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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No posts on Sat 30th

29 November, 2019

82 Days Under Water: Tide Is High, but They’re Holding On

Fall Flooding Imperils Florida Communities

This is all just NYT nonsense. What is described has little or nothing to do with the sea level or tides. The Southeastern U.S. coast has been subsiding for years and gives no sign of stopping.

The same is true of the East central English cost -- where records showing sinking and erosion go back hundreds of years. There is no cure for it in either the USA or England and it is most unlikely to stop

All coastal land along the affected coast should be made public parks. There is no other safe use for it. I believe that has already been done in some cases

The “King Tides” are unusually high this year, creating a maddening logistical task for people along the Blackwater Sound, a low-lying stretch of the Upper Keys. The tides have been six to 18 inches higher than expected.The “King Tides” are unusually high this year, creating a maddening logistical task for people along the Blackwater Sound, a low-lying stretch of the Upper Keys. The tides have been six to 18 inches higher than expected.

The are 215 homes in the neighborhood, whose mangrove-lined streets now look more like stagnant canals.

Life during the unusually high “king tides” in South Florida this fall has become a maddening logistical task for people along the Blackwater Sound, a scenic but low-lying stretch of the Upper Keys. For nearly three months, the residents of Stillwright Point’s 215 homes have been forced to carefully plan their outings and find temporary workarounds to deal with the smelly, stagnant water — a result not of rain, but a rising sea — that makes their mangrove-lined streets look more like canals.

Another Key Largo neighborhood, Twin Lakes, is similarly inundated. Scientists say a combination of factors, including disruptive hurricanes, have contributed to this year’s exceptionally high tides.

“King tides” take place predictably each fall, when the alignment of the moon, sun and Earth creates a stronger gravitational pull on the warm oceans. Rising sea levels caused by climate change make the flooding worse.

This year, Hurricane Dorian and other tropical storms in late August and September likely interrupted the Gulf Stream, which moves water away from southern Florida. Instead, the water backed up, said Chris Rothwell, lead forecaster with the National Weather Service in Key West. Tides from the Carolinas to Florida, and from the Florida Keys to Tampa, have been six to 18 inches higher than expected.

“This is a high anomaly,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

“But as time goes on, what we think of as high anomalies will gradually become more normal. There’ll be a time at some point where what used to be our high tide becomes the mean sea level.”

The last time Miami set a record for an average monthly low tide, measured by a tidal gauge in Virginia Key, was in 2009, Mr. McNoldy said, adding that he would not be surprised if that record is never broken. In contrast, Virginia Key set average monthly records for high tide this year in March, July, August, September and October, “and in November, I have full confidence that we’ll break that monthly record too,” he said.

Longtime Florida Keys residents and officials say they have never seen tidal flooding this bad outside of a hurricane — and certainly not when they bought their properties 20 or 30 years ago. The most flooding that Stillwright Point regulars remember was for 22 days in 2015. When this year’s flooding reached biblical proportions — 40 days and 40 nights — the dramatic news made the front page of The Miami Herald.

That was more than a month ago. The water, which neighbors say reached 18 inches in some places, briefly started to recede; then, overnight during the last full moon, it swelled again, surprising residents who had thought the worst was behind them.

“You feel like a trapped rat,” said Jan Darden, 61, who is Mr. Darden’s wife, as she stood outside the couple’s house with water up to the driveway. She had postponed a trip to the mainland to pick up prescription eyeglasses.

Stillwright Point was once an enclave of fishing cottages that later drew commercial pilots craving the island life, just an hour from Miami International Airport. Now, the neighborhood has some million-dollar homes. A single road, North Blackwater Lane, leads in and out of the community.

Residents want Monroe County to elevate their roads and install pumps, similar to what Miami Beach did to mitigate its sunny-day flooding. Rhonda Haag, the county’s sustainability director, said she would ask commissioners next month to expedite road-modeling work, but any actual construction would still be far-off. Pilot elevation projects for Twin Lakes and a low-lying community in Big Pine Key that have been in the works for years are planned first.

Elevating a third of the county’s 300 miles of roads could cost $1 billion, Ms. Haag said. “We are the most vulnerable county in the state, if not the nation.”

“For sale” signs sit outside several houses. Two streets have handwritten “No wake” signs, reminding drivers to go slow to avoid splashing onto other cars, driveways and what used to be gardens.

SOURCE

Educational deficiencies lead to doomsday projections

Using microscopic sound bites from vast data on social media from celebrities like Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Barbara Streisand, and Meryl Streep that the Earth will end in ten years is an insult to the intellect of our students and educational system.

So, if we’re not educated by reviewing wider ranges of available data, to see when and where climate changes have and are occurring, then we better start educating the world of upcoming social changes trying to live on electricity alone.

Today, it’s the Green New Deal and the Paris Accord that promotes electricity as the worlds’ savior to replace fossil fuels that are taking the brunt of the blame for the recent changes in climate. The doomsday prognostications have quickly chosen the need to eliminate our use of fossil fuels and replace it with electricity.

Before we shut down the airlines, and rid the world of militaries, and throw away our iPhone, let’s imagine how life was without those fossils before 1900 when we didn’t have TV’s, No computers, NO I Pads, NO cell phones, NO Disneyland, NO militaries, NO vehicles, NO airlines, NO cruise ships, NO space program, NO medications and medical equipment, NO vaccines, NO fertilizers, NO tires for vehicles, and NO asphalt for roads.

But when we look at what intermittent electricity from wind turbines or solar panels CAN NOT do, we see they are blatant failures to qualify as replacements for the fossil fuels that produce those 6,000 products. They are the basis of our lifestyles and of our numerous infrastructures. Which manufacture the aviation, diesel and gasoline fuels every day to meet the demands of the worlds’ transportation and commerce.

It’s obvious that the worlds 4.5 billion years of existence has gone through numerous and continuous climate changes so let’s look at just a few of the topics now perversely on social media.

CO2: To support the microscopic scientific evidence for warming of the climate system, the NASA graph only looks at CO2 levels back 800,000 years to show recent increases to 400 ppm which is tiny in comparison to Earth’s historical levels. NASA dismisses the facts that earths’ CO2 levels reached 3,000 ppm about 150 million years ago, and levels of 8,000 ppm almost 550 million years ago. Today, the real risk is CO2 starvation as mass extinction occurs at levels below 150 ppm. Maybe we should reconsider the current doomsday predictions as the earth survived CO2 levels in the past that were as much as twenty times higher than today.

Sea Levels: We’re constantly being bombarded by NASA with projections that the recent ocean levels rise by millimeters from 1870-2013 are projected to flood major cities and populations. What we’re not being told is why the oceans have been rising by more than 450 feet over the last 20,000 years with the last 8,000 years being flat. In fact, it looks like there has been no rise since civilization began, and that the recent rise of about 20cm is another microscopic interpretation of data to inject fear about climate change. Given factual data to our millennials, about what the sea levels have been doing over a longer period of time, what is their conclusion.?

Heat Waves: The local weather reports constantly over-emphasize those recent heat waves as a reflection of climate change. When one looks at 130 years of data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) we see that the 1930’s was the hottest recent period, while temperatures today are the same as the early 1900’s, more than a century ago. Injecting fear of incurring heat waves into the future from small sound bites, deprives intelligent residents of all the EPA supported evidence to the contrary. What conclusions do millennials have when they see where we’ve been on heat waves?

Temperatures: When its hot outside, we quickly surmise that the end of the world is eminent. But the data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show we had much hotter periods from the 1800’s to 1955. Concluding that the slight upward trend from 1955 is a rise that is unstoppable, is another doomsday prediction from microscopic data points. What conclusion do millennials have when the see that the hotter temperatures were before 1955?

Wildfires: California has been getting more than their share of recent wildfires and yes, it was former California Governor Jerry Brown was the first to blame manmade global warming on the horrific fires. Jerry appears to be one of many that have yet to review the USDA Forest Service data that documents the greatest number of wildfires occurred from 1926 to 1959 and that today, they’re one-fifth of the record. Jerry is one of many that is only looking back to 1983 when a slight upward trend in fires occurred. Again, Jerry is using a microscopic data snippet as a talking point. But what conclusions do intelligent residents see in the USDA Forest Service data on wildfires?

We’ve had more than 100 years to find an alternative or generic to fossil fuels and the products we get from them. Yet, have only come up with electricity that can be generated intermittently from sunshine and wind. We still haven’t found a replacement for the source of those thousands of products that are now the standard for our lifestyles. As discussed above, the NASA, EPA, NOAA, and Forest Service shows us that not much has changed over the last century.

Thus, just changing to intermittent electricity from industrial renewables will most likely not impact any climate changes. Moving to electricity ALONE would severely impact our lifestyle as wind and solar are unable to produce those 6,000 products that are the basis of our lifestyles and of our numerous infrastructures. It’s obvious we would be unable to support the military, airlines, cruise ship, and merchant ships. As a reminder, without transportation and the leisure and entertainment industries, we have no commerce.

In the event we deprive underdeveloped countries from experiencing an industrial revolution that we’ve enjoyed, how can the world help to reduce the 11 million children deaths per year due to “preventable” causes that developed countries have mastered the cures?

We’ve got a lot of creative minds in our youth and in our educational system. I encourage them to be agnostic before investigating a wider and larger data base, rather than pick upon sound bites, short tweets, and microscopic data points before projecting the demise of the world in the next few years.

Our educational system could do the world a favor and begin to educate our youth about our planet’s natural cycles that have been happening for 4.5 billion years. A species that’s only been around, relatively speaking, a little less than the last two minutes, when we portray the worlds’ total existence into a 24-hour clock, may not be the cause of this weeks’ climate changes.

SOURCE

The Climate change money machine

For far too long the public has been deluded into believing that groups whose titles indicate their efforts to protect our environment are the Davids in a battle with the Goliath industrial complex of our nation. They tell a story of protecting our air, our water, our forests and our wild life. In the past 20 years with few exceptions, a central theme on which their fundraising letters and advertisements depend, is the need for money to stop the existential threat that a rising temperature from the carbon dioxide emissions from the use of fossil fuels is causing.

Ron Arnold and Paul Driessen, authors of the 2018 book Cracking Big Green, learned to read IRS form 990 in the annual reports of non-profit organizations. They focused on the readily available year 2012. You can be sure the dollars they found to have been received that year have increased in the more recent years of Climate Change hysteria. Here is what they found to have been the incomes of some of the major well known groups in 2012 alone.

The Sierra Club took in $97,757,678

The Sierra Club Foundation took in $47,163,599

The Environmental Defense Fund took in $111,915,138

Natural Resources Defense Council $98,701,707

National Audubon Society $96,206,883

National Wildlife Federation $84,726,518

Greenpeace USA $32,791,149

National Parks Conservation Association $25,782,975

The Wilderness Society $24,862,909

Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection $19,150,215

But those are the medium sized incomes, here are the biggies:

The Nature Conservancy $949,132,306

Greenpeace International $406,000,000

Wildlife Conservation Society $230,042,654

World Wildlife Fund $208,495,555

The picture the green groups make of the big bad energy companies like Exxon-Mobile and BP is that of gigantic sums of lobbying money to keep the government on its side. This is not true. They do not spend even a small fraction of the sums listed above in an effort not to be driven out of business. These companies and their competitors, rather than battling the Green Ideology, spend money to join them by embracing wind and solar energy, even energy from bacteria as well as efforts to pump CO2 emissions underground.

But the money the above environmental groups take in is not the whole story of their gigantic power. They work their magic through a program of law suits against the government which the government settles rather than going to court and thereby giving the groups success in their goals without reducing the funds in their coffers.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s report “Sue and Settle:Regulating Behind Closed Doors, shines a long overdue light on the back-room manipulations that are now common between Big Green and the Environmental Protection Agency. It works like this.

A private environmental group sues the EPA to issue new regulations by a date certain. The agency and the environmental group meet behind closed doors. In the typical case, the government agrees to do whatever the activist group wants because for decades the EPA has been peopled by men and women who have long had a relationship with the ideology of the activist groups. There are no messy congressional hearings, no public comment period, no opportunity for parties that will be adversely affected by the deal, to have their day in court. Still better for them, in most cases you the taxpayer paying the litigators legal fees.

In addition, the international banking community is a major part of the green money machine. It has financed the worlds rush to solar and wind projects regardless of there dim future in providing economic energy across the globe. Germany’s Deutsche Bank, Switzerlands Credit Suisse, America’s Morgan Stanley and Goldman Saks and nearly all their competitors are knee deep in the billions of dollars spent by the global warming industry.

F. William Engdahl, in a perceptive essay titled ‘Climate and the Money Trail’ in the Journal NEO, published on September 25, 2019 said: “the links between the largest financial groups, central banks and global corporations, to the current push for a radical climate strategy to abandon the fossil fuel economy in favor of a vague unexplained Green Economy, it seems, is less about genuine concern to make our planet a clean and healthy environment to live. Rather it is an agenda, intimately tied to the UN Agenda 2030 for “sustainable” economy, and to developing literally trillions of dollars in new wealth for global banks and financial giants who constitute the real powers that be.”

We must recognize that today’s radical environmentalists are not attempting to solve problems but instead are calling for changes in our political system, in the reach of our laws, our methods of agriculture and industry, in the structure of capitalism, the profit system, international relations and definitely in education. They are now working toward these goals with the best financed lobby in our history. Global warming and climate change just turned out to be the very best mechanism to achieve these goals.

Portions of this article were excerpted with permission of the authors and publisher of Cracking Big Green by Ron Arnold and Paul Driessen. It is a stunning expose of the modern environmental movement and its hidden financial masters.

SOURCE

Clive James, Legendary Author, Poet, Humorist & Climate Sceptic Has Died

Below is his 2017 essay on global warming. I liked Clive. He was a conservative but hid it behind humour

Mass Death Dies Hard

When you tell people once too often that the missing extra heat is hiding in the ocean, they will switch over to watch Game of Thrones, where the dialogue is less ridiculous and all the threats come true.

The proponents of man-made climate catastrophe asked us for so many leaps of faith that they were bound to run out of credibility in the end. Now that they finally seem to be doing so, it could be a good time for those of us who have never been convinced by all those urgent warnings to start warning each other that we might be making a comparably senseless tactical error if we expect the elastic cause of the catastrophists, and all of its exponents, to go away in a hurry.

I speak as one who knows nothing about the mathematics involved in modelling non-linear systems. But I do know quite a lot about the mass media, and far too much about the abuse of language. So I feel qualified to advise against any triumphalist urge to compare the apparently imminent disintegration of the alarmist cause to the collapse of a house of cards. Devotees of that fond idea haven’t thought hard enough about their metaphor. A house of cards collapses only with a sigh, and when it has finished collapsing all the cards are still there.

Although the alarmists might finally have to face that they will not get much more of what they want on a policy level, they will surely, on the level of their own employment, go on wanting their salaries and prestige. To take a conspicuous if ludicrous case, the Australian climate star Tim Flannery will probably not, of his own free will, shrink back to the position conferred by his original metier, as an expert on the extinction of the giant wombat. He is far more likely to go on being, and wishing to be, one of the mass media’s mobile oracles about climate. While that possibility continues, it will go on being dangerous to stand between him and a TV camera. If the giant wombat could have moved at that speed, it would still be with us.

The mere fact that few of Flannery’s predictions have ever come even remotely true need not be enough to discredit him. The same fact, in the case of America’s Professor Ehrlich, has left him untouched ever since he predicted that the world would soon run out of copper. In those days, when our current phase of the long discussion about man’s attack on nature was just beginning, he predicted mass death by extreme cold. Lately he predicts mass death by extreme heat. But he has always predicted mass death by extreme something, and he is always Professor Ehrlich.

Actually, a more illustrative starting point for the theme of the permanently imminent climatic apocalypse might be taken as 3 August 1971, when the Sydney Morning Herald announced that the Great Barrier Reef would be dead in six months. After six months the reef had not died, but it has been going to die almost as soon as that ever 1 since; making it a strangely durable emblem for all those who have wedded themselves to the notion of climate catastrophe.

The most exalted of all the world’s predictors of reef death, President Obama, has still not seen the reef even now but he promises to go there one day when it is well again. Assurances that it has never really been sick won’t be coming from his senior science adviser John Holdren. In the middle of 2016 some of the long-term experts on reef death began admitting that they had all been overdoing the propaganda. After almost half a century of reef death prediction, this was the first instance of one group of reef death predictors telling another group to dial down the alarmism, or they would queer the pitch for everybody. But an old hand like Holdren knows better than to listen to sudden outbursts of moderation. Back in the day, when extreme cooling was the fashion, he was an extreme coolist. Lately he is an extreme warmist. He will surely continue to be an extremist of some kind, even if he has to be an extreme moderate. And after all, his boss was right about the ocean. In his acceptance speech at the 2008 Democratic convention, Obama said – and I truly wish that this were an inaccurate paraphrase – that people should vote for him if they wanted to stop the ocean rising. He got elected, and it didn’t rise.

The notion of a count-down or a tipping point is very dear to both wings of this deaf shouting match, and really is of small use to either. On the catastrophist wing, whose ‘narrative’, as they might put it, would so often seem to be a synthesised film script left overfrom the era of surround-sound disaster movies, there is always a countdown to the tipping point. When the scientists are the main contributors to the script, the tipping point will be something like the forever forthcoming moment when the Gulf Stream turns upside down or the Antarctic ice sheet comes off its hinges, or any other extreme event which, although it persists in not happening, could happen sooner than we think (science correspondents who can write a phrase like ‘sooner than we think’ seldom realise that they might have already lost you with the word ‘could’).

When the politicians join in the writing, the dramatic language declines to the infantile. There are only 50 days (Gordon Brown) or 100 months (Prince Charles wearing his political hat) left for mankind to ‘do something’ about ‘the greatest moral challenge . . . of our generation’. (Kevin Rudd, before he arrived at the Copenhagen climate shindig in 2009.)

SOURCE

Australia: NSW Labor Leader: Shorten Daylight Saving Time To Fight Climate Change

Labor leader Jodi McKay has lobbied the NSW government to consider a request made by one of her constituents that daylight saving be shortened to help combat climate change.

In the letter sent by the Strathfield MP to Energy Minister Matt Kean, Ms McKay writes that her constituent "advises that daylight saving time in NSW had made last summer too hot for walking in Hammond Park, her local park, at 8pm as the temperature at that time remained at the 40°C mark".

"[The constituent] has requested the duration of the daylight saving period in NSW be shortened as it has a significant impact on climate change," Ms McKay wrote on October 11. "I await your consideration and response on this matter."

Daylight saving has been a fraught issue since being introduced in 1971, with multiple referendums in Queensland and Western Australia rejecting the arrangement.

Over the years, critics have attributed the change of time to a fall in robberies, increased petrol sales, a jump in heart attacks, less milk being produced by cows and faster fading curtains.

There are also various studies that show the change in time leads to higher or lower energy use.

A spokesman for Ms McKay said it was not her view that daylight saving should be changed. "Strathfield has a diverse community with a wide variety of views," he said. "It is the job of the local member to represent those views to government without judgment ... she will never apologise for making sure that members of her community have their concerns heard."

Mr Kean, who is in London, declined to comment.

Without daylight saving, which begins on the first Sunday of October and continues until the first Sunday in April, the sun would rise in Sydney between 4.30am in summer and 7am in winter.

Ms McKay's constituent is not alone in calling for the daylight saving period to be shortened. Adam Marshall, now the Agriculture Minister, told the Moree Champion in 2015 that he would propose cutting the first and last months of the daylight saving period.

"While it's not in my top two or three burning issues, it's an old chestnut, but it's a real burr in the saddle and it grates for many of my constituents," he said at the time.

Despite the Strathfield electorate resident's concern, and numerous university studies, there appears to be no strong connection between daylight saving and climate change.

A 2011 study published in The Review of Economics and Statistics found daylight saving time increased the social cost of pollution emissions by up to $US5.5 million that year. Another paper, published in the journal Energy Policy in the same year, found energy had been saved in southern Norway and Sweden.

Earlier research by two University of California, Berkeley, academics — which focused on Sydney during the 2000 Olympics — decided there was no effect on energy consumption whatsoever.

SOURCE

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28 November, 2019

The world 'will miss its chance to avert climate disaster' without an almost impossible fall in fossil fuel emissions, the United Nations warned today

That CO2 levels keep rising and yet nothing seems to change -- despite their prophecies -- does rather dent the credibility of their prophecies. We are said to be already "too late" but you would never know it

The UN Environment Programme said global emissions need to fall by 7.6 percent, each year, every year until 2030 to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C.

But emissions have continued to soar, smashing a record 55.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2018 - three years after 195 countries signed the Paris treaty on climate change.

'We are failing to curb greenhouse gas emissions,' UNEP's executive director, Inger Andersen said. 'Unless we take urgent action now and make very significant cuts to global emissions we're going to miss the target of 1.5C.'

The World Meterological Organization said Monday that atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations hit an all-time record in 2018.

The Paris deal committed nations to limit temperature rises above pre-industrial levels to 'well below' 2C, and to a safer 1.5-C if at all possible.

To do so they agreed on the need to reduce emissions and work towards a low-carbon world within decades.

Yet the UN found that even taking into account current Paris pledges, the world is on track for a 3.2C temperature rise, something scientists fear could tear at the fabric of society.

Even if every country made good on its promises, Earth's 'carbon budget' for a 1.5-C rise - the amount we can emit to stay below a certain temperature threshold - would be exhausted within a decade.

In its own words, the UN assessment is 'bleak'.

While it insisted the 1.5-C goal is still attainable, it acknowledged that this would require an unprecedented, coordinated upheaval of a global economy that is still fuelled overwhelmingly by oil- and gas-fuelled growth.

The Emissions Gap report, now in its tenth year, also details the cost of a decade of government inaction.

Had serious climate action begun in 2010, just after the Copenhagen summit that breathed new life into the debate, annual needed emissions cuts would be 0.7 percent for 2C of warming and 3.3 percent for 1.5C.

'10 years of climate procrastination has led us to where we are today,' said executive director Andersen.

The report highlighted specific 'opportunities' for big emitters to push their economies into line with the Paris goals.

While advice varies between countries, the theme is clear: completely phase out coal, significantly pare back oil and gas, and dramatically build up renewable energy.

G20 nations were singled out as laggards: although they produce around 78 percent of all emissions, only 15 rich nations have outlined plans to reach net-zero.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, notified the UN earlier this month that the US will pull out of the Paris treaty, and has taken steps to boost fossil fuel production, including subsidies for technology to capture and store CO2 emissions from power plants.

In all, countries must increase their contributions to the climate fight five-fold to deliver the cuts needed for 1.5C.

Last year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - the world's leading scientific body on the subject - issued a stark warning that going beyond 1.5C would increase the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, superstorms and mass flooding.

With just 1C of warming so far, 2019 is projected to be the second hottest in human history, a year marred by deadly wildfires and cyclones rendered more frequent as temperatures climb.

And despite the need for urgent action, with global energy demand set to continue rising for years, the UN itself conceded Tuesday that 'there is no sign of (greenhouse) gas emissions peaking in the next few years.'

That turning point should have come years ago, said Alden Meyer, director of policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

'We are not running out of time - we are already out of time,' he told AFP.

The report said emissions would need to drop 55 percent by 2030 to stay on a 1.5C track - an unprecedented fall at a time of sustained global growth.

John Ferguson, director of country analysis at The Economist Intelligence Unity, said he was pessimistic that countries could undertake emissions cuts in the time required.

'There's the emissions gap but there's also the gap between rhetoric and action, and that gap explains my pessimism that we're not going to limit it to 1.5C,' he told AFP.

SOURCE

Big Business and Climate Cronyism

After all the endless debate over climate change, the central topic of conversation remains what to do about our CO2 output. Carbon dioxide — now at record levels — is blamed for rising surface temperatures, which aren’t rising as fast as we are led to believe. And America is blamed as the cause, even though the U.S. pumps less CO2 into the atmosphere than countries that have joined the Paris Climate Accord. In any case, an unlikely group has gotten behind a new plan to reduce CO2 emissions, and the makeup of this group has many on both sides of the political aisle scratching their heads.

The Climate Leadership Council (CLC) is made up a who’s who of Republican and Democrat lawmakers, consultants, and policy wonks who have supposedly come up with a plan to develop a “revenue neutral” carbon tax that would provide dividends to low- and middle-income Americans to offset the inevitable higher energy costs that would be produced by said tax.

The CLC plan has the support of several energy producers, including ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips and other oil and natural-gas companies. It might sound intriguing at first glance, but as with all things revolving around climate policy, it’s necessary to drill deeper.

This plan appears to be an attempt by energy producers to eliminate their competition in the coal sector. Any carbon tax is sure to hit coal producers the hardest, and leftists have not been shy about their desire to remove coal from our energy options altogether. They have found a fair-weather ally in oil and natural-gas producers.

If the CLC’s revenue-neutral carbon tax, supported by some of the nation’s largest oil and natural-gas producers, sounds like cronyism, well, it is. Remember Enron? The natural-gas company lobbied the George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s to place caps on CO2 emissions, knowing that this would hit coal producers the hardest. Since 93% of all the coal produced in the U.S. is used by the electrical power grid, Enron hoped to fill the void left by the loss of coal with its own natural-gas production. This would have made Enron and a few other companies the de facto providers of the nation’s electricity. Of course, that whole idea went down the drain when it was revealed that Enron was the most crooked company in modern history.

Additionally, the roster of Republican names on CLC’s board doesn’t hide the fact that it’s also receiving a large chunk of financial support from left-of-center groups that also fund numerous activist organizations, including some of the very same groups that go after large energy producers. And let’s not forget that revenue-neutral schemes rarely ever work because the revenue never seems to find its way to its intended target, which in this case would be energy consumers.

It’s a tangle web, and generally that means that it’s the citizens at the bottom of the pyramid who get the shaft. The best solution to our climate troubles, exaggerated though they may be, is to let the market do what it does best. Innovation free of government meddling is what works best. There are too many special interests in government to trust that taxes and increased regulation will bring about the desired solution. And in the end, no drastic solution is even necessary.

SOURCE

The silly notion of “speed limits for ships”

Occasionally a report appears which claims to be wisdom, but after careful analysis, offers solutions that don’t make much sense. Such a report was issued earlier this month by United Kingdom consulting firm GL Reynolds, titled “The multi-issue mitigation potential of reducing ship speeds.” The report proposes that we can reduce global warming by imposing speed limits on ocean-going ships.

The GL Reynolds report concludes that a 10-20 percent reduction in ship speeds would have a “highly positive potential impact” on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and nitrous oxide (NOx) and sulfur oxide (SOx) pollutants. The report also projects that a ship speed reduction may reduce fatal collisions with whales.

The report is actually conservative and recommends that more study is needed. But the BBC and environmental groups now hail the report as a roadmap for international maritime policy.

Matt McGrath, environment correspondent for BBC News, wrote “Cutting the speed of ships has huge benefits for humans, nature and the climate, according to a new report.” John Maggs from Seas at Risk told the BBC, “It’s a massive win, win, win, win.”

According to the International Transport Forum, ships carried 10.7 billion metric tons of freight in 2017, 70 percent of world freight volumes. ITF projects maritime freight volumes to triple from 2015 to 2050.

Like almost all modern transportation, ships emit carbon dioxide when they burn fuel. Ships emitted about 932 million tons of CO2 in 2015, about 2.6 percent of global emissions. When ships move at lower speeds, they consume less fuel and emit less carbon dioxide. A 2017 study by CE Delft estimated that a 20 percent reduction in commercial ship speeds would reduce CO2 emissions by 19 percent, after a required 13 percent increase in the number of ships to provide the same transport work.

In 2017, the value of the world shipping fleet was estimated at $829 billion. Increasing the size of the fleet by 13 percent would cost over $100 billion, plus additional costs to hire and train additional crews.

Today, most global corporations practice cycle time reduction as a key business process. Apple, currently the world’s most valuable company, calls it “reducing time to value.” On-line retailing giant Amazon implemented one-day delivery for many products this year. Footwear and apparel producer Nike announced a goal to reduce supply chain lead times by 83 percent.

Regulations to reduce the speed of ocean-going ships by 20 percent would increase cycle times and costs for the shipping industry. Crews would need to be paid more for longer voyages and each ship would take 20 percent more time to deliver the same cargo. Cycle-times and costs would also increase for Apple, Amazon, Nike, and all freight customers.

Advocates point out that emissions of sulfur oxides and nitrogen oxides can be reduced with slower ship speeds. But international regulations are already in place to reduce SOx emissions by reducing the sulfur content of fuels and to reduce NOx emissions through new diesel engine emission standards.

Collisions with whales have been rising with the growth of the world shipping fleet. National measures such as routing and speed restrictions are now in place in coastal whale migration areas at certain times of the year to reduce collisions. But how will increasing the number of ships by 13 percent reduce the number of whale impacts?

In 1975 during the first oil crisis, the US federal government imposed a National Maximum Highway Speed Limit of 55 mph. Officials estimated that lowering highway speeds would cut national gasoline consumption by over two percent. Later studies showed actual savings to be less than one percent. Today the world is awash with petroleum and the US 55 mph limit no longer exists.

We could certainly run our ships, planes, and vehicles at slower speeds. And if we returned to horse-drawn wagons, vehicle collisions with deer would be eliminated. But does anyone really think this would stop sea levels from rising?

SOURCE

Indian Farmers Rejoice as Best Monsoon in 25 Years -- Vanquishes Climate Fears

In India, monsoon is synonymous with joy. That’s probably because the majority of India’s 1.3 billion people directly or indirectly depend on agriculture, the success of which depends largely upon the rains of the annual monsoon season.

Climate alarmists have long argued that India would suffer from global warming because of its negative impact on the monsoons. But reports of doom and gloom are nowhere to be seen this year.

The people of India have special cause to rejoice this year. The 2019 Indian summer monsoon was the best in 25 years.

September witnessed the highest rainfall in the 102-year record and was 153% of the Long Period Average (LPA, average rainfall received during the south-west monsoon over a 50-year period).

The central, western, and southern parts of India received above-normal rainfall, causing large-scale floods and filling up most of the country’s reservoirs — important for providing water to the vast agrarian landscape and acting as lifelines for many important cities where groundwater levels are low.

Local farmers are greatly encouraged by the estimate of the types and amounts of crops they can expect to plant and harvest in the coming months.

Cotton producers and the textile industry expect a banner year. Cotton production is likely to reach 36.5 million bales (over 6.8 million tons) this crop year, 15% higher than the year just ended. This is especially good news for my childhood homes — Bombay (now Mumbai) and Coimbatore, respectively nicknamed “The Manchester of India” and “The Manchester of South India” for their cotton production and textile mills.

The Indian monsoons have been largely unaffected by the meager increase in global average temperature (GAT). They have also been healthy. Studies show that there has been a “revival of summer monsoon” in the north and central parts of India during recent decades.

This monsoon health — coupled with increased use of agricultural technology — has translated into record-high crop output in three consecutive years (2016, 2017, 2018). Even the El Niño-driven dry phase in 2016 failed to disrupt agricultural output significantly in following years.

To be sure, the Indian monsoon remains generally unpredictable, as evidenced in the historical record (1871–2017). If anything, the monsoon displays epochal trends over multiple decades, and these trends don’t seem to be cyclic.

So, although short-term trends can be captured and quantified, forecasts remain difficult. What does seem clear, however, is that climate alarmists’ fears about monsoon failure rest on poorly informed science.

The reality is that India has great reason for joy after this year’s monsoon. And it is not just the farmers! A favorable monsoon season is also expected to directly benefit the overall economy.

Reserve Bank of India (RBI), India’s central bank, has announced that the best monsoon in 25 years will have positive impact on the economy.

“Comfortable reservoir levels augur well for rabi [winter] sowing and foodgrains stocks above the buffer norms provide a cushion against potential inflationary pressures,” read its latest Monetary Policy report.

The report also stated, “The prospects of agriculture have brightened considerably, positioning it favourable for regenerating employment and income, and the revival of domestic demand.”

For many of us here in India, the fears about climate change portrayed in the media have no practical relevance. Our monsoon has hardly shown any signs of climate fatigue, and our agricultural outputs are skyrocketing like never before.

SOURCE

Australia: "Green" Victoria is locking up almost all publicly-owned land from any use

Victoria is the vanguard of states in major struggles over the control and use of public lands. These comprise around 35 per cent of the state, the majority of which is in parks and reserves that aim to minimise human impact. Such areas have long been seen as under-managed and infested with exotic flora and fauna. They are increasingly recognised as perilous host to ferocious and destructive fires.

The rest of the public land is state forest, traditionally available for forestry, grazing, mining and a whole range of leisure activities such car rallies, hunting, horse riding, camping and dog walking, none of which are generally permitted in National Parks.

Two developments are changing the nature of Victoria’s public lands. The first is increasing restrictions on the activities allowed in the state forests. Over the past 30 years governments have progressively constrained the use of the forests for timber harvesting and grazing. Grazing has been all but eliminated and only 6 per cent of Victoria’s public forests are available for timber production, the annual harvesting area having been reduced from 25,000 hectares 40 years ago to just 3,000 hectares today. Last week, the Andrews government announced a 2030 phase-out of all timber-getting in the state forests.

The second change is the conversion of state forest to national park and other conservation reserve categories. This not only imposes restrictions on use but is also an essential step to converting the land to Aboriginal title, which unlike Native title, grants beneficial-use and veto rights over the activities and intentions of others. Even within the remaining state forest, the government is moving to enhance designated Aboriginal groups’ influence by granting them controls over exploration licences.

To effect the transfer the title of the land to National Parks or similar classifications, the government funds the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council (VEAC), an environmental bureaucracy comprised largely of former eco-activists, to sequentially investigate regional areas. Under the guise of community engagement, VEAC acts largely at the behest of environmental activists and Aboriginal groups (see, for example, the latest annual report). The latter are paid to rediscover long-dormant attachments to the area under investigation and, with the prospect of title and financial support for management, are quite naturally all in favour of a change.

VEAC also hires economic consultants, who over the course of several investigations have demonstrated a skill for divining how much people supposedly value land being redesignated as being exclusively for conservation. In their most recent investigation, applying an alchemistic methodology called “contingent valuation” VEAC’s consultants have estimated that the Victorian public would be willing to pay $247 million in order to convert 60,000 hectares of state forest in the Victorian Goldfields (the Central West) into National Park.

The valuation ($4600 per hectare) of restraining public use of public land is not based on some marginal change to land use. It would be equally applicable to the whole of the state. Its logic means people would be willing to sterilise all of the 3,100,00 hectares of state forest from commercial and most leisure uses and consider themselves to be $14 billion better off as a result! It would mean that, if half the state’s agricultural land were to be surrendered to non-uses, we, the people, would be better off! In addition, the consultants place a trivial value on the loss from preventing car rallies, hunting, horse riding and camping. They do so with little evidence of usages.

In the case of forestry, there has been a steady, politically-driven erosion of the area permitted to be harvested. The Regional Forest Agreements at the turn of the century were supposed to have settled the conservation/harvesting split, but harvesting has since been reduced by three quarters. The latest proposals envisage further reductions on the road to the total embargo.

VEAC’s consultants also argue against mining and prospecting and claim that future mineral discoveries are well-nigh impossible. This view about minerals is remarkable since the Geological Survey of Victoria estimates that half the state’s gold is yet to be found, and the area has hosted much mineral production in the past. In relatively recent times, two major gold mines have been opened near the area – one of which, Fosterville, actually has the second-richest gold concentrations of any mine in the world and is presently producing at over one billion dollars per annum.

Moreover, entrepreneurs risking their own money take a different view to VEAC – expenditure in the 42 exploration licenses current in the area is around $9 million a year. A recent discovery in the area of a nugget worth $160,000 by an amateur prospector is further evidence of the region’s prospectivity. Uncovering any further hidden wealth would be foreclosed by reclassifying the land as National Park which VEAC have recommended.

So, we have a double whammy. First, policies are being pursued to banish commercial and much leisure-use activities that have proven to be perfectly compatible with forest conservation. Secondly, requiring the cessation of commercial forestry also means eliminating many of the roads, and thereby heavy machinery, essential to fight fires. It would be hard to devise a more destructive set of policies.

Several hundred regional forest workers have held a rally outside Parliament House to protest the new measures that will bring needless and counterproductive job losses. Coalition MPs showed their solidarity, but with green philosophies dominating the bureaucracy and a state government determined to court inner-city votes, the march to transform Victoria into an unproductive tinderbox continues apace.

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 November, 2019

Are We Doomed?

Climate alarmists spread myths and declare impending doom.

No Plan B for Planet A

Replacing fossil fuels with “renewable” energy would devastate the only planet we’ve got

Paul Driessen

Environmentalists and Green New Deal proponents like to say we must take care of the Earth, because “There is no Planet B.” Above all, they insist, we must eliminate fossil fuels, which they say are causing climate change worse than the all-natural ice ages, Medieval Warm Period or anything else in history.

Their Plan A is simple: No fossil fuels. Keep them in the ground. More than a few Democrat presidential aspirants have said they would begin implementing that diktat their very first day in the White House.

Their Plan B is more complex: Replace fossil fuels with wind, solar, biofuel and battery power – their supposedly renewable, sustainable alternatives to oil, gas and coal. Apparently by waving a magic wand.

We don’t have a Planet B. And they don’t really have a Plan B. They just assume and expect that this monumental transformation will simply happen. Wind, solar, battery and biofuel technologies represent the natural evolution toward previously unimaginable energy sources – and they will become more efficient over time. Trust us, they say.

Ask them for details, and their responses range from evasive to delusional, disingenuous – and outrage that you would dare ask. The truth is, they don’t have a clue. They’ve never really thought about it. It’s never occurred to them that these technologies require raw materials that have to be dug out of the ground, which means mining, which they vigorously oppose (except by dictators in faraway countries).

They’re lawyers, lawmakers, enforcers. But most have never been in a mine, oilfield or factory, probably not even on a farm. They think dinner comes from a grocery store, electricity from a wall socket, and they can just pass laws requiring that the new energy materialize as needed. And it will happen Presto!

It’s similar to the way they handle climate change. Their models, reports and headlines bear little or no resemblance to the real world outside our windows – on temperatures, hurricanes, tornadoes, sea levels, crops or polar bears. But the crisis is real, the science is settled, and anyone who disagrees is a denier.

So for the moment, Let’s not challenge their climate or fossil fuel ideologies. Let’s just ask: How exactly are you going to make this happen? How will you ensure that your Plan A won’t destroy our economy, jobs and living standards? And your Plan B won’t devastate the only planet we’ve got? I’ll say it again:

(1) Abundant, reliable, affordable, mostly fossil fuel energy is the lifeblood of our modern, prosperous, functioning, safe, healthy, fully employed America. Upend that, and you upend people’s lives, destroy their jobs, send their living standards on a downward spiral.

(2) Wind and sunshine may be renewable, sustainable and eco-friendly. But the lands, habitats, wildlife, wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, transmission lines, raw materials, mines and laborers required or impacted to harness this intermittent, weather-dependent energy to benefit humanity absolutely are not.

(3) The supposed cure they say we must adopt is far worse than the climate disease they claim we have.

Using wind power to replace the 3.9 billion megawatt-hours that Americans consumed in 2018, coal and gas-fired backup power plants, natural gas for home heating, coal and gas for factories, and gasoline for vehicles – while generating enough extra electricity every windy day to charge batteries for just seven straight windless days – would require some 14 million 1.8-MW wind turbines.

Those turbines would sprawl across three-fourths of the Lower 48 US states – and require 15 billion tons of steel, concrete and other raw materials. They would wipe out eagles, hawks, bats and other species.

Go offshore instead, and we’d need a couple million truly monstrous 10-MW turbines, standing in water 20-100 feet deep or on huge platforms in deeper water, up and down our Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Not as many of the beasts, but each one a lot bigger – requiring vastly more materials per turbine.

A Category 4 hurricane going up the Atlantic seaboard would wipe out a lot of them – leaving much of the country without power for months or years, until wrecks got removed and new turbines installed.

Using solar to generate just the 3.9 billion MWh would require completely blanketing an area the size of New Jersey with sunbeam-tracking Nellis Air Force Base panels – if the Sun were shining at high-noon summertime Arizona intensity 24/7/365. (That doesn’t include the extra power demands listed for wind.)

Solar uses toxic chemicals during manufacturing and in the panels: lead, cadmium telluride, copper indium selenide, cadmium gallium (di)selenide and many others. They could leach out into soils and waters during thunderstorms, hail storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and when panels are dismantled and hauled off to landfills or recycling centers. Recycling panels and wind turbines presents major challenges.

Using batteries to back up sufficient power to supply U.S. electricity needs for just seven straight windless days would require more than 1 billion half-ton Tesla-style batteries. That means still more raw materials, hazardous chemicals and toxic metals.

Bringing electricity from those facilities, and connecting a nationwide GND grid, would require thousands of miles of new transmission lines – onshore and underwater – and even more raw materials.

Providing those materials would result in the biggest expansion in mining the United States and world have ever seen: removing hundreds of billions of tons of overburden, and processing tens of billions of tons of ore – mostly using fossil fuels. Where we get those materials is also a major problem.

If we continue to ban mining under modern laws and regulations here in America, those materials will continue to be extracted in places like Inner Mongolia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, largely under Chinese control – under labor, wage, health, safety, environmental and reclamation standards that no Western nation tolerates today. There’ll be serious pollution, toxics, habitat losses and dead wildlife.

Even worse, just to mine cobalt for today’s cell phone, computer, Tesla and other battery requirements, over 40,000 Congolese children and their parents work at slave wages, risk cave-ins, and get covered constantly in toxic and radioactive mud , dust, water and air. Many die. The mine sites in Congo and Mongolia have become vast toxic wastelands. The ore processing facilities are just as horrific.

Meeting GND demands would multiply these horrors many times over. Will Green New Dealers require that all these metals and minerals be responsibly and sustainably sourced, at fair wages, with no child labor – as they do for T-shirts and coffee? Will they now permit exploration and mining in the USA?

Meeting basic ecological and human rights standards would send GND energy prices soaring. It would multiply cell phone, laptop, Tesla and GND costs five times over. But how long can Green New Dealers remain clueless and indifferent about these abuses?

Up to now, this has all been out of sight, out of mind, in someone else’s backyard, in some squalid far-off country, with other people and their kids doing the dirty, dangerous work of providing essential raw materials. That lets AOC, Senator Warren, Al Gore, Michael Mann, Greenpeace and other “climate crisis-renewable energy” profiteers preen about climate justice, sustainability and saving Planet Earth.

They refuse to discuss the bogus hockey stick temperature graph; the ways Mann & Co. manipulated and hid data, and deleted incriminating emails; their inability to separate human influences from the powerful natural forces that have caused climate changes throughout history; or the absurd notion that the 0.01% of Earth’s atmosphere that is carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use over the past 50 years is somehow responsible for every extreme weather event today. But they won’t be able to ignore this fraud forever.

Meanwhile, we sure are going to be discussing the massive resource demands, ecological harm and human rights abuses that the climate alarm industry would impose in the name of protecting the Earth and stabilizing its perpetually unstable climate. We won’t let them dodge those issues in 2020.

Via email

No Beef with Cows: Study for EPA Finds Fears About Methane Increase "Not Justified By the Facts"

Spectroscopy Paper by Former Trump Science Adviser is First to Challenge the "Methane Scare"

Arlington, VA - The CO2 Coalition, a group of climate scientists, today released a study showing that the projected doubling of methane levels over the next 180 years would have a barely measurable effect on global temperature. The paper, Methane and Climate, was written by CO2 Coalition founder and board member Will Happer, a Princeton physics professor, and W. A. van Wijngaarden, of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at York University, Canada. Happer recently served as director of emerging technologies at the National Security Council, where he was President Trump's top adviser on climate science.

The Life:Powered Initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation included the paper as the scientific basis for a letter submitted today to the Environmental Protection Agency opposing the regulation of methane during oil and gas extraction and pipeline transportation. Some states and countries have been imposing restrictions on extraction, pipelines, and animal husbandry because of fears of methane's warming potential. Even "cow farts" have been cited as a concern for Green New Deal legislation, which calls for the end of fossil-fueled energy. Over 80 percent of U.S. and world energy comes from fossil fuels.

The paper's Abstract explains that while the "radiative forcing" of each methane molecule is indeed 30 times larger than that of a carbon dioxide molecule, the increase in global methane is 300 times less than that of carbon dioxide. As a result, methane is only one tenth (30/300) as powerful in forcing as carbon dioxide. A methane doubling would provide only a tiny fraction of total greenhouse forcing, the paper says.

The paper uses spectroscopic measurements from the HITRAN data base of the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories. The minimal effect of methane emissions is summarized by numbers and figures in the paper.

"Cows and oil drillers can rest easy," said Dr. Caleb S. Rossiter, the executive director of the CO2 Coalition. "This report by respected physicists Drs. Happer and van Wijngaarden show that methane is irrelevant to global warming, and alarmist reactions to an increase are unjustified."

For more information or to connect with biologist Jim Steele, please reach out to Ryan@RokkSolutions.com.

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

Claim: Jet steam ‘is being shrunk by climate change, scientists say’

In the Times yesterday, we read the following:

"The jet stream — the powerful transatlantic wind that dominates British weather — is being shrunk by climate change, scientists say."

Climate change shrinks many things: the US economy, fisheries, fish, chips, Salamanders, wasps, tropical moths, plankton (could they get much smaller?), mountain goats, the Winter snowpack, the Sahara Desert, oyster habitat in California, the ranges of Adelie Penguins and bumble bees and Sweden’s tallest mountain.

In fact, probably the only thing which climate change doesn’t shrink is hurricanes, which are becoming ginormous and threatening to gobble up huge areas of the US. Note also how climate change obligingly shrinks mountain goats and mountains – meaning the poor dimininutive critters won’t feel so overwhelmed by their environment because as they shrink, it shrinks also. How sweet. I guess that’s what you call #ClimateJustice for small(er) furries. But anyway, we can now add the Jet Stream to that long list above, courtesy of research scientist Tim Woollings:

Tim Woollings, associate professor of atmospheric physics at Oxford University, who has published a new book, Jet Stream, said: “The planet is warming rapidly due to humanity’s greenhouse gases. It means the whole of the Earth’s tropical belt is likely to expand, pushing the jet stream north so it shrinks in size and accelerates.”

The warning comes as greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere hit a new high, keeping Earth on track for global temperature rises of 4C-5C by 2100. This weekend CO2 levels reached 410 parts per million (ppm) at one global reference laboratory in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, and 414ppm at another in Alaska. Such figures are a huge rise on the 350ppm seen in 1990.

Apparently, this “means that Britain is at growing risk of more violent storms in winter and searing heatwaves in summer”.

Woollings suggests that, as the world warms, the jet stream will spend more of the winter across the British Isles and go further into Europe, letting storms keep their power as they reach the UK.

In summer it is likely to shift further to the north than now, opening Britain to hot air from the tropics.

Scientists have long been reluctant to link weather events to climate change but, said Woollings, the number of extremes means connections can be made. He cited the stormy winter of 2013-14 as the first evidence that the jet stream was altering.

Reluctant? Who is he kidding? They’re falling over themselves to attribute extreme weather to climate change. They can’t get in there quick enough!

Now this is all very well but what the Times doesn’t tell you in its eagerness to convince readers that heatwaves in summer and storms in winter are heading their way is that this is just another hypothesis about what might happen to the jet stream due to GHG warming and it is a hypothesis which relies upon a predicted consequence of GHG warming which has not been observed, despite the best efforts of scientists to torture the data in order to claim that it has been observed.

The predicted consequence is accelerated warming in the tropical troposphere, the so called tropospheric tropical ‘hot spot’, which has remained annoyingly elusive.

Woolings explains his hypothesis in more detail at the Nonversation:

"Scientists are however increasingly confident that important changes are afoot in the tropics. Driven by the vast quantities of energy pouring in from the Sun directly overhead, these are the great powerhouses of Earth’s climate.

Over the past few years, it has become apparent that at high altitudes, the Earth’s tropical regions are heating up more quickly than the rest of the world. At least partly because of this, the tropical regions of the atmosphere have been widening, expanding ever so slightly away from the equator, and impinging more on the jet stream."

Woolings’ link which he uses to justify his claim that the tropical atmosphere is heating faster than the rest of the world goes to a 2013 paper entitled ‘Revisiting the controversial issue of tropical tropospheric temperature trends‘ by four authors including Stott of the Met. He gets around does Peter Stott. Popping up here, there and everywhere in scientific defence of the climate worrier culture. The abstract says:

Controversy remains over a discrepancy between modeled and observed tropical upper tropospheric temperature trends. This discrepancy is reassessed using simulations from the Coupled Climate Model Inter?comparison Project phase 5 (CMIP 5) together with radiosonde and surface observations that provide multiple realizations of possible “observed” temperatures given various methods of homogenizing the data. Over the 1979–2008 period, tropical temperature trends are not consistent with observations throughout the depth of the troposphere, and this primarily stems from a poor simulation of the surface temperature trends. This discrepancy is substantially reduced when (1) atmosphere?only simulations are examined or (2) the trends are considered as an amplification of the surface temperature trend with height. Using these approaches, it is shown that within observational uncertainty, the 5–95 percentile range of temperature trends from both coupled?ocean and atmosphere?only models are consistent with the analyzed observations at all but the upper most tropospheric level (150 hPa), and models with ultra?high horizontal resolution (? 0.5° × 0.5°) perform particularly well. Other than model resolution, it is hypothesized that this remaining discrepancy could be due to a poor representation of stratospheric ozone or remaining observational uncertainty.

They tortured the data. Alas, the discrepancy between observed tropospheric warming vs. that predicted by models is still apparent as shown by Christy and by McKitrick & Vogelsang. This means that Woolings’ idea is an interesting hypothesis not currently backed up by data. Indeed, not only this, but the fact that the jet stream, in contrast to becoming more powerful and straighter (zonal) has apparently given rise to an increase in extreme weather events in the 21st century precisely because it has tended to be weaker and more meridional. This has been much remarked upon by climate activists, scientists and the alarmist press and presented as evidence for the correctness of Jennifer Francis’ hypothesis that Arctic warming has weakened the jet stream. Woolings is not convinced by this alternative hypothesis.

SOURCE

At MIT, a new name (Shell Auditorium) for an old standby (54-100) fuels outrage

For years, the lecture hall at the base of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences building has been known rather prosaically as 54-100. But MIT’s decision to rename it Shell Auditorium — after the energy giant, a major donor — has ignited a backlash among students and environmental activists.

The auditorium, the first room that most students encounter after climbing several flights of stairs in a building designed by the famed architect I.M. Pei, is among MIT’s largest lecture spaces. The building, known as the Green building, is home to the university’s geologists, planetary scientists, and oceanographers. Many of the faculty and graduate students in the department study climate science.

Naming the main auditorium after Royal Dutch Shell PLC, which has historically backed climate change skepticism and remains heavily invested in oil and gas, sends the wrong message, said Catherine Wilka, 29, a doctoral candidate at MIT studying climate, physics, and chemistry.

“When you put a name of someone or something on the building, it becomes a statement of the values and priorities of the department,” Wilka said. “It feels to me that the administration cares more about oil money than the integrity of the science that is done in the building.”

The name Shell Auditorium has added to an already heated debate about whom the university should take money from and how to honor gifts.

The campus has been in an uproar this fall over donations from a disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, the late Jeffrey Epstein; revelations about his gifts led to several resignations.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology also faced criticism last year for taking money from the Saudi government after the kingdom’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was linked to the brutal killing of a journalist who wrote for the Washington Post.

After the Epstein scandal, MIT formed two committees to review how the university accepts and solicits gifts.

The Shell gift is part of the more than $30 million that the university has raised for the $60 million renovation of the Green Building and construction of a new earth and environment pavilion.

MIT officials declined to say how much Shell contributed, but several students said they were told by department officials that the oil company gave $3 million for the project.

“I appreciate that Shell stepped forward to support the renovation of the lecture hall and, in doing so, MIT’s commitment to education,” said Robert van der Hilst, head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

“This project brings us closer to creating a vibrant hub on campus for interdisciplinary earth and environmental sciences programs and action.”

Shell has had extensive ties to MIT for more than two decades. In 2010, the company announced it would spend $25 million over five years on research and development of sustainable energy technologies. Last year, the company worked with MIT to develop its “sky scenario,” which outlined how to get to a future where emissions are at net-zero by 2070.

Shell has also contributed to MIT’s research on how climate change will disrupt transportation, said Curtis Smith, a company spokesman.

But Shell has also funded research at MIT on energy exploration and production.

“We’re proud of our relationship with MIT and look forward to continuing a partnership that advances society’s understanding of the most important issue of our time,” Smith said.

Deepa Rao, 29, who earned her undergraduate degree at MIT and is now there to complete a doctoral degree in oceanography, said Shell gets credit for tackling climate change in recent years.

This year, Shell left the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers lobby over the group’s lack of support for the Paris climate accord. But the company is also being sued by environmental groups and the State of Rhode Island over its alleged failure to address climate change, despite knowing about problems for decades.

By putting Shell’s name on a frequently used auditorium on campus, MIT is allowing the company to boost its environmental reputation, Rao said. It also helps to inoculate the energy company from criticism that it isn’t doing enough to address climate change, she said.

It’s a classic example of “greenwashing,” Rao said, referring to the criticism that energy companies give money to environmental causes to divert attention from their otherwise questionable track records.

Rao is among a group of students who have organized a teach-in on Monday at MIT about greenwashing and the renaming of the auditorium.

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

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

26 November, 2019

Hundreds of climate protesters disrupt Harvard-Yale game, demand fossil fuel divestment

NEW HAVEN, CONN. — Demonstrators stormed the field during halftime at the Harvard-Yale football game Saturday, delaying the game for about an hour to demand that both universities divest their investments in fossil fuels and to call attention to the issue of climate change.

The protest, which began with a few dozen protesters staging a sit-in midfield as the Yale band finished its halftime routine, swelled to about 500 people at one point as others in the stands joined the demonstration, The New York Times reported.

Some held banners urging the schools’ presidents to divest from the fossil fuel industry and others spoke out against Puerto Rican debt and the treatment of Uighurs in China.

“Students are tired of Harvard and Yale profiting off of climate destruction and neocolonial investments in Puerto Rico’s debt,” protesters said in a statement to news organizations Saturday. “It’s time for more than lip service and greenwashing from academic leaders. Harvard and Yale must address the climate emergency at the scale and with the urgency it demands. This action is only the beginning.” ESPNU replaced the live broadcast with another game.

During the midfield protest, the protesters chanted: “Hey hey! Ho ho! Fossil fuels have got to go!” One banner read, “This is an emergency.”

Some of those involved with the game, such as Yale captain J.P. Shohfi, took the disruption in stride. “If we can’t control it, we can’t worry about it. In the locker room we were just re-focusing on our game plan, trying to stay loose,” Shohfi said.

Harvard coach Tim Murphy said you just deal with the circumstances that you have. “You don’t make a big issue out of it with your team,” he said. “It is what it is.”

Demonstrators were surrounded by police and security and the public address system asked them to clear the field “as a courtesy to players.”

Finally, police formed a line and moved from the Yale sideline to the Harvard sideline. Protesters began leaving the field.

Up to about two dozen protesters remained on the field, and Yale Police Chief Ronnell Higgins warned them they would face arrest, according to the AP.

Rachael Dane, a Harvard spokeswoman, said the university would not comment on the student protest or police response. A New Haven police spokeswoman directed comment to Yale University.

In a statement on Harvard’s climate actions, the university said that Harvard Management Company, which manages the University’s endowment, “engages directly with companies to address issues related to climate change through its work with the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment and the Climate Action 100+.”

The university statement said commitments in its Climate Action Plan “explicitly recognize” that the world must move quickly to end its use of fossil fuels. “While we agree on the urgency of this global challenge, we respectfully disagree with divestment activists on the means by which a university should confront it,” the statement said.

“Universities like Harvard have a crucial role to play in tackling climate change and Harvard is fully committed to leadership in this area through research, education, community engagement, dramatically reducing its own carbon footprint, and using our campus as a test bed for piloting and proving solutions.”

In a statement posted to Twitter Saturday afternoon, the Ivy League conference said it supports the right to freedom of speech and demonstration.

“It is regrettable that the orchestrated protest came during a time when fellow students were participating in a collegiate career-defining contest and an annual tradition when thousands gather from around the world to enjoy and celebrate the storied traditions of both football programs and universities,” the conference statement said.

Karen Peart, a Yale spokeswoman, said in a statement that the university “stands firmly” for the right to free expression, and also stands with the statement issued by the Ivy League. “We are grateful to the staff members and police officers who ensured the peaceful departure of students from the field,” Peart said in the statement. “The exercise of free expression on campus is subject to general conditions, and we do not allow disruption of university events.”

SOURCE

UK: Green grandstanding is out of control

The parties’ ever more outlandish climate plans will eviscerate our living standards.

BEN PILE

Brexit aside, this General Election campaign will be remembered for parties’ promises to spend more than their rivals. From the NHS to ‘free’ broadband for all, a bidding war has erupted. But it is the promises to spend on the green agenda that reveal just how ridiculous and empty most politicians’ promises are.

As reported previously on spiked, Boris Johnson’s green thunder was stolen from him before he became Conservative leader back in the summer. Theresa May, in her last days as prime minister, secured the ‘Net Zero’ CO2 emissions-reduction policy for her ‘legacy’. But this green competition to outbid and outmanoeuvre political rivals harks back even further. During the 2000s, David ‘hug-a-husky’ Cameron aimed to steal a march on the then Labour government by rebranding his party as an environmental champion.

But green politics is a game of politics-by-numbers that disfavours first-movers. The Labour government responded to Cameron’s initiative by proposing the UK should reduce its CO2 emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. The Conservatives upped the bid to 80 per cent. The Liberal Democrats said it should be 100 per cent. To settle the argument, MPs decided that an ‘independent’ panel should be appointed to determine the UK’s so-called carbon budget. The Committee on Climate Change was thus formed and it decided that the target should be 80 per cent.

A decade on, and after MPs from all parties had talked themselves into the 100 per cent target (ie, Net Zero), the only two parameters left to compete with were the date, and how much money to spend to get there.

Sure enough, not long after the Net Zero target was waved through by parliament, Labour Party members passed a motion at their autumn conference committing the party to bringing the Net Zero target date forward by 20 years, to 2030. It’s worth spelling out that this would mean decarbonising the economy. Essentially, the Labour membership voted to abolish every petrol and diesel car, to abolish the gas grid and every gas-fired central-heating boiler, to abolish flights, and to force every homeowner in the country to spend tens of thousands of pounds to make their homes ‘Net Zero’ compliant. How could any party up that ‘ambition’?

Then, after months of parliamentary paralysis over Brexit, the election was called. Eager to quash green speculation that the Conservatives were not as committed to the climate-change agenda as they claimed, the party announced an indefinite moratorium on fracking. Small beer, perhaps. By virtue of it requiring the government to do nothing at all and coming from the odds-on favourite to win the next election, it has been the most realistic policy proposal. But it has also dashed any hopes for a sensible energy policy in the near future. The Tories also promised that 30million new trees would be planted every year between now and 2025.

The Lib Dems then upped the stakes. Net Zero would be achieved by 2045 and 60million trees per year would be needed to hold off the climate apocalypse. Additionally, a Lib Dem government would ban petrol and diesel cars 10 years earlier than the Tories, and bow to Extinction Rebellion’s demands to hold ‘citizens assemblies’ charged with deciding how to achieve these off-the-cuff climate targets.

Despite the endless green pledges and whinging, it has been Brexit that continued to dominate coverage of the election. The Green Party now argues that the election is not about Brexit, but is instead a ‘climate election’. ‘This election is the last chance to stop climate change’, it warns. This might be a more believable claim if the Green Party were to commit to never again mentioning climate change if they failed to win the ‘climate election’. But Greens are not ones for respecting the expressed wishes of the voting public in any case, as illustrated by their participation in a ‘Remain Alliance’.

The Green Party’s manifesto says that a 2030 ‘Net Zero’ target would be achieved by spending £100 billion a year over the next decade. This includes £91 billion per year of borrowing. Not including interest, that trillion-pound ‘Green New Deal’ is equivalent to £15,000 per head of the population.

But the green grandstanding didn’t end there. During the drafting of the Labour Party’s manifesto, the unions voiced scepticism about the party’s 2030 Net Zero target. It was unachievable, it would lead to mass job losses, and it would dent the living standards of millions of workers, they said. Shadow trade secretary Barry Gardiner suggested the target would be softened to apply only to energy production. But shadow business secretary Rebecca Long-Bailey was on hand to quash rumours of an outbreak of common sense and to reiterate the party’s target. ‘Our manifesto will set out a pathway towards Net Zero by 2030’, she tweeted.

Just as with Brexit, the rift on climate change reflects the widening divisions between Labour’s traditional base and the urban middle-classes that dominate its outlook. In fact, Labour’s disorientation reflects the wider disconnect between all of the disoriented parties and the public.

All their absurd jostling to be the climate champions might make sense if the election was to be decided by the votes of some 45million Guardian readers. But the only thing passing for a test of the public’s appetite for radical green policies are poorly conceived opinion polls that attempt to measure the emotional impact of David Attenborough’s films. Yes, people largely agree that climate change is a problem. But asking people if they prefer mountain fresh clean air and trees or toxic pollution and dead polar bears is not a meaningful test of the public’s commitment to tackling climate change. No doubt, people’s enthusiasm for climate action cools when faced with the prospect of spending more each year on the climate than is spent on education or of being forced to make drastic lifestyle changes.

Another problem is that it is merely assumed, by all parties, that spending – ‘investing’, in the Westminster vernacular – trillions on green projects and environmental legislation will yield trillions in return. But there exists in the public domain no evidence whatsoever that spending a trillion on green energy, for example, will yield a single penny of benefit to the average voter. It will much more likely saddle households and the public purse with rising prices and substantial debt. The policies envisaged will kick people out of their cars on to inadequate public transport and will raise the cost and lower the standard of living. Politicians have barely begun to contemplate these consequences, let alone respond to them.

Far away from reality, politicians who claim to be championing climate change promise jobs, ‘social justice’, and economic renewal. But what the evidence suggests, from places as far afield as Iran, Chile, France, the Netherlands, and now Germany, is that rising energy prices and overbearing green legislation very quickly give rise to social discontent and often radical anti-government protests. No politician has yet explained how the UK will manage the inevitable difficulties ahead.

The only sense, then, that can be made of promises to spend trillions on the green agenda is that they are not offers to the public at all. They are instead pledges by the extant political establishment to itself. They are certainly nothing to do with representing the public’s wishes. After all, if no political party will depart from the cross-party consensus, then the cross-party consensus cannot be meaningfully tested. If nobody can vote against Net Zero, nobody can meaningfully vote for Net Zero, either. The point of green politics is to deny voters any choice whatsoever: not just over what to eat and how to travel, but also over how we are governed.

SOURCE

Global Warming’s Apocalyptic Path

Global warming has been characterized by its critics (and occasionally by followers like Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono) as a religious movement. While this is correct, it is a religious movement of a special kind, that is, an apocalyptic movement.

And although it is widely known that apocalyptic movements foretell an end of days, demand huge sacrifices by followers, and demonize dissent, what is less known is that these movements follow predictable patterns. The general “laws” that an apocalyptic movement follows over time explain both its short-term strength and, fortunately, its longer-term vulnerability.

In Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (2011), Richard Landes chronicles recurring apocalyptic eruptions over the last 3,000 years. Typically there is belief in an imminent cataclysmic destruction that can only be averted by a total transformation of society. Precisely because the stakes are so high, a successful apocalyptic movement has extraordinary initial power. Believers are committed, zealous, and passionate, the urgent need for prompt action putting them at a high pitch of emotional intensity.

Landes describes the four-part life cycle of such movements. First comes the waxing wave, as those whom Landes calls the “roosters” (they crow the exciting new message) gain adherents and spread their stirring news.

Second is the breaking wave, when the message reaches its peak of power, provokes the greatest turmoil, and roosters briefly dominate public life.

Third is the churning wave, when roosters have lost a major element of their credibility, must confront the failure of their expectations, and mutate to survive.

Last is the receding wave, as the “owls” — those who have all along warned against the roosters’ prophecies — regain ascendancy.

While Landes does not apply his apocalyptic model to global warming, the fit is obvious. In the 1980s and ’90s, a series of UN conferences on climate launched the waxing wave. This was followed at the beginning of this century by the breaking wave.

In 2006, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (which later became a classroom staple) persuaded a broad public that man-made global warming threatened doomsday. That same year Sir Nicholas Stern, appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair to lead a team of economists to study climate change, prophesied it would bring “extended world war” and the need to move “hundreds of millions, probably billions of people.” In 2009, then–UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon told the Global Economic Forum, “We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.”

Remarkably, in November of that same year, 2009, at the height of its urgency, the global warming apocalypse suddenly fell into the churning wave phase. Someone hacked into the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England and downloaded emails exchanged among the top scientific climate roosters. The messages bemoan recalcitrant data that fail to support the claim of “unprecedented warming,” describe the tricks (their term) used to coax the data to buttress the theory, report efforts to keep the views of scientific dissenters out of reputable journals and UN reports, and boast of deletion of data to make it unavailable to other researchers.

Given that public belief in the global warming apocalypse depended upon its supposed rock-solid scientific foundation, the scandal, dubbed “Climategate,” was devastating. Beleaguered owls, especially at the Heartland Institute, ground zero of what the mainstream media dismissed as “science deniers,” had high expectations that the credibility of the apocalypse had suffered a fatal blow.

It didn’t. One can only speculate as to the reasons. One major factor may be that political elites had become too committed to go back. Landes writes that elites are typically a hard sell, especially in the case of prophecies demanding a society self-mutilate. In this case they were won over with astonishing ease. Only a month after Climategate, in December 2009, England passed the Climate Change Act, in the works for several years, that mandated an 80-percent cut in six greenhouse gases by 2050 (relative to 1990 emissions).

Journalist James Delingpole, a long-time owl, has called it “the most stupid, pointless and wasteful piece of legislation ever passed in British parliamentary history,” with the costs likely to exceed a trillion pounds. It is a mark of the inroads the apocalypse had made in the political class that there were only five dissenting votes out of the nearly 650 cast. Not to be outdone, Germany’s politicians in 2010 passed the Energiewende, a program that looked forward to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80 to 95 percent by 2050.

Whatever the reasons, the churning wave turned out to be a mini-wave. For a few years polls showed greater public skepticism, with the issue ranking low compared to others. But this July, a BBC program called ‘Climategate’: 10 years on, what’s changed? found Climategate (the charges of scientific misbehavior come off in the program as “a smear”) might as well not have happened. Since then, the BBC reports, the public has reengaged, former skeptics have changed their minds, politicians are increasingly concerned, and children are speaking out “authentically.”

Rather than completing the normal cycle by going into a receding wave, the climate apocalypse has come roaring back as a breaking wave, this time with children in the forefront. (The classroom indoctrination of the previous decade paid off.) Led by a 15-year-old (now 16) in pigtails, Greta Thunberg, beginning in March millions of children in over 120 countries skipped school to embark on a series of “climate strikes.” At the March UN climate summit, Thunberg announced, “We are at the beginning of a mass extinction.” Berating the respectful audience of world leaders for having “stolen my dreams and my childhood,” she produced her electrifying (to her followers), “How dare you?”

“Time has almost entirely run out,” say the activists of Extinction Rebellion, a civil disobedience movement launched in England in October 2018 (it expanded to the U.S. this January). Its red-robed adherents have shut down traffic from London to Australia to Washington, D.C. ER, as it is called, demands that governments declare “a disaster and ecological emergency” and reduce carbon emissions to net zero by 2025. As a think tank sympathetic to the group has pointed out, this requires an end to air travel and taking 38 million cars off the road.

Nonetheless, this second breaking wave is also doomed to give way to churning and eventually receding waves. What eventually dooms apocalyptic prophecies is their failure to materialize. In the case of global warming, true believers are in a bind. The public is likely to accept a major reduction in its standard of living only if it believes “mass extinction” is the alternative. Yet the closer and more threatening the scenarios, the more they are subject to disproof. Believers may postpone the apocalyptic date, but eventually cognitive dissonance becomes too great.

What will trigger a successful “churning wave” and when it will occur is impossible to predict. But some of the factors likely to bring it closer are obvious. EU countries, with their legally binding commitments, have taken on the chief economic burden of “saving the planet.” Pushback has already begun from segments of the population feeling the effects. France’s Yellow Vest movement originated as a protest against the fuel tax President Macron sought to impose to reduce fossil fuel use (he retracted it). Last month Dutch farmers descended on Amsterdam in thousands of tractors to protest against government demands that they cull their herds to meet EU-imposed climate targets.

As the years go by and requirements for emissions reductions rise according to existing laws, these restrictions become ever more costly and burdensome to meet. Sooner or later some in the EU are bound to ask, “Why are we making these sacrifices when world CO2 emissions are rising anyway and most countries are more interested in economic growth than saving the planet?”

While the Paris Climate Agreement of 2016 was considered a milestone in bringing the world on board, a report co-authored by Sir Robert Watson, former chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, examined the pledges made by 184 countries and found that the 28 EU nations were the only sizable emitters of greenhouse gases to make a significant commitment to reduce them. Indeed, 127 nations made their pledges for any reduction at all conditional on funding from rich nations, to the tune of 100 billion dollars a year. The Trump administration has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accords, leaving the EU, already struggling economically, to foot that bill as well.

Fearful of being labeled “science deniers,” European politicians have been unwilling to challenge global warming orthodoxy. But with the rise of populist parties, even that is changing, One study by the Adelphi Institute found that seven of the 21 populist parties studied were “deniers and skeptics.” In Germany, ground zero for climate virtue, Alternative for Germany is making opposition to government policies on climate change its signature issue, with co-leader Alexander Gauland declaring that renewable energy will turn Europe into a “de-industrialised settlement region covered in wind farms.” These parties are still marginal, but if establishment politicians see that they make electoral headway with the issue, they too will be tempted to reexamine their most economically self-destructive policies.

It is very important that the receding wave come as soon as possible. That’s because, as Landes points out, that apocalyptic movements are always wrong does not mean their effects are not profound. In the case of global warming, the longer the roosters are ascendant, the more difficult it is to undo the damage. Even in the United States, where at the federal level global warming hysteria has not had the impact it has had in Europe (states like New York and California are another matter) entrenched interests become very hard to dislodge. There is an ethanol lobby, a solar lobby, and a wind energy lobby, all determined to hang on to their mandates and subsidies.

Owls can feel frustrated and helpless as they see the roosters rising. But by what they do — and avoid doing — owls can bring the end nearer. The worst thing they can do is try to compete with roosters, for example by offering, as so many have done in ostensibly conservative journals of opinion, so-called market-based plans for carbon taxes. Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida has advanced a “Green Real Deal” to counter the Democrats’ Green New Deal, with the idea of appealing to young people eager for action on climate change. All this only lends more credibility to the roosters.

What’s more, appeasement doesn’t work. Despite its pioneering role in the fight against climate change, its huge investment in renewables and setting binding targets even more stringent than other EU countries, Germany has seen the largest turnout of angry child planet-savers, with an estimated 1.4 million participating in a recent (September 20) school strike.

There are issues the owls can usefully exploit. While climate science is mysterious, something the public does understand is costs, and owls can demand more transparency. Recently the state of New York legally committed itself to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 by at least 85 percent over 1990 levels. If the average citizen was made aware of the huge impact on his energy bills of this exercise in climate virtue, he might find it less alluring.

The chief apocalyptic danger is not a “sixth mass extinction,” as the current crop of roosters maintain, but an economic collapse should leaders in the West succumb to their demands. Robert Harris’ 2019 novel The Second Sleep could then prove prophetic. He describes a future in which a mysterious calamity has led drastically shrunken Western societies to revert to the horse-driven, torch-lit, homespun clothed existence of their ancestors.

SOURCE

The wicked Chamber of Commerce

Comments by Chuckie Schumer and Shelly Whitehouse, two of the most rabid Democrat Senators. Unintentionally, they rather make the chamber look good

The earth is spinning toward climate catastrophe. The international community has about a decade to take the steps necessary to avoid breaching the 1.5 degrees Celsius safety zone that the scientific community has established. It will take American leadership to achieve that goal, which means not only bold action in Congress, but meaningful leadership from the president, our allies around the globe, and leadership from powerful forces like major corporations.

Unfortunately, much of corporate America so far failed to step up and sufficiently support policies that would begin to address the existential threat of climate change. Many individual corporations, perhaps out of conviction, perhaps out of the desire to keep and win over new customers, profess to be on the side of fighting climate change. But in an act of rank hypocrisy, they turn around and support business associations, like the US Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute, which have been relentless adversaries of climate action.

Take the Chamber. The US Chamber is not the local chamber of commerce sponsoring your main street businesses. It runs a massive influence machine on behalf of big corporations, touching every part of the federal government.

In federal agencies, the Chamber is an 800-pound gorilla in virtually every room where climate policy comes up. It lobbies agency officials, files regulatory comments by the dozen, and deploys its public relations machine whenever regulators turn to matters affecting the fossil fuel industry.

In courts, the Chamber is in a league of its own. During a three-year period late in the Obama administration, the Chamber filed friend-of-the-court briefs in 476 cases and was a litigant in another 25. Environmental issues were its third most litigated subject, and its position always aligns with polluters.

In Congress, the Chamber is the largest lobbyist, spending roughly three times more than the next biggest group. Energy and environmental issues are a big part of that lobbying effort. Every year, the Chamber sends out dozens of letters and key vote alerts telling members which way it expects them to vote. Those letters and alerts inevitably support fossil fuel and oppose reducing emissions.

The Chamber aggressively attacks climate action with the last piece of its machine: election spending. The Chamber has spent almost $150 million on congressional races since the Citizens United decision of 2010. In most congressional election cycles, it is the biggest dark-money spender. The Chamber is known for having sharp political elbows. Cross them and you risk triggering an ad against you — like the one run against a US Senate candidate in Pennsylvania in 2016 suggesting her climate position was akin to stealing youthful energy from American children.

Some Chamber members who say they support climate action may well be funding the efforts to oppose climate action in Washington through the Chamber and other groups. This doubletalk needs to end.

To fight back, companies that care about climate ought to demand full disclosure of who funds climate obstruction at the Chamber, as well as at API and other big lobbying and influence groups. Justice Louis Brandeis said, “Sunlight is . . . the best of disinfectants.” Send sunbeams into the dark-money corners where climate denial and obstruction fester.

Better yet, these “pro-climate” companies should demand that those organizations stop blocking climate action and instead support real action in Congress to address climate change. Corporate shareholders ought to know whether their company funds groups that block climate legislation. And corporations who are board members of these denial and obstruction groups have their own governance obligations to know if they’re throwing good money after bad, allowing their goals to be diluted by the influence of the fossil fuel industry.

The stakes are high: There are massive economic risks flowing from climate change. Don’t take our word for it; listen to the Bank of England, Freddie Mac, Nobel Prize laureate economists, and hundreds of our own government’s most knowledgeable experts.

Corporate America can still choose which side of the climate fight to be on. But the clock is running out.

SOURCE

Marine heatwaves threatening Australia's oyster industry and affecting Great Barrier Reef, scientists warn

Note the dog that didn't bark below. The people involved are NOT barking about global warming. They cannot logically do so. If waters are warming much more rapidly than the global rate, it is not global warming! Sometimes a tautology is needed

Waters off parts of Australia are warming at some of the most rapid rates in the world, threatening the future of some of the country's most important marine industries, scientists say.

Scientists say the heatwaves are having a severe impact on oysters — and threaten the future of the industry — as well plants and creatures that rely on the ocean for life, pushing some into new areas, while killing others.

"The oceans are really ringing the alarm bells," said CSIRO biological oceanographer Alistair Hobday, a leading expert on MHWs.

"[The oceans] are telling us we've got big problems and those problems are not going to go away."

A MHW is defined as a period of warm water that lasts five days or longer, where temperatures are in the top 10 per cent of events typically experienced in that region.

They are graded in severity — similar to how cyclones are — with category five being the most intense.

The heatwaves lead to outbreaks of diseases that can be fatal to oysters and other molluscs, and reduce the reproduction rates of species such as salmon and abalone as well as killing seagrass and kelp.

"[We thought] marine heatwaves were an example of what the climate would look like in 100 years time," Dr Hobday said. "But we [are] getting it today."

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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25 November, 2019

That wicked air pollution again

The article below is a riot of statistics but one thing it sedulously avoids is any mention of effect sizes. The effect size in other studies of this topic is usually negligible so that may tell you why.

None of the previous studies of this topic are exactly comparable but some of them have been pretty powerful. For instance, a 2018 study included the entire Medicare population from January 1, 2000, to December 31, 2012. And their finding that only one in a million people die from particulate air pollution is pretty decisive. If you bother about that tiny risk, you should never get out of bed.

In the present study, even a probability statistic or two would have been of some help, though the large sample size would show just about any effect as statistically significant. The text of the article does imply that effect size statistics can be found in the supplementary material but when I clicked on the heading of the relevant table there nothing happened. Very suspicious.

There are however some indications that the effects were very weak. The authors' reliance on inter-quartile ranges is characteristic of what you do when there is no overall significance in the data. And take the sentence below:

"PM2.5 exposure was associated with excess burden of death due to cardiovascular disease (56070.1 deaths [95% uncertainty interval {UI}, 51940.2-60318.3 deaths])"

As far as I can work out the number of deaths was just about in the middle of the uncertainty interval, again suggesting that nothing much was going on. One hopes that the authors provide some real and accessible statistics about effect size soon.

The big hole in studies of this topic is failure to take account of income. Poor people commonly have much worse health and unless income is controlled for you may be simply seeing the effects of poverty, not what you think you are seeing.

To their credit, the authors did use an expansive demographic statistic to provide some sort of control on their results. But their procedure there was rather brain-dead -- or perhaps the procedure of someone who doesn't really want to deal with demographics. They created an Area Deprivation Index (ADI), which ranks geographic locations by socioeconomic status disadvantage and is composed of education, employment, housing quality, and poverty measures.

One wonder exactly what "poverty measures" were. Nothing as simple as individual income, it would seem. And that was it: No attempt to control for individual poverty.

So even if the ADI index was well done, that is not the end of the story. Using the characteristics of an area as a proxy for individual characteristics is quite desperate. Any one area will include a considerable demographic range. A poor person living in a rich are will be characterized as rich -- which is madness.

So once again the study founders on the rock of a failure to control for income. The illnesses observed might have been effects of poverty, not air pollution. For a variety of reasons, poor people are more exposed to air pollution, something this study does concede

And at risk of killing a dead horse, the pollution measures were also area statistics rather than individual statistics. That assumes that everyone living in the same area breathes in the same amount of pollution. I hope I don't have to give reasons why that may not be so

But air pollution SHOULD be bad for you, someone will say. It probably is -- at some level. But is the level normally encountered in American cities bad for you? That is what no-one so far has been able to establish reliably.

Given our evolutionary history of sitting around campfires for perhaps a million years, one would expect that evolution would have given us a substantial tolerance of inhaled air pollution. That is probably what is actually revealed in studies like the present one

Burden of Cause-Specific Mortality Associated With PM2.5 Air Pollution in the United States

Benjamin Bowe et al.

Abstract

Importance: Ambient fine particulate matter (PM2.5) air pollution is associated with increased risk of several causes of death. However, epidemiologic evidence suggests that current knowledge does not comprehensively capture all causes of death associated with PM2.5 exposure.

Objective: To systematically identify causes of death associated with PM2.5 pollution and estimate the burden of death for each cause in the United States.

Design, Setting, and Participants: In a cohort study of US veterans followed up between 2006 and 2016, ensemble modeling was used to identify and characterize morphology of the association between PM2.5 and causes of death. Burden of death associated with PM2.5 exposure in the contiguous United States and for each state was then estimated by application of estimated risk functions to county-level PM2.5 estimates from the US Environmental Protection Agency and cause-specific death rate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Main Outcomes and Measures: Nonlinear exposure-response functions of the association between PM2.5 and causes of death and burden of death associated with PM2.5.

Exposures: Annual mean PM2.5 levels.

Results: A cohort of 4?522?160 US veterans (4?243?462 [93.8%] male; median [interquartile range] age, 64.1 [55.7-75.5] years; 3?702?942 [82.0%] white, 667?550 [14.8%] black, and 145?593 [3.2%] other race) was followed up for a median (interquartile range) of 10.0 (6.8-10.2) years. In the contiguous United States, PM2.5 exposure was associated with excess burden of death due to cardiovascular disease (56?070.1 deaths [95% uncertainty interval {UI}, 51?940.2-60?318.3 deaths]), cerebrovascular disease (40?466.1 deaths [95% UI, 21?770.1-46?487.9 deaths]), chronic kidney disease (7175.2 deaths [95% UI, 5910.2-8371.9 deaths]), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (645.7 deaths [95% UI, 300.2-2490.9 deaths]), dementia (19?851.5 deaths [95% UI, 14?420.6-31?621.4 deaths]), type 2 diabetes (501.3 deaths [95% UI, 447.5-561.1 deaths]), hypertension (30?696.9 deaths [95% UI, 27?518.1-33?881.9 deaths]), lung cancer (17?545.3 deaths [95% UI, 15?055.3-20?464.5 deaths]), and pneumonia (8854.9 deaths [95% UI, 7696.2-10?710.6 deaths]). Burden exhibited substantial geographic variation. Estimated burden of death due to nonaccidental causes was 197?905.1 deaths (95% UI, 183?463.3-213?644.9 deaths); mean age-standardized death rates (per 100?000) due to nonaccidental causes were higher among black individuals (55.2 [95% UI, 50.5-60.6]) than nonblack individuals (51.0 [95% UI, 46.4-56.1]) and higher among those living in counties with high (65.3 [95% UI, 56.2-75.4]) vs low (46.1 [95% UI, 42.3-50.4]) socioeconomic deprivation; 99.0% of the burden of death due to nonaccidental causes was associated with PM2.5 levels below standards set by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Conclusions and Relevance: In this study, 9 causes of death were associated with PM2.5 exposure. The burden of death associated with PM2.5 was disproportionally borne by black individuals and socioeconomically disadvantaged communities. Effort toward cleaner air might reduce the burden of PM2.5-associated deaths.

JAMA Netw Open. 2019;2(11):e1915834. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.15834

Greta Thunberg and her handlers run from questions in Edmonton

Baltimore’s Answer to High Homicide Rates and Low School Performance? Ban Plastic Bags

What do you do when your community faces crushing poverty, failing schools, and disturbing homicide rates?

In Baltimore, the answer is: Ban plastic bags, of course. Yes, Charm City is saving the world, one plastic bag at a time.

The Baltimore City Council passed a citywide ban on retailers’ use of plastic bags at checkout on a 13-to-1 vote Monday. If that weren’t enough, the city will now put a 5-cent charge on paper bags.

The legislation now awaits signature by Mayor Bernard Young. If he signs it, it wouldn’t take effect until late next year.

Councilwoman Danielle McCray was the sole vote against the measure. Though she supported the ban on plastic bags, McCray opposed the new 5-cent tax on paper bags.

“I know that pennies add up,” she said on Baltimore’s WJZ-TV Channel 13. “I know that dollars add up, and my vote will be a consistent ‘no’ when it comes to unnecessary taxes on my constituents.”

The problem is, bag bans are not just annoying and inconvenient, they also add up to little more than virtue-signaling of being “environmentally conscious.”

There’s even evidence that they end up being worse for the environment.

A study by University of Sydney economist Rebecca Taylor in Australia found that banning plastic bags certainly caused customers to use fewer plastic shopping bags.

However, people began to use other kinds of plastic bags to make up for the lost supply.

Many customers actually reuse plastic bags for lining wastebaskets, among many other secondary uses. The study found that in areas that had plastic bag bans, there was a surge in the use of the thicker 4-gallon bags, which use more plastic.

The laws also create a huge uptick in the use of paper bags, which—according to some research—are actually worse for the environment than plastic bags.

The bottom line is, the bag bans have marginal or dubious value.

It’s notable that while Baltimore wages war on bags, the city has very real—and far worse—problems.

When one considers all of those problems, and then we see that the priority of Baltimore’s political leadership is getting rid of bags and tearing down Confederate statues, it’s no wonder the city is trapped in a cycle of despair.

As I wrote in August, when President Donald Trump harshly criticized the city in a tweet, Baltimore is dealing with a number of genuine crises.

Violent crime has spun out of control in recent years.

There were 342 homicides in Baltimore in 2017, the highest homicide count in the nation. The city recently hit 300 homicides, the fifth year in a row that has happened, with more than a month remaining in 2019.

In fact, the number of homicides is climbing in Baltimore while it’s falling around the rest of the country.

If that’s not bad enough, the city has an astounding amount of poverty to go along with crushingly high taxes.

Baltimore isn’t offering much hope for future generations, either. It has some of the lowest-performing public schools in the country, despite the fact that the city annually spends about $16,000 per student.

“In fourth- and eighth-grade reading, only 13 percent of city students are considered proficient or advanced,” according to The Baltimore Sun. “In fourth-grade math, 14 percent were proficient, and in eighth-grade math, 11 percent met the mark, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally mandated test from the U.S. Department of Education.”

To top it all off, the city is contending with a heaping helping of corruption. The past three Baltimore mayors have resigned in disgrace.

Former Mayor Catherine Pugh, who at one time was billed as a “reformer,” resigned in May and has been charged with “conspiracy to commit wire fraud, seven counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States and two counts of tax evasion,” Fox News reported.

Pugh was originally caught in a scheme allegedly involving kickbacks for selling her children’s books to hospitals, in which she was able to pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Rather than addressing these serious problems, Baltimore’s politicians opt for empty virtue-signaling. The residents of Baltimore are the ones left holding the bag, literally and figuratively.

SOURCE

New York's Burgeoning Electricity Crisis

Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo's regime is causing major headaches for New Yorkers.

What happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object? When both are personified by Democrat New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, one gets an eco-radical whose “carbon neutral” policies may end up leaving thousands of business owners, residents, and builders in Brooklyn, Queens, and on Long Island without reliable energy service.

“Cuomo is a proud opponent of fossil fuels,” the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board explains. “But now that the consequences of his policies are harming people in the real world — those who can’t afford to escape to Florida — the Governor is blaming others.”

Because the governor has blocked shale fracking upstate, as well as several pipelines that would deliver natural gas from Pennsylvania, upstate New Yorkers are paying some of the highest electric bills in the country — as in 40% more for electricity than the people of Pennsylvania, and 15% more than those in in New Jersey. Moreover, 25% of them still use heating oil, which costs about $1,000 more per year than natural gas — and emits 40% more CO2, the “greenhouse gas” that is the bane of those who believe mankind is the ultimate culprit on a planet headed for extinction, unless we kowtow to the will of our internationalist overlords.

Overlords whose own commitment to eco-purity is overshadowed by a deeper commitment to mansions, limousines, private jets.

Last March, as a result of the aforementioned pipeline constraint championed by the governor, New York utility Con Edison halted natural-gas connections north of New York City. Last May, another power provider, the British-owned National Grid, announced a moratorium on new gas hook-ups following a decision by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to nix a proposed pipeline known as the Northeast Supply Enhancement project.

National Grid insisted its gas capacity is maxed out, and without construction of the pipeline, it couldn’t guarantee uninterrupted service to existing customers. By contrast, Cuomo, other elected officials, and eco-advocates insist the utility company is holding its customers hostage to its demands for approval of the pipeline, and that the company never seriously investigated alternative methods of delivering energy.

Last month, Cuomo played both ends against the middle in an effort to escape the consequences of his policies. Earlier in the month, his administration ordered National Grid to provide electricity to 1,157 customers who had been denied service because of the moratorium on new hookups. The Public Service Commission (PSC), which licenses and oversees public utility companies, warned National Grid that a failure to do so would precipitate “millions of dollars in penalties.”

National Grid pledged to deliver the gas, but once again explained the obvious problem of meeting demand when supply is artificially constrained. “We stand by our analysis and there are very real gas supply constraints in the northeast,” stated said National Grid spokeswoman Karen Young in an email.

A little less than two weeks later, in the midst of further attacks on National Grid, Cuomo directed his animus at the PSC, despite the reality that the PSC is, as Politico put it, “a quasi-independent commission he effectively controls.” The governor wrote a letter to PSC Chairman John Rhodes in which he admitted that National Grid’s assertion of supply issues “was not a startling insight.” He excoriated Rhodes and his agency’s failure “to adequately anticipate, respond, or prevent this harm which was your regulatory duty.”

Cuomo persisted. “I also want to know when and how we eliminate an abusive utility from the state to protect consumers,” he added. “To that end, I want the specific explanation of potential grounds for revocation of National Grid’s license and its liability for the damage that has already been incurred and future damages which will be incurred over the following 12 to 18 months as development is delayed for additional projects is needed.”

On Nov. 12, Cuomo sent a letter to National Grid, giving the utility 14 days notice “of my intention to revoke National Grid’s certificate to operate its downstate gas franchise.” He also ordered the utility to explore “short-term options” he alleged the utility “either deliberately, negligently or incompetently refused to secure” to increase supply. They included transporting natural gas by tanker or truck, the proposal of other infrastructure, and the installation of additional unloading facilities, which he considered viable alternatives, courtesy of a company that he finds “grossly negligent” or one that “deliberately defrauded” the people of New York.

Yet as the Journal notes, several inconvenient realities intrude. “Building barges would require environmental permitting and is opposed by green groups in any case. National Grid already plans to deliver compressed natural gas by truck during the winter, but what if a snow storm closes roads?” The Journal’s editorial board further notes the irony of Cuomo’s pipeline veto below New York Harbor that “could reduce annual CO2 emissions by the equivalent of 500,000 cars on the road,” as opposed to his embargo, which “is raising state emissions.”

“National Grid is in receipt of the letter from Governor Cuomo and will review and respond accordingly within the timeframe outlined in the letter,” a company spokeswoman said in a statement. “We continue to work with all parties on these critical natural gas supply issues on behalf of all our customers in downstate New York.”

In the meantime, Cuomo boasted about his leverage: “This would be one of the most lucrative franchises in the country.”

Perhaps, but one might think if the governor makes good on his promise to end National Grid’s franchise, getting another utility willing to be browbeaten by the governor, hamstrung by the PSC, and very likely sued by a number of the state’s eco-warriors for any attempt to provide power that doesn’t comport with the state’s agenda to be “carbon neutral” by 2050, might prove problematic.

It is worth remembering that New York also sued energy giant Exxon for alleged securities fraud related to global warming. “Additionally, more than a dozen ‘public nuisance’ lawsuits seek to hold energy companies responsible for billions of taxpayer dollars spent on acclimating to a warming world, or picking up the pieces following unprecedented hurricanes, floods and wildfires,” the Los Angeles Times reports. “Rhode Island filed such a complaint last year, while a dozen city governments from California, Washington, Colorado, Maryland and New York have also sued.”

What they haven’t done? They haven’t given up using fossil fuels. Gas stations are still open, homes are still being heated and cooled, and the numerous products — many of which are critical to maintaining a modern society — are still being sold.

In other words, eco-talk is cheap. Moreover, what is happening in New York is a great harbinger in miniature of the devastating real-world consequences that the Democrat Party’s Green New Deal would engender.

Everyone wants a clean planet. But magic solutions, whereby reliance on fossil fuels can simply be mandated away by eco-warriors — many of whom will buy “carbon offsets” in a self-serving effort to preserve their own greenhouse gas-spewing lifestyles — and their overwhelming hypocrisy — aren’t part of the equation.

SOURCE

The politicians are responsible for Australia's big fires, says the NYT

The NYT has noticed Australia's bushfires. Bushfires suit their agenda a lot better than the punishing cold that is gripping most of America at the moment. On the U.S. data they would have to be talking about global cooling!

As was to be expected from the NYT, the fires are said to be all due to global warming. Global warming explains everything, it seems.

It would be good if we DID have warming at the moment. Ocean warming would evaporate off more water vapor, which comes back down as rain, which would tend to put the fires out. A warmer world would be a wetter world, much less conducive to fires. Bring on that elusive warming!

Excerpt only below

When a mass shooting shattered Australia in 1996, the country banned automatic weapons. In its first years of independence, it enacted a living-wage law. Stable retirement savings, national health care, affordable college education — Australia solved all these issues decades ago.

But climate change is Australia’s labyrinth without an exit, where its pragmatism disappears.

The wildfires that continued raging on Wednesday along the country’s eastern coast have revealed that the politics of climate in Australia resist even the severe pressure that comes from natural disaster.

Instead of common-sense debate, there are culture war insults. The deputy prime minister calls people who care about climate change “raving inner-city lunatics.” Another top official suggests that supporting the Greens party can be fatal. And while the government is working to meet the immediate need — fighting fires, delivering assistance — citizens are left asking why more wasn’t done earlier as they demand solutions.

“We still don’t have an energy policy, we don’t have effective climate policy — it’s really very depressing,” said Susan Harris Rimmer, an associate professor at Griffith Law School. [LAW school?]

But in Australia, where coal is king and water is scarce, the country’s citizens have spent the week simmering with fear, shame and alarm. As a 500-mile stretch from Sydney to Byron Bay continued to face catastrophic fire conditions, with 80 separate blazes burning and at least four deaths reported, Australians have watched, awe-struck, as life-changing destruction has been met with political sniping.

Michael McCormack, the No. 2 official in the conservative government, kicked it off on Monday, telling listeners of the country’s most popular morning radio programs that fire victims needed assistance, not “the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital city greenies.”

Barnaby Joyce, the government’s special envoy for drought assistance, followed up by suggesting that two people killed by fires near a town called Glen Innes over the weekend might have contributed to their own deaths if they supported the Greens.

The victims’ neighbors called his comments “absolutely disgraceful.”

But a Greens party senator responded with his own outrage: He said the major parties were “no better than arsonists,” an insult carrying special weight for the world’s most arid inhabited continent....

Just a few days before the fires, for example, Prime Minister Scott Morrison told a mining group that new laws were needed to crack down on climate activists and progressives who “want to tell you where to live, what job you can have, what you can say and what you can think.”

What’s galling for many scientists is that the public wants the federal government to do more; polls consistently show that Australians see climate change as a major threat requiring aggressive intervention.

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 November, 2019

Ronald Bailey has gone over to the Dark side

Bailey was once a climate skeptic but claims that in 2005 new data made him into a Warmist. I commented on that "conversion" at the time. He has however upped his game since then and we see the result below. His big failing this time can be found in the rubric (red bit) below. He is precisely wrong in what he says there. The Climategate emails show that the major players in Warmism are outright crooks. They arbitrarily alter data sources and do their best to ensure that any articles that don't suit them never get published. How surprising that the word "climategate" does not occur once in Bailey's long and diligent aricle.

So it is difficult to ascertain the truth when the chief sources of information about the climate are untrustworthy. This is particularly so if we realize something that Bailey himself admits: The data is full of estimates. The climate data is woefully incomplete and all sorts of dodges have to be resorted to to fill in those gaps, with some of the estimates (terrestrial-based measures of arctic temperatures, for instance) being truly heroic. At almost every point there is room to move estimates in the direction desired. So all the findings that Bailey relies on may or may not be true. We cannot know. But it is the warmist claim is that we DO know

But that is not a deliberate retreat into nescience. We can still make our own observations and develop our own theories. And that is what climate skeptics have done. And they have found much that does not support the conventional theories and findings. Bailey attempts to debunk one by one the dissident theories and findings but he does so by relying on findings from people within the consensus. And we know that data to be assumption-laden. So Bailey's large project ends up with circular reasoning: Warmism is true if you accept what warmists say. Or putting it another way, you cannot lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. Once crookedness has been established, it is difficult to find the truth

But vast government activity worldwide is based on Warmist claims being truth. To use another metaphor, that is a castle built on sand.

The replication crisis

I must stress that I am not putting total reliance on the climategate revelations. What I am stressing is the constant need for guessing when dealing with incomplete data. And confirmation bias is well known even without the climategate revelations. There is now a substantial literature in medical and psychological research showing that unreplicable findings will regularly be accepted until someone comes along and blows the whistle -- by attempting a close replication of the original finding. A disastrous 60% of findings do not replicate -- indicating that most of what we thought we knew in those disciplines was frankly wrong.

So what about climate findings? Do they replicate? We cannot know. Climate researchers have traditionally kept all details of their data and its analyses close to their chest. They defy the basic philosophy of science dictum that your data and analyses must be available for all to check. So that basically tells you all you need to know about the research concerned. The authors know that their results will not replicate when examined by outsiders so make such examinations impossible.

And that suspicion hardens into certainty when we look at Michael Mann's influential hockeystick claim. Mann denied access to his data but inadvertently left some of it on a server where sophisticated computer users could find it. And when Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre did a reanalyis of that data using Mann's program they found that ANY data fed into Mann's program would produce Mann's result. Mann's findings were a total fraud. Mann guards his data jealousy to this day. He was even prepared to lose his lawsuit against Tim Ball rather than reveal it. And Mann is one of those whom Bailey assumes to be "acting in good faith".

Sadly, global warming is the greatest hoax in human history, perpetrated by grant-hungry scientists with few scruples. The future of the climate CANNOT be known or predicted but it is the contention of the Warmists that it can be.

The satellite data

I will be mentioning the satellite record of global temperatures shortly so before I do that I need to spend a little time looking at Bailey's attempt to discredit the satellite data.

He says, rightly, that even the satellite data requires adjustments for various things and points to discrepancies in what the various versions of what the satellite data shows. In the best Leftist practice however he tells only half the story. Let me mention something he leaves out. The two major versions of the satellite record have long been the UAH record maintained by skeptics and the RSS version by the conventional Carl Mears.

And the two produced such similar results that the RSS figures were often used by skeptics as discrediting warmism. Even the RSS data from Carl Mears showed little warming.

As Mears himself admits, he was mightily irritated by people accusing his temperature record of supporting the climate skeptics. He was in fact expressing irritation with that for quite some years. He declared several times that he still supports Warmism despite what his own data show.

So in 2016 he finally devised a solution to his embarrassment. He "adjusted" his data. He said his old data had errors in it and he has now corrected the errors, to show some warming -- a warming of 18 hundredths of one degree over nearly 20 years, no less! One hundredth of a degree per annum! (If there had been errors in it, one wonders why he rode with the "erroneous" data for so long but let that be by the by).

And the explanation he gives for his adjustments is reasonable in principle, but, as always, the devil is in the details. And the details do contain devilry, as Roy Spencer has pointed out. Carl's adjustments were so bad in fact that the paper in which he described them was rejected as unpublishable by a major climate journal, eventually being accepted by a meteorological one. However you look at it, however, one hundredth of a degree per annum is negligible warming. Both major versions of the satellite data continued to show no significant warming

The skeptical response

Most of the prominent climate skeptics have looked at Bailey's article and are mocking of it. I thought I might close by reproducing a emailed comment on it from Don Easterbrook:

"The latest evidence shows that the likelihood of an apocalyptic climate change are about as close to zero as you can get. The NASA and NOAA portrayals of 'hottest year ever' are totally fraudulent. NOAA temperatures in the US have cooled slightly over the past 20 years and global satellite temperatures show no warming (see below).

We are now entering a Grand Solar Minimum, guaranteeing that temperatures will plunge, not warm catastrophically. The chances of cataclysmic warming are not worth worrying about!

Excerpts from Bailey

Researchers use complicated computer climate models to analyze all these data to make projections about what might happen to the climate in the future. My reporting strategy has been to take seriously what I believe to be the principal objections made by researchers who argue on scientific grounds that panic is unwarranted. I also assume that everyone is acting in good faith. What follows is based on what I hope is a fair reading of the recent scientific literature on climate change and communications with various well-known climate change researchers.

Ice Age Climate Change

To decide how worried we should be, we need to go back much further than 1992. Starting about 2.6 million years ago the Earth began experiencing ice ages lasting between 80,000 and 120,000 years. The world's most recent glacial period began about 110,000 years ago.

Most researchers believe that variations in Earth's orbital path around the Sun is the pacemaker of the great ice ages. Ice ages end when wobbles in Earth's orbit increase the sunlight heating the vast continental glaciers that form in the northern hemisphere. These orbital shifts initiate a feedback loop in which the warming oceans release of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which in turn further boosts global temperatures. Higher temperatures increase atmospheric water vapor which further boosts warming that melts more ice and snow cover. Less snow and ice enables the growth of darker vegetation which absorbs more heat and so forth.

At the height of the last glacial maximum 19,000 years ago atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide stood at only about 180 parts per million. The level of atmospheric carbon dioxide increased to around 280 parts per million by the late 18th century. This chain of feedbacks eventually produced a rise in global average surface temperature of about 4 degrees Celsius. That's the difference between the last ice age in which glaciers covered about one-third of the Earth's total land area and today when only 10 percent of the land area is icebound.

As a result of human activities, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen to about 415 parts per million now. The annual rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide during the past 60 years is about 100 times faster than the rate of increase that occurred at the end of the last ice age. How much this increase is responsible for having warmed the planet over the last century, along with how much more warming will result if carbon dioxide concentrations continue to rise, is the central issue in climate change science.

Just Add Carbon Dioxide

Of course, the sun powers the Earth's climate. About 30 percent of solar energy is directly reflected back into space by bright clouds, atmospheric particles, and sea ice and snow. The remaining 70 percent is absorbed. The air and surface re-emit this energy largely as infrared rays that are invisible to us but we feel as heat.

The nitrogen and oxygen molecules that make up 99 percent of the atmosphere are transparent to both incoming sunlight and outgoing infrared rays. However, water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone are opaque to many wavelengths of infrared energy. These greenhouse gas molecules block some escaping heat and re-emit it downward toward the surface. So instead of the Earth's average temperature being 18 degrees Celsius below zero, it is 15 degrees Celsius above freezing. This extra heating is the natural greenhouse effect.

NASA climate researcher Andrew Lacis and his colleagues contend that carbon dioxide is the key to greenhouse warming on Earth. Why? Because at current temperatures carbon dioxide and other trace greenhouse gases such as ozone, nitrous oxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons do not condense out of the atmosphere. Overall, these noncondensing greenhouse gases account for about 25 percent of the Earth's greenhouse effect. They sustain temperatures that initiate water vapor and cloud feedbacks that generate the remaining 75 percent of the current greenhouse effect. Lacis and his colleagues suggest that if all atmospheric carbon dioxide were somehow removed most of the water vapor would freeze out and the Earth would plunge into an icebound state.

Princeton physicist and lately resigned Trump administration National Security Council member William Happer has long questioned the magnitude of carbon dioxide's effect with respect to warming the atmosphere. In fact, Happer is the co-founder and former president of the nonprofit CO2 Coalition established in 2015 for the "purpose of educating thought leaders, policy makers, and the public about the important contribution made by carbon dioxide to our lives and the economy."His 2014 article, "Why Has Global Warming Paused?" in the International Journal of Modern Physics A, Happer argued that climate scientists had gotten crucial spectroscopic details of how atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbs infrared energy badly wrong. As a result, he asserts, a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would likely warm the planet by only about 1.4 degrees Celsius. If the effect of carbon dioxide on temperatures was indeed constrained to that comparatively low value man-made global warming would probably not constitute a significant problem for humanity and the biosphere.

In 2016, NASA Langley Research Center atmospheric scientist Martin Mlynczak and his colleagues analyzed Happer's claims in a Geophysical Research Letters article and found, "Overall, the spectroscopic uncertainty in present-day carbon dioxide radiative forcing is less than one percent, indicating a robust foundation in our understanding of how rising carbon dioxide warms the climate system." In other words, the details of how carbon dioxide absorbs and re-emits heat are accurately known and unfortunately imply that future temperatures will be considerably higher than Happer calculated them to be.

Another related claim sometimes made is the effect of carbon dioxide on the climate is saturated, that is, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is already absorbing re-emitting about as much heat as it can. Consequently, increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere won't much increase the average temperature of the globe. But is this so?

This claim is based on the fact in the current climate era that, as Princeton University climatologist Syukuro Manabe in a 2019 review article "Role of greenhouse gas in climate change," notes, "surface temperature increases by approximately 1.3?degrees C in response to the doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration not only from 150?ppm [parts per million] to 300?ppm but also from 300?ppm to 600?ppm." To get a further increase of 1.3?degrees Celsius would require doubling atmospheric CO2 concentration to 1200 ppm. A metaphorical way of thinking about this issue is to visualize that the atmosphere consists of layers and as each layer fills up with enough carbon dioxide to absorb all the heat that it can, the extra heat radiates to the next layer that then absorbs it and re-emits it, and so forth. Consequently, the effect of CO2 on temperatures does decline but it does not saturate at levels relevant to future climate change.

Again, an increase of 1.3 degrees Celsius due to doubling carbon dioxide doesn't seem too alarming. "It is much smaller than 2.3?degrees C that we got in the presence of water vapour feedback," notes Manabe. Researchers find under current climate conditions that "water vapour exerts strong a positive feedback effect that magnifies the surface temperature change by a factor of ?1.8." A warmer atmosphere evaporates and holds more water vapor which again is the chief greenhouse gas. Just as predicted, water vapor in the atmosphere is increasing as average global temperatures rise. Citing satellite data, a 2018 article in Earth and Space Science reported, "The record clearly shows that the amount of vapor in the atmosphere has been increasing at a rate of about 1.5% per decade over the last 30 years as the planet warms."

Evidence Tampering?

Researchers have devised various records to track changes in global average temperatures. These include surface records incorporating thermometer readings on land and at sea; remote sensing of atmospheric trends using satellites, and climate reanalyses to calculate temperature trends for two meters above the surface.

All temperature records must be adjusted since all have experienced changes that affect the accuracy of their raw data. For example, surface temperature records are affected by changes in thermometers, locations of weather stations, time of day shifts in measurements, urban heat island effects, shipboard versus buoy sampling and so forth. Satellite data must be adjusted for changes in sensors and sensor calibration, sensor deterioration over time, and make corrections for orbital drift and decay. Climate reanalysis combines weather computer models with vast compilations of historical weather data derived from surface thermometers, weather balloons, aircraft, ships, buoys, and satellites. The goal of assimilating and analyzing these data is to create past weather patterns in order to detect changes in climate over time. Since climate reanalyses incorporate data from a wide variety of sources they must be adjusted when biases are identified in those data.

Some skeptics allege that the official climate research groups that compile surface temperature records adjust the data to make global warming trends seem greater than they are. A recent example is the June 2019 claim by geologist Tony Heller, who runs the contrarian website Real Climate Science, that he had identified "yet another round of spectacular data tampering by NASA and NOAA. Cooling the past and warming the present." Heller focused particularly on the adjustments made to NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) global land surface temperature trends.

One general method used by climate scientists of adjust temperature records, explains Berkeley Earth climate data scientist Zeke Hausfather (now at Breakthrough Institute) is statistical homogenization. Researchers compare each weather station to all of its nearby neighbors and look for changes that are local to one station, but not found at any others in the area. A sharp sustained jump to either lower or higher temperatures at a particular station generally indicates a change such as a shift in location or a switch in instrumentation. The records of such out-of-line stations are then adjusted to bring it back in line with its neighboring stations.

In general, temperatures increase more rapidly over land compared to the oceans because of the oceans' greater capacity to absorb heat and ability to get rid of extra heat through evaporation. Heller is right that raw land station adjustments by NOAA/NASA have increased overall land warming by about 16 percent between 1880 and 2016. On the other hand, NOAA/NASA adjustments of raw sea temperature data to take account of the shift from measuring ocean temperatures using buckets and intakes aboard ships to a widely deployed network of automatic buoys reduced the amount of warming in past. The adjustments result in about 36 percent less warming since 1880 than in the raw temperature data. When taken together the NOAA/NASA adjustments to land and ocean data actually reduce, rather than increase, the trend of warming experienced globally over the past century. Adjustments that overall reduce the amount of warming seen in the past suggest that climatologists are not fiddling with temperature data in order to create or exaggerate global warming.

More HERE

Group To Air Thanksgiving-Themed Ad Knocking Green New Deal

A right-leaning group is continuing its months-long attack on the Green New Deal by releasing an ad warning about the climate policy proposal as Democrats prepare to take the debate stage on Wednesday night.

The ad depicts a family who refuses to drive to their grandmother’s house, citing the Green New Deal’s impact on gas prices. “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” the mother in the ad says before the family rides off on scooters.

Titled “Scooters,” the ad will be the latest installment in a $250,000 campaign by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

It will air on MSNBC during the lead-up to the Democratic primary debate on Wednesday. The ad will air in the Washington, D.C., market and will appear on other cable news stations over the following week.

Each of the three Democratic frontrunners — former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. — have all endorsed the GND’s basic framework.

The costs of their plans range from $1.7 trillion over 10 years to $16 trillion over 15 years.

“Since Washington politicians are asking the American people to support energy rationing that will lead to higher costs and a complete restructuring of our economy, CEI is asking families to imagine what life would be like under the Green New Deal,” CEI President and CEO Kent Lassman said in a statement provided to Fox News.

“The Green New Deal would cost families tens of thousands of dollars in higher energy, housing and logistics costs and everyone should think about how those higher costs would affect their daily lives.”

The group debuted its ad campaign during October’s Democratic debate, claiming low gas prices and easy transportation would be disrupted by the Green New Deal.

In a dramatic tone shift, the ad showcased what it called the “other option” — alarmism, intrusive government intervention, and skyrocketing energy prices.

CEI has come under fire for taking donations from groups associated with the Koch brothers, two figures progressives have attacked for opposing climate change efforts.

CEI describes itself on its website as a “non-profit public policy organization dedicated to advancing the principles of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty. CEI’s mission is to promote both freedom and fairness by making good policy good politics.”

Since the plan’s release, conservative groups have warned that the policy — notably sponsored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., — would be a nightmare.

For example, CEI released a study in July that estimated the plan would cost the average household in swing states an average of $70,000 in the first year of the policy’s rollout.

SOURCE

Despite all the Greenie heartburn and protesting, world coal use is surging

A series of reports this week makes clear that, led by China, global coal use is surging, not in decline. India, Africa and much of Asia are getting ready to follow.

For years environment groups have said China was giving permits to new coal-fired power stations that would not be built. But that confidence has been dispelled in a Global Energy Monitor report, which shows that reductions in coal use in the developed world are being offset many times over by increases in China alone.

Global Energy Monitor, originally called CoalSwarm, started life as a bunch of activists and journalists wanting to put pressure on coal-plant developments in the US. It now tracks China, which it says has the power to make or break the Paris climate goals.

China has been given until 2030 to peak its emissions under the Paris Agreement but on the latest figures that is looking like a pipe dream.

Something radical urgently is needed to reshape the coal-burning trajectory of China and India for there to be any hope of even getting close to achieving the least ambitious targets of the Paris Agreement.

At a nuclear energy conference at the White House this week, US Energy Secretary Rick Perry offered a view from space. “If we look at a satellite image of the globe,” he said, “we see vast tracts of land that are shrouded in darkness. More than a billion people are completely without electricity; they are trapped in energy poverty.”

Perry said the pursuit of a “renewables only” approach to climate change and sustainable development would “lock them into that state maybe forever”.

In discussion with MIT Technology Review early this year, Microsoft founder Bill Gates said further technological evolution was essential. “If we freeze technology today you will live in a 4C warmer world in the future, guaranteed,” Gates said.

The big discussion playing out around the world gives context to the debate in domestic politics where the Greens have sought to link Australia’s bushfires directly to a lack of domestic action on climate change.

Scott Morrison says the suggestion that individual actions of Australia, accounting for 1.3 per cent of the world’s emissions, are impacting directly on specific fire events, here or anywhere else in the world, is not scientifically credible.

One response is that Australia must lead by example.

But the big picture is that China appears to have stopped reading the climate change script. According to Global Energy Monitor, for the first time since China’s coal-building boom began in the 1980s the coal fleet outside China shrank.

From January last year to June this year, countries outside China decreased their total coal power capacity by 8.1 gigawatts through steady retirements and an ongoing decline in the commissioning of new coal plants. But across the same period China increased its coal fleet by 42.9GW, and as a result the global coal fleet overall grew by 34.9GW.

In short, the increase in China’s coal-fired capacity across the 18-month period was equal to about eight times Australia’s total electricity capacity of 51GW.

“As more countries turn away from coal and retire their plants, China’s continued pursuit of coal is increasingly out of step with the rest of the world, and is now effectively driving the ongoing expansion of the global coal fleet,” the report says.

Today, 147.7GW of coal-fired plants are under active construction or under suspension in China and likely to be revived. This is an amount nearly equal to the existing coal-fired power capacity of the EU (150GW).

Some of China’s new coal-fired power development is to replace existing more polluting plants. However, the Global Energy Monitor report says given the amount of capacity under development, China’s central government looks ready to increase its 1100GW coal-fired power cap, as set by its 13th Five-Year Plan to 2020.

Coal and power industry groups are proposing the central government increase total coal-fired power capacity by 20 per cent to 40 per cent to between 1200GW and 1400GW as part of China’s 2035 infrastructure plan. That plan is expected to be released next year.

“The continued growth of China’s coal fleet and consideration of plans to significantly raise the nation’s coal power cap show that while the country is often hailed as a clean energy leader, the momentum of coal power expansion has yet to be halted,” the report says.

According to the report, an increase in China’s coal-fired power capacity is not compatible with the Paris climate agreement to hold warming well below 2C, and “almost certainly forecloses the possibility of China achieving greater emission reductions under the Paris Agreement — currently pegged at peaking carbon dioxide emissions by 2030”.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found keeping warming well below 2C requires a 58 per cent to 70 per cent reduction in global coal-fired power generation by 2030 below current levels, ramping up to between 85 per cent and 90 per cent by 2035. Global Energy Monitor says China needs to have phased out most of its coal-fired power capacity by 2035 to meet the IPCC scenario.

If China continues to increase total coal-fired power capacity through 2035, its coal-fired power generation alone will be more than three times as large as the global limit determined by the IPCC to keep warming well below 2C.

Global Energy Monitor concludes that China’s continued expansion of its coal fleet is not inevitable but the path that China’s central government chooses could make or break the Paris Agreement’s goals.

There is no doubt that enormous investment will continue in renewable energy sources including solar and wind with an increasing emphasis on storage. China has been held up as an exemplar in renewable energy.

But it is becoming increasingly clear globally that something is still needed for the world to replace the heavy lifting of coal.

SOURCE

Let’s not pollute minds with carbon fears

IAN PLIMER

As soon as the words carbon footprint, emissions, pollution, and decarbonisation, climate emergency, extreme weather, unprecedented and extinction are used, I know I am being conned by ignorant activists, populist scaremongering, vote-chasing politicians and rent seekers.

Pollution by plastics, sulphur and nitrogen gases, particulates and chemicals occurs in developing countries. That’s real pollution. The major pollution in advanced economies is the polluting of minds about the role of carbon dioxide. There are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black. Such terms are deliberately misleading, as are many claims.

But then again, we should be used to this after the hysteria about the Great Barrier Reef bleaching that has really been occurring for hundreds of years, fraudulent changing of past weather records, the ignoring of data that shows Pacific islands and the Maldives are growing rather than being inundated, and unsubstantiated claims polar ice is melting. By ignoring history and geology, any claim of unusual weather can be made sensational.

We’ve had reefs on planet Earth for 3500 million years. They came and went many times. The big killer of reefs was because sea level dropped and water temperature decreased. In the past, reefs thrived when water was warmer and there was an elevated carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. Reef material is calcium carbonate, which contains 44 per cent carbon dioxide. Reefs need carbon dioxide; it’s their basic food.

We are not living in a period of catastrophic climate change. The past tells us it’s business as usual.

It has never been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming.

Climate models have been around 30 years. They have all failed. Balloon and satellite measurements show a disconnect from climate model predictions. If they have failed across the past 30 years when we can compare models with measurements, there is little chance that the climate projections across the next 50 years will be more successful. Modellers assume carbon dioxide drives climate change. It does not. The role of the sun and clouds was not considered important by modellers. They are the major drivers for the climate on our planet.

We emit a trace atmospheric gas called carbon dioxide at a time in planetary history of low atmospheric carbon dioxide. The geological history of the planet shows major planetary climate changes have never been driven by a trace gas. Just because we are alive today does not mean we change major planetary systems that operated for billions of years. Earth’s climate dances to rhythms every day, every season and on far larger lunar, ocean, solar, orbital, galactic and tectonic cycles. Climate change is normal and continual. When cycles overlap, climate change can be rapid and large. Sporadic events such as supernovas and volcanic eruptions can also change climate.

The main greenhouse gas is water vapour. It is the only gas in air that can evaporate, humidify and condense into clouds that precipitate rain, hail and snow. These processes involve a transfer of energy, and water vapour makes the atmosphere behave like a giant airconditioner. Carbon dioxide is a non-condensable atmospheric gas like nitrogen and oxygen. Water vapour in air varies depending on temperature and location from five times the atmospheric carbon dioxide content in deserts to more than 100 times in the tropics. Water is 12 times more effective than carbon dioxide with respect to all incoming and outgoing radiation.

Earth is unevenly heated. Our spinning oblate globe is influenced by two fluids of different composition and behaviour moving chaotically against each other over the irregular solid surface of the planet. Oceans hold most of the planet’s surface heat, not the atmosphere. Processes that occur during sunlight do not occur at night due to the prime driver of our planet’s surface temperature: the sun.

Carbon dioxide is plant food. It is neither a pollutant nor a toxin. Without carbon dioxide, all life on Earth would die. Plants convert carbon dioxide, water and sunlight during photosynthesis into sugars, cellulose, fruit, vegetables and grains, which animal life uses as food. Marine organisms also take up and use carbon dioxide. Plants need almost three times today’s carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere to thrive. For decades horticulturalists have pumped carbon dioxide into glasshouses to increase yields. The fossil record shows that a thriving and diversification of plant and animal life occurs every time the atmosphere had a very high carbon dioxide content. In the past, warming has never been a threat to life on Earth. Why should it be now? When there is a low atmospheric carbon dioxide content, especially during very cold times, life struggles.

For the past 500 million years, the atmospheric carbon dioxide content has been decreasing and if we halved today’s atmospheric carbon dioxide content, all life would die. This carbon dioxide has been removed into the oceans and is sequestered into coral, shells, limey sediments and muds and on the land into coals, muds, soils and vegetation.

Air contains 0.04 per cent carbon dioxide. We add carbon compounds to our bodies from food and drinks and exhale carbon dioxide. The human breath contains at least 4 per cent carbon dioxide. Our bodies contain carbon compounds. If we were so passionately concerned about our carbon footprint, then the best thing to do is to expire.

In our lifetime, there has been no correlation between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature. On a larger scale, the ice caps show that after a natural orbitally driven warming, atmospheric carbon dioxide content increases 800 years later. Rather than atmospheric carbon dioxide driving temperature, it is the opposite. Geology shows us again there is no correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature. Each of the six major past ice ages began when the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was far higher than at present. The thought that a slight increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide will lead to unstoppable global warming is demonstrably wrong.

In the past decade China has increased its carbon dioxide emissions by 53 per cent, 12 times Australia’s total carbon dioxide output of 1.3 per cent of the global total. The grasslands, forests, farms and continental shelves of Australia absorb far more carbon dioxide than Australians emit. The attack on emissions of the gas of life is an irrational attack on industry, our modern way of life, freedoms and prosperity. It has nothing to do with the environment.

SOURCE

Australia: Farmers ‘subsidising drivers of electric cars’

Farmers who drive long distances, and pay hefty petrol excise, are subsidising inner-city electric car drivers who pay none, prompting a peak infrastructure body to call for a “road user charge” on electric vehicles to share the tax burden more fairly.

Rapid forecast growth in electric vehicle sales will sap federal government fuel tax revenue but give state governments an opportunity to secure a growing source of revenue, according to a report by Infrastructure Partnerships Australia. “Applying a simple distance-based charge to electric vehicles will ensure every motorist makes a fair and sustainable contribution to the use of the roads and will help secure a vital stream of transport funding for generations to come,” said IPA head Adrian Dwyer.

The report, released on Thursday, says: “Electric vehicle motorists pay nothing at the pump, and only contribute to the road network through state-based road access charges such as registration and licence fees.

“All motorists should pay their fair share. Without reform fewer road users, especially in regional areas who drive vast distances, will increasingly subsidise electric vehicle motorists.”

Fuel excise collected per kilometre driven has steadily fallen from more than 7c in the late 1990s to just over 4c in 2017 as consumers switch to more efficient cars and electric vehicles, which are expected to grow from 0.3 per cent of new car sales in 2018 to 8 per cent by 2025.

“While a shift to electric vehicles could be great for the environment, we still need to make sure we can fund transport services to help people spend less time in their cars,” Mr Dwyer said.

The IPA said a 4 cent per kilometre road user charge, broadly equivalent with what most other motorists pay, wouldn’t discourage take-up of electric vehicles, which are expected to increase in cost effectiveness against petrol-powered cars as battery technology improves and charging stations become more prevalent.

It was imperative to act soon, though, given electric vehicles made up only 0.076 per cent of the light vehicle fleet, before a new tax became politically untenable. “While the revenue raised is unlikely to be substantial in the short term, it could raise rapidly as uptake grows — into the hundreds of millions each year for a large state and the billions by 2030,” the report says.

The NSW government’s review of federal financial relations, released last month, canvassed alternative state revenue sources to replace “highly inefficient” property stamp duty, shrinking coverage of the GST, including road user chrging.

The Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics predicts the electric vehicle share to hit 27 per cent in 2030 and 50 per cent by 2035.

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 November, 2019

Living near a park could add years to your life! City dwellers whose homes are close to green spaces are less likely to die young 'because they have cleaner air and exercise more' (?)

Not this old chestnut again. There are normally one or two studies every year that claim to prove a relationship between pollution (or lack of it) and health and I regularly review them. See here. Without fail, the studies are full of holes. They do not show what they purport to show. They omit major methodological precautions that would have protected them from false conclusions and as a result leave their reported effects attributable to other things than pollution.

Living near a park is desirable so mainly the rich can afford it. And the rich have better health anyway. Some of these studies claim to control for demographics but usually rely on a proxy such as education, e.g. here. I have never seen actual income data for each person gathered

Living near a park may slash your risk of an early death, according to the biggest ever review of the evidence.

An international team of researchers analysed nine existing studies involving eight million city-dwellers around the world.

Results showed adults who lived near green spaces were significantly less likely to die young from any cause, including heart disease, cancer and dementia.

Urban parks help improve the air quality, filtering out toxic pollutants that kill scores of people every year.

Researchers say they also offer no-cost spaces for people to exercise, which helps drive down obesity rates.

These benefits are also good for mental health and stress levels, said the Barcelona Institute for Global Health-led academic team.

They have now called for more shrubs, plants and trees to be planted in urban areas on the back of the findings.

People who can walk to a park are less likely to be fat
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), found that children in the state who grew up within a third of a mile of a park were at a lower risk of becoming obese by age 18 and were less at-risk for chronic health problems later in life.

After a review of studies on California parks and human health, they concluded parks may offer a free, untapped resource for millions of Californians and city dwellers on the whole.

One of these studies surveyed 80,000 California households about their mental health, stress and financial circumstances.

They found that regardless of how poor or wealthy those families were, the ones that lived close to a park or green space were less distressed.

Their analysis also suggested teens that live near parks may take advantage of them for exercise.

One of the studies found that nearly 30 per cent more teenagers spent an hour or more doing some form of physical activity five days a week when they lived near parks and green spaces.

The study authors surmise that that meant less screen time for the teenagers living near parks, too, which may offer mental health benefits for them.

The studies that were reviewed included people from seven different countries – the US, Canada, Spain, Italy, Australia, Switzerland and China.

The researchers used satellite images to measure the distance between participants' homes and green spaces and cross-referenced it with their health records.

The studies tracked the participants for several years. Results were published in the journal The Lancet Planetary Health.

They found that for every two per cent increase in greenness within 500 metres of their home, there was four per cent lower chance of an early death.

Lead author David Rojas, researcher at the Barcelona Institute and Colorado State University, said: 'This is the largest and most comprehensive synthesis to date on green space and premature mortality.

'The results support interventions and policies to increase green spaces as a strategy to improve public health.'

The research team - which involved experts from the World Health Organization - are currently applying the results to estimate the number of premature deaths that could be prevented in cities around the world.

Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, director of the Urban Planning, Environment and Health Initiative at the Barcelona institute said: 'Urban greening programmes are not only key to promoting public health, but they also increase biodiversity and mitigate the impacts of climate change, making our cities more sustainable and livable.'

SOURCE

Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam said the Holocaust wasn't unique and was 'holding Germany back'

He's not the first Green antisemite. Hitler was one too

Hallam, 53, sparked outrage in Germany by referring to the Holocaust as 'just another f***ery in human history'.

He compared the murder of six million Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis to other historical massacres and claimed that memory of the Shoah - or Holocaust - was holding Germany back.

The former organic farmer was quickly condemned by Extinction Rebellion groups in Germany, as well as the German government after his comments to a newspaper in the country.

And the British branch of the organisation also distanced itself from him, denouncing his claims.

In an English-language interview he told Die Zeit: 'The extremity of a trauma...can create a paralysis in actually learning the lessons from it.

'The fact of the matter is, millions of people have been killed in vicious circumstances on a regular basis throughout history.'

He cited the Belgian colonialists who 'went to the Congo in the late 19th century and decimated it'.

Some Twitter users called for Extinction Rebellion to expel their co-founder Toger Hallam over his remarks about the Holocaust to a German newspaper.

Henrique Laitenberger wrote: 'This is Extinction Rebellion's final litmus test - Roger Hallam is not just any activist, he co-founded the movement and was central to the development of its strategy, despite his extremist politics. Will @XRebellionUK expel Hallam? Or do they tolerate his heinous views?'

In a statement sent to MailOnline, Extinction Rebellion UK said: 'Extinction Rebellion UK unreservedly denounces today’s comments from our co-founder, Roger Hallam, in the German newspaper Die Zeit, made in a personal capacity in relation to the recent launch of his book.

'Jewish people and many others are deeply wounded by the comments today. Internal conversations have begun with the XR Conflict team about how to manage the conflict process that will address this issue.

'We stand by restorative outcomes as preferable, although in some cases exclusion is necessary.

'Our 6th Principle states: ''We welcome everyone and every part of everyone working actively to create safer and more accessible spaces''. Our movement must be safe for Jews as well as all other minorities, marginalised peoples, and religious groups.

Hallam claimed his comments had been taken out of context and compared the impact of the Holocaust with the looming climate disaster, but did not apologise for the offence caused.

SOURCE

Climate ‘Science’ Riddled With Dishonesty, Incompetence

As climate historian Tony Heller makes clear

The absolute worst case of professional incompetence and dishonesty is in the area of climate science. Tony Heller has exposed some of the egregious dishonesty of mainstream environmentalists in a video he’s titled “My Gift To Climate Alarmists.”

Environmentalists and their political allies attribute the recent increase in deadly forest fires to global warming. However, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, forest fires reached their peak in the 1930s and have declined by 80% since then.

Environmentalists hide the earlier data and make their case for the effects of global warming by showing the public and policymakers data from 1980 that shows an increase in forest fires.

Climate scientists claim that rising sea levels are caused by man-made global warming. Historical data from the tide gauge in Lower Manhattan shows that sea levels have been rising from about the time when Abraham Lincoln was president to now.

Heller says that sea levels have been rising for about 20,000 years. He points out that anthropologists believe that when the sea level was very low people were able to walk from Siberia to North America.

Hot weather is often claimed to be a result of man-made climate change. Heller presents data showing the number of days in Waverly, Ohio, above 90 degrees. In 1895, there were 73 days above 90 degrees. In 1936, there were 82 days above 90 degrees. Since the 1930s, there has been a downward trend in the number of days above 90 degrees.

If climatologists hide data from earlier years and started at 1955, they show an increase in the number of above 90-degree days from eight or nine to 30 or 40. Thus, to deceive us into thinking the climate is getting hotter, environmentalists have selected a starting date that fits their agenda.

You might ask: “Who is Tony Heller? Does he work for big oil?” It turns out that he is a scientist and claims to be a lifelong environmentalist. From what I can tell, he has no vested interests. In that respect, he is different from those who lead the environmental movement, who often either work for or are funded by governments.

Once in a while environmentalists reveal their true agenda. Ottmar Edenhofer, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth summary report released in 2007, speaking in 2010 advised: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”

United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres said that the true aim of the U.N.’s 2014 Paris climate conference was “to change the (capitalist) economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

Christine Stewart, Canada’s former minister of the environment, said: “No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits. … Climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

Tim Wirth, former U.S. undersecretary of state for global affairs and the person most responsible for setting up the Kyoto Protocol, said: “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Not all scientists are dishonest and not all news reporters are leftists with an agenda. But one wonders at the deafening silence where there’s clear, unambiguous evidence.

For example, if ocean levels have been rising for some 20,000 years, why do scientists allow environmentalists to get away with the claim that it’s a result of man-made global warming? Why aren’t there any reporters to highlight leftist statements such as those by Edenhofer, Stewart, and others who want to ride global warming as a means to defeat capitalism and usher in socialism and communism?

I would prefer to think that the silence of so many scientists represents their fears as opposed to their going along with the environmental extremist agenda.

SOURCE

Climate change and human population growth are putting 7,000 plant species in Africa at risk of extinction, a study claims

Just another prophecy, no more likely to be true than all the others

A third of tropical plants in Africa are headed for extinction, a study has revealed.

Researchers determined that out of more than 22,000 vascular plant species, nearly 7,000 have now been classified as 'likely or potentially' threatened.

The report points at the losses of biodiversity, rapid human population growth and changes in land use and the effects of climate change as reasons to why these plants are disappearing.

Following an even deeper analysis, the team determined the regions most at risk were Ethiopia, the center of Tanzania, the southern Democratic Republic of Congo and the forests of West Africa.

A team of international researchers assessed the 'Red List', which is 'the most authoritative list of threatened species', developed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The researchers assessed a total of 22,036 vascular plant species in tropical Africa and found that 32 percent are on their way to disappearing.

'Our study thus provides further evidence that the flora of tropical Africa will be highly vulnerable in the future,' reads the study published in Science Advances.

'This situation will no doubt be magnified by the effects of climate change, which is one of the most important assumptions influencing extinction risk.'

Although multiple countries are losing fauna, the team found Ethiopia has the highest number of disappearing species.

The country's highlands are in the top 10 most threatened with 50 percent of its tropical plants were deemed 'likely or potentially' threatened.

The new study uses a novel methodology based on key components of the IUCN Red List's assessment process to discern the potential conservation status of tropical flora at the continental scale.

The team used a the newly constructed database called RAINBIO, which consists of over 600,000 geo-referenced occurrence records of more than 20,000 vascular plant species in tropical Africa.

'Tropical Africa is a highly suitable model for undertaking such a study as it is faced with significant and mounting threats resulting from a wide range of activities, including logging, fuelwood collection, and deforestation for agriculture and mining,' reads the study.

After applying their PACA approach to the RAINBIO database, the researchers were able to categorize each species into five preliminary conservation status levels: likely threatened, potentially threatened, likely rare, potentially rare, and likely not threatened.

Study co-author Bonaventure Sonké noted that 'These results were possible because the partners involved agreed to share their data,' adding: 'This is a strong signal to encourage researchers to share their data, in order to obtain results on a larger scale.'

SOURCE

Leaked emails show ABC journalists conspiring on Global Warming

The ABC is Australia's major public broadcaster

Leaked emails have shown ABC journalists and producers conspiring together behind closed doors to push an ideological line on Global warming.

The first leaked email was sent on Sunday to journalists at the taxpayer funded public broadcaster by Melbourne executive producer Barbara Heggen. Heggen wrote that she was inquiring after “interest in an ABC-staff climate crisis advisory group”. The purpose of this new group was to “gather together the brains trust of the ABC staffers to develop ways to report on and inform Australians about the climate crisis using a solutions journalism approach” and “to report back to ABC management our ideas and strategies for responding to the climate crisis both internally and externally”.

For those unaware, Ms Heggen is the woman responsible for such sterling journalism as this article discussing the possibility of fleeing to Tasmania to escape climate change and this radio segment talking about whether or not Australians should stop having children to save the planet.

The “Solutions journalism approach” she advocates is a theory of journalism developed in the late 90s which suggested that journalists shouldn’t simply report the facts but should suggest “solutions” to social problems. How this fits in with the obligations of the ABC charter is of course an interesting question.

Barbara’s friends and colleagues were excited at the prospect of what would effectively be an internal lobby group inside the ABC pushing for even more extreme alarmism and bias than currently. The ABC’s national rural reporter, Dominique Schwartz replied: “I’m keen. I have just been looking into how other media organisations are dealing with coverage of climate change.”

Investigative reporter Stephen Long agreed: “Also keen to discuss this. You should be aware also that [Editorial Policies] is having a look at this issue.” To get an insight into Stephen’s view on the matter one only needs to peruse the over two dozen articles he’s written slamming the proposed Adani coal mine, plus his other articles spruiking the benefits of renewables and downplaying the threat of blackouts caused by them.

ABC PM Presenter Linda Mottram also agreed: “We must report established science, the evidence, and not myth.” Presumably when Ms Mottram is speaking of reporting “evidence” instead of “myth” she’s referring to stories such as the one from earlier this month where the ABC breathlessly announced that 11,000 scientists were “declaring a climate emergency. The ABC of course neglected to mention during this “evidence” based reporting that many of the signatures were obviously false and that one of the signatories was a Professor “Mickey Mouse”.

I guess if they want to improve their “evidence” based reporting they can always give Tim Flannery another bag full of money to film yet another series. Maybe this time he can expand on his belief in a Gaia-like earth spirit.

The ABC receives over a billion dollars a year of taxpayer funds. If its journalists weren’t publicly funded then these leaked emails showing them conspiring to slant coverage behind closed doors would be annoying; but as an organisation funded by involuntary contributions of taxpayers it’s enraging.

The ABC will never reform unless it is under the threat of complete defunding. The time to start threatening that defunding is now.

SOURCE

‘Inside’ the ABC’s climate group

Alas, the latest ABC staff-initiated brainchild is no more. As revealed on Monday through emails obtained by The Australian, senior journalists at Aunty had discussed establishing an “ABC-Staff climate crisis advisory group” to “report back to ABC management our ideas and strategies for responding to the climate crisis both internally and externally”.

ABC producer and presenter Barbara Heggen had made the proposal, suggesting a “solutions journalism approach”. ABC Melbourne journalist Karen Percy described it as “a fabulous idea,” national rural and regional correspondent Dominique Schwartz said she was “keen”. Senior journalist Linda Mottram said it was a “great idea”, also speaking of the “need (for) constant reminders that we must report established science, the evidence, and not myth”. Incidentally, Mottram’s ABC bio notes “Most recently she has taken a strong interest in editorial training at the ABC”.

The Institute of Public Affairs director of policy Gideon Rozner summed it up best. “Because if there’s a gap in ABC coverage, it’s climate change,” he quipped. As noted by The Australian’s media editor, Leo Shanahan, ABC policies require that “editorial decisions are not improperly influenced by political, sectional, commercial or personal interests”.

Yesterday ABC chairwoman Ita Buttrose put the kybosh on these journalists come crisis activists, stating “it was one of those ideas that is not going to happen.”

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

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

21 November, 2019

Climate Change to Have Harsh Effect on Children

You can count on the NYT to keep this arrant nonsense alive. Winter is the time of dying. Warmth is on balance good for you

The health effects of climate change will be unevenly distributed and children will be among those especially harmed, according to a new report from the medical journal The Lancet.

The report compared human health consequences under two scenarios: one in which the world meets the commitments laid out in the Paris Agreement and reins in emissions so that increases in global temperatures remain “well below 2 degrees Celsius” by the end of the century, and one in which it does not.

The report, published Wednesday, found that failing to limit emissions would lead to health problems caused by infectious diseases, worsening air pollution, rising temperatures and malnutrition.

“With every degree of warming, a child born today faces a future where their health and wellbeing will be increasingly impacted by the realities and dangers of a warmer world,” said Dr.

Renee N. Salas, a clinical instructor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the United States policy brief that accompanied the report.

“Climate change, and the air pollution from fossil fuels that are driving it, threatens the child’s health starting in the mother’s womb and only accumulates from there,” she said.

Children are especially vulnerable partly because of their physiology.

“Their hearts beat faster than adults’ and their breathing rates are higher than adults,’” said Dr.

Mona Sarfaty, the director of the program on climate and health at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, who was not involved in the report.

As a result, children absorb more air pollution given their body size than an adult would in the same situation.

But unless nations halt emissions, air pollution, which, according to the report, killed seven million people worldwide in 2016 alone, will quite likely increase.

The burning of fossil fuels such as coal and gas also releases a type of fine air pollution called PM 2.5 that can damage the heart and lungs when inhaled. Exposure to PM 2.5 air pollution is correlated with health problems such as low birth weight and chronic respiratory diseases like asthma.

Research published in The New England Journal of Medicine after the passage of policies designed to improve air quality “shows that the children who grew up when the air was better quality literally had more functioning lung tissue,” Dr. Sarfaty said.

In addition to the emissions associated with burning fossil fuels, the report said future generations would be exposed to a growing source of fine-particulate pollution: wildfires.

As temperatures rise, wildfires are becoming more frequent in part because hotter temperatures dry out vegetation, making it easier to ignite. The smoke, like the smoke that comes from burning fossil fuels, has negative health effects.

According to the report, since the middle of this decade there has been a 77 percent increase in the number of people exposed to wildfire smoke worldwide. Much of that growth has been in India and China. The 2018 California wildfire season, though, when the Camp Fire became the state’s deadliest and most destructive blaze in terms of acres burned, and this year’s wildfire season make it clear that increasing wildfires are also happening in the United States.

Across the Western United States, the rise of giant wildfires has worsened air pollution enough to erode some of the airquality gains from the Clean Air Act.

“You have young kids escaping fires that are going to be, in effect, challenged for life,” said Gina Mc- Carthy, a former administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. “There are mental health issues happening as a result of these climate events and fires and floods that children have never had to face, certainly not to the frequency and intensity that they have to face now.” The report said that there were many links between climate change and mental health, including the loss of property and the loss of livelihoods but stopped short of quantifying the impact.

Part of the exposure risk that children face is simply that they spend more time outside than adults. Coupled with their differing physiology, it makes them more susceptible to fine particulate pollution. These same factors also mean they are more likely to suffer from the effects of extreme heat associated with climate change; eight of the 10 hottest years on record have happened this decade.

The European heat waves in 2003 lead to the deaths of 70,000 people. “We know that climate change had its fingerprints there and that’s concerning,” said Dr.

Nick Watts, the report’s executive editor, adding that subsequent heat waves have “resulted in tens of thousands of deaths.” While many of those people were elderly, young people suffered, too.

As heat waves become more severe, parents and coaches “may not realize that the children are more exposed and therefore more vulnerable,” Dr. Sarfaty said.

A 2017 report that she helped prepare found that, in the United States, heat related illnesses were the leading cause of death and disability in young athletes.

This is the third time The Lancet has weighed in on the health impacts of climate change, but the first with a focus on children.

“It was our contention, both negatively, that the health costs were huge and underestimated.

But also, more positively, that by putting health first in our response to climate, there were dividends for both the public and for the economy in terms of cleaner and safer cities and healthier diets,” Dr. Richard Horton, editor in chief of The Lancet, said.

To that end, the report does contain glimmers of hope. Carbon intensity, or how much energy can be produced for each unit of greenhouse gas released, has increased.

And more cities are filing climate assessments detailing solutions that can be put into place.

But these actions are happening against a backdrop of greenhouse gas emissions that continue to rise.

SOURCE

UK: Climate change: Firms failing to tackle crisis will be delisted from stock exchange, Labour Party says

Companies that fail to act on the climate change they cause will be axed from the stock exchange, under radical Labour plans.

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, pledged his government would ensure firms are “pulling their weight” to tackle the “existential threat” to the planet.

And he warned: “For those companies not taking adequate steps under Labour they will be delisted from the London Stock Exchange.”

Vowing to “rewrite the rules” of the economy to benefit workers, Mr McDonnell also insisted curbing the climate crisis would be “Labour’s overriding priority” if it wins the general election.

The Corporate Governance Code would be beefed up to “set out a minimum standard for listing related to evidencing the action being taken to tackle climate change”.

“If we are meet the climate change target to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, we need to ensure that companies are pulling their weight alongside government,” he told an event in London.

And, claiming some support from the corporate world, he added: “Business bodies are calling for companies to improve climate related financial reporting and for all companies to bring forward decarbonisation plans.”

Earlier, the Green Party lashed out at Labour for dropping plans to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2030, as a shadow cabinet minister revealed on Monday.

It said the decision proved only the Greens are willing to wage “a war” on climate change, with a £100bn pledge to end emissions by that date.

SOURCE

Climate Extremism In The Age Of Disinformation

ROY W. SPENCER

Do the global warming wars ever change anyone’s mind?

I suppose there are a few people whose minds have been changed. As I recall, Judith Curry has said Climategate (now “celebrating” its 10-year anniversary) was her wake-up call that institutionalized climate science might not be all it claims to be.

She is now a well-informed and unabashed skeptic of the modern tendency to blame every bad weather event on humans.

While I’m sure there are other examples, the unfortunate truth is that fewer and fewer people actually care about the truth.

The journalist who broke the Climategate story, James Delingpole, yesterday posted an article entitled The Bastards Have Got Away with It!, James concludes with,

Climategate was the event when, just for a moment, it seemed we’d got the climate scamsters bang to rights, that the world’s biggest scientific (and economic) con trick had been exposed and that the Climate Industrial Complex would be dismantled before it could do any more damage to our freedom and our prosperity.

But the truth, it would seem, is no match for big money, dirty politics and madness-of-crowds groupthink. We’ve lost this one, I think, my friends. And the fact that all those involved in this scam will one day burn in Hell is something, I’m afraid, which gives me all too little consolation.

You see, it does not really matter whether a few bad actors (even if they are leaders of the climate movement) conspired to hide data and methods, and strong-arm scientific journal editors into not publishing papers that might stand in the way of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) mission to pin climate change on humans, inflate its seriousness, and lay the groundwork for worldwide governmental efforts to reduce humanity’s access to affordable energy.

The folks were simply trying to Save the Earth™, and we all know that the ends justify the means, right? So what if they cheated? Boys will be boys, you know. The science is sound, and besides, 97% of all scientists agree that…something.

The Roots of Polarization

One would think that the practice of science would be objective. I once believed this, too.

As a fresh post-doc at the University of Wisconsin, when I discovered something new in satellite data, I was surprised to encounter NASA employees who tried to keep my work from being published because they feared it would interfere with a new satellite mission they were working toward.

I eventually got it published as a cover article in the prestigious journal, Nature.

But the subject I was dealing with did not have the profound financial, political, policy, and even religious import that climate change would end up having.

Furthermore, 35 years ago things were different than today. People were less tribal. There is an old saying that one should not discuss politics or religion in polite company, but it turns out that social media is far from polite company.

From a practical standpoint, what we do (or don’t do) about human-caused climate change supports either (1) a statist, top-down governmental control over human affairs that involves a more socialist political framework, or (2) an unconstrained individual-freedom framework where capitalism reigns supreme.

So, one could easily be a believer (or non-believer) in the ‘climate emergency’ based upon their political leanings.

While I know a few socialists who are skeptical of human-caused climate change being a serious issue, this is the exception rather than the rule.

The same is true of capitalists who think that we must transition away from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy (unless they stand to make money off the transition through subsidies, in which case they are financially rather than ideologically driven).

Or, on a spiritual level, a human who desires to worship something must ultimately choose between the Creation or the Creator. There is no third option.

I find that most Earth scientists are nature worshipers (showing various levels of fervor) and consider the Earth to be fragile.

In contrast, those who believe the Earth was created for the purpose of serving humanity tend to view nature as being resilient and less sensitive to lasting damage.

Both of these views have equally religious underpinnings since “fragile” and “resilient” are emotive and qualitative, rather than scientific, terms.

So, I would argue it really does not matter that much to most alarmists or skeptics what the evidence shows.

As long as 8 billion people on the planet have some non-zero effect on climate — no matter how small or unmeasurable — the alarmist can still claim that ‘we shouldn’t be interfering with the climate system’.

As a counterexample, the skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg actually believes the alarmist science from the IPCC, but claims that economics tells us it’s better to live in and adapt to a warmer world until we have more cost-effective substitutes for fossil fuels.

For this stance regarding policy, he is labeled a global warming denier despite fully believing in human-caused climate change.

The Role of the Disinformation Superhighway

Baylor Professor Alan Jacobs has an interesting essay entitled On Lost Causes regarding the tendency for people to believe anything they see on the internet if it supports their biases.

He mentions a recent novel in which a high-tech billionaire, fed up with the disinformation he sees on the Web, concocts an elaborate online story that Moab, Utah, has been obliterated by a nuclear explosion.

He has CGI video, actors, witnesses, and an elaborate (but fake) social media presence to support the story.

The plan is to then show the world how easily they were duped so that people would become less credulous when digesting information.

But instead, people cling to their belief. Even after many years, the ‘Moab truthers’ claim that anyone who disputes that Moab was destroyed is a troll or paid shill. People could actually travel to Moab to see for themselves, but virtually no one does.

SOURCE

N. Hemisphere In Hypothermic Shock! Record Cold, ‘Historic Snowstorms’

Winter hasn’t even officially arrived, but already large areas of the northern hemisphere are seeing “historic snowfalls,” frigid temperatures, and even avalanche alarms.

The Northern Hemisphere has certainly caught a major cold, one certainly not caused by the human CO2 virus.

Instead of fever, parts of the northern hemisphere are in hypothermia!

Alarmists, media desperate

Though global warming scientists will never admit it, they are really surprised and stunned.

All that is left for them is to make up some cockamamie warming-causes-cold explanations and hope there are enough severely stupid among the media and masses to believe it.

“United States — Rewrite the Record Books”

Beginning in North America, “sub-zero temperatures are now blasting” millions of Americans following “the three historic snowstorms which buried parts of the U.S. last month,” reports weather site electroverse.net here.

Electroverse writes that “lows throughout the week will be more like January temperatures” with readings below zero for many U.S. states and “temps down into the teens are even forecast as far south as Texas.”

Yesterday, 97 records were toppled.

“It’s a big deal,” Electroverse writes in its headline. They also add:

“No, record cold & snow IS NOT made ‘more likely in a warming world.’ In fact, the IPCC’s line—until not that long ago—was that ‘milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms.’”

Solar activity suspected

It’s not the sort of thing we are supposed to be expecting from a “warming planet”. Some climate experts blame natural factors, like solar activity, for the cold, and that these warnings have long been known since the sun has entered a new period of calm.

Freeze watches and warnings also extend as far south as Florida. And it’s only early November. And don’t expect to see many FFF activists show up at rallies protesting hot weather any time soon.

Polar Bear Science site here also reports that the Hudson Bay in Canada has started freezing up earlier than normal three years in a row!

Europe starting to get clobbered by snow, 2m in the Alps

Meanwhile cold has also spread across Europe, though not quite as brutal as what we’ve been seeing across North America.

In central Europe, the Austrian online Heute here reports that “huge amounts of snow” are on the way for the Alps.

German site Wetteronline.de reports here of “new, severe snowfalls in the Alps” with “up to two meters of fresh snow are possible in places up to the weekend” in Switzerland, Austria, and Northern Italy. “This is good news for winter sports enthusiasts – but the danger of avalanches is increasing.”

Biggest November snowstorm in 40 years

Even global warming child activist Greta Thunberg’s Sweden is getting hard hit by extreme cold and snow. Electroverse reports the Nordic country is suffering “its biggest November snowstorm in 40 years.”

On November 10th, Mika tweeted that temps in northern Sweden fell 10 -34.5°C.

Most snow in 60 years

The German Ruhrkultur site reports how also Finland just saw “the coldest autumn temperature and the highest snow depth in at least 60 years” and that “the temperature in Enontekiö, a municipality in Finnish Lapland, dropped to 28.2°C on Tuesday 5 November.”

Deepening cold across Siberia as well

“On November 11 in Yakutia, the daily temperature never rose above ?30°C (-22F),” reports the SOTT site here. “Some parts of Siberia were even colder: In Evenkia and the northern regions of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, the temperature dropped to ?41 … ?44°C.”

SOTT comments (sarcastically): “I wonder how much ice will melt at ?44°C (-47F).

With all the early winter weather, it’s ridiculous to claim the globe is burning up. So it’s no wonder the alarmists have taken their climate ambulance to the far side of the globe, NSW Australia, and kept their narrow focus on brush fires.

SOURCE

Venice Flood Due To Climate Change – Only It Wasn’t

On November 13th, the BBC website carried an article about the flooding in Venice, quoting the Mayor Luigi Brugnaro. He said “Now the government must listen. These are the effects of climate change… the costs will be high.”

This latest flood in Venice reached 1.87 metres according to the tide monitoring centre. Only once since official records began in 1923 has the tide been higher, reaching 1.94 metres in 1966. The BBC article said ‘Photographs showed people wading through the streets as Venice was hit by a storm’.

Hit by a storm. Hang on, the mayor said it was because of climate change. Storms are natural events, so which is it?

A storm coinciding with a high tide is what it is, and they are surprised it caused a flood? In a city sinking into the ground? A city that has flooded multiple times before?

The BBC article also said it was a result of the highest tide in 50 years. Tides are a natural event, they happen every day, caused by the Moon not the climate. Unless we are now to start blaming the Moon for climate change? It’s also interesting to note that in February 2018 & 2017, after weeks of no rainfall, the canals in Venice almost ran dry. Did the BBC article mention that? No of course not.

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 November,

An omen of what the Green New Deal would be like

Alistair Pope

Permit me to recount a short history detailking the reality of life without electricity, something I experienced in Dubai during the massive power outage of 2005. The reports that followed made light of the incident as just a minor inconvenience. It wasn’t. Rather, and the reason that nightmare comes to mind all these years later, is the recognition that I was experiencing the Green Dream, the ordeal we will likely suffer this coming summer as a stressed and diminished grid falters and fails.

Dubai back then had just witnessed a decade-long building frenzy and commensurate expansion of the population to such an extent that the electricity-generating capacity was barely adequate until, one day, it wasn’t adequate at all.

I had been in Dubai for ten days and was due to fly at 2am flight for London. As I had a lazy day to kill. I woke at about 9.00am, not because it was time to get up but due to my hotel room being uncomfortably hot. My sweat was soaking the sheets. Clearly we had a problem, so I called reception and was told that the air conditioner was off due to an electrical fault, but it should be OK in an hour or so. As I was sticky with sweat (I am male, so I sweat, not genteelly perspire) so I had a shower — or at least I began to have a shower. Three minutes into my ablutions the water stopped. I was covered in soap and hair conditioner, so this was a problem. I considered my choices, and in the end selected Option A which was to towel off the soap and dry myself as best I could. Option B would have been to rinse with water from the toilet bowl, which I rejected. As I later discovered, the toilet would have been the far better option. I will explain at the appropriate time.

It was not yet 10.00am and the room was stifling. The windows were sealed, so no chance of fresh air (or jumping out). I sat down to check my emails. There were plenty, but none of my replies were leaving my outbox as the server was down. I was out of contact with the world. About 30 minutes later the battery on my laptop expired, so that was that.

I packed and decided to leave my bags with the concierge so I could go to a cool restaurant in a cool mall for a cool drink of cool water. Cool was becoming an obsession

Once packed, I left the room and dragged my suitcases to the lift, which wasn’t working. I was not surprised to find that I could not return to my room, since the door was electronic and my card no longer worked. Using the emergency telephone (totally inappropriately) as it was still working (don’t ask me why) I implored the reception desk for help. They declined, saying all staff had been allocated to other tasks. She offered no advice.

Oh well, it’s not really that bad, I thought, as I dragged my bags down 10-flights of stairs to the ground floor. The stairwells were not air conditioned, so the temperature must have been 50°C. This attempt at resolving my checkout problem turned out to be a near fatal move, as the ground floor door was electronically alarmed and sealed automatically when the power failed, surely a serious safety hazard and trap in the event of a fire!

Going back up ten floors, or even a few floors, was not an option. The floor hallways were not accessible from the stairwells without a pass key, as they were for escape (allegedly), not inter-floor travel. Anyway, I found I was not alone. At least 80 other guests were now jammed into the lower stairwell and in the same desperate position. The people at the front were now banging with a panicked urgency on the steel door, and the stairwell behind me had already filled with as many as were in front. I thought I caught a glimpse of Dante and Milton in the crowd as we wilted in the hellish heat, sealed off from cool water and rescue by that steel security door. To our great relief, it eventually opened as a tradesman of sorts smashed the lock. By then the stairwell crowd was 200 strong, and together we surged in a staggering mob into the “cool” 42°C lobby, where we each given a bottle of cold water. All were upended immediately and drained in seconds.

I had a late checkout arranged for 8.00pm, but when I got to the counter after another hour’s wait in an ever-lengthening queue, I discovered no electricity meant no bill, which meant no checkout and no credit cards. I was luckier than most as I was carrying several thousand in US dollars, so I could pay cash. But how much cash? Now I found out what the absent staff were doing. Equipped with keys that bypassed the electronic stairwell locks, they were climbing to each and every of the 30 floors to check mini-bars. Nobody was leaving without paying to the last cent.

My bill was compiled manually as I sat on the carpet, there being no other seats available as every single guest, like me, had sought refugee in the Lobby. Again, I was lucky as after only another hour they called my name and presented me with the handwritten bill, a (now warm) bottle of water and some sushi they were giving away before it spoiled. We agreed on the amount, I handed over the cash, checked out, gave my bags to the concierge and went to find a taxi. It was just after 3.00pm, 11 hours before my flight was due to depart.

Once more I was blessed by fortunate, as I had a taxi within 15 minutes, the usual swarm having vanished, but I presumed this was because the power outage had made them busier than normal as people followed my example and headed for the malls. Not so, as I soon found out.

I thought of rejecting the cab driver’s demand for the usual fare multiplied by five, but as no other taxi was in sight and with more people checking out the queue would only grow, so I agreed to the exorbitant demand. I realised the transport situation could only get worse, so I retrieved my bags and told the driver to head straight to the airport, where I pictured myself relaxing in the Business Class Lounge. I could even have a shower! This was becoming an obsession as my skin itched from the soap and sweat and I found it impossible not to scratch like a mangy dog. There are only so many poses you can adopt before everyone knows your crotch is the worst-affected area in need of serious attention.

I had driven the journey to the Dubai Airport dozens of times so I assumed it would be only a 20-minute journey at most, depending on the traffic. On this day it was nearly two hours before the airport finally came into sight, and then half as much time again until we arrived at the departures concourse. The drive from the hotel had been akin to a scene from a B-grade mega-disaster movie. When the power and air conditioning failed throughout Dubai — not just our hotel, as we had been lead to believe — the entire population piled their families into SUV’s, turned on the air conditioning and drove aimlessly around. Those who ran low on fuel were soon reminded that petrol and gas pumps also need electricity.

And a lot of vehicles ran dry. Cars were driven until they stopped and left wherever that happened, usually in the middle of the road. Entire families then piled out and sat under trees, or, if there was no shade, lay down under their cars. My driver chased some people out of their shade, doing ‘whatever it took’ to collect his fare, even mounting the kerb and mauling the painstakingly watered and nurtured grass verge with his tyres before returning to the road and squeezing between abandoned cars. No traffic lights were working so each junction was clogged – they were by far the favourite places to abandon automobiles no longer mobile. We finally made it to the departure ramp three hours after leaving the hotel.

It was now only 8-hours until my flight, but things weren’t about to get any better.

This world-renowned mega airport had no power either! No fight details, no check-in terminals, no baggage conveyors and, apparently, no flight-control radar. Fortunately, the control tower could still talk to the pilots, so they were able to divert 90 per cent of the air traffic to other airports. Again my luck held because they had already printed a hard copy of the manifest for my flight. As the plane was already on the tarmac they would be able to take my bags, write the flight number on them and manually load them on to the aircraft. However, as no intercom was working I had to stay within a designated area from midnight while waiting for my flight to be called. I was assured that it was ready to fly.

At the airport nothing worked. No coffee, tea or cooked meals were available and all transactions were cash, but there was nothing for sale, not even water. As a business class passenger I staked out a piece of carpet for a bed, rather than taking a spot with the commoners on the polished floor. Although it was still daylight, I rejected the idea of going to the Business Class Lounge, as it was deep in the bowels of the terminal and I had thought ahead about what it might be like trying to find my way back to the ticket counter in the dark. So stayed where I was.

Darkness fell, but there was no relief from the heat. One serious improvement was that I could now scratch my head, armpits and crotch like a demented chimpanzee, and do so without the disapproving looks of my soap-free non-traveling traveling companions.

At midnight, right on the dot (just as the airline had told us), my flight was called. We gathered in the darkness, where the announcement was made that the flight would be delayed until the next day, as the air traffic controllers were only able to use the inadequate emergency backup system, the main system not having its own generator (something they have long since fixed).

All water from the taps stopped and bottled water ran out about 02.00am. Surprisingly, despite the 40°C heat there was no riot, no robberies, no bad behaviour and no violence (as in New Orleans after Katrina), just a subdued resignation. The possibility of deaths from dehydration was, I suspect, quite real. Airline staff with torches did distribute bottled water to women and children, but I did not see any men demanding their places in this modern version of Titanic’s lifeboat drill and I did not ask for anything for myself, though I knew I was seriously dehydrated.

Sometime between 04.00am and 08.00am power was partially restored and a semblance of civilised life began again. However, the authorities had to manage the load, so the airport air conditioning was set at 28°C — still uncomfortable, but better than 42°C. Also, the recovery of power meant they were able to pump water the refill the water tanks, bringing the taps and toilets back to life. The toilets were a major problem, though, as nothing had been flushed for the past 18 hours. The low-paid foreign workers set uncomplainingly to work in those appalling conditions. No sooner had they finished than the toilets went out of commission again as a backlog of desperate people filled them up faster than the system could cope.

Time crawled in a slow, sweaty, scratchy torment. Finally, at noon the conveyors and terminals sprang to life and real, energy-guzzling civilisation returned. It was reported that fewer than a dozen CO2 producing humans had expired in the heat, thus returning their carbon to the Earth and ceasing their polluting, breathing ways. Surely a poor result from the perspective of the green-minded, who seem to think the world would be a far better place were humans not on it.

Suffice to say that at 2.00pm we were bussed to the plane where I found the smell of my fellow passengers more than somewhat unpleasant. No doubt the feeling was reciprocated, as I had been in the same clothes in fearsome heat for over 30-hours. Our departure then endured yet another two-hour delay as two of the plane’s toilets were blocked to overflowing.

It was only after we took off that the pilot informed us that the control tower was supplementing radio communications with binoculars in addition to the emergency backup radar. He said it was the first time in ten years he had made a ‘visual takeoff’, but he assured us that, as only 10 per cent of normal traffic volume was trying to get into the air, there was no real danger. Oh, good.

My relative good fortune (I hadn’t expired from heat fatigue) continued on my arrival in London for two reasons: first, I had an EU Passport, so I was not checked by Immigration. Those with foreign Passports did not have an exit stamp from Dubai so were held for interrogation Second, my checked luggage was distinctive, so I found my bags with ease. Neither mine nor anyone else’s had been security-checked in Dubai. Heathrow management was not pleased by this and put every bag through their own intense security screen. It took me more than an hour to clear Customs, despite having nothing to declare.

My nightmare glimpse of the Green Dream had taken me 54-hours ‘bed-bed and ‘shower to shower’. I had red soap burns on my skin and my crotch was raw from scratching. I note by way of advise in regard to our coming summer that, when the power goes out, the toilet bowl option I rejected should be embraced. As the Greens keep telling us, we must adapt to our changing world.

Within a few years of my experience, Dubai resolved the majority of their energy deficiencies. They have built a massive oil-burning power station and provided backup diesel generators to all essential services. They saw the problem and took the sane, appropriate action required to benefit themselves, leaving the planet to look after itself – something it is perfectly capable of doing.

SOURCE

Cal EPA studying ways to sunset the California economy

California is about to take one giant step toward following Germany’s failed climate goals which should be a wake-up all for governments everywhere. Yes, you guessed it, our legislatures have authorized CalEPA in the 2019 – 2020 California State budget and Assembly Bill AB 74 to conduct studies and identify strategies to manage the decline of in-state crude oil production and decrease demand and supply of fossil fuel.

Germany tried to step up as a leader on climate change, by phasing out nuclear, and pioneered a system of subsidies for industrial wind and solar that sparked a global boom in manufacturing those technologies. Today, Germany has the highest cost of electricity in the world.

From Alberta to Australia, from Finland to France and beyond, infuriated voters are increasingly showing their displeasure with expensive energy policies imposed by politicians in an inane effort to fight purported human-caused climate change. Now you can add Chile to the growing list of countries whose governments are suffering a backlash as average people, tired of elites forcing costly climate policies down their throats with continuous proposals to raise public transport fares and energy bills.

Like Germany and a slew of other countries, California continues to make decisions based on their believe that intermittent electricity from renewable wind and solar will be the replacement to fossil fuels to run the 5th largest economy in the world. Like Germany, this has come at a HIGH COST to Californians.

With its green dreams of an emission free state, California has not even been able to generate enough of its own electricity in-state and imported 29% of its needs in 2018. The bad news is that imported electricity comes at higher costs and those costs are being borne by residents and businesses alike. California households are already paying 50% more, and industrial users are paying more than double the national average for electricity.

The future of electricity in California does not bode well as the State has chosen to not challenge the closure of the States’ last nuclear zero emission generating plant at Diablo Canyon, and 3 natural gas generating plants in Southern California.

The four upcoming losses of continuous generating electricity are:

1. PG&E’s Nuclear 2,160 megawatt Generating Plant at Diablo Canyon’s to be shuttered in 2024.
2. The 823 mw Natural Gas Power Plant at Scattergood in Playa Del Rey, to be shuttered in 2024.
3. The 575 mw Natural Gas Power Plant at Haynes in Long Beach, to be shuttered in 2029.
4. The 472 mw Natural Gas Power Plant at Wilmington, to be shuttered in 2029.

With NO plans for industrial wind or solar renewable intermittent electricity projects to generate “replacement” electricity in-state, especially with the huge land requirements for those renewables, there will be a need to import from other states. States with greater percentages of California’s electricity needs in the years ahead. And as you guessed it, more costs to the consumers and businesses who are already infuriated with high costs.

Could it be that our legislatures are also unaware that those unstoppable costs of more regulations, taxes and increased minimum wages targeted toward businesses are just passed through to the consumers of the services and products from those businesses? Those higher costs roll directly into housing, utilities, food, and entertainment if there’s any money left, and may be very contributory to California’s growing homelessness and poverty populations.

I know our legislatures want to sunset the oil industry, BUT imagine how life was without those fossil fuels before 1900 when we had NO militaries, NO vehicles, NO airlines that now move 4 billion people around the world, NO cruise ships that now move 25 million passengers around the world, NO merchant ships that are now moving $50 Billion dollars of products monthly through California ports, NO space program, NO medications and medical equipment, NO vaccines, NO fertilizers to help feed billions, NO tires for vehicles, and NO asphalt for roads.

Most importantly, before the 1900’s we had NONE of the 6,000 products that are manufactured from the chemicals and by-products from fossil fuels. Interestingly from each 42-gallon barrel of crude oil, half is for those thousands of products and the other half for the fuels to run commerce.

We’ve had more than 100 years to find alternative or generic methods to manufacture the thousands of products we get from those deep earth minerals, and to manufacture the fuels for commerce and the military. By nearly every quantifiable measure, we are better off than our pioneer predecessors because of fossil fuels. In more than a century we’ve only come up with electricity that can be generated intermittently from sunshine and wind.

When we look at what intermittent electricity from wind turbines or solar panels CANNOT do, we see they are blatant failures to qualify as replacements for the fossil fuels that produce those 6,000 products. Of which are the basis of our lifestyles and of our numerous infrastructures. With manufacturing more than 60 million gallons of fuels every day to meet the demands of the states’ commerce and nearly 40 million residents.

I believe it’s easy to understand that wind and solar alone are obviously incapable of supporting the military, airlines, cruise ship, and merchant ships. As a reminder just in case you’re still living in the pre-1900’s, without transportation and the leisure and entertainment industries, we have no commerce.

Imagine if politicians would tell voters that their utopian vision of a world run on solar panels and windmills is a fairy tell? But instead, they have doubled down to sunset the economy with legislature verbiage that pre-determines the outcome of the CalEPA efforts to study ways to decrease the size of the in-state oil industry that’s driving (no pun intended) the California economy.

SOURCE

You’ll Be Surprised Who Is Trying to Empower the Deep State at EPA

Some key House Republicans have chosen to support a Democratic bill called the Scientific Integrity Act. That nearly every House Democrat is a co-sponsor of the bill was apparently insufficient warning.

Recently passed out of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, the bill actually has nothing to do with what one would reasonably think of as “scientific integrity.” It does nothing to ensure that federal scientists conduct legitimate science.

Instead, the bill is aimed at empowering deep-state scientists for the duration of the Trump administration.

In a nutshell, the bill requires that federal agencies set up formalized grievance procedures for federal scientists who claim they are being silenced by senior bureaucrats and political appointees.

Under the bill, the filing of a grievance would start a process that not only disseminates the underlying “science” to the public regardless of its merits, but also guarantees dramatic headlines of censorship and persecution.

Such claims of censorship are not new, but they’ve been greatly exaggerated.

Followers of the climate wars will recall, for example, during the Bush administration when NASA gadfly James Hansen ludicrously claimed the Bush administration tried to silence him. The truth is that Hansen had been talking to anyone who would listen to him, without any government interference.

Of course, the government has every right to rein in faulty, ideologically-driven science when it occurs. This year, for instance, the White House blocked a State Department intelligence employee from testifying about climate change and national security.

The media was appalled, but they conveniently overlooked the fact that a prominent scientist on the National Security Council staff had fact-checked the State Department employee’s testimony and found it in error.

Such oversight is important. The Scientific Integrity Act, however, would basically make it illegal for federal agencies to exert any control over the scientists that work for them.

The House Science Committee’s ranking member, Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., succeeded in mildly amending the bill so that “aggrieved” federal scientists can’t go straight to the media, but instead would have to follow agency procedures in doing so.

Having accomplished little, Lucas then rolled over and said, “With the adoption of my amendment, I will support passage of the bill and encourage all my colleagues to do so.”

Lucas and five other Republicans joined Democrats in voting for the bill.

House Democrats, of course, don’t need the support of Republicans to pass bills out of committee and bring them to the floor. But Lucas and the other Republicans he convinced to support him now make the bill “bipartisan.”

Besides aiding and abetting the Resistance against the Trump administration—which is supposed to be in charge of federal employees—the bill also allows Democrats to pose as the party of federal scientific integrity.

This does not comport with reality.

The Environmental Protection Agency has protected faulty science in the past. For example, during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years, the EPA allowed taxpayer-funded scientists to hide scientific data on air quality research from Congress and independent scientists.

This data was then used by the Obama administration in its junk science-fueled war on coal, the principal cause of the coal industry losing about 94% of its market value between 2011 and 2016.

During the three previous Congresses, Republicans passed (with no Democratic support) a bill that would have prohibited the EPA from using such “secret science” as the basis for regulation. But without a filibuster-proof majority, they couldn’t pass the bill out of the Senate.

Since passing such a bill is hopeless for now, the Trump administration is trying to ban the use of secret science through an EPA executive action. But Democrats are again opposing the effort.

While House Science Committee Chair Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas, acknowledges that the proposed rule would require the EPA to “rely only on scientific studies that are reproducible from the data that is publicly released,” she nonetheless called the bill an “insidious” effort to “cripple” the EPA.

Inevitably, the science put out by the EPA and other agencies is going to be politicized. The goal should be to have a process that allows for both free scientific inquiry and proper oversight. The fact is there are some rogue, ideologically-driven scientists in the government who need to be kept in check.

If Republicans are going to support something called the “Scientific Integrity Act,” they should ensure that such a bill makes at least some actual progress toward that goal. This bill falls way short.

SOURCE

The IPCC contradicts the Climate Emergency

Here is a recent screaming statement of the supposed climate change emergency: “Trump’s greatest dereliction of duty – – his disgraceful denial of climate change” in the Washington Post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/11/05/trumps-greatest-dereliction-duty-his-disgraceful-denial-climate-change/

This alarmist diatribe says: “At a time when the international scientific community has concluded that we have 11 years to avert the worst of climate change, Trump and his Republican allies are working to intensify the threat, not deter it. A more egregious dereliction of duty is impossible to imagine. Trump’s denial mirrors the story of Nero fiddling while Rome burns. Like Nero, Trump is helping set the flames. Democrats are raising the alarm. The contrast cannot be clearer.”

Here is the wildly false claim: “At a time when the international scientific community has concluded that we have 11 years to avert the worst of climate change…” This claim occurs repeatedly in emergency declarations.

This false claim refers to the IPCC SR15 report issued in October 2018. What the IPCC really said was we have the 12 years until 2030 to prevent the small difference in impact between 1.5 degrees of total warming and 2.0 degrees. With one degree already done this is just the difference between 0.5 degrees of new warming and 1.0 degrees. The question only came up because both targets are mentioned in the Paris Accord. The question thus arises, what difference this difference makes?

According to the IPCC this difference in impact is very small. It is certainly not “the worst of climate change” as the Post and other alarmists repeatedly claim.

Proponents of the climate emergency scare often cite last year’s IPCC SR15 report as their scientific basis, but it is no such thing. The widely proclaimed 12 year deadline is just for holding warming to 1.5 degrees, which the IPCC says is almost impossible. The IPCC numbers also say that exceeding that warming is in no way catastrophic. The difference between the impact of 1.5 degrees of total warming (just 0.5 degrees of new warming) and 2.0 degrees is tiny. Thus, the IPCC report actually contradicts the unfounded claim of a climate emergency.

Here is an example from the SR15 Summary for Policy Makers: “Temperature extremes on land are projected to warm more than GMST: extreme hot days in mid-latitudes warm by up to about 3°C at global warming of 1.5°C and about 4°C at 2°C, and extreme cold nights in high latitudes warm by up to about 4.5°C at 1.5°C and about 6°C at 2°C.”

Extreme hot days, which are uncommon to begin with, warm by up to about just one degree going from 1.5 degrees to 2.0 degrees of total warming. This is certainly not an emergency. It is probably not even detectable due to natural variability.

Note that the 3 degrees of hot weather warming at 1.5 degrees of total global warming and the 4 degrees at 2 degrees both include the one degree that is supposed to have already happened. Presumably, something like half of this impact has already occurred, so that is not part of the future impact emergency issue.

In short we are talking about just a tiny amount of impact as being the difference between 1.5 and 2.0 degrees of total warming. There is simply no basis for declaring an emergency in these IPCC numbers. There is nothing catastrophic in going to 2.0 degrees of warming instead of 1.5 degrees.

Note too that extreme cold nights warm even more, which is arguably a good thing. Given that extreme cold is reportedly more dangerous than extreme heat, going to 2.0 degrees might even be net beneficial. Richard Tol’s integrated assessment model actually says this.

The proponents of the scary emergency need to be called out on this contradiction. No IPCC science supports the climate emergency. What the proponents of climate emergency are calling for is all cost with no benefit.

The emergency is a fallacy.

SOURCE

Australia: Blackouts risk to force states’ hand on coal

Blackouts particularly likely in "Green" Victoria

Energy Minister Angus Taylor will demand tougher energy reliability standards in a move that could trigger legal obligations on major retailers in some states, including Victoria, to source more power from coal, gas and hydro.

The intervention comes with the market regulator already warning of blackouts this summer in Victoria, which is under pressure to meet the current standard and will likely be forced to again seek emergency reserves during periods of high demand, with 1.3 million households forecast to be at risk of power outages.

Mr Taylor told The Australian that he would be asking for agreement on the tougher standards at a Council of Australian Governments meeting of his state and territory counterparts on Friday.

Victoria, which has placed a strong focus on renewables, has said it would agree to revised standards but wants to include a strategic reserve. The federal government claims this would risk pushing up prices.

Mr Taylor said the current reliability standard was too weak.

According to the Australian Energy Market Operator, under a revised standard Victoria would have a capacity shortfall of more than 435MW — the equivalent of a new gas-fired power plant — triggering a mechanism called the retail reliability obligation (RRO), which requires retail electricity companies to hold contracts or invest in generation to maintain reliability. South Australia is also likely to suffer supply issues this summer although it has moved to increase gas generation following statewide blackouts in 2017.

“As an energy minister with a strong focus on reliability and the price impacts of a shortage of reliable generation, I can tell you my tolerance is tested,” Mr Taylor will say in a speech to an energy summit in Sydney on Tuesday.

“Over the last year, my view has hardened. My view is that we haven’t got the reliability standard right. The system inherently accepts too much risk and relies on too many contingencies.

“In addition, given shortages in supply in many states at crucial times, well-targeted supply should reduce prices. I think we need to strengthen the standards, and quite likely trigger the RRO in a number of jurisdictions. In a world of limited resources, it is clear that Victoria is a state that needs the most reliable investment.

“SA has obviously had challenges but is now on track to recovery, and we’re seeing that in their falling prices. It is also clear that NSW, if not managed properly, could have gone down the wrong path.”

Mr Taylor repeated his claims that the problem was “starkest in Victoria” and said its shortfalls could have national flow-on effects.

He accused Victoria of seeking to blame others for its problems and said the Andrews Labor government had failed to replace ageing infrastructure and address price and reliability issues.

The AEMO had already warned that Victoria was not expected to meet reliability standard this summer. “Most announced new-generation projects are variable renewable energy generators, which often do not generate at full capacity during peak demand or may be positioned in a congested part of the network,” it said. “While providing significant extra energy during many hours of the year, these projects are forecast to only make a limited contribution to meeting demand during peak hours.”

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 November, 2019

The Electric Car Fantasy

Hilariously unmentioned is that in a NY winter you will be able to drive electric cars only a small distance. Winter heating gulps a huge amount of battery power, leaving a much reduced capacity to move the car. So unless you have a very short commute, you will need a combustion car to get to work in winter. Fun! A two car family is going to have a new meaning

And let me not mention congestion at charging stations. Are you looking forward to waiting for half and hour while the guy in front of you charges up?

Greenie ideas are unbelievably dumb

Senator Chuck Schumer’s ambitious proposal bucks basic economics—and science.

New York Senator Chuck Schumer has promised that if Democrats win the Senate in 2020, they’ll pass a law requiring that every car in America be electric by 2040. Chinese policymakers must be celebrating, because China makes the majority of the world’s batteries and has the most new battery factories under construction.

The Chinese will need someone to buy all those batteries. This past summer, when China abandoned subsidies for electric vehicles (EVs), sales collapsed. China’s plan now is to require automakers to produce EVs, but at a paltry 3 percent to 4 percent of output. Perhaps Beijing will ultimately increase the allocation, but truly revolutionary technologies never require governments to order their adoption. As for Schumer’s plan, it will fail on every front—including saving China’s battery industry.

Let’s start with what consumers want. SUVs and pickups now account for 70 percent of all vehicles purchased. Most people, it seems, like big vehicles. The minority who buy purely for economy choose small cars with gasoline engines. This option, by the way, puts less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than a Tesla.

Consumers are price-sensitive in every category, a reality that politicians ignore at their peril. Batteries add about $12,000 to the cost of small and midsize cars. That’s meaningful for all consumers but the 1 percent. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, automobiles constitute the most expensive category of consumables for the average household, costing twice that of health care. (Housing is the biggest expense, but that’s not a consumable.) A recent McKinsey analysis suggests that automakers could “decontent” EVs to cut costs—that is, take out the extra features that every salesman knows are what sells cars.

Setting aside details like cost and features, the key claim is that widespread use of EVs will reduce global carbon-dioxide emissions—except that it won’t, at least not meaningfully. First, it bears noting that regardless of Washington’s creative accounting, the all-EV-option would entail at least a $2 trillion cost to America’s economy, just in higher car costs. Then, simple arithmetic shows that this option wouldn’t even eliminate 8 percent of world oil demand. And the impact on global carbon-dioxide emissions would be even smaller.

Why? It takes energy—the equivalent of 80 to 300 barrels of oil—to fabricate a battery that can hold energy equal to one barrel. Thus, energy used to make batteries brings a carbon “debt” to EVs which, depending on where the factories are located, greatly diminishes, or even cancels out, emissions saved by not burning oil.

None of this changes the fact that, for the first time in a century, EVs are exciting options for niche markets. Credit for that goes to the three scientists who received the 2019 Nobel Prize in chemistry for inventing the lithium battery—and to Elon Musk.

If Teslas weren’t well-designed and appealing, even subsidies wouldn’t have enticed well-heeled buyers. Nor would every automaker be trying to compete. But for perspective on sales adoption in niche markets: even Tesla’s impressive cumulative total of over 500,000 sold in the six years after its introduction was eclipsed by the Ford Mustang, selling 2.5 million in its first six years.

The reality: there’s no stroke-of-a-pen way to change energy use radically for mainstream cars, 100 million of which are purchased every six years in America. And, as the International Energy Agency notes, efficiency improvements expected for combustion engines will save 300 percent more global energy than will all the EVs forecast to be on roads by 2040.

Senator Schumer is looking for a transportation revolution in all the wrong places. New York City was the epicenter of history’s last mobility revolution, when citizens embraced the automobile, leaving behind the era of filthy streets congested with inconvenient and expensive horses and a fatality rate tenfold higher than for car passengers today. Changing the fuel used by today’s cars is no more revolutionary than changing the type and source of horse feed 120 years ago.

For a real energy revolution, policymakers should join Bill Gates in calling for the only viable path to a radically different future: much more research in the basic sciences. That’ll require different budget priorities, as well as patience. Someday a chemist or physicist may discover, for example, a way to make a low-cost room-temperature superconductor. That would really change the world. Such a discovery would mean that electrons could be poured into a meta-barrel as easily as oil is poured into a steel one. Meantime, if today’s electric cars were genuinely compelling, consumers wouldn’t have to be ordered to buy them.

SOURCE

Coastal NC storm shows fragility of solar farms

Solar goons and their bought-and-paid-for politicians (like Bob Steinburg and Bobby Hanig) like to tell you there’s nothing to fear from all these state-subsidized solar farms being erected all over the countryside. A little poking-around by Currituck County commissioner Paul Beaumont is telling us otherwise.   Here is Beaumont’s personal testimony to his county board colleagues which was supplied to The Haymaker:

Wednesday morning, September 18th, I was asked to come out and meet with a concerned resident neighboring the Grandy, EcoPlex Solar Electric Plant. The resident called because workers at the facility were wearing masks over their faces and she was concerned about her family’s health. After arriving, an additional two neighbors joined us. Their concerns consisted of:

How the facility had stood up to the winds during hurricane Dorian.

How flooded the site and the surrounding lots became, that the drainage was worse than before construction.

One neighbor had experienced electric arcing when using a sump pump. She was concerned that the damaged panels, which were lying in standing water, were electrifying the water.

Based upon the video showing the destruction of a section of panels during the storm, I called Michael Ali, (PE) in the State Construction Office. During the conversation I informed him of the damage suffered in Grandy. He told me that this was the first significant test of a solar plant during a hurricane in the coastal region and was alarmed at the damage I described, despite winds significantly less than “designed” wind load certification.

Thursday morning, September 19th, I requested that I be able to visit site to better understand how the damage was caused, and the extent the damage. I asked Ben if it would be possible to go out with Eric Weatherly and Bill News which occurred later that day.

In examining the damage, it appeared as though every failure of frame and panel was caused by the loss of the fasteners holding the system together. Nuts, washers, and bolts were frequently found by the failed components. The panels are attached by only four bolts; where two fell of, the remaining two were torn from the frame as the panels departed.

As of Friday, EcoPlex was waiting on the insurance company prior to securing the damaged sections or reinforcing the remaining sections; I’ve been told every time the wind blows, panel sections bang together.

Conclusions

Neither Eric Weatherly nor Bill News are qualified to contradict the obviously flawed certification by the EcoPlex Professional Engineer (nor permitted statutorily). Although the County has requested analysis and revised engineering, currently they may not be under a date of completion. EcoPlex is still permitted to install solar panels on the current frame system. For consideration of the Board of Commissioners:

Should a “Stop Work” be issued considering the design failed during significantly less winds than the 120/150 mph the system was “certified” able to withstand?

Should we require independent engineering analysis of the proposed solution as a second opinion?

Should a date be set for the revised engineering input to the county?

Should the Board consider a “Field Trip”?

There is a strong possibility the identical design was used in Shawboro.

SOURCE

NY State blows smoke to hide wind costs

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s energy agency issued a stern correction to an October 24 blog post in this space that said subsidies for offshore wind developers could cost ratepayers more than $6 billion.

NYSERDA, the state Energy Research and Development Authority, said my calculations (which were based on NYSERDA’s own data) were “incorrect and misleading.”

So I went back and double-checked. In one respect, I did make a mistake, explained below—but not in reaching the $6 billion estimate. In fact, the final price tag could climb even higher.

Background

First, some basics: Wind turbines set for construction off Long Island and New York City can’t operate profitably under present market conditions, so the state must subsidize their installation and operation. In the case of two wind projects announced by Governor Cuomo in July, the subsidies will be collected by public utilities from ratepayers across the state—a form of indirect taxation.

The turbine operators will sell electricity (at a loss) into New York’s wholesale market. Over a 25-year period beginning around 2024, the difference between their revenues and a higher rate guaranteed by NYSERDA will be made up with money collected through “credits” that utilities must buy. The utilities will then charge higher rates to recoup that cost.

So what will this cost ratepayers? The wind projects were first announced months ago, but it wasn’t until last month that we got a glimpse of more specifics in a report filed by NYSERDA with the state Public Service Commission.

Based on the numbers in that report, my blog post included the following:

State-of-the-art turbines … have capacity factors greater than 60 percent. The contracts with Empire and Sunrise appear to acknowledge as much, since NYSERDA has agreed to subsidize up to 9.9 million MWh per year—reflecting capacity factors averaging 66.4 percent. In that case, at $25.14 per MWh, the contracts now “valued” at $2.2 billion in 2018 dollars would cost ratepayers $6.2 billion over 25 years.

Within hours of the blog post, NYSERDA issued (to a single journalist, not the general public) the following unsigned statement:

"The Empire Center’s calculations are incorrect and misleading. In back-calculating the annual megawatt hours generated by the projects, Girardin confused real and nominal values to create erroneous ratepayer impact metrics. NYSERDA’s calculations did in fact utilize the generation from the Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind projects as bid – with an approximate 50 percent capacity factor, as noted in the OREC agreements themselves appended to the Phase 1 Report. NYSERDA used an outlook of wholesale energy and capacity prices to calculate the expected OREC prices, resulting in an average OREC cost of $25.14 per megawatt hour (2018 real dollars). The estimated total OREC contract value, in 2018 real dollars, is $1.2 billion and $1.0 billion for Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind, respectively.

My mistake: NYSERDA said the “contract value” of the two deals totaled $2.2 billion, and I assumed that was the total cost of subsidies. I wrote that such a price-tag wasn’t consistent with other project figures, and said NYSERDA had likely low-balled the subsidies by underestimating how many megawatt-hours it would subsidize.

That assumption was wrong, however, because NYSERDA never intended the “contract value” to represent how much New Yorkers would pay in subsidies (in today’s money). The agency used an accounting technique to put a “value” on the contracts as though they were an investment. This valuation used a 6.55 percent “discount rate,” which makes numbers look considerably smaller in future years than just adjusting them for expected inflation.

For example, applying NYSERDA’s 6.55 percent discount rate, a 2048 dollar will have dwindled in value to the equivalent of about 15 cents in today’s terms. But assuming average consumer price inflation of 2 percent, which is the Federal Reserve’s target level, a dollar in 2048 will be worth about 55 cents in today’s terms. Applying a discount rate, instead of adjusting for inflation, made the subsidies look considerably smaller.

So for the purpose of figuring out what New Yorkers will actually have to pay, the “contract values” are useless because we don’t know how much subsidy they can expect to pay in each year. NYSERDA has assured developers they’ll get up to $29 billion, in nominal dollars, over the life of the contracts. There is, to say the least, a lot of uncertainty baked into these deals, which will still have New Yorkers paying subsidies beyond Andrew Cuomo’s 90th birthday.

In short, the mistake was in trying to deconstruct NYSERDA’s $2.2 billion figure: it was never meant to represent a serious cost estimate, but to deliberately mislead.

Digging deeper

For anyone interested in calculating the actual cost impact of the wind turbine projects, the most substantive number in NYSERDA’s filing was a $25.14 “average” subsidy, in what the NYSERDA filing labeled “2018 dollars,” for every megawatt-hour generated over the life of the 25-year deals. Taken together with the 9.9 million megawatt-hours maximum generation NYSERDA has agreed to pay for each year, that puts the total ratepayer subsidies at up to $6.2 billion in “2018 dollars”—which presumably means an inflation-adjusted value.

Even this number relies on long-term energy market forecasts and on assumptions about how much energy NYSERDA expects to buy from each developer in each year. NYSERDA hasn’t released details of those forecasts and assumptions. Thus the per-megawatt-hour average subsidy could be even higher than $25.14.

So why does NYSERDA need to conceal the actual price-tag of these projects?

Because, for one thing, the agency has put New Yorkers on the hook for more money than it publicly acknowledges. And because NYSERDA has good reason to conceal what is shaping up to be a very bad deal.

State blew up wind costs

The Cuomo administration’s approach to offshore wind has been primarily driven by political considerations. Offshore wind has a cult-like following in certain environmentalist circles, and the state zeroed in on it as a solution instead of weighing it alongside other substantive mechanisms for reducing carbon emissions (such as a carbon tax or hydroelectric power).

The bidding process for subsidies was completed earlier this year, in a seemingly rushed manner, before the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management could let additional companies get leases directly off New York’s coast. In fact, the Cuomo administration has vocally opposed a federal plan to allow turbines off the Hamptons in Suffolk County, where they could potentially be built at a lower cost than those now set to get state subsidies.

Cuomo’s stance artificially shrank the pool of bidders, and left just four developers able to submit bids. Only one (Empire Wind) actually proposing anything in New York waters—even as several other companies were asking the feds for permission to build offshore the Empire State.

And for those that could compete, the state artificially hiked their costs: Governor Cuomo last summer pledged to force developers to pay union rates during the construction of these and other renewable energy projects. He also, unlawfully, coerced bidders into steering work to certain construction unions that had endorsed his re-election last fall. These steps have likely driven up the project costs, and the subsidies needed, considerably.

The subsidy contracts themselves, with 25-year terms, are curiously long, considering the rhetoric from offshore wind proponents about how the industry will eventually operate without subsidies. New Jersey and Maryland, for instance, gave developers 20-year deals, meaning they envision profitable operation without subsidies during several years when New York ratepayers will still be subsidizing ours.

And finally, NYSERDA (and by extension, ratepayers) are assuming tremendous risk under these contracts. If electricity prices end up lower than NYSERDA expects, the subsidies (for which more than half the cost will be borne by people living north of New York City) will have to be larger. At the same time, the Cuomo administration may even be counting on electricity prices to rise downstate and decrease the need to subsidize the wind projects—which is yet another reason why NYSERDA should, but won’t, be more transparent about these deals.

SOURCE

Pseudo science by pseudo scientists

It’s not often that an opinion piece makes headlines around the world. But last week, a ‘viewpoint’ article in the science journal Bioscience did just that. ‘World scientists’ warning of a climate emergency’ featured the grandiose byline ‘William J Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Thomas M Newsome, Phoebe Barnard, William R Moomaw, and 11,258 scientist signatories from 153 countries’. While the intent may have been to give the impression that the scientific community had come together to sound the alarm, the article actually seems to demonstrate that there is no ‘climate emergency’ at all.

Much fun has been had at the expense of the authors – members of the self-proclaimed Alliance of World Scientists – and their puffed-up claims because it has been shown to be pretty easy to put fake names on the list, including ‘Micky Mouse’ (sic) from the ‘Micky Mouse Institute for the Blind, Namibia’. The headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore, also makes a guest appearance. The list of signatories was withdrawn at one point to allow for a cull of obviously made-up names.

But such leg-pulling aside, the real problem was that the definition of ‘scientist’ was so broad as to be pretty much meaningless. This was not just a list of experienced academic researchers in climate science and its associated fields — it also included biologists, geographers, social scientists, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and others.

Of course, anyone should have the right to declare their concerns about climate change or any other issue. But the implication of the article, as amplified through the media coverage of it, is that these authors and signatories speak with authority. They are the experts, we are the numpties, therefore we should all just shut up and pay attention to every pearl of their wisdom. In truth, the vast majority of the signatories are not experts on the issue of climate change, never mind having the authority to tell the rest of us what we should do about it.

More strangely, the article seems to demonstrate the opposite of what the authors claim. If we are living in a ‘climate emergency’, what would that look like? Perhaps it would be a state in which living standards plummet, food supplies run short and we live a miserable existence, if we even survive at all. So what does the article tell us?

The article helpfully provides us with a myriad of different graphs – what the authors call ‘vital signs’ – showing the changes going on over the past four decades. Human population is shooting up (graph 1a), but birth rates have fallen sharply (graph 1b). That means that people are living longer lives than before. We’re farming more livestock (graph 1c), presumably because we’re eating more meat (graph 1d). World GDP is rising by 80.5 per cent each decade (graph 1e). This all sounds incredibly good to me, but the eco-worrying authors call these changes ‘profoundly troubling’.

Global forest cover is down, says graph 1f, but the authors also admit that: ‘Forest gain is not involved in the calculation of tree cover loss.’ They counted the trees lost, but not the ones gained. Data compiled by the World Bank suggests the total area of land covered by forest worldwide has fallen from 31.6 per cent in 1990 to 30.7 per cent in 2016 – a fall of less than one percentage point in 26 years. Even the authors of the Bioscience study have to admit that the rate of loss of the Amazon rainforest has fallen sharply since the early 2000s, though it has accelerated a little recently.

To summarise, we have a bit less forest than before and the decline of the Amazon rainforest, with its considerable biodiversity, has slowed down a lot. Not a perfect picture, but hardly worthy of being called an ‘emergency’.

Energy consumption has risen sharply, which is surely good news for poorer people, but not much of it is wind or solar power (graph 1h). The situation with air travel (graph 1i) is truly exciting, with the number of passengers carried by plane rising by over 64 per cent per decade. Wow! (Again, this is one of those ‘profoundly troubling’ trends, apparently.) Greenhouse-gas emissions are rising, of course, but that seems a price worth paying for wealthier and healthier lives – especially when global temperature has risen by just 0.183 degrees Celsius per decade over the past 40 years (graph 2d).

Other graphs show that there has been some melting of ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic, though simply putting this down to rising global temperatures is tricky. Ocean ‘acidity’ is increasing, but what that really means is that the oceans are slightly less alkaline than before. The change is not huge at all.

Overall, it is clear that the world is changing. It is different to the way it was before. This raises some problems. But in terms of human welfare, the changes of the past 40 years represent the greatest, fastest leap forward in history.

What really gives the game away is the authors’ mini-manifesto for what we should do about all of this: stop using so much energy, leave fossil fuels in the ground and transfer resources from the greedy developed world to the developing world. They also say we should restore ecosystems (even when they are constantly changing anyway), eat mostly plant-based foods, reorganise the economy away from GDP growth, and control population. This, they claim, ‘promises far greater human wellbeing than does business as usual’.

In truth, most of these ideas are reactionary, a way to ensure the continuation and exacerbation of poverty. Such claims are an insult to the wonderful and profound achievements of science and human ingenuity in increasing human knowledge and improving lives across the world. These so-called scientists should stop taking the name of science in vain.

SOURCE

Chemicals in plastic could be harming our health

Groan! This old scare has so often been debunked in the past that it is a pain to see it still popping up. Briefly, the toxicity is in the dose and the dose people are getting of these two compounds is regularly shown as too low to be harmful

Plastic is everywhere. We use it to carry our food, eat with, we drink out of it, buy our cosmetics in it and even cook with it.

While Australians have embraced plastic and its many uses, there is growing concern about what it’s actually doing to our bodies.

News.com.au has launched its series What a Waste to coincide with Planet Ark’s National Recycling Week, highlighting the impact single-use plastics have on the environment and encouraging readers to reduce their personal waste.

In September, there was a warning about the use of plastic kitchen utensils.

The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, which advises the German Government on issues related to product, chemical and food safety, released an advisory that recommended people limit the exposure of their polyamide utensils when dealing with hot food.

It said components called oligomers from plastic cooking spoons, spatulas and whisks could migrate from into food and be eaten.

While these utensils have not been proven to have negative health impacts on humans, the organisation said at high doses the compounds could cause adverse effects in the liver and thyroid.

It recommended consumers keep their utensil’s contact with food as brief as possible, especially at high temperatures above 70C.

There is also growing evidence on the impact of compounds found in plastics on fertility.

Dr Mark Green is a lecturer in reproductive biology and is studying the impacts of certain chemicals on people’s fertility.

He told news.com.au that chemicals like Bisphenol A (BPA), which is used to make some types of plastics, is one of the most studied endocrine disrupting substances.

BPA can be found in takeaway containers, plastic bottles, the lining of takeaway coffee cups as well as polycarbonate (hard) plastics such as baby bottles.

It’s also used in the lining of cans to stop the food coming into contact with the metal, and is even found on the shiny coating of cash register receipts.

BPA is so common, about 95 per cent of people have detectable levels in their urine.

Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) has decided it does not pose a significant human health risk for any age group, despite finding BPA at very low concentrations in some foodstuffs.

Other countries have taken a different stance. France has banned it and the European Union has removed its use in baby bottles.

The Federal Government did announce a voluntary phase-out of baby bottles containing BPA in 2010.

Dr Green said scientists had so far found a “strong correlation” between BPA and obesity, and recent research also suggests it increases people’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

There’s also evidence in fertility clinics that it may affects the number of eggs a woman produces, and there’s an increasing link to miscarriage.

Compounds such as BPA are considered endocrine disrupters and can “mimic” oestrogen, which impacts people’s hormones.

“We have gained a lot of knowledge and data on the effects of BPA from animal studies” Dr Green said.

“But we are never going to run a human study in which we expose people to BPA, as we know how harmful it is, which is why it’s hard to show causality, hence we can only show association.”

Phthalates are another class of chemicals for which there is a growing body of evidence to support detrimental effects on our health. These are used in soft plastic fishing lures, shower curtains, vinyl upholstery, adhesives, floor tiles, food containers and sex toys made of so-called jelly rubber.

It’s also an endocrine disrupter that may impact male fertility, including semen quality and the quantity of damaged DNA in sperm.

Dr Green said a chemical’s impact on the body might vary depending on how long people were exposed to it and how long it’s been in their system.

“It’s very hard to measure many of the chemicals that have effects on our endocrine systems,” he said. “Generally these can be at low levels in the environment but these levels are often high enough to have an effect on our bodies.”

Other factors such as exercise and poor diet could also influence people’s health.

“This area is quite hard to work in because we often study the effects of just one compound at a time, but we live in a soup of multiple environmental pollutants,” he said.

This is one reason why studies in different areas sometimes produce different results, as different compounds could be working with or against each other.

“If there is a mixture of compounds, it could be about how they work together to have a particular effect on the body and people’s health.”

Dr Green said these chemicals were so pervasive in our surroundings it was hard to avoid them, however he recommended people minimise their contact with plastic, especially if they were trying to conceive.

There are many simple ways people can easily reduce people’s exposure.

For example, people should avoid drinking or eating food out of soft plastic containers. This includes takeaway containers and especially plastic bottles, which he describes as “lethal if left to heat up in a car”.

“You are basically drinking water and a sizeable dose of BPA,” he said.

“Use glass or aluminium drink bottles; they are more sustainable.

“With a takeaway coffee cup, the lining is BPA, not to mention the plastic in the lid.”

However, looking for plastic products that are “BPA free” may not be safer as some manufacturers have begun replacing BPA with other similar chemicals that could be just as bad for us.

Avoiding plastic when possible is safer, while also being better for the environment.

“There are a lot of common messages around recycling or sustainability, but there is also the added benefit that it’s better for your health,” Dr Green said.

“It’s better for the environment and better for us, so why not do it?”

SOURCE

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

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

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18 November, 2019

Italy: Venice ‘on its knees’ after second-worst flood ever recorded

The worst flooding in Venice in more than 50 years prompted calls Wednesday to better protect the historic city from rising sea levels as officials calculated hundreds of millions of euros in damage.

The water reached 1.87 meters (6.14 feet) above average sea level Tuesday, the second-highest level ever recorded in the city and just 7 centimeters (2½ inches) lower than the historic 1966 flood. Another wave of exceptionally high water followed Wednesday.

The flooding was caused by southerly winds that pushed a high tide, exacerbated a full moon, into the city.

Rising sea levels because of climate change coupled with Venice’s well-documented sinking make the city built amid a system of canals particularly vulnerable. The sea level in Venice is 10 centimeters (4 inches) higher than it was 50 years ago, according to the city’s tide office.

Brugnaro blamed climate change for the “dramatic situation” and called for a speedy completion of a long-delayed project to construct offshore barriers.

Called “Moses,” the moveable undersea barriers are meant to limit flooding. But the project, which has been opposed by environmentalists concerned about damaging the delicate lagoon ecosystem, has been delayed by cost overruns and corruption scandals, with no launch date in site.

Across the Adriatic Sea, an intense storm with powerful winds caused floods in towns in Croatia and Slovenia.

In the Croatian town of Split, authorities said the flooding submerged the basement area of the Roman-era Diocletian’s Palace, where emergency crews battled to pump out the water.

Hydrographic Institute Croatia said sea levels on Wednesday in Split and Ploce were the highest since 1955, when monitoring started.

SOURCE

Last year, global warming made Venice canals run dry

It's versatile stuff, that global warming

Venice's iconic waterways have run dry after no rain has fallen in weeks. A combination of high atmospheric pressure in the upper Adriatic, cold weather and low tides left the famous canals dry.

Water levels have been reported to be up to 60cm lower than normal levels.

The retreating waters mean gondolas and water taxis have been unable to navigate the city’s elegant canals.

It is the second year in a row that Venice's canals have been left without water despite being prone to heavy flooding several times a year.

A mix of high pressure, low rainful and low tides that are common this time of year have cause Veince to run dry
The Venice canals are running 70 cm below it's normal water level

The low water levels in Venice has caused transport and navigation problems

Studies have indicated the city is sinking at a rate of 1-2mm a year.

In 2015 water levels were as much as 28 inches below normal levels.

Tourists were shocked by the lack of water in the famous city.

Venice’s record low was set in 1934, when the tide was four feet below average.

SOURCE

Steel and concrete are naughty too

“DANGER. No unauthorized entry. Hot rolling in progress.” If anything, the sign beneath the dirty hunk of industrial machinery underplays things. When the 11-tonne slab of metal I’ve been watching emerges from the furnace, heated to 1300°C, it glows incandescent white. Then it zips along a conveyor belt, hissing and steaming as it is cooled by water jets, before a line of rolling cylinders press it into the final product: a sheet of gleaming steel.

For all that we live in the digital age, we still rely on hot and dirty processes like this to construct our cities, homes and vehicles. Walking around the steelworks in Newport, UK, I get a sense of the immense energy required – and this is only the stage at which the steel is worked. Making it from raw iron ore is even more intensive. In fact, the production of steel and that other construction staple, concrete, accounts for as much as 16 per cent of humanity’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. That is equivalent to the carbon footprint of the US.

In the fight against climate change, heavy industries are the final frontier. Decarbonising transport and energy is the easy part. Steel and concrete are different beasts. It is much harder to produce them without releasing enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. And yet if we want to reach net-zero carbon targets, we can no longer ignore them.

SOURCE

Climategate – The whitewash continues

This month marks the tenth anniversary of Climategate — the biggest scandal in the brief, ignominious history of “climate science”. So naturally, the left-wing media has commemorated the occasion with a series of articles and a documentary which could all have been titled: ‘Move along, nothing to see here.’
The most egregious offender was a BBC4 documentary, Climategate: Science of a Scandal.

This examined the evidence with about the same diligence and objectivity of Stalin’s formal investigations into the massacre of Polish officers by his NKVD at Katyn in 1940 and reached much the same conclusion: the perpetrators were completely innocent.

Not only were they innocent but, furthermore, they were heroic, wronged, and martyrly.

It began with Michael ‘Hockey Stick’ Mann describing his shock and upset on being sent a package of mysterious white powder in the post and went downhill from there.

The take-home points of this shoddy, dishonest propaganda exercise were:

The Climategate scientists were just decent, hardworking, nice professionals doing an honest job

Climategate was a last ditch act of sabotage by a tiny minority of nasty, devious, anti-science climate deniers. A “rearguard assault on climate science” as Mann described it

The document dump was definitely not a leak but a criminal hack — an act of theft against a reputable and blameless scientific institution (the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia)

Any nefarious conclusions reached by sceptics were based on a few cherry-picked emails which they deliberately misrepresented to make them sound worse than they actually were, notably the ‘Hide the Decline’ email.

The Climategate scientists were really nice — oh, did we mention that already?

The Climategate scientists shed tears, real tears, not only at the time but also looking back, ten years on, when remembering how they felt at all those death threats they (allegedly) received from evil, vicious, hateful deniers.

Michael Mann’s ‘Hockey Stick’ chart, far from being just about the most widely discredited artefact in the history of junk science, was in fact an “iconic” image

The notorious Mike’s Nature Trick email was not, in fact, an extremely dodgy and unscientific “apples and oranges” attempt to fudge the results of inconvenient proxy data by splicing on real temperature data. It was – Mann again – “an entirely innocent and appropriate conversation between three scientists”.

Climate science is entirely trustworthy and in no wise did Climategate demonstrate anything to the contrary.

“The modern period was likely the warmest in the last 1,000 years” (Tim Osborn of the CRU). So take that, Medieval Warming Period! Just like Mann’s Hockey Team had always hoped you’ve finally been written out of history…

George Monbiot never wrote this in the Guardian after Climategate: “No-one has been as badly let down by the revelations in the emails as those of us who have championed the science”.

He can’t have done because he appeared on this documentary as one of the star witnesses, explaining how totally undamning and innocuous those emails in fact were.

The Climate Industrial Complex, as we know, operates like a giant tag team. Which is why a compliant media was ready and waiting to give this complacent piece of tosh the favourable attention it didn’t deserve.

Here is Guardian reviewer Lucy Mangan. (I love Lucy: she is my touchstone of wrong. If ever she writes favourably about something — be it the wokefest travesty that is the BBC’s His Dark Materials, or the PC atrocity that is Watchmen — you just know it’s going to suck, big time.)

She begins:

Is it pure arrogance that makes laypeople think they know better than scientists who have spent their lives painstakingly researching an issue? Or a desperate insecurity that makes them unable to stand the respect accorded to experts?

Yes, Lucy. Amateur psychoanalysis of your ideological enemies is so much easier than doing basic journalism, like, say, asking: “Do the claims in this TV documentary stand up?”

Unsurprisingly, Lucy can’t even get her basic facts right.

She dismisses Steve McIntyre, probably the most rigorous and scrupulous investigator of climate science shenanigans, as “Steve McIntyre, who worked in the fossil fuel industry.”

Not quite, but I can understand why young Lucy made this mistake. The documentary heavy-hinted that this was the case by captioning him — in order, of course, to slyly to discredit his testimony — “former minerals exploration executive”.

Here’s a bit more Lucy, just because I think it’s quite helpful to see how the left are busily spinning Climategate:

It is a story we are now depressingly familiar with, and it induces the same incredulous rage. Beyond the trolls, who have their own revolting pathology, who are these people who feel justified to try to undo a life’s work? Who feel able to set themselves up in judgment? What have they added to the sum of human knowledge?

Yeah — denying deniers with their wicked denialism! How dare they criticise such giants of intellect and integrity as Michael Mann and Phil Jones!

Meanwhile, the Evening Standard — a London freesheet read mainly as a last resort by desperate commuters when their mobile phones have run out of juice — went one further, by attempting to discredit one of the true heroes of the Climategate story, the guy who actually broke it in the mainstream media.

The mainstream media ran with the story just ahead of the UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen that December. James Delingpole published a piece in the Daily Telegraph, headed “Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?” — “climategate” being a term he had picked up from an Australian blogger.

Hmm. I like the sound of that Delingpole guy. So much so that I’m going to tell you more about his side of the story in a Climategate special article tomorrow.

Finally, the Financial Times — a rampantly Europhile rag, highly favourable to the crony capitalism which gorges, leech-like, on the Potemkin industry of greenery. So, naturally enough, it too had kind words to say about the BBC’s Climategate whitewash.

Measured, circumspect, cautious, these were unlikely men to be at the heart of a global storm of controversy and invective. Although in a sense, global storms were their métier. 10 years ago, the scientists of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia were accused of withholding and manipulating data after more than a thousand emails were hacked in a malicious attempt to deny their findings on climate change. Police investigating the breach classed it as a Category A crime, as serious as terrorism: the perpetrator was attempting to sway the decisions of nations on an issue of global concern.

The hacker was never caught, but this documentary rounds up other key players to lay out the instructive tale of “Climategate”. It did indeed derail the 15th UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen, convening just a fortnight after the leak. Even more significantly, it sowed doubt in the minds of the public about the reality of global warming. And it all began with a simple, elegant image.

Actually, that claim about Climategate derailing the UN’s Copenhagen conference isn’t true: it’s a misleading claim made by the documentary in order to muddy the waters. In fact, Copenhagen fell to pieces because the Western nations (led by then U.S. President Obama) could not find an accommodation — and vice versa — with the emerging BRIC nations.

Correlation is not causation; anyway, it ought to be obvious that all the delegates at a UN climate conference are fully on board with the environmentalist programme. It’s hardly as though the release of a few emails, however discrediting of the alarmist cause, were ever going to derail the climate gravy train or deter those travelling on it.

At the beginning I mentioned Stalin. I’m going to end with him too by recalling this habit he had of airbrushing inconvenient people and events out of history.

SOURCE

Australia: Sacked Captain Creek fire brigade sits idle as state burns

Bureaucratic nastiness at work. The brigade commander used his own initiative to fight a fire. How Awful! The fact that the fire was defeated does not matter to the fire service top brass. Their control was threatened and their own pathetic power is what really matters to them

While two states burn, most of the 49 volunteer firefighters of the rural brigade at Captain Creek, Queensland, twiddle their thumbs, seething that the well-performed unit was disbanded just when it was needed most.

As he tells the story, first officer John Massurit shakes his head: “Mate, you couldn’t make this up. We are ready, willing and able to go but they have taken away our vehicles, cancelled our membership and deregistered the brigade. It’s an absolute disgrace.”

By rights Mr Massurit’s team should be out there with their weary colleagues, holding the line against the dozens of bushfires that continue to threaten life and property from the tip of Cape York Peninsula to the Shoalhaven region south of Sydney.

But the brigade’s celebrated effort a year ago to help save Agnes Water, on the central Queensland coast, led to a bitter dispute between the outspoken Mr Massurit, 53, and Rural Fire Service command. It came to a head when its headquarters at Captain Creek was padlocked on November 2.

Fourteen homes have gone up in the Cobraball blaze near Yeppoon, less than two hours away. How sorely the RFS could use the skills and experience languishing at Captain Creek.

Venting her frustration, veteran firefighter Gail Jacobsen, 58, said she was so disgusted she would never again serve in the RFS after more than 20 years as a volunteer: “We are not perfect but we are bloody good at what we do. I think their problem is that John is loud. He is very passionate. He says what he thinks and I don’t think they like it.”

The brigade’s second officer, Jim Greer, 57, said the RFS had been so determined to drive out Mr Massurit it was prepared to sacrifice the rest of the unit.

“Why they would want to get rid of John Massurit, I have got no idea. He knows more about bushfires than those pencil-pushers ever will,” he said.

The Queensland Fire and Emergency Services command overseeing the RFS is standing its ground, insisting on Friday that an audit of the brigade had revealed “poor behaviour, misuse of brigade equipment and poor financial management”.

The unit was deregistered because it could no longer provide “an effective, safe and sustainable fire and emergency service response”, QFES said.

The finding was rejected by Mr Massurit and his supporters at Captain Creek, a hamlet of 100.

At the height of the Agnes Water drama a bulldozer broke down, leaving its driver and a two-person repair crew stranded in the path of the flames. Mr Massurit damaged an RFS 4WD while getting to them. He then boarded a QFES chopper to direct waterbombing operations credited with halting the fire before it could break into Agnes Water.

Last December, Mr Massurit was advised by QFES that he faced a long list of misconduct allegations including causing unnecessary damage to an RFS vehicle, improperly commandeering a helicopter, lighting unauthorised fires for backburning, unnecessarily calling in “expensive” aerial tankers and historic misuse of the brigade’s finances.

He was disqualified from his leadership role as first officer. Eventually, most of the adverse claims were downgraded or dropped. After Mr Massurit challenged the fairness of the QFES process, independent workplace investigators reported in July that only three allegations had been sustained: the vehicle damage, that he “went up in an operational helicopter without appropriate authority” and that he failed to comply with a direction to leave a fire ground for fatigue management, namely his own property.

On November 2 a site meeting of the brigade’s angry members was told by a delegation of brass headed by QFES Acting Assistant Commissioner Tony Johnstone that they were being disbanded.

Police and other personnel were waiting around the corner to clear out the shed and drive away the two fire trucks. The gates were then locked.

Mr Massurit said he still had not received an explanation for the brigade’s axing at such a critical juncture, an issue taken up by Liberal National Party MP Stephen Bennett in state parliament and directly with Emergency Services Minister Craig Crawford and the QFES leadership.

Mr Crawford said he had been assured by QFES that neighbouring brigades had been reinforced to cover Captain Creek. A spokesman for the agency said former members could apply to join other units in the area.

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

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

17 November, 2019

SUVs in the gun again: Soaring demand for SUVs is cancelling out the "benefits" of electric cars

The increasing demand for sports utility vehicles is eliminating the emissions savings made by those who have switched to electric cars, the global energy watchdog has warned.

There has been a sixfold increase in SUVs since 2010, from 35 million to 200 million, and they now account for 40 per cent of new car sales, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

It said that nearly all manufacturers had increased advertising of the cars because they tended to provide higher profit margins.

The share of motor sales in Britain taken by SUVs rose from 21 per cent in 2014 to 39 per cent last year, according to separate analysis of industry data by the green group Transport & Environment. Four of Britain’s top ten best-selling cars last month were SUVs — the Nissan Qashqai, Ford Kuga, Kia Sportage and Range Rover Evoque.

SUVs consume 25 per cent more fuel per mile than a medium-sized car because of additional weight and poorer aerodynamics. They were responsible for all of the growth in oil demand, of 3.3 million barrels a day, from passenger cars between 2010 and 2018, with total fuel consumption from other types of car falling slightly, the agency said.

If the sales trend continued, SUVs would be responsible for an additional two million barrels of oil a day by 2040, offsetting the savings from nearly 150 million electric cars. The IEA said the car industry planned to offer 350 electric models by 2025 but they would mainly be smaller cars as SUVs were “harder to electrify”. It forecast that global annual sales of electric cars would rise tenfold by 2030 from two million last year. Even so, electric cars would still account for less than 7 per cent of the world’s fleet.

The agency’s annual World Energy Outlook report said: “Unless there is a major change in consumer preferences, the recent boom in SUV sales could be a major obstacle towards developing cleaner car fleets.”

Boris Johnson pledged yesterday to invest an extra £500 million in rapid charging points for electric cars to ensure that drivers would never be more than 30 miles from one.

SUVs have become the second fastest rising source of greenhouse gas emissions globally after power generation, according to the IEA.

Almost half of all cars sold in the US are SUVs, although the agency noted that “this trend is universal”, making up 42 per cent of sales in China, 30 per cent in India and 27 per cent in South Africa.

SUVs produced 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide last year, a rise of 544 million tonnes on 2010, higher than the growth in emissions from heavy industry, lorries, aviation and shipping. The IEA said that male and younger drivers were more likely to buy SUVs.

The AA said that cheap car finance was partly responsible because it meant that more people could afford an SUV. The government’s decision to charge a standard rate of £140 a year in road tax after the first year for all cars, regardless of emissions, had also reduced the incentive to buy a more fuel efficient car.

Luke Bosdet, an AA spokesman, said that lack of gritting in winter prompted some people to buy SUVs while for others the motivation was “a bit of keeping up with the Joneses”.

Greg Archer, UK director of the campaign group Transport & Environment, said: “The growth in SUV sales is the main reason CO2 emissions from new cars have been rising. This is making it harder for carmakers to achieve targets for reducing emissions.”

The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders said drivers valued SUVs for their “style, higher ride and commanding view of the road”. It said that average CO2 emissions from new SUVs, or “dual-purpose” cars, had fallen by more than 43 per cent since 2000.

SOURCE

Climate Change is the Least of the Causes of California's Wildfires

Arlington, VA - Biologist Jim Steele, who for more than a decade ran San Francisco University's Sierra Nevada Field Campus and currently serves as a member of the CO2 Coalition, a Virginia-based group of 50 climate scientists and energy economists who use research to explain why they believe people should not be alarmed by the rise in carbon dioxide, finds the increase in wildfires in California since the 1970s has been caused by changes in forest management, not climate change.

In a new piece at science publication WattsUpWith That, Steele outlines a detailed scientific rebuttal to media claims that CO2-driven warming is to blame for California's devastating wildfires, based on tree-ring research at the field campus. It disputes a CNN story,California wildfires burn 500% more land because of climate change based on this study by lead authors Park Williams and John Abatzoglou.

After identifying the primary causes of California's fires, none of which is an increase in average temperature, Steele concludes:

"Doing my best Greta Thunberg imitation, I say to climate alarmists, 'How dare you misrepresent the causes of wildfires. How dare you imply less CO2 will reduce human ignitions and reduce surface fuels and the spread invasive grasses. Bad analyses lead to bad remedies - your bad science is stealing Californian's dreams and your false remedies distract us of from the real solutions."

"Bad analyses cause bad remedies, and here is why Williams and Abatzoglou's last paper exemplifies a bad scientific analysis," writes Jim Steele, the 32-year director of San Francisco State's Sierra Nevada field campus. "Analyzing changes in California's burned areas from 1972 to 2018 they claimed, "The clearest link between California wildfires and anthropogenic climate change thus far, has been via warming-driven increases in atmospheric aridity, which works to dry fuels and promote summer forest fire." But natural cycles of low rainfall due to La Niñas also cause dry fuels. The increase in burned area is also attributed to increases in human ignitions such as faulty electrical grids, to increased surface fuels from years of fire suppression, and to changes in vegetation that increased the abundance of easily ignited fine fuels like annual grasses.

Furthermore, temperatures in some local regions experiencing the biggest fires have not been warming over the past 50 years (See temperature graphs in this essay's last segment. Data from Western Regional Climate Center). All those factors promote rapid wildfire spread and greater burned areas. Although good science demands separating those contributing factors before analyzing a possible correlation between temperature and area burned, Williams and Abatzoglou oddly did not do so! That's bad science."

Via email from https://co2coalition.org/

The Green New Deal Isn’t Just Expensive. It’s Also Bad Environmental Policy

We’re not hearing much about the Green New Deal these days, but it’s still a priority for some candidates, as anyone who’s attended a recent Bernie Sanders rally can attest.

Criticism of the Green New Deal tends to center on cost and rightly so. It would be extremely expensive. Researchers estimate it would take more than $5 trillion just to switch from coal, nuclear, and natural gas to 100% renewables.

But even if you set economic concerns aside, an ironic fact remains: In the United States and around the world, the central planning policies at the heart of the Green New Deal have a horrible track record for the environment.

Governments in countries such as Venezuela and China (or in the past like the Soviet Union and Cuba) either routinely mismanage and waste resources or ramp up production with little to no accountability for environmental damage that comes with it. The absence of price signals reduces the incentive to be more efficient and do more with less.

In addition, the absence of property rights reduces the incentive to conserve and gives government-controlled industries a free pass to pollute without compensating or protecting its citizens.

The Green New Deal would massively expand the size and scope of the federal government’s control over activities best left to the private sector. It would empower the feds to change and control how people produce and consume energy, harvest crops, raise livestock, build homes, drive cars, and manufacture goods.

Secondly, the Green New Deal would result in a number of unintended consequences. For instance, policies that limit coal, oil, and natural gas production in the United States will not stop the global consumption of these natural resources. Production will merely shift to places where the environmental standards are not as rigorous, making the planet worse off.

Moreover, it’s not as if wind, solar, and battery technologies magically appear. Companies still have to mine the resources, manufacture the product, and deal with the waste streams.

There are challenges to disposing potentially toxic lithium-ion batteries and solar panels, or even wind turbine blades that are difficult and expensive to transport and crush at landfills. While these are solvable problems, they’re seldom discussed by Green New Deal proponents.

There would also be massive land use changes required to expand renewable power. Ben Zycher at the American Enterprise Institute estimates that land use necessary to meet a 100% renewable target would require 115 million acres, which is 15% larger than the land area of California.

Two recent National Bureau of Economic Research papers underscore the unintended consequences of energy policy on human well-being. One found that cheaper home heating because of America’s fracking revolution is averting more than 10,000 winter deaths per year. The Green New Deal would wipe all of that away, and reverse course by mandating pricier energy on families.

Another paper found that the Japanese government’s decision to close safely operating nuclear power plants after Fukushima increased energy prices and reduced consumption, which consequently, increased mortalities from colder temperatures. In fact, the authors estimate that “the decision to cease nuclear production has contributed to more deaths than the accident itself.” Unintended consequences.

Another hallmark of bad environmental policy is focusing on outputs, not outcomes. According to the frequently asked questions sheet released along with the Green New Deal, it is “a massive investment in renewable energy production and would not include creating new nuclear plants.”

One would think that if we only have 11 or 12 years to act on climate change, we’d want to grab the largest source of emissions-free electricity we can get. But that’s not the case.

That’s typical for most big-government environmental policies: They’re so focused on prescriptive ways to control peoples’ behaviors that they crowd out or ignore opportunities for innovative solutions.

The reality is that environmental policies aren’t good for the environment if they’re so bad for people. The costs of the Green New Deal would be devastatingly high for households. Government policies that drive up energy bills are not only very regressive, but they would also harm consumers multiple times as they pay more for food, clothes, and all of the other goods that require energy to make.

By shrinking our economy by potentially tens of trillions of dollars, the Green New Deal will cause lower levels of prosperity and fewer resources to deal with whatever environmental challenges come our way. That’s a bad deal for our economy and our environment.

SOURCE

Planners versus people

Writing in Slate, bicycle activist and journalist Alex Baca argues that the Green New Deal has a big blind spot: It doesn’t address the places Americans live. Sprawl, she claims, along with the transportation and other issues it creates, is perhaps the largest contributor to climate change.

Baca mocks progressive Berkeley, California, for spending $40 million to renovate a parking garage a block from a subway station (albeit with rooftop solar, electric-vehicle charging stations, spots for car-share vehicles, rainwater capture, and water treatment). This, she says, shows that “progressive Democrats remain unwilling to seriously confront the crisis of climate change,” given that America’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions is transportation.

In Baca’s view, Green New Dealers should stop building roads that promote suburban and exurban greenfield developments. On top of retrofitting buildings, why don’t “we” build more housing closer to jobs centers and reallocate what we spend on building new roads to paying for public transit. “We,” of course, implies government mandates that force compliance.

The late Henry Hazlitt, author of Economics in One Lesson, in a 1962 speech warned that when we discuss “economic planning,” we must be clear concerning what it is we are talking about. “The real question being raised is not: plan or no plan? but whose plan?”

Hazlitt asserted that planners want to substitute their own plans for the plans of everyone else, often by laying down a government-backed “master plan” that individuals dare not deviate from. Of course, government planners assure us, “the only persons who are going to be coerced are those whose plans are ‘not in the public interest’.”

Daniel John Sobieski, in American Thinker, called Greta Thunberg’s celebrated voyage “a fossil fuel–supported stunt [that] was not about climate and not about real sacrifice. It was about shaming the Industrial Revolution and capitalism, things that have reduced planetary poverty to historic lows and fueled technologies that have raised the global standard of living to historic highs that more people than ever before share in.”

Sobieski pegged Thunberg’s voyage as “not about climate … [but] about creating a climate of fear, a picture of imminent planetary doom that can only be forestalled by government’s control of every aspect of our lives, from the energy we use to the food we eat to the land we use to our modes of transportation. Everything from cows to combustion engines is bad.”

Ever since the 1992 “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, U.S. Presidents have lauded Agenda 21, a grandiose United Nations scheme to reorganize the world to save the planet from climate change. But as a 2014 CFACT editorial explained, “The only way Agenda 21 can work is to deny private citizens their private property rights.“ This should not have been surprising, given that the UN has long maintained that “public control of land use is … indispensable.”

Indeed, Agenda 21 stated clearly that “Land… cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market…. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes.”

Sobieski reminded us that enviro-socialist globalists believe that a fragile Earth itself is on the brink, “and humanity is the plague infecting it.” In his view, “The globalists are hammering out an agenda that will determine not only how many people there will be, but where they will live, how they will live, and what governments will permit them to do in order to save the planet.”

Baca’s article demonstrates a major flaw in much of enviro-socialist planning. Zillow states that the current median home value in Berkeley is $1.25 million, and the median rent price is $3,775 per month. Is there any wonder people commute to work?

A 2015 study by the nonpartisan California Legislative Analyst’s Office advised the Legislature to change its policies to facilitate significantly more private home and apartment building in California’s coastal urban areas. The study, however, warned that doing so “would require the state to make changes to a broad range of policies that affect housing supply … including policies that have been fundamental tenets of California government for many years.”

In short, the study states that California will have to reverse decades of planning to solve the affordable housing crisis the planners themselves created. Baca’s plan is based on her theory that “sprawl” is inefficient, thus people should be herded into more concise spaces – in a nation where “going to the country” has been a dominant theme throughout its history.

SOURCE

Australia: Climate alarmists are brazen opportunists preying on misery

Chris Kenny writes well below but omits what is probably the most important point: Global warming CANNOT cause drought. Global warming would induce more evaporatoion off the oceans which would come down as MORE rain, not less.

So the widespread claims that the fires are caused by of global warming because global warming has induced drought are just another Greenie fraud. Drought is if anything a sign of cooling, not warming. It is true that drought does dry out the vegetation and thus encourages fires but what causes drought?

Nobody knows exactly. All we know is that Australia is very prone to it. Australian farmers often go for years without seeing rain -- which is why there is a lot of irrigation

Like a struck match in the bush, global warming is the spark that triggers a destructive firestorm in public debate. Heated on emotion, fanned by sensationalist media and fuelled by ideology, it burns through common sense, reason and decency, showing no respect for facts or rational thought.

Climate alarmists are using tragic deaths and community pain to push a political barrow. Aided by journalists and others who should know better, they are trying to turn a threat endured on this continent for millennia into a manifestation of their contemporary crusade.

It is opportunistic, transparent, grisly and plain dumb. Contributions this past week take lunacy to new levels in an ominous sign for public discourse. In this land of droughts and flooding rains — Dorothea Mackellar’s “flood, fire and famine” — we now confront an extra injury every time the weather tests us; silly and reckless posturing from climate alarmists trying to prove their point.

History doesn’t matter to them, nor the facts. Rather than consider reality they proffer an almost hallucinogenic alternative, pretending their political gestures will deliver cooler, damper summers unsinged by bushfires.

This repugnant rhetoric must be called out; facts and science must prevail. But engaging in this debate must never be interpreted as downplaying the severity of what has occurred — four deaths, hundreds of properties destroyed, lives changed and trauma ongoing. It is only to say this is the perennial horror of our sunburnt country that will bedevil this land long after all of us, our children and our children’s children are gone.

Australia’s natural history is impossible to interpret without reference to fire; plants evolved to survive bushfire and depend on it for propagation. Indigenous heritage demonstrates an understanding of fire in managing vegetation, protecting kin and hunting animals. Since European settlement our story is replete with the menacing scent of disaster and tragic episodes.

Victoria has suffered most, in 1851 with a dozen people killed, along with a million sheep and five million hectares burned. In 1926, 60 dead; in 1939 there were 71 dead and just five years later at least 15 died. In the 1960s dozens were killed in Victoria in numerous years and just 10 years ago on Black Saturday 173 lives were lost along with more than 2000 houses.

In South Australia and Tasmania there is a similar repetition of tragedy, often during the same heatwaves, only with smaller and sparser populations the casualties are lower. Still, the toll is horrific; 62 people died in the Tasmanian fires of 1967.

Wetter summers and drier winters make the NSW fire season earlier and less intense, with blazes common in late spring. Devastating blazes have been regular, taking multiple lives on multiple occasions in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.

Yet so much coverage and commentary in the past week would have it that the latest tragedy is a new phenomenon. Rare as it is for the rainforests of northern NSW and southern Queensland to burn, it happens.

Back in September, Joelle Gergis of the Australian Nationa University’s Climate Change Institute wrote in Guardian Australia about how “I never thought I’d see the Australian rainforest burning. What will it take for us to wake up to the climate crisis?”

The Climate Council member wrote: “As a scientist, what I find particularly disturbing about the current conditions is that world heritage rainforest areas such as the Lamington National Park in the Gold Coast hinterland are now burning.”

But such fires predate climate change: “A bushfire in Lamington National Park today swept through a grove of 3000-year-old Macrozamia palms,” The Cairns Post reported on October 25, 1951. “These trees were one of the features of the park … the fire has burnt out about 2000 acres of thick rainforest country.” That is rainforest burning in Lamington National Park 70 years ago.

Journalists, often encouraged by authorities, have written about the “unprecedented” nature of the Queensland fires. Yet newspaper searches tell a different story. Toowoomba’s The Chronicle in 1946 reported winter fires in late August: “From Bundaberg to the New South Wales border … hundreds of square miles of drought-stricken southeastern Queensland were aflame.” Two years later in The Central Queensland Herald there were reports on September 30 of “An 800-mile chain of bushfires fed by dry grass stretched tonight along the Queensland coast from Cairns to Maryborough.”

Earlier this year, former NSW fire commissioner, now climate activist, Greg Mullins told ABC radio: “There’s fires breaking out in places where they just shouldn’t burn, the west coast of Tasmania, the world heritage areas, wet rainforest, subtropical rainforest, it’s all burning — and look, this is driven by climate change, there’s no other explanation.”

But The South Australian Chronicle of February 1915 reported lives lost and the “most devastating bushfires ever known in Tasmania sweeping over the northwest coast and other districts. The extent of the devastation cannot be over-estimated.” And in 1982 The Canberra Times detailed a “huge forest fire” burning out 75,000ha of dense rainforest on Tasmania’s West Coast.

Terrible as our fires are — often the worst in a generation or more — they are not abnormal in our landscapes, in our climate. A sober discussion in the global warming context might argue that, across time, our endemic bushfire threat could increase marginally rather than diminish with extra rain.

But to suggest the threat is new or can be diminished by climate policy is to pile false hope and mind-numbing stupidity on top of alarmist politicking.

This week, journalists and politicians have wilfully misrepresented claims from NSW fire authorities that they had never confronted so many emergency-level fires at once. An unprecedented number of fires, especially when deliberately lit, has more to do with expanding population than climate.

There also has been much hyperbole about the fire rating of “catastrophic”; a new category added to the rating system after Victoria’s 2009 fires to ensure greater community responsiveness. CNN International went heavy on our fires, saying half of Queensland was facing bushfire emergency.

The US-based broadcaster ran a Nine Network report by Airlie Walsh declaring it was the “first time in history Sydney had been met with such catastrophic conditions”. This was typical of the misleading reporting; it was merely the first time the “catastrophic” category had been invoked since it was introduced a decade ago.

Back in 2009, the ABC reported how the additional category was about raising awareness: “Victorian Premier John Brumby said in the last fire season, only five days would have been classified as code red. The new fire warnings system will provide the community with a better understanding of the level of bushfire threat on any given day based on the forecast weather conditions, he said in a statement.”

CNN also used our fires as the basis for an interview with David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth. He was asked “how dangerous” it was that our Prime Minister “doesn’t actually want to tackle the problem”. This, in the modern parlance, is fake news.

Wallace-Wells, without resort to science, asserted Australia was already “suffering intensely” from climate change which, according to him, was responsible for our current drought. He also wrongly claimed our government was not taking any “meaningful action” on climate.

As a national park staffer, and having studied and trained at bushfire management, I experienced one of the Ash Wednesday infernos in 1983. Temperatures well over 40C, tinder-dry bush in the steepest parts of the Adelaide Hills and winds gusting towards 100km/h; this was hell on earth, when fires become a storm and only survival counts.

I missed the worst of it but joined the mop-up — a miserable task amid burned homes, melted cars and the smell of death — before helping to extinguish blazes over following days. No one who was there will ever say they’ve seen worse.

People who have seen bushfires only on television can have no idea, and those who experience the horrors of a firestorm won’t get into silly comparisons. In her nonfiction account of Victoria’s Churchill fire on Black Saturday, Chloe Hooper relays first-person accounts.

“The flames were lying down because the wind was howling through.” “It was basically hailing fire.” “It was like a jet engine, I’ve never heard a noise like it and then the penny dropped — it was the fire coming.” “Trees ignited from the ground up in one blast, like they were self-exploding.”

All of this is so lethal, terrifying and devastating — and always has been. It insults all those who have been lost before to pretend it is worse now.

Heat, wind and fuel are what drive our fire threat, and the worst conditions will involve hot, dry conditions and gale force winds across a heavy fuel load. The only factor we can realistically control is fuel — hazard reduction is crucial but often resisted.

While drought can limit the fire threat in some areas by inhibiting grass and shrub growth, the big dry has turned the forests of northern NSW and southern Queensland into tinderboxes. This situation is directly linked to the drought, so the critical question is whether there is a connection between the drought and climate change.

The most authoritative assessment of this came in June from the director of the Centre for Climate Extremes, Andrew Pitman. (I have inserted an additional word, in brackets, that Pitman and his centre later said should have been included.)

“This may not be what you expect to hear but as far as the climate scientists know there is no (direct) link between climate change and drought.

“Now, that may not be what you read in the newspapers and sometimes hear commented but there is no reason a priori why climate change should make the landscape more arid.

“And if you look at the Bureau of Meteorology data over the whole of the last 100 years there’s no trend in data, there’s no drying trend, there’s been a drying trend in the last 20 years but there’s been no drying trend in the last 100 years and that’s an expression of how variable the Australian rainfall climate is.”

Pitman is no climate sceptic. These are just the scientific facts. Yet his comments are fastidiously ignored by most media except to deliberately reinterpret them.

Mostly preferred are unfounded prognostications from people such as businessman cum green campaigner Geoffrey Cousins telling Radio National Breakfast “everyone in this country now understands the link between climate change and these fires”.

Or Greens leader Richard Di Natale telling the Senate that global warming is “supercharging these megafires”.

What a confluence: media eager to elevate a sense of crisis; political actors exaggerating to advance a cause; horrendous threats that require no embellishment; public fascinated by weather patterns; and information from official authorities feeding the frenzy (revised fire danger categories; weather bureau rainfall records starting only from 1900, therefore eliminating the first five years of the Federation drought; historical temperature readings revised downwards so that this January a record capital city maximum was declared in Adelaide despite a maximum one full degree higher being recorded in January 1939).

When cold, hard analysis of facts is required, we see wild claims constantly made and seldom tested.

Di Natale and fellow Greens Adam Bandt and Jordon Steele-John stoop so low as to blame these fatal fires on the government, dubbing it “arsonists”. Former fire chiefs gather to suggest, with straight faces, that some additional climate change action from government could have quelled these fires. It is as offensive as it is absurd, but it is seldom called out by a complicit media.

Even Chief Scientist Alan Finkel has conceded that if we were to eliminate all our nation’s greenhouse gases (about 1.3 per cent of global emissions) it would do “virtually nothing” to the climate.

The real situation is even more hopeless, of course, because global emissions continue to rise. So, the first crucial furphy perpetrated daily by the virtue signallers is that Australian action can control the climate.

It is too ridiculous to be repeated yet it is, seriously, and daily. We also constantly hear, as we did on CNN, claims Australia is doing nothing; this ignores our Paris commitments, energy upheaval and the latest report from ANU experts Andrew Blakers and Matt Stocks. They found the country is on track to meet its Paris emissions reduction targets, investing 11 times the global average in renewable energy.

This has not, and will not, cool our summers or quell our bushfires. Still, even if we magically could freeze the climate — setting it permanently at whatever it was in the 1950s, 1850s or 1750s — we know we would still face catastrophic fire conditions in many, if not most, fire seasons.

Many commentators this week have done what they often do when the green left overreaches; they say the debate has gone too far at either end.

This is intellectually dishonest; one side of this argument urges getting on with the hard task of battling our brutal and ever-present bushfire threat, the other side is playing inane and opportunistic politics.

No one has cut through the nonsense and sanctimony better than The Weekend Australian’s cartoonist, Johannes Leak. He has given us the brattish little arsonist sitting on his mother’s lap being told, “Don’t blame yourself darling, that bushfire you lit was caused by climate change.”

Then there was “Total Fire Bandt” who was fighting bushfires by installing solar panels while others confronted the flames. And Leak showed the Greens sacrificing the economy in a pointlessly pagan attempt to appease an ominous blaze.

The overwhelming majority of Australians, who comprehend the omnipresent bushfire threat, would agree with these points. But our debate is shaped by a media/political class far removed from practical realities, more afraid of the chill winds of the zeitgeist than a blistering hot northerly.

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 November, 2019

Christmas goes 'woke' as British people rent trees and are urged to stop sending cards

While Christmas has for some time been a time of excess and glittery celebrations, the eco-minded up and down the country are dreaming of a "woke" Christmas.

Campaigners have urged British people to rent their trees this year from companies which plant them back into the ground after use, decorate their homes using pine cones and holly from outside and to stop sending cards in order to reduce waste.

Celebrities including Emma Thompson have joined the trend and said they will refuse to buy presents in order to be more sustainable.

Analysis from consumer trends specialists Mintel found that last year 29 per cent of British gift buyers bought gifts with a lower environmental impact, and it is expected more will this year.

Tree rental is on the rise; seven million Christmas trees enter landfill every year in the UK, and when they rot they produce carbon dioxide. 100,000 tons of greenhouse gases are produced by rotting trees after the festive period annually.

Alastair and Diane Lucking run Galvaston Farm in Leicestershire, and are one of the three businesses in the UK which offer Christmas tree rentals.

They told The Telegraph: "Our sales from last year have already doubled this year and there are still six weeks to go before Christmas Day! On a daily basis since late September we get emails and phone calls from across the UK from people wanting to rent a Christmas tree, which is fantastic news.

"Be assured that our rented trees most definitely get replanted back into the field. We do have a small percentage of returned trees dying (last year 2 per cent) but this is 50 times better than cut trees which is 100 per cent."

They send the trees in biodegradable netting, planted in a sustainable pot, and pick them up in January to be planted in the ground.

Friends of The Earth said: " More and more places, such as garden centres and plant nurseries, now offer a Christmas-tree hire service over the festive season. They'll often even deliver and collect the tree to save you the hassle. And the tree can carry on growing after it's returned. Sounds like a good solution. Just make sure it's grown sustainably by looking for either the FSC or Soil Association logo."

The campaigners also recommended wrapping Christmas presents in a scarf instead of using paper, and sending e-cards instead of cardboard ones.

Plastic waste reduction charity Wrap recommends swapping out tinsel for mistletoe and holly.

A spokesperson said: "Natural decorations such as ivy, fir cones, mistletoe and holly look festive and can be composted if they are not covered excessively with glitter – though artificial decorations like ribbons and plastic flowers will need to be removed. After Christmas, greenery can be separated from the base and added to your garden/green waste collection or dropped at your local household waste recycling centre."

Emma Thompson, actress and eco-campaigner, said she is not going to be giving Christmas presents this year in a bid to be sustainable and will instead take her family on a walk.

She told Lorraine on ITV: "Christmas is a kind of complicated time of year. Everything comes up at Christmas and we don’t talk about it - we tamp it all down by buying each other stuff…

“This year we’re going to have a sustainable Christmas - no gifts. So you’re not thinking in the run up to Christmas, ‘Oh what am I going to get…’ You’ve not got that terrible thing of thinking you’ve got to spend all the money and also what are you going to get them because we’ve got everything because some of us do have way too much.

“Then you think, ‘Well, we could go for a walk or we could all cook together. If people want to bring something they can bring bread sauce or whatever. That’s the sort of thing.”

Wrap agrees with this. A spokesperson said: "We all like to show our appreciation of friends and relatives by finding them the perfect gift – but remember that presents don’t have to be ‘things’. You can buy vouchers for all kinds of ready-made experiences, from gin tasting to theatre tickets, zip wires, bungee jumping or more sedate occupations such as researching a family tree. You could even put together your own special ‘experience package’".

SOURCE

Back to Hanoi for Jane Fonda!? Vietnam can’t build coal plants fast enough as economy booms – Fonda urged to take her DC climate protest to Hanoi instead

Vietnam’s coal and crude oil imports surged in the first ten months of this year, government data released on Tuesday showed, highlighting the Southeast Asian country’s increasing reliance on imported energy to support its fast-growing economy.

Vietnam has one of the fastest-growing economies in Asia, backed by robust exports and foreign investment. Economic growth this year is expected to surpass the government’s target range of 6.6%-6.8%, as the country benefits from the Sino-U.S. trade war.

The strong growth has boosted demand for coal. Imports of the commodity, mostly from Australia and Indonesia, during the January-October period more than doubled from a year earlier to 36.8 million tonnes, valued at $3.25 billion, the Customs Department said in a statement.

The imported coal will mostly be used for the country’s growing fleet of coal-fired power plants, which will still play a key role in its power generation mix for the years to come even as Hanoi promotes renewables.

The country’s crude oil imports rose 80.6% from a year earlier to 6.8 million tonnes during the period, the department said.

Once a key export earner for Vietnam, crude oil output of the country has been declining recently as its reserves fall at existing fields and as China’s increasingly assertive stance in the region hampers offshore exploration.

Government data showed crude oil output in the first ten months of this year fell 7.2% from a year earlier to 9.3 million tonnes. Meanwhile, its coal output rose 10.5% to 37.9 million tonnes.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade said in July Vietnam will contend with severe power shortages from 2021 as demand outpaces construction of new plants, with electricity demand expected to exceed supply by 6.6 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) in 2021, and 15 billion kWh in 2023.

Vietnam will need an average of $6.7 billion a year to expand its annual power generation capacity by 10% between 2016 and 2030, the ministry had said.

Tuesday’s customs data also showed Vietnam recorded a trade surplus of $9.01 billion during the first ten months of this year, widening from a surplus of $7.24 billion a year earlier.

SOURCE

Everything You Hear About Billion-Dollar Disasters Is Wrong

Roger Pielke

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) counts the number of disasters in the United States that result in losses of greater than $1 billion, starting in 1980. Over the past three decades that count has shown a sharp increase, from five or less such disasters each year in the decade of the 1980s to ten or more in each of the past 4 years.

That increase must be due to climate change, right? Actually, no. The billion-dollar disaster tally is easy to understand, simple to communicate, but—regrettably—incredibly misleading and just plain bad economics.

Before proceeding, it is important to underscore that climate change resulting from the emission of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels poses significant risks to our collective futures, including influences on extreme events. As a consequence, it makes sense to focus policy on the mitigation of emissions and adaptation to reduce vulnerability and exposure to weather and climate.

But the importance of climate change as a policy issue does not mean that the subject gets a free pass when it comes to scientific accuracy, and especially claims made by authoritative bodies like NOAA. To the contrary, building support for action on climate requires maintaining the highest standards of scientific integrity.

The billion-dollar disaster tally, even though it is popular, doesn’t meet that standard. The biggest problem with the time series is that it is based on a threshold of $1 billion, but both the value of the dollar changes over time (inflation) and, more importantly, the value of property and wealth subject to losses from extremes has grown dramatically over time.

When NOAA first released the billion-dollar disaster dataset in 2012, it neglected historical events that, after considering inflation, would have exceeded the billion-dollar threshold. For example, a disaster that caused $900 million in losses in 1980 (in 1980 dollars) would not have been included, although the actual loss amount would have exceeded $1 billion in contemporary times. After this was pointed out, NOAA corrected the oversight and added 19 additional events to their dataset, warning appropriately: “Caution should be used in interpreting any trends based on this graphic for a variety of reasons.”

But the inflation snafu revealed a far deeper problem with the use of the billion-dollar threshold: U.S. disaster take place at the intersection of a changing and variable climate and a nation growing in population, wealth and development. Consider that an identical hurricane making landfall in Texas in 1980 versus 2019 would result in vastly different loss totals, because today there are simply more people in more homes with more stuff than thirty years ago. In 2012, I identified nine disasters from 1980 not included in the NOAA tabulation that would likely have exceeded a billion-dollar threshold has those events occurred in 2011.

The NOAA billion-dollar disaster dataset is not a reliable indicator of trends in disasters or their costs, and it certainly is not a time series that says anything meaningful about changes in climate. Anyone wanting to look at trends in climate and weather, including extreme events, should always look first at data on climate and weather, not economic loss data.

So how might NOAA improve its economic loss record for U.S. disasters? The answer is simple: Do away with the billion-dollar threshold and look at the entire record of losses. Even better, address the effects of a growing U.S. economy, and greater loss potentials over time, by normalizing disaster loss data based on GDP (or other factors).

That is exactly what I did in the graph below, based on data from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (GDP) and Arizona State University (hazard losses). The graph shows U.S. hazard losses from 1980 (the start of the NOAA dataset) to 2016 (the end of the ASU dataset). There is clearly no upwards trend. The apparent slight downward trend results from the “drought” of major hurricanes from 2006 to 2016, which has since ended in 2017 and 2018.

Compare that graph to NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster tally, shown below, over the same time period. You can easily see how the NOAA tally has potential to mislead.

Billion-dollar disasters

To their credit, early on NOAA recognized that there were methodological issues in its approach to collecting and sharing disaster loss data, and commissioned a study of the dataset and methodology, which was peer-reviewed and published in 2013. That study acknowledges that, “the billion-dollar dataset is only adjusted for the CPI [consumer price index, representing inflation] over time, not currently incorporating any changes in exposure (e.g., as reflected by shifts in wealth or population).” NOAA admitted that the lack of such adjustments had implications for the increasing trend in the count of billion-dollar disasters: “The magnitude of such increasing trends is greatly diminished when applied to data normalized for exposure.”

Not surprisingly, due to such methodological concerns, the NOAA study concluded: “it is difficult to attribute any part of the trends in losses to climate variations or change, especially in the case of billion-dollar disasters.” That conclusion is solid.

Yet, in the years since, NOAA has ignored its own research and continued to attribute an increase in the counts of billion-dollar disasters to climate change. On its website today NOAA says: “Climate change is also playing a role in the increasing frequency of some types of extreme weather that lead to billion-dollar disasters.”

With respect to floods, NOAA says, “Billion-dollar inland—non-tropical—flood events have increased in the United States” and attributes this to climate change, “heavy rainfall events and their ensuing flood risks are increasing because warmer temperatures are "loading" the atmosphere with more water vapor.”

NOAA’s claim on rainfall and flood risks is contradicted by the most recent U.S. National Climate Assessment: “in U.S. regions, no formal attribution of precipitation changes to anthropogenic forcing has been made so far, so indirect attribution of flooding changes is not possible. Hence, no formal attribution of observed flooding changes to anthropogenic forcing has been claimed.” What this somewhat technical passage says is that for the United States, it is incorrect to claim that increasing rainfall in some regions or flooding (which has not increased) can be attributed to human-caused climate change. Yet, NOAA – one of our most important and respected scientific agencies – is making such an unfounded claim and extending it even further to disaster losses.

With misinformation coming from one of our most trusted federal agencies, it’s no surprise that bad science propagates widely. Just yesterday Climate Central reported on the latest NOAA quarterly climate report: “this year has been full of devastating extreme weather events—which are getting more costly as the climate warms.”

The billion-dollar disaster time series should provide us a lesson on how easy it is to promote a simple message that fits a particular narrative but which is completely misleading and even outright wrong. NOAA is an important agency – among its many functions it provides the weather data and forecasts that help keep all Americans safe. NOAA is too important an institution to get caught up in dodgy science related to climate change.

SOURCE

We Need an Honest Debate on Climate Change

Pacific Gas and Electric of San Francisco began public safety power shutoffs to prevent equipment from starting wildfires. Deadly fires in the last few years have resulted in PG&E being sued for billions of dollars and the company is now bankrupt. These blackouts have left up to nearly three million people without electricity for up to five days.

Pacific Research Institute (PRI) has published “California’s Blackouts: How Did We Get Here and What Can We Do to Keep the Lights On?” Kerry Jackson of PRI begins the introduction with the reactions by the politicians to the Great Blackouts of 2019.

“The state’s political class quickly played a game of political hot potato, blaming PG&E and others for the blackouts, while positioning themselves as having the best solution to prevent future blackouts moving forward.”

Of course, many politicians seeking more political power are quick to claim California fires are caused by climate change. Jackson provides a few examples.

“PG&E executives as well as political figures and journalists have declared, with no supporting evidence, that “climate change” has fueled California wildfires in recent years.” According to CNN, “deadlier and more destructive wildfires have become the new normal.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted “this is what climate change looks like” as wildfires raged. “Climate change is real, it’s happening, and you and everyone else will recognize that,” said former Gov. Jerry Brown (D-Calif.) who opened his testimony before Congress in October swearing, presumably under oath, that climate change is “a direct cause of California’s increasingly dangerous wildfire seasons.”

Sorry, CNN, Gov. Brown and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, but many studies confirm that wildfires in California peaked in 1980 and have steadily declined since that date. A U.S. Geological Survey of the data showed “there have been fewer and fewer wildfires” in the state. UCLA professor Jon Keeley agrees. “The claim commonly made in research papers and the media that fire activity is increasing throughout the western USA is certainly an overstatement,” Keeley said in a research paper.

Concerning the continuous, safe, and efficient delivery of electricity to everyone in California, there are two enormous political problems. First, PG&E and other utilities are government-controlled monopolies that are very bureaucratic and persistently controlled by political whim and pressure. Second, the politicians and State of California bureaucracies have long been heavily influenced by very aggressive environmental activists who have thwarted known safe forest management practices.

In 1996 there was legislation was passed to “deregulate” the state electricity market. Unfortunately, what was pronounced to be deregulation was more regulations and control. Adrian Moore of the Reason Foundation found that the 1996 law “discourages entry into the market … restricts expansion of capacity, and … sustains the old systems and rules that prevent competition.”

Additionally, Jackson reports on a main reason for California’s blackouts; state law mandates that utilities must only use renewable energy by 2045. Jackson wrote, “If anything, it’s the state’s obsession with global warming that has contributed to the fires. The rush to renewable energy, and the crusade to reduce and ultimately eradicate fossil fuels, have pushed utilities to allocate funds that should have been used for wildfire prevention to programs and projects conceived by politics.”

Terry Anderson of the Hoover Institute knows that environmental activist organizations have badly prevented “scientific management — including logging, prescribed burns, and thinning — to treat forest fuel loads.”

Jackson concludes: “Wildfires are unavoidable in California. It’s truly a place “nature built to burn.” Yet preventive measures can lessen the losses of life and property. The necessary changes will require a new way of thinking in California. The old paradigm that says utilities must be government-protected monopolies has to be left behind. The state that was at one time not afraid of fresh ideas has stayed dedicated to an old one for far too long.”

Also very critically needed is an honest debate on global warming. Actions taken by California and many other jurisdictions are beginning to have a major impact on the lives and needs of their citizens. (I have previously published, "The Climate Crisis that Wasn’t: Scientists Agree there is 'No Cause for Alarm.'”)

“Foreseeing the potential for horrific political decisions based on inadequate science and mob rule, five hundred scientists and professionals in climate related fields have sent a “European Climate Declaration” to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, which strongly states, “There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050.”

“Thomas D. Williams, the Senior Research Associate at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, writes, “The signatories of the declaration also insist that public policy must respect scientific and economic realities and not just reflect the most fashionable frenzy of the day.”

It is long past time to have an honest debate on climate change.

SOURCE

Australia: Green bureaucracy blocking big natural gas developments

Two world-class liquefied natural gas (LNG) projects valued at $40 billion and owned by some of the world’s biggest oil companies, including Shell, BP and PetroChina, are at risk of being permanently marooned by a complex “economy v environment” dispute in Australia.

The Browse and Scarborough projects will only be developed if final government approvals can be obtained and that could mean satisfying the carbon emissions requirements of an international climate-change agreement.

Unfortunately for the companies behind the projects, which have taken more than 30 years to reach the point of a final investment decision, different layers of government in Australia can’t agree on whether local or international rules apply.

At a political level there is support for both Browse and Scarborough because of the economic and job creating benefits from investment.

But at an administrative level there are government officials who argue that approval is not possible for any big resource development, including oil and gas, unless the proponents can demonstrate how they will offset all emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the gases blamed for global warming and climate change.

Australia, like many other countries, is a signatory to the Paris Agreement on climate change which includes a set of recommendations designed to limit carbon dioxide pollution.

But, for a country which is heavily dependent on mining and oil production the Paris deal has become a logistical nightmare and, in the case of natural gas a two-edged sword because while it might be a fossil fuel it is far less polluting than the coal or oil it can replace.

Asian countries such as China, Japan and Korea are major buyers of minerals and energy products produced in Australia and are keen to see a continuation of a reliable LNG supply from a relatively risk-free supplier.

But, if the civil servants working in government departments, such as the Environmental Protection Authority of Western Australia (EPA), both Browse and Scarborough will be subjected to onerous emissions offset requirements which could jeopardize their development.

First hint of a standoff between elected and unelected government officials emerged earlier this year when the EPA said all new LNG projects could only proceed if they could demonstrate “zero net emissions” and needed to meet so-called Scope 3 emissions, or those emitted by countries which consume resources sourced from Australia.

The resources industry has rejected that position even if it does comply with the Paris agreement and Australia’s obligations, warning that all new resource projects face an insurmountable hurdle, especially when it came to Scope 3 because Australia cannot control what a foreign customer does with raw material even if it is sourced from Australia.

Elected government officials are slowing waking to the trap into which they have been led by not reading the fine print of the Paris agreement and by allowing civil servants, many with strong views on environmental protection, commit the country to a set of international rules which do not appear to be in Australia’s best interests.

An attempt to tone down the early EPA ruling has been made by the State Government of Western Australia but that position will soon be tested by the imminent development application for the Scarborough project led by Woodside Petroleum and BHP.

They plan to extract gas from the offshore Scarborough gasfields and pipe it to the onshore Pluto gas processing plant which is, in turn, being connected to the North West Shelf gas plant owned by Woodside, Shell, BP, Chevron, BHP, Mitsubishi and Mitsui.

The next stage in a process to create a major LNG “hub” is to develop the Browse gasfields owned by Woodside, Shell, BP, PetroChina, Mitsui and Mitsubishi.

Sorting out the ownership of the different stages of the projects has been likened to herding cats, a near-impossible task, but that process appears to have been settled, leaving the the challenge of dealing with government which is split between pro-and-anti development positions.

Last week, the Scarborough project took two big steps towards formal approval by its owners. The amount of gas in the fields was recalculated to deliver a 52% increase to now stand at 11.1 trillion cubic feet, just short of Browse with its 13.9tcf, and a contract was signed to build an inter-connecting pipeline between Pluto and the North West Shelf gas processing plants.

With design and ownership issues largely settled the LNG projects have moved to within sight of investment commitments, setting the stage for a showdown between elected and unelected officials over the question of Australia’s economic interest and its international climate-change obligations.

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 November, 2019

EPA wants research data to be readily available

The screech from the NYT below relies, as usual, on a distortion.

Much of the "science" used by the EPA has in the past been secret. The conclusions are announced but not the raw data used to arrive at the conclusion. That is a breach of scientific ethics but Greenies don't care about that. Often, other scientists have doubted the conclusions and asked for a copy of the raw data so that they can do their own analyses. The EPA has refused, a practice that throws their findings into doubt.

The new Trump rules aim to stop the rot. Unless the data is made available to other scientists, the conclusions will be ignored.

The NYT rubbish below pretends that the new rules will cause scientists to breach confidentiality. It will not. The raw data can be and normally is anonymized. All that is required is a set of numbers

The Trump administration is preparing to significantly limit the scientific and medical research that the government can use to determine public health regulations, overriding protests from scientists and physicians who say the new rule would undermine the scientific underpinnings of government policymaking.

A new draft of the Environmental Protection Agency proposal, titled Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science, would require that scientists disclose all of their raw data, including confidential medical records, before the agency could consider an academic study’s conclusions. E.P.A. officials called the plan a step toward transparency and said the disclosure of raw data would allow conclusions to be verified independently.

“We are committed to the highest quality science,” Andrew Wheeler, the E.P.A. administrator, told a congressional committee in September. “Good science is science that can be replicated and independently validated, science that can hold up to scrutiny. That is why we’re moving forward to ensure that the science supporting agency decisions is transparent and available for evaluation by the public and stakeholders.”

The measure would make it more difficult to enact new clean air and water rules because many studies detailing the links between pollution and disease rely on personal health information gathered under confidentiality agreements. And, unlike a version of the proposal that surfaced in early 2018, this one could apply retroactively to public health regulations already in place.

“This means the E.P.A. can justify rolling back rules or failing to update rules based on the best information to protect public health and the environment, which means more dirty air and more premature deaths,” said Paul Billings, senior vice president for advocacy at the American Lung Association.

Public health experts warned that studies that have been used for decades — to show, for example, that mercury from power plants impairs brain development, or that lead in paint dust is tied to behavioral disorders in children — might be inadmissible when existing regulations come up for renewal.

For instance, a groundbreaking 1993 Harvard University project that definitively linked polluted air to premature deaths, currently the foundation of the nation’s airquality laws, could become inadmissible. When gathering data for their research, known as the Six Cities study, scientists signed confidentiality agreements to track the private medical and occupational histories of more than 22,000 people in six cities. They combined that personal data with home air-quality data to study the link between chronic exposure to air pollution and mortality.

SOURCE

AOC Suggests We Need to Fight 'White Supremacy' to Combat Climate Change

"White supremacists"are the mythical boogeymen for the Left

On Saturday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) claimed that fighting "white supremacy" is a fundamental part of combatting climate change. She also attacked "consultants" who would encourage climate activists to focus on solar panels more than social justice.

"The way we inoculate ourselves from continuing to burn up our planet at unsustainable level, triggering feedback loops that we have not even begun to comprehend, is by honoring indigenous wisdom and allowing it to guide our climate policy. The way that we preserve our systems is by transitioning to principles of universality. That means I want you clothed, I want you educated, I want you paid a living wage, no ifs ands or buts. And what that also means — and what Naomi talked about as well — is directly, consciously, combatting white supremacy in the United States of America," AOC declared.

She was referring to Naomi Klein, a Canadian activist who had spoken just before her. Klein had been more explicit. She spoke about "two fires": climate change and the divisive conservative politicians like President Donald Trump who champion an "in-group" over an "out-group." She accused Trump of dividing America with "white supremacy."

"At this moment when the climate crisis becomes impossible to deny ... at this very moment these figures who are so expert at the art of spreading division" are rising, she said. "I believe that we all know on the cellular level that there’s something deeply wrong with our common home," and she accused the right of exploiting that fear with the message, "We will protect you against the other."

"Do we think it is a coincidence that these two fires are raging at the exact same time? And as these strongmen turn their populations against each other, that frees them up for the real business at hand which is pillaging the" earth. "We cannot win this fight without battling white supremacy."

Speaking at a rally for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate AOC had endorsed, the congresswoman recalled strategizing about her central policy proposal, the Green New Deal. She said her team planned to launch it not just to fight the alleged catastrophe of climate change but also to help "communities that were left behind."

AOC went on to chide consultants who encouraged her to focus on the technological solutions to the alleged climate crisis, rather than tying climate into her identity politics message.

"Just worry about solar panels, leave the social justice stuff behind," the congresswoman summarized. "Race makes everything complicated." She dismissed this advice as wrong-headed.

As a practical matter, Ocasio-Cortez is entirely wrong. Even if climate change were a catastrophic threat, fighting "white supremacy" would have a negligible impact on the environment. AOC has the uncanny ability to see "white supremacy" behind everything from the tea party movement to The New York Times. In this case, she seems to interpret "white supremacy" as anti-immigrant terrorists like the El Paso shooter.

Terrorism in all its forms should be condemned, and true white supremacy — the doctrine that white people are inherently superior to other racial groups and should rule over them — should also be unequivocally condemned. However, AOC uses "white supremacy" as a catch-all term to describe her political opponents and to connect them with racism and terrorism. This disgusting tactic has everything to do with taking power and nothing to do with saving the environment.

As for the environment, predictions of climate catastrophe — extreme cold, extreme heat, glaciers melting, cities underwater — have failed to come to pass. In one of the most embarrassing examples, alarmists predicted that The Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean would sink beneath the waves in 2018 — and the islands are still there. In fact, they have actually grown in recent years!

AOC's Green New Deal is a fantasy. Taxing the rich at 100 percent would not even come close to footing the bill for the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, according to a Heritage Foundation study. The $48 trillion or $93 trillion price tags aside, AOC's attempt to remake the American economy in her social justice and climate alarmist image is not possible. If Ocasio-Cortez were serious about fighting climate change, she would talk more about nuclear energy and less about restricting the entire economy, let alone "white supremacy."

SOURCE

'Scientists' Advocate Population Control to Save Planet

Climate alarmists falsely claim the only "real solution" is to have fewer people.

Like something out of a dystopian science-fiction story, more than 11,000 “scientists” from 153 nations recently signed a petition declaring that climate change would bring “untold human suffering” that is “unavoidable” unless drastic action is immediately taken. And what is the drastic action these “scientists” advocate? A socialist tyranny that would end capitalism by stopping all economic growth and … human population control. Why is it that socialists’ solutions invariably call for less stuff, fewer people, and restricted freedom?

As David Harsanyi notes, “Basically, these scientists are advocating for the Green New Deal: a collection of ludicrous solutions wholly unconcerned with economic tradeoffs or political reality. The plan treats nature and people as moral equals, imagining them in an apartment-dwelling, plant-based-food-eating, bicycle-riding society where well-being is administered ‘by prioritizing basic needs and reducing inequality’ — which doesn’t sound creepy or authoritarian at all.”

Oh, the glaring irony in warning of “untold human suffering.” That’s exactly what would be brought by the socialist “solutions” to climate change — solutions that are responsible for creating some of the worst human suffering and misery the world has ever known. So, in order to save the planet and keep humanity from suffering, millions must die.

It’s the overpopulation myth. Harsanyi observes, “‘Overpopulation’ is routinely cited by journalists — who often live in the densest, yet miraculously, the wealthiest, places on earth — as a problem. Yet, if density were itself causing human suffering, Monaco, as Nicholas Eberstadt once pointed out, with its 16,000 people per square kilometer, would be a far bleaker place than Bangladesh, with its 1,000 people per square kilometer.”

The truth, is the greater number of humans existing, the greater amount of human capital leading to greater intellectual capacity to find and develop solutions to the myriad of problems facing humanity and the world. Stopping all modern economics and artificially limiting and controlling the human population will only serve to greatly increase human suffering, not lessen it. Thanks in large part to the spread of capitalism, the number of individuals living in abject poverty across the globe has been halved since the year 2000, even as the population of the planet has continued to increase.

SOURCE

Lettuce Pray: Climate Change, Neo-Paganism, and the End of the World

The climate change movement has become the “modern world’s secular religion,” declared Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker recently.

Climate activists preach a gospel of conservation that aims to redeem humanity’s environmental sins. They counsel us to abstain from eating meat to reduce our “carbon footprint,” and prophesy that Earth will perish unless governments worldwide trust the oracle from whom we received this hallowed revelation.

Climate cultists appropriate aspects of Christianity to call the world to repent for its “Original Sin of a carbon industrial revolution,” wrote Baker. They do that and more. Climate cultists, whether consciously or unconsciously, have adopted the schema of the Christian eschaton, or end of the world. They have also incorporated into their faith elements of neo-paganism.

Baker wasn’t the first to spot traces of the eschaton in the climate gospel. Researchers Rachelle Peterson and Peter Wood remarked in “Sustainability: Higher Education’s New Fundamentalism” that “sustainability, like Christianity, offers a view of the Earth as once-pristine and pure but now fallen; recognizes the sinfulness of humanity,” and “offers forms of expiation and absolution.”

However, rather than seeking to redeem humanity in the “next life,” sustainability promises to stave off the end times and save sinners in the “here and now.”

Some episodes have emphasized the climate cult’s resemblance to neo-paganism. Sumantra Maitra at The Federalist pointed to an event at Union Theological Seminary in New York City where students confessed their sins to plants. Maitra argued that this means climate activists are “pagan animists.” In other words, they believe that worshipping nature enables one to “grow as a living soul connected to the universe.”

Maitra also highlighted a gathering at the Glarus Alps where 250 Swedes hosted a funeral to mourn a melting glacier. And Martha Sheen at The Irish Times identified shades of paganism in the climate gospel’s code of how to live, which prescribes “ritualistic sacrifices” like abstaining from meat to “satisfy the gods.”

Maitra and Sheen noted that, as opposed to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, who worship a personal creator that engages humanity from without space and time, neo-pagans worship Earth and other created things.

The emergence of pagan themes in climate activist circles is part of a trend away from Judeo-Christian-based faiths and toward religions like Wicca, which has surged in popularity among millennials, the demographic that worries most about climate change.

Wiccans aren’t the only neo-pagan sect. “Druids, Goddess worshipers, Heathens, and Shamans” count too. And although neo-pagan beliefs vary, historian Ronald Hutton of Bristol University has said that neo-pagans practice “forms of worship which regard nature as sacred.”

Some worship inanimate objects such as “trees, plants, and animals” to glorify the “soul” of each. Pre-Christian Celts, for example, worshipped the River Boyne in Ireland as Boann, the “Celtic Goddess of Poetry, Fertility, Inspiration, Knowledge, and Creativity,” to quote one feminist writer. Almost all pagans consult an astrology guru and play with tarot cards.

Neo-pagans form a small segment of Americans, but their ideas have permeated elites. Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in March indulged fans who obsessed over what her time of birth and horoscope meant for the future of the republic. In response to “fervent public interest,” she allowed astrologer Arthur Lipp-Bonewits to tweet the information.

Singer and climate crisis believer Lana Del Ray described herself in 2017 as a “witch” and said she hexed President Donald Trump. She bade her Twitter followers do the same, directing them to “bind” the president on dates that “corresponded to monthly waning crescent moons.”

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady trumpeted his connections to neo-paganism after winning his sixth Super Bowl title in February. He told reporters that his wife, supermodel and climate crisis apologist Gisele Bundchen, “always makes a little altar” for him before the big game and provides him with “healing stones and protection stones.”

Bundchen allegedly predicted that the Patriots would overcome the Los Angeles Rams in Super Bowl 53 and said to Brady later that night, “You’re lucky you married a witch.”

There have also been reports claiming that conservative icon and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who played a formative role in persuading the United States to sign on to the Montreal Protocol in 1987, consulted an astrologer after she was nearly assassinated in 1984 by IRA terrorists. The Irish Times in 1996 quoted astrologist Marjorie Orr alleging she was asked by Thatcher to “warn her of future threats.”

Former President Ronald Reagan, without whom there wouldn’t have been a Montreal Protocol, leveraged his influence to help the treaty along for reasons, said The New York Times in 2013, “no one has ever quite understood.”

Reagan was, of course, warned that failing to join the protocol would deplete the earth’s ozone layer. But according to former White House Chief of Staff Don Regan, “virtually every major move” at the Reagan White House was cleared by Joan Quigley, an astrologer hired by Mrs. Reagan after John Hinckley Jr. failed to assassinate the president outside the Washington Hilton in March 1981.

At one point, wrote historian H. W. Brands in “Reagan: The Life,” it appeared to some in the administration that Quigley’s consultations determined even the president’s medical regimen.

None of this suggests that all climate crisis believers are neo-pagans, but wherever one hears among elites a call to save the planet, one also finds neo-paganism.

The outbreak of essays revealing the climate change movement’s religious underpinnings bothered at least some of its defenders.

According to a blog post at Sightings, an outlet published by The University of Chicago’s Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion, conservatives have made similar arguments about everything from “Marxism to socialism, liberal progressivism, [and] Silicon Valley capitalism,” all of which also combined the Christian eschaton with its own worldview.

Critiquing secular ideas about the eschaton isn’t a niche market for right-wingers, however. In “God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World,” historian Walter Russell Mead traced the Christian, or, Abrahamic origins of today’s secular ideologies not to discredit them, but to explain how they influence domestic political movements and foreign policy.

The Abrahamic understanding of history teaches that events are “part of a narrative that extends back into the misty prehistoric past and forward to some unimaginable climax in the future.”

Liberalism borrowed from Abrahamism the idea that history has a “shape and purpose: a beginning, middle, and an end”: Humanity began prehistory in a state of natural freedom. The first despotic governments sank it into an era darkened by class warfare, wars over religion, and arbitrary state rule. History ends when representative democracies, religious liberty, free markets, and low tariffs between trading countries fulfill liberalism’s purpose to create a “peaceful, liberal, and prosperous world order.”

Climate activists (and most secular liberals) fall under the category of what Mead called “Unconscious Abrahamists,” or, “those whose mental and political worlds are shaped in an Abrahamic context without the influence of a conscious religious belief.”

In the climate activist’s version of history, Earth’s “Garden of Eden” spanned the years that preceded the Industrial Revolution. Man fell into history when he began to deforest the world and burn carbon-emitting fossil fuels to shelter his offspring and grow the economy. The last days will come when his refusal to recognize the “integrity of non-human nature” causes a global catastrophe that destroys the planet as we know it. An eschaton.

Appropriating Abrahamic themes isn’t likely to make climate cultists treat their political opponents amiably.

“Wars of religion are largely an Abrahamic trait, found among the Abrahamic peoples and, in self-defense, among their neighbors,” Mead wrote.

A survey of the news stories coming out of the world of climate activism shows that even secular citizens who claim to be relativists share the Abrahamic faiths’ tendency to insist upon the universality of truth. And like the warring sides in conflicts past, they intend to shape human beings and political institutions to reflect that understanding.

Climate cultists so far haven’t organized to resist the carbon-emitting powers by the sword, but they have assumed responsibility for remaking civilization in their image.

Ocasio-Cortez became an icon of climate cultism when she proposed the Green New Deal in February. The bill alleged that “human activity” is melting glaciers, and increasing the rate of occurrence of wildfires, severe storms, and droughts.

If the earth warms “two degrees Celsius beyond pre-industrialized” temperatures, she warned, 99% of coral reefs will go extinct and over 350 million people will fall victim to “deadly heat stress.”

Ocasio-Cortez also catastrophized that the climate crisis will cause the American economy to crumble. She predicted the United States will lose $1 trillion caused by damage to public infrastructure and “coastal real estate.” This detail likely hit home with AOC’s big-money donors and members of Congress.

The Green New Deal counted pilots, farmers, and coal miners together. It proposed that we mobilize the country to a degree not seen “since World II” to purge the earth of farting cows and airplanes.

To get there, we must first “overhaul transportation and agriculture,” which is to say the federal government must shut down transportation and agricultural industries as they currently exist. These policies will guarantee that the United States emits “zero greenhouse gases.”

Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old of Swedish origin, bore witness to Ocasio-Cortez’s testimonial when she addressed the United Nations in September.

“My message is that we will be watching you,” Thunberg began before an audience of world leaders. She upbraided the carbon-emitting civilization that transmitted her image around the world crowing, “You have stolen my dreams.” Even 50% cuts won’t suffice to heal the planet. “If you choose to fail us,” she concluded, millennials “will never forgive you.”

The climate gospel of Thunberg and Ocasio-Cortez is spreading. Extinction Rebellion, a British environmentalist group, recently blockaded thoroughfares in London to “address the climate crisis.” It entreats its followers to create a “world that is fit for generations to come.” And hopes to regenerate our culture by making it “healthy, resilient, and adaptable.” Its members actively hose nonbelievers with fake blood. What does this mean for us?

No civilization has a pass to trash the planet, of which the post-industrialized world is guilty. Nevertheless, climate cultists have amalgamated ideas that should not mix. The heirs of the Wicker Man should not be flattered to think that they can deliver humanity’s salvation.

Despite their talk of bringing us together, neo-pagans behave like people unfit to rule. They mock climate skeptics, prophesy phony predictions, worship themselves more than “Mother Earth,” and threaten to harm us unless we do what they say.

A 2018 Gallup Poll survey showed that climate cultists are winning the minds of millennials. We’re running out of time to stop the disciples of AOC from taking their agenda to Washington. The best we can do now is show that climate cultists are exaggerating their claims to attain political power.

Perhaps we can. The concept of “solar geoengineering,” which would have us blast particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays back into space to cool the planet, is gaining favor among climate scientists. Research is ongoing, though it appears we’ll be spared after all.

SOURCE

Australian Labor party lost in climate fog

Most of the fatal flaws exposed by the internal review of Labor’s emphatic electoral repudiation were so obvious that many of us had been pointing them out before, during and after the campaign. None of which detracts from the hilarity of watching the majority of players and commentators who argued Labor had a plausible agenda, campaigned well and would easily win the election now also say the findings are obvious.

Still, there is one glaring exception — a planet-sized blind spot — wilfully ignored by the review and much of the analysis. Yet even this hopeless oversight was predictable, simply because of who the ALP chose to conduct its review.

It was dubbed the climate election by many in Labor who were eager to accentuate the choice between targets and plans, yet the ALP chose as one of two reviewers Jay Weatherill — he was the premier of South Australia who pushed his state to a 50 per cent renewable energy share and allowed coal and gas-fired generators to close, delivering some of the world’s highest electricity prices but leading to the lights going out in the first statewide blackout.

When one of the most contentious policy choices in the campaign was about whether to embrace Labor’s plan to more than double the national renewable energy target (to the same level that created chaos in SA) and almost double the national emissions reduction goal, how could a renewables zealot such as Weatherill give an objective assessment? For him to call out the recklessness of Labor’s federal climate policy would be for him to admit his own costly legacy.

Labor has twice gone to a national election with radically more ambitious emissions reductions plans than the Coalition — in 2013 and this year — and the results speak for themselves. But Weatherill is deaf and blind to this reality; if he and others have their way, the next election will offer a similar choice.

On Thursday, delivering the review he conducted along with the pedestrian former trade minister Craig Emerson, Weatherill said it was clear Labor must continue to “stand for strong action on climate change” and that this was a “bedrock principle” for the party.

Yet elsewhere in the review there is clear evidence that its anti-coal rhetoric and climate evangelism contributed strongly to the party’s abysmal performance in Queensland, NSW’s Hunter Valley and elsewhere in regional Australia.

To be fair, sensible people might argue this nation had long been engaged in “strong action” on climate change, so Weatherill’s aim could easily be satisfied by offering bipartisan support for the Paris emissions reductions targets. But we know this is not what Weatherill and other members of Labor’s Socialist Left want.

The policy “bedrock” will be interpreted as something close to the extreme and uncosted policies Labor put to the people on May 18, which means one of the most obvious lessons from the election will be rejected by large elements of the party. Only Hunter Valley MP and Labor resources spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon seems willing to urge his colleagues to see sense.

Labor has made itself a victim to its own straw-man strategy. The review finds: “A modern Labor Party cannot deny or neglect human-induced climate change. To do so would be wrong, it would cause enormous internal instability and it would be a massive electoral liability.” This is true but pointless because no major party argues this position.

By pretending its opponents proffer denial and inaction, Labor locks itself into reckless policies and indefensible arguments. It is conned by its own hyperbole, hemmed in by its own hype.

The review goes on to say that the way forward for Labor is to focus on jobs from renewable energy and on the “costs of inaction”. But this is exactly what Bill Shorten and others did during the campaign, especially to avoid talking about the costs of their policies.

And the reality is that renewable energy jobs have not materialised to the extent promised anywhere, and voters are wise enough to understand the costs of climate inaction in Australia are approximately zero. No matter how dramatic Australia’s cuts, they cannot improve the global environment while global emissions continue to grow substantially — our costly policies will not stop a single storm, ease a drought or avoid a flood.

The only benefit they deliver is a down payment on international action. Obviously, then, there can be no financial or economic cost to inaction.

While the climate cannot be altered by anything we do alone, the only price to pay for inaction would be possible diplomatic repercussions for rejecting multilateral climate gestures. The “cost of inaction” argument is an exercise in stupidity and, as the election demonstrated yet again, mainstream voters tend to be smarter than that.

On climate, the ALP review is alarmingly myopic; it effectively recommends Labor sticks with the same extreme policies and inane arguments. It is unclear how it expects voters, who have repeatedly seen through this, to suddenly fall under its virtue-signalling spell.

Yet Anthony Albanese is sticking with this rhetoric; at the National Press Club on Friday the Opposition Leader continued with the pretence that additional climate action will create jobs rather than cost them. And he regurgitated Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s line from the day before about how the government’s drought response failed to mention climate change — does Labor argue a higher renewable energy target can end the drought? This is absurd stuff.

At Tony Abbott’s farewell dinner on Thursday there was some well-received triumphalism from conservative forces, especially from Peter Dutton, who was received as a hero for bringing on the move to take down Malcolm Turnbull. But Abbott made the most incisive point; he said that without Morrison’s victory this period of Coalition government would have gone down in history as an “embarrassing failure”.

Abbott then pointed out that both he and Turnbull owed Morrison a debt of gratitude. Yes, the Morrison win means all three can bathe in some of the success of a tumultuous period that has restored border integrity, rescued the budget, axed onerous taxes, struck significant free-trade deals and ushered in same-sex marriage.

Climate is the issue that repeatedly has divided the Liberal Party and is always a chance to do so again. This is where the Prime Minister has been proven right and others, including me, got it wrong. The proposition that he should abandon Paris as a means of accentuating policy difference has been proven unnecessary. His pitch of “Paris and no more” has seen him pick the economic, environmental and political sweet spot where Australia is doing enough but not too much, in a cautious but prudent response.

Taking extreme action on climate is to impose certain economic harm for dubious or non-existent benefits. Best leave that to Weatherill and Labor.

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 November, 2019

Global cooling!

A terrifying video shows the moment an American Airlines plane skidded off a snowy runway at the O'Hare International Airport in Chicago as the Arctic blast grounds more than 800 flights in the Midwest.

None of the 38 passengers and three crew members aboard the Envoy Air flight from Greensboro, North Carolina, were hurt when the plane slid off the runway at about 7.45am Monday morning amid the quick-moving storm system that is expected to affect at least 60 million people across the US.

In the video, flight 4125 is seen sliding off the runway shortly after the plane landed. The passenger who recorded the video is heard in the background saying 'oh sh*t' once he realized the plane was heading off the runway.

'We're sliding! We're sliding!' another passenger yells in the background shortly before the plane's wing hit the ground, bringing the aircraft to a stop.

The city's aviation department says 803 flights in and out of the airport have been canceled since the incident.

Besides the flights canceled at O'Hare, snow and ice have forced airlines to cancel 93 flights at Chicago's Midway International Airport, putting the total cancellations at 896 between both airports.

The National Weather Service (NWS) expects as much as 6 inches of snow in Illinois and up to 10 inches in northwest Indiana and southwest Michigan.

The snow also caused some minor delays for Metra trains going in and out of Chicago on Monday.

A winter weather advisory has been issued for Chicago and surrounding areas, according to the NWS.

SOURCE

'Climate emergency' declaration takes heat for fictional 'world scientists'

There was something goofy about the petition signed by 11,258 “world scientists” from 153 countries declaring a “climate emergency.”

One “scientist” was named “Mouse, Micky” from the “Micky Mouse Institute for the Blind, Nambia.” Another was Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts. And then there was “Araminta Aardvark” from the fictional University of Neasden.

Among the “Alliance of World Scientists” members who were apparently real people, many identified themselves as teachers, students, administrators, statisticians, economists, technicians, therapists, doctors, psychologists — not climate scientists.

As it turns out, however, being recognized as a “world scientist” may be easier than you think.

The alliance is a project of the Oregon State University College of Forestry, which invited “all scientists” to add their names to the four-page statement, “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency,” by clicking on a green “sign the article” button on the college’s website.

Following a round of fact-checking in the press and on social media, the college removed 34 names, including “Micky,” “Araminta” and “Dumbledore,” bringing the total to 11,224 signatories on the Nov. 5 article published in the journal BioScience, part of the Oxford University Press.

“During our original signature screening process, we attempted to remove all signatures that appeared to be invalid,” said a post on the OSU website. “Although, a few invalid ones were missed. We are thoroughly reviewing the full list at the moment and will make further updates if required.”

That said, the less-than-scientific signature-gathering process and ensuing media mockery did no favors for the climate-crisis movement, nor the major media outlets that trumpeted the story.

“More than 11,000 scientists from around the world declare a ‘climate emergency,’” said the headline in the Washington Post.

Said the CNN article: “11,000 scientists warn of ‘untold suffering’ caused by climate change.”

“Climate crisis: 11,000 scientists warn of ‘untold suffering,’” said the [U.K.] Guardian, while ABC News reported, “11,000 scientists sign declaration of global climate emergency.”

Ezra Levant, a conservative commentator on Canada’s Rebel News, said the alliance is “not a thing. It’s a one-page homemade website set up by some guy in the forestry department at Oregon State University.”

He noted that one signer identified his speciality as “BS Detection and Analysis.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s a joke,” Mr. Levant said on his Thursday show. “But it sure was important for the propaganda to say there were 11,000 scientists signing this. I wonder, are there even 11,000 climate scientists in the world? Maybe, come to think of it, because what a great way to get government grants.”

No Michael Mann

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano noted that the alliance posted a similar declaration in 2017, and that both were spearheaded by OSU forestry professor William J. Ripple, but that the previous petition was signed by 15,000 “world scientists.”

“Here we go again: The same organization is attempting to recycle their non-scientific commentary about a ‘climate emergency’ with a heavy dose of grad students, social workers, psychologists, veterinarians, librarians, and of course, Disney’s famous mouse character,” said Mr. Morano in an email.

Cracked Breitbart’s James Delingpole: “Now they’re down to just 11,000. Presumably, this time, Professors Donald Duck, Minnie Mouse, Pluto, the Little Mermaid, the Seven Dwarfs and the 101 Dalmatians just weren’t available.”

Australian climate blogger JoNova pointed out that none of the world’s leading climate scientists, including Penn State’s Michael Mann and NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, signed the article.

“Strangely, the world’s about to die and yet none of the top climate scientists are willing to put their name on the list,” she said.

The biggest kahuna on the article may be Stanford biology professor Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 doomsday book, “The Population Bomb,” which may explain the petition’s focus on reducing world population to combat climate change. He was also listed as a “contributing reviewer.”

In his bestselling book, Mr. Ehrlich predicted that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death” in the 1970s due to global overpopulation. He famously lost a 1980 bet with economist Julian Simon over whether commodity prices would rise or fall in the next decade, with Mr. Ehrlich predicting they would rise due to scarcity.

“How fitting if he is involved in the ‘climate emergency,’ since he was the inventor of the population emergency,” said Mr. Morano.

The Washington Times has reached out to Mr. Ehrlich, Mr. Ripple and Oregon State for comment.

The article declared that “the planet Earth is facing a climate emergency” and recommended eliminating fossil-fuel use; increasing forestation; eating more plant-based foods and less meat; lowering fertility rates, and curtailing economic growth.

“Our goals need to shift from GDP growth and the pursuit of affluence toward sustaining ecosystems and improving human well-being by prioritizing basic needs and reducing inequality,” said the alliance.

Mr. Morano described the piece as “a political activist ‘statement’ designed to lobby for ‘social and economic justice’ and ‘a sustainable and equitable future.’”

“Despite the obvious agenda and flaws of this declaration, the media promoted it as expected,” he added.

SOURCE

When Wolves Infiltrate the Sheepfold: Discerning Climate Truth From Falsehood in Churches

In recent decades, environmental issues have emerged as a major source of concern for our society. Churches, except for a small percentage, have largely remained silent on how Christians should approach and even help overcome the environmental challenges.

As a result, Christians have remained susceptible to being deceived by unbiblical principles that demand subscription to radical environmental viewpoints, often antithetical to the biblical doctrines on our relationship with the creation.

These radical theories are often promoted as scientific theories. In reality, they are merely predictive guesses, not hard truth based on solid evidence. With no proactive discourses on such matters in the church, Christians tend to absorb the radical principles and make choices based on them.

Vegetarianism and veganism, for example, are the most common radical environmentalist principles that have infiltrated the church. They have roots in Eastern philosophy and cannot be justified as a morally superior dietary lifestyle.

Other, more radical, principles are often mixed with science to make them more appealing to the masses.

In the 20th century, population control was the most dominant radical environmental theory. Proponents argued that the world will run out of food and other essential resources by the end of the 20th century because of growing population.

But their theories failed. Twentieth-century population growth failed to lead to resource depletion. The world now produces a record number of food crops. Most resource prices are falling—signaling that they are more abundant now, not less. Life expectancy has increased dramatically throughout the world.

Today, a new radical principle is being injected into the church: catastrophic anthropogenic (man-made) global warming (CAGW). In simple terms, CAGW is the belief that greenhouse gas emissions from human activity have caused a dangerous increase in global average temperature (GAT).

However, this time, the radical environmentalists—learning from all the mistakes they made in the 20th century—have made their CAGW theory closely resemble science, making it hard to distinguish it from truth.

Yet CAGW is a radical proposal. Unlike climate change, which is real and continuous, CAGW largely relies on assumptions and forecasts about GAT that are far from the truth.

Real science, using paleoclimate data, shows that current changes in climate (predominantly warming) are neither unprecedented nor dangerous. The radical environmentalists want people to believe current climate changes are unprecedented and will worsen in the future.

Real climate science says warming is driven by many various factors, including changes in the earth's rotation and tilt toward the sun, cycles of energy and magnetic wind output from the sun, ocean circulations, cloud cover, changes in concentration of greenhouse gases (GHG) and various other natural factors. But the radicals want the masses to blindly believe that increased atmospheric GHG concentrations, driven by human activity, are the primary driving force behind the modern warming.

Real climate science has shown us that climate and weather are unpredictable. CAGW radicals want us to trust their faulty computer climate models as legitimate, dependable, accurate tools of climate prediction. Yet computer models failed constantly in the past two decades to predict the trend and magnitude of change in GAT.

Radical environmentalists use several strategies to silence those who try to critically review their distortion of climate science. One is to call anyone who disagrees with their theory a "denier."

As E. Calvin Beisner put it, "belief in 'climate change' (shorthand for dangerous man-made warming that must be mitigated even at the cost of trillions of dollars and potentially trapping billions in poverty) really is a leap of faith." But unlike the Christian faith, which is based on evidence, CAGW is based on imaginary forecasts about future climate states.

Surprisingly, the church has fallen for this crafty bait. The pope, the archbishop of Canterbury and many other Christian leaders are now ardent supporters of the climate alarmist movement. Even some Christian scientists have joined the chorus.

Not one but many wolves have infiltrated the sheepfold. It is high time that the shepherds equip themselves with sound doctrine on environmental stewardship, the counter perspectives and how to discern between lies and truth.

The church needs to do a great deal of study to understand the complex web of climate science, the radical players involved in the debate, and how it compares with the biblical command to steward the creation while wisely using natural resources to meet people's needs.

The scientists, economists, theologians and other scholars of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation think human-induced global warming is real. They also think empirical evidence indicates that it is relatively small and largely benign. They think efforts to reduce it by substituting wind, solar and other renewable energy sources for fossil fuels would do more harm than good both to humanity and to the entire biosphere. They provide scientific, economic and engineering reasons for this view in hundreds of articles and several major papers on their website.

SOURCE

Prominent Geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack dissents – Laments ‘hubris’ of those who ‘believe that we can ‘control’ climate

Global Warming/Climate Change began as a scientific discussion. It has evolved into a polarizing political argument (whenever a scientific understanding depends on a “consensus”, we know it has become political), and from there to a semi-religious campaign advanced by well-intended people who feel, deep in their hearts, that they are “saving the planet”.

Many of those people have chosen to allow their good intentions to override their scientific objectivity. As soon as people who disagree about scientific conclusions start calling each other pejorative names, we know that the discussion has become primarily political, not scientific.

I know the work of [MIT’s Dr. Richard] Lindzen, [Climatologist Dr. Roy] Spencer, [Georgia Tech Climatologist Dr. Judith] Curry, [Climatologist Dr. John] Christy, [Princeton Physicist Dr. Will] Happer, etc.I share the skepticism that these people have expressed that anthropogenic CO2 emissions represent the primary driver of the climate change now under way.

We know that the climate “warmed”, with a few unexplained reversals, from ~18,000 years ago until ~1830 AD, as a consequence of factors that have controlled climate for all of Phanerozoic time. It defies the imagination to suggest that those factors abruptly ceased to operate ~300 years ago just to accommodate our need to attribute contemporary climate change to human activity.

It beggars the imagination to assert that the natural factors that drove the warming trend from 18,000 years ago to ~300 years ago (with some unexplained temperature reversals) abruptly stopped operating at the end of the Little Ice Age to accommodate our political need to attribute climate variability to human industrial activity.

Climate models are instructive, but they lead to scenarios, not predictions. They can be manipulated to yield desired outputs.
Removing the groundwater contribution, not directly the consequence of climate change, yields a rate of global sea-level rise that is the slowest in the last 18,000 years. In prior “interglacial” times, most recently to ~125,000 years ago, global sea level rose to levels higher than the present sea level, and no humans were burning fossil fuels.

We run an insidious risk: When/if a) we learn that anthropogenic CO2 is not the primary driver of contemporary climate change; b) we drastically reduce anthropogenic output of CO2 and the climate does not respond as we have predicted; or c) we enter a period of unexplained cooling, as the mid-20th-century cooling episode, or the Little Ice Age, the credibility of climate scientists will be dashed, and with it the credibility of any scientist who tries to inform environmental policy via rigorous science.

More HERE

Australia: Greens playing politics with fire, say Labor and Coalition

Senior Coalition and Labor MPs have launched a bitter attack on the Greens for suggesting climate change policies are responsible for the catastrophic bushfire threat confronting NSW and Queensland.

As firefighters braced for the arrival of high winds and low humidity that threaten some of the worst conditions seen since the Black Saturday bushfires a decade ago, Greens leader Richard Di Natale sparked fury from both major parties when he said the nation’s emissions policy had caused the fires that killed three people and injured 100.

Senior Nationals turned the attack back on the Greens, suggesting that environmental opposition to backburning, particularly in national parks, had exacerbated the bushfire threat.

NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro criticised his state’s National Parks Service for contributing to the catastrophic threat facing the state by failing to carry out extensive backburning in the lead-up to bushfire season.

“We need to do more hazard reduction, (burning) in national parks to manage the fuel load,” Mr Barilaro told The Australian. “Everyone knows that this is a real issue and I’ve got the guts to say it.”

Senator Di Natale sparked the row on Monday when he said: “Every politician, lobbyist, pundit and journalist who has fought to block serious action on climate change bears responsibility for the increasing risk from a heating planet that is producing these deadly bushfires.”

Federal Labor agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon, who is facing fire threats in his NSW seat of Hunter, lashed the Greens for politicising the catastrophe.

Mr Fitzgibbon said it was “absolutely the wrong time to be looking for political opportunity and it’s also hypocritical given the Greens opposed the CPRS (the Rudd government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme)”.

“But if Scott Morrison wasn’t sitting back and allowing emissions to increase every year there would be less political tension in the necessary community conversation about the need to act and adapt to our changing weather patterns,” he added.

Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack criticised the Greens’ comments as the “disgraceful, disgusting” behaviour of “raving inner-city lunatics”.

The Nationals leader said Australia had experienced bushfires since “time began” and he found it “galling” that people linked the catastrophe with climate change. “What people need now is a little bit of sympathy, understanding and real assistance, they need help, they need shelter,” Mr McCormack said. “They don’t need the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital-city greenies at this time when they’re trying to save their homes.”

However, Greens MP Adam Bandt said Mr McCormack was a “dangerous fool” who was putting lives at risk through the government’s inaction on climate change.

“Thoughts and prayers are not enough; we need science and action too,” Mr Bandt said. “They’ve done everything in their power to make these catastrophic fires more likely. When you cuddle coal in Canberra, the rest of the country burns.”

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd hit out at the Greens’ comments, pointing out it was the Greens who had blocked action on climate change when they opposed the CPRS in 2009.

“Seriously? If it weren’t for the Green party’s political opportunism in 2009-10, we would now be 10 years into an emissions trading scheme, a fully functioning carbon price, a long-term transition from coal and leading global action on climate,” Mr Rudd told The Australian.

“Instead, what did the Green party do? To try and score political points off my government, they hypocritically jumped into bed with the Liberals to defeat my legislation in the Senate. The rest is history.”

NSW Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall echoed Mr Barilaro’s sentiments, saying: “More needs to be done to clear fire trails, back burning operations and allow controlled stock grazing to keep fuel loads down. Better management would help enormously and lack of good quality local management has contributed.”

Mr Marshall told parliament three weeks ago that he had written to state Environment Minister Matt Kean “requesting a full and immediate review of fire management in the state’s national parks”.

“It is clear that landholders felt that there is a ‘lock it and leave it’ approach to management in national parks, which is not good enough,” Mr Marshall said at the time.

Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce said it was “infuriating” the Greens were attempting to score political points by saying the government’s “inaction” on climate change had contributed to fires that had killed three people.

Mr Joyce said climate change action in Australia would do nothing to reduce the bushfire risk unless there was also action taken by China, India and the US.

Australia produced 1.3 per cent of the planet’s emissions, compared with China’s 27.5 per cent and the 14.75 per cent that comes from the US.

Mr Joyce, a former deputy prime minister, said people were “once again talking about indigenous land management” because there were too many regulations around controlled burning ahead of bushfire season.

“We haven’t had the capacity to easily access (hazard) reduction burns because of all of the paperwork that is part of green policy,” Mr Joyce said.

Shine Energy chief executive Ash Dodd, an indigenous businessman trying to build a coal-fired power station in central Queensland, said traditional owners had undertaken hazard reduction to manage the fire risk “since time immemorial”.

“The responsibility of the build-up of surplus fuel must lay at the hands of state governments which do not allow seasonal burning based upon the traditions and customs of Australian traditional owners such as the Birri people,” Mr Dodd said.

Hazard-reduction burning has also been a contentious issue in Queensland.

A Queensland Audit Office report issued last year revealed the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services had missed key deadlines to improve the state’s bushfire readiness.

The report, itself a follow up to a highly critical audit of QFES in 2014, had “improved its visibility and oversight” of bushfire risk, including establishing the Office of Bushfire Mitigation and area fire management groups. However, the audit office said the authority had not fully implemented any of the original 2014 recommendations despite committing to do so by the following year.

SOURCE

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

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12 November, 2019

Electric vehicles 'won't kill oil demand'

An unexpectedly aggressive take-up of electric cars will hardly dent oil demand by 2040, according to Spencer Dale, chief economist of Britain-based energy major BP, meaning trillions of dollars of investment is needed in new supply to avoid acting as a drag on world economic growth.

"The idea that rapid growth in electric cars will kill oil demand is just not borne out by arithmetic," Mr Dale said.

He said the call on investment to develop new fields – even in a scenario consistent with meeting the Paris climate goals – was a point often misunderstood by critics.

BP's analysis has found that even in that Paris-consistent scenario, which would see oil demand peak in the mid-2020s, "enormous" investment is needed in new oil because of the declining rate of production from new fields and demand that would still be in the vicinity of 80 million-85 million barrels a day by 2040.

That compares with demand of close to 100 million barrels a day now.

"Think plateau not peak in terms of oil demand," said Mr Dale, a former chief economist on the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, referring to expectations that while global consumption is set to peak some time over the next five to 25 years it will not go into sharp reverse.

BP is anticipating rapid growth in electric vehicles from about 4 million today to just over 300 million by 2040 in its "evolving transition" scenario, which assumes an evolution in technologies and policies in a similar manner as in previous years.
Emissions impact 'almost nothing'

That growth would see electric cars account for 15 per cent of the global car fleet of about 2 billion by 2040, although electricity is expected to power about 30 per cent of car kilometres by that time because EVs are expected to be more intensively driven than conventional cars due to the rise of driverless cars.

BP envisages fully autonomous cars becoming increasingly available from the early 2020s, with most sold to fleet companies offering shared mobility services such as Uber, Lyft and DiDi because of their cost. But the expected much lower cost of of a ride in a shared mobility, fully autonomous car is expected to boost demand.

Still, the net impact by 2040 in that scenario is still only an erosion of oil demand of 3 million-4 million barrels a day by 2040 compared to what it would be otherwise.

Mr Dale said that in an "extreme" scenario, where the world banned all internal combustion engine cars from 2040 and allowed only full battery cars, the EV fleet could surge to more than 1 billion by 2040. That is about twice the forecast of the most bullish mainstream forecaster, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which is forecasting about 500 million EVs by 2040.

But even then the total level of oil demand by that time is still higher than today, even though consumption in car transportation is lower, he said.

In sobering findings for the climate, BP assesses the impact of huge growth in EVs is negligible on carbon emissions. Even in the super-bullish scenario of 1 billion EVs by 2040, and assuming 100 per cent of those cars were powered by renewable energy, the impact on carbon emissions is "almost nothing", Mr Dale said.

"It just does not move the dial in terms of carbon emissions," he said, noting that in this scenario, carbon emissions would still rise by 7 per cent by 2040, compared to a 10 per cent increase under the evolving transition case. That still leaves a huge gap to the 50 per cent cut in emissions seen in the scenario where the Paris climate goals are met.

"Cars only account for a relatively small proportion of total carbon emissions and so even if you reduce carbon emissions from cars by a half it is still only a very small fraction of the big falls we need to see in terms of getting on the road to Paris."

Mr Dale said improvements in efficiency of fuel use in vehicles is "an order of magnitude more important" than EVs in reducing oil demand.

SOURCE

Why Extinction Rebellion seems so nuts

Brendan O'Neill

One of my favourite political events this year was the Battle of Canning Town. This was the moment when Extinction Rebellion decided to send its painfully middle-class agitators to a working-class part of East London early in the morning to lecture and inconvenience people who just wanted to get to work. What could go wrong?

Quite a lot, it turned out. There were many wonderful moments. The two posh greens who climbed on top of a Tube train at Canning Town were mocked and eventually dragged down. A commuter can be heard branding one of the protesters a ‘ponytail weirdo’.

Elsewhere on the Tube system that day, commuters pointed out that the London Underground is run on electricity and is therefore pretty eco-friendly. ‘Are you that fucking stupid?’, one asked a smug-looking couple of XR agitators. ‘No wonder you can’t get jobs…’

But the best moment came during the Battle of Canning Town, during that clash between working people and eco-elitists, when one of the commuters shouted at the protesters: ‘The world is not coming to an end!’ I thought that was brilliant. This woman was just trying to get to her job and yet she found herself having to act as the voice of reason against the new hysteria. And she rose to the occasion wonderfully. She said what many of us know to be true: humankind does not face extinction.

The reason I admire the Battle of Canning Town is that it represented a potential turning point in modern green politics. It was really the first time in a long time that eco-hysteria was subjected to public judgement, to democratic rebuke, to the rational scepticism of the people. For far too long green ideology has been insulated from public challenge and public debate and this has allowed it to become increasingly eccentric and even unhinged. The Battle of Canning Town represented a reasoned, bottom-up pushback against the protected hysteria of modern environmentalism.

This is the thing I find most fascinating about Extinction Rebellion: its very name is a lie. Those two words themselves are untrue. Humankind does not face extinction, and all reasonable people know this. We know that there is nothing in the IPCC reports – which themselves are often over-the-top – to justify XR’s harebrained claims that we have 12 years to save the planet, and if we fail billions of people will die. They’ve just made this up.

As for the second word – ‘rebellion’ – this is a lie, too. Extinction Rebellion is not a rebellion. Rather, its ideology and misanthropy are entirely in keeping with the outlook of mainstream politics and popular culture. From the educational sphere to Hollywood’s output, from the political elite to the worlds of advertising and publishing, the ahistorical, anti-human idea that mankind is destroying the planet and will be punished by Weather of Mass Destruction for having done so is entirely accepted, and increasingly unquestionable, in fact.

Extinction Rebellion is not an edgy, radical movement. It is the militant wing of capitalist society’s loss of faith in itself. It expresses in an outward, colourful, pseudo-protesting form the intellectual and moral rot of the capitalist system itself, which now prefers to freak out over the ‘human footprint’ on the planet than to remake the world in the image and the interests of at least a certain section of humanity.

There are two striking things about Extinction Rebellion. The first is that it expresses the same old incorrect, disproven claims of conservationism and environmentalism that have been doing the rounds for decades. And the second is that it does this in an increasingly intemperate, morally unanchored and even apocalyptic fashion. We need to explain why this is.

On the first point – XR makes the same fundamental mistake as every naturalist misanthrope in history. It views population growth and humanity’s use of resources as variable and everything else, most notably human ingenuity, as fixed. This means its basic maths, not to mention its morality, is wrong.

It means XR makes the same mistake as Thomas Malthus did, and as the early 20th-century eugenicists did, and as 1970s eco-extremists did. It sees humankind as merely a consuming force, never as a producing or imaginative one. This is why Malthus failed to foresee the Industrial Revolution, which obliterated his claims that humankind would starve; and this is why 20th-century eugenicists failed to foresee the Green Revolution and its feeding of vast numbers of human beings; and this is why contemporary eco-alarmists fail to see, or simply ignore, the potential of the Nuclear Revolution – because these people have a jaundiced view of mankind as merely a user, an exploiter, a drain, which means they rarely appreciate mankind’s capacity for production and discovery and invention.

But XR expresses this old morally illiterate, scientifically dubious view of mankind in a strikingly new way. Its language is, to be frank, deranged. It says Africa is on fire, which is a lie. It says billions of humans will die in the next few years, which is not true. It says we are running out of resources – another myth. The linguistic shifts are remarkable. Greens have gone from talking about climate change to climate emergency to climate breakdown to climate catastrophe. These are not scientific terms; they are moralistic terms that express a fearful and often quite unstable view of humanity’s impact on the planet.

Why is XR like this? Because for too long green thinking has been insulated from debate and confrontation. Censorship has been deployed to deflect criticism from the green ideology. Anyone who raises questions about eco-misanthropy is branded a climate-change denier and efforts will be made to expel him or her from public life. The tragic environmentalist outlook has been forcefielded against rational, serious challenge, and in such a criticism-free vacuum green thinking has become more estranged from reason and more apocalyptic in outlook.

Censorship is the midwife of stupidity, and more importantly of dogmatism. When religious or political or moral ideologies are insulated from critique, they become dogmas. They become belief systems that are cleaved to, not because they have been tested and discussed in the public sphere, but because their adherents just know that they are right. These are the perfect conditions in which arrogance and intellectual hollowness can flourish, and in which defensiveness and fury become the default responses to any challenge from outside.

That is what has happened to environmentalism. It has been protected by the establishment against questioning and ridicule. Until the Battle of Canning Town. That’s the beauty of that battle – how quickly green hysteria crumbled in the face of simple scepticism. ‘The world is not coming to an end…’ This was the light of reason shining into the dark, dogmatic recesses of green ideology. Let’s have more of it.

SOURCE

Flight shaming sees record number choose train over plane to get from London to Glasgow, Virgin announces

Record numbers of people are taking trains over planes to get from London to Scotland as a "flight shaming" movement urges travellers to cut their carbon footprint.

Some 35 per cent of people travelling between the English capital and Glasgow and Edinburgh went by rail rather than air in the year to July, Virgin Trains said.

The figure, up 1 per cent from the previous year, is the biggest proportion of people using trains over planes on the routes ever recorded by the company.

Virgin Trains said the number of rail passengers travelling between England and Scotland's biggest two cities grew by 6 per cent to a new record of 717,592 over the same period.

It comes as climate change activists such as Greta Thunberg promote the Swedish concept of "flyskam", or "flight shame".

The term, which emerged in 2017 when Swedish singer Staffan Lindberg said he would give up flying, suggests people should feel guilty about air travel due to the carbon emissions produced by planes.

Travellers are increasingly turning their backs on flights, with 21 per cent saying they had cut down on flights due to environmental concerns over the past year, according to a recent survey by Swiss bank UBS.

Bruce Williamson, from the campaign group Railfuture, told The Telegraph: "People are feeling more guilty about flying generally, and, of course, the London to Scotland trains are electric, and therefore clean and green. "It's a very environmentally-friendly way of travelling."

Mr Williamson said the likes of Extinction Rebellion and Thunberg - who sailed from Britain to New York in an emissions-free yacht earlier this year - have helped to trigger a change in travel habits.

The number of travellers taking domestic flights in the UK has fallen by 10 per cent to 22.8m from 2007-2017, according to Civil Aviation Authority figures.

Industry experts said this was partly down to taxes on flights from UK airports and improved train services - though it is still cheaper and quicker to travel by air. In August, researchers found that 60 per cent of long-distance journeys in Britain were cheaper by plane than rail.

Flights from London to Glasgow are about three hours and 10 minutes faster than train journeys, not accounting for delays.

SOURCE

Green light for new coal mine in Cumbria, England

Kells was originally a mining town. The coal is metallurgical, used to make steel, not to generate electricity]

Plans to develop the UK’s first new deep coal mine in decades have been given the go-ahead by the government.

The Woodhouse Colliery would process around 2.5 million tonnes of coking coal a year, expected to replace imports from the US, Canada, Colombia and Russia.

The Woodhouse Colliery would extract coking coal from the seabed off St Bees, with a processing plant on the former Marchon [chemical works] site at Kells.

West Cumbria Mining (WCM) said the Ministry of Housing would not “call in” the application already approved by the Cumbria County Council despite objections from green groups.

It added the mine would help create around 500 jobs in the area.

The company said in a statement: “WCM can now start the process of delivering on its plan to build one of most modern mines in the world. It will supply the UK and international steel industry, deliver hundreds of local jobs and deliver a first-class supply chain across the country.”

SOURCE

Australia: Greenies ‘directly responsible’ for big fires: Firefighter

A rural firefighter has issued a heartbreaking plea on social media, telling the government “enough is enough”.

As catastrophic fires burn across Queensland and New South Wales — with experts warning that the worst is yet to come on Tuesday — rural firefighter Tyson Smith has issued a heartbreaking plea on Facebook.

The post, which has been shared more than 2600 times and liked by over 1600 people, asks how much more it will take before the government acknowledges current fires are the result of a larger issue.

Three people have died in NSW, and 200 homes and sheds lost to bushfires in both states over the weekend.

“How many more homes?” wrote Smith. “How many more acres of destroyed forest and bushland? How many more lives? How much more do we need to endure until you Muppets realise you f**ked up?”

Smith, who volunteers his time as a rural firefighter, said that every time there is a disaster like this, “thousands of people like myself drop what we are doing and go to work. We put ourselves in harm’s way so that another family can have a house to sleep in.”

The “authority figures that have stood for environmental protection” over the past five years are “directly responsible for this devastation”, Smith wrote.

“The fuel loading we are seeing out on the ground is ridiculous. We are looking at 5-10 years of growth, this fuel source is making these fires untouchable, we can’t even get near them to fight them.”

The heat generated from the fires burning in NSW and QLD “kills everything, right down to the microbes deep in the soil. It takes years for these areas to regenerate!” Smith wrote.

“The controlled reduction burns we do only skim the surface, they safely remove the fuel without destroying the place.”

Smith said the environmental authorities who have a put a stop to reduction burns — which include controlled burning, mechanical clearing like slashing undergrowth, or even reducing the ground fuel by hand — “need to be held personally accountable for the losses people have endured. People have lost their lives as a direct result of the decisions made by the environmental authorities!”

The firey ended the post, asking, “Tell me why these enviros shouldn’t be stood up in front of a judge and charged with manslaughter? Enough is enough!”

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 November, 2019

The Golden (Brown) State

California's environmental mismanagement is taking the state backwards in time.

Perhaps nothing defines the progressive movement better than what is arguably the most bankrupt phrase in the English language: my truth. For decades, one of California’s primary expressions of “my truth” has been the idea that global warming is the chief cause of the ongoing catastrophes wrought by wildfires. Unfortunately, Californians who still expect the largest state in the richest nation in the world to provide basic modern-day amenities are finding out the hard way that when political ideology trumps common sense and basic management skills, one can literally end up in the dark — on schedule.

A critical part of the global-warming agenda rests on the idea that mankind is so irresponsible it can never assume the top spot in the hierarchy of practical environmental solutions. Thus in the 1990s, the logging industry that was integral to removing dead trees and combustible underbrush — for which they “diabolically” expected to earn a profit — was hit with a series of regulations aimed at protecting the Spotted Owl.

Regardless, the Spotted Owl’s population continued to decline, due to predation. Far more important, the harvest rate declined to the point where tree harvesting on federal lands is one-tenth of what it was in 1988.

In an interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Democrat (and dedicated ecofascist) Gov. Gavin Newsom admitted the state’s response to wildfires has been “inadequate to the task, but so is the federal government, which manages over 40% of our forest lands and it’s the height of irony and almost indignity that we’re being criticized by members of the White House and the president himself.”

Last year, Trump pointed out the obvious: “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor.”

Yet it was then-Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke who revealed the eco-driven machinations that make Newsom’s assertions ring exceedingly hollow. When “we try to thin forests of dead and dying timber, or we try to sustainably harvest timber from dense and fire-prone areas, we are attacked with frivolous litigation from radical environmentalists who would rather see forests and communities burn than see a logger in the woods,” he stated.

Such frivolity has consequences, and Newsom himself admitted as much when he recalled his father’s experience in the small town of Dead Flat. “The dead trees up there are legendary,” the governor explained. “Hundreds of millions of dead trees and the cost… [What] we just did on our property cost $35 grand and was just — it seemed like a small little patch of dead trees. I mean it was jaw-dropping the cost just to one property owner.”

Former California legislator Chuck DeVore explains that such jaw-dropping costs are “a consequence of California’s Byzantine environmental regulatory patchwork.”

That regulatory patchwork and the eco-insanity that drives it is hardly new. In 2016, former Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bipartisan wildfire-management bill that would have given local government more say in forest management by engaging the Public Utilities Commission to create maps of fire hazards near utility lines.

How bipartisan? Unanimous votes of 75-0 in the Assembly, and 39-0 in the Senate. Thus Brown had a great hand in precipitating what he and other radical environmentalists call the “new normal.” In 2017, that new normal precipitated wildfires in the Napa and Sonoma wine regions, killing 44 people and destroying thousands of structures. In 2018, the state endured the most destructive wildfire in history: Camp Fire wiped out the town of Paradise and killed 86 people.

The real culprit here? “Years and years of greed, years and years of mismanagement in the utilities, in particularly PG&E,” Newsom — who spent eight years as Brown’s Lt. Governor — asserted last month. “Greed has precipitated a lack of intentionality and focus and a hardening our grid, undergrounding their transmission lines. They simply did not do their job.”

That would be the same PG&E that filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, due in large part to the anticipation of massive legal claims associated with what has become scheduled blackouts — blackouts designed to prevent the ignition of timber and underbrush that has been allowed to accumulate near PG&E’s power lines. The same PG&E, California officials now want to buy out, as if taxpayer funding — and their assumption of the utility’s massive liabilities — will solve the utility’s problems.

As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, a large portion of the PG&E’s problems are directly attributable to the climate agenda pursued by the Brown-Newsom administration, including the mandate that 60% of the electricity come from renewables by 2030.

An added “bonus” for Californians? Their electricity rates are the third highest in the nation — when they get it.

Last February, the U.S. Forest Service announced that an additional 18 million trees, mostly conifers, died in California since fall 2017, and that over 147 million trees have died on 9.7 million acres of federal, state, local, and private lands since the state’s drought began in 2010. In May 2018, the state created the Forest Management Task Force whose mission is to “protect the environmental quality, public health, and economic benefits that healthy forests provide to California.”

Yet as a 2016 article by San Francisco Chronicle columnists Chad T. Hanson and Dominick A. DellaSala indicates, the definition of “healthy forests” is rather circumspect if it doesn’t align with an environmentalist agenda that insists dead trees “are the most important parts of a healthy forest as they anchor soils thus preventing erosion, shade new seedlings from intense sunlight and provide habitat for scores of insect-eating bats, birds and small mammals.”

In addition, there’s the state’s Forest Carbon Plan, an initiative designed to “establish California’s forests as a more resilient and reliable long-term carbon sink, rather than a greenhouse gas and black carbon emission source.” By that “logic,” sucking up CO2 requires planting even more trees and leaving existing forests in relatively pristine condition in a state where the natural weather pattern consists of a distinct wet season precipitated by Pacific storms that begin in November/December, and bone dry, fire-friendly conditions that occur in both the summer and the fall.

The bottom line? California harvests less than one-third of the trees it harvested 30 years ago, a bankrupt utility cannot afford to modernize its grid, and the fires are spewing enough greenhouse gases into the air that California “will be decades late in meeting its ambitious goal of cutting greenhouse gases 40% below 1990 levels by 2030,” the LA Times reports.

And global warming is the all-purpose excuse for it all.

Regardless, the best laid plans of California’s eco-warriors are going up in smoke — literally. “Our resolute ancestors took a century to turn a wilderness into California,” long-time state resident Victor David Hanson writes. “Our irresolute generation in just a decade or two has been turning California into a wilderness.”

As the saying goes, will the last person leaving the state please turn out the lights? Oh, wait…

SOURCE

Settled Science? Diet and Climate

Bad science has consequences, regardless of what it's attempting to prove.

Those who are considering the claims that climate change is “settled science” would do well to review the history of the study of coronary heart disease.

Crossfit, the hip workout program, would seem to be a strange bedfellow for climate-change skeptics. The fitness brand is known for its intense workouts and cult-like following, not necessarily for its politics or public-policy positions. But Crossfit gurus have been tenacious and vociferous opponents of what they see as bad science as it relates to health and nutrition. Perhaps most notably, they have led the counterattack against what was once considered settled science — that cholesterol and fat are dietary enemy #1 and leading contributors to shorter life spans.

The idea that dietary fat was fatal gained legitimacy with help from the U.S. government. A few staff members from a George McGovern-led Senate committee “almost single-handedly changed nutritional policy in this country and initiated the process of turning the dietary fat hypothesis into dogma,” said Gary Taubes in Science back in 2001. The bureaucrats likely had great intentions, but they based their flawed guidance off a study that used cherry-picked data to “prove” the author’s hypothesis. The author, like the Committee staff, had good intentions, but he made some big jumps to get from correlation to causation. His analysis of coronary heart disease focused on the fat and ignored other factors like smoking, stress, activity levels, and obesity.

The Department of Agriculture translated the Committee’s dogma into policy: fat-free and reduced-fat products became the norm for any food program that involved government funding — school lunches, WIC, and SNAP — and received what was effectively free advertising in the form of USDA guidelines that strongly encouraged people to avoid fat and cholesterol. As is almost always the case when bureaucrats intervene, the Law of Unintended Consequences was in full effect. Consumers dutifully modified their eating habits, replacing the fat with large quantities of carbohydrates.

Although the studies need to be taken with a grain of salt (if that wasn’t a no-no as well), recent research suggest a high-carb diet may be much more harmful than a high-fat diet. Thanks to the sugar and carbs (with an assist from more sedentary lifestyles), obesity rates have climbed steadily, from the mid-teens when the dietary fat bogeyman was first introduced to well over 30% today. Diabetes has followed a similar trend.

As a result of the bureaucratic meddling, millions of people are worse off and billions more dollars have been spent on healthcare (often for obesity-related illnesses) than had we maintained the status quo (fat isn’t dietary enemy #1).

One of the most vocal critics of the fat-is-bad fallacy framed it this way:

The history of the national conviction that dietary fat is deadly, and its evolution from hypothesis to dogma, is one in which politicians, bureaucrats, the media, and the public have played as large a role as the scientists and the science. It’s a story of what can happen when the demands of public (health) policy-and the demands of the public for simple advice run up against the confusing ambiguity of real science.

Another skeptic wrote:

For 50 years an increasingly specious, pseudoscientific dogma has been growing in the Western World. This hypothesis originally proposed that coronary artery disease … is caused by the kind and amount of fat in our diets. That hypothesis was based upon fragile and selected data. The hypothesis has now been tested in dozens of clinical trials costing hundreds of millions of dollars. In adequate trials, that answer has been the same: dietary treatments are not effective.

The statements ring just as true if we replace fat and coronary heart artery disease with fossil fuels and climate change. Whether it purports to study biology or climate, agenda-driven research that merely seeks to validate politically popular ideas isn’t science. The question of dietary-fat-heart-disease correlation should also give us pause when we consider climatology.

If we have this much trouble proving hypotheses when we have a relatively reliable sample population to collect data from (human beings), it would be foolhardy to believe that we can definitively assess something as complex as global climate trends, much less predict where those causes and effects will take us decades from now.

SOURCE

David Attenborough Tacitly Admits His Film’s Deception

Sir David Attenborough finds himself at the center of another scandal over deceptive filmmaking.

Back in the spring, he was accused of deceiving viewers when he claimed, in his Netflix show Our Planet, that walruses were falling off Siberian clifftops as a result of climate change.

This was shown to be untrue by Canadian biologist and mammal expert Dr. Susan Crockford, who described the abundant scientific literature, dating back many decades, showing that walruses have always taken to the land, and even fallen from clifftops.

She also pointed out that the footage Attenborough used to make his case seemed to have come from a well-documented incident when walruses had been driven over cliffs by polar bears.

Yesterday, in his new BBC documentary Seven Worlds, One Planet, Attenborough again showed falling walruses, but this time making it quite clear that polar bears were driving them off the cliff.

Remarkably, however, the footage he used appears to be from the same incident and shot by the same cameraman as shown in his Netflix documentary, despite the producers’ claims at the time that no bears had been in the vicinity.

Attenborough, therefore, seems to be tacitly admitting that the claims he made in the Netflix film, and the denials issued by the show’s camera team and producers, were untrue.

GWPF director Dr. Benny Peiser welcomed Attenborough’s climb-down.

“We can only be pleased that Sir David has stepped back from the deceptive claims he made in his Netflix show.

He and the producers should apologize for the trick they pulled and withdraw the Netflix film that has badly misled and unnecessarily traumatized millions of people and news media around the world”.

SOURCE

More Electric Vehicles Could Lead To A Mountain Of Battery Waste

In 2017, more than 1 million electric vehicles were sold for the first time. That number doubled to 2 million in 2018 and by 2040 electric cars could make up more than half of all new sales.

Electric vehicles will play a pivotal role in meeting global targets to reduce carbon emissions, but new research warns the world is unprepared to deal with the lithium-ion batteries that power these cars once they reach the end of their useful life span.

Based on the number of electric cars sold in 2017, researchers in the United Kingdom calculated that 250,000 metric tons, or half a million cubic meters, of unprocessed battery pack waste will result when these vehicles reach the end of their lives in about 15 to 20 years — enough to fill 67 Olympic swimming pools.
“Landfill is clearly not an option for this amount of waste,” said University of Leicester professor Andrew Abbott, co-author of the review that was published in the scientific journal Nature on Wednesday.

“Finding ways to recycle EV (electric vehicle) batteries will not only avoid a huge burden on landfill, it will also help us secure the supply of critical materials, such as cobalt and lithium, that surely hold the key to a sustainable automotive industry,” he said in a press statement.

Lithium-ion batteries cannot be treated like normal waste; they are flammable and could release toxic chemicals into the environment.

When Batteries Retire

The report says that more needs to be done to identify uses for vehicle batteries once they reach retirement age. Even if they can’t power a passenger car, the batteries may be able to do less demanding tasks such as store electricity from wind turbines and solar farms.

The report also says better ways to gauge the health of a battery would make it easier to assess whether it can be reused or repaired.

And if the batteries can no longer be used or, as forecast, the supply of batteries exceeds second-hand demand, rapid and more efficient recycling methods need to be developed that can extract the valuable raw materials such as lithium and cobalt, which can be environmentally damaging to mine.

“We believe that it is possible to move to more advanced recycling technologies that can not only recover a larger proportion of the materials in the battery but also will be better able to handle the volume of EV waste batteries we anticipate coming through the system,” Gavin Harper, Faraday Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, who was the lead author on the paper, told CNN.

Currently in the United Kingdom, there are no dedicated operating facilities for processing electric vehicle waste batteries. What batteries do get processed are exported and recycled using a pyrometallurgical method, which uses high temperatures to smelt the batteries and extract some reusable components. However, it’s wasteful and inefficient, which means some materials can’t be recovered, he said.

There’s also a general lack of technical know-how, with a 2015 survey from the UK Institute of the Motor Industry finding there were only 1,000 trained technicians in the country capable of servicing electric vehicles, with another 1,000 in training — less than 2% of the country’s 170,000 motor technicians.

The batteries produced by different manufacturers vary widely and the paper calls for more standardization to allow easier recycling. Current designs also don’t lend themselves to easy deconstruction by hand or machine.

“The recycling challenge is not straightforward: There is enormous variety in the chemistries, shapes and designs of lithium ion batteries used in EVs,” said Harper.

“If you look at lead acid batteries, we have really high recovery rates of around 95 % because the technology is there to recycle them and it makes economic sense … the battery has a value.”
“We need to get to a similar place with EV batteries where they are seen as an opportunity and not a burden,” he added.

SOURCE

Australia: How the world has reacted to the NSW, QLD bushfires

Brain-dead Lefty journalists who know nothing about Australia (or anything else much) say: "Climate change" did it.

Australia has always had big forest fires, with some of the biggest many years ago. So there is no way you can tie the present fires to global warming. It is just empty assertion by brainwashed dupes

Where the fires mainly are at the moment -- Southern Queensland and Northern NSW -- is normal for spring, which is where we now are

Media outlets around the world have been reacting to the fires burning across Australia’s east coast, saying climate change is to blame.

Three people have been confirmed dead, five are missing and 40 have been injured, with 150 homes already destroyed — and the worst is yet to come.

“We’re not even in summer yet,” NSW Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said.

“I’m quite concerned that … we’re going to see more fires as we close through the season.”

Mayor Carol Sparks told the Sydney Morning Heraldthat her community has been “devastated” and the entire country is at risk from dangerous climate change.

Sparks, a member of the Glen Innes Severn Council, has no doubt that global warming is increasing the number of fires and their intensity.

“We are so impacted by drought and the lack of rain,” she said.

“It’s climate change, there’s no doubt about it. The whole of the country is going to be affected. We need to take a serious look at our future.”

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian told the Today Show that the discussion around climate policies being to blame is not one that will be had “for the next weeks.”

“We need to focus on saving lives,” the Premier said, and “the communities who are doing it tough.”

“Often, the first couple of days when I meet someone whose lost everything, they seem resilient.

“But you know that in the next few days when the shock wears off and they face reality, that’s when we really need to provide our support and I just asked everybody to put politics aside and just consider the human toll and what we can do as humans to support people in our state.”

Readers of the BBC’s coverage on the fires have shared Sparks’ concerns. While some shared “thoughts and prayers”, many others blamed climate change and the Australian government for the situation, with one reader writing, “Climate in peril as the world burns.

“Governments are to blame,” wrote Suzanne G Kelly on a BBC post. “They have ignored climate change even though all of the experts including Risk Analysts have been talking and warning about this for over two decades. “It’s now gone beyond blame. Governments have to be held to account and have to act now. They have been warned for decades of this and have done very little. “It’s shameful and heartbreaking.”

It was a sentiment echoed by other readers, with another writing, “Climate change is truly the topic now. Government should take this seriously. But some take climate change as their advantage to win elections.”

The Guardian have also provided significant coverage on the fires — where readers have also pointed out there’s no denying climate change is the catalyst for the blaze.

UK’s The Times coverage included quotes from Adam Bandt of the Australia Greens party, who accused Prime Minister Scott Morrison of inaction in the face of the global climate crisis, saying that he hadn’t done enough to reduce carbon emissions.

“I’m not saying the Prime Minister is directly responsible for the fires and the loss of life but he has contributed to making it more likely that these kinds of tragedies will occur,” he said.

SOURCE

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

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

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

10 November, 2019

Does one ten thousandth of the atmosphere control Earth’s thermostat?

There exists a belief that we are living in a world threatened by an important molecule that makes life possible on this planet?carbon dioxide.

To save the earth many believe we must transform society by shutting down the use of oil and natural gas which has improved life of modern society.

The arguments in support of this belief are the math equations or climate models claimed to simulate how nature does control the Earth’s.

In consultation with Astrophysicist Willie Soon and Tom Wysmuller, formerly of NASA, I chose the to consider following twelve variables which common sense says, must be considered when attempting to predict future temperatures and climate impacts on our planet. It turns out that all of these variables are not well understood, so if they appear at all, are just guesses. They include:

1- changes in seasonal solar irradiation

2- energy flows between the ocean and atmosphere

3- energy flows between the air and land

4- the balance between the Earth’s water, water vapor, and ice

5- the impact of clouds

6- understanding the planet’s ice

7- mass change among ice sheets, sea level, and glaciers

8- the ability to factor in hurricanes and tornadoes

9- the impact of vegetation on temperature

10- tectonic movement on the ocean floor

11- the differential rotation between the earth’s surface and the planet’s core

12- the solar system’s magnetic field and gravitational interaction

All of these factors that impact our climate are not well understood, requiring us to make educated guesses at how they relate to each other and our climate. More specifically, as to how they impact the Earth’s temperature.

Governments have poured billions of dollars into the coffers of academic institutions churning out predictions from useless equations. More than 100 climate models are financed by the United States government, none of which agree with each other. None have accurately predicted anything as to our climate over the past 30 years.

It is no surprise that Willie Soon calculated a few years ago that if we actually knew all the variables involved in a reasonable mathematical climate model it would take a supercomputer 40 years to reach an answer to a question we posed.

In an appeal to our readers’ common sense we have constructed two accurate 10,000 dot charts. The first one below shows how much man-produced carbon dioxide exists in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas relative to all such greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. The second chart shows how much carbon dioxide exists in our atmosphere relative to all other gases in our atmosphere.Does one ten thousandth of the atmosphere control Earth's thermostat?

On the first chart you can see that while Carbon dioxide makes up 3.6% of all greenhouse gas, man’s contribution of CO2 from factories power plants and automobiles is only 0.12% of all greenhouse gas. On the second chart you can see that total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes up four ten thousands (.0004) of all atmospheric gases, but man’s contribution is only one ten thousandths (.0001).

We all know there is a cottage industry of folks building climate models which appear to be scaring the public to enlarge government to save them from seeing their planet destroyed. There are however many sound scientists that recognize the absurd exaggeration of the impacts of carbon dioxide emissions on our planet. But they also work with mathematical models to show how tiny is the impact of carbon dioxide on our Earth. They are often called Luke-warmers. The problem is that by their professing carbon dioxide’s impact as being small they are giving the proverbial “inch” which allows the alarmists to take a “mile”.

It is time that we all stop fighting alarmist numbers with our small numbers. The only number that matters is ZERO. That is, in fact, the real impact of carbon dioxide on the Earth’s thermostat and sea level rise. We are not in a battle over numbers. We are in a battle to protect our way of life.

If we lose to the so-called Progressives, who should really be called Regressives, they will take us back to life as it was in the 19th century, but much worse, as they will have installed a government capable of controlling every aspect of our lives.

On the first chart you can see that while Carbon dioxide makes up 3.6% of all greenhouse gas, man’s contribution of CO2 from factories power plants and automobiles is only 0.12% of all greenhouse gas. On the second chart you can see that total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes up four ten thousands (.0004) of all atmospheric gases, but man’s contribution is only one ten thousandths (.0001).

SOURCE

Sale of indulgences dominates Madrid climate summit

In Madrid the negotiators will be trying hard to finalize the Paris Accord emission trading scheme. The non-binding Paris Accord targets may have big bucks value for some developing countries and this has led to a paralyzing controversy.

Emission trading means any country that does better than their target can sell the difference as indulgences, called carbon credits.

This is potentially a huge market. The airlines are already promising to offset their enormous, jet propelled emissions, and most developed countries are not on track to hit their targets, so there are a lot of potential buyers.

Countries like China and India have a lot to sell, despite their coal mania, because their targets are based on emissions per GDP, not emissions per se. Industrialization increases emissions but it increases productivity even more, a lot more. Booming Brazil also has a pot full of indulgences to sell, as may others.

This big pile of old credits is the primary sticking point. The new trading scheme, called the Sustainable Development Mechanism (SDM), replaces the old Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol, which expires next year. China and India have banked huge amounts of CDM carbon credits, thanks to their rapid industrialization. So much that some fear there is danger of a glut making credits worthless. China and the other big holders of CDM credits do not see it that way.

There is also the feeling that the old CDM credits are mostly bogus. A 2016 EU-commissioned report found that just 2% of CDM projects were likely to ensure additional emissions reductions. Claiming emission reductions for projects that were going ahead anyway is cheating in many people’s eyes.

There is also the issue called “double counting.” This is when Country A sells credits to Country B, but does not subtract the credit from its reduction claim. In effect both A and B are then counting the reduction the credit is supposedly based on. (Socialism is the land of complex rules.) Preventing this sort of double counting would require that every country open their emission books to outside scrutiny, which China especially does not want.

For these reasons, among others, there is a widespread movement to not allow CDM credits to be brought forward into the SDM pot. China, India et al disagree strongly. They want to cash in on those old credits. With possibly billions of dollars at stake, this is by far the biggest issue on the Madrid summit table. After all, this whole show is about money, not climate.

Another SDM issue that is active in the halls but not yet on the table is social justice. The argument is that a lot of CDM projects were socially bad, for example harming local communities. So there is a group of mostly small countries, led by Switzerland, who want the SDM to include social justice safeguards, like local approval. The big dogs do not want this.

Another interesting aspect is that the value of credits to sell is an incentive for developing countries to set weak targets that are easy to beat. In short there appear to be lots of ways to game the SDM system.

This debate may not end in Madrid. It failed to end at the last summit, in Poland. It was the topic of a special session last month, in Costa Rico, that also made no progress. Some people even argue that without the SDM the Paris Accord system fails.

CFACT will be covering this flaming hot issue in Madrid.

SOURCE

NPR Invents Fake Italy Wine Crisis

There they go again. National Public Radio published an article on its website claiming global warming is wreaking havoc on Italian wine production and forcing producers to seek new ways to protect their grapes. Yet the objective data show wine production in Italy, the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world are all doing quite fine.

As CFACT documented last month, global wine production set a new record last year. Italy was no exception, as Italian wine production also set a new record in 2018. Italian wine production is down some in 2019, but wine analysts attribute the 2019 decline to wine producers deliberately growing fewer grapes this year because they had so much holdover wine from 2018. To the extent weather impacted the wine grapes that were grown, unusually late spring COLD weather and frosts diminished output. Of course, as we are all lectured, global warming causes an earlier end to winter and an earlier start to spring. Without our recent modest global warming, this year’s cold spring would have been worse, this year’s late frosts would have been worse, and this year’s grape harvest would have been worse.

Leave it to NPR, however, to spin the record 2018 wine production, the excess wine held over into 2019, and the cold spring weather on global warming. NPR described the cold spring and late frosts as “weather extremes due to climate change.” Well, I guess “weather extremes” is one way to describe a cold spring and late frosts. Blaming those on global warming, however, is simply preposterous.

Regardless of what NPR would have people believe, wine production in Italy and throughout the globe is doing just fine as our planet modestly warms. So raise a glass and toast global warming!

SOURCE

Little Sister Is Watching: Scowling Greta Coming to a Kitchen Near You

A trend in Tel Aviv workplace cafeterias - photos of a judgemental Greta Thunberg next to disposable utensils

Imagine you've strolled into your office break room to enjoy some lunch, you open a cabinet to grab a paper napkin, reach in, and -- egads! -- see the visage of that 16-year-old emotionally troubled climate crusader, Greta Thunberg, scowling at you from behind the plastic spoons.

Is this a prank? Some weird new diet plan? Did Greta get lost on her latest fake-carbon-neutral adventure and wind up somehow in your work fridge?

None of the above. "Greta Shaming" is the latest lame stunt from the planet-saving crowd, intended to make you think twice before... I dunno... having the desire to go on living.

Actually, it's to make people reconsider using disposable utensils and the like, and it's apparently a very big deal in Israel where the whole Greta Shaming thing is taking off.

Israelis are Greta shaming each other over plastic

Photos of the teen Swedish climate activist being placed in work places to discourage using disposable plasticware

Allison Kaplan Sommer reports for Haaretz that "employees have been placing photos of a judgmental-looking Thunberg on top of their office’s supply of disposable cups, plastic plates and utensils." This is kind of a big deal in Israel, where there's a high proportion of workers trying to keep kosher -- and that means using disposable utensils in non-kosher kitchens. As Kaplan writes, "many more workplaces, including the Israeli army, have been more resistant to getting rid of paper and plastic" for exactly that reason.

So what's a Gaia-worshipping buttinsky to do? Why, the same thing they do at various UN conferences, for major media outlets, and on fake eco-tours: Turn for help to that GenZ superhero, Scowling Greta.

There is a more serious angle to this story though. Following WWII and the Holocaust, Israel was founded -- and backed up by a sierra-hotel defense force -- as the one place in the world where Jews would always be free to practice Judaism. Flash forward to today, and you have simple soldiers and office workers being shamed out of keeping kosher. I'm not religious, and I'd probably be terrible at it if I tried, but what gives Gaia-worshippers the right to harass people of other faiths in their own workplaces?

Oh, right... progressives always know best, and enjoy nothing but impunity for their annoying little stratagems. And here's an easy prediction: Now that Greta Shaming has made the papers, it won't be long before it goes global.

I was going to take a lunch break after filing this piece, but I seem to have lost my appetite. But then, ruining nice things for everyone else is what postmodern environmentalism is all about.

SOURCE

Time frame set for ban of exported recyclable waste from Australia

Recycling is costly and is about to become more so. For a time a useful cost minimization strategy was to pay poor Asians to recycle the stuff. But they have recently become embarrassed by that role so are now refusing to take the waste

The bulk of recyclable waste is sent from Australia to other countries for processing at a huge cost, but not for much longer.

Australia will ban the export of recyclable waste from its shores, with a phase-out of the expensive and controversial practice beginning in July next year.

A meeting of federal, state and territory environment ministers today has devised a timeline to cease sending plastic, paper, glass and tyres internationally.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison flagged the ban after the last Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting in August, and today’s agreement has set in stone a staggered process to allow jurisdictions time to adjust.

“Ministers will further test the timetable with industry and local government, while also developing response strategies and undertaking independent market analysis,” the agreement states.

At present, when households and businesses put rubbish into recycling bins, just 12 per cent of that material is processed in Australia.

The remainder has been shipped to other countries – until recently most of it has wound up in China and Indonesia – at a hefty cost.

Last year, China banned imports of Australian waste and Indonesia has sent back shipments that were contaminated with non-recyclable waste, including soiled nappies and food.

From July 2020, glass waste will be banned for export, followed by mixed waste plastics the following year and all while tyres in December 2021.

All remaining waste products, including mixed paper and cardboard, will be banned no later than June 30, 2022.

“This timetable reflects the unique challenges of each jurisdiction, and the preparedness of some jurisdictions to complete the phase-out ahead of schedule,” the agreement states.

“All jurisdictions acknowledged resourcing, from Commonwealth, states and territories, and ndustry will be required to effectively implement the ban.”

Today’s agreement also committed to an ambitious waste reduction target under a new National Waste Action plan.

It aims to make Australia a world leader in waste management and recycling and includes an 80 per cent recovery rate of material across all waste streams. “All ministers have committed to identifying any significant procurement opportunities over oming months such as major road projects that could use significant amounts of recycled material,” the agreement states.

“The Commonwealth agreed to take a leading role. This reflects a wider commitment from the Commonwealth and states to drive procurement strategies for recycled material.

“The Commonwealth Government will prioritise work with states and territories and relevant industry and standards bodies to develop engineering specifications and standards to support

the use of recycled materials in building, construction and infrastructure development, for use across all jurisdictions.”

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 November, 2019

Earth Needs Fewer People to Beat the Climate Crisis, Scientists Say

What crisis? Caleb Rossiter (rossiter@co2coalition.org) comments:

The UN IPCC, in the scientific body of its latest AR5 review of climate science, finds NO statistically significant upward global trends in hurricanes, droughts, floods, rate of sea-level rise and even rate of temperature rise compared to the first half of the 20th century to the second half. The IPCC does not claim a CO2 effect on the half a degree warming in the first period, but cites "expert judgment" to claim at least a 50 percent (or a quarter of a degree) CO2 warming effect in the second period. So, if the crisis variables are not rising from the natural period to the CO2-infuenced period where is the climate crisis? The answer is: in the models, which are in their infancy and may never emerge to adulthood"

Forty years ago, scientists from 50 nations converged on Geneva to discuss what was then called the “CO2-climate problem.” At the time, with reliance on fossil fuels having helped trigger the 1979 oil crisis, they predicted global warming would eventually become a major environmental challenge..

The scientists got to work, building a strategy on how to attack the problem and laying the groundwork for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s preeminent body of climate scientists. Their goal was to get ahead of the problem before it was too late. But after a fast start, the fossil fuel industry, politics and the prioritization of economic growth over planetary health slowed them down.

Now, four decades later, a larger group of scientists is sounding another, much more urgent alarm. More than 11,000 experts from around the world are calling for a critical addition to the main strategy of dumping fossil fuels for renewable energy: there needs to be far fewer humans on the planet..“We declare, with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from around the world, clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency,” the scientists wrote in a stark warning published Tuesday in the journal BioScience.

While warnings about the consequences of unchecked climate change have become so commonplace as to inure the average news consumer, this latest communique is exceptionally significant given the data that accompanies it..When absorbed in sequence, the charts lay out a devastating trend for planetary health. From meat consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and ice loss to sea-level rise and extreme weather events, they lay out a grim portrait of 40 years of squandered opportunities.

The scientists make specific calls for policymakers to quickly implement systemic change to energy, food, and economic policies. But they go one step further, into the politically fraught territory of population control. It “must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that ensures social integrity,” they write.

The problem is enormous, yet the signatories still manage to strike an upbeat tone. For all the lost chances, progress is being made, they contend..“We are encouraged by a recent surge of concern,” the letter states. “Governmental bodies are making climate emergency declarations. Schoolchildren are striking. Ecocide lawsuits are proceeding in the courts. Grassroots citizen movements are demanding change, and many countries, states and provinces, cities, and businesses are responding.”.

The report, however, comes one day after U.S. President Donald Trump began the formal procedure of withdrawing America from the Paris climate accord

SOURCE

An AOC future

EPA Rolls Back Obama Admin Regulation on Coal Plant Waste

President Donald Trump delivers remarks on America’s environmental leadership at the White House, July 8, 2019. (Tia Dufour/White House)
The Environmental Protection Agency announced Monday that it will roll back Obama administration rules governing the storage and disposal of coal ash, which were intended to prevent the toxic waste from seeping into waterways.

The 2015 rule required plants that burn coal to dispose of the fine powder and sludge using wastewater treatment technology in order to prevent about 1.4 billion pounds of coal ash from leaking into waterways. Coal ash often contains arsenic, lead, and mercury toxic to human consumption and the environment.

The new Trump administration rules would allow unlined coal ash waste ponds to remain open until 2027 at the latest.

EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the old rules “placed heavy burdens on electricity producers across the country.”

“These proposed revisions support the Trump administration’s commitment to responsible, reasonable regulations by taking a common-sense approach that will provide more certainty to U.S. industry while also protecting public health and the environment,” Wheeler said.

Coal companies have complained in court that the Obama-era rules drain their finances, and President Trump has repeatedly pledged to support the industry since running for office.

Environmental advocates have spoken up against the new rules, calling them “unconscionable.”

SOURCE

The long history of eco-pessimism

Climate change isn’t the first eco-apocalyptic idea, and it won’t be the last.

The global soil-erosion scare

In the words of agricultural economist Dennis Avery, soil erosion ‘has been threatening since man scratched the first seedbed with a stick’ (1). Indeed, population growth, deforestation and soil erosion form the main backdrops of the oldest known written story, The Epic of Gilgamesh. Plato later lamented that Athens’ backcountry, whose hills had once been ‘covered with soil’, the plains ‘full of rich earth’, and the mountains displaying an ‘abundance of wood’, had been turned, after years of abuse, into a landscape that could ‘only afford sustenance to bees’, because all the ‘richer and softer parts of the soil [had] fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land [was all that was] left’.

In the middle of the 19th century, the American naturalist and diplomat George Perkins Marsh observed in his classic Man and Nature that, besides historical records that documented the past fertility of the regions stretching from Spain and North Africa to Mesopotamia and Armenia, the ‘multitude and extent of yet remaining architectural ruins, and of decayed works of internal improvement’ all pointed towards ‘former epochs [when] a dense population inhabited those now lonely districts’. It could only have been sustained, he concluded, ‘by a productiveness of soil of which we at present discover but slender traces’.

Throughout history, land mismanagement sometimes resulted in localised soil depletion and compaction, siltation, waterlogging, salinisation, gullying and, in extreme cases, desertification. By the first decades of the 20th century, a growing number of writers deemed such problems significant enough to threaten humanity’s very survival. This fear played into the agenda of a few powerful constituencies. In America, it could justify New Deal programmes and their accompanying ‘gentle rain of checks’ to address Dust Bowl problems. Elsewhere, it appealed to eugenicists fearful of overpopulation, and colonial administrators keen to control native populations’ agricultural practices, such as cattle-grazing and shifting cultivation. As one British colonial administrator put it a century ago:

‘A child is not allowed to play with fire, although it may very much like to see the flames; in the same way the British people, as locally represented by the Gold Coast Government, cannot allow the inhabitants of the district to play fast and loose with their priceless treasures, the African forests, well knowing that the country will be permanently injured thereby.’

In a 1939 work, The Rape of the Earth: A World Survey of Soil Erosion, British writers Graham Vernon Jacks and Robert Orr Whyte wrote that, ‘as the result solely of human mismanagement, the soils upon which men have attempted to found new civilisations are disappearing, washed away by water and blown away by wind’. They continued: ‘[The] destruction of the Earth’s thin living cover is proceeding at a rate and on a scale unparalleled in history, and when that thin cover – the soil – is gone, the fertile regions where it formerly lay will be uninhabitable deserts.’

In 1948, ecologist William Vogt published his Road to Survival, which was to become the biggest-selling environmentalist book, until the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Vogt argued that, with rare exceptions, man had ‘taken the bounty of the earth and made little or no return’. Where he had not lost water and soil, he had ‘overgrazed and overcropped, and by the removal of animals and plants, [had] carried away important soil minerals, broken down the all-important soil structure, and generally exhausted the environment’. Civilisations were at risk, because ‘hundreds of millions of acres of once rich land’ had become ‘as poor as or worse than – the city gardener’s sterile plot’. Population growth and wealth creation had in the end delivered ‘[d]espoiled forests, erosion, wildlife extermination, overgrazing, and the dropping of water tables’.

That same year, Vogt’s close friend, the conservationist Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr, published his book Our Plundered Planet. There he warned that environmental destruction would soon prove even more deadly than the Second World War, for ‘man’s destructiveness has turned not only upon himself but upon his own good earth – the wellspring of life’. Osborn deemed American agricultural production one ‘great illusion’, because the ‘story of our nation in the last century as regards the use of forests, grasslands, wildlife and water sources is the most violent and the most destructive of any written in the long history of civilisation’. Man’s ‘avoidance of the day of atonement that is drawing nearer as each year passes’, Osborn continued, meant he had to learn ‘to work with nature in understanding rather than in conflict’. Failure to change threatened ‘man’s very survival’. Humanity had ‘now arrived at the day when the books should be balanced’.

More HERE

When climate scientists cry

Emotionalism is clouding the climate-change debate.

‘Environmental scientists must be allowed to cry’, say three academics in a letter to the journal Science this month. Their plea has caused a ripple of wider media interest, but perhaps only partly because it overturns traditional ideas about scientists as dispassionate observers. This is a view the authors of the letter dismiss as a ‘pervasive illusion’ that is ‘dangerously misguided’. Rather, these scientists’ appeal for more attention to be paid to their own ‘emotional trauma’ seems to affirm the contemporary tendency to respond to the issue of climate change primarily in emotional terms.

They are not the first to highlight the feelings of climate scientists. An article in Nature last year, for instance, noted that ‘eminent ecologists, social scientists and climate researchers… invoke concepts of grief and mourning to describe their personal distress’. A 2017 study of the ‘emotional labour of climate scientists’ noted disapprovingly that many researchers strove to ‘separate themselves from emotions’, arguing that they misguidedly did so because they were influenced by ‘strong social and cultural pressure to be positive’. Yet it seems that such cultural expectations – that one should ‘manage emotion’ and ‘remain optimistic’ – no longer hold. Instead, the expectation today is that one should catastrophise and emote, preferably loudly and in public.

Alongside Greta Thunberg’s impassioned, lip-trembling speeches to world leaders, or the ostentatious displays of woe staged by Extinction Rebellion protesters, grief-stricken scientists seem to fit right in. But casting the issue of climate change as a matter of personal feelings and emotional responses is distinctly unhelpful. It turns what ought to be a question of scientific investigation and political discussion into an issue for therapeutic sanctimony, where professions of intense feeling about the problem tend to substitute for reasoned debate about how to deal with it.

In the field of environmental communication, the emotionalisation of climate change is nothing new. Analysts have long wondered how to craft the hardest-hitting campaigns, with debate often revolving around the question of whether inducing fear in the public leads to feelings of urgent invigoration or paralysing dread. The pernicious assumption underpinning much of this discussion is that people should be influenced through emotional appeals rather than being convinced as rational political beings.

In 2009 – the year that the academic journal Ecopsychology was established – a report by the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Interface Between Psychology and Global Climate Change noted that ‘risk perceptions… are influenced by associative and affect-driven processes as much or more than by analytic processes’. Indeed, there was already a long research tradition in psychology arguing for the primacy of visceral affect over cognitive reasoning, both in general terms and specifically in relation to environmentalism. Two decades ago, it was already uncontroversial to argue that, as one study put it in 2000, ‘the key entry point for environmental education is via the affective domain’.

The eco-psychologists were taking their cue from politicians, many of whom had already worked out that speaking about climate change on the basis of their personal feelings gave them greater moral authority than trying to revive the tired language of left/right politics. The archetypal case is Al Gore, who began his campaign for the US vice-presidency in 1992 by declaring that ‘this election isn’t about politics’, and talking instead about his experiences of family tragedy and grief. He thereby shifted the ground from politics to the sphere of private experience, claiming moral purpose based on his personal understanding of the pain of imminent loss and the need to care for future generations.

Emotion-based appeals not only allow politicians to avoid the far more difficult business of rationally and politically justifying themselves and their policies to the electorate — they also help to disguise the character of measures that would be a very hard sell indeed if they were made explicit. The UK government’s declared target of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, for example, apparently feels so good that others have sought to heighten the sensation by declaring a 2030 or 2025 target. The harsh realities of immiseration, upheaval and austerity that meeting such a target would entail, however, are unlikely to be spelled out openly in any election manifestos.

Ecological thinking has always offered a fearful, dystopian vision of the future, emphasising limits, distrusting modernist ambition, and rejecting humanism as ‘anthropocentrism’. The mainstreaming of such ideas in recent years has been facilitated by a therapeutic outlook that understands politics in terms of inward-focused projects of the self. We are continually invited to self-monitor and self-audit, to express our feelings, confess our fears and signal our virtue. Just take a look at the climate ‘rebels’ currently prancing and weeping around London to see where this narcissistic approach leads. If science were to follow a similar trajectory, then maybe we really would be as doomed as the Extinction Rebellion protesters proclaim.

SOURCE

Australia Flicks Switch on First New Power Station in 7 Years

Fascinating that the Greenies have not opposed this. The dire blackouts that South Australia suffered when they demolished all their coal-fired generators must have focused a few minds

AGL Energy Ltd.’s Barker Inlet gas-fired power plant began operations Monday, Australia’s first major new power station since 2012, with its quick-start capability designed to back-up fast-growing wind and solar generation.

The A$295 million ($204 million) facility in South Australia has 210 megawatts of capacity and will help supplement renewables, which regularly meet more than 50% of the state’s power demand, the company said in a statement. The plant is capable of reaching full capacity within 5 minutes, AGL said.

“This is important, because it will allow us to provide a rapid response to changes in renewable generation supply and demand -- particularly wind generation here in South Australia,” Chief Executive Officer Brett Redman said in the statement. Barker Inlet is part of AGL’s A$2 billion pipeline of infrastructure projects aimed at bolstering the grid.

Australia will likely need around A$400 billion in new utility-scale generation assets over the next 30 years as aging coal-fired power plants retire, the Grattan Institute, a think tank, said in a study last month. However, the industry has complained that the lack of policy certainty at a national level is hampering investment.

The government has short-listed 12 projects under a program to underwrite investment in new generation, and is also giving financial backing to the A$5 billion-plus Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project that will provide large-scale energy storage to back-up renewables.

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 November, 2019

U.S. Begins Formal Withdrawal from Paris Agreement

The Trump administration formally notified the United Nations on Monday that the U.S. will begin its withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, a process that will be completed over one year.

“Today the United States began the process to withdraw from the Paris Agreement,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement. “Per the terms of the Agreement, the United States submitted formal notification of its withdrawal to the United Nations. The withdrawal will take effect one year from delivery of the notification.”

“We will continue to work with our global partners to enhance resilience to the impacts of climate change and prepare for and respond to natural disasters,” Pompeo added.

Trump has criticized the non-binding agreement, which 195 countries signed in 2015, saying other countries benefit from the climate accord at the expense of America. Wealthier countries such as the U.S. had pledged to assist financially struggling countries meet their greenhouse-gas emissions-reduction goals.

“What we won’t do is punish the American people while enriching foreign polluters,” Mr. Trump said last month during an appearance in Pittsburgh. “I can say it right now and I’m proud to say it: it’s called America First, finally.”

“My job is to represent the people of Pittsburgh, not the people of Paris,” Trump added, recalling his 2017 remark.

13
The president first announced in June, 2017 that the U.S. would withdraw, making good on his campaign promise to do so, but the earliest the Trump administration is permitted to exit the agreement is November 4, 2020, one day after the next presidential election.

The goal of the climate accord was to keep global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius over this century. For its part, the U.S. had pledged to lower greenhouse-gas emissions by approximately a quarter by 2025, using 2005 levels as a benchmark.

SOURCE

Former NSC Director Says Climate Change Is ‘Imaginary Threat’ Brainwashing Our Youth

A notorious climate change science skeptic, Happer, 80, recently left the Trump administration after the White House killed his plan to create a panel to challenge government assessments of global warming.

But Happer remains undeterred, confident that President Trump, the most vocal climate change skeptic to occupy the White House, is naturally inclined to come around to the idea.

“Hard things often take a long time,” Happer told the Washington Examiner in his first interview since leaving the administration in September. “I hope it’s in my lifetime.”

Happer is as eager as ever to challenge the climate science consensus, calling it a “completely imaginary threat that doesn’t exist. People are afraid to stand up and say that.”

He compared his crusade to the experience of the protagonist in an 1882 play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, which tells the story of a man who speaks an “unpalatable truth” and is punished for it.

Happer drew outrage in 2014 for declaring in an interview that “demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler.”

Happer said the statement “was not meant to be in any way anti-Semitic” but that he was sorry he said it.

Nevertheless, he stood by the comparison, invoking his father’s service in the Scottish military in World War II to say that he feels strongly about opposing “fanaticism.”

In keeping up the fight against the mainstream of climate science, Happer faces opposition among an increasing number of Republicans who fear that the party will not be viable if it does not change to appeal to climate-conscious voters, especially young people.

He said he’s held his views on climate change since the early 1990s when he served as director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science in the George H.W. Bush administration.

“I feel bad about the younger generation,” said Happer, who has six grandchildren ranging from middle school- to college-age. “They have been brainwashed. The people who think this is a winning election issue are wrong.”

After leaving his post as a National Security Council senior director, Happer has returned to Princeton, where he is an emeritus physics professor.

He’s also rejoined the CO2 Coalition, an advocacy group he founded that claims rising levels of carbon will benefit the world.

He’s working on a research paper that questions whether methane contributes to climate change. Methane, the main component of natural gas, is a more powerful warming pollutant than carbon dioxide, although it stays in the atmosphere for less time.

Former national security adviser John Bolton hired Happer in September 2018 to work on “emerging technology” issues involving classified military projects.

He helped Trump issue an executive order on bolstering the power grid to withstand electromagnetic pulse attacks.

Happer, however, said he only took the job under the condition the White House let him pursue his side project to scrutinize climate science.

Happer said it’s a coincidence he left the job shortly after Bolton resigned, insisting he always planned to stay for a year.

“They let me push this issue as far as I can,” Happer said of Trump and Bolton. “I was very pleased they kept their word.”

Happer’s goal was to recruit a panel of scientists through the White House National Security Council to scrutinize the science underlying the 2017 National Climate Assessment, in which researchers across 13 federal agencies concluded that climate change is already affecting the country and is caused by humans.

It would then have used the findings of the science review and applied them to national security policy.

The national security and intelligence communities within the U.S. government have established that climate change threatens national security and puts military bases at risk from extreme weather.

Happer insists there were “lots of scientists who would have been delighted to help” question climate science and how it informs national security policy.

However, Judith Curry, a scientist who was considering participating in the panel if it conducted a “serious assessment,” said it appeared Happer was not pursuing a good-faith effort.

“I’m not at all sure that this is what the White House had in mind,” Curry, the former head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, told the Washington Examiner, declaring it “a politicized assessment.”

The idea also faced significant opposition within the government from a slew of senior officials, including Kelvin Droegemeier, Trump’s top science adviser, as well as the Pentagon and agencies that work on climate science, such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Naturally, there were people in defense who supported climate alarmism, as there were in many other agencies,” Happer said. “That was no surprise to me. “

Happer contended the national security community’s findings of climate change rely on flawed science generated by “insular and paranoid” like-minded scientists. He said he believes greenhouse gases “have some warming effect, but it’s not very big.”

“The climate change community always has the benefit of being a judge for its own cause,” Happer said. “That’s never been very healthy.”

SOURCE

Former California Governor Jerry Brown Stokes His Climate-Change Backfire

Jerry Brown has been on the quiet side since he left office, but raging fires across the state have smoked out the hereditary, recurring governor. As he told Politico, this was “only a taste of the horror and terror that will occur in decades,” in “America, in Africa, in Canada.” For Brown, a three-time presidential loser, it was not a new theme.

“I would point to the fact that it took Roosevelt many, many years to get America willing to go into World War II and fight the Nazis,” Brown said on “Meet the Press” on December 30. “Well, we have an enemy, though different, but perhaps, very much devastating in a similar way. And we’ve got to fight climate change. And the president’s got to lead on that.”

Brown said Trump had the right to his own opinions, “but he doesn’t have a right to his own facts.” Yet Brown, a lawyer and former seminarian with no formal background in science, has not advanced reproducible climate data in support of his position. In his final two terms, he oraculated about climate change while neglecting California’s volatile tax system, pension debt, regulatory reform, and unelected bodies such as the Coastal Commission that override voters and trample property rights.

Brown gave way to the current governor, Gavin Newsom, whose grandfather was awarded the concession for the 1960 Squaw Valley Olympics by Jerry Brown’s father, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. In a similar style, Gov. Jerry Brown appointed William Newsom, Gavin’s father, to a judgeship in Placer County and later the state court of appeals. Gov. Jerry Brown was occasionally an effective goalie, but protégé Newsom has signed 69 bills that Brown vetoed, including AB 61, about petitioning judges to take away a person’s firearms. As Katy Grimes notes in California Globe, as the fires rage, Newson been ramping up the rhetoric.

“As it relates to PG&E, it’s about dog-eat-dog capitalism meeting climate change,” the governor said. “It’s about corporate greed meeting climate change. It’s about decades of mismanagement.” As Grimes recalls, Newsom’s predecessor Jerry Brown is “responsible for implementing the majority of the climate change and environmental restrictions on water, natural gas and nuclear power, and impositions of 33%, then 50% and finally 100% renewable energy mandates on the utilities.”

None of that seems to be quelling the fires and accompanying blackouts. So there’s more to it than the climate change-capitalism axis. If current conditions persist, the last person leaving the state will have no need to turn out the lights.

SOURCE

How the EPA Makes Wildfires More Likely

Wildfires are claiming lives and destroying property across California. As they flee the deadly blazes, Californians should be aware that federal bureaucrats make such fires more likely to occur. Consider the case of U.S. Navy veteran Joe Robertson in Jefferson County, Montana.

Robertson’s property was vulnerable to fires, so he built small protection ponds and dug a ditch, one foot wide and one foot deep, to supply firefighters in the event of an outbreak. The federal Environmental Protection Agency charged that under the Clean Water Act, the ditch was a federally protected commercial waterway and required a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers, even though the nearest navigable waterway was 40 miles away. The federal government criminally prosecuted Robertson, 77, sent him to prison for 18 months and fined him $130,000, all upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Robertson completed his sentence and was still on parole when he died in March 2019, at the age of 80. His wife Carri took up Joe’s petition to the U.S. Supreme Court to vacate his conviction. On April 15, 2019, the Supreme Court vacated the Ninth Circuit’s ruling and in July the Ninth Circuit vacated the conviction and fine.

As Myron Magnet notes, the Trump administration recently revoked the regulation under which Robertson was convicted. Magnet is a critic of the powerful administrative state that makes such atrocities possible. “Not only do we have bureaucrats making rules like a legislature and interpreting them as a judge,” Magnet writes, “but also the interpretations amount to a further lawmaking power, with no checks or balances whatsoever.”

This is the same EPA that hired “policy advisor” John Beale, who claimed he also worked for the CIA and basically skipped work for nearly 20 years, drawing “retention bonuses” all the while. Beale also kept drawing a government paycheck nearly two years after his retirement. Such an unaccountable agency is hardly worthy of trust.

The Trump administration should continue to cut EPA regulations, particularly those that make it more difficult for citizens to protect their own lives and property.

SOURCE

Jeremy Corbyn’s Scientist Brother Exposes Climate Fraudsters

Piers Corbyn, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexiteer climate-sceptic elder brother, has lambasted Extinction Rebellion as a Soros-funded, EU- and UN-backed scam to transfer money from ordinary people to corporations.

Speaking to YouTube personality and former UKIP candidate Carl ‘Sargon of Akkad’ Benjamin, the physicist, weather forecaster, and former Labour councillor warned viewers that “climate policy is there to control you, not climate”.

“The political origin of [Extinction Rebllion] is the globalist supernationals, the mega-rich. They’re funded by George Soros, among others, he spent 24 million dollars on the group which set up the so-called climate strike,” Corbyn alleged.

“They are orchestrated by the mainstream media and tolerated deliberately by all the governments in the world, just about, bar very few,” he continued.

“If you and I were to have a demonstration about Yemen, the war and arms, and so forth, we would be swept off the street in half an hour, right?” he told Benjamin.

“Or if the miners’ strike had have tried to occupy London like they did, they would have had the horses against them straight away, they’d be swept away — so [Extinction Rebellion] are completely tolerated by the powers that be,” he added.

SOURCE

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

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

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

6 November, 2019

The giga and terra scam of offshore wind energy

The latest “renewable, sustainable” energy claims show the IEA belongs in an insane asylum

Paul Driessen

Can anti-fossil fuel policies based on climate crisis alarmism possibly get any more insane than this?

In what might be described as a pre-Halloween trick of ginormous proportions, the International Energy Agency (IEA) now asserts that “renewable, sustainable” energy output will explode over the next two decades. Certainly for onshore wind and solar energy – but especially for offshore wind, says the IEA.

“Offshore wind currently provides just 0.3% of global power generation,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol noted. But “wind farms” constructed closer than 37 miles from coastlines around the world, where waters are less than 60 meters (197 feet) deep, could generate 36,000 terawatt-hours (36 million gigawatt-hours or 36 billion megawatt-hours) of electricity a year, he assures us. That’s well above the current global demand of 23,000 terawatt hours, Birol and a new IEA report say.

In fact, the potential for offshore wind energy is so great, the IEA asserts, that 20 years from now the industry will be 15 times bigger than in 2019 – and will attract $1 trillion a year in investments (riding the coat tails of government mandates and subsidies). The boom will result from lower costs per megawatt, larger turbines, and technological developments like floating platforms for turbines, says the IEA.

Wind “farms”? Like some cute, rustic Old McDonald family farm? Are you kidding me? These would be massive offshore electricity factories, with thousands, even millions, of turbines and blades towering 500-700 feet above the waves. Only a certifiable lunatic, congenital liar, complete true believer, would-be global overseer or campaign-cash-hungry politician could possibly repeat this IEA hype – or call these wind energy factories renewable, sustainable or eco-friendly.

They all clearly need yet another bucket of icy cold energy reality dumped over their heads – in addition to this one, this one and this one. If the world buys into this crazy scheme, we all belong in straitjackets.

As I have said many times, wind and sunshine may be free, renewable, sustainable and eco-friendly. But the turbines, solar panels, transmission lines, lands, raw materials and dead birds required to harness this widely dispersed, intermittent, weather-dependent energy to benefit humanity absolutely are not.

A single 1.8-MW onshore wind turbine requires over 1,000 tons of steel, copper, aluminum, rare earth elements, zinc, molybdenum, petroleum-based composites, reinforced concrete and other raw materials. A 3-MW version requires 1,550 tons of these non-renewable materials.

By my rough calculations (here and here), replacing just the USA’s current electricity generation, backup coal and natural gas power plants, gasoline-powered vehicles, factory furnaces, and other fossil fuel uses with wind turbines and backup batteries would require: some 14 million 1.8-MW onshore turbines, sprawling across some 1.8 billion acres, some 15 billion tons of raw materials, thousands of new or expanded mines worldwide, and thousands of mostly fossil fuel-powered factories working 24/7/365 in various foreign countries (since we won’t allow them in the USA) to manufacture all this equipment.

Those overseas mines now “employ” tens of thousands of fathers, mothers and children – at slave wages.

Can you imagine what it would take to build, install and maintain 36 billion megawatt-hours of offshore wind turbines ... in 20 to 200 feet of water ... many on floating platforms big and strong enough to support monstrous 600-foot-tall turbines ... in the face of winds, waves, salt spray, storms and hurricanes?

The impacts on terra firma ... and terra aqua ... would be monumental, intolerable and unsustainable.

Moreover, a new study – by the company that has built more offshore industrial wind facilities than any other on Earth – has found that offshore turbines and facilities actually generate much less electricity than previously calculated, expected or claimed! That’s because every turbine slows wind speeds for every other turbine. Of course, that means even more turbines, floating platforms and raw materials. Using 3, 9 or 10-MW turbines would mean fewer of the beasts, of course, but larger towers, bases and platforms.

More turbines will mean countless seagoing birds will get slaughtered and left to sink uncounted and unaccountable beneath the waves. The growing jungle of fixed and floating turbines will severely interfere with surface and submarine ship traffic, while constant vibration noises from the towers will impair whale and other marine mammals’ sonar navigation systems. Visual pollution will be significant. And there’d be thousands of miles of submarine cables bringing electricity to onshore transmission lines.

Maps depicting the USA’s best wind resource areas show that they are concentrated down the middle of the continent – right along migratory flyways for monarch butterflies, geese, endangered whooping cranes and other airborne species; along the Pacific Coast; and along the Atlantic Seaboard.

Coastal states, especially their big urban areas, tend to be hotbeds of climate anxiety and wind-solar activism. Indeed, many Democrat Green New Deal governors and legislators have mandated 80-100% “clean, renewable, sustainable, eco-friendly” energy by 2040 or 2050. California, Oregon and Washington in the West ... and Maine, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Virginia in the East ... are notable examples. So the IEA’s love affair with offshore wind energy is certainly understandable. Of course, Blue State Great Lakes would also be excellent candidates for fixed and floating turbines.

Pacific Ocean waters typically get deep very quickly. So thousands of huge floating platforms would be needed there, although Puget Sound is also windy and could be partially denuded for turbines, as they’ve done in West Virginia’s mountains. California prefers to import its electricity from neighboring states, rather than generating its own power. However, as Margaret Thatcher might say, pretty soon you run out of other people’s energy. So homegrown wind energy will soon be essential – and inland Golden State and Middle America voters would almost certainly support putting turbines straight offshore from Al Gore’s $9-million mansion in Montecito and the Obamas’ $15-million cottage in Rancho Mirage.

When it comes to actually implementing these ambitious “renewable energy goals,” resistance and delays grow exponentially. A Massachusetts wind project for 170 offshore wind turbines was originally proposed around 2001. It’s now down to 130 3.6-MW behemoth turbines, with the US Interior Department delaying permits yet again, pending “further study.” The reaction of coastal residents to the reality of endless thousands of turbines could well turn into Fossil Fuels and Nuclear Forever.

Actual electricity output is rarely as advertised. It often hits 20% or lower, depending on locations – and fails completely on the hottest and coldest days, when electricity is most urgently needed. During the July 2006 California heat wave, turbines generated only 5% of nameplate capacity. In Texas, wind capacity factors are generally 9% to 12% (or even down to 4% or zero) during torrid summer months. Offshore, echoing Samuel Taylor Coleridge, they’d be as idle as a fleet of painted turbines upon a painted ocean.

Actual wind turbine electricity output declines by 16% per decade of operation – and worse than that offshore, because of storms and salt spray. Removing obsolete offshore turbines requires huge derrick barges and near-perfect weather. Costs and difficulties multiply with turbine size, increasing distance from shore, and whether concrete bases and electrical cables must be removed and seabeds returned to their original condition, as is required today for offshore oil and gas operations.

Cutting up 300-foot (or taller) towers and 200-foot (or longer) blades from offshore turbines, and hauling the sections to onshore landfills and scrap yards, is no piece of cake. Recycling blades is also difficult, because they are made from fiberglass, carbon fibers and petroleum resins; burning blades releases hazardous dust and toxic gases, and so is (or should be) prohibited.

Dismantling and disposal costs could easily reach millions of dollars per offshore turbine, and many billions for every industrial-scale wind “farm.” But wind energy operators should not be allowed to simply leave their derelicts behind, as they have done with smaller turbines in Hawaii and California.

Bottom line: From any economic, environmental, raw materials or energy perspective, offshore wind energy is simply unsustainable. It’s time for politicians, environmentalists and industry promoters to stop selling offshore wind (and onshore wind and solar power) as magic pixie dust to replace fossil fuels.

Via email

What is a Nuclear Microreactor?

Nuclear is getting smaller… and it’s opening up some big opportunities for the industry. A handful of microreactor designs are under development in the United States and they could be ready to roll out within the next decade.

These plug-and-play reactors will be small enough to transport by truck and could help solve energy challenges in a number of areas, ranging from remote commercial or residential locations to military bases.

Microreactors are not defined by their fuel form or coolant. Instead, they have three main features:

1.Factory fabricated: All components of a microreactor would be fully assembled in a factory and shipped out to location. This eliminates difficulties associated with large-scale construction, reduces capital costs and would help get the reactor up and running quickly.

2.Transportable: Smaller unit designs will make microreactors very transportable. This would make it easy for vendors to ship the entire reactor by truck, shipping vessel, airplane or railcar.

3.Self-regulating: Simple and responsive design concepts will allow microreactors to self-regulate. They won’t require a large number of specialized operators and would utilize passive safety systems that prevent any potential for overheating or reactor meltdown.

Benefits

Microreactor designs vary, but most would be able to produce 1-20 megawatts of thermal energy that could be used directly as heat or converted to electric power. They can be used to generate clean and reliable electricity for commercial use or for non-electric applications such as district heating, water desalination and hydrogen fuel production.

Other benefits include:

Seamless integration with renewables within microgrids

Can be used for emergency response to help restore power to areas hit by natural disasters

A longer core life, operating for up to 10 years without refueling

Can be quickly removed from sites and exchanged for new ones.

Most designs will require fuel with a higher concentration of uranium-235 that’s not currently used in today’s reactors, although some may benefit from use of high temperature moderating materials that would reduce fuel enrichment requirements while maintaining the small system size.

The U.S. Department of Energy supports a variety of advanced reactor designs, including gas, liquid metal, molten salt and heat pipe-cooled concepts. American microreactor developers are currently focused on gas and heat pipe-cooled designs that could debut as early as the mid-2020s.

SOURCE

Bernie Sanders’ Perpetual Motion Green New Deal

One time, as I was riding in an Uber from the airport, the driver began explaining perpetual motion.

Even though we were in a motor vehicle which needed regular infusions of gasoline to keep going, the driver, who was a devotee of ancient Egyptian technology, claimed that the pyramids were really generators, that modern technology had been stolen by the white man, and that free energy was real.

He also had a video of a perpetual motion machine powered by a bicycle chain. “It generates energy by sliding down,” my driver assured me. “And then it gets pulled up by its own weight. It’s real simple.”

I never got around to asking him why he didn’t use the perpetual motion bicycle chain to power his car.

But now, Senator Bernie Sanders has announced his own perpetual motion energy plan.

In Bernie’s new Green New Deal, 20 million new jobs will be created to fight, what the elderly socialist claims is, a “climate crisis”. These jobs will be "good paying, union jobs" in "energy efficiency retrofitting, coding and server farms, and renewable power plants", not to mention the eternal New Deal fantasy of government work camps under a "a reimagined and expanded Civilian Conservation Corp".

And this perpetual motion plan will pay for itself by, among other things, "collecting new income tax revenue from the 20 million new jobs created by the plan."

The bicycle chain slides down. And then gets pulled up. And creates 20 million jobs. It’s real simple.

Bernie’s plan calls for spending a mere $16.3 trillion (also known as most our national debt) and that will create 20 million union jobs in such booming sectors as sealing windows and coding (when the coders have been unionized, all our software will work as well as all other union sectors), and then the income tax from those 20 million jobs will help cover that $16.3 trillion. Presumably with some tax hikes.

But it’s okay. We’ll just pay the workers more so they can afford to pay the higher taxes. It’s real simple.

Much like my Uber driver’s perpetual motion machine, the energy will be free.

First, Bernie will “ban the imports and exports of fossil fuels”. There will also be bans on fracking, coal mining and offshore drilling. And he’ll also “ensure fossil fuels stay in the ground by stopping the permitting and building of new fossil fuel extraction, transportation, and refining infrastructure.”

You wouldn’t want those fossil fuels escaping the ground and sustaining human civilization.

Then, President Bernie will use the SEC to force "financial institutions, universities, insurance corporations" to divest from oil and gas and buy "clean energy bonds". Those “clean energy bonds” will be subsidizing the failed “renewables” strategy that doesn’t work, but will now have been mandated.

Federal pension funds will also be forced to throw away the futures of their workers in the same way.

By 2030, the entire country’s electricity and transportation grid will be powered by “100 percent renewable energy.” Which is to say you’ll spend a lot of time sitting around in the dark.

But the whole thing will pay for itself “through litigation, fees, and taxes” on the fossil fuel industry.

First Bernie will bankrupt the energy industry and then pay for everything by taxing the industry he bankrupted. The bicycle chain goes up and then it goes down. Which part of that don’t you understand?

At least the energy will be free. Or virtually free.

Bernie’s Green New Deal proposal claims that, “after 2035 electricity will be virtually free, aside from operations and maintenance costs.”

Operators are standing by to take your call.

Bernie promises to “end greed in our own energy system”. Goodbye Edison, vamoose Tesla. There’ll be no more profiteering from the infinite free energy generated by the Green New Deal. Forget energy greed. And the energy grid. There’ll be neither greed nor grid in the Green New Deal.

How will this free energy work?

Simple. "The renewable energy generated by the Green New Deal" will be sold to "cooperatively-owned" utilities that " demonstrate a commitment to the public interest". Ban oil, coal and gas, then force all the financial institutions to subsidize “clean energy” which will be sold to lefty cooperatives.

And they say Communism doesn’t work.

There will be no more “energy greed” because the Green New Deal, whose key pieces of energy infrastructure, windmills and solar panels, are the least reliable ways to produce energy, and only work intermittently when there’s sunlight and wind, will resell its energy to politically correct utilities.

Everything will be subsidized and pay for itself by taxing the oil industry that no longer exists. And forcing everyone to invest their savings and pensions in a boondoggle worthy of Venezuela.

The bicycle chain goes up. The bicycle chain goes down. And you’re really gonna need those bicycles.

As Bernie puts it, "We will move beyond oil toward an electric car." There'll be $2 trillion in grants to buy electric cars. And $681 billion for electric car trade-ins. Then $407 billion to replace all buses with electric buses. And $216 billion to replace trucks with electric trucks. Plus, another $100 billion to “decrease the cost of a new electric vehicle to at most $18,000.”

(It's only money. Taxpayers have lots of it.)

Actual cars will be eliminated through the, "regulation" and "enforcement" of personal vehicles.

But don't worry about the cost of charging your new electric car, built by unionized "indigenous peoples" and "communities of color", because with charging stations everywhere, "drivers will no longer need to worry about where to charge their car or if they can pay for it."

The electricity is "virtually free".

The entire country, including all its vehicles, and long-haul trucks and school buses, and your car, will be dependent on an energy grid run by political apparatchiks who worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign and whose power supply varies depending on the weather, and are managed in defiance of economics.

What could possibly go wrong?

Better hang on to your bicycle. You’re going to need it once the blackouts, brownouts and restrictions on power usage kick in. After a while that $2 trillion worth of electric cars will be banned through “regulation and enforcement”, while everyone except seniors will be told to ride bicycles.

The bicycles will be powered by that unique form of renewable energy known as human muscle.

Human ingenuity and folly are the only true sources of renewable energy. Both are infinite. And sometimes it can be hard to tell one from the other. That is why socialism continues to endure. Not because it works, but because there will always be people who want to believe that the bicycle chain can go up and down, and that your trillion-dollar spending plans will be paid for by your fantasies.

Any intelligent adult would see Bernie’s Green New Deal as raving lunacy. Take the plan to subsidize 20 million jobs with income taxes from those 20 million jobs. Or the claim that the Green New Deal can be paid for with taxes on the energy industries it proposes to wipe out. Or a call to spend $150 billion to “decarbonize” shipping and aviation “as soon as possible”. (Just put windmills on the planes.)

Portions of the Green New Deal read like socialist gibberish poorly translated from the original Russian.

“We will establish a ‘take back’ program to require large corporations that produce goods with the materials needed for this clean energy transition to pay to take those goods back from consumers who no longer want them to establish a nation-wide materials recycling program so we can use as many recycled materials as possible to build the renewable energy equipment needed to transform our energy system,” one particular breathless sentence insists.

There’s no room for periods or commas in this excited vision of a world in which consumers eagerly rush to turn over the goods they no longer want so they can be used to construct windmills for free energy.

After the Bernie revolution, the people will have been educated to realize that they no longer need material goods. (Bernie however will have upgraded from three houses to four.) And they’ll rush to turn over all their iPhones and convertibles, while the evil corporations which convinced them that they needed those things will atone by beating their lawnmowers into solar panels and windmills.

This isn’t a political vision. It’s environmentalist messianism. It doesn’t work. But it isn’t really meant to.

My driver didn’t try powering his car with the perpetual motion bicycle chain. The idea of it was what mattered. Once upon a time, American socialists were cranks confined to lecturing students or random people about their magical economics with no real risk of having to put their delusions into practice.

The truly vital thing was the pseudo-religious vision of a remaking the world into a magical place.

We all like believing that wonder can transcend material reality. For religious people, God is the source of wonder. Others, like my driver, find validation in imagining the technological miracles of ancient Egypt. And millions of lefties believe that given total power they could reshape reality to create their vision of a magical world unbounded by the materialism of economics and energy.

In the real world, the only way the bicycle chain keeps going is if your feet are working the pedals. And lefties invariably realize that the only “free energy” doesn’t come from wind or solar.

The only “free energy” with which lefties build their utopias is slave labor.

Ancient Egypt wasn’t powered by magical batteries or lost ancient technologies. It worked because of slave labor.

Communist dictatorships got things done not because they had good ideas, but because they enslaved millions of people.

Bernie proposes bringing back the Civilian Conservation Corps. Perhaps he forgot that Norman Thomas, America’s leading socialist, had called CCC a “system of forced labor”.

Or maybe Bernie remembers all too well.

The bicycle chain rattles. Keep pedaling. It’s the only way to generate power in the Green New Deal.

SOURCE

German City Destroys 600 Acres Of Forest To Build Wind ‘Farm’

What follows is an example of how German decisionmakers go about protecting the environment: chop down hundreds of acres of forests and pour thousands of tons on concrete reinforced with hundreds of tons of steel on huge beds of gravel, all hauled in by hundreds of truckloads.

Then install skyscraper tall industrial bird-killing monstrosities.

Result: an idyllic forest gets turned into an industrial complex that can be seen and felt from miles away – in order to protect the climate.

It would be a gruesome task to calculate the environmental and CO2 budget for the following described wind park project in the Münsterwald forest near the western Germany city of Aachen.

When finished it will consist of seven 200-meter tall turbines in what once was a natural, forested area and undisturbed biotope.

To get to the site, a “gigantic” swath of forest had to be cut through the heart of the forest. According to the ZDF public television report (see below), “alone here 1000 trees had to be cut down.

And according to chief Rainer Hülsheger of the state association for natural landscape protection: “At least 12,000 square meters of forest needed to be cleared in order to build one wind turbine alone.”

Angry environmentalists say that the forest simply was never even suitable for a wind park to begin with. Yet, the ZDF reports how the forest belongs to the city, and so the revenue-generating project got the green light.

A Threat To Endangered Species

The ZDF report shows the sheer insanity that it takes to install wind turbines in the middle of forests, and how they endanger rare bird species such as the black Stork and red Kite.

Entire Biotope Severely Damaged

For the wind project in Euskirchen, according to the ZDF (2:35): “The planned 24 wind turbines in the so-called Kammerwald cut through an entire biotope system from Rheinland towards Belgium.”

Why are the turbines being installed in the forests? According to Aachen city official Elmar Wiezorek, placing the turbines in fields posed an even greater environmental hazard: “The forest had the least problems.”

But Herbert Klinkenberg of a citizens initiative protecting the wind projects calls it all “a catastrophe.” ZDF sums it up: “Climate protection at the expense of nature.”

SOURCE

Greenie destruction of lots of power generators wiping out Australia's aluminium producers

Mining giant Rio Tinto says its Australian Aluminium smelters, which employ more than 2,600 workers, are not sustainable at current power prices.

The company runs three smelters in Australia, which are under financial pressure due to the high price of electricity, which makes up about a third of their costs, and the low price of aluminium due to a flood of cheap supply coming from Asian competitors.

The resources minister, Matt Canavan, has recently championed the industry, saying Australia was “one of the best aluminium producers in the world” and claiming it needed a continued supply of “cheap baseload” electricity from coal.

“If we turn our back on coal, you turn out the lights on aluminium, it’s as simple as that,” he told ABC Radio last week.

However, speaking in London on Thursday night, the chief executive of Rio Tinto’s aluminium division, Alf Barrios, issued a blunt warning that current prices from coal-fired power were too high.

He said this was despite “fantastic work” done by the team at the Australian smelter division, Pacific, to improve the performance of the plants.

“However power accounts for about a third of the global cost of the smelters and the smelters at Pacific do lack internationally competitive energy prices, which undermines the viability of these assets,” he said.

“We are working very closely with the power suppliers and the governments to find a solution to this challenge. “I’m not going to speculate on the outcome but clearly the current situation is not sustainable.”

The warning comes after Rio Tinto boss Jean-Sebastian Jacques warned in August that Australian smelters were “on thin ice” and follows the company flagging last week that it might close its New Zealand smelter.

Barrios was speaking to reporters ahead of a quarterly update to investors that listed “low-carbon technology” as a priority for its aluminium business.

The company’s head of economics, Vivek Tulpule, said the profitability of aluminium was “challenged by the quick and cheap expansion of supply to meet growth in demand”.

“This underlines the value of our position in Canada with operating costs in the bottom decile of the cost curve supported by hydro power which will become increasingly important in a carbon-constrained world,” he said.

SOURCE

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

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

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5 November, 2019

Oil shocks are history

On September 14, 2019 explosive drones took out one of Saudi Arabia’s major oil refineries which accounted for nearly 6% of the world’s oil supplies (5.7 million barrels a day). Standard media hysteria and public concern arose with the belief that Americans would soon see $4.00 a gallon gasoline all across the nation. Within days the reaction was muted. US oil supplies have increased 40% in the past three years (3.65 million barrels since the end of 2016) and supplies in reserve all over the world, will prove oil shocks like the Arab Oil Embargo of the 1970s are a thing of the past. In the US , we are seeing an increase in production everywhere. The West Texas Permian Basin will increase another million gallons per day in the next few months as new pipelines come on board to take oil to market. Four thousand more wells sit idle waiting for Hydraulic Fracturing once transport of the new oil is assured.

Saudi Arabia restored half their production within a week and reached out to other countries to obtain oil to supply all its clients. They are paying a premium to construction companies helping to build back their own supply .

The International Energy Agency (IEA) consisting of 30 oil consuming nations, including the United States and Canada coordinate their energy security. They can all release oil from their strategic reserves when necessary. President Trump authorized a release unilaterally while IEA did not yet see the need. Their rule of thumb is to do nothing until 7% of global supply is affected. This last happened during the Libyan civil war in 2011 when IEA ordered the release of 60 million barrels of oil collectively from its 30 nations.

Last week IEA reported that crude oil stockpiles around the world had increased by 2.4 million barrels when analysts expected a decline. There is now considerable worry about an over supply around the world being affected by the US- China trade war. Concurrently natural gas prices have declined for three months.

The US holds 644.8 million barrels valued at more than $35 billion at current prices, in four locations in Texas and Louisiana in underground salt caverns. The oil can be extracted at any time by pumping water into the bottom of the caverns forcing oil out the top. It takes about two weeks to draw off significant quantities.

At its peak in 2010 the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve contained 726 million barrels. Now, due to huge increases in new production, the US has been selling excess oil bringing current storage down to 644.8 barrels.

All this points to the end of the sudden distorted shocks that send oil prices up. While the media will likely continue to promote the worst case fears the public will reduce their concerns.

Concurrently the impact of the once strong threats of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to drive prices up at the pump, have been weakened.

Commodity cartels have generally had a poor record of elevating long term prices that markets dictate. OPEC will not stop trying to get their members to limit production. but the world is starting to pay less and less attention. Every price hike caused by OPEC spurs cheating on quotas by cartel members or an increase in production by oil producers not in the cartel. With the United States returning to its position as the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer, as a result of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, Middle Eastern oil shocks will be falling on deaf ears.

SOURCE

You’ve heard of Amazon Prime, why not EPA Prime?

The free market system has brought some incredible things to modern society.

Take Amazon, for example. Millions of products from all over the world are available to consumers in sometimes less than two business days thanks to Amazon Prime.

Years ago, it would have taken months to receive such products, and at a much higher cost. Go even farther back in time, and these products would have never been available to consumers at all.

So why can’t the same efficiencies be applied to services provided solely by government?

This fall, the EPA announced several new grants for water quality and pollution reduction.

Clean water and air are incredibly important initiatives. We should never settle for less than best, and we need to explore every avenue in making our environment and communities as safe as possible.

So, this begs the question, how could this grant awarding process be even better? The EPA could pursue a sort of private-public partnership (also known as a “P3”) when it comes to funding environmental protection – an “EPA Prime” if you will.

Investopedia defines a public-private partnership as “a collaboration between a government agency and a private-sector company that can be used to finance, build, and operate projects, such as public transportation networks, parks, and convention centers.”

For example, according to Onvia.com, the US Forest Service in Arizona has long been using a public-private partnership to manage the Crescent Moon/Red Rock Crossing Recreation Area in Sedona, Arizona with Recreation Resource Management (RRM).

“RRM operates the park under a public-private partnership with the U.S. Forest Service…RRM’s case study compared the privately-run Crescent Moon park to the nearby Red Rock State Park. Red Rock State Park is operated by Arizona State Parks, a public agency. RRM found that while the two parks in the study are geographically close and share similar entry-fees, attendance and overall revenue numbers, Crescent Moon (operated under the P3 agreement with RRM) returns close to $45,000 to the U.S. Forest Service each year in the form of net revenue, while RRM claims the publicly operated Red Rock State Park operated by Arizona State Parks costs the U.S. Forest Service $234,000 per year.”

Private enterprise will always be more efficient and cost-effective than government programs, as shown by the US Forest Service here. But this was used in managing a recreation center. A private entity can clearly have an incentive to invest because a clear profit can be made.

What about other environmental projects where it is less likely – or impossible – for a profit to be made from the investment?

Still, even here a P3 has potential.

Both large corporations and small businesses have an incentive other than profit to make investments in the community. Part of it can be name recognition, but other motivators involve the positive press or the philanthropic goals of a business’ founders. Almost every little league and pee wee football league utilizes this system. Local businesses sponsor a team so they can buy equipment, and in return the business’ logo is on the uniforms and banners of the playing field.

The EPA has pursued limited versions of this. In what the EPA calls “Community-Based Public-Private Partnerships (CBP3)”, the EPA encourages private entities to work with local municipalities to provide “green infrastructure” to underserved communities.

Only one example is listed on the website, however. That example is the stormwater CBP3 put in place by Prince George’s County in Maryland in 2015, called the Clean Water Partnership. There may be other examples but EPA has not listed them on this page as far as could be found.

The County has partnered with Corvias, a private company that “works with the U.S. military, colleges and universities and municipalities to solve their facilities and infrastructure challenges.”

According to the Clean Water Partnership website, 2,372 acres have been “retrofitted and managed” for stormwater issues, 994 bags of trash have been removed, 250 trees and 6,115 shrubs have been planted, 1,834,791 lbs of sediment have been removed from the water each year, and there has been a “30% cost reduction in stormwater retrofits.”

Some of this seems like corporate-speak. It is unclear exactly what the 30% cost reduction in stormwater retrofits refers to; possibly it refers to the decreased cost of water with more efficient stormwater systems.

Whether every piece of this Partnership was absolutely necessary for the health of the County can be debated, but it is clear that involving Corvias, the private company, saved the people of Maryland significant tax money, and provided many beneficial and necessary services that they would not have received otherwise.

It is likely that there are many large companies who would jump at the chance at being able to say they work with the EPA in funding water quality projects across the nation to boost their recognition and impact.

After all, given the recent budget fights in Congress that have stymied federal work for months at a time, wouldn’t it be nice to have projects that aren’t subject to such partisan fights?

There’s tons of money out there to improve our environment, and it doesn’t have to be a only public or only private scenario in every situation.

Maybe you could get water infrastructure improvements almost as fast as you can get your leggings and apple watch.

It’s time for EPA Prime, so to speak.

SOURCE

Is global warming all due to super El Niño’s?

Shortly after it had occurred, I also noticed the steplike rise in temperature mentioned below but I said nothing about it at the time as I did not know quite what to make of it. So I am glad to have the informed comment on it below. I also noticed that the change seemed to coincide with an El Nino and wondered if that was the crucial event.

One thing that does clearly emerge from the figures is that temperature definitely does NOT track the fairly steady rise in CO2 over the period. It is responding to some other cause

In a recent CFACT article, climate expert Joe Bastardi says super El Niños have caused all the atmospheric warming since satellite measurements began in 1978. I suggested this two years ago in a CFACT article titled “No CO2 warming for the last 40 years?” Now Joe has confirmed it.

The focus of Joe’s long article is that these super El Niños are natural.

Most importantly, here is Joe’s picture of the 1998-2000 super El Niño step up in global temperatures, with nothing but 15 to 20 year pauses on either side:

My description of this big step up, posted two years ago, is here.

There is little to no CO2 warming in the entire satellite record! Just a step up warming due to the super El Niño 20 years ago. I told you so. We may now have a second super El Niño step warming but it is too soon to tell. In any case there will still be no evidence of any CO2 induced warming. The gradual increase in atmospheric CO2 has nothing to do with super El Niños. Joe explains this in great detail.

Regarding the supposed surface and ocean warming, while it may be real, to my knowledge it cannot be due to the CO2 increase. (I say may be real because I have serious doubts about the validity of the convoluted statistical methods used to estimate this warming.)

I know of no mechanism whereby steadily increasing CO2 in the atmosphere can cause steady surface warming without first causing steady atmospheric warming, which the satellite data say has not happened. The surface and ocean warming would require increased back radiation from the airborne CO2 molecules, which requires increased atmospheric temperature, which we do not see.

If the surface and ocean are in fact warming, then “why?” is a very big question, which ought to be the focus of research. A solar effect seems most likely. But whatever caused it, this warming is not evidence of AGW. Unfortunately the climate science community is so wedded to AGW that this research is still waiting to happen. Why the predicted CO2 warming has not occurred is another good question, a huge one.

The elegant thing about science, at least in principle, is that a single observation can falsify a popular hypothesis. But as Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his groundbreaking book — The Structure of Scientific Revolutions– this may not be true in practice when the hypothesis is deeply entrenched, due to what I call paradigm protection. The community of believers will resist what observation clearly says. So we get the argument that the data must be wrong. However, the satellite data is accurate enough to falsify AGW.

The great philosopher of science Karl Popper said that science was a process of elegant conjectures, followed by refutation by observation. The conjecture of AGW is largely refuted by observation. CFACT reported it first.

SOURCE

Trump threatens to cut federal relief for California's wildfires and blames Governor Newsom for his poor management - who tells the 'climate change denier' president his opinion is unwanted

President Trump started his Sunday by blasting California Gov. Gavin Newsom over the state wildfires

'The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management. I told him from the first day we met that he must "clean" the forest floors regardless of what his bosses, the environmentalists, DEMAND of him,' Trump wrote.

However, neither of the two massive wildfires currently burning in California - the Maria Fire north of Los Angeles or the Kincade Fire in Sonoma County - are on forest land.

He added that he wanted to give the state 'no more' help and withhold federal financial aid.

Gov. Newsom hit back Sunday morning slamming the president saying: 'You don't believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation.'

Although Trump has repeatedly blamed California officials for the state's fires and forest mismanagement, most of the state's forests are actually owned and managed by federal agencies. Federal agencies manage 57% of the 33million acres of forest in the Golden State.

Trump reamed Newsom on Twitter on Sunday morning, slamming the California politician for the wildfires that continue to spark new destruction year after year.

'Must also do burns and cut fire stoppers,' Trump advised. 'Every year, as the [fires] rage & California burns, it is the same thing- and then he comes to the Federal Government for $$$ help. No more.' 'Get your act together Governor,' the president added.

Trump pointed out that 'you don't see close to the level of burn in other states.'

Newsom hit back at the president pointing at his refusal to acknowledge the role climate change has in accelerating wildfires.

'We’re successfully waging war against thousands of fires started across the state in the last few weeks due to extreme weather created by climate change while Trump is conducting a full on assault against the antidotes,' the Governor said in a statement to DailyMail.com on his work in the state for wildfire prevention and response.

'The reality is that while California has increased fire prevention investments and fuel management projects, the federal government has slashed its funding of those same activities,' Newsom's spokesman Jesse Melgar added.

Scientists have noted that climate change has contributed to the ferocity of wildfires, which have grown in frequency and power over the past couple of years. Hotter temperatures lead to drier, more fire-prone land, meaning blazes are more likely to occur.

In California specifically warm-season days have increased by 2.5 degrees since the early 1970s, according to a Earth's Future study.

Scientists have also said that California's forestry management isn't the only thing that can mitigate wildfires. Climate change as well as human factors like downed power lines and homes built too close together in rural areas also contribute to the blazes.

Last year's Camp Fire - which was the deadliest and more destructive in California history claiming 85 lives - was sparked by equipment operated by utility company Pacific Gas & electric.

At the moment several of the largest wildfires this season aren't even burning in forests.

The Getty Fire and Easy Fire broke out near Los Angeles in brush-filled hillsides.

After slamming Newsom, Trump then used Twitter to show his appreciation to the firefighters working on the ground.

'But our teams are working well together in putting these massive, and many, fires out. Great firefighters!' Trump said.

The president also advised that the state 'open up the ridiculously closed water lines coming down from the North.'

'Don't pour it out into the Pacific Ocean,' he said. 'Should be done immediately.'

SOURCE

Greenies were big donors in the last Australian Federal election

Zali Steggall given $1.1m donations in successful bid to topple Tony Abbott. Steggall given most among independents at election, and largest donor to independents was Climate 2020 lobby group

Climate 2020, the Simon Holmes à Court and Mike Cannon-Brookes-backed environmental lobby group, donated a total of $354,500 to independent candidates, making it their largest source of funding at the 2019 election.

According to disclosures released by the Australian Electoral Commission on Monday, Zali Steggall received a total of $1.1m of donations in her successful bid to topple Tony Abbott in Warringah, the highest of any independent.

Steggall was followed by Helen Haines, who raked in $421,000 in her successful bid to succeed Cathy McGowan in Indi; Oliver Yates, who received $363,000; and the former independent MP for Wentworth Kerryn Phelps, who received $219,000.

The disclosures reveal only donations from a single source above the $13,800 threshold received by individual candidates, independent Senate groups and their respective donors. Party declarations will be released in February.

The other independents who raised more than $100,000 were candidate for Farrer Kevin Mack, Queensland Senate candidate Hetty Johnston, ex-Liberal MP Julia Banks, former independent MP Rob Oakeshott, and disgruntled Liberal turned challenger in Gilmore, Grant Schultz.

Steggall also topped the list for the most number of donors (1,378), followed by Helen Haines (1,002) and Oakeshott (350).

Climate 2020 gave $145,000 to Oliver Yates, who failed in his bid to dislodge the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, in Kooyong; $50,000 to the ACT independent Senate candidate Anthony Pesec; $47,500 to Phelps; $40,000 to Banks; $37,000 to Oakeshott; and $35,000 to Haines. Pesec also received $20,000 from Malcolm Turnbull’s son, Alex Turnbull.

Climate 2020 Pty Ltd is an initiative of energy consultant Holmes à Court that has also received funding from Atlassian co-founder Cannon-Brookes, who describes it as a “non-partisan, non-profit project set up to assist political candidates with a clear commitment to a science-based response to the climate emergency and to restoring integrity to 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

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4 November, 2019

The delusional Andrew Cuomo: 'We Didn't Have Hurricanes' Before Climate Change

On Friday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) said that hurricanes, superstorms, and tornadoes did not occur before climate change. In the same breath, he said that anyone who questions the left's climate-alarmist hysteria is "just delusional." He may want to check in a mirror.

After he finished berating President Donald Trump in an interview with MSNBC, Cuomo turned to his latest attempt to enforce climate change orthodoxy.

"You know, anyone who questions extreme weather and climate change is just delusional at this point," Cuomo said. "We have seen in the State of New York what everyone is seeing. We see these weather patterns that we never had before. We didn’t have hurricanes, we didn’t have superstorms, we didn’t have tornadoes."

While it is at least plausible that carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels might lead to increasing global temperatures and rising sea levels, it takes a special kind of insanity to think that there were no hurricanes or tornadoes before human beings started burning carbon for energy.

Even interpreting Cuomo's words charitably, the governor said that New York State did not experience hurricanes, superstorms, and tornadoes until the effects of manmade climate change. It is difficult to assess this claim, because written records do not go very far back, but even this less delusional suggestion is entirely incorrect.

An analysis of sedimentary evidence from New Jersey showed that a major hurricane struck the New York/New Jersey area between 1278 and 1438, long before the internal combustion engine. Another hurricane tracked parallel to the East Coast with impacts on New England and New York in August 1635. On September 8, 1667, a "severe storm" was reported in Manhattan. The Great Storm of 1693 caused severe damage on Land Island in October 1693. In September 1785, ships crashed into Governors Island as a result of powerful waves reportedly generated by a tropical cyclone. In August 1788, a hurricane struck New York City or Long Island, causing severe flooding and leaving the west side of the Battery "in ruins."

Unless the Iroquois and their ancestors were secretly burning fossil fuels — and cleverly erased the evidence they did so — Cuomo's statement about there having been no hurricanes and superstorms in New York prior to climate change is flat-out wrong. A simple Google search would have set him straight.

Furthermore, his remarks illustrate how climate alarmism can cloud someone's judgment. It is flat-out ridiculous to suggest that extreme weather did not exist before human beings pumped carbon into the atmosphere. After all, Earth's atmosphere has had far more carbon in the past than it does today.

While the climate change narrative may make logical sense, the data does not support the left's alarmist position. Scientists and alarmists have predicted various kinds of doomsday scenarios — extreme cold, extreme heat, glaciers melting, cities underwater — none of which have come to pass. In one of the most embarrassing examples, alarmists predicted that The Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean would sink beneath the waves in 2018 — and the islands are still there. In fact, they have actually grown in recent years!

It is far from "delusional" to question the "climate change consensus." Cuomo's remarks were far more delusional.

SOURCE

Jane Fonda: 'I'm Not Buying Anymore Clothes' to Fight Climate Change

She would already have rooms full of them

Actress and political activist Jane Fonda said on Friday that she's not purchasing any more clothes as a way to fight climate change.

"You see this coat? I needed something red so I went out and found this coat on sale. This is the last article of clothing that I'm going to ever buy," Fonda said at a "Fire Drill Friday" protest on Capitol Hill with actresses Rosanna Arquette and Catherine Keener.

Fonda said youth climate activist Greta Thunberg has made her "think a lot about consumerism."

"I grew up when consumerism didn't have such a stranglehold over us so when I talk to people about how we don't really need to keep shopping—we shouldn't look to shopping for our identity; we just don't need more stuff then I have to walk the talk so I'm not buying any more clothes -- a lot of free time."

Friday's protest marks the fourth time Fonda has been arrested protesting in support of climate change action on Capitol Hill.

SOURCE

Washington subsidies not helping the wind industry

Last week the lobbying arm of the wind energy industry made an unsurprising, though somewhat embarrassing, announcement. It wants a longer lifeline with federal subsidies. So much for wind being the low-cost energy source of the future.

Less than a year ago, the American Wind Energy Association had with great fanfare issued a press statement that as Bloomberg reported: “America’s wind farms are ready to go it alone.” Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a Republican who has strongly supported the wind industry since the days of federal support began in 1992, boasted that the wind industry has finally “matured” and that wind farms were “ready to compete.”

Never mind.

Big Wind’s change of heart was predictable because when this tax giveaway — which basically requires taxpayers to underwrite 30 percent of the cost of wind energy production — was first enacted, the renewable energy lobby promised that it would lift itself out of the federal wheelchair and walk on its own within five years. But like clockwork, every five years they have come back to Congress pleading for an extension — much like Oliver with his porridge bowl asking: “Please, sir, could I have some more.”

What was especially interesting was why Big Wind thinks it is deserving of “more.” The industry execs mentioned the tough competition from natural gas — which isn’t going away. Natural gas is today by far the most cost-efficient source of electric power generation in most markets. Thanks to the shale revolution natural gas prices have fallen by about two-thirds. This means that only with very generous taxpayer assistance on top of local mandates requiring local utilities to buy wind and solar power can green energy compete.

Big Wind said that it will lobby for a continued subsidy so wind power will “have parity” with the solar industry subsidies. The solar industry sun gods have even higher subsidies than wind producers get. They are actually right. Per unit of electricity, solar gets five times as much as wind power. And wind gets some five times more than coal and natural gas. So now we have a subsidy arms race going on.

Over the last 30 or so years, the renewable energy industry has received well over $100 billion in federal, state and local handouts. Yet these are still fairly trivial contributors to America’s overall energy production — supplying somewhere between 5 percent and 10 percent of the nation’s total. The rational solution would of course be to eliminate all federal energy subsidies and simply create a level playing field among coal, nuclear, natural gas, solar and wind. But given the current anti-fossil fuels hysteria and the movement to promote green energy at any cost, the idea of creating an economically-efficient market for energy is about as likely as hell freezing over — which isn’t going to happen anytime soon because of global warming.

Given the powerful green movement’s lobby on Capitol Hill, don’t be surprised if the federal aid keeps pouring in. But here again we see again the central contradiction of the green energy fad. On the one hand, we here rave reviews of how enormously cost effective green energy has become in the 21st century. We are told we can require 50 percent, 60 percent and even 100 percent renewable energy over the next decade at no cost to consumers or businesses.

If so. Why must the subsidies continue ad infinitum? If $100 billion of taxpayer handouts hasn’t worked, what will?

My hunch is that the lifelines Washington keeps tossing to the wind and solar industry have been more curse than blessing. Subsidies can be as addictive as heroin. A cold turkey cut off of taxpayer aid would force the renewable industry to adopt strategies and innovations that would make them viable competitors in energy markets.

Necessity really is the mother of invention.

SOURCE

Lasers could cut lifespan of nuclear waste from "a million years to 30 minutes," says Nobel laureate

Gérard Mourou has already won a Nobel for his work with fast laser pulses. If he gets pulses 10,000 times faster, he says he can modify waste on an atomic level.

If no solution is found, we're already stuck with some 22,000 cubic meters of long-lasting hazardous waste.

Whatever one thinks of nuclear energy, the process results in tons of radioactive, toxic waste no one quite knows what to do with. As a result, it's tucked away as safely as possible in underground storage areas where it's meant to remain a long, long time: The worst of it, uranium 235 and plutonium 239, have a half life of 24,000 years. That's the reason eyebrows were raised in Europe — where more countries depend on nuclear energy than anywhere else — when physicist Gérard Mourou mentioned in his wide-ranging Nobel acceptance speech that lasers could cut the lifespan of nuclear waste from "a million years to 30 minutes," as he put it in a followup interview with The Conversation.

Who is Gérard Mourou?

Mourou was the co-recipient of his Nobel with Donna Strickland for their development of Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) at the University of Rochester. In his speech, he referred to his "passion for extreme light."

CPA produces high-intensity, super-short optical pulses that pack a tremendous amount of power. Mourou's and Strickland's goal was to develop a means of making highly accurate cuts useful in medical and industrial settings.

It turns out CPA has another benefit, too, that's just as important. Its attosecond pulses are so quick that they shine a light on otherwise non-observable, ultra-fast events such as those inside individual atoms and in chemical reactions. This capability is what Mourou hopes give CPA a chance of neutralizing nuclear waste, and he's actively working out a way to make this happen in conjunction with Toshiki Tajima of UC Irvine. As Mourou explains to The Conversation:

"Take the nucleus of an atom. It is made up of protons and neutrons. If we add or take away a neutron, it changes absolutely everything. It is no longer the same atom, and its properties will completely change. The lifespan of nuclear waste is fundamentally changed, and we could cut this from a million years to 30 minutes!

We are already able to irradiate large quantities of material in one go with a high-power laser, so the technique is perfectly applicable and, in theory, nothing prevents us from scaling it up to an industrial level. This is the project that I am launching in partnership with the Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, or CEA, in France. We think that in 10 or 15 years' time we will have something we can demonstrate. This is what really allows me to dream, thinking of all the future applications of our invention."

While 15 years may seem a long time, when you're dealing with the half-life of nuclear waste, it's a blink of an eye.

The process Mourou is investigating is called "transmutation." "Nuclear energy is maybe the best candidate for the future," he told the Nobel audience, "but we are still left with a lot of dangerous junk. The idea is to transmute this nuclear waste into new forms of atoms which don't have the problem of radioactivity. What you have to do is to change the makeup of the nucleus." After his speech he phrase his plans for lasers and waste more plainly: "It's like karate — you deliver a very strong force in a very, very brief moment."

The idea of transmutation's not new. It's been under investigation for 30 years in the U.K., Belgium, Germany, Japan, and the U.S. Some of these efforts are ongoing. Others have been given up. Rodney C. Ewing of Stanford tells Bloomberg, "I can imagine that the physics might work, but the transmutation of high-level nuclear waste requires a number of challenging steps, such as the separation of individual radionuclides, the fabrication of targets on a large scale, and finally, their irradiation and disposal."

Mourou and Tajima hope to be able to shrink the distance a light beam has to travel to transmute atoms by a further 10,000 times. "I think about what it could mean all the time," Mourou says at Ecole Polytechnique, where he teaches. "I don't overlook the difficulties that lie ahead. I dream of the idea, but we will have to wait and see what happens in the years to come."

SOURCE

Australia: Catfish and shrimp take precedence over drought-hit farmers

Environmental madness

Twenty-two billion litres of precious water have been flushed into a swamp in one of Australia's most drought-stricken regions.

The New South Wales state government started releasing 22 gigalitres of water from Wyangala Dam from the middle of last month.

The move was intended to help increase flow to the heavily parched Lachlan River and its tributaries.

But the decision has been criticised because the water has been used without consulting farmers.

The dam has seen its water level fall by 20 per cent as a result and the state's water minister has questioned the timing of the release.

'I would like to see evidence this was the best time to release water for the environment when the Bureau of Meteorology is indicating little to no inflows over the next 12 months,' NSW Water Minister Melinda Pavey said.

The water released from the dam could have sustained 30,000 people living in nearby towns including Cowra and Forbes for over a year.

Instead it will make its journey west down the river to the Great Cumbung Swamp where the Lachlan River ends.

The government agency which operates the state's rivers said in a statement the water release was critical to the survival of the rivers flowing out of the dam.

The Commonwealth Environment Water Holder said the water was vital to improving the health of the river system along the length of the Lachlan River.

A senior green agency source also told The Daily Telegraph the increased supply to the river system would benefit the resident catfish and freshwater shrimp.

But Ms Pavey said 'during times of extreme drought we need flexibility, not blind recklessness'.

The partial opening of the dam has dropped its capacity to about 18 per cent, compared to 23 per cent at the beginning of last month.

The dam is already subject to a proposal to raise its walls by 10 metres at a cost of $650million.

The river stretches almost 1,500km across New South Wales' south and is part of the Murray-Darling Basin which has faced brutal drought conditions in recent years.

SOURCE

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

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

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3 November, 2019

Climategate: Ten years later

Climate alarmists are still promoting junk science, fossil fuel bans and wealth redistribution

Dr Kelvin Kemm

This month marks the tenth anniversary of “Climategate” – the release of thousands of emails to and from climate scientists who had been (and still are) collaborating and colluding to create a manmade climate crisis that exists in their minds and computer models, but not in the real world. The scandal should have ended climate catastrophism. Instead, it was studiously buried by politicians, scientists, activists and crony capitalists, who will rake in trillions of dollars from the exaggerations and fakery, while exempting themselves from the damage they are inflicting on everyday families.

Few people know the Inconvenient Facts about the supposed manmade climate and extreme weather “crisis.” For example, since 1998, average global temperatures have risen by a mere few hundredths of a degree. (For a time, they even declined slightly.) Yet all we hear is baseless rhetoric about manmade carbon dioxide causing global warming and climate changes that pose existential threats to humanity, wildlife and planet. Based on this, we are told we must stop using fossil fuels to power economic growth and better living standards. This is bad news for Africa and the world.

We keep hearing that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels cause rising global temperatures. But satellite data show no such thing. In fact, computer model predictions for 2019 are almost a half degree Celsius (0.9 degrees F) above actual satellite measurements. Even worse, anytime a scientist raises questions about the alleged crisis, he or she is denounced as a “climate change denier.”

A major source of data supporting the human CO2- induced warming proposition came from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.

Then on the morning of 17 November 2009 a Pandora’s box of embarrassing CRU information exploded onto the world scene. A computer hacker penetrated the university’s computer system and took 61 Megs of material that showed the CRU had been manipulating scientific information to make global warming appear to be the fault of mankind and industrial CO2. Among many other scandals, the shocking leaked emails showed then-CRU-director Prof. Phil Jones boasting of using statistical “tricks” to remove evidence of observed declines in global temperatures.

In another email, he advocated deleting data rather than providing it to scientists who did not share his view and might criticize his analyses. Non-alarmist scientists had to invoke British freedom of information laws to get the information. Jones was later suspended, and former British Chancellor Lord Lawson called for a Government enquiry into the embarrassing exposé.

The affair became known as “Climategate,” and a group of American University students even posted a YouTube song, “Hide the Decline,” mocking the CRU and climate modeler Dr. Michael Mann, whose use of the phrase “hide the decline” in temperatures had been found in the hacked emails.

So what is the truth? If one considers the composition of the atmosphere and equates it to the height of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the extra plant-fertilizing CO2 added to the atmosphere since California became the 31st state of the United States in 1850 is less than the thickness of tiles under the Tower.

Can this tiny increase really explain any observed global warming since the Little Ice Age ended, and the modern industrial era began? Since California became a state, the measured global rise in atmospheric temperature has been less than 10C. But most of this increase occurred prior to 1940, and average planetary temperatures fell from around 1943 until about 1978, leading to a global cooling scare. Temperatures rose slightly until 1998, then mostly remained stable, even as carbon dioxide levels continued to rise. Rising CO2 levels and temperature variations do not correlate very well at all.

Moreover, during the well-documented Medieval Warm Period from about 950 to 1350, warmer global temperatures allowed Viking farmers to raise crops and tend cattle in Greenland. The equally well documented 500-year Little Ice Age starved and froze the Vikings out of Greenland, before reaching its coldest point, the Maunder Minimum, 1645-1715. That’s when England’s River Thames regularly froze over, Norwegian farmers demanded compensation for lands buried by advancing glaciers, and priests performed exorcism rituals to keep alpine glaciers away from villages. Paintings from the era show crowds of people ice skating and driving horse-drawn carriages on the Thames.

Industry and automobile emissions obviously played no role in either the MWP or the LIA.

These dramatic events should ring warning bells for any competent, honest scientist. If the Medieval Warm Period occurred without industrial CO2 driving it, why should industrial CO2 be causing any observed warming today? Europe’s great plague wiped out nearly a quarter of its population during the Little Ice Age. The warm period brought prosperity and record crops, while cold years brought misery, famine and death.

Ten years before Climategate, Dr. Mann released a computer-generated graph purporting to show global temperatures over the previous 1500 years. His graph mysteriously made the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age and Maunder extreme cold years disappear – and planetary temperatures spike suddenly the last couple decades of twentieth century. The graph had the shape of a hockey stick, was published worldwide and became a centerpiece for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Many scientists were highly suspicious of the hockey stick claims. Two of them, Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, completely discredited Mann’s computer program and revisionist history. Of course, that did not stop former US vice president Al Gore from using the discredited graph in his doom and gloom climate change movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

The hacked CRU emails also showed exchanges between Mann and Jones, in which they discussed how to intimidate editors who wanted to publish scientific views contrary to theirs, to suppress any contradictory studies. In one email, Jones expressed his desire to get rid of the “troublesome editor” of the Climate Research journal for daring to publish differing views. The editor got sacked.

When University of Colorado climate skeptic Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. asked the CRU for its original temperature readings, he was told the data had been (conveniently) lost. Lost!?! Do professionals lose something as valuable as original data? Many suspected they just didn’t want anyone to expose their clever manipulations and fabrications.

But if industrial carbon dioxide did not cause recent global warming, what did? A Danish research group, led by Prof. Henrik Svensmark, has found a very credible match between levels of sunspot activity (giant magnetic storms) on our Sun and global temperatures over the last fifteen hundred years. This all-natural mechanism actually fits the evidence! How terribly inconvenient for alarmists.

Cosmic rays from deep space constantly impinge on the Earth’s upper atmosphere and produce clouds, much like high-flying jets leave white contrails behind their engines. More clouds can trap heat, but they also cause global cooling because not as much sunlight strikes the Earth. More sunspots mean a stronger magnetic shield, therefore fewer cosmic rays reaching Earth, thus less cloud cover and more global warming. The Sun is currently in a near-record period of low sunspot activity.

All sorts of interest groups are suppressing this information. Maybe worse, when Climategate broke, “climate justice” campaigner for Friends of the Earth Emma Brindal said bluntly: “A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources.” Not protecting Earth from manmade CO2 emissions or natural and manmade climate change – but redistributing wealth and resources, according to formulas that self-appointed ruling elites decide is “socially just.”

Climate campaigners also oppose “excessive” air travel for business or pleasure, 4x4 vehicles as “unnecessary luxuries,” and modern homes for Africans. Some even say Africans must continue living in mud huts and avoid the use of electricity and modern farming technologies. Minor US actor Ed Begley has said “Africans should have solar power where they need it most: on their huts.” They, Al Gore, Phil Jones and Mike Mann are exempted from these restrictions, of course.

Real social justice and human rights mean everyone has access to abundant, reliable, affordable energy, especially universally important electricity. Not from expensive, intermittent, weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels. From fossil fuel, nuclear and hydroelectric power plants.

We in the developing world will no longer let climate truth be suppressed. We will not allow loud, radical activists to put the brakes on African economic development, jobs, and improved health and living standards, in the name of advancing their anti-human, wealth redistribution agendas.

Via email. Dr. Kelvin Kemm is a nuclear physicist from South Africa

Billboad in London Encourages White People to Sterilize Themselves

More modern Malthusians

A billboard has appeared in London encouraging white people to sterilize themselves to solve overpopulation.

The sign, which was put up on Holloway Road, says “Imagine a city less crowded… do your part–get sterilised! Yay!”

The advertisement betrays a noticeable lack of ‘diversity’ as it only features caricatures of white people and no people of color.

Promotion of sterilization appears to be having an impact in some western countries where native birth rates are already dropping.

The number of Swedish men seeking voluntary vasectomies has risen by 70 per cent – from from 1,430 men in 2013 to 2,470 in 2017. In cities like Stockholm, the number of men sterilizing themselves has doubled over the last five years.

This has contributed to Swedes having a 1.78 birth rate, well below the replacement rate of 2.2 children per woman. This compares to just over 2 children for women from migrant backgrounds.

SOURCE

The Shameless Hypocrisy Of Cities Suing For Climate Change ‘Damages’

North and South American natives once spoke of the mythical El Dorado, a sacred city made entirely of gold. History records that conquistadors embarked on expeditions throughout the Americas in pursuit of El Dorado and legendary riches. Ultimately their quests yielded nothing but misery and loss.

A modern-day parallel exists among several municipal governments and Rhode Island, which have set out on an equally unrealistic quest for a modern-day “jackpot justice” – a scheme to reap billions from several energy companies.

Using an already discredited “public nuisance” legal claim, Rhode Island and several cities have filed lawsuits that blame all of Earth’s climate change on a few profitable energy companies. The suits allege that, by producing oil, these energy companies have contributed to climate change, which, they argue, may cause damage to their communities in the future. Their cases, incidentally, fail to mention the large amounts of fossil fuels used by these same cities for public transportation, municipal airports, city buildings, and public improvement projects.

Litigants point to a July ruling in which an activist Rhode Island judge overturned a previous decision to move Rhode Island’s climate change case to federal court. Having watched federal courts dismiss many of these claims outright, the plaintiffs believe they have a better chance of success in lower, state courts. Baltimore was also successful in blocking a motion to move its lawsuit to federal court.

Still, climate litigants would be wise to keep the champagne firmly corked as these recent rulings in Rhode Island and Baltimore will likely be overturned. In North Dakota earlier this year, a similar nuisance case against Purdue Pharma was dismissed by a judge who found the plaintiffs failed to meet the required burden of proof. Moreover, the courts reviewing the Oklahoma case are likely to take a more skeptical view of the nuisance tactic, which has generally fared poorly on appeal. For example, a nuisance suit against lead paint manufacturers initially succeeded, only to fail on appeal in 2009, ironically before the Rhode Island Supreme Court.

A major driver of legal precedent denying the use of nuisance ordinances comes from an Obama-era Supreme Court ruling. In the 8-0 American Electric Power v. Connecticut decision in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations cannot be sued for greenhouse gas emissions because the Clean Air Act specifically tasks the Environmental Protection Agency and Congress with the proper regulatory authority. Put another way, only the executive and legislative branches – not the judicial branch – may regulate and impose climate change policy. That precedent was properly cited last year when New York City’s climate lawsuit was bounced out of court. Also last year, a federal judge dismissed Oakland and San Francisco’s lawsuit for being outside the court’s authority.

In addition to the utter lack of legal substantiation, these lawsuits reveal how these municipalities are speaking out of both sides of their mouths. In one setting they downplay risks of climate change and in other settings they pretend the risks have never been higher.

Consider San Francisco’s 2017 municipal bond offering which reassuringly told potential investors, “The City is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur, when they may occur, and if any such events occur, whether they will have a material adverse effect on the business operations or financial condition of the City and the local economy.” Yet in its multi-billion-dollar climate lawsuit, the city went full-on Chicken Little, warning, “Global warming-induced sea level rise is already causing flooding of low-lying areas of San Francisco.”

The example isn’t isolated. Marin County, California’s lawsuit alarmingly asserted that there’s a 99-percent risk of an epic climate-change-related flood by 2050. But a municipal bond offering to potential investors failed to warn of any potential climate change dangers claimed within its lawsuit. San Mateo County’s prospectus advising bond investors that it’s “unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur” didn’t stop it from forecasting a 93-percent chance cataclysmic flood by 2050 in its lawsuit against oil companies. The examples go on.

Aside from the shameless hypocrisy of mayors wooing potential investors while claiming pending climate disaster in court, the motivation behind these lawsuits is clear. Many cities filing lawsuits against energy companies are financial train wrecks, seeking billions to offset their mismanagement. Huge legal awards – enough to make their fiscal troubles vanish – have a powerful allure. The prospect of jackpot justice has fogged their judgment just as surely as the conquistadors who vainly searched for El Dorado.

If anything, the mayors of Oakland, New York, San Diego, and others are seeking pots of Fool’s Gold. These greedy politicians should stop abusing the legal system, wasting taxpayer dollars, and put a halt to their fantasy gold-digging.

SOURCE

The Academic Rants of Eco-Fascism

Sumantra Maitra

“Lets [sic] start dismantling the ramblings of this colonial, supremacist piece of [expletive censored, for civility].”

I woke up on Monday morning to find an angry email from a certain Luke Barnesmoore, the director of the University of British Columbia Urban Studies Lab, in Canada, who has penned an essay about my sickly “A.D. Worldview(s)”. “I’m quite confident you’ll find all of your very worst nightmares in my writings, and I would love to discourse with you about the demons that haunt your sleep.” He provided links to several of his essays, including a piece called “Destroying the Abrahamic Edifice of Western Civilization: The Pagan Barbarians of the North are Coming,” raging, “We must destroy patriarchy, capitalism, western legal systems and all other manifestations of the sickly, hierarchical ontology of dualism that arises from the poison contained within the fruits of the tree of good and evil.” (I hope the Canadian taxpayers are aware that this is what they are funding as research!)

“Pagan Barbarians” is a “response” to my latest article in The Federalist, “Climate Worship Is Nothing More Than Rebranded Paganism.” I argued there that environmentalism is a neo-pagan, Gaia-worshipping cult exploited by cynical ideologues who wish to destroy the Christian-capitalist edifice of Western civilization. My brio caused a minor storm on Twitter, and prompted both snarky blogposts and serious theological debates.

Out of curiosity, I googled him to find exactly the mugshot of a lifeform, who I expected would call me, an Indian born, residing in the UK, as a “colonial, supremacist”; complete with semi-literate jargon and the obsessive tweeting. Score another one for stereotype accuracy. I hesitate to dwell on the irony, or the poor grammar. I suppose those are also hetero-patriarchal-supremacist concepts.

Barnesmoore’s “response” responds to nothing that I wrote. It’s a rant:

"The barbarians of the north have indeed awakened. We are marching on Rome. ‘Today Rome will burn.’(Chronixx 2012) Only then will we return to reciprocal cosmologies/ontologies of dualism wherein virtue/justice/goodness understood as dependent upon wedding the polarities of natural dualities like light/dark and masculine/feminine. Only then will we remember that we are a part of nature. Only then will we remember that we are one. Only then will we remember how to love. Only then will we remember how to be human. Only then will shed the sickly quest to impose an artificial replica of the Nothing-Infinite Eternal’s unity and regularity upon manifestation through domination of difference and irregularity."

And more like that for two pages. Undeterred by his rhetorical limitations, in his comical anarchist zeal, our protagonist persevered. Needless to mention, with that prose, the scope of his future academic achievement remains limited and bleak.

Barnesmoore doesn’t even like Marxism that much anymore, because “its preservation of the hierarchical worldview(s) of its Greco-Roman/Abrahamic antecedents (e.g. ‘wanting to conquer nature’) is exactly what renders the redeeming qualities as null and void.” He almost made me nostalgic for Trotsky, here, saying, “Man … will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build people’s palaces on the peaks of the Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic.” I prefer old Bronstein [Trotsky] to a twerking climate Chippendales reject any day of the week.

My original argument was simple. Everything that you’re being fed in the name of environmentalism is neo-paganist gobbledygook, which seeks to destroy all that has been created in the Judeo-Christian (and capitalist) west. It aspires to take away right to property, private ownership, freedom of individual actions and thoughts, and it seeks to topple the edifice of enlightenment and capitalism. And it is cynically being used by ideologues, who are opposed to the west, as they see that as the manifestation of everything, they deem evil, something, which is so patently obvious to anyone with a functioning brain and double-digit IQ, that it barely needs elaboration.

It is prudent to ignore trolls, as one often does on twitter or emails or in the comment sections. Trolls offer nothing new, and they feed on attention. Deny them attention, and they crawl back to their pathetic existence. I could have also ignored this particular one. But I chose not to, because of two reasons. Sometimes you need to gut one, to make an example. Barnesmoore is a perfect example of everything that’s wrong with Western academia. His academic profile led me to “An Anarchist Manifesto” and “The Elephant in the Room: Abrahamic Worldview(s) and Terrorism”, jargon-clotted screeds against capitalism and Christianity. For example:

"Rather than anarchical self/collective-governance centered in/oriented by the liminal space between time and the timeless that exists within each of us, we come to believe that we must be governed by an external authority like the child murdering, genocide ordering fallen trickster who masquerades as creator in the Old Testament."

A cross between a Monty Python skit and a postmodern jargon random text generator, our protagonist is also a standard Western activist/academic—a polysyllabic apologist for whatever thugs of the day want an excuse to take a crowbar to anyone who wants to defend thought, decency, or civilization; grooming urban insurgents for barbarism, in Washington, London, and throughout the West. Some are members of the Extinction Rebellion cult. Others are lonely Eco-Fascist losers, such as the El Paso and the Christchurch shooters, enraged by the very existence of the civilization to which they owe everything including the laptops on which they type their Internet rants.

Pity. I’m one of those “colonial, supremacist, capitalist, conservatives” who thinks we should take climate change seriously, and think up sensible policy solutions to address its dangers. But the witch doctors summoning up demons to dismantle civilization and usher in the Long Night are a much larger threat than an extra two inches of seawater on the London quays. Our taxpayers and tuition dollars pay the salaries for all such Barnesmoores. Bad enough we’ve got no end of buffoons; worse to be forced to pay for them. In a good world, Barnesmoore would have to do some manual labour for a living.

I suppose that’s the demon that haunts one’s sleep.

SOURCE

Australia: 'No one listened and then someone died': Fisherman explains why he NEVER lets his family swim in the ocean as the number of hungry, killer sharks increases

Greenie protection of sharks responsible

Fishermen have warned more people will be killed following an explosion in Queensland's shark population and a string of attacks in the water.

Two British backpackers have this week been mauled near Airlie Beach as they snorkelled in the Whitsundays.

Alistair Raddon, 28, had his right foot bitten off as his friend Danny Maggs, 22, copped a leg bite on Tuesday morning.

The shark attacks occurred only a month after Queensland's Labor government removed more than 160 drumlines from 27 beaches.

This followed a Federal Court ruling which ordered the end of shark culling in the Great Barrier Reef.

Nathan Rynn, a Townsville-based commercial net fisherman who operates between Cardwell and Bowen, near Airlie Beach, said surging shark numbers would cause more fatal attacks in the water.

'We've got a catastrophe waiting to happen,' he told Daily Mail Australia on Friday. 'If the government doesn't place some more protection over tourists, swimmers and recreational users, there's going to be more and more of these deaths every year because their numbers are exploding and they're getting hungry.'

Mr Rynn is so worried about predatory sharks in the murky waters of north Queensland he advises his own children to stay out of the water in Townsville.
'Once upon a time, I would have taken them to the local beaches here,' he said.

'If I see mothers or fathers with their kids running down into the water, and they're a fair distance off the beach, I go and tell them, "If I was you, I'd get your kids out".'

David Swindells, a commercial fisherman based at Yeppoon in central Queensland, said he advised swimmers to avoid deep water.

'Put it this way: I'd advise them to stay in shallow water,' he told Daily Mail Australia. 'Only go up around your knees.'

In November 2018, Melbourne medical researcher Daniel Christidis, 33, died after being attacked at Cid Harbour at Whitsunday Island during a trip with friends and colleagues.

That tragedy followed two separate attacks – also at Cid harbour – on Tasmanian woman Justine Barwick and 12-year-old Melbourne girl Hannah Papps within 24 hours in September.

Well before those spate of attacks, Mr Rynn said he and other fishermen had warned Queensland's Department of Agriculture and Fisheries about the danger of the surging shark population.

'I warned the department about two to three years ago about the increase in shark numbers - it wasn't just myself - there were other guys that were giving them information on shark predation in our fishing nets,' he said.

'Before last year's attack at Cid Harbour, I said that there's only a matter of time there's someone going to be killed. Bang. We had someone unfortunately killed.'

Mr Swindells said shark numbers had exploded after fishermen were banned from culling them. 'Since they've stopped us culling them, there's been a massive explosion in the shark population,' he said.

'There had not been as many shark attacks as there are now so why would they remove the drumlines to put the general public at risk?'

Mr Swindells, a director of the Queensland Seafood Industry Association, said the state Labor government appeared to be removing shark drumlines in a bid to chase Greens preferences in Brisbane electorates.

The drumlines were removed in September, however, after animal rights group Humane Society International challenged the policy in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

The Federal Court in September upheld the AAT's April decision, despite a challenge from the state government.

In 2015, former Queensland fisheries minister Bill Byrne, then the Labor member for Rockhampton, told Parliament there had only been one death at a shark control beach in the 53 years since drumlines had been introduced.

'For decades, Queensland's Shark Control Program has made it safe to swim in our surf,' he said.

'Since the program began in 1962, there has been only one shark fatality at a shark control beach in Queensland.'

Put another way, sharks have killed as many swimmers near Queensland beaches during the past year as the previous 56.

SOURCE

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

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

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1 November, 2019

Bill Gates says Fossil-Fuel Divestment Has ‘Zero’ Impact On Climate

Fossil-fuel divestment is a waste of time. At least, according to liberal billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates.

While it may come as a shock to climate activists who claim to refuse to invest in oil and coal will help the planet, the Microsoft co-founder disagreed. Gates told Financial Times, “Divestment, to date, probably has reduced about zero tonnes of emissions.”

“It’s not like you’ve capital-starved [the] people making steel and gasoline,” he said. “I don’t know the mechanism of action where divestment [keeps] emissions [from] going up every year. I’m just too damn numeric.”

Gates argued that investors who want to reduce emissions would be better off funding “disruptive technologies that slow carbon emissions and help people adapt,” FT wrote on Sept. 17.

He cited his own backing of disruptive companies, a list that included Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, as an example of causing change.

“When I’m taking billions of dollars and creating breakthrough energy ventures and funding only companies who, if they’re successful, reduce greenhouse gases by 0.5 percent, then I actually do see a cause and effect type thing,” Gates added.

This wasn’t the first time Gates criticized fossil-fuel divestment. In 2015, The Guardian reported Gates’ opposition to the divestment movement’s “theory of change,” and called it a “false solution.”

“If you think divestment alone is a solution, I worry you’re taking whatever desire people have to solve this problem and kind of using up their idealism and energy on something that won’t emit less carbon – because only a few people in society are the owners of the equity of coal or oil companies,” he said. “As long as there’s no carbon tax and that stuff is legal, everybody should be able to drive around.”

In 2019, Gates was one of several CEOs who criticized Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ (D-NY) Green New Deal resolution. He said it was “not realistic.”

SOURCE

US Energy Reliability Gone With the Wind

It is too often assumed that making maximum use of renewables is the answer to addressing environmental goals. So easy is it to buy into this assumption that intermittent wind power is pulling ahead of coal in Texas.

Energy analysts forecast that wind turbines in Texas will generate about 87,000 megawatt-hours of electricity next year, eclipsing the anticipated output from coal. Coal power is falling in Texas and nationally, while wind power is on a rapid upward climb. Wind power already supplies 20% of the Lone Star state’s power and it’s expected to reach 24% in 2020, second only to natural gas, while coal plants continue to close.

If you think those trends don’t come with a downside, think again. The economy in Texas and nationally demands full-time electricity. Wind only generates part-time electricity. In West Texas this summer, on some hot and humid days it was so still there wasn’t enough of a breeze to stir a leaf. Hundreds of wind turbines stopped spinning. When the Texas grid needed wind power the most, it was nowhere to be found. The Texas electric power grid came perilously close to collapsing.

Electricity prices spiked from their normal range of $20 to $30 per megawatt-hour to $9,000 not once but twice. The state teetered on the edge of rolling blackouts and no air conditioning for millions of families during triple digit temperatures. Operators of the Texas grid issued alert after alert asking consumers to turn off devices and conserve power.

Texas is unlikely to be the only state that comes perilously close to electricity shortages. Federal and state subsidies have made wind and solar power so cheap that they are displacing essential baseload sources of power that are capable of running when needed. Nationally, electricity production from coal continues to decline, falling by 15% in 2019 and another 9% projected in 2020. The very power plants that have long underpinned grid reliability are being pushed aside for sources of power that jeopardize it.

All of this is ominous not only for Texas but also other parts of the country. The rapid shift toward wind power is an opportunity for a reality check in the debate over the deployment of renewables, which benefit from federal tax credits and generous state mandates.

According to the Joint Congressional Committee on Taxation, wind and solar power will have received $36.5 billion in federal tax credits between 2016 and 2020. It’s an imposing number but it doesn’t even touch the subsidies provided for solar and wind at the state level.State renewable portfolio standards that mandate ever-increasing amounts of wind and solar power have been just as disruptive to electricity markets and perhaps even more costly.

It brings into sharp focus the most urgent challenge: How will the United States scale back the use of fossil fuels, yet maintain an adequate energy supply? Are renewables ready to fill the gap alone? Can wind and solar power be advanced fast enough and of sufficient scale, given that energy consumption is expected to grow over the next 30 years. For all the investment in wind and solar, despite all of the billions in subsidies, their limitations remain immense. The United States and the rest of the world will continue to rely on traditional sources of power for decades as populations grow, economies expand and living standards rise.

The current path forward that ignores the need for a balanced mix of energy sources is a road to nowhere.

Instead of indifference, we need to regain our balance and encourage investment in advanced energy technology of all kinds – coal, natural gas, nuclear power, and renewables, along with improvements in energy efficiency – if we hope to avoid future havoc in electricity markets and ensure the availability of reliable and affordable power.

SOURCE

The myth of green growth

Here’s the story about climate that we liberals like to tell ourselves: once we get rid of dinosaur politicians like Trump, we’ll take on the fossil-fuel lobby and greedy corporations and vote through a “green new deal”.

It will fund clean, fast-growing industries: solar, wind, electric vehicles, sustainable clothes. That will be a win-win: we can green our societies and keep consuming. This story is called “green growth”.

Unfortunately, green growth probably doesn’t exist — at least not for the next couple of decades, during which time we’ll have to cut most of our carbon emissions to keep the planet habitable. Our generation has to choose: we can be green or we can have growth, but we can’t have both together.

Let’s start with the basics. We have to nearly halve current global carbon emissions by 2030 to have a chance of limiting the rise in the planet’s temperatures to 1.5C, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Many climate scientists think the IPCC’s backward-looking, consensus-based estimates are too optimistic, but let’s accept that figure for a moment. It would require quite a turnround. Global emissions are still rising, hitting a record last year. Meanwhile, the world’s population is growing.

So we need to slash emissions while feeding and fuelling more people. But those people are also getting richer: global income per capita typically grows about 2 per cent a year.

And when people have money, they convert it into emissions. That’s what wealth is.

To achieve green growth, we’d have to emit radically less carbon per unit of gross domestic product. The amount of carbon required to produce one dollar of GDP has recently been dropping, by about 0.4 per cent a year.

But to keep temperature rises at safe levels, the carbon intensity of the global economy needs to fall at least 10 times faster, estimates the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21), a think-tank.

Green-growthers will say: “Don’t worry, renewable energy is taking off.” And it’s true that modern renewables now account for more than 10 per cent of total energy consumption, according to REN21. By 2050, that figure could reach about 30 per cent.

But the IPCC estimates we’ll need to be at about double that by then. And global investment in clean energy projects fell to its lowest levels in six years in the first half of 2019, says Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Green-growthers trumpet the transformation of European economies in recent decades: higher GDP, falling emissions. But that’s mostly because these countries have offshored their emissions: much of their stuff is now made in Asia.

Moreover, aviation and shipping aren’t counted against national carbon budgets. Once you factor in emissions embedded in imported goods, the EU’s carbon emissions are about 19 per cent higher than the bloc’s official figures, calculates the Global Carbon Project, a network of scientists; for many big cities, the gap is about 60 per cent.

The sad truth is that moving from dirty to green growth will take much more time than we have. The infrastructure we’ll be using these next crucial decades has largely already been built, and it isn’t green. Most of today’s planes and container ships will still be in use by 2040. There are no green alternatives yet, nor enough vegan burgers or sustainable clothes.

In 2040, too, most people will be living on much the same streets as today, still driving cars. Electric vehicles won’t save us: their lifetime emissions are unacceptably high. (Mining lithium, making car batteries, shipping cars and generating most electricity isn’t clean.)

Or picture the world’s biggest new infrastructure project: China’s Belt and Road is a web of highways, ports, cement plants, power plants (many coal-fired) and, yes, lots of greenish rail, built to shunt consumer goods across the world at pace. That’s growth, but it isn’t green.

It’s true we’re becoming more fuel-efficient. Ships, cars and planes have all reduced their energy consumption per mile.

But as William Jevons pointed out in 1865, when fuels become cheaper and more efficient, we use more of them. Note the global rise in car sales, increased ship speeds and the growing numbers flying each year. About four out of five people on earth have never taken a flight. Many of them cannot wait.

If green growth doesn’t exist, the only way to prevent climate catastrophe is “degrowth” now, not in 2050: stop most flying, meat-eating and clothes-buying until we have green alternatives, ban privately owned cars and abandon sprawling suburbs. A long economic depression might be enough to keep the planet habitable. We’d also need to divert money from consumption to building green infrastructure. This is essentially Greta Thunberg’s argument.

But that would put us in a new world. Economic growth, democracy and CO2 have always been intertwined. Growth and democracy barely existed until coal fuelled the industrial revolution. Can democracy survive without carbon?

We are not going to find out. No electorate will vote to decimate its own lifestyle. We can’t blame bad politicians or corporates. It’s us: we will always choose growth over climate.

SOURCE

The Bogus "Consensus" Argument on Climate Change

One of the popular rhetorical moves in the climate change debate is for advocates of aggressive government intervention to claim that “97% of scientists” agree with their position, and so therefore any critics must be unscientific “deniers.”

Now these claims have been dubious from the start; people like David Friedman have demonstrated that the “97% consensus” assertion became a talking point only through a biased procedure that mischaracterized how journal articles were rated, and thereby inflating the estimate.

But beyond that, a review in The New Republic of a book critical of mainstream economics uses the exact same degree of consensus in order to cast aspersions on the science of economics. In other words, when it comes to the nearly unanimous rejection of rent control or tariffs among professional economists, at least some progressive leftists conclude that there must be group-think involved. The one consistent thread in both cases—that of the climate scientists and that of the economists—is that The New Republic takes the side that will expand the scope of government power, a central tenet since its birth by Herbert Croly a century ago.

The Dubious “97% Consensus” Claim Regarding Climate Science
Back in 2014, David Friedman worked through the original paper that kicked off the “97% consensus” talking point. What the original authors, Cook et al., actually found in their 2013 paper was that 97.1% of the relevant articles agreed that humans contribute to global warming. But notice that that is not at all the same thing as saying that humans are the main contributors to observed global warming (since the Industrial Revolution).

This is a huge distinction. For example, I co-authored a Cato study with climate scientists Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger, in which we strongly opposed a U.S. carbon tax. Yet both Michaels and Knappenberger would be climate scientists who were part of the “97% consensus” according to Cook et al. That is, Michaels and Knappenberger both agree that, other things equal, human activity that emits carbon dioxide will make the world warmer than it otherwise would be. That observation by itself does not mean there is a crisis nor does it justify a large carbon tax.

Incidentally, when it comes down to what Cook et al. actually found, economist David R. Henderson noticed that it was even less impressive than what Friedman had reported. Here’s Henderson:

[Cook et al.] got their 97 percent by considering only those abstracts that expressed a position on anthropogenic global warming (AGW). I find it interesting that 2/3 of the abstracts did not take a position. So, taking into account David Friedman’s criticism above, and mine, Cook and Bedford, in summarizing their findings, should have said, “Of the approximately one-third of climate scientists writing on global warming who stated a position on the role of humans, 97% thought humans contribute somewhat to global warming.” That doesn’t quite have the same ring, does it? [David R. Henderson, bold added.]

So to sum up: The casual statements in the corporate media and in online arguments would lead the average person to believe that 97% of scientists who have published on climate change think that humans are the main drivers of global warming. And yet, at least if we review the original Cook et al. (2013) paper that kicked off the talking point, what they actually found was that of the sampled papers on climate change, only one-third of them expressed a view about its causes, and then of that subset, 97% agreed that humans were at least one cause of climate change. This would be truth-in-advertising, something foreign in the political discussion to which all AGW issues now seem to descend.

The New Republic’s Differing Attitudes Towards Consensus
The journal The New Republic was founded in 1914. Its website states: “For over 100 years, we have championed progressive ideas and challenged popular opinion….The New Republic promotes novel solutions for today’s most critical issues.”

With that context, it’s not surprising that The New Republic uses the alleged 97% consensus in climate science the way other progressive outlets typically do. Here’s an excerpt from a 2015 article (by Rebecca Leber) in which Republicans were excoriated for their anti-science stance on climate change:

Two years ago, a group of international researchers led by University of Queensland’s John Cook surveyed 12,000 abstracts of peer-reviewed papers on climate change since the 1990s. Out of the 4,000 papers that took a position one way or another on the causes of global warming, 97 percent of them were in agreement: Humans are the primary cause. By putting a number on the scientific consensus, the study provided everyone from President Barack Obama to comedian John Oliver with a tidy talking point.

Notice already that Leber is helping to perpetuate a falsehood, though she can be forgiven—part of David Friedman’s blog post was to show that Cook himself was responsible (Friedman calls it an outright lie) for the confusion regarding what he and his co-authors actually found. And notice that Leber confirms what I have claimed in this post, namely that it was the Cook et al. (2013) paper that originally provided the “talking point” (her term) about so-called consensus.

The point of Leber’s essay is to then denounce Ted Cruz and certain other Republicans for ignoring this consensus among climate scientists:

All this debate over one statistic might seem silly, but it’s important that Americans understand there is overwhelming agreement about human-caused global warming. Deniers have managed to undermine how the public views climate science, which in turn makes voters less likely to support climate action.

Now here’s what’s really interesting. A colleague sent me a recent review in The New Republic of a new book by Binyan Appelbaum that is critical of the economics profession. The reviewer, Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein, quoted with approval Appelbaum’s low view of consensus in economics:

Appelbaum shows the strangely high degree of consensus in the field of economics, including a 1979 survey of economists that “found 98 percent opposed rent controls, 97 percent opposed tariffs, 95 percent favored floating exchange rates, and 90 percent opposed minimum wage laws.” And in a moment of impish humor he notes that “Although nature tends toward entropy, they shared a confidence that economies tend toward equilibrium.” Economists shared a creepy lack of doubt about how the world worked. [Kaiser-Schatzlein, bold added.]

Isn’t that amazing? Rather than hunting down and demonizing Democratic politicians who dare to oppose the expert consensus on items like rent control—which Bernie Sanders has recently promoted—the reaction here is to guffaw at the hubris and “creepy lack of doubt about how the world [works].”

Conclusion

From the beginning, the “97% consensus” claim about climate change has been dubious, with supporters claiming that it represented much more than it really did. Furthermore, a recent book review in The New Republic shows that when it comes to economic science, 97% consensus means nothing, if it doesn’t support progressive politics.

SOURCE

Australia: Pressure rising for drivers of electric cars to pay their way

Electric vehide drivers should be charged road-user costs, with 76 per cent of Australians calling on green-car owners to contribute to transport infrastructure, and almost one-in-two declaring it unfair they avoid paying fuel excise.

New polling obtained by The Australian reveals pushback against electric vehicle owners, with Australian motorists warning "there shouldn't be one rule for them and another for us". The sample of 1500 Australians, conducted by pollster Toby Ralph for the Australian Automobile Association, shows an "overwhelming sentiment that all road users should pay to fund the roads, not just those using petrol or diesel".

The research, based on 1400 quantitative and 100 qualitative interviews across the nation in July, also revealed concerns about Australia holding 50 days of fuel stocks, with 55 per cent saying it was insufficient and 31 per cent unsure.

AAA managing director Michael Bradley said the data spoke to the fact that "Australian motorists are incredibly price sensitive and very focused on high transport costs". "People understand motoring taxes build and maintain the roads and rail networks we all need, and Australians clearly want that burden shared equally," Mr Bradley said.

"Low emissions vehicle technologies are evolving rapidly and while no one wants the adoption of cleaner, safer cars stifled, Australia's tax system needs to be updated if it is to be ready for the changes coming.

"The task in front of government is to fix a structural flaw in the federal budget by creating a national road access charge for low emission vehicles, which brings this growing fleet into the tax system without disincentivising uptake."

According to Infrastructure Australia, electric vehicles are projected to account for 70 per cent of new vehicle sales and 30 per cent of the vehicle fleet by 2040. In February, the Electric Vehicle Council welcomed IA's identification of the need to construct a national electric vehicle fast-charging network as a "high priority initiative for Australia".

According to interviews conducted for the AAA-commissioned research, respondents raised concerns over electric vehicle owners not paying the fuel excise of 41.6c for every litre of petrol. "It's their choice to get (an electric car) but they should pay too," a respondent said.

Others said "when you think about it, it's like tax avoidance", "why should I subsidise them" and "it's only fair they pay something".

Debate over electric vehicles peaked ahead of the federal election after Bill Shorten flagged an electric vehicle target of 50 per cent of new car sales by 2030.

Both major parties have baulked at funding a major rollout of recharging infrastructure across the nation and supporting generous subsidies for electric vehicles, which have been adopted by some overseas governments.

The AAA research showed while a majority of Australians knew about the fuel excise, they were unaware of how much it was worth, and only older motorists knew it was used to pay for roads. Excise rates on fuel and petroleum products are indexed twice a year in line with the consumer price index.

On paying to increase fuel stocks to 90 days, 59 per cent of those surveyed said nothing and 21 per cent flagged they would likely pay less than 2c. Asked if they were aware Europe's petrol is "cleaner" than Australia's fuel, 72 per cent said they weren't and only 41 per cent of respondents were likely to pay more for cleaner fuel that would "reduce emissions and improve community health".

From "The Australian" of 28/10/2019

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

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

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IN BRIEF

Home (Index page)

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here. It shows that we actually live in an era of remarkable temperature stability.

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.

"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Theoretically, the effect of added CO2 in the atmosphere should be instant. It allegedly works by bouncing electromagnetic radiation around and electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. But there has been no instant effect. Temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.

Antarctica is GAINING mass

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion

Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

The plight of the bumblebee -- an egregious example of crooked "science"

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Fossil fuels are 100% organic, are made with solar energy, and when burned produce mostly CO2 and H2O, the 2 most important foods for life.

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below

WISDOM:

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered, than answers that can’t be questioned.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, Physicist

“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

UNRELIABLE SCIENCE:

(1). “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness… “The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of ‘significance’ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale…Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent…” (Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet, in The Lancet, 11 April, 2015, Vol 385, “Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?”)

(2). “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement" -- Karl Popper

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

A Warmist backs down: "No one knows exactly how far rising carbon concentrations affect temperatures" -- Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

The frequency of hurricanes has markedly DECLINED in recent years

Here's how that "97% consensus" figure was arrived at

97% of scientists want to get another research grant

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

To Greenies, Genghis Khan was a good guy, believe it or not. They love that he killed so many people.

Greenie antisemitism

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

Comparing climate alarmist Hansen to Cassandra is WRONG. Cassandra's (Greek mythology) dire prophecies were never believed but were always right. Hansen's dire prophecies are usually believed but are always wrong (Prof. Laurence Gould, U of Hartford, CT)

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

UPDATE to the above: It seems that I am a true prophet

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

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

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Help keep the planet Green! Maximize your CO2 and CH4 output!

Global Warming=More Life; Global Cooling=More Death.

The inconvenient truth about biological effects of "Ocean Acidification"

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is maximum 4%.

Cook the crook who cooks the books

The great and fraudulent scare about lead

How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The "precautionary principle" is a favourite Greenie idea -- but isn't that what George Bush was doing when he invaded Iraq? Wasn't that a precaution against Saddam getting or having any WMDs? So Greenies all agree with the Iraq intervention? If not, why not?

A classic example of how the sensationalist media distort science to create climate panic is here.

There is a very readable summary of the "Hockey Stick" fraud here

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: "The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Relying on the popular wisdom can even hurt you personally: "The scientific consensus of a quarter-century ago turned into the arthritic nightmare of today."

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.

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