GREENIE WATCH -- by Dr. John Ray

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

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

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31 May, 2020

Coronavirus has had NIL Impact on CO2 Levels

Figure 1: Using a simple method1 for removing the large seasonal cycle from the Mauna Loa CO2 data, and well as the average effects from El Nino and La Nina events, no obvious downtown in global CO2 levels has been observed4. Analysis by Dr. Roy Spencer.

Short Summary:

The COVID-19 aka Coronavirus pandemic is causing a worldwide shutdown in economic activity as businesses close, airlines cancel flights, energy production is reduced, and people shelter in their homes and drive less.

Climate activists expected this economic downtown to translate to less energy usage, and therefore less CO2 emissions globally. While that has indeed happened, with China seeing a 40% emissions drop, and an expected 11% reduction in energy-related CO2 emissions in the U.S. this year, it didn’t translate into the proof they were seeking. What scientists are looking for is any evidence of a decline in global atmospheric CO2 concentrations that would be strong enough to attribute to the economic downturn.

University of Alabama climate scientist Dr. Roy Spencer used a simple method1 for removing the large seasonal CO2 cycle2, due to plant photosynthesis increases/decreases with seasons, from the Mauna Loa CO2 data, and well as the average effects from El Nino and La Nina events, which change the rate of ocean outgassing of CO2. The result: no obvious downtown in global CO2 levels has been observed3,4.

As can be seen in Figure 1, the latest CO2 data show no downtrend, but instead just a ripple, that is not unlike other ripples in the graph when there was no crisis and resulting economic downturn. The newspaper USA Today did a fact check on this issue and found the same result.

NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratories also studied the issue5 and concluded:

“That drop in emissions needs to be large enough to stand out from natural CO2 variability caused by how plants and soils respond to seasonal and annual variations of temperature, humidity, soil moisture, etc. These natural variations are large, and so far the “missing” emissions do not stand out.”

Clearly, there is no indication that the forced reductions have had any effect on global CO2 levels, suggesting that natural forces, such as ocean outgassing of CO2 overwhelm man-made contributions. This further suggests that the calls from climate alarmists to reduce fossil fuel use, automobile use, airline travel, beef consumption, and an entire litany of complaints they make about modern life-enhancing energy use applications will have little or no effect if implemented as they demand.

SOURCE

Study Shows Climate Change Expands Migratory Bird Ranges; Media Freaks

A newly published study shows North American birds are taking advantage of global warming to expanding their ranges northward, without any shrinkage in the southern edge of their North American ranges.

Rather than celebrate this good news for birds, climate alarmists and their media puppets are crying “Crisis!”

A Google News search this morning for the term “climate change” shows articles about the new bird-range study are among the top search results.

Incredibly, the titles for media articles about the study include, “Migratory Birds Are Failing to Adapt to Climate Change,” “Migratory birds in the Eastern US are struggling to adapt to climate change,” and “National Audubon Society Says Climate Change Is Pushing Bird Boundaries, Community Scientists Confirm.”

Saying birds are “struggling” and “failing” to adapt to climate change, or that climate change is “pushing” bird boundaries, are grossly misleading ways to describe the good news of expanding bird ranges.

In the study, wildlife researchers working for the federal government tracked bird ranges during the past 50 years. They published their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers found:

Annual resident bird species (birds that do not migrate) have, as a whole, increased their ranges northward toward the poles without losing any of their southern ranges. That is wonderful news.

Birds that migrate to North America from the tropics have had no change in their northern ranges, though their southern range in Third World tropical nations appears to be shrinking. That is not good news.

So, most North American birds have larger ranges today, thanks to global warming. Annual resident bird species and migratory birds within North America have not experienced shrinking southern ranges.

The only concerning part of the survey is the subset of birds that winter outside the United States in Third World countries.

They appear to have shrinking ranges within those Third World countries. Overall, the findings are quite good news for birds and should be reported as such.

Even the one subset of the study that might raise concern, declining ranges in Third World nations, is quite a stretch to blame on global warming.

If all other bird species, with southern ranges not in Third World nations, see no decline in their southern ranges, why would there be shrinkage of southern ranges only in Third World countries?

The answer can likely be found in what the authors of the study explicitly acknowledge – “[T]he primary threats to North American birds are thought to include habitat loss, invasive species, and direct and indirect anthropogenic mortality.”

Also, “these threats are likely the primary drivers of declines in North America’s” birds, the authors reported.

Habitat loss and other threats to bird species are much greater in tropical Third World countries than in eco-conscious North America.

The North American bird range is growing. Birds that spend some of their time in North America and some of their time in Third World nations experience no range shrinkage in their North American ranges but some shrinkage in their Third World ranges.

The driving cause for the shrinkage of southern ranges for birds wintering in Third World countries clearly appears to be non-climate pressures on birds and other species in Third World countries.

Indeed, the authors themselves note “deforestation and other factors in tropical nations” may be pressuring that subset of birds migrating from tropical nations.

In summary, the new study on climate change and bird ranges is good news. As a general rule, global warming is causing an expansion of bird ranges.

To the extent a subset of bird species defies the overall trend, the reason appears to be non-climate pressures in Third World countries.

When the media describe the overall good news from the study as birds “struggling,” “failing,” or having their boundaries “pushed” by global warming, it reveals their biased and dishonest agenda.

SOURCE

No, Climate Change Does Not Cause Cancer

Among the top articles in a May 19 Google News search for “climate change” were a slew of articles claiming climate change causes cancer. CNBC and several other major news outlets published the claims, citing American Cancer Society (ACS) activists making the assertion. The line of reasoning is preposterous. And even if the ACS’s line of reasoning were sound, the line of reasoning would indicate that climate change is reducing cancer incidence and mortality.

The CNBC article is titled “Climate change is fueling extreme weather that lowers cancer survival rate and threatens prevention.” The article points out ACS’s line of reasoning as “[1] Climate change has triggered more frequent weather disasters like hurricanes and wildfires that [2] release deadly carcinogens into communities and [3] delay access to cancer treatment.” Each of the three prongs of the argument is ridiculous, and the three in combination give new meaning to the term “far-fetched.”

Examining the first prong, climate change has clearly not “triggered more frequent weather disasters like hurricanes and wildfires.” As documented in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, hurricane impacts in the United States are at an all-time low. The United States recently went more than a decade (2005 through 2017) without a major hurricane measuring Category 3 or higher, which is the longest such period in recorded history. The United States also recently experienced the fewest number of hurricane strikes in any eight-year period (2009 through 2017) in recorded history. Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018 “Interim Report” observes there is “only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.” And, as shown in the chart below (see climatlas.com/tropical/frequency_12months.png), there has been a declining number of hurricanes during the past 30 years, not an increase as ACS claims.

Also, drought is the climate component that would impact wildfires. As documented in Climate at a Glance: Drought, the United States is benefiting from fewer and less extreme drought events as the climate modestly warms. In 2017 and 2019 successively, the United States registered its smallest percentage of land area experiencing drought in recorded history. Also, the United States is undergoing its longest period in recorded history with fewer than 40 percent of the country experiencing “very dry” conditions. Moreover, the U.N. IPCC reports with “high confidence” that precipitation has increased over mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere (including the United States) during the past 70 years, while IPCC has “low confidence” about any negative trends globally.

(See https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/SR15_Chapter3_Low_Res.pdf, p. 191.)

The entirety of ACS’s claim that climate change causes cancer rests on the notion that climate change causes more hurricanes and wildfires. With those assertions convincingly debunked, ACS’s entire argument fails. If anything, ACS shows that climate change causes less cancer.

Let’s nevertheless look at the remaining two prongs of ACS’s claim.

The second prong, that a modest increase in wildfires would release more cancer-causing carcinogens into the air, would be marginal, at worst. Very few, if any, cancer cases and cancer deaths are linked to a person being exposed to forest fire smoke. And, again, even if that were the case, we see that climate change is reducing the drought that causes forest fires.

The third prong, that hurricanes and forest fires delay people’s access to cancer treatment, would also be marginal, at worst. Very few, if any, regularly scheduled cancer treatments are missed because someone is caught in a hurricane or wildfire. And, again, even if that were the case, we see that climate change is reducing the frequency of hurricanes and wildfires that would force somebody to miss a cancer treatment.

In summary, activists at the American Cancer Society, together with their willing media puppets, have gotten the entire issue backwards, if there is any link at all. Climate change is not causing more cancer, but it apparently is causing more ridiculous claims from activist groups.

SOURCE

No, Climate Change Didn’t Invent Cyclical Locust Plagues

Parts of India are undergoing their worst locust invasion in decades, following a cycle that has occurred throughout recorded history. Climate alarmists and their media ventriloquist dummies are claiming climate change must be to blame. They are lying.

“India is facing its worst desert locust invasion in nearly 30 years, and the climate crisis is partly to blame,” says an article published in Ecowatch. Nevertheless, the Ecowatch article presents no evidence this cyclical locust invasion is either caused by climate change or is especially severe compared to other historical locus invasions. The article presents no evidence to back up its assertion because no such evidence exists.

“Locusts are not uncommon in the northwest Indian state of Rajasthan, but this year they have also entered the states of Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh for the first time since 1993 and the state of Maharashtra for the first time since 1974,” writes Ecowatch. As the article admits, these events have happened repeatedly before, with the 1974 locust plague occurring during a 30-year global cooling period when the mainstream media were warning about a coming ice age.

Locust plagues have struck periodically, but with some regularity all over the globe throughout history. The Wikipedia entry on locust notes, “[t]he ancient Egyptians carved them on their tombs and the insects are mentioned in the Iliad, the Bible, and the Quran. Swarms have devastated crops and been a contributory cause of famines and human migrations.” And academic papers also show locust plagues have even been common across Europe, with one paper noting, “the history of locust plagues shows how pervasive plagues were, and when records are more complete in later history seemingly almost continuous in occurrence. If it was like this in Europe where the majority of historical records come from, how much more so must it have been in Africa where conditions were much more conducive to locusts?”

As a 2013 article in Farm Progress notes in the United States, “the speed, ferocity and devastation of locusts, particularly the Rocky Mountain locust, would have once been a fact of life for a sweep of American farmers from California to Texas to Minnesota.” The worst locust plague recorded in the United States since European colonization was recorded 1875, which was 150 years of global warming ago, during the late stages of the Little Ice Age. Farm Progress says:

“In 1875, the largest locust swarm in history was recorded over the Midwest — 198,000 square miles. (For a size reference, California covers 163,696 square miles.) The 1875 swarm was estimated to contain several trillion locusts and probably weighed several million tons. That was the largest locust cloud in world history, according to Jeffrey Lockwood, author of ‘The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier.’”

Abundant rainfall in recent years has brought more abundant water, crops, plants, and vegetation. This has benefited people, desirable wildlife, and locusts. The benefits of more water and food for all life do not become a crisis – or even a politically advantageous climate crisis, simply because locusts also benefit from better conditions for all life.

Another natural but, in some sense, unique factor contributing to the locus plague this year was its coincidental arrival with the COVID-19 pandemic. As Wikipedia notes, “recently, changes in agricultural practices and better surveillance of locations where swarms tend to originate, have meant that control measures can be used at an early stage. The traditional means of control are based on the use of insecticides from the ground or the air, but other methods using biological control are proving effective.” Amidst the Coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns, however, many of these normal monitoring and response mechanisms were abandoned.

A recent article in Wired discusses the problems that occurred with monitoring and response to the 2020 locust eruption. In Africa, where the current locust eruption first arose, above-average rainfall, heavy vegetation, and multiple years of good crop production made conditions ripe of the locust population boom.

The Global Locust Initiative at Arizona State University working with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization operate a network of monitoring and response teams across much of North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent. The current locust population explosion occurred in fairly wild and remote areas in the Middle East and Africa, areas with limited roads and infrastructure, and really erupted just as the Coronavirus shutdown was hitting. These factors combined to hamper locust monitoring and response across the region.

In other regions, political instability also prevented an effective response to the booming locust population. Yemen has been ravaged by years of war, leaving it unable no to deploy the specially trained crews the government had previously used to spray common pesticides that effectively kill locusts in mere hours. The ongoing civil war there also made it too dangerous for farmers and other regular folks to spray the pesticides themselves.

In short, myriad factors have contributed to the current locust plague striking large parts of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but there is no evidence that they are historically unusual. To the extent any particular weather or climate factors can be blamed, it would be weather and climate factors that greatly benefit humans, wildlife, vegetation, and crop production. Climate alarmists, however, don’t want people to hear that. Instead, the pick out the small downside and implicitly tell people that an ideal climate would be one of drought, crop failure, water shortages, and sparse plant growth to deprive food for locusts – and everything else.

Yeah, ok.

SOURCE

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

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

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29 May, 2020

Media Champions Fake ‘Climate’ Death Certificates

Five college employees in Australia published a letter in the medical journal Lancet demanding medical doctors list climate factors like heat more often as a person’s cause of death. The authors observed that death certificates don’t reflect as many climate-caused deaths as their models and predictions suggested, so medical doctors should begin listing heat and other climate factors on the death certificates of people who died from other reasons. And Lancet published the letter. And the media are promoting the effort.

“Climate change is a concern to many people. But if the effect of extreme temperatures is not recorded, its full impact can never be understood. Death certification needs to be modernised, indirect causes should be reported, with all death certification prompting for external factors contributing to death, and these death data must be coupled with large-scale environmental datasets so that impact assessments can be done,” the authors argue.

A story in Science Alert uncritically discusses the Lancet editorial, while misrepresenting scientific evidence. “People around the world are already dying from the climate crisis, and yet all too often, official death records do not reflect the impact of these large-scale environmental catastrophes,” the Science Alert article claims.

Death certificates in Australia and elsewhere do actually have a section for pre-existing conditions and other factors. Doctors, however, rarely find evidence of external weather or climate conditions causing or contributing to a person’s death.

Data from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as scientific bodies in Australia, the United States, and elsewhere, indicate extreme events including droughts, floods, hurricanes, and wildfires have neither become more common nor more severe during the recent period of modestly warming temperatures.

Also, the actual research that has been done on climate and premature mortality indicates it is cold, not heat, that causes more death. Indeed, a study published in the Lancet in 2015, researchers examined health data from 384 locations in 13 countries, accounting for more than 74 million deaths—a huge sample size from which to draw sound conclusions—and found cold weather, directly or indirectly, killed 1,700 percent more people than hot weather. No, that is not a typo – 1,700 percent more people die from cold temperatures than warm or hot temperatures.

Well heck, if people aren’t dying as often from climate change as you say they are, then just change the death certificates.

SOURCE

Media Warns of Cassava Crisis as Production Keeps Setting Records

At the top of Google News searches this morning for “climate change” is an article suggesting climate change imperils cassava crops in Africa and tropical regions by boosting diseases and pests that threaten cassava. Buried in the article, “Impact of Climate Change on Pests and Diseases of Cassava Crop,” is a lack of any evidence of worsening diseases and pests. To the contrary, objective data show rapidly rising cassava production as the world warms. Indeed, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports global cassava production is enjoying long-term growth, with the past 10 years providing the 10 years with the highest ever cassava production.

Cassava is a starchy crop that is a staple food for 800 million people worldwide, including 500 million in Africa alone. Cassava is one of the most important crop in tropical regions. Cassava thrives in high heat, and can tolerate varying rainfall prevalence.

Buried in the manufactured concern about cassava production, the article acknowledges, “cassava is a crop which will likely be highly resilient to future climate change stressors.”

Rising cassava production should surprise nobody. Data from the market data firm Tridge shows cassava production has grown consistently since at least 1997, when world cassava production was 161.75 million tons. By 2016, production topped 277.1 million tons.

Data from FAO expand on Tridge’s findings. According to FAO, total cassava production has grown significantly faster than the area devoted to production, illustrating large increases in yields per acre as well as total production.

The report provides no evidence diseases or pests worsening as the climate warms. Even if that were the case, the bountiful increases in cassava production are clearly much greater than any incidental increase in pests or disease, as shown in the overall crop data.

So, when you see today’s Climate Scare of the Day raising concern about cassava production, feel free to enjoy a guilt-free partaking of your favorite tropical foods

SOURCE

Not Guilty! Jurist Legal News Prosecutes False Case Against Climate, Hunger

Jurist Legal News is doing its best Michael Avenatti impression, prosecuting false claims that climate change is causing hunger and malnutrition.

In a May 14 article, “The Link Between Climate Change and Human Health,” Indian law students Sakshi Agarwal and Aniket Sachan quote speculative World Health Organization (WHO) predictions as proof that climate change is causing starvation and malnutrition. That is the same WHO, by the way, that reassured us that Chinese officials found no evidence of human-to-human transmission of COVID-19, that wearing face masks makes you more likely to acquire COVID-19, and praised massive government efforts to “socialize the economy.”

“The World Health Organization (WHO) back in 2018 said that climate change will cause around 250,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050 due to malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea and heat exhaustion,” the Jurist Legal News article reported.

Of course, predictions are not proof, or even evidence. They are merely predictions. Let’s take a look at what scientific evidence shows.

History shows colder periods of time are linked to famine and malnutrition as crops fail, as during the little ice age. By contrast, hunger and malnutrition both decline sharply during relatively warm periods.

Indeed, food production, rather than declining as the climate has modestly warmed, has increased dramatically in recent decades. This is thoroughly documented in Climate at a Glance: Crop Production, as well as in a video-archived panel discussion alongside the United Nations Civil Society Conference in August 2019.

Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, shows how modern agriculture, built upon and entirely dependent upon fossil fuels, is allowing farmers to produce more food than ever on less and less land. In addition, as detailed by CO2Science.org, the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere over the past century, along with modest warming, have resulted in crop yields setting records nearly every year. The two factors combined have resulted in the largest decline in hunger, malnutrition, poverty, and starvation in human history.

Forty-four percent of the world’s population lived in absolute poverty in 1981 – 40 years of global warming ago. Since then, the share of people living in such poverty fell below 10 percent in 2015. And although 700 million people worldwide still suffer from persistent hunger, the United Nations reports the number of hungry people has declined by two billion since 1990 – 30 years of global warming ago.

Hunger and malnutrition, like a changing climate, have always been with us. The evidence, however, shows the only climate change consistently linked to increases in hunger, malnutrition, and premature mortality is a cooling climate.

SOURCE

A Queensland university that unlawfully sacked a professor for criticising colleagues for their research on the impact of global warming on the Great Barrier Reef is back in court

James Cook University is appealing the Brisbane Federal Circuit Court's finding that it contravened the Fair Work Act when it dismissed Peter Vincent Ridd in 2018.

Judge Salvatore Vasta made 28 findings in April 2019 against the university, which censured Prof Ridd for remarks against a coral researcher, the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

The university was later ordered to pay Prof Ridd more than $1.2m for lost income, lost future income and other costs.

Before sacking the geophysicist, the university alleged Prof Ridd had violated its code of conduct during an August 2017 interview on Sky News when he remarked some of the university's research could "no longer be trusted".

It also alleged Prof Ridd wrote of a researcher in an email to a student: "It is not like he has any clue about the weather. He will give the normal doom science about the (Great Barrier Reef)".

Judge Vasta found the university's actions, including the dismissal, were unlawful.

"Incredibly, the university has not understood the whole concept of intellectual freedom," he wrote in his findings.

"In reality, intellectual freedom is the cornerstone of this core mission of all institutions of higher learning."

Freedom of expression and the interpretation of the university's code of conduct were the focus of the appeal submissions on Tuesday.

The university's lawyer, Bret Walker SC, said the university was responsible for enforcing standards of behaviour to protect intellectual freedom and the code of conduct.

Mr Walker said staff had the right to intellectual freedom and the right to express certain views but not bully, harass or intimidate others.

"Freedom .... is not without limit, restriction or standard," he told the court.

The two-day hearing continues.

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, 2020

Coronavirus has more Americans rethinking plastic

One overlooked policy response to the coronavirus has been a changing of attitudes toward plastic. While plastic has drawn the ire of environmentalists in recent years due to concerns regarding pollution, some businesses are now being forced to use more plastic – as a matter of public health.

In the late 1980s, concerns over the environmental impact of logging for the production of paper products, and a belief that plastic bags were more sanitary, led to a widespread adoption of the material in the U.S. As a returning Navy veteran in 1989, after having been in Iceland for 18 months, I (Collier) remember going to California and being asked “paper or plastic” for the first time. While the past few years have seen a shift in environmental priorities, in 2020 plastic is reappearing many places out of necessity.

Starbucks, for instance, stopped allowing customers to use refillable cups (a previously encouraged practice) for fear of contaminating their stores with the coronavirus. The popular coffee chain offers only disposable cups now – and many of them, like those for iced tea and iced coffee, are made of plastic. Though the practice was well intentioned, Starbucks was correct in now acknowledging that “reusable” cups are germ factories.

Grocery stores have also had to rethink plastic in the age of coronavirus. In California, a state which had moved to ban single-use plastic bags several years back, customers are now being asked to leave their reusable shopping bags at home due to health concerns.

The shift toward plastic has also been extremely pronounced when considering the sale of water bottles. The Washington Post reports that Costco has seen a spike in bottled water sales as people stock up to ensure they have an adequate supply to self-quarantine. One cannot overlook the fact that in some places, like the infamous case in Flint, Michigan, the need for clean, storable drinking water is especially urgent when facing a stay-at-home-order and your tap water is compromised. In fact, a recent national poll showed that only 24% of Americans were “very confident” their tap water was always safe.

All of this should be kept in mind when lawmakers are considering policies to tax, regulate, or outright ban the use of certain plastics. Can Chicago really defend its 5 cents per bottle tax on water at a time when residents are stocking up out of necessity?

Moreover, once the coronavirus has been beaten back, shouldn’t we expect a similar surge during the next crisis?

It will be interesting to see what the public’s appetite for single-use plastic bans will be once fears of the coronavirus dissipate. After experiencing the biggest emergency we’ve faced in a lifetime, we may want to think twice about getting rid of the things we need most. While coronavirus fears will eventually fade, the underlying sanitary issues with reusable items will not.

While we share the concerns about plastic pollution in the ocean – the vast majority of which stems from nations other than the U.S. – and are fully supportive of private sector efforts to address this, such as Evian’s decision to shift to bottles made from 100% recycled plastic, the coronavirus has served as a reminder as to why we use plastic in the first place.

Lawmakers should address the environmental concerns by applying more pressure to the countries that are the predominant sources of pollution — not by instituting draconian bans or immoral Chicago-style taxes.

We sympathize with environmental interests, but the road to a lot of bad places is paved with good intentions.

SOURCE

The Renewable Fuel Standard is the gift that keeps on taking

By Rick Manning

As we approach Christmas it is time to take another look at one of the “gifts” Congress gave the U.S. and how it continues to be the gift that keeps on taking. It is a gift that has not only failed to do what it was supposed to do, it has had the exact opposite impact. Of course, that gift is the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). If Congress wanted to give the American people a gift this Christmas, they should repeal this un-environmental, expensive, job killing regulation.

The RFS was initiated to accomplish two main goals: Reduce foreign dependence on energy; and Improve energy efficiency and protect the environment.

Sadly, the mandate has failed at the two jobs it had.

Every year the amount of biofuel the federal government mandates be used goes up. It goes up regardless of the much-improved vehicle fuel mileage since its inception. The mandate continues to increase regardless of the number of electric cars on the road, or the increased amount of people taking public transportation in major cities. The RFS mandate has expanded so much it has now made the U.S. dependent on foreign sources of biofuel.

Yes, that’s right. The law passed by Congress in 2005, and “updated” in 2007, has turned one of its mandates, to reduce foreign dependency on energy, and increased it.

Thanks to a 15-billion-gallon biofuel mandate, the U.S. must import hundreds of millions of gallons of biofuel to meet, not the demand for the fuel, but the artificial requirement put on the U.S. consumer by the federal government. This happens because the U.S. does not have the infrastructure to produce more biofuels nor is there the demand. Primarily, the U.S. is importing the hundreds of millions of gallons of biofuel from nations that heavily subsidize their industries, like Brazil and Indonesia.

It is not hard to see the problem on the horizon with this. Because fuel refiners must either produce the ethanol, buy the ethanol, or purchase the Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) to comply — RINs are how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tracks compliance with the RFS, the refiners are going to go with the cheapest option. The cheapest option is often going to be the government subsidized one. This will end up in a subsidy vs subsidy battle with the U.S. taxpayer coming out the loser.

The RFS was supposed to be more environmentally friendly but recent studies have proven that false. The Department of Energy even posts on its website that E10 and E15 get 3 to 5 percent fewer miles per gallon than regular gasoline. Flex fuel vehicles, E85 are even worse at an astounding 15 to 27 percent fewer miles per gallon. That’s the exact opposite of environmentally friendly.

Possibly even worse than the lower mileage, is the land use and lost opportunity costs. Because it is a mandate, farmers grow corn to be used in ethanol because they know it is a guaranteed consumer. That land is now not being used to grow other crops for human consumption, nor are the crops being used to feed other parts of the farm industry, such as beef, port, and poultry.

The RFS is so bad for the environment groups that once pushed for RFS are now calling it a failure. Scott Faber, Senior Vice President for Government Affairs of the Environmental Working Group, testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety and the Senate Committee on Environment and Public works in 2013. He stated, “the RFS has delivered too many ‘bad’ biofuels that increase greenhouse gas emissions, pollute air and water, destroy critical habitat for wildlife and drive up the price of food. The corn ethanol mandate of the RFS, once promoted as a tool to combat climate change, has instead raised greenhouse emissions, exacerbated air and water pollution challenges and inflated the price of staple foods.”

If most of the oil industry and environmental groups can agree on the uselessness of the RFS, why can’t Congress?

Let’s take a final look at the RFS score card. Did it make the U.S. less dependent on foreign sources of energy? No. Did the RFS improve energy efficiency? No. Does the RFS protect the environment? No. The RFS is an abject failure on every level. It is a favorite of farmers that want the government to subsidize their crops instead of competing in the marketplace, and Wall Street speculators love it because the RINs it creates are another artificial product they can sell and get enormous fees for. It is time for Congress to give the American taxpayer and consumer a Christmas gift and end the Renewal Fuel Standard which has become just another example of government mandates turning into crony capitalism gone wild. It is a Christmas gift that only a Bad Santa would give and should be rejected by Congress.

SOURCE

‘Man-Made Warming’ Demolished In 500 Words

The United Nations IPCC says ongoing warming is due to man’s CO2 emissions, hence ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’ (AGW). The 3 pillars on which they base this claim are unscientific and quickly disproved.

IPCC’s Three Pillars

PILLAR I: Earth’s average surface temperature and man’s CO2 emissions have both risen since 1850, so CO2 must have caused the warming

Five disproofs …

What else has risen? The Sun’s magnetic output, affecting cloudiness (Svensmark), more than doubled from 1901 to 1991 (Lockwood), to its highest peak in 10,000 years (Higgs 1).
In those last 10,000 years …

simple visual cross-correlation shows changes in temperature lagged 60-160 years behind solar-output changes, due to the ocean’s vast heat capacity and slow mixing (Higgs 1, 2) &
… temperature and CO2 were uncorrelated, until their joint rise from the late 1800s.

CO2 is still rising (NOAA), but Earth has cooled since 2016 (Met. Office). Every passing day not ‘warmest ever’ for that date, at multiple sites worldwide, embarrasses the IPCC.
Warming since 1910 paused 1945-75 (30 years) and 1998-2012 but CO2 kept rising

PILLAR II: Global warming’s continuance despite the Sun’s weakening after 1991 absolves the Sun and incriminates CO2

Disproof …

This mismatch is simply due to the oceanic time-lag, currently about 60 years. Thus global warming will continue (with ups and downs, mainly due to the Sun’s 11-year cycles) until around 2050, about 60 years after the Sun’s 1991 grand peak (Higgs 2).

Pillar II was asserted in IPCC’s 2013 ‘Fifth Assessment Report’, Chapter 10 (IPCC 1 p.887, co-author Lockwood [see (1) above], citing 4 of his own papers). But IPPC already knew about the lag, Chapter 3 having stated the “ocean’s huge heat capacity and slow circulation lend it significant thermal inertia” (IPCC 2 p.266).

PILLAR III: Sea level (SL) for the last few thousand years varied less than 25cm, so the 30cm SL rise since 1850 proves abnormal warming by CO2

Disproof …

The 25 cm claim (only “medium confidence”; IPCC 3 p.385) is based on selected evidence (Higgs 3) and on dismissal of the famed 1961 SL curve (Fairbridge; Wiki) with SL oscillations of 2 to 5 metres in the last 6,000 years, confirmed by dozens of later geologists worldwide, and lately with very strong archaeological support (Higgs 4, 5, 6).

Conclusions

That’s it. That’s all they have. Be surprised.

The Sun was by far the main driver of global temperature for the last 10,000 years.

CO2 is innocent; it has no climate effect; the simultaneous rise in temperature and CO2 is pure accident; CO2’s residual ‘greenhouse effect’ is effectively nil (Higgs 7, 8).

The IPCC urgently needs to consult geologists (Higgs 9, 10).
Another Sun-driven large sea-level rise is predictable (Higgs 11).

SOURCE



Australia: The coal, hard fact is we must put jobs first in this economic climate

As the biblical saying goes, you can’t serve two masters. For a decade we have been trying to con ourselves we could. We thought you could serve the master of climate change and keep a strong manufacturing sector.

The data doesn’t lie. You can’t.

While we have reduced our emissions by 5 per cent (largely by making it illegal for farmers to clear their own land), our manufacturing industry has gone backwards for the first time. During the past decade Australian manufacturing has declined in real, absolute terms. The 1990s and 2000s were not boom times for manufacturing but the sector still managed to grow by 10 per cent each decade. Since 2010, it has shrunk by 5 per cent.

During that time, our pursuit of climate change and renewable energy policies helped double the cost of energy, despite our abundant reserves. The COVID-19 pandemic shows what a mistake this has been.

Now everyone wants to secure our supply chains and start making things again. None of this talk will lead to renewed manufacturing strength, however, if we do not get serious about reducing energy costs. And to do that we need to make tough choices about what is important in a post-COVID, economically depressed world.

Talk of the immediate importance of reducing our small carbon footprint now sounds like a discordant echo from a bygone era. With millions are out of work, and our major trade partner threatens our economic security, why would we continue to self-flagellate by imposing the additional costs of reducing carbon emissions for no environmental benefit?

China’s recent actions demonstrate beyond a doubt that there is no hope a global agreement to reduce carbon emissions will lead to any meaningful global action. If we can’t trust China to keep faith with a trade agreement signed just a few years ago, and can’t trust it to be upfront on the pandemic, how can we trust China to honour a global agreement to reduce carbon dioxide emissions?

I do not make these points to critique others. I made the mistakes too. I have been a supporter of the Paris Agreement because Australia has benefited from international agreements. But things have changed. With the need to secure our manufacturing industry and the clear breakdown of international co-operation, we must face the fact that era is over.

We should end our participation in the Paris Agreement, given the more immediate need to secure our manufacturing jobs. And we should rule out any moves to net-zero emissions or a future global agreement on carbon until other countries, much larger than us, demonstrate real reductions in their carbon emissions.

Our future targets continue to restrain our ability to make the tough choices to rebuild Australian manufacturing. Because of those targets, many are rushing to promote gas over coal. Gas in eastern Australia is not a pathway to globally competitive energy prices any time soon. The geology of our gas is not the lucrative shale seams from which the US has benefited.

At best we might hope to get the wellhead energy cost of Australian onshore gas down to $6 a gigajoule. That is still double the mining costs of most Australian black coal (and more than 10 times the cost of brown coalmining). It is also more than double the cost of US shale gas.

If we are not going to pursue and fight for the cheapest energy costs, then we are not serious about rebuilding an Australian manufacturing industry.

Some say the politics of building a coal-fired power station is too tough. I am a big supporter of gas developments but I drove to Canberra last week and I saw about 20 “no coal-seam gas” signs in western NSW. But I didn’t see a single “no coal” sign. Sure, lots of inner-city greenies oppose coal, but all politics is local. As last year’s federal election showed, if you have the locals supporting a project (such as Adani), that is a political fight you can win.

The political battle we should engage in is the one to return manufacturing jobs to Australia. To pursue naive policies that reduce our carbon emissions, regardless of what other countries are doing, hurts our ability to win that battle. To recover from this pandemic we must recognise that the era of rampant globalism is over and put Australian jobs first.

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, 2020

Beware! Post-lockdown stimulus policies worldwide are likely to be "Green"

Administrations are likely to adopt green stimulus policies for the following eight reasons:

1. Green spending is still perceived as unobjectionable because it generates a common benefit, partly because the economic character of renewable technologies is not well understood. Green spending is seen as less threatening than, say, spending on conventional energy, nuclear, coal and gas with carbon capture and sequestration, since those energy sources are perceived as standard, selfish, big business. Green businesses are in fact if anything even less self-denying, less virtuous, but that is not currently the perception. Governments are well aware of this.

2. Furthermore, green public spending would be seen to benefit businesses that can plausibly pretend to address a common threat in climate change. Therefore that spending will be less resented. The fact that there are other, much less resource-hungry ways of reducing emissions is not well understood by the public, and in fact that resource-heavy character is a positive attraction for an administration because…

3. The immediate gross effect of green spending is large. Lowcarbon energy sources, and green technologies generally, are almost all very low productivity – nuclear would be the exception – and a great deal must be spent on both labour and other resources to deliver measurable results. The Net Zero target as outlined by the UK’s Committee on Climate Change, for example, implies extremely heavy spending, on the electrification of transport, and also on hydrogen generation, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen storage and distribution infrastructure, not to mention the re-equipping of 26 million households to use hydrogen boilers in conjunction with heat pumps. And these are only some of the most important costs that are additional to the previous target. This is attractive for an administration since they can spend a great deal with a relatively small number of policy instruments, reducing legislative and administrative burden. There will be no risk of missing the 16.45 departure from Victoria.

4. Furthermore, there are presentational benefits arising from the scale of the spending necessitated by low productivity technologies. The spending results in highly salient action; the consequences of green spending will be highly visible because they will be everywhere, and the numbers of people involved will be large. It will seem as if something is being done to rebuild the economy.

5. While low-productivity investments are clearly undesirable, administrations will persist in supporting them because the green industries have successfully misrepresented themselves as cheaper than conventional energy, a falsehood in which the British government has colluded and now may even believe. Capital costs for both wind and solar are still very high, contrary 3 to the propaganda; the operation and maintenance costs are high and perhaps even rising, and the grid system management costs of introducing wind and solar are vast; no other word will do. Nevertheless, British government departments and indeed some academics persist in claiming otherwise. It is a pitiful intellectual failure, and will eventually be found out, but not soon, which is in fact a further reason that government will be drawn to wasteful and harmful green spending as a post-Covid stimulus, namely…

6. The gross effect of all public spending is immediate, while net effects – positive or negative – are delayed. Thus, it is the gross effect that interests bureaucracies and elected politicians; the net effect is somebody else’s problem. For example, a large upfront expenditure on green technologies has a rapid gross impact, while the inevitable negative net effect will only materialise in a decade’s time. This can be compared with spending on highly productive and valuable technologies; the upfront spending is smaller so the gross effect is reduced, while the positive net effect, like all net effects, is delayed. The result of this is that, paradoxical though it may seem, administrations aiming to stimulate an economy are actually positively drawn to what in other circumstances would be thought of as malinvestment. History, I think, shows this, but a misunderstanding of that history is actually one of the reasons that government will be drawn to Net Zero as a post-Covid stimulus.

7. The positive aura of a Green state intervention rests very heavily on the continuing positive public understanding of Roosevelt’s New Deal, which of course also had a large renewable energy component in the Tennessee Valley Authority. Greens in the UK have been relying on this comparison for some time now, at least since 2008 when the Green New Deal Group was formed, and the phrase Green New Deal is all the more powerful since, with hindsight, the New Deal seems green before its time. However, the net benefit of Roosevelt’s policy is highly questionable, a matter well understood in the United States, but almost undiscussed in the United Kingdom. Indeed in the US there is a sizeable body of analysis suggesting that while Roosevelt’s moves to stabilise the banking system were successful, the massive public spending that followed, and for which the President is most often praised, actually delayed recovery, and that it was only the demand created for war materiel that returned growth to trend. That is still controversial, of course, but at least there is an ongoing adversarial debate in the US. Here in the UK, the history is taught in schools without any qualification, supported by a background of cultural indoctrination: the teaching in schools of the Grapes of Wrath as a set text, and informally from films such as It’s a Wonderful Life. Our understanding of Roosevelt’s New Deal is shallow and obtuse, with consequences for our grasp of the threats posed by any attempt to employ Net Zero spending to restore the economy after lockdown. 4

8. And finally, to these powerful concerns we can add the regrettable truth that the British government at almost every level is wracked by a timid fear of breaking step with what they take to be the consensus of international policy, a timidity brought into sharp focus by the fact that the UK happens to hold the chair of the COP process. They are concerned that by trying to protect British interests they will be seen to align the UK with that part of US opinion with which it most dreads association, namely those that reject the Paris Agreement in order to ‘Make America Great Again‘.
SOURCE

China’s Ascent To Global Superpower Based On Cheap Coal

This year's record drop in carbon emissions due to the COVID-19 crisis has renewed questions about China's continued push for coal-fired power as the government pursues economic recovery.

Last week, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that worldwide carbon emissions linked to global warming will plunge nearly 8 percent this year in the wake of the pandemic and production shutdowns.

Global energy demand will fall by 6 percent, a loss seven times greater than during the 2008 financial collapse, the IEA said in a 41-page report.

In the first quarter, China recorded the biggest cut with a slump in demand of over 7 percent following an eight-week lockdown to limit the spread of the disease.

"The absolute decline in global energy demand is without precedent, and relative declines of this order are without precedent for the last 70 years," the Paris-based agency said.

Among the stunning figures in the IEA's forecast, global oil demand could fall by 9 percent this year, rolling back consumption to levels of 2012.

Worldwide demand for electricity is expected to shrink by nearly 5 percent, driving coal demand down by 8 percent and cutting coal-fired power by over 10 percent.

The magnitude of the declines will draw attention to questions of not only when but how economies recover.

One of the wild cards in the forecast is what China will do to resume growth as the rest of the world struggles to restore demand in staggered time frames and recovery rates.

China's gross domestic product tumbled by a record 6.8 percent in the first quarter, according to official statistics.

The International Monetary Fund has forecast a partial improvement this year with 1.2-percent growth, rising sharply with expansion reaching 9.2-percent in 2021.

But if China's recovery relies on a big rebound in coal-fired power, the damage in terms of climate change could cancel out much of the emissions reduction expected this year.

"The recovery of coal demand for industry and electricity generation in China limits the global decline in coal demand," the IEA outlook said.

Global coal use could recede only half as much as forecast, "if China and other large consumers ... recover more quickly," the IEA said.

The report classifies China as "a coal-based economy." Despite gains in renewable sources and lower-carbon natural gas, the country still relies on coal for 57.7 percent of its primary energy, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

Roughly two-thirds of China's electricity is generated from coal, raising the odds that when the economy bounces back, so will coal consumption and carbon emissions.

"As after previous crises ... the rebound in emissions may be larger than the decline, unless the wave of investment to restart the economy is dedicated to cleaner and more resilient energy infrastructure," the IEA warned.

Recovery so far has been gradual, judging by China's recent data on power production.

Generation in the first half of April rose just 1.2 percent from a year earlier after consumption fell 6.5 percent in the first quarter, the China Electricity Council and state media said.

But the IEA also noted the close links between industrial output and electricity use in China, a factor that points toward future growth of greenhouse gas emissions.

Industry accounted for over 60 percent of power consumption in China last year compared with 20 percent in the United States, it said.

A recovery for industry may inescapably drive a rebound of carbon emissions. But environmental advocates argue that the consequences will increasingly be a matter of choice as the cost of renewables comes down.

Environmental groups have argued for years that falling costs for solar and wind generation would undercut coal and eventually force investors to abandon coal-fired plants, turning them into "stranded assets."

According to a recent report by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, an independent financial think tank, the tipping point of price competition has already passed.

The report estimated that 71 percent of China's coal-fired generating capacity will cost more to run than building and operating renewable projects.

Yet, China appears to be pressing ahead with new coal-fired projects, responding to industry arguments that the country could face a supply squeeze in the next two to three years.

SOURCE

Earth records 600 millionth consecutive cooler-than-average month

The Earth just had its 600 millionth straight cooler-than-average month thanks to naturally-driven cooling.

An historical reconstruction of the Earth’s temperature by Northwestern University Adjunct Professor Dr. Christopher Scotese provides an illuminating and surprising comparison of today’s temperatures to that of the past. And it’s not what you think.

According to Dr. Scotese the Earth “has alternated between a frigid ?Ice House’, like today's world, and a steaming ?Hot House’, like the world of the dinosaurs.”

That’s correct, he described today’s temperatures as frigid. It turns out that most of Earth’s history since the explosion of life in the Cambrian Period nearly 600 million years ago was hotter than our climate today — a lot hotter.

For fully two-thirds of that time the Earth experienced temperatures that were much warmer than today. During these periods of “Hot House” conditions there was no ice at either pole. We “only” entered our current “Ice House” conditions about 50 million years ago. Using the average temperature of the Earth for the last 600 million years, we have experienced 50 million consecutive years of below average temperature.

While factually correct and, for a climate geek and geologist like myself, quite interesting, this information has nothing to do with the current climate debate.

And neither does a recent widely publicized report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) that the planet had its 420th consecutive month with above-average temperature. Bear in mind that the “average temperature” they were referring to was that of the 20thcentury. Well, duh.

Of course recent temperatures would be higher than the 20th century average. That is because the Earth’s temperature has been increasing for more than 300 years. Had NOAA used a 300-year average they could have added even more months of above-average temperatures because the average would have been even lower.

The blessed rise of temperature that we are experiencing is lifting us out of the death-dealing cold of the horrific Little Ice Age, when half the population of Iceland perished. The beginning of this warming started in the late 1600s, long before man could have had any effect on temperature. In fact, the rate of warming over the first 40 years of the trend, extending into the early 1700s, was several times the rate of the 20th century warming and was 100 percent naturally driven.

At least the first 150 years of our current warming were also entirely naturally-driven and contributed about the same amount of warming as the last 150 or so years during which we have been adding CO2 to the atmosphere.

The question is not whether the planet is warming. It is, and demonstrably so. We know this from both direct measurement and thousands of historical records.

The real question is did the natural forces that were driving the temperature increase in the 17thcentury, or for that matter over the last hundreds of millions of years, suddenly stop for some reason in the 20th century? Of course not, but that is what the Ayatollahs of Alarmism want you to believe.

So why the media firestorm and portrayal of the latest data as dangerous? H. L. Mencken warned us of imaginary “hobgoblins of alarm” that governments needed to create to frighten the population into accepting onerous regulations such as the Paris Climate Accords. Climate change today is one of those hobgoblins of alarm used to convince people that our current warming is “unusual and unprecedented” when it is neither.

Six hundred million months of below average temperature or 420 months of above average temperature? Both are true, depending on what metric you choose to use, but the media are publicizing what is designed to best promote fear of catastrophic climate alarm. We have seen in the recent COVID-19 pandemic that fear is one of the most potent motivators of public action. Those promoting the economically destructive green policies will be using this and any other event deemed out of the ordinary to further the climate of fear that they need for public acceptance of these harmful policies.

SOURCE

Net-Zero Greenhouse-Gas Emissions, and Extinction Capitalism

By RUPERT DARWALL

To climate-shame corporations is to hobble economic dynamism.
Shutting down the whole global economy is the only way of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Centigrade, Yvo de Boer, the former United Nations climate chief, warned in the runup to the 2015 Paris climate conference. Thanks to COVID-19 we now have an inkling what that looks like. The conference went further and chose to write into the Paris agreement an aspiration to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C. The 1.5°C backstory reveals much about the quality of what passes for science and gets enshrined in U.N. climate treaties — and is directly relevant to American corporations that now find themselves on the front line of the climate wars.

Nine weeks before the Copenhagen climate conference, the one where Barack Obama was going to slow the rise of the oceans, President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives held the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting. “We are trying to send our message to let the world know what is happening and what will happen to the Maldives if climate change isn’t checked,” Nasheed told reporters after resurfacing. It was part of a campaign by the Alliance of Small Island States claiming that climate change magnified the risk that their islands would drown.

The sinking-islands trope has been endlessly recycled by the U.N. for decades. In 1989, a U.N. official stated that entire nations could disappear by 2000 if global warming was not reversed. Like so many others, that prediction of climate catastrophe came and went. The failed prediction didn’t prevent the current U.N. secretary-general, António Guterres, from declaring last year, “We must stop Tuvalu from sinking.” There was no science behind 1.5°C and the sinking-island hypothesis. Studies show, here and here, that the Maldives and Tuvalu have increased in size. As the 25-year-old Charles Darwin might have told the U.N., coral atolls are formed by the slow subsidence of the ocean bed.

Having incorporated 1.5°C into the sacred texts of the U.N. climate process, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was charged with coming up with a scientific justification for it. In 2018, the IPCC published its report on the 1.5°C limit. It debunked the sinking-islands scare, reporting that unconstrained atolls have kept pace with rising sea levels. The IPCC had a bigger problem than non-sinking islands. The IPCC’s existing 1.5°C carbon budget — the maximum amount of greenhouse gases to keep the rise in global temperature to 1.5°C — was on the verge of being used up. Like some end-of-the-world cult after the clock had passed midnight, it would find itself in a predicament that promised to be more than a little embarrassing.

Help was at hand. As skeptics had long been pointing out, IPCC lead author Myles Allen confirmed that climate model projections had been running too hot and that they had been forecasting too much warming since 2000. Together with some other handy adjustments, the IPCC managed to more than double the remaining 1.5°C budget. Although it could muster only medium confidence in its revised carbon budget, the IPCC had high confidence that net emissions had to fall to zero by 2050 and be cut by 45 percent by 2030. In this fashion, net zero by 2050 was carved in stone.

That timeline is now being used to bully American corporations into aligning their business strategies with the Paris agreement and force them to commit to eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. In fact, the text of the Paris agreement speaks of achieving a balance between anthropogenic sources and removals “in the second half of this century.” The net-zero target has no standing in American law or regulation. Net zero is not about a few tweaks here and there. It necessitates a top-down coercive revolution the likes of which have never been seen in any democracy. This is spelt out in the IPCC’s 1.5°C report, which might as well serve as a blueprint for the extinction of capitalism.

The IPCC makes no bones about viewing net zero, it says, as providing the opportunity for ‘intentional societal transformation.’ Limiting the rise to rise in global temperature to no more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels — an ill-defined baseline chosen by the U.N. because the Industrial Revolution is our civilization’s original sin — requires ‘transformative systemic change’ and ‘very ambitious, internationally cooperative policy environments that transform both supply and demand.’

Thanks to COVID-19, we have a foretaste of what the IPCC intends. It envisages, for example, the industrial sector cutting its emissions by between 67 and 91 percent by 2050, implying a contraction in industrial output so dramatic as to make the 1930s Great Depression look like a walk in the park, a possibility the IPCC choses to ignore. The IPCC places its bets on a massive transition to wind and solar, but no amount of wishful thinking can overcome the inherent physics of their low energy density and their intermittency, which explains why countries with the highest proportion of wind and solar on their grids also have the highest energy costs in the world. One option the IPCC does not favor — a wholesale transition to nuclear power — seems unachievable anyway on the timetable it has in mind. Nuclear power stations typically take well over five years to build, and not many are planned for now. Germany is switching out of nuclear power, the Japanese are, to quote the New York Times “racing to build new coal-burning . . . plants” and the Chinese are wary of overdoing their nuclear construction because of the risk of accident.

Rather than address the possibility of a sustained slump in economic activity the IPCC’s approach is to say the benefits of holding the line at 1.5°C are — surprise, surprise! — greater than at 2 degrees Centigrade while studiously ignoring the extra costs of the more ambitious target. A few numbers show why. A carbon tax sufficiently high to drive emissions to net zero would range up to $6,050 per metric ton, over 60 times the hypothetical climate benefits estimated by the Obama administration, indicating that the climate benefits of net zero are less than 2 percent of its cost. In a rational world, discussion of net zero would end at this point.

You don’t have to be a Milton Friedman to fathom the incompatibility with free markets and capitalist growth of what the IPCC terms “enhanced institutional capabilities” and “stringent policy interventions.” So it’s easy to understand why the governments of the world have no intention of achieving net zero by 2050. As Todd Stern, one of the principal architects of the Paris agreement, remarked last November, “there is a lack of political will in virtually every country, compared to what there needs to be.”

Led by Britain, several European countries have legislated net-zero targets without having a clue how they might meet them or their economic impact. Indeed, Britain can claim to be the world’s leading climate hypocrite. Having offshored its manufacturing base to China and the European Union, it is the G-7’s largest per capita net importer of carbon dioxide emissions. Before adopting its net zero target, the Committee on Climate Change observed that Britain lacked a credible plan for decarbonizing the way people heat their homes and that government policy was insufficient to meet even existing targets.

If governments — the legal parties to the Paris Agreement — have no collective intention to achieve net zero, why should America’s corporations? There is no environmental, economic, or ethical good when a corporation cuts its carbon dioxide emissions to meet the net-zero target when the rest of the world doesn’t, unless, that is, you’re one of the select few who believes that self-impoverishment is inherently virtuous. Yet corporations are increasingly being held to ransom by billionaire climate activists like Mike Bloomberg and BlackRock’s Larry Fink with the demand that they commit to net zero, make their shareholders and stakeholders poorer, and give a leg up to their competitors in the rest of the world, especially in the Far East.

The arrogation of the rule-making prerogatives of a democratic state by a handful of climate activists raises profound questions on the demarcation between the rightful domains of politics and of business. It also raises profound questions about the future of capitalism. “Capitalism pays the people that strive to bring it down,” Joseph Schumpeter, the greatest economist of capitalism, observed in the 1940s. They won’t succeed, but for the efforts of soft anti-capitalists within the capitalist system.

The moral case for capitalism rests on its prodigious ability to raise living standards and transform the material conditions of mankind for the better. To climate-shame corporations without the sanction of law or regulation will extinguish the economic dynamism that justifies capitalism. Remove its capacity to do so, and we will have entered a post-capitalist era. This is how capitalism ends.

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

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

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26 May, 2020

Prioritizing climate over pandemics

We need a full accounting of what was spent preparing for the ‘climate crisis’ versus COVID

Paul Driessen

As of May 20, the United States had more than 1.5 million confirmed cases of Wuhan Coronavirus. US deaths related or attributed to the virus topped 92,000 (though many were really due to old age and related co-morbidities). Because of COVID, much of the US economy has been shut down since late March. More than 36 million American workers have now filed for unemployment insurance, while tens of millions more have been furloughed or seen their hours and/or salaries reduced severely.

With infections, cases and deaths declining, lockdowns and stay-home orders are finally easing, though only slightly and slowly in many areas. Millions of businesses face bankruptcy or simple disappearance, and rebuilding the recently vibrant US economy will likely take years. Lockdown-related deaths from medical screenings and treatments foregone, suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, other diseases of despair, and other causes will likely kill many tens of thousands of Americans in the coming years.

The Eurozone is likewise in dire straits, as are countless other countries around the world. Impoverished Africa is being hit by the Coronavirus and starvation amid one of the worst locust plagues in its history.

Perhaps the most vital and fundamental role of government, at every level, is to protect its citizenry from criminals, foreign invasions, natural disasters and other threats – including pandemics that have ravaged mankind repeatedly throughout history. This raises two enormously important questions.

One, aside from the sudden appearance of the Wuhan COVID-19 pandemic – and bungling and duplicity by Chinese and World Health Organization (WHO) officials – why was the US response so slow?

Wall Street Journal and other articles suggest that “missteps” nearly everywhere helped magnify problems. Multiple federal government reports called attention to potential threats and inadequacies during future pandemics, but only modest steps were ever taken to prepare for them.

For example, a Strategic National Stockpile was established in 1999 for pharmaceuticals needed in a terrorist attack, natural disaster or pandemic, but Congress never allocated ongoing funding for pandemic preparations. The Bush, Obama and Trump administrations focused more on preparing for chemical, biological and other terrorist attacks than on pandemics. Reliance on foreign production (mostly Chinese) for N95 masks (30%) and surgical masks (90%) was highlighted but not addressed; expanding Made in America capacity was mostly just a slogan.

Left with large quantities of personal protective equipment (PPE), respirators and other items after the Swine Flu epidemic that ended in 2009, most manufacturers that had ramped up production during the epidemic refused to maintain high output capacity. Hospitals with similar experiences slashed inventories of masks, respirators and other supplies, to reduce costs; their inventory tracking software and programs focused on economic efficiency, rather than availability and resiliency during pandemics.

One healthcare system that did stock up on masks failed to replace them after their expiration date, and brittle elastic bands made them unusable. After Maryland (and probably other states) acquired abundant Coronavirus test kits, regulatory red tape and inefficiencies prevented their use for over a week.

Little has been reported about state or local studies, plans, actions or stockpiles for pandemics. However, in recent years New York City sold off its ventilator stockpiles to avoid spending more money on storage and maintenance. Perhaps logical at the time, NYC’s decision led to shortages and chaos amid Corona.

Far more lethal was NY Governor Cuomo’s decision to compel nursing homes with acutely vulnerable patients to admit recovering (and likely still contagious) COVID patients – even though the Javits Center and USS Comfort had some 2,000 empty beds. Other states did likewise, and far too many imposed blanket policies for all hospitals and clinics statewide, based on acute problems in a few urban centers.

Post-pandemic analyses, actions and preparations must ensure these “mistakes” never happen again.

Two, what were all these government entities focusing on – if not recurrent pandemics? Put another way: How much money, attention, task force time and policymaking was devoted during the past several decades to preparing for pandemics, drug and PPE needs, and safe nursing homes – versus:

How much was devoted to “dangerous manmade climate change” ... closing down fossil fuel production, pipelines and use ... mandating and subsidizing wind, solar and biofuel operations ... and adapting bridges and other infrastructure to rising seas and other alleged manmade climate crisis disasters?

Cumulative climate and renewable energy spending at federal, state and local levels over the past several decades was certainly in the hundreds of billions of dollars over this period, if not trillions. Government time devoted to climate change and renewable energy certainly totaled many millions of hours.

It is unclear whether anyone has any idea how much money, time and resources were devoted to climate research, modeling, preparation, mitigation, “educations,” conferences and just plain fear-mongering.

It’s equally uncertain whether any federal or state study examined how much was devoted to preparing for pandemics. But it was very likely a tiny fraction of the climate change/renewable energy total.

What is clear is that hardworking American taxpayers absolutely deserve and must get a full accounting of how much money and personnel time were devoted to both of these threats.

They deserve to know how much was devoted to protecting families and communities from pandemics like the Wuhan Coronavirus and ensuing economic collapse (and perhaps to other bona fide real-world disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts) – versus crises that exist primarily in unverified computer models and endless assertions that every temperature rise, drought, species loss and extreme weather event was unprecedented and due to fossil fuel use – despite a near total absence of real-world evidence to support any of those claims.

The Department of Defense alone spent billions on climate initiatives and renewable fuels during the Obama era. How much did it spend preparing for pandemics on aircraft carriers and during basic training? How many billions did federal, state and local healthcare agencies spend on climate change versus past and future pandemics? How much money and attention did those healthcare agencies devote to our excessive dependence on China for masks, pharmaceutical components, metals, critical materials and solar panels?

The United States and individual states established countless agencies, task forces, and special legislative and regulatory panels devoted to climate change. How many did they establish for pandemics? In the seven years following the 2009 Swine Flu Epidemic, how much money and attention did the Obama Administration devote to pandemic prevention and mitigation? How about all those House and Senate committees and staffers? All those state agencies, state legislatures, counties and city councils?

In just a few months, the Wuhan Coronavirus locked us in our homes, shuttered our businesses, cost the United States trillions of dollars in lost economic output, and resulted in hundreds of billions in lost tax revenues. Even if we attribute every flood, drought, hurricane, tornado and dead polar bear to manmade climate change, the cumulative impact of our fossil fuel use won’t come anywhere near that.

Does Congress have the stomach for digging into this? for appointing a “blue ribbon task force” to do so? Will any editors and “investigative journalists” at the Washington Post or New York Times take up the challenge? Will any states, counties or cities? Will President Trump appoint a special commission?

They don’t have to address the issue of real-world crises versus those that exist only in climate models and environmentalist press releases. They just need to tally up expenditures on the pandemic and climate sides of the ledger. That would ensure a factual, data-driven analysis, and minimize the politics.

Indeed, Europeans, Canadians, Australians and people everywhere deserve to know how national, state and local governments allocated and spent tax revenues on climate versus disease preparation and relief.

There are good reasons why only 2% of Americans believe “climate change” (manmade, dangerous, natural or otherwise) is the most important problem facing the United States. Federal, state and local accountings are long overdue – as are a reordering of government priorities. Will we ever get them?

Via email

British wind farms paid record £.9.3m to switch off their turbines on Friday

The so-called 'constraint payments' have been declared a "national embarrassment" and a power management "disgrace" by campaigners

More than 80 plants across England and Scotland were compensated for the lack of demand

Wind farms in Britain were paid a record £.9.3m to switch off their turbines on Friday, The Telegraph can disclose.

More than 80 plants across England and Scotland were handed the so-called 'constraint payments', when supply outstrips demand, by National Grid, as thousands of buildings lying empty following the coronavirus lockdown contributed to a nosedive in demand for energy.

In what has been declared a "national embarrassment" and a power management "disgrace" by campaigners, consumers will ultimately foot the bill of £6.9m to 66 Scottish plants and £1.9m to 14 offshore plants in England.

SOURCE

Small Algae Bloom In Antarctica Freaks Out Alarmist Media

Life is spawning in a few, tiny locations in Antarctica that recently did not sustain life.

As small amounts of surface ice turn to slush in a few locations, small amounts of algae have sprung to life in the icy slush.

The cumulative total of algae is less than a square mile. Incredibly (or maybe not), alarmists and their media stooges are declaring a crisis.

CNN’s scaremongering headline announces, “Snow is turning green in Antarctica — and climate change will make it worse.”

IFL Science hypes the horror with a headline, “The Climate Crisis Is Turning Antarctic Snow Green.” Many other prominent media outlets published articles with similarly alarmist titles.

A team of British researchers published a study in Nature Communication, indicating that during the Antarctic summer, temporary algae blooms cover a combined 1.9 square kilometers (0.73 square miles) on the Antarctic peninsula.

Two-thirds of the algae formed on small low-altitude islands. Most formed in the immediate vicinity and thriving on the droppings of penguin colonies flourishing on the Antarctic peninsula.

To put the size of the algae blooms in perspective, Antarctica is 14,200,000 square kilometers in size, so the seasonal blooms affect approximately 0.00001% of the continent.

Although sometimes dormant or covered with snow, algae, lichen, and moss have always been present in these areas, particularly where large groups of penguins congregate and huddle, fertilized by the nutrients of their excrement.

Indeed, the study shows most or all of the blooms were located either within 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) of a penguin colony, or where other birds nest or where seals congregate onshore.

The media uniformly claim that a small bit of life forming from the nutrients in penguin excrement in very small portions of Antarctica is a climate crisis.

But is that truly the case?

The fake new media claim this less-than-one-square-mile of temporary algae absorb light and heat, unlike white snow, and therefore will cause substantial additional global warming.

IFL Science reports, “White snow reflects around 80 percent of the Sun’s radiation, while green snow only reflects about 45 percent.” But this only tells part of the story.

The algae act as carbon dioxide sinks, meaning they take more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere than they release.

As the ISL Science article admits, “these blooms, which act as a carbon sink, remove 479 tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide per year—equivalent to the emission of 486 planes traveling between New York and London.”

Well, if you believe in a climate crisis, isn’t that good news?

The algae blooms will always be constrained by Antarctica’s long, extremely cold winters. Winter temperatures average ?10°C on the Antarctic coast to ?60°C at the highest parts of the interior.

Even if the algae expand modestly in the short summer months, the algae will mitigate global warming by taking more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

So how and why is a tiny bit of algae that takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere a “crisis,” ISL Science? And why will this make climate change worse, CNN?

It doesn’t really matter to them, so long as they can add another fictitious “crisis” to The Climate Delusion.

SOURCE

Global Warming: Still Junk Science After All These Years

Climate alarmists insist that an increase of one degree in the average global temperatures is a signal that the end of civilization is near.

Every day a new revelation: more fires in California, snow in Antarctica is turning green, salmon are dying in Alaska – all attributed to rising temperatures.

The first question an inquiring mind would ask is, does the Earth maintain the same average temperature over millennia and how does it accomplish that task?

The answer is that it doesn’t.

Civilization began because of global warming.

About 6,000 years ago, according to experts, hunter-gatherers were driven from the higher lands because rising temperatures brought drought, loss of plants and animals, and famine.

They moved to river valleys in three or four places around the globe, most notably the Nile River.

There they had water and the water also provided food. But planting by hand did not suffice.

Someone devised the plow.

It was the “trigger” that led to a series of technological inventions and discoveries and brought about civilization, according to the book Connections, by James Burke, which also became a highly popular TV series in 1978.

Plowed fields meant surplus crops, and planning for the harvest and storage included preparing for the annual Nile floods, which brought about math, writing and cloth clothing, and a series of events subsequently that Burke linked to the 1965 electrical shutdown in Northeast America.

All because the Earth’s temperature had increased 6,000 years ago.

Has the global temperature remained the same every year since then? Climate alarmists admit it has not but say it has risen about one degree since 1850, which they say is way too fast.

It will mean crops can’t be grown in some places where they now flourish.

But won’t they grow in places where it has been too cold?

Those who predict the end of civilization by the very mechanism that brought about civilization still have a lot of explaining to do if they expect people to give up their freedom and wealth to a global government that promises to control the climate that experts admit they don’t fully understand.

SOURCE

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

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

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25 May, 2020

Highly Touted Alarmist Hurricane ‘Study’ Sets New Low for Misleading Deception

The media are breathlessly touting a cheap new “study” falsely asserting climate change is causing an increase in strong hurricanes. In reality, the study relies on deception, unethical data manipulation, and aggressive misrepresentation of quite normal short-term trends to support its false claim.

The study, published by government-employed and government-funded researchers whose jobs and income depend on perpetuation of the alarmist Climate Delusion, has been reported – without any critical examination – by the New York Times, Washington Post, The Weather Channel, and others. The Environmental Defense Fund is even using the new study to raise money for itself.

The headline for the Washington Post article tells us what the alarmists are peddling in this new study: “The strongest, most dangerous hurricanes are now far more likely because of climate change, study shows.” The truth, as shown by objective scientific facts, is quite different.

The study’s authors report that an examination of tropical storms that formed between 1979 and 2017 indicates that after the first half of the 39-year time period, the chance of a given tropical storm growing to become a major hurricane (category 3 or higher) rose by 8 percent in each of the latter two decades.

As an initial matter, the authors are dubiously claiming that merely 20 years of a minor variation in hurricane numbers is sufficient to prove a substantial long-term trend and a definitive link to climate change as the causal factor. This is a preposterous claim to make over such a short period. For example, objective data – as shown in the graph below (see climatlas.com/tropical/global_running_ace.png) – show that over a 25-year period from 1992 through 2014, the frequency of hurricanes declined significantly and the frequency of major hurricanes did not increase at all. This was also during a period of global warming. Why is that 25-year period irrelevant when it is so similar in time and length to the authors’ cherry-picked 29-year period? The fact is, there will always be natural and largely random variation in the frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, etc., within periods of just a few decades.

Second, the data show essentially no change in the frequency of major hurricanes since the early 1990s. Any claim of more frequent recent hurricanes requires cherry-picking the abnormally quiet 1980s as the baseline for comparison rather than the past 30 years, during which there has been no trend. The fact that the 1980s were quieter than the 1990s is largely r relevant to the assertion that global warming is currently causing an increase in strong hurricanes. To the contrary, the lack of any increase during the past 30 years is much more relevant.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the authors and their media sock-puppets bury the fact that the authors are reporting on the percentage of tropical storms that become major hurricanes rather than the raw number of major hurricanes. Objective data – as shown in the chart below (see climatlas.com/tropical/frequency_12months.png), show that the number of tropical storms has been declining throughout the time period of the authors’ study.

So, the authors and the media can technically claim that the percentage of tropical storms that become major hurricanes is growing, even while there is no increase in the overall number major hurricanes. The percentage of tropical storms that become major hurricanes is largely irrelevant if the overall number of major hurricanes stays the same. If anything, the new study simply illustrates that fewer tropical storms are forming, which would largely be seen as a beneficial climate development.

Fourth and finally, media outlets like the Washington Post even misrepresent the misleading and cherry-picked conclusions of the authors’ study. As noted, the authors note a very minor increase in the percentage of tropical storms that become hurricanes, even while the overall frequency of major hurricanes has not increased during the past 30 years. Compare that to the Washington Post’s headline assertion that “The strongest, most dangerous hurricanes are now far more likely.” Strong hurricanes are not more likely at all, let alone “far” more likely.

The new study, and its accompanying media coverage, represent a perfect example of the horse-dung sensationalism that climate alarmists tell us is “settled science.” The only settled science is that alarmists will go to incredible lengths to manipulate and misrepresent objective scientific facts for the cause of promoting their alarmist Climate Delusion.

SOURCE

Turbine output drops steadily -- steeply after ten years: US research

The performance of newer US wind turbines degrades at a slower rate than that of older projects, with a relatively abrupt decline in output after ten years of operation coinciding with the withdrawal of federal support, according to a new study.

Output from a typical US wind farm shrinks by about 13% over 17 years, with most of this decline taking place after the project turns ten years old, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) found.

On average, output decreased by only 0.17% per year in the first ten years of operation, the researchers found.

Increased downtime for maintenance, the erosion of blade edges, and increased friction within rotating components all contributed to declines in output, they explained.

The research suggested project operators are incentivised to maintain turbines during the first decade by the tax credit support system. The fall in performance is noticed more acutely after a project is no longer receiving the subsidy.

As the production tax credit (PTC) is paid in line with a turbine’s output, operators maximise the benefit of the support before it is phased out by keeping their turbines in better condition to maintain output levels, the researchers explained.

The acceleration of declining performance after ten years — observed in the data from 917 wind farms across the United States — was not found in prior studies focusing on European wind fleets, in which output declined consistently over time, they added.

This rate of decline is apparently unique to US sites further supporting the hypothesis.

Elsewhere, the researchers found a variety of project specifics afford gentler rates of decline.

They suggested a flatter terrain around projects means turbines encounter less wind turbulence and so reducing stresses put on them.

However, data on turbulence is not systematically available, the researchers noted.

Meanwhile, turbines with lower specific power ratings — which have longer blades relative to their generator size and are increasingly common — also fared better.

The researchers said this might be because these turbines are capable of harvesting a greater portion of the available wind energy, which partially offsets the decreasing aerodynamic efficiency experienced by all turbines.

Direct-drive turbines were also found to perform better than geared turbines, as gearboxes may be more subject to mechanical failure, leading to higher levels of output degradation. Although the data set for this was small.

The Berkeley Lab’s study was based on data from 917 wind farms across the US and was included in the peer-reviewed journal Joule.

SOURCE

Mexico pulls the plug on “renewables”

As Mexico is poised to plunge into its worst recession in recent-memory the leftist president is making cuts and pulling the plug on subsidy dependent intermittent power from wind and solar that has been driving up the cost of electricity for its financially challenged population.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the 2018 election by a landslide. His approach to government spending — even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout — might best be compared to that of conservative icons Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Recognizing that industrial wind and solar electricity bring little to no value to electrical grids, Mexico is moving to avoid the higher electrical prices. Of which have been experienced by Germany, Denmark, Great Britain, South Australia, California, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and other governments that have heavily subsidized their supply of intermittent electricity.

The only things ‘inevitable’ about the ‘transition’ to wind and solar are rocketing electricity prices and unstable power grids. As to the latter, the Mexican government has taken a stand that has sent renewable energy rent seekers into a tailspin.

The Mexican government’s concept, not without merit, is that if you are looking for a reliable electricity supply, then it doesn’t make much sense to rely on the ‘unreliables’. Mexico needs reliable and affordable power, more than ever.

Mexico’s Centro Nacional de Control de Energia (Cenace), which oversees the electrical system, indefinitely suspended critical tests for new intermittent electricity projects as the nation grapples with the spread of the coronavirus.

The stage is now set for yet another legal dispute between Mexico’s government and the intermittent electricity sector. The Mexican government is acting to freeze project connections in a supposed bid to underpin system stability in the COVID-19 era.

While the wind and solar industries seem eager to deliver their peculiar brand of a ‘healthy environment’ for Mexicans, their government appears more inclined to ensure the delivery of affordable electricity as and when Mexicans need it.

You could be a South Australian business owner trying to keep your head above water. How about a farmer’s wife in Ontario trying to keep her head on the pillow and sleep despite incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound. Whether you’re any of these or an Eagle just trying to keep its head, you’ve probably formed a pretty strong opinion about the ‘merits’ of subsidized wind electricity.

Oaxaca is a state in southern Mexico that is home to almost two-thirds of Mexico’s wind-power capacity, including the Tehuantepec turbines. Many people in towns with wind parks seem to still favor them, but over time, people have seen less benefits than originally promised. Job opportunities, for example, have fallen short of expectations, locals say. The touted improvements to roads or schools have also not materialized, overall.

Trillions have been spent on industrial wind turbines and solar panels that do not deliver as advertised. The worldwide ecological destruction from the mining of precious minerals leave lands uninhabitable and worthless for plants and trees. Renewable taxpayer handouts have stripped landscapes. Left in the wake of intermittent electricity farms and subsidized biomass-fueled power plants is cynical at best. They are mercenary in their ability to destroy nature’s ability to alleviate the coronavirus via cleaner air.

During this global pandemic, dependence on China for rare earth minerals, which solar panels and wind turbines are useless without, makes clean energy a costly proposition.

The environmental destruction that wind turbines create is extraordinary – “building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of plastic.”

Wind and solar also bring little to no value to electrical grids. When the sun does not shine, and the wind does not blow at set speeds it destroys a grid spinning reserve mode, peaking mode, and backup mode. Similarly, in Great Britain Prime Minister Boris Johnson catches coronavirus, and his country struggles with an unstable grid over widespread adoption of renewables for electricity. In the age of COVID-19 there are life and death matters if electricity is hampered for any length of time.

Renewables then make no sense when the entire world is sick. Only using Warren Buffet’s logic does chaotic wind power bring financial wealth when Mr. Buffett said: “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That is the only reasons to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

What makes the entire notion of relying on chaotically intermittent renewables dangerous is a seminal work by energy expert Robert Bryce titled, “Question of Power: Electricity and Wealth of Nations,” which highlights this startling fact:

“Roughly 3.3 billion people – about 45 percent of all the people on the planet – live in places where per-capita electricity consumption is less than 1,000 kilowatt-hours per year, or less than the amount used by a refrigerator.”

Uncertainty is the one constant the coronavirus has shown. Long-term planning is no longer in vogue – now it is understanding cratering oil prices and a possible Great Depression. If the World does not get back to work soon, it’s trillion-dollar deficits as the new norm, and prosperity will be taking a backseat to police-state-like shut-ins.

More than 6,000 products come from the derivatives of crude oil, including every part in solar panels and wind turbines. Additionally, renewables cannot produce the critical medical equipment like ultrasound systems, ventilators, CT systems, and X-ray, medicines, masks, gloves, soap and hand sanitizers for hospitals, and protective gear for doctors and nurses. All those products begin from crude oil, or as the Wall Street Journal states – “Big Oil to the Coronavirus Rescue.”

More damning for renewables than endless subsidies or the billions of people needing reliable electricity, is the fact that without the products from petroleum derivatives the coronavirus would rage unchecked.

SOURCE

Coldest day in a CENTURY: Parts of Australia's east coast shiver through the briskest May day in 98 years

Global cooling!

Brisbane has endured its coldest May day in a century with the mercury hitting 15C at about 1pm on Friday - and the chilly snap is here to stay.

Including wind chill the apparent temperature was even colder - dropping to 10C at 3pm, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.

The cold snap wasn't just confined to the north with New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia also experiencing an icy weekend courtesy of cold fronts sweeping over the states.

Australians have been warned to brace for continuing cold weather as the week progresses and we head into winter, with most major cities forecast with maximums of 20C or lower on Sunday.

The cold fronts also mean the wet weather will continue with large areas of the country forecast to experience overcast conditions and showers.

In New South Wales the cold fronts brought wind, rain and even snow in some places such as the Blue Mountains and Bathurst.

On Saturday in Sydney, a severe weather warning was issued as massive waves battered many of the city's surfing beaches, including Bondi.

A layer of cold dry air, rain and thick cloud cover is causing the unseasonal weather. 'That acts kind of like an evaporative air conditioner,' meteorologist Lauren Pattie said on Friday.

Ms Pattie also said the cool weather is expected to persist into next week, with frost possible in some areas from Sunday.

Her Bureau colleague, meteorologist Rosa Hoff agreed, saying the cold weather would continue into Sunday.

Brisbane is forecast to drop to just 9C overnight, before warming up to a top of 21C by midday, she said. [It was 27 degrees at 1:30pm Sunday]

The last time Brisbane hit a top of 15C like on Saturday was in 1922 - with other regional centres also breaking decades-long records.

Longreach and Charleville in the state's mid-west had their lowest May maximum temperatures in 50 years at 14.6C and 13.2C respectively.

SOURCE

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

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

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24 May, 2020

Another Crack in the Climate Censorship Wall

In 'Reading Seawater," a review essay in the December 2019 issue of the science journal Inference, Lawrence University geosciences professor Marcia Bjornerud wrote that changes in ocean chemistry from carbon dioxide emissions damage shell health and may be leading to mass extinctions. Professor Bjornerud also argued that as deep oceans remove CO2 from the surface today, they "regulate" the climate.

Ecologist Patrick Moore, the chair of the CO2 Coalition, submitted a footnoted response to Inference disputing Professor Bjornerud's conclusions. In another sign of a reopening of debate in mainstream journals on claims of CO2-driven climate catastrophe, Inference printed the response in its May 2020 issue. This spring, the Chronicle of Philanthropy also printed an exchange on such claims. However, daily news sources such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, and CNN continue to refuse to print critiques of their climate narrative.

Dr. Moore's response, below, is followed by the relevant excerpts from the Bjornerud article. The CO2 Coalition will shortly be publishing a more detailed White Paper on this topic, Ocean Health: Is there an 'Acidification' problem? This summary of decades of research on CO2 and ocean health was prepared by biologist Jim Steele, long-term director of San Francisco State University's Sierra Nevada research campus.

Here is Dr. Moore's letter to Inference, published May 4, 2020:

To the editors:

Marcia Bjornerud has written a tour de force on the history and chemistry of the oceans. She ties many aspects of the world's seas together in a thoughtful narrative. There are, however, a few subjects on which I believe some comments are needed.

Bjornerud asserts that "leakage of carbon from the surface into the deeper ocean is, in fact, essential for climate regulation" and that "this process, known as the carbon pump, has partly offset anthropogenic increases in CO2 arising from the combustion of fossil fuels." No evidence can be found in the geological record going back 500 million years that the oceans have regulated the climate by absorbing CO2. During this period, there is little correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and global temperature. There is no support for a causal relationship.

During this 500-million-year history, atmospheric CO2 has declined from at least 6,000 parts per million (ppm) to 180 ppm. It reached its lowest level during the last major glaciation, 20,000 years ago. Far more CO2 has been sequestered into sediments as fossil fuels and carbonate rocks, such as limestone, than has been released back to the atmosphere. If this process had continued without anthropogenic emissions, CO2 would eventually have been reduced to lower than 150 ppm, leading to the eventual death of plant life. In this light, emissions can be seen as inadvertently rescuing life on earth from an early demise due to continued sequestration of an essential ingredient for all life.1

Even at the present 415 ppm, of which 135 ppm are due to industrial emissions, CO2 is still a limiting factor for the growth of most plants, including farm crops and trees. The anthropogenic increase in CO2 has raised crop production globally by 15 to 30 percent since 1900. Field experiments show that the expected increase in the next 100 years will have an even greater impact.2 It is standard procedure for commercial greenhouse growers to elevate CO2 to 800-1200 ppm, increasing growth and yield 20-50 percent.3

Bjornerud also asserts that "excess CO2 in seawater can eat away at the shells of the tiny calcitic organisms that help to sequester carbon in mineral form." She refers to the contention that higher CO2 levels in seawater will result in ocean acidification that harms aquatic species, especially those that produce calcium carbonate from CO2 and calcium to build protective shells. There is no evidence to support this hypothesis. Marine and freshwater calcifying species survive in a wide variety of pH values, including freshwater species of clams, mussels, and crayfish that calcify in the acidic range at pH 6 and lower.4

There is no conceivable atmospheric CO2 concentration that will result in offshore ocean pH becoming lower than an alkaline 7.5, let alone neutral 7.0, in the foreseeable future.5 Many of the calcifying species evolved when atmospheric CO2 was 4,000 ppm or higher. These include the microscopic phytoplankton coccolithophores, the zooplankton foraminifera, the molluscs, marine arthropods, and corals. It is primarily these species that have removed large amounts of CO2 from the oceans in order to armor themselves with shells. Human emissions of CO2 have inadvertently reversed the worrisome depletion of CO2, the primary food for all carbon-based life on earth.

In her final paragraph, Bjornerud states, "All the mass extinction events evident from the fossil record have been linked to variations in ocean chemistry," and that "the demise of the dinosaurs, for example, can be attributed in large part to oceans poisoned by the constituents of the carbon and sulfur-rich rocks vaporized by the Chicxulub impactor." The cause of the Permian extinction is widely contested and there is no consensus on any of the suggested explanations. The only extinction for which there is relatively good evidence is that of the dinosaurs at 65 million years BP, which was coincident with a large asteroid striking the Yucatan peninsula. It is surmised that the asteroid penetrated the earth's crust. This caused a vast amount of material to be thrown into the stratosphere, where it remained for years, blocking the sun, ending most photosynthesis, and cooling the earth until it cleared. It is difficult to imagine how a change in ocean chemistry could eliminate all the terrestrial dinosaurs in addition to the marine species. It is not difficult to imagine that both terrestrial and marine species would die out for lack of photosynthesis and the food it provides.

Bjornerud concludes, "For this reason, some of the changes in ocean chemistry observed during the Anthropocene ought to give pause. The magnitude of these changes is comparable to the Great Dyings of the geologic past." It should be noted that the proposal to adopt the term "Anthropocene" has not yet been approved by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which oversees the official geologic time chart.6 On the question of CO2 emissions, there is simply no possibility that current emissions could make the oceans toxic for marine life.

Joy Ward et al. "Carbon Starvation in Glacial Trees Recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits, Southern California," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102, no. 3 (2005), doi:10.1073/pnas.0408315102. ?
"What Rising CO2 Means for Global Food Security," CO2 Coalition, February 23, 2019. ?
T. J. Blom et al., "Carbon Dioxide in Greenhouses," Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, Government of Ontario, December 2002. Yunpu Zheng et al., "The Optimal CO2 Concentrations for the Growth of Three Perennial Grass Species," BMC Plant Biology 18, no. 27 (2018), doi:10.1186/s12870-018-1243-3. ?
Wendell Haag, North American Freshwater Mussels: Natural History, Ecology, and Conservation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), doi:10.1017/cbo9781139048217. ?
Caitlin Kennedy, "Ocean Acidification, Today and in the Future," National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, November 3, 2010. ?
Meera Subramanian, "Anthropocene Now: Influential Panel Votes to Recognize Earth's New Epoch," Nature, May 21, 2019, doi:10.1038/d41586-019-01641-5. ?

Here are the relevant excerpts from "Reading Seawater" by Professor Bjornerud:

On CO2-driven "acidity" and shell health: "Some of the carbon in organic matter is reoxidized-that is, decomposed and converted to CO2 again-which is one factor causing the oceans to become more acidic. Excess CO2 in seawater can eat away at the shells of the tiny calcitic organisms that help to sequester carbon in mineral form."

On changes in ocean chemistry and mass extinction:
"All the mass extinction events evident from the fossil record have been linked to variations in ocean chemistry, such as widespread acidification, anoxia, and associated perturbations to the carbon cycle.... For this reason, some of the changes in ocean chemistry observed during the Anthropocene ought to give pause. The magnitude of these changes are comparable to the Great Dyings of the geologic past."

On climate regulation:

"(L)eakage of carbon from the surface into the deeper ocean is, in fact, essential for climate regulation.... This process, known as the carbon pump, has partly offset anthropogenic increases in CO2 arising from the combustion of fossil fuels."

Email from tThe CO2 Coalition [info@co2coalition.org]

Calls to add ‘climate change’ to death certificates – New study demands ‘climate change’ be added as ‘pre-existing condition’

Professors in academia are touting a new study that is being used to call for “climate change” to be added as a cause of death on death certificates. “Climate change is a killer, but we don’t acknowledge it on death certificates,” co-author Dr Arnagretta Hunter, from The Australian National University (ANU) Medical School, said. The study was published May 20, 2020 in The Lancet Planetary Health.

Given the focus on COVID-19 infection rates and death tolls, it appears the climate activists in academia may want in on the scary and emotional death toll counts in order to draw attention back to their climate cause.

Hunter explained: “There is second component on a death certificate which allows for pre-existing conditions and other factors. “If you have an asthma attack and die during heavy smoke exposure from bushfires, the death certificate should include that information.”

“We can make a diagnosis of disease like coronavirus, but we are less literate in environmental determinants like hot weather or bushfire smoke.” … “Climate change is the single greatest health threat that we face globally even after we recover from coronavirus,” Dr Hunter said.

The study claims: “Death certification needs to be modernized, indirect causes should be reported, with all death certification prompting for external factors contributing to death, and these death data must be coupled with large-scale environmental datasets so that impact assessments can be done.”

Statistician Dr. Matt Briggs reacted this way: “They discovered a way to boost fear and keep control!” Briggs added, “Daily body counts blasted from the evil media, ‘Over 100 people died from climate change today, raising questions about … blah blah…'”

But the climate skeptic blog Tallbloke was not receptive to claims that “climate change” should be added to death certificates. “Climate alarmists yet again strain credulity to the limit, no doubt hoping to stir up guilt in the populace about energy use,” the blog noted.

A comment on the Tallbloke blog also ridiculed the study’s claims, noting: “Australia must have a lot of health threats if the ‘single greatest’ one accounts for 2% of the mortality rate.”

SOURCE

Destroying Virginia’s environment to save it

By Paul Driessen

Mere weeks after Governor Ralph Northam signed a partisan “Clean Economy Act” that had been rushed through the state legislature, Dominion Energy Virginia announced it would reach “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To do so, the utility company will raise family, business, hospital and school electricity bills by 3% every year for the next ten years – as they and state and local governments struggle to climb out of the financial holes created by the ongoing Coronavirus lockdown.

Just as bad, renewable energy mandates and commitments from the new law and Dominion’s “integrated resource plan” will have monumental adverse impacts on Virginia and world environmental values. In reality, Virginia’s new “clean” economy exists only in fantasy land.

The infamous Vietnam era quotation, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” may or may not have been uttered by an anonymous US Army major. It may have been misquoted, revised, apocryphal or just invented. But it quickly morphed into an anti-war mantra.

For Virginia, it could reemerge as “we had to destroy our environment in order to save it.” (The same will be true for any state that travels this make-believe “clean, green, renewable, sustainable” energy path.)

Supposedly to reduce emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide, Dominion Energy plans to expand the state’s offshore wind, onshore solar and battery storage capacity by some 24,000 megawatts of new (pseudo)renewable energy by 2035 and far more after that. It will retain just 9,700 MW of existing natural gas generation, and only through 2045, build no new gas-fired units, and retire 6,200 megawatts of coal-fired generation. The company also intends to keep its four existing nuclear units operating.

To “replace” some of its abundant, reliable, affordable fossil fuel electricity, Dominion intends to build at least 31,400 megawatts of expensive, unreliable solar capacity by 2045. Dominion estimates that would require a land area some 25% larger than Fairfax County, west of Washington, DC.

Fairfax County is 391 square miles (250,220 acres). It has more than 23,000 acres (36 square miles) of parks. That means Dominion Energy’s new solar facilities alone will blanket 490 square miles – 313,000 acres – of what are now beautiful croplands, scenic areas and habitats, teeming with wildlife.

That’s nearly half the land area of Rhode Island. It’s eight times the District of Columbia – and nearly 14 times more land than all Fairfax County parks combined. All will be blanketed by imported solar panels, plus more land for access roads and new transmission lines. Just for Dominion. Just for solar.

And those solar panels will actually generate electricity maybe 20-25% of the year, once you factor in the nighttime hours, cloudy days, and wintertime, early day and late afternoon to evening times when the sun is not shining brightly enough to generate more than a tiny smidgeon of electricity.

Dominion and other Virginia utility companies also plan to import and install over 400 monstrous 850-foot-tall offshore wind turbines – and tens of thousands of half-ton battery packs, to provide backup power for at least a few hours or days when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. They will supposedly prevent the economy from shutting don’t even more completely during each such outage than it has during the Corona lockdown.

Most of these solar panels, wind turbines and batteries – or their components (or the metals and minerals required to manufacture those components) – will likely come from China or from Chinese-owned operations in Africa, Asia and Latin America … under mining, air and water pollution, workplace safety, fair wage, child labor, mined land reclamation, manufacturing and other laws and standards that would get US companies unmasked, vilified, sued, fined and shut down in a heartbeat.

However, those laws and regulations do not apply to most of the companies and operations that will supply the supposedly “clean-tech” technologies that will soon blight Virginia landscapes.

Thus far, no one has produced even a rough estimate of how much concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, lithium, cobalt, silica, rare earth metals and countless other materials will be needed. All of them will require gigantic heavy equipment and prodigious amounts of fossil fuels to blast and haul away billions of tons of rocky overburden; extract, crush and process tens of millions of tons of ores, using explosives, acids, toxic chemicals and other means to refine the ores; smelt concentrates into metals; manufacture all the millions of tons of components; and haul, assemble and install the panels, turbines, batteries and transmission lines, setting them on top of tens of thousands of tons of cement and rebar.

No one has tallied up the oil, natural gas and coal fuel requirements for doing all this “Virginia Clean Economy” work. Nor the greenhouse gases and actual pollutants that will be emitted in the process.

Nothing about this is clean, green, renewable or sustainable. But neither Dominion Energy nor Virginia government officials have said anything about any of this, nor about which countries will host the mining and other activities, under what environmental and human rights standards.

When will we get a full accounting? Just because all of this will happen far beyond Virginia’s borders, does not mean that we can ignore the global environmental impacts. Or that we can ignore the health, safety and well-being of children and parents in those distant mines, processing plants and factories. This is the perfect time to observe the environmentalist creed: think globally, act locally. Will that be done?

Will Dominion and Virginia require that all these raw materials and wind, solar and battery components be responsibly sourced? Will it require independently verified certifications that none of them involve child labor, and all are produced in compliance with US and Virginia laws, regulations and ethical codes for workplace safety, fair wages, air and water pollution, wildlife preservation and mined lands reclamation? Will they tally up all the fossils consumed, and pollutants emitted, in the process?

Science journalist, businessman and parliamentarian Matt Ridley says wind turbines need some 200 times more raw materials per megawatt of power than modern combined-cycle gas turbines. It’s probably much the same for solar panels. Add in the backup batteries, and the environmental and human health impacts become absolutely mindboggling in their scale.

If you ignore all the land and wildlife impacts from installing the wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and transmission lines – you could perhaps call this “clean energy” and a “clean economy” within Virginia’s borders. But beyond those borders? A compelling case could be made that the world would be far better off if we just built modern combined-cycle gas turbines (or nuclear power plants) to generate electricity in the first place – and avoided all the monumental human and ecological impacts of pseudo-renewable energy.

And when it is time to select sites for these 490 square miles of industrial solar facilities, will Virginia, its county and local governments, its citizens, environmentalist groups and courts apply the same rigorous standards, laws and regulations – for scenic views, habitats, wildlife and threatened or endangered species – as they do for pipelines, drilling, fracking, coal and gas power plants, and other projects? Will they apply the same standards for 100-foot-tall transmission lines as they do for buried-out-of-sight pipelines?

Virginia’s Clean Economy Act will likely plunge every project and every jurisdiction into questions of race, poverty and environmental justice. Dominion Energy and other electric utilities will have to charge means-tested rates (even as rates climb 3% per year) and exempt low-income customers from some charges. They will have to submit construction plans to environmental justice councils – even as the utility companies and EJ councils ignore the rampant injustices inflicted on the children and parents who are slaving away in Chinese, African and Latin American mines, processing plants and factories.

Talk about breaking new ground. It will be interesting to see how Governor Ralph Northam, Attorney General Mark Herring, Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw, House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn, and other Virginia government, utility and industry officials handle all these fascinating issues.

SOURCE

The dark side of renewable electricity

The “Praise the Lord” (PTL) empire that preacher Jim Bakker built with wife Tammy crumbled thirty years ago. Today, it seems like we’re being mesmerized again in the press and social media. The rhetoric is about dispensing with thousands of products from petroleum derivatives so we can save the world from human destruction by switching to industrial wind and solar generated electricity.

Everyone knows that electricity is used extensively in residential, commercial, transportation, and the military. All of which to power motors, lite the lights and make all our medications and medical equipment. Yet it’s the thousands of products that get manufactured from crude oil that are used to “make” those motors, lights, medications and electronics.

We’ve had almost 200 years to develop clones or generics to replace the products demanded by society that we get from crude oil. The social needs of our materialistic societies are most likely going to remain for the products that have become part of our daily lifestyles, and for continuous uninterruptable electricity, not just intermittent electricity from wind and solar.

Despite the preaching about these renewable saviors, it’s becoming obvious that due to their intermittency, unreliability, and their inability to replace any of the derivatives from petroleum, societies around the world may not be too thrilled about needed social changes to live on just electricity.

Electricity is one of those products that came AFTER the discovery of oil. All the mineral products and metals needed to make wind turbines and solar panels rely on worldwide mining and transportation equipment that are made with the products from fossil fuels and powered by the fuels manufactured from crude oil.

A single electric-car battery weighs about 1,000 pounds. Fabricating one requires digging up, moving and processing more 500,000 pounds of raw materials somewhere on the planet. Never discussed by the GND or Paris Accord sponsors are the questionable and non-transparent labor conditions and loose, or non-existing, environmental regulations at the mining sites around the world for the products and metals required for renewables. To meet the goals to go “green” will most likely cause a rare earth emergency as those “green” goals require a massive worldwide increase in mining for lithium, cobalt, copper, iron, aluminum, and numerous other raw materials such as.

A list of the sixteen components needed to build wind turbines are: Aggregates and Crushed Stone (for concrete), Bauxite (aluminum, Clay and Shale (for cement), Coal, Cobalt (magnets), Copper (wiring), Gypsum (for cement), Iron ore (steel), Limestone, Molybdenum (alloy in steel), Rare Earths (magnets; batteries), Sand and Gravel (for cement and concrete), and Zinc (galvanizing).

A list of the seventeen components needed to build solar panels are: Arsenic (gallium-arsenide semiconductor chips), Bauxite (aluminum), Boron Minerals, Cadmium (thin film solar cells), Coal (by-product coke is used to make steel), Copper (wiring; thin film solar cells), Gallium (solar cells), Indium (solar cells), Iron ore (steel), Molybdenum (photovoltaic cells), Lead (batteries), Phosphate rock (phosphorous), Selenium (solar cells), Silica (solar cells), Silver (solar cells), Tellurium (solar cells), and Titanium dioxide (solar panels).

The origins of the products for wind and solar are mined throughout the world, inclusive of more than 60 countries of Algeria, Arabia, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Congo (Kinshasa), Cuba, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guinea, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kazakhstan, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, New Caledonia, Oman, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Republic of Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Suriname, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Western Sahara, and Zambia.

The signatories to the Green New Deal (GND) and Paris Accord, to sunset the fossil fuels industry for a world surviving on renewable electricity would also sunset its own renewable industry that’s supposed to be the salvation for the world, as there would be no components to build the turbines and panels!

All mining and processing activities to get the iron ore and other metals that go into turbine manufacturing, transporting the huge blade beasts to the sites, and decommissioning them, are all energy intensive activities that rely on fossil fuels and the products from crude oil and leave difficult wastes behind to dispose of during decommissioning.

The useful life of wind turbines is limited, generally from 15 to 20 years, but none of the decommissioning plans are public. Mining projects, oil production sites, and nuclear generation sites are required to provide for decommissioning and restoration details down to the last dandelion. Would governments and greenies allow a decommissioned mine, oil or nuclear site similar latitudes given to renewable sites?

We can be preached to forever about “clean electricity” messages, and bedazzle farmers with the prospects of on-going revenue from renewables. However, the extensive mining worldwide for materials for millions of wind turbines and solar panels, and the decommissioning and restoration details, and the social changes that would be necessitated for societies to live without the thousands of products from petroleum derivatives remain the dark side of the unspoken realities of renewables.

The dark side of renewable wind, solar and biofuel energy is that they are not clean, green, renewable or sustainable. They are horrifically destructive to vital ecological values that will last for generations to come.

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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22 May, 2020

This is No Time for Green Giveaways

After spending nearly $3 trillion on everything from stimulus checks to small business relief to bailing out wealthy universities, lawmakers would be wise to take a breather. But, some members of Congress led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) want to spend yet another $3 trillion. Unsurprisingly, a long line of lobbyists with empty tin cups have (virtually, of course) descended on Capitol Hill looking for perks and favors in the name of “Coronavirus relief.” Solar and wind producers have been at the front of the line, pushing hard for subsidies to “green” technologies that otherwise wouldn’t be able to compete with traditional energy sources. While these companies deserve the same opportunity to get relief as any other business and industry, lawmakers must be weary of narrow handouts that favor some industries over others. And, after $3 trillion already spent on taxpayers’ account, Coronavirus relief efforts must not morph into a grab bag of special interest goodies.

Companies across all industries are struggling to cope with the Coronavirus, and the energy and electricity sectors are no different. According to data from the nation’s two largest Independent System Operators, electricity demand in March 2020 was down about 7 percent compared to March 2017-19. Rail shipments of coal in March were down about 15 percent in March, while oil companies have struggled to cope with low or even negative prices. Meanwhile, solar installations may be 17 percent less than expected this year thanks to an unprecedented drop in demand. All of these technologies, ranging from solar to coal to oil, are a pivotal part of America’s energy portfolio.

But some manufacturers want to tip the scales in favor of some technologies while kneecapping others. Solar and wind manufacturers have long benefited from generous federal tax credits which offer investors up to 30 percent off of system costs and producers 1¢–2¢ per kilowatt-hour of energy produced (over the first ten years of production). In order for project developers to get these lavish credits they need to start construction on projects by a certain date and actually put the projects in service by year-end of the fourth year after the start of construction. Never mind that these tax credits have long outlived their usefulness and wind and solar companies are now well capitalized and more than capable of starting large projects without taxpayers’ help.

Four years is more than enough time to see projects through to completion, but solar and wind developers argue that COVID-related difficulties are holding up projects first started in 2016. And, in a surprising (and disappointing twist), the Treasury Department may extend out the tax credits from four years to five years. If the Treasury Department doesn’t proceed with their plan, lawmakers are poised to act.

There are many indications that lawmakers aren’t done extending needless subsidies to “green” companies. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) tweeted on May 13, “The next #COVID19 package needs to include support for the clean energy sector, which has been devastated by the pandemic. Our response can’t just be a reaction, it has to be an investment in the technologies & workers who will power this country’s future.” On May 15, House Democrats approved the hastily introduced Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act, which establishes a 45 cent per gallon payout for biofuel producers. The bill’s backers are determined to usher in a “green” revolution on the taxpayers’ dime, even though biofuels aren’t exactly eco-friendly.

Getting America back to normal requires a free, vibrant market in energy without the government actively picking winners and losers. Over the past 40 years, the federal government has already showered more than $100 billion in tax subsidies on “green” producers and punished affordable alternatives with onerous regulations and mandates. It’s time to end this sorry track-record, and leave the door open to a diverse array of energy sources. Before Congress starts ramping up spending again, lawmakers need to get their priorities straight.

SOURCE

Gemini Solar: A Billion-Dollar Vegas Boondoggle

On May 11, the Interior Department approved Gemini Solar, the largest solar power project in U.S. history. It is to be built by Arevia Power, a California-based energy group, with backing from Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Nevada’s energy utility NV Energy, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, which will be the customer for the project’s electricity. Gemini Solar will sit on 7,100 acres of public land, the size of 5,369 football fields, in the Mohave Desert, about 30 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

The estimated $1 billion cost pales in comparison to the trillions of dollars being spent battling the coronavirus and its economy-destroying aftermath. But a boondoggle by any other name remains a boondoggle and, even though it takes NV Energy a step closer to complying with Nevada’s nonsensical law that requires utility providers to get at least half the energy they produce from renewables, Gemini Solar is certainly a boondoggle.

This ambitious three-year project will never come close to its target of 690 megawatts, enough to power 260,000 homes. And the 900 new construction jobs that the Department of the Interior (DOI) boasts will be created by Gemini Solar will quickly shrink to only 19 full-time workers required to operate the plant once it is completed in December 2023, according to the Reuters news agency.

Studies in Europe show that the cost of renewable energy such as solar raises electricity costs for consumer so much that, for every job created in the renewables industry, two to three are lost in the rest of the economy. So much for DOI’s Casey Hammond’s statement that, “This action is about getting Americans back to work, strengthening communities and promoting investment in American energy.”

That makes no more sense than employing millions of Americans to exercise on stationary bicycles connected to electric generators to make power. At least the bikes would increase our citizens’ fitness and give them long-term jobs.

The government tells us that a massive 380-megawatt lithium ion battery backup will be included to replace the power the solar plant is not able to generate at night. These batteries supposedly generate no greenhouse gases. Yet, even the left-leaning Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) pointed out that “Mining and processing the minerals, plus the battery manufacturing process, involve substantial emissions of carbon.”

In reality, no batteries exist that could take up the load for long when the sun is not shining. And, if they could, it would take hours or even days to recharge them.

Anyone who thinks all this is a ‘green solution’ must not have seen Michael Moore’s brilliant new documentary Planet of the Humans. The film shows how active solar projects such as Gemini Solar are anything but green. Moore demonstrates that, when one considers the materials that are required to build these massive facilities, they produce huge amounts of toxic waste.

The CBC cites Jennifer Dunn at Northwestern University’s Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience who explained: “the material that helps power the battery is produced from a number of different metals, things like nickel and cobalt and lithium.”

And, of course, China controls most of the lithium and cobalt which are often produced with child labor and near-slave labor, and with practically no health, safety or environmental safeguards. For example, CBC reports that “there have been mass fish kills related to lithium mining in Tibet.”

Moore’s film shows that solar stations are, in reality, just a front for more, not less, fossil fuel plants. And the negative impact on the fragile desert environment will be significant. The experts interviewed in Planet of the Humans don’t pull their punches: we have been lied to when it comes to the supposed environmental benefits of solar power and we have allowed ourselves to play-pretend for over three decades.

In The Hitchhiker’s Journey Through Climate Change, a new book by Terigi Ciccone and the senior author of this article, we show that the renewable energy debate is actually over and can be summed up with a simple rule of thumb that states: “in every community electric grid, an excess amount of fossil fuel or nuclear power must be available at the ready to go online in seconds, that is equal to the potential output of all intermittent solar energy considered a portion of the grids electric capacity.”

When one digests this simple rule, one wonders why the arguments over solar energy have gone on for so long without facing a stark reality: solar energy must never be an essential part of any energy portfolio. It must have 100% back up with rapidly variable fossil fuel-generated power to ensure that the communities’ electric grid will not let them down. Las Vegas of all places cannot afford a blackout.

After all, with temperatures at times spiking above 110 degrees Fahrenheit each summer and many hotels, homes and businesses with sealed windows, can you imagine what would happen if a city-wide power failure occurred during a heatwave and all the air conditioning suddenly shut off? Indeed, in such weather, homeless people must often seek cool indoor shelter or at least some will die.

Thinking that batteries are going to save Vegas has been and will be impossible for the foreseeable future. This project most likely will double down on lunacy, as in a few years it will need to build a fossil fuel-powered plant to back up the batteries that back up the intermittent and unreliable solar plant.

On top of that, this mandatory fossil fuel back up will need to run 100% of the time, at near full power, emitting pollution and greenhouse gases while burning almost the same fuel as if the solar plant was never there in the first place. And, when the fossil fuel backup is not at full power, they will be operating at low efficiency and so emit more CO2 and real pollution. Think of what happens to your car’s gas efficiency when driving in stop-and-go traffic.

In the final analysis, private and commercial customers will be burdened with considerable increases in their electric rates due to Gemini Solar. So, other than Warren Buffett and the relatively few people who will have temporary jobs during the construction phase, who will benefit from this adventure? Moore’s documentary shows exactly who the green energy opportunists really are.

The Trump administration must revoke, or at least suspend, the project’s approval until all decision-makers have seen Planet of the Humans and formal inquiries into its real environmental benefits and problems are held. To phrase this gamble in the common vernacular of Vegas, the odds that this plant will be the one that works as intended when so many others have failed is about the same as the odds of winning at the roulette table in your first try—practically nil.

SOURCE

Germany’s solar industry could implode this summer

Germany’s solar industry is in deep crisis and may implode in the summer. Solutions have been around for a long time, but internal power struggles and debates over distance rules between wind turbines are holding back progress. EURACTIV Germany reports.

The country’s solar industry is collecting signatures and writing incendiary letters to politicians to finally abolish the solar cap and thus save thousands of jobs.

According to the latest survey results of the German Solar Industry Association (BSW), the industry’s business expectation index has halved in just three months, and that’s not even due to the coronavirus.

“We have never seen a comparable slump in such a short time. More and more solar companies are having existential fears,” said Carsten Körnig, BSW’s chief executive officer.

The latest figures from the Federal Network Agency show how thin the air under the solar cap has become.

At present, Germany has solar plants with a capacity of 50.09 gigawatts.

However, once the 52 GW threshold is reached – probably as early as this summer – the cap will close. This means that smaller plants of up to 750 kilowatts, which make up the majority of newly built plants, will then no longer be entitled to subsidies from the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG).

Postponed, cancelled and ignored

There are no technical reasons why the solar cap has not been abolished despite all the promises made by the grand coalition since last year. The legislative text has long been drafted and is in the hands of the Bundestag’s energy committee, right next to a draft bill by the Bundesrat, which advocated abolishing the cap in October .

But there is no white smoke rising from the Bundestag building in Berlin just yet because internal resistance is blocking the release of the law to the plenary.

Business interruption during the coronavirus crisis has caused a 14% fall in demand for electricity in Europe over the past month. Combined with record solar output, this has caused a 39% drop in related CO2 emissions, according to a new analysis.

An eagerly awaited meeting of the federal states’ premiers on 12 March did not lead to an agreement, and the planned working group between the state leaders and the federal government did not even meet because the coronavirus had paralysed public life.

Little else has happened since then.

“With its blockade policy against renewable energies, the government endangers climate protection and investment security in equal measure. This is even more irresponsible for the economy in times of corona-induced uncertainty,” said Julia Verlinden, energy policy spokeswoman for the Greens and member of the economic committee.

On the last two occasions, there were no results either.

Last week, the federal cabinet passed a “mini-amendment” to the EEG to bolster the energy sector against the pandemic, such as longer implementation periods for solar parks, but ignored the topic of solar caps. Even a video conference of the energy ministers on 4 May did not deal with the topic.

COVID-19 crisis upsets Germany's coal phase-out timetable

In Germany, the coronavirus health crisis is keeping politics on tenterhooks as many legislative proposals are being postponed. Will the country’s coal phase-out carry on as planned? EURACTIV Germany reports.

Economic spokesperson remains silent

In an absurd way, the problem is not the solar cap itself, because there is broad consensus that it has to go. According to a poll by YouGov, more than 80% of voters from all parties, except the far-right AfD, are in favour of abolishing the cap.

The debate has for months been hinging on the controversial distance rules between wind turbines and buildings, for which Economy Minister Peter Altmaier (CDU) wanted to set a 1,000-metre minimum distance to reduce the countless civil lawsuits against wind turbines.

While Altmaier has since softened his proposal, this distance debate has long become a power game between the CDU and the SPD. The economic policy wing of the conservative Union of CDU/CSU is insisting the solar cap should only be adopted together with the coal phase-out law and a solution for wind energy, thereby blocking any rapid progress.

The Union’s economic policy spokesman, Joachim Pfeiffer (CDU), was not available to speak on the subject despite repeated requests.

SOURCE

Australian coal mine nears approval

WHITEHAVEN Coal has cleared another hurdle in its push for a $700 million coal mine expansion near Gunnedah, in north-eastern NSW.

The Department of Planning, Industry and Environment has recommended the project is "approvable" and pushed the application to the Independent Planning Commission (IPC).

The application seeks to extend the Vickery coal mine, about 25km out of Gunnedah, and develop a new coal handling and preparation plant, as well as a rail spur line to connect to the main railway that leads to the Port of Newcastle. This would mean the end of coal trucks transporting the goods on the road to Gunnedah.

The project - which went on public exhibition in the latter half of 2018 - attracted 560 submissions with 345 in support of the project, and 201 who opposed the plan.

In September last year, Vickery Coal submitted an amended application. It's expected to generate 450 jobs as well as 500 during construction, as well as a net benefit of $1.16 billion to the state.

The Department released its report on Tuesday and highlighted key issues for the IPC to consider which included impacts on water resources, amenity and biodiversity.

The report from the department will now be considered by the IPC who will hold a further public hearing in coming weeks. The IPC must make a final determination on the project within 12 weeks.

Whitehaven Coal issued a statement on Wednesday welcoming the release of the report.

"We know there is strong support for Vickery from the comprehensive community consultation process that has already been undertaken - 60% of public submissions to the Department of Planning and 75% to the IPC called for the Project to be approved," Whitehaven Coal Managing Director and CEO Paul Flynn said

But in April, the mining giant put all expansion decisions on hold due to "volatile financial market conditions", including the Vickery mine expansion.

"While coal markets in the March quarter have demonstrated their resilience, volatile financial market conditions caused Whitehaven to continue to be cautious in allocating capital to expansion," the company said at the time.

Lock the Gate - a vocal opponent of the expansion plan - has long maintained the coal mine "will damage local groundwater, put an iconic heritage property at risk, and worsen the social damage large-scale mining has already inflicted on the local community".

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, 2020

Trump issues executive order to protect power grid from attack

President Trump on Friday issued an executive order declaring a national emergency over threats to the U.S. power system, taking steps to defend the grid against cyberattacks and foreign interference.

The executive order bans the use of equipment for the power grid that was manufactured by a company under the control of a foreign adversary, or the buying of any equipment that poses a national security threat.

“Additional steps are required to protect the security, integrity, and reliability of bulk-power system electric equipment used in the United States,” Trump wrote. “In light of these findings, I hereby declare a national emergency with respect to the threat to the United States bulk-power system.”

The order also established a task force to protect the power grid from attacks and share risk management information to prevent interference. Members of the task force will include the secretaries of Commerce, Defense and Homeland Security, as well as the Director of National Intelligence.

Trump noted in the order that the power system is a target for those “seeking to commit malicious acts” against the U.S., pointing to concerns around cyberattacks in particular.

“A successful attack on our bulk-power system would present significant risks to our economy, human health and safety, and would render the United States less capable of acting in defense of itself and its allies,” Trump wrote.

Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette applauded the executive order, saying in a statement that it would “greatly diminish the ability of foreign adversaries to target our critical electric infrastructure.”

“Today, President Trump demonstrated bold leadership to protect America’s bulk-power system and ensure the safety and prosperity of all Americans,” Brouillette said. “It is imperative the bulk-power system be secured against exploitation and attacks by foreign threats.”

The order establishes the secretary of Energy as the official tasked with identifying equipment currently in use in the bulk power system that poses a risk, and working to take out and replace that equipment. The secretary is also in charge of creating a list of “pre-qualified” vendors that are deemed safe to work with.

The Department of Energy has stepped up its focus on protecting the grid from attacks in recent years. Former Energy Secretary Rick Perry established the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) in 2018 to help prepare and respond to threats.

The official CESER account tweeted Friday that the agency “stands ready” to help defend the bulk power system, adding that “malicious actors” have targeted the power system for the past decade.

SOURCE

Wind farm taxpayer subsidies come with a now controversial beneficiary: China

U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley says he backs taxpayer subsidies of wind farms because they are good for his home state of Iowa.

But today, some 30 years after Grassley conceived the federal wind tax credit program, which birthed rows of turbines across the country’s emptiest spaces, he has another, somewhat improbable cheerleader: China.

China’s curious role in support of taxpayer wind energy subsidies in the U.S. is now raising suspicion, as Grassley tries to convince Trump Administration officials that their COVID-19 stimulus measures should include a boost to his beleaguered wind program.

The U.S. Treasury Department released a letter to Grassley last week suggesting it plans to “modify the relevant rules,” allowing wind farm developers facing a Dec. 2020 deadline four more years to finish their taxpayer subsidized projects.

The wind subsidy program was supposed to make wind energy makers self-sufficient within a decade— or by 2002. However, it is currently in year 29.

According to an analysis last year by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the wind Production Tax Credit (PTC), which goes to “corporations who either erect new wind turbines or refurbish turbines.” has cost U.S. taxpayers $65.1 billion.

A huge chunk of that taxpayer money has gone directly to companies in which the largest shareholder is the Communist Party of China (CCP).

Grassley’s Senate colleague, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said Sunday that many Chinese companies operating in the U.S. are doing so for the sole purpose of spying on our country.

Americans “need to have their guard up against Chinese espionage,” Cotton said.

He is proposing legislation that would ban taxpayer-funded researchers from also accepting funding from Chinese-affiliated firms.

A University of Arkansas electrical engineering professor was arrested Monday and charged with secretly accepting $500,000 from the CCP.

“Steadfast in our approach”

The Chinese were minor, inconsequential players in wind energy when Grassley, 86, started arguing for U.S. taxpayer support of the industry in 1992. Now, they dominate the space, controlling five of the world’s ten largest wind turbine manufacturers.

According to a 2016 Navigant Research report, Chinese companies controlled 28.2 percent of the wind turbine manufacturing market, versus 9.2 percent for U.S.-controlled companies. It reported that China had five times as many workers employed making turbines (509,000) as did the U.S. (102,500).

Chinese-owned Goldwind is the second-largest wind turbine producer in the world, having installed more than 19,000 turbines in 17 countries. It controls 25 percent of the Chinese market— more than twice its next largest competitor.

Goldwind Chairman Wu Gang has worked in wind power since the late 1980’s. He previously served as the Chinese Communist “Party Committee” secretary at Goldwind’s parent company, Xinjiang New Energy.

In 2010, Goldwind opened a U.S. subsidiary, headquartered in Chicago, with an eye towards exploiting Grassley’s tax credit program here.

It has since purchased wind farms in Montana and partnered with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway on a wind farm project in West Texas.

“At Goldwind, we are steadfast in our approach to the United States and broader North American wind markets,” said David Sale, Chief Executive Officer of Goldwind Americas.

Buffett, whose Des Moines-based Mid-American Energy owns 2,600 wind turbines in Iowa, is a longtime backer of Grassley’s subsidy program, which he has used to reduce his company’s tax bill.

"I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire's tax rate," Buffet said in 2014. "For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."

Wind subsidies started phasing out in 2017 and were supposed to finally expire at the end of 2019.

There are 58,000 wind turbines in the U.S.

In 1983, Iowa became the first state to mandate its utilities derive a percentage of their power from wind or solar. The state reports that 42 percent of its generated electricity came from wind in 2019, versus 35 percent from coal and 13 percent from natural gas.

That’s six times the national average for wind power generation of seven percent.

Nationwide, 38 percent of electricity is derived from natural gas, 24 percent from coal and 20 percent from nuclear.

SOURCE

Wind and solar add zero value to the grid

Why is wind power and solar power, not making significant gains in providing a substantial amount of renewable electricity? The US has utilized, in its energy mix, about eight percent of wind and two percent solar for more than a decade. The reason it is not growing requires an understanding of the fundamental elements, of an electrical grid.

The grid is the electrical industry’s term for all of the hardware and software needed to convert fuel into electricity. The electricity is distributed by wires, transformers, sub-stations, etc. to all of us. The system must ensure our safety from malfunctions, security to customers, and safety for the community.

For a simple example, let’s assume we are a local electric utility in Smallville, USA. It’s a town with a population of 50,000 and another 25,000 people in the surrounding farms, along with small factories, professional offices, shops, a hospital, bakeries, etc. Everyone in the area needs reliable and affordable electricity. Over the years, Smallville set up a modern grid to assure a 99.98 percent reliability. In order to guarantee that reliable availability, the community’s grid must have at least a 75 percent excess capability above the everyday norm. Twenty-five percent of the excess must be in the “spinning reserve mode,” another 25 percent must be in the “peaking mode,” and 25 percent in the “back-up mode.” Let’s examine each of these portions of the necessary reserves.

Spinning Reserve. If some malfunction happens at any time and shuts down a generating plant, a back-up plant needs to kick-in and pick up 100 percent of the lost power in seconds. If it’s a few seconds too late, the electrical demand will overwhelm the grid, causing a “brown-out,” or worse, a “blackout.” It’s as if all the customers of a bank show up at the same time, demanding to take out all their money immediately. It’s a disaster.

The only way to ensure that this blackout doesn’t happen is to have a back-up fossil fuel power plant already running at about 90-95 percent of rated power. It burns fuel but creates no electricity. They will burn almost the same amount of fuel as they would if there was no solar or wind plants connected to the grid because solar and wind can not serve as backup power. The backup power must be 100% reliable. All existing solar and wind power must have fossil fuel back up, while solar and wind power can not be used to back up fossil fuel power as a result of its unreliability. (The wind may not blow adequately and the sun may not shine). As a result, electric utilities are wasting capital, fuel, and operating costs thinking wind and solar can contribute a significant portion of their available energy. It just increases the cost of community power.

Peak mode: This is the extra electrical power that’s needed twice a day, typically for two to three hours each. First is the morning peak demand, from six to nine AM to cook breakfast, get ready to go to school and work. The other high demand period is usually from about five to seven PM. That’s when the extra power is needed to cook dinner, fire up the AC or central heat, etc. But solar plants can’t fill either of these peak demands. That’s because solar produces electricity near mid-day when it’s needed the least. Wind turbines might be put to work a few hours in the morning or evenings. In all cases, however they still need the spinning reserve fossil-fuel back-up plant running at about 90 percent of rated power, 100 percent of the time.

Back-up Reserve: These power plants are like a spare tire in the trunk of a car; they sit there until called to duty. But unlike the spinning reserve, these reserves don’t need to be up and on-line in seconds. So, they only operate when they are started, typically for scheduled maintenance on other plants. Depending on the type of plant, it may take several hours or more for them to come online, and then they may run for days, weeks, or a year non-stop. Having a power plant just sitting there, doing nothing most of the time is very expensive, but is a valuable insurance policy against failure.

Let’s examine the real-life experience of Germany that made the bold decision to go all-in on being green. It is now the number one producer of wind and solar electrical power in the world on a per capita basis. In 2004 Germany launched an aggressive plan to replace many of their coal and nuclear plants with wind and solar. By 2018 Germany had an installed electrical base of about 210 gigawatts. Of that, 28 percent was wind power, 26 percent solar, and the remaining 46 percent was their remaining fossil fuel and nuclear power plants along with a little hydro. At least that is the nameplate rating of the power capability of these solar and wind installations when operating under the best conditions. However, the real production is startlingly different.

While these solar and wind plants could theoretically produce 46 percent of Germany’s needs, in actuality, they only produce about 12 percent of Germany’s total electrical output. Who knew that one of the world’s most prosperous and industrialized nations could not figure out how to produce enough electricity to meet the needs of its own people and industry from wind and solar power?

To relieve this national shortage, Germany has been importing vast amounts of electrical power, mostly from France, and are paying exorbitant rates for it. The average cost of electricity in Germany is now almost three times the cost in the United States.

Germany is now launching a major program to rebuild dozens of fossil-fueled power plants. They have also signed a contract with Russia to build a natural gas pipeline from Siberia to fuel their electrical demand and to back up its unreliable wind and solar plants.Wind and solar add zero value to the grid

Sweden has a funny but sad story that needs to be told. They launched a vast wind program a decade ago, which is proving to be a problem in their challenging environment. In their northern latitudes, solar was out of the question. Wind also has some issues. This photo is from a recent article in the online service, “whattsupwiththat.com.” Here we see a picture of a Swedish helicopter trying to de-ice a wind turbine like an airport tanker truck de-ices an airplane’s wings and fuselage . Only the windmill is about four to five times bigger than a Boeing 747’s. A helicopter can only carry 10-20 percent of what a truck can. So, by the time they’ve finished one or two-blades, they need to start all over again. Now imagine a wind farm with hundreds of these turbines. This picture is worth thousands of words and a few giggles. But it’s not funny for Sweden.

Note: Portions of this article were excerpted from the 2020 book A Hitchhikers Journey Through Climate Change with permission of the author Terigi Ciccone. The book is the best possible source for parents and grandparents to explain reality to their children.

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Minister says it is not Australia’s policy to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, despite signing up to the Paris agreement, because the Morrison government will not adopt a mid-century target in advance of a plan to achieve it.

The energy minister said on Tuesday that signatories to the Paris agreement, including Australia, had agreed to hit net zero “in the second half of the century”. But scientists say in order to meet the central Paris goal of keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5C – a commitment Australia adopted in 2015 – signatories need to hit net zero by 2050.

A new review of the government’s climate policies headed by former Business Council of Australia president Grant King notes that “like other signatories to the Paris agreement, Australia has agreed to adopt progressively more ambitious targets beyond 2030 and has endorsed the agreement’s overarching long-term goals, namely to limit the global temperature rise to well below 2C – and if possible below 1.5C – by achieving net zero emissions as soon as possible in the second half of the century”.

Major business groups, including the Business Council of Australia and the Ai Group, say Australia should adopt the net zero by 2050 target. Earlier this month the Ai Group called for the two biggest economic challenges in memory – recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and cutting greenhouse gas emissions – to be addressed together, saying it would boost growth and put the country on a firm long-term footing.

Every Australian state has signed up to net zero emissions by 2050, and these commitments are expressed either as targets or aspirational goals.

But asked on Tuesday whether net zero by 2050 was the federal government’s policy, Taylor said: “No.”

“Our approach is not to have a target without a plan,” Taylor told the ABC. He said technology improvements would drive significant reductions in emissions “and we’d love to be able to achieve net zero by 2050, but ultimately that will depend on the pathways of technology to deliver that without damaging the economy”.

The King review has recommended new approaches to reducing pollution including paying big emitters to keep their emissions below an agreed limit, and allowing businesses to bid for funding from the government’s climate policy – the $2.55bn emissions reduction fund – for projects that capture emissions and either use them or store them underground.

The King review proposal to pay emitters to remain below their baseline looks like a voluntary carbon trading mechanism. The review says the idea “could be achieved by crediting emissions reductions below baselines and providing for the sale and purchase of … safeguard mechanism credits by the federal, state or territory governments or through voluntary transactions in carbon markets”.

Despite that clear description in the review, Taylor contended initially on Tuesday the proposal was not a form of voluntary carbon trading. He said the review proposed a “carrot” to give companies an incentive to overachieve on their pollution reduction commitments.

The Coalition has spent a decade opposing carbon pricing, and it abolished the emissions trading scheme legislated during the Gillard government. Rightwingers in the Liberal party also moved against Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership in part because he pursued a policy to reduce emissions in the electricity sector.

But after first saying the King proposal was not a form of carbon trading, the energy minister then argued that principle was “nothing new”. “You can trade Australian carbon credit units now. There is nothing new with that, that’s a pre-existing system we have through the emissions reduction fund.”

It is unclear whether some of the proposals in the review would garner majority parliamentary support, but Taylor said some of the proposals might be able to be achieved without changing legislation.

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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20 May, 2020

Miami Herald Misleads Readers About Reassuring NOAA Hurricane Study

Among the top Google News search results this morning for “climate change,” the Miami Herald published an article asserting a new study shows global warming is causing more Atlantic hurricanes. In reality, the new study shows there is a declining trend in hurricanes in many parts of the world and concludes there will likely be a declining trend globally during the 21st century. Moreover, objective data show the number of Atlantic hurricanes is declining, just like the forecast global trend.

The Herald article, titled “Climate change, pollution impacts hurricane formation in the Atlantic, NOAA study says,” claims, “In the last 40 years, the East Coast, including Florida, has been hit by dozens of hurricanes. New NOAA research suggests human pollution may have increased the likelihood of those Atlantic basin storms….”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) study referenced by the Herald reports, “our climate models project decreases in the number of global TCs [tropical cyclones] toward the end of the 21st century due to the dominant effect of greenhouse gases on decreasing TC occurrence in most of the tropics, consistent with many previous studies.”

The NOAA study reported a trend of “substantial decreases” in Indian Ocean and North Pacific hurricanes is already detected in the record. The study asserts there has been an increase in Atlantic hurricanes since 1980, which “anthropogenic aerosols could have also influenced.”

The major takeaway from the NOAA study is there will be fewer hurricanes as the world continues its modest warming. That is good news. Rather than reporting good climate news, however, the Herald goes to great lengths to try to pull some bad news from a good-news study.

Even the study’s one asserted drawback, that Atlantic hurricane activity has increased, is quite a stretch. A 2017 article in The Economist, titled “Hurricanes in America have become less frequent,” documents how Atlantic hurricanes have became much less frequent during recent decades compared to the first half of the 20th century. In the six decades between 1900 and 1960, there were an average of 19 Atlantic hurricanes each decade. In the six decades since, there has been an average of only 14 Atlantic hurricanes per decade. In fact, there has not been a single decade since 1960 in which more hurricanes formed than the average decade between 1900 and 1960.

The only reason the authors of the NOAA study could report an increase in Atlantic hurricanes since 1980 is because the decade ending in 1980 was an abnormally low year, with the fewest number of Atlantic hurricanes on record. So, any trend line starting at the record-low point of 1980 will show more frequent hurricanes. However, a more complete and representative record shows a long-term and ongoing decline in Atlantic hurricanes.

Located in Florida, the Miami Herald surprisingly did not mention two very important facts about hurricanes and Florida. As documented in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, Florida recently concluded an 11-year period (2005 through 2016) without a landfalling hurricane of any size—the longest such period in recorded history. The Gulf of Mexico also recently benefited from its longest hurricane-free period in recorded history (2013 through 2016).

For completely misleading its readers about the recent NOAA study, and for asserting the exact opposite of the truth regarding hurricane frequency and Atlantic hurricane frequency, the Miami Herald earns a gigantic Pinocchio award.

SOURCE

Electric Vehicle Sales Set to Crash in 2020 Amid Coronavirus and Oil Price Shocks

Global electric vehicle sales look set to crash this year, and the coronavirus pandemic won’t be the only culprit. Total EV sales will plunge 43 percent in 2020, according to new research from Wood Mackenzie.

The 2020s are the decade in which EVs are expected to move from the margin of the global auto market to its fast lane, as battery pack prices tumble, driving ranges extend and charging infrastructure becomes more sophisticated and widespread. But the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic shockwaves have not made for a good start.

WoodMac now expects global EV sales of 1.3 million units in 2020, nosediving from a record 2.2 million units sold last year.

The coronavirus pandemic deserves much of the blame. In China, the world’s largest EV market, sales of all types of cars fell 21 percent in January compared to last year, and by an eye-watering 80 percent in February. Things were even worse for EVs, with February sales projected to be down more than 90 percent.
Top Articles

“Most new EV buyers are still first-time owners of the technology,” Ram Chandrasekaran, principal analyst for transportation and mobility at Wood Mackenzie, said in a research note. “The uncertainty and fear created by the outbreak have made consumers less inclined to adopt a new technology.”

“Once the epidemic is contained in China, we suspect consumers will flock back to car dealers and reaffirm their confidence in EVs.”

The bounce-back could take longer in Europe and North America, where the COVID-19 outbreak is several months behind China's trajectory.

“The first lockdown in the U.S. did not start until March 20, but the effects have already begun to show in EV sales,” Chandrasekaran said. “General Motors is offering a discount of $10,000 for its Chevrolet Bolt. Further such rebates are sure to follow to move inventory as demand drops [more].”

Other factors are contributing to skidding EV sales, including the collapse of oil prices and a relative lack of new EV models set for commercial release this year, Chandrasekaran said.
Tesla's ambitious 2020 goal looks questionable

Tesla, the world’s highest-profile EV manufacturer and the dominant player in the U.S. market, is an exception to the lack of new models on the market, having last month started deliveries of its Model Y, a compact crossover utility vehicle built on the Model 3 sedan platform. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has mused that Model Y could outsell Model S, Model X and Model 3 combined.

Tesla roared into 2020, putting up unexpectedly strong EV delivery numbers in the first quarter after turning out the first vehicles at its new factory in Shanghai, known as Gigafactory 3. But its share price has fallen by 40 percent since achieving an all-time high in February, amid manufacturing disruptions and economic concerns related to the coronavirus outbreak. (The stock has still doubled over the past year.)

Tesla idled production at its Fremont, California EV factory last month, raising serious questions about the company's ambitious goal to hit 500,000 vehicle deliveries this year — concerns Musk has not yet addressed. Most of the workforce has been sent home at Nevada’s Gigafactory, where Tesla makes battery packs and other components with its partner Panasonic. Tesla has reportedly slashed employee salaries across the board, with deeper cuts of up to 30 percent for executives.

Beyond the Model Y, many anticipated EV models were not expected to hit the market until late 2020 or 2021 — and that was true before the novel coronavirus hit, WoodMac’s Chandrasekaran said.

General Motors brought hundreds of analysts, investors, journalists and policymakers to an event near Detroit last month to highlight its big ambitions for EVs, but none of those models will be available until late 2021. Ford's Mustang Mach-E is not expected to be widely available until late 2021, and Volkswagen's long-touted ID.3 won't hit the market until later this year.

Beyond any impact from the coronavirus, those sluggish EV-model launch timelines could weigh on the market this year as consumers hold off on making purchases.

“Unfortunately for EV adoption, this is likely to lead to a plateauing of sales in the near term," Chandrasekaran wrote. "While the pent-up demand from the pandemic will help a bounce-back in sales later in the year, new demand growth will [not be apparent] until 2021."

SOURCE

‘Jurist Legal News’ Prosecutes Phony Case Against Climate, Hunger

Jurist Legal News is doing its best Michael Avenatti impression, prosecuting false claims that climate change is causing hunger and malnutrition.

In a May 14 article, “The Link Between Climate Change and Human Health,” Indian law students Sakshi Agarwal and Aniket Sachan quote speculative World Health Organization (WHO) predictions as proof that climate change is causing starvation and malnutrition.

That is the same WHO, by the way, that reassured us that Chinese officials found no evidence of human-to-human transmission of COVID-19, that wearing face masks makes you more likely to acquire COVID-19, and praised massive government efforts to “socialize the economy.”

“The World Health Organization (WHO) back in 2018 said that climate change will cause around 250,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050 due to malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat exhaustion,” the Jurist Legal News article reported.

Of course, predictions are not proof or even evidence. They are merely predictions. Let’s take a look at what scientific evidence shows.

History shows colder periods of time are linked to famine and malnutrition as crops fail, as during the little ice age. By contrast, hunger and malnutrition both decline sharply during relatively warm periods.

Indeed, food production, rather than declining as the climate has modestly warmed, has increased dramatically in recent decades.

This is thoroughly documented in Climate at a Glance: Crop Production, as well as in a video-archived panel discussion alongside the United Nations Civil Society Conference in August 2019.

Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, shows how modern agriculture, built upon and entirely dependent upon fossil fuels, is allowing farmers to produce more food than ever on less and less land.

In addition, as detailed by CO2Science.org, the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere over the past century, along with modest warming, has resulted in crop yields setting records nearly every year.

The two factors combined have resulted in the largest decline in hunger, malnutrition, poverty, and starvation in human history.

Forty-four percent of the world’s population lived in absolute poverty in 1981 – 40 years of global warming ago. Since then, the share of people living in such poverty fell below 10 percent in 2015.

And although 700 million people worldwide still suffer from persistent hunger, the United Nations reports the number of hungry people has declined by two billion since 1990 – 30 years of global warming ago.

Hunger and malnutrition, like a changing climate, have always been with us. The evidence, however, shows the only climate change consistently linked to increases in hunger, malnutrition, and premature mortality is a cooling climate.

SOURCE

‘Snowpiercer’: Climate ‘Deniers’ ‘Doomed Us With Their Lies’

These days, the last thing we want to think about is being cooped inside for what seems like forever. Unfortunately for us, that happens to be the plot of TNT’s Snowpiercer which premiered May 17.

Based on the 1982 French graphic novel Le Transperceneige as well as the 2013 movie Snowpiercer, we follow a post-apocalyptic society that doesn’t forget to remind us about the true horror: climate deniers.

The pilot “First, the Weather Changed” introduces us to what it conceives as the future. Scientists attempted to fire chemicals into the atmosphere to fight against global warming, but the result instead led to a massive, uninhabitable Ice Age.

To survive, a wealthy industrialist designed and constructed a massive perpetual-motion train called “Snowpiercer” to house the remnants of humanity.

Very quickly, a caste system forms on the train, with the wealthy elite housed in the front and the starving poor at the tail end.

Riots, we soon see, are frequent as the tail-end passengers fight for more food and better conditions from the hoarding rich.

Amid the obvious class allegories and an entire apocalypse happening outside, the show throws several characters and conflicts into the mix to keep this engine going.

There’s Layton (Daveed Diggs), a former homicide detective who now leads the rebellion among the “Taillies,” along with Melanie (Jennifer Connelly), a first-class passenger who helps keep order within the train.

However, none of the characters compare to the horror brought upon by the “deniers” of the old Earth.

In an animated prologue, Layton describes the background of the train as well as what caused the new Ice Age.

Some of the very first words we hear from the episode emphasize how the climate change deniers “doomed us with their lies.” In a way, everything bad that happens in this series can now be attributed to them.

Layton: First, the weather changed. The deniers knew why, but still they doomed us with their lies. War made the Earth even hotter. Her ice melted, and all her species crashed. So, the men of Science tried to cool the Earth, to reverse the damage they had sown. But instead, they froze her to the core.

Contrary to what this show and every other leftist politician would have you believe, “deniers” are not “dooming” us with their “lies.”

In fact, a lot of the so-called “deniers” have actually exposed many lies from the climate activists including but not limited to melting polar ice caps, rising temperatures, and the end of life as we know it.

It’s almost more plausible to believe in a perpetually moving train than a cohesive climate change argument at this point.

As far as the show goes, blaming global warming deniers for the end of the world is hardly anything new. Neither is complaining that the rich are hoarding everything from the starving poor for that matter.

We still have a long way to go with Snowpiercer, but my interest has already left the station.

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, 2020

The end of oil is not in sight

Environmentalists dreaming of a post-pandemic future free of fossil fuels need to wake up.

For once, the cliché ‘unprecedented’ really did apply. In April, the price of an American barrel of oil, delivered in May, briefly dropped from a low $20 to minus $40. Storage capacity for oil became so tight, producers paid people to take it off their hands, for fear that supply chains would clog up irreparably.

That has never happened in 150 years of processing oil.

Some believe that the world’s daily average supply of oil – about 100million barrels a day (mmb/d) – could drop by 20 per cent. After all, America’s lockdown has already made demand for oil there fall from 20 to 14 mmb/d. But it is the collapse of demand for it in transport that has attracted most attention. Indeed, in the OECD area (which includes Europe, the US and Central America), transport accounts for more than 60 per cent of overall demand for oil.

The green establishment, now complete with woke banks and investors, sees in ghost roads and empty skies the beginning of the end of oil. These are the ‘sunset years of the fossil-fuel era’, contends Sky News’ economics editor. The former head of BP, Lord Browne, now says ‘people who have spent months worrying about their lungs are more likely to want clean air’ than continued use of oil. The International Energy Agency’s chief energy modeller has proclaimed that renewables beat fossil fuels because they’re like children – immune from the effects of the virus. Overall, we’re told, the world faces peak demand for oil in just a decade or two.

These people need a reality check. They are convinced electric vehicles will supplant petrol and diesel ones, and that renewables will replace fossil fuels. But they’re fooling themselves.

Take electric transport, for example. It would take 14 years just to restock the entire fleet of cars on UK roads. And, even then, that would depend on: all new cars made being electric by law; the sales of these new cars remaining steady, at 2.3million per year, despite the coming depression; the eight million used, internal-combustion-engine cars sold every year being declared illegal; and the sunk costs of petrol stations and tankers being ignored in favour of new charging points everywhere. And that’s four very big ifs. In other words, it could take much, much longer than 14 years to replace the UK’s existing fleet of cars.

For decades, too, acquiring and transporting the materials for electric cars – as, indeed, for wind turbines and solar panels – will depend on oil much more than electricity. Remember, for example, that the cobalt in batteries isn’t mined in by far the world’s largest producer, the Democratic Republic of Congo, by electric robots and distributed by electric trucks. No, it’s mined using children and diesel.

Greens also expect far too much of China. I’m a big fan of China’s electric cars, but Asia’s rebound from Covid-19 will see demand there surge for cheap-to-buy-and-run conventional cars. Renault, for example, envisages electric vehicles taking just a quarter of the Chinese market by 2030. And it will not just be the Chinese in Asia who, with higher incomes, will want the freedoms provided by the conventional car.

Beyond oil and transport, what about heat and gas? In energy, the price of gas tends to follow trends in the price of oil; so right now, gas, like oil, is really cheap. Yet, obsessed with global ‘heating’, our electric fetishists nevertheless forget the role of heat in industrial processes – the production of steel, chemicals, fertiliser, food, drink, cement, pulp, paper, and plastics – and the centrality of gas within those processes. Even in advanced, electric-arc furnaces, for instance, only half the energy used to make steel comes from amps and volts. Similarly, it is just possible that, by 2050, all plastics production in the EU will be electricity-based, including that of PPE. But environmentalists themselves concede that, in such a case, costs would be two to three times higher than today. And the claims that we can replace ‘nearly all’ UK household gas boilers with electric heat pumps or other alternatives to gas by 2050 remain fanciful at best.

And what of power supply? Environmentalists again deceive themselves when they take the irresistible rise of ‘green electricity’ for granted.

The government’s Digest of UK Energy Statistics states that, in 2018, wind and solar provided just 63.5 per cent of the record 33 per cent of UK electricity produced by renewables. The rest was produced by biofuels, the use of which many greens criticise on the grounds that they emit CO2 and require excessive amounts of land to be grown.

In other words, what are generally understood to be ‘renewables’ amount to just 21 per cent of the UK’s annual electricity supply. Yes, breezy and sunny summers can famously generate higher quantities of UK renewable electricity. But wind and solar won’t dominate year-round UK power supply for ages.

Greens contend that renewables use will increase because wind and solar are always getting cheaper. Yet while wind and solar, like electric vehicles, will indeed benefit from improvements in production technology, so will oil and gas. Our electric fetishists ignore, for instance, how IT has raised the productivity of US shale oil and gas production.

Selective in their appreciation of technological advance, electric fetishists are downright dishonest about the work that goes into electric systems. As noted above, child labour, sweat and exploitation account for much of the production of cobalt for batteries. But for electric fetishists, such facts are inconvenient.

As, indeed, is the fact that nobody can really forecast oil prices. But one kind of forecasting we can do without is the sort that’s wishful, technocratic, and, above all, authoritarian. In the 1980s, the uber-Thatcherite minister Norman Tebbit famously told the unemployed: ‘On your bike!’ Now our wannabe electric rulers tell everyone: on your electric bike – or buy that £40,000 Tesla.

SOURCE

Roll Call Caught Telling Farmers Lies About Drought, Floods, Crop Yields

At the top of Google News searches this morning for “climate change” is a Roll Call article titled, “Farmers are coming around on climate change.” The article’s subtitle is “Flooded fields, persistent droughts or ravaging wildfires are giving many a change of heart.” Factual data, as well as the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), establish there is no increase in drought or floods. Moreover, crop yields set new records virtually every year. Roll Call is simply peddling discredited climate lies dressed up into fake news.

Drought Claims Are Strike One

Let’s first examine Roll Call’s claim about “persistent droughts.” As documented in Climate at a Glance: Drought, the United States is benefiting from fewer and less extreme drought events as the climate modestly warms.

For example, in 2017 and 2019, the United States registered its smallest percentage of land area experiencing drought in recorded history.

Also, the United States is undergoing its longest period in recorded history with fewer than 40 percent of the country experiencing “very dry” conditions.

Globally, the IPCC reports with “high confidence” that precipitation has increased over mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere (including the United States) during the past 70 years. Moreover, IPCC has “low confidence” about any negative trends globally. (See https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/SR15_Chapter3_Low_Res.pdf, p. 191.)

Roll Call’s claims about climate change causing “persistent droughts” is fake news and strike one.

Flood Claims Are Strike Two

Next, let’s examine Roll Call’s claim about “flooded fields.” As documented in Climate at a Glance: Floods, there has been no evidence of increasing flooding frequency or severity as the climate modestly warms.

The IPCC admits having “low confidence” in any climate change impact regarding the frequency or severity of floods.

Also, IPCC admits having “low confidence” in even the “sign” of any changes. In other words, it is just as likely that climate change is making floods less frequent and less severe.

Supporting this, a recent peer-reviewed study on the climate impact on flooding for the USA and Europe, published in the Journal of Hydrology, Volume 552, September 2017, Pages 704-717, found “The number of significant trends was about the number expected due to chance alone.”

The study also reported, “The results of this study, for North America and Europe, provide a firmer foundation and support the conclusion of the IPCC that compelling evidence for increased flooding at a global scale is lacking.”

Roll Call’s claims that climate change is causing “flooded fields” fake news and strike two.

Claim of Declining Crop Yields Is Strike Three

Finally, let’s examine Roll Call’s claim about reduced crop yields. This, when all is said and done, is the heart of the issue regarding farmers and agriculture. Droughts and floods are merely the climate instruments by which crop yields may be stunted, hurting farmers. Does crop data show declining yields as Roll Call claims?

As documented in Climate at a Glance: Crop Yields, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization document that U.S. crop yields and global crop yields are setting records nearly every year as global climate modestly warms. Thanks in large part to longer growing seasons, fewer frost events, more precipitation, and the fertilization effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide, farmers are producing more food on less land, allowing them to feed a growing global population.

Indeed, almost every important U.S. crop has set record yields per acre during the past three years, with most of the top 10 years in yields-per-acre occurring during the past decade.

Crop yields set new records virtually every year, yet Roll Call attempts to fool readers with lies claiming the contrary.

Roll Call’s claim about climate change causing declining crop yields is strike three.

Three Strikes, Roll Call, Yerrrrrr Out!

Three strikes and you’re out, Roll Call. Climate facts trump fake climate news.

SOURCE

Alarmist Study Claims More Heat Deaths, Ignores Greater Number of Cold Deaths

CNN, the Washington Post, and other media outlets are touting an alarmist paper claiming the number of days with high heat and humidity has doubled since 1979 in some parts of the world, causing more heat-related deaths. In reality, if an increase in global temperatures and humidity is occurring, its primary effect is saving human lives.

Peer-reviewed research finds cold temperatures kill 20 times more people globally than warm or hot temperatures. With such a disproportionate amount of deaths caused by cold temperatures, clearly an increase in global temperatures will save many more people than it will kill. However, the new study being touted by the alarmist media fails to take into account the many more people who are being saved from cold-related deaths. As if often the case with climate alarmists and their ventriloquist dummies in the media, they isolate a minor negative repercussion of warmer temperatures, completely ignore the much greater positive benefits, and then cast the net overall benefit as a climate emergency.

For example, much of the focus in the new alarmist paper is on the southeastern United States. Yet the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports cold temperatures kill many more people in the United States than warm or hot temperatures. The new paper leaves readers with the false impression that the net impact of warmer temperatures is more deaths, when it completely ignores the much greater number of people saved due to less frequent, severe, and deadly cold.

Indeed, in the United States and around the world, many more people die each year during the cold winter months than the hot summer months. Any change that reduces the prevalence and severity of cold relative to heat will accordingly save lives.

SOURCE

Greenies often assure us that we will run out of food. David Littleproud claims Australia has the best food security in the world. Is he correct?

Rice, pasta and some canned foods sold out in the weeks after state and federal governments imposed restrictions and urged Australians to stay at home, with a sudden rush to stock up severely straining supply chains.

State and federal government ministers have said repeatedly that buying huge volumes of food and groceries is unnecessary, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison labelling panic buying "ridiculous" and "not sensible".

The National Farmers' Federation also sought to quell concerns about food shortages, telling consumers not to "panic" as there was "plenty of food to go around".

The Minister for Agriculture, Drought and Emergency Management, David Littleproud, went so far as to declare that Australia "[has] the most secure food security in the world".

"We're a nation of 25 million people," Mr Littleproud told ABC Radio National's Afternoon Briefing program on May 11. "We produce enough food for 75 million."

Is that correct? Does Australia have "the most secure food security in the world"? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.

The verdict: Mr Littleproud's claim is in the ballpark.

According to many studies and experts, Australia enjoys a very high level of food security. The nation produces an abundance of food, exports far more than it needs, and has ample alternative sources of certain foods should they become scarce.

While Australia is not the top-ranked or "most" food-secure nation in the world, according to some comparisons, it nevertheless has plenty of flexibility in terms of food sources and could switch production priorities to alleviate shortfalls. One international comparison places Australia 12th among 113 nations in terms of food security.

Richard Heath, of the Australian Farm Institute, typified the response of the experts.

"By the most basic definition — which is, 'Are we at risk of starving because we cannot feed ourselves?' — we are so far from that, it's ridiculous," he said.

"When you consider the availability of irrigated-water area, the amount of arable land … we are a very secure nation in terms of food."

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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18 May, 2020

The Real Climate Science Deniers

Paul Driessen

Fifty years ago, I helped organize Earth Day #1 programs on my college campus, calling attention to serious pollution problems that afflicted much of the USA. Over the ensuing decades, laws, regulations, and changed attitudes, practices and technologies reduced most of that pollution, often dramatically.

I didn’t buy into the 1970 end-is-nigh, doom-and-gloom, billions-will-die hysteria that Ron Stein and Ron Bailey summarize, including the manmade global cooling crisis. I don’t buy it today, either – certainly not this year’s Earth Day focus on the alleged manmade global warming crisis, also blamed on emissions of carbon dioxide, the same gas that humans and animals exhale, and plants use to grow. We’re told the crisis is unprecedented, and poses existential threats to humanity and planet. What nonsense.

But what I find fascinating in all this is the steadfast, often nasty determination of scientists, politicians and interest groups promoting alarmist themes – and profiting immensely from them – to reject and deny any science, history and evidence that undermines their claim that nothing like this ever happened before.

The “highest ever” temperatures are a mere few tenths or even hundredths of a degree above previous records set many decades ago. The United States recently enjoyed a record 12-year respite from Category 3-5 hurricanes, ended finally by Harvey and Irma in 2017. Violent tornadoes were far fewer during the last 35 years than during the 35 years before that, and the complete absence of violent twisters in 2018 was unprecedented in US history. Modern day floods and droughts were certainly no worse than past floods or the multi-decade droughts that devastated Anasazi, Mayan and other civilizations.

However, alarmists insist, Earth’s climate and weather were stable and unchanging until humans began using coal, oil and natural gas. We must eradicate fossil fuels now, they say, regardless of what biofuel, battery, wind and solar replacements (and mining for raw materials to manufacture them) might have on wildlife, scenery, environmental values or human rights. Their disconnect from reality is astounding.

Equally fascinating is the notion that melting glaciers are something new. It amounts to asserting that everything was just peachy until American, European and Greenland glaciers started melting a few decades ago, threatening us with catastrophic sea level rise. It amounts to claiming the glacial epochs never happened; their mile-high ice sheets never blanketed a third of the Northern Hemisphere, multiple times, with warm periods in between; and seas haven’t risen some 400 feet since the Pleistocene ice age.

It amounts to claiming the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods never happened, and weren’t followed by the Little Ice Age, when priests performed exorcisms, asking God to keep glaciers from inundating villages in the Alps of Europe. It’s as though we couldn’t possibly be finding what we are finding today.

In the latest example, government and university researchers recently found numerous Viking-era artifacts along a Norwegian mountain pass that had been heavily traveled for at least 700 years, but then was buried beneath the ice and lost to history for 1,000 years. Locals used the rough 2,200-foot-long pass to travel between summer and winter lodgings, while long-distance trekkers used it as a trade route.

Within the treasure trove were tunics, mittens, horse shoes and bits, remnants of sleds used to haul food and gear over winter snow, a small shelter, and even the remains of a dog with a collar and leash. They all came to light because the glacial ice is again receding, as Earth continues its post Little Ice Age warming.

Alarmists insist the warming is due to fossil fuels, and deny that it is just part of natural climate cycles. And much more evidence of past warming and cooling periods has also come to light in recent years.

In 1991, German hikers found the incredible mummified and heavily tattooed remains of “Oetzi the Ice Man” sticking out of the ice in the Oetzal Alps near the Italian-Austrian border, at an altitude of some 10,000 feet. A partial longbow, bearskin hat and other artifacts were found nearby. He had died about 5,300 years ago from an arrow wound and had the blood of four different people on his clothes and weapons. He is further evidence of human habitation in these alpine areas during past warm periods.

Tourists and archeological teams have also discovered parts of shoes, leather clothing, fragments of a wooden bowl and numerous other items from 3000 to 4500 BC (BCE) that have emerged from the alpine ice. They are among the oldest objects ever found in the Alps. A Bronze Age pin, Roman coins and early Medieval artifacts have also been found. They show how these mountain passes and trails, impassible during cold, more glaciated periods, served as vital trade routes in periodic warmer centuries.

Norwegian ice fields show shrinkage and growth patterns similar to those of the alpine glaciers, says Norwegian glacial scientist Atle Nesje. The archaeological findings “seem to fit quite nicely with our glacier reconstructions,” he adds, which helps us understand past, present and future climate changes.

Years of research by Swiss and other scientists have produced similar findings – sometimes human artifacts, but also plant and animal remains, in areas of newly melted ice. In one location in the Swiss Alps, University of Berne geology professor Christian Schluechter found pieces of wood 12-24 inches thick and the remains of a moor. Melting waters had flushed them out from under the glacier. That means the ice there is hardly “perpetual,” he says. There were multiple periods of warmer weather and less ice.

In fact, carbon-14 dating shows ten “clearly definable time windows” over the last 10,000 years – periods when glaciers were limited to regions up to 1,000 feet higher in the Alps than today. This means that, for multiple long stretches of time, “the Alps were greener than they are today,” Schluechter concludes.

Inca children sacrificed 500 years ago in Argentina’s Andes have also emerged from melting glaciers.

Off the Florida coast, the Mel and Deo Fisher archeological diving team didn’t just find the famous Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha, which sank during a ferocious 1622 hurricane, or only the British slave ship Henrietta Marie, which went down during a 1700 hurricane, after leaving 190 Africans in Jamaica, to be sold as slaves. They also found charred tree branches, pine cones and other remnants from a forest fire 8,400 years ago, when this vast ocean area was still well above present day sea levels!

Even an entire forest has been discovered, protruding from the melting Mendenhall Glacier near Juneau, Alaska – an area I visited several years ago. Roots, stumps and large segments of entire upright spruce or hemlock trees have already been found across several acres. They are the remains of a forest that thrived there for as long as 2,350 years, until it was buried by glacial ice around 1,000 years ago.

The chronicle of amazing discoveries yielded by melting glaciers goes on and on. Their most important lesson is that our current climate is but a snapshot in time, on a vibrant planet where climate change and extreme weather have been “real” since time began. Only a science-denying climate alarmist would refuse to recognize this. Simply put, there is nothing “unprecedented” about what we are seeing today.

This is dangerous stuff – sacrilegious, even. It pulls the rug from under demands for a post-Coronavirus Green New Deal. It must be suppressed. And frightened climate science deniers are doing their best to keep it out of “mainstream” and social media. Realists must do their best to disseminate climate facts.

Of course, it may be that these past climate changes were caused by carbon dioxide and water vapor from wheezing, snorting horses, oxen and humans – laboring at the edge of exhaustion, doing what our fossil-fuel-powered vehicles and equipment do for us today. But it’s far more likely that the changes were due to a complex and still poorly understood combination of solar and other powerful natural forces.

Climate alarmists may not want to recognize or discuss these natural fluctuations and causes. But the rest of us should, and this historic evidence must be a central part of that discussion.

Improving our knowledge of what these forces are and how they work together will enable us to better predict, prepare for and adapt to future climate changes. Continuing to focus on carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases,” as the primary or sole cause of climate changes and weather events, will ensure that we never get beyond the politically driven climate and energy battles in which we are now engaged.

SOURCE

Covid-19 is a frightening dress rehearsal of the climate agenda

Months into the pandemic and many unknowns still cloud our understanding of the virus. The basic parameters of its transmission rate are still contested by scientists. Rather than shedding light, experts from prestigious institutions descend into acrimonious, politically charged, point-scoring debates. Even the grim daily ritual of the body count is slated as either an overestimate or a grotesque underestimate. But the biggest unknown yet is the damage the virus and attempts to control it have done to society and the economy, and how we will recover. From this wreckage, the green blob has re-emerged from an all-too-brief period of obscurity with a list of demands that will destroy any hope of recovery.

From the outset, there has been a palpable sense of green jealousy of the virus as it stole attention from the climate fearmongers. For half a century, greens have been prognosticating the imminent collapse of society. Yet with each new generation, deadlines to stop the destruction of the planet pass without event. In reality, the world’s population has become healthier and wealthier, and we live longer lives than ever before. Panic about the virus achieved in days what greens have been demanding for years: grounded planes, empty roads, and a halt in economic growth.

Countless lives and livelihoods throughout the world have been destroyed – either by the virus or by the draconian policies intended to stop it. But the anti-population campaigner, David Attenborough, has still managed to complain that human beings have it too good. ‘Human beings have overrun the world’, he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr. Attenborough said that living ‘in a more modest economic way’ should be an ‘ambition’: ‘The world is not a bowl of fruit… if we destroy it, we destroy ourselves.’

Of course, the natural world has endured despite all the green forecasts of its demise. But experience of coronavirus shows that the kind of fear, panic and mistrust ramped up by doom-laden forecasts has had severe consequences for humanity. Fear of the virus has threatened to dissolve the essential relationships of mutual dependence between human beings, almost in an instant – and on a greater scale than anything Gaia can throw at us in her angry revenge. Greta Thunberg’s maxim – ‘I want you to panic’ – should cause environmentalists to pause and consider what they actually want for society.

But such reflection is unlikely to be forthcoming. After all, lockdown gives greens what they have always wanted: the abolition of flight, and of travel deemed ‘unnecessary’ by technocrats; and the prohibition of goods which have been designated ‘non-essential’. Indeed, this is apparently what a green utopia looks like. Green pundits have marvelled at the clean air – ignoring the boarded-up shops, bars, restaurants and cafes that may never reopen. They have cheered the empty blue skies, while human life is confined to the home and neighbourhood. We may have endless free time, but we have no money and no freedom to go anywhere. Naturally, George Monbiot is delighted.

The virus of green thinking has infected political leaders and their plans for the economic recovery, too. ‘No one hesitates to make very profound, brutal choices when it’s a matter of saving lives’, French president Emmanuel Macron told the FT: ‘It’s the same for climate risk.’

Meanwhile, an unconvincing Dominic Raab, standing in for the prime minister, appeared to contradict him. ‘There is no choice between cutting emissions and growing our economy – that’s a myth the UK has helped to shatter over the past decade’, he said in a Twitter address from 10 Downing Street. Climate policy, promised Raab, was an ‘essential element to our strategy to rebound’ from the pandemic.

But which will it be? Raab’s green growth or Macron’s ‘brutal choices’? It cannot be both. The Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat – France’s undemocratic climate assembly, set up by Macron to develop climate policy – has called for the strict rolling back of industrial society to be part of the post-coronavirus ‘recovery’. Its proposal even includes the abolition of out-of-town supermarkets. But then, what would you expect? No politician, anywhere, has ever been able to explain how green restraints on an economy – and hence material constraints on people, including price rises and travel restrictions – can allow, much less create, growth.

Green platitudes are nothing more than a veneer of bullshit for no-mark politicians to hide behind. ‘We can turn the crisis of this pandemic into an opportunity to rebuild our economies differently and make them more resilient’, said the unelected president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen while promoting her ‘EU Green Deal’. Undemocratic technocrats everywhere – from every national and global political institution, from the UN to the town hall – are agreed on the necessity of rebuilding and redesigning economies along green lines. But they cannot answer how they will rebuild them. Who will pay for it? What do we, the people, get out of it? And when do we get to vote on it?

We do not get any say on it, of course. Political necessity, not democracy, shall dictate the action. The climate agenda rescues Macron from his deep domestic crises. Climate change even makes Raab look like he stands for something. And it gives the hollow European project purpose. The green agenda is being brought forward, and the viral crisis is being rolled into the climate crisis, because the pandemic has revealed the emptiness of the political class. Not only are the elites devoid of any ideas for kickstarting economic growth — they have even run out of ideas for how to sustain economic stagnation.

Greens also claim that the pandemic exposes the shortcomings of a fossil-fuel dependent world. The recent crash in oil prices proves this, apparently. As demand for energy withered, cargo ships containing oil approached depots that were at full capacity. Consequently, supply being far in excess of demand, the oil price, which was already sinking, went negative. This, said Sky News’ Ed Conway in The Times, was a sign of our ‘post-oil future’. ‘Eventually the world will wean itself off fossil fuels, so today’s oil producers’ days are numbered; only a handful will survive’, he wrote.

But the demand for fossil fuels is suppressed, not because of any inherent problems with fossil fuels, but because vast numbers of people have been immobilised. The reason the oil price plunged is the same reason videos of dancing nurses appeared on social media. Whereas many nurses are extremely busy, the lockdown has caused other health workers to become surplus to need.

The same is true of the broader economy. No economic system can be made resilient to its own deliberate abolition. But perhaps this is beyond the understanding of journalists, many of whom have rushed to indulge the economic wisdom of a child who has not yet completed secondary education.

In Conway’s imagination, wind turbines and solar panels were powering the post-oil green utopia. In reality, they were producing a dangerous surplus that threatened to destabilise the electricity grid, causing operators to demand emergency legislation to take them offline. Yet, thanks to the irrationality of the energy ‘market’ created by green policies, rather than this surplus supply leading to lower prices, money was instead pumped to the green-energy developers – and to the wealthy landowners who rent out the land on which the turbines and solar panels sit.

If there is a term for this political order designed by institutional science, remote technocrats, idiot green journalists and vapid politicians, it is eco-feudalism. Democratic control of the economy is a distant memory. The rights and freedoms enjoyed by people can be constrained by what is deemed ecologically necessary. Science says so, apparently. And the ultimate beneficiaries of whatever trade or movement is still permitted will be the owners of land on which energy – the scarcity of which has been manufactured by diktat – is produced. The pandemic is being used to advance the ‘transition’ to this new political order.

Indeed, the pandemic has played out as a time-lapsed rehearsal of the climate crisis. It has revealed that governments that lack any sense of direction of their own are very easily panicked into making impulsive decisions with catastrophic long-term consequences. And as with climate change, the scientific modelling supplies the main tool of fearmongering – the precautionary principle. The scientists themselves turn out to be as petty, vindictive and self-serving – and as hopelessly divorced from reality – as any politician. Much of their advice has been spurious and unscientific. The supranational WHO, which was supposed to see these emergencies coming and to bring the world’s expertise to bear to solve the crisis, instead dragged its feet.

On this timescale, we can see that far-reaching and regressive political agendas are hidden behind a preoccupation and oversensitivity to risk. And whereas the green agenda has played out in years, we can see in mere weeks that policymakers are indifferent to our lives and livelihoods, and will cynically embrace crises to advance their own interests. There will be no chance of an economic recovery if Britain, the EU and the rest of the world follow their existing climate-change agendas – there will only be a lockdown, or something like it, forever.

SOURCE

Tesla’s secret batteries aim to rework the math for electric cars and the grid

Electric car maker Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) plans to introduce a new low-cost, long-life battery in its Model 3 sedan in China later this year or early next that it expects will bring the cost of electric vehicles in line with gasoline models, and allow EV batteries to have second and third lives in the electric power grid.

For months, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk has been teasing investors, and rivals, with promises to reveal significant advances in battery technology during a “Battery Day” in late May.

New, low-cost batteries designed to last for a million miles of use and enable electric Teslas to sell profitably for the same price or less than a gasoline vehicle are just part of Musk’s agenda, people familiar with the plans told Reuters.

With a global fleet of more than 1 million electric vehicles that are capable of connecting to and sharing power with the grid, Tesla’s goal is to achieve the status of a power company, competing with such traditional energy providers as Pacific Gas & Electric (PCG_pa.A) and Tokyo Electric Power (9501.T), those sources said.

The new “million mile” battery at the center of Tesla’s strategy was jointly developed with China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd (CATL) (300750.SZ) and deploys technology developed by Tesla in collaboration with a team of academic battery experts recruited by Musk, three people familiar with the effort said.

Eventually, improved versions of the battery, with greater energy density and storage capacity and even lower cost, will be introduced in additional Tesla vehicles in other markets, including North America, the sources said.

Tesla’s plan to launch the new battery first in China and its broader strategy to reposition the company have not previously been reported. Tesla declined to comment.

Tesla’s new batteries will rely on innovations such as low-cobalt and cobalt-free battery chemistries, and the use of chemical additives, materials and coatings that will reduce internal stress and enable batteries to store more energy for longer periods, sources said.

Tesla also plans to implement new high-speed, heavily automated battery manufacturing processes designed to reduce labor costs and increase production in massive “terafactories” about 30 times the size of the company’s sprawling Nevada “gigafactory” — a strategy telegraphed in late April to analysts by Musk.

Tesla is working on recycling and recovery of such expensive metals as nickel, cobalt and lithium, through its Redwood Materials affiliate, as well as new “second life” applications of electric vehicle batteries in grid storage systems, such as the one Tesla built in South Australia in 2017. The automaker also has said it wants to supply electricity to consumers and businesses, but has not provided details.

Reuters reported exclusively in February that Tesla was in advanced talks to use CATL’s lithium iron phosphate batteries, which use no cobalt, the most expensive metal in EV batteries.

CATL also has developed a simpler and less expensive way of packaging battery cells, called cell-to-pack, that eliminates the middle step of bundling cells. Tesla is expected to use the technology to help reduce battery weight and cost.

The sources said CATL also plans to supply Tesla in China next year with an improved long-life nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) battery whose cathode is 50% nickel and only 20% cobalt.

Tesla now jointly produces nickel-cobalt-aluminum (NCA) batteries with Panasonic (6752.T) at a “gigafactory” in Nevada, and buys NMC batteries from LG Chem (051910.KS) in China. Panasonic declined to comment.

Taken together, the advances in battery technology, the strategy of expanding the ways in which EV batteries can be used and the manufacturing automation on a huge scale all aim at the same target: Reworking the financial math that until now has made buying an electric car more expensive for most consumers than sticking with carbon-emitting internal combustion vehicles.

“We’ve got to really make sure we get a very steep ramp in battery production and continue to improve the cost per kilowatt-hour of the batteries — this is very fundamental and extremely difficult,” Musk told investors in January. “We’ve got to scale battery production to crazy levels that people cannot even fathom today.”

Tesla has reported operating profits for three quarters in a row, driving a near-doubling of its share price this year. Still, Musk’s ambitious expansion plans depend on increasing both profit margins and sales volume.

A number of the technical advances made by Tesla and CATL in battery chemistry and design originated at a small research lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The lab has been run since 1996 by Jeff Dahn, a pioneer in the development of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage.

Dahn and his team began an exclusive five-year research partnership with Tesla in mid-2016, but the relationship dates back at least to 2012.

Among the critical contributions from Dahn’s lab: Chemical additives and nano-engineered materials to make lithium-ion batteries tougher and more resistant to bruising from stress such as rapid charging, thus extending their life.

The cost of CATL’s cobalt-free lithium iron phosphate battery packs has fallen below $80 per kilowatt-hour, with the cost of the battery cells dropping below $60/kWh, the sources said. CATL’s low-cobalt NMC battery packs are close to $100/kWh.

Auto industry executives have said $100/kWh for battery packs is the level at which electric vehicles reach rough parity with internal combustion competitors.

Battery expert Shirley Meng, a professor at the University of California San Diego, said NMC cells could cost as little as $80/kWh once recycling and recovery of key materials such as cobalt and nickel is factored in. Iron phosphate batteries, which are safer than NMC, could find a second life in stationary grid storage systems, reducing the upfront cost of those batteries for electric vehicle buyers.

In comparison, the new low-cobalt batteries being jointly developed by General Motors Co (GM.N) and LG Chem are not expected to reach those cost levels until 2025, according to a source familiar with the companies’ work.

GM declined to comment on its cost targets. Earlier this year, it said only that it planned to “drive battery cell costs below $100/kWh” without specifying a timetable.

SOURCE

Why Would 'Climate Migrants' Flee from Food?

Dark predictions of the future from climate alarmists warn that “climate change” will force hundreds of millions of “climate migrants” to flee from hellish conditions caused by humanity’s use of fossil fuels and its resulting CO2 production. (Those who are not quite as bold in their conviction might call it “climate-encouraged migration”.) A widely-cited 2008 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggested 200 million migrants could be displaced by 2050. The question that naturally follows is, “What specific effects of ‘climate change’ would drive this migration?” The IPCC cites rising sea-levels, agricultural land that has been salinized and desertified, and most importantly, water scarcity and food insecurity, which frequently go hand-in-hand. Indeed, severe food scarcity has driven populations to move in the past.

If we ignore non-agricultural variables such as food imports and food distribution, then food scarcity is clearly a result of low agricultural production, which can be blamed on a number of possible factors, including poor soil quality, ignorance of modern scientific farming, diseases and pests, and environmental conditions, e.g., variations in temperature and precipitation or irrigation.

The bottom-line measure of agricultural efficiency that directly depends on soil quality, farming methods, (prevention of) diseases and pests, and growing conditions is crop-yield. Crop yield is essentially the ratio of crop production per unit of land area, usually measured in metric tons per hectare or hectograms per hectare. To understand if there is potential for climate-linked migration due to food-scarcity, crop yields provide a reasonable test. Because good climate conditions are a necessary prerequisite, but not a sufficient condition, for high yields, uniformly high yields of important crops that are well-sampled geographically can effectively rule out climate-related drivers of food scarcity.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (often called the FAO for short) has kept reliable statistics on cultivation area, production, and yield for various crops, by country, from as far back as 1961. These statistics can be easily found in the FAO’s database.

The graphs displayed below show the historic crop yields, with trend lines, for important crops from a representative set of countries that could be affected by “climate change”. Included are the historic yields of maize (corn) in Mexico, rice in India, coffee beans in Brazil and in Vietnam, sweet potatoes in Kenya, and bananas in Guatemala. You want to see the real "green movement"? This is it:

These positive yield trends are not outliers, but rather, they are typical of other crops around the world. The devil’s counterargument is that these excellent results were brought to us by scientific farming, but the counter-counterargument is, science would be irrelevant if the most important variable – climate – were not sustaining of agricultural production.

Even if we assume the climate is warming overall, the production of food crops may not be significantly impacted. According to a study on the causes of crop failure, by Yale researcher Robert Mendelsohn, annual warming may have little to do with crop failures:

Warmer average temperatures in January and April contribute to higher crop failures whereas warmer October temperatures reduce failure rates. October temperatures are a proxy for autumn harvesting conditions. Warmer temperatures in this period help to dry at least grain crops. They may also extend the growing season allowing crops to fully mature. Curiously, July temperature does not have a significant effect. Although the seasonal temperatures have a significant effect on crop failure rates, they are offsetting. Adding the effects of the three seasons together suggest that annual warming will not have a significant effect on crop failure rates.

Furthermore, nothing in the FAO’s crop yield statistics gives an indication that the trend of increasing yields will not continue for the foreseeable future. Michael Shellenberger recently summarized the FAO’s long term projections in Forbes:

Humans today produce enough food for 10 billion people, or 25% more than we need, and scientific bodies predict increases in that share, not declines. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) forecasts crop yields increasing 30% by 2050. And the poorest parts of the world, like sub-Saharan Africa, are expected to see increases of 80 to 90%.

He goes on to remind us that the FAO cites basic concerns, not climate, as critical to continued growth in yields:

Rates of future yield growth depend far more on whether poor nations get access to tractors, irrigation, and fertilizer than on climate change, says FAO.

If the world were on fire, as the alarmists assert, would our fields be so lush and bountiful? While it is quite possible that many people will choose to move from warmer, less developed parts of the world to cooler, more-developed ones, in the future, it almost certainly would not be because agriculture collapsed from an inhospitable Earth.

SOURCE

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

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

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17 May, 2020

Rising sea levels over the past 120 years are a result of man-made climate change and NOT variations in the Earth's orbit, study shows

This is a strange report. The link to the journal article does not work and the alleged author does not even list the article in his "In press" publications. Was it published and then withdrawn? Probably. Impossible to evaluate anyway

Rising sea levels over the past 120 years are a result of man-made climate change and not variations in the Earth's orbit, a study has found.

Over the last 66 million years, the Earth has both had ice ages and ice-free conditions — both caused by variations in Earth's orbital properties.

However, sea-level rise has accelerated in recent decades, threatening to flood many populated coastal cities, communities and low-lying land by the century's end.

This consequence of greenhouse gas emissions also poses a grave threat to many ecosystems and could generate costly damage to infrastructure.

'Our team showed that the Earth's history of glaciation was more complex than previously thought.' said paper author Kenneth Miller of Rutgers University.

'Although carbon dioxide levels had an important influence on ice-free periods, minor variations in the Earth's orbit were the dominant factor in terms of ice volume and sea-level changes — until modern times.'

In their study, the researchers reconstructed the history of sea level changes and glaciations since the age of the dinosaurs ended, around 66 million years ago.

They compared estimates of the global average sea level — based on deep-sea geochemistry data — with continental margin records.

Continental margins, which include the relatively shallow ocean waters over a continental shelf, can extend out hundreds of miles from the coast.

The team discovered that periods of nearly ice-free conditions — such as was found 17–13 million years ago — occurred when atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide was not much higher than it is today.

Glacial periods were also found to have occurred at times previously thought to have been ice-free, including from 48–34 million years ago.

'Atmospheric carbon dioxide had an important influence on ice-free periods on Earth,' said Professor Miller.

'Ice volume and sea-level changes prior to human influences were linked primarily to minor variations in the Earth's orbit and distance from the sun,' he added.

The largest sea-level decline took place during the last glacial period, around 20,000 years ago, when the water level dropped by about 400 feet (around 122 metres).

The team have concluded that sea-level changes were at a standstill until around 1900, but began rising as human activities began influencing the climate.

The full findings of the study were published in the journal Science Advances.

SOURCE

People not concerned about climate change only wear a mask 30 percent of the time in public during the coronavirus pandemic, survey reveals

People who doubt one official story tend to doubt others

A survey finds your stance on climate change determines your decision to wear a mask during the coronavirus pandemic.

Approximately 54 percent of individuals who are climate-concerned 'always' wear masks in public, while only 30 percent of those who responded 'not too concerned' or 'not concerned at all' strap on the gear.

The trend was also observed when following advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – those who are troubled by human causing changes in the environment following social distancing and cleaning practices.

In the unconcerned group, 65 percent identified as conservative and 36 percent are deemed baby boomers.

The US has been hit by the coronavirus harder than any other nation in the world. As of Friday, there are more than 1.4 million cases and over 84,000 reported deaths.

The CDC has rolled out guidelines to the public with the hope of limiting the spread of the outbreak, which includes wearing a mask, social distancing and cleaning homes.

The Morning Consult, a technology firm, set out to see how a person's view on one public health crisis affects their behavior toward another.

The team conducted an online survey with 2,200 Americans from April 14 through 16, which asked participants about their views on climate change and precautions they adhere to during the coronavirus pandemic.

The 'climate-concerned' group included those who agree the changes to the environment are caused by human activity and worry about the future of our planet.

The other group, deemed 'climate-unconcerned' were individuals who said they were either 'not too concerned' or 'not concerned at all' about climate change.

Social distancing was found to be practiced by both groups - 86 percent of the climate-concerned and 72 percent of the climate-unconcerned.

Experts who analyzed the findings suggest that 'the discrepancy can be traced either to science skepticism or to personal autonomy concerns, the combination of which has fueled climate change dismissal and denial for decades, Morning Consult shared.

Emma Frances Bloomfield, an assistant professor in communication studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said that this also stems from a general skepticism of authority and a personal concern, rather than what is better for the masses.

'Everything that science asks us to do is really sacrificing personal convenience for community convenience and well-being,' Bloomfield said. 'And for a lot of people, the coronavirus is invisible, just like climate change is invisible.'

'A lot of people don't know people who have been directly affected, and in the case of climate change, a lot of the more severe effects are still years away.

However, Ed Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, said that in the United States, the most important predictor of a person's attitude toward climate change is his or her political ideology.

'Conservative Republicans are much more likely to be climate skeptics, and liberal Democrats are much more likely to be seriously concerned about climate change,' he said.

President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are known offenders of dismissing the CDC recommendations.

On Thursday, Trump visited a medical supply company factor in Pennsylvania, but took the tour without a mask, marking the second time he wasn't pictured with a facial covering as he traveled outside of the White House to visit companies helping the battle against the coronavirus.

And Friday, the president made mask-wearing an option for officials at the White House's Rose Garden event.

Although Pence has not been seen wearing the face cover, the vice president did say he should have worn one when visiting the Mayo Clinic in April.

SOURCE

Buffet’s billion dollar subsidy farm

Warren Buffet just got the go ahead to spend over one billion dollars to construct America’s largest ever solar installation in Nevada’s Mojave desert.

An energy corporation owned by America’s third richest man is planning to rake in the solar subsidies.

You may recall that Buffet has been candid with his investors as to why he invests in so-called “renewables.” Here’s what he infamously said about wind turbines: “For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

Dr. Jay Lehr outlines “the futility of this mammoth project that will blight this great desert forever, while pulling the curtain down on the futility of attempting to obtain dependable power from the sun unless it is on your roof top. We have been lying to ourselves about this potential for over three decades.” Read his full commentary here at CFACT.org.

Green ideologues resort to magical thinking when it comes time to rationalize their “renewable” energy schemes. Corporate investors are certainly not going to correct them.

Dr. Lehr further explains:

Thinking that some special new battery is going to maintain as much power as the absent sun, has been and will be an impossibility for the foreseeable future. The mandatory back up fossil fuel must stand by running near full out and emitting carbon dioxide and producing no electricity until the sun cannot fill the bill and it must step in. The excess cost for the excess backup power will show up in the electric bills of the residents of Las Vegas as sure as night shall follow day.

So there we have it. Investors collect the subsidies, while rate and taxpayers get fleeced. CO2 emissions don’t budge (if that’s your thing) while vast natural lands are turned into solar wastelands.

Green Robin Hoods steal from the poor and the planet to give to the rich.

SOURCE

A billion dollar solar boondoggle in Vegas

On May 12 the Interior Department gave approval for the largest solar power project in the U.S. to be built by Warren Buffett’s NV Energy company on 7100 acres of Federal lands in the Mohave Desert. At a cost of one billion dollars, it pales into insignificance on the days we read of the trillions of dollars being spent battling the corona virus economic destruction. But a boondoggle by any other name remains a boondoggle.

The plan for this three year project is very specific and quite ambitious and will never fulfill even close to its targets of 690 megawatts that are said will power 260,000 homes, provide 900 jobs, with a massive battery backup to replace the solar system at night, and emit no carbon dioxide. Had the government seen Michael Moore’s brilliant new movie Planet For The Humans before approving the project they may not have approved it. The film illustrates on the ground at various sites, how and why every major solar project in the country has failed miserably.

In just a few sentences we can explain the futility of this mammoth project that will blight this great desert forever, while pulling the curtain down on the futility of attempting to obtain dependable power from the sun unless it is on your roof top. We have been lying to ourselves about this potential for over three decades.

In a new book light-heartedly titled The Hitchhikers Journey Through Climate Change one discovers that the renewable energy debate can be summed up with a simple Rule of Thumb which states “in every communities electric grid, an excess amount of fossil fuel or nuclear power must be available at the ready to go on line in seconds, that is equal to the potential output of all intermittent solar energy considered a portion of the grids electric capacity”. No batteries exist on earth that could take up the load when the sun is not shining. If they could it would likely only be for a single night for how would then recharge them. This is a fairy tale of absurdity being sold to Las Vegas just as the snake oil salesmen of the old west plied their trade.

When you digest this simple rule, you will wonder that the pro/con arguments over solar energy have gone on for so long without facing the only reality that can ever allow solar energy to be an important part of our energy portfolio. *It must have 100% back up with fossil fuel or nuclear power to insure that the communities electric grid can not let them down*. Las Vegas of all places can not afford a blackout. Thinking that some special new battery is going to maintain as much power as the absent sun, has been and will be an impossibility for the foreseeable future. The mandatory back up fossil fuel must stand by running near full out and emitting carbon dioxide and producing no electricity until the sun can not fill the bill and it must step in. The excess cost for the excess backup power will show up in the electric bills of the residents of Las Vegas as sure as night shall follow day.

SOURCE

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

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

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15 May, 2020

Wind Power: Subsidy after Subsidy As the Infant Never Grows Up

A group of bipartisan senators on Thursday asked the Department of Treasury to extend safe harbor deadlines to ensure renewable energy developers are able to secure the tax credits they need to finance their projects.

In order to qualify for the production tax credit (PTC) or the investment tax credit (ITC), project developers have to meet certain construction deadlines, but many in the industry are seeing lengthy project delays as a result of supply chain disruptions, workforce shortages and other COVID-19-related setbacks.

Renewables advocates have been asking Congress to extend these provisions for weeks, citing the loss of potentially billions of dollars in investments if these projects are not able to proceed.
A letter from six Green New Deal-light senators to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin states in part:

… we urge you to extend the continuity safe harbor, provided under existing Treasury Department guidance, for both the production tax credit (PTC) and energy investment tax credit (ITC), from four years to five years for projects that started construction in 2016 or 2017. This modest adjustment to the PTC and ITC guidance would help preserve tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in investments and provide some certainty in these challenging times.

… the COVID-19 crisis has disrupted supply chains, construction operations, and permitting timelines, delaying projects otherwise on track to be in operation by the end of 2020. While existing IRS guidance provides certain exceptions for specified setbacks in construction, these exceptions do not anticipate nor fully capture the wideranging interruptions now faced by developers.

Providing a temporary extension of the continuity safe harbor of five years, in lieu of the current four, would address the unforeseen interruptions developers are experiencing due to COVID-19 and provide the certainty businesses need to move forward with existing projects.

Such would qualify as the 13th federal subsidy extension for wind power, dating back to 1992. Yet back in 1986, amid California’s wind subsidies, a representative of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) stated: “The U.S. wind industry has … demonstrated reliability and performance levels that make them very competitive.” Which brings to mind what Milton and Rose Friedman stated in 1997:

The infant industry argument is a smoke screen. The so-called infants never grow up.

The uneconomic remains so because of basic energy physics in light of consumer preference. And in this case, the uneconomic is also cronyism unbound.

It is time for a flight to quality; to dense, reliable energies.

SOURCE

Fusion Energy Gets Ready to Shine—Finally

UNTIL 1920, HUMANS had no real sense of how the sun and stars create their vast amounts of energy. Then, in October of that year, Arthur Stanley Eddington, an English astrophysicist, penned an essay elegantly titled “ The Internal Constitution of the Stars.” “A star is drawing on some vast reservoir of energy by means unknown,” he wrote. “This reservoir can scarcely be other than the sub-atomic energy which, it is known, exists abundantly in all matter; we sometimes dream that man will one day learn how to release it and use it for his service.”

From that moment, scientists began the quest to harness unlimited, carbon-free power on earth. They've built more than 200 reactors that have tried to slam hydrogen atoms together and release fusion energy. It's a dream perennially called delusional, impossible, and “always 20 years away.” In 1985, recognizing that no country had the will to solve the world's most complicated puzzle alone, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev called for an international effort to give it a go.

In 1988, engineers began designing the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, now just ITER. Along the way, 35 nations have split the $23.7 billion price tag to construct its 10 million parts. Now, surrounded by vineyards in France's Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, the 25,000-ton machine is set to be flipped on in 2025.

The isotopes butting heads will be deuterium and tritium. To get the atoms whipping around the inner chamber of the Russian-nesting-doll-like machine, a magnet will drive 15 million amperes of electricity through them. They'll also be zapped by 24 microwave generators and three semitruck-sized particle guns, until they reach 270 million degrees F and, avec optimisme, crash into each other, releasing heaps of energy. There's no guarantee ITER will achieve fusion by 2035, as scheduled. But Edward Morse, who teaches nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley, says it's the “only viable” hope we have to secure the energy we'll need over the next millennia: “It's Rosemary's baby. We have to pray for Rosemary's baby.” And if it fails? As Eddington wrote, if man “is not yet destined to reach the sun and solve for all time the riddle of its constitution, yet he may hope to learn from his journey some hints to build a better machine.”

SOURCE

Hydrogen Technology May Turn Gas Green and Fractivists Red with Rage

A partnership between Penn State EMS Energy Institute researchers and a Pittsburgh-based start-up company may hold the answer to reducing so-called greenhouse gas emissions while also paving the way to disrupt the chemical and material industries. The collaboration has resulted in several research projects that aim to “reinvent” both coal and natural gas as clean, cost-effective sources of fuels and high-performance materials.

The holy grail in energy (at least right now) is hydrogen. Have you noticed all the stories about using hydrogen for energy? Hydrogen this and hydrogen that. Hydrogen will save Mom Earth from toasting to death. Whatever.

When you “burn” hydrogen you get water, not carbon dioxide (the stuff you breathe out with every breath). The issue with hydrogen is getting enough of it. Using traditional methods you either create nasty emissions or it’s too expensive.

Penn State and a company called H Quest are extracting hydrogen from natural gas using microwave plasma technology. It’s completely free of so-called greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, microwave plasma enables smaller, modular chemical conversion plants–cheaper to build and deploy.

A multi-disciplinary collaborative relationship, developed between Penn State EMS Energy Institute researchers and a Pittsburgh-based start-up company, may hold the answer to reducing global greenhouse gas emissions while also paving the way to disrupt the chemical and material industries.

Since 2015, Randy Vander Wal, professor of energy and mineral engineering and materials science and engineering, and affiliate at the EMS Energy Institute, has been collaborating with H Quest Vanguard on a growing number of projects that use the company’s plasma technology to enable potential new, non-emissive uses of coal and natural gas.

“The unique capabilities of Penn State’s Material Characterization Laboratory provide invaluable insights into properties of H Quest’s plasma-produced materials and are crucial to establishing a product fit for commercialization,” said George Skoptsov, H Quest CEO.

The collaboration has resulted in five research projects that aim to reinvent coal and natural gas in the 21st century as clean, cost-effective sources of fuels and high-performance materials.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions

While the Earth’s climate has changed throughout history, the current scientific consensus is that the present global warming trend is likely the result of human activity, namely emissions of green house gases due to combustion of fossil fuels.

Switching to cleaner fuels is recognized as a key component in reducing these emissions. Hydrogen, in particular, is a promising energy carrier because burning it produces only water and not carbon dioxide. But hydrogen is very rare in its pure molecular form. It is abundant, however, in the form of water—11% hydrogen by mass—and methane, a principal component of natural gas—25% hydrogen by mass. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, presently 95% of the hydrogen for fuel in the U.S. is extracted from natural gas.

The most widely used industrial process for hydrogen production—steam-methane reforming—heats methane from natural gas using steam to produce carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Unfortunately, this process has a large greenhouse gas emission footprint and consumes large amounts of water.

Thermal methane decomposition heats natural gas to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which cracks the hydrocarbon molecules, extracting hydrogen as gas and leaving the solid carbon behind. Introducing catalysts to this process can reduce the required temperature but introduces the problem of separating the solid carbon from the catalyst surfaces. Overall, due to constraints associated with heating, this process remains a costly, energy-intensive, and greenhouse gas-emissive process.

H Quest’s microwave plasma technology catalyzes reactions in a novel way and allows very rapid—1,000 degrees Fahrenheit per second—heating of gas, which is not possible with conventional heating technologies such as boilers, furnaces, heat exchangers, or inductive heaters.

Because renewable electricity can power microwaves, and methane decomposition does not use oxygen, extracting hydrogen from natural gas using microwave plasma technology can be completely free of green house gas emissions. In addition, microwave plasma technology enables modular, small-scale, low-capital deployment of chemical conversion plants, making the chemical industry more efficient, effective, flexible and competitive.

In a recently awarded University Coalition for Basic and Applied Fossil Energy Research project, sponsored by the DOE, Vander Wal is looking to develop a deeper understanding of how process conditions within H Quest’s reactor define carbon product parameters.

Vital to this effort are the capabilities of the Material Characterization Laboratory, which has a wide variety of characterization techniques in the areas of microscopy, spectroscopy, surface analysis, and thermo-physical techniques that will help shed light on why different materials show different properties and behaviors.

The project, titled “Optimization of Microwave-Driven, Plasma-Assisted Conversion of Methane to Hydrogen and Graphene,” aims to identify reactor design and process conditions for hydrogen production with the capability to tune carbon product characteristics and evaluate methane conversion, product yields, and selectivity.

The goal is to develop relations between the carbon product form, characteristics, and process parameters. Such relationships will allow selective production of specific carbon forms and the ability to tailor their physical-chemical properties. The researchers hope this will lead to next-generation hydrogen technologies that could enable using stranded domestic energy resources, such as stranded natural gas reserves, while also diversifying hydrogen feedstocks.

If successful, it could also reduce the costs associated with large-scale hydrogen energy products; create market demand, technologies, and infrastructure to enable hydrogen energy deployment; and use domestic natural gas for manufacturing energy and synthetic carbon products.

“Microwave processing of natural gas represents decarbonization of a fossil fuel while paving the path toward the hydrogen economy,” Vander Wal said.

It would also create a pathway to cleaner, lower-cost carbon products. Graphene, for example, is a material that is stronger than steel and more conductive than copper.

“Graphene, as an additive to concrete, can increase strength and durability, contributing to infrastructure improvement while sequestering at large scale carbon/graphene production,” Vander Wal said.

Penn State EMS Energy Institute researchers and H Quest are also partnering through a National Science Foundation Small Business Technology Transfer Program award to test the company’s material in these roles. They also are investigating applications of microwave plasma to convert coal into carbon products through an award from the DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory.

The breadth of the plasma-derived products is immense, from activated carbon to 3-D-printable plastics to industrial carbon electrodes for steel and aluminum smelting, the possibilities are immeasurable, Skoptsov said.

“Coal has been foundational for modern industrial organic chemistry,” he added. “So many synthetic products—from aspirin to nylon—have been produced from coal, before it became synonymous with electricity generation in the era of cheap oil in the 1950s. This research will unlock the true value of our fossil resources as the source of high-performance materials but will do so in a more sustainable and cost-effective way than has ever been possible.”

So we can “decarbonize” fossil fuels. Turn them clean and green, right? Here’s the thing: Even if you could wave a magic environmental wand over natural gas (or coal) and make it 100% clean and green, irrational fossil fuel haters are still gonna hate. They will refuse to accept the technology simply because it’s called “fossil fuel.” That’s the reality.

Perpetually angry fractivists just have to hate and will turn red with rage if gas is made even greener, says Jim. Is he correct? Probably so.

We applaud these researchers for their efforts, but we predict ultimately this technology will go nowhere because of the prevailing, demented thinking on the part of those who call themselves environmentalists

SOURCE

It’s All Over For Europe’s Green Deal As Angela Merkel’s MEPs Say ‘It’s No Longer Viable’

Opposition to the EU’s Green Deal promoted by EU Commission leader Ursula von der Leyen is growing among Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU MEPs in the European Parliament.

Markus Pieper is the leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic CDU/CSU parliamentary party in the European Parliament
The leader of the Parliamentary Party Markus Pieper told news magazine FOCUS:

The Green Deal was a gigantic challenge for an economy in top shape. After the corona bloodletting, it is simply not financially viable.”

Pieper suggests, among other things, to expand trading in CO2 to electric cars and building renovations instead of fixed CO2 quotas. “Then the market regulates the progress in climate protection according to supply and demand via a price mechanism,” Pieper told FOCUS.

Pieper also called for energy policy to be the “core concern of EU foreign policy” in order to import more electricity from renewable energy from Africa and the Middle East. The Federal Government also warned that the current carbon price of ten euros per tonne of CO2 should be maintained and the decision by the Federal Council on a higher carbon price should be rejected.

SOURCE

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

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

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14 May, 2020

Abandoning the concept of renewable energy

Highlights:

* Renewable energy (RE) is a widely shared concept that influences energy policy worldwide.

* The concept of RE is problematic in many ways, yet these problems are often ignored.

* The umbrella of RE seems to enable questionable bait-and-switch tactics.

* Alternative conceptualization of energy could support more effective climate policy.

Abstract

Renewable energy is a widely used term that describes certain types of energy production. In politics, business and academia, renewable energy is often framed as the key solution to the global climate challenge. We, however, argue that the concept of renewable energy is problematic and should be abandoned in favor of more unambiguous conceptualization.

Building on the theoretical literature on framing and based on document analysis, case examples and statistical data, we discuss how renewable energy is framed and has come to be a central energy policy concept and analyze how its use has affected the way energy policy is debated and conducted. We demonstrate the key problems the concept of renewable energy has in terms of sustainability, incoherence, policy impacts, bait-and-switch tactics and generally misleading nature. After analyzing these issues, we discuss alternative conceptualizations and present our model of categorizing energy production according to carbon content and combustion.

The paper does not intend to criticize or promote any specific form of energy production, but instead discusses the role of institutional conceptualization in energy policy.

SOURCE

UK: World's largest solar farm could cause explosion on scale of small nuclear bomb, residents complain

Developers want to erect up to one million solar panels the height of a double-decker bus on 900 acres of farmland, the equivalent of 600 football pitches, at Cleve Hill near Faversham at a cost of £450m.

They would have the capacity to power more than 90,000 homes using energy from what would be the biggest battery storage facility in the world - and three times bigger than the lithium-ion battery built by Elon Musk, the Tesla tycoon, in South Australia.

But thousands of campaigners say the battery facility, which would cover 25 acres, is unsafe and their idyllic village would be decimated if there was a battery fire which could not be controlled....

SOURCE

The dark side of environmentalism

The response of eco-activists to the coronavirus pandemic has exposed their deep misanthropy.

There are some who believe that the Covid-19 pandemic represents humanity’s comeuppance. They will tweet comments like ‘humanity is the real virus’, or that this is Mother Nature’s way of defending herself against humanity. And the principal source of such statements lies in a part of the environmentalist movement, and its anti-human, sometimes openly misanthropic worldview.

Just look at the enthusiasm with which some greens have greeted the stopping of so much human activity, despite the economic damage it will wreak. And then there is the language environmentalists use to describe humanity. At the very least, they portray humans as feckless exploiters of nature. Others are less coy, and overtly cast humanity as a plague on the planet, or a cancer that needs to be eradicated. The more fervent the eco-warrior, the more dehumanising the rhetoric.

Even more morbid is greens’ suggestion that mass pandemics serve the useful function of culling people. This ties to another favourite subject of radical conservationists: population control.

Population control has been advocated by several prominent politicians and public figures in recent years. They claim that population growth will result in the use of more resources and therefore will put more strain on the environment. This argument draws on the thoroughly debunked work of 18th-century reactionary Thomas Malthus, who claimed that since the earth’s resources are finite, it could only support a finite number of people. Too many people would mean famine, disease and war.

Malthus’s error was to underestimate the extent to which humanity, through technological advances, could increase productivity and unlock hitherto inaccessible resources. So despite the massive population growth since the 1790s, not only is there currently more food available than ever before, it is more efficiently produced and distributed, too.

You would have thought this would have been cause for celebration. But no – despite the persistent historical refutation of the overpopulation thesis, it has continually found doom-laden advocates, especially in the environmentalist movement.

So, in the 1960s and 70s, many scientists and experts, citing Malthus, predicted that global mass starvation and civilisational collapse would occur within two or three decades if immediate action was not taken. One of the most vocal prophets of ecological doom at this time was Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford professor and author of The Population Bomb (1968). He warned that between 1970 and 1990, billions would starve to death due to population growth exceeding levels of food production. Additionally, he argued that the earth’s natural resources would be depleted, leading to an energy crisis and major world conflicts. Like Malthus, his predictions were apocalyptically bleak. And like Malthus he was completely, undeniably wrong.

The problem with the overpopulation thesis is not simply that it is wrong – it is that it has resulted in the proposal of sinister, draconian solutions. Ehrlich and others, for instance, recommended spiking food and water supplies with sterilising drugs; keeping blacklists of organisations and individuals who were seen to hinder population-control efforts; and gradually changing the culture to vilify couples with more than two children.

Ehrlich also said that governments should resort to ‘compulsion’ if people failed to change their procreative habits voluntarily. And what does such compulsion look like? Well, it looks a lot like communist China’s one-child policy, complete with mandatory sterilisations and forced abortions. Even less authoritarian regimes imposed similarly brutal policies in the name of tackling overpopulation. The Indian government, for instance, carried out millions of often coerced sterilisations during the 1970s.

What’s even more troubling about the deeply misanthropic worldview of a significant part of the green movement is its proximity to what is known as eco-fascism. That may sound like an oxymoron, given the misperception of environmentalism as left-wing, but there are indeed fanatical environmentalists within the far right, obsessed as it is with eugenics, racial purity and the alleged ‘natural order’. Indeed, the manifestos of several recent mass shooters, who identified themselves as far-right white nationalists, have lamented the destruction of the environment and criticised the corporate plunder of the earth’s resources.

The proximity of environmentalism to the far right is actually long-standing. Eugenics and scientific racism had a significant influence on the environmentalist movement in the early 20th century. Take Madison Grant. He was an American writer and lawyer, best known for The Passing of the Great Race, a work admired by Adolf Hitler. It detailed how the supposed supremacy of the Nordic people was being undermined by ‘lesser’ races. Grant was not just a white supremacist. He was also recognised as one of America’s most prolific conservationists and he was the architect of the American National Park service. As Grant saw it, the preservation of the American natural landscape preserved a ‘master race’ of species of trees and animals. His ecological beliefs, therefore, grew out of his ideas on racial supremacy.

This dark past of environmentalism has largely been quietly ignored in modern times. But lately, with the rise of the loosely defined alt-right movement, the proximity of far-right views to certain environmentalist ones has become clear once again.

However, this does not mean we should throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water. Just because someone is a passionate conservationist, that does not mean he or she is a latent authoritarian or a bitter misanthrope. There is nothing wrong with wanting to protect the environment, the devastation of which would harm humanity. And wanting to preserve natural beauty for its own sake is admirable, too. But any sincere environmentalist should recognise that no matter how well-meaning he or she is, others are far less so.

That is to say, while some environmentalists genuinely love nature, too many others are fuelled by resentment. They are driven not by a love of nature, but above all by a hatred of people.

SOURCE

Earth Day at 50: Progress, Not Politics, Cleaned Up America

Environmental activists decreed in 1970 that April 22 was to be commemorated as Earth Day. Fifty years later, if you listen to these activists, especially as they are fog-horned by the mainstream media, you might get the impression that our environment is in more jeopardy than ever. Is this true?

Let’s stipulate that post-World War II America was much dirtier than 2020 America. Industrial cities were beset with smog. Pollution in rivers caught fire. Waste dumps weren’t always managed well. Not much thought was given to use and exposure to chemicals like pesticides. Litter was commonplace.

All that said, with the exception of three days in October 1948, when the weather trapped acrid factory emissions in the valley town of Donora, Pa., resulting in the deaths of 20 people, the environment was not an actual public health problem. Still the Donora tragedy propelled states and then the federal government to take action on the environment. Awareness of the value of environmental protection and the regulation of emissions were all underway by the time of the first Earth Day.

Over the decades we have made tremendous progress. Here are some examples to consider:

Air pollution has declined dramatically.There is no chance of another Donora-like incident.

Except for rare accidents like what occurred in Flint, Mich., drinking water is clean and safe.

Except for stubborn surface water problems caused by runoff (as seen in the Gulf Mexico and Chesapeake Bay) surface water quality has dramatically improved. Any industrial discharges to surface water have been cleaner than the surface water itself for decades.

There are no more uncontrolled toxic waste sites that threaten anyone’s health.

Pesticides are thoroughly tested for safetybefore use and use is strictly regulated.

How did all this progress happen? Environmentalists would like to take all the credit. But reality is more complex.

As our society became wealthier, we could afford the luxury of paying more attention to our environment. That same wealth has made it possible to afford expensive laws and regulations and to afford scientific knowledge and technology development. The key, though, was and remains wealth – a reality backed up by closer examination of the environments of poorer nations around the world.

Air quality, for example, is awful in places like China and India not because they don’t know what to do or don’t care, they just can’t afford to do much about it at this point in time.

Despite all this progress, environmentalists used the 50th Earth Day to sound the alarm about climate change. We have been told that climate change is literally the end of the planet.

Climate is a variegated subject, but suffice to say, for present purposes, that since pre-industrial times, there has been approximately 1.1 degree Celsius of warming and almost 50% more CO2 in the atmosphere. Despite the alarm, no one knows what the future holds. The assumption of the alarmists is that emissions are bad, but history tells a different story.

Since man started emitting vast quantities of greenhouse gases, more people are living longer and at a higher standard of living. Life expectancy is up from approximately 40 years (1850) to approximately 79 (2019). U.S. per capita GDP is up from approximately $2,825 in 1850 to approximately $53,000 in 2016 (2011 dollars).

The Earth is greener today than it was 40 years ago when we started taking satellite photos of the planet, according to NASA.

What is the future of the environment? No one knows for sure, but if the past is any hint of the future, more wealth, strong property rights, better education and new technologies will enable us to keep our environment clean.

We could also use less hysteria, which just causes money to be wasted versus being spent more productively. Early hysteria about toxic wastes site (such as Love Canal in upstate New York) resulted in $50 billion being wasted litigating Superfund cleanups. A lot of sites could have been cleaned up with that money. Instead, it went to lawyers. More generally, green groups have often taken extreme positions to advocate for overregulation that has impeded environmental protection and wasted time and money.

Radicals often attack capitalism with the line, “You didn’t build that.” On Earth Day, that should be retorted with: “You didn’t clean that up.” Environmental protection has been a group effort enabled by our wealth, culture and system of government.

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, 2020

Green-Energy Crime: Endangered Red Kite Blocking Wind Farm Found Shot Dead

Red kites and wind power just do go well together. These predatory birds can find good prey, especially where farmers mow meadows or plow fields.

Lethal are cases such as the one in Baden-Württemberg, where areas with green fodder have been planted in the immediate vicinity of a wind park.

When these fields are mowed, the red kites search for food within the hay. It is ideal for them, but also possibly deadly because they cast their view downward when hunting, and not forward.

The Hilpensberg wind farm was even approved in a red kite area. Now one of the beautiful animals has fallen victim again, as the Nature Conservation Initiative reports:

According to biologist Immo Vollmer, the conclusion can only be that we should not build any more wind turbines in areas where red kites nest or where buzzards often seek food.

Otherwise the red kite, which has its largest distribution center in the world in Germany, will have no future here, because the loss rate is already almost in the same order of magnitude as the rate of offspring.”

And another sad case has just been reported in North Rhine-Westphalia. A female, nesting red kite was shot dead near Paderborn.

In an earlier trial, a judge even gave the controversial wind project approval – precisely where the shot bird was found – under the condition that no protected species be proven to exist there.

Now that the animal has been executed, this condition has been met. Probably just a coincidence, or maybe suicide, to make the wind turbines possible and to get out of the way?

SOURCE

Trump dismantles environmental protections under cover of coronavirus

The Trump administration is diligently weakening US environment protections even amid a global pandemic, continuing its rollback as the November election approaches.

During the Covid-19 lockdown, US federal agencies have eased fuel-efficiency standards for new cars; frozen rules for soot air pollution; proposed to drop review requirements for liquefied natural gas terminals; continued to lease public property to oil and gas companies; sought to speed up permitting for offshore fish farms; and advanced a proposal on mercury pollution from power plants that could make it easier for the government to conclude regulations are too costly to justify their benefits.

The government has also relaxed reporting rules for polluters during the pandemic.

Trump’s ambitions reach even to the moon, which he has announced he wants the US to mine.

Gina McCarthy, formerly Barack Obama’s environment chief, now runs the Natural Resources Defense Council. She said the Trump administration was acting to cut public health protections while the American public is distracted by a public health crisis.

“People right now are hunkered down trying to put food on the table, take care of people who are sick, worry about educating their children at home,” McCarthy said. “How many people are going to really be able to sit down and scrutinize these things in any way?”

McCarthy said the government was “literally not interested in the law or science”, and that “is going to become strikingly clear as people look at how the administration is handling Covid-19”.

The Trump administration is playing both offense and defense, rescinding and rewriting some rules and crafting others that would be time-consuming for a Democratic president to reverse.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has written what critics say will be a weak proposal for climate pollution from airplanes, a placeholder that will hinder stricter regulation.

Trump officials have been attempting to create a coronavirus relief program for oil and gas corporations, a new move in his campaign to back the industry and stymie global climate action. The president has sown distrust of climate science and vowed to exit the Paris climate agreement, which the US can do after the election.

Historians say Trump’s presidency has forced a pendulum swing back from the environmental awakening of the 1960s and 70s, when there was bipartisan support for conservation. Protecting the environment – and particularly the climate – is an issue that has become embroiled in political ideology.

“What Trump’s done is create a blitzkrieg against the environment … trying to dismantle not just Obama’s environmental achievements but turn back the clock to a pre-Richard Nixon day,” said Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at Rice University who is writing a book on the subject. “It’s just death by a thousand cuts. It’s not one issue, it’s just across the board.”

The administration is under a tight deadline to secure changes before the election. A US law, the Congressional Review Act, allows lawmakers to more easily rescind regulations or rollbacks issued later in an election year.

“They’re hitting a now or never timeline,” said Christine Tezak, the managing director at the analysis firm ClearView Energy Partners. “There’s a lot they want to get done before the election, just in case.”

Some trends are working against Trump – including states advancing environmental goals, and low-cost renewable power and natural gas helping reduce the climate footprint of the electricity sector. Even Houston, an energy hub, has issued a climate action plan. Yet such contributions are not expected to be enough to fulfill America’s role in stalling the global crisis.

Environmental advocates have challenged many of the Trump changes in court – and won. The Natural Resources Defense Council has sued 110 times and says it has prevailed in about 90% of lawsuits resolved.

Recently, judges tossed out a permit for the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline and decided the EPA cannot bar scientists who receive federal grants from serving as agency advisers.

Jeff Holmstead, a lawyer with the firm Bracewell who represents regulated industries and was a deputy EPA administrator under George W Bush, argued that many of the changes characterized as “rollbacks” are actually “sensible, reasonable regulatory reforms” or fixes to problems.

“It’s impossible to understand the Trump administration’s EPA unless you go back and look at the Obama administration,” he said. “In many groups there was a sense that there really had been a great deal of regulatory overreach. And even if you disagree with that, the regulatory programs created problems that they didn’t come back and fix.”

Trump’s deregulatory agenda has addressed some issues industry would rather were left alone. The agency is changing the way it calculates the benefits of mercury controls for power plants. Companies had already complied with the rule and most didn’t want it changed. But the revision is meant to set a precedent for the government to ignore some positive health outcomes of regulation.

Trump’s weakened standards often go against science too, critics say.

Last month, for example, the EPA decided not to tighten rules for soot pollution, refuting rebutting guidance from experts that more stringent standards would save lives. The EPA has also repopulated advisory boards with representatives from industry and conservative states and is trying to change what science it can consider when developing health protections.

If a Democrat takes the White House, it will take years to reverse some changes. Moving faster would require Democrats holding both chambers of Congress. Even then, industry would fight hard.

Christopher Cook, the environment chief for Boston, said Trump’s efforts had been “incongruous with all the actions that major cities are taking”.

“The thing I would ask most Americans to consider when they’re supporting stronger regulation is that this isn’t about what we’re protecting against, this is about who we’re protecting,” Cook said, noting that places with more pollution are faring worse under the coronavirus pandemic.

“Covid has been a dry run for the climate crisis. We’ve seen the populations that Covid affects because it attacks the respiratory system. We can’t continue with bad air in America.”

SOURCE

Harvard Retreats On Air Pollution-Coronavirus Deaths Link

Harvard researchers publicly walked back Monday a key finding in a highly touted but hotly contested paper linking air pollution exposure to deaths from the novel coronavirus, slashing the estimated mortality rate in half.

The preliminary study by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health made a splash when the results were announced April 7 in The New York Times, prompting alarm on the left as Democrats sought to connect COVID-19 deaths to the Trump administration’s regulatory pushback.

A few weeks later, however, its researchers quietly backtracked from their finding that people who live for decades in areas with slightly more particulate matter in the air are 15% more likely to die from the coronavirus, lowering the figure to 8%. The press release was revised Monday.

“This article was updated on May 4, 2020, based on an updated analysis from the researchers using data through April 22,” reads a footnote on the Harvard press release.

The revision came after weeks of criticism over the study’s modeling and analysis. Tony Cox, a University of Colorado Denver mathematics professor and chairman of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, said the model used to derive the 8% figure had “no basis in reality.”

“The model has not been validated and its assumptions are unrealistic,” said Mr. Cox, who heads the advanced analytics consulting firm Cox Associates. “In layman’s terms, it assumes an unrealistic effect of fine particulate matter on deaths, and then with that assumption built into the model, it uses data to estimate how big that unrealistic effect is. They’re making an assumption that has no basis in reality.”

JunkScience’s Steve Milloy said the Harvard paper is “not just junk science, it’s scientific fraud.”

“There is no biological data to support the notion that air quality in any way affects the outcome of coronavirus infection — and the researchers know it,” Mr. Milloy said.

The paper has been submitted for publication but has not yet been peer-reviewed, meaning its estimates could change again.

“I would expect that if they keep going and improve the analysis further, and start putting in some of the important confounders that they omitted, that their association will continue to get smaller,” Mr. Cox said.

Even so, the initial results have been trumpeted by Democrats as fresh evidence of the health risk posed by fossil fuels, given that the fine particulate air pollution, or PM2.5, examined in the study is generated “largely from fuel combustion from cars, refineries, and power plants,” according to the Harvard release.

Gina McCarthy, EPA administrator under then-President Barack Obama, and former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg cited the study in a Monday op-ed for his eponymous news outlet, “How Trump’s EPA is Making Covid-19 More Deadly.”

“A recent Harvard study shows that even a tiny increase in fine particulate matter air pollution — commonly known as ‘soot’ — increases death rates from Covid-19,” said the op-ed. “Hit the hardest are low-income communities and people of color, who are disproportionately exposed to pollution sources, such as highways and refineries.”

Despite that, they said, “the Trump administration has launched a series of attempts to make our air dirtier and harder to breathe.”

Eight Democratic senators fired off a letter to the EPA warning that its pushback on the Obama administration’s climate agenda could “potentially increase the COVID-19 death toll and hospitalizations,” while the Joseph R. Biden presidential campaign touted the study on a press call with The Washington Post.

House Democrats also have pointed to the paper’s findings, while a petition from the Sierra Club, Earthjustice and the Colorado Latino Forum calling for a halt to a major Interstate 70 highway project referred to the COVID-19 risks outlined in the paper.

“In fact, one recently published study by Harvard University found that even a slight increase in exposure to air pollution ‘leads to a large increase in COVID-19 death rate,’” said the petition to Gov. Jared Polis on ActionNetwork.

In a Friday letter, Rep. Andy Harris, Maryland Republican, asked the EPA and the Department of Health and Human Services to “undertake an assessment of the recent claims” in the Harvard study on a “causal association between long-term exposure to fine-particulate matter and the likelihood of dying of COVID-19.”

“Clearly, the widespread political and media attention to the pre-publication findings has the potential to significantly influence public perception and policy outcomes associated with the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Mr. Harris said in the letter.

The paper was led by a Harvard doctoral candidate, Xiao Wu, and its co-authors include Harvard biostatistics professor Francesca Dominici, who said the 15% figure was lowered in response to

“more updated data plus a more comprehensive and rigorous adjustment for potential confounding factors.”

Ms. Dominici said the paper was upfront about the research’s limitations, pointing out that

“[h]igh quality nationwide individual-level COVID-19 outcome data are unavailable at this time and for the foreseeable future, thus necessitating the use of an ecologic study design for these analyses.”

“The study used standard statistical approaches and it is fully reproducible (data and code are publicly available) and accounts for over 20 confounding variables and we have conducted over 68 sensitivity analyses to check the sensitivity of the results to the specification of the statistical model,” Ms. Dominici said in an email.

Mr. Cox argued that the study failed to control adequately for confounders such as the differences in crowding between rural and urban communities.

“They really didn’t look at the rural urban continuum, and it’s puzzling to me that they didn’t do so, because it’s very easily available information,” he said. “They didn’t include it. And in my opinion, that would be a very important variable to include.”

The EPA has moved to address the impact of factors such air pollution on COVID-19, a “rapid review” from the Scientific Advisory Board on the health and environmental impacts of the contagious virus that has killed 248,000 worldwide since emerging in December in Wuhan, China.

SOURCE

Only reliable electricity can give Australia the economic jolt needed for recovery

These past few months have taught us many things, including the fact many state government ministers are none too bright.

Competition for the wooden spoon has been fierce, including Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos, who claimed the response of her department to the runaway COVID-19 outbreak at a Melbourne abattoir had been “perfect”. Mind you, NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard has been giving her a run for her money.

But the competition is not confined to health. The recent actions of South Australian Energy and Mining Minister Dan van Holst Pellekaan demonstrate a failure to appreciate the new economic challenges and his determination to hammer the last nail in the coffin of the worst-performing state economy.

Last week, this minister expressed his support for SA accelerating the date at which the state should reach 100 per cent renewable electricity generation. The current time frame is 2030.

I don’t know what he thought he was doing attending the launch of the newly constructed gas-fired electricity generation facility at Barker Inlet in Adelaide last November. The minister raved about the plant, built by AGL Energy, being “good news for affordability and reliability of electricity supplies in South Australia”. Are we to assume that the plant will be closed down by 2030 (or before) for the state to meet its renewable energy target?

And I wonder how he interprets the depressing results of SA becoming an electricity island earlier in the year? As a result of the need to repair the interconnector linking SA with Victoria, the Australian Energy Market Operator was forced to drastically curtail the amount of renewable energy generated in the state and instead rely on expensive gas generation to ensure the stability and reliability of the grid.

The cost of managing the power system was $310m in just the first quarter of this year, more than double the previous record set in 2008. It is estimated that managing the grid accounted for 8 per cent of all energy costs compared with the historical average of between 1 per cent and 2 per cent.

South Australian voters might have expected a change of direction when the longstanding Labor government was voted out. But the Liberal government headed by wet Premier Steven Marshall is every bit as beholden to the renewable energy players as the previous government.

The dream is that a new interconnector will be constructed between SA and NSW that will allow the excess renewable energy generated in SA to be exported to NSW — when the wind blows and the sun shines, that is.

And because the interconnector will be regulated, consumers will bear the cost. This will significantly inflate electricity prices.

According to the witless policy advice to the SA government, reliable electricity could be imported from NSW and Victoria to offset the inherent unreliability of renewable energy, even given the addition of short-living and expensive batteries. This way the illusion of SA being 100 per cent renewable can be maintained.

The economics of baseload or intermediate electricity generation in those other states is undermined by virtue of renewable energy being sent across the border. And let’s not forget that the NSW government has silly plans in relation to the promotion of renewable energy, too. The same goes for Victoria and Queensland.

At this rate, all the eastern states could become an electricity island, awash with unreliable energy and insufficient backup.

Into this policy quagmire comes the advice of the ideological Australian Energy Market Operator, telling us that it would be technically possible to have 75 per cent renewable energy electricity generation. That’s if we spent a lot of money — for example, on more expensive interconnectors, transmission and distribution — and changed the rules to favour renewable energy providers even more than they do now. This is poor advice.

The only sensible alternative in the post-COVID world is to junk the obsession with renewable energy (which is an inefficient way of reducing emissions, particularly when measured on a life-cycle basis), to kill the subsidies and to secure affordable, reliable electricity based, in all likelihood, on new gas plants.

When green rent-seekers start calling for a green new deal — more subsidies for renewable energy — the response should be that we have had a green new deal for more than a decade. And it has worked out badly for Australia’s industrial competitiveness. It’s time for a change.

And when the rent-seekers moan about fugitive emissions from gas, tell them these have already been taken into account when emissions are calculated by the federal government. Estimates, including by the CSIRO, put fugitive emissions at between 1 per cent and 1.4 per cent of total production.

With the lower price of gas this year and the possibility that new reserves will be developed in the Bowen and Beetaloo basins and possibly Gippsland, we are on the cusp of an exciting new phase for electricity generation and other heavy industry. With cheaper and reliable power, it’s easy to foresee substantial investments in the manufacture of explosives, paper, glass and bricks, and in food processing, among other possibilities. It simply won’t happen if we depend on renewable energy.

To be sure, we won’t need to junk the raft of renewable energy that already exists in the electricity grid, although some will begin to wear out in the not-too-distant future. (Several overseas renewable energy construction companies are already leaving the country.) But only firmed electricity — that is, 24/7 power with backup — should be accepted from these providers, a requirement that exists in most parts of the world.

We have paid a heavy penalty — some of the highest electricity prices in the world — for allowing renewable energy providers to offer electricity into the grid without bearing the costs of reliability and stability (frequency/inertia).

Unless the SA government takes a realistic stance in relation to energy and other matters, the place will be just a footnote in our economic history in 50 years.

And I haven’t even mentioned the urgent need for the federal government to cancel the expensive and unviable submarine project. That might be the last straw for the state’s economy — or a wake-up call for the South Australian government to get real rather than chase rainbows.

SOURCE

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

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

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

12 May, 2020

LA Times Caught Inventing Fake Link Between Climate, Drought, Wildfires

The Los Angeles Times has launched a new way to make money and gain leftists accolades from the false climate crisis: a new newsletter called “Boiling Point.” Sammy Roth, a Times energy reporter, opened a May 5 preview of the newsletter by telling quite a whopper – and providing no scientific evidence to back it up. Roth claimed, “Drought conditions in Northern California may prompt an early start to the 2020 wildfire season – and as Californians have learned in recent years, climate change is fueling more devastating droughts and fires.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) does report, here and in the chart below, that Northern California is currently experiencing “moderate drought,” and is one of the few places in the country experiencing dryer than average conditions. At the same time, NOAA reports most of California is experiencing normal conditions, while Southern California is experiencing “moderately moist” conditions.

Hmmm… some areas are dry, some are moist, and most are normal. Must be a climate crisis!

In reality, as shown here and in the same NOAA graph above, only a small amount of the country is experiencing drought. Also, Climate at a Glance: Drought reports the United States is undergoing its longest period in recorded history without at least 40 percent of the country experiencing “very dry” conditions, with peaks in drought around 1978, 1954, 1930, and 1900 being much larger than what the U.S. experienced during any time in the 21st century or the late 20th century.

Just as compelling, Climate at a Glance: Drought reports that in 2017 and 2019, the United States registered its smallest percentage of land area experiencing drought in recorded history.

Even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledges with “high confidence” that precipitation has increased over mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere (including the United States) during the past 70 years, while IPCC has “low confidence” about any negative trends globally.

Since drought conditions are low, and drought is easily the single biggest climate factor regarding wildfires, it should come as no surprise that wildfires have not become more frequent or numerous in recent years. In the few regions that have experienced particularly severe wildfires, such as California and Australia, geologist Gregory Wrightstone and Montana state Sen. Jennifer Fielder explain that the root cause of these fires is government policies hampering proper land management in areas prone to wildfires.

Perhaps all this good news and scientific evidence are why Roth and the Times are required to make false statements, without presenting scientific evidence, in order to perpetuate their money-making climate scare.

SOURCE

Pulling the curtain off energy subsidies

It is time to end the quagmire of outdated energy subsidies built up over a century of programs once intended to help develop innovative ideas for energy development. They are now nearly all aiding and abetting taxpayers money flowing to companies and individuals no longer deserving to feed at the government trough.

No one in the lifetime of my readers will ever see energy shortages in the United States again. Awesome new technologies have allowed our nation to move from worrying about running out of oil to no longer having space to store all the oil and gas we are capable of developing.

Of course that problem of abundance has been exacerbated by the pandemic that has shut our nation and the world down for weeks. That will in time pass away and our abundance will settle back to normalcy. Sadly the energy industry will shake out with the survival of the fittest, but that ultimately is the way of the world for all industries.

While the vast dollars expended on dozens of subsidy type programs are near impossible to pin down, the great number of programs developed long ago can give us an idea of wasted tax dollars. Most of these programs should have ended long ago, but as we all know government programs never die. An example is that, believe it or not, Peter Ferrara was able to track the names of 187 different means tested welfare programs in his 2016 book, Power To The People. Obviously many of them should have been phased out long ago. I will not attempt to uncover the breadth of all energy subsidies but rather to make a case that it is time to end all of them.

SOURCE

Elites issue climate warning in overdrive – C’est!

Another call-to-arms to rescue the planet has appeared. An “open letter” this week from about 200 self-important signatories warned the world’s inhabitants that we face “a global ecological collapse” worse than the pandemic, and that “massive extinction of life on Earth is no longer in doubt.”

This vacuous letter, published in the French media outlet Le Monde, reads almost as parody. It demands a “profound overhaul of our goals, values and economies.” The signatories include Nobel laureates for medicine, chemistry and physics and—unsurprisingly—entertainers.

This letter is pure hysteria and nonsensical. Are we are supposed to give it credence because some signatories are Nobel Prize winners?

Those from the entertainment industry include: Cate Blanchett, Monica Bellucci, Jane Fonda, Robert De Niro, and Madonna – all of whom are highly successful in their professional careers and exactly the wrong messengers.

“We believe it is unthinkable to go back to normal,” they wrote. If any of these do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do mega-rich entertainers—who have lived opulent lifestyles for decades—now practice a smidgen of what they are demanding of everyone else, please someone inform me. How many homes do they have (and how large?), or how many frequent-flyer miles do they accumulate in a single month (pre-pandemic)? How big are their carbon footprints, and what have they relinquished? Carbon credits, electric cars and solar-powered gadgets showcased by elites count for nothing as climate virtue, as their fellow alarmist, Michael Moore, inconveniently reminded everyone.

There is more to discredit them. Ms. Fonda has never adequately apologized for mocking our POWs in Vietnam or calling American soldiers “war criminals.” Mr. De Niro has become sadly unhinged in his twilight years as evidenced by his frequent foul-mouthed tirades. Madonna has her own challenges with the aging process based on her inability to eschew clothing worthy of a college Halloween keg party.

Successful entertainers have vastly more recognizable names than scientists, and thus draw worldwide attention to this letter. But, they simultaneously serve to discredit its message as a specious diatribe. I do not begrudge entertainers becoming wealthy by performing their craft since millions of people willingly pay to watch and listen. Rather, it is their ongoing flagrant hypocrisy that makes a mockery of their ecological message, even without refuting the dubious science it claims.

Seriously, are Madonna, De Niro and Fonda the best spokespersons to tell us in this letter, “the pursuit of consumerism and the obsession with productivity have led us to deny the value of life itself; that of plants, that of animals, and that of a great number of human beings”?

It is human “productivity” and “pursuit of consumerism” that enabled millions of people worldwide to purchase Madonna CDs, Jane Fonda exercise videos, and movie theater tickets and DVDs to watch De Niro, Blanchett, et.al. Will they now give refunds?

It is long become tiresome to reiterate that such people are impervious to self-awareness.

What of these Malthusian-like scientists? This letter they also signed claims “pollution, climate change, and the destruction of our natural zones has brought the world to a breaking point.” Really? This sensationalism retreads Paul Ehrlich’s, The Population Bomb, circa 1968.

The planet is quite resilient and is getting cleaner and more livable by greater environmental awareness, technological advances and freer economies. A true environmentalist should take credit for laws that reduced pollution, cleaned up waterways, and so much else. Energy development itself is getting cleaner and more efficient, in particular, hydro fracturing for natural gas, which emits less carbon than coal and crude oil.

This is not “an ongoing ecological catastrophe” or “a meta-crisis.” As the letter says, we should “examine what is essential.”

Poverty in the developing world has been reduced dramatically in the last 30 years. As economic growth and prosperity spread globally, health improves, life expectancy increases, and the environment gets cleaner. “Climate change” of maybe one-half degree warmer in the last four decades is no threat and hardly noticeable. Arctic ice remains; polar bears are flourishing. Humans inhabited a much warmer planet in centuries past.

Yes, the world has plenty of environmental problems remaining, including plastic litter in the oceans, and still millions of people globally without electricity and running water. The drivel in this letter does not address their needs, and solutions from such planet alarmists would make their condition worse.

The open letter in Le Monde has it exactly backwards. It is a screed, bereft of substance or sound ideas, worthy of Hollywood actors wishing—and failing—to be seen as serious people on the environment.

SOURCE

Malaria 'completely stopped' by microbe

Malaria is spread by the bite of infected mosquitoes
Scientists have discovered a microbe that completely protects mosquitoes from being infected with malaria.

The team in Kenya and the UK say the finding has "enormous potential" to control the disease.

Malaria is spread by the bite of infected mosquitoes, so protecting them could in turn protect people.

The researchers are now investigating whether they can release infected mosquitoes into the wild, or use spores to suppress the disease.

What is this microbe?

The malaria-blocking bug, Microsporidia MB, was discovered by studying mosquitoes on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya. It lives in the gut and genitals of the insects.

The researchers could not find a single mosquito carrying the Microsporidia that was harbouring the malaria parasite. And lab experiments, published in Nature Communications, confirmed the microbe gave the mosquitoes protection.

Microsporidias are fungi, or at least closely related to them, and most are parasites.

However, this new species may be beneficial to the mosquito and was naturally found in around 5% of the insects studied.

How big a discovery is it?

"The data we have so far suggest it is 100% blockage, it's a very severe blockage of malaria," Dr Jeremy Herren, from the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology (icipe) in Kenya told the BBC.

He added: "It will come as a quite a surprise. I think people will find that a real big breakthrough."

More than 400,000 people are killed by malaria each year, most of them children under the age of five.

While huge progress has been made through the use of bed nets and spraying homes with insecticide, this has stalled in recent years. It is widely agreed new tools are needed to tackle malaria.

How does the microbe stop malaria?

The fine details still need to be worked out. But Microsporidia MB could be priming the mosquito's immune system, so it is more able to fight off infections.

Or the presence of the microbe in the insect could be having a profound effect on the mosquito's metabolism, making it inhospitable for the malaria parasite.

Microsporidia MB infections appear to be life-long. If anything, the experiments show they become more intense, so the malaria-blocking effect would be long-lasting.

When can this be used against malaria?

At the very least, 40% of mosquitoes in a region need to be infected with Microsporidia in order to make a significant dent in malaria.

The microbe can be passed between adult mosquitoes and is also passed from the female to her offspring.

So, the researchers are investigating two main strategies for increasing the number of infected mosquitoes.

Microsporidia form spores which could be released en masse to infect mosquitoes

Male mosquitoes (which don't bite) could be infected in the lab and released into the wild to infect the females when they have sex

"It's a new discovery. We are very excited by its potential for malaria control. It has enormous potential," Prof Steven Sinkins, from the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, told the BBC.

This concept of disease control using microbes is not unprecedented. A type of bacteria called Wolbachia has been shown to make it harder for mosquitoes to spread dengue fever in real-world trials.

What happens next?

The scientists need to understand how the microbe spreads, so they plan to perform more tests in Kenya.

However, these approaches are relatively uncontroversial as the species is already found in wild mosquitoes and is not introducing something new.

It also would not kill the mosquitoes, so would not have an impact on ecosystems that are dependent on them as food. This is part of other strategies like a killer fungus that can almost completely collapse mosquito populations in 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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11 May, 2020

California Avoids Addressing Causes of Its High Energy Costs

Californians will continue to pay some of the highest costs for electricity and fuel use as the State unexpectedly collides catastrophically with the global pandemic that will impact businesses and employment for an unpredictable economic future.

The State’s much-touted $21 billion operating-budget surplus is likely to disappear entirely due to declining tax revenues and rising public welfare costs.

Sacramento has not yet disappeared by seawater submergence but its urban-centered politicians—who were elected by misinformed Californians—continue to skirt logical solutions addressing the causes of the state’s ultra-extreme consumer energy costs. Such extra-ordinary energy costs can only lead to the state’s stagnation and retard its post-COVID-19 economic recovery efforts.

As America recovers from the COVID-19 shelter-in-place medical treatment of choice on the nation’s economy, California cannot rid itself from the continuing and state-prescribed high costs of energy that other states are not shackled by, and those elected California officials will not do anything to effectively and forever resolve the causes of the energy high costs that severely limit the state’s economic base and its potential for improvement.

Today. the intermittent electricity from low-power density renewables is expensive, far more than oil and natural gas, and have been contributory prices for electricity in California being 50% higher than the nation’s average for residents, and double for commercial consumers. Costs to homeowners and industry are projected to go even higher with the continuation of Governor Newsom’s carbon dioxide gas emissions-centric puppeteering radical Green Crusade.

Adding to the onerous problem of affordable electricity, California is closing nuclear reactors that have been safely generating uninterrupted carbon dioxide-free electricity for decades. In 2013, California shutdown Southern California Edison’s San Onofre plant, which generated 2,200 MW. It has ordered the closure of Pacific Gas & Electric’s Diablo Canyon 2,160 MG generators by 2024, but only if Sacramento still exists in its present format as a voter approved official legislative entity! Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, known to desire the governorship of California , recently announced forthcoming closures of three natural gas-powered plants at Scattergood, Haynes, and Harbor: “…this is the beginning of the end of natural gas in Los Angeles.” His demanded replacing technologies are economically iffy and presently infeasible; indeed, they are high-cost substitutes.

Since California is currently unable to generate sufficient electricity in-state to meet demand, the state is forced by its own policies to import more electricity than any other state, an outcome that is not in the financial interest of any California resident. Without any known state-fostered plans to rebuild with more in-state power generation, California continues to shut down its safely functioning nuclear and natural gas electricity generation plants! California’s electricity costs are already among the highest in the country and will continue to increase as imports from other states increase and become more expensive—Newsom’s intentional imposition, his “Save Everyone Hostage Effect”—as well as necessary to fill the impending absence of all those shuttered power-plants, whatever their fuel source.

Psychically skewed, enviously radical green abnormal California politicians profess leadership of everyone, spouting laudatory pride as the only state in contiguous America that imports most of its crude oil energy from foreign countries.

Misguided Sacramento leaders have caused California to increase imports from foreign countries from 5 percent to 57 percent of total consumption. The imported crude oil costs California more than $60 million dollars a day being paid to oil-rich foreign countries, depriving Californians of jobs and business opportunities.

Apparently, Governor Gavin Newsom wants to markedly reduce in-State oil production even more and is seeking to permanently ban oil-shale fracking technology’s use. Such a California governmental action, by law or regulation with the effect of law, would INCREASE costly foreign crude oil imports to California to fill the gap of ever-declining California and Alaska production, further crippling the State, forcing the continuation of California as a remarkable national security risk for the USA.

Once the world’s 5th largest economy, tax-paying Californians now must cope with uncertain future bureaucracy-distributed State and local monetary expenditures along with the state’s unfunded pension debt liabilities of one trillion dollars, or almost five times the State’s 220 billion-dollar 2020-21 budget! Newsom’s moral dilemma: “Save Everyone” yet continue the state’s lavish and hyperbolic operations which nowadays must be based on a sudden COVID-19 fundamentally weakened state economy and national economy. Certainly, California seaports, both coastal and inland, will need to endure the effects of an international trade throughput decrease, especially with China.

Our post-pandemic about energy policies that California politicians refuse to address correctly, is not intended for the 5% of taxpayers who contribute 70% of monies to the State’s General Fund, but for the 95% of uninformed and poorly informed voters who pay, every day, for the foolish actions and evil inactions, of the unrealistic California politicians who were empowered by election outcomes.

SOURCE

Dr. Patrick Moore & Dr. Caleb Rossiter Rebut Wash Post: Oops! Climate Change Actually NOT the Cause of Coastal Flooding

Consumers of the climate religion media - which comprises pretty much every outlet from CNN leftward - should be forgiven for believing that a climate crisis requires that we ban the cheap, reliable energy that powers 80 percent of the world economy. After all, those outlets only run stories on one side of the question and brook no debate. The recent "Earth Day" issue of the Washington Post Sunday magazine is a case in point. It was devoted to finding evidence of climate changes caused by the warming gases that are emitted when fossil fuels are converted to energy. The most important of these emissions, by far, is carbon dioxide, a non-toxic plant, and plankton food. Unfortunately, the evidence started out weak and got weaker. And of course, the magazine refused to run letters pointing that out.

There was the requisite image of a polar bear clinging to a melting iceberg, and a story on lower counts of wood thrush in the DC region. But neither of those has anything to do with climate change. Polar bear counts, as all researchers have shown since the elegant animal became a favored fund-raiser for Green groups 20 years ago, are increasing. The wood thrush story itself pointed out that housing development and deer density are the primary problems.

The final insult to scientific fact, though, was the centerpiece story on flooding in communities around Norfolk, Virginia, which was presented with this subtitle: "Climate change is forcing many communities to imagine leaving the waterfront behind." That claim mirrors the U.S. government's 2018 summary National Climate Assessment, which includes Norfolk and its U.S. naval facilities as examples of places threatened by rising seas due to CO2-driven climate change.

However, according to the UN's most recent report, the current global rate of sea-level rise - about an inch a decade, or 3.2 millimeters per year - is the same as it was 100 years ago. These estimates are uncertain, as sea-level is difficult to measure, but it is clear that the rise is related to the steady increase in global temperature since the Little Ice Age ended around 1800.

All of this, of course, was long before 1950, which the UN reports was when industrial carbon dioxide was first emitted in sufficient quantities to cause measurable warming. Ironically, this UN information about sea-level rates being the same before and after CO2 warming was included in the scientifically-detailed version of the National Climate Assessment, contradicting the widely-publicized summary.

Sea-level rates include the fall, or "subsidence," of land due to a variety of natural and human-caused processes that have nothing to do with temperature. The reason that sea-level rise is higher than average (about 3.9 mm per year, according to the U.S. Geological Service) at the mouth of the Chesapeake is that the land there is sinking at a rate that far exceeds the global subsidence rate. Who says so? Every scientist who studies it, as shown in the U.S. Geological Service's 2013 report, Land Subsidence and Relative Sea-Level Rise in the Southern Chesapeake Bay Region: "Land subsidence has been observed since the 1940s in the southern Chesapeake Bay region at rates of 1.1 to 4.8 millimeters per year (mm/yr), and subsidence continues today.

This land subsidence helps explain why the region has the highest rates of sea-level rise on the Atlantic Coast of the United States. Data indicate that land subsidence has been responsible for more than half the relative sea-level rise measured in the region."

Why is land falling around Norfolk? As the USGS points out, "most land subsidence in the United States is caused by human activities." The withdrawal of groundwater for human use and agriculture causes 80 percent of it nationally. In the Norfolk area, the USGS reports that water use compacts the clay layers in the aquifer system, permanently. That is why the USGS recommends moving Norfolk's pumping activities far inland. Groundwater levels have already fallen by about 200 feet around Norfolk in the past century. But in Norfolk, there is yet another important source of land subsidence: what the USGS calls "glacial isostatic adjustment" and estimates at one mm per year. As land levels a few hundred miles north of Norfolk rebound from the melting of heavy, mile-high ice 18,000 to 12,000 years ago, Norfolk sinks in response.

For purposes of comparison, let's use the data for the longest periods in the USGS report's Chart 3: 3.9 mm annual rise in sea-level, but a long-term global average of 1.8 mm, both of which include land subsidence. But the local land subsidence is 2.8 mm, meaning that at least 72 percent of the change in flooding is due not to rising seas but sinking lands. Yet in the magazine article, there is no mention - not one word out of thousands - about land subsidence.

An additional possible factor in land subsidence is the geology around Norfolk, which is unique in America due to a remarkable event 35 million years ago: the impact of an asteroid that left a crater right at the opening of the Chesapeake 55 miles around and a mile deep. Some USGS scientists see the crater as a continuing factor in land subsidence, while others, as in the 2013 summary report, discount it. Like the rest of the possible factors in sea-level rise in Norfolk, the crater has nothing to do with CO2-driven "climate change."

SOURCE

Net-Zero Greenhouse-Gas Emissions, and Extinction Capitalism

To climate-shame corporations is to hobble economic dynamism.
Shutting down the whole global economy is the only way of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Centigrade, Yvo de Boer, the former United Nations climate chief, warned in the runup to the 2015 Paris climate conference. Thanks to COVID-19 we now have an inkling what that looks like. The conference went further and chose to write into the Paris agreement an aspiration to pursue efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C. The 1.5°C backstory reveals much about the quality of what passes for science and gets enshrined in U.N. climate treaties — and is directly relevant to American corporations that now find themselves on the front line of the climate wars.

Nine weeks before the Copenhagen climate conference, the one where Barack Obama was going to slow the rise of the oceans, President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives held the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting. “We are trying to send our message to let the world know what is happening and what will happen to the Maldives if climate change isn’t checked,” Nasheed told reporters after resurfacing. It was part of a campaign by the Alliance of Small Island States claiming that climate change magnified the risk that their islands would drown.

The sinking-islands trope has been endlessly recycled by the U.N. for decades. In 1989, a U.N. official stated that entire nations could disappear by 2000 if global warming was not reversed. Like so many others, that prediction of climate catastrophe came and went. The failed prediction didn’t prevent the current U.N. secretary-general, António Guterres, from declaring last year, “We must stop Tuvalu from sinking.” There was no science behind 1.5°C and the sinking-island hypothesis. Studies show, here and here, that the Maldives and Tuvalu have increased in size. As the 25-year-old Charles Darwin might have told the U.N., coral atolls are formed by the slow subsidence of the ocean bed.

Having incorporated 1.5°C into the sacred texts of the U.N. climate process, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was charged with coming up with a scientific justification for it. In 2018, the IPCC published its report on the 1.5°C limit. It debunked the sinking-islands scare, reporting that unconstrained atolls have kept pace with rising sea levels. The IPCC had a bigger problem than non-sinking islands. The IPCC’s existing 1.5°C carbon budget — the maximum amount of greenhouse gases to keep the rise in global temperature to 1.5°C — was on the verge of being used up. Like some end-of-the-world cult after the clock had passed midnight, it would find itself in a predicament that promised to be more than a little embarrassing.

Help was at hand. As skeptics had long been pointing out, IPCC lead author Myles Allen confirmed that climate model projections had been running too hot and that they had been forecasting too much warming since 2000. Together with some other handy adjustments, the IPCC managed to more than double the remaining 1.5°C budget. Although it could muster only medium confidence in its revised carbon budget, the IPCC had high confidence that net emissions had to fall to zero by 2050 and be cut by 45 percent by 2030. In this fashion, net zero by 2050 was carved in stone.

That timeline is now being used to bully American corporations into aligning their business strategies with the Paris agreement and force them to commit to eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050. In fact, the text of the Paris agreement speaks of achieving a balance between anthropogenic sources and removals “in the second half of this century.” The net-zero target has no standing in American law or regulation. Net zero is not about a few tweaks here and there. It necessitates a top-down coercive revolution the likes of which have never been seen in any democracy. This is spelt out in the IPCC’s 1.5°C report, which might as well serve as a blueprint for the extinction of capitalism.

The IPCC makes no bones about viewing net zero, it says, as providing the opportunity for ‘intentional societal transformation.’ Limiting the rise to rise in global temperature to no more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels — an ill-defined baseline chosen by the U.N. because the Industrial Revolution is our civilization’s original sin — requires ‘transformative systemic change’ and ‘very ambitious, internationally cooperative policy environments that transform both supply and demand.’

Thanks to COVID-19, we have a foretaste of what the IPCC intends. It envisages, for example, the industrial sector cutting its emissions by between 67 and 91 percent by 2050, implying a contraction in industrial output so dramatic as to make the 1930s Great Depression look like a walk in the park, a possibility the IPCC choses to ignore. The IPCC places its bets on a massive transition to wind and solar, but no amount of wishful thinking can overcome the inherent physics of their low energy density and their intermittency, which explains why countries with the highest proportion of wind and solar on their grids also have the highest energy costs in the world. One option the IPCC does not favor — a wholesale transition to nuclear power — seems unachievable anyway on the timetable it has in mind. Nuclear power stations typically take well over five years to build, and not many are planned for now. Germany is switching out of nuclear power, the Japanese are, to quote the New York Times “racing to build new coal-burning . . . plants” and the Chinese are wary of overdoing their nuclear construction because of the risk of accident.

Rather than address the possibility of a sustained slump in economic activity the IPCC’s approach is to say the benefits of holding the line at 1.5°C are — surprise, surprise! — greater than at 2 degrees Centigrade while studiously ignoring the extra costs of the more ambitious target. A few numbers show why. A carbon tax sufficiently high to drive emissions to net zero would range up to $6,050 per metric ton, over 60 times the hypothetical climate benefits estimated by the Obama administration, indicating that the climate benefits of net zero are less than 2 percent of its cost. In a rational world, discussion of net zero would end at this point.

You don’t have to be a Milton Friedman to fathom the incompatibility with free markets and capitalist growth of what the IPCC terms “enhanced institutional capabilities” and “stringent policy interventions.” So it’s easy to understand why the governments of the world have no intention of achieving net zero by 2050. As Todd Stern, one of the principal architects of the Paris agreement, remarked last November, “there is a lack of political will in virtually every country, compared to what there needs to be.”

Led by Britain, several European countries have legislated net-zero targets without having a clue how they might meet them or their economic impact. Indeed, Britain can claim to be the world’s leading climate hypocrite. Having offshored its manufacturing base to China and the European Union, it is the G-7’s largest per capita net importer of carbon dioxide emissions. Before adopting its net zero target, the Committee on Climate Change observed that Britain lacked a credible plan for decarbonizing the way people heat their homes and that government policy was insufficient to meet even existing targets.

If governments — the legal parties to the Paris Agreement — have no collective intention to achieve net zero, why should America’s corporations? There is no environmental, economic, or ethical good when a corporation cuts its carbon dioxide emissions to meet the net-zero target when the rest of the world doesn’t, unless, that is, you’re one of the select few who believes that self-impoverishment is inherently virtuous. Yet corporations are increasingly being held to ransom by billionaire climate activists like Mike Bloomberg and BlackRock’s Larry Fink with the demand that they commit to net zero, make their shareholders and stakeholders poorer, and give a leg up to their competitors in the rest of the world, especially in the Far East.

The arrogation of the rule-making prerogatives of a democratic state by a handful of climate activists raises profound questions on the demarcation between the rightful domains of politics and of business. It also raises profound questions about the future of capitalism. “Capitalism pays the people that strive to bring it down,” Joseph Schumpeter, the greatest economist of capitalism, observed in the 1940s. They won’t succeed, but for the efforts of soft anti-capitalists within the capitalist system.

The moral case for capitalism rests on its prodigious ability to raise living standards and transform the material conditions of mankind for the better. To climate-shame corporations without the sanction of law or regulation will extinguish the economic dynamism that justifies capitalism. Remove its capacity to do so, and we will have entered a post-capitalist era. This is how capitalism ends.

SOURCE

West Australia's decision to keep its mines open amid coronavirus may have saved Australia's economy

Stephen Easterbrook manages risk for a living and as he watched COVID-19 spreading across the globe and edging closer to Australia, he was nervous.

Mr Easterbrook is the managing director of Breight Group, a Perth based mining services company which prides itself on its safety training for scaffolding workers.

When he learned the West Australian Government had deemed mining an essential service, the former rigger breathed a big sigh of relief.

"Prior to hearing that, there was a lot of sleepless nights," he said.

But the reprieve has come with a price for fly-in, fly-out workers.

Some Breight Group staff are now working on mine sites in WA's north west for up to six weeks at a time.

The longer swings were an attempt to minimise people movement and prevent the spread of the virus.

"We've got guys that are working four, six weeks away from their families," Mr Easterbrook said.

"This shows a commitment to the value of the mining industry, that we're all prepared to [make sacrifices] to keep ourselves employed, and also what we're able to do by contributing to the Australian economy to keep it going."

WA's decision to keep workers flying in and out of mine sites has been praised by Federal Treasury Secretary Stephen Kennedy.

"Western Australia … deemed mining an essential service in the sense in which they were imposing their restrictions," he told a Senate committee late last month.

"These were important, carefully calibrated decisions. "As long as the health risks are well managed in what's a reasonably low employment environment, that's a very important economic flow."

Analyst Philip Kirchlechner, from Iron Ore Research, was even more explicit. "By keeping the mines open … Western Australia is supporting the whole country," he said.

"Iron ore miners are paying company tax which goes to the Federal Government, so it's all the Australian people [who] benefit from the taxes the mining companies pay."

It has helped that despite the virus, China has kept buying iron ore from Australia and two of the nation's biggest competitors, Brazil and South Africa, haven't been able to operate as normal.

Mr Kirchlechner said Brazil was on the brink of reopening two mines forced to close because of a deadly dam collapse when COVID-19 hit. "Because of the virus, the restart of those mines has been delayed," he said.

"South Africa and also India have put in stoppages, they have put in place lockdowns for the whole country, so South Africa's iron ore production has been affected and its guidance has been reduced about 50 per cent."

WA Treasurer Ben Wyatt said deciding whether to keep mines open was a big call, but he believed his Government got it right in keeping the industry going. "It was an incredible time, one of those things that I think I'll look back for the rest of my life," Mr Wyatt said.

"Because as the coronavirus was coming at us and our numbers were, you know, something like 20 a day … you got a real sense of fear in the community … how far we were going to have to put the brakes on everything to get the virus under control … and I think we got that right."

Mr Wyatt said the crisis had underlined the importance of WA's mining sector.

Ben Wyatt wearing a grey suit and pink tie, smiling outside an office building.
WA Treasurer Ben Wyatt said the coronavirus crisis underlined the state's economic importance.(ABC News: Julian Robins)
"I think Australians now really understand what Western Australia has been talking about for such a long period of time — that is, we have a world-class mining sector," he said.

"The fact we've been able to keep it operating during this time has not only protected the Western Australian economy, but has underwritten the Australian economy.

"I know Josh Frydenberg, the Commonwealth Treasurer, every day will be waking up and thanking Western Australia's mining 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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10 May, 2020

A miraculous turn of events

Michael Moore and Driessen agree! Wind, solar and biofuel energy are devastating Planet Earth

Paul Driessen

Never in my wildest dreams did I envision a day when I’d agree with anything filmmaker Michael Moore said – much less that he would agree with me. But mirabile dictu, his new film, Planet of the Humans, is as devastating an indictment of wind, solar and biofuel energy as anything I have ever written.

The documentary reflects Moore’s willingness to reexamine environmentalist doctrine. It’s soon obvious why more rabid greens tried to have the “dangerous film” banned. Indeed, Films for Action initially caved to the pressure and took Planet off its website, but then put it back up. The film is also on YouTube.

Would-be censors included Josh Fox, whose Gasland film Irish journalists Phelim McAleer and Anne McElhinney totally eviscerated with their FrackNation documentary; Michael Mann, whose hockey stick global temperature graph was demolished by Canadian analysts Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre, and many others; and Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, who just got slapped with a potential $1-million penalty (in legal fees) for bringing a SLAPP (strategic litigation against public participation) and defamation lawsuit against a mathematician who criticized Jacobson’s renewable energy claims.

These critics and their allies are rarely willing to discuss any climate or energy issues that they view as “settled science,” much less engage in full-throated debate with “deniers” or allow former colleagues to stray from the catechism of climate cataclysm and renewable energy salvation. They prefer lawsuits. But they sense the Planet documentary could be Fort Sumter in a green civil war, and they’re terrified.

Their main complaint, that some footage is outdated, is correct but irrelevant. The film’s key point is the same as my own: wind, solar and biofuel energy are not clean, green, renewable or sustainable, and they are horrifically destructive to vital ecological values. The censors believe admitting that is sacrilegious.

Director-narrator Jeff Gibbs never talks to coal, oil or natural gas advocates – or to “renewable” energy and “manmade climate crisis” skeptics. Instead, he interviews fellow environmentalists who are justifiably aghast at what wind, solar and biofuel projects are doing to scenic areas, wildlife habitats, rare and endangered species, and millions of acres of forests, deserts and grasslands. He peeks backstage to expose bogus claims that solar panels actually provided the electricity for a solar promotion concert.

After speaking with “renewable” advocates in Lansing, Michigan, and learning that the Chevy Volt they’re so excited about is actually recharged by a coal-fired generating plant, Gibbs visits a nearby football-field-sized solar farm. It can power 50 (!) homes at peak solar intensity. Powering all of Lansing (not including the Michigan State University campus) would require 15 square miles of panels – plus wind turbines and a huge array of batteries (or a coal or gas power plant) for nights and cloudy days.

The crew films one of those turbines being erected outside of town. Each one is comprised of nearly 5,000,000 pounds of concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, plastic, cobalt, rare earths, fiberglass and other materials. Every step in the mining, processing, manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance and (20 years later) removal process requires fossil fuels. It bears repeating: wind and sun are renewable and sustainable; harnessing them for energy to benefit mankind absolutely is not. (Go to 36:50 for a fast-paced mining tutorial on where all these “clean, green” technologies really come from.)

Then they’re off to Vermont, where a wooded mountaintop is being removed to install still more wind turbines. Removing mountaintops to access coal, bad; to erect huge bird-killing wind turbines, good?

An aerial shot features 350,000 garage-door-sized mirrors sprawling across six square miles of former Mojave Desert habitat – with the giant Ivanpah “solar” power plant in the center. The system gets warmed up each morning by natural gas-powered heaters, so that it can generate a little electricity by sundown.

This “environmentally benign” solar facility now sits where 500-year-old yuccas and Joshua trees once grew. “Outdated” footage shows them being totally shredded to destroy any evidence they ever existed.

Gibbs and Moore next discuss ethanol – and the corn, water, fertilizer and fossil fuels required to create this “clean, green, renewable” gasoline substitute, which emits lots of carbon dioxide when burned.

Even worse is the total devastation of entire forests – clear cut, chopped into chips, maybe pelletized, and shipped hundreds or even thousands of miles ... to be burned in place of coal or natural gas to generate the electricity that makes modern homes, factories, hospitals, living standards and life spans possible. The crew gets “five seconds” to leave a denuded forest and “biomass” power plant area in Vermont – or be arrested. Haunting images of a bewildered indigenous native in Brazil and a terrified, mud-covered orangutan in Indonesia attest to the destruction wrought in the name of saving Earth from climate change.

You’re left to wonder how many acres of corn, sugarcane or canola it took for Richard Branson to fly one biofuel-powered jet to mainland Europe. How many it would take to produce the 96 billion gallons of oil-based fuel the airline industry consumed in 2019. How many decades it will take to replace the millions of acres of slow-growth forest that are incinerated each year as a “carbon neutral” alternative to coal.

“Is it possible for machines made by industrial civilization to save us from industrial civilization?” the producers wonder. “Renewable” energy systems last only 15-20 years, and then must be torn down and replaced, using more non-renewable resources, “if there’s enough planet left,” they say. “We’re basically being fed a lie.” Maybe we’d be “better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place,” than doing this.

Indeed. But bear in mind, the devastation that so deeply concerns Moore and Gibbs is happening in a world that is still some 85% dependent on oil, natural gas and coal, 4% on nuclear and 7% on hydroelectric. Imagine what our planet would look like if we went 100% (pseudo)renewable under various Green New Deals: millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of batteries, thousands of biofuel plantations and denuded forests, thousands of new and expanded mines, and more.

But where some see devastation, others see opportunity. Or as Arnold Schwarzenegger says in the film, where some see the Mojave Desert as miles and miles of emptiness, he sees a vast “gold mine.” Al Gore sees endless millions in profits, a lovely seaside mansion and cushy private jets. Koch Industries sees bigger solar and biofuel empires. The Sierra Club and Union of Concerned Scientists envision raking in more millions off climate doom and renewable salvation, while 350.org founder Bill McKibben can’t seem to remember that the Rockefeller Brothers and other fat-cat foundations gave him millions of dollars, too.

But Moore and Gibbs aren’t indicting free market capitalism. They’re indicting government-mandated and subsidized crony corporatist opportunism. And the solution they ultimately proffer isn’t recognizing that climate change has been “real” since Earth began; that humans and fossil fuels play only minimal roles amid the powerful natural forces that brought glacial epochs and interglacial periods, Medieval Warm Periods and Little Ice Ages; or that modern nuclear power plants generate abundant CO2-free electricity.

Instead, they propose that we humans must “get ourselves under control.” This means not just slashing our living standards (may we all have “carbon footprints” as small as Al Gore’s) and “de-developing” and “de-industrializing” the United States and Europe, while simultaneously dictating to still impoverished nations how much they will be “permitted” to develop, in accordance with former Obama science advisor John Holdren’s totalitarian instincts. It also means having far fewer humans on this glorious planet. (How exactly that is to be achieved they don’t say, though several twentieth century dictators offer ideas.)

This is where Planet of the Humans takes a troubling, wrongheaded, neo-Malthusian turn. But these final minutes should be viewed attentively, to understand what still motivates far too many “environmentalists,” who too often get lionized or even canonized for their devotion to Mother Earth – even if the price is measured in billions left in unimaginable poverty, malnutrition and energy deprivation, and millions dying long before they should.

Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs have done us a great service in exposing the environmental degradation from pseudo-renewable energy. Now they just need to reexamine neo-Malthusian doctrines as well.

Via email

There is no such thing as "The Science". Science is not some grand tome we can consult to get the ‘right’ answer

According to David Blunkett, a former senior cabinet minister in Tony Blair’s governments, attempts to have a blanket lockdown on the over-70s are discriminatory. He believes that the current ‘shielding’ rules are too crude and need to be more nuanced. Whatever the merits of his ideas, his comments on the scientific advice that the government is receiving are interesting.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s The World at One on 28 April, Blunkett argued that the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) has a problem. Drawing on Matthew Syed’s book, Rebel Ideas, he said that ‘major mistakes in the recent past have been made by people of similar ilk, similar ideas, similar background, similar thinking being considered the only experts that you could draw down on. And I’d like RAGE – a Recovery Advisory Group – that had a very much broader swathe of advice and expertise to draw down on.’

The dangers of listening to a small pool of experts with orthodox thinking was also pointed to by a former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King. Reacting to reports that Boris Johnson’s senior adviser, Dominic Cummings, may have pushed SAGE to back the current lockdown, King told Bloomberg: ‘There is a herd instinct in all of us – we call it groupthink. It is possible that a group is influenced by a particularly influential person.’

Other leading scientific figures have criticised the idea that the government’s policies are based on science. Professor Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, told the Guardian: ‘As a scientist, I hope I never again hear the phrase “based on the best science and evidence” spoken by a politician. This phrase has become basically meaningless and used to explain anything and everything.’

The same article quotes Professor Mark Woolhouse, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh: ‘I do think scientific advice is driven far too much by epidemiology – and I’m an epidemiologist. What we’re not talking about in the same formal, quantitative way are the economic costs, the social costs, the psychological costs of being under lockdown. I understand that the government is being advised by economists, psychiatrists and others, but we’re not seeing what that science is telling them. I find that very puzzling.’

All these comments and more point to one of the most striking aspects of the Covid-19 crisis. For many years now, politicians – largely bereft of any wider purpose or philosophical principle – have claimed that they are pursuing ‘evidence-based policy’ and being ‘led by The Science’. In reality, science is a process of trying to draw together tentative conclusions driven by experiment and observation. Claiming authority from The Science – as if there were a grand tome you could simply open up to find the correct answer – is just wrong.

As Professor Brian Cox told Andrew Marr this week: ‘There’s no such thing as The Science, which is a key lesson. If you hear a politician say “we’re following The Science”, then what that means is they don’t really understand what science is. There isn’t such a thing as The Science. Science is a mindset.’

With widely publicised disagreements about everything from computer models to the use of face masks, it is clear that we need to move beyond the idea that we can rely on scientists coming to a cosy consensus. Science works – at its best – through the accumulation of evidence, an openness to new theories, and a willingness to challenge and be challenged.

It’s great that these principles are being restated. Funnily enough, though, this wasn’t the reaction we saw over Michael Gove’s much-half-quoted comment during the EU referendum – that the public has ‘had enough of experts’. (In fact, he said: ‘I think the people of this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying they know what is best, and getting it consistently wrong.’) The trouble with politicians, we were told by Remain-supporting types, is that they don’t listen to the cool, rational views of experts nearly enough. Now that it seems that experts might be blamed for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, the expertise cheerleaders are reversing out of that position, pronto.

Actually, the public never gave up on experts. We’re only too happy to find out about the latest scientific understanding of the virus, how soon we might have a treatment or a vaccine, and so on. What some have taken issue with is the politicisation of expertise. An unholy alliance of politicians and a selected band of experts, whose views suit the current needs of government, have often in recent years told us what ‘The Science says’ and urged critics to just shut up – over issues from passive smoking to climate change. To disagree with the experts was, and is, to be a ‘denier’, and should lead to the perpetrator’s expulsion from public life and even private career.

Even giving a platform to a critical voice is beyond the pale. For example, when the former chancellor of the exchequer and climate-change sceptic, Nigel Lawson, appeared on Radio 4’s Today back in 2017, it was Cox who tweeted: ‘Irresponsible and highly misleading to give the impression that there is a meaningful debate about the science.’ Cox certainly seemed to believe that there is a thing called The Science three years ago.

We need to get beyond a simple black-and-white view of science and expertise. The question is not whether we should believe experts, but how we understand expertise. Each and every claim needs to be treated with scepticism (not cynicism) and we need to be clear about the limits of each claim.

To go back to Blunkett’s points, it really does seem that the over-70s are at greater risk from Covid-19 than younger people. That doesn’t mean it necessarily makes sense to keep them under house arrest and separated from their families indefinitely. That’s a judgement that involves questions of physical and mental health, autonomy, pleasure and much more.

Carbon dioxide may be heating our planet. But the wilder claims about an overheating planet and eco-geddon need to be understood in the context of, for example, the assumptions made by computer models – some of which are actually very overheated themselves. Moreover, even if we are heading for a much warmer world, abandoning fossil fuels for a ‘Net Zero’ future seems to many people (including me) very likely to cause much more harm than global warming. These are matters for public debate. They should not be closed down because of The Science.

In the midst of a health crisis, hopefully we are now developing a proper and very healthy scepticism towards experts.

SOURCE

Saving Species on Private Lands

“‘Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.’ These words were written in 1934 by Aldo Leopold, the father of scientific wildlife management. In the same essay, Leopold called himself a ‘political and economic dreamer,’ acknowledging that, in his day, society lacked both the appetite and the tools for rewarding private landowners for conserving wildlife.

Eighty-six years later, America has begun to understand what Leopold meant when he wrote that “[t]he implements for restoration lie not in the legislature, but in the farmer’s toolshed.” Although many of our historic battles over wildlife management have focused on public lands, the current frontier of conservation is on private lands—especially the working lands that are economically productive and support an individual’s livelihood, such as farms, ranches, and timberlands. In the continental United States, 74 percent of all land is privately owned. Among species listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act, two-thirds can be found on privately owned land, as can hundreds more species at risk of being listed. Private land provides critical wildlife habitat in every state, including many of the most imperiled and ecologically valuable areas. For example, more than 75 percent of remaining wetlands and 80 percent of remaining grasslands in the United States are located on private land.

The historic approach to conserving endangered species focused on public land and largely used federal legislation and command-and-control policies. Statutes such as the ESA prohibit actions that would harm listed wildlife, and land management statutes such as Federal Land Policy and Management Act and the National Forest Management Act, both enacted in 1976, require public land managers to apply these laws. This has resulted in both conservation successes and failures on public land, but the history of efforts to bring this approach onto private land is unequivocally one of failure, punctuated by conflict, litigation, recriminations, and distrust. At its worst, federal wildlife management created perverse incentives that encouraged landowners to mismanage their land in order to prevent the appearance of any endangered species upon their property.

This is because, in the vast majority of cases, species are in decline and perhaps in danger of future ESA listing because of loss of habitat due to development, mostly on private land. Thus, as Leopold understood, landowners ultimately bear much of the cost of conservation. In fact, many people criticize the ESA for functioning as a regulatory land-use law. This tension between commercial development and wildlife values has been the root of most bitter conflicts over wildlife.

Conservation will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves the public interest.

As Leopold understood, in our system of private property, the cost of conserving land must fall in large part upon the owners of that land. But today, command-and-control regulation is not the only option for conservationists. Thanks to improving incentives, voluntary conservation on private lands has expanded greatly in recent years. Incentives for voluntary action are emerging as a powerful tool for aligning landowner interests with wildlife recovery and improving conditions for species while avoiding listings under the ESA and the costs that federal regulation can bring.

The conservation successes discussed in this essay illustrate that by extending at-risk species conservation’s historic regulatory approach to also include incentives and financial support for conservation on private lands, we can fulfill the public’s interest in maintaining and restoring healthy wildlife populations. This essay will focus on two bird species in particular: the red-cockaded woodpecker and the greater sage-grouse, which exemplify the importance of voluntary habitat conservation and how the right incentives can encourage species recovery.

The Path Forward

Private landowners have been instrumental to the success of both greater sage-grouse and red-cockaded woodpecker conservation. In each case, proactive conservation efforts took species that had suffered many decades of declines and set them on a course for recovery. Achieving conservation on private lands requires patience and partnership-building among government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and, of course, landowners themselves. These species show that Aldo Leopold’s vision of public support for private lands conservation is the path forward for conservation in the twenty-first century. What is needed now is for more people to step forward and answer this challenge.

MORE here

Coronavirus: Science is clear on climate and the pandemic

Climate activists seldom waste a crisis, whether it is a drought, a bushfire or a viral pandemic. Having failed to come up with a way to blame the pandemic on climate change (yet), the green left is begging for more renewable energy funding to boost the post-pandemic economy.

They also reckon the coronavirus response offers a template for global warming policy. “Above all,” The Sydney Morning Herald editorialised this week, “Australia should take the same evidence-based scientifically led approach to climate change as we took to COVID-19.”

This is the same newspaper that editorialised last September about how the Prime Minister should have attended a climate speech in New York, not by a scientist but by a teenage activist. “Scott Morrison should have gone to hear Greta Thunberg,” counselled the Herald.

Presumably, the pandemic has turned the paper’s focus away from teenage slacktivism and back to science. It makes sense given that Earth Hour in March couldn’t make much of a mark when everything was already shut down, and school strikes don’t really cut it when the kids aren’t in their classrooms to start with.

So, science it is. Let’s take up the Herald’s challenge and compare a science-based pandemic response to the climate policy debate.

The COVID-19 pandemic, like rising global greenhouse gas emissions, is a global problem emanating largely from China. The big difference is that by banning overseas arrivals and enforcing strict quarantine rules, Australia has been able to isolate itself and deal with the virus within our borders.

This has been Australia’s single greatest scientific advantage: isolation. It has meant that all the other actions we have taken — from hospital treatments to social distancing, from testing to infection tracing — have delivered material benefits for this country, regardless of what happens in the rest of the world.

By contrast, the atmosphere knows no borders; we all share the same air and experience whatever climatic variations occur globally, regardless of the policies of individual countries. On climate action Australia is beholden to what the rest of the world does or does not do; we could cut our emissions to zero and our climate would still be hostage to rapidly rising greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere.

The science is clear. If global emissions growth delivers a warming planet and dire climate changes for Australia, our own emissions reductions effort will do little more than reduce the economic resilience we need to deal with the consequences.

The appropriate analogy between climate and COVID-19 is to imagine how effective it would have been for this country to impose social-distancing measures but still allow tens of thousands of international visitors to arrive every day. Our anti-infection measures would have been rendered almost as futile as our emissions reduction schemes.

The fundamental evidence-based point the green left continues to ignore is that the minuscule reductions in our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions have been eclipsed many times over by increases elsewhere. According to the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory, annual emissions to September last year were 531 million tonnes, 69 million tonnes (or 11 per cent) less than the corresponding period in 1990. Across those same three decades, annual emissions in China alone rose from 3265 million tonnes to 13,405 million tonnes — from more than five times our total emissions to more than 25 times.

You don’t need to be a Nobel laureate to look at those facts and work out the likely impact of Australia’s renewable energy target on global atmospheric conditions and climate patterns. Those who pretend our policies make any difference globally are indulging in a giant deceit or a grand delusion. Our efforts are mere gestures, and science tells us that gestures will not save a planet.

The economic pain Australians have inflicted on themselves has produced no environmental gain. The cost-benefit analysis is stark: the cost in the energy sector alone tops something like $100bn, while there is no gain or, to be generous, the negligible benefit that we might have marginally reduced global emissions increases. The only plausible argument for deepening our emissions reduction effort is to suggest that where we go, others will follow. But like our early settlers who believed the rains would follow their ploughs, this theory is bound to end in heartache.

Malcolm Turnbull’s secret gift to our political debate, Guardian Australia, had a treatise this week from an unlikely triumvirate pushing the pandemic-climate coupling. “If we have learned anything from what we have already endured in 2020 it is that stopping an emergency is far better than responding to one,” said Australian Council of Social Service chief Cassandra Goldie, Australian Industry Group chief Innes Willox and Investor Group on Climate Change chief Emma Herd.

This stuff is trite and superficial. It is a level of political advocacy that demeans their case.

The coronavirus pandemic was and is a real and present danger. We know it is highly infectious and kills people, mainly those who are elderly or already ill. Even then, there is widespread and ongoing scientific research and debate trying to ascertain precisely how virulent and contagious it is. We can see the damage that is done when the virus runs rampant.

The science on stopping the spread of a virus is simple. We need to avoid direct human contact and be careful with indirect contact.

There has been no scientific debate about how to deal with the problem. The dilemma has been in deciding what is practical — we could all self-isolate in our bathrooms for a month, which would stop the virus but destroy our society — so we have had ongoing debates and adjustments to balance the battle to slow the spread of the virus against the sustenance of our community and economy.

Our domestic response is being sullied by political science. Buoyed by their successful suppression of the pandemic, some premiers have fallen into egotistical mission-creep; forgetting that their aim was to restrict infections to a level our health system could handle, they now see every new case as a personal and political blemish.

We need to prize our society, its economic viability and its self-reliance above a zero-tolerance policy on COVID-19 that we would never apply to influenza, cancer or syphilis. To fight HIV-AIDS in the 1980s the left took delight in promoting condom-protected promiscuity; to battle the coronavirus Daniel Andrews demanded that lovers who did not live together should not even visit each other. This viral puritanism could have flattened more than the curve. Thankfully, Andrews was sweet-talked out of it.

“Our success in flattening the curve,” that Herald editorial continued, “has been because the advice and science have been believed and clearly communicated.”

This is a very unscientific simplification of what the nation is enduring. The whole conundrum of the pandemic response has been balancing the scientific objective of minimising human contact against the economic imperative for human engagement. If it were science alone, we would all be wasting away in our bathrooms.

Likewise, notwithstanding the futility of Australia reducing carbon emissions while they rise globally, any attempt to reduce emissions here is far more complicated than merely following the science. It is scientifically accurate to declare that burning fossil fuels generates CO2 emissions, therefore if we stop doing it emissions will reduce. But what would we do for affordable and reliable energy? How would our civilisation function without this crucial input? And if science reigns supreme, why would we not embrace scientifically proven, emissions-free nuclear energy?

The wrongheadedness of the Herald’s sloganeering was laid bare when it declared: “We have also learned in the past couple of months that working together as a nation we can actually beat global threats and climate change should be no different.” This is utter tripe.

We have banded together to solve a national problem. Look outside our borders and you can see COVID-19 chaos in the US, Britain, Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. Australia cannot solve the global pandemic unless we come up with a vaccine (which would solve our export diversification issues, too). Science suggests we cannot come up with a vaccine for global warming.

This all underscores the scientific absurdity that anything the Australian federation can agree to do on emissions reduction policies can make the slightest difference to global atmospheric conditions or improve the climate in Australia or anywhere else. Any rational scientific analysis of national climate policy can only conclude that it will have an infinitely greater impact on our economy than our environment — yet that is precisely the aspect the green left ignores.

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, 2020

Not so green energy: Hundreds of non-recyclable fiberglass wind turbine blades are pictured piling up in landfill

Incredible photos have revealed the final resting place of massive wind turbine blades that cannot be recycled, and are instead heaped up in piles in landfills.

The municipal landfill in Casper, Wyoming, is the repository of at least 870 discarded blades, and one of the few locations in the country that accepts the massive fiberglass objects.

Built to withstand hurricane winds, the turbine blades cannot easily be crushed or recycled. About 8,000 of the blades are decommissioned in the U.S. every year.

Once they reach the end of their useful life on electricity-generating wind turbines, the blades have to be hacked up with industrial saws into pieces small enough to fit on a flat-bed trailer and hauled to a landfill that accepts them.

In addition to the landfill in Casper, landfills in Lake Mills, Iowa and Sioux Falls, South Dakota accept the discarded blades - but few other facilities have the kind of open space needed to bury the massive blades.

Once they are in the ground, the blades will remain there essentially forever - they do not degrade or break down over time.

'The wind turbine blade will be there, ultimately, forever,' Bob Cappadona, chief operating officer for the North American unit of Paris-based Veolia Environnement SA, told Bloomberg in February.

Veolia is searching for better ways to deal with the massive waste generated by the discarded blades. 'Most landfills are considered a dry tomb,' Cappadona said. 'The last thing we want to do is create even more environmental challenges.'

Texas-based Global Fiberglass Solutions claims to be the first U.S. company to develop a method to repurpose discarded turbine blades into useful products.

The company uses material from the blades to make fiberglass pellets that can be turned into flooring, parking bollards, warehouse pallets, and other items.

'We can process 99.9% of a blade and handle about 6,000 to 7,000 blades a year per plant,' CEO Don Lilly told Bloomberg. 'When we start to sell to more builders, we can take in a lot more of them. We're just gearing up.'

Like nearly every other industry, the U.S. renewable energy industry is reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, which has delayed construction, put thousands of skilled laborers out of work and sowed doubts about solar and wind projects on the drawing board.

As many as 120,000 jobs in solar and 35,000 in wind could be lost, trade groups say.

The wind industry is plagued by slowdowns in obtaining parts from overseas, getting them to job sites and constructing new turbines.

'The industry was on a tremendous roll right up until the last month or two,' said Tom Kiernan, CEO of the American Wind Energy Association. 'That reversal is stunning and problematic.'

Fossil fuels such as natural gas and coal remain the leading providers of the nation's electricity, with nuclear power another key contributor, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

But renewable sources - wind, solar, hydroelectric, biomass and geothermal - have jumped in the last decade as production costs have fallen and many states have ordered utilities to make greater use of renewable energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Renewables produced nearly one-fifth of the country's energy last year.

The EIA predicts renewable energy, despite recent setbacks, will grow 11 percent this year - an indication of the sector's strong surge before the economy tanked. Meanwhile, coal-fired power is expected to decline 20 percent and gas generation to grow just 1 percent.

The wind and solar industries have asked lawmakers and federal agencies for help, including an extension of their four-year deadlines for completing projects without losing tax benefits. Similar assistance was granted during the 2008-09 recession.

SOURCE

Systemic Misuse of Scenarios in Climate Research and Assessment

Roger Pielke, University of Colorado Boulder and Justin Ritchie,
University of British Columbia

Abstract

Climate science research and assessments have misused scenarios for more than a decade. Symptoms of this misuse include the treatment of an unrealistic, extreme scenario as the world’s most likely future in the absence of climate policy and the illogical comparison of climate projections across inconsistent global development trajectories. Reasons why this misuse arose include (a) competing demands for scenarios from users in diverse academic disciplines that ultimately conflated exploratory and policy relevant pathways, (b) the evolving role of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – which effectively extended its mandate from literature assessment to literature coordination, (c) unforeseen consequences of employing a nuanced temporary approach to scenario development, (d) maintaining research practices that normalize careless use of scenarios in a vacuum of plausibility, and (e) the inherent complexity and technicality of scenarios in model-based research and in support of policy. As a consequence, the climate research community is presently off-track. Attempts to address scenario misuse within the community have thus far not worked.

The result has been the widespread production of myopic or misleading perspectives on future climate change and climate policy. Until reform is implemented, we can expect the production of such perspectives to continue. However, because many aspects of climate change discourse are contingent on scenarios, there is considerable momentum that will make such a course correction difficult and contested - even as efforts to improve scenarios have informed research that will be included in the IPCC 6th Assessment.

SOURCE

The Scientific Case for Vacating the EPA's Carbon Dioxide Endangerment Finding

Patrick J. Michaels

Executive Summary

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2009 “Endangerment Finding” from carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases grants the agency a legal mandate that can have profound and far-reaching effects. The Finding is based largely on a Technical Support Document that relies heavily upon other mandated reports, the so-called National Assessments of global climate change impacts on the United States.

The extant Assessments at the time of the Endangerment Finding suffered from serious flaws. We document that using the climate models for the first Assessment, from 2000, provided less quantitative guidance than tables of random numbers—and that the chief scientist for that work knew of this problem.

All prospective climate impacts in the Endangerment Finding are generated by computer models that, with one exception, made systematic and dramatic errors over the climatically critical tropics. Best scientific practice would be to emphasize the working model, which has less warming in it than all of the others.

Instead, the EPA relied upon a community of wrong models.

New research compares what has been observed to what is forecast, and finds that warming in this cen- tury will be modest—near the lowest extreme of the prospective range given by the United Nations.

The previous administration justified its policy choices by calculating the Social Cost of Carbon [dioxide]. We interfaced their model with climate forecasts consistent with the observed history and enhanced the “fertilization” effect of increasing atmospheric concentrations of CO2. We find that making the warming and the vegetation response more consistent with real-world observations yields a negative cost under almost all modeled circumstances.

This constellation of unreliable models, poor scientific practice, and exaggerated estimates of the Social Cost of Carbon argue consistently and cogently for the EPA to reopen and then vacate its endangerment finding from carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

SOURCE

CO2 Emissions Have Declined in the USA More Than Anywhere

No country on earth has done more to reduce CO2 emissions than the United States. Its emissions have declined big-time since 2005 while others’ grew.

From the June 2019 BP Statistical Review of Global Energy, the following are some details on global C02 emissions between 2005 and 2018 (the most recent year available):

CO2 emissions

Between 2005 and 2018, global CO2 emissions from energy grew by 20 percent (5748 million metric tons)

Declines in CO2 emissions between 2005 and 2018 were led by the United States (-12 percent and 706 million metric tons). Annual CO2 emissions in the United States declined 8 times during this period.

The next largest decline was in the United Kingdom (-32 percent and 182 million metric tons).

The largest increase in carbon dioxide emissions between 2005 and 2018 came from China (55 percent and 3329 million metric tons).

The next highest increment came from India where emissions rose by 106 percent (1275 million metric tons).

Together, China and India accounted for 80 percent (4604 million metric tons) of the increase in global carbon emissions (5748 million metric tons).

Editor’s Note: I’m not convinced CO2 emissions are the big threat others suppose them to be, as they’ve gone up and down many times over the eons, but assuming there is a benefit in reducing them, no country in the world has made as much progress as the United States of America.

Meanwhile, China, the source of the virus killing people and economies throughout the world has vastly increased its CO2 emissions. This is as some attempt to give it credit for renewables leadership but the only real progress that matters is happening right here in the United States of America.

Moreover, our first class progress on CO2 emissions is happening due to the efforts of private industry, operating without the corporatist subsidies on which green eggs and scam here and everywhere depends. It’s fuel switching made possible by fracking that changed everything.

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, 2020

Costly Climate Policies Must Be Abandoned To Save Economy

European governments have no choice but to abandon costly climate plans that are threatening to burden nations with huge costs and millions of job losses if they want a strong economic recovery from Covid-19 lockdowns. That’s according to a new report by Rupert Darwall, a former special adviser in the UK Treasury.

In a new paper released today, Darwall shows how the imposition of unilateral climate policies on business and industry will have a devastating effect on any economic recovery from Covid-19. With Net Zero costing up to 60 times hypothetical climate benefits, voters in Britain, America and Australia are putting economic recovery ahead of the environment, according to a recent IPSOS Mori poll.

The report reveals that the West’s pre-pandemic carbon dioxide emissions accounted for only one quarter of global emissions. “It is naïve as well as futile to think the tail of the West’s emissions is going to wag the global climate dog,” Darwall says.

What is more likely to doom UN climate talks is the deep rift that’s opening up because of China’s disastrous cover-ups about the Covid-19 virus.

“It is not a coincidence that the UN climate talks got under way after the end of the Cold War,” Darwall says. The deterioration in relations between the US and China and the re-emergence of geopolitical rivalry after 30 years are likely to prove terminal for the global climate agenda, Darwall suggests.

Mr Darwall’s report is being published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation

SOURCE

How To Make Money By Spreading Anti-GMO Propaganda

Anti-GMO activists routinely label scientists and biotech supporters "shills for Monsanto." However, a new study suggests that those who spread GMO disinformation are the ones who are actually motivated by money.

The anti-GMO movement is bizarre in so many ways. The topic is essentially non-controversial in the scientific community, with 92% of Ph.D.-holding biomedical scientists agreeing that GMOs are safe to eat.

Yet, GMOs have become a perverse obsession among food and environmental activists, some of whom have gone so far as to accuse biotech scientists of committing "crimes against nature and humanity." Why? What's in it for them?

A new paper published by Dr. Cami Ryan and her colleagues in the European Management Journal examined this issue. They came to the conclusion that many of us had already suspected: It's all about the Benjamins, baby.

The authors, who work for Bayer (which acquired Monsanto), begin by explaining the attention economy. Like most everything else, from money to coffee beans, human attention can be thought of in strictly economic terms. Attention is a scarce commodity; there is only so much of it to go around. Entire businesses, like social media, have developed a revenue model that relies on capturing as much of your attention as possible. In various ways, that attention can be monetized.

To quantify the attention that the topic of GMOs receives, the authors utilized BuzzSumo, a website that aggregates article engagement from all the major social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. The authors identified 94,993 unique articles from 2009 to 2019, and then whittled down the list to include only those domains that published at least 48 articles on GMOs (which is an average of one per month for four years). Thus, the researchers identified 263 unique websites.

And now, the depressing results. By far, the most shared articles on GMOs came from conspiracy, pseudoscience, and/or activist websites. The image on the right depicts the top 25 websites based on median article shares. Of these, only two -- The Guardian and NPR (highlighted green) -- are widely considered to be mainstream news outlets. (It should be pointed out, however, that The Guardian is often not a reliable source of information on science, technology, and public health.)

It isn't a coincidence that many of these same websites also peddle snake oil. Mercola.com, for instance, is a website that sells everything from hydrogen-infused water to krill oil supplements for your pet. The website publishes anti-GMO and anti-vaccine articles, as well as a whole host of other fake health news, in order to drive traffic to itself. Then it sells the reader phony medicine.

If you're wondering how Mercola.com gets away with this, here's how: (1) It's not illegal to lie, and (2) It's not illegal to sell phony medicine, provided that there is a tiny disclaimer somewhere on the website admitting that the FDA hasn't evaluated any of the health claims.

SOURCE

Release The Franken-Nuts! GMO Chestnut Trees May Repopulate Forests

A serious infectious disease nearly wiped out a beloved species in the United States. Scientists have now discovered how to bring it back. Should they restore this once prevalent species to its former glory?

Yes, of course! That's one of the primary goals of conservation and environmentalism.

Oh, what did you say? Scientists did it using biotechnology? Never mind. It's Frankenstein.

That's essentially the argument that's playing out in regard to the American chestnut tree. As is often the case, environmentalists are in favor of restoring the environment as long as scientists aren't involved.

The American chestnut tree was nearly wiped out by a fungal pathogen that was imported from Asia. The blight was detected in 1904, and within 50 years it had destroyed 90% of American chestnut trees, which had no natural resistance. (It is for the same reason that perhaps 90% to 95% of Native Americans were killed by smallpox, measles, and influenza.)

For multiple reasons, it has long been a goal to bring the American chestnut back. As Dr. William Powell and colleagues describe in a recent journal article, the American chestnut had ecological, economic, and cultural significance. The tree is large, long-lived, and fast-growing; was a good source of lumber and food; and served as the inspiration for songs and literary works. We roast chestnuts, not pine cones, on an open fire.

Using Science to Restore the American Chestnut

To make the American chestnut resistant to this particular fungus, Dr. Powell and his team genetically modified it with a wheat gene that encodes an enzyme called oxalate oxidase. Oxalate, a compound that also happens to form kidney stones, is produced by the fungus in cankers and eventually kills the tree. A tree modified to produce this enzyme destroys the oxalate, instead.

Dr. Powell's team is going about their efforts in the right way. To avoid creating a monoculture, they want to crossbreed their genetically enhanced chestnut with the remaining survivors in the wild. In this way, a genetically diverse population of blight-resistant trees can go forth and multiply. To ensure safety, the team is also working with the USDA, FDA, and EPA.

Going Nuts over Franken-Nuts

But as we have come to expect, none of this really matters to those who are ideologically (religiously?) opposed to GMOs. According to the Associated Press, opponents are worried about "a massive and irreversible experiment," whatever that means. Let's assume the worst happens and the blight resistance gene "escapes" into the environment. The result will be more plants resistant to fungus, hardly an ecological apocalypse.

Predictably, the anti-GMO (and poorly named) Union of Concerned Scientists -- which is really more akin to a union of fundraisers, PR flacks, political hacks, communications majors, and lawyers -- is deeply concerned about biotechnology. From the AP article:

"I think we have to step back and ask whether our ability to manipulate things is getting ahead of our ability to understand their impacts," said Gurian-Sherman, a former senior scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Perhaps we should take a step back and ask why journalists think the Union of Concerned Scientists speak for all scientists.

G-M-Oh Yes!

There is no legitimate reason to block Dr. Powell's project. Not only will the restoration of the American chestnut serve as a gigantic triumph for biotechnology, it will also help relieve public concerns over the safety of GMOs in the food supply. Likely, that's the real reason some environmentalists are opposed to this project.

They should be ignored. To shamefully appropriate a quote from The Economist, the GMO chestnut will help "take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress."

SOURCE

“Renewables” scams on the ropes

The device you’re reading now is likely powered by nuclear, gas, or coal-fired electricity.

There’s a smaller chance it may be powered by hydro-electricity or biomass (burning trees, as if that’s Green).

There’s little chance, despite billions spent, that it came from wind or solar. The climate folks and “renewables” corporate interests don’t want you to know that, yet people’s eyes are opening.

Wind and solar corporations push the rated output of their installations as if that’s actually the power you get. They don’t want you to think about intermittency, that the wind doesn’t always blow or the sun always shine, and that if efficient power plants, mostly powered by nuclear and fossil fuels, were not kept running constantly, our lights would go out.

We just featured a fantastic series of articles at CFACT.org that delve into the important details that reveal just what a waste wind and solar have proven to be. Add in that they have tremendous nature-crushing footprints, that wind turbines take a horrific toll on birds and bats, and the turbines themselves wear out quickly and can’t be recycled!

This entire discussion received a sharp jolt when Michael Moore released his latest movie, Planet of the Humans. An arch-Leftist filmmaker actually documented the absurdities and lies surrounding the “renewables” industry. With billions of your dollars at stake, this touched off a civil war on the Left, with those cashing in launching an effort to silence Moore and bury his film.

Dr. Jay Lehr details the hard truths Europeans refuse to acknowledge about the failure of renewable energy on their continent:

While these solar and wind plants could theoretically produce 46 percent of Germany’s needs, in actuality, they only produce about 12 percent of Germany’s total electrical output. Who knew that one of the world’s most prosperous and industrialized nations could not figure out how to produce enough electricity to meet the needs of its own people and industry from wind and solar power?

To relieve this national shortage, Germany has been importing vast amounts of electrical power, mostly from France, and are paying exorbitant rates for it. The average cost of electricity in Germany is now almost three times the cost in the United States.

America needs to wake up, acknowledge the hard truths about “renewable” energy, and plan for a realistic power grid to supply abundant, affordable electricity to 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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6 May, 2020

'Blown away': Safe climate niche closing fast, with billions at risk

Once again we have Green/Left loons ignoring half the story. Where I live in sub-tropical Brisbane a summer temperature of 29 degrees is merely comfortable. 34 degrees is more typical of a summer's day. And in the tropics proper even higher temperatures are common. And yet life goes on there as normal. The authors clearly have no idea of the range of normal human adaptability. They should get out more

As much as one-third of the world's population will be exposed to Sahara Desert-like heat within half a century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at the pace of recent years.

Scientists from China, the US and Europe found that the narrow climate niche that has supported human society would shift more over the next 50 years than it had in the preceding 6000 years.

As many as 3.5 billion people will be exposed to "near-unliveable" temperatures averaging 29 degrees through the year by 2070. Less than 1 per cent of the Earth's surface now endures such heat.

That heat compares with the narrow 11- to 15-degree range that has supported civilisation over the past six millennia, according to research published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Absent climate mitigation or migration, a substantial part of humanity will be exposed to mean annual temperatures warmer than nearly anywhere today," the paper said.

The research extended current population and greenhouse gas emissions trends into the future, and excluded impacts from the coronavirus pandemic on both.

The researchers also considered possible rainfall changed. "The global pattern of population distribution seems less constrained by precipitation - while there is also an optimum around 1000 mm [of rainfall a year ] - so we focused on temperature," Dr Xu said. "Changes of precipitation regime would definitely have impacts, but such impacts together those of temperature change would be more complex to foresee."

Compared with pre-industrial-era conditions, temperatures globally will be about 3 degrees hotter by 2070. But as land warms faster than the oceans, the rise for people on average will be about 7.5 degrees, the paper found.

SOURCE

Jesse Jackson Stands up for Natural Gas Development in Struggling Community

The Rev. Jesse Jackson is bucking many of the environmentalists who believe natural gas production perpetuates a world in which climate change is disproportionately hurting black communities.

Jackson is prodding local, state, and federal officials in Illinois to okay the construction of a $8.2 million, 30-mile natural-gas pipeline built for a community, Axios noted in a report Monday addressing the reverend’s contrarian position.

The Pembroke, Illinois, pipeline would shuttle natural gas into an area of the state that suffers from high energy prices, according to Jackson.

“When we move to another form of energy, that’s fine by me, I support that,” Jackson told Axios in February as the issue began heating up. “But in the meantime, you cannot put the black farmers on hold until that day comes.”

Pembroke residents have a median income of $28,922 and rely on a combination of propane, wood stoves, and space heaters for heat during Illinois winters, media reports show.

Residents of the town want to know why other parts of Illinois have access to gas but they must rely on wood and propane.

“Everyone else has (gas service),” Levi, a 52-year-old construction worker and resident, told the Chicago Tribune in December 2019 as Jackson promoted the pipeline. “I’m unclear why it’s so hard for us to get it.”

Another resident–Cathy Vanderdyz, a city clerk in the area–told Axios that she pays between $500 and $800 to heat her home over a two-month period. Jackson got involved due in part to a request from Mark Hodge, mayor of Hopkins Park, a town in the area.

The mayor told Axios that businesses refuse to come to the area because local energy prices are too high.

“It’s not on my radar at this point, not to say in the future it would not be,” Hodges said of climate change. “My main concern is cutting our energy costs out here.” Customers have to pay for some of the cost of delivering such pipeline access under current regulations.

Pembroke residents must pay $3.2 million of the estimated total $8.2 million pipeline extension, according to Nicor Gas, the company behind the project. Each household would have to pay more than $8,000 upfront for access, Axios notes. Illinois’s state Legislature is considering a bill designating Pembroke as a “designated hardship area,” which would allow Nicor Gas to pay the entire cost.

Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton, and National Urban League President Marc Morial have said in the past that they oppose an abrupt move away from fracking, a technique producers use to extract natural gas from shale. They said the technique for producing natural gas helps black people who struggle with high energy prices.

Morial, Jackson, and Sharpton’s comments came after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People warned its local chapters in 2019 that oil companies are supposedly trying to manipulate them into supporting their products.

Nearly 1 in 5 households are forced to go without food to pay their energy bill, the Energy Information Administration noted in a 2018 report.

SOURCE

Wind and solar add zero value to the grid

Why is wind power and solar power, not making significant gains in providing a substantial amount of renewable electricity? The US has utilized, in its energy mix, about eight percent of wind and two percent solar for more than a decade. The reason it is not growing requires an understanding of the fundamental elements, of an electrical grid.

The grid is the electrical industry’s term for all of the hardware and software needed to convert fuel into electricity. The electricity is distributed by wires, transformers, sub-stations, etc. to all of us. The system must ensure our safety from malfunctions, security to customers, and safety for the community.

For a simple example, let’s assume we are a local electric utility in Smallville, USA. It’s a town with a population of 50,000 and another 25,000 people in the surrounding farms, along with small factories, professional offices, shops, a hospital, bakeries, etc. Everyone in the area needs reliable and affordable electricity. Over the years, Smallville set up a modern grid to assure a 99.98 percent reliability. In order to guarantee that reliable availability, the community’s grid must have at least a 75 percent excess capability above the everyday norm. Twenty-five percent of the excess must be in the “spinning reserve mode,” another 25 percent must be in the “peaking mode,” and 25 percent in the “back-up mode.” Let’s examine each of these portions of the necessary reserves.

Spinning Reserve. If some malfunction happens at any time and shuts down a generating plant, a back-up plant needs to kick-in and pick up 100 percent of the lost power in seconds. If it’s a few seconds too late, the electrical demand will overwhelm the grid, causing a “brown-out,” or worse, a “blackout.” It’s as if all the customers of a bank show up at the same time, demanding to take out all their money immediately. It’s a disaster.

The only way to ensure that this blackout doesn’t happen is to have a back-up fossil fuel power plant already running at about 90-95 percent of rated power. It burns fuel but creates no electricity. They will burn almost the same amount of fuel as they would if there was no solar or wind plants connected to the grid because solar and wind can not serve as backup power. The backup power must be 100% reliable. All existing solar and wind power must have fossil fuel back up, while solar and wind power can not be used to back up fossil fuel power as a result of its unreliability. (The wind may not blow adequately and the sun may not shine). As a result, electric utilities are wasting capital, fuel, and operating costs thinking wind and solar can contribute a significant portion of their available energy. It just increases the cost of community power.

Peak mode: This is the extra electrical power that’s needed twice a day, typically for two to three hours each. First is the morning peak demand, from six to nine AM to cook breakfast, get ready to go to school and work. The other high demand period is usually from about five to seven PM. That’s when the extra power is needed to cook dinner, fire up the AC or central heat, etc. But solar plants can’t fill either of these peak demands. That’s because solar produces electricity near mid-day when it’s needed the least. Wind turbines might be put to work a few hours in the morning or evenings. In all cases, however they still need the spinning reserve fossil-fuel back-up plant running at about 90 percent of rated power, 100 percent of the time.

Back-up Reserve: These power plants are like a spare tire in the trunk of a car; they sit there until called to duty. But unlike the spinning reserve, these reserves don’t need to be up and on-line in seconds. So, they only operate when they are started, typically for scheduled maintenance on other plants. Depending on the type of plant, it may take several hours or more for them to come online, and then they may run for days, weeks, or a year non-stop. Having a power plant just sitting there, doing nothing most of the time is very expensive, but is a valuable insurance policy against failure.

Let’s examine the real-life experience of Germany that made the bold decision to go all-in on being green. It is now the number one producer of wind and solar electrical power in the world on a per capita basis. In 2004 Germany launched an aggressive plan to replace many of their coal and nuclear plants with wind and solar. By 2018 Germany had an installed electrical base of about 210 gigawatts. Of that, 28 percent was wind power, 26 percent solar, and the remaining 46 percent was their remaining fossil fuel and nuclear power plants along with a little hydro. At least that is the nameplate rating of the power capability of these solar and wind installations when operating under the best conditions. However, the real production is startlingly different.

While these solar and wind plants could theoretically produce 46 percent of Germany’s needs, in actuality, they only produce about 12 percent of Germany’s total electrical output. Who knew that one of the world’s most prosperous and industrialized nations could not figure out how to produce enough electricity to meet the needs of its own people and industry from wind and solar power?

To relieve this national shortage, Germany has been importing vast amounts of electrical power, mostly from France, and are paying exorbitant rates for it. The average cost of electricity in Germany is now almost three times the cost in the United States.

Germany is now launching a major program to rebuild dozens of fossil-fueled power plants. They have also signed a contract with Russia to build a natural gas pipeline from Siberia to fuel their electrical demand and to back up its unreliable wind and solar plants.Wind and solar add zero value to the grid

Sweden has a funny but sad story that needs to be told. They launched a vast wind program a decade ago, which is proving to be a problem in their challenging environment. In their northern latitudes, solar was out of the question. Wind also has some issues. This photo is from a recent article in the online service, “whattsupwiththat.com.” Here we see a picture of a Swedish helicopter trying to de-ice a wind turbine like an airport tanker truck de-ices an airplane’s wings and fuselage . Only the windmill is about four to five times bigger than a Boeing 747’s. A helicopter can only carry 10-20 percent of what a truck can. So, by the time they’ve finished one or two-blades, they need to start all over again. Now imagine a wind farm with hundreds of these turbines. This picture is worth thousands of words and a few giggles. But it’s not funny for Sweden.

SOURCE

The coronavirus can’t stop the windpower blowhards, let alone economic reality

For Australian energy, 2020 started precariously. The bushfires showed the vulnerability of the nation to its subsidy-induced reliance on renewable energy.

Average prices in January reached near-record levels. In addition, the market manager was forced to intervene spending over four times as much as normal — $310 million — buying services and compensating suppliers in order to stabilise the system.

In February, low demand, an influx of renewable energy, and high supplies of hydro brought about a halving of the previous month’s prices. These conditions continued in March when they were reinforced by a forced cessation of demand and ample gas supplies caused by the COVID-19 crisis.

And in April prices fell to $35 per MWh. Such levels were last seen five years ago, before wind/solar subsidies caused closures of two major coal power stations, resulting in a two-and-a-half-fold increase in prices and, due to the higher share of intermittent electricity, a permanent lift in unreliability.

Forward markets indicate that prices that were previously forecast at $75 per MWh are now at around $55 per MWh, a level that will be maintained through 2021. This trend could continue in later years if, as is constantly threatened, one of the big three aluminium smelters were to close, thereby reducing national electricity demand by five per cent.

Long term, the low prices cannot be maintained with the current wind/solar-rich generation, even if there is an-ongoing de-industrialisation. Wind and solar costs are difficult to estimate since the contracts are confidential and the headline price contains various contingencies. CSIRO estimated the cost of wind at around $50 per MWh and Bloomberg New Energy Finance at $40-74. Lazards put the cheapest wind at $52. On some estimates, large scale solar is cheaper. China, which in the March quarter of 2020 announced approved more new coal capacity than in the whole of 2019, is clearly unimpressed with such estimates.

One reason for this may be that intermittent renewables also need a firming contract which presently costs $40 per MWh but which Snowy Hydro says will fall to $25-30. Add to this, wind (but not solar) earns a discount on the average spot price because of its lesser availability during high price events (when typically, there is little wind). According to the Energy Council, wind on average received in 2018/19 24 per cent less per MWh than the average spot price in South Australia (in NSW it was only five per cent less).

A further cost is that seen in January this year when the market manager had to buy, and charge to wind farms, frequency control services (FCAS) and require backoffs, with wind farms also choosing to back off to avoid high FCAS charges.

Thus, if the spot price is $55 per MWh, a wind farm capable of a variable production cost of $50 per MWh would need $90 per MWh because of its earnings being discounted by, say 20 per cent, or $10 per MWh; a hedge cost at, say, $30 per MWh

In addition, it would have other costs caused by the lack of system strength and FCAS charges.

Offsetting these penalties, wind and solar receive the renewable subsidy, which last year averaged $31.5 per MWh (about $457,000 per turbine). Forward prices have this declining to around $20 per MWh. Long term it has to fall to zero which means a wind/solar dominated system would deliver electricity with support to offset wind/solars’ intrinsic unreliability at best at $80 per MWh.

Wind and, to a lesser degree, large scale solar is now a mature technology and is likely to see cost reductions not dissimilar from those of nuclear of fossil plant.

In Australia a system dominated by coal plant, supplemented by fast start hydro and gas, can provide a highly reliable electricity supply system at around $55 per MWh. China and other developing countries would probably not be able to match this as they lack the low cost and conveniently located coal we have on the East coast. Even so, they will have nuclear/fossil fuelled electricity at far less than the $80 we can hope for from our present policy settings. The energy intensive industries are therefore likely to migrate away from Australia and other industries will see costs higher than they need, an outcome of which is a lower exchange rate and lower living standards.

The market manager, AEMO, has released a plan that indicates the network could accommodate up to 60 per cent “instantaneous penetration of wind and solar and could be adapted to accommodate 75 per cent. AEMO does not specify what the costs of this would be.

Meanwhile, renewable energy lobbyist Martijn Wilder, who the Commonwealth has appointed to head up hand-outs to renewables through the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, finds their appointee is calling for more monies to be directed into renewables as a result of coronavirus. His views are supported by the head of the Business Council who opined, “Every dollar we invest in energy, should be a dollar towards a lower carbon economy”.

Maybe we just want to be poorer than we need to 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

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

5 May, 2020

Ford, Rivian, Others Scrap E-Vehicle Plans Amid Pandemic

The economic and logistical toll of the coronavirus pandemic is affecting the rollout of several electric vehicle models, and even canceling one project.

Driving the news: Ford and the EV startup Rivian just scrapped plans to jointly develop a vehicle under the Lincoln brand that would use Rivian’s “skateboard” platform.

But beyond that cancelation, other product launches and schedules are being delayed as the EVs are caught up in the turmoil that’s pushing back various types of cars.

Where it stands: Here are several models affected — or potentially affected — by the crisis.

Rivian has pushed the production of its upcoming electric pickup and SUVs into the first half of 2021 to complete the retooling of an Illinois factory.

General Motors told the EV site Electrek that a “refreshed” version of its Chevrolet Bolt has now been pushed into 2022.

Via coverage in Electrek and TechCrunch, the production and delivery timeline for Chinese EV startup Byton’s M-Byte SUV is now uncertain.

Ford said yesterday that the timing of some of this year’s product launches, including the Mustang Mach-E electric crossover, could slide, depending on how long its operations are disrupted.

The startup Lordstown Motors said last week that production of its Endurance pickup is now slated for January of 2021 instead of late this year.

The big picture: Beyond the immediate delays, the industry’s big investments in electrification could be slowed. “[We] anticipate many auto companies will cut back on their EV efforts or delay them significantly to address near term cash needs,” Morgan Stanley analysts said in a note Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the consultancy Wood Mackenzie sees near-term effects on the consumer side, forecasting a 43% drop in global EV sales this year.

SOURCE

Al Gore Falsely Claims Fossil Fuels Raise Coronavirus Death Rate

Al Gore falsely attempted to blame fossil fuels for raising the coronavirus death rate during a February 27 MSNBC interview. In reality, economic prosperity brought by the use of abundant, affordable fossil fuels results in lower death rates from viruses and epidemics. Also, viruses like influenza and COVID-19 thrive in cold climate conditions and are inhibited by warmer temperatures.

“This climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic are linked in some ways,” Gore said on MSNBC, as reported by The Hill. “The preconditions that raise the death rate from COVID-19, a great many of them, are accentuated, made worse by the fossil fuel pollution.”

Scientists have long known that cold temperatures are a key factor in the annual death toll for influenza, which kills an average of approximately 36,000 Americans per year.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) documents that flu season ramps up when the weather turns cold, and then peters out when warm temperatures return. According to CDC, “influenza activity often begins to increase in October. Most of the time flu activity peaks between December and February, although activity can last as late as May.”

According to Harvard University researchers, “In the southern hemisphere, however, where winter comes during our summer months, the flu season falls between June and September. In other words, wherever there is winter, there is flu. In fact, even its name, “influenza” may be a reference to its original Italian name, influenza di freddo, meaning “influence of the cold”.

“[A]t least in regions that have a winter season, the influenza virus survives longer in cold, dry air, so it has a greater chance of infecting another person,” the Harvard researchers added.

Scientists are still learning about COVID-19, but preliminary evidence indicates warmer temperatures have either minor or significant impacts reducing the spread and harm of coronavirus. Warmer temperatures certainly do not make COVID-19 worse.

According to a publication released by Harvard Medical School, a recent study by the National Academies of Sciences “found that in laboratory settings, higher temperatures and higher levels of humidity decreased survival of the COVID-19 coronavirus.” The scientists are currently attempting to determine whether this will also be the case in natural environments outside the laboratory.

In fact, cold temperatures kill many more people – for a variety of reasons – than warm or hot temperatures.

SOURCE

Alarmist Media Wrong Again – Facts Prove More CO2 Benefits Crops and Plant Life

At the very top of Google News searches for “climate change” this week, an article in The Conversation falsely claims more atmospheric carbon dioxide will bring few if any benefits regarding plant life. The article completely ignores many documented benefits of carbon dioxide for crops and plant life.

The article, “Climate explained: why higher carbon dioxide levels aren’t good news, even if some plants grow faster,” claims, “At best, you might be mowing your lawn twice as often or harvesting your plantation forests faster.”

The author, Sebastian Leuzinger, acknowledges in passing that increased carbon dioxide helps plants grow faster and larger, and even improves their use of water. He attempts to dismiss this by putting the worst possible spin on it, suggesting that the primary result is people will have to more frequently engage in the unpleasant task of mowing our lawns. Putting the worst possible spin on good climate news is a common tactic of climate activists.

Higher carbon dioxide levels and modest warming have resulted in crop yields setting records nearly every year. This is much more impactful than mowing lawns more frequently, and an incredible benefit for human health and welfare. Also, greater crop yields mean we can preserve more open spaces for the environment rather than farms.

Leuzinger also complains that more abundant, faster-growing plant life will not necessarily absorb more carbon from the atmosphere. But we don’t want all or most of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide to be locked away forever. Rather we want plants to use it to grow more abundantly, providing food for plant and animal life on land and in the oceans. As documented in Climate Change Reconsidered: Biological Impacts (CCRBI), carbon dioxide enriched plant growth has contributed to record crop yields, helping to bring about the largest decline in hunger, malnutrition, and starvation in human history.

So, regardless of what climate alarmists and their media sock puppets say, more abundant and faster-growing plant life is more than simply mowing our lawns more frequently. More atmospheric carbon dioxide benefits crop production, plant life, and human health and welfare.

SOURCE

Australia: $300m clean energy fund to back fossil-fuel hydrogen projects
The Morrison government has committed $300 million to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and instructed it to invest in new hydrogen energy projects including those powered by fossil fuels.

The move makes clear the government's position on the debate over the potential to develop an emissions-free hydrogen industry powered exclusively by renewable energy.

"Gas and gas transmission networks already play an essential role in energy reliability, but gas has even more potential as a resource to produce and transmit hydrogen," said Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor.

Renewable energy advocates, along with Labor-led governments in Queensland, Western Australia and the ACT, argue fossil-fuelled hydrogen should be barred from public funds, which should flow to “green hydrogen” powered by renewables. State governments contribute to regulation of the energy sector through the Council of Australian Governments (COAG).

But crucially for Mr Taylor, he secured majority support at the November COAG meeting to develop a hydrogen industry under a "technology-neutral" approach including all power source options.

Hydrogen has emerged in recent months as a key element of the Morrison government’s emissions reduction strategy, which Mr Taylor said would be based on a "technology investment road map".

Mr Taylor said his goal was to back projects that could reach a long-term goal of producing hydrogen at $2 a kilogram – the point "where hydrogen becomes competitive with alternative energy sources in large-scale deployment across our energy systems".

The announcement of the Advancing Hydrogen Fund follows a crash in the global oil market crash. The fall has flowed on to lower gas prices, which Mr Taylor said “provides us with an opportunity for strategic economic stimulus”.

The government has estimated an Australian hydrogen industry could create more than 8000 jobs and generate about $11 billion a year in GDP by 2050.

Chief Scientist Alan Finkel has said a domestic hydrogen industry could underpin an energy export boom for Australia, and Australia should develop it using renewables and fossil fuel to avoid the risks associated with reliance on any one fuel source.

"By producing hydrogen from natural gas or coal, using carbon capture and permanent storage, we can add back two more lanes to our energy highway, ensuring we have four primary energy sources to meet the needs of the future – solar, wind, hydrogen from natural gas, and hydrogen from coal," Dr Finkel said.

"Think for a moment of the vast amounts of steel, aluminium and concrete needed to support, build and service solar and wind structures.

"What if there was a resources shortage? It would be prudent, therefore, to safeguard against any potential resource limitations with another energy source."

In time, green hydrogen could take over and drive a net zero emissions global economy, according to Dr Finkel.

The Advancing Hydrogen Fund will provide debt or equity finance to commercial projects requiring $10 million or more in capital, which Clean Energy Finance Corporation chief executive Ian Learmonth said would fill market gaps created by "technology, development or commercial challenges".

Mr Taylor recently announced a $70 million fund for green hydrogen project development through the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

SOURCE

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

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

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

4 May, 2020

Why I’ve had enough of eco-luvvies

Many celebrities are sanctimonious, so there’s no use complaining too much. But there is something particularly nauseating about eco-luvvies.

The lifestyles of the filthy rich and uber-famous are among the most carbon-intensive imaginable. But that has never stopped them from finger-wagging to the rest of us about how we are overusing our own meagre share of the planet’s resources.

Emma Thompson is perhaps the most extreme eco-luvvie. Last year, she infamously flew from LA to London to join in a roadblock with the doomsday cultists of Extinction Rebellion (XR). XR is truly the maddest green group among a mad bunch. Its central claim is that humans face a mass-extinction event unless we decide as a species to revert to a semi-feudal, carbon-free lifestyle by 2025.

Now, on behalf of XR, Thompson has starred in a new short film called Rebellion. Much has been made in the press about the film’s use of all-vegan costumes. But what’s really remarkable about it is how clearly it shows her and other activists’ delusions of radicalism.

The film opens with a quote from Naomi Klein about people feeling ‘threatened’ about the subject of climate change before cutting to one of XR’s days of ‘rebellion’. In the meantime, a posh XR activist is waiting to start a negotiation with a posh Tory politician and his posh adviser. The XR activist is waiting for another posh (albeit dressed-down) activist to arrive before putting the government in its place. When posh Emma Thompson finally arrives, it becomes clear that the only thing the film accurately represents is that eco-warriors are overwhelmingly posh.

Unsurprisingly, the characters trot out the unconvincing XR lines about humanity facing extinction and governments covering up ‘the truth’ about the climate crisis. When the nasty politician says he won’t overturn the global capitalist system at the behest of a few activists, everyone explodes into uncontrollable shouting. At one point, Emma Thompson screams that she has been ‘putting up for 40 years with this patriarchal BULLSHIT!’.

Rebellion, like so much eco-propaganda, positions the environmentalist as the rebellious antagonist to the established order. But of course nothing could be further from the truth.

The film was deliberately released on the anniversary of the UK parliament declaring a climate emergency. And yet a recurring complaint of the film’s characters is that the UK is doing nothing about climate change.

Far from doing nothing about climate change, unless the pandemic blows it off course, the Conservative government has committed the UK to a ‘Net Zero’ target for carbon emissions. This will be the most expensive and far-reaching policy in our history. The opposition parties wanted to go even further, pledging Net Zero targets by 2030 at the last election. Extinction Rebellion’s target of 2025 is certainly more stringent (and utterly mental) but its attachment to eco-austerity is shared by the whole of the political class.

Extinction Rebellion activists like Thompson delude themselves into thinking they are rebellious outsiders, raging against the system. But even the capitalist class share their anti-human tendencies. Environmentalism is well-represented every year at Davos, the exclusive gathering of the global elites. Greta Thunberg has given keynote addresses there on multiple occasions, and last year even spokespeople for Extinction Rebellion were invited on to panels.

The problem for those of us who want to live free and fulfilling lives is that Extinction Rebellion’s ideas are actually incredibly mainstream. It is only a matter of degree and flamboyancy that makes XR stand out from the rest. Emma Thompson and the other eco-zealots have much more in common with a drab Tory MP than they would care to admit. What we need is a rebellion against the posh eco-luvvies.

SOURCE

Eco-conscious wine lovers should buy corked instead of screw top because it has up to half the carbon footprint, scientists discover

Eco-conscious wine lovers should seek out bottles sealed with a cork rather than a screw top because it has up to half the carbon footprint, scientists have discovered.

In the past, the water used to grow cork trees, and the fact you are cutting trees to make the stoppers, made some believe it was better for the environment to buy wine sealed with a recyclable cap.

However, a new study by Ernst & Young has found that corks are carbon negative, meaning the production of them captures carbon from the atmosphere instead of adding to the industry's carbon footprint.

They found a natural cork captures 309g of CO2, and a natural cork for sparkling wine captures 562g of CO2.

The average wine bottle has a carbon footprint of 1200g, so the use of cork stoppers can reduce this by a quarter in a still wine

SOURCE

New Republic, Bill McKibben Caught Lying About Earth Day and Climate

The New Republic is touting its new weekly newsletter, Apocalypse Soon, claiming this week’s 50th Earth Day anniversary reveals a “tragic failure of the environmental movement to change our trajectory.” Moreover, according to the New Republic, “The dissonance has felt more unbearable each year, as the threats to the planet grow.” Objective data, however, show the trajectory of environmental stewardship has been improving for decades, regardless of the New Republic‘s tall tales.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chart below shows emissions of the six most important pollutants tracked by EPA have declined 68% since 1980. The decline is even larger if we track back 50 years to 1970 and the initial Earth Day.

The New Republic’s misrepresentation of the real facts is similar to its deceitful coverage of climate change issues across the board. For example, this week’s Apocalypse Soon newsletter favorably cites climate activist Bill McKibben. This is the same McKibben who shamefully exploited the devastating 2011 Japan tsunami to lie and call attention to his radical climate change agenda. In an article ostensibly on the Japan tsunami, McKibben wrote, “We’re seeing record temperatures that depress harvests – the amount of grain per capita on the planet has been falling for years.” Yet, as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports, the world has been benefiting from dramatic long-term growth in grain production. In fact, as shown in the FAO chart below, UN global grain production sets new records virtually every year as our planet modestly warms.

The New Republic and Bill McKibben make excellent bedfellows. Both simply make stuff up, spew false climate claims, and seek to ignore and eliminate evidentiary testing under The Scientific Method.

SOURCE

Svalbard Now At 6th Highest Sea Ice Extent With Very Thick Ice

Susan J Crockford PhD

For the second time this month, sea ice around Svalbard Norway was the 6th or 7th highest since records began in the late 1960s. Pack ice at the end of April still surrounds Bear Island (Bjørnøya) at the southern end of the archipelago, which is a rare occurrence at this date.

These conditions document a recurrent pattern of high ice extent and especially extreme ice thickness in the Barents Sea since last summer.

Graphs provided by the Norwegian Ice Service only goes back to 1981 (see the ‘Min/Max’ dotted line in the graph above) but their records go back to at least 1969. Extent at April 29th was sixth highest and on the 30th seventh highest – only slightly less than 1998. NIS archived ice charts availble online only go back to 1998 for April. Below are the charts for April 29th and 30th:

Thick sea ice in the Barents Sea north of Svalbard has been remarkable this year, as the chart below from Danish Arctic research shows:

The icebreaker Polarstern, intentionally trapped in the ice pack, may well have trouble making its rendezvous with two German icebreakers off Svalbard in mid-May to exchange staff and replenish supplies. The world’s most powerful nuclear-powered icebreakers can plow through ice up to 2.5m thick but most of the ice just north of Svalbard (see map above) is 3.0-3.5m thick.

A commenter on Twitter posted a link to a blog post (in Russian) that contains remarkable photos of Russian icebreakers working through consolidated sea ice north of Novaya Zemlya in the Barents Sea in early April. Google Translate offered this nugget: “On the northern shores of Novaya Zemlya there are glaciers that throw off such gifts to sailors in the sea.” These ‘gifts’ are icebergs breaking of the huge icefields of NW Novaya Zemlya

Similar conditions are what stopped explorer William Barents and his crew in their tracks back in 1596 in late August and forced them to spend the winter and following spring in the Arctic. See map below of the ice cap (white) on northwest Novaya Zemlya from this paper: icebergs form ‘ice fields’ off the west coast, generated by the many glaciers; these icebergs get consolidated into the pack ice north and northwest of the island. Cape Spory Navolok is where Barents’ ship was trapped – they made it through the ice fields on the west and north coasts only to get caught in the thick ice off the northeast coast:

SOURCE (See the original for links and graphics)

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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, 2020

Melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland are responsible for a global sea level rise of 0.55 inches since 2003, study shows

Ho-hum. The accuracy of measurement of these surveys is very uncertain. And even if it were, what caused the melting? Note that global warming is not mentioned. The probable cause is the well-known subsurface volcanic activity at both poles

Ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland shrinking and melting since 2003 have contributed towards a global sea level rise, a NASA funded study revealed.

Researchers at the University of Washington examined data from two space lasers that were able to make the most precise measurements of the ice sheets to date.

They found the net loss of ice from Antarctica, along with Greenland's shrinking ice sheet, has been responsible for 0.55 inches of sea level rise since 2003.

In Antarctica, sea level rise is driven by the loss of the floating ice shelves melting in a warming ocean - they hold back the flow of land-based ice into the ocean.

The study found that Greenland's ice sheet lost an average of 200 gigatons of ice per year, and Antarctica's ice sheet lost an average of 118 gigatons of ice per year.

One gigaton of ice is enough to fill 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The findings come from the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2), which was launched into orbit in the autumn of 2018.

The team behind the study compared recent ICESat-2 data to measurements from its predecessor taken between 2003 and 2009.

'If you watch a glacier or ice sheet for a month, or a year, you're not going to learn much about what the climate is doing to it,' said lead author Benjamin Smith.

'We now have a 16-year span between ICESat and ICESat-2 and can be much more confident that the changes we're seeing in the ice have to do with the long-term changes in the climate,' said the glaciologist at the University of Washington.

'We're seeing high-quality measurements that carpet both ice sheets, which let us make a detailed and precise comparison with the ICESat data.'

Previous studies of ice loss or gain often analyse data from multiple satellites and airborne missions but the new study takes just a single type of measurement.

It takes height as measured by an instrument that bounces laser pulses off the ice surface - providing the most detailed and accurate picture of ice sheet change.

The researchers took elements of earlier ICESat measurements and overlaid the new data from ICESat-2 measurements taken last year.

They then ran the data through computer programs that accounted for the snow density and other factors, and then calculated the mass of ice lost or gained.

'The new analysis reveals the ice sheets' response to changes in climate with unprecedented detail, revealing clues as to why and how the ice sheets are reacting the way they are', said co-author Alex Gardner, a NASA glaciologist

Of the sea level rise that resulted from ice sheet meltwater and iceberg calving, about two-thirds of it came Greenland, the other third from Antarctica

'It was amazing to see how good the ICESat-2 data looked, right out of the gate,' said co-author Tom Neumann, the ICESat-2 project scientist.

'These first results looking at land ice confirm the consensus from other research groups, but they also let us look at the details of change in individual glaciers and ice shelves at the same time,' Neumann said.

In Greenland, there was a significant amount of thinning of coastal glaciers.

The Kangerdulgssuaq and Jakobshavn glaciers, for example, have lost 14 to 20 feet of height per year for the past 16 years - the authors discovered.

Warmer summer temperatures have melted ice from the surface of the glaciers and ice sheets, and in some places warmer ocean water erodes away the ice at their fronts,' the NASA backed team say.

In Antarctica measurements showed that the ice sheet is getting thicker in parts of the continent's interior, likely as a result of increased snowfall, Smith said.

The loss of ice from the continent's margins, especially in West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula, far outweighs any gains in the interior.

'In West Antarctica, we're seeing a lot of glaciers thinning very rapidly,' Smith said.

'There are ice shelves at the downstream end of those glaciers, floating on water. And those ice shelves are thinning, letting more ice flow out into the ocean as the warmer water erodes the ice.'

These ice shelves, which rise and fall with the tides, can be difficult to measure, said co-author Helen Amanda Fricker, a glaciologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

Some of them have rough surfaces, with crevasses and ridges, but the precision and high resolution of ICESat-2 allows researchers to measure overall changes, without worrying about these features skewing the results.

This is one of the first times that researchers have measured loss of the floating ice shelves around Antarctica simultaneously with loss of the continent's ice sheet.

Ice that melts from ice shelves doesn't raise sea levels, since it's already floating - just like an ice cube in a full cup of water doesn't overflow the glass.

But the ice shelves do provide stability for the glaciers and ice sheets behind them -'It's like an architectural buttress that holds up a cathedral,' Fricker said.

'If you take away the shelves, or even if you thin them, you're reducing that buttressing force, so the grounded ice can flow faster.'

The researchers found ice shelves in West Antarctica, where many of the continent's fastest-moving glaciers are located, are losing mass.

Patterns of thinning show that Thwaites and Crosson ice shelves have thinned the most, an average of about five meters (16 feet) and three meters (10 feet) of ice per year, respectively,' the researchers said.

This NASA funded study has been published in the journal Science.

SOURCE

'Lockdown is FASCIST': Elon Musk demands that people are given 'back their God-damn freedom' after his California Tesla plant is shut for another MONTH

He's right

Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday called sweeping US stay-at-home restrictions to curtail the coronavirus outbreak 'fascist' as the electric carmaker posted its third quarterly profit in a row.

Shares of the company were up more than 9% at $873 in extended trade and Tesla's report of a profitable quarter came just a day after Detroit-based rival Ford Motor Co reported a $2 billion first-quarter loss and forecast losing another $5 billion in the current quarter.

But one of the biggest disruptions to Tesla has been the government-ordered shutdown of its factory in Fremont, California March 24.

Alameda County, where the factory is based, on Wednesday extended stay-at-home orders until May 31 and vehicle manufacturing is not considered an essential business that is exempt.

'To say that they cannot leave their house and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist,' Musk said on an earning calls Wednesday

On a conference call on Wednesday, Musk said he did not know when they could resume production.

'I think the people are going to be very angry about this and are very angry,' Musk said as he went off track in the call about earnings. 'It’s like somebody should be, if somebody wants to stay in the house that’s great, they should be allowed to stay in the house and they should not be compelled to leave.

'To say that they cannot leave their house and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist. This is not democratic, this is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom!'

The strictest stay-at-home orders recommend that people only leave their homes for essential trips such as visiting the grocery store or pharmacy.

Tesla shut down the California factory just as it was ramping up production of its new electric crossover utility vehicle Model Y, which it expects to generate record demand and higher profit margins.

Tesla on Wednesday said the Model Y was already contributing profits, marking the first time in the company's history that a new vehicle is profitable in its first quarter.

Earlier this month, Tesla said production and deliveries of its Model Y sports utility vehicle were significantly ahead of schedule, as it delivered the highest number of vehicles in any first quarter to date, despite the outbreak.

Tesla reported that it eked out a first-quarter net profit Wednesday. The electric car and solar panel company said it made $16 million from January through March, its third-straight profitable quarter.

But Musk called the state stay-at-home order a 'serious risk' to the business.

'So the expansion of the shelter in place or as frankly I would call it, forcibly imprisoning people in their homes, against all their constitutional rights, is my opinion, and breaking people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong, and not why people came to America or built this country, excuse me,' Musk added later.

'It’s an outrage. It will cause loss, great, great harm, but not just to Tesla, but any company. And while Tesla will weather the storm there are many small companies that will not.'

SOURCE

The madness of Brian Cox

Brian Cox, the softly spoken TV professor and former keyboard player for D:Ream, has found a ‘silver lining’ to the coronavirus crisis.

Appearing on Good Morning Britain yesterday to mark Earth Day, Cox said that the coronavirus crisis has ‘shown us what a future with less pollution and more active wildlife could be like’.

It is certainly true that emissions have enormously declined over the past few months. And for Cox, coronavirus ‘could change how we think about our impact on the environment’ because it has revealed what a world looks like ‘with lower pollution’ and ‘without aircraft flying overhead’. This is a ‘future we could choose’, he says.

Of course, all it took to bring about this reduction in emissions was a novel virus that has ravaged the world, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and a political response to this crisis that has put billions of people under house arrest and sent the global economy into free fall. We have no idea how devastating the economic, social and political fallout could yet be.

So, has Cox lost his mind? Environmentalists have always been cavalier about the human costs of their desire to rein in economic progress for the supposed good of the planet. But this is surely a new low.

SOURCE

"The science" and "the experts" are no longer sacrosanct

Here are some words you would never have expected to read in the Guardian. Boris Johnson’s government, the paper says, is using the refrain ‘following the science’ to ‘abdicate responsibility for political decisions’. It reports some experts’ concerns that in constantly saying ‘we are following scientific advice on Covid-19’, ministers are ‘abdicating political duty to [a] narrow field of opaque expertise’. In short, the cabinet is too faithfully traipsing in the wake of scientific expertise rather than making judgements about what might be the best course for the country in the era of Covid. The Guardian says there is now worry among scientists themselves that the current ‘prominence given to science in supporting political decisions risks burdening scientists with unrealistic expectations’.

This is a turnaround of epic proportions. The Guardian has probably done more than any other media outlet to push the new orthodoxy that political decision-making must be expert-led and scientifically infused. On everything from climate change to a No Deal Brexit, the liberal elite’s mantra in recent years has been ‘Listen to The Science’ or ‘Listen to The Experts’. The Science – they always say ‘the science’ rather than just ‘science’, to give it an extra godly quality – has been turned into a kind of gospel truth we must all bow down to, and upon which all political decisions must be based. Indeed, for the past year we have had Greta Thunberg, feverishly promoted by the political establishment and media class, touring the world and demanding we all ‘listen to The Science’.

Now, it seems, this latter-day demand for unflinching fealty to an implacable truth – though in this case derived from science rather than from God – is being called into question in some quarters. It has dawned on people that science is a complex, drawn-out, falsifiable search for solutions and truths, not a dispenser of unquestionable wisdom that entire societies must organise themselves around. The Spectator reports that ‘cabinet members have been taken aback by the disagreements among those now advising the government’. One cabinet member says ‘scientists are as bitchy as a bunch of lawyers’. Another says that even the scientists who make up the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies – which has effectively become the supreme governing body of the UK – ‘don’t agree with each other’. ‘They bicker’, apparently, which is not at all surprising: science is an often conflictual process of expanding our understanding of the natural world, not a font of unimpeachable political or moral wisdom.

The cabinet member said to the Spectator: ‘And we talk about following “the science” as if there is one opinion and not at least seven.’ This is a critical point and one that must endure even after the Covid-19 crisis. Science is not a good guide for society. Of course science is essential to our understanding of the world and to the creation of the new insights, technologies and treatments our societies need. But it cannot tell us what is best for our societies in political, moral or economic terms. Indeed, it is the very specialised nature of science, whereby very clever people remove themselves from normal life and focus on one field for a very long period of time, that makes it unsuited to the broader, democratic question of what is in the best interests of society. When science becomes infused with politics, both suffer: science risks becoming politicised while democratic life is weakened through a growing reliance on ‘expert advice’ over the considerations and wisdom of the crowd.

What the Covid-19 crisis has really done is throw the science question into sharp relief. In the eyes of those of us who understand the importance of democratic leadership and the necessity of specialised science, there has always been a problem with using science to justify political action and moral conviction. But now, because of the intensity of the current crisis, others appear to be realising that, too. Epidemiologists might understand how viruses tend to spread, but their understanding of the dire economic consequences of a lockdown is no better than anyone else’s, some are saying. Modelling might be a useful source of information for politicians, but to partake in an unprecedented demobilisation of working people and economic life on the basis of a model is ridiculous and dangerous, others are saying.

This is all good, if a little late. But we need to push further now. One of the key dynamics in the politicised elevation of science and expertise in recent years has been the crisis of politics and institutions, and in particular the crisis of leadership. Science has slowly filled the gap where political and moral judgement ought to be. In the Covid-19 crisis, one of the most striking things has been the relative ease with which the government has abdicated its judgement in favour of following the science or succumbing to media pressure and to supposed public opinion. It speaks to a political class that lacks the capacity for leadership, and in particular lacks leadership’s most important virtue: courage.

This is not Boris-bashing. There is no more infantile political pursuit in the UK right now than Boris-bashing. It is ahistorical to pin the blame for the decades-long sclerotic nature of the British bureaucracy on a man who has been PM for eight months, and it is immoral to blame deaths from Covid-19 on him too, as if a novel virus could be stopped in its tracks by political decision-making alone. Will Boris also be culpable for this year’s flu deaths? That would be ridiculous. No, this is a call for a broader reorientation of political life, away from the caution and instinct for self-preservation that has defined it for a few decades now, and which has fuelled its reliance on the authority of science and experts, and towards a new and meaningful era of leadership in which our leaders take seriously their responsibility to make judgements, take decisions, and convince the rest of us, intellectually and democratically, that it is the right course of action.

It is now widely reported that Boris’s government hasn’t only been ‘following the science’ but has also felt under incredible pressure to buckle to the media class’s demand for action, in particular for a lockdown, and to ‘public opinion’ that says the lockdown is the right thing. There is no doubting the corrosive role the media are playing right now, and have been for many years in fact. Their increasingly opinionated, moralised coverage of the news, in which they seem to think their role is to harry and shame people in power rather than to report on what is happening, has led to a dangerous culture of media self-importance. Politicians, already feeling uncertain of their authority, too often feel cowed by the newly arrogant, agenda-defining media, and are reluctant to fall foul of their demands and diktats. If it is true that Boris put the country into lockdown partly in response to media pressure, then the media themselves may have a lot of questions to answer about the damage currently being done by this unprecedented freeze on working life and the economy.

As to the question of ‘public opinion’ – this needs to be put into context. Polls currently show fairly widespread support for the lockdown. But we must remember that ‘public opinion’ is a sometimes invented, or at least embellished, phenomenon, sometimes shaped by polling questions or political expectation. Even more important than that, right now the public has been demobilised. Indeed, there is no ‘public’ to speak of in Covid-hit Britain. We have been utterly atomised, pushed into our homes away from the world. What people say now, in this individuated, concerned state, might be different to what they would say in a properly public forum like a meeting or a hustings or a protest. Being with others influences our opinions and our confidence. The notion of public opinion in a time when public life has been retired is something we should at least be sceptical about.

Against all of this – against scientific advice, media pressure and alleged public opinion – Boris now needs to push back. He needs to think, not about what the papers want to hear or what modellers with no political or economic nous think we should do, but about what is best for the country. This lockdown is proving disastrous. It has ended our freedom, it is causing economic mayhem, it is giving rise to mass unemployment, and it has replaced public life with a culture of atomisation and fear. We need a far more strategic focus on protecting those most vulnerable to Covid-19 alongside a commitment to reopening society and reviving economic life and everyday liberty. Courage will be required. Judgement – and confidence in one’s judgement – will be essential. There will be criticism, there will be op-eds by angry scientists in the press, there will be Twitterstorms about ‘Boris the Butcher’. Ignore it all and lead. And use the institutions of democracy to bring the public along with you. This shouldn’t even be a radical proposal. Indeed, there is already a word for this kind of action: politics.

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

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

1 May, 2020

Mankind will suffer worse pandemics than coronavirus if we do not protect the environment and halt deforestation, scientists warn

This is just speculation. Yet another prophecy

Humans are to blame for coronavirus and even deadlier pandemics will follow unless the environment is protected, scientists have warned.

Scientists said in a report published this week: 'There is a single species responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic – us.

'Recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity, particularly our global financial and economic systems that prize economic growth at any cost.'

The report was published by IBPES, an international platform that informs policy through science, and co-authored by experts Professors Josef Settele, Sandra Díaz, Eduardo Brondizio and Dr Peter Daszak.

Up to 1.7 million unidentified viruses known to infect humans are thought to exist in mammals and water birds, they warned, and 'Any one of these could be the next "Disease X" – potentially even more disruptive and lethal than COVID-19'.

The report, written for the science-policy website IPBES, said: 'Rampant deforestation, uncontrolled expansion of agriculture, intensive farming, mining and infrastructure development, as well as the exploitation of wild species have created a 'perfect storm' for the spillover of diseases.'

The scientists said activities like these cause pandemics by bringing increasing numbers of people into direct contact with animals that carry the pathogens, where 70 per cent of emerging diseases originate from.

The explosive growth of air travel coupled with urbanisation allowed for a harmless virus in Asian bats to bring 'untold human suffering and halt economies and societies around the world,' they said.

'This is the human hand in pandemic emergence. Yet this may be only the beginning.'

They added that 'Future pandemics are likely to happen more frequently, spread more rapidly, have greater economic impact and kill more people if we are not extremely careful about the possible impacts of the choices we make today.'

The scientists warned that we have a small window of opportunity in overcoming the challenges of the current crisis 'to avoid sowing the seeds of future ones'.

They said a global 'One Health' approach must be developed to recognise the 'complex interconnections among the health of people, animals, plants and our shared environment'.

Government fund recovery packages to bolster failing economies must be used to strengthen environmental protection. Relaxing environmental standards 'without requiring urgent and fundamental change essentially subsidises the emergence of future pandemics', they said.

Health services must also be funded properly in countries most at risk of future pandemics to protect the 'health of the most vulnerable'.

They said: 'This is not simple altruism – it is vital investment in the interests of all to prevent future global outbreaks.'

The article comes following a landmark 2019 report when the scientists led the most comprehensive planetary health check and concluded human society was at risk from earth's rapidly declining resources.

Report co-author Dr Peter Daszak told The Guardian that 'The programmes we're talking about will cost tens of billions of dollars a year. But if you get one pandemic, even just one a century, that costs trillions, so you still come out with an incredibly good return on investment.'

He added that business as usual is 'not a good strategy' and that 'we need to deal with the underlying drivers.

The UN's environment chief, Inger Andersen, said in March that 'nature is sending us a message' with the coronavirus pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis.

And last week the UN secretary general António Guterres said: 'The current crisis is an unprecedented wake-up call' and 'we need to do things right for the future.'

The outbreak has seen more than three million confirmed cases of coronavirus worldwide and 211,000 deaths as the pandemic continues to cause widespread devastation.

Strict lockdown measures have been implemented in most countries to slow its spread as scientists race to create a vaccine, though some countries have begun to ease rules.

The World Health Organisation chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said 'the world should have listened' when it first sounded the alarm about coronavirus.

On Monday he said: 'We can only give advice to countries. We don't have any mandate to force countries to implement what we advise them.

'The world should have listened to the WHO carefully. We advised the whole world to implement a comprehensive public health approach - find, test, contact tracing and so on.'

SOURCE

Imagine our Covid-19 response running on wind and solar power

Until the Pandemic struck the world, the desire of the progressive political movement in the United States and much of the world that was focused on ridding the planet of fossil fuels, said to be negatively altering the planet’s climate.

These folks are fully convinced that the world, at its present state of technological advance, could be run entirely on renewable refuels lead by solar and wind power. They have always ignored the intermittency of these sources when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. While they know we have no economic method to store such energy, they assume one will come along.

It has been futile yet interesting to continue such a debate in the face of a calm period where conjecture was but an intellectual exercise. Then reality hit us all in the face with a disaster never seen in our life times. Where would the two million Covid-19 afflicted people be today who depended on ventilators run by electricity from coal and natural gas if they were powered from the wind and the sun? The obvious answer is that many more would be dead.

While not much good will come from this world wide tragedy, perhaps more of the people deluded by the climate change fear mongering will come to their senses. Eliminating fossil fuels to produce electricity or power automobiles would not support life as we know it today but only life as we knew it a century and a half ago. It may also be time to rename the electric cars, beloved by many, to what they really are, coal, natural gas or nuclear powered cars.

It is a mystery that virtually all the electric car owners believe their power comes magically out of a wall socket at home or a charging station on the road. The power really comes from a nearby power plant all of which burn coal, natural gas or obtain heat from nuclear fuel. Even if the plant gets some energy from local wind turbines or solar photovoltaic cells this amount is minimal. If we really want a huge increase in the number of electric automobiles on the road we must build more fossil fuel burning power plants, not more wind or solar farms.

Perhaps a little history of the electrification of our nation is in order. It was the development of our fossil fuels that made possible the greatest contribution to health and prosperity which was to make electricity affordable everywhere.

In 2000 the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE) announced “the 20 engineering achievements that have had the greatest impact on the quality of life in the 20th century”. The achievements were nominated by 29 professional engineering societies and ranked by a distinguished panel of the nation’s top engineers. They ranked electrification as the number one achievement.

It powered almost every pursuit and enterprise in modern society. Aside from lighting the world, it impacted countless areas of daily life including food production and processing, air conditioning, heating, refrigeration, entertainment, transportation, communication, health care and eventually computers.

In the NAE announcement regarding electrification it stated : “One hundred years ago life was a constant struggle against disease, pollution, deforestation, treacherous working conditions and enormous cultural divides ……. By the end of the 20th century, the world had become a healthier, safer and more productive place, primarily because of this engineering achievement”.

Fossil fuels brought electricity to the homes and workplaces of billions of people around the world. Wind and solar power in anyone’s wildest dreams can never support what electricity provided us in these past 148 years since Thomas Edison built the world’s first coal fired generating plant on Pearl Street in New York City in 1882.

Part of our collective problem as to energy and electricity is that technology has past us by. We all once understood how an automobile engine worked, how a home was wired, and what was a fuse. When computers, GPS and smart phones came along, most of us gave up trying to understand. Many believe there really is a cloud up there keeping our data safe.

So why not think electric cars reap the magic from the wall socket, the wind and sun can keep us doing all that we do. That scientists have high tech crystal balls to tell us the climate decades from now. It should become clear as technology advanced beyond the average persons ability to comprehend, we have actually become dumber. Perhaps being rationally ignorant of things we do not need to know is okay. Unfortunately people in leadership positions are then able to lead us astray. The elimination of fossil fuels is a poor path to follow.

Isn’t it a little strange that a century ago electrification and its fossil fuel source was revered and now so many despise the source but think they can just keep the electricity. No one told them you can not have your cake and eat it too, or that there are no free lunches.

SOURCE

Beyond the Blinders: Economic Progress in the Age of Radical Environmentalism

The dominant global narrative is that the world is overpopulated and we are exhausting natural resources.

With the ongoing hysteria surrounding climate change, some even go so far as to suggest that human population growth is the cancer of the earth.

But what if I told you that these fears are baseless? That innovation and invention are making resources less scarce over time, even as population and resource consumption rise? That our ability to adapt improves as the world changes?

Here are some real facts that the mainstream media seldom acknowledge in this scaremongering era.

Despite two world wars and disease outbreaks like the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic and now the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis, the world has become a better place to live in.

Forty-two percent of the world’s people lived in severe poverty in the early 1980s, and many more in the preceding centuries. As of 2015, only 10% did.

During the 1950s, almost all of today’s developing countries were under severe stress and food shortage. The agricultural revolution in the 1960s transformed many of these developing countries into agricultural superpowers, meeting their local demands and exporting food to the world.

Today, we live longer and healthier lives. Global average life expectancy rose from a mere 29 in 1777 to 71 in 2014. That’s over a 40-year gain. The number is even higher in Japan and the UK.

Some argue that humans, in order to achieve this socioeconomic progress, are using up natural resources and will soon run out of many. But that is far from the truth.

The Industrial Era Revolutionized Our Use of Natural Resources

Radical environmentalists put resource use in a bad light. They conveniently ignore the fact that the world has become more efficient in extracting, processing, using, and reusing natural resources.

In the past, wood served almost all energy needs. As a result, people rapidly cut down forests. But after the Industrial Revolution, the situation changed. Despite the rapid increase in population since then, Europe’s forests are growing in size.

How is this possible?

The trump card to this turnaround is human ingenuity in harnessing naturally available resources, aided by scientific discoveries.

The ability to harness raw materials is the greatest achievement of the 19th and 20th centuries. Instead of exclusively relying on wood for construction, transportation, industrial, and household needs, we now have an array of long-lasting, affordable, safe, efficient, and convenient alternatives.

Today we manufacture a diverse array of end products from raw materials. The same materials, in earlier centuries, would have served only a single service or even have been considered useless.

Using coal as fuel revolutionized the use of iron ore, enabling us to produce steel for construction. This drastically reduced our reliance on wood.

Coal is one of the key raw materials for all metallurgical processes that involve smelting — the process of extracting metal from ore. The global boom in coal use thus enabled an upgrade of metallurgical processes. Without this extraction, our homes and working places would lack most of the things we use today.

We are more efficient not only with the use of available resources but also with our time and energy.

Similarly, the advancement in agricultural technology — like drone-based precision agriculture and GMOs — has enabled us to produce crops that give a higher yield and to smaller areas of cultivation using less water and pesticides.

We have also revolutionized animal husbandry and now serve quality nutrition to billions across the globe. With improved insights into the microbiological world, we know how to restore the population and habitat of various species of plants and animals.

Illegal hunting, not population growth, is the primary explanation for the downfall of wildlife species across the globe. Through conservation efforts, some species that were pushed to the brink of extinction by over-hunting are making a comeback. The growing numbers of polar bears in the Arctic and the Bengal tigers of India give us a ray of hope.

Fake-news peddlers and fearmongers are losing this argument. The world has become a better place for us to live in, and we are making it better for other life forms as well.

SOURCE

The strategic petroleum reserve and the fallacies of ‘embargo’ thinking

President Donald Trump announced a few days ago that the US Department of Energy (DoE) will purchase “large quantities of crude oil” to be stored in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), created under authority of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, enacted in the wake of the 1973–74 oil “embargo” imposed by the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

The SPR at present contains about 635 million barrels (mmb) of crude oil in its salt domes, with a total capacity of 713.5 mmb; accordingly, the goal of filling the SPR to capacity would yield purchases of about 78 mmb. There are four SPR storage sites, with respective capacities available for additional oil, in mmb, of about 4.2, 26.7, 16.9, and 30.7. The Trump announcement emphasized the opportunity to acquire additional crude oil at prices suppressed sharply by a global economic slowdown attendant upon the COVID-19 pandemic and by the strenuous tug-of-war over production quotas and prices between Russia and Saudi Arabia.

Expecting exceptionally low prices now to rise sharply (that is, faster than the rate of interest) over the foreseeable future is a problematic strategy, given that the price today is the best market evaluation of the price tomorrow for a natural resource that can be consumed either today or tomorrow. (Consumption is “substitutable” over time.) After all, if a sharp price increase is expected tomorrow, the price would rise today. One central purpose of stockpiles — they are a form of insurance — is to shift the availability of supplies into uncertain future periods when the value of those supplies is predicted to be relatively high. An example: a future period during which there is a serious supply disruption.

The purchases Trump announced are intended to prop domestic oil prices up, thus implicitly subsidizing domestic producers. But the magnitude of that effect is likely to be slight, given that the notional purchase of 78 mmb would be less than one day of global oil production of about 100 mmb and only about six days of daily US production of about 12–13 mmb.

For now, it is useful to recognize that much conventional wisdom about the rationale for a government oil stockpile continues to be driven by the “embargo” thinking from decades ago, the fallacies of which I discuss below. One former senior official at the DoE argued the following in support of the new Trump policy: “I am in the camp of keeping the SPR at full capacity and using it as needed in case of supply emergencies.”

However ubiquitous, such thinking — the SPR as a hedge against supply disruptions — raises a fundamental question. Why would a government oil stockpile be necessary (or economically efficient) in a world in which the private sector can foresee the near certainty of oil supply disruptions, thus leading it to stockpile oil on its own? Does the private sector have incentives to stockpile too little? Precisely what is the rationale for a government oil stockpile?

One argument in favor of the SPR might be that the federal government — Congress, senior executive-branch officials, and the bureaucracy — has better foresight about the likelihood and magnitude of future oil supply disruptions. That premise simply does not pass any test for bare plausibility: Producers, buyers, and shippers of oil, ad infinitum, have powerful incentives to maintain a minute-by-minute vigil of all things international oil market in the hope that opportunities for profits (that is, efficient reallocations of oil) might emerge.

Another argument might be that the federal government has a longer time horizon than the private sector, a hypothesis even less plausible than the first given that the next election is the overwhelming parameter driving the attention of senior public officials.

A third argument might be that the federal government enjoys storage costs lower than those confronting the private sector, particularly because the reported costs of storing oil in the SPR salt domes are lower than those of storage in tanks, floating vessels, underground reservoirs, and the like. This is not a persuasive argument for a government oil stockpile, in that the salt domes could be sold or leased to the private sector for storage purposes, with market competition driving up the price. Official cost comparisons do not include the opportunity costs of such forgone revenues.

A fourth hypothesis might be that the federal government can be predicted over time to allocate the stored oil more efficiently, a premise that is laughable given the wholly ad hoc process characterizing the federal government’s past decisions to sell or trade oil throughout the history of the SPR. Under the reasonable assumption that market forces are vastly more efficient in terms of allocating oil across sectors and over time, the feds should sell call options for the future rights to draw oil out of the SPR, allowing the market to determine such resource allocation.

One argument does make conceptual sense: Because the federal government imposed price and allocation controls during the 1973 and 1979 supply disruptions, the perceived likelihood of such market meddling — “no price gouging or profiteering!” — during a future disruption is greater than zero, so the market has net incentives to store too little oil from the social standpoint. Under this rationale for the SPR, the federal government compensates for the perverse effects of past policies by implementing additional costly policies, the adverse effects of which will lead to more such policies. Such expanding federal power inexorably will be used to subsidize favored constituencies; is there a better description of the historical growth of the federal leviathan?

Note also that market forces yield an equilibrium aggregate stockpile of oil balancing costs and expected benefits. It is far from clear that a government stockpile actually increases total preparedness, as it might lead the private sector to stockpile less. Perhaps the ad hoc nature of federal decisions to sell off some of the SPR oil makes the SPR less relevant in terms of the market equilibrium level of stockpiling, an ironically beneficial effect of federal clumsiness. Or perhaps it yields a decline in aggregate preparedness. Who knows?

It still is asserted commonly that the 1973 Arab OPEC oil “embargo” created the sharp price increases in 1973 (and even 1979) and the market dislocations experienced in the US during that decade. In the wake of the 1970s experience, many have argued that explicit and implicit subsidies for domestic energy production — an example is the Renewable Fuel Standard — would increase energy “independence” and thus insulate the US economy from the effects of international supply disruptions.

Those arguments were and remain largely incorrect. Since there can be only one world market for crude oil, a refusal to sell to a given buyer (i.e., impose a higher price on that buyer only) cannot work, as market forces will reallocate oil so that prices are equal everywhere (adjusting for such minor complications as differential transport costs). In 1973 there was (1) the “embargo” aimed at the US, the Netherlands, and a few others; (2) the production cutback by Arab OPEC; and (3) the US system of price and allocation controls.

The embargo itself had no effect at all: All the targeted nations obtained oil on the same terms as all other buyers, although the transport directions of the global oil trade changed because of the reallocation process. It was the production cutback that raised international prices, and it was the imposition of price and allocation controls that created the queues and other market distortions

Note that there was no embargo in 1979. But there was a production cutback in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, and the US again imposed price and allocation regulations. And, once again, there were queues and market distortions.

Furthermore, however counterintuitive it may seem, the degree of “dependence” on foreign sources of energy is irrelevant, except in the case in which a foreign supplier or foreign power can impose a physical supply restriction, perhaps through a naval blockade or a military threat to ocean transport through, say, a narrow strait. Because the market for crude oil is international in nature, nations that import all their oil (e.g., Japan) pay the same prices as those that import none of their oil (e.g., the UK). Changes in international prices, caused perhaps by supply disruptions, yield price changes in the two classes of economies that are equal, except for such minor factors as differences in exchange-rate effects.

Political machinations have afflicted energy markets for decades. One might think that an administration dedicated generally to “deregulation” would avoid such meddling. At least in the context of the SPR, one would be 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

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IN BRIEF

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Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here. It shows that we actually live in an era of remarkable temperature stability.

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.

"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Theoretically, the effect of added CO2 in the atmosphere should be instant. It allegedly works by bouncing electromagnetic radiation around and electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. But there has been no instant effect. Temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.

Antarctica is GAINING mass

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion

Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

The plight of the bumblebee -- an egregious example of crooked "science"

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Fossil fuels are 100% organic, are made with solar energy, and when burned produce mostly CO2 and H2O, the 2 most important foods for life.

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below

WISDOM:

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered, than answers that can’t be questioned.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, Physicist

“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

UNRELIABLE SCIENCE:

(1). “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness… “The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of ‘significance’ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale…Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent…” (Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet, in The Lancet, 11 April, 2015, Vol 385, “Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?”)

(2). “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement" -- Karl Popper

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

A Warmist backs down: "No one knows exactly how far rising carbon concentrations affect temperatures" -- Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

The frequency of hurricanes has markedly DECLINED in recent years

Here's how that "97% consensus" figure was arrived at

97% of scientists want to get another research grant

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

To Greenies, Genghis Khan was a good guy, believe it or not. They love that he killed so many people.

Greenie antisemitism

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

Comparing climate alarmist Hansen to Cassandra is WRONG. Cassandra's (Greek mythology) dire prophecies were never believed but were always right. Hansen's dire prophecies are usually believed but are always wrong (Prof. Laurence Gould, U of Hartford, CT)

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

UPDATE to the above: It seems that I am a true prophet

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

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

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Help keep the planet Green! Maximize your CO2 and CH4 output!

Global Warming=More Life; Global Cooling=More Death.

The inconvenient truth about biological effects of "Ocean Acidification"

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is maximum 4%.

Cook the crook who cooks the books

The great and fraudulent scare about lead

How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The "precautionary principle" is a favourite Greenie idea -- but isn't that what George Bush was doing when he invaded Iraq? Wasn't that a precaution against Saddam getting or having any WMDs? So Greenies all agree with the Iraq intervention? If not, why not?

A classic example of how the sensationalist media distort science to create climate panic is here.

There is a very readable summary of the "Hockey Stick" fraud here

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: "The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Relying on the popular wisdom can even hurt you personally: "The scientific consensus of a quarter-century ago turned into the arthritic nightmare of today."

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.

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