger writes:

Over the last decade, journalists have held up Germany’s renewables energy transition, the Energiewende, as an environmental model for the world.

“Many poor countries, once intent on building coal-fired power plants to bring electricity to their people, are discussing whether they might leapfrog the fossil age and build clean grids from the outset,” thanks to the Energiewende, wrote a New York Times reporter in 2014.

With Germany as inspiration, the United Nations and World Bank poured billions into renewables like wind, solar, and hydro in developing nations like Kenya.

But then, last year, Germany was forced to acknowledge that it had to delay its phase-out of coal, and would not meet its 2020 greenhouse gas reduction commitments. It announced plans to bulldoze an ancient church and forest in order to get at the coal underneath it.

Oops. What the Germans discovered is that this stuff (renewable energy) doesn't actually work to anywhere near the extent necessary. They tried it. I doubt this would mean much to true believers like Bernie and AOC, but the rest of us might pay attention. In fact, it's worse:

Now comes a major article in the country’s largest newsweekly magazine, Der Spiegel, titled, “A Botched Job in Germany” (" Murks in Germany"). The magazine’s cover shows broken wind turbines and incomplete electrical transmission towers against a dark silhouette of Berlin.
[snip]

Over the past five years alone, the Energiewende has cost Germany €32 billion ($36 billion) annually, and opposition to renewables is growing in the German countryside.

Germany is one of the most technologically advanced countries, but despite their failure, this is where the Democrats want to lead us. It's an act of faith, not science. They are effectively being anti-science, preaching their brand of environmentalism as a religion.

This has been evident for some time, but it is reaching a level that is actually deleterious to what they claim to desire. Intelligent, less apocalyptic, evaluations of climate, like that of Denmark's Bjorn Lomborg, are snuffed out or ignored by a Democratic Party that seems to be engaged in a modern form of know-nothingism. Suffering most in this are our young people, who are discouraged from thinking for themselves (the actual scientific method).

But all is not lost. Guess who is leading the world in the direction of creating a healthy environment? (Again, don't tell Bernie and AOC.)

According to Environmental Protection Agency data, greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States are dropping. Despite having a so-called climate-change denier in the White House along with a complicit Congress, the United States is leading the way in cutting greenhouse gases, which the bureaucrats at the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say cause global warming.
How did this happen? (Forget for a moment whether greenhouse gases actually are that bad.) The free market, largely. Private companies figuring out how to make life better for us while — gasp! —making a profit. Doing something for themselves and us all at once, sort of like Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.

People of that sort — not bloviating politicians — will be the ones who invent the energy sources of the future.

And meanwhile, not to worry, despite what the Democratic Party and the enviro profiteers at the UN tell us, we have plenty of time. Back in 1982, the United Nations' environment program's executive director Mustafa Tolba warned: “...by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.”

Nostradamus, they're not

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

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

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




   
17 May, 2019

Carbon Dioxide Soars to Record-Breaking Levels Not Seen in at Least 800,000 Years

So what?  There is no correlation between CO2 levels and global temperature. Temperatures are down a bit at the moment, actually.  Good news for gardeners and farmers, though

There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been for 800,000 years — since before our species evolved.

On Saturday (May 11), the levels of the greenhouse gas reached 415 parts per million (ppm), as measured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Scientists at the observatory have been measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide levels since 1958. But because of other kinds of analysis, such as those done on ancient air bubbles trapped in ice cores, they have data on levels reaching back 800,000 years. [8 Ways Global Warming Is Already Changing the World]

During the ice ages, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were around 200 ppm. And during the interglacial periods — the planet is currently in an interglacial period — levels were around 280 ppm, according to NASA.

But every story has its villains: Humans are burning fossil fuels, causing the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which are adding an extra blanket on an already feverish planet. So far, global temperatures have risen by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) since the 19th century or pre-industrial times, according to a special report released last year by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Every year, the Earth sees about 3 ppm more carbon dioxide in the air, said Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of meteorology at Penn State University. "If you do the math, well, it's pretty sobering," he said. "We'll cross 450 ppm in just over a decade."

The subsequent warming is already causing changes to the planet — shrinking glaciers, bleaching coral reefs and intensifying heat waves and storms, among other impacts. And carbon dioxide levels higher than 450 ppm "are likely to lock in dangerous and irreversible changes in our climate," Mann told Live Science.

"CO2 levels will continue to increase for at least the next decade and likely much longer, because not enough is being done worldwide," said Donald Wuebbles, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The long-term increase is due to human-related emissions, especially the emissions of our burning of fossil fuels."

However, he noted that the annual peak in carbon dioxide, which fluctuates throughout the year as plants change their breathing rhythms, occurs right now. The annual average value will be more like 410 to 412 ppm, he said. Which … is still very high.

"We keep breaking records, but what makes the current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere most troubling is that we are now well into the 'danger zone' where large tipping points in the Earth’s climate could be crossed," said Jonathan Overpeck, the dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. "This is particularly true when you factor in the additional warming potential of the other greenhouse gases, including methane, that are now in the atmosphere."

The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were this high, way before Homo sapiens walked the planet, the Antarctic Ice Sheet was much smaller and sea levels were up to 65 feet (20 meters) higher than they are today, Overpeck told Live Science.

"Thus, we could soon be at the point where comparable reductions in ice sheet size, and corresponding increases in sea level, are both inevitable and irreversible over the next few centuries," he said. Smaller ice sheets, in turn, might reduce the reflectivity of the planet and potentially accelerate the warming even more, he added.

"It's like we're playing with a loaded gun and don't know how it works."

SOURCE 





Federal Bureaucrats Keep Placing Green Energy Bets on the Wrong Horses

Many people lost a lot of money betting on Maximum Security to win the 2019 Kentucky Derby last weekend. The horse had been the favorite to win the 145th running of the Derby before the race, but was disqualified by track officials following its first-place finish, which vaulted the long shot Country Home into the winner’s circle in its place.

True, nobody could have predicted this particular outcome for the race and the circumstances under which it happened with any degree of confidence before it started, but for those who gambled on the horses running in the race, there was one certainty: the most they could lose by betting on the wrong horse to win was the amount of money they chose to bet. With that kind of certainty, most of the people who bet on the race gambled only money they could afford to lose if the outcome didn’t go their way.

Just ahead of the 2019 Derby weekend, news broke about the outcome of a very different kind of horse race, one where the people who did the gambling were not betting their own money, whose lawyers are now opening an investigation into why they lost millions. Megan Geuss of Ars Technica reports on a new investigation announced by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) into green energy bets placed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and how it lost the money it bet:

Earlier this week, the Department of Justice (DOJ) notified Southern Company that it is opening an investigation “related to the Kemper County energy facility,” according to Southern’s most recent financial statement (PDF).

The Mississippi-based facility had received $387 million in federal grants to build a state-of-the-art coal gasification and carbon-capture power plant (otherwise known as an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle, or IGCC, plant). But in 2017, Southern’s subsidiary, Mississippi Power, decided to scrap the cutting-edge tech and only use the power plant to burn cheaper natural gas, in a major blow to the proponents of carbon capture.

Kemper was a complicated project. It was located near a lignite coal mine, which was intended to serve Kemper exclusively. Lignite is a low-grade coal compared to the anthracite and bituminous coal that’s found in Wyoming and Montana, so Kemper planned to synthetically transform the plentiful local coal to gas. The plant would then burn the syngas in a turbine, strip the carbon dioxide (CO2) from the power plant’s flue, and send that CO2 through a pipeline to an oilfield where it would be used for enhanced oil recovery. (That is, CO2 is forced down into an oil well to increase the pressure of the well so more oil can be recovered.)

In theory, Kemper’s complicated process was supposed to help it compete with other nearby coal plants because it could use lower-grade local coal, and the captured carbon would be used to increase oil field returns.

But in practice, Kemper proved to be an expensive boondoggle. It came online just as natural gas prices were falling to a point when burning natural gas was simply cheaper than relying on any type of coal, local or not. The plant ran more than $4 billion over budget before the Mississippi Public Service Commission made clear to the company that Kemper would need to pursue a more affordable solution for Mississippi customers.

Gavin Bade of Utility Dive explains what that “more affordable solution” was back when it happened in 2017:

In response, Mississippi regulators last week directed Southern to work up a plan that would allow Kemper to run solely on natural gas. An analysis of the project’s economics by the Mississippi PSC indicated the project would only be economic if natural gas prices rose considerably.

That regulatory directive prompted Southern to throw in the towel, company officials said in a statement.

In effect, the DOE bet $387 million from 2010 through 2016 on what proved to be the wrong green energy horse. Had Mississippi state regulators not disqualified the subsidized carbon capture and sequestration technology, it is unlikely that the DOJ would now be involved trying to recover a portion of the millions of taxpayer dollars the DOE’s bureaucrats had gambled on it. An effort that itself will almost certainly cost millions of taxpayer dollars.

The DOE has a long history of making disastrously bad bets, particularly in recent years as so-called “green energy” initiatives have become popular among political leaders.

These costly failures keep happening because the bureaucrats are not betting their own money, and thus, they do not feel the pain of losing. I wonder if the cost to taxpayers of losing from their gambling would be as large if they were required to put their government pensions on the line when placing their bets in the first place.

SOURCE 





UN Biodiversity Report Confirms the Sky Is Not Falling

There’s no better way to start a week than perusing through the pages of a massive, alarmist report that predicts the demise of everything held dear. But, the United Nations’ (UN) gargantuan new report on biodiversity around the globe (see summary here) is actually a hidden reality check. The authors warn that nearly 10 percent of all terrestrial species are facing habitat loss, and as a result, around 1 million species face extinction in the coming decade.

That sounds alarming, especially after reading tidbits like, “The global rate of species extinction is already at least tens to hundreds of times higher than the average rate over the past 10 million years and is accelerating.” But as crazy as it seems, the UN report is actually a rebuke to the most alarmist extinction predictions, and details progress by developed, capitalist countries to protect the environment. The sky is not falling.

Most environmental researchers will profess to something truly mind-boggling: we don’t know about most of the species that go extinct. Global extinction figures are the result of scientific modeling, instead of meticulously counting species that we already know about which have gone extinct. Less than one thousand species have actually been documented as lost over the past four hundred years, and scientists must attempt to extrapolate to come up with realistic planet-wide estimates.

In 2011, however, scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles and Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China found that, using available methods, scientists were way overestimating extinction rates. Scientists typically use something called the “species area relationship” to estimate extinctions. This is where they study an area of land and measure the area they have had to comb through before encountering the first member of the species in question. They then assume in their calculations that, if this area was destroyed, the entire species would be wiped out. This of course makes little sense, and the researchers demonstrated via computer simulations that scientists’ preferred type of modeling made extinction rates look 83 to 165 percent higher than reality.

These wildly off-the-mark estimates lead to crazy claims about ecosystem destruction. One commonly-quoted stat estimates that we’re losing “one species per minute” because mankind is a pesky, destructive lot. That implies that, over the next ten years, 5 million species will go the way of the dodo instead of the 1 million species figure used by the UN (over multiple decades). Fortunately, the UN uses a better methodology that takes some of these flaws into account. Even if the UN’s method of species counting isn’t the worst out there, their more conservative figures could still use some context.

As science writer and journalist Fred Pearce notes, “the majority of documented extinctions have been on small islands, where species with small gene pools have usually succumbed to human hunters.” Not only are those species unrepresentative of more tenacious species on larger land-masses, but isolated species also have fewer chain-effects on the wider world. In other words, more extinct and endangered species are like the dodo than the allegedly imperiled honey bee (which is doing just fine).

But inevitably, media outlets seize upon a large, scary-looking figure without any sort of context, and suggest that the need for radical “green” change is now. Never mind that large-scale extinctions are also happening in Western Europe, where countries such as Germany and Switzerland implement costly, far-reaching policies that set aside vast tracts of land for preservation if there is even a small risk of a species going extinct. But there does seem to be good news outlined in the UN report: more economic development appears to increase ecological conservation.

Developed countries lead the way in protection of biodiversity, pollution reduction, and minimizing needless biomass extraction.  This trend dovetails more closely with economic growth than government regulation, and in fact, air pollution reduction preceded expansive federal action. Additionally, researchers at the University of Illinois and the Nature Conservancy found that funding and manpower for conservation organizations are strongly tied to stock market performance. A richer society is able to set aside more funds for preservation and conservation.

The UN report (subtly) admits what many in the press won’t: indicators aren’t so bad, and capitalism can help save the environment. People may pluck whatever predetermined conclusion they have out of this massive report, but there’s no denying that things aren’t as dire as the headlines suggest.

SOURCE 






The climate-fearing, capitalism-loathing Left cannot abide questions or differing opinions

Paul Driessen

Throughout history despots had effective ways of reducing dissension in the ranks. Inquisitors burned heretics. Nazi’s burned books – before taking far more extreme measures. Soviets employed famines, gulags, salt mines and executions. ChiComs and other tyrants starved, jailed and murdered millions.

Today’s Green New Dealers and their allies have mapped out their own totalitarian strategies.

They proclaim themselves socialists, but their economic policies and tolerance for other viewpoints reflect a different form of government – fascism: A political system in which authoritarian government does not own businesses and industries, but strictly regulates and controls their actions, output and rights – while constraining and suppressing citizens and their thought, speech and access to information.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has “no problem” with the fact that implementing her Green New Deal would require “massive government intervention,” wealth redistribution on an unprecedented scale, and many trillions of dollars in new debt. GNDealers want to totally eliminate fossil fuel production and use, and control how much we can drive and fly, heat and cool our homes, eat meat, and live our lives.

If retrofitting 29 million British homes to make them climate-friendly would cost $5.6 trillion – remaking America’s 125 million generally larger private homes would easily cost $25 trillion! Putting just five million electric cars on California roads would require 5 billion pounds of lithium-ion batteries.

Replacing fossil fuels that provide 82% of our energy and 100% of countless plastic and other products would require biofuels grown on tens of millions of acres. Replacing coal and gas-generated electricity with wind and solar would require millions of turbines and panels, on tens of millions more acres, billions of tons of rare earth and other metals, and hundreds of billions of pounds of lithium-ion batteries.

China controls all those rare earth metals and most of the lithium, cadmium and cobalt needed for all that pseudo-renewable, pretend-sustainable energy. They are produced in China and Africa, often with child labor and near-slave labor, and with virtually no health, safety or environmental safeguards.

Meanwhile, Asian, African and EU nations are building or planning over 2,000 coal and gas-fired power plants. So even US elimination of fossil fuels would do absolutely nothing to reduce global CO2 levels. Moreover, citizens are likely to rise up in loud opposition to having millions of wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and biofuel plantations in their backyards and across scenic vistas and wildlife habitats.

GNDealers don’t want to talk about any of those ethical, social justice or environmental issues – or about the GIGO computer models and bald assertions of Climate Armageddon that have no basis in real-world evidence. They don’t want anyone else talking about it, either. They want to control what we say and think, even what ideas and information we can find online and in print, television, radio and social media.

They loath and fear ideas, facts and questions that challenge their views and political power. Free speech and access to other people’s free speech is a clear and present danger to their perceived and asserted wisdom on fossil fuels, capitalism, manmade climate chaos, Western culture, and who should make policy decisions on energy, economics, jobs, living standards, religion, civil rights and other matters.

Their version of “free speech” thus includes – and demands – that their critics have no free speech. On college campuses, in “mainstream” and social media, on search engines, in online information libraries, even in the arts, bakeries and K-12 education, thought control and electronic book burning are essential. Despite having a 12 to 1 ratio of liberal to conservative professors, leftist college faculty, administrators and students still ban, disinvite, disrupt and physically attack conservative speakers and their hosts.

They harass Trump administration officials in restaurants – and “dox” political opponents, revealing their names and home addresses, so that other radicals can harass, intimidate and attack them … thereby “persuading” others to stay silent. They assaulted North Korean escapees for wearing MAGA hats.

The Big Tech monopoly routinely implements electronic book-burning tactics. Google and other internet search engines systematically employ liberal biases and secret algorithms to send climate realism articles to intellectual Siberia and censor conservative thinking and discussion. Google YouTube blocks access to Prager University (PragerU.com) videos that its censors decree offer “objectionable content” on current events, history, constitutional principles, environmental policies and other topics.

Google helps the Chinese government deny its citizens access to “dangerous ideas” – and says nothing when China sends a million Uighur Muslims to “reeducation camps.” Its hard-left employees ostracize any conservatives they still find in their ranks … and claim helping the US Defense Department with Cloud computing or artificial intelligence surveillance would “violate their principles.”

Facebook “shadow banned” an ad promoting a Heartland Institute video that called on millennials to reject socialism and embrace capitalism. Facebook censors told Heartland they “don’t support ads for your business model” (capitalism) and would not reveal “red flags” and trade-secret algorithms they use to “identify violations” of their policies and “help preserve the integrity of our internal processes.” Google suppressed Claremont Institute ads for a talk on multiculturalism and political speech restrictions.

Twitter routinely engages in similar cold, calculated censorship of views it opposes.

Wikipedia posts distorted or false bios for climate realist experts and organizations – labeling me an anti-environment lobbyist – and then pops up ads soliciting money for its biased “educational” material. Securing corrections is a long, often fruitless process. Even more totalitarian, the Southern Poverty Law Center uses phony “hate speech” claims to defund and “deplatform” conservative groups like David Horowitz’s Freedom Center, by pressuring credit card companies to close off donations to them.

State attorneys general and members of Congress want to prosecute and jail people for “denying the reality” of “manmade climate cataclysms.” Worst of all, the callous organizations and policies that Big Tech supports cause millions of deaths every year, by denying impoverished nations and families access to the modern energy, insect control and agricultural technologies that its vocal, racist elements loathe.

Creating conservative competitors or finding ways around these social media and fake info behemoths is vital, but would be stymied by their sheer size, wealth and dominance. Trust busting by the FTC, other federal agencies, Congress and the courts, á la Standard Oil Company, should certainly be considered.

These cyber-giant social media and information platforms may be private companies, but they wield massive power, especially with younger generations that get almost all their information online. They are entirely dependent on the internet – which was created by US government agencies and taxpayers. (“You didn’t build that,” President Obama might tell Google.) They have become essential, dominant public forums for discussing and evaluating public policies that increasingly affect our lives.

A federal judge has ruled that President Trump may not block hate-filled criticism from his Twitter account. Because it is a public forum, akin to a park or town square, for discussing important policy and personnel matters, it is protected by the First Amendment. Blocking unwanted tweets is therefore viewpoint discrimination, and Twitter is not beyond the reach of First Amendment public forum rules, she held. Her reasoning should not apply only to the President and his most obnoxious critics.

The right of free speech and free assembly – to participate fully in debates over important political and public policy matters – is the foundation for the other rights and freedoms that enable our vibrant nation to function. Banning, censoring and deliberately falsifying certain viewpoints deprive major segments of our population and electorate of the right to speak, be heard, become informed, examine all sides of an issue, and live in harmony, peace and prosperity.

Viewpoint censorship, bullying and silencing violates the basic rights of speakers, students, professors, voters and all people whose views an elite, intolerant, power-hungry few have deemed “inappropriate” or “hurtful” to the sensitivities of climate alarmist, pro-abortion, atheist and other liberal factions.

It’s time to take action, demand investigations, and rein in the monopolistic cyber censors.

Via email






ANOTHER GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

Three current articles below

Australian Greens hate Israel

With all the excitement about Australia being in the Eurovision grand final, it’s worth recalling that last May Lee Rhiannon, a Greens senator at the time, pressured then SBS managing director Michael Ebeid to drop its broadcast because it would be held in Tel Aviv and therefore “could impact on Palestinians”.

Rhiannon, who was sitting on the Senate Standing Committee on Environment and Communications, melodramatically told the committee it “could actually impact on who lives and who dies”.

The Greens’ candidate for the eastern Sydney seat of Kingsford Smith, James Cruz, has tweeted his own call to boycott Eurovision in Israel.

Rhiannon’s replacement in the Senate, Mehreen Faruqi, has spent her first few months in federal parliament appearing at events hosted by Palestine Action Group Sydney, an organiser of the Eurovision boycott.

Ebeid dismissed Rhiannon’s calls for a boycott: “The whole point of Eurovision is to forget politics, forget all of that and unite communities and countries together in the spirit of song.” But for so many Greens, when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians, nothing is beyond politics.

Moreover, with recent reports of Greens candidates outed as supporters of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel — despite it not being official Greens policy — we are entitled to ask whether the Greens are a party that cynically says one thing but does another.

Many Greens politicians and activists openly support BDS. This disingenuous shell game has allowed the Greens to portray themselves as environmentalists and social justice crusaders while providing a safe space for obsessive Israel-haters.

In the eyes of your local Greens candidate, support for Israel could lead to your complete political disenfranchisement. In the previous election, Greens candidate for Melbourne Ports Steph Hodgins-May buckled to political pressure from far-left sources and withdrew from a candidates’ debate for the Jewish community because Zionism Victoria co-sponsored the event. Yet she had no such qualms attending an election forum by the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network. Can such a candidate claim to be prepared to represent an entire electorate?

In 2015 Greens leader Richard Di Natale recognised Israel as a Jewish state, only to walk back that recognition shortly afterwards, and tactlessly used a condolence motion in the Senate to bash former Israeli president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres.

In 2017, Di Natale called for a debate in Australia about “appropriate” economic sanctions against Israel, adding that all military trade between Australia and Israel “has to stop”.

Also that year, the federal Greens refused to condemn the NSW Young Greens after they announced their official policy to boycott Jewish students.

Last year, the acting deputy leader of the Australian Greens, Adam Bandt, removed from his social media a caricature of a banker that mirrored Nazi caricatures of hook-nosed Jews. His spokesman meekly apologised for “any offence caused”.

The record has shown that virulent animus towards Israel — venturing far beyond the confines of official party policy — is not something limited to a single politician, candidate or state branch. It is pervasive among Greens because activists know the party will not censure them.

We all lose from such political game-playing. BDS undermines Australian interests, not only in seeking peace for the region but also in our trade with Israel, our democratic ally and among the world’s foremost hubs for technological innovation.

The Greens party propagates on its website the views of Hiba El-Farra, whose articles speak not of an occupation that began in 1967 but in 1948. Indeed, Israel’s entire existence since its establishment is portrayed as continuous “occupation”.

El-Farra’s vision of peace unequivocally demands a Palestinian “right of return” to Israel and not a separate Palestinian state, and does not allow for the existence of Israel as the Jewish national home.

Such are the views marketed on the Greens’ website, and it matters little that the post is tagged as “opinion” that is “not official policy of Greens WA”. The fact is the website does not publish views that deviate far from the maximalist Palestinian narrative that is antithetical to peace.

Yet not only is the Greens’ one-sided policy against Israel out of step with Australian interests, it contradicts the party’s platform when it comes to the environment, LGBTQ and gender equality issues, anti-Islamophobia, religious tolerance, democratic freedom and indigenous rights.

On these and other progressive issues, especially compared with its regional neighbours, Israel stands alone as a beacon of liberal values the Greens claim to hold so dear.

A political party that aspires to compete on centre stage with the Coalition and ALP, the Greens must avoid reducing this complex issue to black and white absolutes, and ensure it practises what it preaches regarding two states for two peoples.

SOURCE  

Basic facts taught at school undermine the Warmist gospel

Bill Shorten and his allies, the Greens economic vandals, believe climate change is a moral issue. So is telling the truth.

With his elite private school education, the Oppo­s­i­tion Leader would have learned about the Roman Warming, the Dark Ages, the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age. These took place before industrialisation and were all driven by changes in the sun. He would have learned that ­natural warm times, like now, bring great prosperity, increased longevity and less disease, whereas Jack Frost brings death, depopulation and economic stresses.

In biology, the Labor leader would have learned of Darwinism and environmental adapta­tion of species. Humans live on ice and in the hills, valleys, tropics and des­erts, at altitude and on coastal plains. Like countless other organ­isms, we move and adapt when the environment changes. Species thrive when it is warm.

From his education at a relig­ious school, he would have learned about the apostle Thomas. One of the strengths of our Western civilisation is doubt and scepticism. Surely Shorten does not believe the catastrophism promoted by green activists and self-interested alleged experts at the expense of the nation. If he does, he is unelectable.

If he is knowingly promoting a falsehood, he is unelectable. Critical thinking was fundamental to our culture and should be embraced in policy formulation. In school science, Shorten would have learned carbon dioxide is the food of life and without this natural gas, which occurs in space and all planets, there would be no life.

He also would understand from his maths lessons that when 3 per cent of total annual global emissions of carbon dioxide are from humans and Australia prod­uces 1.3 per cent of this 3 per cent, then no amount of emissions reductio­n here will have any effect on global climate.

A quick search would show him that whenever in the past there was an explosion of plant life, the carbon dioxide content was far higher than at present. If we halve the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, all life dies.

Shorten should know that for thousands of millions of years the Earth has been changing, with cycles­ and one-off events such as an asteroid impact, super-volcano or a supernova explosion.

He should know that climate always changes and that the planet would be in serious trouble if it did not. There are cycles of air, water, rocks and continents. There are measurable cycles with the sun, Earth’s orbit, oceans and moon that drive climate change, especially if cycles coincide. It has yet to be demonstrated that the climate change today is any different from those of the past.

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars of expenditure during the past few decades, it still has not been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive ­global warming. Yet wind and solar industrial complexes pepper the landscape allegedly to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

They run on subsidies, not the wind or the sun. Wind and solar are transfering money from the poor to the rich, not saving the environment. These subsidies, paid by the long-suffering consumer and employer, add to emissions because coal-fired elec­tricity needs to be on standby for when there is no wind or sunshine.

The amount of energy used to construct solar and wind facilities is greater than they produce in their working lives. The amount of carbon dioxide released during construction and maintenance is far more than is saved. Renew­ables such as wind turbines are environmentally disastrous because they pollute a huge land area, slice and dice birds and bats, kill insects that are bird food, create health problems for humans who live within kilometres of them, leave toxins around the turbine site and despoil the landscape.

Union superannuation funds have invested massively in renewable energy. Labor’s promise of 50 per cent renewables will cost electricity consumers hundreds of billions but will benefit the unions.

As soon as renewables were introduced into the grid, electric­ity prices increased and delivery became unreliable. Increased elec­tric­ity costs have created unemployment, and many pensioners and the poor cannot afford electricity. An increase in renewables will make matters worse.

Does Shorten’s energy policy consider those who lose jobs and have the power cut off in his race to achieve 50 per cent renewables to fill the pockets of Labor union mates? And what about the scams siphoning off tens of billions that slosh around the world as carbon credits, carbon trading and renewable energy certificates? Rather than take this money from the poor via higher electricity prices, it would be better spent at home.

To smugly claim that valid questions about energy costs are dumb or deceitful is a loud warning bell. Shorten refuses to tell us how he will spend our money or to give any detail on energy ­systems that are proven failures. It is our money and, if he will not give us the financial details, we should be very scared of his shiftiness. I have never written a blank cheque for a used car. Why should I now?

Emeritus professor Ian Plimer’s latest book, The Climate Change Delusion and the Great Electricity Ripoff, is published by Connor Court.

SOURCE  

Greens plan is an arrow to the heart of free speech and the welfare of the poor

If you have lots of money stashed away, go your hardest. Vote 1 Greens. But don’t expect to get richer under Green policies. Your kids won’t enjoy the same cashed-up lifestyle as you either. And as for the poor, they simply cannot afford to vote Green.

Who votes for the Greens matters because Green votes in the Senate will determine policies in a Shorten government. The Greens are beholden to a voting base that is, historically, far more demographically and ideologically ­defined than the earlier balance-of-power party, the Australian Democrats, or today’s minor parties, be it Pauline Hanson’s One Nation or Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party.

Roy Morgan’s latest State of the Nation report for Saturday’s election details the depth of self-indulgence behind the Greens’ voting base.

The Greens attract voters from the highest socio-economic quintiles: 31 per cent of people in the AB quintile and 24 per cent in the C quintile, meaning people with the fattest incomes, the best jobs and the highest level of education.

Forget the baloney about the Liberals representing the top end of town.

Fully one-third of Australians in the cushiest socio-economic groups vote Greens. These smartypants voters with univer­sity educations imagine they are helping the poor by voting Greens. But their paternalism is not simply empty virtue-signalling. Worse than parading their faux morality, those who vote Greens are wrecking the chances of the poor to get rich. So, strike out every mention of “aspirational”, “a decent life,” “economic injustice”, “being a good economic manager”, “a fairer society” from the Greens’ campaign statements. These claims are monumental frauds.

The poor, those who do not vote for the Greens, know something many rich people do not. Those with less education understand that the Greens’ plan to ban thermal coal by 2030 and phase out coking coal too is economic suicide. In 2018, coal was our highest export earner, $66 billion last financial year, and $35.7bn coming from Queensland. Where will the Greens find an additional $66bn each year to provide education, health and support to the neediest Australians? Their policy of a “super profits” tax on mining companies won’t raise money when exports are shut down and company profits dry up. You don’t need an arts degree or even a PhD to work out that equation.

With pretensions to government, the Greens have not come up with an alternative to the coking coal needed to make steel, along with iron ore. And yet apparently highly educated Australians will vote for the economic nonsense of a green ban on coal on Saturday. The Adani coalmine, a creator of jobs in far north Queensland but bitterly opposed by inner-city Greens voters with nice jobs, is the defining parable about the fraud of voting Greens.

Poorer Australians understand that higher taxes, even on the rich, will not help the poor get rich. That’s why a fraction of the bottom quintile of Australian voters vote Greens, their group the only one not to rise on 2010 numbers.

And, in a sign perhaps those well-heeled doctors’ wives are on the march, women are more easily duped by promises of nirvana than men; the Greens attract 59 per cent of their support from women, up from 54 per cent since the 2010 election.

Support from men has dropped off, according to Roy Morgan polling, down to 41 per cent from 46 per cent when the Greens joined with Julia Gillard’s Labor minority government.

The disconnect of Greens voters has grown worse in the past eight years. Seventy-two per cent of Greens supporters, up from 65 per cent in 2010, live in capital cities where they will rarely face the reality of sprawling immigration, unemployment in the regions or missing infrastructure links. The Greens are not just reckless economy wreckers. They have their sights on killing our culture too. In video of a speech delivered in Melbourne in March, Greens leader Richard Di Natale said he wants new laws that make it a crime to engage in hate speech, taking specific aim at those who analyse Greens policies the most.

“We’re going to make sure that we’ve got laws that regulate our media so that people like Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones and Chris Kenny … if they want to use hate speech to divide the community then they’re going to be held to account,” Di Natale said.

Di Natale’s plan will kill a free and independent media in Australia. Hate speech will become the new thoughtcrimes of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a highly subjective, legal weapon to be aimed at those who say things you hate.

And don’t imagine he won’t find support from the party that comes to power with Greens preferences. The Gillard Labor government tried to regulate the free press in Australia in 2013, bolstered by then Greens leader Christine Milne who wanted a “fit and proper” test giving government more power to control the media. Stephen Conroy wanted the package pushed through before the 2013 election.

While the policy was ditched that year, the entrenchment of “hate speech” as an acceptable limit on freedom means the task of fighting for freedom of expression will be harder today than it was six years ago.

Don’t take my word for it. Last week, Di Natale was interviewed on the ABC on two occasions, first by Sabra Lane on AM, the ABC’s premier radio analysis program. Di Natale repeated his radical plan to regulate the media in his quest to “hold to account” journalists at News Corp. Lane’s uninterested response was: “You’ve made the point. We need to move on.”

Move on? What, nothing to see here? Leigh Sales had interviewed Di Natale the previous night on 7.30 and failed to question Di Natale about his radical policy to alter our liberal freedoms.

When the ABC’s premier political analysts don’t bother to analyse a policy that would control media output, it’s worth asking why. Critiquing Di Natale’s plan is not about defending News Corp. It is about defending freedom of the press, a core value in a liberal democracy.

The ABC does that a lot when unloading on US President Donald Trump for his attacks on the media. Why is the public broadcaster silent about a far more radical policy on the home front to shut down voices in the Australian media? Could it be that the ABC hosts are more likely to vote Greens? They certainly fit the demographic pattern of Greens voters, namely rich and well-educated city slickers.

SOURCE  

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

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16 May, 2019  

Bill Nye In F Bomb Rant: ‘the Planet Is on F*cking Fire!’

I have just looked out my front door and cannot see anything on fire, not even fucking fire.  The man is deranged. The use of profanity is the sign of a weak mind trying to express itself forcibly

Appearing Sunday on HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Bill Nye launched into an profanity-laden and hyperbolic rant about climate change, exclaiming “the planet’s on fucking fire!”

“By the end of this century, if emissions keep rising, the average temperature on Earth could go up another four to eight degrees,” Nye said while discussing the Green New Deal, the far-left proposed stimulus package that aims to address global warming and economic inequality. “What I’m saying is the planet’s on fucking fire. There are a lot of things we could do to put it out — are any of them free? No, of course not. Nothing’s free, you idiots. Grow the fuck up. You’re not children anymore. I didn’t mind explaining photosynthesis to you when you were 12. But you’re adults now, and this is an actually crisis, got it?

Safety glasses off, motherfuckers,” he added.

Nye remarks come after the Senate voted down the Green New Deal package by a vote of 57-0. Notably, 43 Democrats voted “present” for it. The measure was co-sponsored by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and freshman congresswoman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). The concept has since been endorsed by numerous 2020 Democrat White House hopefuls like Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Cory Booker (D-NJ).

In a rant of his own, Oliver defended the proposal against those who dismissed the Green New Deal as a pie-in-the-sky proposal.

“It is a non-binding resolution that very briefly sets out some extremely aggressive goals, including achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, meeting 100% of the country’s power demand through clean, renewable and zero-emission energy sources and creating millions of good, high-wage jobs in the United States,” he said. “The whole Green New Deal is just 14 pages long. That is seven pages shorter than the menu for the Cheesecake Factory.”

SOURCE 






Leaked German govt report: emissions target will be missed despite on-target renewables

A leaked draft of Germany’s Energiewende Progress Report 2019, due to be released by the economy ministry in May or June, predicts the country will miss its targets for reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions by wide margins. This is despite the inevitable emissions reductions due to the 2009 recession and being on track for renewables. If no other measures are taken Germany will reduce emissions by 33% by 2020, falling short of the national target of 40%. The 2030 target is 55%, but the predicted drop is only 42%. Julian Wettengel of Clean Energy Wire picks out the report’s highlights, which also warns that transport and buildings are what’s holding the country back the most.

The transportation and building sectors continue to be the problem children of Germany’s energy transition. “Enormous efforts” are needed to reduce energy consumption in both sectors to ensure Germany reaches its climate targets, according to a leaked draft of the economy ministry’s (BMWi) upcoming Energiewende Progress Report 2019.

The 300-page document, seen by Clean Energy Wire, concludes that Germany is on track to achieve — and surpass —the aimed share of renewables in electricity and final energy consumption next year. But the country is not reducing its overall energy use fast enough.

In fact, the amount of energy used in transportation in 2020 and 2030 is even projected to exceed the levels of the baseline year, 2005.

Germany is bidding farewell to nuclear energy, expanding renewable energy production and aiming to make its economy largely climate-neutral by mid-century. Europe’s most populous country initiated the decades-long overhaul of its economy — the Energiewende — with broad public backing and cross-party support. To monitor the progress of this endeavour in all economic sectors, the economy ministry publishes an annual Energiewende Monitoring Report.

Every three years, the ministry releases a Progress Report instead. It provides broader context and more in-depth analysis with a longer-term time horizon. The version seen by Clean Energy Wire – a draft primarily analysing 2017 data and warning in many places that updated data still has to be added – will now be reviewed by other ministries.  The final report is expected in May or June 2019. The draft also did not include an opinion by the independent expert commission on Energiewende monitoring, which accompanies every report and contains recommendations for future policy decisions.

Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions saw their largest drop since the 2009 recession last year, but the country is still on track to miss its goals by a wide margin, according to data from an unpublished emissions projection from the environment ministry included in the draft.

“A wide gap can be assumed for the years 2020 and 2030, with the measures implemented so far. The target path represents an enormous challenge,” says the draft.

The projections take into account all climate measures decided by summer 2018. Therefore, it does not take into account a commission proposal to gradually phase out coal by 2038 at the very latest. If no other measures are taken, Germany will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 33 percent by 2020, falling short of the national target of 40 percent, according to the report. Ten years later, international and European agreements require the government to bring down emissions by at least 55 percent below 1990 levels. But the data indicates Germany is on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by only 42 percent.

To bridge the gap between climate targets and current emission trends, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has introduced a “climate cabinet” to ensure more progress on emissions reduction. The group of ministers with key responsibilities related to climate issues are supposed to come up with a package of legislation to ensure Germany reaches 2030 climate targets, to be introduced by the end of the year.

Additional climate measures in transport and buildings sectors urgently needed to avoid penalty payments
Germany’s government is under pressure to complete the package of measures and legislation to avoid falling short of its targets, which would require the country to make costly payments to purchase emission allocations under the European Union’s effort-sharing regulation. Under that framework, Germany must reduce overall emissions from sectors not covered by the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), such as transport, buildings and agriculture, by 14 percent by 2020, compared to 2005 levels.

The leaked draft does not include details on the emissions projections in those sectors. However, the draft states: “Ambitious national measures are urgently needed to reach [the 2020 effort-sharing] goal.”

SOURCE 






Electric Vehicles Ecologically Worse than Diesel Motors

A study directed by Christopher Buchal of the University of Cologne, recently published by Cesifo Institute in Munich, concludes that electric vehicles (EV) have “significantly higher CO2 emissions than diesel cars.” That is due to the large amount of energy used in the mining and processing of lithium, cobalt, and manganese, which are critical raw materials for the production of electric car batteries.

So, electric vehicles will not help cut CO2 emissions over the coming years, as the introduction of electric vehicles does not, in fact, lead to a reduction in CO2 -emissions from road traffic. Natural gas combustion engines are the ideal technology to exploit for the transition to vehicles which in the future, may be powered by hydrogen, “green” methane, or perhaps even alternative forms of suppressed, wireless free energy technology.

A battery pack for the Tesla Model 3, pollutes the climate with 11 to 15 tonnes of CO2. Each battery pack has a lifespan of approximately ten years, or total mileage of 94,000. That works out to emit 73 to 98 grams of CO2 per kilometre, or 116 to 156 grams of CO2 per mile, Buchal said. Add to this the CO2 emissions of the electricity from power plants that power such vehicles and the actual Tesla emissions could be between 156 to 180 grams of CO2 per kilometre, or 249 and 289 grams of CO2 per mile.

A battery pack costs the EV-owner over € 10.000, excluding the expenses for the recycling of the old pack. The  pollution caused by these batteries is overwhelming. Think about how you are not even permitted to put tiny Li batteries in the garbage because of the extremely high toxicity. Where will all the defunct batteries go, added to the fact that they only last 10 years. Subsequently, one has to fork out $12,000 to buy a replacement, and how much does it cost you to dispose of the battery? EV is a giant con operation, just another Ponzi scheme for more debt-creation. As the banks decided to issue debt to fund this whole scheme!

In their study, the authors criticise the fact that EU legislation allows electric vehicles to be included in calculations for fleet emissions with a value of “zero” CO2 emissions. This suggests that electric vehicles do not generate any such emissions. The reality is that, in addition to the CO2 emissions generated in the production of electric vehicles, almost all EU countries generate significant CO2 emissions from charging the vehicles’ batteries using their national energy production mixes.

The authors also made a critical analysis of the discussion about electric cars in Germany, which centres around battery-operated vehicles, while other technologies also offer great potential: hydrogen-powered electric vehicles or vehicles with combustion engines powered by green methane, for instance. “Methane technology is ideal for the transition from natural gas vehicles with conventional engines to engines that will one day run on methane from CO2-free energy sources. This being the case, the German federal government should treat all technologies equally and promote hydrogen and methane solutions as well,” emphasises Professor Sinn.

For true emission reductions, researchers concluded the study by saying that methane-powered gasoline engines or hydrogen motors could cut CO2 emissions by a third and possibly eliminate the need for diesel motors altogether.

Global warming has been the biggest scam ever. Particularly when taking into account all the money that has been wasted on research at universities; wasted on corporate “green” incentives. Useless windmills that cost more to take down after they prematurely wear out, than it costs to put up in the first place, etc. What an utter shame with the paltry power supplied, the noise pollution and wasted landscapes.

Nowadays there is more Arctic/Antarctic ice than ever, more polar bears than ever, no ocean-level rise whatsoever.  Nothing predicted 20-25 years ago has come true. Nothing. Conclusion; the plan to save the world with electric cars is the biggest scam of our lifetime. The scam is intricately entwined with the Greater Agenda 2030 of the elites to slowly rob us of our freedoms, including the freedom to move around as we choose. Electric cars are only the beginning of their sinister plan. What will surely follow in the future will be freshly obtained “scientific data,” proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that we must give up our rights to vehicles completely, in order to save the planet.

The real Motivation is the goal of Government to control Everyone

The sinister catch to this scam is that Self-driving, electrically-powered cars must always be connected to a network. Tesla’s EVs connect to a network over the 4G Grid today, which will become 5G wireless networks later this year. And remember: 5G is a microwave radiation technology being deployed as depopulation warfare, full spectrum dominance and absolute human control.

The government will know the location of every self-driving car at all times. And with the right authority, a self-driving car could be rerouted to a government’s location of choice at any time. For example, what if someone suspected of a crime was trying to “drive” out of state? The local government could simply reroute the car to the nearest police station.

And there’s something else very sinister behind all this: Consider Waymo, a self-driving technology development company, that belongs to Google’s parent company. Google’s motivation is simple: It wants to collect as much data as possible about consumers and sell that data to whomever will pay for it.

Google is spending much time and money on research and development on autonomous driving technology, so that it can license that technology to car manufacturers. In exchange, it will be able to retain and sell the data that it collects. Think about it before getting into an EV, it comes straight out the Orwellian caboose.

The Electric Shock

The laws of thermodynamics say: Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it simply changes form. The electricity  used to power a car has to come from somewhere, at present, in the majority of cases, it still comes from coal-fired power plants.

Every time energy changes its form, as in the case of battery power, energy is lost due to inefficiencies of the system by friction, heat loss, drag, etc.  Simply put, not all of the available energy stored in a battery, will be available for its intended purpose; Some, if not most, is lost to these inefficiencies.

The real, -non-political- solution for greener cars is readily available: For transportation only high quantities of energy accumulated per unit, end up being economically and practically acceptable for use in vehicles.

As laid out above, energy from electricity does not meet these conditions. Wind-power, solar etc. are not practical. Ethanol has a lower energy output per unit and requires a special, more expensive adaption to engines. The only energy source that meets the above criteria, is the internal combustion diesel engine that gets about 30% more mileage out of every litre than gasoline, and those savings are prevalent in all the different kinds of driving conditions, with a refuel range of over 1’000KM or 600 miles. What’s more, people who worry about global warming, prefer diesel, because it emits up to 20% less carbon dioxide (CO2) than other kinds of fuel.

Diesel engines emit 20% less CO2

This has been common knowledge to insiders for a long time. Diesel engines are not harmful to the environment! They don’t shorten the lifespan of people; it even extends the lifespan of citizens living in so-called seriously affected cities. Electric cars are more harmful. Just another grandiose lie that will meet the truth.

The tale of Media Fear-Mongering: The global warming story is a cautionary tale of how media-concocted fears have become the defining ideas of an entire generation. The whole global warming saga has become a religion and  people who disagree are called lunatics.

It is said that Global warming could come from a gas called nitrous oxide (N2O):

Additionally, the International Council for Science (ICSU) in Paris, a federation of scientific associations from around the world, has issued a report concluding that most analyses made, have underestimated the substantial effects to global warming of a gas called nitrous oxide (N2O) by a factor of between three and five.

Although N2O is not common in the Earth’s atmosphere, it is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 and it hangs around much longer. But now it appears that this conclusion may be premature. For a rather long time, people living in the two cities on the planet with the highest NO2 concentration, namely Stuttgart and München live longer. Research has shown that in Stuttgart, the NO2 leader in 2018, residents can look forward to almost one and a half year longer lifespan than other people in Germany. The people living in Munich, blessed with the top NO2 value in 2017, even live a good two years longer than the German average.

There is apparently a clear link between NO2 exposure and public health and research has shown that the more and the denser the car traffic, the longer people seem to live. In short: nitrogen oxides are extending lives.

Whether the EU will introduce a long-overdue diesel duty, or at least a nitric oxide quota in the near future, based on these ground-breaking findings, cannot be predicted. However, we have a pretty good idea of how eco-activists will react if the NO2 limits are finally revealed as being purely fictional numbers.

Conclusion; EV’s are politicised and not Green

Electric cars are too expensive and bad, if not far worse for the environment than is purported by mainstream science. The electric green car is being politicised, presented and pushed as being a viable alternative to our present forms of transport. But it is also being politicised by idealists who do not know anything about the technical background on this subject. They are running with un-researched talking points and do not understand the faulty science.

 SOURCE 







GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

Four current reports below

Antisemitism rife in Australian Greens

In keeping with their far-Left stance

Jewish leaders have urged Richard Di Natale to call out anti-Semitism within the Greens, after anti-Israel social media comments emerged from three Greens candidates in NSW federal seats.

The comments described Israel as an “apartheid” regime, accused members of the Israeli government of “openly advocating genocide”, denied the crimes of listed terrorist organisation Hamas, and criticised Senator Di Natale for failing to support the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions movement.

In a Facebook comment on an Australian Jewish News article about the Executive Council of Australian Jewry congratulating Senator Di Natale on his election as Greens leader, Greens candidate for Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s seat of Cook, Jonathan Doig, said he was “surprised the Greens don’t support BDS on Israel.” “Time to reconsider surely,” Mr Doig wrote.

The party’s candidate for the western Sydney seat of Watson, Emmett de Bhaldraithe, commented on Facebook that people in the current Israeli government “quite openly advocate genocide”.

“What has Hamas actually done that would suggest they wish to follow through on (genocide)/can?” Mr Bhaldraithe wrote.

Greens candidate for the eastern Sydney seat of Kingsford Smith, James Cruz, had a dig at his party’s Queensland Senator Larissa Waters, tweeting a picture of Senator Waters with Australian Eurovision contestant Kate Miller-Heidke, saying it was “disappointing to see Larissa Waters endorsing Eurovision held in apartheid Israel.”

“People of concious (sic) should #BoycottEurovision2019 in solidarity with Palestinians fighting for their land and lives,” Mr Cruz tweeted.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry CEO Alex Ryvchin said it was easy to dismiss the statements as “online ramblings of the far-left”. “But when such statements come from candidates for public office, who have been elevated to national prominence by their party, it is a matter of deep concern,” Mr Ryvchin said.

“To accuse Israel of apartheid and genocide, to whitewash the crimes of Hamas, a designated terrorist organisation committed to the destruction of a sovereign state and Jewish people worldwide, is a means of inciting hatred against Israelis. “It also endangers the overwhelming majority of Australian Jews who have deep personal and historic links to Israel.

“These are reckless, harmful comments. They should be condemned by Senator Di Natale without equivocation, and rooted out of the culture of the Greens, instead of being allowed to flourish.”

A spokesman for the Greens said BDS was not Australian Greens policy, “and we understand the concern among the Jewish community around the language used.” However, the spokesman said the Greens “reject charges of anti-Semitism.”

“It is legitimate to criticise the Netanyahu government’s actions in obstructing peace and Palestinian sovereignty,” he said.

“Now more than ever, with a rising tide of white supremacism and anti-Semitic attacks, the Greens stand in support of the Jewish community, all faith groups and a strong, diverse multicultural Australia.”

Anti-Defamation Commission chair Dvir Abramovich said the three Greens candidates should not get a “free pass” for their “contemptible and malicious” comments which reveal “unabashed venom towards Israel”.

“Richard Di Natale should not give sanction to such divisive rhetoric, and should urge these individuals to not only apologise for their rabid anti-Israel statements, but to renounce these incendiary positions,” Dr Abramovich said.

SOURCE  

Koalas are 'functionally extinct' with just 80,000 left in the wild meaning they 'can't produce a new generation'

What rubbish. Koalas are in plague proportions in some places -- e.g. Kangaroo Island

Koala numbers have fallen so low across Australia that the species is now 'functionally extinct', animal campaigners believe.

The Australian Koala Foundation said there may be as few as 80,000 of the animals left in the wild, meaning they are unlikely to produce a new generation.

'Functionally extinct' describes an animal population which is either so small it has ceased to affect its environment, has no breeding pairs left, or is still breeding but from such a small number of individuals that it succumbs to genetic disease.

The foundation says that, since 2010, it has monitored 128 Federal electorates that fall within known koala environments, and in 41 there are no koalas left.

While researchers admit that the koala's tendency to move around and its patchwork habitat make it difficult to track, they say numbers are in steep decline.

Between 1890 and 1927, more than 8million of the animals were shipped to London after being shot for fur.

Research conducted in 2016 showed there were around 330,000 of the animals left in Australia, though this number could be as low as 144,000 and as high as 600,000.

The biggest threats to koalas are habitat loss and heatwaves caused by climate change, such as the one last year that saw thousands of animals die from dehydration, studies have shown.

Since May 2012, koalas have been officially listed as vulnerable in Queensland, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory. This means their populations are in steep decline or at risk from entering a decline.

While the animals are not listed as vulnerable in Victoria or South Australia, local populations are known to have gone extinct - though the species is relatively abundant elsewhere.

Koala Foundation chairman Deborah Tabart said: 'I am calling on the new Prime Minister after the May election to enact the Koala Protection Act (KPA) which has been written and ready to go since 2016. 'The plight of the Koala now falls on his shoulders.'

SOURCE  

Queer Greek Greenie abuses Christians

The Greenies attract some odd types

Damning footage of Greens candidate for the inner-west Sydney seat of Barton, Connor Parissis, has emerged showing the “left wing” and “mental health” activist trying to shout down Christians giving out free food at Sydney University.

Mr Parissis is shown screaming “your beliefs are a joke” at the Christians who were hosting a free food stall during the gay marriage debate.

A mob of angry protesters descended on the 25 Christian students trying to give away food.

“Shut the f..k up,” Mr Parissis yelled, “Go back to church … You know who’s a joke? Your f..king beliefs..” “Go wank yourself at home, you and your f..king Jesus picture,” Mr Parrisis yelled over the crowd, “I wish I could kick your face in.”

Mr Parissis, 21, advertises himself as a candidate who will fight for youth mental health, refugees and indigenous rights. On his candidate website he boasts being “University of Sydney Queer Officer, at the forefront of the Safe Schools Campaign and the YES campaign for marriage equality”.

According to The Daily Telegraph, Mr Parissis has been using a twitter handle called “@TheElginMarbles” to post offensive images and boast about stealing a plant from Kmart.

During Greek Easter celebrations, Mr Parissis posted an image showing Jesus performing a sexual act, with the caption “I love easter traditions”.

Last week, Mr Parissis apologised for his earlier posts.

SOURCE  

Labor should beware a revolt against renewables

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has told the world that the political will to fight climate change has faded and that many countries are not living up to their commitments under the 2016 Paris agreement.

There are few people in the world better able to assess the mood of the international community than Guterres.

In Australia, if the opinion polls are right, Bill Shorten will be prime minister after Saturday’s election and one of the driving forces behind that victory—particularly among younger voters -- will be his plan to accelerate carbon reduction in Australia by investing in renewables.

So, we are moving in a direction that is different to large parts of the international community.

That raises clear trade warning bells but, for the moment, let’s leave that aside. Around 2016 the rest of the world was like Australia today, with large segments of the population driving for lower carbon emissions via renewables.

Australia and a Shorten government needs to take note of the Guterres warning and learn from the mistakes countries have made which have turned big segments of their populations against renewables-driven carbon reduction, despite the climate warnings.

In summary the populations were told renewables would reduce prices. That’s simply wrong unless you plan the introduction with great care, rather than plonking windmills or solar panels around the land with no co-ordination with existing installations and networks.

The first thing that does is to put pressure of the power grid and I described the problem last month.

But it’s an area where international global power experts can inadvertently mislead and in that commentary I described how problems in the grid can affect the charging of electric car batteries (in this case Tesla) in Australia. I later discovered the expert was talking about the US. I apologise for that mistake, but the message is the same--- whatever changes you make in power generation or usage, make sure the grid in all areas can handle it. If you don’t then the unreliability created will turn the community against carbon reduction and may lead to bizarre outcomes.

In Europe, power utilities can receive carbon credits by switching from coal to wood and belching out far more carbon than modern coal burning.

It’s an obscene racket and I have discovered there are a vast variety of estimates as to how big it is.

But there is also good news on the carbon front. Back in 2016 the only way to adjust the grid for renewables and other changes was to spend large sums on new wires. Now there are low-cost technologies to stabilise the grid and expand its capacity, which is fantastic news for electric cars.

I described the Faraday Grid system last month and an early step of an ALP government should be to assess the rollout of the Faraday system in London and Tokyo and check whether there are any rival systems. That way we can avoid at least one of the traps that changed the renewable views of other countries.

We should also be aware that, in Europe at least, economic difficulties can play a role in changing views.

We have not encountered anything like the problems of many European countries but as I explained yesterday, a prolonged US-China trade war at the same time as an Australian credit squeeze, a retirement and pensioners tax, and negative gearing clamps, will create a severe downturn which may cause Australia to embrace the same renewable energy views as many other countries.

We have already seen how tough times in northern Queensland have made parts of the local population strongly in favour of coal mining.

Some years ago, Germans were enthusiastic about their “Energiewende” energy transition project that involved the erection of vast numbers of windmills and solar panels. But it turned into an extremely costly debacle causing higher power prices, blackouts and load sharing. And it also changed the idyllic rural landscapes. ‘Energiewende’ is now winding back and is an excellent example of the new community attitudes described by the UN Secretary-General.

In the UK the renewables have forced gas-fired power stations to suddenly boost their output and then reduce it in order to balance the grid and prevent blackouts.

In addition, few are investing in efficient modern gas-fired plant while renewables are subsidised. The result is that the gas-fired fleet is much less efficient than it should be and price rises will continue for the foreseeable future.

That’s what will happen in Australia if we don’t integrate renewables with the existing systems.

Just as new technologies solved the grid problems, the world is working on much better non-carbon energy production other than wind (including more efficient solar) and is developing better batteries to change the economics of wind.

We are in danger rushing into technologies that will be obsolete while Europe and other areas fudge their figures by burning wood.

SOURCE  

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

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15 May, 2019  

The Solar Energy Racket

If solar energy were not propped up by various government policies and subsidies, no utility would buy it.  Not only does solar not work at night, but it does not work if it is cloudy or if a cloud passes in front of the sun.

Utility-scale solar requires a large solar farm consisting of photovoltaic panels.  For $100 million, one can buy a solar farm capable of generating about 80 megawatts of electric power when the sun is squarely shining on the panels.  Depending on the geographical location and the climate, the average power generated will be about 18 megawatts, more during the day and nothing at night.  More in summer and less in winter.  If the power can be sold for $50 a megawatt-hour, about the cost of wholesale electricity generated by natural gas, the annual revenue earned by the plant would be $7.8 million.  But why would anyone want to pay $50 per megawatt-hour for electricity that does not work at night or when the weather is bad?  Better to buy it from a natural gas plant that one can count on.

How much would a utility really be willing to pay for erratic electricity from a solar farm?  The answer is $20 per megawatt-hour or less.  The reason is as follows.  No utility would ever incorporate a solar plant to reliably provide electricity.  Solar electricity is unreliable.  But solar electricity, if it is cheap enough, could be used as a supplement to save fuel in a utility's main natural gas plants.  When the solar was working, some of the utility's gas plants could be throttled back to save fuel.  The fuel to generate a megawatt-hour of electricity in a modern natural gas plant costs about $20.

How much does the electricity from a $100-million solar plant cost?  The biggest cost is the $100 million spread over the 25-year life of the plant.  If you take out a 25-year, $100-million mortgage, the annual payment will be between about $7 million and $9 million depending on the interest rate of between 5 percent and 8 percent.  A 5% interest rate is what a corporation with excellent credit might get.  With fair credit, a corporation might get 8%.  If a corporation has a poor credit rating, nobody is likely to loan it $100 million.  The plant will produce about 157,680 megawatt-hours of electricity per year, 18 megawatts per hour average times 8,760 hours per year.  The cost of the electricity, counting only the contribution from the construction cost of the plant, will be between $45 and $60 per megawatt-hour.  If you sold this electricity to a utility for $20 per megawatt-hour, you would lose millions every year.  If all costs are taken into account, the real cost of utility-scale solar power, where there is excellent sunshine, is about $70 per megawatt-hour.

Solar electric plants are being built because there are two subsidies and one mandate.  The mandate is provided by laws in about 30 states, requiring electric utilities to source some percentage of their power from "renewable" sources.  These laws are called "renewable portfolio standards."  By forcing utilities to develop sources of renewable power, mostly solar or wind, a ready market for solar power is created with creditworthy utilities willing to sign long-term contracts and pay whatever it takes to get solar power.  These laws are special-interest legislation tailored to provide shelter for wind and solar developers.  The "whatever it takes" cost is passed on to electricity customers.

The first of the two direct subsidies is the solar investment tax credit or the solar ITC.  This is a federal subsidy for the construction of solar facilities, currently at 30% of the cost and set by current law to gradually decline to 10%.  The second subsidy is less transparent.  It consists of modifications to tax laws that make possible a scheme called tax equity finance.  Tax equity finance uses a highly taxed corporate partner that can reduce its federal income tax by utilizing special accelerated depreciation available for solar energy facilities. The bottom line from the complicated shenanigans is that money that would have gone to the federal treasury as income tax payments instead goes to the developer of solar power and to the tax partner.  The tax-writers in Congress knew they were doing a favor for solar and wind developers when they created this scheme.  The net result of the mandate and subsidies is that about 70% of the cost of utility-scale solar plants is subsidized by electricity consumers and the federal government.

What is the justification for these laws bilking the public and subsidizing solar energy?  It is claimed that solar energy will prevent global warming by reducing CO2 emissions.  The problem is that building solar energy plants to reduce CO2 emissions ends up costing the government and electricity-consumers about $140 for each metric ton of CO2 emissions avoided.  But you can buy a "carbon offset" that does the same thing in the carbon offset market for $10.  The most prominent believers in global warming catastrophe — for example, James Hansen — advocate using nuclear energy to reduce CO2 emissions, not solar.  It is useful to remember that 86% of CO2 emissions come from outside the United States, where they are increasing.  But U.S. emissions have been decreasing due to substitution of natural gas for coal and due to energy conservation.

The other justification for solar is that we will run out of fossil fuels.  The sun won't run out of sunshine for around 10 billion years.  There is no prospect for running out of fossil fuels anytime soon.  Fracking has just unleashed a 100-year supply of natural gas and oil.  The U.S. has coal for 500 years.  The supply of nuclear fuel is, for practical purposes, unlimited.

What we have is an alliance among hysterical environmental groups, profit-making solar developers, and politicians eager to make important friends.  The environmental groups need a stream of impending catastrophes for which they propose impracticable or crackpot solutions.  That's how they excite interest and stay in business.  The Sierra Club and other groups are against all energy sources except wind and solar and some niche energy sources.  The media, probably out of ignorance, go along with the propaganda in favor of solar energy.  Rational, fact-based analysis appears to be politically incorrect.

SOURCE 






Climate Change Triggers Hysteria As Irish parliament Declares A ‘Climate Emergency’

Irish logic does not have a good reputation.  We seem to be seeing why below.  I wonder what set them off.  The fairies?

Ireland has declared a climate emergency, with Climate Action Minister Richard Bruton calling climate change the greatest challenge mankind is facing.

ITV quoted the minister as saying, “We’re reaching a tipping point in respect of climate deterioration. Things will deteriorate very rapidly unless we move very swiftly and the window of opportunity to do that is fast closing.”

The move, which followed cross-party support to amendments to a climate action report drafted by the country’s parliament, made Ireland the second country in the world to declare a climate emergency after the UK. In the latter, the declaration followed crippling environmentalist protests in London that paralyzed parts of the city.

In its wake, an independent, government-appointed Committee on Climate Change recommended to the government such measures as reducing the consumption of meat and dairy products, changing the way farms do business, and making electric cars the only cars that people can buy starting in 2035. By 2050, according to the panel, the country should be greenhouse gas emission-free.

SOURCE 






But not everyone in Ireland is onside

52 communities are fighting against wind in Ireland
 
Major concerns have been raised this week about natural habitats and the environment, as wind farm developers continue to seek planning permission for wind farms from local authorities around the country.

Residents in an area of south Co. Kerry that is home to the freshwater pearl mussel have said the species “will be destroyed” if a wind farm planned for their area goes ahead.

Furthermore, disquiet over flooding in the midlands has also emerged as residents in Lanesboro await a decision in respect of a wind farm development planning application by Bord na Mona at Derryadd.

In Co. Donegal residents in the south east of the county have highlighted their worries over the hen harrier population after an application was made to An Bord Pleanala for the development of Meenbog Wind Farm, comprising 19 turbines.

And, in Co. Kildare, a local area representative has said that, as far as he is concerned, wind farms are “not the solution” to the country’s carbon problem and the environment is becoming more and more damaged because Ireland “is so far behind” on its emissions.

Co. Kerry

Fred O’Sullivan is chairman of the Sliabh Luachra Wind Awareness Group. It was established after Kerry Co. Council granted planning permission for a wind farm comprising 14 turbines – 150m in length – in a rural area along the Cork/Kerry border that is home to the freshwater pearl mussel.

O’Sullivan says the pearl mussel is unique to the area and can be found in the River Blackwater. He also pointed to the dangers posed by the wind farm to the mussel. One flood of silt into the river and the freshwater pearl mussel is destroyed; that’s it, it will be gone forever.

O’Sullivan went on to say that he “cannot understand” how policymakers in Ireland think that wind energy offers a solution to protecting the environment, or indeed reducing the country’s carbon emissions.

“We have bog land in our area that we know is carbon absorbent and they are being ripped up to facilitate these wind farms,” he said.

“Even the landowners have gotten caught out with these wind farms because they are locked into a contract that they can’t get out of for 30 years; neither can they build on the land for 30 years.

“There are 52 communities in Ireland fighting against wind – that is very significant,” he said.

Co. Longford

Further up the country in Lanesboro in south Co. Longford residents are concerned on a number of fronts, not least about their environment, after Bord na Mona applied to An Bord Pleanala for the development of a wind farm that comprises 24 turbines.

Chairman of the No to Derryadd Wind Farm Group Niall Dennigan said residents in the area are “infuriated” by the move.

He also pointed to the numerous implications for the locality including health and environmental. Dennigan says the area in which the wind farm is proposed is also prone to flooding.

There are flooding issues already taking place downstream in Lanesboro and putting in that number of turbines will just add to this problem.

He continued: “A lot of the health issues we have are the same as every other person in the country facing a wind farm development in their area; we are also concerned about noise, shadow-flicker and epilepsy.”

Dennigan went on to claim that there are some studies which indicate that some people have suffered health problems as “a direct result” of wind turbines.

Co. Kildare

Local area representative in the Maynooth Municipal District, councillor Padraig McEvoy told AgriLand that there was a “perception” out there that wind farms were the solution to the carbon problem – yet, as far he is concerned “the environment is getting more and more damaged because Ireland is way behind in its carbon emissions”.

He was speaking in the aftermath of a new planning application made by North Kildare Windfarm Limited at the end of 2018 for the development of Maighne Wind Farm comprising 12 turbines.

Co. Donegal

Speaking to AgriLand, Finn Valley Wind Action spokesperson Marie Scanlon said that at the time the developer, Micheal Murnane of Planree Limited, applied for planning permission to develop Meenbog Wind Farm, comprising 19 turbines, the area earmarked in south-east Donegal for the project was classed as being “environmentally sensitive” in the county development plan.

Scanlon also pointed to the fact that the wind farm is earmarked for an area of south Donegal that supports up to 7% of the national breeding population of hen harrier in the Republic of Ireland.

She says people in the area are completely opposed to the development. “They also remain hopeful that the county development plan – which is currently under review – will continue to support the area in question,” she said. The plan was challenged last year by the wind farm developer.

“We will continue to strongly oppose any further plans and will continue to protect our area; we want our area not to be zoned and not open to consideration for these types of developments,” she said.

Wind Aware Ireland

Wind Aware Ireland, meanwhile, is opposed to wind energy in this country. Its spokesperson Paula Byrne claimed that there is “mounting evidence” to suggest that wind energy “does not reduce” the use of fossil fuels or the levels of emissions.

She referenced Elsevier – a Dutch information and analytics company and one of the world’s major providers of scientific, technical, and medical information – when speaking about wind energy effects in Ireland.

There are two other fundamental problems with wind energy, she added, including the fact that the wind doesn’t always blow and there is no storage available at grid level.
“We know that with regards to wind farms, when the wind is not blowing, electricity is not being generated and therefore people will return to more conventional sources,” Byrne said.

She continued: “We also know that hydro and solar both reduce the use of fossil fuels, while wind energy increases it. Wind energy is a fake solution to reducing Ireland’s carbon emissions.”

SOURCE 






Austerity forever

Britain's Net Zero climate policy would negatively impact on so much of our lives

BEN PILE

Last week, the UK’s Committee on Climate Change (CCC) released its Net Zero report, calling for the UK to cut its CO2 emissions to ‘net zero’ by 2050. Going further than its February report advising that no newly built home should be connected to the gas supply, it recommends political interventions that intrude on all areas of private and productive life, from diet to transport. Among other things, it calls on the government to reduce the consumption of meat, to find ways to ‘reduce demand’ for travel, especially flight, and to limit the amount of energy consumed in homes and businesses.

While the report is big on headlines, it is woefully short on detail. Rather than an explanation of how its CO2 target can be delivered, it is more like a manifesto for radical transformation of our lives, lifestyles and economy – although there is no intention to test this manifesto at the ballot box.

If the current and future governments go ahead with the CCC’s recommendations – which seems likely – no area of our lives will be left unaltered. The report reflects the extent to which politics and the relationship between people and the government has completely shifted over the past few decades. Millions of people will have to bear the burden of the proposals, but the notion that they can have any choice in this proposed reorganisation of society is completely absent. The democratic contest between competing ideological perspectives on how productive society should be organised (if at all) has been abolished and replaced with spreadsheets that will determine what you may eat, how far you may travel and by what means, and how warm your home may be.

The dearth of technical detail in the manifesto tells us that its political ambition is put before its feasibility, while the public’s needs barely get a look-in. Take, for instance, the CCC’s ambition of eliminating the entire fleet of Britain’s 38million fossil-fuel powered vehicles and replacing them with electric cars. Britain’s annual sale of 2.3million new and eight million second-hand cars will magically achieve that goal within just 15 years, according to the logic of the report (typically, it gives neither of these figures). But radically new battery technologies are needed both to substantially lower the price of running an electric car, and to extend the life of electric cars so as to create a second-hand market for them. Unless this technology materialises, this projection is a fantasy.

But as far as environmentalists are concerned, every one of those 38million cars on the road was bought and is used in callous disregard for the planet. In reality, of course, motoring is an economic necessity for millions of people, the majority of whom will be priced off the roads and on to public transport, which is increasingly costly and whose coverage is poor in most parts of the country, if the CCC’s pipe dream does not materialise.

Driving may be off the cards but don’t imagine that staying at home will be cost-free under these plans. The CCC has declared that an ‘energy-efficiency retrofit’ of every single one of the 29million homes across the country ‘should now be a national infrastructure priority’. This will cause severe disruption to at least one million homes per year, every year, until the CCC’s target is reached. Each home will have to be emptied of its occupants and contents, have its walls and roofs stripped, insulated and re-covered, and have its boilers and heaters removed. According to the Energy Technologies Institute (IET), retrofitting on this scale could cost in excess of £2 trillion – a cost equivalent to demolishing and rebuilding every home from scratch.

Nevertheless, the CCC claims that these radical changes, and the many others it proposes, are ‘achievable with known technologies’. It expects the cost to be between one and two per cent of GDP, or around £20 to £40 billion per year, every year. But the IET’s figures put that claim into perspective. The two-trillion-pound programme of retrofitting every home over the next 30 years would cost £66.6 billion a year. Buried deep into the report, the CCC is more candid: ‘The precise investment needs of getting to net zero by the middle of the century are unknowable.’

The track record of technocrats’ financial foresight and their profligacy with public money should never be forgotten. Even far less ambitious and technically simple grands projets like HS2 begin by making claims which quickly depart from reality. HS2 was initially estimated to cost £32.7 billion. But in 2015, the government admitted that the cost is likely to be £55.7 billion. Now even this figure seems to have been underestimated by several billion.

Given the cost and the scale of the CCC’s promised ‘extensive changes across the economy’, it is fair to ask what benefit ordinary people will see. The average person will see absolutely no net benefit. Most people will likely be left in significant debt from the cost of retrofitting their homes. It will leave people far less mobile, without the freedom to enjoy overseas holidays, and with options for domestic travel severely restricted. It will have repercussions throughout the economy, depressing demand for ordinary goods and services outside the green sector. The CCC euphemistically describes these costs as ‘investments’ and ‘opportunities’. But opportunities for whom?

The political class is the big winner in this. Climate-change policy is one of the few areas that can command a cross-party consensus in the British establishment. The CCC was established by the Climate Change Act in 2008, to offer ‘independent advice’ to parliament on what the UK’s ‘carbon budget’ should be until the UK reaches its initial target of an 80 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050. This effectively took far-reaching decisions about the economy out of democratic control, into the hands of unelected technocrats.

Similarly, the net-zero target was established for political rather than environmental reasons. The entire political establishment – political parties, the civil service, quangos, NGOs, big businesses and the media – has been humiliated by recent political developments, which have exposed their disarray and their aloof, self-serving disregard for ordinary people. The desire for such a far-reaching, top-down reorganisation of the economy is the political class’s most recent attempt to secure its interests, to reassert control over the public, and to save face on the international stage.

If all that sounds far-fetched, consider that the CCC’s report gives far more detail on how the UK’s global reputation will be secured by a commitment to net-zero emissions than it gives on the role for nuclear energy in the ‘zero-carbon economy’. Nuclear energy, being ‘zero carbon’, has the potential to obviate the need for expensive energy-efficiency retrofitting, and could even be the backbone for the electrification of heating and transport, for a fraction of the cost that the CCC intends to spend. Instead, the CCC report flatters politicians, telling them that they can show ‘leadership by example’, to ‘shape political conditions in other countries’, by targeting financial support and taking a lead role in negotiating global agreements.

All in all, the CCC’s Net Zero report is a manifesto for permanent green austerity: the perpetual transfer of wealth upwards, for the benefit of the political establishment. As politicians and their parties recognise their estrangement from ordinary people, and as technocrats, ‘civil-society’ organisations and corporations struggle to justify their positions and privilege, the net-zero economy has emerged as a perfect fig leaf.

SOURCE 







Nissan Leaf electric car: too little, too late?

Nissan Leaf, $49,990 in Australia

It’s annoying waiting at the Caltex counter while someone fumbles about for their credit card, and it’s even more frustrating to be behind umpteen cars in a pump line. Patience is a virtue unknown to motorists and our inner alarm clocks are calibrated in milliseconds. Fail at a tight parking space, or react slower than a drag racer to a green, and other drivers will lean on their horns impatiently.

So it’s a mystery why anyone thinks motorists will have the stomach for EV recharging times. Best-case estimates, for an EV with the fastest wiring hooked up to the most powerful DC supercharger, suggest 10-minute refills will be possible. Ten minutes? To most drivers that’s an eternity.

Of course, actual times will stretch much longer – 20, 30, 40 minutes or more. So you’ll park, plug in and seek a distraction. Well, good luck. There’s nothing about the average petrol station that says, “Hey, come and relax in our comfy coffee lounge” because there isn’t one. You get a paper cup and run.

Perhaps the recharging network – when we have one – will be different. Maybe it will spawn its own ecosystem of small businesses catering to heel-kicking EV drivers. Smoothie and a massage while you charge? Or a fitness circuit? Yeah, and maybe we’ll all become Buddhist monks.

This was front of mind while I was recharging this week’s electric buggy, the Nissan Leaf, at the NRMA unit in Sydney’s Olympic Park, the only convenient supercharger within cooee of where I was heading. Admittedly, it was a sleepy public holiday weekend and little was open. But even on a good day, the discount chemist would have been one of the highlights and once I’d restocked the bathroom there was little to do but wait.

It charged at the rate of almost 3km a minute – not bad, considering – but EVs don’t fill up like regular cars. They’re more like your smartphone: once the batteries hit 80 per cent capacity, recharging slows to a crawl. This is essential to avoid damaging or degrading the batteries. In fact, the NRMA unit stopped once it hit that figure and if there’s a way of over-riding it, I didn’t have the patience to find out.

Now you’ll need some endurance, because I’m going to rattle on about range.

If you own an EV, you’ll routinely recharge overnight at home and (possibly) fill the car completely by morning. The new Leaf, a tad optimistically, claims 270km fully amped – a huge leap over the first generation’s 175km. In reality, the Leaf’s range depletes quicker than the miles you cover and it’s line-ball with its sole rival at this level, the Hyundai Ioniq, which claims 230km. However, since on-the-move refills deliver only four-fifths of the stated range, I had 200km to play with.

It gets worse, because you’d be mad to run your EV down to zero – it’s impractical and doesn’t help battery longevity. So the 80 per cent ceiling has a corresponding floor figure of about 20 per cent; go below that and you’ll understand the true meaning of range anxiety. In the Leaf, you wouldn’t want to be stuck in traffic 40km from a plug.

Factor all that in, and without another refill I could afford to go about 80km in the Leaf before turning around and heading home.

In many markets, the first Leaf was the sole mainstream EV and with more than 400,000 sold, it’s the planet’s battery best-seller. The second generation has been available overseas for some time, and ahead of its local launch here in August, the test car was UK spec.

It’s affordable by EV standards but, of course, still not cheap. When the Hyundai Ioniq arrived a few months ago it reset the starting price at $45k. The Leaf comes in $5k higher and compensates with features such as intelligent cruise control and mild autonomy. It’s slightly longer than before, has a larger boot and, as well as increased range thanks to more battery capacity, also has more power (110kW, up from 80kW) and torque (320Nm, up from 280Nm). It can recharge using a home wall-box in 7.5 hours.

The Leaf is a pleasant enough car for shuffling around town, with the same virtues evident in any EV. It’s quiet, responsive and driveable thanks to maximum torque arriving from the off. With its low centre of gravity, it irons out most road bumps – although its suspension struggled once or twice with Sydney’s city tarmac.

But a few high-tech features aside, it’s been built down to a price. The cabin feels low-rent, despite heated seats and other comforts. There’s only one USB port in the cabin, when most new cars these days are bristling with them. The control screen can be invisible in bright light and the dash-top throws reflections into the driver’s line of sight. The driving position seems unnaturally raised yet the corners of the car are difficult to gauge – not helped by its over-large turning circle.

It steps off the line smartly, but without the surprising shove-in-the-back some EVs deliver. An e-pedal delivers lift-off braking a bit too aggressively, while the steering and brake itself are vague. And there’s one giveaway: the park brake is foot-operated, an antiquated device more at home on a cart than an EV with ambition. Most cars now use electric push-buttons instead.

The Leaf has carried the banner for “affordable” battery cars for some time and this second-generation model could have moved the game along. But the Ioniq is more appealing, and most new EVs are targeting a range of 400-500km.

So this feels like a missed opportunity and perhaps Nissan already knows it. Available in Japan is a Leaf e+ with about 40 per cent more range. It reaches Europe later this year but if this Leaf is any guide (it’s been delayed several times), Australia will be waiting a while. And who has the patience for that?

SOURCE  

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

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14 May, 2019  

Thunberg’s apocalyptic millenarianism

Michael Fitzpatrick

‘I speak on behalf of future generations’ was Thunberg’s opening line in her speech to British parliamentarians. These are indeed the words of a prophet – one claiming an even bigger constituency than the ‘99 per cent’ of humanity whom the Occupy Movement of 2011/2012, forerunner of today’s Extinction Rebellion, claimed to represent. Many commentators who are critical of the claims of populist politicians to speak on behalf of ‘the silent majority’ or to have privileged access to the minds of the masses seem to accept without question Thunberg’s status as the self-appointed tribune of the yet unborn.

Thunberg’s gloomy message that we are facing ‘the end of civilisation as we know it’ echoes the familiar ‘Repent the End is Nigh’ slogan of evangelical Christians. Like the millenarian preachers of 19th-century America, Thunberg has appointed a precise end time: ‘10 years, 252 days and 10 hours’ from the moment of her speech in London. William Miller, founder of the Seventh Day Adventists and promoter of the Great Awakening evangelical revival, proclaimed 22 October 1842 as the Last Day.

Though the Great Awakening was followed by the Great Disappointment when the promised messiah failed to appear, similar movements have reappeared around the world at times of social crisis. In a famous chapter in The Making of the English Working Class, the historian EP Thompson characterised as ‘the chiliasm of despair’ the millenarian movements that emerged in Britain following defeats of the early labour movement. One striking difference is that, whereas Miller and his ilk, including ‘the deluded Joanna Southcott’, anticipated a messiah bringing redemption and salvation as well as hellfire, Thunberg and her secular modern followers believe that this really is the end: ‘Now we probably don’t even have a future any more.’

Like all preachers, Thunberg has a dogma – ‘the message of the united climate science’. Climate science is here elevated to the status of revealed truth, as The Science. It is also boosted as ‘united’, in the sense that it is backed by a consensus of authorities, including politicians and religious leaders as well as scientists. For much of the 20th century, the same could be said about the now discredited racial science and eugenics.

Whatever the complexities of the controversy about carbon emissions, it is certain that science, even The Science, cannot predict the future. From Thomas Malthus in the 1790s to the Club of Rome in the 1970s, environmental science has a poor record in its projections of future trends. When asked at Westminster how she dealt with those who questioned her message, Thunberg’s response – ‘I don’t’ – won applause. The dogma of ‘the united climate science’ is, like divine revelation, beyond debate. To question it is the 21st-century equivalent of heresy, or a manifestation of the psychological disorder of ‘denialism’.

Thunberg’s autistic identity raises other worrying issues. Commentators have attributed the ‘glorious simplicity’ of Thunberg’s arguments to her diagnosis as autistic. In a radio interview, she suggested that her autism makes her ‘see things from outside the box’. Not only does she think that autism provides intellectual insights – she believes it also confers moral qualities. ‘I don’t easily fall for lies, I can see through things’, she says. Congratulating Thunberg, celebrity chef Jack Monroe, who has also been diagnosed as autistic, describes her own autistic traits as ‘a kind of superpower’ (which she has harnessed to the production of exotic recipes).

Thunberg has acquired the aura of ‘the blessed fools of Old Russia’, whom the autism specialist Uta Frith has suggested may have merited a diagnosis of autism. Though regarded as eccentric and apparently oblivious to social convention, the ‘holy fools’ were considered to have qualities of innocence and virtue that allowed them ‘to confront bishops and tsars’. By contrast, Thunberg’s moral message has received the endorsement of the pope, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, the plutocrats of Davos, the United Nations and the European and British parliaments, if not yet any tsars. It is bizarre that a creed supported by such a chorus of reaction should be considered by some, such as the Guardian’s Aditya Chakrabortty, as a left-wing cause.

For journalist Ian Birrell, Thunberg’s insistence that ‘being different is a gift’ is a message ‘so pertinent to our troubled age, arguably as important as her bold stand on climate change’. He argues that the difficulties facing autistic people are the consequence of ‘blinkered attitudes and bigotry’ that arise from a lack of respect for difference. He claims that the abuse of people with autism – and their premature mortality – results from ‘indifference and insidious discrimination’.

As the parent of a young man with autism and severe learning disabilities, I struggle to regard autism as a gift. I am also wary that celebrating ‘difference’ indulges a sort of identity politics that merely encourages fragmentation and isolation. Like the tragically murdered MP Jo Cox, I believe that we have more in common than divides us and that we are stronger together. As a doctor, I am also well aware of the indifference and other poor standards of care that people often experience under the NHS – but ill-treatment is sadly by no means exclusive to people with autism.

I am also sceptical about locating the blame for the problems facing people with autism in the prejudices of ordinary people (there is a striking parallel here with the misanthropic outlook of the environmentalist movement). In more than 20 years as a parent, I have often had occasion to be grateful for the kindness of strangers and for the tolerance and understanding of people faced with my son’s sometimes challenging behaviour in public places.

Birrell writes about ‘girls like Greta’ facing ill-treatment in secure units. But the main reason why many young people languish in such units, eight years after the Winterbourne View scandal, is the lack of suitable accommodation, day centres and support systems in the community. This has nothing to do with popular prejudices, but is the direct result of the austerity policies imposed on local authorities by the government of David Cameron (for whom Birrell worked as a speechwriter).

‘Autism awareness training’ for all NHS staff and sentimental pieties about ‘difference’ and ‘autism as a gift’ will do little to improve the plight of most people with autism, who need more and better community resources, and properly paid and well-trained care staff.

When Extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrook invoked the authority of Sir David Attenborough in support of her claim of impending mass species extinction, breakfast TV host Richard Madeley observed that ‘he’s just a broadcaster, not a saint’. But, of course, despite having been chastised by Cardinal George Monbiot for a lack of environmentalist zeal in the past, Attenborough is indeed a secular apostle in the church of impending planetary doom, in which Thunberg has been elevated to the status of patron saint.

Brendan O’Neill is right to point out that the appointment of Thunberg by the green movement as ‘the messiah of their miserabilist political creed’ is ‘unforgivable’. The deference of the political establishment to this child-like saviour, and its approval for school protests supporting her environmentalist crusade, reflects the abdication of adult authority in British politics, of which David Cameron is the most abject personification.

Like that other precocious teenager, Shamima Begum, Thunberg has been radicalised by an older generation which ought to be more careful about exploiting childhood innocence in pursuit of their political agenda, and ought to teach children to think for themselves.

SOURCE 






Climate Change Letter To The Editor, Sunday Times

Sea level rise is to be expected -- but from a SOLAR cause

Mr Bob Ward (letter, 5th May, ‘A roasting for climate claims’) is unlikely to be impartial on CO2, for he is Policy and Communications Director for the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, an entity whose very existence (founded 2008) rests on the assumption that modern global warming (since 1900) is due to CO2 via the 19th-century idea of a so-called greenhouse effect.

Mr Ward feels geophysicist Mr Gil Gilchrist (letter, 28th April) is arrogant to say geologists are “the only scientists qualified to speak with authority” on climate change. I disagree: sedimentary geologists in particular, unlike any other profession, deal almost daily with the effects of Earth’s ceaseless changes in climate (hence sea level) throughout its 4.5-billion-year history.

Gilchrist claims warming by man-made CO2 is an “unproven idea promulgated by” the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which, he rightly laments, has no geologists among its 800 “experts” (his quotation marks).

In flat contradiction Mr Ward says “Many of the authors on the panel’s assessments have been geologists”. In fact IPCC’s author listings (accessible online) for its Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports (published 2013-14 and due 2022) do indeed show “not … a single geologist” (Gilchrist) among the 838 and 784 authors, who include ‘climate scientists’ (a flourishing new discipline), meteorologists, economists, sociologists and public-health specialists; the geosciences are represented only by a few glaciologists and geophysicists.

Thus IPCC lacks crucial long-term perspective.

Nobody denies man’s rising CO2 emissions accompanied modern warming. However, warming also accompanied rising solar output (dismissed in IPCC climate models). Warming reached a (geologically unspectacular) peak temperature in 2016 (NASA online graph; note cooling since then), a few decades after the solar peak (1958), a delay compatible with the vast ocean’s thermal inertia (ignored by IPCC).

Astrophysicists define this 20th century solar upswing as a rare Grand Maximum (GM) of the sun’s output, unsurpassed since the 4th century GM. The latter was followed decades later by global warming and a sea-level rise of 3 to 5 metres (e.g. google Romano-British Transgression; denied by IPCC), ["transgression" = rising seas in geology-speak]  proven by world geological evidence plus exquisite UK archaeological evidence, e.g. Portchester seaside fort’s 4th century water well, dug to 6 metres (proving low sea level), but with a deliberately introduced (stratified) 5-metre backfill, dateable by contained 5th and 6th century artefacts; and in Londinium a flow-eroded notch reaching 1.7 metres up the Thames-estuary Roman wall, and a drain-hole at 1 metre deliberately plugged with rubble including 4th-century pottery.

Yours sincerely,

Roger Higgs DPhil (geology)

SOURCE 






Big Green The Handmaiden Of Big Oil

Written by David Wojick PhD

Climate alarmists often accuse skeptics, like myself and independent groups like CFACT, of being in the pay of Big Oil. This is completely false — we don’t receive a dime from them.

It is part of the green fairy tale that skepticism only exists because the oil companies are funding it.

That Exxon-Mobil threw a few million at various skeptical causes prior to 2007 is the standard example, but that was many years ago. They have stopped sending any money whatsoever to skeptical causes since then.

So I did some digging and the reality turns out to be just the opposite. In fact, the big oil companies are putting at least a billion dollars into alarmist projects and lobbying.

Of course, they have good commercial reasons, which are killing coal and making natural gas more “climate friendly.” After all, Big Oil is also Big Gas.

The central vehicle for moving these green billion dollars goes by a perfectly descriptive name — the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative or OGCI.

If the false accusers were correct then “oil and gas” would never go together with “climate initiative” but there it is and it is very big.

Collectively they claim to produce 30% of the world’s oil and gas.

The OGCI website features a lineup of Corporate CEOs, just to show how seriously green they are. Their latest annual report has a letter from the CEOs, including this gem:

“As our ambition grows with the scale of the challenge, we look forward to working closely with policy-makers, regulators and all stakeholders to help develop the levers that can economically and sustainably accelerate the pace of the low carbon transition.”

OGCI was started in 2014, shortly after the famous Chesapeake Energy scandal. Chesapeake’s CEO was caught giving the Sierra Club millions of dollars to support the war on coal, but some Club members objected, given that they consider fossil fuels their enemy.

What seems to have happened is that the ever-wily big companies simply created their own green group. With a billion bucks in funding, it may well be the biggest outfit in Big Green (not counting the green governments).

However, I also found that EDF is actively engaged with corporations, via its EDF+Business arm. In particular, EDF has a huge methane reduction program — the Methane Challenge — that involves OGCI.

This program is featured in the Sustainability Reports of several major oil companies. EDF is even building and launching their own satellite, cleverly called MethaneSAT.

EDF is clearly getting a lot of money for this. They say they get none directly from the companies, rather that they get it from unspecified “philanthropies.”

Where these philanthropies get it may be a different story. They could easily be laundering Big Oil money. It may be telling that OGCI does not issue a financial report.

Space News actually asked EDF about this funding but got stonewalled. Here is their report:

“However, EDF has provided few details about how much MethaneSAT will cost or how it will be funded. The project received last year a grant from a new initiative called The Audacious Project, although the size of the award was not disclosed. An EDF spokesman did not respond to an inquiry about the financial status of the project.”

Having EDF on their side is certainly a big plus for Big Oil.

In any case, it is clear that Big Oil is spending at least a billion dollars on the green stuff, which is a lot of green.

There is no evidence that the skeptics are getting anything, but if some are it is trivial in comparison. Meanwhile, OGCI is getting at least a billion and EDF maybe many millions.

When it comes to skepticism, the simple fact is that roughly half of Americans do not accept climate alarmism, right up to the President. No one is paying for this widespread skepticism.

As for Big Oil, they are putting big bucks into green climate initiatives, not skepticism. Conservatives do have their think tanks, which happily manage to find some funding, but not from Big Oil for climate skepticism.

Claiming that Big Oil is responsible for skepticism is just another part of the alarmist fantasy world.

SOURCE 






Record ‘Global Warming’ In May Hits Switzerland

Switzerland snowfall may 2019An historic Arctic blast affecting much of Europe over the past couple of days brought record amounts of snowfall for the month of May to parts of Switzerland.

Capital Bern received 4 cm (1.57 inches) of snow on May 5, breaking the previous record for the month set back in 1945 at 1 cm (0.39 inches).

The city of St. Gallen received 19 cm (7.48 inches) of snow on the same day, breaking the previous record of 12 cm (4.72 inches) set on May 7, 1957.


The region will continue feeling effects of the unseasonal cold blast, but damage to crops are not expected to be as severe as in 2017 when Swiss fruit farming industry suffered heavy losses, due to frost coming a few weeks later after many trees have already blossomed, SwissInfo reports.

SOURCE 






Climate politics as changeable as global weather

Comment from Australia

The politics of climate change is moving quickly and in different ­directions in different countries, presenting serious media and politicians with even more challenges in the coming decade.

Last Saturday week The Australian’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly argued that the election of a Shorten government would redefine the politics of climate change as voters accepted Labor’s assertion that Australia needs tougher ­action to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions than that offered by the Coalition and effectively rules out being constrained by policy costings. Kelly likened the situation here to protests in Britain by people wanting a commitment to carbon neutrality and cited the influence of Swedish 16-year-old savant Greta Thunberg.

Yet the push for carbon neutrality is not going as uniformly well as Labor leader Bill Shorten or Greens leader Richard Di Natale would have you believe. As this column has pointed out for three years, China and India, No 1 and No 3 respectively of the top global emitters, have not committed to start to reduce carbon intensity, let alone total CO2 output, until 2030.

Activists and left-wing media outlets never like admitting the one major emitter to have success in reducing emissions, though still short of the Paris commitments it is withdrawing from, is the US. It has achieved this on the back of fracking for natural gas.

Gas was expected to be the transition fuel to renewables here when former Labor PM Julia Gillard signed her deal with the Greens in 2010. Just as Greens’ maximilism destroyed Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading system, advocates after 2010 immediately pushed for a faster transition to renewables.

With no gas reservation policy to guarantee domestic prices, ­renewables that had been expected to phase in across 40 years ramped up faster than the grid could cope with and created instability and price pressure. Back in 2010, the idea had been that ­renewables would not dominate until 2050, when large-scale, grid-size battery storage technology had matured.

What Labor, the Greens and some media companies appear to have missed is that the same pressures that have created havoc in our power industry are now splitting EU and Canadian attitudes to renewables.

EU plans for total carbon neutrality are in trouble east of France. Europe’s biggest economy, Germany, long a leader in renewables, is facing a possible economic slowdown and historically high energy prices in its heavy manufacturing sector, just as energy conservatives have argued it would. While Britain, France and The Netherlands remain committed to the idea of zero carbon and want it sooner if possible, Italy, Poland and Hun­gary are falling in behind Germany in urging a more cautious approach. No EU country is as yet meeting its Paris commitments in full.

Several European countries, especially Poland and Hun­gary, are a long way behind their targeted reductions and Europe’s rate of renewables growth is ­slowing. Wind and solar photovoltaic ­installation rates have declined and total ­renewable installation in Europe last year was only at half the 2010 level.

Populist parties of the Right, ­especially in France but also in Finland and The Netherlands, are building electoral support for nationalist programs aimed at resisting the EU on centrally imposed climate policies. While these parties were once driven by anti-immigration sentiment, they are increasingly mobilising behind opposition to Brussels over planned carbon ­dioxide reductions. France’s protesting yellow shirts are violently opposing plans to increase fuel taxes. Wait until France’s farmers hear about Greens proposals to hit the meat, game and poultry industries, given agriculture is next on the activists’ list after electricity.

Even renewables as they are in Europe are not what many in the media may think. As business columnist Terry McCrann pointed out in The Weekend Australian on May 4, ­Europe is pulling what many would think is a renewables swiftie. The biggest renewables power generator across the EU is biomass, effectively firewood. Despite being a heavy emitter of CO2, biomass emissions are not counted in Europe’s carbon accounting.

The theory says carbon dioxide will eventually be reduced by growing new biomass, but this does not seem to fit alarmist scenarios calling for carbon neutrality immediately. Biomass was 60 per cent of renewables generation across ­Europe in 2016. And Europe, a long-time ­opponent of fracking, is doubling imports of US gas created by fracking.

Add to the European picture the votes in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Ontario for conservatives opposing carbon taxes. Manitoba, Saskatchewan and New Brunswick are also facing federal carbon taxes because their governments have refused to ­implement their own.

However quasi-religious the rhetoric of the ALP or parts of the Coalition in committing to action on climate change, there is no point in a country with 1.3 per cent of global emissions destroying its economy when major emitters are increasing global CO2 output.

Politicians need to resist policies that hurt their own poor, and journalists should resist bullying calls for reporting conformity by parts of the scientific, political and business community, many with a vested interest in renewables.

Environment writers could start by reading the submission to the US congress on February 6 by eminent climate scientist ­Judith Curry. Curry, hated by climate alarmists, bells the cat on media lies about extreme weather events. She points out that even the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rejects the idea that any individual weather ­incident can be linked to CO2 ­increases and cites data showing droughts and heatwaves in the US are not as ­severe as they were in the 1930s dust bowl era. She says more work needs to be done to understand the role of geology and the sun in global temperatures and ridicules the notion that CO2 can be used like a dial to change global temperature.

She urges the US to be cautious: “Drastic reductions … will not ­reduce global CO2 concentrations if emissions in the developing world, particularly China and India, continue to increase. If we believe the climate model simulations, we would not expect to see any changes in extreme ­weather/climate events until the late 21st century.”

Like Copenhagen Consensus director Bjorn Lomborg, published in this paper for 15 years, Curry ­rejects environmental spiritualism in favour of rational approaches that will not damage society. She urges greater adaptation strategies to deal with possible emerging weather changes and discusses ­social and planning changes to ­increase “resilience, anti-fragility and thrivability”.

Politicians who think commitments to action at any cost will win them votes need to be careful. While the Coalition has torn itself to pieces on climate change for a decade, Labor’s position is not without risk, as Germany and France show in different ways. Labor, the party of the worker, needs to be mindful of possible damage it could do by appealing to rich Greens and young voters at the expense of the older poor.

And journalists, before reporting ridiculous scientific claims, should look at a piece published in The Wall Street Journal last June 21 under the headline, ­“Thirty years on, how well do ­global warming predictions stack up?” The answer? Every scientific doom forecast has been proven wrong.

SOURCE  

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

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

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





13 May, 2019  

Researchers often report findings of no effect as if they meant something

I have been going on about this for decades so it is good to see it systematically surveyed in a major medical journal.  If medical researchers often manipulate their results it clearly subjects the results of climate research to similar doubt. In the study below, positive spin of statistically nonsignificant primary outcomes was found in 57% of abstracts and 67% of main text of the published articles.

Level and Prevalence of Spin in Published Cardiovascular Randomized Clinical Trial Reports With Statistically Nonsignificant Primary Outcomes

M. Khan et al.

Abstract

Importance:  Clinical researchers are obligated to present results objectively and accurately to ensure readers are not misled. In studies in which primary end points are not statistically significant, placing a spin, defined as the manipulation of language to potentially mislead readers from the likely truth of the results, can distract the reader and lead to misinterpretation and misapplication of the findings.

Objective:  To determine the level and prevalence of spin in published reports of cardiovascular randomized clinical trial (RCT) reports.

Data Source:  MEDLINE was searched from January 1, 2015, to December 31, 2017, using the Cochrane highly sensitive search strategy.

Study Selection:  Inclusion criteria were parallel-group RCTs published from January 1, 2015, to December 31, 2017 in 1 of 6 high-impact journals (New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, JAMA, European Heart Journal, Circulation, and Journal of the American College of Cardiology) with primary outcomes that were not statistically significant were included in the analysis.

Data Extraction and Synthesis:  Analysis began in August 2018. Data were extracted and verified by 2 independent investigators using a standard collection form. In cases of disagreement between the 2 investigators, a third investigators served as arbitrator.

Main Outcomes and Measures:  The classifications of spin type, severity, and extent were determined according to predefined criteria. Primary clinical outcomes were divided into safety of treatment, efficacy of treatment, and both.

Results:  Of 587 studies identified, 93 RCT reports (15.8%) met inclusion criteria. Spin was identified in 53 abstracts (57%; 95% CI, 47%-67%) and 62 main texts of published articles (67%; 95% CI, 57%-75%). Ten reports (11%; 95% CI, 6%-19%) had spin in the title, 35 reports (38%; 95% CI, 28%-48%) had spin in the results section, and 50 reports (54%; 95% CI, 44%-64%) had spin in the conclusions. Among the abstracts, spin was observed in 38 results sections (41%; 95% CI, 31%-51%) and 45 conclusions sections (48%; 95% CI, 38%-58%).

Conclusions and Relevance:  This study suggests that in reports of cardiovascular RCTs with statistically nonsignificant primary outcomes, investigators often manipulate the language of the report to detract from the neutral primary outcomes. To best apply evidence to patient care, consumers of cardiovascular research should be aware that peer review does not always preclude the use of misleading language in scientific articles.

doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.2622






But What About Traffic? The Case for Road Pricing

Building more housing will inevitably cause more congestion. The answer is to price the space where the congestion occurs.

In my last Catalyst column, I wrote of the need for places like San Francisco to build more housing. Their shortages have created severe affordability problems, I wrote, and the answer is to relax zoning and allow more density. But these ideas often get blowback from people who live in the areas, and feel the impacts of the growth. They may be concerned about noise, crowding, and aesthetic changes, but above all, many are concerned about the added automobile congestion – hence their talking point “what about traffic?”

It’s a valid concern. Today, the densest cities  have America’s worst congestion and longest commutes, with metro San Francisco among the leaders in both. This makes sense: if more people jam into a space, and don’t significantly change their behavior (for example, by foregoing car ownership), things will naturally get more crowded. So wouldn’t increasing San Francisco’s density worsen the problem?

Well, yes – if certain policies don’t change. San Francisco and other dense cities feel crowded with cars, because the spaces where they’re stored and driven don’t require payment. As with many other “free” public goods, this has caused overuse – a tragedy of the commons. Basic economics would say that to prevent said overcrowding, the city should price these goods based on market demand, so that a scarce commodity is efficiently rationed. In San Francisco, this would mean market-based pricing for both parking spaces and roads. Let’s unpack both ideas.

First, a common complaint in San Francisco is that building more housing will worsen the on-street parking armageddon that already exists. But one reason San Francisco’s parking situation is a mess is that it’s under-priced. Most neighborhoods have no paid residential placard system – anyone can park anywhere. Even in neighborhoods that do, the placards cost a measly $136/year, and each address can purchase up to 4 placards. In both cases, this means too many people are searching for a small number of spots. When people can’t find parking in front of their homes, they waste time and add to congestion by circling to look for it.

Donald Shoup, a renowned parking guru, and professor in the Department of Public Planning at UCLA, has called for San Francisco “to charge drivers what parking is worth.” Residents would bid with each other for annual parking placards. Winning bidders would get the space; losing bidders would settle for cheaper, off-street parking (likely causing the construction of more lots or garages); while others who are priced out would forego car ownership, freeing up street space. Those non-owners could settle for alternative modes of transportation like transit and ridesharing, which would bolster the revenue for those services, improving their coverage. Shoup has even suggested using the proceeds from the parking placard system to fund transit.

San Francisco’s second congestion problem—crowded roads—could be fixed with a similar concept: congestion charging. While there are tolls at some entry points into the city, they are minor, and driving on city streets is free. This leads to the same tragedy-of-the-commons scenario. Drivers can’t move quickly, and their lingering further worsens pollution and gridlock.

In a congestion charging system, which has been widely lauded by economists from Paul Krugman to Murray Rothbard, road use is priced dynamically to be more expensive during peak hours and less expensive off-peak.

Installing this in San Francisco, via electronic tolls and transponders, would create behavioral shifts. Traffic would spread out more across the day, as some drivers amend their habits to avoid the premium rush hour fee. Some people would stop driving, instead taking transit that, because of the reduced congestion, would have lower headways and better on-time ratings. And interesting changes may even occur in the rideshare industry. With congestion charging, an Uber or Lyft ride would be more expensive. But that could impel the companies to scale up their services to carpool (as they already have to some degree), so the higher costs of movement are shared by multiple riders.

Cities that have tried congestion charging, including London and Singapore, have seen this increase in transit usage and reduction in gridlock. In March, lawmakers agreed to try the concept in New York City. And Scott Wiener, the California state senator of SB 50 fame, wants rush-hour pricing for San Francisco.

The benefits of doing this should be intuitive: competition for road space in San Francisco is fierce because of its density, and will get fiercer with more growth. But that doesn’t have to mean “more traffic.” If parking and driving is priced according to market demand, it will shift the behavior of users and the strategy of different industries, as they respond to the price signals. The outcome will be clearer roads for San Francisco.

SOURCE 






Shenanigans with rapid transport facts

Greenies love buses but how well can we trust what they tell us about the advantages of buses?  The following episode suggests that bus data can be as rubbery as Greenie climate data

An occasional hobby of mine is writing letters to newspapers to address the state of the world. It is a petty occupation, but it keeps my hand in at writing and occasionally I get a bit of fun in stirring the pot and generating a reaction. Recently I had a letter in the Irish Times about the BusConnects plan that generated an interesting reply.

BusConnects

BusConnects is a plan to upgrade Dublin's transport services by introducing dedicated bus and cycle lanes along key routes all the way from suburbs to centre. Dublin is an old city with many narrow roads, and the plan has upset local residents on affected routes who are reluctant to give up their on street parking, part of their front garden, or see full grown trees cut down, just so that passers-through can pass through more quickly.

I can understand residents' disquiet, as the changes will have considerable impact on certain streets. However as a lifelong car-avoider, I can assure you that some sort of significant change is essential and long overdue. Bus services in Dublin are very unreliable and slow, with long, meandering routes and buses competing for road space with private cars. On bad weather days when car traffic spikes it can take well over an hour to travel the short 6 or 8 kilometres from the suburbs to the centre by bus. Meanwhile cycle lanes are generally either non-existent, or are so poorly implemented as to be actually more dangerous.

Letter and Response

I read the brochure describing changes to the planned Rathfarnham to city centre route, about which a number of residents had complained in previous missives to the editor. Page 16 of the brochure stated that current journey times of up to 75 minutes would be regularised to 25 minutes, and so I wrote a letter supporting the plan, judging that a saving of up to 50 minutes per journey was worth the sacrifice of a moderate amount of on-street parking and trees. Each passenger on the 600 buses per day on that route could reclaim time up to the equivalent of a working day per week, not to mention the reduction in costs for the bus companies, freeing up vehicles to provide additional services, reduction in emissions and so on.

Rathfarnham route change summary
A response in the next edition put me straight. The writer rubbished the 50 minute reduction as nonsense, pointing out that page 311 of the main report stated the maximum journey time was only 28 minutes, and thus if I saved 50 minutes I would be achieving time travel to the extend that I might meet myself coming back out of town on a return trip.

Two Versions of the Truth

I was curious and checked the quoted report. The writer was correct. The BusConnects' own website had published one set of figures in the consultation brochure, from which I had quoted, and a different and contradictory set in the main report, from which she had quoted.

No alt text provided for this image
Rathfarnham route journey durations from the full length report.
An additional discrepancy was that the brochure stated journey times after the changes would be 25 minutes, while the full report stated that in many cases journey times were already close to half of that with savings amounting to 7 or 8 minutes per journey. The report also made clear that the gains would be made not just by changes to infrastructure along the route, but by prioritised traffic signalling for buses and the introduction of an entirely cashless fare system.

I felt a bit of a fool, but recognised a situation I have often encountered in my work over the years - an organisation publishing two conflicting versions of the truth!

The Quest for Certainty

Looking in more detail at the main report, the times quoted were not real, absolute maximums, but rather ''the average journey time per half hour over the course of a normal weekday".

Immediately I could speculate that a "normal" weekday was one that did not contain unusual delays or variations, i.e. that excluded statistical outliers. This would explain how a 'normal average maximum' could differ so much from an absolute or occasional maximum, but how could I know if this speculation was accurate?

I know from previous experience that traffic surveys are heavily dependent on the time of year and weather that occurs while they are collecting data. Having complained to a local councillor about the volume of school and college traffic 'rat running' through our quiet estate each morning and evening, I was surprised to see survey equipment set up a few months later. Unfortunately this was during the unbroken sunshine of early August, when all the schools and colleges were off, builder's holidays were in effect, and many other people were away too. Needless to say the survey found traffic levels were very light and recommended no additional measures to control speed etc.

So what time of year was the route survey done for BusConnects? Was the weather poor or fair? What other things might have had an impact, e.g. road works, strikes, or public events? What statistical methods were used to determine the 'average' or what was a 'normal' day? What exceptional 'outliers' did they find, and did they exclude these or include them? All buses have been fitted with GPS devices for some time now, so data should be readily available in huge quantity and detail.

Looking for additional explanation to understand the data I found none. There was no information about when or how the assessment of journey times had been made, no explanation of how the figure of 75 minutes in the brochure came to be, no breakout of how much of the hoped for time savings would be delivered by infrastructure changes, and how much by less disruptive changes to traffic signals and the introduction of cashless payment, and no set of base raw figures for a data geek like me to sink my teeth into.

The only other source of data I could find was the official Dublin Bus timetables, which suggested that passengers should plan for a journey time of about 48 minutes along the affected route. Now I had three differing versions of the truth!

Conclusion

It is poor form that the supporting information published by a state body to help persuade the public about the benefits of a major and very expensive infrastructure upgrade should be so unclear and apparently self-contradictory. Unfortunately it is little surprise.

All organisations suffer similar situations from time to time. Without a central agreed data source different teams and departments can easily use similar data sources to generate widely different figures. This means that people with an existing predisposition for or against something can chose the set of figures that they wish to believe - a recipe for conflict and a sure-fire way to discredit the data management professionals involved on either side.

When such situations arise it is important to be able to work quickly back and find the source of the differences, something that is made much easier by having a proper data infrastructure and by adhering to agreed data processes and standards.

Public bodies should also adhere to the State's own advice on data transparency - i.e. that where data can be made public, it should be made public. That way any interested party can look into the data, challenge broad assertions, answer their own questions and ultimately confirm their faith in the competence of the relevant organisations.

SOURCE 







‘Global Warming’ Not Scary Enough, Alarmists Rebrand It ‘Climate Crisis’

Since the expressions “global warming” and “climate change” do not frighten people enough, activists are proposing a shift in language to “climate crisis” or “environmental collapse,” with the help of advertising consultants.

Neuroscience research suggests that “global warming” and “climate change” do not produce a powerful enough reaction in people, whereas “climate crisis” got “a 60 percent greater emotional response from listeners” according to a recent study.

Environmental lobbying has reportedly yielded a 15-point increase in the share of Americans who believe that climate change is a serious problem, but activists are looking for ways to boost that number still further by using more explosive language.

Enter SPARK Neuro, an advertising consulting firm that measures physiological data such as brain activity and palm sweat to quantify people’s emotional reactions to stimuli.

SPARK Neuro fixed electroencephalography (EEG) devices to the heads of 120 volunteers to gauge the electrical activity coming from their brains.

At the same time, a webcam monitored their facial expressions and sensors on their fingers recorded the sweat produced by heightened emotions.

The group, which was evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, listened to audio recordings of six different climate phrases.

“Global warming” and “climate change” performed the worst, beaten hands down by “climate crisis,” “environmental destruction,” “weather destabilization,” and “environmental collapse.”

According to Spencer Gerrol, CEO of SPARK Neuro, there are two probable reasons that “global warming” and “climate change” perform so poorly.

For starters, they are both neutral phrases, with nothing “inherently negative or positive” about the words themselves.

Second, people have gotten used to these expressions and they no longer pack a significant punch. Both global warming and climate change are “incredibly worn out,” Gerrol said.

Moreover, if an expression doesn’t elicit a strong emotional response in the first place, it is even more likely to wear out quickly, Gerrol said.

In its study, Spark said it was looking for a “sweet spot” that provoked a response but did not backfire by driving people over the edge.

“A successful candidate’s aim is to broaden the conversation around an issue with words that spark interest on both ends of the political spectrum… while avoiding overstating the problem,” it declared.

SOURCE 







Both major Australian parties are failing to confront the undisputed fact that the huge costs of their climate policies CANNOT yield any beneficial result

The Australian population and economy is too small for even their most severe climate policies to have any impact on the climate

Plain-speaking Australia has been replaced by parlour games, and we all suffer. Instead of arguing big issues from first principles, politicians corral debate to avoid offending the Canberra press gallery, the ABC or theoretical swinging voters as imagined by political consultants.

This is how an election choice between orthodox economic progress and a reckless ideological punt ends up being portrayed as an ill-defined contest between evenly matched plans.

We have the unthinkable scenario of Labor refusing to reveal the economic impact of its climate and energy policies on the absurd basis that it will be less than the cost of inaction.

Our spineless national debate also means the Coalition can’t bring itself to respond with the plain fact that there is no cost to inaction; presumably because that might expose the folly of heavy costs already imposed by its climate policies. Much in this campaign is based on similar obfuscation.

Think of it this way. If Labor were to run an emotive argument on climate change during a drought — suggesting it could stop droughts, floods and bushfires — and ignoring details and cost, it just might get a head nod in focus groups. Then imagine Coalition strategists deciding they need to tackle Labor’s plan by pointing out the obvious facts about how Australia’s actions can have no environmental benefit while global emissions are rising by a much greater factor and that doubling our emissions reductions will produce serious economic disadvantages. The pollsters and consultants might step in and warn that this would be a self-defeating approach because their qualitative polling shows climate is Labor’s ground.

Instead of having a real argument about costs and benefits, the Coalition might retreat to policy and rhetoric that doesn’t confront the emotive and wrongheaded foundations of Labor’s plan but merely quibbles over the extent of action. The real debate is left ­unargued.

This, as you can see, is probably not far from what has transpired. And it is not the only debate eviscerated in such a fashion.

Too many commentators are sucked down the same path. Analysis can be constrained within the unspoken boundaries of the media/political class, unconsciously placing a greater store in resonating with peers rather than serving audiences.

This is how groupthink is formed and, together with a broad green-left bias in the media, it is why so many commentators have had to back-pedal in this campaign from earlier predictions of a Labor landslide. As we approach the crucial final week, what important facts and issues are not being aired and what myths are being perpetuated?

The economic choice is profound. At a time of global uncertainty and domestic stasis — as exemplified by the Reserve Bank’s contemplation of lowering interest rates from record emergency lows — Labor’s prescription to increase the government take from the economy by up to $387 billion across 10 years is frightening.

The major parties agree public debt levels are worrying and that returning the budget to surplus is just the start of a fiscal recovery plan. Yet the Coalition prescription is to lower taxes and constrain spending to foster growth and Labor’s plan is the polar opposite.

We know which of these works and which will lead to ruin. The postwar political and economic history of Western liberal democracies tells us the smaller government approach is required. Yet Labor promises bigger government, with more interventions in tax, wages and energy.

Labor rolled out Bob Hawke and Paul Keating to endorse its economic prescription and they rightly claimed their reforms set up decades of prosperity. But they failed to mention how their own party repudiated this aspirational approach under Kevin Rudd and is now focused not on economic ­reform but on increased taxation, redistribution and spending.

Privately, Hawke and Keating would be horrified by modern Labor’s economic regression. But the media remains conveniently ­incurious.

In economic terms this election is at least as important as the 2007 switch from John Howard and Peter Costello to Rudd and Wayne Swan. That is saying something.

The climate debate is disgraceful. There cannot be a journalist in the country who doesn’t know that global carbon emissions are growing each year by about double Australia’s annual emissions, yet they allow Shorten and Labor to get away with the fiction that their policies will be cost-free and will reduce drought, floods, bushfires and cyclones.

How is it that so many people with functioning intellects can allow this nonsense to go ­unchallenged day in, day out? Presumably they want to conform with a climate-sensitive, “woke” generation or don’t want to risk being denied access to Labor insiders on the cusp of forming government. They go with an ­orthodox fiction and fail their ­audiences.

The Greens get away with murder. Richard Di Natale has been spruiking new laws to clamp down on the media and says the aim is to stamp out hate speech, but it sounds more like silencing his ­critics. The ABC and other media have been silent about this threat to freedom of speech even though there is form — in alliance with the Greens, the Gillard government tried to impose de facto regulation on print media.

Days after these plans were exposed, Di Natale’s double standards were laid bare as he stood by candidates caught posting offensive and racist material online. One resigned but Di Natale still backs George Hanna, the Greens candidate in the Northern Territory seat of Lingiari, who referred to his indigenous Coalition opponent ­Jacinta Price as a coconut.

This is purely racist abuse — suggesting someone is brown on the outside and white on the inside — and the only excuse the Greens can offer is that Hanna, too, is indigenous. Pathetic. Imagine the reaction if the Coalition attempted to stand by a candidate in such circumstances.

Much of the media/political class buys into Labor’s paranoia about News Corp but is incurious about how the publicly funded broadcasters boost the green-left agenda 24/7 and fail to scrutinise Labor or the Greens.

They see a conspiracy when The Daily Telegraph tells the inspirational truth about Shorten’s mother but are fine with the deliberate and extended fake news around the so-called “watergate” scandal.

A clutch of 15 so-called independent MPs and candidates are boosted by the media — because they attack conservatives — but are never pinned down over who they would support to form government. They will support Labor, of course, which may prove very important as a hung parliament is a possibility.

Much of our debate seems incapable of referencing a reasonable person test. As much as the Coalition has let us down, damaged itself and made it easy for people to vote against it, it has muddled through a useful period of economic and fiscal recovery, restoring our border security and securing significant free trade deals.

Would a reasonable person believe that a switch to Labor does not involve an enormous and unnecessary risk on border security, energy affordability and reliability and economic progress?

The choice is stark and the debate is far more opaque than it should be.

SOURCE  

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

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

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12 May, 2019  

A forbidding island off Martha’s Vineyard, once a bombing site, is now a bunny refuge

Maybe this makes sense to Greenies but it makes no sense to me.  Rabbits are Australia's worst pest species.  They greatly reduce the productivity of our pastures.  So to me and to most Australians the only good rabbit is a dead rabbit. And from a species conservation viewpoint, rabbits are nearly as toxic as rats. 

And it is on islands that they do greatest harm -- wiping out many native species.  Herculean efforts have been made on South Georgia and Macquarie islands to get rid of them and remove the threat of further extinctions hanging over the what's left of the  native flora and fauna. So why on earth are they being introduced to Nomans island?  Are there no flora and fauna native to that place?  As a federal wildlife refuge one would think there is


Closed to the public, Nomans Land, 3 miles southwest of Martha’s Vineyard, is littered with unexploded bombs and rockets from its years as a naval bombing site.

This week, the federal government was delivering a payload of a gentler sort: 13 cinnamon-colored New England cottontail rabbits, each one nestled in its own compartment in wooden boxes stowed behind the captain’s chair.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service, which had outfitted the rabbits with tiny GPS collars, was on a mission to help rescue the species by establishing a self-sustaining colony on Nomans Land, a 628-acre federal wildlife refuge.

SOURCE 






'Climate Anxiety': There's a Guide for That (Seriously)

For all the panicked young people out there, climate alarmists say they feel your pain.  

A conciliatory CNN report this week touches on the issue of so-called “climate anxiety,” which apparently is becoming widespread. The first paragraph of the report introduces a Willamette University student who “woke at 2 a.m. and then cried for two solid hours about the warming ocean.” That student’s climate professor, Wendy Petersen Boring, asserts, “Back in 2007, [climate change] was the mouse in the room; then, it became the elephant in the room. By 2016, those concerns and fears began to flood over.”

The report goes on to cite a 69-page American Psychological Association/ecoAmerica climate guide published in March 2017 that tenders ways to ameliorate the effects of environmental anxiety. According to the guide, “This … report is intended to further inform and empower health and medical professionals, community and elected leaders, and the public.”

CNN fans the flames by claiming, “Higher temperatures alone have led to more suicides and increased psychiatric hospitalization and have hurt our sleep, which can also harm mental health. These problems will get worse as the temperature continues to rise, research shows.” With statements like that, it’s little wonder students think the sky is falling.

Fact check: It’s not. As veteran meteorologist Joe Bastardi has pointed out time and again, our standard of living and gross domestic product on a global scale has never been better because of fossil fuels. Taking those away hastily is a recipe for disaster.

Of course, not everyone is victimized by “climate anxiety.” In March, Gallup reported that 66% of Americans are convinced global warming is man-made. That said, “Fewer than half of Americans — 45% — think global warming will pose a serious threat in their own lifetime and 44% say they worry a great deal about it. Another 21% worry a fair amount about global warming, while about a third (35%) worry only a little or not at all.”

But even that worry seems to become less so come voting time. After every election, climate change as a preeminent issue ends up ranking fairly low among voters. It’s good that at least some people get their priorities straight before casting their votes.

Which bring us to the final point. Tellingly, Gallup also reports, “In terms of demographic differences, there is a 20-percentage-point spread between the youngest and oldest Americans in those classified as Concerned Believers: 67% of those 18 to 29 vs. 47% of those 65 and older. Additionally, only 7% of young adults meet the definition of Cool Skeptics, compared with 22% of seniors.”

Younger generations are more prone to believe climate-change alarmism thanks to our modern-day leftist education complex. Older generations, on the other hand, have lived long enough to know that a plethora of climate doomsday scenarios haven’t unfolded. Propaganda and pollaganda are powerful tools. And for that, we should all be extremely anxious for our future.

SOURCE 






NRDC Never Stops Lying About Glyphosate, or Science in General

Pop quiz: What do the New York Times, Jeffrey "the yogic flying instructor" Smith, and the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) have in common?

Answer: They all shamelessly lie about glyphosate to make money. (You get full credit if you answered, "They are all bad sources of science information.")

Danny Hakim, a journalist (I'm using that word rather loosely) who writes for the New York Times, promotes conspiracy theories about American agriculture. He once wrote an article comparing pesticides to "Nazi-made sarin gas." And he followed that up with another article accusing the U.S. government of knowing that glyphosate was killing people but covering it up. I eagerly await his next exposé on the aliens the government is hiding at Area 51.

The same sort of hysteria is repeated by Jeffrey Smith, a yogic flying instructor (yes, it's as weird as it sounds) who operates the deceptively named Institute for Responsible Technology. Like the New York Times, Smith perpetuates one lie after another about biotechnology. Now, he's spreading lies about medical treatments for cancer which are so egregious that, if cancer patients actually followed the advice, they would die. So much for responsible technology.

In our experience, birds of a feather flock together. It's an easy jump from being anti-GMO to being anti-vaccine or anti-technology in general.

NRDC: Cranks, Crackpots, and Conspiracy Theorists

Thus, joining this motley crew is the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a group of cranks, crackpots, and conspiracy theorists who knowingly spread misinformation about nuclear power, GMOs, and scary "chemicals."

While the NRDC is fond of calling everybody who disagrees with them a "shill" for industry, the reality is quite different. The NRDC rakes in a whopping $130 million every year telling people that the latest technological developments in energy and biotechnology are just too scary for Americans. It's good business. The President, Rhea Suh, made $541,000 in 2016. Not bad. That's more than half of ACSH's entire budget.

Well, NRDC is back, trying to cash in on the delirium surrounding glyphosate. What better time to cash in than when trial lawyers are duping juries into awarding multi-million-dollar verdicts to sympathetic cancer patients? It is within this milieu that NRDC's Jennifer Sass said:

"EPA's Pesticide office is out on a limb here—with Monsanto and Bayer and virtually nobody else. Health agencies and credible non-industry experts who've reviewed this question have all found a link between glyphosate and cancer."

That's not just a lie. That's a pants-on-fire, nose-is-longer-than-a-telephone-wire sort of whopper.  The truth is literally the exact opposite.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) claim that there is no link between glyphosate and cancer. That is also the conclusion of regulatory agencies in Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea. (See this excellent infographic from the Genetic Literacy Project for more.)

To insist that glyphosate causes cancer, you would have to reject the scientific consensus established by regulators around the entire world. (Or, you'd have to believe that Monsanto has secretly bought off every major nation on the planet.) The only groups who reject the consensus are IARC and the environmental activists and their lawyers who rake in millions of dollars telling juries that biotechnology is killing them.

We can predict that the New York Times will cheer them on and uncritically parrot whatever the NRDC says, because needlessly scaring people is good business for them, too. And for the yogic flying instructor.

It's utterly infuriating to watch as modern medicine and science are mocked and exploited for personal profit by environmental activists and lawyers. What a stupid time to be alive.

SOURCE 






Fake Climate Science And Scientists

The multi-colored placard in front of a $2-million home in North Center Chicago proudly proclaimed, “In this house, we believe: No human is illegal” – and “Science is real” (plus a few other liberal mantras).

I knew right away where the owners stood on climate change and other hot-button political issues. They would likely tolerate no dissension or debate on “settled” climate science or any of the other topics.

But they have it exactly backward on the science issue. Real science is not belief – or consensus, 97% or otherwise. Real science constantly asks questions, expresses skepticism, reexamines hypotheses and evidence. If debate, skepticism and empirical evidence are prohibited – it’s pseudo-science, at best.

Real science – and real scientists – seek to understand natural phenomena and processes. They pose hypotheses that they think best explain what they have witnessed, then test them against actual evidence, observations and experimental data.

If the hypotheses (and predictions based on them) are borne out by their subsequent findings, the hypotheses become theories, rules, laws of nature – at least until someone finds new evidence that pokes holes in their assessments, or devises better explanations.

Real science does not involve simply declaring that you “believe” something, It’s not immutable doctrine. It doesn’t claim “science is real” – or demand that a particular scientific explanation be carved in stone.

Earth-centric concepts gave way to a sun-centered solar system. Miasma disease beliefs surrendered to the germ theory.

The certainty that continents are locked in place was replaced by plate tectonics (and the realization that you can’t stop the continental drift, any more than you stop climate change).

Real scientists often employ computers to analyze data more quickly and accurately, depict or model complex natural systems, or forecast future events or conditions. But they test their models against real-world evidence.

If the models, observations and predictions don’t match up, real scientists modify or discard the models and the hypotheses behind them. They engage in robust discussion and debate.

They don’t let models or hypotheses become substitutes for real-world evidence and observations. They don’t alter or “homogenize” raw or historical data to make it look like the models actually work.

They don’t hide their data and computer algorithms (AlGoreRythms?), restrict peer review to closed circles of like-minded colleagues who protect one another’s reputations and funding, claim “the debate is over,” or try to silence anyone who dares to ask inconvenient questions or find fault with their claims and models.

They don’t concoct hockey stick temperature graphs that can be replicated by plugging in random numbers.

In the realm contemplated by the Chicago yard sign, we ought to be doing all we can to understand Earth’s highly complex, largely chaotic, frequently changing climate system– all we can to figure out how the sun and other powerful forces interact with each other.

Only in that way can we accurately predict future climate changes, prepare for them, and not waste money and resources chasing goblins.

But instead, we have people in white lab coats masquerading as real scientists. They’re doing what I just explained true scientists don’t do.

They also ignore fluctuations in solar energy output and numerous other powerful, interconnected natural forces that have driven climate change throughout Earth’s history.

They look only (or 97% of the time) at carbon dioxide as the principle or driving force behind current and future climate changes – and blame every weather event, fire and walrus death on man-made CO2.

Even worse, they let their biases drive their research and use their pseudo-science to justify demands that we eliminate all fossil fuel use, and all carbon dioxide and methane emissions, by little more than a decade from now. Otherwise, they claim, we will bring unprecedented cataclysms to people and planet.

Not surprisingly, their bad behavior is applauded, funded and employed by politicians, environmentalists, journalists, celebrities, corporate executives, billionaires and others who have their own axes to grind, their own egos to inflate – and their intense desire to profit from climate alarmism and pseudo-science.

Worst of all, while they get rich and famous, their immoral actions impoverish billions and kill millions, by depriving them of the affordable, reliable fossil fuel energy that powers modern societies.

And still, these slippery characters endlessly repeat the tired trope that they “believe in science” – and anyone who doesn’t agree to “keep fossil fuels in the ground” to stop climate change is a “science denier.”

When these folks and the yard sign crowd brandish the term “science,” political analyst Robert Tracinskisuggests, it is primarily to “provide a badge of tribal identity” – while ironically demonstrating that they have no real understanding of or interest in “the guiding principles of actual science.”

Genuine climate scientist (and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology) Dr. Judith Curry echoes Tracinski.

Politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren use “science” as a way of “declaring belief in a proposition which is outside their knowledge and which they do not understand.

The purpose of the trope is to bypass any meaningful discussion of these separate questions, rolling them all into one package deal – and one political party ticket,” she explains.

The ultimate purpose of all this, of course, is to silence the dissenting voices of evidence- and reality-based climate science, block the creation of a Presidential Committee on Climate Science, and ensure that the only debate is over which actions to take first to end fossil fuel use … and upend modern economies.

The last thing fake/alarmist climate scientists want is a full-throated debate with real climate scientists – a debate that forces them to defend their doomsday assertions, methodologies, data manipulation … and claims that solar and other powerful natural forces are minuscule or irrelevant compared to man-made carbon dioxide that constitutes less than 0.02% of Earth’s atmosphere (natural CO2 adds another 0.02%).

Thankfully, there are many reasons for hope. For recognizing that we do not face a climate crisis, much less threats to our very existence.

For realizing there is no need to subject ourselves to punitive carbon taxes or the misery, poverty, deprivation, disease, and death that banning fossil fuels would cause.

Between the peak of the great global cooling scare in 1975 until around 1998, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and temperatures did rise in rough conjunction.

But then temperatures mostly flat-lined, while CO2 levels kept climbing. Now actual average global temperatures are already 1°F below the Garbage In-Garbage Out computer model predictions. Other alarmist forecasts are also out of touch with reality.

Instead of fearing rising CO2, we should thank it for making our crops, forest and grassland plants grow faster and better, benefitting nature and humanity – especially in conjunction with slightly warmer temperatures that extend growing seasons, expand arable land and increase crop production.

The rate of sea level rise has not changed for over a century – and much of what alarmists attribute to climate change and rising seas are actually due to land subsidence and other factors.

Weather is not becoming more extreme. In fact, Harvey was the first Category 3-5 hurricane to make US landfall in a record 12 years – and the number of violent F3 to F5 tornadoes has fallen from an average of 56 per year from 1950 to 1985 to only 34 per year since then.

Human ingenuity and adaptability have enabled humans to survive and thrive in all sorts of climates, even during our far more primitive past.

Allowed to use our brains, fossil fuels, and technologies, we will deal just fine with whatever climate changes might confront us in the future. (Of course, another nature-driven Pleistocene-style glacier pulling 400 feet of water out of our oceans and crushing Northern Hemisphere forests and cities under mile-high walls of ice truly would be an existential threat to life as we know it.)

So if NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio and other egotistical grand-standing politicians and fake climate scientists want to ban fossil fuels, glass-and-steel buildings, cows and even hotdogs– in the name of preventing “dangerous man-made climate change” – let them impose their schemes on themselves and their own families.

The rest of us are tired of being made guinea pigs in their fake-science experiments.

SOURCE 






Tim Blair's lesson for all the student climate protestors

Attention, students. Because so many of you missed Friday’s classes, what with your little climate party and all, today I’m assigning extra work.

Let’s begin with mathematics. 558,400,000 is a really big number. Can anyone here tell me what it might represent? No?

Well, that’s the amount in tonnes of carbon dioxide that Australia emitted last year.

I’ll just pause here for a minute until Samantha stops crying. By the way, Samantha, your sign at the climate rally needed a possessive apostrophe and “planet” was spelled incorrectly, so I’m putting you back in remedial English again.

Where were we? Oh, yes. 558,400,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Let’s see how we can reduce that number. Ban coal mining? That’ll knock off a big chunk.

Ban petrol-powered vehicles? Good call. That’s another slab of emissions gone.

Does the class believe we should ban all mining? You do. Interesting. For your homework tonight, I want you all to design batteries that contain no nickel or cadmium.

Good luck getting to school in electric cars without those.

And there’ll be no more steel wind turbines once the iron ore mines are closed. It’s just the price we’ll have to pay, I suppose.

Even with all those bans, however, Australia will still be churning out carbon dioxide by the magical solar-powered truckload. Cuts need to go much further.

More people means more human activity which means more carbon dioxide, so let’s permanently ban immigration. Is the class agreed?

Hmmm. You’re not quite so enthusiastic about that one. Come on, students. Sacrifices must be made.

Speaking of which, how many of you have grandparents? Not any more you don’t.

And Samantha is crying again. Can someone please take her to the school safe space and let her “process some emotions”, or whatever the hell it is you kids do in there? Thank you.

Who agrees we need to simplify our lives in order to reduce emissions? Returning to earlier times, when emissions were much lower, might help save our earth.

So goodbye to air travel, the internet and your cell phones. People got by without them in the past and they’ll survive without them in our sustainable future.

Still, those emissions will be way too high. Just for fun, let’s ban Australia and see what happens.

All factories, houses, streets, farms – gone. All people gone. Every atom of human presence on this land mass, completely erased.

At that point we’ll have finally cut our emissions to nothing. We’ve subtracted an annual 558,400,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Congratulations, children. By eliminating Australia, you’ve just reduced the world’s yearly generation of carbon dioxide from 37,100,000,000 tonnes to just … 36,541,600,000 tonnes.

Still, every tiny reduction helps, right? Maybe not. Let’s have a quick geography lesson. Tyler, please point out China on this map. No; that’s Luxembourg. China is a bit bigger. Try over here. There you go.

Here’s the thing about China. How long will it take for China to produce the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide that we’ve slashed by vanishing Australia? One year? Two years? Five years?

Not quite. Start the carbon dioxide clock on China right now, and that one enormous nation will have matched our annual output by April 5. China adds a whole Australia to the global emissions total every twenty days.

For that matter, China will have added another 1,190,953 tonnes by the end of this one-hour class.

Even a tiny increase in China’s output puts Australia in the shade. Various experts last year estimated that China was on course for a five per cent carbon dioxide boost.

This would mean an extra 521,637,550 tonnes – or basically what Australia generates. Our total is the same as China’s gentle upswing.

So maybe your protest was in the wrong country. Here’s another assignment: write letters to the Chinese government demanding it stops dragging people out of poverty.

Make sure you include your full name and address, because the Chinese government is kind of big on keeping records. Send a photograph of yourself standing in front of your parents’ house.

You might repeat this process in India. In fact, rather than going to Europe for your next big family holiday, prevail upon your parents to visit India instead. The tiny village of Salaidih would be the perfect place to tell slum-dwelling residents they shouldn’t have electricity.

They’ll probably thank you for it. Or they should, if they aren’t stupid climate deniers. Indian paupers must avoid making the same tragic affluence mistakes as us, so we must keep their carbon footprints as tiny as possible.

Can you imagine how terrible is would be for the earth if all of India’s one billion-plus population owned cars and airconditioners? It really doesn’t bear thinking about.

One further assignment: tonight, locate a clean, green alternative source for $66 billion in exports. That’s how much was raised last year by the Australian coal industry.

Working it out won’t be too much of a challenge, I’m sure. After all, you know science and stuff. About half of your signs on Friday claimed you know more about all these things than does the Prime Minister.

Show him how advanced your brains are by devising a brand-new multi-billion export bonanza.

Hey, look who’s back! Feeling better, Samantha? That’s nice. Feelings are the most important thing of all.

SOURCE  

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

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

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10 May, 2019  

Biodiversity threat won’t be tackled by alarmist biologist hype and dismantling capitalism

The recent total absurdity about loss of species (Scientists warn 1 million species threatened with extinction) seems to have got far more attention than it deserves so the rational counterblast below by BY MATT RIDLEY is very welcome

Driven perhaps by envy at the attention that climate change is getting, and ambition to set up a great new intergovernmental body that can fly scientists to mega-conferences, biologists have gone into overdrive on the subject of biodiversity this week.

They are right that there is a lot wrong with the world’s wildlife, that we can do much more to conserve, enhance and recover it, but much of the coverage in the media, and many of the pronouncements of Sir Bob Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), are frankly weird.

The threat to biodiversity is not new, not necessarily accelerating, mostly not caused by economic growth or prosperity, nor by climate change, and won’t be reversed by retreating into organic self-sufficiency. Here’s a few gentle correctives.

Much of the human destruction of biodiversity happened a long time ago

Species extinction rates of mammals and birds peaked in the 19th century (mostly because of ships taking rats to islands). The last extinction of a breeding bird species in Europe was the Great Auk, in 1844. Thousands of years ago, stone-age hunter-gatherers caused megafaunal mass extinctions on North and South America, Australia, New Zealand and Madagascar with no help from modern technology or capitalism. That’s not to say extinctions don’t still happen but by far the biggest cause is still invasive alien species, especially on islands: it’s chytrid fungi that have killed off many frogs and toads, avian malaria that has killed off many of Hawaii’s honeycreepers, and so on.

This is a specific problem that can be tackled and reversed, but it will take technology and science and money, not retreating into self-sufficiency and eating beans. The eradication of rats on South Georgia island [And Australia's Macquarie Island] was a fine example of doing this right, with helicopters, GPS and a lot of science.

We’ve been here before. In 1981, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich predicted that 50% of all species would be extinct by 2005. In fact, about 1.4% of bird and mammal species, which are both easier to document than smaller creatures and more vulnerable to extinction, have gone extinct so far in several centuries.

The idea that “western values”, or “capitalism”, are the problem is wrong

On the whole what really diminishes biodiversity is a large but poor population trying to live off the land. As countries get richer and join the market economy they generally reverse deforestation, slow species loss and reverse some species declines. Countries like Bangladesh are now rich enough to be reforesting, not deforesting, and this is happening all over the world. Most of this is natural forest, not plantations. As for wildlife, think of all the species that have returned to abundance in Britain: otters, ospreys, sea eagles, kites, cranes, beavers, deer and more. Why are wolves increasing all around the world, lions decreasing and tigers now holding steady? Basically, because wolves are in rich countries, lions in poor countries and tigers in middle income countries. Prosperity is the solution not the problem.

Nothing would kill off nature faster than trying to live off it. When an African villager gets rich enough to buy food in a shop rather than seek bushmeat in the forest, that’s a win for wildlife. Ditto if he or she can afford gas for cooking rather than cutting wood. The more we can urbanise and the more we can increase our use of intensive farming and fossil fuels, the less we will need to clear forests for either food or fuel.

Intensive farming spares land for nature

It’s been calculated that if today’s population were to be fed using the mainly organic yields of 1960, we would have to farm 82% of the world’s land, whereas actually we farm about 38%. Thanks to fertilisers, tractors, genetics and pesticides, we now need 68% less land to produce a given quantity if food than we did in 1960. That’s a good thing. Most sensible conservationists now realise that “land sparing” is the right approach – intensive farming plus land set aside, rather than inefficient farming with some nature in the fields. Professor Andrew Balmford of Cambridge University led a team that did thorough research showing that this is the better approach not just for land use but for other environmental issues too: they found that organic dairy farms cause at least 30% more soil loss, and take up twice as much land, as conventional dairy farming for the same amount of milk produced, for example.

Doing more with less

A favourite nostrum of many environmentalists is that you cannot have infinite growth with finite resources. But this is plain wrong, because economic growth comes from doing more with less. So if I invent a new car engine that gets twice as many miles per gallon, I’ve caused economic growth but we’ll use less fuel. Likewise if I increase the yield of a crop, I need less land and probably less fuel too. This “growth as shrinkage” happens all the time: think how much smaller mobile phones are than they once were.

The fact that species are recovering is ignored by the media

The BBC used a humpback whale song to illustrate species under threat of extinction. Humpback whales were down to a few thousand in the 1960s and listed as “endangered”. In 1996 as the population grew, they were downgraded to “vulnerable”. In 2008 as they became numerous, they were downgraded again to “least concern”. Today there are 80,000 of them, they are back to pre-exploitation densities in many parts of the world, and groups of up to 200 are sometimes seen feeding together, a success unimaginable when I was young. The same is true of many previously exploited species such as fur seals, elephant seals, king penguins and more.

For some reason, environmental activists hate talking about the success stories of conservationists in saving species, recovering their populations and reintroducing them to the wild. They prefer to dwell on the threats. This brings more publicity and donations, but it also spreads a counsel of despair, leaving many ordinary people feeling helpless, rather than engaged. It’s time for an honest debate about what we can do to save wildlife, rather than a Private Fraser cry of “we’re all doomed”.

SOURCE 






Rideshare cars worsen congestion, says study

One of the early promises of the ride-hailing era ushered in by Uber and Lyft was that the new entrants would complement public transit, reduce car ownership and help alleviate congestion.

But a new study on San Francisco has found the opposite may be in fact be true: far from reducing traffic, the companies increased delays by 40 per cent as commuters ditched buses or walking for mobile-app summoned rides.

Published in Science Advances, the study went back to 2010, before the advent of so-called transportation network companies (TNCs), and compared journey times and road conditions with 2016, they year they became a common sighting.

San Francisco, where Lyft and Uber are headquartered, grew from 805,000 inhabitants to 876,000 during that period, as 150,000 jobs were added and the road network updated.

The authors, from the University of Kentucky and the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA), accounted for these changes via a computer model that asked: what would things look like if ride-hailing companies had not come on the scene?

Greg Erhardt, an assistant professor of engineering at the university, said his team had found “some substitution” from private cars to TNCs as well as a slight increase in carpooling.

“But the net effect is that two-thirds of TNCs are new cars added to the roadway, that would otherwise not be present,” he said.

They also found that weekday vehicle hours of delay -- defined as the difference in travel time in congested versus free-flowconditions -- increased by 62 per cent between 2010 and 2016.

By contrast, in the simulated model without ride-hailing companies, delays went up by only 22 per cent -- meaning that theTNCs were responsible for 40 per cent of the increase.

Deadheading and disruption

The findings were challenged by Lyft, which said the study had failed to account for increased freight and commercial deliveries-- an area in which Amazon and others have aggressively expanded in recent years, as well as tourism growth.

“Lyft is actively working with cities on solutions backed by years of economic and engineering research, such as comprehensive congestion pricing and proven infrastructure investment,” the company said in a statement noting its investments in shared rides and bikes.

Uber called for more widespread congestion charging, arguing that “while studies disagree on causes for congestion, almost everyone agrees on the solution.”

The study comes as rideshare drivers in major US cities were set to stage a series of strikes ahead of Uber’s keenly anticipated Wall Street debut. Lyft went public in March.

Proponents of ridesharing often use the argument that the majority of journeys take place at non-peak times, such as when people have gone for a night out and are returning home from bars.

But the study found peaks occurring at 7am and 8am and then again around 5pm and 6pm.

Among the cars’ most disruptive activities on traffic flow were kerbside pick-ups and drop-offs, especially on major arterial roads, it found.

Another notable effect was so-called “deadheading,” which Erhardt explained as driving around in search of the next customer. “It doesn’t serve a purpose in terms of transporting a person. So that’s purely an addition to traffic.”

Data scraping

The study relied on background traffic speed from GPS data obtained from a commercial vendor, but when the researchers approached the companies to share their own trip data, they were denied access.

They were forced then to rely on a method of data scraping developed by Northeastern University that uses the companies’ publicapps to learn about vehicle movements.

Elliot Martin, a research engineer at the University of California Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Centre, who was not connected to the study, said its methodology was rigorous.

“I think that they did a good job of trying to draw comparisons, to look at what would have happened in a world where TNCs didn’t exist versus where they did exist,” he said, adding the methodology was the “best available” given the amount of information.

Despite the findings, ride-hailing isn’t all bad, said co-author Joe Castiglione of the SFCTA.

“They are providing services like helping people move around in the evening when transit isn’t great, or assisting the visually impaired,” he said.

The trick, he said, was to determine “how (to) manage the positive benefits without the negative externalities” through newpolicies like congestion pricing or kerbside regulation.

SOURCE 






Fossil-Foolish at the BBC

Overheard on the BBC News Channel’s “Beyond 100 Days” programme yesterday:

"Christian Fraser: You know, yesterday I was on the south coast in Brighton, Katty, and I was looking out to sea at the wind turbines which were turning at quite a rate of knots yesterday in the wind. And I was wondering how much impact those sort of new technologies have – and today I came in to quite an interesting statistic. So the UK, right now, is in its fifth consecutive day of powering the National Grid without any coal. So since Wednesday night, there’s been no coal-fired power in the UK – it’s mostly gas and renewable energy. And that’s the longest time the UK has gone being powered without coal since the Industrial Revolution. So this is – you know, this is a stat that shows wind power is not something we aspire to, it’s not something that might be useful one day, it is making a difference now, and it shows that if we do change, we can make quite a sizeable difference."

Where to start… Maybe at the Gridwatch website, which was indeed – a few minutes ago, anyway – showing coal at 0% but also nuclear at 19.63%, CCGT at 59.65% and wind at 7.42%.  So a more accurate summary might be “mostly gas and nuclear energy”.

SOURCE 






The Ice Melt Myth

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (nsidc.org), ice currently covers six million square miles, or one-tenth the Land area on Earth, about the area of South America.

Floating ice, or sea ice, alternately called pack ice at the North and South Poles, covers 6% of the ocean’s surface (nsidc.org), an area similar to North America. The most important measure of ice is its thickness.

The United States Geologic Survey estimates the total ice on Earth weighs 28 million Gigatons (a billion tons). Antarctica and Greenland combined represent 99% of all ice on Earth.

The remaining one percent is in glaciers, ice sheets, and sea ice. Antarctica can exceed three miles in thickness and Greenland one mile.

But the Antarctic is the coldest place on Earth.

At www.coolantarctica.com calculations show the temperature would have to rise 54 degrees Fahrenheit to start the warming of that ice cap.

The geologic record provides a perspective on how climate impacts the quantity of ice on Earth. They have encompassed every extreme. Some 800 million years ago the planet was almost entirely encased in ice (Rafferty, J.P. Cryogenics Period).

Since then there have been many extended periods when there has been no ice present. As recently as three million years ago sea levels are believed to have been 165 feet higher than today.

While ice covered a third of the entire planet during the last ice age, when sea levels were 400 feet lower, allowing ancient peoples to cross the Siberian Land Bridge to populate North America.

Al Gore predicted in 2007 that by 2013 the Arctic Ocean would be completely ice-free. In the summer of 2012, ice levels did reach all-time lows in the Arctic.

Emboldened by this report, Australian Professor Chris Turney launched an expedition in December of 2013 to prove that the Antarctic Sea Ice was also undergoing catastrophic melting only to have his ship trapped in sea ice such that it could not even be rescued by modern ice-breakers.

The Professor should have known that a more accurate estimate of sea ice can be had from satellite images taken every day at the Poles since 1981.

These images show that between summer and winter, regardless of the degree of summer melting, the sea ice completely recovers to its original size the winter before for almost every year since the pictures were taken.

The sea ice has been stubbornly resistant to Al Gore’s predictions. In fact, the average annual coverage of sea ice has been essentially the same since satellite observations began in 1981.

However, that has not stopped global warming advocates and even government agencies from cherry picking the data to mislead the public.

Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro has been the poster child for land-based melting supposed to be caused by Global Warming.

It did lose half of its ice cover between 1880 and 1936 before the major use of fossil fuels and only 30% more in the past 80 years.

However, the temperature at its peak has not risen at any time during these years above freezing (32 degrees Fahrenheit).

The melting has been due to deforestation and the dry air rising to the mountain top causing the ice to turn directly into water vapor—a process called sublimation.

Melting glaciers are another topic of warming alarmists. Indeed they can choose to point to some that are actually melting, ignoring those that are growing or remaining stable.

Why the differences? They are largely dependent on whether over periods of time more snow falls than ice melts or the reverse. They are a great place to cherry pick data.

The solution to public fear about ice melting and sea level rising is simply using common sense.

SOURCE 






Australia: ‘Green tape’ strangling infrastructure

Delayed environmental approvals for mining and rail projects are ­expected to contribute to a significant downturn in major infrastructure projects in Queensland.

The peak body representing Queensland’s infrastructure sector has forecast that after two years of increasing major project expenditure, the state is facing a decrease of 24 per cent next year.

The Infrastructure Association of Queensland’s ­annual Spotlight report, released today, focuses on rail and mine projects in the Galilee Basin. But it says the downturn would be even more pronounced if the federal Brisbane-to-Melbourne inland rail project and Adani’s Carmichael mine in central Queensland faced further ­delays with approvals.

IAQ chief executive Steve Abson said investors were turning away from Queensland because of perceived political instability, particularly around “red and green tape”. “By Queensland’s boom-and-bust standards, the (downturn) is not unusual, but the problem is it gets worse if we don’t have the bilateral agreement for inland rail and it doesn’t get moving through approvals,” he said.

“It also gets worse if Adani don’t get their approvals. If you’re already having a downturn, the last thing you want is for projects earmarked to be delayed.”

Adani was last week dealt another blow by the Palaszczuk government when the Department of Environment and Science rejected its plan to manage populations of the endangered black-throated finch. The Indian mining company is also awaiting approval of its critical groundwater management plan.

Mr Abson said the lack of an agreement between the federal and Queensland governments on the inland rail project had ­hindered the Australian Rail Track Corporation in progressing its environmental impact statement.

“If we are faced with a decline in activity next year, then let’s do all we can to make the current projects that are shovel-ready get ­approval,” Mr Abson said.

“With projects like inland rail and the Galilee Basin mines (the government) should be finding ways to say ‘yes’ to those projects and not unreasonably holding them up.”

The IAQ’s report, which receives input from the government and major engineering and economic firms, considers all public and private engineering projects worth more than $50 million, excluding hospitals and schools, to outline the pipeline of programs under way or proposed. This year about $6 billion is being spent on projects, but that is expected to fall to less than $4.5bn next year.

That would drop by a further $500m if the inland rail and Adani mine projects are stalled.

Mr Abson said political instability and “backflips over projects” were driving national and inter­national investors away from Queensland.

“It’s difficult to see how all this carnage with Adani’s approvals that is going on right now is not going to have some kind of effect on investors’ view of Australia as an attractive destination,” Mr Abson said. “It is and will have an effect.”

Mr Abson said the public and private sectors traditionally shared about 50 per cent of the ­expenditure on major infrastructure projects in Queensland.

But a reduction in investment, partly fuelled by concerns over green and red tape, had seen that shift to 65 per cent government investment and 35 per cent from the private sector.

SOURCE  

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

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

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9 May, 2019  

CNN Moving To Hudson Yards Proves They Know Global Warming’s A Hoax

If CNN believes Global Warming is a real and an imminent threat, why did the far-left network agree to move much of its broadcasting operations to a location … right on the water?

Outside of the basement-rated outlet axing more than a hundred jobs on Monday, the big media news this week is CNN’s move to Hudson Yards, which sits right on the coast, right on the Hudson River.

In other words,  CNN has moved to the water’s edge of Manhattan, the very same Manhattan that will be underwater as soon as 2015.

Oops, sorry, that was an old scientific prediction. Obviously, 2015 has passed without Manhattan flooding. But Manhattan will be underwater as soon as 2018, which can only mean that–

Oh. Sorry again, that was another prediction our global warming scientific experts got wrong. But soon, very soon Manhattan will be underwater because the scientists CNN takes very, very seriously say so.

As recently as seven months ago, and without a hint of skepticism, CNN warned that if nothing is done by 2030, in 11 short years, “the planet will reach the crucial threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by as early as 2030, precipitating the risk of extreme drought, wildfires, floods and food shortages for hundreds of millions of people.”

Floods, y’all, floods.

Again, with only fealty and not a hint of skepticism, CNN spread around this statement by a “lecturer in climate science:”

“This is concerning because we know there are so many more problems if we exceed 1.5 degrees C global warming, including more heatwaves and hot summers, greater sea level rise, and, for many parts of the world, worse droughts and rainfall extremes.”

Greater sea level rise, y’all, greater sea level rise.

Did CNN not read this very important and 100 percent factual, pro-science report that predicts flooding in New York during the 2020s, so as soon as next year?

What kind of monsters moves their employees into that kind of danger?

So what do we have here…? Isn’t it obvious…?

What we have is a national news organization spreading alarmism about flooding and rising sea levels on one hand while on the other it moves a large part of its base of operations to the edge of the shoreline, and not only to the shoreline but to the shoreline of Manhattan which was supposed to be underwater four years ago.

CNN regularly and relentlessly abuses its broadcast megaphone to spread fear about Global Warming, to demand we all change our lifestyles, give up our freedoms, vote for Democrats, pay higher taxes, turn our lives over to central planners, and publicly testify to our belief in global warming lest we be denounced as “climate deniers.”

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, CNN commits the ultimate (and expensive) act of climate denialism by moving a large part of its multi-million dollar headquarters to very area we are told will soon be the ground zero of Global Warming flooding.

CNN’s move to the Manhattan waterline is the ultimate act of faith that Global Warming is a hoax, is the ultimate proof CNN knows it’s a hoax, even as it spends billions and billions of corporate dollars to spread this hoax, to scare the rest of us into voting a certain way.

No one who believes in Global Warming spends piles of money to move its operations into a danger zone. No one. What’s more, CNN already had an inland headquarters. What could be safer than Atlanta?

But under CNN chief Jeff Zucker, CNN has been moving much of its broadcasting base out of Atlanta and into the danger zone of Manhattan and… Under Jeff Zucker, CNN has ramped up its Global Warming propaganda against us skeptics in a big way.

So the next time CNN launches its next Hate Campaign against President Trump over his healthy skepticism, remember CNN’s long-planned and very expensive move into the danger zone, remember its ultimate act of faith that Global Warming is pure horseshit.

SOURCE 





Voters Worldwide Are Becoming Much More Skeptical

From Alberta to Australia, from Finland to France and beyond, voters are increasingly showing their displeasure with expensive energy policies imposed by politicians in an inane effort to fight purported human-caused climate change.

Skepticism about whether humans are causing dangerous climate change has always been higher in the United States than in most industrialized countries.

As a result, governments in Europe, Canada, and in other developed countries are much farther along the energy-rationing path that cutting carbon dioxide emissions requires than in the United States.

Residents in these countries have begun to revolt against the higher energy costs they suffer under as a result of ever-increasing taxes on fossil fuels and government mandates to use expensive renewable energy.

For instance, in France in late 2018, protesters donning yellow vests took to the streets—and have stayed there ever since—in large part to protest scheduled increases in fuel taxes, electricity prices, and stricter vehicle emissions controls, which French President Emmanuel Macron claimed were necessary to meet the country’s greenhouse gas reduction commitments under the Paris climate agreement.

After the first four weeks of protest, Macron’s government canceled his climate action plan.

Also in 2018, in part as a backlash against Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate policies, global warming skeptic Doug Ford was elected as premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province.

Ford announced he would end energy taxes imposed by Ontario’s previous premier and would join Saskatchewan’s premiere in a legal fight against Trudeau’s federal carbon dioxide tax.

In August 2018, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was forced to resign over carbon dioxide restrictions he’d planned to impose to meet the country’s Paris climate commitments.

His successor, Scott Morrison, announced reducing energy prices and improving reliability, not fighting climate change, would be the government’s primary energy goals going forward.

Subsequently, Australia’s deputy prime minister and its environment minister announced the country would continue using coal for electricity and expand coal mining and exports.

The changes in 2018 were just a prelude for the political climate revolt of 2019.

In mid-March, the Forum for Democracy (FvD), a fledgling political party just three years old, tied for the largest number of seats, 12, in the divided Dutch Senate in the 2019 elections.

FvD takes a decidedly skeptical stance on climate change. On the campaign trail, Thierry Baudet, FvD’s leader, said the government should stop funding programs to meet the country’s commitments to international climate change agreements, saying such efforts are driven by “climate-change hysteria.”

On April 14 in Finland, where climate change policies became the dominant issue in the election, support for climate skepticism surged.

Whereas all the other parties proposed plans to raise energy prices and limit people’s energy use, the Finns Party, which made the fight against expensive climate policies the central part of its platform, gained the second-highest number of seats in the Parliament, just one seat behind the Social Democratic Party’s 40.

The second-place finish was a big win for the Finns Party and its skeptical stance: just two months before the election, polls showed its support was below 10 percent.

After the Finns Party made battling alarmist climate policies its main goal, its popularity soared. The New York Times credited the Finns Party’s electoral surge, in large part, to its expressed climate skepticism.

In Alberta, Canada, where the economy declined after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate policies took hold, voters on April 16 replaced Premier Rachel Notley and her New Democratic Party (NDP), which supports the federal climate policies, with the United Conservative Party, headed by newly elected Premier Jason Kenney, who vowed to scrap the province’s carbon tax and every other policy in NDP’s climate action plan.

Among the other climate policies, Kenny said he will reverse in an effort to revive the economy are NDP’s plans to accelerate the closure of the province’s coal power plants, and its plan to cap greenhouse gas emissions from the region’s oil sands.

In addition, Kenny says he will challenge the federal government’s climate impositions in court and streamline regulations hampering Alberta’s critical oil and gas industry, including restrictions preventing pipeline construction imposed by NDP.

Even as daily headlines in the lamestream media become ever shriller, hyping climate fears based on projections made by unverified climate models, the public, especially the voting public, is becoming increasingly wary of the Chicken Little claims of impending climate doom.

Voters in developed countries are saying “enough is enough” to high energy prices which punish the most vulnerable people in society and do nothing to regulate climate change.

SOURCE 






UN Officially Relegates Climate Change To A Second-Tier Threat

The BBC has just reported on the newly published Summary for Policy Makers of the as yet unpublished UN 1,800-page global assessment of nature compiled by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

The two-day-old ‘climate crisis’, so recently [not] declared by the British government has already been knocked off the top spot as far as existential crises are concerned and officially languishes in third place, in the Second Division.

Land use change is now Premier Division. However, unlike action on the ‘climate crisis’, which has become a $1.5 trillion industry, action on land use change has been negligible to non-existent.

Even hunting (legal and non-legal) and the direct exploitation of wildlife is one division above climate change in terms of the threat to biodiversity.

Bugger all has been done to address these threats too, relatively speaking, during the last three decades, whereas trillions have been thrown at ineffective, and socially, economically and environmentally damaging attempts to limit global warming to 2C (and latterly 1.5C). I warned about this three years ago.

They just expect us to ignore this devastating indictment of international policy, shrug our shoulders and now accept the new recommendations for ‘saving the planet’ (eating less meat and getting rid of your dog!).

It’s not going to happen. People will be angry – very angry – at being so dreadfully misled for so long by finger-in-the-pie climate doom merchants and they are going to be even more skeptical about the claims of imminent catastrophe now being advanced by the new merchants of doom at the UN.

The BBC does seem to be just a little concerned maybe that it might be about to lose its favorite environmental hobby horse with which it has scared us all for so many years and so recently and notably with the much-heralded broadcast of Attenborough’s Climate Change – The Facts.

They’re gonna have to get the old boy to do a swift follow up program soon: Biodiversity – The Even More Shocking Facts.

Is This Worse Than Climate Change?
Climate change is a crucial underlying factor that’s helping to drive destruction around the world.

Greenhouse gas emissions have doubled since 1980 and temperatures have gone up 0.7C as a result. This is having a big impact on some species, restricting their ranges and making extinction more likely.

The global assessment finds that if temperatures go up by 2C, then 5% of species are at risk of climate-driven extinction, rising to 16% if the world warms by 4.3C.

“Of the prioritised list of proximate drivers of biodiversity decline, climate change is only number three,” said Prof John Spicer from the University of Plymouth.

“Climate change is certainly one of the greatest threats that face humankind in the near future – so what does that tell us about the first and second, changes in land/sea use, and direct exploitation? The current situation is desperate and has been for some time.”

The report’s authors hope that their assessment becomes as critical to the argument about biodiversity loss as the IPCC report on 1.5C has done to the debate over climate change.

They must be a bit miffed at the Beeb, having just invested so much effort into misleading the public about the existential threat of climate change and no doubt helping to get a ‘climate emergency’ [not] declared.

SOURCE 






Conning the Fijians

The unfortunate Fijians are taking all the alarm  seriously

The Conversation now has a policy of publishing articles which promote the false notion that extreme weather is virtually synonymous with climate change and in particular that vulnerable, low-lying island and coastal communities are climate change victims because of sea level rise and/or extreme weather.

Their most recent fake news article has apparently attracted a lot of criticism as numerous comments have been removed by the moderators and they have closed comments a day after publishing apparently because there is a “high risk of comments breaching our standards”. I bet. What they mean is there is a “high risk of comments exposing our shameless, unscientific climate change propaganda”.

The article is written by academics from the University of Queensland and University of the Sunshine Coast. When I say ‘academics’, it’s the usual science-lite dippy subjects: human geography/social sciences/environmental science/sustainability/climate change adaptation.

These people wouldn’t know proper science, hard science, if it walked up to them and slapped them hard in the face. Yet, here they are, bold as brass, making grand claims that an increase in global atmospheric CO2 concentration has forced the re-location of two villages in Fiji via its effects upon sea level and via the impact of one cyclone in particular.

The original Fijian village of Vunidogoloa is abandoned. Houses, now dilapidated, remain overgrown with vegetation. Remnants of an old seawall built to protect the village is a stark reminder of what climate change can do to a community’s home. Vunidogoloa is one of four Fijian communities that have been forced to relocate from the effects of climate change. And more than 80 communities have been earmarked by the Fiji government for potential future relocation.

There is no misinterpreting this introduction to the article: climate change caused the relocations (man-made climate change). Because:

Low lying coastal communities like these are especially vulnerable to threats of sea-level rise, inundation of tides, increased intensity of storm surges and coastal erosion. Extreme, sudden weather events such as cyclones can also force communities to move, particularly in the tropics.

They then talk about their (no doubt fully funded) ‘research’:

Our research documents the experiences and outcomes of relocation for two of these Fijian communities – Vunidogoloa and Denimanu.

Vunidogoloa is a classic example of the slow creep of climate change. For a number of decades the residents have fought coastal flooding, salt-water intrusion and shoreline erosion. The village leaders approached the Fijian government, asking to be relocated to safer ground.

In contrast to Vunidogoloa, Denimanu experienced sudden onset effects of climate change.

While the village had been experiencing encroaching shorelines for years, it was Tropical Cyclone Evan, which hit in 2012 destroying 19 houses closest to the shoreline, that prompted relocation.

Let’s get down to the facts shall we. Firstly, sea level rise in Fiji. Here’s what the Fiji Meteorological Service, Australian Bureau of Meteorology and Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have to say:

Satellite data indicate sea level has risen in Fiji by about 6 mm per year since 1993. This is larger than the global average of 2.8–3.6 mm per year. This higher rate of rise may be partly related to natural fluctuations that take place year to year or decade to decade caused by phenomena such as the El Ni?o-Southern Oscillation.

They then show this graph of observed (tide gauge and satellite altimetry) sea level rise, along with an estimate of the natural range of variability in that region. You can see immediately that the estimated natural range of variability dwarfs the 90% envelope of the climate model projected sea level rise, that the natural rise and fall of sea level in Fiji since 1970 exceeds even this estimate. There is a trend, but only since about 1980 and a large part of that appears to be large fluctuations associated with the powerful El Nino of 1982/83, 1997/98 and 2015/16.

And then there’s cyclones – “sudden onset climate change impacts” according to our erudite scholars at the Conversation.

Large interannual variability in tropical cyclone frequency, from 0 to 5. A decreasing trend, if any, in tropical cyclone frequency since 1969/70. Doesn’t look much like ‘sudden onset climate change’ to me! Back in the day, when the Con was at least making an effort to report on actual science, this is what author Kevin Walsh said about Winston, a cat 5 which struck the Fijian islands in 2016:

In the South Pacific, typically around nine tropical cyclones are recorded on average each year, but there’s a lot of variability year to year. They are most common in January through to March, but can occur as early as November or as late as May.

In the past 30 years or so, several severe tropical cyclones have affected Fiji, so it’s not unusual for Fiji to experience severe cyclones.

Is climate change affecting cyclones?

It’s difficult to say what the trends are in cyclone intensity in the South Pacific, as only limited data are available since the 1980s. Trend analyses in this region have given ambiguous results. Frequency of cyclones in the Australian region has been decreasing in recent decades. In the South Pacific region as a whole, trends appear weak.

We have just seen the peak of one of the strongest El Ni?o events on record. El Ni?o is related to the movement of warm water in the Pacific Ocean, so it’s not surprising that it has an influence on cyclones.

Contrast this with the garbage being put out in defence of climate action and ‘climate justice’ by our three geographers/sustainability experts/environmental ‘scientists’. The most absurd thing is, if you read the authors’ study, it is rather less certain that climate change is to blame for weather events in Fiji:

The first case study describes how relocation was driven by slow-onset climate change impacts while the other study site is an example of sudden-onset impacts, in this case driven by cyclonic storm surge activity. While not uncritically attributable to anthropogenic climate change, the increased strength of cyclonic and storm activity has a level of climate change attribution (Walsh et al. 2016).

So they’ve hyped up even their own study to present it as climate change propaganda on the Con website. The fact is, ENSO activity plays a huge part in tropical cyclone variability in the Fiji islands and natural sea level rise and fall, observed and estimated, also driven by ENSO activity, dwarfs the short term observed trend in sea level rise.

Climate change impacts are projected. There is no unequivocal evidence that ‘sudden onset’ or ‘slow creep’ impacts are happening right now, creating ‘climate refugees’ in their wake. This is pure alarmist hype from the Con with the undoubted intention of promoting political action.

SOURCE 





Australia: Green eggs and Di Natale’s team of haters

Greens leader Richard Di Natale has been accused of double standards as he stands by two of his candidates who made racist jokes on social media despite condemning other parties over hate speech.

The Greens candidate for the seat of Lalor, Jay Dessi, joked about having sex with children and dead people, made a racist joke about an Asian man’s eyes, posted a cartoon about oral sex and liked a post about abortion and child pornography. Next to a photograph of an Asian friend wearing a frog hat, Mr Dessi wrote: “Which eyes are the real eyes?”

In the Northern Territory seat of Lingiari, Greens candidate George Hanna has refused to apologise directly for sharing a meme in which Liberal candidate Jacinta Price was called a “coconut”

When asked if he would disendorse the candidate, Senator Di Natale told the ABC: “I’m getting a briefing on that. They have given a full apology, in particular the gentleman in the Northern Territory, himself an aboriginal man.”

Senator Di Natale also downplayed links between his party and the woman who tried to egg Scott Morrison yesterday at a Country Women’s Association event.

Amber Holt, who was tackled by secrutiy staff immediately after throwing the egg, has shared numerous Facebook posts in support of the Greens and labelled all right-wing Australian politicians Nazis.

Senator Di Natale distanced himself from the protester, telling the ABC: “There are millions of people who vote for the Greens.” He branded the attack on Mr Morrison “disgraceful”.

“We’ve made it very clear that the way to defeat a rotten government - and this has been one of the most rotten governments in this country’s history - is in 10 days’ time at the ballot box,” he said.

Mr Hanna, who is Aboriginal, told Darwin radio he did not believe the meme he reposted was racist. “It (coconut) is a derogatory term used by Aboriginal people against other Aboriginal people that they feel don’t do the right thing by them,” he said.

He said the Liberals were “pulling for the race card because they’re ­struggling in this electorate”.

Resources Minister Matthew Canavan urged Senator Di Natale to sack his candidate. “I’m not going to hold my breath, but if Richard Di Natale had any standards over his party then this ­candidate would be ­immediately sacked,” Senator Canavan said.

Mr Dessi’s online conduct came to light after the Greens member for Melbourne, Adam Bandt, said last week his Labor ­opponent Luke Creasey’s decision to resign was the right one. Mr Creasey was caught having made offensive posts on Facebook.

Labor MP Joanne Ryan, who holds Lalor, said Mr Dessi’s comments were insensitive, offensive and demonstrated poor judgment from someone seeking public ­office. “Adam Bandt and Richard Di Natale need to explain why there is one standard for Greens candidates and another for everyone else,” Ms Ryan said.

Mr Dessi, a financial technology developer, said he was “truly sorry for the language used” in ­social media posts he made years ago and comments he shared.

“The language and content was plainly offensive, and doesn’t reflect who I am today,” he said. “I apologise unreservedly to anyone that it may have hurt.”

A Greens spokesman said the party was disappointed by his language. “The content of these posts and ‘likes’ is contrary to Australian Greens social media policy, and he has apologised for that,” the spokesman said.

Josh Frydenberg, whose campaign material has been defaced with Nazi symbolism, said the Greens, who are running high-profile candidate Julian Burnside in Kooyong, were “extreme, ­aggressive and intolerant of views that don’t match their own”.

Senator Di Natale yesterday condemned Ms Holt’s alleged ­attack on the Prime Minister. “We think the way to defeat a shocking government is at the ballot box,” Senator Di Natale said. “We can have a fierce contest of ideas but we shouldn’t resort, no one should ­resort to these sorts of attacks.”

Scrutiny of Senator Di Natale’s candidates comes after the Greens leader pushed for legislation to regulate the media and stamp out alleged hate speech, targeting Sky News and News Corp commentators ­Andrew Bolt and Chris Kenny and 2GB radio host Alan Jones.

In the wake of the alleged egging attempt on the Prime Minister, Senator Di Natale agreed there had been a disturbing trend of physical attacks on politicians.

Ms Holt, 24, was charged with common assault and possession of a prohibited drug (cannabis) by NSW Police yesterday after allegedly approaching Mr Morrison and attempting to throw an egg at the back of his head as he mingled with elderly women.

She has “liked” the Albury Greens Facebook page and shared numerous posts from Senator Di Natale and NSW Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi but the party said she was not a member of the ­Australian, NSW or Victorian Greens.

Ms Holt said on Facebook she studied at Charles Sturt University but the university said she was not a current student. It would not confirm if she was a former student.

“The university does not condone or endorse Ms Holt’s behaviour. The university will not be making any further comment on the matter,” a spokeswoman said.

After the Christchurch terrorist attacks on two mosques and Queensland senator Fraser Anning’s comments blaming the atrocity on New Zealand’s immigration program, Ms Holt posted: “This is actually outrageous. My heart goes out to all impacted by today’s events in Christchurch. Why is every right-wing politician in Australia a Nazi?”

Senator Anning was later egged in an unrelated incident.

Ms Holt also shared an Internat­ional Women’s Day message from Senator Di Natale and urged her Facebook followers not to let the Prime Minister’s “bigoted views bring you down”.

Mr Morrison described the ­alleged egging attempt as an “ugly type of protest”, and called on Australians to disagree better.

He compared the incident to vegans who invaded farmers’ land and members of militant unions who “stood over” small business owners and employees.

Senior sources in Mr Morrison’s office said there would not be a review of the Prime Minister’s ­security detail, which had “acted very quickly”.

A woman who Mr Morrison ­referred to as Margaret was knocked over during the incident. The CWA said she was “shaken, but she is OK”.

Bill Shorten said the incident was “appalling and disgraceful ­behaviour”. He said any protests approaching violence were “completely unacceptable”.

SOURCE  

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

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

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8 May, 2019  

Will we get smarter about global warming?

MARTIN HUTCHINSON

Philipp Blom’s “Nature’s Mutiny” (Liveright, 2019) looks at the Little Ice Age of 1560-1700 and demonstrates that, whereas the first generation afflicted by unexpected cold weather sat around moaning about God not loving them, after about 40 years more intelligent responses occurred, such as improvements in agriculture, a massive growth in international trade and the birth of modern capitalism. Since it is nearly 40 years since the world started worrying about global warming, can we hope for an equivalent improvement in response IQ?

The Little Ice Age involved a decline in global mean temperature of about 1 degree Celsius, between about 1560 and 1700 (its onset appears to have preceded the sunspot “Maunder Minimum of 1640-1700). Blom’s thesis is that the climate change was a stimulant to political, economic and social changes in Europe, which propelled what we now know as the “Enlightenment”.

In its first few decades, until about 1600, the reaction to unexpectedly cold winters was almost entirely gloomy and negative. European society at both the elite and mass level was used to regarding natural changes as evidence of God’s will, so the unexpectedly cold winters and poor harvests were taken as evidence of God’s wrath, caused by the sinfulness of Mankind. Numerous leaders focused on casting out human sin, which had no effect on the climate, but resulted in the emergence of various extreme religious manifestations. One especially cruel manifestation of this was a spate of witchcraft trials, over 110,000 in Europe between 1588 and 1600, resulting in over 50,000 burnings of unfortunate and presumably mostly innocent ladies, as well as a few “warlock” men.

Around 1600, responses to the Little Ice Age became more constructive. In the Netherlands, a spate of land reclamation projects with windmill-powered drainage hugely increased the amount of arable land available for farming, while throughout northern and western Europe the enclosure movement and more effective farming techniques increased crop yields by some 50%. Another such development, primarily in the Netherlands and Britain, was the commercialization of agriculture, so that grain came to be sold through centralized wholesalers with international distribution rather than through local markets.

A third change, essential to the financing of increasingly costly government, which could no longer extract enough surplus revenues from the agricultural sector, was the development of long-distance trade routes and exotic products that could be taxed on their way to consumers. The British and Dutch East India Companies (spices, tea and coffee), both started around 1600, were key to this change, as was the development of North American and Caribbean colonization (tobacco and sugar) in the early 17th Century. The English had been first with this innovation, founding the Muscovy Company in 1553, but the Muscovy Company founders, seeking a North-East passage to “Cathay” around the north of Russia, were unwitting Deniers of the Little Ice Age, and hence ended with a lot of frozen ships and mariners and not very much useful trade.

We are still not 40 years into the climate change debate – James Hansen’s Congressional testimony, which can be judged as starting it, took place in 1988, so the 40th anniversary will not occur until 2028. We are thus still at the “God does not love us” stage in our response to it. Most of the proposed government remedies so far, notably the “Green New Deal” have been attempts to wipe out our sin, in this case the sin of running a carbon-emitting industrialized modern economy.

We have also had innumerable witchcraft trials, in our modern world attempts to close down disfavored energy producers such as coal mines and oil companies, or to silence those whose opinions on “climate change” are unattractive to the consensus. Fortunately, the fatality levels from the modern witchcraft trials have been much lower than in the 16th Century, but that is not for want of trying among those acting as prosecutors.

However, in the next few years, we are due to see some better solutions if the pattern of the “Little Ice Age” is repeated. Indeed, some of those solutions are already apparent, and should make our “clean energy” picture much brighter than seemed likely only a few years ago.

For one thing, the disgraceful crony capitalist 2007 legislation passed by the Nancy Pelosi-led Congress and signed by George W. Bush that banned incandescent light bulbs has done less damage than it might have. Instead of the unpleasant, expensive and environmentally vile CFL light bulbs, that GE and other crony capitalists were trying to force us into using, we now have LED bulbs, that have the blissful advantage of lasting a couple of decades, so to offset their higher capital cost bring a genuine consumer benefit of not having to be replaced every few months. I have not noticed any significant lowering of electricity bills from using LED bulbs, but I hate changing light bulbs, so the new LED bulbs leave me ahead of the game.

A second emerging solution is that solar panels, mostly manufactured in China, have become so cheap that solar power is now cost-competitive with other power sources, provided it is being used in a region with abundant sunlight. It still makes no sense to assemble gigantic solar power grids in Germany, for example, where heavy cloud cover, high latitude and high land costs make them uncompetitive, but in Arizona, solar power is a genuinely competitive alternative.

Now a third better solution to climate change has appeared. The efforts of Elon Musk and Tesla to make electric vehicles cost-competitive have so far been futile. However the demand from electric vehicle makers for high capacity low cost batteries has brought down the cost of battery storage so far that it is now a viable solution to the main problem preventing the adoption of solar and wind power as a principal power source: that they provide no power when the sun is not shining or the wind not blowing. Florida Power and Light is building a 409 megawatt battery farm alongside a solar power project in Manatee County, which will come on stream in 2021 and provide 24-hour power in a way not previously possible from solar and wind sources.

If battery storage is now a solution to the intermittent power problem, then renewables can now provide a much higher percentage of the electric power grid, and one of the major bottlenecks to “clean” energy production will have disappeared. Tesla may not have solved the problem of electric automobiles and may indeed find that the major auto companies are about to eat its breakfast in that business, but it may have solved the storage problem for renewable energy sources in the electric power grid.

Solutions to the global warming problem are thus beginning to appear, in plenty of time to prevent an excessive artificial heating of the planet by 2100 – we are after all not yet at 2020. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Green New Deal are beginning to seem like the citizens of the German town of N?rdlingen, who in 1590 entered on a program of witch burning that resulted in wiping out, not just marginal old crones but the wives of some of the city’s wealthiest leading citizens. God ended by punishing N?rdlingen in the following generation, by subjecting it to one of the nastiest sieges of the Thirty Years War – irrational cruelty such as the Green New Deal would impose is generally punished later.

It is becoming apparent that the solutions to global warming propounded since 1988 are like the witch burning and religious pessimism of the late 16th Century – harmful in themselves and irrelevant to the real problem, in that case of declining agricultural production. We do not need draconian government controls, expensive “green” boondoggles or massive new carbon taxes, all of which will destroy the economy’s productivity while doing nothing to solve the global warming problem.

The Little Ice Age should teach us another lesson: that sudden changes in global temperature can happen naturally, and that we should be ready to meet them in a way that avoids wiping out a high percentage of the world’s population. The huge increase in global population since the Industrial Revolution, from 1 billion to 7.5 billion, must be halted and then reversed as soon as possible. Population must be kept far below the carrying capacity of the planet, so that natural and man-made environmental problems and even catastrophes can be solved without mass global tragedy.

For the carbon emissions problem, whatever the severity of its impact on climate, we need new technologies and massive declines in the cost of technological solutions. Scientific advances, brought by the magic of the private sector’s market forces, are beginning to solve this climate problem as they solved those of the Little Ice Age. Regulation, taxation and political denunciations of business will simply get in the way, just as did religious admonition and witch-burning the last time around.

SOURCE 






Here we go again: UN, Media recycle climate species ‘extinction’ fears – Dredge up discredited Paul Ehrlich

The UN has now officially expanded its mission now to include the “climate change” species extinction scare. The UN is once again calling for putting itself in charge of “solving” the newly hyped species “crisis.” “A huge transformation is needed across the economy and society to protect and restore nature, which provides people with food, medicines, and other materials, crop pollination, fresh water, and quality of life,” according to the new UN report. The AP quoted one of the activist scientists claiming “this is really our last chance to address all of that.”

This latest report has been touted as the IPCC for nature by the UN. “The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) included more than 450 researchers who used 15,000 scientific and government reports. The report’s summary had to be approved by representatives of all 109 nations,” the AP reported. Let’s repeat, “The report’s summary had to be approved by representatives of all 109 nations.” The same hijacking of science by politicians and UN bureaucrats that has always occurred in the UN IPCC climate reports. See: UN’s alleged scientific process features “government officials” having a say in each line of the report’s summary

But this is not the first time we have warned about species. As early as 1864, “tipping points” about the “extinction of the species” were issued. And it turns out, economic prosperity may help save the species

Yet, despite a massive track record of scientific failure about climate and species “crises” the UN, the media and the usual suspect scientists like failed overpopulation guru Paul Ehrlich, are at it again.

Greenpeace Co-Founder & Ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore challenges specious species claims: ‘That is so 1970s. Paul Ehrlich is pathetic and has been crying wolf for decades. While he pontificated doom for starving millions in the 1970 from his Ivory Tower at Stanford.’

‘History shows that it is the destiny of most species to be destroyed by periodic natural calamities or competition from other species…No species has an assured place on Earth. Some species can adapt and survive – those unable to adapt are removed from the gene pool. Because of Earth’s long turbulent history, most species surviving today are not ‘fragile’ …

Moore, in an interview with Climate Depot, refuted the claims of the species study. “The biggest extinction events in the human era occurred 60,000 years ago when humans arrived in Australia, 10-15,000 years ago when humans arrived in the New World, 800 years ago when humans found New Zealand, and 250 years ago when Europeans brought exotic species to the Pacific Islands such as Hawaii,” Moore explained.

“Since species extinction became a broad social concern, coinciding with the extinction of the passenger pigeon, we have done a pretty good job of preventing species extinctions,” Moore explained.

“I quit my life-long subscription to National Geographic when they published a similar ‘sixth mass extinction’ article in February 1999. This [latest journal] Nature article just re-hashes this theme,” he added. Moore left Greenpeace in 1986 because he felt the organization had become too radical.

This is not the first time Moore has gone to battle over alarming claims of species extinction. In the 2000 documentary “Amazon Rainforest: Clear-Cutting The Myths”, Moore bluntly mocked species extinction claims made by biologist Edward O. Wilson from Harvard University. Wilson estimated that up to 50,000 species go extinct every year based on computer models of the number of potential but as yet undiscovered species in the world.

Moore said in 2000: “There’s no scientific basis for saying that 50,000 species are going extinct. The only place you can find them is in Edward O. Wilson’s computer at Harvard University. They’re actually electrons on a hard drive. I want a list of Latin names of actual species.” Moore was interviewed by reporter Marc Morano (now with Climate Depot) in the 2000 Amazon rainforest documentary:

Environmental activist Tim Keating of Rainforest Relief was asked in the 2000 documentary if he could name any of the alleged 50,000 species that have gone extinct and he was unable.

“No, we can’t [name them], because we don’t know what those species are. But most of the species that we’re talking about in those estimates are things like insects and even microorganisms, like bacteria,” Keating explained.

UK scientist Professor Philip Stott, emeritus professor of Biogeography at the University of London, dismissed current species claims in the 2000 Amazon rainforest documentary.

“The earth has gone through many periods of major extinctions, some much bigger in size than even being contemplated today,” Stott, the author of a book on tropical rainforests, said in the 2000 documentary.

“Change is necessary to keep up with change in nature itself. In other words, change is the essence. And the idea that we can keep all species that now exist would be anti-evolutionary, anti-nature and anti the very nature of the earth in which we live,” Stott said.

SOURCE 






We need a grown-up debate about climate change

The celebration of panicked schoolchildren is not healthy

We should not trust Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish environmentalist who has captured the world media’s attention. Don’t get me wrong: it is not her motives I mistrust. It is the fact that she is a child who, unsurprisingly, gives bad advice on complex political issues and, despite her protestations to the contrary, has not done her homework.

‘I want you to panic’ about climate change, she counsels. But since when has panic ever been a wise response to any sort of crisis? Panicking, particularly in a supposedly doomsday scenario, almost inevitably produces the most inefficient, wrongheaded and counterproductive results. The graver the crisis, the more the need for calm.

If an adult were telling us to panic we would react very differently. We would understand that he is either immaturely panicking himself, in which case we would prudently ignore him, or looking to induce an irrational mental state in others, while hypocritically avoiding it himself. But whoever it comes from, it is an intellectually and politically suspect position.

Greta Thunberg is no doubt genuinely scared about what might happen to the world a few decades from now. But why should we attach so much authority to the words of a child? The politicians currently fawning over Thunberg need to explain how they suddenly went from deferring to experts in matters of global warming to deferring to someone who has not finished school.

Thunberg sparked the ‘school strike’ movement, calling on kids to ditch school to protest against climate change. But it will no doubt have been in school where she got this idea that the world will soon be in flames. All around Europe, and particularly in right-on countries like Switzerland and Sweden, teachers have become preachers of green alarmism. This is why many teachers are delighted with protesting children playing truant for a ‘good cause’.

This, incidentally, shows how non-radical these school strikes are. If your teachers agree with it, it’s not likely to be a radical cause. But it is also therefore foolish to just tell these protesting children they should quit waving their placards and go back to school. That would be like asking the guy carrying an ‘End is nigh’ sign to go back to the fundamentalist church he attends.

Teachers, particularly of the sciences, have smuggled political positions into what should be factual and objective subjects. It is of course fine to teach children that rising CO2 is warming the planet. But that fact doesn’t tell us how we should respond to it. The idea that we must reduce CO2 is a political view. But any student who questions reducing CO2 will be denounced as unscientific.

Thunberg uses the same tactic, which she likely learned at school. In the same breath she urges us to ‘unite behind the science’ and work to reduce CO2 emissions to zero. She believes that the science actually dictates how we should act. It doesn’t occur to her that people might completely accept the consensus on climate change while believing that drastically cutting CO2 is not the right way to go.

In his book A System of Logic, John Stuart Mill writes that scientists cannot, if they are to remain scientific, instruct us on how we should act. A scientist, he says, ‘is not an adviser for practice’, and is only there to ‘show that certain consequences follow from certain causes, and that to obtain certain ends, certain means are the most effectual’. Science, for instance, can tell us what we must do if we wish to build more houses, but it cannot tell us that we should build those houses. Science concerns itself with what is, not with what should be.

The same applies to climate change. The scientific consensus is that global warming is mainly caused by mankind emitting CO2. But it does not follow that we should therefore emit less, any more than it follows that we should emit more or maintain present levels. All of those are political positions that could, reasonably, flow from the science. It is disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

The celebration of Greta Thunberg and the school strikes is a sign of how infantilised political debate around climate change has become. These five-foot footsoldiers of the green ideology have been well coached in the language of environmental doom-mongering. What we need now is a more frank, calm and grown-up debate.

SOURCE 





A fracking embarrassment

The restrictions the UK places on shale drilling are ridiculous

Last weekend, the UK commissioner for shale gas, Natascha Engel, resigned her post, claiming in an interview for the Mail on Sunday that fracking had been made all but impossible thanks to government restrictions. In her resignation letter to the energy secretary, Greg Clark, Engel complained that a ‘perfectly viable industry is being wasted because of a government policy driven by environmental lobbying rather than science, evidence and a desire to see UK industry flourish’.

Hydraulic fracturing – ‘fracking’ – is a central part of enabling drillers to extract gas from shale rocks far below the surface of the Earth. In short, drills dig down and sideways into the shale rock, then fluid is forced at high pressure into the rock, creating fractures from which gas is released. Unsurprisingly, the process can lead to geological shifts and earth tremors. These are almost invariably too small to be felt at the surface, but very rarely these tremors are large enough to be detected without instrumentation.

When it gave the go-ahead for fracking in the UK, the government set an upper limit on how large such tremors could be before work would need to be suspended. However, the upper limit is set ludicrously low: just 0.5 on the Richter scale. As Engel told the Mail on Sunday: ‘A 0.5 tremor is much weaker than the rumble you might feel when walking above a Tube train. Yet if a frack unleashes a tremor rated 0.5, operators have to stop what they’re doing for 18 hours… this is making fracking impossible.’

Any tremor below 2.0 is unlikely to be felt by anything but seismographic instruments. To cause damage to buildings, tremors need to be of the order of four or five on the Richter scale. The scale is logarithmic – that is, each full point upwards is 10 times larger than the previous one. So the kind of tremor that would cause damage to buildings would need to be thousands of times stronger than the kind of faint vibration that could currently cause work to stop. Thus, setting a limit of just 0.5, despite the opposition of industry and geologists, is ridiculous. As Engel noted in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House news show on Sunday, no such limits apply to other ways of getting stuff out of the ground. The same rules should apply to fracking, too.

Making the limit just 1.5 – still well below US regulation levels – would make things far easier for drillers while still protecting homes and other buildings. Yet Engel claims Clark is unwilling to review the rules – despite promises by the government to do just that once some real-world data on fracking in the UK was available. Instead, she says, there is ‘paralysis’ rather than leadership.

Despite being very concerned about climate change, Engel also offers a dig at some recent high-profile climate campaigners like Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion: ‘I cannot understand why politicians would rather listen to a teenager who tells children not to go to school because they will soon be dead rather than looking at ways of reducing our emissions by taking gas out of the ground here. We should be giving our children a positive and hopeful message: telling them to go to school, go to university, to become scientists and innovators who can find the answers to climate change.’

Perhaps Engel should have known how serious the government was about the issue from her working conditions. Despite being the ‘fracking tsar’, Engel admitted on Broadcasting House that she had no actual office nor any civil servants working for her – it was just her and a laptop. So much for embracing the ‘shale gas revolution’.

SOURCE 

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Melting Permafrost ‘Crisis’ Debunked By Historical Record

Climate alarmists are resuscitating an old scare, claiming melting permafrost caused by modest global warming will accelerate warming, thus creating rapid and runaway global warming.

Objective historical data, however, conclusively debunk the scare.

An article in the April 30 edition of Nature claims, “Permafrost collapse is accelerating carbon release. The sudden collapse of thawing soils in the Arctic might double the warming from greenhouse gases released from the tundra.”

As a result, alarmists claim, global warming will continue to accelerate and may be irreversible absent dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Alarmists are piling on in response to the article.

“Carbon released into the atmosphere by the increasing loss of Arctic permafrost, combined with higher solar absorption by the Earth’s surface due to the melting of sea ice and land snow, will accelerate climate change,” states a EurekaAlert press release from Lancaster University

“A ‘sleeping giant’ hidden in permafrost soils in Canada and other northern regions worldwide will have important consequences for global warming,” claims the PhysOrg website.

The notion that modest warming will release frozen methane and carbon dioxide that will destabilize the climate is an old and tired scare that is thoroughly debunked by past climate history.

As even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has documented (see page 202, here), many warming periods have occurred throughout the planet’s history, including several substantial warming events that raised temperatures higher than present levels.

Several of these substantial warming events have occurred since the last ice age glaciation ended approximately 10,000 years ago.

Yet each warming period eventually ended and was followed by a subsequent cooling period. If runaway ‘positive temperature feedbacks’ occur due to thawing permafrost, none of the subsequent cooling periods would have happened.

Ultimately, the Earth’s climate is not inherently unstable and subject to self-reinforcing temperature trends.

While scientists theorize about how and why the Earth’s climate self-regulates in response to initial warming and cooling episodes (with subsequent changes in cloud cover being a likely factor), the objective data show quite clearly that the Earth’s climate tends to self-regulate.

Thawing permafrost occurred during each of the past warming events, and yet the impacts from none of the resulting methane and carbon dioxide releases were sufficient to cause runaway, self-perpetuating global warming.

Consider the ‘runaway permafrost thawing’ scare just that – a self-serving and historically debunked climate scare.

SOURCE 

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

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

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7 May, 2019  

Emma Thompson the first-class hypocrite! Actress is pictured dining on champagne and beef in £18,000 personal booth on carbon-spewing BA plane jetting to New York days after lecturing us all to stop flying

It's only we little people who have to change.  The Leftist elite can do anything

Left-wing actress Dame Emma Thompson was branded a ‘first-class hypocrite’ last night after jetting to New York just days after backing climate protests that brought chaos to London.

The Jeremy Corbyn supporter took her personal booth in the luxury cabin of a British Airways flight from Heathrow to JFK on Friday morning after earlier demanding: ‘We should all fly less.’

First-class BA flights to New York cost up to £18,000 and generate nearly two tons of carbon dioxide – the main driver of climate change – for each passenger in the elite cabin.

Onlookers claim the multi-millionaire activist also drank Laurent-Perrier champagne and dined on beef carpaccio – even though cattle farming is also a major contributor to greenhouse gasses.

Dame Emma has also previously called on people to eat less meat in the name of ‘preserving the planet’.

Cows produce methane – which is 23 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide – while clearing forests for pasture and to grow feed for livestock also drives global warming.

Just two weeks before her 3,400-mile flight, lifelong Labour supporter Dame Emma, 60, joined the Extinction Rebellion protests that shut down swathes of Central London, climbing aboard a pink boat the activists had used to blockade Oxford Circus.

The group wants to curb air travel and even made an abortive attempt to close Heathrow Airport, from where she departed at 11.20am on Friday for the eight-hour journey. Her share of the carbon dioxide generated by the flight was the same as that emitted by heating an average house for nine months.

Dame Emma was spotted in 2F – one of the most exclusive seats on board the Boeing 777-200, which accommodates just 14 wealthy passengers in the first-class cabin.

An onlooker said Dame Emma – who has previously championed the Meat Free Monday movement which aims to raise awareness of the environmental damage caused by eating meat – was ‘tucking into those bovines who produce all that methane’.

Extinction Rebellion believes that there is now a ‘climate crisis’ and has suggested that flights be used only in an emergency.

Dame Emma was previously criticised after flying 5,400 miles from her 60th birthday party in Los Angeles to join their protests over the Easter weekend. On Good Friday, the Hollywood star, who lives in Hampstead, North London, but regularly flies to and from the US, addressed protesters at their makeshift camp off Oxford Street.

She told them: ‘I am so proud and thrilled to be part of Extinction Rebellion. ‘We have to be here, we have to do this. It’s inconvenient for people sometimes but it’s much more inconvenient to leave a planet that’s so completely destroyed.’

At the time, the group defended its celebrity backer. It insisted that the tons of carbon her flight produced for her to be at their protest was an ‘unfortunate cost in our bigger battle to save the planet’.

And addressing the charge of hypocrisy, Dame Emma added: ‘It’s very difficult to do my job without occasionally flying, although I do fly a lot less than I did.

‘Yes, it’s unhappy and an inconvenience and we’re often involved in situations where we will be hypocritical, but if we don’t address this we are failing our children and our grandchildren.’

But she insisted: ‘We should all fly less, the future of this planet is at stake and that’s perhaps more important than our own reputations.’

Dame Emma says she plants trees to make amends for her globe-trotting, claiming: ‘I’m in the very fortunate position of being able to offset my carbon footprint, but most people can’t.’

An Extinction Rebellion spokesman said: ‘If Emma Thompson wants to come and help out, that’s great – she’s using her platform which is incredibly valuable to anyone. If she has to fly around the world like a climate lawyer might have to fly around the world, it seems counter-productive in the short term but we are looking at the bigger picture.’

But last night critics branded the excuses nonsense. Tory MP David Morris said: ‘This is typical Left-wing “Do as I say, not as I do”. Dame Emma Thompson is clearly a first-class hypocrite and a champagne socialist.’

SOURCE 







Most Brits Unwilling To Make Lifestyle Changes To Fight Global Warming, Poll Finds

The majority of Britons are unwilling to significantly reduce the amount they drive, fly and eat meat in order to combat climate change, a Sky Data poll reveals.

Just over half – 53% – say they would be unwilling even in principle to significantly reduce the amount they fly, while 28% say they would be willing to give up traveling by plane or reduce the amount they do so significantly (19% say they never fly anyway).

People responding to polls often overclaim their willingness to change their behavior in ways considered socially desirable – but despite this, some 52% say they would be unwilling to reduce the amount of meat they eat much (31%) or at all (21%) to help reduce global warming.

Four in ten say they would be willing to either reduce their meat consumption significantly (35%) or give it up entirely (five percent). A further eight percent do not eat meat.

A report from the Committee on Climate Change called for people to reduce how much meat they eat and how often they fly.

It also called for the government to bring forward the planned ban on conventional car sales by ten years to 2030, encouraging people to switch to driving electric cars.

Some 56% say they would be unwilling to drive significantly less to protect the environment, with 28% saying they would be willing to reduce the amount they drive significantly or give it up entirely (17% already do not drive).

SOURCE 






Academic Elites Shouldn’t Be Deciding America’s Energy Policy:  The case of Naomi Oreskes

In the foreseeable future, the House of Representatives will hold more hearings on climate change as some promote the so-called Green New Deal. One of the witnesses who could testify is Professor Naomi Oreskes, a self-styled science historian.

While mislabeled as an “internationally renowned” climate change scholar, Oreskes’ true background is troubling.

For years, her goal has been attacking the American oil industry by advocating a legal assault modeled after the anti-tobacco crusade. Her claim, boiled down, is that oil and gas companies long ago knew they were allegedly harming the planet but failed to warn people. Therefore, they owe everybody huge gobs of money and the government should control the distribution.

Oreskes’ official bio at Harvard lists her as a professor of the History of Science. She has no degrees in climatology, meteorology, or atmospheric sciences, but only in mining geology.

Her “expertise” is searching through documents to find things she can twist or use out of context to further her political agenda. Since big companies have mega-millions of documents, it’s child play to find discrepancies and loose language. And Oreskes’ own writings contain the very types of flaws which she considers sinister in anybody else’s paperwork.

To her, fossil fuels are an inherently dangerous product and the world should ignore how abundant affordable energy has given us such a high quality of life. Playing fast and loose with facts is justified in pursuit of a greater good. Inspired by the massive settlements paid by Big Tobacco, she sees far-bigger dollar signs from attacking energy companies with big lawsuits.

But what about her own history?

Oreskes was an early promoter of the theory that “scientists all agree” about global warming, basing that conclusion on reviewing just the abstracts (short summaries) of articles written by others. She then co-authored the conspiracy theory book, “Merchants of Doubt” to claim that we’ve been duped by slick advertising telling us that oil and gas are good.

That’s an automatic guarantee for adulation by the left and by Hollywood. Her book climbed to its current rank of #21,300 on Amazon’s best-seller list. The movie version grossed a whopping $308,156 — so instead they made it free on the internet.

Fair presentations are not her strength. She told one interviewer that it’s not right to give equal weight to both sides of an issue.

How has she launched her attack in the courts? In 2012 Oreskes coordinated the La Jolla conference of left-wing activists and developed a strategy of nationwide lawsuits against oil and gas.

In 2015, Oreskes directly petitioned the New York State Attorney General to consider state action against the oil industry. She followed with a training workshop involving attorney generals’ offices from more than a dozen states (similar to her hosting countless media figures to indoctrinate them also).

The legal strategy is that if anyone within a giant energy company ever expressed concerns or disagreements about anything then the company is engaged in a conspiracy (and securities fraud) if it fails to adopt or publicize these different conclusions.

Obligingly, lawsuits and investigations have been brought by Democrat attorney generals, such as those in New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. But the actual legal work is often supplied by wealthy environmentalists — something which they tried to conceal from the public.

Oreskes’ conspiracy theory approach also contends that statements by one company (before the 1999 merging of Mobil with Exxon) prove misconduct by the other company. That’s like blaming Chrysler for the business decisions made by FIAT before they merged.

But we cannot forget that the entire conspiracy claim is based on “scholarly” analysis of some selected articles and of ExxonMobil’s public communications.

So what if another prominent scholar disagrees? Turns out there are disputes about Oreskes’ approach. Oreskes’ work is fundamentally flawed, according to analysis by Professor Kimberly Neuendorf, a communications content expert at Cleveland State University. Her conclusion was that Oreske’s work “lacks reliability, validity, objectivity, generalizability, and replicability.”

How sad and scary it would be if our essential energy industry were to have its fate decided by competing opinions among scholars? And how terrible for consumers if conspiracy theories like Oreskes keep spreading.

Or maybe this is a conspiracy by wealthy donors who have bet their fortunes on replacing oil and gas with their Green New Deal?

We elect people to make more common-sense decisions rather than relying on ivory tower studies. The politicians should take note of that and be skeptical if and when Oreskes testifies on Capitol Hill or in the media.

SOURCE 





Get Ready for Hot Dogs Made with Insect Parts Thanks to Liberals Worried About Overpopulation

The stupid old food shortage scam again.  Food is getting more plentiful, not less.  Most crops are in glut and the Western world population is DECLINING

“Meat Science Professor Dr. Louwrens Hoffman said conventional livestock industries would not be able to meet worldwide demand for meat, and alternatives were needed to replace or complement traditional protein sources,” Geek.com reported.

So, Hoffman’s answer? “[M]aggots, locusts and other alternative proteins.”

“An overpopulated world is going to struggle to find enough protein unless people are willing to open their minds, and stomachs, to a much broader notion of food,” Hoffman told Australia’s What’s New in Food.

“Would you eat a commercial sausage made from maggots? What about other insect larvae and even whole insects like locusts? The biggest potential for sustainable protein production lies with insects and new plant sources.”

However, Hoffman understands, not incorrectly, that consumers in the West aren’t really big on eating whole insects.

“In other words, insect protein needs to be incorporated into existing food products as an ingredient,” Hoffman said. “For example, one of my students has created a very tasty insect ice cream.”

Oh, so that’s why Ferris Bueller passed out at 31 Flavors that one night: pesticide bioaccumulation!

In addition to feeding you maggots, Hoffman would also like to feed your chicken maggots, too, by incorporating black soldier fly larvae into chicken feed.

“Poultry is a massive industry worldwide and the industry is under pressure to find alternative proteins that are more sustainable, ethical and green than the grain crops currently being used,” Hoffman said.

Well, I’ll say this much: Hoffman is more famous now than he was 15 minutes ago. Otherwise, this is the exact same nonsense we’ve been hearing since Paul Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb” roughly a half-century ago.

Ehrlich, for those of you who are too young to remember the soi-disant Cassandra of the environmentalist movement, predicted that food production wouldn’t rise at a clip commensurate with population growth, a disaster which would be exacerbated by environmental changes. The result would be mass famine which would kill hundreds of millions of people a year.

This didn’t happen, of course, but it didn’t stop Ehrlich from appearing on Johnny Carson about as often as Michael Avenatti appeared on CNN before he got arrested. Food producers and farmers got more creative and were able to feed more people using less resources. We have less famine now than we did when Paul Ehrlich was preaching about the eschatology of scarcity.

As for the modern insect-eating movement, I understand that hundreds of millions of people around the world eat insects as part of their diet.

However, none of what Hoffman is saying is going to avert a food crisis. It’s unlikely to help the environment to any great extent. And, perhaps most importantly, none of his environmental fatalism is at all new.

Heck, just six months ago, we were being told that eating mealworms with our pasta was another great way to save the environment. I understand adoption of new habits may be a slow process, but somehow I don’t see any movement in that direction happening anytime soon.

SOURCE 






Contradictions aplenty among top-end-of-town Greens

If the Australian Greens were called the Australian Browns, or the Australian Purples, would so many people vote for them? I doubt it, and I reckon a lot of people vote “green” because they don’t like to think about politics — who can blame them? — and, well, the word green sounds nice. Grass is green, trees are green. It’s the colour of nature, growth and life.

But most Greens voters don’t live anywhere near greenery. They are surrounded by brown, and grey, in the hum of traffic congestion, as far removed from ­nature as possible, in the centres of our large and crowded cities.

The typical Greens voter worries about climate change but lives in a concrete jungle where the evidence of damage to the environment is all around.

The typical Greens voter is happy to limit enterprise and growth to allegedly save the ­planet. But through an app on their smartphone, they are likely to pay someone on a motorbike to bring them a vegan burger.

Your typical Greens voter likes to echo feel-good theories and support the introduction of rules that other people should pay for and live by. But just how far will they go when it comes time to vote? When it comes down to it, at this election, will Greens voters cut into their own incomes and ­assets by voting to increase their own tax bills?

The Greens party is not doing as well as it used to. The latest Roy Morgan Poll (of 1533 electors Australia-wide) shows Greens support at 9.5 per cent. At the 2010 federal election, Greens support reached a peak of 11.8 per cent. Roy Morgan research shows that Greens supporters are increasingly female (60 per cent). Eight years ago polling showed ­female support at 55 per cent. In 2010 under two-thirds of Greens supporters lived in capital cities but now more than 70 per cent of supporters live in them. In the past decade the share of Greens support coming from NSW, South Australia and Tasmania has dropped.

Now nearly a third of Greens supporters reside in Victoria; their numbers have swelled from just over a quarter in 2010. Greens leader Richard Di Natale has ­focused on inner-urban seats in Victoria’s capital, including Melbourne, Batman/Cooper, Melbourne Ports/Macnamara, Koo­yong, Higgins and Wills.

Roy Morgan data gathered from more than 4000 Greens ­voters in 2010 and last year shows that the party’s supporters are quite well off. Greens voters are pushing increasingly into higher income brackets at a faster rate than everyone else.

Roy Morgan figures on household income show that in 2010, while the median household ­income of all electors was $88,540, the median household income of Greens voters was $93,910.

Last year the figures show the median household income of all electors is $106,930. This is an ­increase of $18,390, or 21 per cent. However, the median household income of Greens voters is $120,880, representing a rise of $26,970, or 29 per cent.

So Greens voters earn more than everyone else and their ­incomes are rising at a higher rate. Greens voters are the dreaded “top end of town” and they are contributing to, and benefiting from, the terrible widening inequality that their chosen party keeps going on about.

Green, the colour of nature, is the colour of American money, too.

SOURCE  

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

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

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6 May, 2019  

Humans risk wiping out ONE MILLION natural species as the Earth's life-support system reaches breaking point, say UN scientists urging action

This is just "think of a number" talk.  There is no way they could have tracked one million species.  Extinction of species goes on all the time -- with or without human intervention.  And "extinct" species keep re-emerging

And where is their "breaking point"?  What is about to break?  They do not say.  Life seems to go on getting better and better all the time. Food has never before been as abundant or as cheap. China and India now feed their own people without having to import food.  This nonsense below is just childish alarmism.  It wouldn't even pass muster as a freshman essay


Mankind is on the verge of wiping out up to one million natural species which will put the Earth's vital life-support systems at breaking point, UN scientists will reportedly warn.

They say that food and water resources will run dry for future generations and put humanity in jeopardy unless immediate steps are taken to reverse climate destruction. 

Stark warnings about the ecological crisis are to be made in a 1,800-page UN report which reveals that the annihilation of natural landscapes, forests and wetlands is leading to an 'unsustainable' loss of plants of animals which risk extinction.

Robert Watson, chairman of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), told the paper: 'There is no question we are losing biodiversity at a truly unsustainable rate that will affect human wellbeing both for current and future generations.

'We are in trouble if we don't act, but there are a range of actions that can be taken to protect nature and meet human goals for health and development.' 

The global assessment on the state of nature - the product of 400 experts over three years - will construct several scenarios for the future based on likely decisions taken by governments and policymakers over the coming years.

Food, pollination, clean water and a stable climate all depend on a thriving plant and animal population.   

SOURCE 







Big Oil goes Big Green

Oil companies give billions to climate alarmists, but hardly a dime to climate realists

David Wojick

Climate alarmists often accuse skeptics, like myself and independent groups like the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Heartland Institute, of being in the pay of Big Oil. This is completely false – the Big Lie repeated so often that people eventually believe it. We do not receive even a dime from Big Oil. It’s part of the green fairy tale that skepticism exists only because the oil companies are funding it.

For the record, none of us skeptics – climate realists – doubt or deny climate change. We all recognize that Earth’s climate is in nearly constant turmoil and fluctuation, locally, regionally or globally.

What we question is assertions that emissions from fossil fuel use have somehow replaced the sun and other powerful natural forces that have driven beneficial, benign, harmful or even hugely destructive climate changes throughout Earth and human history:

Changes such as at least five glacial periods that buried much of North America, Europe and Asia under mile-high rivers of ice, warm periods in between that melted those massive glaciers, Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, a Little Ice Age, the century-long Anasazi and Mayan droughts, the Dust Bowl, and countless other major and minor climate and weather changes.

The standard refrain is that ExxonMobil gave a cumulative few million dollars to various skeptical groups prior to 2007. But that was many years ago. They got scared off by alarmist pressure groups and haven’t given climate realists a dime since then. In fact, the situation today is completely the opposite.

Big Oil companies now give at least a billion dollars a year to climate alarmists, projects and lobbying, to drive the Manmade Climate Chaos narrative. Why would they do that? Two reasons come to mind.

First, typical commercial reasons – what some would call corporate greed, or eliminating competition through the laws of the jungle. Feeding climate alarmism helps oil companies kill off “dirty” coal and position natural gas as being more “climate friendly.” After all, Big Oil is also Big Gas.

Second, public relations and “greenwashing” – portraying themselves as being more “green,” more socially and environmentally “responsible,” for supporting environmentalist groups and providing “clean” (or at least “less dirty”) alternatives to “climate destroying” coal.

The central vehicle for moving these green billions of dollars goes by a perfectly descriptive name: the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI). If the false accusers were correct, “oil and gas” would never be connected logically or ethically to “climate initiative.” But there it is, and it is very big. OGCI members include these well-known Big Oil names:

British Petroleum * Chevron * China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) *

Eni * Equinor * Exxon Mobil Corporation * Occidental Petroleum *

PEMEX (Petr?leos Mexicanos) * PETROBRAS (Petroleo Brasileiro) * Repsol *

Royal Dutch Shell * Saudi Aramco * Total

Collectively, they claim to produce 30% of the world’s oil and gas. Their OGCI website also features a lineup of Big Oil corporate CEOs, just to show how seriously and responsibly “green” they are. Their latest annual report has a letter from the CEOs, including this little gem:

“As our ambition grows with the scale of the challenge, we look forward to working closely with policy-makers, regulators and all stakeholders to help develop the levers that can economically and sustainably accelerate the pace of the low carbon transition.”

You have to wonder whether their list of “stakeholders” includes families, companies and communities that understand how completely dependent they and all of modern industrialized society are on fossil fuels, especially oil and gas. Just read this list and watch the little embedded video.

More to the point, consider its origins. OGCI was launched in 2014, shortly after the infamous Chesapeake Energy scandal, when its CEO got caught giving the Sierra Club millions of dollars to support the environmentalist and Obama Administration war on coal. Ironically, even Club members opposed taking the money, since they consider all fossil fuels to be their enemy – and after it had bashed coal into submission, the Club took aim at natural gas, Chesapeake’s primary revenue source.

What seems to have happened is that the ever-wily Big Oil companies created their own “green” organization. With its billion bucks in annual funding, Big Oil is now one of the biggest financiers of Big Green, not counting Big Government funding sources.

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is also actively engaged with Big Oil, through its EDF+Business arm. In particular, EDF has a huge methane reduction program – the Methane Challenge – which not surprisingly involves OGCI. The program features prominently in “Sustainability Reports” of several major oil companies. EDF is even building and launching its own satellite, cleverly called MethaneSAT.

EDF is clearly getting a lot of money for this. It claims it gets no money “directly” from the companies. Instead, the cash comes from unspecified “philanthropies.” Of course, where these philanthropies get their cash may be a different story; they could easily be laundering Big Oil money. It may be telling that OGCI does not issue a financial report – or provide any transparent online information about its financials.

Space News actually asked EDF about this funding – but got stonewalled. Here’s its report:

“However, EDF has provided few details about how much MethaneSAT will cost or how it will be funded. The project received last year a grant from a new initiative called The Audacious Project, although the size of the award was not disclosed. An EDF spokesman did not respond to an inquiry about the financial status of the project.”

Having EDF on its side is certainly a big plus for Big Oil. But talk about hypocrisy – for both of them.

In any case it is clear that Big Oil is spending at least a billion dollars on green stuff, which is a lot of green. (Cold cash, in the form of American greenbacks, is clearly the new Big Green.) There is no evidence that climate skeptics are getting any of this. But if some are getting any, it is trivial in comparison. Meanwhile OGCI and Big Green get billions, and EDF maybe many millions.

Another big irony is that the supposed alternative to abundant, reliable, affordable, civilization-enabling fossil fuels is supposedly “clean, green, renewable, sustainable, responsible” wind, solar and biofuel energy. (Hardcore environmentalists do not approve of nuclear or hydroelectric power, either.)

Those alleged “alternatives” require inconceivably vast amounts of land – not just for the wind turbines, solar panels, backup batteries and biofuel farms, but to mine and process the billions of tons of iron, copper, rare earth metals, lithium, cadmium, limestone and other materials needed to make the turbines, panels, batteries, transmission lines, tractors, trucks and other “sustainable” infrastructure.

All that mining, processing, manufacturing and transportation requires fossil fuels. And biofuels emit just as much (plant-fertilizing) carbon dioxide when they are burned as do coal, oil and natural gas.

Even more disturbing, many of those raw materials are produced with widespread slave and child labor, under health, safety and environmental rules and conditions that would make Upton Sinclair and other early Twentieth Century reformers think their oppressed workers were living in paradise.

When it comes to skepticism, the simple fact is that roughly half of Americans do not accept climate alarmism, right up to the President. Yet no one is paying for this widespread skepticism. As for Big Oil, it is pouring big bucks into Big Green and green climate initiatives. Conservative and climate realist groups have think tanks that do manage to find some funding, but it doesn’t come from Big Oil .

That Big Oil is responsible for skepticism is just another part of the alarmist fantasy world.

Via email






New York Times Blames Wine Consumers for Climate Change, Issues Instructions for Researching Vineyards

Wine drinkers contribute to climate change when they don’t do proper research and make the right purchase decisions, The New York Times warns in a how-to guide published Tuesday.

In its “How Does Your Love of Wine Contribute to Climate Change?” The Times says the wine industry is “a microcosm of larger society” when it comes to climate change, so wine lovers must do their part to save the planet:

“That industry is simply a microcosm of larger society. Just as politicians have little incentive to address climate change unless voters require it, many wine producers are less inclined to reduce their own carbon footprints unless consumers demonstrate that such steps are important to them.”

The Times advises wine buyers to research winemakers to find answers to questions like:

Do they plow or till, or do they have a crop cover?
Do they mow their crop cover, instead of rolling it?
Do they make and use their own organic compost?
Do they still use combustion engines, or have they switched to electric or hybrid vehicles?
Do they use chemical sprays?
Do they “promote biodiversity and soil life?”
Do they use renewable fuels?
Do they catch and store the carbon they produce?
What energy source do they use?
What are their water management practices?

“These are the many questions that consumers would need to address in judging a producer’s carbon output,” The New York Times says.

Additionally, the article recommends that, when shopping for wines in stores, consumers should:

Buy wine in lightweight bottles,
Complain about heavier wine bottles,
Buy wine at bars and restaurants that store wine in kegs,
Favor boxed wines.

SOURCE 







GOP Rep Pulls a McConnell With Plan to See if House Dems Have the ‘Guts’ to Back Their Green New Deal

A Republican representative from Georgia took a page out of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell‘s (R-Ky.) book, announcing that he will be introducing a resolution to the House of Representatives to force a vote on the controversial Green New Deal.

On Monday, Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) told The Hill that he was planning on introducing a discharge petition to the House on Wednesday in an attempt to force a vote on freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez‘s (D-N.Y.) nonbinding resolution, the Green New Deal.

“I’m looking forward to it — the American people need to know where their representatives stand by the Green New Deal, and I’m hopeful we’ll be able to gather 218 votes and give that choice to the people of America,” Hill told The Hill.

“Ninety-two of them are signed onto it now as far as cosponsoring, so hopefully at least 20 of them will have the guts to say, yeah let’s vote on it,” he added.

A discharge petition is a type of resolution used in the House of Representatives to “discharge” a bill from the committee it is being considered in and bring it to the full House floor for a vote. For a bill to be eligible for discharge, it has to have been introduced to the House and referred to a committee for at least 30 days.

After 20 minutes of debate, the House votes on the legislation.

However, discharge petitions are incredibly hard to pull off, as they require an absolute majority of the House — 218 members — to sign on as co-sponsors of the petition. The main challenge standing before Hice is convincing 20 Democratic representatives to sign onto the petition.

Hice’s upcoming move is incredibly reminiscent of McConnell’s forcing of the Senate vote on the resolution last month. Fifty-seven senators voted against the nonbinding resolution, while the 43 others — all of them Democrats, sans Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — voted “present.”

IJR Red previously reported that McConnell continued to blast the Democrats after the vote, posting a video montage of the Democrats who advocated for the nonbinding resolution but voted “present” on the legislation, including 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidates such as Sanders and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.).

As IJR Red also noted, the queen of the Green New Deal was not too keen regarding the Senate vote on her own legislation, calling it a “disgrace” in a tweet last month.

SOURCE 






Biomass fuel: The Great Carbon Con

I’d be very surprised — and very impressed if contradicted — if one in 100 readers of this newspaper, even intelligent and informed as they are by definition, would be able to name the biggest generator of so-called renewable energy in Europe, which is climate central for the cult of carbon dioxide fear and loathing.

I’d be even more surprised if one in 1000 of our Down Under adherents of that anti-CO2 cult, unintelligent and uninformed as they are by definition, could do so.

Even fewer, I suggest, in both groups would be able to specifically name the single biggest so-called renewable energy power station in Europe.

Surely, it’s one of all those so-called “wind farms”, sprouting like metallic weeds all over the European landscape, and increasingly offshore as well, and which collectively must be the biggest source?

Or maybe even the only real — as in reliable and functional — renewable energy we’ve ever had and still only have: hydro power? But surely not solar in, apart from the Mediterranean countries, sun-challenged Europe?

Well, there are some clues in the words I have used very advisedly: “generator” of energy and “power station”. For you see, the answer is plain and simple: burning wood.

Yes, it is dressed up — and intended to quite deliberately deceive as that’s the European Union way — with the fancy all-green sounding name “biomass”. And yes, it includes burning municipal waste and charcoal. But it is mostly burning wood and, in part, shipped across the Atlantic from the US.

Exactly just like we used to do, from the prehistoric discovery of fire to well into the 20th century, until we switched to mostly coal-fired power stations. And still do in large parts of the developing world, including in India, killing tens of thousands of people every year. And which the opponents of the Adani coal mine want to keep doing.

Sure, in “clean, green Europe” they don’t burn the wood — sorry, biomass — in the open air so it doesn’t pump out the people-killing dirty bits of grit and other unpleasantries. But it still pumps out that gas — what’s it called? — oh yes, CO2.

Except, that the EU and especially EU central in Brussels, the European Commission, has decreed that the CO2 being pumped out by the burning of wood and other materials, in “biomass power stations” is non-existent.

That is to say, it’s “carbon neutral”. The CO2 pumped into the air — just like a coal-fired station, except a biomass station pumps out about 50-100 per cent more CO2 for the same amount of electricity — is deemed by the EC as cancelled by the CO2 which will become embedded in the new growth of plants as a consequence of the increased CO2 in the atmosphere.

We used to think that was a good thing: who wouldn’t want to green the planet and dramatically increase the production of wheat, corn and all other food crops. Some real scientists such as the great Freeman Dyson — as opposed to the charlatans and poseurs that now infest the academy — still do.

The more specific point, of course, about this utter so typically EU “renewable” absurdity is that the CO2 coming out of a wood-burning plant is coming out now; the removal of that CO2 in new plant growth might take up to 100 years.

This also goes to the ludicrous suggestion that we could “square the circle” of our proposed CO2 cuts by buying so-called “emission permits’’ from overseas and most particularly from — where else? — Europe.

It has, of course, utterly escaped what passes for the public policy elite in this country that the only point in Australia reducing its CO2 emissions is if the entire world similarly embarks on that task.

We’ll put outside the absolutely fundamental point that the world is not.

At best, China — the biggest emitter by the length of the Flemington straight — and third-placed India have crossed their hearts and promised to start cutting after 2030. Until then, they’ll keep increasing.

Put that aside and fantasise of a world where everyone was trying to cut their emissions. What do you think would happen to the price and, even more, the availability of such emission permits — which would only be created by a country cutting its emissions by more than the world required and having the surplus to sell?

This also, by the bye, is why Bill Shorten was actually — if utterly unintentionally and even more unknowingly — telling the truth when he said the cost of Labor’s 45 per cent reduction policy was impossible to determine. It is impossible to cost infinity.

Let me finish with some detail about Europe and so-called biomass.

According to Eurostat — that’s the official EU statistical body — 65 per cent of EU renewable generation in 2016 came from biomass: wood and charcoal, biogas and biofuels, and municipal waste.

Burning wood was easily the biggest, at nearly half all so-called renewable generation in Europe.

The biggest biomass station is Drax, in the north of England. It switched from burning coal to burning wood. The CO2 it emitted as a coal station was causing climate change; the increased CO2 it now emits from burning wood is defined by the EC bureaucrats as not existing.

Under the EC rules, Drax — and all other biomass plants — only have to count the CO2 generated by the processing of the wood into pellets and its transportation; they do not count the overwhelmingly much larger CO2 emissions from the actual burning.

Even some Greens in Europe, who have not lost all touch with reality, realise this is a classic and simply insane EC con. A case was launched in March seeking to have the EU General Court rule that biomass could not be counted as a renewable.

But let’s hope they lose. Then we can convert Liddell to burning wood and all but instantly reach Labor’s renewable generation target.

SOURCE  

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

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5 May, 2019  

Maine becomes 1st state to ban single-use foam containers

Maine has banned single-use food and drink containers made from polystyrene foam, commonly known as Styrofoam, becoming the first state to do so.

Democratic Gov. Janet Mills signed the bill, which takes effect in 2021, into law Tuesday.

Environmental groups have sought such bans amid rising public awareness of throwaway plastic that accumulates in the oceans, but the Natural Resources Council of Maine said that Maine is the first state to enact a ban.

Similar legislation passed Maryland’s Legislature in April, but it’s unclear whether that state’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, will sign it.

Oregon, Vermont and Connecticut are also considering banning the containers, and dozens of communities from Berkeley, California, to New York City have already passed their own bans, some of which date back to the late 1980s. Several companies such as Dunkin’ and McDonald’s have also pledged to or have already eliminated foam cups.

In December, European Union officials agreed to ban some single-use plastics, such as polystyrene food and beverage containers, in an effort to curb marine pollution.

“With the threats posed by plastic pollution becoming more apparent, costly, and even deadly to wildlife, we need to be doing everything possible to limit our use and better manage our single-use plastics — starting with eliminating the use of unnecessary forms like plastic foam,” said Sarah Lakeman, Sustainable Maine director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

Mills called it an “important step forward in protecting our environment.” The governor said it creates consistency for businesses while providing time to adjust.

The law will prohibit “covered establishments” — like restaurants and grocery stores — from using polystyrene containers. Hospitals, seafood shippers and state-funded meals-on-wheels programs will be exempt.

Maine has banned foam food containers at state facilities and functions since 1993. Some communities in the state had also already banned polystyrene.

The legislation faced strong opposition from the plastics industry, food service container manufacturers and Maine business and tourism groups, which argued polystyrene is economical and a better than other materials at keeping food from spoiling.

Such industry groups argue Maine’s new law doesn’t mean consumers will stop littering and doesn’t ensure alternatives will be better for the environment.

“It is our sincere hope that Gov. Mills and the Maine Legislature will reconsider this legislation next year after they see how it will negatively impact the environment and local businesses and consumers,” said Omar Terrie, a director in the American Chemistry Council’s plastics division.

The plastics industry also says they’re taking voluntary steps to make plastic packaging reusable, recyclable or recoverable by 2030. The industry in January committed to spending $1.5 billion over five years to end plastic waste through a new nonprofit, The Alliance to End Plastic Waste, according to American Chemistry Council lobbyist Margaret Gorman.

“All packaging leaves an environmental footprint regardless of the material type,” Gorman told Maine lawmakers in written testimony.

Maine State Chamber of Commerce lobbyist Ben Gilman said the bill would raise costs for small businesses, in particular, while sending a “chilling message” to companies in the state that manufacture food service containers.

“These types of issues are better dealt with on a regional or national basis due to unbalanced cost impact it will have on Maine businesses,” he said in written testimony to lawmakers.

SOURCE 





California's High-Speed Train Makes Solyndra Look Like a Bargain

The ongoing saga of California’s high-speed bullet train may end up being as classic a story of Democratic politicians’ hubris as the Solyndra debacle. The difference is that the bullet train is still going—well, not the train itself, but the taxpayer spending on the planning—despite some optimism earlier this year that Gov. Gavin Newsom was going to put the project out of its misery. A Los Angeles Times story last week by Ralph Vartabedian is a deep dive on the consulting companies that have been intimately involved in the whole process. Here’s the most revealing nugget:

The rail authority’s consultants are hardly household names, but they are politically powerful and made major contributions to support the 2008 political campaign for the bullet train bond. They have staffed their ranks with former high-level bureaucrats, and their former executives have occupied key government posts….

The consultants, however, have played a key role in the political success of the project. Along with labor unions, consultants helped fund the campaign for the $9-billion bond that is paying everybody’s salaries, including their own.

Engineering and construction firms contributed $837,000 to the bond campaign, second only to the $1.6 million spent by various unions, according to a Times review of campaign filings. WSP put $107,000 into the campaign. There was no organized opposition to the bond measure. It passed with 52.7% support, but its popularity has dropped in public opinion polls ever since.

The consultants continue to provide political muscle for the project. A revolving door provides lucrative job opportunities for state and federal officials to enter higher-paying private jobs.

The firms and the unions that expected to profit from building the rail line paid for the campaign to persuade voters to approve the bond issue that would commit taxpayers to the project. And the consultants move in and out of government to make sure the project—if not any actual train—stays on track. Political scientists write about an “iron triangle” of government agencies that handle a particular issue or project, special interests that benefit from it, and legislative committees that oversee it. The flow of personnel—the “revolving door”—is part of that cozy process.

So how’s all that coziness working out for California taxpayers? Here’s the basic story:

When California shifted its bullet train plan into high gear in 2008, it had just 10 employees to manage and oversee design of the largest public construction project in state history.

Consultants assured the state there was little reason to hire hundreds or thousands of in-house engineers and rail experts, because the consultants could handle the heavy work themselves and save California money. It would take them only 12 years to bore under mountains, bridge rivers and build 520 miles of rail bed — all at a cost of just $33 billion….

But significant portions of this work have been flawed or mismanaged, according to records reviewed by The Times and interviews with dozens of people involved in the project. Despite repeated warnings since 2010 about weaknesses in its staffing, the rail authority believed it could reduce overall costs by relying on consultants and avoiding a large permanent workforce. But that strategy has failed to keep project costs from soaring. Ten years after voters approved it, the project is $44 billion over budget and 13 years behind schedule.

And here’s a typical example of economic analyses of stadiums, convention centers, mass transit, and other megaprojects:

At one time, Cambridge Systematics, the consultant that developed ridership models, estimated that more than 90 million people would ride the trains every year, based on an overly optimistic assumption that 90% of motorists along the route would switch to trains, said David Brownstone, a UC Irvine economics professor who reviewed the work of consultants that provided ridership estimates.

“Once we pointed out all the problems, they lowered it to 25 million and characterized it as a minor change,” he said. “Calling that a minor adjustment was a flat-out lie. The mistakes were obvious and crude.”

In Brownstone’s opinion, the rail authority didn’t question the calculations because high ridership estimates supported its revenue projections.

“Some of these consultants will tell you whatever you want to hear for a fee,” Brownstone said.

This Wednesday the rail authority plans to send the legislature “a detailed plan on building a partial operating system from Bakersfield to Merced for $16 billion to $18 billion.” You can drive from Bakersfield to Merced in 2.5 hours according to Google Maps. You can already take a train for $27 that covers the distance in two hours and 45 minutes, and the consultants promise that the high-speed train would cut that by 45 minutes. And all for only God-knows-how-many billions of dollars.

At only $535 million in unpaid taxpayer loans, Solyndra looks like a bargain.

SOURCE 






UK: National Trust scraps horse trials which Royals have ridden in for 40 years to protect worms

The National Trust has scrapped a prestigious horse trials event in which Royals have competed in for 40 years citing concerns for earthworms.

The Belton Horse Trials is looking for a new home after officials said horse hooves treading on worms and other "soil loving creatures" means the ground could become boggy and waterlogged.

Worms play a vital role as aerators of soil, and helping grassland grow.

The decision came as organisers of the three-day international event at the Lincolnshire stately home of Belton House began planning its 40th anniversary celebrations for 2020.

This year’s horse show, which attracted around 20,000 people to the 1,300 acre site in March, attracted a top field, including Olympic riders Pippa Funnell, Laura Collett and Piggy French. In 2017, Zara Tindall took a runners-up spot.

However, the National Trust said the very "size and scale" of the event in Grantham is "now at odds" with conservation at the Grade I listed site.

British Eventing claimed that the “difficult decision” to put the event to bed was “very disappointing” and the local authority, South Kesteven District Council, added that the trials make a “significant contribution” to the local economy.

North Lincolnshire Riding Club also spoke of the loss to the area. “It is a huge loss for the Lincolnshire equestrian community after so many years being able to watch the best competitors at the top of their sport,” said Mrs Gale, the club’s secretary.

“We can only hope that another fairly accessible venue can be sourced so we don't have to always travel miles to enjoy the sport.”

Mother-of-three Rachel Good, who travelled to Belton House with her teenage daughter who competed in the equestrian event this year, told The Telegraph she is disappointed that they won’t be returning soon.

She said: “We went for the first time this year, it was an absolutely brilliant and beautiful event.

“I’m very sad that we can’t go back and I feel desperately sorry for the organisers who had no notice of the decision.

“It is very special to compete and use a wonderful and historic landscape through our sport and leisure activity. By doing this, the National Trust are making a facility stand even more still in time.”

Another self-professed equestrian supporter, Jo Mawditt, said she has contacted the National Trust to complain and urged them to reconsider the decision.

“This event is a highlight of not only the eventing calendar but also supports the local economy, as well as gives the general public the opportunity to experience the thrill of man and horse in harmony,” Ms Mawditt said.

 We are devastated at the loss of Belton International Horse Trials. This decision was announced to us yesterday and came as a shock to the whole team.

“Surely the National Trust have a responsibility to protect such events and build awareness of the countryside for the nation.  A more rounded organisation is one that listens to its members and the public and is strong in character.”

Despite calls of concern, Ian Cooper, general manager at Belton House stood by the National Trust’s decision.

He said: "Unfortunately, it has come to a point where we can't carry on."

Mr Cooper said horse hooves and large vehicles had caused significant soil compaction across parts of the Grade I listed parkland, impacting wildlife and historic trees.

He added: “We recognise the significance of the Horse Trials and their place in Belton’s recent history, and have therefore not come to this decision lightly.

“The core purpose of the National Trust is to protect this historic place for future generations, and we must honour that commitment.”

Belton House was gifted to the National Trust in 1983 after it was built for Sir John Brownlow in the 1680s.

SOURCE 






What Rising CO2 Levels Mean for Global Food Security

"A group funded by conservative foundations to promote doubt about the effects of climate change has quietly expanded its outreach in Congress over the last few months.

"Yesterday, the CO2 Coalition held a briefing for congressional aides to claim that rising levels of carbon dioxide are falsely stigmatized. The group argues that more CO2 is beneficial to humans through the promotion of plant growth and crop yields.

"The presenter was Craig Idso, a researcher whose work has been funded by the Mercer Family Foundation, a major Trump donor, and who is affiliated with the Heartland Institute, a group that discredits climate science. Idso told an audience of legislative interns and committee staffers that CO2 levels of 600 parts per million would be beneficial to humankind, a claim contradicted by NASA, NOAA and the world's major science agencies.

"The event was part of the CO2 Coalition's effort to have a bigger presence on Capitol Hill, said Caleb Rossiter, the group's executive director, in an interview.

"'We're trying to be up here as much as possible and take people like Craig around to talk to people who are interested. I hope you'll see us a lot more,' said Rossiter, who has a doctorate in statistics.

"The group's efforts come as public opinion is shifting on climate change, including among Republicans. Polls show that Democratic voters increasingly rank climate change as a top issue heading into the 2020 presidential election. And a growing number of Republicans are worried about climate change after seeing a string of extreme storms and wildfires strike states across the nation, surveys show.

"The Trump administration released the latest National Climate Assessment in November, which showed that parts of the country are already experiencing the disastrous and deadly effects of rising temperatures. They include wildfires, severe storms and heat waves. The CO2 Coalition is trying to counteract that public shift and has received a friendly reception from some GOP lawmakers.

"Rossiter said his group is targeting first- and second-term lawmakers who may not have hardened climate opinions, "because they're up for grabs." His group tries to help lawmakers highlight uncertainty, while avoiding an outright rejection of science.

"'I just want you to look at the data and say this is how much temperature change we've seen versus this is how much is predicted, this is how many hurricanes we've had per decades versus beliefs that it has gone up, etc.,' Rossiter said. 'Don't go past that because it's such an uncertain system. Why make yourself look silly?'

"Scientists at NASA and elsewhere have said that climate models have tracked closely to real-world observations in recent decades. The last five years have been the warmest on record, according to NASA.

"The CO2 Coalition was co-founded by William Happer, an emeritus physics professor with Princeton University who has sought to discredit climate science for years. The group receives funding from the Mercer family, the Koch network and foundations that support conservative causes, E&E News has reported (Climatewire, Feb. 28). Happer was appointed to the White House National Security Council by President Trump and is now leading an effort to conduct an "adversarial" review of climate science.

"The presentation yesterday could reach a wide variety of lawmakers. In attendance were staffers for Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.). Representatives for the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Senate Agriculture Committee and the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis were also there.

"One legislative staffer said he was a little less concerned about the dangers of rising carbon dioxide levels after hearing the presentation.

"'I'm now maybe slightly less concerned about increasing CO2 levels. I'm still not convinced that that's not an issue that something needs to be done about,' said Sean Bland, a staffer in Wicker's office, who said he was speaking for himself. He said he would distill a few talking points from the presentation and submit them to his supervisor in the senator's office.

"Rossiter said he plans to brief more members of Congress in the coming months. His group has already briefed at least eight lawmakers, he said, including Reps. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and James Comer (R-Ky.). The meetings can give lawmakers talking points to be used in climate hearings conducted by Democrats.

"On Tuesday, at a House Oversight Committee hearing on the public health risks of climate change, Comer had some of those talking points ready to go.

"Comer, who represents coal-producing regions of Kentucky, repeated some of the talking points used by the CO2 Coalition in his opening statement. He said he wanted to talk about the "role that coal would play in helping more Americans escape poverty and maintain a higher state of health and well-being."

"Rossiter, who testified at the Tuesday hearing, said increased fossil fuels would bring wealth to the world and claimed that fossil fuels had saved lives.

"'So far, CO2 emissions have had a modest, positive impact on public health in the United States: They have increased plant productivity because CO2 is plant food and reduced mortality because CO2 has contributed to warming,' Rossiter told lawmakers.

"Later, he added: 'Being wealthy saves lives.'"

"At Tuesday's hearing, Republicans used much of their time asking Rossiter to comment on climate change, rather than the four witnesses who were public health experts. Democrats, meanwhile, spent time questioning Rossiter about funding sources for the CO2 Coalition and on misleading claims he made about climate change. Some of the health experts also devoted part of their time to correcting Rossiter.

"'Let's get it back to the subject of this hearing, which is the impact of climate change on human health. We are not debating whether climate change is real, and we are not debating any of those attendant effects. We are debating and discussing the impacts on public health,' said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

"Public health experts described a number of ways that they're seeing climate change affect health.

"'The allergy season is longer, the trees are flowering more, we're having more vibrant flowering of all trees, which then quickly creates more asthma and more allergies and then that causes a tremendous increase in cost,' said Cheryl Holder, a physician and associate professor at Florida International University.

"Aaron Bernstein, director of the Climate Change & Health Initiative at Harvard University's Global Health Institute, corrected Rossiter's claims, saying they were cherry-picked and not the entire truth about climate change.

"'What you heard does not reflect the full truth as regards to what the science understands,' Bernstein said."
 
SOURCE 






Australian Leftist leader reinvents climate politics

He claims that warming is so urgent that cost is irrelevant

Refusing to play by orthodox rules, Bill Shorten — if he wins — will transform the politics of climate change in Australia by proving what counts is the necessity for action and that disputing the cost of ambitious emissions reduction targets is yesterday’s news.

The conventional wisdoms by which climate change politics has been conducted is on the edge of obliteration. Any Labor victory in the May 18 election rejects the debate about modelling, costs and economic downsides in favour of the principle of urgent action to fight global warming. It would crush the conservative side of the Coalition, with its ideology of climate change caution.

What counts: the action or the cost? This is the election choice the Opposition Leader and Scott Morrison have put before the public this week. Their rival positions could not be clearer. Shorten says the public is “sick and tired” of excuses and if Australia doesn’t take serious action it faces an economic disaster. His message is the nation cannot afford inaction. Don’t ask him about the economic cost of his policy because, ultimately, he thinks that is yesterday’s question.

Shorten mocks the government as “climate denying cave dwellers”. He warns our politics will stay broken until climate change is confronted. He says the modelling report used by the Prime Minister to discredit Labor’s policy on cost grounds can be “filed under P for propaganda”. And in a defining event, in the first leaders debate he refused to put a cost figure on Labor’s policy: “I don’t think that’s possible to do.”

Having no data on the cost of his policies, Shorten seeks to make a virtue of weakness. He may not have started out to transform the politics of climate change but this will be the impact of any Labor victory. The public, if it votes Labor into office, can decide over time if it wants to backtrack and put limits on the cost — and Labor in office would need to be pragmatic about the costs it imposed. But Shorten, having declared climate change is “one of the top two or three issues”, is betting his career on a sea change in politics.

It is just six years since Tony Abbott won office with his campaign against the carbon tax and Shorten now seeks victory rejecting the need for cost estimates and even the validity of such a debate, because only one thing matters: the penalty of inaction.

Morrison is the model of Liberal orthodoxy. He practises the climate change politics the Liberals have followed since 2009 — but those politics face their demise if Labor wins. “This election is not about whether we should take action on climate change,” he says. “I believe we should.” The issue, Morrison says, is whether you had “reckless” action with a 45 per cent emissions reduction target, or “responsible” action with the government’s 26 per cent target.

The attack Morrison mounts is that Shorten will impose his choice — “between the economy and the environment” — on the public. Put another way, it is whether the public will buy Shorten’s line, repudiate the Liberals and join the progressive sentiment: “Let’s just get on with it.”

The progressive tide for global action is leaving Shorten far behind, let alone Morrison. This week the British parliament passed a fateful declaration on an environment and climate change emergency, a symbolic victory for the activists and demonstrators who caused chaos across much of London for 10 days.

In Britain, people power is intimidating the politicians. While the declaration was passed partly because it has no tangible effect, the activists will sell the idea of Britain now moving to a “war footing” on climate. The declaration was passed as an opposition motion with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn warning that without “rapid and dramatic action” the climate crisis “will spiral dangerously out of control”.

The high-profile Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg tweeted: “Now other nations must follow.” Greens MP Adam Bandt says he will move for the new parliament to declare a climate emergency in Australia. “It is time to act as if our house is on fire, because it is,” Bandt says.

Incredibly, Shorten hasn’t been asked where Labor stands. Does his pledge of “real action” on climate change mean he will follow the UK parliament’s emergency symbolism? Australian activists will duplicate the push abroad and unless government is seen to respond, the shift to civil disobedience will intensify.

If Shorten wins he will face an immense challenge from the climate activist Left, which he cannot satisfy. The message this week from Greens leader Richard Di Natale was that his party wants to work with Labor on climate change — they cannot afford any repeat of their rejection of the Rudd 2009 carbon scheme — yet the Greens must also respond to climate activism.

Shorten’s task, if he wins, will be to find and then hold a new political centre on climate change. The Coalition would be reduced to an internal crisis.

The activists now challenge the democratic system. Their premise, outlined by George Monbiot in The Guardian, is that because the political class “cannot be trusted with the preservation of life on Earth” and meeting this “vast existential predicament”, mere democratic voting cannot do the job — concentrated power of protest is essential.

A threshold is being crossed to large-scale civil disobedience and public disruption, with groups such as Extinction Rebellion calling for truth-telling on climate, and a citizens assembly.

In the US, the Green New Deal, a radical agenda promoted by newly elected Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has gained rapid momentum (and provoked immense pushback), the idea being to decarbonise the economy on a faster, more sweeping scale than anything proposed so far. The US radicals believe there is a wave of untapped public demand for tough action.

Many activists in Britain and the US demand zero emissions in six years, a growing sentiment among young people and a guarantee of huge economic and social disruption. The New York Times takes these ideas seriously and published an oped last week by anthropologist and activist David Graeber backing the Extinction Rebellion and warning the passion for change “must come from outside the system”. His message: if governments cannot go radical, then the people will.

This is extremism not too short of revolutionary. Its final logic cannot be avoided: once you say the issue is human extinction then you open the door to suspension or interruption of the democratic process to save the planet. Anyone who thinks such calls won’t be made by activists in coming years knows nothing of history.

The Australian Greens have toughened their climate stance — they repudiate Liberal and Labor targets as “woefully” inadequate. They want net zero emissions by 2040, an immediate ban on any new coal, gas or oil development, a preferred scenario of 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2030, and a termination of thermal coal ­exports by 2030.

“This is a plan to take on coal,” Bandt said of the Greens policy.

Herein lies another touchstone in the politics — the progressives have turned climate change into an anti-coal virtue test. Having a rational emissions reduction policy is not enough — you must back state intervention against coal. This constitutes a historic defeat for conservative politics.

The class of independents running at this election have mostly made climate change the main priority. What unites Labor, the Greens and the independents is the view that Australia must do more, that this will benefit the economy and that Coalition obsessions about the cost of climate change action no longer engage a majority of the public.

This is a formidable alignment against the Coalition. In the unlikely event no major party has a post-election majority, the independents would back a Labor government swayed by the climate change issue.

The Greens will operate in a legislative alliance with a Shorten government if Labor wins. There seems to be a bizarre reluctance to state the obvious on this point. Shorten is too astute to repeat the blunder of Julia Gillard in 2010 when she dashed into a formal alliance with the Greens, a compromise from which her government never recovered.

But Shorten’s formula gives him flexibility. He will talk to all parties in the Senate. But when it comes to executive government, Labor will form its own cabinet and run its own policies. Shorten would need to offer the Greens concessions to secure his climate policies through the Senate but probably not much since he would have a strong negotiating position.

In summary, Shorten would govern in the executive domain in Labor’s own right. In the parliamentary domain, he would need the Greens not just for his climate agenda but his entire agenda — tax, spending, industrial relations. In legislative terms Shorten would operate in a de facto parliamentary alliance with the Greens.

A feature of the campaign is the embedded acceptance of the Labor-Greens preference alliance in contrast to the contentions arising from the Coalition’s preference deals — or lack of deals — with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party.

On the Left of politics, Labor gets a shade more than 80 per cent of Greens preferences. Despite efforts by Morrison, the Labor-Greens preference alliance has not become an election issue.

Shorten rarely, if ever, has to explain why Labor MPs are elected to parliament because of Greens preferences, given the extreme policies of the Greens on a wide range of social, economic, security and climate issues.

The Greens will be fundamental to the redirection of Australia under the policies proposed by Shorten. They will be instrumental in helping to ensure much of Labor’s agenda is converted into law. How much is difficult to say, given the unpredictable Senate voting system, with Labor and the Greens unlikely to have more than 36 Senate votes in total, when 39 votes constitutes a majority. So Labor will need further crossbench support.

The Newspoll published this week showed the Palmer party on 5 per cent of the primary vote and One Nation reduced to 4 per cent. This testifies to the extent of fragmentation on the Right — a total of 9 per cent of the primary vote — and if these numbers stick it is virtually impossible to see how the Coalition can win the election.

But Shorten, enjoying apparent immunity for his alliance with the Greens, branded Morrison as operating in coalition with Palmer and Hanson, a reminder that while alliances on the Left have legitimacy, alliances on the Right, seem to lack such legitimacy. Morrison had no viable option but to strike a preference deal with Palmer, but whether that means he can extract 60 per cent of Palmer preferences remains to be seen.

Morrison will pursue Shorten on the Labor leader’s refusal to model his climate policies or put a calculation on the cost to the economy. Because the task is hard is no excuse. Election integrity requires such an effort.

Telling the Australian people you are unable to inform them how big a penalty will be imposed on economic growth and living standards because of your ambitious climate change agenda is risky and arrogant. Shorten, in effect, just says “trust me”.

Having refused to put its estimates on the table, Labor’s attack on Brian Fisher for his modelling of Labor policies has been extreme. Fisher’s latest work, released this week, estimates that Labor’s emissions reduction targets by 2030 result in a cost to GDP ranging from $53 billion to $187bn. “We don’t believe the scary numbers,” Shorten says. “We think they’re just rubbish.”

He has compared Fisher, a former public servant with an international reputation, with doctors who once defended big tobacco. Labor’s environment spokesman Mark Butler says Fisher’s work is “a complete crock of rubbish” by an author who “has spent 20 years building a career fighting every single climate policy”.

Morrison is right to try to hold Labor to account. But Morrison’s problem is that internal Coalition chaos has meant the government lacks a viable climate change agenda. He comes at Shorten from a position of weakness and the Labor leader knows this. It radiates his approach.

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

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

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3 May, 2019  

Renewable Energy Mandates are a costly failure

Do Renewable Portfolio Standards Deliver??

Michael Greenstone et al.

Abstract

Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) are the largest and perhaps most popular climate policy in the US, having been enacted by 29 states and the District of Columbia. Using the most comprehensive panel data set ever compiled on program characteristics and key outcomes, we compare states that did and did not adopt RPS policies, exploiting the substantial differences in timing of adoption.

The estimates indicate that 7 years after passage of an RPS program, the required renewable share of generation is 1.8 percentage points higher and average retail electricity prices are 1.3 cents per kWh, or 11% higher; the comparable figures for 12 years after adoption are a 4.2 percentage point increase in renewables' share and a price increase of 2.0 cents per kWh or 17%.

These cost estimates significantly exceed the marginal operational costs of renewables and likely reflect costs that renewables impose on the generation system, including those associated with their intermittency, higher transmission costs, and any stranded asset costs assigned to ratepayers.

The estimated reduction in carbon emissions is imprecise, but, together with the price results, indicates that the cost per metric ton of CO2 abated exceeds $130 in all specifications and ranges up to $460, making it least several times larger than conventional estimates of the social cost of carbon. These results do not rule out the possibility that RPS policies could dynamically reduce the cost of abatement in the future by causing improvements in renewable technology.

SOURCE 






EPA Press Office Under Fire for Releasing Politically Charged Resignation Letter

A politically appointed adviser to the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a vocal resignation letter last week praising President Trump and denouncing the political “left.” That put the agency’s press office in an awkward position.

Mandy Gunasekara, who since November 2017 had been principal deputy administrator in the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, wrote in a Feb. 7 letter to Trump saying she was leaving to “spend my time educating the public.” She bemoaned the "dangerous rhetoric from the far-left supportive of Venezuelan-style socialism, government take-overs, and crony 'green new deals,’ ” telling Trump that “ensuring eight years of your leadership is of utmost importance.”

The letter, according to news reports and confirmed by EPA to Government Executive, was provided to reporters by the press office. That prompted the nonprofit advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility on Monday to file a complaint with the Office of Special Counsel seeking a probe of an alleged Hatch Act violation.

PEER asked the OSC, the chief enforcers of the Hatch Act, to “identify which EPA press office staff were involved in circulating or providing her letter and whether these actions were directed by more senior officials. Notably on the day of her resignation, acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler issued a statement commending Ms. Gunasekara's tenure at the agency,” PEER said in a release. 

"Federal offices should not be converted into Trump campaign centers," PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch said, noting that Trump became a formally declared candidate for reelection shortly after his inauguration.  "We are asking OSC to determine which officials and what official resources were involved in this patently partisan political activity." 

In a statement to Government Executive, EPA’s press office said it “has provided resignation letters and statements when asked by the press and with consent from former employees. Content of the resignation letters is the work of the former employees.”

SOURCE 






UK: Climate change campaigners vow to appeal after Heathrow runway challenge quashed

A third runway at Heathrow will increase its capacity from 480,000 to 740,000 flights a year

A legal challenge over a third runway at Heathrow was rejected yesterday despite warnings that an expansion of the airport would worsen climate change.

High Court judges dismissed five separate cases against the expansion, insisting that ministers’ handling of the process had been legally sound.

The court upheld the government’s claims that increasing the airport’s capacity did not undermine its climate change commitments.

It had been argued that ministers acted unlawfully by not taking into account the Paris agreement — which seeks to limit increases in global average temperatures — when the decision was made. The judges said that, although the agreement has been ratified by the government, it does not yet form part of British law and has no impact on the Heathrow decision.

SOURCE 






Study finds ‘biodegradable’ plastic bags can still hold shopping three years after being discarded

Shoppers who try to do the right thing for the environment and use biodegradable plastic bags might want to sit down for this.

Plastic bags that claim to be biodegradable, are anything but in some cases. A new research paper has revealed that in certain scenarios they can still carry a full load of shopping three years after they were thrown away.

Seen as a solution to the globe’s increasingly urgent plastic pollution problem, disposable bags are supposed to decompose if they are buried in landfill, or wash into the sea.

The study, published in Environmental Science and Technology, examined biodegradable, oxo-biodegradable, compostable, and standard plastic bags for a period of three years.

The bags were exposed to three natural environments: left in open-air, buried in soil, and submersed in seawater, as well as in controlled laboratory conditions. The range of environmentally friendly bags fared differently in each environment.

After nine months exposure in the open-air, all bag materials had disintegrated into fragments.

In the marine environment, the compostable bag completely disappeared within three months. The same compostable bag type was still present in the soil environment after 27 months but could no longer hold weight without tearing.

However two of the bags — technically known as oxo-biodegradable — were still able to carry shopping after spending three years in the ground or covered in seawater.

“It is therefore not clear that the oxo-biodegradable or biodegradable formulations provide sufficiently advanced rates of deterioration,” the researchers from the UK’s University of Plymouth wrote.

After three years, some bags were perfectly robust.
After three years, some bags were perfectly robust.Source:Supplied

There have been at least four reports of dead whales being found with huge amounts of plastic waste in their stomach, causing them to starve, in the last year.

Professor Richard Thompson, of the International Marine Litter Research Unit, who was involved in the study said it showed that certain bags might be polluting the ocean when consumers expect them to decompose.

“This research raises a number of questions about what the public might expect when they see something labelled as biodegradable. We demonstrate here that the materials tested did not present any consistent, reliable and relevant advantage in the context of marine litter,” he said.

He previously gave evidence to a government inquiry in the UK that led to a small levy on plastic bags in the country. He called for new standards to be imposed on bag manufacturers.

“Our study emphasises the need for standards relating to degradable materials, clearly outlining the appropriate disposal pathway and rates of degradation that can be expected,” he said.

Some have suggested that the manufacturers of the bags — many of which reside in China — could be skimping on the required biodegradable additives to make them truly compostable.

Research fellow Imogen Napper, who led the study as part of her PhD, said: “After three years, I was really amazed that any of the bags could still hold a load of shopping. For a biodegradable bag to be able to do that was the most surprising.

“When you see something labelled in that way, I think you automatically assume it will degrade more quickly than conventional bags. But, after three years at least, our research shows that might not be the case.”

SOURCE 






'I'm not going to invent a number': Australian Leftist leader  refuses to say how much his renewable energy policy will cost – as experts estimate it would wipe $264BILLION off Australia's economy

Labor leader Bill Shorten, who is favourite to become Prime Minister later this month, has again refused to say how much Labor's climate change policy will cost the economy.

The Opposition Leader was asked several times on the ABC's 7.30 program about his plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 - which is much more ambitious than the government's 28 per cent goal.

To reach that goal, the required switch of power source from fossil fuels to renewables will come at a high price but Mr Shorten has repeatedly declined to say how much.

'I'm not going to get caught up in this government game of gotcha when you've got to invent a number which you can't possibly,' he told the ABC on Wednesday.

Leigh Sales, the host of 7.30, suggested there must be a short-term hit to Australia's gross domestic product and called on Mr Shorten to be frank about the cost.

'I accept your position that there's a long-term benefit,' she said. 'What I'm asking you to do is to square with the voters about exactly what the short-term cost is of getting to that position.'

Hours after that interview, BAEconomics released modelling showing Labor's climate change plan would cost the economy $264billion.

Dr Brian Fisher, the managing director of the Canberra-based consultancy, told Daily Mail Australia the 'economic consequences' would depend on a future government's willingness to accept international emissions trading permits. 'The impacts could be very severe,' he said.

BAEconomics released another report in March estimating Labor's climate plan would cost 336,000 jobs and cause an eight per cent plunge in lost wages by 2030.

In the 7.30 interview on Wednesday night, Mr Shorten argued no action on tackling climate change would cost more in the long-run. 

'You assume there is no cost to doing nothing and there is,' he said. 'If you don't change, then the cost will be far greater than any initial investments.

'If you're asking me to specify what a particular company and a particular factory will have to do, I can't do that, nor could you, nor can the government.'

On Thursday, Labor unveiled a $75million plan to create 70,000 renewable energy jobs.

The Opposition is also vowing to have 50 per cent of Australia's energy come from renewal sources by 2030.

In mid-April, Mr Shorten engaged in a tense stand-off with Channel 10 reporter Jonathan Lea, who repeatedly asked him to provide detail the economic effects of Labor's plan to reduce carbon emissions by 45 per cent within 11 years.

SOURCE  

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

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

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






2 May, 2019  

Climate change denier tells fox & friends carbon dioxide 'not a pollution'

A Newsweak report below

A former Republican aide who rejects the scientific community's consensus on climate change said carbon dioxide is not pollution, dredging up a decades-old defense of CO2 emissions in order to write off Beto O'Rourke's newly announced climate plan.

Speaking Tuesday morning with Fox & Friends, the longtime Fox News climate change denier Marc Morano joined host Jedediah Bila in ridiculing the former Texas congressman's $5 trillion climate change proposal, which seeks to provide a less ambitious alternative to the Democrats' Green New Deal. Morano, who has previously agreed that CO2 is nothing more than "plant food," immediately unearthed the longtime carbon claim among conservatives and labeled O'Rourke's climate plan a "boondoggle."

"First of all, pollution and carbon dioxide, humans, we inhale oxygen and we exhale carbon dioxide, so he's calling CO2 pollution, which it's not," Morano proclaimed Tuesday. "No, this plan is as pie-in-the-sky as the Green New Deal except it's a little bit more tepid."

In a December 2018 interview with Fox Business Network's Stuart Varney, Morano agreed with the host that excess CO2 in the atmosphere was not a negative result of human emissions, but rather a positive because it is just "plant food." In that interview, Morano bragged that several Nobel Prize-winning scientists have informed him "the earth is in a CO2 famine" and he attacked the United Nations position on climate change.

The Environmental Protection Agency classifies carbon dioxide emissions as a hazard to human health, although the EPA doesn't state that CO2 by itself is a pollutant given that humans and plants exhale it, but instead, they note increasing concentrations of the heat-trapping gas are deeply concerning. Carbon dioxide is widely considered to be a pollutant when it's put in context with the burning of fossil fuels such as gasoline, coal and natural gas.

The EPA previously ruled that modern concentrations of carbon dioxide are the "unambiguous result of human emissions," although CO2 levels have dramatically fluctuated in Earth's atmosphere for billions of years. Carbon dioxide levels are currently higher than they have been for more than 800,000 years, according to climate.gov.

O'Rourke's four-part climate framework announced this week seeks to start cutting pollution, mobilizing $5 trillion over ten years, guaranteeing net-zero emissions by 2050 and defending communities who are preparing for and fighting extreme weather.

Morano, who is author of the book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change," dismissed O'Rourke's plan as a watered down version of the Democratic proposal first put forward by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey.

"The US is one the world’s largest carbon pollution emitters. But a #GreenNewDeal holds the potential for us to be global clean energy leaders, w planet-saving technology being stamped 'Made in America'. Climate change is the economic and natl security issue of our time," Markey tweeted Tuesday.

Morano continued, "What's happened here is Beto O'Rourke is not satisfying the Democratic base, within minutes of him releasing this plan the Sunrise Movement, which was instrumental in the Green New Deal, is going after Beto O'Rourke for going back on his pledge for 2030 zero emissions to now 2050. They're saying Beto's plan could result in 100 million refugees and tens of million dead. So that's the thanks Beto O'Rourke gets for coming up with a lighter version of the Green New Deal."

Fox & Friends co-host Bila labeled O'Rourke's plan "very vague and very nice and very idealistic." But as she listed bullet points of the plan, she derisively dismissed the idea of starting to cut pollution, saying, "whatever that means."

She concluded Americans "won't be so excited" about fighting climate change once they see its effect on their pocketbooks.

SOURCE 





Natural Gas Is Gaining on Renewables; The Gap Has Never Been Wider

The supposed inevitability of renewables is a matter of faith with gullible fractivists but the facts show we’re using more natural gas energy than ever.

Never surrender to the hype. Facts always serve us better in the long run, although the temptation to accede to the will of crowd is ever strong. Such is the case with the supposed inevitability of renewables, which are anything but. Indeed, natural gas is gaining on renewables according to the latest data from the Energy Information Administration.

U.S. energy consumption is higher than ever

Natural gas consumption in the United States reached a record high 83.1 billion cubic feet/day (Bcf/d), the equivalent of 31 quadrillion Btu, in 2018. Natural gas use rose across all sectors in 2018, primarily driven by weather-related factors that increased demand for space heating during the winter and for air conditioning during the summer.

As more natural gas-fired power plants came online and existing natural gas-fired power plants were used more often, natural gas consumption in the electric power sector increased 15% from 2017 levels to 29.1 Bcf/d. Natural gas consumption also grew in the residential, commercial, and industrial sectors in 2018, increasing 13%, 10%, and 4% compared with 2017 levels, respectively.

Think what that means for CO2 emissions given the fact electricity use is relatively flat by comparison. It means gas substituted for coal and oil and emissions are far less than they would have otherwise been. But, that’s not all, because this is what EIA says about renewables:

Renewable energy consumption in the United States reached a record high 11.5 quadrillion Btu in 2018, rising 3% from 2017, largely driven by the addition of new wind and solar power plants. Wind electricity consumption increased by 8% while solar consumption rose 22%.

Biomass consumption, primarily in the form of transportation fuels such as fuel ethanol and biodiesel, accounted for 45% of all renewable consumption in 2018, up 1% from 2017 levels. Increases in wind, solar, and biomass consumption were partially offset by a 3% decrease in hydroelectricity consumption.

The dirty little secret about renewables is that the largest of the energy used in this category is biomass, which does nothing for reducing CO2 emissions unless you assume the corn, wood and so on would have been grown anyway and left to rot. Hydroelectric is also a huge part but has no future unless we want to flood more of America. Wind is the only other thing that matters and it simply doesn’t happen without massive subsidies by taxpayers and other ratepayers. No one would do wind without them.

This is why natural gas keeps gaining on renewables, thanks to the shale revolution!

SOURCE 






Environmental Hypocrites of the Left: Why progressives refuse to live by their own Earth Day bluster

George Monbiot recently expressed a carefully calibrated environmental message that allows people on the environmental left to feel self-righteous without making any real sacrifice. In a video that was shared widely, including by celebrities such as James Corden, the British writer argues that the only way to help the environment is to change the “big, structural, political economic stuff.” Monbiot concludes that we need to “go straight to the heart of capitalism and overthrow it.” At the same time, he dismisses “pathetic, micro-consumerist bollocks which just isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

This is absolution for those who want to feel green but can’t be bothered with going to the effort and expense of actually living their own values. Publicly advocating the “do as I say, not as I do” approach reinforces the reality that conservatives tend to live out the environmental ethic that the Left only preaches.

As a conservative who has worked in environmental policy for two decades, I have been frustrated watching as ideological fellow travelers avoid environmental topics, even as they privately express their commitment to environmental stewardship. As the Left becomes more detached from responsible and effective environmental solutions, conservatives should confidently fill the void.

One reason conservatives do not engage is that environmentalism has become synonymous with horrible government policy. Every Earth Day, we are treated to theatrical images of marches featuring unhinged activists demanding action on a range of environmental issues. Clever hashtags are generated. Alarmist slogans are flaunted. Naked people glue themselves to park benches. And all who disagree with the demands for more government power are denigrated as “deniers.”

The other 364 days of the year, however, people on the left do little in their daily lives to justify all that environmental browbeating. A study by researchers at the University of Michigan and Cornell University found that those who are “highly concerned” about climate change are “least likely to report individual-level actions” to reduce their environmental impact. Those who considered themselves “skeptical” of climate change “were most likely to report engaging in individual-level pro-environmental behaviors.” To be sure, not all conservatives are skeptical of climate change, but generally, we aren’t nearly as alarmist about climate change or other environmental issues, even when we recognize the risk.

That gap between the Left’s loud talk and their unwillingness to make personal sacrifices is not an accident. It is now part of their dogma. Individual actions are mere “bollocks,” useless gestures. Only the sacrifices made by others will make a difference.

This dichotomy is evident in my home state of Washington, where politicians pride themselves on showing “leadership” in the effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This year, our legislature enacted a law requiring the state to meet a 100 percent renewable-energy target by 2045. Environmental activists tweeted their support, saying they “demand action now” and worrying about the climate crisis.

Ironically, though, many who demand action do little of it themselves. For only a few dollars a month, anyone who supports renewable energy can already buy renewable-energy credits (RECs), ensuring that there is enough renewable energy on the grid to cover their personal use. I asked one politician pushing for the 100 percent–renewable requirement if she buys RECs to cover her environmental impact. She admitted that she does not and has no plans to do so.

This is consistent with the message of Monbiot and political leaders pushing the Green New Deal. Personal sacrifice is of little consequence, so why even try? Even as they call for an end to air travel, politicians who demand we impose lifestyle change have not curtailed their own carbon-producing travel, despite living in the era of HD video conferencing.

The most effective environmental efforts are often small, personal actions in which people have skin in the game. Farmers find ways to conserve water because waste costs money. Aluminum cans are lighter today because it saves resources and they cost less to ship. Homeowners and businesses conserve energy because they pay the price for every kilowatt-hour. When they don’t save, they change course, unlike politicians who fear public embarrassment and throw good money after bad.

This isn’t just a theory. The amount of energy per unit of GDP in the United States has fallen steadily for several decades. There are no sharp drops. Instead, the improvement is gradual and constant, as individuals and businesses find ways to squeeze a bit more out of their energy use. Politicians can lecture all they want, but these are truly the front lines of environmental stewardship.

As Earth Day 2019 came and went, the pattern of environmentalists demanding action that they themselves won’t take predictably repeated itself.

The pattern of conservatives’ avoiding talk of environmental stewardship even as they live it every day, however, is a pattern we should break. Effective environmental policy doesn’t start with politicians and publicity stunts. Conservatives understand this. We should make it clear that personal environmental stewardship is not only more effective, it is a more moral way to live.

SOURCE 






The Carbon Tax Fantasy

Stephen Moore

Every time a reporter asks me if I would support a carbon tax, I always say that I might if it led to a dollar-for-dollar reduction in income or payroll tax rates. And the new energy tax would have to replace onerous greenhouse gas regulations. And every time I say this, the next day a headline reads, "Steve Moore Is for a Carbon Tax."

E&E News did it again two weeks ago, writing Stephen Moore says, "yes to carbon tax."

This is Fake News 101. What the story left out was my prediction that the chances of the left agreeing to the carbon tax deal I have in mind range from zero to microscopic.

I live in the real world, not in the dreamy ivory towers of academia. We will wind up with costly taxes and regulations.

There is, of course, another practical and insurmountable problem with a U.S. carbon tax to stop climate change. Any American levy against our coal, oil, gas and transportation industries would do virtually nothing to reduce global carbon emissions. Some of these schemes would institute a tax on imported energy, but this would necessitate a new international tariff regime, bigger government and lower living standards, particularly for the poor. I thought economists were for freer trade: They sure have been critical of Trump trade policies.

But even a tariff wouldn't prevent China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Vietnam and Africa from emitting mass amounts of carbon into the atmosphere for their own consumption, which would swamp the effect of any realistic American greenhouse gas reductions. Virtually none of the nations that are major polluters have come anywhere near their carbon emission promises under the Paris Agreement. China is massively increasing its emissions. How does it save the planet if we shut down a coal plant but China, India, et al. builds four or five new ones? No one benefits, and the coal workers in Ohio and West Virginia get clobbered. No deal.

Nor will an energy tax be coupled with a reduction in income tax rates. The left is adamant that it will spend any new dollars on its own corporate welfare green energy programs. Just ask the author of the Green New Deal — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The carbon tax funds "Medicare for All," electric vehicles, mass transit and guaranteed national income.

This is a lose-lose for American prosperity. The energy experts at The Heritage Foundation have crunched the numbers and found that "by 2030, with a $37 per ton carbon tax, the country would experience an aggregate gross domestic product loss of more than $2.5 trillion — or more than $21,000 in income loss per family." Oh, and about 1 million jobs would vanish, half from manufacturing. The shale energy revolution that has rebuilt the economies in states like Alaska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia would come to a screeching halt.

All of this is unnecessary. If the climate change warnings of the alarmists turn out to be true, we will use technology and innovation to combat weather changes — not steel-booted world-government mandates and edicts. This requires more economic growth so the private sector has the funds to finance these initiatives. Any climate change "solution" that makes America poorer — such as a massive tax increase — is no solution at all.

SOURCE 






You can count the climate cost of Australian Leftist policies and it is terrifying

Labor’s climate change spokesman, Mark Butler, is just wrong when he says it’s impossible to cost Labor’s climate change policies.

Sure, it’s hard and assumptions have to be made, and it’s probably best to present a range of estimates rather than a single point.

However, to bring the Parliamentary Budget Office into the argument is disingenuous. The role of the PBO is to model budgetary implications of particular policies. It doesn’t assess the economy-wide costs of policies.

So what do we know?

Labor is running with a 45 per cent emissions target by 2030 and does not intend to use the Kyoto carry-over. This means Labor’s carbon abatement budget is 1.3 billion tonnes by 2030. This is not disputed by Butler.

The Coalition’s target is much lower — 26 to 28 per cent — and uses the Kyoto carry-over. This means the Coalition’s carbon abatement budget is just over 300 million tonnes. It’s plain that Labor’s ­policy will impose much bigger costs on the economy than the ­Coalition’s. There may be benefits in terms of avoided climate change-induced economic damage, but this works only if every other country in the world meets or exceeds its Paris targets.

Only a handful of countries are on track to meet commitments. And China and India are not required to cut emissions before 2030.

One of the dopier things Bill Shorten said in the early stages of the campaign was that the cost of Labor’s climate change policies, all 1.3 billion tonnes of abatement, were the same as the Coalition’s just over 300 million tonnes because Labor would allow companies to purchase international carbon credits.

But here’s the thing: if every country is seeking to meet its Paris targets — and Labor must assume this is the case — then the price of these international carbon credits will rise and probably steeply.

We have already seen the price soar as the EU rejigs regulations that apply to these credits. They are currently trading above $40.

Former executive director of the Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics Brian Fisher has undertaken a comprehensive modelling exercise on the costs to the Australian economy of different emission reduction targets.

What his work shows is the ­Coalition’s policies do impose some economic costs but they are manageable. This is hardly surprising given the relatively modest target as well as the use of the Kyoto carry-over. When it comes to Labor’s proposal, the costs blow out. Real wages fall by 8.5 per cent over the period, there are 340,000 fewer jobs and the cumulative loss of GDP is close to $1.2 trillion.

The key is what is called the marginal abatement cost curve, which plots costs associated with emissions reduction targets. Initially there are some low-hanging fruit and the costs are not too high but there comes a point when costs start to escalate. The point of inflexion is around the 30 per cent emissions cut mark.

Labor might want to dispute Fisher’s figures but to do so credibly it has to offer alternative estimates and not prattle on about the use of international carbon credits. Voters deserve to know what they are in for.

SOURCE

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

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

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1 May, 2019  

New Study on GND Effects: 'Barely Distinguishable From Zero'    

In a column for The Patriot Post in August of 2015, meteorologist and climate analyst Joe Bastardi asked, “All This for .01 Degrees Celsius?” in reference to Barack Obama’s scheme “to reduce greenhouse gases to save us from an apocalyptic atmosphere.” Bastardi’s point was to show that Obama’s carbon-emissions-reduction methods would accomplish virtually nothing. But don’t take his word for it. He cited former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, who at the time “admitted that the steps being taken would only prevent .01 degrees Celsius of warming, but it was the example that counted for the rest of the world.”

The Green New Deal is no different — both in terms of its bloviators and its influence.

According to the American Enterprise Institute’s Benjamin Zycher, the Left’s newest climate and socioeconomic monstrosity would similarly accomplish nothing — except to promote socialism. “Notwithstanding the assertions from GND proponents that it is an essential policy to confront purportedly adverse climate phenomena,” he writes, “the future temperature impacts of the zero-emissions objective would be barely distinguishable from zero: 0.173°C by 2100, under the maximum Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change parameter (equilibrium climate sensitivity) about the effects of reduced GHG emissions.” He adds, “Under an assumption consistent with the findings reported in the recent peer-reviewed literature, the effect would be 0.083°C by 2100.”

Coming back full circle to Gina McCarthy’s ultimate objective, The Daily Wire’s Emily Zanotti says, “Green New Deal proponents, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), have long claimed that the GND … would be worth it if it such extreme measures would in the long run lessen our impact on climate.” Yet Zycher reports that “the annual economic cost of the GND would be about $9 trillion.” That’s a whole lot of nothing for a “deal” that will cost the economy $9 trillion annually and not really lessen our impact on climate.

Whether it’s the Clean Power Plan, Paris Climate Accord, or Green New Deal, the Left believes that spending oodles of money will solve the “problem” (whatever that is), even though some of them have conceded that temperatures won’t really change all that much. As Zycher summarily puts it, “The GND’s real goal is wealth redistribution to favored political interests under the GND social-policy agenda and a dramatic increase in government control of resource allocation more generally.”

SOURCE 







Ford under criminal investigation by the US government over emissions certification

The U.S. Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into Ford Motor Co.'s emissions certification process.

Ford said in February that it had begun an internal investigation into whether its vehicles have worse gas mileage and emit more pollutants than car, truck and SUV labels actually reveal, going back to 2017 models.

“Our investigation continues into how Ford estimates road load as part of the U.S. fuel economy and emissions certification process," Kim Pittel, the company's vice president for environment and safety engineering, said in a new statement issued Friday.

"We are working with regulators and independent experts to complete a technical review, as planned," she said. "The Department of Justice contacted us earlier this month to let us know that they had opened a criminal investigation."

An anonymous employee reporting system at Ford raised the issue in September 2018, the company disclosed in February.

On Friday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission publicly posted the company filing where Ford disclosed a criminal investigation.

"As previously reported, the Company has become aware of a potential concern involving its U.S. emissions certification process," the filing said.

"We voluntarily disclosed this matter to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board on February 18, 2019, and February 21, 2019, respectively. Subsequently, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation into the matter. In addition, we have notified a number of other state and federal agencies. We are fully cooperating with all government agencies. Because this matter is still in the preliminary stages, we cannot predict the outcome, and we cannot provide assurance that it will not have a material adverse effect on us."

DOJ not mentioned

After the stock market closed Thursday, CFO Bob Shanks delivered a media briefing at Ford World Headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, where he noted more than once that first quarter earnings would be the best of the year because of due to expected restructuring costs.

Two hours later, Ford CEO Jim Hackett, Shanks and other top executives held an extensive discussion in a call with investors and raised many issues. Executives cited challenges facing the company, ranging from geopolitics, product launches and factory retrofits to UAW contract negotiations, but didn't mention the investigation.

Jennifer Flake, executive director of Ford global markets, operations and product communications, explained to the Free Press on Friday, "We make filings like this, in part, to disclose or flag certain risks. ... We want the market to be aware of that."

Ford has not announced any personnel changes related to the investigation.

The investigation, which Ford confirmed, requires significant technical expertise and will last awhile. These cases often involve big fines.

"Ford doesn’t know where this is going to end up," said Peter Henning, a former federal prosecutor who teaches law at Wayne State University. "The benefit of self-reporting is that the company receives credit for that. The decision ultimately about whether to bring a criminal charge will hinge on how cooperative the company is. Here, Ford seems to have gotten out in front of this issue, and that will be a benefit for them going forward."

Gina Balaya, spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Detroit, said, "Department of Justice policy prohibits us from either confirming or denying the existence of an investigation."

Fiat Chrysler, VW, Mercedes too

Ford isn't the only member of the Detroit Three facing federal criminal investigation related to emissions.

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is awaiting the results of an investigation into alleged diesel emissions cheating. The company, along with auto supplier Bosch, has agreed to settle a civil case in the matter that could result in payments of about $3,000 for some affected Jeep and Ram owners. FCA, which continues to deny any intentional cheating, expects to spend more than $790 million. The government, however, said the company not only broke the law but also tried to hide its actions.

FCA is also facing an unrelated recall, announced last month, of close to 1 million cars and SUVs as a result of emissions investigations.

And on April 14, Reuters reported Germany’s motor vehicle authority KBA was investigating Daimler on suspicion that 60,000 Mercedes cars produced between 2012 and 2015 were fitted with software designed to fool emissions tests.

Volkswagen settled an emissions cheating case with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for $14.7 billion in civil penalties and about $3 billion in criminal fines.

In addition, several of VW's executives have been charged criminally. The VW case involved "defeat devices" that kicked on during emissions testing but not in normal driving.

Unlike VW, Ford emphasized in February, when it disclosed its internal investigation, and again in Friday's SEC filing, "the potential concern does not involve the use of defeat devices."

The Ford incident surfaced through an employee "Speak Up" program that allows people to reach out on a number of issues, including concerns. Feedback is submitted by phone, email, website or mobile app.

"It allows them to confidentially share their concerns, come forward with questions and share their ideas about improving how the company runs," Flake said Friday.

SOURCE 






Around the World, Buyer’s Remorse Sets in for Costly Clean Power

Two decades ago, governments and utilities around the world began offering above-market rates and contracts to fuel the rise of clean energy, helping wind and solar become some of the cheapest power sources. Now, these pacts are under attack.

In Canada, Ontario Premier Doug Ford killed hundreds of contracts for planned wind and solar farms. Spain pulled back subsidies, yanking the rug from projects already up and running. And in the U.S., bankrupt California power giant PG&E Corp. could soon move to renegotiate costly power deals signed when prices were three times as expensive as they are now.

The rollback has divided both policy makers and the energy industry, with some calling it a natural evolution and others warning that it will undermine clean energy growth just as wind and solar have finally become mainstream sources of power. While renewables can now compete head-to-head against coal and natural gas in some parts of the world, the risk of contracts getting dropped threatens to scare away investors and undermine the economics of capital-intensive projects.

“It sends shudders through the industry,” said Ethan Zindler, head of Americas research for BloombergNEF.

The blowback is, weirdly enough, a sign of renewable power’s success.

Beginning around 2000, governments began establishing incentives for clean power to fight global warming and generate jobs. The strategy worked, triggering a rapid rise in the installation of solar arrays and wind turbines. Prices plunged, falling 84 percent for solar over the last decade and 50 percent for wind, according to BNEF.

A Natural Evolution?

Early contracts -- which typically last for two decades -- began looking more expensive. It’s a natural progression for an emerging industry, said Nina Eshoo, founder of New York-based energy and infrastructure advisory firm Saltbox Partners.

“It’s an evolution of starting a new technology,” she said. “If more people are not going to pay for the beginning, then it won’t get developed.”

California began requiring utilities to buy wind and solar power as early as 2002. Some of those early contracts cost three times as much as today’s going rates, according to state data. Ditching them could save $1.4 billion annually, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

San Francisco-based utility owner PG&E, which filed for Chapter 11 in January, has asked the judge overseeing the case to rule that it has the right to throw out the deals. Just the prospect of those contracts getting killed or renegotiated has weighed on the company’s power suppliers and led to a tussle between PG&E and renewable-energy giant NextEra Energy Inc.

For its part, PG&E said in a statement that the company hasn’t decided what to do with the contracts in bankruptcy and recognizes that it has an “important role in supporting the state’s commitment to clean energy initiatives.”

The backlash first erupted in Spain, where a set of financial incentives were offered for clean power -- most notably, a subsidy called a feed-in tariff that guaranteed a premium price. By 2008, the country had become Europe’s hottest renewable market, with more than 4 gigawatts of solar and wind power installed that year, according to BloombergNEF data.

The only problem: Spain’s retail electricity prices weren’t high enough to cover the cost of producing it, a gap made ever-wider by rising fossil fuel prices and the subsidies. That “tariff deficit” ballooned just as the global economy fell into a tailspin. Spain ended up slashing incentives, wrecking the finances of even existing solar and wind farms. Installations plunged from 2.5 gigawatts in 2012 to 0.5 gigawatts the following year, according to BNEF, and they’ve only just begun to recover.

“These cuts effectively killed the new-build market there,” said Pietro Radoia, a Milan-based BNEF analyst.

In Canada, Ontario’s Ford rode into office last year on a populist wave, in part by arguing the province was paying too much for electricity. Canada’s most populous province had signed long-term contracts that handed wind and solar a premium, in part to create jobs. Within weeks of taking office, Ford began the process of canceling more than 700 contracts for future renewable projects, estimating it would save C$790 million ($600 million).

The pullback may be disruptive, but it could also be viewed simply as a sign of an industry growing up.

“The need for these subsidies might be rolling off faster than originally intended,” said Allan Marks, a Los Angeles-based partner at law firm Milbank LLC who specializes in energy and infrastructure, but “to me, that’s a success story.”

SOURCE 







Battery Foolishness in Florida

The largest electric utility in Florida is proposing building the world’s largest battery to smooth the output of solar energy installations.

Wind and solar energy are erratic. Output depends on when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. If only electricity could be economically stored, wind and solar would be a lot more practical, or at least, less impracticable. With storage, when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, electricity could be stored for use when the wind or solar was temporarily dead in the water.

There are two methods of storing electricity that are not entirely inadequate: pumped storage and lithium batteries. Pumped storage is best, but it requires two reservoirs at considerably different heights. That’s out of the question in pancake-flat Florida. Batteries are great for computers, cellphones and portable drills. They are even semi-practical for automobiles like Tesla’s products. But batteries are desperately expensive for smoothing out wind or solar energy.

Florida Power and Light (FPL) is proposing that the world’s largest battery will be connected to a small solar plant. The battery will be capable of storing 900 megawatt hours of electricity. It will cost about $400 million. The solar plant in question has an average output of about 15 megawatts. The battery will be able to store 60 hours’ worth of the solar output. If it is cloudy for more than 60 hours the battery will likely run flat. There are over 100 cloudy days per year in nearby Tampa Florida, so one suspects that it is cloudy for more than 60 hours, or 3 days in a row, from time to time.

The electricity exiting from a typical utility scale solar plant, without subsidies, costs about $70 per megawatt hour. Adding the battery to the system will jack up the price to more than $300 per megawatt hour. An interesting sidelight is that the energy stored in FPL’s 900 MWh battery is equal to the energy in 800 tons of high explosive TNT. That is about 1/20th of the energy released by the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan. Given the many fires traceable to lithium batteries, that is something to think about.

FPL’s proposed battery is capable of supplying 400 megawatts for 2 hours. That is a high rate of discharge, making the system more expensive. So, perhaps, the battery is actually intended to be a peaking generator pressed into service when electricity consumption peaks briefly. I suspect that this is the case and all the blather about solar energy is a cover story to make the battery fit in with green psychology. The beauty of painting something green is that it makes foolish projects desirable. The problem with the battery as a peaking generator is that for about the same money one can buy a combined cycle natural gas plant that can supply 400 megawatts for as long as you want, not just for two hours. Further the electricity from the gas plant will cost $50 per megawatt hour, not $300.

The profiteers who have painted wind, solar and batteries fluorescent green are very good at propaganda and changing the subject. Somehow reducing CO2 emissions has become an urgent priority. The profiteers never make a peep about the 86% of CO2 emissions that come from places outside our borders. China is building hundreds of new coal generating plants, the biggest emitters of CO2. Wind and solar are 70% subsidized. Now green ideologues are lobbying Congress to add batteries to the green welfare rolls.

Climate change, formerly known as global warming, is another green hoax. Clever propagandists have managed to make skepticism concerning global warming politically incorrect. Our legislators shake in their boots fearful of being tagged as climate deniers. If you want to know that it is a hoax it is only necessary to read the climategate emails among prominent scientist-promoters of global warming. Global warming made climate scientists rock stars rather than nerdy occupants of an academic Siberia. They vigorously defend their new celebrity status. The predictions of global warming come from complex computer models that are easy to manipulate under the influence of confirmation bias.

Utilities don’t shrink from building over-priced, useless projects. Actually, they are eager, frothing in the mouth and champing at the bit. The reason is that they add the cost of the useless project to their rate base. Regulation usually allows them a profit proportional to the size of the rate base. The catch is that a public utility commission must approve the project. In the current atmosphere, useless projects go through easily provided they are green.

Supposedly, Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda, said “Repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” The Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who died in 1923, stated that men form their beliefs from emotion and passion and that rational justifications are window dressing for the underlying passion. A core justification for science is that scientists are supposed to form their beliefs based on rationality and data, not emotion or personal prestige. Unfortunately, in climate science, it’s not working. Similarly, journalists are supposed to be skeptical and dig for the truth. Instead, most journalists, especially in the big, establishment media companies, uncritically accept green delusions, be it windmills or global warming.

The picture is not completely dark. There are plenty of scientists that dispute the global warming/ climate change mythology. There are many journalists, especially outside of the big media companies, that write skeptically and intelligently about green ideology. It is disturbing that there are persistent efforts to silence these dissenters.

Calling people climate deniers and demanding that they listen to science are not discussions about public policy. These are attempts to hold people to public ridicule and silence dissenters. It is disgusting that big media and big science engage in these tactics. It is sad that our legislators cower in the face of these attacks.

It is difficult to challenge global warming propaganda, because the science is very opaque and complex. However, the engineering and economics behind green energy is not particularly difficult. There are thousands of engineers and scientists that understand perfectly well that green energy is largely fraudulent. But the dissenters are not organized or well-financed. The promoters of green energy are connected to large business with billions of dollars of annual sales. They are able to control public opinion and the legislative agenda with money and influence.

SOURCE 






Australian Labor party climate change spokesman says it’s impossible to cost Labor’s climate change policy

Opposition climate change spokesman Mark Butler says it is “impossible” to cost Labor’s climate change policy because Labor is not putting a direct carbon price on businesses.

Mr Butler said in Perth today businesses would ultimately influence the economic cost of Labor policy and claimed “that is what they asked Labor for” and the Parliamentary Budget Office could not cost it.

“It isn’t possible to cost this because a Shorten government ... would not be imposing a direct carbon price, and certainly not a carbon tax,” he said in Perth today.

“What we have decided to do, after talking exhaustively with business groups over the last 12 to 18 months, is simply adopt the safeguards mechanism proposed by Malcolm Turnbull.

“All that mechanism does is set a limit on carbon pollution. If businesses are able to stick to their limit, they won’t hear from government anymore ... there is no price impact at all.

“If they are not able to stick to their limit ... they will have the broadest possible range of offsets. But how business deals with that is a matter for them.

“It won’t be dictated by Canberra so it won’t be costed by Canberra.”

SOURCE  

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

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

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Home (Index page)


Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here. It shows that we actually live in an era of remarkable temperature stability.

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.



I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.


Context for the minute average temperature change recorded in the graph above: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts

"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Theoretically, the effect of added CO2 in the atmosphere should be instant. It allegedly works by bouncing electromagnetic radiation around and electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. But there has been no instant effect. Temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.

Antarctica is GAINING mass

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.



Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion



Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

The plight of the bumblebee -- an egregious example of crooked "science"

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Fossil fuels are 100% organic, are made with solar energy, and when burned produce mostly CO2 and H2O, the 2 most important foods for life.

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below


WISDOM:

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered, than answers that can’t be questioned.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, Physicist

“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

UNRELIABLE SCIENCE:

(1). “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness… “The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of ‘significance’ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale…Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent…” (Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet, in The Lancet, 11 April, 2015, Vol 385, “Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?”)

(2). “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement" -- Karl Popper

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.


ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

A Warmist backs down: "No one knows exactly how far rising carbon concentrations affect temperatures" -- Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.


SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

The frequency of hurricanes has markedly DECLINED in recent years

Here's how that "97% consensus" figure was arrived at

97% of scientists want to get another research grant

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

To Greenies, Genghis Khan was a good guy, believe it or not. They love that he killed so many people.

Greenie antisemitism

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

Comparing climate alarmist Hansen to Cassandra is WRONG. Cassandra's (Greek mythology) dire prophecies were never believed but were always right. Hansen's dire prophecies are usually believed but are always wrong (Prof. Laurence Gould, U of Hartford, CT)

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

UPDATE to the above: It seems that I am a true prophet

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

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

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Help keep the planet Green! Maximize your CO2 and CH4 output!

Global Warming=More Life; Global Cooling=More Death.

The inconvenient truth about biological effects of "Ocean Acidification"

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is maximum 4%.

Cook the crook who cooks the books

The great and fraudulent scare about lead


How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The "precautionary principle" is a favourite Greenie idea -- but isn't that what George Bush was doing when he invaded Iraq? Wasn't that a precaution against Saddam getting or having any WMDs? So Greenies all agree with the Iraq intervention? If not, why not?

A classic example of how the sensationalist media distort science to create climate panic is here.

There is a very readable summary of the "Hockey Stick" fraud here

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: "The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Relying on the popular wisdom can even hurt you personally: "The scientific consensus of a quarter-century ago turned into the arthritic nightmare of today."

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.





DETAILS OF REGULARLY UPDATED BLOGS BY JOHN RAY:

"Tongue Tied"
"Dissecting Leftism" (Backup here)
"Australian Politics"
"Education Watch International"
"Political Correctness Watch"
"Greenie Watch"
Western Heart


BLOGS OCCASIONALLY UPDATED:

"Marx & Engels in their own words"
"A scripture blog"
"Recipes"
"Some memoirs"
To be continued ....
Coral Reef Compendium.
IQ Compendium
Queensland Police
Australian Police News
Paralipomena (3)
Of Interest
Dagmar Schellenberger
My alternative Wikipedia


BLOGS NO LONGER BEING UPDATED

"Food & Health Skeptic"
"Eye on Britain"
"Immigration Watch International".
"Leftists as Elitists"
Socialized Medicine
OF INTEREST (2)
QANTAS -- A dying octopus
BRIAN LEITER (Ladderman)
Obama Watch
Obama Watch (2)
Dissecting Leftism -- Large font site
Michael Darby
Paralipomena (2)
AGL -- A bumbling monster
Telstra/Bigpond follies
Optus bungling
Bank of Queensland blues


There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)






Main academic menu
Menu of recent writings
Basic home page
Pictorial Home Page.
Selected pictures from blogs
Another picture page (Rarely updated)



Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename the following:
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20151027-0014/jonjayray.comuv.com/

OR: (After 2015)
https://web.archive.org/web/20160322114550/http://jonjayray.com/