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

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

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31 October, 2018

Top Climate Scientists Warn Governments Of 'Blatant Anti-Nuclear Bias' In Latest IPCC Climate Report

Warmists are split on nukes

Some of the scientists most often cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have taken the unusual step of warning leaders of G-20 nations that a recent IPCC report uses a double standard when it comes to its treatment of nuclear as compared to renewables.

“The anti-nuclear bias of this latest IPCC release is rather blatant,” said  Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “and reflects the ideology of the environmental movement. History may record that this was more of an impediment to decarbonization than climate denial.”

Other signers of the letter include Tom Wigley, a widely-cited climate scientist who has contributed to IPCC reports on 13 separate occasions, David Lea, professor of Earth Sciences at University of California, Santa Barbara, and Peter Raven, Winner of the National Medal of Science, 2001.

“Such fear-mongering about nuclear has serious consequences,” the authors write. “As IPCC itself acknowledges, public fears of nuclear are behind the technology’s slower-than-desirable development.

The letter signers include leading radiation experts who expressed outrage that the IPCC had claimed a link between nuclear power stations and leukemia when in reality “there is no valid evidentiary support for it and the supposed connection has been thoroughly dismissed in the literature.”

“Public fear of nuclear drove the panicked over-reaction to past nuclear accidents,” they note, “including mass evacuations, which health experts agree had a far larger negative impact on human health than the low-levels of radiation that escaped from the plants.”

In fact, note the letter authors, which include Gerry Thomas, a Professor of Molecular Pathology at Imperial College London and co-founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, there is “higher radiation exposure from coal plants and the manufacturing of solar panels than from nuclear.”

The authors of the open letter aren’t the only ones finding evidence of anti-nuclear bias in the IPCC report. The day after the letter was published, physicist Jani-Petri Martikainen published an analysis showing that IPCC modelers restricted the role of nuclear by assuming a scarcity of uranium — something that has not been a concern since the late 1950s but has been a talking point of anti-nuclear campaigners since the 1970s.

In other instances, Martikainen finds, IPCC modelers assume uranium mining comes to a halt for an unspecified reason. “For some weird reason, humanity stops mining uranium even when the fuel cost is still massively lower than for fossil fuels,” Martikainen writes.

Such manipulations disturb climate modelers like Wigley. “There are a number of productive climate scientists who are ideologically opposed to nuclear,” he explained. “In some cases this stems from early associations with Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth (or similar organizations).”

The signers, who include nuclear weapons expert and Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Rhodes, criticize the IPCC’s claim “that the ‘use of nuclear power poses a constant risk of proliferation’ even though no nation in history has ever created a nuclear weapon from civilian nuclear fuel under inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The letter signers note that the report raises concerns about nuclear waste, “without acknowledgment that spent fuel is safely contained, usually on site, nor any mention of the waste from other low-carbon energy sources, including solar panels, which contain toxic metals including lead, chromium, and cadmium, and which in most of the world lack safe storage or recycling.”

In addition to inputting future uranium shortages as an assumption, physicist Martikainen noted that IPCC modelers assume large cost reductions for solar and wind but none for nuclear, gross overestimates of efficiency (capacity factors) for wind, and gross underestimates of efficiency for nuclear.

Martikainen notes that if IPCC modelers removed the uranium scarcity assumption, “Nuclear power would end up dominating the energy supply. I have a feeling that resource constraint was introduced specifically for this reason. Modellers first did their calculations without the constraint and ended up with a result that they found distasteful.”

Concludes Martikainen, “I suspect that modellers worked backwards and set the resource limitation based on the maximum share of the energy supply they were ready to grant for nuclear power. Not cool.”

Other signers of the letter include a growing list of pro-nuclear non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from around the world, including Environmental Hope & Justice, Climate Coalition, Anthropocene Institute, Energy for Humanity, the Ecomodernist Society, Saving Our Planet, Mothers for Nuclear, Voices for Nuclear, Nuklearia, Ren Energi Oplysning, and Partei der Humanisten

Defenders of the IPCC report noted that many of the scenarios in the recent report call for the expanded use of nuclear energy, something the letter authors acknowledge.

“While many of the scenarios in the IPCC report call for the expanded use of nuclear energy,” the signers noted, “the report nonetheless repeats misinformation about nuclear energy, contrasts nuclear negatively to renewables, and in some cases, suggests an equivalency with fossil fuels.”

Climate scientists say including nuclear in the models is a poor excuse for the overall bias of the report. “This is a big deal,” said Wigley. “Dishonesty in any branch of the science that underpins the global warming issue taints us all. Dishonesty must always be exposed. If not exposed, lies can persist and damage the truth for a long, long time.”

SOURCE






"But what will take its place?"

Does government really need to regulate everything? Can no program be allowed to expire?

Greg Walcher

In high school and college, I competed in debate tournaments across the state and country. I clearly remember many occasions when a debate team’s plan would include abolishing some government program. Inevitably, the opponents would ask, “What will you replace it with?”

Only once did I hear any debater respond with, “Nothing at all. Government shouldn’t be doing that at all.” Everyone in the room was stunned, and that team lost.

Even today, most people find it hard to imagine abolishing anything. That’s why President Reagan once quipped that a government program is the closest thing to eternal life on this planet.

I couldn’t help reflecting on that a couple months ago, when the EPA released its new version of the “Clean Power Plan,” the Obama Administration’s thinly-veiled attempt to kill the coal industry. More than half the states sued, and the Supreme Court suspended the Obama plan as an unauthorized expansion of the agency’s authority under the Clean Air Act.

That was two and a half years ago, and after the election the Trump Administration withdrew the Obama plan. The entire discussion was in limbo for a long time thereafter. But now we have a new EPA and a new plan to debate. It’s called the “Affordable Clean Energy” rule.

A new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “Special Report” says we must spend $2.4 trillion (!) per year for the next 17 years to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, or humanity and our planet are doomed. But after all the scare stories and “tipping points” – and empty promises that China, India, Africa and the rest of the world would soon abandon coal, oil and natural gas for wind, solar and biofuels – the American public is growing increasingly skeptical of the fear-mongering. Many are not convinced we need a new carbon dioxide (CO2) rule at all.

Nevertheless, we always knew this new EPA initiative was coming.

The real debate stems from an earlier controversy, at the beginning of the Obama era, when the EPA declared that plant-fertilizing, life-giving, people and animal-emitting carbon dioxide is an unsafe pollutant that “endangers the health and welfare of all Americans.”

That “endangerment finding” was also widely challenged, because Congress never authorized the EPA to regulate the air we exhale as a “greenhouse gas.” Nevertheless, the Supreme Court backed the EPA’s authority to designate CO2 (which makes up about 4 one-hundredths of one percent of the atmosphere) as “dangerous,” if it concluded the risks of global climate change outweighed the trace gas’s benefits. Of course, the Obama EPA then determined that CO2 was unduly dangerous.

That ruling then formed the basis for the Clean Power Plan, a host of other regulations attacking coal, oil and natural gas use, and U.S. participation in the Paris climate treaty. Many observers were thus very guarded in their enthusiasm when President Trump withdrew from the Paris deal, and cancelled the Clean Power Plan. They realized that his new EPA has, so far, made no effort to revisit or reverse the “endangerment finding.”

That is problematic, because EPA probably cannot legally declare something to be a dangerous pollutant, but then decline to regulate it. So the concern is that if EPA does not reverse the “endangerment finding,” federal courts would eventually order a new “clean power plan” anyway. That is why the EPA has released this new plan.

However, thankfully, the new plan is nothing like the original, an outright attack on the very existence of the coal industry. Instead, EPA now acknowledges that our most abundant and affordable energy source can be used without destroying anything.

Sadly, many political leaders on both sides still think big environmental problems require federal solutions, as opposed to letting individuals, businesses or even state and local governments address them, in cases where there actually is a problem and the proposed solution would actually fix the problem.

In any event, this new EPA approach proves federal “authority” doesn’t necessarily require heavy-handed dictates from Washington.

Global Energy Institute President Karen Harbert says the new plan at least calls for “a more collaborative process that fits within EPA’s statutory authority and will result in achievable progress through more practical, state-driven programs.”

As the Clean Air Act intended, EPA now says states can develop and enforce performance standards. States have broad flexibility to consider their unique circumstances; and one-size-fits-all federal regulations rarely succeed in environmental matters.

Pittsburgh’s pollution has nothing to do with Grand Junction, Colorado or Chicago, Illinois. What works in Miami will likely not work in Los Angeles. Local leaders are better arbiters, because they know the territory better than distant bureaucracies can.

That makes a state-based approach better by definition, even if carbon dioxide were a significant problem. In fact, manmade contributions notwithstanding, climate change is governed mostly by the sun and other natural forces. Nothing humans might do will prevent those forces from changing the climate again and again, as they have throughout Earth’s history.

Nevertheless, the new rules represent an improvement over the Obama approach.

The new plan is based on what can be achieved “inside the fence” of a power plant. We shouldn’t expect or demand that a Western Colorado rural utility stop generating power because of some dubious theory about polar bears dying off in Central Canada if the Earth might warm another degree.

But at least the new approach will encourage investment in upgraded electricity generation and pollution control technologies, because such improvements will no longer automatically trigger costly permitting requirements. The previous rule discouraged such investments, defeating its own purpose.

Finally, the new rules will no longer shut down existing power plants before their useful life is over, or their financing is paid off. Such waste drove average electricity rates up 60% in many areas under Obama – hurting factories, businesses, hospitals, schools, and families that were least able to pay.

Ironically, EPA estimates that U.S. CO2 emissions will continue to decline at about the same rate (roughly 33% between 2005 and 2030) under the new plan as under the Obama plan – or under no new regulation at all. In other words, our emissions are declining anyway, not because of government intrusion, but because of improving and changing technologies.

The new EPA plan is a significant improvement. Now, let’s also abolish the “endangerment finding” and replace it with – nothing at all.

SOURCE 






the Land and Water Conservation Fund or don’t renew it to just do more federal land grabs

By Robert Romano

The Land and Water Conservation Fund was enacted in 1965, according to the act, to “provid[e] funds for and authorizing Federal assistance to the States in planning, acquisition, and development of needed land and water areas and facilities and … providing funds for the federal acquisition and development of certain lands and other areas.”

Although it started out to help state and local governments with recreation projects, over the years, the primary mission of the fund has shifted almost entirely to federal land purchases, with as little as 12 percent going to stateside projects, according to U.S. Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), writing for the Daily Caller on Oct. 9.

That is why Bishop offered an amendment to H.R. 502, which reauthorizes the fund, that would require that at least 40 percent of the taxpayer money in the fund indeed goes to the states. It’s a good start, but it might not make up for other shortcomings of the legislation.

For starters, the bill raises the amount of the fund to $900 million from its FY 2018 level of $425 million, a 112 percent increase, and the highest level since 2001.

The bill also permanently reauthorizes the fund, abdicating Congress’ constitutional prerogative to allow the legislation to sunset.

As of this moment, the fund’s authorization lapsed on Sept. 30. Meaning, Congress will be looking for an excuse to reauthorize it. But that gives Congress leverage to reform the program without expanding it so dramatically.

It is unfortunate that the only way it was perceived that state and local government programs could be funded was to simply double the agency’s budget. Under the well-intentioned Bishop amendment, stateside projects would now get $360 million. But it comes at the cost of doubling land acquisition funding to more than $400 million, even though the Trump administration request hundreds of millions of dollars less than that.

If anything, the reauthorization should be an opportunity to limit federal land grabs. The federal government already owns 46.4 percent of western states’ land as it is, according to a 2017 study by the Congressional Research Service. How much more does it really need?

Surely, in the lame duck session of Congress, this will come up again, especially now that the bill has cleared committees in both the House and Senate. But the haste to get the bill done during the lame duck should not come at an exorbitant cost to taxpayers. It might be better to just wait until 2019 if the alternative is doubling the amount of federal land grabs.

SOURCE






Lunatic climate alarmists now say the entire system of free market enterprise must be dismantled to save the planet

The Cult of Climate Change is finally coming out of the closet in conveying its true agenda for the world. As relayed by The Daily Signal, the only way to stop global warming, according to the world’s “top scientists,” is to completely dismantle all forms of capitalism and free enterprise.

This is the conclusion reached by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which recently announced that the only system of government that offers humanity both dignity and the opportunity to flourish and prosper must be abolished in order to protect the polar bears, stop the oceans from rising, and increase sales for Al Gore’s latest climate fiction novels.

“If you are wondering what you can do about climate change,” tweeted meteorologist and apparent soy boy Eric Holthaus, “The world’s top scientists just gave rigorous backing to systematically dismantle capitalism as a key requirement to maintaining civilization and a habitable planet.”

Well, isn’t that just convenient? A globalist organization known as the United Nations has decided that the only way to stop a fictitious phenomenon known as climate change is to force all remaining non-globalist countries, such as the United States, to basically forego their sovereignty and merge with the New World Order.

Even though a great number of the world’s “top scientists” also oppose the climate change hoax, the IPCC wants everyone to believe their “top scientists” who insist that everything they say is climate fact, including the ridiculous notion that free societies are somehow responsible for leading us to the point where we apparently have just 11 years to fix this “problem” before it’s too late.

Remember back in 1989 when climate lunatics said global warming would destroy the planet by the year 2000?
While this is hardly the first time that the U.N. has tried to use unsubstantiated fear-mongering in an attempt to strong-arm countries like the U.S. into giving up their freedoms in order to “save the planet,” it is a milestone for these globalists to openly admit in no uncertain terms that stopping “global warming” and “climate change” really means forcing every country to become either socialist or communist.

Some readers may recall that, back in 1989, the U.N. attempted a similar coup using the excuse of climate change. The Associated Press (AP) reported back at that time that a senior U.N. official warned that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.”

“Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos,” the report added, quoting then-director of the New York office of the U.N.’s Environmental Program, Noel Brown.

Similar to this latest 11-year warning from the U.N., Brown claimed at the time that the world had just 10 years, the deadline being 1999, to fix the “greenhouse effect” before “it goes beyond human control.”

Eighteen years later and, last we checked, Americans are still living along coastlines, bothered by little more than rainstorms and the occasional hurricane. There are still no “eco-refugees” anywhere to be found, and ocean levels are much the same as they were back when Brown lied to the world about the imminent dangers of climate change.

“Free, competitive energy markets drive innovation and provide the affordable, reliable energy that families and businesses need, and yield a cleaner environment,” writes Nicolas Loris for The Daily Signal.

“Conversely, international efforts to combat climate change have been centrally planned boondoggles. They’ve resulted in wasted taxpayer money, higher energy prices, and handouts for preferred energy sources and technologies – all for no noticeable impact on climate.”

SOURCE






Institute of Public Affairs blasts Australian goverment's  'un-Liberal' energy policies

IPA’s John Roskam says government should ‘stop all subsidies to coal, wind and anything else’

The Institute of Public Affairs has blasted the Morrison government’s “big stick” in energy policy – a threat to break up energy companies in a bid to lower prices – accusing it of breaching Liberal values and endangering investment.

The IPA executive director, John Roskam, told Guardian Australia that “heavy-handed intervention” was “positively un-Liberal” and would open the door for Labor to campaign on policies bashing big businesses – which are “simply responding to the policy settings the government itself has created” to make a profit.

Roskam also warned against any form of subsidy for electricity generation including renewables subsidies, underwriting new power generation and indemnifying coal power against a possible future carbon price.

The intervention from the influential rightwing thinktank exposes divisions in the conservative side of politics on energy policy. Some, including MP Craig Kelly and former prime minister Tony Abbott, have called for an end to renewable subsidies and withdrawal from the Paris agreement, in line with demands from the IPA.

The Morrison government has indicated it wants to preserve popular solar subsidies and to stay in Paris while it pushes ahead with competition measures to lower price in the absence of a policy to reduce emissions by 2030.

Roskam said breaking up energy companies “continues the trend of targeting particular industries” as the Coalition did with the bank tax in the 2017 budget and would “further confuse Australians” about what it stands for.

“The idea that the government would determine the shape and size of the industry in this way cuts across every principle of the Liberal party,” he said. “If you want a guarantee that nobody will ever invest in Australia again, this is how you do it.”

The Coalition has promised policies to encourage new generation – including providing a floor price, contracts for difference and government loans – and has not ruled out using those measures to support new coal-fired power stations.

The energy minister, Angus Taylor, has said the government should address investors’ concerns about “political risks”, in a sign it could also indemnify coal power against future emissions reduction policies such as a carbon price. Taylor has also said there is “no plan” to change the small-scale renewable energy scheme.

Roskam said the government should “stop all subsidies to coal, wind and anything else” because “picking winners should be an anathema to the Liberal party”.

Although the IPA wants to see more coal power, Roskam said the government should “reduce the regulatory barriers to them being funded”, not keep the barriers and overcome them with subsidies.

He said he had “some sympathy” for the idea the government should “compensate coal for the disadvantage they have been put under” by support for renewables, but warned that indemnifying coal against political risk would be a “further distortion” in the market.

Roskam said the Liberal Party is “hopelessly conflicted on climate change” and “riven down the middle”. He warned the party can not appeal both to “rich people virtue-signalling because they can afford to” in the blue-ribbon seat of Wentworth who want emissions reduction, and voters who want lower power prices in Longman in Queensland, both sites of recent byelection defeats.

“Wentworth is not Australia,” Roskam said, echoing conservative commentators who have played down the byelection defeat.

The sentiment is not shared by moderate Liberal MPs who privately note the Liberals hold many seats with a base of supporters with high incomes and progressive social attitudes including Brisbane, Goldstein, Higgins, Kooyong, Warringah, Mackellar and North Sydney.

Roskam suggested the Liberal party should present a “sharp difference” with Labor by exiting the Paris agreement. “You can’t out virtue-signal the Labor party,” he said.

Despite the suggestion emissions and price reductions are incompatible, renewables are forecast to lower prices while coal subsidies would increase energy costs.

On Friday Scott Morrison told ABC’s AM that “all the information before us” is that Australia will meet its emissions reduction target of 26% by 2030, particularly due to “increased investment in renewables which is happening as a result of common sense and technology”.

The claim is contradicted by environment department figures showing emissions are rising and advice from the Energy Security Board that Australia will fall short under a business-as-usual scenario.

Morrison said the government needs to prioritise “making sure we’ve got reliable power”.

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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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30 October, 2018

Air pollution is the new tobacco and is killing seven million people a year and harming billions more, head of World Health Organisation warns

This "wisdom" from an Ethiopian politician and the eminently buyable WHO is deep-dyed nonsense.  As I have pointed out repeatedly, the evidence for harm from particulate pollution in the Western world is just not there.  The alleged "proofs" of it are all deeply flawed.  The article below is a triumph of assertion over evidence


More than 90 per cent of the world's population suffers toxic air pollution which is having a drastic effect on the health of people, especially children.

The danger toxic air has on the world's population has been deemed 'a silent public health emergency' by the head of the WHO.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO's director general, told The Guardian: 'The world has turned the corner on tobacco. Now it must do the same for the 'new tobacco' – the toxic air that billions breathe every day.

'No one, rich or poor, can escape air pollution. It is a silent public health emergency. 'Despite this epidemic of needless, preventable deaths and disability, a smog of complacency pervades the planet.' Children and babies, whose bodies are still developing, are the most at risk from  the toxic air.

And there are now 300 million people living in places where toxic fumes are six times above international guidelines.

Dr Maria Neira, WHO director for public health and the environment, told The Guardian: 'We have to ask what are we doing to our children, and the answer I am afraid is shockingly clear: we are polluting their future, and this is very worrying for all us.'

Most urban areas in the UK have illegal levels of air pollution and causes more deaths per year than tobacco.

But researchers think the harm known to be caused by air pollution, such as heart attacks and lung disease, and is 'only the tip of the iceberg'.

SOURCE


          
   
                                                                                               

A looming technology-security minerals crisis?

New book analyzes near-total foreign dependency for critical minerals – and offers solutions

Paul Driessen

In 1973 OPEC countries imposed an oil embargo to retaliate for US support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Drivers endured soaring gasoline prices, blocks-long lines, hours wasted waiting to refuel vehicles, and restrictions on which days they could buy fuel. America was vulnerable to those blackmail sanctions because we imported “too much” oil – though it was just 30% of our crude.

The fracking revolution (horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing) and other factors changed that dramatically. The United States now produces more crude oil than at any time since 1970.

But now we face new, potentially far greater dangers – because we import up to 100% of dozens of metals and minerals essential for wind turbines, solar panels, and a vast array of defense, security, automotive, computer, communication, electrical grid, battery and countless other technologies. Two dozen of them come 60% to 100% from China, Russia or mines controlled by those two countries … and where child labor, worker safety, human rights and environmental standards are minimal to nonexistent.

Recent Defense and Interior Department reports have identified literally hundreds of ways US industries and military readiness are acutely vulnerable to supply interruptions for these rare earth and other exotic materials. Equally troubling, 90% of the world’s printed circuit boards are produced in Asia, more than half of them in China; that presents still more risks that competitors and enemies are establishing more ports of entry (on top of highly professional hacking) into industry and defense computer systems.

And now the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change absurdly claims American (and global) fossil fuel use must be slashed from over 80% of our energy today to zero by 2050 – and replaced by renewable energy. That would raise our dependency on these metals and minerals, and their costs, by orders of magnitude. It would severely impact every facet of our economy, security, defense and personal lives.

Just building the wind turbines, solar cells and high-tech transmission systems for billions of megawatt-hours of electricity would require incalculable quantities – and money. Batteries to back up all that electricity for windless and sunless hours, days or weeks would require vast additional quantities.

Thankfully, volcanic and magmatic activity, plate tectonics and other powerful geologic processes have blessed America with metallic and other mineral deposits unsurpassed almost anywhere else in the world. We likely have all these essential materials right under our feet. Incredibly, insanely, the United States is the only nation in the world that locks them up, makes them inaccessible under almost any conditions.

Federally controlled lands are especially problematical. Not only are they our most mineralized regions. We have no idea what is actually there. And we are not permitted to evaluate their mineral potential, in order to make informed, rational decisions about how they should be managed – to balance environmental protection and preservation against the raw material needs of a modern industrialized, technological nation.

A 1975 report found that 74% of federal lands were totally or effectively closed to exploration for and development of critical minerals, because of pro-wilderness, anti-mining, anti-energy laws, regulations, bureaucratic roadblocks, environmentalist lawsuits and court decisions.

An updated 1994 study (conducted after 78 million acres had been transferred to the State of Alaska and Alaskan Natives) concluded that 71% of federal lands were still off limits: 427 million acres; our best mineral lands; a land area equal to Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming combined! Since then, the situation has worsened steadily, especially during the Obama years. Even supposedly available lands are mostly inaccessible, because bureaucrats refuse to issue permits.

Perhaps worst of all, much of this steady lockdown resulted from a concerted, irresponsible effort to place lands in wilderness and other highly restrictive land-use categories – often with the deliberate purpose of preventing anyone from ever assessing or accessing their critical and strategic mineral potential. A recent US House of Representatives committee memorandum summarizes growing congressional concerns.

A groundbreaking book – titled Groundbreaking!America’s new quest for minerals independence – will soon provide persuasive reasons why we must reexamine the policies that brought us to this untenable and unsustainable point in American history. In concise, plain language, geologist Ned Mamula and Silicon Valley expert Ann Bridges explain why we must literally break ground in these areas … and drill down to find out what minerals are in them. Their key points must be pondered, absorbed and acted on by all who care about our security and prosperity.

* We won the oil and gas energy war, but a growing minerals and metals dependency imperils our future.

* America is undeniably endowed with mineral riches, but we have no idea what we have or where it is located, because we are not permitted even to look for, map and evaluate deposits. In fact, we cannot even mine major deposits when we know their precise location, composition and value. We need to know as much about subsurface values as we do about surface values, if we are to make informed decisions.

* American jobs, prosperity and security have always been based on “mineral wealth.” Some of our major cities and many of our major industries (including Silicon Valley) exist because of metals and minerals.

* We are at great risk now, because we are 50-100% reliant on foreign countries for the exotic minerals and metals needed to satisfy our addiction to computers, cell phones and other high-tech gadgetry, for virtually every civilian, industrial, medical, communication and defense application imaginable.

* China and Russia supply enormous quantities of our most critical and strategic materials – and could easily use them as leverage if the US challenges their hegemonic goals in Asia, Europe or the Pacific. The wealthy, powerful, increasingly radical environmental industry exacerbates these vulnerabilities.

* Chapters devoted to rare earth metals, uranium and copper-molybdenum-gold explain the politics, economics and corruption surrounding their stories, and how certain politicians and pressure groups actually want to de-industrialize America and reduce our living standards and global power.

* Excessive laws, land withdrawals run amok, costly and interminable environmental review and permitting processes, and other factors impose severe constraints on US viability and sustainability. Constantly changing technologies mean constantly changing materials needs and renewed exploration.

* Australia and Canada protect their precious environmental heritage while also utilizing their precious metals and minerals heritage. The United States must apply these lessons in devising better ways to handle land withdrawals, environmental reviews and permitting – with the White House, Congress, universities and the private sector leading the way on public discussions and positive initiatives.

* Alternatives to fossil fuel energy, high-tech equipment of every description, nearly everything we use in our daily lives is tied to the exotic, strategic and critical minerals we have so cavalierly made off limits.

* Except for national parks and certain other places, federal lands must be surveyed and explored by government agencies and private sector companies using aerial and ground-based induced polarization, magnetometer and radiometric technologies, grid soil analyses and equipment literally carried in backpacks. Good prospects must then be evaluated further using truck and helicopter drilling rigs, to collect core samples and other information needed for deciding an area’s highest and best uses.

* It’s time to launch a groundswell of support for more responsible policies, disrupt the status quo, and turbo-charge US mining, job creation, job and industry preservation, and long-term national security and defense readiness. Failure to do so violates the most fundamental principles of national security and responsible government.

The needs of current and future generations are at stake, because prolonged disruptions of our access to these minerals would lead to the collapse of Silicon Valley and many other industries, severely compromised defense capabilities, and the disruption or even destruction of almost every sector of our computer-dependent economy and society.

President Trump, his cabinet, members of Congress, military and industrial leaders, regulators, citizens and environmentalists need to read this book (coming in December). Above all, they need to recognize that modern mining technologies, techniques and regulations enable us to develop the minerals and metals we so critically need, while preserving the scenic, wildlife and environmental values we cherish.

Via email






Will Global Warming Destroy the World? Ask America’s Farmers

With the fall harvest underway across the nation’s Midwest “breadbasket,” early U.S. Department of Agriculture reporting predicts record-setting corn and soybean crops for 2018.

The corn crop will be above average for a record sixth year in a row, while soybean production is projected at an all-time high of 4.4 billion bushels, up 4 percent from last year’s previous record.

U.S. corn, soybean, wheat, and even rice crops look to continue a trend of remarkable growth in both productivity and output.  This year, corn may yield a record 178.4 bushels per acre nationwide.

If realized, this will be the highest yield on record for the United States. Soybean yields will likely be up 2.5 bushels from 2017, which surprised grain-trading experts and exceeded even the highest private yield estimate.

Wheat yields (for all varieties) are forecast to increase 1.1 bushels from last year,  and the 2018-19 U.S. rice crop is projected at 210.9 million cwt, down less than 1 percent from an earlier forecast but 18 percent larger than a year earlier.

America’s farmers will once again help feed a hungry planet that presently has more than 7.6 billion inhabitants and may reach 8.6 billion by 2030.

Global agricultural trends reflect gains as well.  Since 2002, world production of four major crops – corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans – has grown by 846 million tons or 48%.

Yields have kept pace with the world’s annual population growth rate of 1%.  In fact, prices for staple grain crops reveal a downside to those abundances, such that plentiful supply depresses commodity prices on world markets.

“There is too much corn,” said one analyst, to match demand. Corn- and soybean-growers now concern themselves with consumption of previous record-setting crops to promote future market price increases.

These blessed abundances occur in an environment where Americans are fed a steady diet of dire predictions of climate change with its presumption of human-caused global warming.

Scientists tell us that weather phenomena like the extremes of storms, drought, wind, heat, and rainfall will be more frequent and intense.

Add pestilence, pollution, fires, and the encroachment of human activity to other natural calamities, and one wonders just how the American farmer can survive to produce and even prosper.

Instead, the American farmer continually adapts to the climate – and weather – through changes in crop rotations, planting times, genetic selection, fertilizer choices, improved equipment, innovation, pest and water management, and shifts in areas of crop production, among other possible measures.

Farmers take advantage of an unmatched system of education, research, science, and technology in American universities and business that has evolved to aid and support American agriculture.

Farmers also make good use of a responsive agri-business banking and finance system. On whole, American farmers are part of, and benefit from, a well-honed agricultural infrastructure that fosters advances in production and efficiency.

By contrast, in just one global example, Africa, despite vast natural resources, including stretches of arable land, has the world’s highest incidence of undernourishment (estimated at near one in four persons).

It is assessed that more than 60% of the planet’s available and unexploited cropland is located in sub-Saharan Africa, yet agricultural production remains dismal, which further undermines Africa’s future and economic growth.

Africa must import food staples valued at some $25 billion annually, largely because continental food production, supply, and consumption systems do not function optimally.

Why?  Consider that no nation on that continent can provide its farmers the needed political and societal stability to support a similarly developed agricultural infrastructure.

The examples of Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia and once Africa’s breadbasket) and Sudan are illustrative of the entire continent’s challenges.

Zimbabwe has Africa’s most fertile farmland, yet, as a recent exposé explained, “a onetime net exporter of maize, cotton, beef, tobacco, roses, and sugarcane,” Zimbabwe now “exports only its educated professionals,” who fled by the thousands from decades of corrupt autocratic rule.

In Sudan, only 16% of the available land had been cultivated by 2009 – the majority of which now falls within South Sudan, a “new” country that must still import nearly all its food.

Imagine the possibilities if African farmers could bring to bear similar resourcefulness, science, technology, finance, know-how, entrepreneurship, and work ethic to what the American farmer possesses.

What if Africa’s arable and unexploited croplands were farmed to similar standards as those in the American Midwest and production raised to the optimal – and sustainable – levels they are capable of?

It is not climate change, weather phenomena, human encroachment, or other natural calamities that pose the greatest threats to future generations.

Humans adapt to their environment and can adjust the agricultural enterprise to feed the people.

The real global threat is poor, non-functioning governance, and more precisely, autocratic, dictatorial, corrupt regimes not acting for the common good of the governed.

Poor governance has worsened more people’s lives – made more people go hungry – than anything extreme weather, pests, or climate change will ever do.  That is the national security concern; that is the threat to global agriculture and food production.

When offering thanks for our blessings before coming holiday meals, remember and appreciate America’s farmers for their achievements we all too often take for granted.

SOURCE






Last-ditch push to scrub carbon from the air

Scrubbing carbon from the air would be criminal. The present high levels are making all plants flourish -- including trees and crops.  Deserts are even shrinking

With time running out to avoid dangerous global warming, the US’ leading scientific body on Wednesday urged the federal government to begin a research program focused on developing technologies that can remove vast quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to help slow climate change.

The 369-page report, written by a panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, underscores an important shift. For decades, experts said that nations could prevent large temperature increases mainly by reducing reliance on fossil fuels and moving to cleaner sources like solar, wind and nuclear power.

But at this point, nations have delayed so long in cutting their carbon-dioxide emissions that even a breakneck shift toward clean energy would most likely not be enough.

According to a landmark scientific report issued by the United Nations this month, taking out a big chunk of the carbon dioxide already loaded into the atmosphere may be necessary to avoid significant further warming, even though researchers haven’t yet figured out how to do so economically, or at sufficient scale.

And we’ll have to do it fast. To meet the climate goals laid out under the Paris Agreement, humanity may have to start removing around 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air annually by midcentury, in addition to reducing industrial emissions, said Stephen Pacala, a Princeton climate scientist who led the panel. That’s nearly as much carbon as all the world’s forests and soils currently absorb each year.

“Midcentury is not very far away,” Professor Pacala said. “To develop the technologies and scale up to 10 billion tons a year is a frightful endeavor, something that would really require a lot of activity. So the time would have to be now.”

The panel’s members conceded that the Trump administration may not find the climate change argument all that compelling, since the President has disavowed the Paris Agreement. But, Professor Pacala said, it’s quite likely other countries will be interested in carbon removal. The United States could take a leading role in developing technologies that could one day be worth many billions of dollars.

Right now, there are plenty of ideas for carbon removal kicking around. Countries could plant more trees that pull carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it in their wood. Farmers could adopt techniques, such as no-till agriculture, that would keep more carbon trapped in the soil.

A few companies are building “direct air capture” plants that use chemical agents to scrub trace amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, allowing them to sell the gas to industrial customers or bury it underground.

But, the National Academies panel warned, many of these methods are still unproven or face serious limitations. There’s only so much land available to plant new trees. Scientists are still unsure how much carbon can realistically be stored in agricultural soils. And direct air capture plants are still too expensive for mass deployment.

In theory, it might be possible to collect wood or other plant matter that has absorbed carbon dioxide from the air, burn it in biomass power plants for energy and then capture the carbon released from combustion and bury it deep underground, creating, in essence, a power plant that has negative emissions. While no such facilities are operating commercially today, the technology to build them exists.

But one potential problem with this approach, the National Academies panel said, is that the land required to grow biomass for these power plants could run into conflicts with the need for farmland for food. The panel estimated this method might one day be able to remove three billion to five billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year, but possibly much less, depending on land constraints.

That’s a far cry from the 10 billion to 20 billion tons of carbon dioxide we may need to pull out of the air by the end of the century to limit overall global warming to around 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), according to the recent United Nations report. That figure assumes nations manage to decarbonize their energy and industrial systems almost entirely by 2050.

SOURCE






Hottest October day in 120 years: Queensland swelters as mercury tops 40C for the TENTH day in a row - and it's not over yet

One day is newsworthy? This is just nitpicking.  I have been enjoying springtime in Brisbane for a total of 40 years and the current season seems no different from any other.  We always get some warm days and some cool days and a temperture of 32 degrees C is no outlier for Brisbane.  34C is in fact about the usual summer afternoon temperature in Brisbane

At the time of writing in the afternoon of Monday 29th, it is in fact rather cool in Brisbane for the time of the year. I actually had to put a shirt on.  My thermometer says 22C.  We have just had rather a lot of rain too. It's been raining off and on for the last two days in fact.  No drought in Brisbane!


Australia's north is continuing to endure a monstrous heatwave, with no relief in sight.

Central Queensland registered 40C temperatures for the tenth consecutive day on Sunday, but the area will see extreme heat until Thursday. 

The soaring temperatures shattered October records that had been in place for the region for more than 120 years, with one regional town topping out at nearly 44C.

'In Brisbane we'll probably see a few showers develop late this evening, it will be pretty cloudy as well,' Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Chris Joseph told the Courier Mail.

'It will probably be a better chance for showers tomorrow and pretty cool as well.'

The stormy skies in the state capital will come after it too basked in sunshine on Friday and Saturday. Crowds gathered to escape the heat at Streets Beach in the the city's South Bank Parklands as they sweated through temperatures of 32C on Friday.

Australia's major cities also had a dry Sunday, with Hobart the only capital to register any rainfall at all.

'Some locations have had two to three times October's rainfall in a week, but others haven't seen any significant falls. Overall, the cropping season is looking like one of the 10 driest on record,' climatologist Felicity Gamble told Daily Mail Australia.

The record-breaking dry spell could be a sign of things to come.

The Bureau of Meterology has predicted higher than average temperatures throughout the summer months for nearly the entire country.

The heatwave brings with it particularly grim conditions for the country's farmers, who have been suffering through a major drought.

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.  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

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



29 October, 2018

Backed Into A Corner, Lady Fat chops Fails To Produce ‘Smoking Gun’ In #ExxonKnew Lawsuit


New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood

After it was “put up or shut up” time, the New York Attorney General’s office finally came forward with its #ExxonKnew lawsuit.

To say it was a dud would be an understatement.

New York Attorney General (AG) Barbara Underwood today filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil alleging that the company deceived investors on the potential impact that yet-to-be-enacted climate change regulations could have on the company’s value.

The lawsuit comes more than three years after disgraced former New York AG Eric Schneiderman announced his investigation of ExxonMobil, and four years since the investigation itself began.

Since that time the New York AG has forced ExxonMobil to turn over millions of pages of documents as one conspiracy theory after another failed to withstand scrutiny.

Finally, Justice Barry R. Ostrager ordered the New York AG earlier this year to wrap up the endless investigation and decide whether to press charges. According to InsideClimate News, Ostrager stated:

‘“This cannot go on interminably,’ he said. The company has provided millions of pages of documents and answered questions over some three years of investigation, Ostrager said. ‘It’s not my place to tell you when an investigation ends, but it is my place to put an end date on the requests for information and the filing of a compliant.’”

Or as ExxonMobil’s lawyer bluntly put it, “They should put up or shut up.”

The lawyer representing the New York AG warned that they had “smoking gun” evidence. Backed into a corner, New York AG Barbara Underwood was forced to show her cards today or accept the embarrassment of publicly folding after committing countless resources to a baseless investigation.

Unfortunately for Underwood, it appears that her office was bluffing when they claimed to have a “smoking gun.” The arguments presented in the compliant today have already been scrutinized and soundly rejected.

The New York AG’s argument is premised on the claim that ExxonMobil misrepresented the potential cost of future climate change regulations – regulations which do not even currently exist – because they used a different internal assumption for a price on carbon than what it externally reported. According to a press release accompanying the complaint:

“The complaint further alleges that in various other aspects of its business – including evaluating the volume of its oil and gas reserves, determining whether to write down its major assets, and estimating demand for its products in the transportation sector – Exxon chose not to apply proxy costs in the manner it represented to investors. By applying a lower proxy cost or not applying any proxy cost at all, Exxon repeatedly and consistently underestimated the potential financial risk that increasing climate change regulation posed to its assets and value.”

However, ExxonMobil has already explained the alleged discrepancy in costs:

“…ExxonMobil considers two costs when assessing the potential impacts of climate policies on certain parts of the business. ‘Proxy Costs’ assess the potential impacts of a broad mosaic of climate policies and regulations on global demand for oil and gas. By contrast, ‘GHG Costs’ forecast the direct effect of actual and anticipated greenhouse gas (“GHG”) related regulations on specific ExxonMobil projects.”

In other words, where a cost on carbon has already been established, ExxonMobil uses the price that actually exists, rather than the proxy cost they use as a conservative stand-in.

The New York AG had specifically faulted ExxonMobil for using the existing carbon tax in Alberta instead of its proxy cost, and ExxonMobil pulled no punches in its response:

“Grasping for any justification to support its Motion, OAG faults Alberta Planners for applying carbon taxes imposed by law…But there is no basis in law, logic, or ExxonMobil’s public statements for Planners to have done otherwise. When an actual tax is known, it defies common sense to ignore that cost and replace it with one that is hypothetical.” (emphasis added)

ExxonMobil further explained that this information is available in a public document for investors to see: “Significantly, these exact terms appear and are described in Managing the Risks…”

A similar line of attack has also already been deployed in federal court in a class-action lawsuit brought by current and former company employees who accused ExxonMobil of not adequately disclosing climate risk. That case was ultimately dismissed. In that case, Judge Keith Ellison said:

“Plaintiffs allege that Exxon employed an inaccurate ‘price of carbon’ when evaluating the value of its reserves…In the Amended Complaint, Plaintiffs reproduce language from Exxon’s 2015 Corporate Citizenship Report, which explains that Exxon estimates a ‘proxy cost of carbon’ which ‘may approach $80 per ton by 2040.’

…Plaintiffs do not allege any facts to show why this particular price of carbon was a misrepresentation or did not account for the current or an anticipated regulatory landscape. Plaintiffs seem to believe that the estimated price of carbon was wrong, but they do not plausibly link inaccuracies about the price of carbon to the eventual write-down in reserves or stock price decline. Nor do they allege a regulatory landscape that would change the price of carbon.”

In addition to being rejected in court, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has also investigated how ExxonMobil factors climate-change regulations into the calculations underlying the value of its assets.

After an extensive review, the SEC declined to take any enforcement action against the company.

Given the lack of a “smoking gun” in this case and the prior scrutiny of the New York AG’s claims, it is likely that this case will close with a similar conclusion.

It is increasingly clear that New York AG Underwood is only bringing this case to avoid admitting that the New York AG’s office oversaw a case that was a colossal waste of resources in order to harass a company for political purposes.

SOURCE






Trump administration approves first oil and gas drilling in Alaska's federal waters

The Interior Department on Wednesday approved what would be the first oil and gas production facility in federal waters off the coast of Alaska, part of the Trump administration’s effort to expand where the U.S. produces fossil fuels.

Energy company Hilcorp proposes to build a nine-acre artificial gravel island in shallow waters of the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean, calling it the Liberty Project. The project would be near four other oil and gas producing artificial islands in waters that the state controls.

"Responsibly developing our resources, in Alaska especially, will allow us to use our energy diplomatically to aid our allies and check our adversaries," Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said. "That makes America stronger and more influential around the globe.”

Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) issued conditional approval for the project after evaluating the potential environmental impacts, and incorporating input from the public, and from North Slope communities and tribes. Hilcorp still must obtain other permits from local, state, and federal agencies before moving forward with construction, development, and production, according to Guy Hayes, a BOEM spokesman.

BOEM's approval comes after the Trump administration in January proposed a massive offshore oil and gas drilling plan to allow it in nearly all federal waters, including sales off the Alaska coast.

The plan has received bipartisan criticism, with almost all coastal governors expressing opposition to allowing drilling off their shores, especially in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans — and new parts of the eastern Gulf of Mexico — for fear of spills and harm to tourism.

Zinke has since indicated he will likely scale back the plan when he finalizes it later this year.

But local politicians support drilling off Alaska’s coast. The state is heavily dependent on oil and gas revenue to support its budget.

Last year, Republicans in Congress, as part of their tax reform legislation, allowed for a long-sought onshore opportunity in Alaska, opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and natural gas drilling.

Republicans expect drilling in ANWR to raise $1 billion over a decade to help pay for tax reform. Democrats, however, contend that won’t happen in light of low oil prices and steep competition from natural gas, and worry drilling there would harm the ecosystem of what they describe as one of the wildest places left on earth.

SOURCE






Strange Agreements and Stranger Taxes: The United Nations' Climate Drama

When I first watched “Stranger Things” (a Netflix original) in 2016, I thought the story writer was really talented and the show lived up to its name. But a real-world storyline is even stranger: the climate policies recommended to us by the United Nations.

Despite its many scientific and structural failings, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the world’s most influential, though not the most credible, source of policy on climate change. No other political or scientific body has the same reach.

For over two decades, this has enabled it to persuade governments around the world to implement global climate policies that are harmful to nearly everyone in the developing world.

I live in India. We in the developing world require massive amounts of reliable, affordable energy, especially electricity, for our power-hungry industries and cities. Without it, our economic engines will stall, causing a large-scale disruption of growth and development, trapping billions in poverty and pushing hundreds of millions back into it.

The United Nations’ numerous proposals to reduce the use of all carbon dioxide emitting energy sources never boded well for the development plans of developing countries.

The call to reduce emissions appeared strange to many economists and industry analysts, as all are aware of the fact that fossil fuels were responsible for the majority of the development in the West. It makes sense that they should be also for the rest.

This is why developing countries introduced the concept of “climate justice” on the heels of the 2015 Paris climate change conference. They reasoned that it is unfair to rob developing countries from rightfully accessing fossil fuels — their major energy source. Nearly 73% of all electricity consumed by three billion people (in India and China) came from coal (2015).

To appease these top carbon dioxide emitters, the United Nations created a Green Climate Fund through which the developed world would fund the developing nations’ transition from fossil fuels to the less-reliable, more expensive renewable energy sources.

The biggest source of funds was scheduled to come from the United States, which rightly pulled out of the Paris agreement in 2017. No one in out of the UN knows who will make up for this lost source of funding.

Facing pressure from all quarters, the UN decided to take the “strangeness factor” to the next level. This past week, it came up with a new report calling for harsher punishments for those who emit carbon dioxide.

The demand? A very high carbon tax to encourage emission reduction. This is strange for several reasons.

Firstly, human use of fossil fuels is not the only source of carbon dioxide emissions. The majority comes from natural sources. To blame undesirable climate change, if any, solely on anthropogenic sources is biased and unrealistic.

Secondly, almost all major developing countries and even top developed countries like Germany and Canada have failed to meet their promised emission reduction targets.

Nations are unlikely to pay high carbon taxes to an international institution like the UN, which doesn’t even have proper compliance and co-operation from its so-called leaders. The absence of the world’s biggest economic powerhouse, the U.S., is another major excuse that will be used by developing countries not to pay the proposed taxes.

Moreover, both India and China have continued to defy their promises to reduce emissions. They, along with Russia, Australia, and the U.S., have been involved in increased coal production, use, and export in 2018.

Others, like Germany and Japan, continue to depend on coal because of their aversion to nuclear energy. Japan, especially, had a massive overhaul of its energy sector following the Fukushima incident. It has shifted its dependence from nuclear to coal.

With all the top emitters refusing to comply, the UN’s flagship Paris agreement and the newly announced taxes are just imaginary, make-shift policies that appear good only on paper. And maybe even not that. At an estimated cost of $70 trillion to $140 trillion by the end of the century, the Paris agreement would prevent at most an inconsequential 0.17?C of warming.

The reality is that climate change is not catastrophic. National leaders know this, even if they’re too timid to say it aloud. We need some with the courage to shout out, “The emperor has no clothes!”

SOURCE






Kids’ Climate Change Lawsuit Vacated Following SCOTUS’ Decision To Halt Case

A judge in Oregon is vacating a climate lawsuit several young people leveled against the Trump administration following the Supreme Court’s decision to stay the case.

U.S. Judge Ann Aiken of Oregon canceled all “schedules and deadlines” plaintiffs in the case made prior to SCOTUS’s decision, according to the court docket associated with the case.

The court will etch out a scheduling conference if the stay is lifted, noted Aiken, who was nominated by former President Bill Clinton in 1997.

The Trump administration repeatedly asked both SCOTUS and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to stop the trial through a writ of mandamus, a rarely used judicial tool allowing a higher court to overrule a lower court before a verdict is made.

Supreme Court Justice John Roberts granted mandamus after the 9th Circuit twice turned down the writ.

The 21 plaintiffs, all between the ages of 11 and 22, are arguing that federal officials violated their due process rights by allowing the fossil fuel industry to release greenhouse gas emissions, despite knowing for years that such emissions can cause climate change.

The plaintiffs are seeking a court order requiring the federal government to implement an “enforceable national remedial plan” phasing out carbon emissions in an effort to stabilize the climate and protect the environment.

Their case — Juliana v. the United States — has survived several attempts by the government to torpedo the case after it was originally filed in 2015.

SOURCE





No end in sight to electricity Australian consumers paying for poor policy

We were staying in a Queensland country town a few weeks ago. I got talking to the owner of the local bakery. He was looking at his latest ­financial statement that the ­accountant had sent through. And there it was in black and white. His annual power bill last financial year was $114,000. It had been a tad over $30,000 two years before.

He employs 30 people, some on a part-time basis. Business seemed to be brisk but it’s hard to put up the price of pies and buns too much without demand dropping.

It’s easy to concentrate on the impact of rising electricity prices on households. And let’s be clear on that score. In real terms, the ­average retail price of electricity over the 10 years ending in 2017-18 rose by 51 per cent and the average retail bill rose by 35 per cent (people have used less electricity, in part because of the higher prices).

But for many small and med­ium-sized businesses, the increase in their electricity bills has been higher again. Many are exposed to the full variations in wholesale ­prices, which have risen from less than $40 a megawatt hour to more than $100/MWh before settling around the $70 to $80/MWh mark. This threatens the viability of a number of businesses.

It’s hardly surprising the federal government has decided to focus on getting electricity bills down. Let’s be clear about reduced emissions and the commitment the government has made to the Paris climate agreement — the target in respect of electricity will be met by the early 2020s. Every participant in the industry ­acknowledges this.

It’s one of the reasons why the emissions reduction target that was part and parcel of the now ­defunct national energy guarantee was superfluous. Note also there was considerable manipulation going on of the precise details of this target to suit the activist ambitions of those promoting the NEG. The only part of the NEG now worth saving relates to the ­reliability obligation, which is ­likely to become binding much sooner than generally expected.

For those who complain about a decade of energy policy paralysis, the truth is there has been a constant and active government policy position over that time. Renewable energy sources have been massively promoted, favoured and subsidised.

The renewable energy target, which remains in force until 2030, has spun off subsidies to renewable energy generators to the tune of about $80/MWh (the value has been higher in the past) through large-scale generation certificates. The value of these LGCs is expected to drop but not for several years.

In addition, there have been the interventions of reverse auctions run by state governments and the ACT that provide guaranteed cash flow for renewable energy projects. There are also the rules in the National Energy Market that give preferential dispatch to renewable energy generators. And there are the mountains of subsidies available through bodies such as the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency.

Estimates put the value of the subsidies paid to the renewable ­energy sector at between $2 billion and $3bn a year, paid by consumers and taxpayers. That’s not policy paralysis; that’s policy promotion of a particular sector. If we ignore the decimation of the business models of dispatchable power generators and the much higher electricity prices we have had to pay, arguably the policy has worked. It is estimated that $2bn was invested last year in renewable energy generation — a record amount. And this year the boom has been even bigger.

The Clean Energy Regulator has released information that 34 renewable energy power stations with a combined capacity of 667MW were accredited last month, which was the largest single month of solar and wind ­capacity since April 2001. Nearly 2800MW has been accredited so far this year, compared with the previous annual record set last year of 1088MW.

The CER also notes about 1600MW of rooftop solar will be installed this year — the six panels every minute scenario mentioned by Audrey Zibelman of the Australian Energy Market Operator — which is up 44 per cent on last year. There are now more than three million small-scale installations. Note there are also about 40,000 commercial solar systems.

Now, if renewable energy could provide reliable electricity at ­affordable prices, these trends would be great. But even on the most optimistic estimates of the boosters of renewable energy, wind can produce at most 50 per cent of the time and solar at 30 per cent. This produces a very large shortfall that has to be covered by firming capacity. Batteries and pumped hydro don’t come close to filling the gap and are unlikely to do so for many years.

And here’s another thing that needs to be considered when ­observing the boom in renewable energy investment: 10 coal-fired power stations with a total ­capacity of more than 5000MW have left the grid since 2012. None of these stations has been replaced.

What is beginning to emerge is a crisis affecting the grid that makes up the National Electricity Market, which covers South Australia, Victoria, NSW, Queensland, Tasmania and the ACT. This is being recognised by AEMO, which worries about the reliability of the grid in general and the possible shortfall of power in South Australia and Victoria at certain times during the coming summer.

The NEM electricity grid has always been long and skinny. It is now longer and skinnier, with far too much unreliable renewable energy and far too little firming ­capacity. This is the principal reason why federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor is so focused on getting more firming capacity into the system to back up the runaway ­investment in renewable energy.

It is also why he has decided to take a resolute line with the large “gentailers” — think AGL, Origin and Energy Australia — whose ­behaviour has contributed to the growing fragility of the system as well as to rising prices. The companies are quite capable of manipulating the market while promising to invest in firming ­capacity but never quite following through with their plans.

Of course, in a normal competitive market government should always refrain from intervening to force down prices. But the electricity market is not a normal market. Apart from the fact electricity is an essential service, the high ­degree of market concentration almost certainly means prices are higher than they should be. The egregious behaviour of the retail divisions of the gentailers, by dudding loyal customers in particular, indicates they cannot be trusted. Just ignore their howls of complaints about the downsides of regulation. By setting a reference price for standing offers, this will force down prices more generally, and the companies know it.

By bringing more dispatchable power into the system as quickly as possible — another focus of Taylor — wholesale prices will hopefully fall, bringing further price relief for customers. The truth is the gentailers have been feasting on high wholesale prices. Surely no one will complain if the government offers the same cost of capital to new dispatchable power plants that is available to ­intermittent ­renewable energy plants?

With all this new renewable ­energy coming into the market, there is a real question mark over the commercial viability of some of the projects. When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, wholesale prices can be driven to low levels. Clearly, the backers of these projects are basically betting on the election of a Labor government to impose a higher emissions reduction target and a reinstituted RET. In this scenario, we would expect electricity prices to resume their upward trajectory.

The NEM is in disarray, but let’s not kid ourselves that this is because of policy paralysis. This is because of incredibly poor policy where the consequences in terms of price and reliability were completely foreseeable. The challenge for the federal government is how to pull us back from this abyss.

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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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






28 October, 2018

Canada’s ‘Climate Barbie’ Catherine McKenna Mistakes CO2 for Air Pollution


She gives blondes a bad name

The Canadian Minister of Environment and Climate Change has justified the nation’s new carbon tax by suggesting that carbon dioxide is a pollutant.

In a tweet Tuesday, Catherine McKenna, confused the issue of air pollution with the emission of greenhouse gases such as CO2.

“Canadians know that pollution isn’t free,” the minister wrote. “We see the costs in storms, floods, and wildfires — that’s why we’ve announced we’re putting a price on pollution. It’s good for the environment and it’s good for the economy.”

In May 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a comprehensive report documenting the severe health risks caused by air pollution.

According to the WHO report, “around 7 million people die every year from exposure to fine particles in the polluted air that penetrate deep into the lungs and cardiovascular system, causing diseases including stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases and respiratory infections, including pneumonia.”

The report made no mention of climate change and spoke only of the adverse health effects of polluted air, a different phenomenon.

All of the potentially fatal pathologies referenced in the report are caused by “exposure to fine particles in polluted air” and not by global warming, much less exposure to carbon dioxide.

In its infographic on the causes of air pollution, the WHO lists six sources of dangerous fine particulate matter, none of which is related to climate change.

The six sources of air pollution are industry and energy supply, dust, agricultural practices, transport, waste management, and household energy.

Among the six solutions proposed by WHO for combatting air pollution, not one of them touches on carbon dioxide emissions, for the simple reason that CO2 is not a pollutant and is not harmful to human health.

Unlike pollutants, carbon dioxide is odorless, colorless, and most importantly, non-toxic. Human beings expel carbon dioxide with every breath they take (without polluting), and breathe it in with every lungful of air they inhale — to no ill effect. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than oxygen.

The WHO database collects annual mean concentrations of fine particulate matter. Those that pose “the greatest risks to human health” are sulfate, nitrates, and black carbon, they state.

The WHO report further noted that deaths relating to air pollution occur overwhelmingly in third-world countries where large segments of the population “still do not have access to clean cooking fuels and technologies in their homes.”

Ms. McKenna — affectionately known as “Climate Barbie” — is not alone in erroneously confusing carbon dioxide with air pollution.

Canadian finance minister Bill Morneau has made the same mistake, referring to CO2 emissions as “carbon pollution.”

Carbon pollution [soot] does indeed exist in certain parts of the world, but it should not be confused with carbon dioxide, which is a normal component of air, and not a foreign pollutant.

SOURCE






Three Surprises About Nobel Laureate Nordhaus’s Model of Climate Change

Yale University professor William Nordhaus was named a co-recipient of this year’s Nobel (Memorial) Prize in Economic Science for his work on climate change. The award was of particular interest to me because back in 2009 I published an article in The Independent Review offering a thorough analysis and critique of his Dynamic Integrated Model of Climate and the Economy (DICE). At the Institute for Energy Research website, I have explained that Nordhaus’s latest version of his model does not support the United Nations’ current push for aggressive measures to limit global warming. In the present post, I will revisit my 2009 article to showcase three surprising facts about Nordhaus’s DICE model, all of which are very relevant for the climate change policy debate.

Surprise #1: Overly Aggressive Policies Are a Cure Worse Than the Disease

The most important table in my paper was taken directly from A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options of Global Warming Policies, Nordhaus’s 2008 book treatment of the 2007 version of his model. The table shows the costs and benefits of various policy goals for dealing with climate change:

For example, in the baseline case of no controls from the government, the long-run cost of environmental damages is estimated to be $22.55 trillion, expressed as a present-value sum (in 2005 dollars). However, Nordhaus’s baseline includes virtually no “abatement costs,” which measure the harm to the economy from complying with onerous climate regulations and emission taxes.

In the second scenario, Nordhaus shows the cost that his model yields when all the governments of the world implement a carbon tax at the optimal rate (which increases over time, although this isn’t shown in the table). Because greenhouse gas emissions are lower in this scenario, the present-value of environmental damages drops to $17.31 trillion.

Note that this estimate is $5.24 trillion lower than the estimated environmental damages in the baseline scenario. However, those gross benefits of the optimal carbon tax are not the actual net value of implementing the policy. Being a good economist, Nordhaus also acknowledges the cost of implementing his ideal carbon tax, in the form of forfeited economic output. As Table 4 indicates, the present value of the total abatement costs from Nordhaus’s optimal carbon tax is $2.2 trillion. Thus, the net benefits of the optimal carbon tax—relative to the “no controls baseline”—is only $3.07 trillion, shown in the first column of the table.

So, to sum up: In the world of the DICE model, as of its 2007 calibration, the theoretically optimal carbon tax made humanity about $3 trillion richer (in present-value terms) compared to a laissez-faire scenario, in which businesses and households emitted more than the socially optimal amount of carbon dioxide. Hence William Nordhaus in real life supported a carbon tax, because—done right—it had the ability to make humanity up to $3 trillion richer.

Yet notice something very interesting. Table 4 also shows the gross benefits and costs from other possible climate policies. And the worst shown alternatives—especially Al Gore’s proposal to cut emissions by 90 percent—would not only yield worse outcomes than “doing nothing” (i.e. the no-controls baseline), but the absolute value of the net harms would be several times larger than the net benefits of the optimal policy. For example, Gore’s recommendation would hurt conventional economic output so much that humanity would be $21 trillion poorer than under the baseline scenario. (This is a net figure, taking into account the large reduction in future climate change damages due to Gore’s aggressive limit on emissions.) Thus, Gore’s proposal would cause seven times as much net damage as the net benefits accruing from Nordhaus’s theoretical optimal policy.

Before moving on, consider in Table 4 the policy goal of “Limit temp. to 1.5°C.” This policy, although not as disastrous as Gore’s proposal, is still quite bad: It makes humanity $14 trillion poorer than doing nothing about climate change, and here again the net damages from this bad policy are more than four times the magnitude of the net benefits from the best possible policy.

Why am I focusing on this scenario? Astute readers will recognize that limiting global warming to 1.5°C is the UN’s latest announced goal, released on the same day as the announcement of Nordhaus’s Nobel Prize. Although I and other free-market analysts have pointed out the irony, the lion’s share of the media coverage treats Nordhaus’s award as complementary to the latest UN calls for drastic government intervention in the energy and transportation sectors.

(To be clear, Nordhaus’s more recent model calibrations are more pessimistic about the harms of climate change, and so the UN’s target wouldn’t be as ludicrous as it seemed in his 2007 model runs. However, as I explain at the Institute for Energy Research, it’s still the case that Nordhaus’s DICE model recommends far more warming than the UN’s preferred ceiling.)

Surprise #2: “Optimal” Carbon Tax Almost Triples within a Decade

It’s interesting to look back at Nordhaus’s estimates for the optimal carbon tax, based on his 2007 model runs and compare them to his most recent (2016) update. As I showed in Table 3 of my article, back then Nordhaus estimated the optimal tax in the year 2025 at $53.39 per ton of carbon (not carbon dioxide), measured in 2005 dollars.

However, before we compare the figure to his most recent estimate, we should make two adjustments. First, we need to convert the 2005 dollars to 2010 dollars, because the latter is what Nordhaus uses in his recent update. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator, the relevant figure in 2010 dollars should be $59.83.

The second adjustment is to convert the figure from a tax per ton of carbon to a tax per ton of carbon dioxide (which is now the standard unit in this literature). So we need to divide our figure by 3.67 in order to reach the warranted conclusion: Back in 2007, Nordhaus’s DICE model estimated the optimal carbon tax in the year 2025 would be $16 per ton of carbon dioxide (in 2010 dollars).

Yet according to Nordhaus’s 2016 calibration, the optimal carbon tax in the year 2025 would be $44 per ton—meaning the estimate has almost tripled in under a decade.

Now to be sure, proponents of aggressive government intervention would exclaim, “You see?! We told you the situation was dire! The evolution of Nordhaus’s estimate shows that we need a stiff carbon tax right now.”

However, opponents of aggressive government intervention could review this history and respond, with just as much justification, “This is clearly a very fluid area full of speculation. If the recommended dosage of a certain dietary supplement almost tripled in nine years, many people would understandably conclude that medical science was still grappling with the issue, and would be less confident in heeding their doctor’s advice.”

Surprise #3: Most of Nordhaus’s Estimated Climate Change Damages Based on Ad Hoc Method

A final takeaway from my 2009 article revolves around its Table 2, which shows the sectoral breakdown of the impacts of a hypothetical 2.5°C warming. According to Nordhaus’s 2007 treatment, this level of warming would cause an expected 1.5 percent hit to global GDP.

However, upon closer inspection, we see that “catastrophic impacts” account for an expected hit to global GDP of 1.02 percent, which works out to 68 percent of the total damages. Now if this figure were derived in a systematic way, it would be one thing. However, as I explain in more detail in my article, it is quite surprising to see how Nordhaus (and his earlier co-author) actually came up with this number. Here’s how I summarized the situation:

Nordhaus in 1994 asked experts to estimate (among other things) the probability of global GDP loss of 25 percent in the event of 3.0°C warming…The surveyed experts gave him their answers, from which he computed the mean. By 1999, further research had made these scenarios seem more plausible or catastrophic. So, Nordhaus and Boyer took the original average of probabilities reported by the experts, doubled it, and then assigned this new figure as the probability for a 30 percent loss of GDP rather than the 25 percent the experts had been told to consider, for a less significant warming of 2.5°C rather than the 3.0°C mentioned in the original survey. (Murphy 2009, italics in original.)

And so we see the crude method by which Nordhaus derived his “expected value” of catastrophic impacts, which was computed by weighting the huge potential loss of 30 percent of global GDP according to the (low) probability of such an outcome occurring. As I indicate in the above block quotation, the numbers he plugged into this calculation were rather arbitrary, only loosely tied to what was even originally merely a survey of experts (as opposed to an actual analysis of concrete scenarios).

It is true that Nordhaus’ model and the other Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) of the global economy and climate system have continued to improve over the years. Nonetheless, MIT’s Robert Pindyck—who is a proponent of carbon taxes—wrote a scathing peer-reviewed article in 2013 in which he dismissed these models as “close to useless.” Among their faults, the models gave policymakers a false sense of precision, because their damage functions were crude and arbitrary.

Conclusion

William Nordhaus is a pioneer in the economics of climate change, who arguably invented the discipline in its modern form. His so-called DICE model of the global economy and climate system is state-of-the-art, and was one of three selected by the Obama Administration to estimate the “social cost of carbon.” In recognition of his accomplishments, Nordhaus was one of this year’s Nobel laureates in economics.

Despite his prestige, Nordhaus’s model has serious shortcomings, as I documented in The Independent Review in 2009. Looking back, there are three surprising facts about Nordhaus’s model that are relevant to today’s policy debate:

First, Nordhaus shows that aggressive mitigation policies can be a cure worse than the disease, and he specifically included the United Nation’s latest goal in his examples of such misguided goals. Second, Nordhaus’s estimate of the optimal carbon tax (for the year 2025, for example) has almost tripled in less than a decade. Third, far from being tied to specific analyses of particular threats, Nordhaus’ global damage estimate was largely driven by a simple survey of experts, and this figure was furthermore manipulated arbitrarily by Nordhaus in light of new developments. The public would be very surprised to learn just how crude the “settled science” underlying various proposals to limit climate change really is.

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Two Brothers Want to Start a Christmas Tree Farm on Their Own Land. The Township Might Fine Them $450,000

Two brothers might have to cough up $450,000 payable to Canton Township, Michigan. Their infraction: daring to cut down trees on their own private property.

Gary and Matt Percy own and operate two businesses in the state: a trucking company and a tree specialization company. They planned to start a Christmas tree farm on a 16-acre piece of land they own in Canton Township.

But to do that, they needed to cut down more than 1,400 existing trees. And for good reason, their attorney, Michael J. Pattwell, told MLive.com. The property was ravaged by "invasive plants like phragmites, buckthorn and autumn olive," he said.

It's not like the brothers cleared the area without replacing the trees they cut down. They planned to put 2,500 Christmas trees into the ground, about 1,000 of which have already been planted.

Unfortunately for the Percys, a township ordinance prohibits landowners from cutting down trees without the government's permission. Watchdog.org reports:

The township defines a tree as a woody plant with a defined stem of at least three inches in diameter at chest height. Because the township does not know the exact number of trees removed, it hired an arborist to examine the make-up of trees on an adjacent property to estimate what trees were on the Percy brothers' property before they removed them. In a settlement offer, the township proposed fines of about $450,000 for the removal of what it claims is slightly less than 1,500 trees, including 100 landmark or historic trees.

Pattwell told MLive.com that the township's approval "may be obtained by either payment into the township's so-called tree fund or on-site replacement with trees of certain designated trunk diameters." If the brothers do both of those things, their fines can be reduced by about $70,000, he told Watchdog.org.

But Pattwell claims this clients didn't do anything wrong in the first place. For one thing, he says much of what the township defined as trees was actually invasive vegetation. Moreover, the adjacent property examined by the township's arborist has a "different land history and distinguishable characteristics" from the Percy brothers' land, he told MLive.com.

Finally, the brothers believed they were eligible for an exemption under the ordinance. According to that exemption, "agricultural/farming" and "commercial nursery/tree farm operations" don't have to receive government approval before clearing trees on private property.

Township attorney Kristin Kolb, meanwhile, told MLive.com that the brothers were warned "at least twice" they needed a permit, but they "never came and got one."

Pattwell believes the case is an example of "misguided overreach" by the government. "It is unavoidably about whether people who own property are allowed to use it," he told MLive.com.

He's right. Reason's Ronald Bailey has pointed out in the past that locals do a much better job of protecting forests than the government. The Percy brothers may have been cutting down trees, but only so they could plant new ones in their stead. And Pattwell certainly makes it sound like they weren't even in violation of the township ordinance.

But the larger issue at play here is the government infringing on property rights. The land in question doesn't belong to the township; it's private property owned by the Percy brothers. Whatever they decide to do with said land is their choice, not the government's.

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How Do You Debate A Greenhouse Gas Theory ‘Expert’?

Written by Stephen Wells

For the last five years I have been arguing against people who have more academic credentials than me. People who have much more ability at mathematics than me. People who are experts in a scientific field that is relevant to understanding climate.

People who are, quite frankly, more intelligent than I am. I am just a bloke with an above average but not exceptional IQ who stopped formal study of mathematics and Physics at age 16 (achieving O level grade B in both) and who didn’t begin informally studying either again until the age of 44.

Yet I keep arguing. At first, I thought my suspicions must be wrong. Who was I, after all to be challenging people who do this stuff for a living? But the thoughts wouldn’t go away and the more I asked for experts to prove me wrong, the more my doubts grew. After a while I started to think that, maybe, just maybe, I might be right after all. Now I am sure of it! As certain as I can be that the Earth is not flat, I am as certain that there is no such thing as a Radiative Greenhouse Effect.

In the course of my arguments I have been made to look like an idiot on the subject of thermos flasks, space blankets, air conditioners, water syphons, glazing, light bulbs, microwave ovens and even lasers.

My knowledge of all of these different things has improved greatly with each embarrassing encounter, but my opponents can still run rings around me on the finer details of how any of these things work. Then there are opponents who know the ins and outs of Einstein’s theory of Relativity, quantum mechanics or the inner workings of photons, and happily respond to my arguments with four line equations to demonstrate what an idiot I am and encourage me to shut up and accept the judgement of my betters.

After each encounter I learn a little more about all of these things than I knew before and come away even more confident that my assertions about a lack of Greenhouse Effect are correct.

Astrophysicist Joseph Postma (see climateofsophistry) has a word for the tactics of my opponents: Sophistry. That of deliberately adding complexity where it is unnecessary to the understanding of a subject, for the purpose of discrediting opposition to a flawed idea.

People who are cleverer than ourselves can be genuine experts who wish to enlighten us, or they could be people who think they are experts but are mistaken in their assumptions, or they could be con artists who are using their superior knowledge and intelligence to deceive us. How to find out which one they are?

How does one find out who is saying correct things to us and who is wrong, when our own knowledge of a subject is so inferior to the person who is trying to convince us of their views?

We have been bombarded with the message that “97% of scientists believe in climate change”. Should we make our decisions about what the majority of clever people say is true? The majority of clever people in 1000AD said the sun revolves around the Earth.

They were wrong. A majority of doctors twenty years ago said that eating food that is high in cholesterol such as eggs would increase your chance of a heart attack. They were wrong.

A majority of mechanics might tell someone who knows nothing about cars that they need to spend $2,000 to prevent their car from breaking down. The majority of mechanics might be con artists! Depends where you live.

No, it’s not good enough to simply “trust the experts”. Regardless of whether it’s a mechanic, a climate scientist or a doctor treating your cancer. So what to do?

First recognise that is incumbent on anyone more knowledgeable than you to prove to you that they are not con artists. It is not incumbent on you to show you are clever enough to rebut their claims. The default position on ANYONE who has superior knowledge of something than you who wishes you to believe them about something, should be that they are con artists until they can prove otherwise to YOUR satisfaction.

That means the person must tailor their language and their knowledge to a level you can understand. More importantly they must overcome your objections and reasoning, with logic and language that fits your level of intelligence. Finally, they must be able to directly respond to your objections and not use vague analogies or bring up examples of things that appear completely unrelated.

So in my own experience with the Greenhouse Effect, I have had many very clever people tell me all kinds of things about everything from lasers to quantum physics. But I’m still waiting for any of them to show me a lab experiment where the basic premise of the diagram below is demonstrated.

This diagram shows the surface of the earth absorbing energy from the sun. Then the earth’s surface emits infrared radiation. The “Greenhouse gasses” absorb some of this energy and send half of what they absorb back to the surface. The surface then re-absorbs this energy as well as new energy from the sun and this results in the surface emitting more energy than the sun alone is providing.

Simple enough. Should be easy enough to show me an example where the same thing occurs in a lab experiment.

I don’t need the sun to provide the energy for the experiment. All I need is a solid object with a constant input of energy which results in the object emitting infrared radiation. An electric bar heater would do just fine. Or a metal plate with an electric current running through it.

Now, if I put enough Carbon Dioxide in the way of the radiation, the CO2 should absorb some of it, send some of the energy back to the bar heater or metal plate, they should increase their infrared energy output and get hotter.

I’m also happy if the person wishes to substitute the Carbon Dioxide for another IR absorbing substance. It doesn’t even need to be a gas! As long as the IR radiation is absorbed and the energy output of the original emitting object is increased above that of the power source, you’ve got me!

Five years of making a complete fool of myself will be shown beyond a reasonable doubt and I will hand over all my money to Al Gore’s beachside property fund! If someone can show me this experiment doing what is proposed in the diagram, I will make a public apology and then shut up forever.

What happens instead is my opponents talk about thermos flasks, space blankets, water syphons, photons, microwave ovens, lasers, or post long equations with Greek symbols instead of numbers.
I am clever enough to be able to engage on these subjects and very often stupid enough to allow myself to be engaged in them! I don’t get as ridiculed as I used to, as I’ve educated myself a little bit along the way, but these people still know a hell of a lot more than me about all of these subjects. Just like every mechanic still knows a hell of a lot more than me about cars.
The funny thing is, is that the better I get at arguing with “expert” scientists about the Greenhouse Effect, the less money I seem to be spending on fixing my car.

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New York AG sues Exxon Mobil, says company downplayed climate change risks

New York's attorney general filed a lawsuit Wednesday accusing Exxon Mobil Corp. of fraudulently downplaying the risks of climate change to its shareholders.

The attorney general's office argued in its suit that Exxon Mobil failed to accurately depict the likely financial risks associated with climate change, thereby deceiving investors.

“Investors put their money and their trust in Exxon — which assured them of the long-term value of their shares, as the company claimed to be factoring the risk of increasing climate change regulation into its business decisions," New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood (D) said in a statement. "Yet as our investigation found, Exxon often did no such thing.”

She added that Exxon Mobil instead “built a facade to deceive investors into believing that the company was managing the risks of climate change regulation to its business when, in fact, it was intentionally and systematically underestimating or ignoring them, contrary to its public representations.”

The suit follows three years of investigation by the New York attorney general's office that looked into whether the company lied to investors and the public over the risks of climate change. It did not address how Exxon might have played a role in exacerbating the effects of climate change, but leaves the door open to additional lawsuits.

Underwood additionally alleged that her office's investigation found that the fraud reached up to Exxon Mobil's highest levels and that the misrepresentation was known by former Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson — who left the company to become President Trump’s first secretary of State. He left that post in March.

An Exxon spokesman told The Hill that there "is no evidence to support these allegations."

"These baseless allegations are a product of closed-door lobbying by special interests, political opportunism and the attorney general’s inability to admit that a three-year investigation has uncovered no wrongdoing," the spokesman said. "The company looks forward to refuting these claims as soon as possible and getting this meritless civil lawsuit dismissed."

Environmental groups reacted positively to news of the lawsuit.

Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity, called climate change deception “central to Exxon’s business model.”

“This is the same company that bankrolled a 30-year, multimillion denial campaign, manufacturing doubt about climate science when it knew there was none,” Wiles said. “The New York Attorney General’s office deserves credit for defending the state's investors against Exxon's latest deception.”

An investigation by InsideClimate News published in 2015 said Exxon was aware since at least 1977 of the risks posed by climate change driven, at large, by burning fossil fuels, but sought to downplay the effects despite warnings from the company’s in-house scientists.

Bill McKibben, cofounder of 350.org, said the suit was necessary to stand up to "Exxon’s lies."

“Big oil may finally face some consequences for its role in wrecking the climate,” he said. “The New York Attorney General is standing up for investors who may have been swindled, and indirectly for the 7 billion of us who will suffer from Exxon's lies.”

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Australia: King coal surges 60pc as ministers agree to work on reliable power

Coal has emerged as the nation’s most valuable resource commodity — increasing in value by almost 60 per cent over the past five years — as states and territories agree to a December timeline for a deal to make electricity supply more reliable.

Following a meeting with his state and territory counterparts yesterday, federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor said progress had been made on a key element of the now-scrapped national energy guarantee, the “reliability obligation”. The obligation, to be implemented by mid-2019, would help to shore up stability of the ­energy system by requiring retailers to contract ahead to guarantee supply during forecast shortfalls.

State and territory energy ministers used the Council of Australian Governments’ Energy Council meeting in Sydney to agree to consider a draft bill in ­December establishing the new obligation amid concern about the security of supply over summer. “The reliability obligation is absolutely crucial,” Mr Taylor said. “We know this summer we’re facing some real challenges.”

Australian Energy Market Operator chief executive Audrey Zibelman briefed the ministers on preparations to buttress the security of supply in the national electricity market over the Christmas holiday period. AEMO warns of the need for “additional measures” to guarantee greater reliability.

Its warning coincided with the release of a new data series from the Australian Bureau of Statistics yesterday showing that coal mined in Australia in 2017-18 was valued at $65.6 billion, up from $41.4bn in 2013. “This is the first time that statistics for output (by commodity) and intermediate use of inputs have been published for the mining industry,” the ABS said.

Queensland Resources Council chief executive Ian Macfarlane said the data showed the mining industry added 8.8 per cent of the value of the Australian economy in the past financial year compared with 4.7 per cent in 1994-95.

“In 1994-95, Australian coal production was worth $8.8bn, compared with an incredible $65.6bn in June this year,” he said.

Gas production also increased dramatically over the past five years, rising from $22bn in 2013 to $46.5bn in 2018. In 1994-95, gas production was worth $2.6bn.

Resources Minister Matt Canavan seized on the results, saying it was “another reminder that Australia’s mining industry remains crucial to our nation’s wealth”.

“Fossil fuel exports from ­Australia are helping our economy maintain positive growth and get the budget back into surplus,” he said. “Just in the past two years, coal and gas exports have surged by $50bn — that’s equal to our ­entire exports of agriculture.”

The growth coincides with a debate over a new government plan to shortlist a “pipeline” of ­potential baseload power generation projects, including new clean coal stations, by early next year. The projects would be eligible for government assistance under a scheme being designed. Mr Taylor has signalled the government could potentially indemnify a new coal project against the risk of a ­future carbon price.

A government plan to establish a “default market offer” against which energy retailers would set their prices was also discussed at the Energy Council meeting. The ministers agreed on the “need to develop a reference point/comparison rate against which all ­offers could be measured”, for consideration in December.

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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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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26 October, 2018

The attacks on "Roundup" go on

The Greenies will only be happy when we have no pesticides left.  Two of the most effective -- DDT and Dieldrin  -- went long ago and everything else has been targeted.  Methyl Bromide went recently, though it is still used in Australia

Dozens of cereals, oatmeals and snack bars contain trace amounts of a weed killer that has been linked to cancer, a new report says.

Released by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), the report found 26 of 28 oat-based cereal products that were tested had 'harmful' levels of glyphosate, the main ingredient of Roundup.

Products included variations of Cheerios and Quaker Oats, including Honey Nut Cheerios, Quaker Oatmeal Squares Honey Nut, and Quaker Overnight Oats.

The weed killer was recently at the center of a trial in which a California jury found Roundup was responsible for giving groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, 46, terminal cancer.

None of the products in the new report had levels above what is allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but the EWG argues that customers should be concerned that any levels are being detected in products consumed by children everyday.

In August, the EWG conducted its first study, which found the presence of glyphosate in 45 samples of breakfast cereals from producers Quakers, Kellogg's, and General Mills.

On the heels of this study, the group wanted to dive further and test specifically Quaker Oats and Cheerios products, because high levels of glyphoste were found in the first study and they are two of the most popular cereal brands.

For the new study, the EWG purchased the products at grocery stores in San Francisco and Washington, DC, and had them tested at Anresco Laboratories in San Francisco.

Results of the samples showed glyphosate was detectable in all 28 products, and levels considered unsafe were found in 26.

The EPA caps glyphosate tolerance at 5.0 parts per million (ppm).

But the EWG's health benchmark is much more conservative and says any level greater than 160 parts per billion (ppb) is not safe.

In the report, the highest level was found Quaker Oatmeal Squares Cereal Honey Nut, registering at 2,837 ppb.

That number is nearly 18 times greater than EWG's benchmark.

However, government agencies, manufacturers and advocacy groups seem to be conflicted about what is - and is not - considered safe.

Following the results of the EWG's report, both General Mills and Quaker released statements insisting their products are safe.

'[The] EWG report artificially creates a "safe level" for glyphosate that is detached from those that have been established by responsible regulatory bodies in an effort to grab headlines,' a statement from Quaker, sent to Daily Mail Online, read in part.

'We believe EWG's approach is invalid, and we stand behind our statement that the Quaker products tested by EWG are safe.'

General Mills, the makers of Cheerios, also cited the group's benchmark, telling CNN: 'The extremely low levels of pesticide residue cited in recent news reports is a tiny fraction of the amount the government allows.' 

The EPA itself released a statement saying the report should not leave consumers concerned.

But Dr Alexis Temkin, a toxicologist at the EWG who worked on the report, says the results are disconcerting.

'Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's safe or that it provides that extra level of protection for children,' she told Daily Mail Online.

She mentioned that the EPA increased the amounts of glyphosate residue allowed on oats from 20 ppm in 1997 to 30 ppm in 2008.

'The EPA likely saw it was increasingly being used as a pre-harvest dessicant (the application of a herbicide crops shortly before harvest) and increased the limit to allow it to be legal,' Dr Temkin said.

Glyphosate-based products are sold in more than 160 countries, and farmers use it on 250 types of crops in California alone, which is the leading farming state in the US.

In March 2015, the World Health Organization found that that the herbicide is 'probably carcinogenic to humans'.

Then, in 2017, California named glyphosate an ingredient that causes cancer under the state's Proposition 65, which requires Roundup to carry a warning label if sold in California.

Roundup's maker, Monsanto, says glyphosate is safe and that its product has undergone stringent testing.

However, in August, a California jury ordered the company to pay $289 million to a groundsman who claimed the weed killer is responsible for giving him cancer.

A judge upheld the verdict on Monday but reduced Monsanto's payout to Dewayne Johnson to $78million.

'The report shows that breakfast cereals are not a place for pesticides linked to cancer,' said Dr Temkin. 

'What we show here is that there are detectable levels in common foods that children exposed to every day. Over a long period of time, that can be dangerous.'

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India Rumbles Wind Power as Fake Electricity: Output Collapses During Dead-Calm Monsoon

It never takes them long to work out that wind power is the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time. Eco-zealots have attempted to ram wind and solar power down the throats of Third World governments under the auspices of saving the planet and purportedly with the purpose of dragging millions out of poverty. As the initiated well-know, wind power rates zero on both scores. Pointless and expensive, wind power is a kind of first world disease being spread by UN endorsed lunatics, across the developing world.

Now, Indians have branded wind power an outright fraud, too. The calm, and very wet weather that comes with the monsoon has left wind ‘powered’ Tamil Nadu scrambling for the reliable stuff; and that means coal-fired power. The state had unscheduled power cuts for the first time since 2015.”

India is coal country with a 76 percent market share for the indigenous fuel. But authorities are pushing uneconomic renewables as part of a green central planning plan.

Wind Power in Tamil Nadu

One such place is my home state of Tamil Nadu. Its wind turbines have a capacity of about 7.9 gigawatts. Tamil Nadu is often glorified as a global leader in wind energy and regularly compared with Scandinavian countries.

Yet the reality is totally different!

Wind turbines’ poor capacity to provide electricity was exposed last month, when Tamil Nadu faced an unforeseen energy shortage due to a dwindling coal supply. The state had unscheduled power cuts for the first time since 2015.

Most of the state’s electricity (45 percent) comes from stable and reliable coal plants. They require 72,000 tons of coal per day. The coal demand rose, and the subsequent shortage of coal created a power-shortage panic. The federal government had to dispatch coal to the state.

In such situations, wind turbines cannot provide the required backup. Moreover, the rise in energy demand from coal plants can be attributed to the fall in wind energy this year.

Energy from wind turbines dropped 37 percent this year because of heavy monsoon rains. But heavy monsoon rains are not abnormal! They are blamed simply because they interrupt the turbines. Before the era of wind turbines, the rains were just as severe, but they didn’t interrupt power generation.

Wind turbines are infamous for their operational inefficiency. Wind factories usually are built with capacities far above their normal actual production in order to meet the required production targets.

But at times of steady optimum-velocity winds, they produce more than grid operators can use, leaving electricity to be sold at a loss to other locales.  This means that the wind turbines operate far below capacity most of the time, requiring grid operators to meet much of the demand from thermal plants.

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Bad news for Ireland: Peat is most damaging fuel in terms of global warming, even worse than coal

Peat is the most damaging fuel in terms of global warming; even worse than coal.

It has a lower calorific value than coal (generating less energy per tonne when it is burned) and yet it produces higher CO2 emissions per unit, so it is the least climate-efficient way to produce electricity or heat in Ireland bar none.

As a consequence, the writing has been on the wall for peat production – including the once, much-loved peat briquette – and peat-burning power plants for some years; all because of climate change.

In a scenario where overall Irish greenhouse gas emissions are locked into a rising curve, especially those associated with heat, transport and agriculture, it became impossible to justify use of peat on environmental and sustainability grounds.

As a consequence, Bord na Móna committed to getting out of peat by 2030. Its announcement this week “is acknowledging that climate change is our biggest challenge globally” and commits to closing bogs by 2025.

Peat was responsible for 3.4 million tonnes of emissions in Ireland during 2016, of which 75 per cent was for electricity and 25 per cent in residential heating (which is about 9 per cent of carbon emissions from total fossil fuel use (including coal, oil, gas and peat). Phasing out that heat component will make a big difference to Ireland’s emissions.

The peat issue was so glaring, the Government’s independent Climate Change Advisory Council repeatedly said Bord na Móna should get out of peat a lot sooner than envisaged, though it underlined the need for “a just transition” for workers and communities affected. Its chairman Prof John FitzGerald has gone further, hitting out at the perverse decision to continue subsidising peat-fired electricity generation stations until 2030 – consumers pay for this through the public service obligation (PSO), a levy added to their electricity bill.

Peat is partially decomposed plant material; essentially coal in the making. It forms when plant material is deposited in an oxygen-poor environment, generally one that is saturated with water such as a bog. Its destruction releases vast amounts of carbon, particularly methane, into the atmosphere.

Burning, draining, and degrading peat bogs emits significant amounts of CO2 .

In contrast, bogs – and restored wetlands – have the potential to fulfil a major role in capturing and storing carbon.

The fate of peat burning power stations in the Midlands, however, will largely depend on the extent to which the EPA will permit “co-firing of peat with biomass” in coming years.

SOURCE






Trudeau’s Carbon-Tax Rebates A Pittance, Opponents Argue

The Official Opposition Conservatives criticized Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise of carbon tax rebates for consumers Tuesday.

At the House of Commons, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer held a news conference to call the rebates “an election gimmick,” saying what the Trudeau government proposes to give back to Canadians is a pittance.

“Canadians have known all along that Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax was just a tax plan dressed up as an emissions plan,” he said. “Now we know it’s all an election gimmick. And now Canadians are supposed to take his word that a measly $12.50 a month will cover the true cost of the carbon tax.”

Trudeau was in Toronto on Tuesday where he officially outlined his carbon tax and rebate plan in Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s constituency.

Trudeau now routinely refers to CO2 emissions as “pollution” and refers to his carbon tax as “the price of pollution.”

“Starting next year, it will no longer be free to pollute anywhere in Canada. And we’re also going to help Canadians adjust to this new reality,” Trudeau said. “Every nickel will be invested in Canadians in the province or territory where it was raised.”

The Liberals plan to impose the carbon tax on all gasoline, propane and natural gas products.

But they won’t directly tax all Canadian voters; instead, the government will go after the distributors of these products, who will then pass it along to consumers.

The tax is expected to increase the price of each of these energy sources by about four cents a liter.

SOURCE






The Australian government gets realistic on the drivers of electricity costs and is told about "The ‘hoax’ Australians have been sold on electricity

A comprehensive investigation of the drivers of electricity costs reveals that Greenie costs are not the only driver pushing costs upward.  Electricity firms are also making a motza. So Morrision takes modest measures to rein in those profits.  So the Left praise him for that?  Leftists don't like big business. 

But, no, Morrison is "hypocritical" for doing that.  He said that enironmental costs were a big driver of costs so he should stick to that only apparently. He is not allowed to look at more than one cost driver at a time, apparently.  He'll get no logic or reason from Leftists, just hate. I suppose in the simplistic Leftist mind, things CAN have only one cause


WHEN the Abbott Government first romped to victory in 2013 on its promise to axe the carbon tax, it was to address one key issue — the rising cost of electricity.

Addressing climate change was costing too much, Australia’s future prime minister Tony Abbott argued, and was impacting people’s power bills.

Five years later and despite dumping the so-called tax, people’s power bills have still skyrocketed but it’s not for the reason they think.

As ABC finance analyst Alan Kohler highlighted in a series of graphs, electricity prices have jumped by 55 per cent since 2007.

The reason? While climate change policies have played a part, they were not the biggest factor and an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) report released in July gave an interesting insight into why prices had risen.

Mainly it’s because of network costs (which added 4 cents per kilowatt hour), the cost of wholesale electricity (2.8 cents), environmental costs (1.6 cents), retail margin (1.4 cents) and retail costs (0.8 cents).

Most of these terms mean nothing to average consumers. To simplify it, the climate change impact can be attributed partly to the lack of a good policy, which means there has not been an “orderly” transition to cleaner energy sources.

Big coal-fired power stations like Northern and Hazelwood have closed without much notice, making it difficult for the market to find alternatives. The closures have also driven up wholesale prices partly because there is less supply and competition. Gas prices also jumped up after the resource started being exported and this has also contributed to higher prices in Australia.

Meanwhile, there’s little incentive for companies to invest in new sources of electricity when the closures mean they can instead charge more for the energy they are already generating.

The ACCC also found “network costs” had driven up prices the most. In particular, in NSW, Queensland and Tasmania, there has been over-investment in networks, the so-called “poles and wires”.

But one of these figures have escaped much of the scrutiny applied to the others: retail margins.

For those not familiar with the jargon — this is the profit that electricity companies make. And this has grown by 1.4 per cent.

As Mr Kohler noted, selling electricity has become so profitable in Australia, retail margins are now the highest in the world.

The government focus has now turned to cracking down on retailers for confusing customers, price gouging and unfair late payment fees.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced measures to bring down prices, including that it ask the Australian Energy Regulator to put in place a “price safety net”, which is essentially an electricity price cap, something Australia used to have and then got rid of in 2007.

While the crackdown on retailers is in line with ACCC findings, some have noticed the government’s approach now appears to fly in the face of its previous scaremongering.

The new Morrison Government is trying to break the link between carbon emissions reduction and rising power prices, saying it will “comfortably” meet Australia’s Paris agreement targets while at the same time lowering prices.

It’s something that 7.30 host Leigh Sales questioned Energy Minister Angus Taylor about last night and the lack of response was telling.

“This government suggests that emissions reduction, carbon emissions reduction, and power prices are not linked,” Sales said. “If that is true, then you are admitting that your entire anti-carbon tax platform was a hoax because your opposition to it was based on it driving up power prices?”

One of the first things Mr Morrison did when he took over the prime ministership was get rid of the proposed National Energy Guarantee (NEG), which was aimed at reducing electricity prices, providing more stability in the system but also legislating an emissions reduction of 26 per cent over the next 10 years.

Now it looks like Australia won’t have a climate policy and may have to rely on the government topping up the Emissions Reduction Fund, which Mr Abbott introduced to pay businesses, community organisations, local councils or others to reduce their carbon emissions.

The Morrison Government has also left the door open to support new coal-fired power stations and may even protect these investments against the future climate change action.

Mr Taylor told The Guardian the government would look at absorbing the risks for companies, which had found it hard to get finance because they were unable to predict future carbon action, particularly because Australia has not been able to agree to a bipartisan policy.

Asked whether he acknowledged that would expose taxpayers to risk, Taylor said: “We’ll look at the risks and we’ll seek to minimise the risks to the commonwealth”.

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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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25 October, 2018

47,000 Ticks on a Moose, and That’s Just Average. Blame Climate Change

Maybe recent warmer years have had an effect on Moose.  But was that warmth anthropogenic?  No.  recent warm years were due to El Nino -- an influence that has now ceased and led to a fall in temperatures

The biggest number of winter ticks that Peter J. Pekins ever found on a moose was about 100,000. But that moose calf was already dead, most likely the victim of anemia, which develops when that many ticks drain a moose’s blood. So it was probably a lowball estimate, because some of the ticks had already detached.

“It’s about as grody a picture as you can imagine on a dead animal,” said Dr. Pekins, a professor of natural resources and the environment at the University of New Hampshire. (A warning: The pictures below are, indeed, grody.)

Between 2014 and 2016, Dr. Pekins counted ticks on moose calves at two locations in New Hampshire and Maine. He wanted to see how the moose were faring, given that climate change has been delaying snow’s arrival in New England’s winters.

The longer-lasting warmth gives the ticks a leg up as they glom onto the moose, their preferred hosts, in the fall. They then feed through winter and hop off in the spring to lay eggs.

The moose-tracking exploits of Dr. Pekins and his colleagues were published last month in the Canadian Journal of Zoology. They argued that three consecutive years of tick outbreaks “arguably reflects a host-parasite relationship strongly influenced by climate change at the southern fringe of moose habitat.”

While large numbers of ticks, literal bloodsucking parasites, aren’t great for adult moose, they’re especially bad for moose calves, which can die from the onslaught.

With the help of a team that shoots nets from helicopters to catch and tag the calves with radio collars (a process that takes about 15 minutes for the moose and eschews the use of drugs), Dr. Pekins was able to track 179 moose calves. The average number of ticks he found on them was 47,371.

In some ways, the moose are a victim of their own success.

“Maine and New Hampshire had less than 50 moose in the 1970s,” Dr. Pekins said. But their numbers have multiplied many times over since then, thanks to improvements in the available habitat and a lack of predators like wolves.

As a result, Maine now has anywhere from 60,000 to 70,000 moose; New Hampshire had as many as 8,000 or 9,000 in the early 2000s, though the numbers now hover around 5,000. And it’s the abundance of moose that enables the ticks to survive.

“You need a lot of moose on the landscape to have a lot of parasites,” Dr. Pekins said. “That’s the host-parasite relationship.”

That relationship was more or less in balance until the changing climate tilted the scales in the ticks’ favor. Over the long term, Dr. Pekins doesn’t expect the moose to die off completely, but there will be fewer of them.

The ticks don’t want the moose to die off completely, either. “The parasite doesn’t want to kill off its host — that’s bad evolution,” Dr. Pekins said. “Because the parasite loses the game.”

SOURCE







Professor urges students to vote Democrat in midterms or else ‘future generations’ will face ‘higher seas, much hotter temps’

A Texas A&M University professor is urging his students to vote in the 2018 midterm elections in order “to determine” how much the seas rise and how much global temperatures will rise.

Professor Andrew Dessler, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences, also implied that his students must cast those votes for Democrat candidates or else “future generations” will face “higher seas, much hotter temperatures, less ice, vastly different precipitation patterns, etc.”

Dessler wrote on October 23: “I’ve been encouraging my students to vote. This is what I tell them: they’re voting to determine whether we’ll be in the top row or the bottom row.” Dessler’s tweet featured a UN IPCC chart showing various rows of temperature scenarios from the years 2046 through the year 2200. The top row features the UN IPCC lowest temperature increase projections through the year 2200, while the bottom row shows a more severe temperature throughout the year 2200.

In response to a tweet declaring “I won’t vote democrat–sorry that party has lost it,” Dessler replied: “I’m sure future generations — as they live in degraded world with higher seas, much hotter temperatures, less ice, vastly different precipitation patterns, etc. — will totally understand and sympathize.”

Dessler is confident that a vote for Democrats can impact future temperatures in the years 2046 through 2100, that he retweeted a tweet claiming, “VOTE. Your vote can help us stay on the top row.”

Dessler has a long history of claiming that government taxes and regulations can regulate the climate and weather

Dessler has been a fierce critic of President Trump overturning so-called climate regulations

SOURCE







Sen Cruz: Climate Change Is A ‘Pseudoscientific Theory’ Concocted To Nix Big Oil

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas criticized the climate movement Monday night as a type of Trojan horse effort activists started to target the fossil fuel movement while also gaining control over aspects of the government.

Climate change is “the perfect, I believe, pseudoscientific theory because it could never be disproven,” the Texas senator said at a Texas Oil & Gas Association forum. He also chastised his Democratic opponent, Beto O’Rourke, for not being in line with the state’s energy industry.

Cruz, a Republican running for re-election in the first midterm election in the Trump-era, also noted that the environmental movement is predicated on government control over the energy sector.

“The solution for climate change is the same as global cooling and global warming, which is massive government control of the economy, the energy sector and every aspect of our lives,” he said. Cruz also told attendees that the climate movement has made huge gains over the decades.

The fossil fuel industry needs to counteract a “misinformation and propaganda effort,” he said, adding that journalists and celebrities are at the vanguard of the movement. “We’re getting killed — killed — in the culture.”

Cruz added: “The left has those commanding heights and uses it to push the agenda that all of you are bad,” he told the audience. “On the right, look, the best and the brightest, what do they go do? They go make money.”

He has spent several months railing against the use of taxpayer funds on programs devoted to influencing discussion on global warming. Cruz took issue in June with public funds going to the National Science Foundation, for instance.

“We find NSF’s stewardship of the federal taxpayer dollars devoted to the latter project particularly egregious for a number of reasons,” Cruz and colleagues Rand Paul of Kentucky and James Lankford of Oklahoma wrote in a letter to NSF Inspector General Allison Lerner. (RELATED: ‘It’s Unfortunate’: EPA Says Jilted Official Is Spreading Fake News About Her Suspension)

Their letter came after NBC News reported the non-profit group Climate Central “reached more than 500 local TV weathercasters” as part of its “Climate Matters” program that launched in 2012.

The program was backed by two NSF grants totaling more than $4 million that were rewarded in 2009 and 2014, according to federal records. The grants were issued to two universities and Climate Central, a website covering environmental issues.

SOURCE






Carbon Dioxide Emissions Dip Slightly in Trump’s First Year, EPA Says

Greenhouse gas emissions have declined across multiple sectors since President Donald Trump has been in office, the Environmental Protection Agency announced.

The latest figures show total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions dipped by 2.7 percent during 2017 compared with 2016, President Barack Obama’s last full year in office, the agency said as part of its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program.

The EPA collects emissions data from industrial sources on an annual basis. Those sources include power plants, oil and gas production plants, refining facilities, iron mills, steel mills, and landfills.

“Thanks to President Trump’s regulatory reform agenda, the economy is booming, energy production is surging, and we are reducing greenhouse gas emissions from major industrial sources,” Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, said in a press release Wednesday, adding:

These achievements flow largely from technological breakthroughs in the private sector, not the heavy hand of government. The Trump administration has proven that federal regulations are not necessary to drive CO2 reductions. While many around the world are talking about reducing greenhouse gases, the U.S. continues to deliver, and today’s report is further evidence of our action-oriented approach.

Environmental activists link greenhouses gases to what they consider man-made climate change, or global warming.

Other key findings identified by the EPA show that greenhouse gas emissions from large power plants declined 4.5 percent since 2016 and 19.7 percent since 2011.

More than 8,000 facilities submitted data to the agency’s program for the 2017 reporting year.

Greenhouse gases that the EPA says trap heat in the atmosphere include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gases. But it is the carbon dioxide emissions that stand out.

“The 2.6 billion metric tons of CO2 [carbon dioxide] reported for 2017 represent 90.7 percent of the [greenhouse gases] reported in 2017,” the EPA said. “Methane emissions represent 7.7 percent of reported … emissions, N2O [nitrous oxide] represents 0.9 percent, and fluorinated gases (HFCs, PFCs, SF6) represent 0.6 percent.”

The Trump administration anticipates that carbon dioxide emissions from the U.S. power sector will continue to decline if the government implements its proposed Affordable Clean Energy Rule.

The Trump rule would replace the Obama administration’s “Clean Power Plan” with guidelines that give states more flexibility to determine how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants.

“Much of the world ridiculed the Trump administration for withdrawing from the Paris Accord [on addressing climate change] and rolling back the previous administration’s climate regulations,” Nick Loris, an energy policy analyst for The Heritage Foundation, said in an email, adding:

But they’re not singing our praises as market-driven innovations lead the world in reducing emissions, while they fail to meet their nonbinding commitments under Paris. It’s clear that talking the talk and walking the walk are two very different things.

Wheeler has described the Obama administration plan as a “top-down, one-size-fits-all” approach to energy policy.

In February 2016, the Supreme Court ordered a halt in enforcement of the Clean Power Plan until a lower federal court ruled on its legality.

That order—which came in response to legal challenges from 27 states, 24 trade associations, 37 rural electric co-ops, and three labor unions—marked the first time the high court had stopped a regulation before a lower appeals court issued a final judgment.

The EPA projects that the Trump proposal would lead to a decrease in carbon dioxide emissions of 35 percent below 2005 levels.

The agency will hold a webinar Oct. 24 to demonstrate a data publication tool on greenhouse gases called FLIGHT.

SOURCE






Australia: Conservative coalition could indemnify new coal projects against potential carbon price

The energy minister, Angus Taylor, has signalled the Australian government could indemnify new power generation projects against the future risk of a carbon price, and says it could also support the retrofitting of existing coal plants.

In an interview with Guardian Australia, the man dubbed the “minister for getting power prices down” by the prime minister, Scott Morrison, has also committed to keeping current subsidies for households and businesses to install renewable energy technology like solar panels until 2030, and insists Australia’s electricity sector will reduce emissions by 26% on 2005 levels in “the early 2020s”.

Taylor on Tuesday outlined a range of measures the government wants to implement to help lower power prices, including cajoling retailers into offering customers out-of-cycle price cuts so consumers could experience hip-pocket relief by January, ahead of the next election.

He also foreshadowed policy interventions to boost investment in new “reliable” power generation, including providing a floor price, contracts for difference, cap and floor contracts and government loans.

Morrison held out the prospect of government support for new coal-fired power stations “where they meet all the requirements” of the yet-to-be finalised mechanisms to boost investment in new electricity generation.

One of the key problems preventing private investment in new coal-fired power generation is proponents have struggled to get finance because they are unable to predict future carbon risk, particularly given Australia’s decade-long partisan standoff over emissions reduction policies.

Taylor told Guardian Australia the government would look to remove the risks stopping investment in new power generation. “I’m saying we will look at whatever risks that can’t be managed by the companies that need to be managed to get investment.

“What we are saying is the risks that government needs to absorb to get investment in reliable generation, we will look at absorbing. We need the investment.”

Asked whether he acknowledged that would expose taxpayers to risk, Taylor said: “We’ll look at the risks and we’ll seek to minimise the risks to the commonwealth.”

The concept of the government underwriting new investments in power generation in order to boost competition in the market was originally recommended by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission but with tightly defined criteria. The government is pursuing the ACCC’s general principle, but writing its own rules.

The ACCC was focused on encouraging new market participants, but the energy minister said the government could back the retrofitting of existing power plants to extend their operating life.

Asked how retrofitting an existing plant was bringing new generation into the market, he said: “It’s new generation if it would otherwise be gone, that’s the point.

“What we want is additional investment, new investment, that would mean we get capacity we wouldn’t otherwise have.”

Business is extremely wary of the government’s plans to impose price regulation in the energy sector, and about oft-repeated public threats by the government to wield a “big stick” – introducing divestiture powers to break up power companies engaging in price-gouging.

The chief executive of the Business Council of Australia, Jennifer Westacott, warned on Tuesday that “ad hoc intervention in the energy market, such as underwriting generation investment or forced divestment, is sending a signal to the world that investing in Australia comes with considerable risks”.

“In the long term this will only result in less investment in energy generation, less reliable energy and ultimately higher prices,” the BCA chief said.

Taylor told Guardian Australia he was confident the government had the power to legislate to force divestiture, and a toughening of regulatory options was required because of poor market conduct.

Asked whether he expected legal challenges from power companies in the event the government ever used the divestiture power, he said: “I can’t predict what people are going to do.”

Asked what trigger the government planned to use to break up badly behaving power companies, Taylor said it was a lack of competition and deliberate withdrawal of supply.

“The issue is, have we got enough capacity and supply in the market to meet customers’ needs and are companies in the sector thwarting that, are they deliberately taking anti-competitive action to withdraw supply from the market to drive up prices?”

Stakeholders in the energy market are also enormously frustrated with the Coalition’s chopping and changing on energy policy, which culminated in the ditching of the national energy guarantee’s 26% emissions reduction target.

Taylor insists the electricity sector will hit 26% well before 2030. Asked why the government ditched a target it was going to easily exceed, the minister said: “Labor want a higher target. We are not going to facilitate that in any shape or form.

“We are not going to load the gun for Labor to have a much higher target.”

Energy ministers will meet this Friday for the first time since the Morrison government grounded part of the Neg. Taylor wants to sound out his counterparts on whether they will agree to roll out new price regulations in the electricity market, or whether Canberra will force the change by overriding them.

The Victorian energy minister, Lily D’Ambrosio, has warned she has no intention of agreeing to anything on Friday, given the state is days away from entering caretaker mode ahead of the state election.

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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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





24 October, 2018

Faith in science is undermined by peer-review failings

Science has been in the news ­lately. As part of the release of the latest UN Inter­govern­mental Panel on Climate Change report, the boast was made that the contents were based on the work of 91 of the top scientists and more than 6000 scientific references.

This carries on the tradition outlined by the chairman of the IPCC from 2002 to 2015, Rajendra Pachauri: “We carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry the credibility of peer-­reviewed publications, we don’t settle for anything less than that.”

The trouble for the IPCC — and for many other outlets that carry scientific findings — is that a crisis in science has been brewing for some time. Known as the replication or reproducibility crisis, the fundamental problem is that the results of many peer-reviewed ­papers and reports have not been confirmed when the experiments have been repeated or the data ­reanalysed. Eminent medical scientist John Ioannidis belled the cat as early as 2005 in a much cited technical paper, Why Most Published Research Findings are False.

He concluded that “there is ­increasing concern that most current published research findings are false … For many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.” He further noted research findings were less likely to be true when “more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance”.

There is a variety of reasons for the failure of studies to be repli­cated. At one end of the spectrum is fraud and misconduct, while at the other end is manipulation and cherry-picking of data. Researchers have strong incentives to ­establish significant results while discarding inconvenient data and failed hypotheses. Authors often deliberately make it difficult for other researchers to re-do experiments or check findings.

Additionally, many referees, who are the gatekeepers in the peer review process, do a lousy job by simply reading papers and ­approving them if they agree with their findings. Peer review generally doesn’t involve re-running ­experiments, for instance.

One editor of an academic journal was so troubled by the issue of non-reproducibility that he decided to send out already published papers to new reviewers for their assessments. Apart from the fact a reasonable proportion of reviewers didn’t even recognise that the papers had ­already been published, several of the papers were actually rejected by the new reviewers. So much for the infallibility of peer review.

A serious effort was made in 2015 to replicate the findings of 100 experiments reported in three major psychology journals. Ninety-seven per cent of the original studies had reported significant results but only 36 per cent of the repli­cated studies could confirm these effects. This is a damning outcome.

More recently, a research project tried to reproduce 21 ­social ­science experiments published ­between 2010 and 2015 in the prestigious journals Science and ­Nature. Thirteen replication studies were successful, while eight others could find no effects at all.

The editors of Nature recently conducted a survey of nearly 1600 researchers. It was noted that 70 per cent of researchers had ­failed to ­reproduce other scientists’ experiments. Ninety per cent of respondents felt reproducibility in science was a significant or slight crisis. Only 3 per cent thought it wasn’t a crisis at all.

Whether economics should be regarded as a science is debatable, but a recent edition of the prominent Economic Journal ­included a reassessment of the ­results from several of its published papers. The conclusion drawn was that most of the underlying analyses were statistically underpowered, meaning no reliance could be placed on the conclusions. For the other studies that had enough power, there was a distinct tendency for the size of ­effects to be overstated.

A replication audit of 67 economics papers published in 13 prestigious journals was conducted by the US Federal Reserve and the Department of Treasury. Less than half the studies could be replicated, even with the help of the ­authors. “We assert that eco­nomics research is usually not ­replicable,” concluded the authors.

If all this sounds alarming to the layperson, it should. After all, the results of many of these peer-reviewed studies have had practical effects, warning people to alter their diets or lifestyles as well as influencing public policy initiatives.

At this stage, the disciplines most under a cloud are social ­psychology, neuroscience, chemistry, medicine (including cancer ­biology) and economics. No doubt the list will continue to grow as more replication studies are ­under­taken, although this is often difficult as such studies are generally not government funded.

One of the main elements of this crisis as identified by Ioannidis is the tendency of ­researchers to dredge data to get the most sig­nificant results. (Nobel prize-winning economist Ronald Coase famously quipped: “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.”) To this we can add the downplaying of any deficiencies in the underlying data.

In this context, it is interesting to note the findings of John McLean, an Australian who has been awarded a PhD for his audit of the HadCRUT4 data set on global temperatures used by the IPCC. There are a large number of anomalies in the data set. For ­instance, two stations tracking temperatures recorded monthly average figures above 80C. Another two stations in the Carib­bean recorded averages of 0C. A station in Romania recorded minus 45C and there is data sourced from ships that are located 80km inland.

More worrying is the use by the IPCC of a small number of global temperature recordings from the 1860s and 1870s — coverage was about one-eighth of the world at that time — as the measure of pre-industrial temperature levels. The accuracy of this assumption is highly questionable.

When the British Met Office was asked to respond to these criticisms, the answer was along the lines that there was an awareness of these weaknesses but they were few in number and the Met ­Office continuously was working to improve the data set, and this would be available to the IPCC when it next produced a report. On the face of it, this looks like a very unsatisfactory response, particularly given what we know about the crisis in science more generally.

What does the replication crisis mean for the credibility of science? Should we trust science to reliably inform public policy decision-making? Or should we conclude the scientific world is basically a club of self-serving, like-minded individuals who do not welcome dissenting views and are sloppy to boot? Should we just forget about scientific research and go with our instincts?

In my view, the preferred middle course is along the following lines. All research findings should be treated cautiously. Journals and research outlets should sign up to an open and transparent code of conduct, and published authors should be made to release all the details of underlying experiments, the data sets and computer codes. Studies that find no effects should be considered for publication.

Research funding bodies should allocate a portion of their funding to replication studies. An urgent priority in Australia is for the replication of several contentious studies about the Great Barrier Reef in which the overseas authors have never been prepared to hand over the data or the codes.

There is no doubt science has an important role to play in our ­society and economy. But as University of California computational biologist Michael Eisen warns us: “We need to get away from the notion, proven wrong on a daily basis, that peer review of any kind at any journal means that the work of science is correct.” The leadership of the IPCC should take note.

SOURCE





Former Harvard U. Physicist rejects new UN IPCC report: ‘Similar claims are on par with the spam about penis enlargement’

Former Harvard University Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl on UN IPCC report: “I am no longer reading this garbage – and neither does an overwhelming majority of the people. There’s absolutely no true, useful, or original content in this stuff. Almost identical predictions have been proven incorrect hundreds of times…We’ve been bombarded by effectively equivalent garbage hundreds of times, the specifics of the newest report are completely irrelevant and uncorrelated with any events, insights, or new scientific evidence. All this fearmongering is just a random mutation of nonsense that everyone has seen many times, with some completely irrelevant and random new noise.”

“Only the people who consider themselves to be obedient soldiers of any far left-wing movement pay lip service to that junk but they don’t really believe it, either.”

“Message to all climate fearmongers: Give it up. This unscientific movement has already peaked in 2009, it has been dying a slow and painful death for about a decade, and you will be much happier if you accelerate it and make the climate hysteria die quickly and abruptly.”

“Climate fearmongers, you’ve become some of the most dishonest as well as useless people in the Earth’s history.”

SOURCE






Is Renewable Energy a Fraud?

Can it be that wind and solar energy is a complete fraud? In the book "Dumb Energy," Norman Rogers makes a powerful and convincing case. His main point is that there must be backup generating plants because the delivery of electricity from wind or solar is erratic, depending on the surging or weakening of wind and sunlight. The backup plants supply kilowatt hours when the flow of green electricity falters. As a consequence one has to have two systems, the wind or solar system plus a backup system.

The backup system is usually a fossil fuel plant powered by natural gas. Natural gas plants are best suited to serve as backup plants, because a gas turbine is agile, able to increase and decrease power rapidly. Agility is needed because the variations in wind or solar can happen quickly.

The cost of generating electricity with wind or solar is nearly the same for either technology — about seven cents per kilowatt-hour. The cost of generation is mostly due to the cost of financing initial construction. Building a wind or solar facility costs about four times as much as a natural gas plant with the same average electricity output. A natural gas plant is cheaper to build, but burns about two cents worth of natural gas for each kilowatt-hour generated.

If you have to have a backup plant, why not eliminate the wind or solar and just use the backup plant? The outspoken supporters of wind and solar energy say consumption of fuel in the backup plant will be reduced whenever green electricity is generated. Burning less fuel means less carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted.

Let’s examine those alleged benefits of wind or solar.

Both wind and solar electricity costs about seven cents per kilowatt-hour but the fuel saved in the backup plants has a value of two cents per kilowatt-hour. Do the math. That’s a net loss of five cents for every kilowatt-hour of green electricity generated. Remember, the only financial benefit of wind or solar is the fuel saved in the backup plants. A wind or solar plant can’t replace a fossil fuel plant, because a fossil fuel plant has to remain in place as backup. The backup plants have to be capable of carrying the full load because sometimes there is no green electricity. Sometimes clouds set in and sometimes the wind just doesn’t blow.

The loss of five cents per kilowatt-hour represents a subsidy for wind or solar. Somebody has to cover that bill and just whom do you think that is? That’s right, taxpayers and electricity consumers’ pick-up the subsidy. The subsidy is paid for primarily by increasing rates to consumers and funneling tax-dollars to the plants.

Is wind or solar justified because it reduces CO2 emissions?

We can calculate how much it costs to use wind or solar to reduce CO2 emissions. Every kilowatt-hour of wind or solar electricity requires a five-cent subsidy. Generating that same kilowatt-hour using natural gas results in the emission of 0.8 pounds of CO2. So it costs five cents to reduce CO2 emissions by 0.8 pounds. That works out to a cost of about $140 to reduce CO2 emissions by a metric ton (2200 pounds). We use a metric ton, because that is the standard method of accounting for reductions in CO2 emissions. Reducing CO2 emissions by a metric ton is called a carbon offset. There are many companies selling carbon offsets, often for around $10 each. They create carbon offsets by such things as planting trees that absorb CO2. Why pay $140 for a carbon offset you can buy one for 10 bucks?

Utility scale wind or solar is 70 percent subsidized — five cent subsidy on a seven cent cost. Residential solar is far more expensive per kilowatt-hour due to the lack of economies of scale, while the benefit of fuel saved is the same. As a result the subsidy exceeds 90 percent. The homeowner that installs rooftop solar may actually save money depending on the economic relationship with the utility but the taxpayers and other electricity consumers pay for the homeowner’s savings. It is laughable that the advocates of rooftop solar depict their highly subsidized installations as allowing homeowners to escape the tyranny of greedy utilities. Actually, the homeowner is swindling the greedy utility, the government and the other consumers of electricity down the line.

The book has a chapter on the extensive propaganda campaigns used to plant the idea in the public mind that wind and solar are a cost saving wave of the future. Environmental non-profits and trade groups generate the propaganda, lots of it. For example they will quote the cost of wind power without revealing the extensive subsidies. Competitors to wind and solar, particularly coal and nuclear, are demonized as dangerous and polluting. Trick photography is used to make it look like coal generating plants are emitting black smoke from their smoke stacks. The meaning of the word pollution has been extended to include CO2, a colorless, odorless and harmless gas essential to plant life. CO2 is not pollution.

The book is primarily about energy, not global warming. But, there is a chapter on global warming. Global warming propaganda has been improved by replacing “global warming” with “climate change.” The reason is that the globe has not been warming significantly, undercutting the climate catastrophe theme. The promoters of climate change now blame every bad weather event on the emissions of CO2. The scientific justification for this is nil, but it makes for good propaganda.

There is a scientific establishment dependent on government money. Scientists are not high-minded and disinterested advisors. Scientific conclusions and advice are slanted to support the interests of the scientific establishment. Scientists who dispute the global warming theme are attacked and may lose their jobs. Scientific truth is discarded if it gets in the way of the money flow from Washington. Rogers provides many examples of corrupt behavior on the part of the scientific establishment.

Rogers does not claim that global warming is impossible. Rather his position is that there are so many different forces that can cause warming or cooling that it is difficult to isolate the effects of CO2 and similar “greenhouse” gases. The data on the Earth’s climate provides little support for the idea that we face a looming catastrophe.

A short chapter on nuclear power shows that nuclear power has been killed in the country where it was invented by environmental hysteria. Nuclear power thrives in Asia and some other countries. Nuclear does not emit CO2.

In contrast to the wildly exaggerated global warming catastrophe there is the danger of a real catastrophe caused by a long term collapse of the electric grid. There are about 2,000 very large transformers that are an essential part of the grid. These transformers are vulnerable to an attack by hacking or by an electromagnetic pulse. If the transformers are destroyed, the grid could be down for years with disastrous consequences for the country. An electromagnetic pulse can be created by a natural solar storm or by the detonation of a nuclear device in near outer space. This is a real danger that can be prevented by protective measures, but that danger is ignored, swamped by the constant propaganda promoting renewable energy and a global warming catastrophe. "Dumb Energy" is a book that takes direct aim at popular beliefs, or delusions, with solid arguments.

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Anti-Wind Farm Activism Is Sweeping Europe And The U.S. Could Be Next

In September, the Netherlands counterterrorism unit the NCTV identified a new group threatening public safety: anti-wind farm activists.

These activists, the NCTV claimed, had “radicalized” to the point that they represented a public risk. The picture the NCTV painted—of a group that has threatened, intimidated, and destroyed the property of politicians and developers—might sound bizarre to the casual follower of the renewable energy industry. But anti-wind farm activism is serious business, and it isn’t limited to the Netherlands.

At the December 2017 inauguration of France’s first offshore wind turbine, protesters set fire to tires in front of police in riot gear. Earlier this year, French protesters went even further, setting fire to wind turbines directly and lodging explosives in others. Across Europe, where last year countries erected about 5,000 wind turbines, the sudden emergence of the towering machines—both on land and offshore— has incited deep-seated anxiety in a small but vocal minority. Anti-wind activists are a diverse patchwork, from local residents stirred by NIMBY-ism to fishermen claiming wind farms displace fish populations to coal workers dreading a renewable energy future.

In the Netherlands, which is home to one of the largest offshore wind farms in the world (150 turbines in total) and which is planning another, even larger offshore wind farm that it will anchor to an artificial island, anti-wind farm activism reached a fever pitch this year. In April, activists distributed pamphlets calling pro-wind farm politicians Nazis and planted flags with swastikas that compare the encroachment of wind turbines to living in “occupied territory.” Farmers who have supported the construction of land-based wind turbines have discovered heavy chains, concrete-filled cans, and iron bars on their property, seemingly left by activists who want to damage their farm equipment.

This July, anti-wind farm activists in the northern regions of Drenthe and Groningen in the Netherlands issued a threatening letter to 34 companies involved in the construction of wind farms. Jan Nieboer, a leader of the anti-wind farm group Platform Storm, told the Dutch news service NOS that he has heard of people buying hand grenades and other explosives for protests.

The complaints of these activists are multitudinous. Many resent the way wind farms are located without their input. Others despise the presence of turbines along their skyline. Some fear that living near wind turbines will cut into their home values (although at least in the United States, research has shown no effect).

Another sore spot is that the money made from wind farms is rarely shared with the local community. “Communities are almost always more supportive of wind projects when the financial benefits are distributed widely among locals residents, rather than flowing to outside investors,” Bob Darrow, a PhD candidate at UMass Amherst who studies the politics of renewable energy, told Earther.

But, at least for onshore wind farms, the most galvanizing fears revolve around rumours that wind turbines punish the health of local residents. Activists claim that the low noise emitted by turbines triggers everything from persistent headaches to behavioural changes in animals in what they term “wind turbine syndrome,” a concept that scientists have largely rejected.

A 2013 analysis from researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia concluded that although noise from wind turbines can result in “annoyance” and potentially “poorer sleep quality” among residents, “there is no consistent evidence” tying that noise to many of the self-reported health effects. In a 2014 paper, King’s College psychology professors attributed “wind turbine syndrome” to the “nocebo effect”—a psychological phenomenon in which the expectation of negative health outcomes becomes self-fulfilling—and to anxiety about technological encroachment.

“There is also a lot of ‘fake news’ circulating about wind power,” said Darrow. “Often this misinformation is intentionally spread by groups with a vested interest in slowing the adoption of renewable energy.”

One prominent vessel for those false claims is U.S. President Donald Trump. During an August 2018 rally in Indiana, he insisted that people living near wind farms “go crazy after a couple of years,” before adding that wind turbines “kill so many birds” and that resisters “can blow up the windmills” if they need to.

Whether Trump’s rhetoric has stoked more wind energy resistance on the American right is unclear. But even land-based wind, which is a booming industry across parts of the midwestern U.S. and Great Plains, struggles against backlash from rural communities that pushed over 120 local governments to scrap or restrict turbines from 2015 to 2017. Offshore wind, meanwhile, has long struggled to gain a toehold thanks to fierce local opposition.

In Cape Cod, a 2001 attempt to launch what would have been the U.S.’s first offshore wind farm was abandoned in December 2017 after a decade of lawsuits from local residents concerned about disrupting fishing patterns and coastal views. Rhode Island’s 6-turbine Block Island Wind Farm, which opened in December 2016 after angry locals likened it to “visual pollution,” now holds the title of the first U.S. offshore wind farm.

Recently, U.S. states like Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New York have unveiled ambitious plans to build offshore wind farms that will power hundreds of thousands of homes within the next decade. But UMass professor Erin Baker, who has written about the rise of offshore wind farms, doubts that these projects will see opposition on the scale of Europe because most U.S. offshore wind farms will be located 40km or more from the coast. That distance “will not get the general public too interested,” Baker told Earther. Fears about “wind turbine syndrome” tend to dissipate when a wind farm is far offshore, and 40km is roughly the distance where wind farms become invisible from the shore, pre-empting complaints of visual pollution.

What’s more, only a small subset of the U.S. population actually opposes wind farm development. Just a quarter of residents living within half a mile of a wind farm have a “ negative” or “very negative” view of wind farms, while three-quarters take a neutral or positive view, according to a poll of Americans from researchers at the California-based Berkeley Lab. And most Americans, including roughly 8 in 10 Republicans, support expanding wind and solar energy, according to a May 2018 Pew poll.

In Europe too, the number of people who oppose wind farms is quite small. In the Dutch region of Groningen, where wind farm opposition is at its strongest, only 2 per cent of people have reported experiencing “a form of hinder in their everyday life by windmills,” according to statistics that University of Groningen researcher Tom Postmes shared with Earther. In Denmark, where wind turbines accounted for an unprecedented 43.4 per cent of the nation’s electricity last year, at least 8 in 10 people support their construction.

Still, the anti-wind minority remains an exceptionally vocal one. Especially for onshore wind farms, resistance in Denmark has grown so intense that it has become nearly impossible for some local governments to approve turbines, according to Darrow. “In many municipalities, officials are hesitant to support wind projects for fear of the public backlash such proposals inevitably generate,” he said.

One strategy to quell that backlash is for wind energy proponents to work more closely with nearby communities about where to site wind farms so that they will be the least disruptive. Denmark has seen some success engaging with fishermen to build offshore wind farms away from prime fishing territory, for instance.

But if there’s one thing proponents of wind energy have learned in Europe, Darrow said, it’s “not to get overconfident about the public supporting their projects.” And while U.S. opposition hasn’t reached the kind of fever pitch that it has across the Atlantic, it seems unlikely that the renewable energy source will continue to spread without a few fights.

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How the Supreme Court Could Now End the Climate Wars

Many climate skeptics were hopeful that the election of Donald Trump would end the climate wars in the US on favorable terms. Many of us assumed that this would be done by persuading EPA to overturn the greenhouse gas Endangerment Finding (EF). But so far all that has happened is that a number of Obama EPA climate regulations have been put on hold or started down the road towards repeal. If the Democrats should win the Presidency, all these changes could be undone fairly rapidly.

To start the process of EF reconsideration, a number of petitions have been sent to EPA by skeptic groups requesting that EPA reconsider the EF. Unfortunately, EPA has not announced such a reconsideration. I believe this is still the best overall strategy since if successful it would finish off climate alarmism as an option on a fairly permanent basis if upheld by the Supreme Court, which now appears possible. This is the strongest approach, and is still the preferred approach.

A second approach which should now be a possibility would be for the Court to overturn Massachusetts vs. EPA by finding that EPA does not have authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act (CAA). Mass. vs. EPA was decided by only one vote at the Court, including the justice that will  be replaced by Brett Kavanaugh. With such a ruling, the climate alarmists would have to persuade Congress to change the CAA to explicitly allow EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. This appears unlikely.

The  confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh  opens up a third possible approach, however, of getting the Supreme Court to declare the Obama Clean Power Plan (CPP) illegal by exceeding the powers granted by Congress to EPA under the CAA. By ruling that EPA cannot impose limitations on emissions beyond “the fence” of polluters, the Supreme Court could effectively prevent the legal cornerstone of the Obama EPA climate regulations from becoming a regulation. The action of the Supreme Court in staying the CPP has had a similar effect in the near term but leaves the way open for a reconsideration by a future Democratic administration.

Or what might be best is to try to get the Court to endorse all of these viewpoints, which are arranged in decreasing order of effectiveness. That would effectively prevent even a future possible Democratic administration from reviving the Obama EPA’s attempt to impose major decarbonization as the law of the land through regulations and the courts. The great danger is not that the Trump Administration will support decarbonization but that a new Democratic Administration would do so. But if the views above should be endorsed by the Court, that would be very difficult for many years.

The time has come to nail down the death of climate alarmism in terms of achieving its climate goals through regulations and the courts by using the now stronger conservative majority.

SOURCE

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23 October, 2018

NASA Sees Climate Cooling Trend Thanks to Low Sun Activity

The climate alarmists just can’t catch a break. NASA is reporting that the sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age; and Earth’s atmosphere is responding in kind.

So, start pumping out that CO2, everyone. We’re going to need all the greenhouse gases we can get.

“We see a cooling trend,” said Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.”

The new data is coming from NASA’s Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry or SABER instrument, which is onboard the space agency’s Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) satellite. SABER monitors infrared radiation from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances that play a vital role in the energy output of our thermosphere, the very top level of our atmosphere.

“The thermosphere always cools off during Solar Minimum. It’s one of the most important ways the solar cycle affects our planet,” said Mlynczak, who is the associate principal investigator for SABER.

Who knew that that big yellow ball of light in the sky had such a big influence on our climate?

There’s a bit of good news in all of this. When the thermosphere cools, it literally shrinks, therefore reducing aerodynamic drag on satellites in low Earth orbit. In effect, the shrinking thermosphere increases a satellite’s lifetime.

But that appears to be where the good news ends, unless you prefer cold weather and increased space junk. “The bad news,” according to Dr. Tony Phillips, editor of spaceweather.com, is: “It also delays the natural decay of space junk, resulting in a more cluttered environment around Earth.”

Mlynczak and his colleagues have created the Thermosphere Climate Index (TCI), which measures how much NO is dumped from the Thermosphere into outer space. During Solar Maximum the TCI number is very high. At times of Solar Minimum, TCI is low.

“Right now, (TCI) is very low indeed,” said Mlynczak. “SABER is currently measuring 33 billion Watts of infrared power from NO. That’s ten times smaller than we see during more active phases of the solar cycle."

SABER has been in orbit for only 17 years, but Mlynczak and the scientists at NASA’s Langley Research Center have been able to recreate TCI measurements back to the 1940s. “SABER taught us how to do this by revealing how TCI depends on other variables such as geomagnetic activity and the sun’s UV output — things that have been measured for decades,” said Mlynczak.

In fact, TCI numbers now, in the closing months of 2018, are very close to setting record lows since measurements began. “We’re not quite there yet,” Mlynczak reports. “but it could happen in a matter of months.”

The new NASA findings are in line with studies released by UC-San Diego and Northumbria University in Great Britain last year, both of which predict a Grand Solar Minimum in coming decades due to low sunspot activity. Both studies predicted sun activity similar to the Maunder Minimum of the mid-17th to early 18th centuries, which coincided to a time known as the Little Ice Age, during which temperatures were much lower than those of today.

If all of this seems as if NASA is contradicting itself, you’re right — sort of. After all, NASA also reported last week that Arctic sea ice was at its sixth lowest level since measuring began. Isn’t that a sure sign of global warming?

All any of this “proves” is that we have, at best, a cursory understanding of Earth’s incredibly complex climate system. So when mainstream media and carbon-credit salesman Al Gore breathlessly warn you that we must do something about climate change, it’s all right to step back, take a deep breath, and realize that we don’t have the knowledge, skill or resources to have much effect on the Earth’s climate. God — and that big yellow ball of light in the sky — have much more impact on our climate than we ever could.

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China Is Expected to Phase Out Renewable Subsidies, Continue to Build Coal Plants

China’s energy regulator indicated the country will speed up efforts to ensure its wind and solar power can compete without subsidies and achieve “grid price parity” with traditional energy sources. China is encouraging renewable manufacturers and developers to drive down costs through technological innovations and economies of scale in order to phase out power generation subsidies, which have become an increasing burden on the state.

China owes about 120 billion yuan ($17.5 billion) in subsidies to solar plants despite cutting its subsidies to solar power and capping new capacity at 30 gigawatts this year—down from a 53 gigawatts in 2017—because the government is concerned about overcapacity and a growing subsidy backlog.

China’s National Energy Administration issued the draft guidelines on September 13, 2018, indicating that some regions with cost and market advantages had “basically achieved price parity” with clean coal-fired power and no longer required subsidies, and that other regions should learn from their experiences. The draft guidelines urged transmission grid companies to provide more support for subsidy-free projects and ensure they have the capacity to distribute all the power generated by wind and solar plants. Currently, China is soliciting feedback from the industry and has not given a date for implementation of the guidelines.

Coal Construction Continues

While China is putting the brakes on its renewables, it has restarted coal-fired projects that had been put on hold. Approximately 46.7 gigawatts of new and restarted coal-fired power construction has been spotted through satellite imagery. The coal-fired power plants are either already generating power or will soon be operational, increasing China’s coal-fired power capacity by 4 percent.

Coal consumption in China increased 3.1 percent in the first half of 2018 compared with the same period last year due primarily to coal-fired generation. Electricity consumption increased 9.4 percent during that period. A rebound in industrial demand for electricity and electric power shortages during the summer in some regions have made policy-makers more accepting of overcapacity from demand-responsive generation. Economic data for the first half of 2018 indicate that China’s power demand is rebounding.

Despite the change in coal-fired plant construction, overcapacity is still a problem in China. Utilization rates for coal-fired plants recovered slightly from a 50-year low in 2016, but have not even returned to 2015 levels. About half of the country’s coal-fired power plants were running at a loss in the first six months of this year due to high coal prices. Because of capacity cuts in its domestic mining sector, China’s coal imports increased, driving global prices for thermal coal that is used to generate electricity.

Despite China’s push to ensure all solar and wind production is distributed by the grid, China’s thermal electricity production (coal, natural gas, oil, and biomass) is increasing much faster than its renewable (wind and solar) electricity production. In the second quarter of 2018, wind and solar generation increased by 51 terawatt hours while thermal electricity production increased by 176.9 terawatt hours—about 3.5 times as much. Together wind and solar power represented just 21 percent of the increased power generation in the second quarter, while thermal power provided 72 percent.

Conclusion

China is still counting on coal to keep the lights on and keep its industrialization booming. While it has invested heavily in subsidizing its solar power industry, it realizes it cannot continue with the massive subsidies and has issued draft guidelines to phase them out. Despite having overcapacity and underutilized plants, it is continuing to construct coal-fired plants to ensure that power is available throughout the country and throughout the day.

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The “No-Growth” Prescription for Misery

A growing number of academics are claiming that economic growth must stop because the planet is crossing environmental boundaries, and inequality between humans is increasing. They are wrong on both counts, and their agenda is a recipe for keeping poor people poor

LONDON – From their ivory towers, nearly 240 academics have declared that economic growth is bad for Europe and the planet. In two months, they and global supporters of the “no-growth economy” have held conferences in Mexico City, Malmö, and Brussels.

Their efforts herald a return to an earlier, thoroughly debunked form of alarmist environmentalism that is detached from reality and disdainful of billions of the world’s people.

The campaigners claim we must stop economic growth because the planet is crossing environmental boundaries, and inequality between humans is increasing.

But for the most important environmental issues, economic growth has solved problems, not created them. The cleanest places are not the poorest countries, but the richer economies that have cleaned up their act. As societies become richer, individuals can afford to stop worrying about food and sanitation, and to start worrying about the environment.

Indoor air pollution is the world’s biggest environmental killer, claiming lives because poor people burn dung and wood for cooking and heating. As societies get richer, people can afford cleaner technology. In 1990, indoor air pollution caused more than 8% of deaths; in 2016 it was 4.7%. Each year 1.2 million fewer people die from indoor air pollution, despite an increase in population.

Outdoor air pollution worsens as societies first leave extreme poverty. But then it declines markedly as growth, technological change, and public attitudes affect policies and regulations. In China, for example, sulphur dioxide emissions peaked in 2006 and have been declining since.

The world’s forests tell a similar story. For most of human history, trees were decimated wherever humans settled. Higher agricultural yields and changing attitudes have meant rich countries are increasingly preserving forests and reforesting.

Moreover, economic growth delivers improved access to all the vital things that most people on the planet demand or want: health, education, security, and mobility.  Both within and between countries, life satisfaction increases with higher incomes. A study in Europe asking whether prosperity enhanced quality of life found that, “Europeans’ life-quality is better in wealthier societies.”

The no-growth campaigners claim that inequality is at the heart of their concern, but they studiously ignore the vast majority of the planet. The US has experienced a clear increase in inequality: the top 1% earned 18% of income in 1913; this fell to 10.4% in 1976, and returned to 20% in 2014. But the experience is markedly different in most of the world, including continental Europe and Japan, where the top 1% earn about half what they did 100 years ago. Globally, inequality has been declining, because many more people in the developing world have emerged from poverty.

Income is not the only indicator of inequality that is dropping. Half of all welfare gains from 1960 to 2000 come from us living longer, healthier lives. In the past half-century, the gap in life expectancy between the world’s wealthiest and poorest countries has narrowed from 28 to 19 years. As a result, lifespan inequality is lower than it has been for two centuries.

Global trade and economic growth have transformed lives on a scale that was once unimaginable. Two centuries ago, around 94% of the planet was impoverished. In 2015, the World Bank found that for the first time ever, less than 10% of the world’s population was living in extreme poverty. Between 1990 and today, the number of people living in extreme poverty fell by more than one billion.

The latter-day Malthusians are opposed to extending these tremendous benefits to more of the world because they believe that global warming will be so bad that it justifies stopping growth. This contradicts the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which says, “for most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers” like changes in population, age, income, and technology.

According to the IPCC, the total impact of climate change amounts to about 0% of GDP now, and in 2100 will cost 2-4% of GDP. That’s a problem, but not one that remotely justifies blocking people’s opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty.

The solution to climate change – like so many other challenges – will come from technology. We need to work far harder to make green energy cheaper and more efficient than fossil fuels, so we can continue to lift millions from poverty without emitting carbon dioxide.

With blinkered analysis and misplaced concern, the academics essentially say that to reduce global warming slightly, we should end growth that can lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, avoid millions of air pollution deaths, and give billions the opportunity of a better life through improved health care, shelter, education, and income.

There is something deeply disturbing about academics’ telling others to forgo the benefits they have enjoyed. What the world really needs is far more growth and far less hypocrisy.

SOURCE







Fight tuberculosis, not climate change, to save lives

A tiny fraction of the resources wasted on combating climate change could eradicate tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest infectious disease

BJORN LOMBORG

Global leaders recently swept into New York for the UN General Assembly, trailed by thousands of media, activists and protesters. During the high-level get-together, two very different meetings held at exactly the same time revealed much about their priorities — and their flawed approach to the planet’s biggest problems.

At a glittering gala event, the heads of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Google and the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, joined leaders from Denmark, France, New Zealand and beyond to pledge support for the acceleration of the implementation of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

This is a very poor answer to climate change: even Al Gore’s climate adviser, Jim Hansen, now says it is “wishful thinking” that will increase emissions.

The big problem with the Paris treaty is that countries are expensively trying to cut relatively small amounts of carbon dioxide by subsidising today’s inefficient alternative energy. This doesn’t tackle the underlying problem that green energy sources are far from ready to replace fossil fuels: wind and solar energy meet only 0.8 per cent of our energy needs yet require $US150 billion ($212bn) in subsidies.

The best individual and collectively peer-reviewed economic models show implementing the agreement will cost $US1 trillion to $US2 trillion every year from 2030 by increasing energy costs and thereby slightly slowing GDP growth. Yet this will do almost nothing to solve climate change. It is widely accepted by climate scientists that keeping temperature rises below 2C requires a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to almost 6000 gigatonnes of CO2. The UN organiser of the Paris Agreement estimates that if every country makes every single promised carbon cut between 2016 and 2030, emissions will be cut by the equivalent of 56Gt of CO2 by 2030. Paris leaves 99 per cent of the problem in place.

A far more effective answer to global warming would be to ramp up research and development investments into green energy to outcompete fossil fuels, so all countries can switch without abandoning poverty-eradicating growth.

Across town from the climate event, the first UN leaders’ meeting on tuberculosis made a far smaller splash. Only 16 heads of government showed up, with none from Europe or North America, and no leaders from Silicon Valley or Wall Street.

Public health campaigners were requesting an increase of $US5.4bn a year for the fight against TB, the globe’s biggest infectious disease killer. The disease receives only 4.6 per cent of health development spending from rich countries.

For more than a decade, hundreds of top economists and seven Nobel laureates have undertaken cost-benefit analysis for the Copenhagen Consensus Centre to evaluate solutions to the world’s biggest challenges. Globally and at a national level, this consistently shows testing for and treating TB creates phenomenal returns to society.

TB is especially insidious because it hits mostly young adults, just as they establish families and careers. Recent CCC research looking at several states in India, which has the highest level of TB, found that improving detection and treatment generated huge benefits for society. In monetary terms, every dollar spent can generate a return to society worth more than $US100.

The difference is stark. The World Health Organisation estimates that since the 1970s climate change has claimed about 140,000 lives each year, rising to about 250,000 towards the middle of the century. The Paris response will cost the planet more than $US1 trillion annually, avoiding almost none of these deaths. At an annual cost of one-half of one-hundredth of the cost of Paris, we could avoid the deaths of more than a million people each year from TB.

The two meetings show how global priorities are askew. It shouldn’t be a struggle to get donor attention for challenges such as TB (or the many other health, societal and environmental problems that weren’t highlighted by the UN). This is especially disturbing when money and political capital are being poured into a flawed response to climate change by world leaders who — unlike Gore’s climate adviser — refuse to admit the obvious.

The blinkered focus is affecting development spending for the world’s poorest. The OECD estimates that more than $30bn of country-to-country aid — more than one-fifth — is climate related. That is more than three times what would be needed to eradicate the world’s worst infectious disease. Yet international organisations spend another $US19bn on climate-related aid.

This is not what the world’s poor want. Nearly 10 million people were asked their policy priorities. Education and better healthcare were the clear answers, both globally and from the world’s most destitute. At the bottom of the list came climate policies. We should tackle climate change effectively through green energy R&D. That would leave more attention and money for other important issues, from stopping air pollution and reducing malnutrition to ending child marriage — and for finally eradicating the world’s biggest infectious disease killer.

SOURCE







Oil Prices Could Fall Further on Rising U.S. Supplies, OPEC Report Says

Rising crude oil inventories and increased output in the U.S. could push oil prices down in the coming weeks, an internal OPEC report said Thursday.

A coming “seasonal scale back in refinery demand...could result in oil stock builds,” said an internal market report, which was circulated late Thursday within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The buildup, “amid the upward trend in US crude oil production, could be a bearish factor for oil prices in the coming few weeks," the report said.

OPEC’s assessment came as Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, fell below the $80-a-barrel threshold for the first time in nearly a month on Thursday, after data showed an unexpected rise in U.S. inventories.

Late Thursday afternoon, light, sweet crude for November delivery was 0.9% lower at $69.14 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude was 0.3% lower at $79.78 a barrel.

At a meeting last month, the cartel and its allies debated how much they should open up their spigots to make up for Iranian oil exports, which will fall under a U.S. ban next month.

But while Saudi Arabia and Russia have boosted output, some OPEC officials are worried about a global oil surplus.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration said Monday it expects American tight-oil production to rise by 98,000 barrels a day from October to November.

The planned maintenance of Russian refineries could hit oil prices charged by Moscow and its competitors in Europe in particular, the OPEC report said.

Meanwhile, revisions to global economic forecasts by the International Monetary Fund, fueled by trade disputes between the U.S. and its partners, “cast more uncertainty over oil demand growth in 2019,” the document said.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration on Wednesday reported crude oil stockpiles had risen by 6.5 million barrels last week, to stand at 416.4 million barrels.

Earlier in October, Brent breached the $85-a-barrel level for the first time in roughly four years.  But prices have come under pressure in the past week, amid global stock market turmoil and signs of weakening oil demand.

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.  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 October, 2018

It will take the Earth 3 million years to recover from the species going extinct in the near future

This is utter nonsense.  To make such a claim, you have to have a firm count of how many species there already are plus an equally firm count of the number of species that existed on at least one occasion in the past.  No such counts exist.  So it is all just guessing.

And in any case extinctions have always happened, sometimes on a massive scale.  On some estimates, 95% of all the species that have ever lived on earth are now extinct. We don't grieve that the once ubiquitous trilobites are no more so it would seem normal to accept the reality of death and extinction. But given the modern-day efforts at nature conservation, it is entirely open to us to conclude that extinctions actually have slowed down in the modern era.  LOL

Note that a lot of the extinctions we know about were from the pre-modern or early modern era, not the product of 20th and 21st century civilization:  The mammoth, the dodo and the passenger pigeon, for instance.  And the extinction of the Australian megafauna appears to date from the arrival of Aborigines in Australia, who were pretty good hunters of slow animals -- and that was about 50,000 years ago -- so definitely not the fault of modern man

And note the implicit assumption that the non-extinction of all animals is good.  Why is it good?  I think we could make a case that it does not matter at all -- excerpt perhaps for sentimental reasons.  The possibility that some one or other of the existing animals might do us some unknown good in the future would have to be vanishingly small at this stage of our knowledge.  We don't allow for all the possibilities in our lives -- or else we would never do anything


Humans will cause so many mammal species to go extinct in the next 50 years that the planet's evolutionary diversity won't recover for 3 to 5 million years, a team of researchers has found.

The Earth may be entering its sixth mass extinction: an era in which the planet's environments change so much that most animal and plant species die out. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature predicts that 99.9% of critically endangered species and 67% of endangered species will be lost within the next 100 years.

The five other times a mass extinction has occurred over the past 450 million years, natural disasters were to blame. But now, human activity is killing mammal species.

In a study published Monday in the journal PNAS, scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark calculated how fast extinctions are happening, and how long it would take for evolution to bring Earth back to the level of biodiversity it currently has.

The scientists concluded that in a best-case scenario, nature will need 3-5 million years to get back to the level of biodiversity we have on Earth today. Returning to the state Earth's animal kingdom was in before modern humans evolved would take 5-7 million years.

Evolution can't keep up

Evolution is the planet's defense mechanism against the loss of biodiversity. As habitats and climates change, species that can't survive die, and new species slowly emerge. But it takes a long time for new species to fill the gaps — and that process is far slower than the rate at which humans are causing mammals to go extinct.

For their calculations, the Aarhus University researchers used a database containing existing mammal species and mammals that already went extinct as humans spread across the planet. They combined that data with information about extinctions expected to come in the next 50 years, and used advanced simulations of evolution to predict how long recovery would take.

Their estimates are based on an optimistic assumption that people will eventually stop ruining habitats and causing species to die out, and the extinction rate will go back down. But even in that best-case scenario, the timeline depends on how quickly mammals start recovering. If the extinction rate doesn't start falling for another 20-100 years, more species will likely disappear, causing greater diversity loss, the study said.

The researchers noted that in their model, certain species were given more importance than others. Matt Davis, a paleontologist at Aarhus University who led the study, cited the shrew as an example. There are hundreds of species of shrew, so if one or two go extinct, that would not kill off all shrews on Earth.

But there were only four species of sabre-toothed tigers on the planet. So when they all went extinct, many years of evolutionary history disappeared with them.

"Large mammals, or megafauna, such as giant sloths and sabre-toothed tigers, which became extinct about 10,000 years ago, were highly evolutionarily distinct," Davis said in a press release. "Since they had few close relatives, their extinctions meant that entire branches of Earth's evolutionary tree were chopped off."

Today, other large animals like the black rhino are facing extinction. Asian elephants' chance of making it to the 22nd century is less than 33%, the study found. These elephants are one of only two remaining species from a group of mammals that once included mastodons and mammoths.

"We now live in a world that is becoming increasingly impoverished of large wild mammalian species," Jens-Christian Svenning, an Aarhus University professor who researches megafauna, said in the press release. "The few remaining giants, such as rhinos and elephants, are in danger of being wiped out very rapidly."

He noted that the planet no longer boasts giant beavers, giant deer, or giant armadillos.

Though the researchers' findings are dire, the scientists said their work could be used to figure out which endangered species are evolutionarily unique, which might help conservationists decide where to focus their efforts to prevent the most devastating extinctions.

SOURCE






Lady big eyes compares global warming to Nazism

Democratic socialist congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to address global warming the same way America defeated the Nazis during World War II.

Speaking at a campaign event on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez made the case that, since Nazi Germany and global warming are both “existential threats,” the same tactics used against one should be levied against the other.

“So, when we talk about existential threats,” said Ocasio Cortez, “the last time we had a really major existential threat in this country was around World War II. So, we’ve been here before, and we have a blueprint of what we did before. None of these things are new ideas.”

Thunberg's recent actions have been celebrated by climate activists including 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, who highlighted the march and thanked the teen for her leadership in a tweet on Saturday:

SOURCE

So stopping less than 2 degrees of warming is worth 60 million dead?  That's what it took to beat Nazism.  But Greenies hate people anyway so that might not be a problem to them






Warmists now relying on kiddy wisdom



Addressing some 10,000 people in Helsinki on Saturday at what some campaigners are calling Finland's largest ever climate demonstration, 15-year-old Greta Thunberg urged marchers to fight for the major systemic changes that experts have said are necessary to limit greenhouse gas emissions and avert a looming climate catastrophe.

"Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground, so we can't save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to change. Everything needs to change and it has to start today," declared the Swedish teenager, who traveled to the capital city of her nation's Nordic neighbor for Saturday's massive march.

"A lot of people say that Sweden or Finland are just small countries and that it doesn't matter what we do," Thunberg added. "But I think that if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school for a few weeks, imagine what we could do together if we wanted to."

Thunberg garnered international media attention when, ahead of Sweden's September election, she refused to attend school and instead protested outside the Swedish parliament, handing out educational pamphlets to passersby. Now that the election has passed, the self-described "climate radical" and others who have joined the strike return to school for four days each week but still protest on Fridays.

SOURCE







Consumers will suffer the hangover from Trump's ethanol binge

President Trump announced earlier this week that he intends to take actions to increase the mandate to add ethanol to fuels. Currently, refineries producing transportation fuel must demonstrate each year that they have blended certain volumes of renewable fuel into gasoline or diesel, or else acquire expensive credits from others who do so.

The Trump administration’s action, which would require formal rulemaking, would direct the EPA to allow gasoline with 15 percent ethanol to be distributed year-round, reversing the current ban during summer months.

That action might be politically savvy, to make good on a campaign promise and to ease the impact of foreign tariffs on U.S. corn farmers by artificially raising demand for corn. (In this country, ethanol is obtained largely by fermenting corn.)

But it has little else to recommend it.

Politics aside, any defense of U.S. ethanol policy must embrace a series of fallacies which include: 1.) ethanol produced from corn makes the U.S. less dependent on fossil fuels, 2.) ethanol lowers the price of gasoline, 3.) an increase in the percentage of ethanol blended into gasoline boosts the overall supply of gasoline, and 4.) ethanol is environmentally-friendly and lowers global carbon dioxide emissions.

Not one of these claims is true. Yet, the ethanol lobby continues to promote them, and many politicians and lobby groups seem intoxicated by them.

Politicians like to say that ethanol is environmentally-friendly, but these claims must be put into perspective. Although corn is a renewable resource, it has a far lower yield relative to the energy used to produce it than does ethanol from sugar cane. Moreover, ethanol yields about 33 percent less energy per gallon than gasoline, so mileage drops off significantly when it is added. Motorists, who buy fuel in order to travel distances, are thus over-charged for every gallon of blended fuel. Fuel costs for Americans are artificially inflated due to the lower energy content of ethanol and the high costs faced by fuel companies trying to comply with ill-conceived fuel regulations.

The truth is that the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, which mandates ethanol blends in the first place, has failed miserably in achieving any of its stated goals.

Lower-cost biomass ethanol — for example, from rice straw (a byproduct of harvesting rice) or switchgrass — would make far more environmental sense, but large volumes of ethanol from biomass will not be commercially viable for many years. Moreover, production will be delayed by government policies that specifically encourage corn-based ethanol by employing subsidies.

American legislators and policymakers seem oblivious to the scientific and economic realities of corn ethanol production. Brazil and other major sugar cane-producing nations enjoy significant advantages over the U.S. in producing ethanol, including ample agricultural land, warm climates amenable to vast plantations, and on-site distilleries that can process cane immediately after harvest.

Thus, in the absence of cost-effective, domestically-available sources for producing ethanol, rather than using corn, it would make far more sense to import ethanol from Brazil and other countries that can produce it efficiently.

But, of course, this would defeat the purpose of the policy, which is actually meant to be a sop to Midwestern farmers.

The Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group, applauds the administration’s proposed action, because it creates increased demand for its flagship product. Several years ago, the organization opposed the EPA’s proposed lowering of the Renewable Fuel Standard when severe drought boosted corn prices. A spokesman made this particularly ironic comment: “Ultimately, the market will sort out any imbalances in supply and demand.” But the association had evinced little confidence in the forces of supply and demand when they convinced Congress to mandate the diversion of 38 percent of the corn supply to ethanol production.

This intense lobbying reminds us of this observation by 18th-century philosopher and economist Adam Smith: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Politicians may be drunk with the prospect of corn-derived ethanol, but it is consumers who will ultimately suffer the hangover.

SOURCE






Australia's climate policy not changing: treasurer

Climate change has been touted as an important contribution to the Liberals' loss in Wentworth but Josh Frydenberg says the coalition won't shift its policy.

Not even being on track for a minority government will force the coalition into a shift in thinking on climate change, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has confirmed.

Independent Kerryn Phelps is headed for victory in the Wentworth by-election after a historic swing of more than 20 per cent against the Liberal Party.

The expected result will see the coalition with 75 seats in the House of Representatives - one short of a majority - with Labor holding 69.

The Australia Institute's exit polling shows climate change and replacing coal with renewable energy was the biggest issue motivating voters in Wentworth.

The research shows 77 per cent of voters said it influenced their vote, with one-third stating it was the most important issue when heading to the polling booth on Saturday.

While Mr Frydenberg conceded climate change was important to the people of Wentworth, he believed other issues were at play.

He said the predicted defeat for candidate Dave Sharma was more about the Liberal Party's ditching of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who had been the local member since 2004.

"The message from the voters of Wentworth is you've been punished for the events of recent weeks with the leadership," Mr Frydenberg told Sky News on Sunday.

Mr Frydenberg went on to tell reporters on Sunday the government was on track to meet emissions targets. "What we will not do is increase people's power bills as a result of these policies," Mr Frydenberg said.

"That is very different to Bill Shorten. He has a 50 per cent renewable energy target and a 45 per cent emissions reduction target. That spells higher power bills for Australians."

Dr Phelps said the public was tired of the government's "self-interest" and important issues must be kept on the agenda. "They want to start to see some movement on action on climate change," Dr Phelps said.

Senior Labor MP Tony Burke said former prime minister Tony Abbott was still in charge of the coalition's policies. "The hard-right agenda has made this government incapable of dealing with issues like climate change and people have had enough of it," Mr Burke told ABC TV on Sunday.

Centre Alliance's Rebekha Sharkie said the message from the public on climate change was clear. "A couple of critical issues in the Wentworth by-election and people raise with me every day in Mayo is ensuring we have climate change action in the parliament," Ms Sharkie told ABC TV on Sunday.

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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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21 October, 2018

Groan! Another tale about the evils of particulate pollution

New York Magazine has a subsection called "Intelligencer" which would more aptly be called "Dramatizer".  Under the heading, "Trump’s Climate Denial Isn’t Just a War on Our Coastlines. It’s a War on Our Brains'" they have a large collection of tired old Warmist talking points, all of which have been refuted many times by skeptics. Hell! I have refuted them many times.

What has got them particularly stirred up this time is particulate pollution -- tiny little bits of matter that float around in the air.  Diesel truck exhausts put out a lot of it. And various industries put it out too. Technically, it is airborne particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, known as PM2.5.

Various regulations exist to minimize it but there is still some out there.  And to Greenies it is obviously BAD.  They need no evidence to draw that conclusion.  But Greenies are an evangelical lot so they like to draw others into their faith. And a lot of the people they target are pesky people who demand evidence!  So they have often set out to provide it.

That "often"really gives the game away. If there really were any firm evidence that normal levels of particulate pollution were bad for us, they would not have to keep trying to prove it!

For a long time I would write something pointing the holes in the various studies as they came out but I am getting more and more reluctant to do that.  "There are none so blind as those who will not see" and even basic errors of science are usually invisible to the Green/Left.

So let me just give the key paragraph in the whole long winded article and then go on to point out what it misses:

Excerpt: "How big are the developmental and cognitive effects? The term researchers use is “huge” — the equivalent of having lost a year of education. Reducing Chinese pollution to the EPA standard, they found, would improve the country’s test scores by 13 percent and its verbal scores by 8 percent —potential boosts in productivity that should alarm anyone concerned about the country’s rapid economic and geopolitical ascent".

I have recently given a general discussion of such studies here and here and I have dealt with the specific study principally relied on by  New York Magazine here. PM2.5 might be bad for you but that is yet to be shown in a scientifically well-founded way -- JR.







Wow! Media declares moonwalker "mistaken" - Last Man to Walk on the Moon Mistaken About Climate Change on Earth

Why is geologist Harrison Schmitt  mistaken? Because the IPCC says otherwise! And this gem below is used as "evidence" Schmitt is "mistaken." Just how did the Geological Society of London "conclude" this? By a governing board vote of less than a dozen? A vote by people steeped in funding concerns and politics?

Excerpt:  In fact, The Geological Society of London concluded that humans were the cause of rapidly accelerating climate change in a statement published in 2010. Society members wrote an addendum to the statement in 2013 explaining that new climate data from the geologic record bolstered their original conclusion — "that CO2 is a major modifier of the climate system, and that human activities are responsible for recent warming."

SOURCE






Let’s get fracking on with it

The obstructionism has gone on long enough.

At the High Court in London this week, a group of anti-fracking activists had their sentences for blocking lorries going to fracking sites reduced on appeal. Simon Blevins, Richard Roberts and Rich Loizou had received surprisingly long custodial sentences for the protests at a fracking site at Preston New Road in July 2017. The appeal verdict, which reduced those sentences to conditional discharges after the three defendants had already served two weeks in jail, should be welcomed. Peaceful protests should not, ordinarily, attract a prison sentence straightaway. But while those initial sentences are worthy of criticism, so are the aims of the protests themselves.

Thankfully, the protesters appear to have failed to achieve their goal. On Monday at 1pm, according to energy exploration company Cuadrilla, drilling for shale gas started again in the UK. About time, too. The drilling – which is still exploratory in nature rather than for full production – has been held up for years by planning disputes, legal challenges and concerns about earth tremors. But the alarmism is misplaced.

Hydraulic fracturing – ‘fracking’ – of rock is a clever, economic and surprisingly old way to produce energy. It involves using explosions and a pressurised mix of water, sand and small quantities of chemicals to force trapped gas or oil out of rocks. It was first performed in 1947 in America, and the technique has been used since the 1960s in the UK. The big development in the past 20 years or so that has made fracking economically viable is improvements in horizontal or directional drilling, which mean fewer wells need to be dug. Instead, drillers can go deep underground and then drill sideways to maximise the area in which gas or oil is extracted.

There have long been misplaced claims made about fracking. The most lurid claim is that methane can leak from wells into water supplies, allowing tap water to be ignited. This claim is central to the agit-doc Gasland. But while it looks spectacular, the fact is that there have always been parts of the US where methane rising up from underground mixes with water.

In any event, the rocks that are fracked are generally way below the water table. As long as the wells are properly sealed – and drilling companies should be held to account if they’re not – then there should be no way for methane coming up from underground to mix with water.

Another common claim is that fracking causes ‘earthquakes’. It’s certainly true that if you set off explosions underground or force water into rocks, then seismic activity can occur. But only occasionally are such seismic events noticeable by human beings without the help of detection equipment. Even the strongest such events, which are very unusual, are so small that they wouldn’t cause damage to property. At most, there is noticeable shaking.

Such concerns ignore the fact that, while significant earth tremors are rare in the UK, minor events of the same strength as those caused by fracking are much more common. These are mostly natural, but can be caused by mining and other activities. The last notable ‘earthquake’ in recent years in the UK, in Lincolnshire in 2008, measured 5.2 on the Richter scale and was felt hundreds of miles away. However, that event – not exactly one that has lived long in the memory for most Brits – was roughly 800 times more powerful than the most powerful tremor caused so far by fracking (2.3 on the Richter scale). To call such seismic events caused by fracking ‘earthquakes’ is like calling a gentle breeze a ‘hurricane’.

SOURCE






Apocalypse Delayed

The IPCC report does not justify climate scaremongering.

BEN PILE   

We should all be dead by now, thanks to overpopulation and resource depletion. The few of us remaining should be scavenging a landscape denuded of life by acid rains and UV rays. Thankfully, we are not. Also still standing are the scientific institutions and the global bureaucracies that predicted our premature demise. One of those is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The job of the IPCC is to provide a review of climate-change research to policymakers. The bulk of climate policymaking occurs under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which meets yearly to try to wrangle a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At the 2015 UNFCCC meeting in Paris, a loose deal was struck. It aimed to limit global warming to 2°C, with a looser agreement to aim to limit it to 1.5°C. Subsequently, the UNFCCC asked the IPCC to compare global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C for a report to be published this year. So far, so boring.

But before the report was even published, it began to excite climate alarmists. In September, the Guardian reported leaked details from the report’s summary for policymakers, claiming that government interference had forced scientists to ‘water down’ their findings and ‘pull their punches’. The claim that ‘temperature rises of above 1.5°C could lead to increased migrations and conflict’ was cut from the final draft, it reported.

It is usually climate sceptics, not alarmists, who point out that the IPCC’s summaries are subject to political interference. These summaries tend to be much more alarmist than what the actual science says in the reports’ technical chapters. In 2014, for example, the summary for policymakers warned that climate change can increase the risks of conflict and migration. But this was totally unsupported by the technical parts of the document.

This year’s IPCC’s report has been a disappointment to many climate activists, including the apparent source of the leak, Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP) and the Grantham Research Institute (GRI). The GRI is named after its billionaire benefactor, Jeremy Grantham. Both the CCEP and the GRI are chaired by the world’s leading climate technocrat, Nick Stern, author of the UK government’s review of the economics of climate change in 2007.

The problem for Stern, his financial backers, researchers and PR men is that their political agenda depends on science identifying dramatic risks, which can act as a spur to action: catastrophic increases in the frequency and intensity of storms, flooding and drought, devastating changes to agricultural productivity, increases in diseases and poverty, impacts across society that could lead to civil conflict and war for resources. But so far, signs of these dramatic consequences have not materialised. As a result, these activists, researchers and technocrats are now at odds with the science.

That’s not to say that this year’s IPCC report gives nothing to alarmism. But it tells the alarmists that they will have to wait longer, that the apocalypse has been delayed. It also adds important caveats. Take, for example, the claim that ‘Any increase in global warming will affect human health… Risks from some vector-borne diseases, such as malaria and dengue fever, are projected to increase with warming from 1.5°C to 2°C.’ At face value, this appears to be a clear injunction from science that the 1.5°C target is preferable to the 2°C target. However, digging into the technical chapters of the report reveals that incorporating estimates of global adaptation to climate change into projections of its future trajectory ‘reduces the magnitude of risks’.

What this means is that these risks can be overcome by ‘adaptation’, even as the temperature rises. According to the two most authoritative estimates, the number of deaths caused by malaria has fallen dramatically in recent decades. While malaria has been eradicated from North America and Europe, it remains in Africa. Vulnerability to malaria remains strongly correlated with poverty, not meteorology. This ought to be read as an argument for development. It is ideology, not science, which turns the IPCC statement of risks into an argument for emissions reductions.

None of which is to say that global warming does not create risks. It does. But they are not the risks that climate technocrats have hoped to capitalise on. There are no immediate, looming catastrophes that can easily be detected in statistics which can provide unambiguous instruction to governments. Climate activists and technocrats need this threat of catastrophic risks to sustain their political arguments in lieu of any positive agenda. Though the most alarmist edges have been smoothed out of the IPCC’s output, it is still very much driven by ideology.

SOURCE






Thank fracking for continued decreases in US greenhouse gas emissions

For all the pearl clutching that swept over vast swaths of the Left after the U.S. pulled out of the Paris climate accords, President Trump continued the Obama and Bush administrations' success in decreasing domestic greenhouse gas emissions in his first year in office.

Advocates of increased environmental regulations may find it odd that directly measured greenhouse gas emissions fell by 2.7 percent from 2016 to 2017, and are down 12.2 percent since this type of reporting in was first done in 2011.

Trump entered office advocating for the expansion of the coal and the natural gas industry, and he has even tried to prop up big coal using emergency executive powers. But natural gas has relentlessly continued to replace coal as the electricity-generating fuel of choice thanks to its abundant supply and resulting low price. The combustion of natural gas produces just half of the carbon dioxide of coal.

The shale boom made possible by fracking has become a progressive bogeyman of sorts. Liberals will correctly point out that methane released from fracking is far more potent than carbon dioxide in fueling climate change. But as the U.S. Energy Information Administration reports, nearly two-thirds of reductions in energy-related CO2 emissions in the past decade can be attributed to fracking. Through technological developments, total greenhouse gas emissions from fracking have plummeted.

Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted that fracking "has increased and diversified the gas supply and allowed for a more extensive switching of power and heat production from coal to gas; this is an important reason for a reduction of GHG emissions in the United States.”

For what it's worth, even as fracking has expanded in the past decade, methane emissions have plummeted. The result is that the U.S., which has repudiated the Paris treaty, avoided the Kyoto Protocol, and refused to impose any sort of national caps on carbon emissions, has been more successfully in reducing its emissions than any of the nations that have embraced such economically damaging measures.

In short, fracking has done more to reduce greenhouse emissions than any environmentalist or environmental policy in modern history.

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.  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 October, 2018

Scientists bet $10K on the climate. Guess who lost

Climate science decided by gambling!  A rather desperate recourse!  There are others better qualified than I to comment on all the matters raised in this but I want to point out a couple of basics. 

1). OF COURSE climate skeptics declined to predict a specific climate outcome.  The whole position of climate agnosticism is that the climate is a multivariate product which CANNOT be reliably predicted.  You can only get a prediction right by chance.

2). And the quite glaring fault in Annan's reasoning was that he got his big prediction right because the more recent time period he chose encompassed the biggest El Nino we have seen recently.  So the temperature rise was entirely natural, unrelated to anthropogenic global warming. 

Had Annan been a real scientist, he would have corrected his data for the influence of El Nino, which would have shown an essentially flat temperature record -- i.e. no global warming.  Even the simple step of subtracting the leap caused by the previous El Nino would have shown that.

In my research career, I regularly corrected statistically for lots of extraneous factors before I accepted an observed effect as informative.  To make not even an obvious correction is beyond sloppy.  It is non-science

UPDATE: Forecaster Kesten Green writes as follows, putting my point 1 more precisely:

In scientific forecasting terms, what you are saying is don’t expect to beat the no naive no-change forecast of global mean temperatures over longer periods, which Scott, Willie, and I proposed in our 2009 paper in IJF “Validity of climate change forecasting for public policy decision making”.

The logical (and policy-relevant) bet on the predictive validity of “dangerous warming” is not “will it be warmer vs will it be colder” or “will the OLS fitted trend go up or down over the period”, but will the monthly or annual errors from a dangerous warming forecast (the 3C/century that the IPCC have been forecasting for the longest time) be smaller than the errors from a no-change forecast. That was the basis of the Climate Bet that Scott challenged Al Gore to take and that we monitor (as if he had taken the bet) at theclimatebet.com. The initial bet was 10 years to end-2017, which we calculated would be easy for no-change to lose given natural variations over the relatively short period. No-change nevertheless won.


It was a bet any climate scientist would take. It was 2005, and James Annan, a climate scientist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, had heard enough. Some researchers and conservative thinkers who reject mainstream climate science were arguing that climate models were wrong or that Earth would enter a cooler period after solar flares faded.

So he offered them a bet. The wager was $10,000 that the Earth would continue warming through 2017.

The winner would be decided by comparing global surface temperatures from 1998 to 2003 with those between 2012 to 2017. Annan was confident in the climate models, which showed that it would be warmer. Seven prominent climate contrarians refused to bet. Among them was Richard Lindzen, a physicist associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has rejected mainstream climate science.

Annan was essentially fighting with one hand behind his back. The comparison started in 1998, an anomalously warm year in the temperature records, partially driven by an El Niño. Still, Annan was confident that his science would outmatch political ideology.

"They didn't believe what they were saying; this was the whole point to the betting," he said. "It has a serious scientific point to it. ... It's one way of making the point that they're playing debating games."

Eventually, Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev, solar physicists at the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics in Russia, agreed to the wager. This week, Annan declared that the contest was over and that Mashnich and Bashkirtsev had lost. It comes as NASA said this week that 2018 could be the fourth-warmest year on record and the fourth year in a row that is 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the 19th-century average.

The researchers won't pay, Annan said. Neither Mashnich nor Bashkirtsev responded to questions from a reporter. Annan said Bashkirtsev wants a new bet. It would raise the stakes to $100,000 and cover another eight-year period.

Annan has declined that offer because he doesn't think the money will ever arrive. Besides, he said, his point has already been proved.

"It was obvious of course that this settlement risk was the biggest uncertainty right from the start," Annan wrote on his blog, announcing the contest's end Monday. "I had hoped they would value their professional reputations as worth rather more to themselves than the sums of money involved. On the other hand a certain amount of intellectual dishonesty seems necessary in order to maintain the denialist mindset."

Annan has won money on previous climate bets. In 2016, he and climate economist Chris Hope won a £2,000 wager against members of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a U.K.-based group that rejects climate science. The winners said 2015 would be warmer than 2008.

He has also lost.

Once, Annan bet that 2010 would break high temperature records. He was off by a year. The five warmest years since records began in the 19th century have all come after 2011, and the 10 warmest years have all come since 1998. Annan said that year, 1998, broke records, and now "we won't see a year that cold again."

More HERE 






Cockroach Krugman: Donald and the Deadly Deniers

America's leading Leftist economist is at it again. He is an economist and there is no evidence that he knows anything about climate science but that does not restrain him. It is just another area for him to pontificate in.  His idea of wise comments about climate skepticism is, in the usual Leftist way, mere abuse.  He calls our thinking "cockroach ideas".  Charming. Let me do a Trump and shoot back -- by saying he is the biggest cockroach of all:  Worth squashing only.

And his hand-waving arguments, such as they are, are all attacks on a straw man.  Skeptics have always agreed that there does seem to have been a slight warming (no more than one degree Celsius) in the last 150 years or so but regard a warming of no greater than one degree Celsis over that period as trivial and not significant in any important sense. Nothing recent has disturbed that judgement


Climate change is a hoax.

Climate change is happening, but it’s not man-made.

Climate change is man-made, but doing anything about it would destroy jobs and kill economic growth.

These are the stages of climate denial. Or maybe it’s wrong to call them stages, since the deniers never really give up an argument, no matter how thoroughly it has been refuted by evidence. They’re better described as cockroach ideas — false claims you may think you’ve gotten rid of, but keep coming back.

Anyway, the Trump administration and its allies — put on the defensive by yet another deadly climate change-enhanced hurricane and an ominous United Nations report — have been making all of these bad arguments over the past few days. I’d say it was a shocking spectacle, except that it’s hard to get shocked these days. But it was a reminder that we’re now ruled by people who are willing to endanger civilization for the sake of political expediency, not to mention increased profits for their fossil-fuel friends.

About those cockroaches: Details aside, the very multiplicity of climate-denial arguments — the deniers’ story keeps changing, but the bottom line that we should do nothing remains the same — is a sign that the opponents of climate action are arguing in bad faith. They aren’t seriously trying to engage with the reality of climate change or the economics of reduced emissions; their goal is to keep polluters free to pollute as long as possible, and they’ll grab onto anything serving that goal.

Still, it’s worth pointing out how thoroughly all their arguments have collapsed in recent years.

These days, climate deniers seem to have temporarily backed down a bit on claims that nothing is happening. The old dodge of comparing temperatures to an unusually warm year in 1998 to deny that the planet is getting warmer — which is like comparing days in early July with a warm day in May, and denying that there’s such a thing as summer — has been undermined by a string of new temperature records. And massive tropical storms fed by a warming ocean have made the consequences of climate change increasingly visible to the public.

So the new strategy is to downplay what has happened. Climate change models “have not been very successful,” declared Larry Kudlow, the top White House economic adviser. Actually, they have: Global warming to date is well in line with past projections. “Something’s changing and it’ll change back again,” asserted Donald Trump on “60 Minutes,” based upon, well, nothing.

Having grudgingly conceded that maybe the planet is indeed getting a bit warmer, the climate deniers claim to be unconvinced that greenhouse gases are responsible. “I don’t know that it’s man-made,” said Trump. And while he has sort-of-kind-of backed down on his earlier claims that climate change is a hoax concocted by the Chinese, he’s still seeing vast conspiracies on the part of climate scientists, who he says “have a very big political agenda.”

Think about that. Decades ago experts predicted, based on fundamental science, that emissions would raise global temperatures. People like Trump scoffed. Now the experts’ prediction has come true. And the deniers insist that emissions aren’t the culprit, that something else must be driving the change, and it’s all a conspiracy. Come on.

Why, it’s as if Trump were to suggest that the Saudis had nothing to do with the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, who vanished after entering a Saudi embassy — that he was killed by some mysterious third party. Oh, wait.

Finally, about the cost of climate policy: I’ve noted in the past how strange it is that conservatives have total faith in the power and flexibility of market economies, but claim that these economies will be completely destroyed if the government creates incentives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Apocalyptic claims about the cost of reducing emissions are especially strange given tremendous technological progress in renewable energy: The costs of wind and solar power have plummeted. Meanwhile, coal-fired power plants have become so uncompetitive that the Trump administration wants to subsidize them at the expense of cleaner energy.

In short, while the arguments of climate deniers were always weak, they’ve gotten much weaker. Even if you were genuinely persuaded by the deniers five or 10 years ago, subsequent developments should have made you reconsider.

In reality, of course, climate denial has never had much to do with either logic or evidence; as I said, deniers are clearly arguing in bad faith. They don’t really believe what they’re saying. They’re just looking for excuses that will let people like the Koch brothers keep making money. Besides, liberals want to limit emissions, and modern conservatism is largely about owning the libs.

One way to think about what’s happening here is that it’s the ultimate example of Trumpian corruption. We have good reason to believe that Trump and his associates are selling out America for the sake of personal gain. When it comes to climate, however, they aren’t just selling out America; they’re selling out the whole world.

SOURCE





Where riots will break out because there's no more water. Conflicts would be exacerbated by climate change and rising global populations

The nonsense never stops.  Warming of the oceans would produce MORE rain so warming would ameliorate water shortages, not worsen them.  Junk science in support of junk science below

New research has revealed the areas where real-life 'waterworld' riots are most likely to happen.

Researchers mapped the areas where future global conflict is most likely to break out as a result of climate change-fueled water shortages.

Researchers believe vulnerable areas could face 'hydro-political issues' due to water shortages within the next 50 to 100 years. 

Researchers said the areas most likely to be hit by 'hydro-political' issues are those with already stressed water basins.

This includes the Nile, Ganges-Brahmaputra, Indus, Tigris-Euphrates and Colorado rivers.

They believe water-related conflict or cooperation is likely to develop in the next 50 to 100 years as a result of climate change and population growth.

A team of scientists from the European Commission's Joint Research Center (JRC) used a novel machine learning method to identify 'pre-conditions and factors' that might lead to depleting water resources in certain areas, particularly those that contain water sources shared by bordering nations.

They also determined that the two dominant factors leading to 'hydro-political issues' are climate change and increasing population density.

While water scarcity isn't the only trigger for warfare, it's a major contributor.

'Competition over limited water resources is one of the main concerns for the coming decades,' the scientists explained.

SOURCE






Astronaut Dr. Harrison Schmitt rejects UN climate report

The New York Times’ Nicholas St. Fleur: "...as one of the leading climate change deniers, when there was a huge report that just came out last week [talking about] the risk and what is going to happen … as soon as 2040. I’d love to know if you see any irony in your views on people who denied man walking on the moon vs. your views on climate change.”

Schmitt: “I see no irony at all. I’m a geologist. I know the Earth is not nearly as fragile as we tend to think it is. It has gone through climate change, it is going through climate change at the present time. The only question is, is there any evidence that human beings are causing that change? Right now, in my profession, there is no evidence."

"The observations that we make as geologists, and observational climatologists, do not show any evidence that human beings are causing this. Now, there is a whole bunch of unknowns..."

"I, as a scientist, expect to have people question orthodoxy. And we always used to do that. Now, unfortunately, funding by governments, particularly the U.S. government, is biasing science toward what the government wants to hear. That’s a very dangerous thing that’s happening in science today, and it’s not just in climate. I see it in my own lunar research."...

"If NASA’s interested in a particular conclusion, then that’s the way the proposals come in for funding. So it’s a very, very serious issue, and I hope the science writers in this room will start to dig deeply into whether or not science has been corrupted by the source of funds that are now driving what people are doing in research, and what their conclusions are.”

SOURCE





A vision of the future



Note the huge waste disposal problem it creates.  Not very environmentally friendly.  Video from Finland

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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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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





18 October, 2018

Global warming will make beer much more expensive, scientists forecast

This is nonsense on stilts. The authors ignore both agricultural economics and plant biology.

Economics: There is no way there will be a barley shortage.  Grain crops tend to glut, not shortage. A small price rise would produce a flood of it.

Plant biology: A warmer climate would produce MORE rain overall, not less, which is good for ALL plants. And higher CO2 levels would also make ALL plants more vigorous and able to thrive even in low rainfall areas.  The area growing barley could EXPAND under global warming. 

And it is a temperate climate crop originating in the Middle East so if some areas did become too hot for it, a small move poleward should restore it to congenial conditions. And there would be much more arable land in the North under warming -- in Northern Canada and Southern Siberia, for instance.

Don't expect much science from scientists these days


IF YOU weren’t already worried about the effects of global warming, this should definitely do it.

Scientists have looked at the impact climate change will have on barley — a vital crop for beer making — and come up with a grim prediction: a global beer shortage.

While Australia hit “peak beer” in 1974-75, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, we still rank about 23rd in the world when it comes to beer consumption per capita.

So this is a very concerning forecast indeed.

The study was carried out by a small team of researchers in the US, the UK and China and published this week in the journal Nature Plants.

Scientists behind the study suggest that by the end of the century, increased drought and heat could hurt barley crops enough to cause a genuine shortage for beer makers, driving up the cost of a schooner.

“Beer is the most popular alcoholic beverage in the world by volume consumed, and yields of its main ingredient, barley, decline sharply in periods of extreme drought and heat,” researchers wrote.

“Although the frequency and severity of drought and heat extremes increase substantially in range of future climate scenarios by five Earth System Models, the vulnerability of beer supply to such extremes has never been assessed.”

So they set out to look at such a scenario under a range of different climate models.

Worldwide barley is used for all sorts of purposes, mostly feeding livestock. Less than 20 per cent of the world’s barley is made into beer. But in the United States, Brazil and China, at least two-thirds of the barley goes into six-packs, drafts, kegs, cans and bottles.

In Australia, barley has been losing ground to rival crops due, in part, to climate conditions and slowing overseas demand.

Barley is also one of the most heat-sensitive crops, making it particularly vulnerable to global warming and the extreme events brought on by climate change.

“We find that these extreme events may cause substantial decreases in barley yields worldwide,” researchers said.

In their estimation, losses of barley yield could easily be as much as 17 per cent. That means beer prices on average would double, even adjusting for inflation. In countries like Ireland, where cost of a brew is already high, prices could triple.

Study co-author Steve Davis of the University of California, Irvine, said the beer research was partly done to drive home the not-that-palatable message that climate change is messing with all sorts of aspects of our daily lives.

They knew, people like me would write about it and people like you would read about it.

The findings come a week after a dire United Nations report described consequences of dangerous levels of climate change including worsening food and water shortages, heatwaves, sea level rise, and disease.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s early response to the report was to promise that Australia would be not be spending money on climate change conferences and “all that nonsense”.

SOURCE 






Global warming will unlock ancient diseases like the plague, scientists say

The human population was very extensively exposed to the Black Death at the time of its prevalence and huge numbers died.  We, however, are descended from the survivors so should share their immunity

GLOBAL warming could reawaken ancient diseases — even the Black Death — according to an Oxford University professor.

Higher global temperatures would melt ice sheets that store long-buried bacteria, spreading disease and potentially causing new global pandemics.

Professor Peter Frankopan offered his prediction at the Cheltenham Literary Festival on Friday, as reported by The Times.

The professor of global history began by stating in his view there was “absolutely no chance” the international community would hit the Paris Agreement’s target of keeping global temperature rises under 1.5C.

“If we go over that degree change, it’s not about the Maldives being harder to visit on holiday or migration of people — it’s about what happens when permafrost unfreezes and the release of biological agents that have been buried for millennia,” he said.

With ancient bacteria released again into the Earth’s ecosystems, there would be a big risk of the global population being hit by diseases it can’t handle.

Chief among such diseases is the bubonic plague, which Prof Frankopan said was spread in the Middle Ages largely due to a rise in global temperatures.

“For example, in the 1340s, a 1.5 degree movement of heating of the Earth’s atmosphere — probably because of solar flares or volcanic activity — changes the cycle of Yersinia pestis bacterium,” he said.

“That 1.5 degree difference allowed a small microbe to develop into the Black Death.”

While bubonic plague still exists, cases worldwide are incredibly rare nowadays.

However, if Prof Frankopan’s predictions are realised, an outbreak could be wide-reaching and devastating.

He said such a possibility should be taken more seriously than a rise in sea levels or droughts, as the Black Death wiped out between 75 and 200 million people in Europe during the pandemics of the 14th and 15th centuries.

“These are the things we should be hugely worried about,” he said.

SOURCE






Banks must prepare climate change plan

They don't seem to be very clear on what the risks are

The Bank of England has told financial institutions that they must have a “credible plan” to cope with the potential costs arising from climate change.

The Bank’s Prudential Regulation Authority said that banks and insurers should show how they will deal with any fallout.

The PRA said that regulated firms would have to start including a list of their most significant exposures to climate-related risks in their reports to the authorities, as well as carrying out internal stress tests to identify problems, including detailed catastrophe modelling.

The Bank has been increasing pressure on the City to prepare for climate change and Mark Carney, the governor, has given several speeches.

Last month Mr Carney spoke about the risks in an interview with Bloomberg, the data company. He called for more sharing of information and urged businesses to “up their game on the quality of information they provide”.

The Financial Conduct Authority, sister agency of the PRA, published a paper on the issue yesterday setting out its concerns.

SOURCE






Nature-Wrecking Machines…Experts Warn Wind Turbines Slowing Wind Speeds, Causing More Warming!

Less and less wind due to more and more wind turbines?

An ever weaker wind is blowing across Germany. For example in the 1960s annual wind speeds of 3.7 meters per second were measured in Osnabrück, but now it’s only 3.2 m/s. That’s a drop of over 13 percent. Almost all weather stations in the country which were analyzed by the Bonn-based meteorologists at donnerwetter.de found that the trend looks similar.

Wind speed has decreased “very significantly”

“In most places, the mean wind speed has decreased very significantly,” says Dr. Karsten Brandt. And he has a suspicion: “We believe that in the last 15 years more and more massive wind turbines have influenced the wind speed.”

The trend of ever decreasing winds was not observed out on the open sea, however. To the contrary: On the islands of Norderney or Helgoland the wind has in fact increased slightly over the past 20-30 years. Yet in northern Germany, just inland from the coast, i.e. just after the first wind rotors, the donnerwetter.de meteorologists found a decline in the average annual wind speed: from 3.8 – 3.9 m/s to less than 3.5 m/s.

“Of course, the increase in building construction and especially high-rise buildings in Germany has had a slight braking effect,” admits Brandt. “The braking effect of wind turbines should, however, exceed this.”

Confirmed by other studies

A variety of studies support the meteorologists’ assumption. “Danish research has shown that air flow is weaker than before the turbines even 14 kilometers downstream from a wind farm,” says Dr. Brandt.

This is an effect that the operators of such parks are concerned about. If a new turbine park is built in front of an existing park in the main wind direction, the losses could be over 50 percent, American studies have shown.

In northern Germany, there is now one wind turbine every 10 square kilometers. According to the donnerwetter.de meteorologists, the North German air flow is generating so much energy that a weaker north wind is now arriving at the north German interior. The situation is similar with westerlies, which are weakened by wind turbines in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Wind park warming…”more heat inland”!

According to Dr. Brandt: “The weaker wind ensures less air exchange. This in turn drives up pollutant concentration in our air. Especially in the summer months, the lack of wind means more heat inland and less land-sea-wind circulation. In addition, the air is heated by the generators, as further studies have shown.”

“Think again before further developing wind energy”

So far the wind has been considered as an almost inexhaustible source of energy – albeit being incalculable and poorly predictable. The fact that you can extract some of your energy from the wind turbines was seen as a pioneering achievement.

“But the fact that man takes so much energy from the wind”, the climatologist concludes, “and considering the consequences, we should probably think again before further developing wind energy.”

SOURCE







Subsidies to Power Plants Are No Substitute for a National-Security Plan

In an effort to deal with the market and non-market forces inflicting economic losses on coal- and nuclear-power plants, the Trump administration is seeking through regulation to force state and regional grid operators to purchase bulk power from coal- and nuclear-power producers to slow the (early) retirements of those facilities. The administration is justifying this policy on national-security grounds: “The Nation’s security and defensive capabilities . . . depend on an electric grid that can withstand and recover from a major disruption, whether from an adversarial attack or a natural disaster.” And: “Resources that have a secure on-site fuel supply . . . are essential to support the Nation’s defense facilities . . . and other critical infrastructure.”

It is true — and unsurprising — that foreign powers would test their ability to disrupt the U.S. power grid, a crucial component of the economy generally and of our national-defense infrastructure in particular. Nor are natural threats to that infrastructure unimportant. The question is whether this indirect measure — federal intervention in wholesale electricity markets — to address this national-security problem is a sound substitute for federal policies designed to deal with those threats directly. Moreover, states have nontrivial incentives to address reliability and resiliency threats so as to minimize the possibility of blackouts or service disruptions. Is it obvious that the federal intervention proposed by the Trump administration would yield an improved national-security outcome?

It is hardly the case that the federal government, state and regional authorities, and the private sector are ignoring this problem. Are there strong reasons to believe that ongoing and expected actions are insufficient? Nowhere has the Trump administration attempted to make that argument. Indeed, even the Department of Energy has responded to the cybersecurity threat, with its “Multiyear Plan for Energy Sector Cybersecurity” (March 2018). Does the federal government’s right hand know what its left hand is doing?

More generally, it is clear that pipeline operators recognize the importance of the cybersecurity threat to the resiliency of the natural-gas/power-grid nexus and are working with federal officials to address cybersecurity threats through planning efforts and investments. The gas industry last year participated for the first time in the GridEx IV training exercise, in which industry participants were tested with a set of simulated cyber and armed assaults on U.S. electric networks. In March, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) released an updated version of its pipeline-security guidelines, in which it outlines the measures that should be taken to protect pipeline assets in the cybersecurity context.

It must be the case that TSA has access to the same classified information on cyber and physical threats that is available to the Department of Energy. It is far from clear that a new DoE regulatory policy on power purchases would improve on the evolving policy of the TSA, particularly since the latter is designed specifically in terms of the threats, while the Energy Department proposal is a far cruder effort, one designed merely to keep the coal and nuclear generating plants open. It is the TSA guidelines that are consistent with the security objectives and standards established by the government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, which in April updated its official framework of cybersecurity objectives and standards that includes protection, defense, resilience, and recovery methods.

Back to ongoing federal efforts: Through the National Energy Technology Laboratory, the Energy Department has implemented a research-and-development program to develop technology for cyber-security protection across the power-generation sector. Representative Fred Upton (R., Mich.) has introduced legislation (HR 5175, the Pipeline and LNG Facility Cybersecurity Preparedness Act) “to require the Secretary of Energy to carry out a program relating to physical security and cybersecurity for pipelines and liquefied natural gas facilities.”

Such a program would address the cyber and physical threat directly. Why would an indirect program of subsidized purchases from coal and nuclear generators be a superior approach? Mandated purchases would not address the stated threats to pipelines at all, at least conceptually; they would merely shift the national electric-generation mix away from gas generation, thereby creating a new class of “stranded” assets with sales smaller than anticipated and therefore unable to earn the economic returns anticipated when the investments were made.

That outcome would create its own set of problems, foremost among them a system less flexible in terms of adjustments to changes in demand and supply driven by such variables as weather and unanticipated outages. The national-security argument promoted by the Trump administration in support of the proposed purchase mandates applies in equal force to that reduced flexibility for the regional and national grids, and it is far from obvious that the net national-security effect of the Trump proposal would prove to be positive. This is particularly the case given that the Trump proposal would increase costs in ways both explicit and hidden. Because industries contributing both directly and indirectly to national security would bear part of those adverse effects, the aggregate cost of national-security efforts would rise. Accordingly, the net effect of the Trump proposal on U.S. national-security endeavors would be unlikely to prove salutary.

The administration claims authority for this regulatory action under the Defense Production Act of 1950 and the Federal Power Act of 1920, both as subsequently amended. Under various interpretations of those laws, the federal government can order that power plants that store 90 days of fuel — that is, coal and nuclear plants — recover all of their (historical) costs, even when selling power in wholesale power markets in which sales and purchases are made at market prices, and which traditionally have been overseen by state and regional power authorities.

Some suspicion about the invocation of the national-security rationale for this proposal is justified. Why not ask Congress to authorize these subsidies explicitly? It is far from obvious that any such proposal would pass Congress, and it is not irrelevant to point out more generally that the legislative process — negotiating, writing, and enacting laws — is hard work. The end result yielded by the compromises and side promises required to move bills through both houses of Congress can be unsatisfying, to say the least. That is the case a fortiori for efforts to subsidize particular economic sectors, in that the scent of such largesse inexorably elicits demands, on the basis of exceedingly creative rationales, from innumerable interest groups and their political representatives for inclusion among the beneficiaries.

In pursuit of objectives viewed as necessary by presidents and executive-branch agencies, a president not devoted viscerally to the separation of powers and the U.S. constitutional system may be disposed to find the use of executive orders an attractive alternative to the messiness and distasteful components certain to characterize actual legislation. In the famous words of a former presidential aide: “Stroke of the pen, law of the land. Kinda cool.”

Barack Obama exemplified such thinking, and the erasure of much of his policy legacy is one predictable result. Ironically enough, even as the Trump administration is the active eraser, it seems to be following much the same path in its approach to the economic problems confronting coal- and nuclear-power generators.

If there are serious cyber and physical threats to the national power grid, and if federal actions to deal with them are appropriate, then those threats should be confronted directly. An attempt to circumvent them by subsidizing some segments of the power-generation sector at the expense of others is likely to yield the usual array of adverse unanticipated consequences for which federal-government machinations are famous. Too clever by half in a national security context, the Trump policy proposal has a real potential for counterproductive outcomes. However messy the process of legislative negotiation, it would be better for the administration to work with Congress to craft policies aimed directly at the problem, rather than attempt to impose a crude solution driven by an executive deus ex machina.

SOURCE

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

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  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 October, 2018

Climatologist: Florida’s Major Hurricane Hits – No Change In 118 Years

Roy Spencer

I’ve updated a plot of Florida major hurricane strikes since 1900 with Hurricane Michael, and the result is that there is still no trend in either intensity or frequency of strikes over the last 118 years:

This is based upon National Hurricane Center data. The trend line in intensity is flat, and the trend line in the number of storms (not shown) is insignificantly downward.

Nevertheless, the usual fearmongers are claiming Hurricane Michael is somehow tied to climate change.

After all, the Gulf of Mexico is unusually warm, right?

Yes, but if you look at the history of Jul-Aug-Sept average sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies over the eastern Gulf (available here, 25N-30N, 80W-90W), you will see that since 1860, this summer is only the 9th warmest in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

Even more astounding is that out of the top 10 warmest Gulf years since 1860, 7 occurred before 1970, which is before we experienced any significant warming.

So, all the “experts” can do is make vague claims about how major hurricanes like Michael are what we can expect more of in a warming world, but the data show that – so far at least – the data do not support the theory.

Major hurricanes are part of nature. As evidence of this, I will also remind people of the study of lake bottom sediments in Western Lake in the Florida panhandle, not far from where Michael made landfall.

It showed the last 1,000 years have been relatively quiet for Category 4 to 5 hurricanes, but the period from 1,000 to 3,400 years ago was a “hyperactive” period for intense landfalls at that location.

Hurricane strikes in the U.S. are notoriously variable, as evidenced by the recent (and unprecedented) 11+ year “drought” in major hurricane landfalls, which was finally broken in 2017.

Where were the claims that the hurricane drought was due to global warming?

Crickets.

Attributing the latest hurricane in any way to global warming is the ultimate in cherry-picking the data. In fact, they don’t even show the data.

I also included Michael in the count of ALL U.S. landfalling major hurricanes, again from NHC data. The marked downward trend since the 1930s, 40s, and 50s is quite evident:



Where is the news story about THAT? More crickets.

SOURCE






The BBC on meat

The elite are really coming after us normal folks.  Enjoy that T-bone while you can!

Just a week after scientists said huge cuts in carbon emissions were needed to protect the climate, a UK minister has shown just how hard that will be.

Scientists say we ought to eat much less meat because the meat industry causes so many carbon emissions.

But the climate minister Claire Perry has told BBC News it is not the government's job to advise people on a climate-friendly diet.  She would not even say whether she herself would eat less meat.

Ms Perry has been accused by Friends of the Earth of a dereliction of duty. They say ministers must show leadership on this difficult issue.

But the minister - who is personally convinced about the need to tackle climate change - is anxious to avoid accusations of finger-wagging. She said: "I like lots of local meat. I don't think we should be in the business of prescribing to people how they should run their diets."

When asked whether the Cabinet should set an example by eating less beef (which has most climate impact), she said: "I think you're describing the worst sort of Nanny State ever. "Who would I be to sit there advising people in the country coming home after a hard day of work to not have steak and chips?… Please…"

Ms Perry refused even to say whether she agreed with scientists' conclusions that meat consumption needed to fall.

A dereliction of duty?

Craig Bennett from Friends of the Earth responded: "The evidence is now very clear that eating less meat could be one of the quickest ways to reduce climate pollution.

"Reducing meat consumption will also be good for people's health and will free up agricultural land to make space for nature.

"It's a complete no-brainer, and it's a dereliction of duty for government to leave the job of persuading people to eat less meat to the green groups."

He said the government could launch information campaigns, change diets in schools and hospitals, or offer financial incentives.

Ms Perry said: "What I do think we need to do is look at the whole issue of agricultural emissions and do a lot more tree planting.

"But if you and I eat less meat, with all the flatulent sheep in Switzerland and flatulent cows in the Netherlands - that will just be wiped out in a moment. Let's work on the technology to solve these problems at scale."

She said instead of cutting down on meat, we could use (hugely expensive) equipment that sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Supper with the Perry family

Ms Perry said later that her own typical family meal is not steak and chips, but a stir-fry, which brings the taste and texture of meat into a dish dominated by vegetables. But she did not want to say this on camera.

She agreed it was appropriate for the government to advise people on healthy diets because the obesity epidemic is costing taxpayers more in health bills, but implied that this principle did not apply when considering the health of the planet.

Her fear of being condemned in the media as a bossy politician highlights the difficulty of the next phase of climate change reductions.

Until now, 75% of CO2 reductions in the UK have come from cleaning up the electricity sector. Many people have barely noticed the change.

Will the climate battle get personal?

Experts generally agree that for healthy lives and a healthy planet, the battle over climate change will have to get personal.

That could mean people driving smaller cars, walking and cycling more, flying less, buying less fast fashion, wearing a sweater in winter… and eating less meat.

People will still live good lives, they say, but they'll have to make a cultural shift.

If governments do not feel able to back those messages, they say, the near impossible task of holding global temperature rise to 1.5C will become even more difficult.

Ms Perry's comments came as she launched Green GB week, which aims to show how the UK can increase the economy while also cutting emissions. She will formally ask advisers how Britain can cut emissions to zero.

SOURCE





Trump Signs Bill to Clean Up Oceans from Trash Floating from Foreign Countries

Once again America has to shoulder the burden of problems created by others

President Donald Trump signed into law a bipartisan bill Thursday to clean up oceans from millions of tons of floating debris dumped into the ocean annually.

The president said foreign countries like China and Japan are to blame for dumping 8 million tons of debris each year into the world’s oceans, which then floats to the U.S. coast.

“Every year, over 8 million tons of garbage is dumped into our beautiful oceans by many countries of the world. That includes China, that includes Japan, and that includes many, many countries. This waste, trash, and debris harms not only marine life, but also fishermen, coastal economies along America’s vast stretches. The bad news is it floats toward us,” Trump said.

“I’ve seen pictures recently, and some of you have seen them, where there’s -- a vast, tremendous, unthinkable amount of garbage is floating right into our coast, in particular along the West Coast. And we’re charged with removing it, which is a very unfair situation. It comes from other countries very far away. It takes six months and a year to float over, but it gets here, and it’s a very unfair situation. It’s also unbelievably bad for the oceans,” he said.

The Save Our Seas Act “amends the Marine Debris Act to revise the Marine Debris Program to require the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to work with: (1) other agencies to address both land- and sea-based sources of marine debris, and (2) the Department of State and other agencies to promote international action to reduce the incidence of marine debris.”

The measure “also revises the program by allowing NOAA to make sums available for assisting in the cleanup and response required by severe marine debris events.”

“Every year, over 8 million tons of garbage is dumped into our beautiful oceans. And when you think of that number -- I mean, to think 8 million tons -- and I would say it's probably -- Senators, I think it’s probably more than that, based on what I’ve seen and based on the kind of work that I’ve seen being done,” the president said.

“This dumping has happened for years and even for decades. Previous administrations did absolutely nothing to take on the foreign countries responsible. We’ve already notified most of them and we’ve notified them very strongly,” he said.

According to Trump, the Marine Debris Program will be extended for five more years.

The bill also calls on the president to “support funding for research and development of bio-based and other alternatives or environmentally feasible improvements to materials that reduce municipal solid waste” and to “work with foreign countries that contribute the most to the global marine debris problem in order to find a solution to the problem.”

The bill also urges the president to “study issues related to marine debris, including the economic impacts of marine debris; and encourage the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to consider the impact of marine debris in relevant future trade agreements.”

“We also are strengthening that up to improve waste management overseas and clean up our nation’s water. We will boost the federal government’s response to ocean waste by authorizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to declare severe marine debris events, which happen all the time. It’s incredible. It’s incredible when you look at it. People don’t realize it, but all the time we’re being inundated by debris from other countries,” Trump said.

“This legislation will release funds to states for cleanup and for response efforts, and we will be responding and very strongly. The legislation also encourages the executive branch to engage with those nations responsible for dumping garbage into our oceans. My administration is doing exactly that,” Trump said.

The president said the new trade agreement he brokered between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada is the first to address the issue.

“For example, the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement is the first U.S. trade agreement ever to include commitments by the parties to cooperate to address land- and sea-based pollution and improve waste management,” Trump said, adding that it will be put into other agreements as well.

“The United States has some of the most beautiful beaches and oceans in the world, and the coastlines are incredible. As president, I will continue to do everything I can to stop other nations from making our oceans into their landfills.That’s why I’m pleased -- very pleased, I must say -- to put my signature on this important legislation,” he said.

SOURCE






Tesla Buyers Lose $7500 Tax Credit

Tesla has reached the beginning of the end of the $7500 federal tax credit for buyers of the automaker's electric vehicles. The rules of the credit spell out that only the buyers of the first 200,000 electric vehicles sold by each manufacturer are eligible for the full amount; after that point, the credit begins to decrease over time. Tesla hit the 200,000 mark earlier this year, and its credit will expire at the end of 2018. Because of this, Tesla has set a deadline for vehicle orders to be eligible for the credit: October 15.

On Tesla's website, the automaker claims that all vehicle orders placed by that date will be delivered by December 31, 2018, meaning they'll qualify for the full $7500. Deliveries starting January 1, 2019, will only be eligible for a $3750 credit, while deliveries starting July 1, 2019, will drop down to a credit of just $1875. This applies to the Model S, Model X, and Model 3.

This deadline won't affect the typical ordering and delivery process for Tesla vehicles. According to Tesla, those who submit their orders, along with a $2500 deposit, by October 15 will be guaranteed delivery of the vehicle by the end of the year. Final delivery is contingent on the buyer's payment of the full purchase price of the vehicle through leasing, financing, or paying cash (the $2500 deposit is credited toward the final purchase).

We would assume that this deadline will lead to an uptick in orders over the next few days, but Tesla hasn't made any announcements about a plan to ramp up production to make sure all these vehicles get delivered in time to be eligible for the credit.

SOURCE






Former Australian conservative leader John Hewson (The man who lost an "unlosable" election) urges voters to dump conservatives  over climate inaction

Hewson is an embittered man and has drifted Left since he lost. One also wonders whether he is still Chairman of "Port Augusta Graphite Energy" which wants millions in government grants to build a solar thermal plant in SA?  Follow the money? Hewson in fact earns his living by promoting global warming schemes and policies  

Former Liberal leader John Hewson has urged voters to turn on the Liberals in the up-coming Wentworth by-election over climate change, saying it may serve as a wake up call.

Dr John Hewson, who led the Liberal party from 1990 to 1994, said most Australians were disgusted the government had failed to show leadership on climate change.

"It's irresponsible, it's grossly irresponsible - we have politicians playing short-term political games for short-term political gains when they should be delivering a decisive climate action plan," he told SBS News. "It's a national disgrace."

The former Liberal MP for Wentworth stressed he was not endorsing or advocating for any particular candidate but said a political party without a policy on tackling climate change had lost the mandate to form a government. "You lose the right to govern if you do not listen to the electorate on these issues," he said. "This is why the electorate is pissed off."

Independent Kerryn Phelps looks poised to take out Malcolm Turnbull's former seat, based on the latest polling - resulting in a minority federal parliament.

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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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16 October, 2018

Trump gets it right on ’60 Minutes’

The mainstream media once again attempted to challenge President Donald Trump on “climate change,” but Trump emerged unscathed by refuting typical climate claims with accurate and remarkably scientific comments in an October 14, 2018, 60 Minutes interview. (Even the mainstream media acknowledged Trump’s overall interview victory: See:  Variety: ’60 Minutes’ Was Outmatched by Trump – ‘He won every segment of the interview’)

A Climate Depot analysis finds that President Trump’s climate remarks were scientifically, politically and economically accurate. Finally, the United States has a president who understands “global warming”! See: Full climate transcript: Trump: Scientists who promote ‘climate’ fears ‘have a very big political agenda’ – [As Variety noted, Trump understands how to battle the mainstream media: Reporter Lesley Stahl asked Trump about “the scientists who say [the effects of climate change are] worse than ever,” but was [she] unprepared to cite one; knowing, now, that the human factor will not work on Trump, a broadcaster should be prepared to cite hard facts in a faceoff with the President.]

President Trump to 60 Minutes: “I think something’s happening. Something’s changing and it’ll change back again,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a hoax. I think there’s probably a difference. But I don’t know that it’s manmade. I will say this: I don’t want to give trillions and trillions of dollars. I don’t want to lose millions and millions of jobs.” … “I’m not denying climate change,” he said in the interview.

Reality Check: President Trump is frankly giving his assessment of man-made climate change and his understanding is in agreement with some very high profile scientists. Trump has been remarkably consistent with his climate views, demanding that “The Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore” in the wake of the Climategate revelations in 2010.

Trump is also correct on so-called climate “solutions” costing “trillions and trillions” of dollars. See: ‘GLOBAL WARMING’ ‘SOLUTIONS”  COULD COST $122 TRILLION  & Bjorn Lomborg on UN climate deal: ‘This is likely to be among most expensive treaties in the history of the world’

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. Ivar Giever told the new book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” that “The Earth has existed for maybe 4.5 billion years, and now the alarmists will have us believe that because of the small rise in temperature for roughly 150 years (which, by the way, I believe you cannot really measure) we are doomed unless we stop using fossil fuels…You and I breathe out at least thirty tons of CO2 in a normal lifespan, but nevertheless, the Environmental Protection Agency decided to classify rising carbon-dioxide emissions as a hazard to human health.”

The claim here is that carbon dioxide can have a warming impact on the atmosphere, but this does not mean CO2 is the control knob of the climate. As the University of London professor emeritus Philip Stott has noted: “The fundamental point has always been this. Climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically-selected factor (CO2), is as misguided as it gets.” “It’s scientific nonsense,” Stott added. Even the global warming activists at RealClimate.org acknowledged this in a September 20, 2008 article, stating, “The actual temperature rise is an emergent property resulting from interactions among hundreds of factors.”

Atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, a pioneer in development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at the Netherlands’ Royal National Meteorological Institute, has declared (as quoted in my book): “I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached.”

Richard Lindzen, an MIT climate scientist, said that believing CO2 controls the climate “is pretty close to believing in magic.” Climate Depot revealed the real way they find the “fingerprint” of CO2.

“We are creating great anxiety without it being justified … there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic,” award-winning 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.”

University of Pennsylvania Geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack noted in 2014, “None of the strategies that have been offered by the U.S. government or by the EPA or by anybody else has the remotest chance of altering climate if in fact climate is controlled by carbon dioxide.”

In layman’s terms: All of the so-called ‘solutions’ to global warming are purely symbolic when it comes to climate. So, even if we actually faced a climate catastrophe and we had to rely on a UN climate agreement, we would all be doomed!

Renowned Princeton Physicist Freeman Dyson: ‘I’m 100% Democrat and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on climate issue, and the Republicans took the right side’ – An Obama supporter who describes himself as “100 per cent Democrat,” Dyson is disappointed that the President “chose the wrong side.” Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere does more good than harm, he argues, and humanity doesn’t face an existential crisis. ‘What has happened in the past 10 years is that the discrepancies between what’s observed and what’s predicted have become much stronger.

Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist Dr. Ivar Giaever, Who Endorsed Obama Now Says Prez. is ‘Ridiculous’ & ‘Dead Wrong’ on ‘Global Warming’ – Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Dr. Ivar Giaever: ‘Global warming is a non-problem’ – ‘I say this to Obama: Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong. Dead wrong.’

‘Global warming really has become a new religion.’ – “I am worried very much about the [UN] conference in Paris in 2015…I think that the people who are alarmist are in a very strong position.’

Green Guru James Lovelock reverses belief in ‘global warming’: Now says ‘I’m not sure the whole thing isn’t crazy’ – Condemns green movement: ‘It’s a religion really, It’s totally unscientific’ – Lovelock rips scientists attempting to predict temperatures as ‘idiots’: “Anyone who tries to predict more than five to 10 years is a bit of an idiot, because so many things can change unexpectedly.” – Lovelock Featured in Climate Hustle – Watch Lovelock transform from climate fear promoter to climate doubter!

Trump on 60 Minutes: Lesley Stahl tells Trump: “I wish you could go to Greenland, watch these huge chunks of ice just falling into the ocean, raising the sea levels.” – President Trump responds: “And you don’t know whether or not that would have happened with or without man. You don’t know.”

More HERE  (See the original for links)





"Weather cooking"



A presentation worth watching by Dr. Sally Baliunas drawing uncanny parallels between the 14th-15th Century witch hunt and prosecutions for "cooking the weather", and modern attempts to silence rational thought in #climate #science and blame humanity:





UK: Cuadrilla to resume fracking seven years after tremors

Fracking for shale gas is due to resume in the UK today seven years after being temporarily suspended for causing small earthquakes.

About 40 protesters this morning tried to block the entrance to Cuadrilla’s site in a field beside Preston New Road in Lancashire.

However, the company already had all the equipment on site and said the protest would not cause any further delay after Storm Callum had interrupted its plan to start fracking on Saturday.

Cuadrilla will force water, sand and chemicals down a well to hydraulically fracture rock about 1.5 miles below the surface.

The company plans to spend the next three months fracking two exploratory wells, performing the procedure on about 45 horizontal sections of each well.

It will then begin flow testing and should know by Easter whether shale gas will be as productive in the UK as geologists predict. British Geological Survey estimates that extracting only a tenth of the gas in shale rock beneath northern England would meet Britain’s gas needs for 40 years.

Gas production from the North Sea is expected to continue to decline over the next decade and the Oil and Gas Authority forecasts that the UK’s reliance on imported gas could rise from 50 per cent now to 66 per cent by 2030.

Cuadrilla said it hoped to have 100 sites in production in the north of England over the next 20 to 30 years.

The company caused small earthquakes in 2011 at its Preese Hall site in Lancashire 2011 which resulted in a temporary ban on fracking.

The government insists that the problems seen in the US, where communities have blamed fracking companies for contaminating water supplies, will not happen here. The Environment Agency is closely monitoring Cuadrilla’s site for any impacts on air and water quality.

A new early warning system for earthquakes has been introduced since the tremors in 2011. Cuadrilla will have to stop fracking for 18 hours and let the pressure in the well drop if it causes any tremor more than 0.5 in magnitude on the Richter Scale.

It is also forbidden from fracking on Sunday and its permitted hours are 8am to 6pm Monday to Friday and 9am to 1pm on Saturday.

The strongest of the earthquakes Cuadrilla caused in 2011 at its Preese Hall site in Lancashire was 2.3. Earthquakes start to be felt at the surface at about 1.5.

Huw Clarke, a Cuadrilla geoscientist, said the company would publish all its results from its seismic monitoring, with data uploaded to its website by 10am on the day after it was collected. The company has pledged to issue an immediate statement if it hits 0.5.

BGS has a separate array of seismometers within a few miles of the site to verify the results independently.

Eric Vaughan, Cuadrilla’s fracking manager, said the volume of water forced down the well during each frack would only be sixth of that used at Preese Hall, reducing the risk of triggering an earthquake.

The company has also taken three dimensional seismic surveys of the geology and has drilled around faults, unlike at Preese Hall where it hit an undetected one after conducting only two dimensional surveys.

The last of several unsuccessful legal challenges against fracking by environmental campaigners was dismissed by the High Court in London on Friday

Mr Justice Supperstone rejected Bob Dennett’s application for an injunction preventing Cuadrilla from fracking pending his proposed legal challenge.

Mr Dennett had claimed that Lancashire county council’s emergency response planning and procedures at the site are inadequate but the judge ruled that there was not a “serious issue” to be tried which would justify an interim order.

Francis Egan, Cuadrilla’s chief executive, said: “We are delighted to be starting our hydraulic fracturing operations as planned. We are now commencing the final operational phase to evaluate the commercial potential for a new source of indigenous natural gas in Lancashire.

“If commercially recoverable, this will displace costly imported gas, with lower emissions, significant economic benefit and better security of energy supply for the UK.”

Reclaim the Power, an anti-fracking group, blockaded the site with a van from 4.30am this morning. A scaffold structure was erected on top with a banner reading “Stop The Start. Don’t Frack the Climate”

The group said it was hypocritical of the government to be calling for more global action on climate change while overruling Lancashire county council, which had rejected Cuadrilla’s fracking application.

Charlie Edwards, from Reclaim the Power said: “Today the government have launched their ‘Green Great Britain’ week — a tokenistic attempt to hide a series of climate-wrecking decisions such as expanding Heathrow airport and forcing fracking on the local communities.”

Michael Bradshaw, professor of global energy at Warwick Business School, said: “Everyone in the industry, as well as the Conservative government, will now be holding their breath and hoping that nothing goes wrong as the pumps roar.”

SOURCE







British PM reveals bid to cut UK's Greenhouse gas emissions to ZERO following UN warning over 'environmental catastrophes'

She is the complete bureaucrat, with not an original thought in her head

Greenhouse gas emissions need to be slashed to zero across the economy, the Prime Minister signalled yesterday. If adopted, the new targets would mean more radical changes than the country’s existing commitments.

The need to reduce carbon will be across every single sector of the economy, with the Government pointing specifically to industry, homes, transport and agriculture.

For instance, it is likely to mean faster progress in switching to electric power for transport and an increase in planting trees.

Ministers will also set out proposals for new laws for ‘smart energy’ appliances, such as washing machines and electric heating, with the aim of making all new buildings ‘smart’ by 2030.

Prime Minister Theresa May said: ‘On the global stage, the UK is driving forward action on climate change through our work at the UN and with our Commonwealth partners.

‘To ensure that we continue to lead from the front, we are asking the experts to advise on targets for net zero emissions.’

Currently, the Government is committed under the 2008 Climate Change Act to cut emissions by 80 per cent on 1990 levels. But ‘net zero’ – the point at which emissions are balanced by the removal of greenhouse gases – would be even more stringent.

Yesterday, the Government said it wanted advice from the Committee on Climate Change, its advisory body, on how it could cut emissions even further.

Climate Change minister Claire Perry said it would give ‘advice on a roadmap to a net zero economy, including how emissions might be reduced and the expected costs and benefits of doing so’.

Pressure group Plan B has already started legal action against the Government to review its targets in line with the 2014 Paris Agreement.

This commits its 195 signatories to keep temperatures below 2C and try to cut them to 1.5C. Last week, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned a failure to cut to 1.5C would lead to environmental catastrophes, including rising sea levels, heatwaves and droughts.

Ed Matthew, of environment campaigners The Climate Coalition, said: ‘It is not just the target that matters, it’s how fast we get there. The CCC must ensure that this net-zero pathway is compliant with no more than 1.5C of warming.’

Liberal Democrat environment spokesman Tim Farron said the Tories had ‘lurched drastically away from supporting green technologies’.

The Labour Party has already indicated it also wants to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero.

SOURCE






Australia: Renewable investment boom tipped to slow

One of the world's biggest lenders to green electricity projects says rapid growth in Australia's renewable energy investment is likely to slow, as banks become more cautious about the financial impact of electricity grid congestion.

After a record $10 billion poured into renewable projects last year, Japan's Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) Bank, a global banking giant and a major lender to renewable energy in Australia, said it was becoming harder for green energy projects to get finance.

Geoff Daley, the bank's head of Australian structured finance, said one reason for this was because the sheer number of renewable projects built in some areas meant the grid lacked the necessary capacity.

This happens because wind farms or solar farms are often located in parts of the power grid that have not previously had large amounts of generation, such as far north Queensland.

One result of congestion, if the grid is not augmented, is that energy generated may not be able to reach the customers.

"There's greater uncertainty at the moment around that issue and that will mean the lenders are more cautious," Mr Daley said.

Earlier this year, a number of renewable projects also suffered big cuts in their revenue because of changes to ratios used by the regulator in an attempt to apportion how electricity is lost as it flows through the distribution network.

Mr Daley said some generators were likely to make less revenue than projected, which was causing banks to be more cautious in their lending decisions.

"What that means for projects now is that it's much, much harder to get finance unless there's a strong contract," he said.

MUFG Bank was the world's largest arranger of renewable energy finance in 2017, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Industry figures show 2017 was a record-breaking year for renewable energy investment in Australia, with more than $10 billion in projects reaching financial close. But Mr Daley said there would be a "slowdown in the speed of investment".

The director of energy finance studies at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, Tim Buckley, said some slowdown in renewable investment was inevitable, but it was likely to be a "pause." There had been "massive solar boom,"  he said, but little planning around where the projects would be located.

"There's no over-arching plan. If you don't have an over-arching plan, renewables will swamp parts of the grid," Mr Buckley said.

"The willingness of the investment community to invest in renewables in Australia is going to wind back, because we need to take a pause. We've had five years of energy policy chaos which means the grid isn't yet prepared to accommodate ever more renewables."

The government's energy policy was thrown into disarray with the change of prime minister in August. The government has dumped the National Energy Guarantee which aimed to address the problems of high  power prices, carbon emissions and grid reliability.

National Australia Bank's global head of energy, Andrew Smith, acknowledged the bank was monitoring issues raised by grid congestion closely, but he said this was not unique to Australia. "It's certainly an area of focus for banks," he said.

Mr Smith said the issue had not dented the availability of finance for renewable projects. "Certainly now there's significant demand for banks to participate in these projects," he said.

Speaking at the AFR National Energy Summit, AGL interim chief executive Brett Redman said renewable energy investors are concerned about the country’s changing policy landscape and the falling investment costs of renewable generation.

“If I talk about offshore investors, they get very worried over the stability of long-term targets,” Mr Redman told Fairfax Media

Mr Redman said the "biggest issue" for investing in renewables was that costs of developing projects were coming down rapidly.

“So the wind farms we built 10 years ago now look really expensive compared to what it would cost you to build wind now; the solar we built three to four years ago looks really expensive now.

SOURCE 

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

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

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




15 October, 2018

Huge reduction in meat-eating ‘essential’ to avoid climate breakdown

"It is not a coincidence that climate change appeals to the people who most desire, not to save the world from climate change, but to manage people's private lives and habits. A bit like the Taliban or some other religious police." Apt comment by Ben Pile

Huge reductions in meat-eating are essential to avoid dangerous climate change, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of the food system’s impact on the environment. In western countries, beef consumption needs to fall by 90% and be replaced by five times more beans and pulses. [But don't beans produce a lot of gas?]

The research also finds that enormous changes to farming are needed to avoid destroying the planet’s ability to feed the 10 billion people expected to be on the planet in a few decades.

Food production already causes great damage to the environment, via greenhouse gases from livestock, deforestation and water shortages from farming, and vast ocean dead zones from agricultural pollution. But without action, its impact will get far worse as the world population rises by 2.3 billion people by 2050 and global income triples, enabling more people to eat meat-rich western diets. [But the population will FALL in developed countries.  It will mostly rise in Africa, where they mostly eat mealie pap (corn porridge).  They can rarely afford meat]

This trajectory would smash critical environmental limits beyond which humanity will struggle to live, the new research indicates. “It is pretty shocking,” said Marco Springmann at the University of Oxford, who led the research team. “We are really risking the sustainability of the whole system. If we are interested in people being able to farm and eat, then we better not do that.”

“Feeding a world population of 10 billion is possible, but only if we change the way we eat and the way we produce food,” said Prof Johan Rockström at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who was part of the research team. “Greening the food sector or eating up our planet: this is what is on the menu today.”

The new study follows the publication of a landmark UN report on Monday in which the world’s leading scientists warned there are just a dozen years in which to keep global warming under 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods and extreme heat. The report said eating less meat and dairy was important but said current trends were in the opposite direction.

The new research, published in the journal Nature, is the most thorough to date and combined data from every country to assess the impact of food production on the global environment. It then looked at what could be done to stop the looming food crisis.

“There is no magic bullet,” said Springmann. “But dietary and technological change [on farms] are the two essential things, and hopefully they can be complemented by reduction in food loss and waste.” About a third of food produced today never reaches the table.

SOURCE







America now has TOO MANY trees

STARKVILLE, Miss.—Over the past hundred years, the George family’s farm has been sharecropped, grazed by cattle and planted with cotton. By the late 1980s, Clayton George was growing soybeans and struggling to make ends meet.

A new federal program offered farmers money to reforest depleted land. Pine trees appealed to Mr. George. He bought loblolly seedlings and pulled his pickup into a parking lot where hands-for-hire congregated.

“We figured we’d plant trees and come back and harvest it in 30 years and in the meantime go into town to make a living doing something else,” he said.

Three decades later the trees are ready to cut, and Mr. George is learning how many other Southerners had the same idea.

A glut of timber has piled up in the Southeast. There are far more ready-to-cut trees than the region’s mills can saw or pulp. The surfeit has crushed timber prices in Mississippi, Alabama and several other states.

The volume of Southern yellow pine, used in housing and to make paper, has surged in recent decades as farmers replaced cropland with trees and as clear-cut forests were replanted. By 2020, the amount of wood growing per acre of timberland in many counties will have more than quadrupled since 1980, U.S. forestry officials estimate.

It has been a big loser for some financial investors, among them the country’s largest pension fund. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System spent more than $2 billion on Southern timberland, and harvested trees at depressed prices to pay interest on money borrowed to buy. Calpers sold much of its land this summer at a loss. A spokeswoman for the pension fund declined to comment.

It’s also been tough for the individuals and families who own much of the South’s forestland, and who had banked on its operating as a college fund or retirement account. The region has more than six million owners of at least 10 wooded acres, say academics and forestry consultants. Many of the owners were counting on forests as a long-term investment that could be replenished and passed on to heirs.

“If you work and you didn’t want to put all your money in the stock market, you’d buy 40 acres and plant trees and they’d be ready to cut by the time your kid went to college,” said Skip Stead, a timber broker in Lincoln, Ala. “It’s like a 401(k).”

The housing crash 10 years ago worsened the developing timber glut by depressing lumber demand and prompting woodland owners to postpone harvests. Mills closed.

Housing has come back in much of the country, pushing prices for finished forest products such as two-by-fours and plywood to historic highs during the spring and summer building season. Prices for logs, as well, have moved up in the U.S.’s other big timber-producing region, the Pacific Northwest, where supply is kept in check by wood-boring beetles and periodic wildfires.

In the South, timber prices haven’t stopped sliding. Adjusted for inflation, the price of Southern pine is down about 45% since 2007, according to Daowei Zhang, an Auburn University professor of forest economics. So-called saw timber, for making lumber, is at a 50-year low, adjusted for inflation.

Corporate owners of far-flung timber tracts can concentrate logging in regional markets where prices are healthier, such as Savannah, Ga., and Charleston, S.C., which have access to ocean shipping. Timber companies that own saw mills, such as PotlatchDeltic Corp. , can buy local logs on the cheap.

Most Southern woodland owners are stuck with whatever the nearest mill is paying. Hauling logs cross-country chasing better prices isn’t an option. It doesn’t take many tree trunks to fill a truck to its 80,000-pound limit on interstate highways

Some timber harvests are barely worth the effort after the expense of logging, hauling, taxes and replanting. In some areas, there is hardly any margin for the imperfect pines that are pulped for paper and particleboard.

SOURCE





"Drowning in Plastic": a load of rubbish

BBC One’s "Drowning in Plastic", a documentary about the problem of plastic waste in the sea, provoked a predictable flood of environmentalist emotionalism.

No doubt, Liz Bonnin’s journey through rivers of plastic was a visual feast for those inclined to submit themselves to 90 minutes of eco-misery. It would certainly be hard-hearted not to find the images disturbing. There is nothing good about the discovery of plastic detritus in a bird’s digestive tracts. And there is nothing to celebrate about mountains of waste piling up on shorelines. Even if these images and the issues they portray have been exaggerated, nobody is against the proper disposal of plastic waste.

But the programme had barely even started before Twitter was awash with calls for more action to follow the plastic-bag tax and the abolition of single-use plastic items. Some tweeters shared tips on reducing household waste, others openly expressed their disgust for humanity. Yet rather than shedding light on the plastics problem, the documentary and the reactions to it revealed the paucity of green thinking on this issue.

The abolition of plastic in Britain has become a cause célèbre, championed by vapid celebrities and politicians alike, including the prime minister. This is all despite the fact that very little waste from Britain finds its way into the ocean. Drowning in Plastic even alluded to this at one point. But blink and you might have missed it.

It was clearly missed or ignored by the tens of thousands of tweeters who commented while the programme was being broadcast. Most plastic waste finds its way into the oceans when it is disposed of in places where poverty is the norm and local governments lack the resources to provide basic services like refuse collection and processing. In these places, waste of all forms is simply dumped in waterways.

This should be a spur to argue for more development – there are many people in the world who lack the basic services that we should be able to take for granted. Instead, the film appealed to green misanthropy, finding fault with greedy, dirty humans. Rather than making the case for more resources to deal with the problem, the images of animals suffering led to demands for material restraint – for less development and less stuff.

For places that can afford it, waste is very easy to deal with. The cleanest and most effective way of disposing of most waste is incineration, especially when it comes to plastic, which has a high energy content. The controlled burning of waste allows toxic elements to be captured and the useful energy component to be recycled as heat and electricity.

But this simple solution does not appeal to eco-miserablists. Indeed, the group most likely to raise spurious health and environmental objections to waste incineration is, of course, greens. It was greens that objected to the use of landfill and emphasised recycling. The consequences of this have been a substantial rise in fly-tipping and fires at recycling centres that spew thousands of tonnes of toxic smoke into the atmosphere, which are now a near daily occurrence in the UK. Meanwhile, we have to export a great deal of non-recyclable waste to be incinerated in parts of the world where environmental standards are lower.

Reducing the use of plastic, either as a personal choice or a policy goal, is about the emptiest possible gesture one can make. And yet Drowning in Plastic presented this as a profound act. In doing so, it problematised the most basic goods in developed economies and skirted over the need for economic development in the rest of the world. It is a grotesque distortion of priorities that does nothing to solve even the problems it highlights.

The BBC filmmakers were clearly more offended by plastic waste than the miserable conditions endured by millions of people. They offered a shallow, emotional exposition of the horrors of plastic waste when they could have explored the exciting possibility of technical solutions. But to argue that there are simple and effective solutions to the problem of waste would undermine the moral demands made by greens for austerity and restraint.

SOURCE






More Misplaced Environmentalist Outrage

How we long for the good old days! That’s the tone of some environmental industry leaders who are screaming bloody murder (literally, not figuratively) about Department of the Interior actions under President Trump.

The Department’s re-interpretation of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act is a case in point.

One Washington Post writer carped that “cruelty without consequence” is at “the heart of the Trump era.”

The new rule, she wrote, is “harmful to the weak … but also to the strong, who in the exercise of cruelty become less humane, less human.”

To be clear, for these advocates, the “good old days” under one specific rule were from January 10 to February 6, 2017. That is how long an Obama rule from the Department’s lawyer was in effect: 27 days.

President Obama’s Interior Department Solicitor General had written something called “Opinion M-37041,” which radically changed the way federal officials were to enforce the migratory bird law.

Issued just ten days before the Obama Administration ended, it was suspended less than a month later, pending review by the new Trump Administration.

That review, completed earlier this year, found that Opinion M-37041 was inconsistent with the law. The opinion needed review because M-37041 presumed that all killing of all migratory birds in all places at all times was illegal, and could result in fines or even jail.

It no longer mattered whether birds were killed accidentally or intentionally, by negligence or through no fault. It no longer mattered whether birds inadvertently died as a result of entirely legal activity, or if they died from their own poor navigation skills by flying into man-made structures.

Businesses that built such structures could be fined anyway.

The law was never intended to be used that way. But that interpretation had a clear purpose for environmental activists who dominated the Obama Interior Department.

Migratory birds could be used as a weapon in their ongoing battle against coal and metals mining, oil and gas exploration and production, fossil fuel electricity generation, and even ranching and other despised industries.

Meanwhile, officials could grant waivers to their powerful friends in the wind and solar industries.

Thus, administrators could fine industries they disliked up to $15,000 per bird – but look away when wind generators chopped up eagles, or solar panels in the Mohave Desert fried birds in mid-air.

In fact, the Audubon Society says, 90% of all prosecutions under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act had been against oil companies, though nobody ever claimed they cause anywhere near 90% of all bird deaths.

Indeed, a 2011 million-dollar 45-day helicopter search for dead birds across North Dakota oil fields by the Fish & Wildlife Service found only 28 mallard ducks, flycatchers, and other common birds that were inadvertently killed when they landed in uncovered oilfield waste pits.

Ironically, the Post illustrated its “sky is falling” column with a Gerald Herbert (AP) photo of an oil-soaked bird – but his picture was taken during the Obama era. By definition then, the picture had nothing to do with the issue of reversing M-37041 by the current Administration.

By contrast, studies by wildlife biologists have concluded that US wind turbines are killing hundreds of thousands – and some experts say millions – of raptors and other birds every year, along with numerous bats.

Many of these creatures are threatened or endangered or have been made so by the wind turbines. And yet few environmentalists ever voiced concerns about those deaths.

All the current Administration did was withdraw Opinion M-37041 and return to the previous interpretation, which allowed the use of common sense in determining whether negligence resulted in preventable bird deaths.

The text of the law itself prohibits “pursuing, hunting, taking, capturing, killing, or attempting to do the same” – meaning actions whose purpose is taking or killing migratory birds, their nests, or their eggs. It does not criminalize accidental deaths that happen in the course of otherwise legal and productive activity.

The outcry from some eco-activists has been over the top. They wail that the “new” ruling (which merely reinstates the original understanding) will lead to the wanton destruction of wildlife.

“So many more birds will die now,” the Post writer asserted. Officials will simply no longer care about the destruction of our feathered friends.

Under that twisted reasoning, Woodrow Wilson didn’t care about birds, since he signed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act into law in 1918.

Franklin Roosevelt didn’t care about birds, nor did Ike, Kennedy or even Nixon, who signed the Endangered Species Act into law.

Jimmy Carter didn’t care, nor Bill Clinton and Al Gore. None of them applied Opinion M-37041 reasoning to the law.

It was selective enforcement by the Obama Administration that resulted in conflicting judicial rulings.

Previous Administrations all understood the difference between birds dying accidentally or on purpose. That distinction matters, because birds accidentally die all the time. In fact, a study of albatrosses in the Pacific suggests that the lifespan of many birds is actually unknown because they almost always die of unnatural causes.

One analysis said as many as six billion birds die in the USA every year by flying into things – houses, office buildings, power lines, and other structures – or are killed by animals, especially cats. Does that make every cat or homeowner a criminal?

In judging the inhumanity of our society by the way we treat birds, the Washington Post columnist condescendingly pointed out that “people are a part of the natural world, not distinct from it.” No kidding.

Day-to-day human activities affect our environment in numerous ways, sometimes for the better, occasionally for the worse. That doesn’t mean someone must be punished every time a bird dies.

Most of us abhor deliberate animal cruelty. That’s why it is a crime, and accidents are not.

It’s nice to see our government bringing a little common sense back to our laws and regulations. That shouldn’t be a crime either.

SOURCE





Australian chief scientist Alan Finkel has said he does not necessarily agree with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report’s call to phase out coal power by 2050

He also said the government will need a whole of economy emissions reduction strategy in order to meet the set target of reducing emissions to 26 to 28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030.

The IPCC report was written by over 90 scientists and said global emissions of greenhouse gas pollution must reach zero by about 2050 in order to stop global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The scientists recommended that the use of coal for electricity generation would have to drop to between 0 and 2 per cent of current usage.

Dr Finkel said instead the focus should purely be on emissions, as if carbon capture and storage is possible coal power will not produce emissions.

“I actually don’t agree on two basics. I’m not sure the report specifically says that. It says that we need to look at things like coal fired power with carbon capture and storage associated with it,” Dr Finkel told Sky News. “But the main reason for my statement is I feel we’ve got to focus on outcomes. The outcome is atmospheric emissions.”

“We should us whatever underlying technology are suitable for that.” “People paint themselves into an anti-coal corner or a pro-coal corner but the only question of relevance is to look at the atmospheric emissions.”

 Dr Finkel said Australia should be looking to natural gas as a transition fuel. “In the Finkel review we devote a whole chapter and a lot of discussion to the importance of natural gas as a transition fuel. If we use natural gas for the next 20-30 years a lot of it will make it so much easier to use more wind and solar.”

“But we deny ourselves natural gas it makes it more difficult to use wind and solar, so the pursuit of perfection gets in the way of the very good.”

Pressed on his argument that Australia could become the world’s biggest exporter of liquefied hydrogen gas — which was combustible and therefore equivalent to natural gas — Dr Finkel said it was because we have “fabulous resources” here.

The Coalition has struggled with energy policy and has effectively abandoned the emissions reduction component of the national energy guarantee, which was the government’s policy.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said the country will be able to meet its Paris climate agreement targets of reducing emissions by 26 to 28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030 “in a canter”.

Dr Finkel said the government would need a whole new emissions reduction policy in order for that to happen.

“If you go back to the Finkel review where 49 out of the 50 recommendations were accepted, if all of that is done then I think there is a good chance,” he said.

“So one of the recommendations which was accepted by the government was that by the end of 2020 the government should develop a whole of economy emissions reduction strategy. So if you count that as part of the policy development then I think we can.”

Dr Finkel said small modular reactors might reinvigorate the debate about nuclear power in the future.

He also restated his interest in hydrogen as an alternative energy source - which can be produced with hardly any emissions.

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  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 October, 2018

Emerging U.S. Energy Powerhouse

The United States is emerging as the world’s energy powerhouse. Two months ago, the United States became the largest producer of crude oil. Exports of crude oil, oil products and natural gas are rising rapidly. The “keep it in the ground” movement is losing ground.

U.S. crude oil production in August reached 10.8 million barrels per day, more than double the 5 million barrels per day produced in 2008. Last February, U.S. output surpassed that of Saudi Arabia. In August, U.S. production exceeded that of Russia, making the United States the world’s largest producer of petroleum.

U.S. natural gas production is up 40 percent from 2007 to 2017. The U.S. surpassed Russia as the world’s leading producer of natural gas in 2011.

Driving American energy dominance is the hydrofracturing revolution. Over the last two decades, U.S. geologists and petroleum engineers perfected the techniques of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, permitting cost-effective extraction of oil and gas from low-permeability shale rock formations. U.S. companies hold about a 10-year experience lead in shale extraction techniques over international competitors.

In 2000, only about 7 percent of U.S. natural gas came from hydraulically fractured wells. Today, about 70 percent of U.S. gas production and over 50 percent of crude oil production comes from fractured wells. Fracking operations are active in more than 20 states.

U.S. oil and gas production surged despite strong opposition from environmental groups. For more than a decade, green advocates have opposed drilling, fracking, pipeline transport, export terminals, and even investments in oil and gas. But the “keep it in the ground” movement is being trampled by the U.S. energy juggernaut.

Along with the rapid rise in production, U.S. oil and gas exports are exploding. U.S. exports of refined petroleum products increased by a factor of five from 2004 to 2017. Our nation became a net exporter of refined petroleum products in 2011. In 2015, the Obama administration lifted a 40-year ban on U.S. crude oil exports. Crude exports rose by 400 percent since 2014. The U.S. still remains a net importer of crude oil, but oil imports have dropped to the lowest level since 2000.

In 2017, the United States became a net exporter of natural gas, with Mexico the largest customer. Prior to 2010, terminals were under construction to import liquefied natural gas. But the fracking revolution produced a huge volume of gas at one-half of the price of gas in Europe and one-third of the price in Japan. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals started operation in 2016 at Sabine Pass in Louisiana and in 2018 at Cove Point in Maryland. Four other new LNG export terminals are scheduled to come on line by 2020.

Propane, a hydrocarbon fuel used for heating and cooking, is a notable example of success. Prior to 2010, the United States was a net importer of propane. But U.S. propane field production doubled since 2010 and exports now approach 1 million barrels per day.

About 3 billion people around the world do not have modern fuels for heating and cooking. India has a program to get liquid propane gas to 80 percent of households by March 2019. Exports of U.S. propane are meeting this need in India, along with needs in China and other nations. The Panama Canal expansion completed in 2016 allows supertankers to deliver U.S. propane and natural gas to Asia.

A major benefit of U.S. energy resurgence is an improved balance of trade in energy. In 2011, U.S. energy imports exceeded exports by $325 billion. With growing production of oil and gas and rising exports, the US trade imbalance in energy fell to $57 billion in 2017. Energy plays a major role in the strength of today’s U.S. economy.

The U.S. plastics industry now enjoys a large cost advantage in global markets. U.S. oil and gas refineries produce the lowest-cost ethylene and propylene in the world, the basic materials for plastics. U.S. natural gas also provides a cost advantage for chemical and steel firms. Gas fuels generation of cheap electricity for aluminum, cement, paper, and other industries.

Despite environmental opposition, the United States is emerging as the world’s energy powerhouse. U.S. energyproduction is not only good for U.S. industry and the U.S. economy, but exports increasingly provide low-cost energy for Europe, Asia and the rest of the world.

SOURCE





Video: World to End Again: This Time They're Serious

Bill Whittle has heard this climate change warning before, and he has an answer.



The United Nations climate change panel’s new report says global temperatures climbing in just a decade will raise the oceans by feet (not inches), devastate almost all of the coral reefs, and otherwise ruin your day. They have a solution, but few of us will survive it. Bill Whittle thinks he’s heard this before. He has an answer.





Climate Alarmists Admit They Want to Dismantle Our Free Enterprise System

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is warning that the dire costs of climate change are going to be here sooner than we think.

The planet is close to reaching its alleged 1.5-degree Celsius warming threshold, and civilization only has 11 years to fix it.

Oh, yeah, and the solution is to tear down the global free-enterprise system responsible for human flourishing and raising levels of prosperity for billions of people.

Don’t take my word for it.

A writer for the eco-friendly Grist tweeted, “The world’s top scientists just gave rigorous backing to systematically dismantle capitalism as a key requirement to maintaining civilization and a habitable planet.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report itself warns: “There is no documented historical precedent” for the transformation (aka de-development) necessary to curb global warming.

The Associated Press reported:

A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program.

He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.

The year 2000? Oh, wait a minute. The AP article is from June 30, 1989. Scratch that last warning from nearly three decades ago.

The reality is that, though the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and proponents of dismantling the free-enterprise system have been shockingly honest in revealing their true intentions over the past few days, the sentiment is not new.

In fact, three years ago, U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres made similar remarks in a push for the Paris climate accord.

Figueres said, “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

The current economic development model that reigns supreme does so for compelling reasons.

People that freely exchange ideas and products, that have protection from government coercion and that have well-defined and protected property rights because of a strong rule of law have done quite well for themselves.

Free, competitive energy markets drive innovation and provide the affordable, reliable energy that families and businesses need, and yield a cleaner environment.

Conversely, international efforts to combat climate change have been centrally planned boondoggles. They’ve resulted in wasted taxpayer money, higher energy prices, and handouts for preferred energy sources and technologies—all for no noticeable impact on climate.

Eighty percent of all energy consumed by Americans comes from conventional sources, such as coal, oil, and natural gas. About 80 percent of the world’s energy needs are met by these natural resources, which emit carbon dioxide when combusted.

Levying a price on carbon dioxide will directly raise the cost of electricity, gasoline, diesel fuel, and home-heating oil. But the economic pain does not stop there.

When considering the impact of a carbon tax on individuals, it is important to note that carbon is intertwined in all parts of life. Energy is a necessary component for just about all of the goods and services consumed, so Americans would pay more for food, health care, education, clothes—you name it.

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report suggests policy proposals that would be economically cataclysmic.

It proposes a carbon tax of between $135 and $5,500 by 2030. A $5,500 carbon tax equates to a $50-per-gallon gas tax. An energy tax of that magnitude would bankrupt families and businesses, and undoubtedly catapult the world into economic despair.

Importantly, an extreme climate policy would also divert resources away from pressing environmental concerns, such as investing in more robust infrastructure to protect against natural disasters or new, innovative technologies that improve air and water quality.

Are those costs worth it? After all, having wealth, health, and affordable power don’t mean all that much if people don’t have a planet to live on. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates the climate costs could total $54 trillion without action.

But is there any new revelation in the scientific literature that makes climate doom imminent?

Not according to climatologist Judith Curry, a former chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Curry asserts that the main conclusion from the report is that “things would be a little better at 1.5C relative to 2C.”

Furthermore, she notes, “Over land, we have already blown through the 1.5C threshold if measured since 1890.

“Temperatures around 1820 were more than 2C cooler.  There has been a great deal of natural variability in temperatures prior to 1975, when human-caused global warming kicked in any meaningful way.”

Another critical point Curry highlights is the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change largely disregards the lower thirds of likely climate sensitivity values between 1.5C and 4.5C.

Equilibrium climate sensitivity attempts to quantify the earth’s temperature response to carbon dioxide emissions, answering the question: How does the earth’s temperature change from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

There is a lot of scientific debate about equilibrium climate sensitivity within the climate literature, with a fair amount of uncertainty. And, as Curry mentions, “Much of this problem goes away if ECS is actually 1.5 to 2C.”

What about natural disasters? The University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr., who specializes in analyzing extreme weather trends, emphasizes that “the IPCC once again reports that there is little basis for claiming that drought, floods, hurricanes [and] tornadoes have increased, much less increased due to [greenhouse gases].”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s politicization of policy actions presents another problem, and it is evident in the way the report treats nuclear energy.

Nuclear power provides nearly 60 percent of America’s carbon dioxide-free electricity, yet the climate panel engages in fearmongering about its expanded use. One would think that if climate change were an existential crisis, the world would need all the nuclear power it can get.

While the report acknowledges that any pathway to meeting carbon dioxide-reduction targets will include increased nuclear buildout, the report says more nuclear “can increase the risks of proliferation, have negative environmental effects (e.g., for water use), and have mixed effects for human health when replacing fossil fuels.”

Writing in Forbes, Michael Shellenberger documents the IPCC’s historic bias against nuclear power. Yet, the report unabashedly supports expanded wind and solar development and offers personal lifestyle changes to reduce the planet’s carbon footprint, such as air-drying laundry, eating less red meat, and biking to work.

Regardless of the cause, there are undoubted challenges from a changing climate.

Investing in coral reef protection or in preparation for extreme weather events can be worthwhile. However, the combination of fearmongering and offering solutions that would require a takeover of the global economy are unrealistic and counterproductive.

SOURCE






Researchers Argue Benefits of CO2 Outweigh the Harm

Global climate change gained a new urgency for world leaders when a new report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that it would take “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to avoid catastrophic levels of global warming as early as 2030. The IPCC warns that without draconian emissions cuts far above what the world has been able to achieve thus far, global warming will surpass the 1.5°C limit which global leaders have been discussing for years. Is that such a bad thing, though? Some say no, arguing that the benefits of industrialization have improved human life far more than global warming has harmed it.

According to the IPCC report, the situation is grim–global warming is unstoppable unless consumers start traveling less, ridesharing, eating less meat, and increasing the energy efficiency of their homes. Although the IPCC’s report speaks mostly of likelihoods and probabilities, the authors fret over harms that “will persist for centuries to millennia” unless action is taken now.

Even so, not everyone is ready to settle down to sitting at home with a vegetarian burger. Joseph Bast and Peter Ferrara, two senior fellows at the Heartland Institute, researched the human benefits of industrialization on the request of a California judge hearing the state of California’s lawsuit against BP and other energy companies. The evidence the two researchers found argues that it was better to industrialize and warm than not industrialize at all.

“Fossil fuels are lifting billions of people out of poverty, reducing all the negative effects of poverty on human health,” they write. “Fossil fuels are vastly improving human well-being and safety by powering labor-saving and life-protecting technologies, such as air conditioning, modern medicine, and cars and trucks.”

They explain that, for much of human existence, just keeping fed and warm required large amounts of time and labor. Not until the Industrial Revolution–and the introduction of coal, the first fossil fuel–were people able to improve their productivity and standard of living. Energy allowed for factories, cheaper goods, and a new, higher standard of living.

The same trend continues today. Cheaper energy allows for more economic growth and the creation of new businesses and new wealth, reshaping everything from manufacturing to farming. In fact, food production has been one of the less-publicized, yet still crucial benefits of fossil fuel production. As efficiency gains led farmers to trade their horses and mules for tractors, crop yields increased even as fewer and fewer people were needed to work in the fields. In the course of two centuries, some 80 percent of the developed world’s population left agriculture for other industries.

And the benefits don’t stop there. Ammonia fertilizer is produced from natural gas, allowing higher yields from less farmland. Talk of transitioning away from a “fossil fuel economy” often ignores these tertiary benefits in favor of a discussion of harms yet to be seen. Despite the predictions of inevitable famine, crop productions have continued to rise globally, sometimes even benefiting from warmer temperatures.

In fact, higher CO2 levels in the air actually boost plant growth, functioning like airborne plant food. Bast and Ferrara studied the impacts of predicted crop gains due to higher CO2 levels, arguing that they are likely to be significant enough to offset predicted harms.

“The benefits of CO2 fertilization are so great they exceed the entire “social cost of carbon” claimed by the Obama-era EPA. And even these estimates do not include the benefits realized by the timber industry, outdoor recreation, and other industries that benefit from the general greening of the Earth,” they wrote.

In light of the benefits of fossil fuels, the sort of dramatic efforts pushed by the IPCC to curb emissions start to look even more grim. Halting global warming would require the sacrifice of technology that has allowed the world’s population to surge in size while becoming richer. While western nations could perhaps absorb the cost of shifting their energy sources, severe cuts in global emissions would likely hurt the world’s poorest citizens.

“The bottom line is that an enormous increase in energy supply will be required to meet the demands of projected population growth and lift the developing world out of poverty without jeopardizing current standards of living in the most developed countries,” concluded one group of social ecology professors in a recent paper for BioScience.

If the cost of abandoning fossil fuels is so high, should it still seriously be considered as a policy goal?

The argument may become increasingly relevant as international and domestic policymakers are forced to grapple with the reality that it may not be feasible to limit warming to 1.5°C. Even the IPCC’s report mulled over this reality:

“There is no single answer to the question of whether it is feasible to limit warming to 1.5°C and adapt to the consequences,” the IPCC wrote.

SOURCE





There's no such thing as a happy Greenie

Bob Brown is Australia's best known Greenie.  Bob doesn't know the meaning of compromise or moderation when it comes to his causes.  One suspects that he has a genuinely paranoid belief in global warming

Today’s IPCC report is mealy mouthed and dangerous because it fails to tackle the world’s political delinquents like Australia, Bob Brown said today.

“Governments like Australia’s Morrison government will feel relieved that this stodgy panel of scientific conservatives has flagged that there may be more time than previously thought to take the drastic action required to turn around global heating. It is a mistake to give politicians subservient to the fossil fuel industry the message that things aren’t as bad as was thought, especially as the real impacts of global heating - coral death, cyclonic storms, bushfires, droughts, glacial melting, super-heated cities - is so obviously getting worse.”

As NATURE reports today: In the meantime, the newer and larger carbon budget could send the wrong message to policymakers, says Oliver Geden, a social scientist and visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany. He fears that the IPCC report undersells the difficulty of achieving the 1.5 °C goal. “It’s always five minutes to midnight, and that is highly problematic,” he says. “Policymakers get used to it, and they think there’s always a way out.”

“The global heating emergency is upon us and the IPCC is sending the wrong signal to assuage political fire. In the lifetimes of our children the blame for the massive cost of this failure, in terms of dollars and security, will be sheeted home not just to the fossil fuel industry but to powerful groups like the IPCC who hedged their bets,” Brown said.

Media release from Jenny Weber [jenny@bobbrown.org.au] of the Bob Brown organization

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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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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





12 October, 2018

The Environmental Scam: One Quick and Easy Response

by Sean Gabb

Once you cut through their verbiage, the enemies of bourgeois civilisation have two demands. These are:

* Put me and my friends in charge of preferably a one-world government with total power over life and property; or, until then, or failing that,

* Give us a lot of money.

When I was younger, the occasion for making these demands was something to do with poverty or economic instability, and the alleged need was for a bigger welfare state, or state ownership of the means of production, or playing about with money to “move the aggregate supply curve to the right.” The nice thing about these claims and their alleged solutions was that they all had to be debated within the subject area of Economics. Because most of us knew a lot about Economics, we could always win the debates.

By the end of the 1980s, winning was so easy, the debates had become boring. Since then, the alleged need has shifted to saving the planet from some environmental catastrophe. The resulting debates are now harder to win because most of us are not that learned in the relevant sciences. Though I am more than competent in Economics, my main expertise is in Ancient History and the Classical Languages. Much the same is true for most of my friends.

Take, for example, the latest occasion for making the two demands stated above. This is that the sea is filling up with waste plastic, and that this looks horrid, and is being eaten by the creatures who live in the sea, and that they are all at risk of dying – and that this will be a terrible thing of all of us. For the solution, see Annie Leonard, writing in The Guardian: “Recycling alone will never stem the flow of plastics into our ocean. We must address the problem at the source.” You can take her last sentence as shorthand for the usual demands.

What response have I to this? Not much directly. Give me half an hour, and I will explain with practised ease that the Phillips Curve is at best a loose correlation between past variables, and that there is no stable trade-off between unemployment and inflation. But search me how most plastics are made, how long they take to degrade, or what harm they do if eaten.

A short search on the Web has brought up some useful information. There is, for example, an essay by Kip Hansen, published in 2015 – “An Ocean of Plastic.” He says, among much else:

* That the Great Garbage Patch said to be floating about the Pacific is a myth, and that the main alleged photographs of it were taken in Manila Bay after a storm had washed the rubbish out of the streets;

*That the amount of plastic waste floating in the sea is very small per cubic metre of water, and that it is invisible to the uninformed eye in the places where this Garbage Patch is said to be floating;

*That plastic waste quickly breaks down into tiny chunks that are then eaten by bacteria, who are not harmed by it;

*That larger chunks eaten by fish and birds are easily handled by digestive systems that have evolved over many ages to cope with much worse than the occasional lump of polystyrene foam.

His conclusion:

The “floating rafts of plastic garbage”-version of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a pernicious myth that needs to be dispelled at every opportunity.

That really is all I need to know. Of course, however, it is not enough to win an argument. Put me up against someone whose job is to lecture the world on the horrors of plastic waste, and I shall do a very poor job. He will pour scorn on the response I have summarised. He will draw attention to other alleged facts, and support these with reams of official statistics collected I have no idea how.

We shall be engaged not in a deductive argument about the science of human choice, but in an argument about facts that I am in no position to examine for myself, and about scientific claims that I am not remotely qualified to assess. What to do about that?

Here is my response. During the past half century or so, we have had one factual claim after another about the natural world. These include:

The claim my English teacher repeated to me in 1974 about the coming exhaustion of mineral resources – that, for example, there would be no more gold to mine after 1984, and that the oil would run out shortly after or before then;

* The claim, made around 1986, that aids would, by 1990, have killed two million people in England alone;

* The claim, made in 1996, that, by 2006, a million people in England would have had their brains rotted by eating beef infected with Mad Cow Disease;

* The claims, made in the 1980s, that factory emissions were turning the rain to acid, and that this would do terrible things;

* The claims, made about the same time, that our refrigerators and air conditioning units had opened a hole in the ozone layer, and that we would all soon be cooked by radiation from the Sun;

*The claims, that I noticed in 1989, that areas of jungle the size of Belgium were being regularly cut down in the Amazon, and how this would somehow be bad for us;

* The claims, made since about 1988, that our industrial civilisation as a whole was causing a rise in global temperatures.

I leave the last of these claims aside for the moment. What the others all have in common is that they involved predictions of substantial or total collapse unless the usual demands were met. These demands were not met, and the world carried on as normal.

Gold and oil did not run out. I am not sure how many people have heard about the ozone hole. I am not sure if anyone now claims it is getting bigger, or is still there. Nothing substantial was ever done about acid rain, but the world has still not become a giant desert. None of my friends has died of aids, nor of Mad Cow disease. My South American students do not report that Brazil nowadays looks like the surface of the Moon.

I now turn to the claims about global warming. I will not discuss the intricacies of how much carbon dioxide we are releasing, or what effect this may have on temperatures. I leave aside the persistent claims of scientific fraud and other corruption. As said, I am not qualified to comment on these or other matters. What I do note is that, in 2006, Al Gore

"[p]atiently, and surely for the 10,000th time, [explained to The Guardian] what’s going wrong. The atmosphere is like a coat of varnish around the globe, he says. When it’s thin, as it should be, heat naturally escapes. But when it gets thicker, thanks to carbon dioxide emitted by us, it traps in the heat and the world gets warmer. “It’s cooking and wilting the most vulnerable parts of the eco-system, melting all the mountain glaciers, the north polar ice cap, parts of Antarctica, parts of Greenland.” That molten ice-water will raise sea-levels, flooding food-producing areas that all of us rely on. Eventually it will submerge whole cities, from San Francisco to Shanghai. The site of the Twin Towers will not be a memorial garden: it will be underwater.

… He agrees with the scientists who say we have 10 years to act, before we cross a point of no return."

In 2009, the Prince of Wales – advised by the “leading environmentalists Jonathon Porritt and Tony Juniper” – said we had 96 months to change our ways. After that, we faced “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.”

In 2005, George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian:

Winter is no longer the great grey longing of my childhood. The freezes this country suffered in 1982 and 1963 are – unless the Gulf Stream stops – unlikely to recur. Our summers will be long and warm. Across most of the upper northern hemisphere, climate change, so far, has been kind to us.

Ten years took us to 2016. Assuming my arithmetic is correct, 96 months take us to about now. If we have really reached the “point of no return,” why have these people not yet switched to telling us “I warned you: now it’s too late”? Instead, the apocalyptic warnings continue at top volume. Oh – and English weather remains as unpredictable today as it was in 2005. In March this year, there was an inch of snow in Deal.

The point of repeating these claims is that they were not random assertions, but appear to have been made on scientific advice – scientific advice that turned out to be wrong. Whether the scientists in question were lying, or whether they advised in good faith, is less important than that they were wrong. You do not need a degree in the natural sciences to notice when predictions are falsified.

It is with this in mind that I take the present claims of plastic waste in the sea, and reject them out of hand. It may be that, this time, the claims are true. But the whole burden of proof is on those making them. The burden of proof comes with the barely-rebuttable presumption that we are being fed yet another diet of alarmist falsehoods.

My general view is that our planet is a vast treasure house of resources that, properly used, will take us to the stars. We shall colonise the inner planets, and mine the Asteroid Belt. We shall find cures for every illness and extend our lives. We shall uncover every remaining mystery of the natural world. During the past three centuries, much encouraging progress has been made. The curve is now turning almost vertical.

It may be that, now and again, our scientific and technical progress throws up problems. If so, the solution is more scientific and technical progress. The only reasonable fear we should have is that the usual suspects will have their way, and return us to a past that I am fully qualified to describe, and that I assure you was horrible in every respect.

SOURCE






Must Read Lecture: Top Physics Prof Nails the ‘Global Warming’ Myth

In its latest hysterical bulletin, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has urged that we need to spend $2.4 trillion a year between now and 2035 to avoid the potentially catastrophic consequences of ‘climate change.’

But the truth is that ‘climate change’ – at least as perceived by the IPCC – is bunk and all that expenditure (which, added up, amounts to a sum greater than the entirety of global GDP) would be a complete waste of money.

Or, as Professor Richard Lindzen, arguably the world’s greatest expert on the subject rather more elegantly put it in a lecture in London last night:

"An implausible conjecture backed by false evidence and repeated incessantly has become politically correct ‘knowledge,’ and is used to promote the overturn of industrial civilization".

Lindzen, who for 30 years was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is probably the scientist most loathed and feared by the climate alarmist establishment. That’s because he knows the subject rather better than they do and has never been bested in argument.

He is withering in his contempt for man-made global warming theory, as he demonstrated in some scientific detail at the annual lecture of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, hosted by its president (Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer) Lord Lawson.

The global warming scare has little to do with science, Lindzen began by noting, but is rather the product of ignorance of science.

Hence his lecture title: Global Warming for the Two Cultures. This was a reference to the influential lecture given in the Fifties by the novelist and physical chemist CP Snow in which he decried the scientific ignorance among the supposedly educated elite. Little has changed since, said Lindzen:

"While some might maintain that ignorance of physics does not impact political ability, it most certainly impacts the ability of non-scientific politicians to deal with nominally science-based issues. The gap in understanding is also an invitation to malicious exploitation. Given the democratic necessity for non-scientists to take positions on scientific problems, belief and faith inevitably replace understanding, though trivially oversimplified false narratives serve to reassure the non-scientists that they are not totally without scientific ‘understanding.’ The issue of global warming offers numerous examples of all of this"

Later he singled out former Secretary of State John Kerry for especial scorn.

"Former senator and Secretary of State John F. Kerry is typical when he stated, with reference to greenhouse warming, ‘I know sometimes I can remember from when I was in high school and college, some aspects of chemistry or physics can be tough. But this is not tough. This is simple. Kids at the earliest age can understand this’. As you have seen, the greenhouse effect is not all that simple. Only remarkably brilliant kids would understand it. Given Kerry’s subsequent description of climate and its underlying physics, it was clear that he was not up to the task".

Lindzen’s scientific case against the man-made global warming scare is essentially this: the world’s climate is a chaotic system whose workings, even after decades of intense study and billions of dollars of research funding, scientists have but barely begun to comprehend. Yet here they are deciding on the basis of no convincing evidence to pin the blame on just one of the many contributory elements to climate – carbon dioxide – and trying to persuade us that this trace gas is somehow the master control knob.

This notion is so ridiculous, he said, it is close to “magical thinking”.

Now here is the currently popular narrative concerning this system. The climate, a complex multifactor system, can be summarized in just one variable, the globally averaged temperature change, and is primarily controlled by the 1-2% perturbation in the energy budget due to a single variable – carbon dioxide – among many variables of comparable importance. This is an extraordinary pair of claims based on reasoning that borders on magical thinking. It is, however, the narrative that has been widely accepted, even among many sceptics.

Until the late 80s, not even climate scientists subscribed to this theory. It only took off for political reasons and because there was so much money to be made from it.

When, in 1988, the NASA scientist James Hansen told the US Senate that the summer’s warmth reflected increased carbon dioxide levels, even Science magazine reported that the climatologists were sceptical. The establishment of this extreme position as dogma during the present period is due to political actors and others seeking to exploit the opportunities that abound in the multi-trillion dollar energy sector.

Elites are much more susceptible to this nonsense than ordinary people.  As Lindzen explained, elites are less interested in truth than in what is convenient.

1. They have been educated in a system where success has been predicated on their ability to please their professors. In other words, they have been conditioned to rationalize anything.

2. While they are vulnerable to false narratives, they are far less economically vulnerable than are ordinary people. They believe themselves wealthy enough to withstand the economic pain of the proposed policies, and they are clever enough to often benefit from them.

3. The narrative is trivial enough for the elite to finally think that they ‘understand’ science.

4. For many (especially on the right), the need to be regarded as intelligent causes them to fear that opposing anything claimed to be ‘scientific’ might lead to their being regarded as ignorant, and this fear overwhelms any ideological commitment to liberty that they might have.

None of these factors apply to ‘ordinary’ people. This may well be the strongest argument for popular democracy and against the leadership of those ‘who know best.’

The scientists, meanwhile, don’t know nearly as much as they pretend they know. And in any case, many of them have been corrupted by money or their left-wing politics.

1. Scientists are specialists. Few are expert in climate. This includes many supposed ‘climate scientists’ who became involved in the area in response to the huge increases in funding that have accompanied global warming hysteria.

2. Scientists are people with their own political positions, and many have been enthusiastic about using their status as scientists to promote their political positions (not unlike celebrities whose status some scientists often aspire to). As examples, consider the movements against nuclear weapons, against the Strategic Defense Initiative, against the Vietnam War, and so on.

Scientists are also acutely and cynically aware of the ignorance of non-scientists and the fear that this engenders.

But what about all the scary “proof” that global warming is happening? Lindzen has no truck with any of it.

"What about the disappearing Arctic ice, the rising sea level, the weather extremes, starving polar bears, the Syrian Civil War, and all the rest of it? The vast variety of the claims makes it impossible to point to any particular fault that applies to all of them. Of course, citing the existence of changes – even if these observations are correct (although surprisingly often they are not) – would not implicate greenhouse warming per se. Nor would it point to danger. Note that most of the so-called evidence refers to matters of which you have no personal experience. Some of the claims, such as those relating to weather extremes, contradict what both physical theory and empirical data show. The purpose of these claims is obviously to frighten and befuddle the public, and to make it seem like there is evidence where, in fact, there is none."

Just to repeat that last important point: Lindzen believes that there is no real-world evidence that supports man-made global warming theory. None.

Lindzen concluded:

"What we will be leaving our grandchildren is not a planet damaged by industrial progress, but a record of unfathomable silliness as well as a landscape degraded by rusting wind farms and decaying solar panel arrays. False claims about 97% agreement will not spare us, but the willingness of scientists to keep mum is likely to much reduce trust in and support for science. Perhaps this won’t be such a bad thing after all – certainly as concerns ‘official’ science.

There is at least one positive aspect to the present situation. None of the proposed policies will have much impact on greenhouse gases. Thus we will continue to benefit from the one thing that can be clearly attributed to elevated carbon dioxide: namely, its effective role as a plant fertilizer, and reducer of the drought vulnerability of plants. Meanwhile, the IPCC is claiming that we need to prevent another 0.5?C of warming, although the 1?C that has occurred so far has been accompanied by the greatest increase in human welfare in history. As we used to say in my childhood home of the Bronx: ‘Go figure’."

SOURCE






U.N. Ignores Economics Of Climate

New Nobel laureate William Nordhaus says the costs of proposed CO2 cuts aren’t worth it

By Bjorn Lomborg

The global economy must be transformed immediately to avoid catastrophic climate damage, a new United Nations report declares. Climate economist William Nordhaus has been made a Nobel laureate. The events are being reported as two parts of the same story, but they reveal the contradictions inherent in climate policy—and why economics matters more than ever.

Limiting temperatures to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels, as the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change urges, is economically and practically impossible—as Mr. Nordhaus’s work shows. The IPCC report significantly underestimates the costs of getting to zero emissions. Fossil fuels provide cheap, efficient power, whereas green energy remains mostly uncompetitive. Switching to more expensive, less efficient technology slows development. In poor nations that means fewer people lifted out of poverty. In rich ones it means the most vulnerable are hit by higher energy bills.

The IPCC says carbon emissions need to peak right now and fall rapidly to avert catastrophe. Models actually reveal that to achieve the 2.7-degree goal the world must stop all fossil fuel use in less than four years. Yet the International Energy Agency estimates that in 2040 fossil fuels will still meet three-quarters of world energy needs, even if the Paris agreement is fully implemented. The U.N. body responsible for the accord estimates that if every country fulfills every pledge by 2030, CO2 emissions will be cut by 60 billion tons by 2030. That’s less than 1% of what is needed to keep temperature rises below 2.7 degrees. And achieving even that fraction would be vastly expensive—reducing world-wide growth $1 trillion to $2 trillion each year by 2030.

The European Union promises to cut emissions 80% by 2050. With realistic assumptions about technology, and the optimistic assumption that the EU’s climate policy is very well designed and coordinated, the average of seven leading peer-reviewed models finds EU annual costs will reach €2.9 trillion ($3.3 trillion), more than twice what EU governments spend today on health, education, recreation, housing, environment, police and defense combined. In reality, it is likely to cost much more because EU climate legislation has been an inefficient patchwork. If that continues, the policy will make the EU 24% poorer in 2050.

Trying to do more, as the IPCC urges, would be phenomenally expensive. It is important to keep things in perspective, challenging as that is given the hysterical tone of the reaction to the panel’s latest offering. In its latest full report, the IPCC estimated that in 60 years unmitigated global warming would cost the planet between 0.2% and 2% of gross domestic product. That’s simply not the end of the world.

The new report has no comparison of the costs and benefits of climate targets. Mr. Nordhaus’s most recent estimate, published in August, is that the “optimal” outcome with a moderate carbon tax is a rise of about 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. Reducing temperature rises by more would result in higher costs than benefits, potentially causing the world a $50 trillion loss.

It’s past time to stop pushing so hard for carbon cuts before alternative energy sources are ready to take over. Instead the world must focus on resolving the technology deficit that makes switching away from fossil fuels so expensive. Genuine breakthroughs are required to drive down the future price of green energy.

Copenhagen Consensus analysis shows a ramped-up green-energy research-and-development budget of around $100 billion a year would be the most effective global-warming policy. It would be much cheaper than the approach pushed by the IPCC, and would not require global consensus. Most important, it would have a much better chance of ameliorating temperature rises. Under the IPPC’s approach, by contrast, the costs would vastly outweigh the benefits. Instead, the over-the-top reception to the latest IPCC report means that we are more likely to continue down a pathway where the costs would vastly outweigh the benefits.

SOURCE







Trump Should Kill Handouts to King Corn, Not Expand Them

Allowing for year-round sales of E15 gas is a political sop to the ethanol swamp

President Donald Trump is one of the rarest of all creatures — a politician who keeps his promises.

Sick of politicians making grandiose campaign promises, only to discard them after the election, the American people shocked the world by electing a billionaire businessman and political novice in Trump, hoping that he, not beholden to special interests, would battle entrenched politicians and bureaucrats who wield enormous power in the DC swamp.

Trump, from a conservative perspective, has excelled beyond all expectations, slashing massive amounts of economy-crushing regulatory red tape, opening the throttle on American energy production, creating a pro-growth economic environment, pulling us out of or reworking bad trade deals, and making American sovereignty and prosperity the yardstick by which policies are measured.

Unfortunately, not every promise kept is a good thing, as evidenced by reports this week that Trump is giving a sop to the ethanol/corn industry, issuing a waiver for summer restrictions on E15 (15% ethanol/gas blend) fuel, paving the way for year-round use.

This move is entirely political. In fact, after the announcement, Trump held a MAGA rally in Iowa, and that was no coincidence. Between helping Iowa Republicans in the election and heartland farmers hurt by Trump’s own tariffs, the political ramifications are significant, so this decision is, sadly, hardly surprising. For the American people, however, the benefits of expanding this boondoggle are dubious at best.

Last year, when former EPA Director Scott Pruitt announced rollbacks to the ethanol mandate, the response was swift and forceful. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, issued a not-so-veiled threat to President Trump that the move would have consequences; namely, seeing his judicial nominees move through Grassley’s committee at the speed of molasses. Trump got the message, and the changes were put on hold.

Grassley however, has held up his end of the unspoken deal, deftly ushering Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, through a vicious confirmation process that made the Democrats’ reprehensible “high-tech lynching” of Justice Clarence Thomas seem downright neighborly by comparison.

Additionally, this ethanol decision may be the help needed to get Iowa’s Republican governor, currently trailing her Democrat opponent in the polls, and at least two at-risk Iowa House members, over the finish line to victory. These wins would be critical when many are predicting a Democrat takeover of the House and Senate.

As for the ethanol change itself, it’s unlikely that it will take immediate effect. A lawsuit is planned that challenges the legality of the waiver. Additionally, a bipartisan letter from 20 members of Congress from oil-producing states went to President Trump last week, opposing the measure, arguing it would do nothing to protect refinery jobs and would actually harm American consumers.

And they are right.

The ethanol mandate his been a huge victory for Midwestern agricultural states, which are essentially guaranteed a buyer for every ear of corn they can grow, and then some.

Unfortunately, from a scientific and environmental standpoint, the mandate is a disaster. Ethanol harms gasoline engines, eating through seals, gumming up fuel systems, damaging tanks, and introducing stray moisture into the system. This leads to thousands of dollars of unnecessary repairs for consumers.

Ethanol is 33% less energy dense than gasoline — meaning you have to burn 33% more ethanol to travel the same distance — and ethanol is dirtier than gasoline, generating significantly more formaldehyde, creating twice as much ozone smog.

Investor’s Business Daily asks, “Do people want ethanol in their gasoline so badly they’re willing to pay extra for something that cuts their fuel efficiency by anywhere from 5% to 7% per mile?”

Then there is the destruction to the environment caused by clearing millions of acres of land for corn production. In the year 2000, only 5% of America’s corn crop went to ethanol production. By 2013, that had skyrocketed to 40%. To envision what a boondoggle the ethanol mandate is, consider that the amount of corn required to fill a truck’s 26-gallon gas tank would feed a person for an entire year!

A 2009 Duke University study found that growing corn for fuel production actually produces more CO2 than it saves. The Associated Press, in an in-depth investigation of the “green” energy industry entitled “The Secret, Dirty Cost of Obama’s Green Power Push,” concluded:

The ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today. As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies. …

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined — have vanished on Obama’s watch. Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil. Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can’t survive. The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact.

President Trump has done much right since taking office, but this is a decision he needs to reconsider.

It’s also an area where bipartisan agreement — between limited-government, free-market advocates on one side, and environmentalists on the other — could be found and, who knows, maybe even generate enough goodwill to find common ground on other issues.

King Corn has ruled politics long enough. It’s time for a coup.

SOURCE







Australian PM returns serve on energy policy

Claims Australia's energy policy has descended into anarchy are rubbish, Prime Minister Scott Morrison says.

Scott Morrison has dismissed a stinging critique of Australia's energy policy, saying claims of "anarchy" by the architect of the government's dumped plan are rubbish.

Energy Security Board chair Kerry Schott on Wednesday mourned the death of the National Energy Guarantee, which was abandoned when Malcolm Turnbull was knifed as prime minister.

But the current prime minister gave the short shrift to her policy grief, bluntly rejecting the idea the government had lost its way on energy.

"I don't agree with that at all. I think that's rubbish," Mr Morrison told 3AW on Thursday.

Dr Schott told a conference she was still going through the stages of grief over the government's one-time signature energy plan, but was yet to leave anger.

"I characterise the general state of affairs right now as anarchy," she said.

Mr Morrison insists the government is still pursuing a reliability guarantee with state and territory governments, a feature of the NEG.

"What is necessary is that we need to get more reliability into the national energy market which covers the east coast of Australia," he said.

He dismissed suggestions there was uncertainty about the government's emission reduction commitments.

"Everybody knows what they are and we're meeting them."

SOURCE 

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11 October, 2018

The Trump administration is moving to allow year-round sales of gasoline with higher blends of ethanol, a boon for Iowa and other farm states that have pushed for greater sales of the corn-based fuel

Having corn products in your gas tank is absurd.  Greenies put it there and Big Corn keeps it there. If alcohol is needed in fuel, it is most efficiently made from sugar cane.  And the nearby Caribbean is a historic source of cane sugar

President Donald Trump is expected to announce he is lifting a federal ban on summer sales of high-ethanol blends during a trip to Iowa on Tuesday.

The long-expected announcement is something of a reward to Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman led a contentious but successful fight to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The veteran Republican lawmaker is the Senate’s leading ethanol proponent and sharply criticized the Trump administration’s proposed rollback in ethanol volumes earlier this year.

At that time Grassley threatened to call for the resignation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s chief, Scott Pruitt, if Pruitt did not work to fulfill the federal ethanol mandate. Pruitt later stepped down amid a host of ethics investigations.

A senior administration official said Monday that the EPA will publish a rule in coming days to allow high-ethanol blends as part of a package of proposed changes to the ethanol mandate. The official spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of Trump’s announcement.

The change would allow year-round sales of gasoline blends with up to 15 percent ethanol. Gasoline typically contains 10 percent ethanol.

The EPA currently bans the high-ethanol blend, called E15, during the summer because of concerns that it contributes to smog on hot days, a claim ethanol industry advocates say is unfounded.

In May, Republican senators, including Grassley, announced a tentative agreement with the White House to allow year-round E15 sales, but the EPA did not propose a formal rule change.

The senior administration official said the proposed rule intends to allow E15 sales next summer. Current regulations prevent retailers in much of the country from offering E15 from June 1 to Sept. 15.

Lifting the summer ban is expected to be coupled with new restrictions on trading biofuel credits that underpin the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, commonly known as the ethanol mandate. The law sets out how much corn-based ethanol and other renewable fuels refiners must blend into gasoline each year.

The Renewable Fuel Standard was intended to address global warming, reduce dependence on foreign oil and bolster the rural economy by requiring a steady increase in renewable fuels over time. The mandate has not worked as intended, and production levels of renewable fuels, mostly ethanol, routinely fail to reach minimum thresholds set in law.

The oil industry opposes year-round sales of E15, warning that high-ethanol gasoline can damage car engines and fuel systems. Some car makers have warned against high-ethanol blends, although EPA has approved use of E15 in all light-duty vehicles built since 2001.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers, many from oil-producing states, sent Trump a letter last week opposing expanded sales of high-ethanol gas. The lawmakers called the approach “misguided” and said it would do nothing to protect refinery jobs and “could hurt millions of consumers whose vehicles and equipment are not compatible with higher-ethanol blended gasoline.”

The letter was signed by 16 Republicans and four Democrats, including Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a key Trump ally. New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, whose state includes several refineries, also signed the letter.

A spokeswoman for the Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol industry trade group, said allowing E15 to be sold year-round would give consumers greater access to clean, low-cost, higher-octane fuel while expanding market access for ethanol producers.

“The ability to sell E15 all year would also bring a significant boost to farmers across our country” and provide a significant economic boost to rural America, said spokeswoman Rachel Gantz.

SOURCE





UN: It's Climate Doomsday, and We Mean It This Time

As if we needed just one more apocalyptic warning to finally believe these Chicken Littles.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced in a new report that the world has just 12 years to make drastic and changes — “unprecedented in terms of scale” — to reduce global warming or we will suffer an irreversible climate catastrophe. As if we needed just one more apocalyptic warning to finally believe these Chicken Littles.

Remember, this UN report comes just 12 years after Al Gore declared we had 10 years left to save the planet. And 36 years after the UN itself said we had 20 years.

This latest doomsday scenario claims that if the nations of the world don’t take major steps to reduce carbon emissions, we will miss the last opportunity to reduce rising temperatures, basically signing humanity’s death warrant.

No really; they mean it this time!

The New York Times is appalled … at President Donald Trump. “A day after the United Nations issued its most urgent call to arms yet for the world to confront the threat of climate change, President Trump boarded Air Force One for Florida — a state that lies directly in the path of this coming calamity — and said nothing about it,” the Times harrumphed in an editorial masquerading as a news report.

The UN report calls for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over the next 10 years. In order to reach this goal, of course, governments must make “rapid and far-reaching” changes to their energy industries by switching to renewable energy sources and phasing out global coal production, while forcing automotive companies to ramp up production of electric cars. Several nations already want to ban combustion engines by 2040; California Democrats do too.

It’s a long shot that the nations of the world can reduce carbon emissions by one million tons a year, so the UN report conveniently notes that a brief overshoot of the temperature goal will still put us on track to save the planet, so long as everyone sticks to the overall plan.

This latest climate report follows the leftist game plan to use climate change as a path to global socialism, to bring sovereign governments and the international economy to heel under a Marxist cabal that would dictate what countries can manufacture and what people can purchase and how, or if, they travel.

The climate alarmism of the Left goes back decades, and it has always been tied to forcing people to change their behavior in a manner that suits the leftist worldview.

In the 1970s, we were told that overpopulation and a coming ice age would deplete our resources and cause massive starvation. The solution was for First World middle- and upper-class people to stop having children and consuming resources. In the 1980s, global warming became the new culprit with the claim that our coastal cities would all be underwater by the turn of the century. The cure? Massive price and tax hikes for First World energy producers and consumers to convince them to reduce their “carbon footprint.”

Why should the United States pay such a high price for global warming? Of all the nations that are signatories to the Paris climate accord, America is the only one that has actually reduced carbon emissions. And, of course, we’re the only signatory to withdraw, just as Trump promised. Yet most of the solutions that scientists propose to “fix” the problem disproportionately target the capitalist U.S., leaving communist China — the world’s largest polluter — alone.

In every instance, a large number of climate scientists have, either willingly or without realizing it, tried to advance the agenda of the Left. Some have admitted to manipulating data to enhance the danger. Others simply trash the reputations of any colleague who dares question the gospel of global warming. Reasoned debate and research, the backbone of good science, has no room when the real goal is to force a particular outcome or behavior upon the people.

Everyone suffers in this climate of fear. When UN panels, universities, and hustlers like Gore lay out doomsday scenarios and use cooked data to warn of “last chances” and “tipping points” to stop the apocalypse, how is the public supposed to know what is true and what is false about global warming? Environmentalists appear puzzled that people aren’t more concerned about the issue. Perhaps they would be more attentive if they weren’t being lied to so brazenly.

SOURCE






Stopping 'Catastrophic' Global Warming Is Impossible, UN Report Shows, So What's The Point?

Assume for the sake of argument that everything environmentalists say about global warming is true. If that's the case, then there is no chance of stopping it. That's what the latest UN report on global warming clearly demonstrates.

The headlines in stories reporting on the UN's latest climate change report all say something along the lines of: "Urgent changed is needed to prevent global catastrophe."

If global temperatures climb more than 1.5 degrees Celsius — compared with preindustrial temperatures — all hell will break loose, the UN says. There will be catastrophic flooding, drought, more weather extremes. Hundreds of millions will be susceptible to poverty by midcentury. Even at 1.5 degrees, terrible things will happen.

To be clear, we are highly skeptical of these doom-and-gloom scenarios. Past predictions of global warming catastrophes have failed to emerge. In the U.S., for example, there's been no trend toward more extreme weather, drought or flooding, even though the planet has already warmed 1 degree Celsius. This year's tornado season, in fact, has been the mildest on record. What's more, environmentalists have issued these "point of no return" warnings for decades, only to revise them once the supposed deadline passes.

Global Warming Is Inevitable

But even if the alarmist predictions are true, there's nothing that can plausibly be done at this point to stop it. That's the real message of the annual UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

The chart contained in the "Summery for Policymakers" shows projected changes in global temperatures over the next 100 years. It also shows that temperatures will top the supposed 1.5-degree limit by around 2040, even if the world makes drastic reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions within the next two decades.

How drastic?

The UN's forecasts all assume that the entire world become entirely carbon free by 2055 … at the latest. That's just 37 years from now. It also assumes that the world makes massive reductions in other greenhouse gases, such as methane.

Here's an example of what the UN says would have to happen within the next 12 years to meet that goal. Keep in mind, this is the low end of the UN's proposed changes:

* 60% of the world's energy would have to come from renewable sources by 2030, and 77% by 2050. (The Department of Energy forecasts that renewables will account for just 27% of the U.S.'s electric power generation by 2050.)

* Coal use would have to drop 78%, oil 37% and natural gas 25% — compared with 2010 levels — within 12 years. (Last year, global coal demand increased, and use of natural gas has massively climbed in the U.S.)

* There'd have to be a 59% increase in nuclear power by 2030, and a 150% increase by 2050. (Good luck getting environmentalist to buy into that).

* Farmers would have to figure out how to cut methane emissions by 24% by 2030, (and still feed a growing worldwide population).

Even those massive reductions won't produce enough CO2 reductions it. So, the UN assumes the world will also remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. That's despite the fact that nobody knows how to do that today.

Unprecedented, Or Wishful Thinking?

The UN itself admits that achieving anything like these levels of greenhouse gas reductions "would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure, and industrial systems."

It goes on to say that such an undertaking would be "unprecedented in terms of scale." And it would require a "significant upscaling of investments." In other words, massive amounts of money.

To say that changes of this magnitude within that time frame are unrealistic would be putting it mildly.

The last big attempt to get the world to cut CO2 emissions turned out to be a farce. As the UN itself admitted, the CO2 reduction pledges made by the 195 countries that signed on to the Paris Accords won't come anywhere close the level of CO2 reductions it says are needed to avoid "catastrophe."

And countries aren't even living up to those pledges.

In the EU, carbon emissions started climbing again last year. Germany is way off its carbon reduction goals, despite plans to spend $580 billion to overhaul its energy system. A recent report showed that only nine of 195 countries have submitted their CO2 reduction plans to the UN.

Does anyone honestly believe that these countries will suddenly decide to entirely decarbonize their economies in three decades?

Adapting To Global Warming

So, if the chances of avoiding a climate "catastrophe" are gone, what should be done?

Sure, we can research carbon removal technology. And, as the U.S. has shown, a free-market economy — simply by encouraging cost cutting and efficiency — can generate CO2 reductions without the heavy hand of government.

But in our view, the most prudent course of action isn't to wreck the global economy in hopes that it might make a small difference in the climate 100 years from now. The more reasonable approach is to adapt to whatever changes do occur.

Even if the horror stories told by environmentalists come to pass, mankind can and will adjust.

After all, the human race has shown the ability to survive in the most extreme climates. And it's done so with far less technological sophistication. We've learned to live in deserts. And in the Arctic. In hurricane alleys and earthquake zones. The idea that we won't be able to handle changes caused by a slightly warmer planet over the next millennium is ludicrous.

Meanwhile, if the environmentalists' horror stories don't come true, we won't have wasted trillions upon trillions of dollars tilting at windmills.

SOURCE








Four Reasons Why ‘Climate Change’ Is A Flat-Out Hoax

First, a disclaimer: I am not a climate scientist.  In fact, I am not a scientist of any kind.  But I do have a degree in electrical engineering, which I mention only to point out that I am at least as qualified as the next non-scientist to form rational opinions about global warming claims.

In obtaining my degree, I took enough classes in chemistry, physics, and geology to develop a keen appreciation of the scientific method, the best way ever devised for winnowing the truth from fakery and deception.

If taking the scientific method into account, no intelligent person can fail to see that the constant drumbeat of wild and hysterical claims about the climate are insults to the search for Truth.

Following are four reasons why I will bet my life that “climate change” is the greatest scientific and political hoax in human history.

1. Rampant scientific fraud

Ordinary people like me don’t understand climate science, but we can spot cheating a mile away. Without the assistance of a complicit Western media in burying multiple indisputable cases of outright scientific fraud, man-made global warming theory would have been blown out of the water years ago.

One of the most brazen instances of inexcusable scientific misconduct is documented by photographic evidence gathered during a three-month investigation by a veteran meteorologist.

As reported in this PDF, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) placed hundreds of official global warming thermometers in locations entirely unsuitable for gathering natural temperatures:

* Adjacent to hot engines of parked vehicles

* On asphalt-covered roofs

* Near hot exhaust vents of air conditioning units

* On heat-retaining airport tarmacs and paved parking lots

* Next to heat-retaining rock formations and brick buildings

Global warming is measured in tenths of a degree, so every artificial upward nudge creates a deceptive picture of actual temperatures.

To avoid artificially elevated readings, NOAA’s own official site location standards require that thermometers be placed at least 100 feet from any paved or concrete surface, and in a level, open area with natural ground cover.

Those standards were clearly subverted, and every voter should demand to know why.

No supporter of man-made global warming theory who sees the photographs in the PDF linked to above – all of which have been downplayed, or outright ignored, by the complicit Western media – can fail to ascertain that the theory they support is being kept on life support by scientific fraud.

2. The duping of Mr. & Mrs. John Q. Public

As reported in Forbes, the following unguarded statement was made by one of the climate crisis industry’s loudest drum-beaters, the late Dr. Steven Schneider, lead author of numerous alarming U.N. climate reports and former professor of climatology at Stanford:

We need broad-based support to capture the public’s imagination, we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts.  Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

In other words, one of the climate crisis lobby’s most loyal sycophants told his like-minded colleagues that they not only must conceal evidence that casts doubt on global warming theory but also craft their research in dishonest ways designed to create terror in the minds of a trusting public.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that dishonesty and concealment of contrarian views have no place in legitimate science.

3. A long trail of wildly inaccurate predictions

As reported by Fox News, a 2015 report published in the journal Nature Climate Change compared 117 computer model projections during the 1990s with the amount of actual warming that occurred.

Of the 117, only three were roughly accurate, while 114 over-estimated the recorded warming. (The lopsided results suggest that those doing the modeling may have been guilty of using an unscientific technique known as garbage in, garbage out.) On average, the computer models predicted twice as much warming as that which actually occurred.

The wildly inaccurate predictions reported by Nature Climate Change were not alone.  In a terrifying May 11, 1982 prediction trumpeted in the Western media, Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) decreed that an environmental “tipping point” was closing in: “Earth faces environmental disaster as final as nuclear war by the end of this century unless governments act now.”

That bone-chilling assessment was seconded seven years later, in July 1989, by another senior U.N. climate official, Noel Brown, who warned: “Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by 2000.”

When that tipping point came and went 19 years ago, others were concocted, including one by NASA scientist Dr. James Hanson, who declared in January 2009, “President Obama has just four years to save Earth.”

As one frantic tipping point after another falls by the wayside, a new one is invented, each of which is breathlessly reported by the complicit Western media.

4. Intentional concealment of inconvenient parts of climate history 

In serving as willing propagandists for the climate crisis industry, Western media portray every severe weather event as the “worst ever,” which they are now doing regarding the drought in the Southwestern U.S. and the flooding caused by Hurricane Florence.  What the alarmists try to hide from voters at all costs are inconvenient parts of Earth’s climate history, such as these:

* Ancient mega-droughts were infinitely worse than anything people living in modern times have seen. Example: Around the year 850 AD, a mega-drought in what is now the Desert Southwest lasted a staggering 240 years, and that catastrophic climate event was preceded by another mega-drought a half-century earlier that lasted 180 years.

Absent that kind of information, it’s no wonder so many otherwise intelligent Americans have been conned into believing that the current drought is the “worst ever.”

* The Great Hurricane of 1780 killed 20,000 people in the Caribbean.  On Sept. 8, 1900, a Cat-4 hurricane obliterated the island of Galveston, Texas, killing an estimated 10,000 residents.

In 1927, weeks of heavy rains along the Mississippi River caused flooding that covered 27,000 square miles, leaving entire towns and surrounding farmland submerged up to a depth of 30 feet and displacing 640,000 people, from Louisiana to Illinois.

The Yangtze River flood of 1931, one of the deadliest single events in human history, was responsible for a death toll estimated at 3.7 million.

Hurricane Florence and the flooding it caused were unquestionably devastating.  But the worst ever?  You decide.

You won’t hear a peep about past ecological disasters in the debate over global warming.  The climate crisis industry conceals inconvenient parts of Earth’s climate history that undermine its “worst ever” claims.

Bottom line: Listed above are four reasons – I have many more – why I will bet my life that “climate change” is a flat-out hoax.

SOURCE






Australia: Minister backs science on weedkiller use

Agriculture Minister David Littleproud has backed the government's pesticide regulator over concerns the world's most popular weedkiller is unsafe.

The Cancer Council wants an independent review into glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, after it was linked to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

But Mr Littleproud said the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority had determined the chemical was safe.

"The science of the independent regulator says this chemical is safe if you follow the instructions," the minister told Sky News on Tuesday.

"I just say to everybody use some common sense, follow the instructions and you'll be OK."

Debate over glyphosate was reignited in August after a Californian jury ordered agribusiness giant Monsanto pay $US289 million ($A399 million) in damages to a former groundskeeper dying of cancer.

Mr Littleproud said that case and others aired by the ABC's Four Corners on Monday highlighted excessive exposure.

"Home gardeners shouldn't get too worried about this, You're not going to get exposed to levels so long as you follow the instructions," he said.

The minister said farmers were using the chemical in a sensible way, adding agriculture had come a long way in how pesticides were used.

"I just say to everyone calm down ... and have faith that we have the best science in the world," Mr Littleproud said.

APVMA's review came after a 2015 report by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a World Health Organisation body, found glyphosate was "probably carcinogenic to humans".

Labor seized on the concerns, demanding a Senate inquiry into the independence and decision-making of the pesticides agency.

"This issue is too important to the agricultural community, to Australia's farmers, and to consumers to be left unresolved," opposition agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon said on Tuesday.

Labor also wants to investigate the impact of moving the regulator from Canberra to Armidale in northern NSW.

"There is no doubt the government's decision to relocate the APVMA has impacted on its operations," Mr Fitzgibbon said.

But Mr Littleproud accused the opposition of playing politics, saying the agency's most recent assessment was conducted before the relocation started.

National Farmers' Federation president Fiona Simson said the scientific evidence overwhelmingly proved the chemical was safe.

"There is simply no alternative that is as safe and as effective as glyphosate, for these purposes," Ms Simson 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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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10 October, 2018

Clothing is pollution!

That's the latest dotty shriek from the Greenies below. But what really is a source of severe pollution, the manufacture of solar panels, passes without a murmur from them.

And their picking out the shrinkage of the Aral sea (not to be confused with the sea of Azov, the world's shallowest sea) is particularly dotty.  Rivers flowing into the landlocked Aral sea were diverted in Soviet times.  It had nothing to do with anything recent or modern. The Aral sea does still exist.  The Russians have dammed off the bottom two thirds so that what is left of the inflow remains in the Northern third

The idea that the bright young things of Britain will refrain from buying clothes is a laugh. 

And all modern industrial activities generate pollution of one sort or another so it makes no sense to pick on just one.  Why not pick on woodfires instead?  Because it is "natural", Greenies favour wood fires for domestic heating.  But such fires are now so widely used that air pollution in London is now nearly as bad as it was in the bad old days.  That would seem a clear type of harm rather than the  highly inferential harm caused by  dressing fashionably

And what about synthetics?  Should we use only synthetic fibres instead of cotton?  You can be sure that Greenies would have a kneejerk opposition to that.  Lets all go naked!  You could do that where I live but it might get a bit chilly in a British winter


Today, the scrubland that was once the Aral Sea in Central Asia is dotted with camels searching out sparse tufts of grass against a flat, sandy horizon. Only the bizarre sight of boats marooned hundreds of miles inland gives any clue to the area's history. In just four decades, what was once one of the largest inland bodies of water on the globe has shrunk by more than two thirds – an area the size of Ireland – leaving behind a poisonous dustbowl.

And the reason? Our insatiable appetite for cheap jeans – and the rapacious cotton farming that feeds it at almost any cost.

Tomorrow, in a devastating assault on an industry that dictates so much of our high street economy, investigative journalist Stacey Dooley will brand fashion one of the biggest environmental disasters to hit the planet.

With Britons buying twice as many clothes as a decade ago – last year we spent £50 billion – there is mounting concern about cheap, disposable fashion sometimes branded 'look and chuck'. Stacey's BBC documentary Fashion's Dirty Secrets will throw this into sharp relief. It reveals that, around the globe, millions of gallons of clean water have either been diverted to growing cotton, or have been hopelessly polluted by the toxic chemicals used for dyes and manufacture. The facts are stark: to grow enough cotton to make a single pair of jeans can take 3,400 gallons or 15,500 litres of water.

But that is only part of the issue – because the fashion industry's pollution problem is also out of control. Factories connected to high street brands have been dumping chemicals from clothes production into Indonesia's Citarum River, says Dooley, threatening the lives of millions.

Serious problems are already evident in the UK, too. The trend for cheap, disposable fashion means more than 300,000 tons of clothing are dumped in landfill in Britain alone each year, which last year worked out at 235 million items.

Meanwhile, microfibres from fleeces and sportswear are now a significant cause of plastic pollution in our rivers and oceans: 700,000 fibres are released in a single domestic wash.

Stacey, who is currently appearing on Strictly Come Dancing, says on the documentary: 'It's impossible to go down any high street without being bombarded by images luring us into buying cheap clothing. But the few pounds we spend on an item of clothing isn't the true cost.

'It's costing people their livelihoods. It's costing millions of people their health. In fact, it's costing us the earth. It's a situation that needs addressing and fast. There has to be a real sense of urgency now because to be totally honest with you we are running out of time.'

In fact, there is growing momentum on the issue, with many officials now recognising the need for urgent action. Last week, for example, Parliament's Environmental Audit Committee wrote to Britain's ten biggest clothing retailers asking them to reveal their environmental footprint.

They quoted evidence that British shoppers buy far more new clothes than any other European nation. The firms involved, all high street favourites and supermarkets, include Marks & Spencer, Primark, Next, Arcadia, Asda, T K Maxx, Tesco, J D Sports, Debenhams and Sports Direct International. Most churn out hundreds of new fashion lines a year, constantly updating their stock and fuelling trends.

MARY Creagh, chair of the Committee, said: 'Instagram is fuelling this as people are adopting a 'look and chuck' mentality – we've got a lot more fast fashion.

'If you look at Italy's fashion market, there's much more focus on high-end clothing and people tend to save up and buy just one or two garments, like Max Mara coats, which are timeless.

A spokesman for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: 'We are interested in any ideas to reduce the impact of waste on our oceans and wider environment. We have already cut waste from plastic bags and microbeads and we are also taking action on plastic bottles, straws, stirrers and cotton buds.

'We are funding research into new ways to deal with micro-plastics but there is more to do.'

SOURCE







UN issues yet another climate tipping point – Humans given only 12 more years to make ‘unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’

The United Nations has once again issued another dire climate change report claiming we must act before it’s too late. The media has dutifully reported this latest round of climate “tipping points.”  The latest UN report has extended the climate deadline by which we must allegedly empower the UN bureaucrats to save the world until 2030 or just 12 more years!

CNN reports: “Governments around the world must take ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ to avoid disastrous levels of global warming, says a stark new report from the global scientific authority on climate change.”

But as the new book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change”, reveals, climate tipping points have a long history of repetition, moved deadlines and utter failure. The book documents that the earliest climate “tipping point” was issued in 1864 by MIT professor who warned of “climatic excess” unless humans changed their ways.

Book excerpt (Chap 13):

“As early as 1864 George Perkins Marsh, sometimes said to be the father of American ecology, warned that the earth was ‘fast becoming an unfit home for its “noblest inhabitant,”’ and that unless men changed their ways it would be reduced ‘to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the deprivation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.’” —MIT professor Leo Marx

The climate change scare campaign has always relied on arbitrary deadlines, dates by which we must act before it’s too late. Global warming advocates have drawn many lines in the sand, claiming that we must act to solve global warming—or else.

“We are running out of time. We have to get an ambitious global agreement,” warned then–UN climate chief Christiana Figueres at the 2014 People’s Climate March. “This is a huge crisis.”

At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, Al Gore sought UN climate agreement—immediately. “We have to do it this year. Not next year, this year,” he demanded. “And of course the clock is ticking because Mother Nature does not do bailouts.”

Gore has warned repeatedly of the coming tipping point. Climate change “can cross a tipping point and suddenly shift into high gear,” the former vice president claimed in 2006.

Laurie David, the producer of Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, said in 2007 that “we have to have action we have
to do something right now to stop global warming.”

Prince Charles has also warned that time is running out. “We should compare the planet under threat of climate change to a sick patient,” urged the heir to the British throne.

“I fear there is not a moment to lose.”

“The clock is ticking. . . . Scientists believe that we have ten years to bring emissions under control to prevent a catastrophe,” reported ABC News.

But these “tipping points” and “last chance” claims now have a long history. The United Nations alone has spent more than a quarter of a century announcing a series of ever-shifting deadlines by which the world must act or face disaster from anthropogenic climate change.

Deadlines Come and Go

Recently, in 2014, the United Nations declared a climate “tipping point” by which the world must act to avoid dangerous global warming. “The world now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” reported the Boston Globe.

But way back in 1982, the UN had announced a two-decade tipping point for action on environmental issues. Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned on May 11, 1982, that the “world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now.” According to Tolba, lack of action would bring “by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.”

In 1989, the UN was still trying to sell that “tipping point” to the public. According to a July 5, 1989, article in the San Jose Mercury News, Noel Brown, the then-director of the New York office of UNEP was warning of a “10-year window of opportunity to solve” global warming. According to the Herald, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.”

But in 2007, seven years after that supposed tipping point had come and gone, Rajendra Pachauri, then the chief of the UN IPPC, declared 2012 the climate deadline by which it was imperative to act: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced his own deadline in August 2009, when he warned of “incalculable” suffering without a UN climate deal in December 2009. And in 2012, the UN gave Planet Earth another four-year reprieve. UN Foundation president and former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth called Obama’s re-election the “last window of opportunity” to get it right on climate change.

Heir to the British throne Prince Charles originally announced in March 2009 that we had “less than 100 months to alter our behavior before we risk catastrophic climate change.” As he said during a speech in Brazil, “We may yet be able to prevail and thereby to avoid bequeathing a poisoned chalice to our children and grandchildren. But we only have 100 months to act.”

To his credit, Charles stuck to this rigid timetable—at least initially. Four months later, in July 2009, he declared a ninety-six-month tipping point. At that time the media dutifully reported that “the heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world. And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the ‘age of convenience’ was over.”

At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, Charles was still keeping at it: “The grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control.”

As the time expired, the Prince of Wales said in 2010, “Ladies and gentlemen we only—we now have only 86 months left before we reach the tipping point.”

By 2014, a clearly exhausted Prince Charles seemed to abandon the countdown, announcing, “We are running out of time. How many times have I found myself saying this over recent years?”

In the summer of 2017, Prince Charles’s one-hundred-month tipping point finally expired.26 What did Charles have to say? Was he giving up? Did he proclaim the end times for the planet? Far from it. Two years earlier, in 2015, Prince Charles abandoned his hundred-month countdown and gave the world a reprieve by extending his climate tipping point another thirty-five years, to the year 2050!

A July 2015 interview in the Western Morning News revealed that “His Royal Highness warns that we have just 35 years to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.” So instead of facing the expiration of his tipping point head on, the sixty-nine-year-old Charles kicked the climate doomsday deadline down the road until 2050 when he would be turning
the ripe age of 102. (Given the Royal Family’s longevity, it is possible he may still be alive for his new extended deadline.)
Former Irish President Mary Robinson issued a twenty-year tipping point in 2015, claiming that global leaders have “at most two decades to save the world.”

Al Gore announced his own ten-year climate tipping point in 2006 and again in 2008, warning that “the leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.” In 2014, with “only two years left” before Gore’s original deadline, the climatologist Roy Spencer mocked the former vice president, saying “in the grand tradition of prophets of doom, Gore’s prognostication is not shaping up too well.”

Penn State Professor Michael Mann weighed in with a 2036 deadline. “There is an urgency to acting unlike anything we’ve seen before,” Mann explained. Media outlets reported Mann’s made a huge media splash with his prediction, noting “Global Warming Will Cross a Dangerous Threshold in 2036.”

Other global warming activists chose 2047 as their deadline, while twenty governments from around the globe chose 2030 as theirs, with Reuters reporting that millions would die by 2030 if world failed to act on climate: “More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2% of GDP by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday. As global avg. temps rise due to ghg emissions, the effects on
planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by the humanitarian organization DARA.”

As we saw in chapter five, top UK scientist Sir David King warned in 2004 that that by 2100 Antarctica could be the only habitable continent.

Tipping point rhetoric seems to have exploded beginning in 2002. An analysis by Reason magazine’s Ron Bailey found that tipping points in environmental rhetoric increased dramatically in that year.

The Last Chance

Michael Mann warned that the 2015 UN Paris summit “is probably the last chance” to address climate change.38 But the reality is that every UN climate summit is hailed as the last opportunity to stop global warming.

Newsweek magazine weighed in with its own tipping point: “The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find
it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.” That warning appeared in an April 28, 1975, article
about global cooling! Same rhetoric, different eco-scare.

Here is a sampling of previous “last chance” deadlines that turned out to be—well—not the last chance after all.

Bonn, 2001: “A Global Warming Treaty’s Last Chance” —Time magazine, July 16, 2001

Montreal, 2005: “Climate campaigner Mark Lynas warned ‘with time running out for the global climate, your meeting in
Montreal represents a last chance for action.’” —Independent, November 28, 2005

Bali, 2007: “World leaders will converge on Bali today for the start of negotiations which experts say could be the last chance to save the Earth from catastrophic climate change.” —New Zealand Herald, December 3, 2007.

Poznan, Poland, 2008: “Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery warned, ‘This round of negotiations is likely to be
our last chance as a species to deal with the problem.’” —Age, December 9, 2008

Copenhagen, 2009: “European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas told a climate conference that it was ‘the
world’s last chance to stop climate change before it passes the point of no return.’” —Reuters, February 27, 2009

Cancun, 2010: “Jairem Ramesh, the Indian environment minister, sees it as the ‘last chance’ for climate change talks to
succeed.” —Telegraph, November 29, 2010 Durban, 2011: “Durban climate change meeting is “the last chance.” Attended by over 200 countries, this week’s major UN conference has been described by many experts as humanity’s last chance to avert the disastrous effects of climate change.” —UCA News, November 28, 201140

“Serially Doomed”

Perhaps the best summary of the tipping-point phenomenon comes from UK scientist Philip Stott. “In essence, the Earth has been given a 10-year survival warning regularly for the last fifty or so years. We have been serially doomed,” Stott explained. “Our post-modern period of climate change angst can probably be traced back to the late-1960s, if not earlier. By 1973, and the ‘global cooling’ scare, it was in full swing, with predictions of the imminent collapse of the world within ten to twenty years, exacerbated by the impacts of a nuclear winter.

Environmentalists were warning that, by the year 2000, the population of the US would have fallen to only 22 million. In 1987, the scare abruptly changed to ‘global warming’, and the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was established (1988), issuing its first assessment report in 1990, which served as the basis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).

SOURCE







The Ontario declaration

BY GREG RICKFORD (Greg Rickford is Ontario’s Minister of Energy, Northern Development and Mines)

The only thing “green” about the Green Energy Act was the green that lined the pockets of well-connected insiders.

That’s why, yesterday, I was very pleased to be joined by my friend Minister McNaughton to announce that we are repealing this disastrous legislation that killed jobs, hurt families, business and manufacturing across our province.

For many people, the Green Energy Act is a symbol of a failed energy policy, driven by dangerous ideology and a culture of waste at Queen’s Park.

The Green Energy Act forced wasteful projects on unwilling communities while driving up the costs of hydro bills for families and businesses across Ontario. In 2017 alone, wind and solar projects added $3.75 billion in costs to hydro bills. Even worse, 26 per cent of this expensive electricity wasn’t even used, it was curtailed, and you paid for it. This is part of the reason why, under the previous Liberal government, energy rates tripled, hurting families, and driving manufacturing and jobs out of Ontario.

The Green Energy Act represents the largest transfer of money from the poor and middle class to the rich in Ontario’s history. Well-connected energy Liberal insiders made fortunes putting up wind-farms and solar panels that gouged hydro consumers in order to generate electricity that Ontario doesn’t need.

These projects were forced on municipalities, with little to no consultation. When communities raised concerns, they were ignored, in fact trampled by Queen’s Park.

One example of this is the Municipality of Dutton Dunwich. More than 80 per cent of residents in this community voted in a referendum to stop a wind farm in that community. The previous government ignored the people of Dutton Dunwich and forced this unpopular and wasteful project in this community.

These are the consequences of 15 years of bad decisions. That’s why one of my first acts as Energy Minister was to cancel 758 of these expensive and wasteful projects, including the wind farm in Dutton Dunwich. This will save electricity customers across Ontario $790 million. Future decisions on energy supply will not be driven by ideology but what matters most to the people of Ontario, their pocket books.

This legislation, if passed, will send a strong signal about our government’s energy priorities.

We are committed to putting more money in your pocket by lowering hydro bills by 12%.

We are giving power back to municipalities to ensure they are in control of where energy projects go.

We are committed to cleaning up the hydro mess left by the previous government.

We are committed to ending the sweetheart deals of the past that tripled your hydro bill.

SOURCE






Big Green

Major foundations handed nearly $4 billion to global warming activists, anti-fossil fuel campaigners and other environmentalists over the past eight years, according to a database debuted Monday.

The website Big Green, Inc. tracked $3.7 billion in commitments from major grant-making foundations to environmental causes from 2008 to 2016. It’s a project of the free market Institute for Energy Research and is based on nonprofit tax filings.

IER president Tom Pyle said the vast web of funding detailed by Big Green, Inc. shatters the notion environmentalists are locked in a David versus Goliath-like struggle against energy companies

“The truth is the environmental left is a deep-pocketed and powerful force in American politics that is working to stop all natural gas, oil, and coal production in the United States,” Pyle said in a statement.

IER’s project found, for example, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave out $2 billion in grants to environmental causes, including climate activism, between 2008 and 2016 — the largest grant-maker in the database.

The Energy Foundation handed out $444 million in grants and the Sea Change Foundation doled out $373 million. The Energy Foundation got funding from liberal billionaire Tom Steyer’s charitable trust from 2009 to 2013, the group disclosed on its website.

Steyer, a deep-pocketed environmental activist, is leading an effort to impeach President Donald Trump. The former Hillary Clinton campaign bundler has poured millions of his own fortune into his “Need To Impeach” campaign.

The Sea Change Foundation has been targeted by Congress over potential ties to Russian oligarchs. House lawmakers asked the Department of the Treasury to investigate a Bermuda-based shell company that gave Sea Change $23 million in 2010 and 2011.

Lawmakers on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology said the Bermuda-based shell company is run by a law firm with ties to Russian oligarchs.

IER followed the money to more than 1,500 environmental groups, including Climateworks and the Natural Resources Defense Council that got $1.7 billion and $79 million, respectively, from major foundations.

But IER’s database is only the tip of the iceberg. IER tracked more than 8,800 grants from the 10 largest U.S.-based grant-making foundations over an eight-year period. Notably, IER found about four times as much funding than a recent study.

Northeastern University communications professor Matthew Nisbet tracked nearly $567 million on global warming-related funding between 2011 to 2015 from major foundations.

“Significant funding was also devoted to mobilizing public opinion and to opposing the fossil fuel industry,” Nisbet wrote, later adding: “$69.4 million in grants focused on promoting policy actions and regulations to limit fossil fuel production and development.”

“In this case, $42 million was devoted to opposing coal power,” Nisbet wrote. “The major funders in this area were Bloomberg ($20 million) and MacArthur ($15 million) which supported the Sierra Club’s work on the issue.”

Billions more are on the way for the environmental movement. A group of 29 foundations pledged another $3 billion over the next five years “to reduce the rate of global warming,” according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The foundations’ pledges were made at the end of a climate activist summit in San Francisco co-hosted by California Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and former New York City Independent Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

“And they have a strong ally in the mainstream media, which all-too-often has become a cheerleader for their harmful agenda,” Pyle said. “Big Green, Inc. is a first-of-its-kind research tool that provides a detailed accounting of the billions of dollars that flow into and throughout the green movement.”

SOURCE






IPCC push to dump coal-fired power not for us, says Australian PM

Scott Morrison has rejected a rapid global phase-out of coal-fired power and declared his government will not be bound by a landmark climate study, amid concern its blueprint for curbing temperature rises would see the “lights go out on the east coast of Australia”.

A special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has championed a quick end to coal-fired power across the world and found that unprecedented changes in all aspects of society were needed to meet the lower Paris Agreement target limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

The Morrison government yesterday welcomed the report but stood by coal-fired power generation and defended Australia’s record in meeting its international emissions ­reduction targets.

“If we take coal out of our ­energy system, the lights will go out on the east coast of Australia — it’s as simple as that,” Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said.

The IPCC special report said rising temperatures were already affecting the weather in some ­places and there would be a big difference in the impacts on all ­aspects of the natural world from a 2C increase, compared with a 1.5C rise. Warm-water coral reefs would be more than 99 per cent gone with a rise of 2C, but some might survive at 1.5C.

The special report is set to ­become a central focus of a campaign to encourage countries to increase their ambition under the Paris Agreement, starting in ­Poland in December. At present, Paris Agreement pledges would lead to global temperature ­increases of more than 3C.

The Australian government said the report justified the controversial decision to spend $444 million protecting the Great Barrier Reef.

Environment Minister Melissa Price said the IPCC report was designed to inform policy makers but was not “policy ­prescriptive”.

The Prime Minister ­defended Australia remaining a signatory to the Paris Agreement, arguing it would not have any impact on electricity prices. But he said Australia would not be held to any of the IPCC ­report conclusions.

“We are not held to any of them at all, and nor are we bound to go and tip money into that big climate fund,” Mr Morrison told 2GB radio.

Bill Shorten said there was a need to ensure a greater proportion of renewable energy sources in Australia’s energy mix.

“But we are not saying that there won’t be fossil fuel as part of our energy mix going forward,” the Opposition Leader said.

According to the IPCC report, to meet a target of 1.5C warming compared with the 1851-1900 average, global net human carbon ­dioxide emissions would need to fall about 45 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net zero around 2050.

Renewables are projected to supply 70 to 85 per cent of electricity in 2050, under the 1.5C target. Nuclear and fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage (CCS) were modelled to increase in most 1.5C pathways. The use of CCS would allow the electricity generation share of gas to be about 8 per cent of global electricity in 2050.


“The use of coal shows a steep reduction in all pathways and would be reduced to close to zero per cent of electricity (in 2050),” the report said.

CSIRO research scientist Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project, said the special report was probably the last reminder that there were no insoluble biophysical or technical impediments to meet the lowest temperature targets in the Paris Agreement.

But Dr Canadell said it would require the “almost immediate ­establishment of a global carbon market, carbon pricing across all sectors of the economy, massive energy efficiency gains, significant consumer changes in diets, actions to reduce peak global population, and the immediate and growing deployment of options for the ­direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, including the pervasive need for carbon capture and storage in most cases”.

There would be drastic changes in land use, including reforestation and planting crops for energy to suck carbon dioxide from the ­atmosphere and burying emissions when they were burnt.

A shift in diet towards less meat was described in the summary for policymakers as the need for “healthy consumption patterns”, “responsible consumption” and “sustainable diets”.

The provision of billions of dollars in finance to help developing nations would be crucial.

The IPCC said limiting global warming to 1.5C compared with 2C could “go hand-in-hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society”.

The advantages of meeting a 1.5C target rather than 2C were ­detailed in the report. Global sea level rises would be 10cm lower by 2100, the report said.

The likelihood of the Arctic Ocean being free of sea ice in ­summer would be once a century compared with at least once a ­decade. An IPCC official said that while limiting warming to 1.5C was possible within the laws of chemistry and physics, doing so would ­require unprecedented changes.

Global CCS Institute chief executive Brad Page said the ­report had reinforced the point that a 1.5C increase could not be reached without deployment of all clean technologies, and carbon capture was most definitively one.

“CCS must remain at the forefront of national, regional and international policy discussions and, as the IPCC said today, governments must act on this evidence,” Mr Page said.

Australian Conservation Foundation chief executive Kelly O’Shanassy said: “The report makes clear that we need to get better at investing in storing carbon in the natural world and deploying technologies that can remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Our governments and industry should urgently investigate how they can better do this with the right incentives.”

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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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9 October, 2018

Climate crap in a medical journal

No sign of critical thought.  They just assume the truth of global warming holus bolus.  Given what we know of the replication crisis, low-grade reasoning is to be expected in even prestigious medical journals. 

And these authors below are real dumb bunnies, real patsies.  I wonder how they explain the fact that there was an 11 year hiatus in landfalling hurricanes in the USA before the present bout of hurricanes?  It does not remotely fit the global warming theory.

And why in any case are they confident of the cause of the recent hurricanes?  There is no way they can prove that attribution.  It's just faith supported by models with no known predictive skill

They probably feel warm assurance that they are going along with the consensus about climate.  Given how often the medical consensus has reversed (on dietary fat and much else) one would have thought that medical writers would be more careful about accepting a consensus.  But perhaps they know no history either


The Need to Integrate Climate Science Into Public Health Preparedness for Hurricanes and Tropical Cyclones

James M. Shultz, et al.

Hurricane Florence made landfall as a Category 1 storm near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, on Friday, September 14, 2018, with 90-mph winds. At the same time, 3 other named storms—Helene, Isaac, and Joyce—roamed the Atlantic; Tropical Storm Olivia had just passed over Hawaii; and “Super Typhoon” Mangkhut, the strongest tropical cyclone of 2018, was hours away from sweeping over the Philippines with 165-mph (Category 5) winds.

September is often a busy month for global tropical activity, but there has been a changing scenario in recent years. The warming planet is likely to be influencing the characteristics and behavior of extreme storms.1 At the same time, public health preparedness is not keeping pace with advancing climate science knowledge about how tropical storm systems are changing and potentially becoming more dangerous.1 A closer integration of climate science with public health planning and response will be essential to mitigate the worsening health consequences of future extreme storms.

New Developments in Climate Science

Several developments in the understanding of climate-driven changes in the behavior of tropical cyclones have implications for public health preparedness.

* First, the forward speed of storms over land has been slowing.2 Some storms deviate from their predicted course and stall. This pattern was evident for Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and again for Hurricane Florence as each storm generated record-setting precipitation rates and rainfall totals.3

Water hazards, rather than winds, are posing the major risks to coastal populations. Evacuations are geared toward areas of expected storm surge. Changes in storm behavior are complicating emergency response because of the unpredictability of freshwater flash flooding. Both Harvey and Florence produced relentless precipitation and widespread inundation extending far inland.3 Unable to pinpoint which areas would be submerged, many residents could not escape the flood threats. Improvised citizen-initiated water rescues likely saved many lives during both storms.

* Second, some tropical storms undergo extremely rapid intensification.4 This was seen with the strongest storms of 2017—Harvey, Irma, and Maria—and during the initial development of Florence. Storms are reaching and maintaining very high peak intensities, as happened with Irma in 2017.5 Major hurricanes (Category 3 and higher) may also be increasing in frequency.1

* Third, storms such as Mangkhut are reaching peak intensity farther away from the equator.6 Such “poleward migration”6 means that, in the western North Pacific hurricane basin, strong storms can now cause severe damage on coastal populations living farther to the north. Populations that were previously rarely affected by hurricanes and, thus, whose built environments are structurally vulnerable to tropical cyclone winds and surge, are now within the reach of these powerful forces.

* Fourth, recent experience has highlighted the disproportionate risks for climate-induced public health consequences encountered by residents of small island developing states. Island-based populations dwelling in the ocean corridors above and below the equator, where tropical systems develop, contribute negligibly to climate change but are vulnerable to the effects of extreme storms.7,8

Lessons From Hurricane Maria

If the nature of storms is changing, the public health consequences of these storms will also likely change, as exemplified by Hurricane Maria. Maria became a Category 5 storm in the eastern Atlantic, decimated the island nation of Dominica and St Croix, and bisected Puerto Rico. Maria exemplified rapid intensification over anomalously warm waters, which are becoming more common, and produced high-end wind, surge, and rainfall hazards.

Puerto Rico was paralyzed as Maria destroyed the electrical grid and disrupted vital infrastructure. Loss of power led to protracted disruption of hospital operations and access to life-sustaining treatments. Without power or available health care, the people of Puerto Rico sweltered for months in high heat and humidity and were involuntarily exposed to contaminated water supplies and vector-borne disease risks.8

The debate swirling around a small vs large death toll in Puerto Rico attributable to Maria distills to one core distinction. A limited number of deaths occurred because of direct exposures to the storm’s hazards as Maria moved across Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. Advanced storm detection and warning systems alerted residents to take shelter (island populations cannot evacuate) and minimized fatalities from hurricane-force winds, storm surge, and mudslides. However, in the months following Maria, the inability to restore power and health care services in a timely manner contributed to thousands of storm-related excess deaths.9

Improving Public Health Response to Match the Changing Dynamics of Tropical Systems

The global public health challenge related to storms is bound to become more complicated in the coming years. Therefore, it seems important to integrate climate science into population health science and to ensure that the public health response evolves to reflect changing climate realities. There are at least 4 important considerations to meet this challenge.

The first is to establish public health surveillance of storm-affected populations. Hurricane Maria highlights the need to extend the monitoring of storm-related medical conditions and mortality to include the recovery and reconstruction phases. Surveillance needs to include the physical and mental health conditions that emerge months after the storm strikes the area and represent some of the most consequential public health outcomes. Public health and response capabilities need to maintain a better watch over storm survivors whose communities often require years to recover.

Second, tropical cyclone water hazards will become increasingly important determinants of health. It is evident that more people will be exposed to surge, rain, and flood hazards as coastal and island populations increase. This will require innovating water management and flood mitigation, extending flood insurance coverage to more citizens, and improving water rescue capabilities.

Third, public health preparedness for tropical storm hazards must expand its purview. In 2017, across all storms and affected populations, the single deadliest hazard was storm-damaged infrastructure throughout the Caribbean. Anticipating this challenge requires state-of-the-art reformulation of electrical power, water, and health care systems and training cadres of specialized response professionals.

Cuba serves as an example of the life-sustaining potential of this approach. Cuba redesigned its ailing, blackout-prone power system around a decentralized, microgrid architecture. Cuba trained teams of electrical power specialists to respond during power outages. Hurricane Irma put Cuba’s energy self-sufficiency to the test, battering the Cuban Keys and northern coast with Category 4/5 winds for 3 days. Power was initially disrupted for most of Cuba’s 11 million citizens. Specialist brigades deployed and rapidly repaired damaged segments of the grid, restoring power to 70% of citizens within 10 days and nationwide within 3 weeks. Indeed, in the United States, regional responses often do occur, with large numbers of power specialists traveling from unaffected states to affected states as happened when 15 million Floridians lost power during Irma. In addition, before Irma made landfall in Cuba, 1.4 million residents were relocated to shelters. Thousands of physicians and health care professionals were embedded in these shelters, prepositioned in remote areas, or on duty throughout the nation’s network of neighborhood polyclinics, all equipped with generators. Although hundreds of clinics sustained damage, these distributed services ensured that there was no discontinuity in health care access, even as Irma was striking.

A fourth enhancement to public health response will be to advocate for upgrading building codes and retrofitting coastal and island built environments to withstand stronger storms. Extending community storm resilience is essential as more citizens populate coastal areas and stronger storms extend their reach into latitudes farther from the equator.6

Conclusions

As climate scientists expand knowledge about climate-induced effects on storm behavior, health professionals must transform these findings into innovations in public health preparedness. The challenges posed by climate change will only intensify in coming years; population health will be served by adapting to these evolving realities.

SOURCE 






Blood on the Blades: Is Bird Life Facing Global Catastrophe from Wind Turbines?

Bird life across the globe could be facing its worst nightmare in the 21st century because of mankind’s ardent love for wind turbines. Despite the outright denial of renewable enthusiasts, data from across the globe suggests that bird life is in great peril due to wind factories. (They’re not farms, by the way.)

“Cats and high-rise buildings are worse than wind turbines.” “Pollution causes more bird deaths.”

These are some of the excuses usually offered when wind factories come under scrutiny for their undeniable role in the decline of bird populations.

The fact that birds are killed by other sources does not mean that the wind turbines somehow earn the unalienable right to slaughter millions of birds every year. Data from across the world indicate that the situation is much worse than previously thought.

While there have been many reports on bird mortality from studies on wind factories in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, data from developing countries and other less-reported developed countries further expose the heinous role played by what some people call “Cuisinarts of the sky.”

In South Africa, the most developed nation on the continent, wind factories were reported to have caused a considerable amount of damage to the bird population. In Kenya, the wind factories are believed to be a major hurdle in efforts towards the conservation of vultures. Other countries like Israel have reported the same.

The same was true over the entire Southern Hemisphere.

The situation is even worse in larger countries like India, which faces the continuous pressure of generating electricity for nearly 1.3 billion people. India’s wind energy sector is well established and continues to be popular among renewable enthusiasts despite wind turbines’ dismal track record in generating electricity. In addition to being a burden on the energy sector, the wind factories in India have blood on their blades.

A 2013 report by the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS)—a top wildlife research organization—revealed that birds in India faced regular risk of mortality from the giant, swiftly turning blades, as many of them are in the habitat and migratory paths of local and migratory birds.

The situation has become so bad that the government is looking into introducing guidelines for saving birds from wind turbines similar to those already in practice in developed countries like the U.S.

Bird mortality by wind turbines is such a well-established fact in wind energy circles that in 2013 a wind energy company agreed to pay $1 million in fines after the Justice Department proved it guilty in a first criminal case against a wind power company for the deaths of protected birds.

The Great Indian Bustard is a critically endangered species and is one of the victims of wind turbines in India. Sadly, the Bustards don’t face blade-slicing just in India!

My master’s thesis was on the mortality of birds due to powerlines and wind turbines in the special protected area of Alentejo grasslands in Portugal. The region is populated with turbines, and the great Bustards face considerable mortality from them.

Wind turbines have a special liking for raptors and can be blamed without doubt for their rapid decline in regions that host wind factories.

A 2018 specialized study on the impact of wind turbines on raptors concluded that “Collision mortality, displacement, and habitat loss have the potential to cause population-level effects, especially for species that are rare or endangered.”

In addition to murdering the birds with their blades, wind factories also result in the loss of habitat, which in the long run can prove to be a bigger source for decline in avian populations.

The damage caused by wind factories is not limited to just the land area. Offshore wind factories in Europe and elsewhere are known to be well accomplished slayers of bird life.

Six new scientific papers in 2018 affirmed all these case studies from the previous two decades and clearly showed that wind factories continue to be great destroyers of bird and bat habitats, besides killing individual birds by the millions.

The claim that wind energy is clean and green is a myth to environmentalists like me who have witnessed its devastating effects firsthand. Even casual birdwatchers witness it all the time.

This brutal slaughter of birds, especially those that are critically endangered and vulnerable, should be treated on the same standards that are applied to other practices that kill birds.

SOURCE







An ode to nuclear waste

Nuclear power is so amazing even its waste is enormously beneficial.

If only we were as scared of all our waste as we are of nuclear waste. Chemical waste, for example, always remains toxic, and yet the rules and regulations surrounding it are not as strict as they are for nuclear. If chemical waste was treated as scrupulously and carefully as nuclear waste is, a lot of environmental damage could have been avoided – our soil, our water and our air could today be much cleaner.

If we were so afraid of all the waste that threatens our beautiful planet, then we would have thought of similar detection systems to those surrounding nuclear waste. Even the smallest leakage of nuclear waste into the air or the ocean is noticed in no time at all by highly sensitive equipment that registers radioactive material anywhere in the world. I wish we had such delicate systems to trace particulate matter, sulphur, dioxin, mercury, cadmium, barium, thallium, all those heavy metals that are proven to damage our health and even kill us.

So if you are afraid of nuclear waste, I understand that. But I also want you to cherish nuclear waste. I want you to develop a respect for it, and even to feel awe for it. I want you to learn to love nuclear waste.

So what is nuclear waste, really? It is the so-called waste product of nuclear energy: an energy source which, all experts agree, does not contribute to climate change and which produces a huge amount of energy, 24/7, rain or shine, on small pieces of land, meaning there is a lot of space left over for nature.

Compare that to other forms of energy. Burning coal pollutes the air, because sulphur dioxide arises as a byproduct, and that is very damaging to our airways. Also, coal-fired plants produce fly ash that is more radioactive than what is produced by a nuclear power plant.

Solar panels, you say? Solar panels are nothing more than future electronic waste, spread over our rooftops and soon in our beautiful green fields. Within 30 years, these solar panels will have to be dismantled at garbage heaps in poor countries. There, the solar panels are burnt to get the copper wire out, and all the toxic fumes from all that molten plastic and all those heavy metals like lead, chromium and cadmium will cause problems to people’s airways, increased risk of cancer, birth defects… Solar waste: who ever makes a fuss about that?

It is very different when it comes to nuclear waste. In the past 60 years, nuclear waste has never killed or injured anyone; it has not made a single person sick. And that is because nuclear waste is stored safely. Nuclear waste is extremely compact. In volume it is staggeringly little. How little? Currently, there’s 120,000 cubic metres of nuclear waste in the world. How much is 120,000 cubic metres? If you start pouring this greyish drab on to a football pitch, and keep pouring and pouring, you won’t even fill up a regular Premier League stadium. And this is all the highly radioactive waste from each and every one of today’s 450 nuclear power plants in the entire world, since we started with nuclear energy in the 1950s. One football stadium!

I do not want us to throw away our precious nuclear waste. Whatever we do, let’s not do that. Because nuclear waste isn’t really waste. Waste is something which leaks into water, or the soil, or the air. Waste is something that has no economic value and which the owner wants to discard. This is not the case with nuclear ‘waste’. Virtually every component of ‘nuclear waste’ has a useful application in industry, agriculture, science or medicine. We use radio cobalt for the irradiation of potatoes, so that they last longer. We use strontium or plutonium for generators in space travel. We use americium in smoke detectors, tritium in emergency-exit signalling. We use a variety of radioactive isotopes to diagnose and treat diseases.

Nuclear waste isn’t waste because it is still incredibly valuable. It is full of energy. Recent developments show that soon, not only will we be able to split the beautiful but rare U-235 (the radioactive isotope of uranium), but also all the heavy metals in the uranium family. That means we can reuse everything we today regard as ‘nuclear waste’. ‘Nuclear waste’ is a raw material, and could even be the ultimate building block in a circular economy: we could use this ‘waste’ for an overwhelming amount of energy, and for centuries no raw material will be needed.

Nuclear waste is a treasury. Let’s be very careful with it, yes. But we will only be able to open the nuclear-waste treasury when we overcome our fear of this waste, and maybe even learn to love it.

SOURCE






America has grown. Its highways should, too

by Jeff Jacoby

"NOBODY GOES THERE to eat anymore," the legendary baseball star and malaproprist Yogi Berra once said about a St. Louis restaurant. "It's too crowded."

We laugh at the ingenuous irony in Berra's words: His remark simultaneously contradicts itself, yet makes intuitive sense. Obviously the restaurant is crowded because customers are going there. On the other hand, who wants to go to a restaurant that's always crowded?

Transportation planners talk about busy highways in much the way Berra quipped about packed restaurants. Highways are too congested, they say, so why build more of them? Add new traffic lanes and they'll just fill up too. This is the doctrine of "induced demand" — the belief that traffic, like gas, expands to fill any available space, and that it is therefore futile to imagine that highway overcrowding can be relieved by building more highways.

In many circles, this has become unassailable dogma. In a 2014 article in Wired ("Building Bigger Roads Actually Makes Traffic Worse"), Adam Mann put it concisely: "New roads will create new drivers, resulting in the intensity of traffic staying the same." At Streeetsblog, a leading anti-automobile, pro-transit website, Tanya Snyder was even more concise: "Roads cause cars."

To induced-demand true believers, enlarging a highway is as primitive and ineffective a cure for congested traffic as bloodletting was for cholera. Adding highway capacity may briefly speed up traffic flows, they argue, but new drivers quickly slow it back down. Before long, the new lanes are just as congested during rush hour as the old ones were. "Trying to solve congestion by making roadways wider," says urbanist Charles Marohn, "is like trying to solve obesity by buying bigger pants."

But the simile is wrong. Our snarled roadways are less like obesity, an unhealthy condition to be treated and overcome, than like a teen's growth, a natural development to be welcomed and accommodated. In most of the country, automobile driving is the most economical way of getting workers to and from jobs, patients to and from doctors, shoppers to and from stores, sports and music fans to and from games and concerts. And nowhere is it done more efficiently than on interstate highways, which account for just 2.5 percent of all roadway lane-miles in the United States, yet handle 25 percent of all vehicle travel. And that's despite chronic congestion that keeps getting worse.

America badly needs more highway capacity. Our interstate system was built in the 1960s and 1970s for a nation of 200 million with a $1 trillion economy. Today the United States has a population of 325 million and a $19 trillion economy. We are a much bigger nation with a much bigger economy. Our transportation infrastructure hasn't kept up.

This isn't a problem that can be solved with more bike lanes, carpooling, or public transit, even with ample funding and goodwill. Over the last quarter-century, federal and state governments have invested heavily in adding carpool lanes, and about 20 percent of federal Highway Trust Fund money is diverted to public transit. Yet single-driver highway travel remains dominant and indispensable. As Robert Poole Jr., a transportation scholar at the Reason Foundation, points out, outside of six "legacy-transit" cities (Boston, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, and San Francisco), only about 5 percent of daily commuting in America is by transit.

"People continue to travel on urban freeways because using them is less bad than the alternatives," Poole writes in his new book, Rethinking America's Highways. There is no prospect of that changing. For entirely respectable reasons, Americans prefer to drive on highways. Public policy should be aimed at facilitating that preference, not thwarting it.

That said, calling for more highway capacity doesn't mean calling for more 1970s-style monster interchanges, especially in urban areas. Construction engineers in the 21st century have an array of options for expanding or building highways with greater sophistication and sensitivity than they could two generations ago. Among them: decking over highways that were constructed in below-grade trenches, and designing cars-only highways with narrower lanes and reduced speeds. In Tampa, engineers conceived an elegant way to extend the Selmon Expressway without having to condemn any land or displace any residents: The new lanes were built above the median strip of the existing roadway, supported by pillars that required only six feet of width and left ground-level sightlines largely unobstructed.

Adding new highway lanes isn't enough, though. It is also crucial to price them sensibly. That means no more freeways. Those who drive on highways should pay for the privilege, via tolls that change as traffic flow changes, the goal at all times being to keep vehicles moving at a steady speed.

Habituated by a lifetime of "free" highway driving, some motorists (but only some) bristle at the thought of having to pay to use an expressway. But congestion is payment, too — payment with time instead of with dollars. As a means of paying to drive, variable tolling is obviously far more efficient than jammed-up traffic. It's also the only means that advances the purpose for which highways exist: quickly getting people where they need to go.

"Induced demand" is no impediment if highway driving is properly priced. This year Virginia implemented variable tolling on Interstate 66 outside Washington, DC; drivers and advocates howled when tolls during peak travel times sometimes surged above $40. Yet as one Northern Virginia newspaper recently concluded, "the experiment in dynamic tolling is working. Average speeds at rush hour are close to or above the posted speed limit. . . . The result has been more choice for drivers, better use of available resources, and a flow of cash to support [transportation] improvements elsewhere."

The laws of supply and demand operate for highway driving, just as they operate for restaurants, airlines, football tickets, and mobile phones. As demand grows, supply should be increased — and as supply increases, it should be priced to prevent bottlenecks and keep customers coming back.

Even Yogi Berra didn't say that nobody drives on highways that are crammed with drivers. Alas, millions of Americans are forced to do so every day. But they shouldn't have to. If we build more highways and charge more tolls, they won't.

SOURCE






Can poor families sue John Kerry for climate policy deaths?

Conjectural future tolls from climate change pale compared to real energy poverty deaths now

Paul Driessen

It’s not enough that the Climate Crisis-Renewable Energy Cabal (CC-REC) now rails that an average global temperature increase of just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels would bring “catastrophic risks” of “climate mayhem” to people and planet.

When the Paris climate deal was adopted in December 2015, the “chaos tipping point” – the “guardrail for a climate-safe world” – was 2.0 deg C (3.6 deg F). But since then, alarmists have started to claim, “a crescendo of deadly heat waves, floods, wildfires, and superstorms engorged by rising seas” has “convinced scientists” that the bar, the tipping point, the “danger cursor” needs to be set lower.

Allow me to translate that into simple English, and add a few facts that they “inadvertently” left out.

“Above pre-industrial levels” means since 1850: the end of the 500-year Little Ice Age. Since then, average planetary temperatures have already climbed nearly 1 deg C (1.8 F), which is still below levels enjoyed during the Roman and Medieval warm periods. According to CC-REC logic, that means humans can “allow” temperatures to rise only another 0.5 deg C (0.9 F) – or the planet is doomed.

To prevent that alleged calamity, carbon dioxide emissions from human activities “need to peak in 2020 and curve sharply downward from there” – and the entire global economy must become “carbon neutral” by 2050. Control and elimination of carbon-based energy is essential, CC-REC and IPCC alarmists say.

That is simply not going to happen. Thankfully, it is completely absurd to say more plant-fertilizing CO2 and a barely noticeable increase above current temperatures will doom Planet Earth. On the other hand, a colder planet with less CO2 would mean less arable land, shorter growing seasons and less food.

The “unprecedented climate disasters” are not happening. As Climate Depot, WattsUpWithThat, Dr. Roy Spencer, GlobalWarmingPolicyFdn and my own analyses make clear, seas are rising at just 7 inches a century, and temperatures have barely budged since 1998, except during recent El Niños (for example).

It’s likewise not enough that alarmist scientists (who’ve collectively raked in billions of dollars in government/taxpayer grant money over the past decade) have been able to play “nature tricks,” create “hockey stick” and other “manmade” temperature spikes, and “homogenize” and manipulate data. That they treat their taxpayer-funded data, algorithms and methodologies as their private property, inaccessible to scientists who might find fault with them. Or that they refuse to discuss or debate their findings – and instead assert a phony, fabricated “97% consensus” on “dangerous manmade climate change.”

It’s not enough that 100 or more countries signed the Paris accords primarily because they expected to share in hundreds of billions of dollars in “climate mitigation and adaptation” money – and are now increasingly angry that few industrialized nations will contribute to the Green Climate Fund.

It’s not enough that the CC-REC has become a $2-trillion-per-year global industry that has been built, sustained and justified by unproven, even fraudulent claims that humanity faces climate cataclysm.

NOW former US Secretary of State John Kerry wants to sue President Trump for exiting the Paris not-a-treaty, thereby allegedly causing future climate chaos. “I wish I could find legal standing to bring a case against Donald Trump for the lives that will be lost and the property that will be damaged and the billions of dollars because of his decision on climate change,” Kerry said.

Billionaire Kerry (via his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry) owns four mansions and jets around in private aircraft. His “climate warrior” sidekick Al Gore (net worth $300 million, from climate and renewable energy activism) likewise has multiple homes and prefers private jets and SUVs for his global jaunts.

These critics of modern energy use and living standards would do well to curtail their own profligate lifestyles, before telling others how they need to live without fossil fuels. But more to the point:

The people Kerry and comrades profess to care so deeply about are not at risk because of climate change. They are at risk because of anti-energy, anti-technology, anti-people policies imposed in the name of climate change prevention, sustainable development and the “precautionary principle.”

So perhaps Mr. Kerry should sue himself for climate deaths. Or the world’s poor should find legal standing to file lawsuits against Kerry; the clique of climate fraudsters who crank out bogus climate models and phony claims linking every weather event and curious phenomenon to fossil fuel emissions; and the self-serving bureaucrats who run the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, World Bank, multi-lateral (anti) development banks and thousands of environmentalist pressure groups.

As my book Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and numerous articles make clear, these callous agitators are telling Earth’s poorest families they must stop using the fossil fuels that still provide four-fifths of the world’s energy … stop trying to bring their health and living standards anywhere close to what Americans and Europeans enjoy … be content with whatever marginal improvements they can achieve using only wind, solar and biofuel energy – and never use insecticides for disease control.

They don’t even want developing country families to use modern agricultural technologies and certainly not genetically engineered crops – not even Golden Rice to reduce Vitamin A Deficiency, malnutrition and childhood blindness. They want Earth’s most destitute families to practice “Agro-Ecology” – employing only primitive, “culturally appropriate” farming methods … and rejecting hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, tractors and virtually everything else that enables small numbers of modern farmers to feed billions of people with less land, less water and less risk of crop failures.

By opposing insecticides and the powerful, long-lasting mosquito repellant DDT, Kerry and his fellow eco-imperialists perpetuate malaria and yellow fever, brain and liver damage, poverty and death in countries where these diseases are still endemic. Then they blame the diseases on global warming!

Far too many countries have never shared in the amazing developments that sent health, prosperity, opportunity and longevity skyrocketing in modern industrialized, free-market capitalist societies over the past 200 years. Today, Kerry, Gore and the radical groups they ally with conspire to keep poor countries impoverished, malnourished, jobless, disease-ridden, burdened with nineteenth century hospitals and infrastructure – and dying needlessly by the millions, year after year.

It’s sick and immoral. It violates basic principles of human rights and self-determination.

The obsession with pseudo-renewable, pseudo-sustainable, pseudo-climate friendly wind and solar power is also deadly, and not only in Third World countries. We couldn’t even operate earthquake and tsunami detection, warning and evacuation systems with intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar systems that conk out for hours or days on end. (Indonesia, Japan and California should keep that in mind.)

Even in England, soaring electricity prices caused by wind energy mandates continue to cause thousands of needless wintertime deaths, because elderly pensioners cannot afford adequate heat. Meanwhile, over the past five years alone, Germany (pop. 82 million) has spent more than 160 billion euros (US$185 billion) converting from fossil fuels to renewable energy, according to a Federal Audit Office report.

In return, about all it’s gotten is soaring energy prices that have killed jobs, made electricity and heating unaffordable for many families, and a reduced ability for German companies to compete internationally –while China, India and other countries rapidly and massively expand their own fossil fuel use.

The bottom line: John Kerry wants to sue President Trump over hypothetical deaths, years or decades from now, from climate changes that no one can demonstrate with real-world evidence are due to human emissions, much less the US exit from Paris. In the meantime, millions continue to die every year due to anti-fossil fuel policies demanded by Kerry, Gore, and other energy hypocrites and climate fraudsters.

It’s time to end the callous insanity – and base energy and climate policies on reality and humanity.

Via email

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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.  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 October, 2018

Switzerland is rapidly losing its snow -- and climate change is probably to blame (?)

Only someone who knows no history would fall for this tosh. One of the best known events in ancient history is when Hannibal marched elephants over the Alps for his invasion of Rome.  You would never even try it these days. 

It was during the Roman warm period and the Alps were at that time largely snow free.  Clearly snow cover in that area is subject to large natural fluctuations.  So any reference to global warming is entirely supererogatory. 

In any case reduced snowfall in recent years is the likely cause of the reduced snow cover and reduced precipitation is generally a sign of COOLING, not warming.  The fact that the winter of 2017–18 saw record snowfall may indicate that the cycle has just gone into reverse

A new study based on analysis of satellite images shows how much snow cover Switzerland has lost in the last 20 years.
Although Switzerland's mountain areas saw record snow fall in the winter of 2017–18, the country is rapidly losing its snow cover and global warming is probably the cause, a new study suggests.

While just over a third of Switzerland (36 percent) had a very low likelihood (less than 20 percent) of seeing snow in the two decades from 1995 to 2005, that figure jumped to 44 percent from 2005 to 2017.

That is an area of 5,200 square kilometres, or about the size of the canton of Valais.

The results are based on analysis of satellite images of Switzerland carried out by researchers at the University of Geneva and at the United Nations GRID-Geneva environmental data centre.

The study also shows that the area of Switzerland given over to eternal snow (where there is an 80 to 100 percent chance of snowfall) also shrank in the period studied – from 27 percent over the 1995–2005 period to 23 percent from 2005 to 2017.

The loss here is some 2,100 square kilometres, which is an area some seven times larger than the canton of Geneva.

The reduction in snow cover could be seen in the Jura region and in the Alps and was “particularly evident” in the Rhone Valley, said University of Geneva and GRID-Geneva researcher Grégory Giuliani in a press release.

SOURCE






The EPA Is Reportedly Going to Stop One of Its Costliest Abuses

If the Environmental Protection Agency decides to regulate emissions of a specific pollutant, should those emission reductions yield benefits that exceed the costs of doing so?

The commonsense answer to that question is: Of course.

But that’s not how things work with many EPA air pollution regulations. Instead, the EPA has found a way to game the regulatory process in order to impose some of the costliest regulations in U.S. history by using the “co-benefits” (i.e., indirect benefits) of emission reductions of another pollutant, fine particulate matter.

Through the use of these co-benefits, the EPA justifies rules even though there may be little, if any, benefits connected to the purpose of the rule.

Now, the Trump administration and the EPA reportedly are about to do something to curb this abuse.

The EPA is going to recalculate the costs and benefits of a controversial rule known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards Rule for Power Plants, the so-called “MATS rule.” As reported, this co-benefits abuse will not be employed in a new cost-benefit analysis.

When the EPA finalized the MATS rule in 2012, it didn’t bother to consider costs when deciding whether to regulate mercury emissions. This led to a Supreme Court case, Michigan v. EPA, challenging the agency’s failure to consider whether the rule was “appropriate and necessary,” as required under the Clean Air Act.

In 2015, the court held that the EPA, because of that “appropriate and necessary” language, must consider costs.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, explained, “[a]gainst the backdrop of this established administrative practice [consideration of cost], it is unreasonable to read an instruction to an administrative agency to determine whether ‘regulation is appropriate and necessary’ as an invitation to ignore costs.”

The EPA did estimate that the annual benefits of reducing mercury emissions was a mere $4 million to $6 million. The estimated costs, however, were $9.6 billion.

As Scalia pointed out, “[t]he costs to power plants were thus between 1,600 and 2,400 times as great as the quantifiable benefits from reduced emissions of hazardous air pollutants.”

As the court succinctly explained, “[n]o regulation is ‘appropriate’ if it does significantly more harm than good.”

The EPA has argued that the MATS rule, though, has co-benefits from reducing fine particulate matter and sulfur dioxide that amount to as much as $37 billion to $90 billion per year.

This abuse of co-benefits allows the EPA to regulate fine particulate matter without ever making the case that regulating the pollutant of concern (such as mercury) is truly warranted.

These co-benefits can become a cover for regulating whatever the EPA wants without ever justifying the regulation of the targeted pollutant, or for that matter, explaining why there are not far better (and direct) ways to address fine particulate matter.

There is also a specific Clean Air Act process for regulating fine particulate matter and other criteria pollutants (six major air pollutants). Using these non-particulate matter rules as justification to regulate fine particulate matter is an end run around this process. In fact, that was a point brought up by Chief Justice John Roberts in the Michigan v. EPA oral arguments.

This gaming of the system is misleading to the public. For example, it gives the misimpression that reductions in mercury will yield significant benefits, when in fact, the alleged benefits are almost entirely derived from reductions in fine particulate matter.

Such gaming is also not transparent to the public, and it’s susceptible to double counting of alleged co-benefits.

The MATS rule is not an aberration when it comes to co-benefits abuse.  According to NERA Consulting data, based on 26 EPA regulatory impact analyses of major rules between 1997 and 2011, 21 of the rules derived most of their benefits from fine particulate matter co-benefits.

In six of those EPA analyses (from 2009 to 2011), the co-benefits accounted for all of the benefits.

Fortunately, it sounds like the EPA and the Trump administration are going to address this abuse. As reported by The Washington Post:

[A]cting Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the EPA is focused on producing analyses that capture the specific impact of a rule—in this case, mercury—rather than the accompanying benefits that stem from installing new pollution controls on equipment.

“I just think it’s a little fuzzy math when you say, ‘Reduce mercury, and we have all these other benefits over here,’ as the shiny object,” Wheeler said, adding that the agency could still consider other benefits, but should categorize them separately.

While concerns over EPA overreach often focus on the agency exceeding its statutory authority, these hidden games that impose billions of dollars in regulatory costs shouldn’t be forgotten.

The EPA should stop this gaming of the regulatory process for all air pollution rules. Congress should pass legislation to that effect.

To its credit, it appears the EPA may be on its way to doing so, and as a result, helping to improve the integrity and transparency of the regulatory process.

SOURCE





Will California Dictate National Emissions Standards?

Golden State regulators are fighting Trump to keep Obama's standards on cars.

The State of California seems bent on forcing the rest of the nation to adopt its emissions standards and buy more electric cars.

Fortunately, the Trump administration is trying to revoke the state’s power to not only exempt itself from federal guidelines but, because of its size and influence, practically dictate those guidelines to the rest of us. Reuters reports, “California has long been allowed under a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency waiver to set its own, stricter vehicle emissions rules to fight heavy smog in Los Angeles and other urban areas.”

Part of California’s approach to stricter emissions standards stems from the state’s microclimate, which allows smog to flourish, particularly in heavily populated southern California. The state’s strict emissions standard thus addresses a very local issue. So why should residents of other states have to pay more to clean up Los Angeles pollution?

It’s no wonder that California regulators voted last Friday to ignore the Trump administration’s decision to weaken the standards and instead follow those put in place by Barack Obama. The California Air Resources Board, which regulates the state’s air quality, reaffirmed its commitment to these Obama-era federal standards, but the Trump administration is trying to roll them back due to higher costs for consumers.

Automotive News reports, “The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group representing General Motors, Volkswagen AG, Toyota Motor Corp., Ford Motor Co. and others, again urged California and the Trump administration to reach agreement to retain nationwide emissions rules and avoid a prolonged legal battle.” The AAM is a powerful lobbying organization that represents many major automakers. Unfortunately, they want the Trump administration to side with California and impose the state’s strict standards on the rest of the country.

Eric Peters, writing at The Federalist, believes, “If [the Trump administration] does so, it would have the effect of making California the boss of the rest of us, because the car industry can no longer afford to build one set of cars for California and another for the rest of the country. Thus, what a handful of bureaucrats in the California apparat decree threatens to bind the whole country.”

Now, it’s no surprise that car manufacturers would embrace tougher emissions standards; the California car market is simply too significant to ignore. Simply put, they’d rather have Americans foot the bill for expensive fuel-efficient cars and electric cars than lose money themselves. And now that taxpayers are actually subsidizing car manufacturers (Tesla made $800 million from emissions credits over the last three years), it’s no wonder that we’re seeing more electric cars on the roads. Those generous federal and state tax credits for people who buy electric cars? Yep, they’re subsidized by taxpayers as well.

But aren’t electric cars worth the price of reducing air pollution? Not so fast, says Robyn Beck writing at Politico: “Widespread adoption of electric vehicles nationwide will likely increase air pollution compared with new internal combustion vehicles. You read that right: more electric cars and trucks will mean more pollution.” Beck adds that proponents of electric vehicles “fail to consider just how clean and efficient new internal combustion vehicles are.” And remember that the energy needed to charge electric cars often comes from power plants fueled by coal, something that’s likely to remain unchanged for several decades. Consider, too, the environmentally suspect nickel mining that’s required for electric-car batteries.

Like solar power and wind farms, the dream of charging up an electric car while grabbing a latte seems too good to be true. And it is. The reality is that the electric car movement is propped up by taxpayers, government policies, and environmental lobbyists rather than being driven by the free market or by the realities of new technologies.

The battle over emissions standards is getting serious, and California isn’t letting up. The state’s Democrat governor, Jerry Brown, wants to ban internal combustion engines by 2040 (as do Great Britain and France, by the way). If the Trump administration isn’t able to roll back these extreme environmental regulations on vehicles, the rest of us will be paying a hefty price. More ominously, we’ll be giving one state the power to determine national environmental policy and tell us what kind of cars we can drive.

Now that’s un-American.

SOURCE



      

Trash the Fifth Amendment Over Frogs?

The Supreme Court hears a case involving a ridiculous Obama-era power grab.

The Supreme Court heard its first cases of the upcoming judicial session on Monday, unfortunately with former Justice Anthony Kennedy’s seat still vacant due to the ongoing Democrat-created circus surrounding Brett Kavanaugh. So some of these case may end up with 4-4 split decisions. One case in particular on its face appears to deal with an animal known as the Mississippi dusky gopher frog. The frog in question was designated by the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) as an endangered species back in 2001. As per the Endangered Species Act, the FWS has the authority to determine and “designate any habitat of such [an endangered] species” as “critical habitat” and “essential for the conservation of the species.” In other words, the FWS has the authority to both determine and designate whether land (public or private) should be listed as protected habitat.

The case before the Supreme Court regarding the dusky gopher frog deals with a Barack Obama-era expansion of the FWS’s definition of habitat. As SCOTUS Blog explains, “This case will rule whether the Endangered Species Act prohibits designation of private land as unoccupied critical habitat that is neither habitat nor essential to species conservation; and (2) whether an agency decision not to exclude an area from critical habitat because of the economic impact of designation is subject to judicial review.”

Clearly, the core of the issue is a question over Fifth Amendment protections. The big problem in the case of the dusky gopher frog is one of property rights. Back in 2011, the Obama administration decided to designate as protected habitat over 1,500 acres of Edward Poitevent’s land (he’s the plaintiff in the case), on which his company, Weyerhaeuser, depends for his timber business. However, there was one glaring problem that even the FWS noted — there were no dusky gopher frogs living on Poitevent’s land. The Obama administration even acknowledged this fact, listing the property as a “potential backup habitat” for the endangered frog. Based upon that definition couldn’t almost any land be designated as “potential backup habitat?”

As Investor’s Business Daily notes, “The land in question doesn’t have the frog living on it, and the land isn’t even suitable for the frog. Nonetheless, in 2011 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared his land "critical habitat” because, with modifications, it could potentially serve as a home for the endangered dusky gopher frog.“ Like the Obama administration’s redefinition of navigable waters, this is a case of clear government overreach. But unfortunately, the High Court’s decision may end up being split.

SOURCE






Australia: 'The impact will be huge': Experts warn power prices are set to skyrocket over summer

Ordinary people will be paying heavily for the Greenie-motivated closures of big coal-fired generators such as Hazelwood. Losing 1,600 MW from Hazelwood alone leaves a big gap that can only be filled by expensive gas generators

Experts have warned electricity prices will skyrocket over summer, claiming 'the impact will be huge' on domestic households.

The average annual bill for Australian households is $1500, but Victoria and South Australia were closer to $2000 - a 63 per cent jump for all states in the past decade. 

According to a report released by the ACCC, gas prices will go up another 40 per cent. 

The cost is predicted to peak at around $15 a gigajoule over the warmer months and won't go lower than $10.70, the Australian reported. 

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) released a report this week which detailed the expected power prices.

Australian Power Project chief executive Nathan Vass said the prices will be four times higher than the historical prices which rested at $3.

Referencing the report, Mr Vass warned 'the impact on electricity prices will be huge'.

The chief executive explained for every $1 rise in gas prices, the wholesale price of electricity will go up to $11 per megawatt-hour.

'So if gas jumps to $15/GJ you could see the average wholesale price hit $140/MWh,' he told the publication.

'The closure of cheap and ­reliable coal-fired generators and the shift to gas-peaking plants has left South Australia more vulnerable to gas price shocks than any other state.' 

In 2015/16 the average annual Australian electricity stood at $1,524, with network costs making up 48 per cent of the bill, followed by wholesale costs (22 per cent), environmental costs (7 per cent), retail costs (16 per cent) and retail margins (8 per cent).

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.  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 October, 2018

The climate prophets finally get some modelling right -- but it says the opposite of what Warmists want!

Two Harvard scientists have just done the most careful modelling yet of what effects wind turbines have.  They find that, for the next century, wind turbines will INCREASE warming rather than decrease it. 

And here's the really exceptional bit:  Their models agree with observations -- an unprecedented event in global warming literature. It means that you can make reasonably accurate predictions from their models -- unlike the chaff that comes from other modelling.

So what are Warmists saying about the study?  You guessed it: Warmists of course hate the conclusions so say the modelling is no good.  It would be interesting to see them do better. 

Highlights and abstract below:

Climatic Impacts of Wind Power

Lee M.Miller & David W.Keith

Highlights

* Wind power reduces emissions while causing climatic impacts such as warmer temperatures
* Warming effect strongest at night when temperatures increase with height
* Nighttime warming effect observed at 28 operational US wind farms
* Wind's warming can exceed avoided warming from reduced emissions for a century

Summary

We find that generating today's US electricity demand (0.5 TW e) with wind power would warm Continental US surface temperatures by 0.24°C. Warming arises, in part, from turbines redistributing heat by mixing the boundary layer. Modeled diurnal and seasonal temperature differences are roughly consistent with recent observations of warming at wind farms, reflecting a coherent mechanistic understanding for how wind turbines alter climate. The warming effect is: small compared with projections of 21st century warming, approximately equivalent to the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing global electricity generation, and large compared with the reduced warming achieved by decarbonizing US electricity with wind. For the same generation rate, the climatic impacts from solar photovoltaic systems are about ten times smaller than wind systems. Wind's overall environmental impacts are surely less than fossil energy. Yet, as the energy system is decarbonized, decisions between wind and solar should be informed by estimates of their climate impacts.

SOURCE






The reason why electric cars will always be expensive

ELECTRIC vehicles will always be more costly than fuel-burners, according to a senior BMW executive. “No, no, no,” is Klaus Frölich’s reply when asked if EVs will ever equal the prices of equivalent conventional cars. “Never.”

Batteries are the problem, explains the 58-year-old BMW board member in charge of development. Lithium-ion cells that can store the standard 1 kWh unit of electrical energy cost $170 to $250 (€100 to €150).

“It’s very simple,” says Frölich. In EVs with 90 to 100kWh battery packs, the cell cost alone will be $17,000 to $25,000. “You can produce whole cars, only with the cost of the battery,” he adds.

And Frölich doesn’t believe that when lithium-ion batteries for EVs are being produced in huge number that their cost will fall. Some of the metals used to make them will instead become more expensive, he predicts.

“When everybody wants to have cobalt, the prices of cobalt will not go down, they will go up,” Frölich predicts. Cobalt is an essential ingredient of lithium-ion battery cells.

BMW, which plans to rapidly expand the number of pure battery power EVs and plug-in hybrids in its line-up over the next few years, is working to secure low prices for cobalt out until 2030. “We are the only ones who are doing that,” Frölich claims.

“So, it’s a nightmare that an electrified vehicle will cost the same as a combustion-engined car.”

SOURCE






Lies Wrapped In Deception Smothered With Delusion

Dr Tim Ball

Technocrats have darkened hearts just like everyone else, but they soon discovered how to use the mantra of ‘science’ to trick and deceive.

The Washington swamp displayed all its corruption skills with lies, deceptions, misrepresentations, and deliberate creation of deceit, during the Kavanaugh hearings.

We watched Senator Blumenthal, who lied about serving in Vietnam when he never left the United States, remind Judge Kavanaugh of a legal maxim “Falsus in Uno, Falsus in Omnibus,” false in one thing, false in everything.

The only difference between these and previous similar tactics was boldness – the corrupt elite was forced to show their hand more than normal. There are few silver linings to this cloud because if it succeeds, it is the end of America. Everything they did and said undermines core values of a civilized society, correctly and uniquely identified as American exceptionalism.

One sliver of silver lining is in the level of corruption exposed. Now it is easier for people to grasp the extent of corruption on the greatest deception in history, human-caused global warming (AGW). It is easier now to get them to understand that the left will do anything to achieve their goal.

The significant differences between AGW and the Kavanaugh debacle were time and extent. The AGW deception has evolved slowly and insidiously since the late 1960s. It began as the objective of David Rockefeller’s Club of Rome’s (COR) to control energy and thereby political power. It is just as corrupting and devastating an attack on American exceptionalism but worse because it is global. The COR say they are

 “a group of world citizens, sharing a common concern for the future of humanity.“

Compare this claim with H. L. Mencken’s observation that,

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”

America was seen as the greatest threat to their objective, so it became a major target, but it was still only a part of the global control.

COR member Maurice Strong took the urge to rule to the UN where he put it into action. After spending five days with Strong at the UN, Elaine Dewar summarized his goal in her book Cloak of Green.

Strong was using the U.N. as a platform to sell a global environment crisis and the Global Governance Agenda.

He did this by creating the bureaucratic monster known as Agenda 21 and creating the science to support it through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Like all deceptions, there are lies within lies and deceptions within deceptions. Even the selection of terminology and words was deliberately planned to deceive. For example, the Earth’s atmosphere does not work like a greenhouse.

The analogy was only valuable because it automatically triggers the concept of heat for the public. The deceivers knew this type of misrepresentation worked because the same people created the term “holes-in-the-ozone.” They knew there were no holes, but the term implied a leak, a break in the atmosphere, with all the “Chicken Little” the sky is falling fears that engenders.

The next example was the word skeptic, which as Michael Shermer explained.

“Scientists are skeptics. It’s unfortunate that the word ‘skeptic’ has taken on other connotations in the culture involving nihilism and cynicism. Really, in its pure and original meaning, it’s just thoughtful inquiry.”

After 1998 the evidence did not fit the AGW theory anymore so by 2004 they changed it from the global warming theory to the climate change theory. They also changed the slur from skeptics to deniers, with its holocaust connotations. They ignored the fact that these scientists do nothing but educate people to the amount and extent of natural climate change.

The most effective deception was the claim that 97% of scientists agree. It is as false as the whole claim and was also deliberately created. It was a major part of the confusion created and exploited by the difference in meaning of words between different segments of society. It is why Voltaire said,

“If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.”

That sounds arrogant and condescending, but it is essential for any chance of accurate understanding.

RealClimate was the website created to manipulate the global warming story. Most of the people involved with its creation were members of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the IPCC. The need for a propaganda vehicle was revealed in November 2009 when thousands of emails were leaked (Climategate) and exposed their tactics and activities.  A book by Mosher and Fuller listed some of them.

Actively worked to evade Freedom of Information requests, deleting emails, documents, and even climate data.
Tried to corrupt the peer-review principles that are the mainstay of modern science, reviewing each other’s work, sabotaging efforts of opponents trying to publish their own work, and threatening editors of journals who didn’t bow to their demands
Changed the shape of their own data in materials shown to politicians charged with changing the shape of our world.
RealClimate explained on 22 December 2004 why they started to use the word consensus. It illustrates how political it was and how they knew it didn’t apply to science, but the goal was deception.

We’ve used the term “consensus” here a bit recently without ever really defining what we mean by it. In normal practice, there is no great need to define it – no science depends on it. But it’s useful to record the core that most scientists agree on, for public presentation. The consensus that exists is that of the IPCC reports, in particular the working group I report (there are three WG’s. By “IPCC”, people tend to mean WG I).

In short, we agree therefore there is a consensus.

The academic source of the 97% claim came from John Cook et al., in 2013 under the titled “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature.”  Lord Monckton dissected the claim in his comment titled, “0.3% consensus, not 97.1%.”  He explains how the authors took divided 11,944 abstracts of articles into three categories using their own definitions. Monckton used,

The authors’ own data file categorized 64 abstracts, or only 0.5% of the sample, as endorsing the consensus hypothesis as thus defined. Inspection shows only 41 of the 64, or 0.3% of the entire sample, actually endorsed their hypothesis.

The penultimate comment comes from Harvard graduate, medical doctor, and world-famous science fiction writer, Michael Crichton.

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

The ultimate comment comes from Albert Einstein.

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right: a single experiment can prove me wrong.

The bias and corruption was fully revealed in the Kavanaugh debacle. It was so extreme that it made exposure of their methods and tactics clear to people who found them hard to believe. Now, it is easier for them to grasp the AGW deception.

SOURCE






Einhorn on Tesla: 'Like Lehman, we think the deception is about to catch up'

Hedge fund manager David Einhorn is blasting Tesla again. The investor compared the electric car maker to his most famous and prescient bearish call on Lehman Brothers.

"Like Lehman, we think the deception is about to catch up to TSLA," Einhorn said in an investor letter Friday. "Lehman threatened short sellers, refused to raise capital (it even bought back stock), and management publicly suggested it would go private. Months later, shareholders, creditors, employees and the global economy paid a big price when management's reckless behavior led to bankruptcy."

In May 2008, just a few months before Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy during the heart of the financial crisis, Einhorn said at the Ira W. Sohn Investment Research Conference that the investment bank was a risk to the financial system and questioned its accounting. He confirmed his firm Greenlight Capital was short Lehman during that speech.

Shares of Tesla, which were already down Friday in light of CEO Elon Musk's tweets mocking the Securities and Exchange Commission, dropped following news of Einhorn's letter and closed down 7.1 percent.

Musk has taunted short sellers including Einhorn in the past on social media.

Einhorn said like Lehman, Musk has "bluffed" about the company's financial position.

"There are many parallels to TSLA. In 2013, TSLA was on the brink of failure. ... TSLA's cash reserves fell to a dangerously low level and CEO Elon Musk secretly and desperately tried to sell the company," he said. "Rather than communicating the truth to shareholders, Mr. Musk bluffed his way through the crisis."

Einhorn said his fund's Tesla short was the second-biggest winner during the third quarter. The investor has repeatedly criticized the electric car maker as part of his bets against overvalued technology companies, which he calls the "bubble basket."

The hedge fund manager predicts Tesla will report a "large revenue and earnings disappointment" for its fourth quarter.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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.  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 October, 2018

Trump’s EPA moving to loosen radiation limits

At last Greenie knee-jerk reactions will be replaced by real science.  There is plenty of evidence of radiation hormesis -- the fact that low levels of ionizing radiation are not bad for you and can be good for you.  The claim that ALL radiation is bad is just the simplistic thinking you expect from the Greens

Official bodies have resisted acknowledging hormesis but there are some striking incidents of  it.  Even the Wikipedia article on it treats the topic with respect.  It is far from a "way out" idea. 

Everything is disastrous to Greenies and under their influence the reality of hormesis has been resisted.  If ANY radiation is bad, whole heaps of things become bad for us and that suits the scare-mongering proclivities of the Greens.

In fact, quite high doses of radiation can be harmless.  I like this report (via Wikipedia) on the very high natural background gamma radiation cancer rates in Kerala, Southern India:

"Kerala's monazite sand (containing a third of the world's economically recoverable reserves of radioactive thorium) emits about 8 micro Sieverts per hour of gamma radiation, 80 times the dose rate equivalent in London, but a decade long study of 69,985 residents published in Health Physics in 2009: "showed no excess cancer risk from exposure to terrestrial gamma radiation. The excess relative risk of cancer excluding leukemia was estimated to be -0.13 Gy_1 (95% CI: -0.58, 0.46)", indicating no statistically significant positive or negative relationship between background radiation levels and cancer risk in this sample."

Let the panic-mongers put that in their pipes and smoke it!

And Southern Indians are an unusually smart population, particularly in mathematics.  Does radiation improve your mathematical ability?  From what we know of the broadly beneficial effects of low to moderate radiation, it's not impossible!

And I must mention the striking case of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a Japanese salesman who had the epic misfortune to be exposed to both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic blasts.  So was he fried to a crisp or at least died shortly thereafter?  No.  He was badly burned but recovered well and lived to 93!  Hormesis explains that but nothing else does


Yamaguchi

There is a review article here in an academic journal which finds that hormesis fits the facts much better than the conventional theory


The EPA is pursuing rule changes that specialists say would weaken the way radiation exposure is regulated, turning to scientific outliers who argue that a bit of radiation damage is actually good for you — like a little bit of sunlight.

The government’s current, decades-old guidance says that any exposure to harmful radiation is a cancer risk.

The Trump administration already has targeted a range of other rules on toxins and pollutants, including coal power plant emissions and car exhaust, that it sees as costly for businesses. Supporters of the EPA’s proposal argue the government’s current model that there is no safe level of radiation — the so-called linear no-threshold model — forces unnecessary spending for handling exposure in accidents, at nuclear plants, in medical centers, and at other sites.

At issue is the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed rule on transparency in science. EPA spokesman John Konkus said Tuesday, "The proposed regulation doesn’t talk about radiation or any particular chemicals. And as we indicated in our response, EPA’s policy is to continue to use the linear-no-threshold model for population-level radiation protection purposes which would not, under the proposed regulation that has not been finalized, trigger any change in that policy."

But in an April news release announcing the proposed rule the agency quoted Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts who has said weakening limits on radiation exposure would save billions of dollars and have a positive impact on human health.

The proposed rule would require regulators to consider "various threshold models across the exposure range" when it comes to dangerous substances. While it doesn’t specify radiation, the release quotes Calabrese calling the proposal "a major scientific step forward" in assessing the risk of "chemicals and radiation." Konkus said the release was written during the tenure of former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. He could not explain why Calabrese was quoted citing the impact on radiation levels if the agency does not believe there would be any.

Calabrese was to be the lead witness at a congressional hearing Wednesday on the EPA proposal.

Radiation is everywhere, from potassium in bananas to the microwaves popping popcorn. Most of it is benign. But what’s of concern is the higher-energy, shorter-wave radiation, like X-rays, that can penetrate and disrupt living cells, sometimes causing cancer.

As recently as this March, the EPA’s online guidelines for radiation effects advised: "Current science suggests there is some cancer risk from any exposure to radiation."

But that online guidance — separate from the rule-change proposal — was edited in July to add a section emphasizing the low individual odds of cancer: "According to radiation safety experts, radiation exposures of . . . 100 millisieverts usually result in no harmful health effects, because radiation below these levels is a minor contributor to our overall cancer risk," the revised policy says.

Calabrese and his supporters argue that smaller exposures of cell-damaging radiation and other carcinogens can serve as stressors that activate the body’s repair mechanisms and can make people healthier. They compare it to physical exercise or sunlight.

Mainstream scientific consensus on radiation is based on deceptive science, says Calabrese, who argued in a 2014 essay for "righting the past deceptions and correcting the ongoing errors in environmental regulation."

EPA spokesman Konkus said in an e-mail that the proposed rule change is about "increasing transparency on assumptions" about how the body responds to different doses of dangerous substances and that the agency "acknowledges uncertainty regarding health effects at low doses" and supports more research on that.

The radiation regulation is supported by Steven Milloy, a Trump transition team member for the EPA who is known for challenging widely accepted ideas about manmade climate change and the health risks of tobacco. He has been promoting Calabrese’s theory of healthy radiation on his blog.

Jan Beyea, a physicist whose work includes research with the National Academies of Science on the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant accident, said the EPA science proposal represents voices "generally dismissed by the great bulk of scientists."

The EPA proposal would lead to "increases in chemical and radiation exposures in the workplace, home, and outdoor environment, including the vicinity of Superfund sites," Beyea wrote. "The individual risk will likely be low, but not the cumulative social risk," Beyea said.

At the level the EPA website talks about, any one person’s risk of cancer from radiation exposure is perhaps 1 percent, Beyea said.

"If they even look at that — no, no, no," said Terrie Barrie, a resident of Craig, Colo., and an advocate for her husband and other workers at the now-closed Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons plant, where the US government is compensating certain cancer victims regardless of their history of exposure. "There’s no reason not to protect people as much as possible," said Barrie.

Federal agencies for decades have followed a policy that there is no threshold of radiation exposure that is risk-free.

SOURCE






El Nino finally dead! Global Temperatures Keep Falling; Arctic Sea Ice Rebounds



Global temperatures are now below where they were three years ago, i.e. before a very strong El Nino temporarily drove up global temperatures by 0.6 deg C at their peak in February 2016. Since then, they have dropped by even more (0.7 deg C) and nobody knows whether they may decline any further.

The ongoing downturn illustrates that repeated claims by the UK Met Office and other meteorological organizations that most of the rapid warming in 2015 and early 2016 was primarily due to CO2 emissions rather than a super-strong El Nino were spurious and ill-considered.

Even worse is the recent statement by Elena Manaenkova, the World Meteorological Organisation’s deputy secretary-general. Commenting on the current IPCC meeting in South Korea, she claimed that “the sustained warming trend shows no sign of relenting.”

In reality, the opposite is happening: global temperatures have been falling sharply since 2016 while the 21st-century warming trend is half of what most climate models predicted, slowing rapidly.  –Benny Peiser, GWPF Observatory, 3 October 2018

The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) confirm that the average Arctic sea ice extent during September was the fourth highest since 2006, and the greatest since 2014. —Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 2 October 2018

SOURCE






CO2 Connection Wrecked…No Increase In US Flooding And Rainfall From Hurricanes!

With the blaring headlines we saw in the wake of tropical storm Harvey over Houston last year and Florence over the Carolinas last month, the CO2 hysteria saw another severe flare up.

However, a scientific study recently published in the Journal of Hydrology analyzed North Atlantic tropical cyclones (TCs) and their contribution to flooding and rainfall across the US. Hat-tip: a reader.

The result?  No statistically significant trends in magnitude or frequency. What follows is the paper’s abstract and main takeaway points:



Adventurous scientific speculation

Also, leading Univ. of Alabama climate scientist Dr. Roy Spencer dismissed any claimed connection between climate change and Hurricane Florence.

One of the alarmist claims is that hurricanes are slowing down due to jet stream changes, the result of a warming climate, which allegedly resulted from a greenhouse effect by added CO2.

Spencer dumps cold water on it and seems to characterize the attempt as adventurous speculation:

But like most claims regarding global warming, the real effect is small, probably temporary, and most likely due to natural weather patterns.

Any changes in hurricanes over 70 years, even if real, can easily be part of natural cycles — or incomplete data.

Coastal lake sediments along the Gulf of Mexico shoreline from 1,000 to 2,000 years ago suggest more frequent and intense hurricanes than occur today. Why? No one knows.”

SOURCE






Democrats Shelve Climate Change Alarmism As Election Nears

Democratic messaging on climate change has been stunted throughout the midterm election cycle, and most candidates are turning to other issues to connect with voters, the New York Times reports.

Health care and the economy consistently top polls of key issues and social security, immigration and guns usually perform well too.

Climate change, energy, and the environment are almost always counted among the least important issues to voters deciding who to support.

Of 161 potentially competitive congressional races, just a “handful” of Democrats have released campaign ads, either on television or the internet, that talk prominently of climate change and energy issues, Climate Nexus’s in-house database shows, according to the NYT.

“Until voters in the U.S. perceive this as a quite imminent threat, it’s liable to remain mired in the middle of all the other issues,” Climate Nexus executive director Jeff Nesbit, whose group is dedicated to communicating climate change threat, told the NYT.

Influential Democrats such as mega-donor Tom Steyer and former Vice President Al Gore have raised and donated millions of dollars to environmental initiatives.

Environmental issues have gained support from an active minority in the Democratic Party base. The Sierra Club, Earthjustice, and other green organizations have filed dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration over environmental regulations.

Activists travel across the country to protest prominent oil and gas projects such as the Keystone XL and Bayou Bridge pipelines.

The average Democrat running for a congressional seat in 2018 hardly mentions climate change and the environment because most voters would rather hear about other issues.

In close races, speaking on climate change might motivate conservative voters to turn out against Democratic candidates rather than encouraging Democratic voters to cast their ballots, according to The New York Times.

Highly publicized environmental activism and data have not translated into a widespread concern for broader issues of climate change, energy or the environment as far as elections go.

The top issues of registered voters are immigration and health care, according to a June poll by The Pew Research Center. Immigration most interested 19 percent of registered voters and health care is the key issue for 13 percent.

In a survey in which one of seven broad topics voters were most interested in for the 2018 midterms, energy issues never performed better than 5 percent by any metric and was often the least supported key issue, other than issues that fall into the obscure eighth category of “other,” according to an April survey by Morning Consult.

SOURCE





Australia: A shower of cold facts may counter coal phobia

Better to understand just what climate alarmists and anti-coal activists are demanding, a closer look at Australia’s economic reliance on coal is useful.

Apart from the contention that renewable energy is necessary to lower carbon-dioxide emissions, climate alarmists often speak of the boost to the economy that renewable energy will bring. According to the Clean Energy Council, the number of jobs from 39 renewable energy projects under construction or being completed this year is 4,400.

These projects have begun as a result of the billions of dollars of taxpayer money being appropriated by government to subsidise renewable energy. Conversely, the Minerals Council of Australia claims that 51,500 direct jobs and 120,000 indirect jobs are created through the coal industry. In 2017, this led to $57 billion of export revenue (a new record), $6 billion in wages and $5 billion in royalties.

Coal still provides 75 per cent of the energy generated in the national electricity market. No other large-scale source of base-load energy is as low cost. After iron ore, coal generated the largest export revenue, eclipsing agriculture, manufacturing, other services, base metals and gold. The total value of coal exports has nearly tripled in the last decade.

Despite renewable-energy spruikers claiming that Japan is getting out of coal, Japan remains our biggest export market for thermal coal (coal burnt in coal-fired power stations), earning Australia nearly $8.5 billion in 2016–17. South Korea, China and Taiwan are the next largest buyers of Australian thermal coal.

When it comes to metallurgical coal (used to make steel), India, China and Japan are our biggest export markets.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecast shows coal consumption in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries declining in the period till 2040, while in non-OECD countries coal consumption will increase, with projected coal-fired electricity generation being four times greater than in OECD countries in 2040.

Affluent nations’ governments would close down a low-cost, reliable form of electricity generation because of climate alarmism while at the same time exporting coal to developing nations so they can literally power ahead in building their economies.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement won’t “make any difference” to electricity prices and that Australia’s national security would be compromised by doing so because climate change is a concern of Pacific nations. This is false.

The federal renewable energy target (RET) of 23.5 per cent renewable-energy generation by 2020 aims to comply with the Paris Agreement of a 26–28 per cent reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions by 2030. That has resulted in the $3.6 billion of taxpayer subsidies this year that have been funnelled into creating otherwise unviable renewable energy projects. And electricity consumers are still paying higher power bills.

Abandon the Paris Agreement and the RET trying to achieve it and you remove the legislative compulsion for electricity retailers to purchase costly renewable-energy certificates, which will bring down power prices and allow low-cost base-load power to flourish once again.

A Bill Shorten ALP government would legislate a 50 per cent RET by 2030, which would see power prices skyrocket and reliability in the electricity grid plummet. Industry and business would shut down or go offshore in search of lower costs of doing business.

The ALP is pursuing an energy policy that prioritises emissions targets without any regard to affordability and reliability. In the process, it has abandoned any semblance of protecting workers’ livelihoods and economic security.

The only political parties in Australia that seem to be advocating for the most low-cost form of energy (coal) are minor parties such as Labour DLP, One Nation and Australian Conservatives. This is one of the reasons that the major parties are haemorrhaging votes to these minor parties.

Coal is the lifeblood of Australia’s economy. It saved us from disaster during the global financial crisis and is largely responsible for saving us from ongoing levels of calamitous government debt. If governments capitulate to anti-coal campaigners and climate alarmists, Australia’s economy will be irrevocably destroyed.

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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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




4 October, 2018

Australia: September was the second driest month in more than 100 YEARS – and Summer is set to be even worse

Notice the dog that didn't bark?  For once there is no tie to global warming given.  But EVERYTHING is due to global warming!  How come this bout of difficult weather is not attributed to global warming?  I have repeatedly noted that with Leftists, what the leave out is as significant as what they say -- and this is an example of it

What they are not facing up to is that drought is a sign of COOLING!  If the weather really had been hot, more water would have evaporated off the oceans and come down as rain, giving FLOODS, if anything.  It may happen yet but it has not happened so far.  Their cockeyed theory doesn't fit the present observed facts.  The globe is NOT warming.  A big drought contradicts warming


Drought-stricken farmers are expected to get a much-needed break from September's record dry spell over the next few weeks.

But Aussies shouldn't breath a sigh of relief too soon - weather experts believe that the dip in temperature won't last long.

Bureau of Meteorology expert Tom Hough warned that the months leading up to summer will see above-average heat and summer is set to be a scorcher.

Above-average temperatures will grace the country in the months leading up to summer, Mr Hough said.

Temperatures will soar above the norm for the month of October across the country, with the exception of far-east and north Queensland and northeast NSW.

Sydney's average temperatures for October usually sit between 24-27 degrees.

November temperatures will also be above average with the exception of Western Australia's southeast coast. 

Similarly December will see scorching temperatures above the norm in most of the country.   

However there is no need to crack out the sunscreen just yet. Temperatures are expected to cool towards the end of the week and much-needed rain will sweep the country.

A BOM expert told Daily Mail Australia that rain will be widespread across the southern half of the nation over the next two weeks.

At least 25-50mm of rain is expected to fall in Sydney alone, following the country's record dry September. An average of just 5.2mm of rainfall was recorded last month. 

SOURCE 






'Green' folly

Stephen Moore paints a grim picture of the costs to the poor and middle class of wind and solar energy (“How solar and wind mandates tax the poor and middle class,” Web, Sept. 16). But the hidden cost multipliers for solar and wind (so-called “renewables”) are many, many times worse than what he describes.

U.S. electricity demand is today almost 500,000 megawatts. A megawatt (MW) is 1 million watts, equivalent to 1,340 horsepower. Coal and natural gas each delivers about one-third of U.S. electricity and can generate full-time, for a total of about 300,000 MW. Total wind and solar generation is growing, but as Mr. Moore writes, they deliver only about 30,000 MW total — and only part-time.

Anyone who has ever looked out their windows knows that wind and solar only deliver about half the time each day, on good days. Therefore it’s not enough for wind and solar to produce 300,000 megawatts of electricity for consumption during half a day. They must produce more than 600,000 megawatts each day so the renewables can store what is not consumed. The first cost multiplier for renewables is that storage capable of handling more than 300,000 megawatts does not yet exist.

The second cost multiplier is to achieve 100-percent replacement of fossil fuels by increasing wind and solar generation to more than 600,000 MW. This is to store enough energy for several bad days when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow (or blows too hard).

The third cost multiplier is land use. Increasing wind and solar generation to more than 600,000 megawatts will take about 60,000 square miles (square miles, not acres), or the equivalent total land area of Indiana and Kentucky. Still more land area will be needed for storage.

Some experts estimate that widespread adoption of electric cars, especially cars that can’t charge their own batteries, will double these numbers. With the cost multipliers, that would be a quadruple whammy on the poor and middle classes.

SOURCE






China to speed up efforts to cut solar, wind subsidies

China will speed up efforts to ensure its wind and solar power sectors can compete without subsidies and achieve “grid price parity” with traditional energy sources like coal, according to new draft guidelines issued by the energy regulator.

As it tries to ease its dependence on polluting fossil fuels, China has encouraged renewable manufacturers and developers to drive down costs through technological innovations and economies of scale.

The country aims to phase out power generation subsidies, which have become an increasing burden on the state.

China’s regions will make an extra push to provide technological and policy support to the renewables sector in order to ensure they can operate subsidy-free, according to draft guidelines issued by the National Energy Administration (NEA) dated Sept. 13 to the industry and reviewed by Reuters.

The guidelines said some regions with cost and market advantages had already “basically achieved price parity” with clean coal-fired power and no longer required subsidies, and others should learn from their experiences.

They also urged local transmission grid companies to provide more support for subsidy-free projects and ensure they have the capacity to distribute all the power generated by wind and solar plants.

The draft guidelines were issued for feedback from the industry and it is unclear when they will come into effect.

Solar power generation costs fell 90 percent from 2007 to 2017, and GCL New Energy Holdings, one of China’s biggest clean energy developers, said in late August that grid price parity could happen within a year.

“Parity is here already for high price markets,” said Thomas Lapham, chief executive of Asia Clean Capital, which builds rooftop solar projects for major corporations in China.

“I don’t think there will be a specific magical date when (parity) is here for all locations,” he said. “It will gradually spread over time as efficiencies continue to improve and prices become more competitive.”

China’s solar sector is still reeling from a decision to cut subsidies and cap new capacity at 30 gigawatts (GW) this year, down from a record 53 GW in 2017, with the government concerned about overcapacity and a growing subsidy backlog.

According to the NEA, the government owed around 120 billion yuan ($17.46 billion) in subsidies to solar plants by the middle of this year.

Lapham said the cap on new projects has hurt the industry in the short term, but by making a component supply glut even worse, it has also reduced prices and brought China even closer to grid price parity.

“The silver lining may be that we are on more stable ground for 2019 and beyond, even without subsidies,” he said.

SOURCE






Had They Bet On Nuclear, Not Renewables, Germany & California Would Already Have 100% "Clean" Power

Had California and Germany invested $680 billion into new nuclear power plants instead of renewables like solar and wind farms, the two would already be generating 100% or more of their electricity from clean (low-emissions) energy sources, according to a new analysis by Environmental Progress.

The analysis comes the day before California plays host to a “Global Climate Action Summit,” which makes no mention of nuclear, despite it being the largest source of clean energy in the U.S. and Europe.

Here are the two main findings from EP's analysis:

Had Germany spent $580 billion on nuclear instead of renewables, and the fossil plant upgrades and grid expansions they require, it would have had enough energy to both replace all fossil fuels and biomass in its electricity sector and replace all of the petroleum it uses for cars and light trucks.

Had California spent an estimated $100 billion on nuclear instead of on wind and solar, it would have had enough energy to replace all fossil fuels in its in-state electricity mix.
The finding that Germany could have entirely decarbonized its transportation sector with nuclear is a significant one. That’s because decarbonizing transportation is considered a major challenge by most climate policy experts.

Electricity consumed by electric cars will grow 300-fold between 2016 and 2040, analysts predict. That electricity must come from clean energy sources, not fossil fuels, for the transition to electric cars to mitigate climate change.

As a result of their renewables-only policies, California and Germany are climate laggards compared to nuclear-heavy places like France, whose electricity is 12 times less carbon intensive than Germany’s, and 4 times less carbon intensive than California’s.

France's nuclear-heavy electricity is 12 times less carbon intensive than Germany’s, and 4 times less than California’s.EP

Thanks to its deployment of nuclear power, the Canadian province of Ontario’s electricity is nearly 90% cleaner than California’s, according to a recent analysis by Scott Luft, an energy analyst who tracks decarbonization and the power sector.

California’s power sector emissions are over twice as high today as they would have been had the state kept open and built planned nuclear plants.

California’s political establishment pushed hard to close San Onofre nuclear plant in 2013 — triggering an on-going federal criminal investigation — and later to close Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, which generates 15% of all in-state clean electricity, by 2025.

The political leadership of California and Germany have encouraged other nations to follow their example, and the results have been — consistently, following the new EP analysis — counter to the ostensible goal of climate protection.

Over the last 20 years the share of electricity from clean energy globally has declined because the increase in electricity coming from solar and wind wasn’t enough to offset the decline of nuclear.

Carbon emissions rose 3.2% in California between 2011 and 2015, even as they declined 3.7% in the average over the remaining 49 states.

In 2016, emissions from electricity produced within California decreased by 19%, but 2/3 of that decline came from increased production from the state’s hydro-electric dams, due to it being a rainier year, and thus had nothing to do with the state’s energy policies, while just 1/3 of the decline came from increased solar and wind.

In the 1960s and 1970s, California’s electric utilities had planned to build a string of new reactors and new plants that were ultimately killed by anti-nuclear leaders and groups, including Governor Jerry Brown, the Sierra Club, and Natural Resources Defense Fund (NRDC).

Other nuclear plants were forced to close prematurely, including Rancho Seco and San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, while Diablo Canyon is being forced to close by California's Renewable Portfolio Standard, which excludes nuclear.

It remains to be seen if recently-passed SB100, which allows 40% of electricity to be produced from any non-emitting energy source alongside the remaining 60% exclusively from renewables, will motivate the state to save its last nuclear plant.

Had those plants been constructed and stayed open, 73% of power produced in California would be from clean (very low-carbon) energy sources as opposed to just 34%. Of that clean power, 48% would have been from nuclear rather than 9%.

In 2016, renewables received 94 times more in U.S. federal subsidies than nuclear and 46 times more than fossil fuels per unit of energy generated. Meanwhile, a growing number of analysts are admitting that an electricity grid that relies on nuclear power has no need for solar and wind. More troubling, adding solar and wind to a nuclear-heavy grid would require burning more fossil fuels, usually natural gas, as back-up power

As it’s become increasingly clear that Germany would not meet its climate targets, it is coming under criticism from leading renewable energy advocates, who may fear that Germany’s poor record on climate change discredits renewable energy as a solution for climate change.

“If I were a citizen of Germany, I would be concerned about Germany being left behind,” said Al Gore, who is a major renewable energy investor in addition to being a climate policy advocate, last June. “The leadership provided in years past created a reality that now no longer exists.”

“If the world is serious about climate change, we should be keeping existing, safe nuclear power stations open, not shutting them prematurely,” noted Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s Michael Liebreich.

But the new EP analysis underscores that the problem is not just closing plants but also choosing to build solar and wind farms instead of new nuclear power stations.

SOURCE






The war on coal is a winner for China

We’ve just entered the 21st month of Donald Trump’s presidency. While the president is ending his predecessor’s war on coal at home, American taxpayers are still funding Barack Obama’s war on coal abroad.

That’s bad news for US taxpayers, trade — and national security.

In 2013, President Obama ordered the Treasury Department to use its representation on the World Bank, where the US is the largest funder, and other multilateral development banks to veto funding for coal-fired power stations. That year, the World Bank formalized a near blanket ban on coal. Last year, it extended the ban to the funding of oil and gas projects as well.

China is the big winner here. It dominates the solar-power industry. Nine out of the world’s top 10 solar companies are Chinese-controlled.

Just as important, access to cheap electricity is the single best way of boosting economic development in poor countries. Developing nations’ need for coal generation doesn’t go away simply because the World Bank refuses to fund it. Instead, they turn to — guess who? — China.

Indeed, across the board, the West is in danger of ceding development and influence to China: China is spending $1.3 trillion to build transportation and energy projects from the Indo-Pacific through east Africa and Eastern Europe.

Yet the US has one hand tied behind its back. Already China is financing coal-fired power stations in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Kenya. Although the Trump White House rescinded Obama’s anti-coal financing directive last July, it has made only halfhearted efforts to overturn the World Bank’s financing bans. Forming an alliance of like-minded countries to promote the responsible use of fossil fuels has been in the works for some months and would help force a change of policy.

But a major stumbling block appears to be the Treasury, which has day-to-day responsibility for safeguarding American interests at the World Bank and other international-aid banks. What explains the foot-dragging on a policy so obviously harmful to the United States?

The likely answer is: Much of its key leadership is drawn from Wall Street, including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin — meaning they probably share Wall Street’s cultural assumptions that coal is the past and wind and solar the future, even if it’s Chinese.

There’s a revealing passage in Bob Woodward’s “Fear” on life inside the Trump White House. The president and his top economic advisers were having an argument on trade and the loss of blue-collar jobs. People didn’t really want manufacturing jobs, argued Gary Cohn, who was serving as director of the National Economic Council.

“I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk,” the ex-Goldman Sachs president continued. “People don’t want to go into coal mines and get black lung.”

“Trump wasn’t buying it,” Woodward says. The president is right and Cohn badly out of date. Surface mining overtook underground mining some time in the early 1970s. And Wall Streeters continue to ignore renewable energy’s biggest drawback: It doesn’t keep the lights on.

Meanwhile, falling natural-gas prices should be pushing Americans’ energy bills lower, but high-cost renewable energy is pushing them up. In California, which is gearing up for a 100 percent renewable-energy mandate, electric rates are already 60 percent higher than in the rest of the country. A recent survey by the Energy Information Administration found that one in five households reported reducing or forgoing necessities such as food and medicine to pay an energy bill.

It’s even worse for the world’s poor. According to a UN report, providing universal energy access could be done for less than $50 billion a year, but doubling the share of renewable energy could cost $500 billion a year.

There’s no other word for it: Foisting high-cost energy on those who can least afford it is immoral. It’s the poor who bear the heaviest burden of renewable energy.

The next World Bank meeting convenes Oct. 8. Let’s hope Mnuchin and the Treasury Department have what it takes to end Obama’s war on coal and on developing nations around the world. It’s time to lift the ban.

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.  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 October, 2018

EPA Slaps Down Rumors It’s Deleting An Obscure Children’s Health Program

An EPA official is spreading misinformation about why she was put on leave from a small program created in the 1990s to protect children from pollution, an agency official told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Friday.

Ruth Etzel, the director of the Office of Children’s Health Protection, leaked an email to Buzzfeed on Wednesday suggesting the agency placed her on leave to fast-track plans to eliminate her office.

Her email is mischaracterizing the move, according to EPA Chief of Staff Ryan Jackson.

“Although EPA does not customarily comment on personnel matters, due to circulating misinformation, the Director of EPA’s Office of Children’s Health Protection was placed on leave to give the Agency the opportunity to review allegations about the Director’s leadership of the office,” Jackson told TheDCNF.

The New York Times first reported on Tuesday that Etzel was removed from her post. She eventually leaked an email to Buzzfeed suggesting the agency was on a mission to delete her program.

She also had her badge taken away, an anonymous source told the NYTimes at the time.

“I appear to be the ‘fall guy’ for their plan to ‘disappear’ the office of children’s health,” Etzel wrote Tuesday in the email. “It had been apparent for about 5 months that the top EPA leaders were conducting ‘guerrilla warfare’ against me as the leader of OCHP, but now it’s clearly official.”

The Office of Children’s Health Protection advises the EPA on the health needs of children, and its findings can sometimes lead to more stringent environmental regulations.

The office Etzel oversees is small, with 15 full-time employees in Washington, D.C. and 10 regional children’s health coordinators.

EPA spokesman John Konkus did not tell The NYTimes why Etzel was placed on administrative leave, though he did say that no such agenda was in play with the reduction in size and leadership of those offices.

“These offices will continue to be a part of headquarters and regional organizations,” he said in a statement. “Children’s health is and has always been a top priority for the Trump Administration and the E.P.A., in particular, is focused on reducing lead exposure in schools.”

Etzel has not responded to TheDCNF’s request for comment about the nature of the email or the validity of Jackson’s assertion.

Activists and academics made it their mission in 2017 to root out examples where the agency deleted or altered climate change buzzwords from EPA’s website.

The Environmental Data and Governance Initiative characterized in August of that year that the agency’s decision to scrap the term climate “change” from its website as a type of “cleansing.”

The National Institute of Environmental Health Science, for instance, changed a headline on its website at the time from “Climate Change and Human Health,” to “Climate and Human Health,” the group reported.

SOURCE






Less meat, coal key to a cooler planet

Same old, same old.  More prophecy from proven false prophets

An accelerated withdrawal from coal and a change in the global diet away from meat are needed to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C, leaked copies of a major new ­climate report say.

Scientists and diplomats are meeting in South Korea this week to finalise the report that distils the findings of more than 6000 scientific papers.

The 400-page report, scheduled to be released on Sunday, has been described by scientists involved as the most “politically charged” document in the history of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The draft talks of “climate mayhem” and “a swift and complete transformation not just of the global economy, but of ­society, too”.

This is despite claims by reviewer Bob Ward from London’s Grantham Institute that scientists had “pulled their punches” to make policy recommendations seem more palatable to countries such as the US, Saudi Arabia and Australia.

This week, the political representatives of countries that have signed the Paris Agreement are going through the 22-page draft summary line by line to reach an agreed text for policymakers.

Opening the talks yesterday, IPCC chairman Hoesung Lee said the meeting would “produce a strong, robust and clear summary for policymakers while upholding the scientific integrity of the IPCC”.

Leaked copies of the draft document have opened a window on the negotiations.

The bottom line, according to a report by AFP in Paris, is that at current levels of greenhouse gas emissions, there is “high confidence” the 1.5C threshold will be passed around 2040.

The draft report says carbon dioxide emissions should peak not later than 2020 and the global economy must become “carbon-neutral” by 2050.

To meet the remaining “carbon budget” of 550 billion tonnes set out in the summary, the share of primary energy from renewables would have to jump from a few per cent currently to at least 50 per cent by mid-century.

The share of coal would need to drop from about 28 per cent to between 1 and 7 per cent.

The report does not tell policymakers what to do but suggests four pathways.

One relies heavily on future technologies to radically reduce energy needs while another ­assumes major changes in consumption habits, such as eating less meat and abandoning internal combustion engine cars.

The other measures include sucking massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere through large-scale reforestation, use of biofuels or direct carbon capture.

“Never in the history of the IPCC has there been a report that is so politically charged,” Henri Waisman, one of the report’s 86 authors, told AFP.

SOURCE






Kill, don’t expand, tax subsidies for electric vehicles

Don't tax struggling families more to fuel the vehicle purchases of well-off households

The federal government can’t help but get wrapped up in the tech sector, placing ludicrously large bets on boondoggles that benefit few at the expense of many.

Take, for example, electric vehicles and their associated tax credits. In 2008, then-President George W. Bush signed into law an up-to $7,500 tax credit for the purchase of the first 250,000 vehicles on the market. As a part of his massive, ill-advised stimulus package, then-President Barack Obama expanded this credit to include the first 200,000 vehicles sold by each manufacturer in the United States.

Now, as major auto brands such as Tesla are breaching that 200,000 milestone, lawmakers are considering extending the credit. Policymakers ought to question the wisdom of such a costly move, a handout to high-income families with little or no environmental benefit.

Unfortunately, members of Congress are having trouble kicking their costly addiction to shiny “green” tech. Over the summer, Tesla passed their 200,000 electric vehicle benchmark, triggering the start of a federal phase-out of tax benefits to vehicles produced by the company. If nothing changes, the EV tax credit will slowly phase out to zero percent of its current value over the next year. General Motors is not far behind, slated to pass the 200,000 mark by the beginning of 2019. But the Electric CARS Act of 2018, ( H.R. 6274), sponsored by 17 House Democrats, would eliminate the current cap altogether, ensuring unlimited subsidization over a ten-year period for producers of “clean tech.”

Co-sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., hailed the legislation as a way to “make electric vehicles and their charging stations more affordable,” while reducing America’s environmental footprint. But the representative’s waxing begs the question as to who will benefit from the program. According to Dr. Wayne Winegarden of the Pacific Research Institute, the answer is clear: Households with adjusted gross incomes greater than $100,000 used nearly 80 percent of EV tax credits. Further, the tax credit doesn’t apply to used vehicles. But even if it did, owners would be on the line for four-figure battery replacement costs.

Some green proponents concede that EV tax credits widen the wealth gap, but argue instead that the environmental benefits are well worth that cost. While “green” vehicles probably don't reduce carbon emissions (depending on the underlying energy grid they are drawing from), the extraction process required for lithium-and-cobalt car batteries is filthy, exploitative, and breeds instability.

Investigating conditions at Congolese mines, the Washington Post concludes, “mining activity exposes local communities to levels of toxic metals that appear to be linked to ailments that include breathing problems and birth defects, health officials say.” Sure, these jobs may still be the best option for workers feigning disease and starvation. But the resulting pollution holds back entire communities, including the children being forced to mine. And, due to the political instability gripping Congo, mine disruption can reap havoc on battery prices worldwide.

Rather than gamble America’s energy fortunes on subsidies and dirty, despicable labor practices, policymakers should embrace a diverse portfolio that powers the country at a low cost. This means a vibrant mix of vehicles and electricity sources at every price point, from the working poor to the wealthy.

But don't tax struggling families more to fuel the vehicle purchases of well-off households. It's unfair, and it makes for a less-clean Earth.

Rather than expand out the EV tax credit, lawmakers need to phase it out altogether. Resulting savings can be used for widespread tax relief, instead of targeted giveaways to consumers and manufacturers who don’t need them.

SOURCE





The Incredible Economic Opportunities of Offshore Energy Exploration

Our outer continental shelf is teeming with potential energy reserves. Harnessing them could be a great boost to American prosperity and national security.

American economic prospects appear increasingly bright. Today, the United States leads the world in the production and refinement of natural gas and oil, delivering major economic benefits to consumers and manufacturers. But unwarranted fear and outdated regulations keep 94 percent of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) closed to energy production, limiting our country’s economic potential and the enhanced national security that comes with it. Boosting offshore exploration would provide economic benefits to American coastal states and local economies, and it could lift the U.S. economy as a whole, too.

Based on current government projections, natural gas and oil will meet an estimated 60 percent of U.S. energy needs by 2040, and responsible offshore development represents one of the best untapped opportunities to sustain, supply, and safeguard America’s future energy security. In a good first step, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke recently announced a proposal to open much more of the OCS to exploration. We should move forward quickly but responsibly to take advantage of the estimated 90 billion barrels of oil and 300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in potential offshore reserves. In the coming decades, as the global population continues to grow and countries in the developing world become wealthier, worldwide energy demand is projected to jump almost 30 percent. If the U.S. places itself as a leader in the sector, it could reap the economic gains for decades to come.

According to a study commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute (API), opening the Atlantic OCS alone could generate nearly 265,000 thousand new jobs and $22 billion each year in private investment. Estimates suggest that federal and state governments could generate $6 billion a year in new revenue within 20 years of the initial lease sale. While exact state revenues will depend on revenue sharing agreements, coastal states ranging from Florida to Maine could see substantial economic benefits.

The energy sector itself also has a great record of delivering such economic benefits to those Americans who deserve them the most. On average, the industry employs a higher percentage of veterans than the economy as a whole, with about one in ten of its nearly half a million employees having served our country in uniform. While the overall unemployment rate for veterans tracks closely with the national average, a third of all veterans remain underemployed or at jobs below their skill level, and 20 percent of them make less than $15 an hour. Expanding offshore energy exploration could create more well-paying jobs for those brave men and women who served our nation in uniform.

Indeed, natural gas and oil exploration jobs offer average salaries of $116,000 a year, without necessarily requiring a college degree. The industry offers a wide array of jobs to veterans of all different skill sets and military experiences. An Army mapping technician or geospatial engineer, for example, would be able to utilize those skills working in the energy sector. Given the importance of energy security to geopolitics, and U.S. foreign policy more broadly, energy-sector workers also have the capability to continue supporting U.S. national security.

Expanded offshore energy exploration could also benefit sectors far beyond just the energy industry by putting downward pressure on oil and gas prices. Higher gas prices disproportionately hurt low- and middle-income families, who spend a larger share of their disposable incomes on energy. Lower energy prices give consumers more income to spend on all kinds of other goods and services, helping the economy as a whole. Transportation-related industries such as airlines, the auto sector, and shipping companies benefit as well. Finally, at a fundamental macroeconomic level, lower energy prices help keep inflation low, benefiting Americans on fixed incomes the most.

Offshore energy exploration offers incredible opportunities to build on U.S. economic strength. Removing barriers that unnecessarily constrain exploration will lay the groundwork for an American economy that remains strong decades into the future. But the hard work of harnessing the energy waiting in our waters will be time-consuming, so the exploration and quantification phases should start now.

SOURCE






Australia:  Prominent conservative politician demands withdrawal from Paris Agreement

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has called on Scott Morrison to withdraw Australia from the Paris Agreement on climate change or “please explain” why the government would not pull out.

Conservative Coalition MPs led by Tony Abbott, who signed Australia up to the deal when he was prime minister, and Craig Kelly, chair of the government’s backbench energy committee, have been pushing for an exit from the agreement but the Prime Minister has refused to bow to pressure.

Under the agreement, Australia has pledged to reduce emissions to 26-28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030.

“Often people will speak of the voluntary or supposedly non-binding nature of this deal,” Senator Hanson writes in a letter to Mr Morrison.

“Personally, I am not familiar with too many non-binding agreements that come with international debt collectors and a $400 million dollar price tag, a price tag that only looks set to grow. I don’t recall any government telling the Australian people that signing the Paris Climate Agreement would eventually lead to organisations like the Global Climate Fund acting like standover men, knocking at our door, telling us to pay up, or else.”

Senator Hanson was referring to the Green Climate Fund, which was a critical part of the Paris Agreement and received $200m from Australia between 2015 and 2018.

Josh Frydenberg confirmed to The Weekend Australian the government would not increase its commitment to the fund.

Mr Morrison has argued the Paris Agreement will not “change electricity prices one jot” but withdrawing from it could jeopardise key relationships with neighbouring countries in the Pacific and undermine Australia’s national security.

“This is the number one issue of our Pacific neighbours, our strategic partners, our strategic security partners,” he told Sky News last month.

“There are a lot of influences in the southwest Pacific and I’m not going to compromise Australia’s national security by walking away from a commitment that was made a number of years ago to that target. It’s been there for the last four years or three years, just over three years.”

Senator Hanson wrote: “I am writing today to ask you explicitly, please withdraw Australia from the United Nations Paris Climate Agreement. I am also asking you to commit to ending the large contributions of Australian taxpayers’ money to international organisations like Global Climate Fund.

“If you cannot agree to support One Nation in these endeavours then I and many other concerned Australians, would appreciate it if you could please explain why.”

Emissions for the year to March 2018 increased 1.3 per cent, driven largely by LNG production for export, according to the latest national greenhouse gas inventory.

They were 1.9 per cent below emissions in 2000 and 11.2 per cent below emissions in 2005.

Mr Morrison has insisted Australia will reach its target under the Paris Agreement “in a canter”.

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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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





2 October, 2018

BBC’s Climate Change ‘Facts’ Are Fiction

by Harry Wilkinson

In order to avoid giving ‘false balance’ to the climate alarmists at the BBC, I thought it would be a good idea to fact-check their new internal guidance on climate change. This is their totalitarian memorandum aimed at stamping out free scientific discourse, on the basis that certain facts are established beyond dispute.

The problem is that these aren’t, and the BBC is guilty of repeatedly failing to describe accurately the nuances of climate science and the degree to which certain claims are disputed.

The crucial paragraph reads:

‘Most climate scientists regard a rise of 2 degrees C as the point when global warming could become irreversible and the effects dangerous. At current rates, we are on track for a rise of more than 3-4 degrees C by the end of the century.’

There are so many things wrong with this short statement.

That global warming can be somehow ‘irreversible’ is pure propaganda; the climate has always been changing and it always will. The briefing later describes the idea of catastrophic tipping points as a ‘common misconception’, so they have comically failed their own test right at the start.

A temperature rise of more than two degrees is not inherently dangerous either. The majority of economic impact studies put the cost of climate change by the end of the century at between 1.5% and 3% of world GDP, but these studies often make the inaccurate assumption that either no or little adaptation will take place.

In contrast, even the IPCC has admitted (p.15) that the cost of reducing emissions (‘mitigation’) to meet the 2oC target may be up to 4% of world GDP in 2030, 6% in 2050 and 11% in 2100.

These numbers do not incorporate the benefits of reducing our emissions, which are primarily the avoided costs of climate change. But given that a certain amount of warming is already ‘baked in’, it looks almost certain that this ‘mitigation’ will actually be far more expensive than not doing anything. If warming actually turns out to have a positive effect, the gamble will have failed even more spectacularly.

The IPCC has openly admitted that its cost forecasts come with incredibly optimistic assumptions that immediate mitigation takes place in all countries, that there is a single global carbon price, and that there are ‘no additional limitations on technology relative to the models’ default technology assumptions’. With no carbon capture and storage (CCS), they predict the total mitigation cost rises by a staggering 138%. The bad news is that CCS is currently failing to deliver, and few now expect it to play a significant role in reducing emissions.

Given the record of economic forecasts, all these predictions should be taken with a pinch of salt, but on the available evidence it appears we are sleepwalking into spending trillions of pounds to achieve only a negligible reduction in global temperatures.

The father of the two-degree target, veteran climate alarmist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, has admitted the number is entirely fabricated: ‘Two degrees is not a magical limit; it’s clearly a political goal’.  He nonetheless celebrates its cynical effectiveness at motivating international political action.

Other prominent climate scientists, such as Hans von Storch, have been much more critical of this approach. Storch reflects on how scientists have become political sermonisers in a way which damages science as a whole: ‘Unfortunately, some of my colleagues behave like pastors . . . it’s certainly no coincidence that all the mistakes that became public always tended in the direction of exaggeration and alarmism.’

The statement that we are on track for ‘more than 3-4 degrees’ is an even more blatant distortion of the scientific evidence. Earlier this year, Peter Cox of the University of Exeter announced the results of his latest study which ruled out higher levels of warming. He concluded that ‘climate sensitivity’ would be in the narrower range of 2.2-3.4oC, thus ruling out warming of 4 or 5 degrees by 2100. His voice adds to a growing consensus that climate sensitivity will be lower than previously estimated. Does the BBC now consider him a climate denier too?

Quite surreally, the document also describes the statement that ‘climate change has happened before’ as a ‘common misconception’. How much longer before the BBC renames itself The Ministry of Truth?

Estimating the current and future impacts of climate change is a complex and contested enterprise, but the BBC would rather you didn’t know. ‘The science is settled’ they say, so move on. This climate memorandum is nothing less than propaganda presented as fact by controller Fran. There is a critical debate to be had, so inquisitive people had better look elsewhere.

SOURCE





Green Flop: Saudi Arabia Shelves $200 Billion Solar Project

Saudi Arabia has put on hold a $200 billion plan with SoftBank Group Corp. to build the world’s biggest solar-power-generation project, Saudi government officials said, in a complication for another eye-catching transformation project in the kingdom.

The stalled project marks a setback for a partnership between Saudi Arabia and SoftBank that has pursued ambitious ideas. Together, they have created a $100 billion fund for technology company investments that has resulted in a rush of new money flooding into startups.

The project would have turned the world’s most important oil producer into a giant in solar power, ultimately generating about 200 gigawatts of energy—more than three times what the country needs every day.

The plan was announced by SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in New York last March and was meant to be an extension of their partnership.

Now, officials and a Saudi government adviser said, no one is actively working on the project…

“Everyone is just hoping this whole idea would just die,” the Saudi energy official said.

SOURCE





Evidence Lacking for Major Human Role in Climate Change

By Ralph B. Alexander, Ph.D.

Conventional scientific wisdom holds that global warming and consequent changes in the climate are primarily our own doing. But what few people realize is that the actual scientific evidence for a substantial human contribution to climate change is flimsy.

It requires highly questionable computer climate models to make the connection between global warming and human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2).

No Proof Warming Is Human-Caused

The multiple lines of evidence which do exist are simply evidence that the world is warming, not proof that the warming comes predominantly from human activity.

The supposed proof relies entirely on computer models that attempt to simulate the Earth’s highly complex climate and include greenhouse gases as well as aerosols from both volcanic and man-made sources – but almost totally ignore natural variability.

Models Way Off The Mark

So it shouldn’t be surprising that the models have a dismal track record in predicting the future. Most spectacularly, the models failed to predict the recent pause or hiatus in global warming from the late 1990s to about 2014.

During this period, the warming rate dropped to only a third to a half of the rate measured from the early 1970s to 1998, while at the same time CO2 kept spewing into the atmosphere.

Out of 32 climate models, only a lone Russian model came anywhere close to the actual observations.

cmip5 models vs observations

Not only did the models overestimate the warming rate by two or three times, they wrongly predict a hot spot in the upper atmosphere that isn’t there, and are unable to accurately reproduce sea level rise.

Yet it’s these same failed models that underpin the whole case for catastrophic consequences of man-made climate change, a case embodied in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

The international agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions – which 195 nations, together with many of the world’s scientific societies and national academies, have signed on to – is based not on empirical evidence, but on artificial computer models.

Only the models link climate change to human activity. The empirical evidence does not.

Correlation Is Not Causation

Proponents of human-caused global warming, including a majority of climate scientists, insist that the boost to global temperatures of about 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius) since 1850 comes almost exclusively from the steady increase in the atmospheric CO2 level.

They argue that elevated CO2 must be the cause of nearly all the warming because the sole major change in climate “forcing” over this period has been from CO2 produced by human activities – mainly the burning of fossil fuels as well as deforestation.

But correlation is not causation, as is well known from statistics or the public health field of epidemiology.

So believers in the narrative of catastrophic anthropogenic (man-made) climate change fall back on computer models to shore up their argument.

With the climate change narrative trumpeted by political entities such as the UN’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and amplified by compliant media worldwide, predictions of computer climate models have acquired the status of quasi-religious edicts.

Warmists On The Wrong Side Of Science

Indeed, anyone disputing the conventional wisdom is labeled a “denier” by advocates of climate change orthodoxy, who claim that global warming skeptics are just as anti-science as those who believe vaccines cause autism.

The much-ballyhooed war on science typically lumps climate change skeptics together with creationists, anti-vaccinationists, and anti-GMO activists. But the climate warmists are the ones on the wrong side of science.

“Fear, Hyperbole, Heavy-Handed Tactics”

Like their counterparts in the debate over the safety of GMOs, warmists employ fear, hyperbole and heavy-handed political tactics in an attempt to shut down debate.

Yet skepticism about the human influence on global warming persists, and may even be growing among the general public.

In 2018, a Gallup poll in the U.S. found that 36% of Americans don’t believe that global warming is caused by human activity, while a UK survey showed that a staggering 64% of the British public feel the same way.

And the percentage of climate scientists who endorse the mainstream view of a strong human influence is nowhere near the widely believed 97%, although it’s probably above 50%.

Most scientists who are skeptics like me accept that global warming is real, but not that it’s entirely man-made or that it’s dangerous.

The observations alone aren’t evidence for a major human role. Such lack of regard for the importance of empirical evidence and misguided faith in the power of deficient computer climate models are abuses of science.

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





Rooting Out Scientific Corruption

Dr. Brian Wansink recently resigned from his position as Columbia University professor, eating behavior researcher and director of the Cornell “food lab.” A faculty investigation found that he had misreported research data, failed to preserve data and results properly, and employed dubious statistical techniques.

A fellow faculty member accused him of “serious research misconduct: either outright fraud by people in the lab, or such monumental sloppiness that data are entirely disconnected from context.” Among other things, Wansink had used cherry-picked data and multiple statistical analyses to get results that confirmed his hypotheses.

His papers were published in peer-reviewed journals and used widely in designing eating and dieting programs, even though other researchers could not reproduce his results.

It’s about time someone exposed and rooted out this growing problem, and not just in the food arena.

Countless billions of dollars in state and federal taxpayer money, corporate (and thus consumer) funding and foundation grants have fueled research and padded salaries, with universities typically taking a 40% or so cut off the top, for “oversight and overhead.” Incentives and temptations abound.

Far too many researchers have engaged in similar practices for much too long. Far too many of their colleagues do sloppy, friendly or phony peer review. Far too many universities and other institutions have looked the other way. Far too often those involved are rewarded by fame and fortune. Far too many suspect results have been used to attack and sue corporations or drive costly public policies.

A good example is glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup weed killer and the world’s most widely used herbicide.

The Environmental Protection Agency, the European Food Safety Authority, and many other respected organizations worldwide have consistently reaffirmed that this chemical does not cause cancer.

One rogue agency says otherwise. The International Agency for Research on Cancer is top-heavy with anti-chemical activists, some who’ve had blatant conflicts of interest or engaged in highly questionable conduct.

IARC relies on antiquated methods that have examined over 1,000 substances – and found that only one does not cause cancer. It says even pickled vegetables and coffee are carcinogenic.

IARC makes no attempt to determine exposure levels that actually might pose cancer risks for humans in the real world and ignores studies that don’t support its agenda.

It has created enormous pressure on EU regulators to ban glyphosate, which would help organic farmers but decimate conventional farming.

It also helped the mass-tort lawsuit industry hit the jackpot when a San Francisco jury awarded a retired groundskeeper $289 million in compensatory and punitive damages – because he claims his non-Hodgkin lymphoma resulted from exposure to glyphosate. Thousands of similar lawsuits are now in the pipeline.

The potential impact on the chemicals industry and conventional farming worldwide is incalculable. But worse outrages involve research conducted to advance the “dangerous manmade climate change” thesis – for they are used to justify demands that we give up the fossil fuels that provide over 80% of America’s and the world’s energy – and replace them with expensive, unreliable pseudo-renewable alternatives.

In a positive development that may presage a Cornell style cleanup, after seven long years of stonewalling and appealing court decisions, the U of Arizona has finally agreed to give the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic the emails and other public, taxpayer-funded records it asked for in 2011.

The documents relate to the infamous “hockey stick” temperature graph, attempts to excise the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age from history, machinations over the preparation of an IPCC report, efforts to keep non-alarmist papers out of scientific journals, and actions similar to Wansink’s clever research tricks.

While the legal, scientific and public access issues were very similar in another FOIA case back in 2010, the court in that U of Virginia/Penn State case took a very different stance.

That court absurdly ruled that alarmist researcher Dr. Michael Mann could treat his data, codes, methodologies, and emails as his personal intellectual property– inaccessible to anyone outside Mann’s inner circle – even though his work was funded by taxpayers and was being used to support and justify the Obama-era carbon dioxide “endangerment finding” and war on fossil fuels, and thus affected the living standards of all Americans.

Scientific debates absolutely should be played out in the academic, scientific and public policy arena, instead of our courts, as some 800 academics argued in defending Mann’s position.

However, that cannot possibly happen if the scientists in question refuse to debate; if they hide their data, computer codes, algorithms, and methodologies; if they engage in questionable, secretive, unaccountable science.

We who pay for the research and will be victimized by sloppy, improper or fraudulent work have a clear, inalienable right to insist that research be honest and aboveboard.

That the scientists’ data, codes, methods, and work products be in the public domain, available for analysis and critique. That researchers engage in robust debate with fellow scientists and critics.

It’s akin to the fundamental right to cross-examine witnesses in a civil or criminal case, to reveal inconsistencies, assess credibility and determine the truth.

Scientists who violate these fundamental precepts should forfeit their access to future grants.

Instead, we now have a nearly $2-trillion-per-year renewable energy/climate crisis industry that zealously and jealously protects its turf and attacks anyone who dares to ask awkward questions

More HERE 





Australia refuses to be the fall guy for the "crisis" at the global climate fund

Australia will freeze its level of funding for a Green Climate Fund that stalled after giving millions of dollars to replace cooking stoves in Bangladesh and sponsoring “gender responsive” drinking water projects in Ethiopia.

The GCF was a critical part of the Paris Agreement but was suffering a “crisis of confidence” and unable to function.

The US has already pulled $US2 billion ($2.7bn) of its promised $US3bn contribution but Australia is under pressure to contribute hundreds of millions of dollars more. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said Australia had given the fund $200 million between 2015 and 2018. And it would “consider possible further contributions” through the course of “replenishment negotiations”.

But Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said yesterday: “Australia will not be increasing our commitment.”

A paper issued by the World Resources Institute this week said Australia should be the sixth biggest contributor to the fund based on its economy, past greenhouse gas emissions and current emissions per capita. This would amount to about $400m in second-round funding.

Environment groups have said “replenishment” funding would be “a critical indicator to developing countries about whether developed countries are serious about holding up their part of the Paris Agreement bargain”. But former GCF board member Jacob Waslander has written a scathing critique of the fund’s operation. “Rather than a dynamic global centre for climate finance, the GCF board has been mired by ineffective decision-making in an atmosphere of distrust,” Mr Waslander said. “After five years of operation, the GCF — the world’s biggest multilateral climate fund — faces a crisis of confidence … Representative from developed and developing countries, the private sector and non-governmental organisations are deeply concerned about the effectiveness and efficiency of the fund’s governance, and particularly about how its board functions.”

The last board meeting ended in stalemate with the resignation of Australian chief executive Howard Bamsley. Mr Waslander said a key problem was the board worked on the basis of unanimity, so any board member could block any decision for any reason. As a result, funding for new projects had effectively stopped.

The GCF had so far approved 76 projects worth $US3.7bn ($5bn) to help developing countries in their low-emission development. About half of the money was in loans and half in grants, much of it dedicated to promoting renewable energy. Most projects were in Africa and Asia Pacific.

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.  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 October, 2018

The myth of a climate crisis

At the beginning of every autumn, as we approach the peak of the hurricane season and the lowest Arctic sea-ice extent, we have to endure a deluge of media hysteria and doom-laden reports about climate change.

This year, for instance, one report, produced by the Global Commission on the Climate and Economy (GCCE), urged governments to spend $90 trillion over the next decade because ‘more frequent and more intense extreme weather events are becoming the “new normal”’ – a claim illustrated with the following chart:

If it were a true reflection of the state of the planet’s ‘normal’ condition, it might be a compelling case for action. But this chart is not derived from weather data. It is as if the putative fact of climate change permits those who assent to it to speculate about its consequences, whereas those who question this speculation are shut out of public debate.

This is something Roger Pielke Jr, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, knows only too well. Debates about climate change, he tells me, have been turned into ‘legitimacy wars’, something he explores in his newly updated 2014 book, The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change. There he retells his own experience of the climate-change debate, and explains why climate advocates are preoccupied with delegitimising opposition, rather than debating it.

One such attack on Pielke’s legitimacy in the US came from within the Democratic Party. The WikiLeaked emails of John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 US presidential campaign, revealed that a climate activist had boasted to billionaire Tom Steyer that Podesta’s Center for American Progress had successfully prevented Pielke from writing for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website. It didn’t stop there. After Pielke gave evidence about extreme weather and climate change to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2014, John Holdren, who was then President Obama’s science adviser, contradicted Pielke and accused him of being outside the ‘scientific mainstream’. Holdren’s words convinced Congressional representative Raúl Grijalva to investigate the funding of Pielke’s and others’ research, hoping to discover links to fossil-fuel companies. The investigation revealed that Pielke had no such funding, but the smear stuck.

What had Pielke done to prompt such attempts to delegitimise him? It may be because much of his work (and the main theme of The Rightful Place of Science) challenges the idea that we face a looming and inevitable climate catastrophe – an idea sacred to environmentalists because it allows them to circumvent debate, and make policies in spite of public opinion.

The problem with the climate-crisis idea, as Pielke shows, is that most extreme weather data do not support it. This, explains Pielke, is not a fringe view; it is the consensus of climate science.

Moreover, campaigners’ conviction that anthropogenic climate change is bringing disaster upon us overlooks the extent to which economic and social development has enabled us to cope better with extreme weather events. As Pielke explains, ‘societal change is underappreciated, overlooked, and part of that is politics’. ‘The climate-change issue’, Pielke continues, ‘has taken all the oxygen out of the room for vulnerability, resilience, natural climate variability, indeed pretty much everything else that matters. It is absolutely the case that overall being richer as communities, as nations, is associated with more resilience, less vulnerability to natural disasters, particularly when it comes to loss of life… The climate issue has become so all-encompassing that it’s hard to get these other perspectives into the dialogue.’

In other words, climate change may well be a problem, but the data sets consistently show that economic and technological development mitigate the worst problems that climate has always caused. The GCCE report, for instance, appears to show that occurrences of drought increased globally by nearly 9,000 per cent between 1920 and 1940 and between 2000 and the present. But a full look at the data from the same source reveals that the deaths caused by droughts have fallen by nearly 96 per cent, despite a nearly fourfold increase in population.

Climate-change advocates are now adopting a new strategy, which, Pielke argues, marks a comprehensive departure from the scientific consensus. Rather than empirical analyses, they are now making probabilistic claims to link anthropogenic climate change to extreme weather and natural disasters. These claims are produced by entering extreme-weather stats into two climate simulations: one in which there has been no increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration, and one in which CO2 concentration is the same as it is in today’s atmosphere. By comparing the occurrence of extreme events in the two simulations, they can come up with an estimate of climate change’s influence.

But, as Pielke writes, ‘the use of highly uncertain and malleable methods, with essentially no predictive skill, to associate essentially any extreme event to climate change is a recipe for headlines and advocacy’.

Do not pigeonhole Pielke as a climate sceptic, however. He maintains that climate change is real, and presents serious risks to society. His problem is that climate alarmism has distorted both the problem, and how best to understand and respond to it.

‘If the main risk of accumulating greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere was a rise in extreme events, and only extreme events, then it would be a much less powerful case for action’, he tells me. ‘It makes for great headlines, but extreme events in the big picture are not that impactful on societies around the world compared to other things like financial crises and so on.’

Pielke seems to understand well the character of environmental politics. ‘Many aspects of this debate simply cannot be resolved through evidence, since we don’t have any actual data about the future, only assumptions’, he says. This explains the nastiness of the legitimacy wars. ‘Opponents in such debates’, he says, ‘resort to proxies of expertise to try to assert some phantom mandate. The end result has been neither to win the debate nor to secure a political mandate, but to politicise the science itself.’

Pielke’s response is to appeal to scientists. ‘I’m less worried about politicians who cherry-pick and select facts to support a particular narrative’, he says, ‘than I am about us supposed experts who decide to go along with them because they see it as politically convenient… Being an expert and an academic, I have far more hope that we can control how we behave and what we do in public debates than we can control what elected officials do in democracies.’

The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change, drawing on Pielke’s technical expertise and personal experience, gives a convincing account of the politicisation of science, and how science and politics might be disentangled. He may not fully explain the phenomenon of alarmism or the excesses of political environmentalism, but he takes a big step towards encouraging a more vital, challenging and critical debate over climate change. Those who believe that this is simply cover for sceptics can relax: Pielke points out that countries where there has been an active sceptic voice are the ones that have made the most progress on reducing CO2 emissions.

SOURCE (See the original for links, graphics)





  
Utilities have a problem: the public wants 100% renewable energy, and quick

Renewable energy is hot. It has incredible momentum, not only in terms of deployment and costs but in terms of public opinion and cultural cachet. To put it simply: Everyone loves renewable energy. It’s cleaner, it’s high-tech, it’s new jobs, it’s the future.

And so more and more big energy customers are demanding the full meal deal: 100 percent renewable energy.

The Sierra Club notes that so far in the US, more than 80 cities, five counties, and two states have committed to 100 percent renewables. Six cities have already hit the target.

The group RE100 tracks 144 private companies across the globe that have committed to 100 percent renewables, including Google, Ikea, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nike, GM, and, uh, Lego.

The timing of all these targets (and thus their stringency) varies, everywhere from 2020 to 2050, but cumulatively, they are beginning to add up. Even if policymakers never force power utilities to produce renewable energy through mandates, if all the biggest customers demand it, utilities will be mandated to produce it in all but name.

The rapid spread and evident popularity of the 100 percent target has created an alarming situation for power utilities. Suffice to say, while there are some visionary utilities in the country, as an industry, they tend to be extremely small-c conservative.

They do not like the idea of being forced to transition entirely to renewable energy, certainly not in the next 10 to 15 years. For one thing, most of them don’t believe the technology exists to make 100 percent work reliably; they believe that even with lots of storage, variable renewables will need to be balanced out by “dispatchable” power plants like natural gas. For another thing, getting to 100 percent quickly would mean lots of “stranded assets,” i.e., shutting down profitable fossil fuel power plants.

In short, their customers are stampeding in a direction that terrifies them.

The industry’s dilemma is brought home by a recent bit of market research and polling done on behalf of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for utilities. It was distributed at a recent meeting of EEI board members and executives and shared with me.

The work was done by the market research firm Maslansky & Partners, which analyzed existing utility messaging, interviewed utility execs and environmentalists, ran a national opinion survey, and did a couple of three-hour sit-downs with “media informed customers” in Minneapolis and Phoenix.

The results are striking. They do a great job of laying out the public opinion landscape on renewables, showing where different groups have advantages and disadvantages.

The takeaway: Renewables are a public opinion juggernaut. Being against them is no longer an option. The industry’s best and only hope is to slow down the stampede a bit (and that’s what they plan to try).

SOURCE





The costs of climate inaction

More prophecy -- from known false prophets

Politics, according to the nineteenth-century German statesman Otto von Bismarck, is the art of the next best. The global approach of politicians to tackling climate change is a sorry example of this.

The problem: destructive storms that hit the United States and southeast Asia this month are the latest reminder of how vulnerable societies across the world are to climate extremes. The best political solution might seem to be to subordinate all policies — domestic and international — to the goal of stabilizing Earth’s climate. This is difficult. So, instead, the world must rely on the effectiveness of voluntary actions that nations have agreed on under a non-binding international compromise treaty forged in Paris in 2015.

For all its symbolic power, that Paris treaty is a truly second-best solution. Even if it had worked as advertised, the promised cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions are weak. And now the withdrawal of the United States — and, de facto, of Australia — has substantially weakened the global consensus before the treaty has even come into effect.

Discussions on how and when it will start will resume at a two-week United Nations meeting in December in Katowice, Poland. Those attending would do well to read a study published this week in Nature Climate Change that highlights just how irrational it is for the politicians who represent many large economies to settle for next best

The analysis revisits the concept of the social cost of carbon: the cumulative economic impact of global warming caused by (or attributed to) each tonne of the pollutant sent into the atmosphere. This study goes a step further than previous ones and estimates the likely cost to different countries. In doing so, it reveals the countries projected to take the hardest hits.

China and the United States, the world’s two largest emitters of carbon dioxide, will incur some of the highest social costs of carbon of all countries, the scientists report, with respective estimated impacts of US$24 per tonne and $48 per tonne. India, Saudi Arabia and Brazil also feature towards the top. In these countries — unlike in Canada, northern Europe and Russia — temperatures are already above the economic optimum. And climate-induced damage increases with wealth and economic growth, meaning that more-valuable property might sit in harm’s way.

Combined country-level costs (and benefits) add up to a global median of more than $400 in social costs per tonne of CO2 — more than twice previous estimates. On the basis of CO2 emissions in 2017, that’s a global impact of more than $16 trillion. The new analysis is based on a set of climate simulations, rather than a single climate model, and the authors calculated future harm using empirical damage functions that were independently developed for that purpose.

The revised costs are still ballpark figures, based on relatively uncertain assumptions on climate physics, emission trajectories, socio-economic development and climate-driven economic damage. In fact, climate change could also have impacts on international trade, security and human migration that calculations of the social costs of carbon don’t capture. But the concept is valuable, nonetheless. Acting like a magnifying glass, it highlights horrendous climate-impact inequality. For example, whereas Canada and Russia are still gaining economic benefits worth up to $10 per tonne of CO2 from rising temperatures, India is already paying an exorbitant price ($86 per tonne).

It also shows that the way in which society currently prices carbon (as a means of reducing its use and protecting future generations) is an order of magnitude too low. The current price of carbon on the European market is just over $20. And in most other parts of the world, it’s effectively zero.

The new analysis sends a powerful message from a future that most people say they want to avoid. In response, will politicians up their ambition and aim for the best — and necessary — solution? The paper unfortunately comes too late to be included in the special report from the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change on the effects of 1.5?°C in global warming, due to be published next month. But it adds to the growing body of research that unpicks that global effect, and breaks it down into regions and countries. This will be needed to plan mitigation and also to prepare for adaptation.

SOURCE






Why I poo-poo climate change as nothing but hot air

According to an article in Forbes Magazine last September, the methane produced by livestock “originated about one-fifth of methane emissions from 2003 to 2011.” The story explained that “methane is a big contributor to the greenhouse effect, helping to trap heat within the Earth’s atmosphere and contributing to climate change.” Moose, hippos and elephants pass gas too. So what? Why blame the animals? What about people?

The world population is 7.6 billion, with the bulk of the populace crammed into big cities where people are piled on top of each other in high-rise apartment buildings. The largest city in the world (by population) is Tokyo with 38 million people. New York City has 8.6 million. On average, a human produces about one pound of natural solid waste per day, 7.6 billion pounds in the world. If I did the math right, humans produce 2,774,000,000 pounds of manure annually, not counting the natural gasses. That’s a lot of methane.

So I see big cities as just one big toilet. But are we to believe that we are pooping ourselves into extinction?

It’s also annoying to me when people who drive gas-guzzling four-wheel-drive pickup trucks, which are necessary to transport hunting and fishing equipment, shellfishing and lobstering gear, tow boat trailers, haul wood, etc., get blamed for harming the planet. Pickup trucks are practical, purposeful and necessary for many recreational outdoor pursuits in addition to commercial applications. Some of us can’t live or work without them. Or both.

Try to pull a ton or two or three of boat and trailer up the slope of a slippery boat ramp with a car. Better have the number for a tow truck handy. You won’t get up the ramp without a four-wheel drive. Got a few ladder stands to put up before deer season? You’ll need a pickup truck unless you want to transport them one at a time. Have to get a moose, deer or elk out of the woods and down a muddy or snow-covered logging road? You guessed it — truck.

Are you and a buddy going on a deer hunting trip where you’re staying in a cabin and doing your own cooking? Figure at least two guns, gear bags, sleeping bags, coolers with refrigerated food, bins with dry food — and leave enough room to bring back deer if you’re lucky. Figure the same for a fishing trip, but replace the guns with fishing rods and instead of leaving room for deer, save room enough room for a big cooler to bring fish home. A car? Good joke. Make it up yourself?

I don’t believe the man-induced climate change theory, nor do I believe the sky is falling. They are alarmist theories, in my opinion.

Will the inland waters and oceans soon be so hot, you can toss in a sack of potatoes and a bag of onions and have seafood chowder? Will deer, bear and other creatures die off because they’ll be roasted alive in their fur coats, and we’ll return to another tropical Jurassic period where my great-great-great-great-great grandchildren will be hunting creatures like T-Rex and Gigantosaurus? Will there be no more waterfowl hunting in the Lower 48 states because the Arctic tundra, where the majority of ducks and geese spend their summers to breed, won’t be freezing over in the fall, thus the birds won’t need to migrate to warmer climes to find open water?

A few are even using climate change to convince people into believing it’s such a serious threat that they should buy real estate in the Arctic, the only place to escape the heat before long. Those would be the slick realtors with property for sale in the Arctic, I figure.

It’s my belief that because a lot of people, myself included, dismissed “global warming” as horse feathers, the scaremongers switched the name to “climate change” (the human-induced is implied) because it sounded more plausible, more palatable. I’m not buying either one. I expect that my duck guns, bear rifles and fishing rods will be passed on to many future generations of hunters and fishermen to be used as I use them now, on the game and fish as we know them, and here’s why.

Climate change is nothing new. The climate changed for billions of years without man’s influence. It’s been through highs and lows, warm spells and cold spells. It runs in cycles – trends. According to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), 2016 was officially the new warmest year on record, globally, edging out the previous record holder of 2015 by 0.07°F. Oh no, not 0.07 degrees! We’ll all be killed! NOAA also states, “climate experts have long known that global warming due to increasing greenhouse gases won’t necessarily mean that each year on Earth will be warmer than the last. Even as the planet warms over the long-term, natural variability will continue to make some years warmer or cooler than their nearest neighbors.”

Some of the global sea temperatures also are experiencing a warming trend, but like the Earth’s temperature, it’s a trend and they’re variable and bound to change, experts say. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the global sea surface temperature rose at an average of 0.13 degrees per decade from 1901 through 2015. While the temperatures of some of the world’s oceans have risen very slightly over the past 138 years, the EPA also notes, importantly, that some areas, such as parts of the North Atlantic, actually have experienced cooling, rather than warming. You don’t hear about that though, do you? Could it just be the climate running in natural cycles — trends?

While deer hunting on top of a mountain in Jackman, Maine, about 20 years ago, I discovered shellfish fossils that resemble tiny scallops. According to the Maine Geological Survey, they are estimated at 400 million to 425 million years old, meaning the top of that mountain was the bottom of the ocean at one time in history, many eons before humans allegedly were affecting climate change at a fatal rate.

Mother Earth has endured five Ice Ages. The most recent, which included the Ice Man and wooly mammoth, reached its peak 18,000 years ago with the shaggy, elephant-like giants going extinct a mere 10,000 years ago. Were mammoth gas and emissions from the Ice Men’s pickup trucks to blame for the change in climate? Or was it a natural occurrence?

The heaviest dinosaur and largest land animal believed to have ever lived was Argentinosaurus, almost 100 million years ago. At an estimated 154,000 pounds, paleontologists estimate that it consumed 1,000 pounds (a half ton) of vegetation daily, equivalent to 20 average bales of hay. The Brontosaurus was a 15-ton vegetarian from around 150 million years ago. Both giants flourished in the tropical and sub-tropical climates of that era.

If the methane produced by cows, which average 1,500 pounds each and eat less than one bale of hay per day, are contributing to a perilous greenhouse effect, wouldn’t the same have happened with dinosaurs? The biggest ones weighed 100 times more - and ate 20 times more - than a cow, surely dropping tons of dino-duty daily. You can bet they broke a lot of wind too, eating all that fiber. And those were just the XXXL-size beasts. There also were herds of large, medium and small dinosaurs too, which were still huge in their own right (compared to cows) contributing to an abundance of methane gas which should’ve created boiling lakes and oceans. Yet the dinosaurs thrived for millions of years before going extinct.

Humans, cows and pickup trucks hadn’t been invented yet so who or what was to blame for their extinction? Some say it was a cataclysmic event, such as volcanic eruption or an asteroid colliding with our planet. Eventually, the Earth even cooled and much of it froze — five times. Call it God, nature, trends or global cooling — either way, it wasn’t man’s fault.

Some claim it will take 2 billion years for global warming to cause the oceans to boil. Honestly, I’m not that concerned about what’s going to happen in 2 billion years. I believe that another catastrophic calamity will change life on Earth as we know it, just as it probably has in the past, long before any man-induced greenhouse effect. Or maybe it’ll be a fatal virus that will wipe-out humans and most other species. Perhaps another Ice Age. We’ve had five. What’s one more? A half a dozen.

So I’ll continue to dismiss the notion that the sky is falling and keep driving my useful gas-slurping pickup without guilt or fear that I’m going to cause the next Apocalypse.

Anyone can make predictions of what the Earth will be like in a million or a billion years because none of us will be alive then to prove them wrong — or right.

The climate has been changing for billions of years and will continue to change, with or without man’s influence, until the only living things left on the planet will be mosquitoes, blackflies, horseflies and ticks, I predict. Them, and poison ivy. I hate poison ivy — and mosquitoes, blackflies, horseflies and ticks. I hate their guts, and for them, I blame Noah. He could’ve left them behind, but noooo ... and that’s a story for another day.

SOURCE






Australian Politicians again show “Real Genius”

Back in the chaotic dying days of the Whitlam-Cairns-Connor government, Canberra was buzzing with Rex Connor’s grand plans for nationalisation of the mining industry, a national energy grid and gas pipelines linking the NW Shelf to the capital cities, all to be funded by massive foreign loans arranged by a mysterious Pakistani named Khemlani. Malcolm Frazer staged a parliamentary revolt. The economy slumped.

A British observer at that time was asked who was the greater Prime Minister - Harold Wilson or Gough Whitlam. He replied:

“Any fool can bugger up Britain but it takes real genius to bugger up Australia.”

Australian politicians are again showing real genius.

Now, we have incredible tri-partisan plans to cover the continent with a spider-web of transmission lines connecting wind/solar “farms” sending piddling amounts of intermittent power to distant consumers and to expensive battery and hydro backups - all funded by electricity consumers, tax-assisted speculators and foreign debt.

We are the world’s biggest coal exporter but have not built a big coal-fired power station for 11 years. We have massive deposits of uranium but 100% of this energy is either exported, or sterilised by the Giant Rainbow Serpent, or blocked by the Green-anti’s.

Australia suffers recurrent droughts but has not built a major water supply dam for about 40 years, and the average age of our hydro-electric plants is 48 years. And when the floods do come, desperate farmers watch as years of rain water rush past to irrigate distant oceans.

Once, Australia was a world leader in exploration and drilling – it is now a world leader in legalism, red tape and environmental obstructionism.

Once, Canberra and the states encouraged oil and gas exploration with geological mapping and research - now they restrict land and sea access and limit exports.

Once, Australia was a world leader in refining metals and petroleum - now our expensive unreliable electricity and green tape are driving these industries and their jobs overseas.

Once, Australia’s CSIRO was respected for research that supported industry and for doing useful things like controlling rabbits and prickly pear and developing better crops and pastures. Now CSIRO panders to global warming hysteria and promotes the fairy story that carbon taxes and emissions targets can change the world’s climate.

Once, young Australians excelled in maths, science and engineering. Now, they are brain-washed in gender studies, green energy non-science and environmental activism.

Once, Australians were proud of our history, our ancestors and our achievements - now we are supposed to feel guilty and apologise.

Once, Australia had a big coastal fleet carrying passengers and goods and catching fish. Now our roads are clogged with cars and freight and we import seafood.

Once, the opening of a railway or the discovery of oil, coal, nickel or uranium made headlines. Today’s Aussies harass explorers and developers, and queue at the release of the latest IPad.

As Australia’s first people discovered, if today’s Australians lack the will or the knowledge to use our great natural resources, more energetic people will take them off us.

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.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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

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IN BRIEF


Home (Index page)


Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.



I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried

Antarctica is GAINING mass

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.



Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion



Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

The plight of the bumblebee -- an egregious example of crooked "science"

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below


WISDOM:

"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." --- Richard P. Feynman.

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement" -- Karl Popper

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.


ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

A Warmist backs down: "No one knows exactly how far rising carbon concentrations affect temperatures" -- Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.


SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

The frequency of hurricanes has markedly DECLINED in recent years

Here's how that "97% consensus" figure was arrived at

97% of scientists want to get another research grant

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

To Greenies, Genghis Khan was a good guy, believe it or not. They love that he killed so many people.

Greenie antisemitism

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

Comparing climate alarmist Hansen to Cassandra is WRONG. Cassandra's (Greek mythology) dire prophecies were never believed but were always right. Hansen's dire prophecies are usually believed but are always wrong (Prof. Laurence Gould, U of Hartford, CT)

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

UPDATE to the above: It seems that I am a true prophet

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

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

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Help keep the planet Green! Maximize your CO2 and CH4 output!

Global Warming=More Life; Global Cooling=More Death.

The inconvenient truth about biological effects of "Ocean Acidification"

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is maximum 4%.

Cook the crook who cooks the books

The great and fraudulent scare about lead


How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The "precautionary principle" is a favourite Greenie idea -- but isn't that what George Bush was doing when he invaded Iraq? Wasn't that a precaution against Saddam getting or having any WMDs? So Greenies all agree with the Iraq intervention? If not, why not?

A classic example of how the sensationalist media distort science to create climate panic is here.

There is a very readable summary of the "Hockey Stick" fraud here

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: "The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Relying on the popular wisdom can even hurt you personally: "The scientific consensus of a quarter-century ago turned into the arthritic nightmare of today."

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.




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