GREENIE WATCH -- by Dr. John Ray

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

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28 September, 2018

A small hiatus

I last went on vacation in the year 2004 so I have begun to feel that I should get out more. So I have decided to take two or three short breaks in the months ahead. I will therefore be getting on a train later today for a 7 hour trip to see my gorgeous sister. To have a great sister but rarely see her is crazy. And the trip will be on a very modern fast train so the travel alone should be interesting. I will be away for only a few days and will be unlikely to do any blogging while I am away. I will however be taking a computer with me so if there is a big drama happening I might put up something.

China’s Coal Secret Revealed: China Is Building Hundreds Of New Coal Power Plants

Building work has restarted at hundreds of Chinese coal-fired power stations, according to an analysis of satellite imagery.

The research, carried out by green campaigners CoalSwarm, suggests that 259 gigawatts of new capacity are under development in China.

The authors say this is the same capacity to produce electricity as the entire US coal fleet.

The study says government attempts to cancel many plants have failed.

According to this study, there was a surge in new coal projects approved at provincial level in China between 2014 and 2016. This happened because of a decentralisation programme that shifted authority over coal plant construction approvals to local authorities.

The report says that at present China has 993 gigawatts of coal power capacity, but the approved new plants would increase this by 25%.

China’s central government has tried to rein in this boom by issuing suspension orders for more than 100 power plants but this analysis suggests that these efforts have been significantly less effective than previous news reports had indicated.

In this study, the researchers used satellite photos to examine every power plant that was subject to a suspension order. They found construction ongoing at many locations.

For instance, in September last year, China’s National Energy Administration ordered a group of plants – that together could produce 57 gigwatts of electricity – to slow down construction. The organisation also prohibited them from connecting to the grid in 2017.

However the satellite data suggests that half of this capacity appears not to have slowed down at all.

“This new evidence that China’s central government hasn’t been able to stop the runaway coal-fired power plant building is alarming – the planet can’t tolerate another US-sized block of plants to be built,” said Ted Nace, from CoalSwarm.

SOURCE

Owners of America's only under-construction nuclear plant agree to finish building it

After days of negotiations, the owners of America’s only under-construction nuclear plant agreed Wednesday to keep expanding it by adding two new reactors, a major victory for the fading industry and supporters of the zero-emissions power source.

The completion of the Georgia Vogtle plant's new reactors, which are half finished, had been in doubt because the project is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

“We are pleased to have reached an agreement and to move forward with the construction of Vogtle Units 3 & 4, which is critical to Georgia’s energy future,” the co-owners said in a statement. “While there have been and will be challenges throughout this process, we remain committed to a constructive relationship with each other and are focused on reducing project risk and fulfilling our commitment to our member-consumers.”

Utility Southern Company and the plant’s three other owners had sought to reach a deal to limit further cost increases for the nearly $28 billion project, more than double the original projection, after blowing by a self-imposed Monday deadline to decide whether to proceed with the expansion of the Vogtle plant.

The companies said the agreement will "mitigate financial exposure.”

Southern Company’s subsidiary Georgia Power, which owns 45.7 percent of the plant -- making it the largest owner -- agreed to absorb a greater share of the cost of any additional overruns, according to details of the agreement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The deal also gives Georgia Power the option to buy out the other owners if there are more than $2.1 billion in future cost overruns, or it can choose to cancel the project.

Southern Company announced last month that costs for the project had increased by $2.2 billion, which prompted a vote on whether to complete the plant, including the other three other owners: Oglethorpe Power, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia, and Dalton Utilities.

The Trump administration has firmly backed and invested in the plant, providing $3.7 billion in loan guarantees, viewing it as central to keeping alive the promise of clean energy from nuclear power, which emits no greenhouse gases. Vogtle has received a total of $12 billion in federal loan guarantees, with the Obama administration also supporting the plant. The new reactors would be the first to be successfully built in the U.S. in more than 30 years if they are completed as expected, beginning with the first reactor in November 2021.

Southern Company has pitched Plant Vogtle since 2009 as a way to revive the U.S. nuclear industry, to supplement an aging fleet losing out to lower-cost natural gas and renewables. The owners promised that two reactors planned for the site would give the state emission-free electricity for as long as 80 years, powering 500,000 homes and businesses.

Today, 60 percent of the carbon-free energy produced in the U.S. comes from the nation's existing 99 nuclear power plants.

But in March, Westinghouse, the lead contractor on the project that designed the reactors, went bankrupt, imperiling the future of the plant.

Cost overruns forced South Carolina last year to cancel a similar plan for two nuclear reactors in the state after Westinghouse, also the reactor's designer for that project, went bankrupt.

Federal officials on Wednesday, in anticipation of the Vogtle decision, said a thriving nuclear power industry is crucial for the U.S. to limit carbon dioxide emissions.

“Nuclear energy is both clean and reliable,” Environmental Protection Agency Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler said during an address recognizing National Clean Energy Week. “President Trump and his administration are committed to reviving and revitalizing nuclear energy. We're watching what's going on in Georgia to see how that pans out for nuclear energy.”

Neil Chatterjee, a Republican commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, made similar comments at the same event.

“I am worried about what even a slight uptick in the retirement of nuclear units may have on our ability to reduce global emissions,” he said.

SOURCE

Growing Pressure for Clexit – (even from France)

Viv Forbes

Growing Pressure for Clexit – (even from France). And it’s Time to Defund all UN Climate bodies

President Trump has extinguished all hopes that USA will join the Paris Climate Agreement. Since then, other countries are heading towards the Climate Exit. An increasing number of prominent people are joining the campaign to counter the falsehood that man-made CO2 emissions drive global climates, and to expose the threat that UN agencies will take control of every aspect of our lives. The list of dissidents includes:

Tim Ball of Canada led the rush for the exit:

“Canada has more culpability than any other nation for creating and perpetuating the climate deception. It is not an exaggeration to say that Canada was central to creating and mobilizing the false claim of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).”

Graham Williamson from Australia explains why this is not just about climate alarm and the war on coal – there is a far deeper agenda. This not-so-secret agenda covers climate regulations and carbon taxes, paying climate “debts’, enforcing sustainability, control of education, wealth re-distribution, enforcing a new world order, controlling national boundaries and migration, enforcing global environmental laws and preventing environmental backsliding by deplorables.

Graham says: "We also need UNexit.”

Once we are out of the Paris Climate Agreement we should review our membership of and contributions to all UN Agencies that threaten our sovereignty and our prosperity.

Nils-Axel Morner from Sweden supports the need for world-wide Clexit and writes on the treason of the Swedish establishment:

“The Bolin-Palme treason against Science, the IPCC and Paris illusions, and a Clexit solution.”

Professor Bernard Beauzamy from Paris says: “France Too Needs to Clexit the Paris Climate Agreement.”

Roger Tattersall from UK (which is battling to escape the suffocating blanket of the EU Brexit and Clexit.) writes:
“Brexit and Clexit – Leave-Means-Leave”

Herman A (Alex) Pope (retired from NASA in Houston in 2007) writes: “Climate changes in natural cycles and man does not cause them.”

Jerry Ellis AO (Retired Chairman BHP, retired Chancellor Monash University, and retired Chairman of Landcare) says: “I hope our new government abandons the Paris Agreement.”

He is supported by Bob Beatty, Brisbane, who says –
“Australia must Clexit - Leave While We Still Can.”

Jane M. Orient, M.D., physician, President Doctors for Disaster Preparedness says: “Why We Should all Clexit.”

Finally, Germany’s Grand Plan to Abolish Carbon Fuels Fails:

And the UN admits that the Paris deal was a fraud

The globalists made enormous gains while western politicians and media were mired in petty politics. We need to recognise the big picture, roll back the totalitarian green tide and push the need for Clexit and UNexit.

SOURCE

German Green Energy Debacle: “Self Deception”…Dependence On Coal “Cemented For Years To Come”!

Germany used to be regarded as a global leader in the transition to renewable green energies — especially wind and solar power — a project dubbed the “Energiewende”. But this is no longer the case. Germany has fallen behind to the rear of the pack.

Ironically the USA is leading the world in cutting back CO2!

Germany’s “self-deception”

The Düsseldorf-based daily Rheinische Post (RP) here writes that it’s time for Germany to “face inconvenient truths” concerning green energies and that pragmatic (and not ideological) action is needed.

The title of the commentary: “Self-deception in the green energy transition“

Green, cult-like dream now colliding with harsh reality

For years the German government, activists and alarmist scientists promised that green energies — foremost wind and sun — would be plentiful, cheap and clean. “Hooray!” the entire exclaimed in jubilation.

But today in its commentary the RP concedes that “the reality looks totally different” and that it is requiring “an enormous effort” just to keep the power grids stable as waves of unpredictable green power repeatedly surge into the power grid.

According to the RP, emergency power grid interventions by grid operators cost electricity consumers last year 1,4 billion euros. German households consequently pay 47% more for their power than the average EU.

Energiewende: “risky, inefficient and expensive”

And so what have German consumers gotten in return in terms of climate and CO2 emissions for all the extra pain? Nothing.

German CO2 emissions have stagnated (i.e. haven’t fallen at all). And according to the RP: “The German transition to green energy is in reality risky, inefficient and expensive.”

Energiewende “derailed”

The RP comments that highly ballyhooed headlines of new record amounts of green energy being produced don’t change a thing with respect to the failing green energy transition, and notes that although green energies made up 37% of the gross share of gross power consumption, these clean energies amounted only to a measly 13 percent of the entire German energy mix!

The RP asks: “How could the German flagship project have derailed in this way?”

German dependence on coal “cemented for years to come”

The main reason for the failure, the RP writes, was Germany’s panicked rush to exit nuclear power in the wake Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster amid a deeply-rooted, collective and decades-old German aversion to nuclear power. This lead to the German government shutting down half of its nuclear power plants overnight and diving blindly into a rapid, unplanned expansion of wind and solar power.

The decision, the RP writes, was driven by the aim to shut down nuclear power, and not to reduce CO2.

The result, the RP comments: “Unfortunately, both goals are in direct contradiction. The politically desired phase-out of nuclear power has cemented our [German] dependence on coal for years to come. Its share is still 42 percent.”

The RP then comments that if Germany were really serious about reducing CO2, the country would not shut down its remaining nuclear power plants, which produce no “greenhouse” gas emissions.

Green energies “a naive illusion”

The RP also writes Germany should reconsider its efforts “to demonize diesel engines”, which have considerably higher fuel efficiency than gasoline engines. The move to eliminate diesel engines will make CO2 reductions more difficult. The RP also notes that electric cars “are no alternative” in terms of CO2.

100% renewables “a naive illusion”

The RP calls the idea of covering all Germany’s energy needs through renewable energy “a naive illusion” and expects that the country will have to accept the fact that it will remain dependent on fossil fuels also over the long-term.

Also the collectively naive Germans in general need to get realistic and serious about what going 100% green entails. The RP comments:

Anyone who has solar cells mounted on the roof and then flies mindlessly to vacation on the Maldives, has not understood the problem.

Public also opposes CCS

The RP finally comments on other possible technical solutions that could be employed to make the pain of having to go without fossil energies bearable, namely subsidizing CCS technology. However, a great number of Germans oppose that technology as well.

The way things are going, the RP suggests, Germany will never be able to meet its CO2 reductions targets.

SOURCE

Australia: Victoria’s nonsensical renewable energy experiment

One of the benefits of a federation is that each state can learn from the mistakes of others. When it comes to electricity, the disastrous experiment of South Australia, with its uncontrolled promotion of renewable energy, should be a salutary lesson for all the others.

South Australia has close to the highest electricity prices in the world and a system that is so fragile it is constantly being propped up — think coal-fired electricity from Victoria and specifically purchased diesel generators. It’s an example of what not to do. But this is not how the Victorian government sees the world as it embarks on an even riskier scheme of promoting subsidised renewable energy in that state. Virtue-signalling to attract wavering, inner-city voters trumps concern for keeping a lid on electricity prices and maintaining the stability of the grid.

Deeply unimpressive Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio has announced the results of a reverse auction for investments in large-scale renewable energy. The government’s legislated target is for at least 40 per cent of electricity to come from renewable energy by 2025. The auctions aimed to deliver 650 megawatts (nameplate capacity) of new projects. In the end, projects for 928MWs were accepted.

But let’s be clear: reverse auctions involve huge subsidies to the promoters of these projects, guaranteeing cashflow at high megawatt per hour prices. By contrast, the (federal) renewable energy target is a less secure source of subsidy, particularly as total investment is nearing the 2020 final target and the value of the underlying certificates, the large-scale generation certificates, will fall sharply in the early 2020s.

Now, the renewable energy sector will claim wind and solar deliver cheaper electricity than new fossil fuel power plants, although this claim doesn’t take into account the associated costs of firming intermittent renewable energy. This claim is worth interrogating because, notwithstanding a fall in the cost of the solar panels, there is not much in the physical construction of these projects that supports the assertion.

The real answer lies in the subsidised cost of capital that renewable energy projects underwritten by governments are able to secure. In effect, these projects can access debt finance at the long-run government bond rate. (Note that Victoria has a AAA credit rating.) Were new coal-fired plants able to access debt at this concessional rate, their cost per megawatt hour on a firmed basis would be much lower again. But because these plants need to accept direct merchant risk, their cost of capital could easily be 300 basis points above the government bond rate, assuming they can even secure debt finance in this country.

The fundamental problem of the renewable energy policy in Victoria is the refusal to learn from the problems of the South Australian experiment. These include:

The failure to impose any firming obligations on the renewable energy projects to ensure 24/7 supply of electricity.

The failure to take into account the extra expenses associated with investment in transmission and distribution needed to connect these often far-flung projects to the grid.

The failure to take into account the destruction of the economics of existing generators — in Victoria’s case, the brown coal-fired generators in the Latrobe Valley — and the effects of the early retirement of these assets.

If any Victorian voter is foolish enough to think state taxpayers or electricity consumers are getting a good deal out of these reverse auctions, they need to think again. While these costs are not directly sheeted home to the renewable energy providers — they should be — they are real and will cause economic and social damage down the track.

Consider the firming costs that are necessarily part and parcel of renewable energy. Wind farms produce at most 30 per cent of their capacity, mainly in spring and autumn. Solar farms produce slightly less than 20 per cent, with peak output at 1pm — a time of relatively low demand.

When it comes to firming and using the figures from the current Snowy operation, the cost for solar is about $40 per megawatt hour. In the case of wind, however, a firming cost cannot even be nominated because of the inherent unreliability of wind patterns.

So when the Victorian government quotes figures of between $53/MWh and $57/MWh for the successful renewable energy projects in the recent reverse auction, we need to add a minimum of $40/MWh for firming. This makes these projects very expensive.

In terms of the poles and wires issue, there are considerable weaknesses in the way in which the regulation and pricing systems operate. Effectively, a renewable energy project can be located anywhere and, as long as the regulator agrees, the cost of connecting the project to the grid is borne by all customers without any cost imposition on the operator.

Note that regulated assets are priced at a fixed margin over the cost of capital, so the transmission/distribution companies do not really care who bears the cost.

Let’s also be clear about another thing: the abrupt closure of the Hazelwood power station in 2016 was a disaster for the state and the consequences still reverberate. At the time, Labor Premier Daniel Andrews made the ludicrous claim that retail prices would rise by less than 4 per cent in 2017. The actual rise was four times higher.

There are also some important short-term issues for Victoria, including the forecast shortfall of generating capacity of close to 400MW during the coming summer. The Australian Energy Market Operator says a combination of demand management — paying customers to power down — and extra diesel generation will be sufficient to see the state through those very warm days. But it will be a close call.

The Victorian case — and let’s not forget Queensland’s equally bizarre promotion of renewable energy projects, again many in far-flung places — should provide the backdrop to some much needed changes to the operation of the National Electricity Market. The rapid penetration of large and small-scale renewable energy demands some new rules to ensure the stability and reliability of the grid as well as deliver lower prices.

These changes must involve the imposition of more obligations on renewable energy providers who have been afforded too many favours. There are three main changes that are required: day ahead pricing; scheduled generation by requiring firmed capacity; and developer charges on generators for the cost of extra transmission and distribution.

There is no doubt these changes will be resisted by the renewable energy sector. But without them, the stability and reliability of the grid will be imperilled. It was one thing for a small state such as South Australia to lose its head and overinvest in renewable energy; it is another thing altogether for several states to do so.

The AEMO is clear we need to extend the lives of our thermal plants for as long as possible but the actions of foolhardy governments promoting renewable energy to secure inner-city votes threaten this outcome. At the very least, consumers in those states should bear the full costs of their governments’ foolish policies.

The hope is that federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor can deal with some of these issues before it is too late.

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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27 September, 2018

Again: Their own figures contradict global Warmists

I have on a few occasions mentioned that global warming was demonstrably wrong from the outset. The theory was that after WWII there was a big expansion of industry worldwide that pumped lots of CO2 into the atmosphere and that the earth warmed as a result of that. But what actually happened would almost be enough to convince one that God opposes Warmists. Let me go over that again before I go on to a new hole in the theory.

Yes. On theory, more CO2 should produce more warming. Yes. There was a great rise in CO2 output in the postwar era. But, No. Global temperatures did not rise. There was a "long hiatus" between 1945 and 1975. That is a pretty exact refutation of global warming theory. Warmists mutter about "special factors" giving that theory-destroying result but what special factors could exactly match and cancel out 30 years of warming? It is a non-explanation.

Warmists also say "There are always gaps". But that is fatal too. ANY gap disproves the theory. When a CO2 molecule arrives in the atmosphere it is just an inert little puff of gas with no capacity to "decide" what it can do. It just does what it does and does it immediately. So if it causes warming it must do that at once -- not after some "gap" in time. So there is no escape. The long hiatus is a conclusive disproof of global warming.

I have said all that before but I have repeated it because I think it can not be repeated enough. It is basic science but usually passes unmentioned.

So let me go on to another absurdity in Warmism. It is broadly agreed that the amount of global warming was 8 tenths of one degree Celsius over the 20th century. So did all that warming take place after 1945? Far from it. Because of the long hiatus, most of the 0.8C warming happened BEFORE 1945.

But the warming before 1945 was supposed to be natural. So NATURAL warming exceeded the warming attributed to anthropogenic emissions of CO2. So why is the warming after 1945 man-made when natural factors did an even bigger job of producing warming? If the warming before 1945 was natural, how can we be sure that the warming after 1945 was not natural too? If the warming after 1945 was greater than the warming before 1945, the Warmists could have had some case -- but the post-1945 warming was in fact LESS than the prior warming.

Even if the warming before and after 1945 was split 50/50, you would still need evidence to show that the post-1945 warming was anything but a continuation of a natural trend.

The graph at the head of this blog is drawn with rather thick lines but you can still easily see the 1945 - 1975 hiatus and the fact that there was at least as much warming before 1945 as there was afterwards.

Global warming theory flies in the face of reality. If it were a scientific theory and not a money-grabbing racket, it would have been abandoned long ago -- JR

More deliberate fraud from the professional Warmists

Still no mention of the well-known land subsidence on the U.S. East coast. As pointed out in "Sea Levels, Land Levels, and Tide Gauges" (1993) by K.O. Emery and David G. Aubrey, mean sea level is masked by much larger changes due to changes in Land Level. To quote them: "With respect to estimating globally coherent changes in sea level during the last 100 years. the biases arising from vertical land movements mean that estimates based on crude averages of tide-gauge data are subject to large uncertainties; significant elements of the physics involved may be missed".

Sea level rise caused Hurricane Florence’s storm surge to be much worse, new data analysis by non-profit First Street Foundation has found. And the economic impact is expected to be in the billions.

More than 51,000 homes were hit by the storm surge that came with Hurricane Florence, which hit the Carolinas as a Category 1 storm. But as researchers found, 1 in 5 of these homes — which saw water cover more than a quarter of their property — were damaged due to sea level rise.

Comparing today’s sea level to 1970 data, researchers concluded that some 11,000 homes hit by Florence would not have been impacted had sea levels remained stable. But since 1970, seas have risen by about 6 inches — meaning that the damage experienced by 20 percent of homes can be linked to this increase.

And with climate change, according to the Army Corps of Engineers’ projection, if seas rise by a further 15 inches (more than a foot) by 2050, the same storm surge as experienced with Florence would have double the impact, putting an estimated 102,000 homes at risk.

A damaged home and streets littered with debris are seen after Hurricane Irma passed through Florida on September 13, 2017. Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images,
Major insurers lost billions on natural disasters in 2017, they say climate change a ‘serious’ risk
Climate change is making these storms more intense, and more expensive.

Climate change is making hurricanes stronger and wetter. Storm surges are made worse with higher sea levels because it means the surge is beginning from a higher starting point — there is more water available for the hurricane to push onto the land. Plus, with all this water comes less friction which would otherwise slow down the surge. Instead, more water rushes farther inland.

More damaged homes also means higher costs. New figures released on Tuesday reveal just how expensive Florence will be. According to risk modeling firm RMS, the storm is expected to rack up a bill of anywhere between $800 million to $1.2 billion in losses for the National Flood Insurance Program.

And the losses linked specifically to storm surge and inland flood damage are expected to reach between $700 million and $1.2 billion. In total, Florence will see between $2.8 and $5 billion in insured losses.

However, as RMS analysis shows, an estimated 70 percent of homes hit by Florence were uninsured.

A sign warns people away from Union Point Park after is was flooded by the Neuse River during Hurricane Florence September 13, 2018 in New Bern, North Carolina. (Credit: Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Many homeowners hit by Hurricane Florence may not be able to pay for its destruction
Some FEMA flood maps in the area are also outdated.

One recent analysis by McClatchy found that the number of homes in North and South Carolina with flood insurance dropped significantly only a couple miles inland from the Atlantic coast. Part of this is likely due to the fact that many FEMA flood zone maps are out of date and so people may not know they’re living in a risky area.

And it’s not just storm surges fueled by sea level rise that are making homes more vulnerable — it’s also a matter of where homes are being built. As the analysis by First Street Foundation notes, changes in housing development are also a “significant” factor in why so many homes were hit by Florence.

Over the past several decades, wetlands and farmland in the Carolinas have been developed for urban use. Researchers compared housing development patterns in 1970 and today and found that as a result, more than half of the homes hit by Florence can be linked to increased development.

According to one estimate by The News & Observer, roughly 610,000 homes were built within 50 miles of North Carolina’s coastline over the past 30 years. Add to this the fact that FEMA disaster aid often results in homes being re-built or repaired in the exact same vulnerable areas, and it’s no surprise that the number of people at risk isn’t declining.

“With sea levels and coastal development on the rise, the impacts of hurricane storm surges will only get worse,” Matthew Eby, executive director of First Street Foundation, said in a statement. “The time to rethink America’s sea level rise and adaptation strategy is now.”

SOURCE

Market forces triumphed over government ethanol mandates

A funny thing happened on the way to the gas pump.

Consumers want cheaper fuel and bought as much of it as they could without Washington telling them they had to.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise. What’s funny is that some people still needed to learn that economic incentives are a powerful motivator.

Our story begins in Washington, where government regulation is the go-to method of persuasion.

The EPA has sought to increase the use of ethanol, a “renewable” biofuel made from corn. To accomplish this goal, it orders refineries to blend ethanol with the gasoline and other products they produce. Gas sold at the pump contains roughly 10 percent ethanol.

The giant global consolidated oil companies have no problem meeting Washington’s mandate, but it’s put the squeeze on small, independent refiners across the country.

One of those refiners, Philadelphia Energy Solutions, declared bankruptcy after the cost of complying with EPA biofuel regulations hit $300 million – double the cost of its payroll.

The Trump administration has been giving the independent refineries waivers from the EPA regs to help save the thousands of good paying blue-collar industrial jobs that are at risk.

That had the Ethanol Lobby up in arms. They claimed if the government didn’t force every single refinery to adhere to mandatory quotas, there would be no market for ethanol, and demand for the biofuel would fall off a cliff.

Researchers from the University of Illinois department of agricultural economics decided to put this to the test. They wanted to see if the administration’s policy of exempting small refiners from the EPA mandates did in fact reduce demand for ethanol.

And that’s where the funny thing happened.

They found that while the Ethanol Lobby predicted a collapse in ethanol use, it just didn’t happen.

“There is little if any evidence that [demand] for ethanol was reduced as the waivers went into effect. If there has been any ethanol ‘demand destruction’ to date it was very small,” University of Illinois economics professor Scott Irwin writes.

Shorter version of the findings: People are buying just as much ethanol as before even without the government forcing independent refiners into bankruptcy.

More revealing is the reason why ethanol demand remains strong.

Professor Irwin reports, “Ethanol prices since late 2017 have become very cheap relative to gasoline. … This is the reason ethanol demand … has not been affected. … Put differently, ethanol is highly price competitive.”

Imagine that – ethanol is cheaper than gasoline, so people want to buy it.

The market works.

Time and again, we’re told renewable energy (wind, solar and biofuels) is an “infant industry” that can’t stand on its own and absolutely must have government support to survive.

This argument has been used to justify subsidies, perennial tax breaks and production mandates.

It looks like one of the infants has grown up.

The Trump administration has kept its promise, saving good paying blue-collar jobs at independent refineries across the country.

This latest study shows there are win-win solutions that can help corn farmers in the Midwest and industrial workers in the Northeast.

SOURCE

Total makes decade’s biggest gas find

A big natural gas discovery has been made off the Shetland Islands that experts believe could be the biggest in British waters for a decade.

Early estimates for the find made by Total, the French oil major, suggest that there could be one trillion cubic feet of gas, equivalent to more than 175 million barrels of oil, at the Glendronach prospect in the North Sea.

Analysts from Wood Mackenzie, the energy consultancy, said that figure would make it the largest find since the Culzean gasfield in 2008.

The area west of Shetland, which is relatively unexplored, is seen as one of the most exciting areas for the UK continental shelf, with oil industry giants such as Total, BP and Shell investing heavily alongside independents.

SOURCE

Be glad you don't live in "Green" Britain

Where I livev in Australia, ALL garbage is collected once a week -- and you don't have to sort it

More than 50,000 homes will have their bins emptied only once every four weeks under a local authority plan to save money and increase recycling.

Conwy county borough council in north Wales has become the first in England and Wales to cut collections of waste destined for landfill or incineration to once in four weeks. Many other councils are considering reducing the frequency of collections, with less than a quarter of English councils still collecting residual waste once a week. Fifteen per cent of UK councils plan to collect waste once every three or four weeks, according to a survey.

Conwy council said the change could save £390,000 a year and persuade more people to put waste in the correct bin

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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26 September, 2018

Meet the 'climate refugees' who already had to leave their homes

The dirge below is is just assertion designed to reinforce the false impression that bad weather is hitting the USA more than in the past. And even if in some places flooding has become more frequent, there is no way you can tie it to global warming other than via models with no known predictive skill.

And it is amply documented that the East coast of the USA is subsiding, particularly in the South. So flooding is an expected result of that natural process.

Tony Heller comments drily: "I'm in Arizona right now, which is expecting hundreds of thousands of climate refugees from Canada and the Midwest in the next couple of months. Even the baseball teams take refuge here during March"

I grew up in New Orleans. When you’re brought up there you realize you’re below sea level: you see boats beyond the levee that are actually higher than you on the street.

When Hurricane Katrina hit, we were prepared and realized we had to get out of Dodge. We headed to stay with family in Houston.

I saw the pictures of the hurricane on and I thought: “Oh my gosh, everything I remember about this city has gone.” There was a TV shot of my neighborhood; instead of a boulevard, it was a bayou. I called the kids in and said: “I think we’ve lost everything. We’ve lost our lives there.”

I decided to move on even before I saw my house. Going back to New Orleans just reaffirmed that. The whole city smelled of death, it was rotting. It was horribly depressing. The water was up to the eaves of our house and all we managed to salvage was half a briefcase of items. Everything else, my music, my books, my memorabilia, was gone.

We moved to Houston. I managed to get a job in software development. We didn’t appear to be in harm’s way when Hurricane Harvey hit last year but I’ve never seen a flood of that magnitude before.

Even as the water rose I thought: “This will peak soon.” But it rose, sat stable for a while, continued to rise and when it came into the house I thought: “This is crazy.” There was this intense feeling of denial, thinking about how this couldn’t happen again. There was a lot of shock and that night was hard – all the sewage was backing up, we had to stay on our beds to keep out of the water.

We had friends nearby who got us out the next day in boats. There’s maybe one out of every five houses around here with a for sale sign because of the flooding now. I joke that towns should pay me to not move there in order to avoid being flooded.

We will stay, though – I mean, the chances of being hit by a third storm are pretty slim. Things aren’t looking great for our planet but let’s face it, I’m not living on geologic time.

More HERE

ROADS made out of solar panels seems like such a perfect idea, but projects have had underwhelming initial results

FOUR years ago a viral campaign wooed the world with a promise of fighting climate change and jump-starting the economy by replacing tarmac on the world’s roads with solar panels. The bold idea has undergone some road testing since then. The first results from preliminary studies have recently come out, and they’re a bit underwhelming.

A solar panel lying under a road is at a number of disadvantages. As it’s not at the optimum tilt angle, it’s going to produce less power and it’s going to be more prone to shading, which is a problem as shade over just 5 per cent of the surface of a panel can reduce power generation by 50 per cent.

The panels are also likely to be covered by dirt and dust, and would need far thicker glass than conventional panels to withstand the weight of traffic, which will further limit the light they absorb.

Unable to benefit from air circulation, it’s inevitable these panels will heat up more than a rooftop solar panel too. For every degree over optimum temperature, you lose 0.5 per cent of energy efficiency.

As a result, a significant drop in performance for a solar road, compared to rooftop solar panels, has to be expected. The question is by how much and what is the economic cost?

THE ROAD TEST RESULTS ARE IN

One of the first solar roads to be installed is in Tourouvre-au-Perche, northwest France. This has a maximum power output of 420kW, covers 2800sq m and cost €5 million ($8 million) to install. This implies a cost of €11,905 ($A19,230) per installed kW.

While the road is supposed to generate 800kWh/day (kilowatt hours per day), some recently released data indicates a yield closer to 409kWh/day, or 150,000kWh/yr.

For an idea of how much this is, the average home uses around 10kWh/day. The road’s capacity factor — which measures the efficiency of the technology by dividing its average power output by its potential maximum power output — is just 4 per cent.

In contrast, the Cestas solar plant near Bordeaux, which features rows of solar panels carefully angled towards the sun, has a maximum power output of 300,000kW and a capacity factor of 14 per cent. And at a cost of €360 million ($A581 million), or €1200 ($A1938) per installed kilowatt, one-tenth the cost of the solar roadway, it generates three times more power.

In America, a company called Solar Roadways has developed a smart highway with solar panels, including sensors and LED lights to display traffic warnings about any upcoming hazards, such as a deer. It also has heating pads to melt snow in winter.

Several of their SR3 panels have been installed in a small section of pavement in Sandpoint, Idaho. This is 13.9sq m in area, with an installed capacity of 1.529kW. The installation cost is given as $US48,734 (about $A67,000), which implies a cost per installed kilowatt of $A44,420 more than 20 times higher than the Cestas power plant.

Solar Roadway’s own estimates are that the LED lights would consume 106MWh per lane mile, with the panels generating 415MWh — so more than 25 per cent of the useful power is consumed by the LEDs. This would reduce performance even further. The heating plates are also quoted as drawing 2.28MW per lane mile, so running them for just six days would cancel out any net gain from the solar panels.

And this is before we look at the actual data from the Sandpoint installation, which generated 52.397kWh in six months, or 104.8kWh over a year. From this we can estimate a capacity factor of just 0.782 per cent, which is 20 times less efficient than the Cestas power plant.

That said, it should be pointed out that this panel is in a town square. If there is one thing we can conclude, it’s that a section of pavement surrounded by buildings in a snowy northern town is not the best place to locate a solar installation.

However, perhaps there’s a bigger point — solar roads on city streets are just not a great idea.

SOURCE

Green Suicide: Germany’s Economic Backbone Suffers From Soaring Power Prices

Mittelstand companies weighed down by soaring electricity costs are struggling against competition from U.S. and China. If power prices continue to rise, many companies could be forced to close down.

Bosses at a steelmaker in northwest Germany have ripped out old-style lighting in favor of LEDs, tinkered to make machinery more efficient and even locked staff into classrooms to teach them how to save energy.

Across the nation, thousands of companies are doing the same to mitigate the hit from electricity costs that have doubled since 2016. These smaller, often family-run firms are collectively known as the Mittelstand and form crucial links in the supply chains for Germany’s biggest firms, employing almost 20 million people and producing more in sales than Spain’s economy.

When the Mittelstand suffers, Germany takes a knock. And yet it’s those smaller companies along with households that have borne the brunt of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s energy policy, which has imposed higher electric bills to pay for cutting pollution. While 2,000 corporate giants like Volkswagen AG and chemicals maker BASF SE have their own power plants and get exemptions from environmental tariffs, smaller companies pay more to absorb those costs.

“We’re constantly trying to improve energy efficiency,” said Klaus Schmidtke, a spokesman for Georgsmarienhuette GmbH, which employs 1,000 people and feeds steel parts into the supply chain of Volkswagen AG. “But to be blunt, we’ve not been able to offset rising electricity prices.”

Wholesale power rates are on a tear across Europe, and apart from consuming less, there’s little that companies can do about it. The surge can be traced back to jumping demand for generation fuels from coal in China to natural gas in Japan. And that globalization of the energy market is eating away at support for Merkel’s transition away from coal and toward clean energy.

Energy bills for the Mittelstand were surging even before’s this year’s surge in the wholesale market. The companies, together with households, had to cough up hundreds of billions of euros to pay for Merkel’s transition to an economy based on mainly solar and wind. That put them at a disadvantage against competitors from China to the U.S., as well as other European nations.

The subsidies for solar and wind projects as well as a raft of environmental taxes aimed at cutting emissions have made German electricity prices for residential and business consumers the highest in the European Union together with Denmark.

The rising costs have forced Mittelstand firms, almost all of which have sales of less than 1 million euros, to splash out on expensive, energy-efficient equipment and lock in prices with suppliers for several years ahead. Some are even starting to produce their own electricity, while others have shifted production abroad in a last-ditch effort to keep up with Chinese, South Korean and U.S. competitors who pay far less for electricity.

“The drag on competitiveness is particularly severe for small and middle-sized firms,” Eric Schweitzer, President of Germany’s Chambers of Commerce, said by email.

The rising electricity costs threaten to undermine support for Merkel’s Energiewende just as her government is seeking to make up lost ground on the faltering path toward its 2020 emissions-reduction targets. A study of the Mittelstand by DZ Bank found a third of their company leaders thought power prices were a threat to their business.

SOURCE

Wind Energy's Absurd Proposal

Who would think it a good idea to build a wind farm on land rich in actinolite ore – one of the most dangerous mineral forms of asbestos?

Answer – Sweden’s Eolus Vind who want to spear 120-248 turbines at 600 ft tall into the Mojave Desert on the border of Nevada and California. Crescent Peak Renewables wind farm would occupy more than 32,000 acres of public land adjacent to the Mojave National Preserve and the Castle Mountain National Monument in California and the Wee Thump Joshua Tree Wilderness in Nevada.

We’ve posted before about the destruction in parts of the Mojave of the very slow growing Joshua trees to make way for wind turbines. We've also posted many times the destruction by wind turbines of other parts of the Mojave.

Wee Thump means ‘ancient ones’ in the Paiute language and was the first unprotected tract of public land to be designated wilderness in Nevada. It is one of the premier breeding areas for golden eagles in the Southwest.

You get the idea? Wilderness. The desert. A place for golden eagles. Not an industrialised landscape.

Ranged against Eolus Vind – or Evil Sound as someone realized would make a good anagram – are many people. All except a couple in the town of Searchlight are vehemently against the proposal. Searchlight itself was threatened by a wind farm a little over a year ago. However, the threat was withdrawn when a federal judge ordered the developers to start all over again on an environmental assessment, noting that the Interior Department’s approval of the project failed to adequately address concerns about impacts on bald eagles, golden eagles, desert tortoises and migrating bats.

And Searchlight and this part of the Mojave are under siege again.

But potentially many, many more could be hugely impacted upon if this proposal gets the go ahead because of the disturbance to the asbestos-laden ground. If the ground is disturbed, sending asbestos into the atmosphere, and the wind blows in the right direction, the deadly pollution could stretch as far as the Las Vegas Valley.

Libby, Montana, could fade into oblivion by comparison to the lawsuits which could ensue.

The residents of Searchlight have written to the President, and also to Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and to the second-in-charge Director of the Bureau of Land Management, alerting them, inter alia, to this fact and referring them to the case of Libby, Montana.

Libby was the site of one of of one of America's worst man-made environmental disasters. Toxic asbestos dust from the vermiculite mines that helped the town prosper for decades killed hundreds of residents, made ill thousands more, led to thousands of lawsuits as the company had swept the asbestos under the carpet, bankrupted the mining company and led to a massive clean up operation.

It will, however, be as nothing to the potential number of people who could be affected by disturbance of the asbestos-laden ground by a huge windfarm in a wholly inappropriate location.

The Bureau of Land Management, the public body responsible for public land, is accelerating the draft Environmental Impact Statement.

Eolus Vind have organized a meeting tomorrow (Tuesday, 25th) with dinner for the good folk of Searchlight. Their environmental consultants SWCA will be on hand to field questions.

We had a look at SWCA’s website:

'To preserve natural and cultural resources for tomorrow while enabling projects that benefit people today.'

It will be interesting to have the feedback from our friends in Searchlight. The Searchlight townsfolk wear their anti wind turbine pins wherever they go – that should tell Eolus Vind and their cohorts something – and the townsfolk know what they’re about as, no doubt, the developers will find out tomorrow.

Searchlight started as a gold mining town – it’s reputed to have been named because the first prospector was thinking up what to call his stake and he glimpsed a box of Searchlight matches.

Don’t think, wind weasels, that this is going to be a place which is going to roll over and let you in to hatch your golden goose.

SOURCE

Climate Change's #MeToo Movement: The Dark Secrets of Climate Saviors

The #MeToo movement this year exposed the dark secrets of Hollywood and many other global organizations. But the #MeToo movement within one fraternity has been suppressed and underreported by the leftist media.

And that is the climate change fraternity encompassing the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and their climate change conferences that host a wide network of collaborators, including climate scientists and diplomats.

The disturbing news about sexual harassment within the climate fraternity came to light during last year’s climate conference at Bonn. A reasonable number of women have testified of abuse they’ve suffered at UN climate change conferences.

Among them was Farhana Yamin. Yamin has been a climate change lawyer for over 30 years, and she came out against the sexual harassment that was going on within the climate fraternity.

In her detailed write-up at climatechangenews.com, Yamin records that many women have experienced the same in the past three decades and that incidents of sexual misconduct have been “brushed under the carpet.”

Meera Ghani is another climate victim who spoke out against what she describes to be a toxic culture of sexual harassment. It has been nearly two years since Ghani left the climate scene.

In her write-up, Ghani recounts the belittling comments, harassment, objectification, groping, and other serious sexual offenses she encountered at climate conferences. Peers to whom she reported these incidents politely suggested that she should “brush it aside” and told her that the sexual harassment culture was common at UN climate talks.

Women like Ghani and Yamin were involved in the climate movement because of their passion to save the planet. Seldom did they know that they would be sexually harassed.

The mainstream media has largely remained silent on accounts of these women. Instead, it merely reported about the announcement of “zero tolerance for sexual harassment” at Bonn by lead diplomat Patricia Espinosa.

However, the biggest perpetrator in the climate fraternity is not just some random diplomat but the former chairman of the IPCC, Mr. Rajendra Pachauri.

Pachauri led the IPCC from 2002 to 2015, before he resigned on charges of sexual allegations against him in India’s capital city, Delhi. Before heading the IPCC, Pachauri was already a director general at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) — India’s apex think tank educational institute for energy and environmental studies, where he committed his sexual misconduct.

While many believed the allegations against him could have been brought just to tarnish his image, the case against him became stronger as time passed by.

The police have identified more than 23 people as prosecution witnesses against Pachauri in his sexual misconduct case. The victim, a former colleague of his at TERI, submitted to the police thousands of emails, texts, and Whatsapp messages that involved Pachauri.

The case became substantial in 2016, and TERI refused to renew his employment. Last week, Delhi’s Saket district court (less than a mile from my previous home) ordered Pachauri to stand trial on criminal charges.

Metropolitan Magistrate Charu Gupta charged Pachauri under Sections 354 (outraging modesty), 354A (making physical contact, unwelcome and sexually colored remarks), and 509 (teasing and using vulgar gestures and actions) of the Indian Penal Code.

It is astounding and shocking that the former chairman of the IPCC is a man of such dark secrets. While that can be true of any man and any profession, Mr. Pachauri’s life only adds more weight to the “toxic culture” claims of women like Ghani.

When will the leftist media confront the real toxic sexual culture within the climate change bodies and conferences?

It is sad to understand that the media have blurred the line between consensual relationships and sexual harassment. The real demon that the #MeToo movement strives to slay will be slain only by bringing to light the dark evil secrets, not by suppressing them for political or ideological reasons.

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 September, 2018

Fake news about refugees

Yes. Africa has droughts. Always has had and always will have. Yes, there are many genuine refugees but all we know of are fleeing war, not the climate. That some are fleeing the climate is just made up -- fake news. Some are certainly fleeing as a result of bad weather events such as drought but tying weather events to global warming is pure speculation. It cannot be proven and there is no increase in such events if we look at the statistics. There were many equally bad events in the past

From African farms shriveled into desert to monster storms revved up by warmer air over the oceans, climate change is stoking environmental disasters around the globe and uprooting millions of people a year — adding to a refugee crisis said to be the worst since World War II.

The increasingly extreme weather patterns have destroyed food and water supplies, left communities destitute, strained national and international aid resources, and fomented political instability in fragile societies in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, according to development experts.

“Climate change is the force multiplier for chronic social and environmental problems,” said Tim Ash Vie of the Climate Group, an advocacy organization working to counter global warming.

The hazards of global warming will be the focus of high-profile conferences, protests and other events on the margins of the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting this week in New York, echoing some of the features of the Global Climate Action Summit earlier this month in San Francisco.

President Trump is scheduled to address the U.N. on Tuesday. But he has dismissed the science behind climate change as a hoax and pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate accord, which seeks to lower carbon emissions that are linked to global warming.

The Trump administration also has drastically cut the number of vetted refugees fleeing wars and persecution that it will accept into the U.S. Last week, it moved to cap the total next year at 30,000, the lowest since the refugee program was created in 1980.

The plight of those forced from their homes by the changing environment has been overshadowed by the estimated 65 million refugees now surging around the globe, the most in decades. Unlike them, people displaced by environmental changes are not recognized as refugees under international law.

The 1951 Refugee Convention, which grew out of World War II and was ratified by 145 countries, predated modern environmental science. In recent decades, climate scientists have concluded that the planet is warming due to human activities, causing a mix of effects.

A warming polar cap has opened new fishing and shipping routes in the northern oceans, while greater rainfall and longer growing seasons have improved crop yields in some areas. But hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific have steadily worsened, causing devastation from North Carolina to China.

SOURCE

30 Years Ago Officials Predicted The Maldives Would Be Swallowed By The Sea. It Didn’t Happen

Environmental officials warned 30 years ago the Maldives could be completely covered by water due to global warming-induced sea level rise. That didn’t happen. The Indian Ocean did not swallow the Maldives island chain as predicted by government officials in the 1980s.

In September 1988, the Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported a “gradual rise in average sea level is threatening to completely cover this Indian Ocean nation of 1196 small islands within the next 30 years,” based on predictions made by government officials.

Then-Environmental Affairs Director Hussein Shihab told AFP “an estimated rise of 20 to 30 centimetres in the next 20 to 40 years could be ‘catastrophic’ for most of the islands, which were no more than a metre above sea level.”

The article went on to suggest the Maldives, along with its 200,000 inhabitants, could “end” sooner than expected if drinking water supplies dry up by 1992 “as predicted.” Today, more than 417,000 people live in the Maldives.

“Call Noah and have him build another Ark,” Daniel Turner, executive director of the pro-energy group Power the Future, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“Bring out the Coast Guard. Send all the boogie boards and floaties you can find for the Maldives is going down,” Turner said sarcastically.

The Maldives are among the island nations often held up by United Nations officials as being on the “front-lines” of man-made global warming. The island nation was among the first to apply for Green Climate Fund aid, but the funding hasn’t been flowing, according to The New York Times.

“That’s too long to wait,” Maldives energy and environment minister Thoriq Ibrahim told The Times last year. “There’s no use having a fund somewhere if you can’t access it quickly.”

The Maldives are indeed low-lying islands with its highest point only reaching about eight feet above sea level. But obviously, decades-old warnings the Maldives were on the verge of being swallowed by the seas didn’t pan out.

A recent study projected low-lying reef islands, like the Maldives, could become “uninhabitable” by the middle of the 21st Century because too much sea water will get into freshwater drinking supplies.

The study projects “sea-level rise and wave dynamics over reefs will lead to the annual wave-driven overwash of most atoll islands by the mid-21st century.”

However, other research suggest the Maldives and other coral islands may actually be expanding, not sinking into the sea.

New Zealand researchers published a study earlier this year based on aerial photos and satellite images of Pacific islands over the last four decades that found most atolls they examined were increasing in size.

SOURCE

10 years to ditch fossil fuel car engines, save Paris climate target, warns study

Greens hate transport because greens hate freedom. If you think they won't come after your EV after they've got rid of the petrol/diesel car, you have not been paying attention

Europe must stop selling new petrol, diesel and conventional hybrid cars by 2028 in order to stand a better chance of honouring the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious target, according to a new study.

Research conducted by the German Aerospace Centre, commissioned by Greenpeace Belgium, says that passenger car engines as we know it need to be completely phased out from new sales before the end of the next decade.

Otherwise, Europe will struggle to “meaningfully contribute” to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the most ambitious part of the Paris Agreement on climate change’s “well below 2 degrees Celsius” overall aim.

Green activists have now urged governments to adopt effective phase-out regimes, so that existing fleets can be replaced in good time.

The study provides two clear options for meeting the 1.5 degrees goal: one uses a so-called carbon budget that means there will be a 50% chance of hitting the target, while another assumes a more ambitious 66%. A carbon budget is the amount of CO2 we can emit before global warming takes effect and pushes the planet over a certain average temperature.

In the one-in-two chance scenario, the findings insist that unchecked passenger car emissions will eat away the carbon budget for staying under 1.5 degrees within a decade.

For the more ambitious 66% likelihood, the news is even more grim as the budget will be exhausted within just five years if business-as-usual continues.

The German Aerospace Centre study authors concluded that those figures show either “stringent” CO2 cuts to passenger cars are necessary or further cuts in other sectors have to be identified.

In Europe at least, that latter option appears to be a non-starter given that emission cuts can only be sold politically if all sectors are expected to make even progress in reduction measures.

Given the current public attention levied at air quality, urban mobility and the associated health concerns, the study also assumed that demand for the combustion engine will fall gradually by itself.

“The phasing-out of the internal combustion engine in passenger cars will not only benefit the climate, it will also help solve the air pollution crisis and improve the quality of life for everyone,” said Barbara Stoll, Greenpeace Clean Air campaigner.

During the now annual car free day in Brussels on Sunday (16 September), air pollution fell by a massive 30% in the EU capital’s smoggiest streets and even further in other areas.

The mayors of Brussels and Paris have called for an annual car-free day for all of Europe, citing initiatives in their cities that have driven down pollution. But a recent damning report by the EU Court of Auditors revealed there is plenty of work left to do.

Filling a gap

If governments were to heed these 1.5 degree warnings and take measures to kill the combustion engine, then consumers would need to be offered an alternative.

The study acknowledges that increased production and sales of battery-powered vehicles would need to be adopted but also warns that could create problems in the job sector and environmental concerns due to the reliance on rare earth metals.

CO2 limits on cars risk ‘social catastrophe’, industry says
The European Commission may have underestimated the impact a “forced push” for more electric cars could have on EU jobs, Europe’s leading carmaker association has said as lawmakers begin in earnest to look into newly proposed limits on CO2 emissions.

The study does acknowledge that other options are available beyond mass electric car uptake, including synthetic fuels and changes in behaviour, but they are not included in its assumptions.

However, it does insist that they should be taken into account when developing options to come up with carbon reduction strategies.

Pledges to ban petrol and diesel have already been made by the French and British governments, which set a 2040 deadline, while carmakers like Volvo have even promised only to make electric and hybrid vehicles from as early as next year.

SOURCE

Bloom Energy’s “tangled web”

What a tangled web Bloom weaves, since first it practiced to deceive

Paul Driessen and Clint Laird

Bloom Energy executives, investment bankers, venture capitalists, politicians, regulators and others involved in advancing Bloom’s business, reputation and financial dealings are living the complicated life that flows from lying. Lies typically start small. Often, they’re small deceptions. But deceptions can metastasize into a tangled web of lies that threatens corporate survival, as truth intrudes over time from all sides.

For years the truth about Bloom’s business and ethics has intruded. But Bloom successfully parried them, going public on the New York Stock Exchange in July 2018. Its stock came out at $15 and has doubled.

Prior to going public, a competitor’s CEO said he hoped the oft-delayed IPO would happen because it would force Bloom to “dial back their practice of playing very loose with the truth.” He meant the Securities and Exchange Commission would be watching, to protect the public. He proved prophetic.

Within a day of going public, Bloom’s PR people were walking back its CEO’s rosy, inappropriate and unfounded financial predictions. Death by a thousand SEC and other cuts is the fate that awaits Bloom, now that it’s public. It may come sooner and with greater effect than most over-hyped green company failures – especially after a recent Heritage Foundation program exposed many of its shenanigans.

Bloom makes solid oxide fuel cells, which use an electrochemical reaction to convert natural gas into electricity on the customer’s site. Bloom claims cost advantages in generation and from no transmission lines.

Bloom also claims its “green” electricity costs 9-11 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), close to what its competitors charge. But Bloom’s promoted rates come after it receives federal, state and sometimes county subsidies. Absent these, Bloom’s rates would be 25-30 cents a kWh, making it seriously uncompetitive. Even its IPO statements admit a critical dependence on subsidies.

Bloom claims “greenness,” but the USEPA says its fuel cells produce hazardous materials in the filters needed to “scrub” impurities from the natural gas. While acknowledging the hazmats, Bloom claims it is somehow exempt from being labeled a “hazmats generator” – which is critical for Bloom’s marketing.

EPA and Bloom are battling this in the courts. Meanwhile, at least one Bloom customer has paid an environmental fine (without admitting fault) for improperly handling (Bloom’s) hazmats. If Bloom loses this lawsuit, it has another hazmat exemption up its sleeve. Get cut by a sword, parry a stroke, get cut by another.

Everyone likes being green. Apple brags it’s 100% green, although its solar panels and Bloom generators at the Maiden, NC site don’t provide electricity to Apple. Instead, this electricity goes directly to Duke Power, which must pay top retail prices when the sun shines and Bloom cells function. Apple reaps this income while also getting Duke Power’s lowest rates as a high-volume customer. What a sweet arrangement.

But what Apple and other Bloom customers really like are the subsidies they receive when installing “virtuous” Bloom generators. A manufacturer can sell a lot of anything when someone else pays for it. Of course, in this case, the “someone else” is taxpayers and ratepayers.

The federal Investment Tax Credit for fuel cell manufacturers like Bloom ran out in 2016. Sales predictably declined. But Senators Carper (D-DE), Blumenthal (D-CT) and Schumer (D-NY) successfully lobbied to reinstate the ITC retroactively for 2016 and into the future. That will cost the taxpayers between $600 and $900 million. The fuel cell industry will show appreciation in Washington’s typical swampy ways.

Thanks to the ITC reinstatement, Bloom also got fawning financial reporting, and its much-delayed IPO became a reality. The company had been running on fumes and losing $30 million per month. The instant $270 million in reinstated subsidies breathed new life into it.

Bloom’s financial parent is the impressive venture firm Kleiner Perkins. In February 2010, KP’s chief John Doerr put top executives from Google, eBay, Walmart, FedEx and Coca-Cola onstage to promote Bloom technology. To open his long adulation, Doerr said the event reminded him and Google co-founder Larry Page of Google’s own IPO. His slick, alluring statement helped bolster Bloom’s prominence and value.

Page then praised Bloom, saying Google was Bloom’s first customer and he foresees Bloom powering a “whole data center running on [its fuel cells] at some point” (time mark 15:55 in the video). But Google installed only four 100 kW Bloom generators at its headquarters in July 2008. This is a pittance, and only one generator “needed to work” at a mere 60% capacity for just 30 days to permit or persuade Google to endorse Bloom’s technology and help Morgan Stanley raise $100 million for Bloom later that year.

Since then, Google has added no more Bloom generators – an endorsement of a very different sort.

Other deceptions played out in Delaware, where Bloom cut a sweetheart deal involving 30 megawatts of fuel cell generating capacity (75 times Google’s total install) and a virtually free manufacturing facility. Bloom promised 900 jobs, monthly consumer costs of under $1, and 96% operating “up” time. They delivered 277 jobs, $5/month (and rising) electricity costs and 86% “up” time.

The missing jobs triggered a $1.5 million penalty – versus the $12 million that Delaware paid Bloom to locate there and some $200+ million that Bloom has received so far from state ratepayers under its sweetheart deal. The 623 missing Delaware jobs are in India.

In 2013 Bloom was found guilty of hiring Mexican workers for a third of the federal minimum wage and paying them in pesos. It also violated overtime and record-keeping provisions.

These ethics violations and operational deceptions highlight bigger questions. Can a company actually thrive or even survive if it has lost $2+ billion, has annual interest expenses exceeding $100 million, and produces a product that exists only because of multiple subsidies? Can the company be kept on life support and “media spin” long enough for insider investors to cash out?

(But would you want to bet against Kleiner Perkins and its powerful business and political accomplices?)

It’s instructive that several top Kleiner Perkins people have recently left or announced their departure; its top tier has shrunk from nine to five. This month, top tier player Mary Meeker announced that she and her team will leave to form their own firm. It’s rumored that these departures were precipitated, at least in part, by KP’s decisions to back “clean tech,” the financial disappointments from that decision, and rumblings about misstatements of material facts to legislators and regulators.

Several years ago, Advanced Equities investment bank executives argued that Bloom (and others) had misled them, and they in turn simply passed the deceptions on to investors. In 2012, the SEC shut the bank down and fined two of its top executives for doing insufficient due diligence. It will be interesting to see how the SEC and other government agencies treat KP executives and others involved in Bloom’s web of deception.

Equally intriguing, in filing for its IPO, Bloom disclosed large payments to the two Advanced Equities execs – including post-IPO shares, hundreds of thousands of preferred shares and warrants, and a $5 million loan. Many wonder, were these payments and their accompanying non-disclosure agreements illegal hush money?

Others say Bloom personifies influence peddling among the swamp denizens of Washington and state legislatures. Eventually taxpayers and ratepayers will demand comprehensive reform to end this behavior. Savvy Wall Street analysts are already catching on.

In Delaware, Bloom’s costs are transparently displayed on monthly consumer electric bills. People are already asking, “What are all these renewable energy charges, and why do we have to pay them?”

In 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle portrayed the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in Chicago, exposing the meat-packing industry’s flagrant corruption. Despite the absence of radio and television at the time, the book created a national uproar and call for reform, which quickly resulted in the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

Today’s digital and social media could (and should) generate taxpayer and consumer reactions to Bloom’s crony corporatist subsidy saga akin to public response to The Jungle. Consumers will learn to trust their electric bills, not the tangled web of deceptions woven in our political swamps.

Via email

German Animal Lovers Boycott Wind Power: Vegans Incensed by Bloody Bird & Bat Slaughter

German vegans have mounted a boycott against wind power, incensed by the pointless and bloody slaughter of millions of birds and bats.

Irony comes in many sizes and shapes, but the idea of one group of moralising zealots taking on another group of moralising zealots, is simply delicious (so to speak).

The concept of carnivorous wind and sun worshippers going toe to toe with tofu and mung bean munching Germans throws up the opportunity for a new form of blood-sport, a bit like bear-baiting, in the Deutschland of old.

At least one electricity retailer has decided to deliver up the kind of electricity that might just satisfy the ethically fussy palates of German vegans. The cleverly named ‘Vegawatt’ promises to deliver electricity to satisfy all animal lovers, including hard-core vegos.

Although, STT is not quite sure how Vegawatt proposes separating its morally sound megawatts from the unethical stuff, enabling it to deliver only the former to its pious customers as its marketing pitch so nobly promises? Once excited electrons start tearing around an enormous electricity grid, both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ behave in precisely the same manner, making the evil ones pretty hard to distinguish.

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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24 September, 2018

EPA Takes Steps to Ensure Regulatory Reforms Advance

A political appointee will become the No. 2 lawyer at the Environmental Protection Agency, in a change announced Thursday aimed at ensuring that someone committed to President Donald Trump’s agenda is in charge.

This change puts the EPA in line with several other federal departments and agencies.

The move comes as news reports indicate parts of the federal bureaucracy—including some who had key jobs during the previous administration—have rebelled against the elected president.

The change in who serves as EPA’s deputy general counsel also comes as the agency seeks more uniformity in legal interpretations from its regional offices across the country, The Daily Signal has learned.

In a memo Thursday to all EPA staff, General Counsel Matthew Leopold announced he had named David Fotouhi as principal deputy general counsel.

Fotouhi, a political appointee, will replace Kevin Minoli, a career EPA employee who was at the agency during the Obama administration.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt resigned in July amid questions about his ethics raised by Trump’s political opponents and the media even as Pruitt followed through on the Trump administration’s deregulation agenda.

Minoli, who called for independent investigations of Pruitt, announced Aug. 21 that he would leave the EPA in late September to join a Washington law firm. E&E News identified the law firm as Alston & Bird LLP.

The Senate has been slow to confirm Trump’s executive branch appointments ever since his inauguration in January 2017.

The Senate didn’t confirm Leopold as the EPA’s general counsel for nearly a year. If he were to vacate the top legal position, the presence of Fotouhi would ensure that the acting general counsel would be someone else who is committed to the goals Trump was elected to carry out.

Some politicized career bureaucrats with a different agenda have rebelled against the Trump administration’s goals across government agencies, as has been widely reported.

The EPA has been the site of some of the administration’s biggest reforms.

Historically, the second spot in the EPA general counsel’s office has gone to a career employee, although that’s not the case among other federal government departments.

In his memo to all EPA employees, Leopold said:

While new within OGC [the Office of the General Counsel], having a political appointee serve as the principal deputy is consistent with the structure used by the Office of Air and Radiation and the Office of Water (at times), as well as the Department of Justice, Department of Interior, Department of Commerce, and Department of Agriculture.

The change advances Trump policies and the goals of acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, EPA spokesman John Konkus told The Daily Signal in a statement.

“Today’s announcement will make EPA’s Office of General Counsel leadership structure consistent with other EPA program offices as well as the Department of Justice, Department of Interior, and other federal agencies,” Konkus said, adding:

We are advancing the president’s agenda, while at the same time strengthening the senior career leadership ranks. This move is in line with acting Administrator Wheeler’s efforts to establish a standard regional office structure that aligns with headquarters, as the new career deputy position being created will coordinate with and manage the regional counsels to ensure legal consistency in the agency’s actions across the nation.

Political appointees in the U.S. government serve at the pleasure of the president, or under the politically appointed agency head or Cabinet secretary. These employees may be fired at will.

Conversely, career federal employees have civil service protections that make it more difficult to fire them, and typically serve under multiple administrations.

Fotouhi already worked in the EPA general counsel’s office, and will continue in his previous roles, Leopold wrote to employees:

As you know, David has been a deputy general counsel for a year and a half. In this new role, he will continue to oversee issues managed by the Water Law Office and Solid Waste and Emergency Response Law Office and also take on new supervisory roles related to all the deputy general counsels and political staff.

Fotouhi, a graduate of Harvard Law School and Vanderbilt University, began working for the general counsel’s office in March 2017.

He previously was in private practice at the Washington law firm of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher beginning in 2011. He clerked for Judge Raymond Gruender of the Missouri-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit.

On a second front, Leopold’s memo addressed the decentralized nature of the EPA’s regional offices.

An office in Seattle, Washington, for example, could have a different legal interpretation of a dispute than an office in Kansas City, Missouri, had regarding the same matter.

The EPA seeks to implement more uniform standards, and Leopold announced that Dave Cozad, counsel for the agency’s Region 7 in the Midwest, would fill a new career position of deputy general counsel to “coordinate with and manage the regional counsels, among other duties.”

Cozad will serve on an acting basis, he said.

Cozad is a 29-year EPA veteran who began work in the counsel’s office in 1989 under President George H. W. Bush. A graduate of the College of William and Mary Law School, he previously served as an environmental lawyer for the Justice Department.

SOURCE

Climate Policy and the Case for Humility

The Global Climate Action Summit was September 12-14 in San Francisco. One purpose is to “ratchet up the ambition of national climate action plans.” Another is to “provide the confidence to governments to ‘step up’ and trigger this next level of ambition sooner rather than later.”

If you attended the Action Summit, you heard arguments that go much like this: The “science is settled,” 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is real and that humans are the main cause, and the planet will suffer irreparable harm if something is not done immediately. If you do not agree with these claims, you must be a tool of energy companies or of funders of right-wing political causes. The easy default position to take in the face of such claims is to trust the Global Climate Action folks.

But, is the science settled and do 97 percent of climate scientists agree? It is useful to know where there are agreements and where there are disagreements. There is, in fact, consensus among climate scientists that:

global temperatures have increased overall since 1880

humans are contributing to a rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations

Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have a warming effect on the planet

There is a great deal of debate about the following:

whether the warming since 1950 has been dominated by human causes

how much the planet will warm in the 21st century

whether warming is ‘dangerous’

whether radically reducing CO2 emissions will improve the climate and human well being

Many confuse the consensus over the first three points as covering all climate change science. Yes, there is a consensus about those three points, but the claim of consensus falls apart once the next four are considered. Furthermore, even if there were consensus about all final four points, that consensus does not tell what ought to be done.

In thinking about climate policy it may be useful to remember H. L. Mencken’s claim that “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

Humility in policy arenas is not nearly as attractive as making bold claims and public pronouncements. But, before spending trillions of dollars to fight climate change, a little humility might be a good place to start. Frankly, we do not know nearly as much about many things as is widely supposed. Climate scientists, like macroeconomists, are very good at predicting the past. But, human systems and the systems that create climate changes are nonlinear and dynamic and, therefore, quite unpredictable.

I doubt that speakers at the Global Climate Change Summit talked about what I think is our best bet, which is to adapt and mitigate, rather than spend billions to prevent change. But that would be an unpopular position among the climate change activists and it is not popular with politicians or reporters. Proposals to adapt and mitigate are poorly received when talking about climate change. The poor reception might be because risk is something that people in general evaluate poorly. There is a lot of pressure on politicians to “do something.” Pick up any newspaper and there are letters to the editor from the old, young, informed, uninformed, frightened, and optimistic that something must be done. And so on.

Even local politicians face electoral pressures to do something, to adopt more climate friendly policies, to choose electricity produced by wind or solar, and to subsidize supposedly green projects. Voters reward politicians who appear to solve problems. Waiting to adapt is easily characterized as doing nothing. Few politicians like being called a “do nothing” politician. Choosing to wait to adapt is difficult to explain in public meetings or the press. Reporters like talking to the “do something” folks because stories about new policies and their consequences are easier to write, especially if the reporter is a “do something” reporter.

SOURCE

California's Fuel Economy Power Grab is Hijacking the American Car

There are many reasons why residents are choosing to flee California. But imagine leaving the state only to find that the socialists in Sacramento have successfully imposed their will nationwide. That is exactly what is happening with vehicle fuel economy standards. Thankfully, the Trump administration is slamming on the brakes.

California’s air pollution standards are more rigorous than the rest of the country, thanks to special authority to grant the state via waiver under the Clean Air Act (CAA). You might ask yourself, what does air pollution in California have to do with the fuel economy of cars manufactured in places like Michigan and Ohio and sold across the country? Thanks to this special waiver and help from the Obama administration, California now exerts outsized influence on the entire American automobile market.

In 2009 and again in 2013, the Environmental Protection Agency granted California CAA waivers allowing the state to regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from vehicles at levels more stringent than those set by EPA. It’s not an explicit regulation on vehicle fuel economy. But since the only practical way for automakers to achieve greater GHG reductions is by boosting fuel economy, the effect is the same. The root problem is a separate federal law that already regulates fuel economy.

The Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) was created to reduce American dependence on foreign oil by enforcing policies such as the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards. Unlike California’s special power to impose requirements in excess of the CAA, California is explicitly preempted from regulating fuel economy under EPCA. Here’s where the power grab comes in.

The population of California is huge, almost 40 million, which means automakers can’t afford to bypass the entire market. In addition, while no other states enjos the authority to craft their own CAA standards, they can choose to adopt those of California — and some have. Thus, the American automarket is now subject to multiple sets of standards.

To mitigate the obvious chaos of multiple fuel economy standards, the Obama administration brokered a three-way deal between EPA, California, and the automakers, effectively establishing California’s seat at the table as a national regulator. Through its CAA power grab, the progressives in Sacramento have, in effect, imposed stricter fuel economy standards on the rest of the country. Moreover, they have the power to hold the national market hostage to push for even more stringent regulations.

Both the Supremacy Clause and the Commerce Clause outlined in the U.S. Constitution make it clear that the federal government’s fuel economy standards should trump California’s special fuel economy standards. While California’s regulations are not explicit fuel economy standards, EPCA preempts any regulation “related to fuel economy standards.” Not only is greater fuel economy the only practical way for automakers to comply with higher GHG standards, the structure of GHG regulations is based on fleet average, which is unlike other CAA emission regulations — yet identical to the existing CAFE standards.

California’s misused CAA waiver is a classic example of the slippery slope that comes with picking winners and losers in the regulatory space. By granting California exclusive authority under one law to regulate one thing (air pollution), the federal government has given the state an opening to impose its political agenda on something else (fuel economy).

Thankfully, the Trump administration has proposed more realistic national fuel economy standards and moved to revoke California’s waiver. This would disarm Sacramento, ending its bullying of the auto industry and drivers in other states. California was given special authority under the CAA to regulate emissions due to its unique geography, weather, and rapid growth and gridlock that produced localized smog. But GHG regulations are aimed at global climate change, not problems unique to California. There’s simply no reason for the state to have special powers above and beyond national GHG standards.

One-time special privileges are not, it turns out, just a one-time thing. As in the childhood classic “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie,” if you give a regulator a cookie, he’ll ask for a glass of milk. And then a straw … and so on.

In addition to being bad policy, California’s CAA waiver sets an irresponsible precedent. It must be revoked to prevent future abuses of regulatory power. States should not be allowed to wield their consumer market as a weapon to impose a progressive political agenda on the rest of the country.

SOURCE

British tidal power project in trouble

Industrial heavyweights have turned their back on the Swansea Tidal Power project as the countdown begins on a one-year stay of execution for its embattled developer.

Tidal Lagoon Power has lost three of its high-profile backers from the board, including billionaire industrialist Sanjeev Gupta who is pursuing a rival tidal project with Simec Atlantis.

The boardroom exodus took place over the summer amid a make-or-break debt deal which sets the clock ticking on a bid to keep the company afloat.

Gareth Roberts, of KRE Corporate Recovery, said his firm was tasked with setting up a company voluntary agreement (CVA) to “mothball” the beleaguered scheme and help buy time to continue fundraising.

The “holding mechanism” grants the developer a maximum of two years before creditors could opt to take action, but if there is no appetite to fund the project within the next year the company may choose to liquidate.

Rajeev Gandhi, chief financial officer of Simec, owned by Mr Gupta’s GFG Alliance, has also left, along with Keith Clarke, an industry veteran who sits on the board of Sirius Minerals.

SOURCE

Australia set to run on 100% renewable energy within 15 years (?)

How the Green/Left can blind themselves to the obvious is a wonder. Do they seriously think that any population would settle for an electricity supply that only worked when the sun shone and the wind blew? Yet that is what we would have with 100% renewable energy. "Renewables" will always need to be backed to 100% of demand by conventional generators

Australia is set to reach its target of 100% renewable energy by the early 2030’s, provided current uptake of renewable energy options in the residential and commercial sectors remains strong.

The Australian renewables energy industry will install more than 10 gigawatts of new solar and wind power before the end of 2019 and if that rate is maintained, Australia would reach 50% of its renewables target in 2025.

The reduction target, set under the famed Paris Agreement into global climate change, forms part of a commitment made by Australia in 2015 to cut carbon emissions nationwide by up to 28% of 2005 levels by the year 2030.

It represents reductions of around 52% in emissions per capita and around 65% in the emissions intensity of the economy between 2005 and 2030.

Homeowners and industry have embraced the renewables challenge so well that it now seems possible the nation will reach the equivalent of 100% renewables for its electricity supply well before then.

A report by the Energy Exchange Institute at Australian National University, says merely keeping up the current rate of renewable energy deployment – roughly divided between solar photovoltaics (PVs), wind farms and rooftop solar PVs – would meet the country’s entire emissions reduction task for the whole economy by 2025.
New global energy capacity additions 2015 2017 solar wind
Net new global generation capacity additions in 2015 and 2017.

That doesn’t take into account recent announcements at State level to make solar a more attractive option to consumers.

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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23 September, 2018

Morano on the authoritarian Elizabeth Warren

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano appeared on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends” to discuss Democratic senators attempt to vastly expand federal “climate” rules for U.S. businesses and discuss the new 2018 book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.”

Excerpt: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is leading a push to compel companies to disclose more information about how their businesses impact and could be impacted by climate change. On Friday, Warren introduced the Climate Risk Disclosure Act of 2018, which would mandate that publicly traded companies provide extensive climate-related information, such as greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel investments, and risk management strategies for things like rising sea levels and increased temperatures.

Not everyone, however, is a fan of Warren’s legislation… “This is virtue signaling of the highest order for her Democratic base, Marc Morano, the editor of ClimateDepot.com, said on “Fox & Friends” Wednesday. He argued that Warren’s bill would give the U.S. government and the Securities and Exchange Commission extensive power to go after companies and “shake them down.”

“They’re going to use these disclosures now — and they’re going to [be] the size of the phone book in the end — and they’re going to go after them and sue them for money for causing bad weather,” Morano said.

He drew a parallel to how the Washington Post editorial board wrote a column that said President Trump is “complicit” in extreme weather like Hurricane Florence, due to his skepticism of human-induced climate change and his administration’s efforts to “dismantle” environmental regulations.

“Donald Trump does not get credit for our economic growth, but the media is perfectly willing to blame him for a hurricane,” Morano said. “How does that work? It makes no sense whatsoever.”

SOURCE

Feel-Good Bans on Straws and Plastic Bags Don’t Help the Ocean

They increase plastic use, energy consumption, and health risks. Better idea: Improve trash collection in Third World countries.

Politicians in Seattle and San Francisco are being cheered on by some voters for their recent bans on plastic straws, having already banned plastic bags years ago. California in 2016 became the first state to ban plastic bags, New York and New Jersey are mulling similar laws, and countries from Slovenia to New Zealand are planning on banning them in 2019.

Supporters of laws prohibiting plastic products encourage politicians to make meaningless gestures rather than focus on ridding the oceans of plastic and other waste. A 2015 study in the journal Science found that of the estimated 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tons of plastic that entered the ocean from 192 of the world’s coastal countries, as little as 0.9 percent of it came from the United States.

A more recent study, from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, found that 90 percent of plastic polluting the world’s oceans comes from ten rivers, eight of which are in Asia; two are in Africa. In other words, developed countries such as the United States and New Zealand aren’t part of the problem, and taking away the freedoms of their citizens isn’t part of the solution either.

As with most government dictates, plastic bans can have unintended consequences such as increasing energy use and water pollution, heightening public-health risks, increasing overall use of plastics, or harming groups in society such as the disabled and poor. For example, a recent Danish Environmental Protection Agency study found that an organic cotton bag uses more than 150 times as much energy and causes over 600 times as much water pollution when compared with low-density polyethylene (LDPE) grocery-store bags.

A University of Arizona study found that 97 percent of users of reusable grocery bags never wash or bleach them. The research found bacteria levels in bags “significant enough to cause a wide range of serious health problems and even lead to death.” Paper bags have their own drawbacks vs. LDPE ones. These are even more pronounced when one considers how much more frequently supermarkets double up paper bags in an effort to match how remarkably strong LDPE is for its weight. A Scottish report concluded that paper bags, compared with plastic bags, resulted in “higher environmental impact” when it comes to “consumption of water, emissions of greenhouse gases, and eutrophication of water bodies (rivers, lakes, etc.).”

Referring to plastic grocery bags as “single use” is almost certainly a misnomer. An Australian government study estimated their re-use rate to be as high as 75 percent. Consumers in jurisdictions with bans who reused LDPE grocery bags to line their household trash cans, pack lunches, or even pick up their dog’s poop most often have little choice but to purchase significantly higher-density plastic bags for these purposes. Bans on plastic straws have also been documented to lead to increased use of plastics, most notably at Starbucks, where the new nitro lids actually use more plastic than the old lid-straw combo they’re meant to replace. To the extent that restrictions on plastics force consumers to switch to other products, the overall environmental impact can be significantly negative.

Banning plastic bags and straws is akin to sticking your finger in the hole of a dike with a thousand holes; it’s not going to help our oceans. If you worked in a small business that was losing $1,000 a month and you told your boss you’d come up with a way to save a dollar next month, you’d soon be out of a job. Cheering on politicians who propose and implement token bans on plastic encourages them to avoid doing the hard work required to solve the real problem.

Drastic reductions of plastic and other waste in our oceans will come about only through working with countries in Asia and Africa to stop plastic pollution at the source. The developed world needs to encourage or assist governments in developing countries to better manage their waste. Private-sector innovation also shows promising ways it might help.

The Ocean Conservancy and the McKinsey Center for Business and Environment found that improving trash-collection rates to just 80 percent in only five core Asian countries could reduce ocean plastic waste by 23 percent at a cost of around $5 billion a year. Foreign-aid budgets could be redirected to assist cities with waste collection. The Christian relief and development agency Tearfund is urging the British government to spend the equivalent of half a billion dollars of its annual foreign-aid budget to do just that. This would represent a tenfold increase; other governments could do the same.

Private-sector innovation might yield even more promising solutions. David Katz recently gave a TED talk outlining how innovation could help solve this problem. Noting that 80 percent of ocean plastic is coming from countries with extreme poverty, Katz set out to motivate Third World citizens to recycle. He created the Plastic Bank, the world’s largest chain of stores for extremely poor people. Everything in the stores — including school tuition, Wi-Fi, cell-phone minutes, and electricity — can be purchased with plastic garbage.

Using this concept of “social plastic,” Katz has partnered with global corporations such as Britain’s Marks and Spencer and Germany’s Henkel. These companies are incorporating in their products and manufacturing the resources that the Plastic Bank encourages the world’s poor to recycle.

Significant investments are necessary to create effective waste-management systems in developing countries. With this in mind, Circulate Capital was recently formed with the support of major corporations, including 3M, PepsiCo, Dow, and Procter and Gamble. With a focus on South and Southeast Asia, this new investment fund is seeking to remove capital as a barrier to the projects required to prevent plastic and other waste from flowing into the world’s oceans. Operating from the principle that tangible social change and strong financial returns are not mutually exclusive, the fund is actively seeking proposals from businesses interested in projects in three areas of the waste-management supply chain: waste collection, the processing of mixed solid waste, and the transformation of “waste” plastics into new products.

The Plastic Bank’s David Katz has rightly observed that, when faced with an overflowing sink, “it would be pointless to mop or plunge or scoop up the water if we don’t turn off the tap first.” Politicians in developed nations are ignoring the source of the ocean’s problems when they place bans on their citizens that will effectively do nothing to improve the marine environment. Solving this problem requires hard work and tough choices, something too many politicians are shirking. Voters who encourage their leaders by supporting these token gestures are simply perpetuating the problem. In the meantime, entrepreneurs such as Katz and private-sector investors are on track to do more for our oceans than the developed world’s governments combined.

SOURCE

Europe’s Business Lobby Prepares Pushback Against EU’s New Climate Goals

The memo from BusinessEurope, dated 13 September, shows how Europe’s biggest employer association intends to “challenge” EU plans to aim higher in the fight against climate change.

The document, which will be discussed at an internal meeting on Wednesday, says the main line to take about the EU’s climate policy should be “rather positive, as long as it remains a political statement with no implications” on the EU’s existing commitments under the Paris Agreement.

Miguel Arias Canete, the EU climate action commissioner, has suggested updating the EU’s greenhouse gas reduction target for 2030, arguing that the EU’s level of ambition had “de facto” been raised after an agreement was struck on renewables and energy efficiency targets earlier in June.

Currently, the EU envisages cutting its emissions by “at least 40%” by 2030 based on 1990 levels. That target would effectively be raised to 45% following the deal on renewables and energy efficiency, Cañete said.

The EU’s top energy and climate official revealed on Wednesday (20 June) that the bloc is now set to increase its emissions reduction pledge from 40% by 2030 to 45%, after EU negotiators sealed agreements on three clean energy laws in the past fortnight.

That was later backed by Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who said in his annual “State of the Union” address to Parliament that it was “scientifically right” to raise the EU’s climate goals.

But Germany is sceptical of any such move, fearing for the competitiveness of its export-dependent industry.

In August, Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke out against revising the EU’s climate objectives, saying “we should first stick to the goals we have already set for ourselves”.

The internal memo from BusinessEurope follows the same line, recommending “to oppose the new increase in ambition, using the usual arguments” that Europe cannot take action on its own, and should seek a level playing field with global competitors before making any moves.

It suggests “to minimise the issue” by arguing that raising the ambition “is not what matters most. What is key is to persuade other major economies to catch up with the EU’s ambition,” the memo argues.

BusinessEurope also recommends “to challenge the process” by asking for more cost-benefit studies and requiring “more transparency on the calculations”.

SOURCE

UK Energy Regulator Caught Covering Up Green Scandals

Ofgem — the UK government regulator responsible for energy — has been caught covering up two major scandals in the ‘low carbon’ energy industry.

The cost of these scandals — involving smart meters and the renewable heat incentive (RHI) — may run into the tens of billions of pounds.

But rather than protect the consumer, which is supposedly its job, Ofgem has taken the side of the vested interests profiting from these industries. It has done this by using draconian gagging orders to silence two whistleblowers who had wanted to expose the scandals.

Ironically, the story was broken in The Guardian — a newspaper which has long been committed to supporting the corruption- and incompetence-riddled green industry that the whistleblowers were hoping to expose.

One of the whistleblowers told the Guardian he was “continually threatened … for trying to tell the truth. For doing my job and uncovering an issue, Ofgem made my life hell.”

He said the regulator had attempted to “scare me witless with threats of imprisonment” and he felt “utterly ashamed” of Ofgem’s behaviour.

Ofgem said it encouraged staff to report suspected wrongdoing and took their concerns seriously.

Both men worked for Ofgem in entirely different areas of the business and were regarded as qualified experts in their respected fields.

One was Greg Pytel, an economist with oversight of the rollout of the £10.9bn smart meter programme, which is due to be completed in 2020.

Smart meters are electronic devices for homes and businesses that measure the use of electricity and gas. They are designed to make billing easier and to help energy companies manage the supply of electricity more efficiently.

The second whistleblower, who has asked to remain anonymous, worked on the renewable heat incentive (RHI), which offers financial rewards to promote the use of new technologies such as green boilers.

The scheme, which started in 2011, has been controversial – and could eventually cost taxpayers £23bn. Both projects are key to the government’s stated aim of making the UK a low-carbon economy.

So that’s industries worth a total in excess of £30 billion, neither of which would exist were it not for government regulation.

There is no demand whatsoever for smart meters — the public is rightly suspicious of them and the take-up, despite copious government propaganda hailing their merits, has been risibly small.

As for the renewable heat incentive — this was a madcap scheme, introduced by David Cameron’s feeble coalition government, where businesses were paid large sums of money to heat their boilers with wood instead of coal or gas.

This money-for-old-rope scheme was widely abused, especially in Northern Ireland where it effectively bankrupted the government.

As The Times reported at the time:

Flaws in the scheme were exposed by a whistleblower who said businesses were buying biomass boilers solely to collect the subsidy. The whistleblower alleged that one farmer expected to make £1 million over 20 years for using a biomass boiler to heat an empty shed, while heating a number of empty factories would net their owner £1.5 million.

Northern Ireland’s auditor-general, Kieran Donnelly, says the RHI had “serious systemic weaknesses from the start” because it did not have the built-in spending controls imposed on a similar scheme in Great Britain. He added that the scheme was vulnerable to abuse and possible fraud.

Perhaps the even bigger scandal here, though, is the behavior of Ofgem (which stands for Office of Gas and Electricity Markets). It’s a non-ministerial government department.

Here is its remit:

Its primary duty is to protect the interests of consumers, where possible by promoting competition. The Authority‘s main objective is to protect existing and future consumers’ interests in relation to gas conveyed through pipes and electricity conveyed by distribution or transmission systems.

So what, exactly, is it doing acting so flagrantly against the interests of consumers by helping to cover up incompetence and corruption which will undoubtedly cost them millions if not billions of pounds?

Simple. Ofgem’s higher loyalties are to the government and to its determination to force through its renewable energy agenda at whatever cost.

As I’ve argued before, green energy is a charter for crooks and liars. Corruption and mismanagement and extravagant waste are not bugs of the renewable energy industry but features.

But the environmentalist zealots who infest Ofgem and similar government departments do not wish us to know this, therefore they lie and distort and cover-up. It really is that simple. And that depressing.

SOURCE

Pro-coal Coalition MPs schedule private dinner to discuss 'Australia's energy future'

We know that there is no consistency on the Left but this is a lulu. A policy from the conservative side of politics that they failed to suport when conservative PM Turnbull proposed it -- the "NEG" -- is now set to be Leftist policy. It's far from an ideal policy but at least it should keep the lights on. It shows that Turnbull was a better policy-maker than many give him credit for. He was only slightly right of centre but getting things done while leading a very precarious government required something like that

The pro-coal Monash Forum is attempting to convene a private dinner when federal parliament resumes in mid-October with Trevor St Baker, part-owner of the Vales Point coal generator and founder of the business electricity retailer ERM Power.

With the energy minister, Angus Taylor, working up options for cabinet to lower power prices and boost generation capacity by expanding existing plants, upgrading ageing legacy generators and pursuing new investments, the Coalition’s pro-coal ginger group has scheduled dinner with St Baker in Parliament House on 16 October.

According to an invitation circulated among members of the Monash Forum, seen by Guardian Australia, Coalition MPs will meet for dinner and discussion on “Australia’s energy future”.
Coalition won't replace renewables target after it winds down in 2020

St Baker has previously signalled interest in pursuing a replacement for the Hazelwood power station if the federal government settles on a favourable energy policy, and members of the Monash Forum want the businessman to update them about his investment plans.

Planning for the soiree comes as industry associations and energy associations met in Canberra on Thursday with the shadow climate change minister, Mark Butler, and the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, and urged them to persist with the national energy guarantee.

Malcolm Turnbull, as one of his last acts in the top job, dumped the policy after an internal, conservative-led insurgency. The new prime minister, Scott Morrison, and his cabinet have now taken a formal decision to dump the emissions reduction component of the Neg.

Before the policy was junked, the Turnbull government and the then energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, spent months lining up stakeholders to support the policy, which was designed by the Energy Security Board.

Business groups and energy associations are dismayed by the abandonment of the policy because they fear there is now no clear investment signal to guide investment in generation assets with 30 and 40-year operating lives. The groups sent a clear message to Labor that the current mess needed to be resolved.

Shorten and Butler – who are yet to make a final decision on whether to keep or junk the Neg – convened a meeting in parliament on Thursday with AiGroup, the Business Council of Australia, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Energy Users Association of Australia, the Australian Energy Council, the Clean Energy Council and the Smart Energy Council.

According to people present at the meeting, the groups made the case that Labor should persist with the Neg rather than junking it and pursuing a brand new policy for the electricity sector.

In his opening remarks to the meeting, Butler said Labor had heeded the message from industry players that reaching a bipartisan consensus was important, so Labor had attempted to be constructive when the Turnbull government brought forward various policy options, culminating in the Neg.
Steep emissions reductions targets won't drive up power bills, modelling shows

Butler said there was always going to be a difference between Labor and the Coalition on the level of ambition of emissions reduction but he said “getting the rules agreed upon would have been a monumental step forward in resolving the energy crisis and set us up for the investment and jobs that we need over coming years that will start to clean up our energy sector and bring power prices down”.

He told the groups Labor understood there was strong buy-in from stakeholders for the Neg, and Labor wanted “to make sure that good thinking is not entirely lost”.

“We want to make sure the energy policy we put forward at the next election is the most compelling policy that we can possibly come up with from business and household points of view, and we need your help with that,” Butler said.

While Labor is yet to make a final decision, Shorten gave a strong hint at the start of the week that the opposition would keep the Neg as part of a suite of climate policies for the next election. “We are prepared to use that as part of our framework going forward,” he said 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 September, 2018

Hurricane Florence was due to ocean COOLING

Even before Hurricane Florence barreled into the North Carolina coast, a misleading claim about the storm and global warming echoed across the internet.

Florence made landfall in North Carolina as a Category 1 hurricane on Friday, but the day before, The New York Times published a video claiming the storm had formed in “unusually warm waters” in the Atlantic Ocean, heated up by man-made global warming.

In comparing Florence to last year’s Hurricane Harvey, the NYTimes’ reporter said “both of these hurricanes formed in unusually warm waters.” That’s false, according to Cato Institute atmospheric scientist Ryan Maue.

“Ocean surface temperatures along Florence track were abnormally cool for most of its life-cycle partly due to the unusual, higher latitude of the storm,” Maue tweeted on Tuesday night. “The integrated [sea surface temperature] track-based anomaly averaged from Sept 4-11 was 0.6°C below 1985-2017 ‘normal.’”

Florence formed in colder than normal waters in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. Florence also reached major hurricane strength (Category 3 or higher) in cooler waters, before heading into warmer waters where it didn’t do what weather forecasters expected — it weakened and fell apart.

In fact, what’s amazing is how strong the storm got and how long it stayed together over “marginal” ocean temperatures, Maue tweeted.

The National Hurricane Center initially forecast Florence to hit land at Category 3 or 4 strength on the Saffir-Simpson scale, making it a major hurricane at landfall. Forecasters likely expected the warmer waters close to the U.S. coast to intensify the storm.

Instead, Florence weakened as it approached the Carolinas, despite the warmer waters close to the coast. Florence made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane, though the storm still brought heavy rainfall and flooding across the southeast.

However, NYTime’s video on Hurricane Florence ignored such data. Likewise, Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann claimed warmer than normal water temperatures “supercharged” Florence.

Mann blamed an “ocean heat wave,” linking to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) article published about one week before Florence made landfall.

However, the article Mann cited as evidence is referring to the warm coastal waters of New England and eastern Canada — hundreds of miles from Florence’s actual track.

But even the warmer waters near the U.S. coast were actually close to the 30-year average, Maue said.

SOURCE

Eco-Socialism? Hundreds Of Academics Call For An End To Economic Growth

More than 200 academics signed onto a public letter calling on governments to eschew economic growth in order to plan for a “post-growth economy” based on wealth redistribution.

“For the past seven decades, GDP growth has stood as the primary economic objective of European nations,” 238 academics wrote in public letter published by The Guardian on Sunday.

“But as our economies have grown, so has our negative impact on the environment,” they wrote. “We are now exceeding the safe operating space for humanity on this planet, and there is no sign that economic activity is being decoupled from resource use or pollution at anything like the scale required.”

“Today, solving social problems within European nations does not require more growth. It requires a fairer distribution of the income and wealth that we already have,” the academics wrote

The letter echoes the 1960s-era “population bomb” fears. Back then, academics, like former White House science czar John Holdren and biologist Paul Ehrlich, argued out of control population control would outstrip the Earth’s ability to support humanity.

Ehrlich and Holdren predicted the world would eventually move, like it or not, to a “no-growth” economy where famine, hunger and poverty would run rampant until the population stabilized.

Those predictions turned out to be wrong as humanity’s physical and material well-being has increased substantially since then as population growth exploded.

However, hundreds of academics are echoing the Malthusian fears of the 1960s, and calling for governments to prepare for a “no-growth economy” where gross domestic product (GDP) is not a concern.

“If current trends continue, there may be no growth at all in Europe within a decade,” the academics wrote in their letter. “Right now the response is to try to fuel growth by issuing more debt, shredding environmental regulations, extending working hours, and cutting social protections.”

“This aggressive pursuit of growth at all costs divides society, creates economic instability, and undermines democracy,” they wrote.

Copenhagen Consensus Center president Bjorn Lomborg, also known as the “skeptical environmentalist,” called the academics’ demands “silly,” especially the argument “that degrowth can improve our quality of life.”

“The claim that no-growth or de-growth would be good for us is simply wrong,” Lomborg tweeted on Monday.

The academics called for policies that emphasized wealth redistribution and environmentalism over those that add to the material well-being of a country. The letter, however, does not address population growth.

“Resource use could be curbed by introducing a carbon tax, and the revenue could be returned as a dividend for everyone or used to finance social programmes,” academics wrote in their letter.

“Introducing both a basic and a maximum income would reduce inequality further, while helping to redistribute care work and reducing the power imbalances that undermine democracy,” they wrote. “New technologies could be used to reduce working time and improve quality of life, instead of being used to lay off masses of workers and increase the profits of the privileged few.”

SOURCE

Fracking takes a step forward in Britain

Cuadrilla has today received hydraulic fracturing consent from the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) for its second horizontal shale exploration well at its Preston New Road site in Lancashire. Consent was granted for the first horizontal well in July this year. Planning and permits required for both wells are already secured.

Francis Egan, CEO of Cuadrilla, said:

“We are delighted to receive this consent. We are currently completing works on site in readiness to start hydraulically fracturing both wells in the next few weeks. The UK’s need for a new and reliable source of natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel, is underlined by a new report¹ suggesting the UK is going to have to rely on more coal to generate electricity. That would be a massive backwards step in reducing carbon emissions, as would continuing to import gas over long distances by pipe and ship. We are very proud to be the first operator in the UK to make significant headway in shale gas exploration.”

The first horizontal shale well was completed by Cuadrilla in April 2018 through the Lower Bowland shale rock at approximately 2,300m below surface and extends laterally for some 800m. The second horizontal shale gas well was completed in July 2018 and was drilled through the Upper Bowland shale at an approximate depth of 2,100m below the surface, extending laterally for some 750 metres through the shale. These are the first two horizontal shale exploration wells to be drilled onshore in the UK. Following hydraulic fracturing of these first two horizontal wells Cuadrilla will run an initial flow test of the gas produced from both wells for approximately six months.

SOURCE

Tougher Laws On Pipeline Protests Face Test In Louisiana

After a high-profile campaign to oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, a number of states moved to make it harder to protest oil and gas projects. Now in Louisiana, the first felony arrests of protesters could be a test case of these tougher laws as opponents vow a legal challenge.

The controversy here is over the Bayou Bridge Pipeline, the last leg of the Dakota Access. If completed, it will bring crude oil from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota, through Louisiana, where it will be exported abroad.

On a recent day, deep in the Atchafalaya swamp of South Louisiana, twigs snap under the rubber boots of about 40 protesters as they march through shaded woods. Many have tied bandannas around their faces, leaving only their eyes exposed. In the distance, backhoes fling mud as construction workers clear a path for the new Bayou Bridge Pipeline.

"Y'all are trespassing!" a construction worker shouts.

"Go home!" a protester yells back.

After a few minutes, the construction workers shut off their equipment and the protesters celebrate. But later, things get heated after the sheriff's department shows up. A deputy pins one woman to the ground, and the two sides engage in a muddy tug of war until she tumbles free.

It's incidents like this that have helped push lawmakers to take action. Earlier this year, Louisiana state Rep. Major Thibaut proposed a bill with stricter penalties for pipeline protesters.

"You know that there's a right way to do things and a wrong way," Thibaut told a state legislative committee. "And if you want to protest against something ... get your permit and you go do it in a legal fashion."

Trespassing in Louisiana is normally a misdemeanor offense. But the new law deems oil and gas pipelines to be "critical infrastructure," a classification that includes places like nuclear plants, oil refineries and water treatment facilities. As of Aug. 1, trespassing near oil and gas pipelines in the state is now a felony offense, with a possible sentence of up to five years in jail.

Several states have either passed or are considering similar laws, including Oklahoma, Iowa and Pennsylvania.

The oil and gas industry is a big part of many states' economies, including Louisiana. Craig Stevens, who represents pipeline interests with Grow America's Infrastructure Now, says these new laws will help ensure pipelines are not delayed and will also help keep both workers and protesters safe.

"It wasn't too long ago when there were, I think, four protesters that broke through and tried to penetrate, and actually did pierce a pipeline up in the Midwest," he says. "And they used blowtorches. I mean that's the type of thing could actually explode and kill somebody."

Pipeline opponents say more than 10 people have been arrested under Louisiana's stricter law. Journalist-activist Karen Savage captured the first arrests on video, which shows several security officers pulling three protesters from kayaks onto an airboat.

Those arrested said they didn't think they were doing anything illegal since they were on water, which is considered public property.

"It's a ridiculous over-criminalization of people who protest," says Bill Quigley, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans who represents protesters here and in other states.

Quigley calls the new law unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds, and he says he plans to challenge it in court. He hopes doing so will encourage other states to walk back their own laws.

So far, it's not clear whether the local district attorney will prosecute those charged with felonies. But at the Bayou Bridge protest, anti-pipeline organizer Cherri Foytlin says she and others won't be deterred.

"I hope to God no more felonies," she says. "But if there is, then they will be righteous ones."

The next day, Foytlin and three others were also arrested.

SOURCE

Computer Climate Simulations Just Crashed

Ross McKitrick and John Christy have an important new paper out in Earth and Space Science.

This is the latest fusillade in the long battle over whether the climate simulations that lie behind demands for decarbonisation and other political action actually amount to nothing but a hill of beans (as they say on the other side of the pond).

Computer climate simulations predict that manmade global warming will cause the troposphere over the tropics to warm much faster than the surface, and there have been a series of scientific papers arguing whether these predictions are being borne out in practice. In a blog post published yesterday, McKitrick relates some of the back story, including attempts by one mainstream scientist to withhold his data, and the subsequent revelation that he had truncated it in a way that fundamentally altered the conclusions that would be drawn. McKitrick also outlines a series of subsequent papers that have concluded that real-world warming in the troposphere is much less than predicted:

[W]hether we test the tropospheric trend magnitudes, or the ratio of tropospheric to surface trends, across all kinds of data sets, and across all major trend intervals, models have been shown to exaggerate the amplification rate and the warming rate, globally and in the tropics.

So it’s not looking too good for the models. The next logical step is to consider what this means for the bigger picture, and this is where the new paper comes in. As McKitrick points out, if climate simulators get the rainfall in the Amazon wrong, it’s perhaps not the end of the story – that part of the model might be adjusted. But he and Christy are suggesting that what the models indicate about the tropical troposphere is essentially a diagnostic of their structures – almost all climate models agree that it will warm rapidly and it should only be greenhouse gases that can cause such a warming.

In other words, if the models get this wrong, something is fundamentally wrong.

Which is why it’s so important that the authors conclude their paper thus:

Comparing modeled to observed trends over the past 60 years…shows that all models warm more rapidly than observations and in the majority of individual cases the discrepancy is statistically significant. We argue that this provides informative evidence against the major hypothesis in most current climate models.

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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20 September, 2018

Container ship crosses Arctic route for first time in history due to melting sea ice

The above heading is an example of hiding something in plain sight. It gives the impression that the transit through the Northeast passage was something new. In fact it has been one of Russia's commercial maritime trade routes for the past 70 years. So the key thing to note in the heading above is the word "Container". It was the first CONTAINER ship to go through.

And it was certainly no epic triumph. The ship itself was a mini-icebreaker with an ice-strengthened hull and ice cover in the Arctic is at its annual minimum in September -- but even then the ship needed "help from Russia's most powerful nuclear icebreaker" to get through. Basically it was a nothing event and the firm behind it does not plan to repeat the exercise

A commercial container ship has for the first time successfully navigated the Northern Sea Route of the Arctic Ocean, a route made possible by melting sea ice caused by global warming.

Maersk Line, the world’s biggest container shipping company, told The Independent its ship, Venta Maersk, was expected to reach its final destination of St Petersburg next week.

The new ice-class 42,000 ton vessel, carrying Russian fish and South Korea electronics, left Vladivostok, in the far east of Russia, on the 23 August.

With help from Russia's most powerful nuclear icebreaker, it followed the Northern Sea Route up through the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska, before travelling along Russia’s north coast and into the Norwegian Sea.

The route has seen growing traffic during summer months already, with cargos of oil and gas regularly making the journey.

SOURCE

Climate change is real. Welcome to the new normal

An extremely unoriginal bit of Warmism below. Tony Heller and Joe Bastardi have comprehensively debunked it so I will say no more

By Eugene Robinson

Hurricane Florence has drenched eastern North Carolina with more than 30 inches of rain, an all-time record for the state. Last year, Hurricane Harvey stalled over Houston and dumped more than 60 inches of rain, an all-time record for the whole country. Also last year, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island of Puerto Rico and caused, according to an independent study, nearly 3,000 deaths.

Welcome to the new normal.

Tropical cyclones are nothing new, of course. But climate scientists say that global warming should make such storms wetter, slower and more intense — which is exactly what seems to be happening. And if we fail to act, these kinds of devastating weather events will likely become even more frequent and more severe.

Climate change is a global phenomenon. Authorities in the Philippines are still trying to assess the damage and death toll from Typhoon Mangkhut, a rare Category 5-equivalent storm that struck the archipelago Saturday with sustained winds of 165 mph. Mangkhut went on to batter Hong Kong and now, as it weakens, is plowing across southern China.

Every human being on the planet has a stake in what governments do to limit and adapt to climate change, including leaders who, like President Trump, prefer to believe global warming is some kind of hoax. I doubt the citizens of Wilmington, N.C. — a lovely resort town that was turned into an island by widespread flooding from Florence — feel there is anything illusory about the hardship they’re going through.

SOURCE

North Dakota Is Now Pumping as Much Crude as Venezuela

North Dakota’s oil production surged to a new record in July, putting the mid-western state on par with OPEC member Venezuela.

Home to the Bakken shale play, North Dakota pumped 1.27 million barrels a day in July, according to state figures released Friday. That’s roughly the same output as Venezuela during the month. The South American nation, whose oil industry has collapsed amid a prolonged financial crisis, saw production fall further in August to 1.24 million barrels a day -- about half the level seen in early 2016, according to data from OPEC secondary sources.

Soaring output from shale formations, including the Bakken, helped the U.S. overtake Russia and Saudi Arabia to likely become the world’s biggest oil producer earlier this year, according to preliminary estimates from the Energy Information Administration. At the same time, Venezuela’s output is expected to tumble even lower, to 1 million barrels a day by the end of the year, according to the International Energy Agency.

SOURCE

Pelosi Reignites Obama Push To Shut Down Huge Chunk of Coal Industry

The Left never learn

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is renewing the Obama administration’s war on coal by supporting efforts to attack coal use in America.

On Thursday, the California Democrat criticized the coal industry during a speech at the Global Climate Action Summit in California, NTK Network reported.

“Under President Obama, we went on to pass the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act in the House. But we were stopped in the Senate by the coal industry,” Pelosi said. “For this and other reasons, I’m so grateful to Michael Bloomberg’s ‘Beyond Coal’ initiative working with the Sierra Club. It is so essential.”

On its website, “Beyond Coal” says it wants to “replace dirty coal with clean energy by mobilizing grassroots activists in local communities to advocate for the retirement of old and outdated coal plants and to prevent new coal plants from being built.” Among its objectives is to shutter a third of the nation’s coal plants by 2020.

In a New Yorker interview, Bloomberg said coal’s day is done no matter what anyone says to the contrary.

“Coal will go away in any place where there’s a free market, for sure, because the market just forces that, the economics force it,” he said, “It does not help that our federal government is opposed to some rational things and is putting out some of the drivel that they do.”

Pelosi’s most recent criticism of the coal industry was not the first time in recent weeks Pelosi attacked coal.

In an August speech at the Public Policy Institute of California she praised herself for her efforts against a small coal plant that operated in Washington, D.C., The Daily Caller reported.

“And it really is a moral issue if you believe as I do that this is God’s creation we have to be good stewards of it,” Pelosi said. “We have evangelicals and others with us — er, some, those who believe in God’s creation. So, in any case, this was a big thing for us. I had to fight some Democrats. Senator Byrd had a coal-powered plan fueling the Capitol, you know … and that’s gonna go, with all due respect to West Virginia we’re not gonna have a coal-powered plant floating around.”

Pelosi’s view is contrasted with that of President Donald Trump, who has strongly supported the coal industry, and at a recent rally had a coal miner join him on stage, according to The Daily Caller. Trump was telling the story of a miner who spoke to him about the revitalization of the coal industry.

“He said, ‘Sir, what you’ve done for the coal industry is incredible. Because we were dead, and now we’re vibrant again,’” Trump recalled.

The man then came on stage and talked about how under former President Barack Obama “the coal industry absolutely had the boot of government on its throat.”

“Many, many jobs were lost,” said the miner, whose name was not announced. “And many towns were destroyed by this. It was just a horrible thing. Horrible suffering happened in this country. Really for made-up reasons, I think. And what your administration does — has done — is bringing us back to life.”

In 2016, as part of his effort to change America’s energy sources, Obama pushed for a reduction in coal and other fossil fuels, The Washington Post reported. He said his administration would “push to change the way we manage our oil and coal resources, so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet.”

That tone was emulated in the 2016 presidential campaign by Democrat Hillary Clinton who in March 2016 said, “We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” according to Politico.

SOURCE

California Climate Policies Facing Revolt from Civil-Rights Groups

Hugely expensive green mandates will hit poor Californians the hardest.

In April, civil-rights groups sued to stop some of California’s policies designed to address climate change. Then on Monday, California governor Jerry Brown signed into law SB 100, which requires the state’s utilities to obtain all their electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045. Before signing the bill, Brown said the legislation was “sending a message to California and to the world that we’re going to meet the Paris agreement.” In fact, it will only increase the hardships that California’s climate policy imposes on the poor, as detailed in the lawsuit.

High electricity prices should be a concern for California policymakers, since electric rates in the state are already 60 percent higher than those in the rest of the country. According to a recent study by the Berkeley-based think tank Environmental Progress, between 2011 and 2017 California’s electricity rates rose more than five times as fast as those in the rest of the U.S. SB 100 will mean even higher electricity prices for Californians.

In addition to cost, the all-renewable push set forth in SB 100 faces huge challenges with regard to energy storage. Relying solely on renewables will require a battery system large enough to handle massive seasonal fluctuations in wind and solar output. (Wind-energy and solar-energy production in California is roughly three times as great during the summer months as it is in the winter.) According to the Clean Air Task Force, a Boston-based energy-policy think tank, for California to get 80 percent of its electricity from renewables would require about 9.6 terawatt-hours of storage. This would require about 500 million Tesla Powerwalls, or roughly 15 Powerwalls for every resident. A full 100 percent–renewable electricity mandate would require some 36.3 terawatt-hours of storage, or about 60 Powerwalls for every resident of California.

Increasing reliance on renewable energy also means increasing land-use conflicts. Since 2015, more than 200 government entities from Maine to California have voted to reject or restrict the encroachment of wind-energy projects. In 2015 the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously in favor of an ordinance banning large wind turbines in the county’s unincorporated areas. Three other California counties — San Diego, Solano, and Inyo — have also passed restrictions on Big Wind. Last year, the head of the California Wind Energy Association lamented that “we’re facing restrictions like that all around the state,” adding that “it’s pretty bleak in terms of the potential for new development.” The result of the anti-wind restrictions can be seen in the numbers. Last year, California had about 5,600 megawatts of installed wind capacity. That’s roughly 150 megawatts less than what the state had back in 2013.

The land-use problem facing Big Wind in California is the same throughout the rest of the U.S. and Europe: People in cities like the idea of wind turbines. People in rural areas increasingly don’t want anything to do with them. Those rural landowners don’t want to see the red blinking lights atop those massive turbines, all night, every night, for the rest of their lives. Nor do they want to be subjected to the harmful noise — both audible and inaudible — that they produce.

Even before SB 100 passed, though, California’s leaders were already facing a legal backlash from minority leaders over the high cost of the state’s climate policies. On April 27, The Two Hundred, a coalition of civil-rights leaders, filed a lawsuit in state court against the California Air Resources Board, seeking an injunction against some of the state’s carbon dioxide–reduction rules. The 102-page lawsuit declares that California’s “reputation as a global climate leader is built on the state’s dual claims of substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions while simultaneously enjoying a thriving economy. Neither claim is true.”

The gist of the lawsuit is this: California’s high housing, transportation, and energy costs are discriminatory because they are a regressive tax on the poor. The suit claims that the state’s climate laws violate the Fair Employment and Housing Act because CARB’s new greenhouse-gas-emissions rules on housing units in the state “have a disparate negative impact on minority communities and are discriminatory against minority communities and their members.” The suit also claims the state’s climate laws are illegal under the Federal Housing Act, again because their effect is felt predominantly by minority communities. It also makes a constitutional claim that minorities are being denied equal protection under the law because California’s climate regulations are making affordable housing unavailable to them.

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 September, 2018

USA Today op-ed ignores evidence to claim climate change had no role in Hurricane Florence

Under the above heading an article appeared which challenged an article by climate skeptic Roy Spencer. Spencer dismissed on various grounds any connection between storm Florence and global warming. The article is a rather complex piece of formatting so I am not going to reproduce it here but it is readily accessible here. I imagine Spencer will do his own reply to it in due course but, as a critique, it ranges from weak to hilarious so I thought I might make a few brief comments on it.

For a start two of the "4 scientists" are well known Warmists -- Kerry Emmanuel and Andrew Dessler -- so any judgments they make cannot be regarded as unbiased. Knowing that what they say will be under expert scrutiny, however, they are unusually cautious in their utterances, which enables us to see how weak their case is.

They draw on two types of "evidence" to support their conclusions: The first is "scientific studies" which are simply modelling exercises. And, given the stellar record of failure that attends Warmist predictions based on modelling, such "studies" must be regarded as just a game played among friends. Beyond that the studies must be regarded as equivalent to an advertisement for the sale of the Brooklyn bridge. The studies concerned are in fact worse than the usual Warmist modelling in that they generate no testable predictions so are not science at all. They are just games.

The second type of evidence used in criticism of Spencer does at least use empirical observations. They point to various weak trends over a limited time period. And it is that line of argument that amuses me most. Regardless of how accurate their accounts of trends are, they have no way of tying those trends to global warming. I am prepared to accept all the trends they quote as gospel but I see nothing in them that can be shown as due to global warming. There is no way we can show that those trends are non-natural.

You can pick out runs in any body of data but showing that they are non random requires access to the whole body of the data concerned, or at least a representative sample of it -- and the whole body of climate data spans millions of years so that is quite impossible. So the only way they can tie their quoted trends to anthropogenic global warming takes them back to their modelling again -- so it is all faith, not science.

I first put up this critique on Facebook and received the folowing spot-on comment from Roy Spencer: "Why 4? If they were correct, it would only take 1"

Fair's fair!

Al Gore's claim about Hurricane Florence doused by scientists

Meteorologist Ryan Maue says Gore's assertion made 'without any evidence'

Another climate-change claim by former Vice President Al Gore is coming under fire, this one involving Hurricane Florence.

Mr. Gore said Friday that two major storms from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans had never made landfall at the same time, referring to Hurricane Florence, the Category 1 hurricane that struck North Carolina on Friday, and Super Typhoon Mangkhut, which hit the Philippines early Saturday.

“This is the first time in history that two major storms are making landfall from the Atlantic and the Pacific simultaneously,” Mr. Gore told the crowd at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, which wrapped up Friday.

He cited the storm activity on opposite sides of the globe as an example of climate change driving unusual and extreme weather, but meteorologist Ryan Maue was quick to dump cold water on Mr. Gore’s assertion.

“Al Gore just (fraudulently) claimed without any evidence that we’ve never had hurricanes in both the Atlantic and Pacific making landfall at the same time,” tweeted Mr. Maue, an adjunct scholar at the free-market Cato Institute.

University of Colorado Boulder meteorologist Roger A. Pielke Sr. also took issue with the claim by Mr. Gore, known for his 2006 climate-change film, An Inconvenient Truth, and the 2017 follow-up, An Inconvenient Sequel.

“Such statements show that he is not familiar with the history of tropical cyclone landfalls,” said Mr. Pielke in an email.

Numerous articles and even books have been written fact-checking and challenging Mr. Gore’s climate predictions and pronouncements, including meteorologist Roy Spencer’s An Inconvenient Deception, and “Al Gore’s Science Fiction: A Skeptic’s Guide to an Inconvenient Truth,” a 154-page paper by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Marlo Lewis Jr.

In his Friday remarks, Mr. Gore also blamed climate change for driving wildfires, drought, floods, mudslides, “rain bombs,” the May water shortage in Cape Town, South Africa, and record dead trees in California.

Mr. Maue said the “first time in history” claim appeared to originate with an NBC News report last week headlined, “In rare event, Atlantic, Pacific storms churn at the same time.”

The article cited Colorado State University meteorologist Phil Klotzbach, who described the busy storm season in the Pacific and Atlantic as uncommon but said nothing about simultaneous landings being unprecedented.

“The thing that’s interesting now is the Pacific is still active, but the Atlantic is very active, which isn’t normal,” Mr. Klotzbach told NBC. “I’m surprised to see the Pacific and Atlantic active at the same time.”

Mr. Maue, whose comments were first reported in the Daily Caller, said the NBC article “completely missed the mark on ongoing hurricanes and their rarity.”

SOURCE

Climate Science Versus The FangZhi

The Fang Zhi is kind of a government gazette that has been issued by Chinese governments for thousands of years. Data on extreme weather events and famines are included in this gazette. The data show that floods and droughts are common in China and that they are periodically particularly severe.

A cyclical pattern of famines caused by severe drought followed by devastating floods may be traced back through all of recorded history in China. The period of this cycle has been estimated to be about fifty years. A peculiarity of this weather cycle is that floods and droughts can occur at the same time in China because weather in Southern China is about 180 degrees out of phase with that in Northern China. History has recorded many cases when the south is flooding from torrential rainfall while the north is in drought or conversely when the north is flooding and the south is dry.

Much of the sociology, philosophy, literature, and politics of China have been shaped by the flood and drought cycle. Some scholars go so far as to claim that all of Chinese history is a story of the people’s fight against famine caused by this calamitous cycle of weather. One of the largest infrastructure projects in history is the failed attempt to link southern Chinese rainfall with northern Chinese rainfall using a very ambitious canal network. The construction and maintenance of granaries on an immense scale has consumed a succession of Chinese dynasties while famines have been the downfall of others. The 2005 drought in Hainan and Guangdong along with torrential rains and floods in Northern China fits the known pattern of extreme weather in China.

If you truncate history at 1961, however, these weather events will appear to be unusual and unnatural. An equally unnatural cause for this kind of weather may then be assessed. In particular, those with a predisposition to the global warming/climate change hypothesis contained in the Kyoto Protocol and the UNFCCC will find in these events the kind of evidence they need to support their predisposed position (See for example, Waiting in vain for rain that’s two years late has Hainan’s farmers fretting about their future, The Nation, Bangkok, June 3, 2005).

Fossil fuel consumption has risen dramatically since 1961. The data also show what appears to be an irregular increase in the CO2 content of the atmosphere in parallel with rising fuel consumption. At the same time we find the average temperature of the earth has been rising since 1979. It is tempting to draw a causal link from fossil fuels to CO2 and from CO2 to temperature and from there to extreme weather events. These relationships appear so convincing that no further scientific evidence is sought to support the subsumed causalities.

Yet statistical analysis of the observational data do not show the correlations that would exist if this chain of causation to be true were true. The correlation argument is presented in more detail in two related posts. HUMAN CAUSED CLIMATE CHANGE, SPURIOUS CORRELATIONS IN CLIMATE SCIENCE.

In the Chinese weather data, the global warming enthusiasts have been undone by the Fang Zhi. Their claim that fossil fuel consumption is to be blamed for this year’s drought in southern China and floods in northern China appears grossly childish and specious in light of history.

SOURCE

Australia: Greens MP cops onslaught of online abuse after supporting proposed fishing ban

It seems to me that authoritarians who try to interfere with other people's lives should expect retribution for that. Trying to stop people from going fishing is incredibly authoritarian

A Greens MP is currently being bullied online after he showed support for the governments controversial 'lock outs'.

Justin Field's Facebook page has been flooded with cruel abuse, memes and even death threats since the New South Wales MP backed the proposal.

'You're a f***ing germ piece of s***…we will destroy you at the next election you f***ing germ…die you bastard,' one user said on Facebook. 'Prepare to get your legs broken Justin,' wrote another.

Mr Field, a Greens MP in the NSW upper house, has also been called a 'grub' and a 'maggot', with one user going as far as saying they hoped he was 'taken out of the equation'.

Mr Field's wife has also been targeted, with users demanding she make him respond to their vile comments.

The backlash began after Mr Field's vocally supported the governments plan to ban recreational fishing in 25 cities along the coast in a bid to help fish stocks recover.

Mr Field responded to the online hate in interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, acknowledging that although he expected debate and a 'certain rough and tumble in politics', people have gone too far.

He claimed that the raised platform of key figures in talk-back radio and print media have deliberately misinformed the public about the proposal.

'I think some politicians, fishing personalities and the media have been spreading deliberate misinformation to drum up fear and anger over the proposal and that has played a role in the level of hate being expressed about the plan,' Mr Field wrote.

Since the onslaught of comments, the NSW government has back flipped on the plan, just weeks after announcing the proposal.

Primary Industries Minister Niall Blair said on Monday they will be not going ahead with the fishing bans, calling the original proposal 'absolutely unacceptable'.

'The Government has now rewarded this appalling behaviour by effectively walking away from a Sydney Marine Park proposal,' Mr Field said on Facebook following the announcement.

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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18 September, 2018

Yes, You Can Blame Bad Storms on Climate Change. The question is no longer an unanswerable hypothetical (?)

Fickling and Flam below are echoing yet again the claim that you CAN tie individual storms to global warming. They don't mention that such claims are all the results of modelling, which is intrinsically unreliable, particularly in biased hands. And, unlike some modelling, the claims cannot be checked against reality so are not science. They are all just Fickling and Flam.

Fickling makes an interesting claim: "The science behind these studies is relatively new, but draws on long-established methods. “These are techniques that climate scientists stole from epidemiologists and public health researchers,” says Sophie Lewis, a research fellow at the University of New South Wales"

That is an unfortunate admission indeed. Fickling and Lewis are obviously unaware of the replication crisis in medical and psychological research -- a crisis which stems from the fact that such research CAN be tested for realism. And it has been found in up to 70% of cases to be unreplicable. Doing the same experiment twice, the second experiment gives quite different results from the first experiment. With true claims you would get the same result on both occasions

And if that is true of the more rigorous research in those fields, what does it say about the credibility of the more speculative, epidemiological research? Anybody who is inclined to think that epidemiological conclusions are reliable should read John Brignell's hefty book, "The epidemiologists: Have they got scares for you!". Brignell goes through hundreds of epidemiological studies and shows they are rubbish.

And you don't actually need Brignell to show you that. Epidemiological studies in medicine produce such different conclusions about the same question that from time to time you have meta-analytic studies, such as the Cochrane studies, which endeavour to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the studies on any given topic are often so weak that the Cochrane researchers don't even consider most of them. They usually find only a small number -- as few as four out of a hundred or more -- studies that offer useful evidence. And even there the final conclusions are often tentative

And the now debunked but but sometimes still heard claim that red meat and fat are particularly bad for you came out of epidemiological research by Ancel Keys and others.

So if you think climate studies are better than that I've got this great bridge I want to sell you

There’s a familiar refrain that goes up when extreme weather events bear down on population centers, as Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut are now doing in the western Atlantic and Pacific Oceans: While carbon emissions from human activity may be causing a general warming, it’s impossible to draw a direct link between any one event and climate change.

That’s a comforting thought. Droughts, hurricanes, floods and heatwaves have been a feature of the global climate since long before humans walked the earth. Who’s to say whether this latest round of disasters is a result of our industrial and agricultural practices, or simply the normal weather variations of a chaotic atmosphere?

As my colleague Faye Flam wrote this week, there’s a natural tendency to assign blame in the wake of terrible events, and the answer to the question is often more complicated than a simple yes or no. At the same time, it’s no longer right to suggest that attribution is an unanswerable hypothetical, like pondering how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. We know a great deal about it — and the answers are troubling.

Studies of the European heatwaves that have become an almost annual occurrence in recent years have shown that they were several times more likely to happen as a result of climate change, for instance. The odds of the coral bleaching suffered by the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 were 175 times greater than they’d have been without human-induced emissions. And three anomalous warm spells in 2016 would have been impossible in a preindustrial climate, according to papers published this year in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

The science behind these studies is relatively new, but draws on long-established methods. “These are techniques that climate scientists stole from epidemiologists and public health researchers,” says Sophie Lewis, a research fellow at the University of New South Wales.

Researchers use computer models of the climate and run thousands of simulations to establish the odds of events happening at current and preindustrial concentrations of atmospheric carbon. The level of accuracy has risen drastically in recent years as computing power has increased, the number of people working in the field has gone up, and an expanding volume of weather data, climate modelling and extreme events has produced more information to work with.

Importantly for a scientific field, where falsifiability is essential, it’s often the case that no link can be proved. In 35 percent of the 131 peer-reviewed studies published in the American Meteorological Society’s annual reviews of extreme event attribution since 2011, no connection to climate change could be demonstrated.

Floods in Chennai in 2015 and an Indian heatwave the following year had no clear tie to climate change, according to studies published by the World Weather Attribution Project, a scientists’ group. Cold snaps in North America and Europe in 2017 were probably less likely than they’d otherwise have been thanks to human emissions — because the atmosphere is getting warmer, after all. Droughts in the horn of Africa between 2015 and 2017 also showed no clear link to climate change and may in some cases have been less likely, although the water shortage in Cape Town last year was about 3.3 times more probable.

There are still widely varying degrees of accuracy that can be achieved. Large, long-lasting events like heatwaves and cold snaps have become so well understood that researchers are increasingly not focusing their attention on them. “That’s established science now, so it would be like a public health journal publishing on the risks of smoking,” says Lewis.

More complex, short-term events like storms and high winds can be harder to analyze — though even there, the rains that inundated Houston during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 are reckoned to have been three times as likely thanks to climate change.

“For extreme short-timescale rainfall it is very easy to show a link,” said David Karoly, leader of the earth systems and climate change hub at Australia’s National Environmental Science Program. “As the temperature rises, the atmosphere holds more moisture, which is likely to lead to changes in the amount of rainfall.”

While analyses of events in the early 2000s could take more than a year, they’re increasingly now being done in real time, too. One study published last week attempted to isolate the climate-change impact of Hurricane Florence in advance, estimating that it would be stronger and drop 50 percent more rainfall than if it had hit in a preindustrial climate.

The results of this don’t just matter to scientists and climate campaigners. Insurers have a natural interest in the odds of disastrous events, and have been collecting data on extreme weather for decades. The Actuaries Climate Index, a study of anomalous weather events in the U.S. and Canada dating back to the early 1960s, has shown a marked rising trend in recent years that ought to give insurers and reinsurers pause in considering how to protect against future risks.

We’d think it bizarre to state that there’s no link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, even though causation in individual cases is impossible to prove. In the same way, we should drop the comforting belief that the origins of individual weather disasters are mysterious and unknowable. Over the coming years, more and more extreme events will happen — and scientists will grow increasingly sure of our role in causing them.

SOURCE

Bill Nye Gets Dealt Blistering Fact-Check by an Actual Scientist

We are all probably watching the weather developments in the Carolinas — big storms tend to make us sit up and pay attention, no matter where we are.

But something else I hope you have also paid attention to are the left’s psychotic claims that President Donald Trump is to blame for the climate change that supposedly caused Hurricane Florence.

Well, facts are funny things: They have a pesky way of collapsing the liberal narrative. On Friday, Tucker Carlson interviewed Former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer, who blew the liberal climate change theories out of the water.

In the interview, Dr. Spencer threw cold water all over Bill Nye the Science Guy’s statements that Hurricane Florence is caused by climate change.

Dr Spencer acknowledges the earth has gotten warmer, but he doesn’t think the change in temperature is due to climate change. He believes it’s part of the earth’s natural weather cycles. And Bill Nye isn’t going to like Spencer’s scientific data that supports his findings.

Dr Spencer explains to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson: “Well, it has gotten warmer as you said, since the 1950s there has been a warming trend, but what we haven’t seen in terns of any long term weather measurements is whether there’s been any change in severe weather. There hasn’t been any increase in hurricanes. That’s on a global basis in the United States.”

“The frequency of hits of the United States by major hurricanes has gone down by 50 percent since the 1930s and 1940s. There’s been no increase in droughts, no increase in floods. Tornados are down but still weather varies a lot especially hurricanes, year to year, decade to decade.”

“So there is a huge amount of variability, OK, some stall, produce a bunch of rain. Certainly North Carolina is going to have a major flooding disaster, but this is what Mother Nature does naturally, and if there’s a human influence there you wouldn’t know it because there’s so much natural variability,” said Dr. Spencer.

Enter common sense as Carlson asks the obvious question as to why people are claiming global warming is to blame for hurricanes if the data doesn’t support it?

Dr. Spencer’s refreshingly candid remarks might just floor the global warming fanatics. It appears he believes as I do, that they are just saying “stupid things.”

“I don’t know, why do people like The Washington Post say such stupid things? It’s because the people who are informing us in the media about global warming are people like Al Gore, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Neil deGrasse Tyson, people that don’t know anything about atmospheric science,” he said.

Dr. Spencer also responded to Carlson’s challenge of Nye’s qualifications as a scientist. “He’s not a trained scientist. I believe he’s an engineer of some sort.” “Plus he has a widely viewed YouTube video called ‘Climate 101’ where he faked an experiment,” Spencer added.

Liberals would do well to pay attention when choosing to follow the lead of their so-called experts.

On Tuesday, an article by The Washington Post accused President Trump of being “complicit” in facilitating global warming.

“Yet when it comes to extreme weather, Mr. Trump is complicit. He plays down humans’ role in increasing the risks, and he continues to dismantle efforts to address those risks. It is hard to attribute any single weather event to climate change. But there is no reasonable doubt that humans are priming the Earth’s systems to produce disasters.”

On Wednesday, Bill Nye the Science Guy told MSNBC that Florence was the direct result of climate change: “Now I look forward of course to all the hate tweets. It’s going to be great, about a guy who took a lot of physics can’t possibly read a graph. I got all that. But everybody, this is not in anybody’s best interests to continue to deny climate change.”

Hurricane season is just beginning and from the looks of things it’s going to be a long one. And I have no doubt there will be more “stupid” discourse from liberals about climate change and why the president is responsible for it.

Maybe the bright side in this discussion is that more real scientific experts are coming forward with hard facts that will continue to weaken the liberal global warming narrative.

SOURCE

Keep carbon taxes in the ground

Permanently bury these job-killing proposals, after pounding wooded stakes through their hearts

Paul Driessen

The House of Representatives recently passed a sense of Congress resolution that a carbon tax would kill jobs, damage the revitalized U.S. economy, and disproportionately impact poor, minority and working class families. The vote also reflects the fact that America is still over 80% dependent on fossil fuels – and helps explain why a misguided Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) was able to convince only one colleague (Brian Fitzpatrick, R-PA) to cosponsor his carbon tax bill back in July. In the meantime:

Doug Ford became Ontario’s new premier by vigorously opposing the carbon taxes and pricy wind and solar electricity that Canadians have come to despise. He quickly eliminated $2 billion in taxes a year by canceling 200 heavily subsidized renewable energy projects implemented by his predecessor. Meanwhile, the Trudeau government is facing increased resistance to its plans for a steadily escalating carbon tax.

In Australia, Angus Taylor’s appointment as Energy Minister means wind and solar subsidies will soon be terminated. This will undoubtedly delight residents of South Australia, home of a 50% renewable energy program, the world’s highest electricity prices, two weeks of zero wind/zero electricity in two years (September 2016 and 2018), and some 200,000 families no longer able to afford electricity.

Germany’s solar industry is collapsing as its subsidies plummet; its wind turbine subsidies are scheduled to end in 2020; ancient villages and forests have been bulldozed to allow coal mining to fuel its new generating plants; and the country’s Green Party has admitted that “de-carbonizing” the German and world economies can be accomplished only by limiting or eliminating democracy worldwide.

And yet, like Dracula monsters, carbon tax proposals keep rising from the dead.

Several big corporations, Republican officials Jim Baker, Hank Paulson and George Schultz, and their Climate Leadership Council now claim that 56% of American voters support taxing carbon, while only 26% oppose the idea. So says their recent survey. You ask, How is that possible?!?

To begin with, they didn’t call it a tax. They cleverly labeled their scheme a “carbon dividend” (who doesn’t like dividends?) and claimed “the vast majority of American families” would somehow come out ahead if it is implemented. The survey didn’t mention that their program would be administered by our ever-friendly Internal Revenue Service or that the tax would begin at $43 per metric ton of “carbon” emitted. (Trudeau’s hated tax begins at “a mere” US$7.68 per ton and rises to “only” US$38.47 by 2022.)

They didn’t mention that the tax would be imposed on foundries, factories, refineries, coal- and gas-fired power plants, other industrial facilities, and even (at a lower rate) on products imported from other countries. Nor did they intimate how much these advisors, companies and thousands of members of the $2-trillion-per-year Global Climate Industrial Complex would benefit financially from the arrangements.

Equally important, constant assurances that “market-based” carbon tax schemes like this $43-per-ton version would be “revenue neutral,” receipts would be returned to taxpayers in the form of tax reductions elsewhere, and revenues would be used to reduce federal budget deficits are illusory. Can the Council somehow guarantee that the next Congress will not (promptly) reverse these “net-gain” provisions?

But let’s get to the nuts and bolts of “carbon taxes” and “clean, green, renewable” energy.

As MIT emeritus professor of atmospheric physics Richard Lindzen points out, those who control carbon control life. And make no mistake, these are taxes on carbon-based fuels: on 83% of the energy we use. They are taxes on everything we make, ship, eat and do – on our lives, livelihoods, living standards, transportation, heating, cooling, refrigeration, healthcare, clothing and everything else we touch.

By using the word “carbon,” tax proponents deceptively suggest they want to tax soot, pollution, toxic emissions. But with modern scrubbers and other pollution controls, what comes out of U.S. power plant and factory “smoke stacks” today is almost entirely water vapor and carbon dioxide.

Fossil fuels are what made our health and economic progress over the past 150 years possible – and continue to do so. Carbon (coal, oil and natural gas) is what we burn to generate electricity, power factories and operate vehicles. Carbon dioxide is what is created and emitted by that combustion process.

So these Climate Leadership members want to tax carbon dioxide: the gas of life, the miracle molecule that we exhale and that makes life on Earth possible. In fact, the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the faster and better food crop, forest and grassland plants grow; the better they survive droughts, diseases and viruses. Rising atmospheric CO2 levels are actually “greening the Earth,” including forests worldwide.

The Council’s goal is to “keep fossil fuels in the ground,” and force a transition to wind, solar, ethanol and other “renewable” energy. In the process, the activists, politicians, lobbyists and crony corporatists expect to get incredibly wealthy and gain increasing control over global economies and living standards.

How would $43 per metric ton of carbon dioxide affect you? It would raise your electricity and gasoline costs to the exorbitant rates families and businesses already pay in California, Denmark and Germany. Every aspect of your lives would be impacted. Millions of jobs would be lost. In just one example, at California’s or Germany’s business rate (18¢ per kWh), a hospital that now pays 8¢ per kWh and $1.6 million a year would see its electricity costs rise by an unsustainable $2 million annually!

To top it off, all this incredible pain and lost liberty would bring no climate benefits. Even assuming for the sake of argument that carbon dioxide has replaced the sun and other powerful natural forces that do control Earth’s climate – poor nations are burning more carbon fuels every year, emitting more CO2 and other greenhouse gases, and building or planning to build some 1,600 new coal-fired power plants.

It is sheer nonsense to claim that 400 ppm CO2 and another 1 degree C (1.4 F) of global warming will bring “unprecedented cataclysms” and “existential threats” to people and planet. Carbon dioxide has some effect, but saying it controls the climate ignores five Pleistocene glacial and interglacial periods, the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, the Little Ice Age, the Dust Bowl and Anasazi drought, the record 12 years of no major hurricanes making U.S. landfall, and other natural weather and climate changes.

Scientists simply do not yet know enough about Earth’s climate or what caused past climate fluctuations even to separate current human influences from natural influences – much less predict future changes.

Poor countries signed onto Paris climate treaty because they expected to get $100 billion every year in “climate adaptation and mitigation” money from (currently) wealthy countries that the treaty says must slash their fossil fuel use, carbon dioxide emissions, economic growth and living standards – while now poor nations dramatically increase theirs. With rich countries unable and refusing to pay up, the treaty is likely to implode like the house of cards it is, before or during the [Katowice,%20Poland]COP24 summit in Katowice, Poland.

Last but not least, renewable energy is not renewable, clean, green or sustainable. Manufacturing wind turbines, solar panels, backup batteries and ultra-long transmission lines requires removing billions of tons of rock and earth to extract and process millions of tons of exotic ores, limestone, iron, manganese, copper, petroleum-based fiberglass and composites, and other materials – all using fossil fuels.

The vital exotics come from Mongolia, China and Congo, under minimal to nonexistent environmental, health and safety standards. But that’s somebody else’s backyard, so virtue preening climate activists can just ignore the emissions, habitat destruction, water pollution, health effects and premature deaths.

No wonder alarmists are ranting nonstop at their Global Climate Action Circus, devoting $1 billion a year to climate activism and “education,” and working with and for Democrat governors and state attorneys general to advance their radical agenda, draft laws and regulations, and attack and even prosecute climate chaos skeptics. This abuse of government law enforcement powers and taxpayer dollars must end.

What needs to be kept in the ground is not the fossil fuels that make modern health and living standards possible, while spurring plant growth. It is carbon tax proposals, preferably with large wooden stakes driven through their hearts. May sanity and reality yet prevail.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author books and articles on energy, climate change, economic development and human rights.

FAKE NEWS: Weather Channel Reporter Caught Exaggerating During Storm Coverage

Have the lies in the mainstream media become so prevalent that there is no longer any escape from the fake news?

The answer seems to be no after a reporter for The Weather Channel who was covering Hurricane Florence was busted after a video of him clearly exaggerating the effects of the winds and rain hit Twitter and has now gone completely viral.

Mike Seidel was in Wilmington, NC on Friday and appeared to be holding on for dear life as the storm barreled down on the area but questions – and much scorn – quickly arose when two people casually strolled by in the background and it was all caught by the camera.

The video shows longtime Weather Channel meteorologist and reporter Mike Seidel as he tried to gain his footing as the storm’s winds bore down on him.

“This is about as nasty as its been,” Seidel, who was reporting from Wilmington, N.C., says in the clip while bracing against the wind.

The camera then pans over to a pair of figures casually walking on a road behind the reporter.

“So dramatic!” one Twitter user wrote with the video clip. “Dude from the weather channel bracing for his life, as 2 dudes just stroll past.”

After seeing this, how could you ever watch hurricane coverage without being suspicious again?

If Seidel ends up being sacked by TWC due to public relations fallout over this stunt, he is a cinch to land a similar gig at CNN. In fact, he’s already passed the audition with flying colors.

SOURCE

Ruling Australian conservative party has been taken over by climate denialists, says Labor party leader

If only it were true. There is a great deal of skepticism among Federal conservatives but it has not yet become formal policy

Bill Shorten has confirmed Labor is prepared to adopt the government’s junked national energy guarantee if it wins power, as he declared the Liberal Party had been taken over by “climate denialists”.

The Opposition Leader said the framework of the NEG could be used by a future Labor government to create a policy that would lower carbon emissions.

“The government did some work on this national energy guarantee and we are prepared to use that as part of our framework going forward. That’s not our final position, I hasten to add, and we’ll have consultation and discussion with my colleagues,” Mr Shorten told the ABC.

“I think that people are sick and tired of the climate change wars. The climate denialists for all intents and purposes, like Tony Abbott, have taken over the Liberal Party. They didn’t want the clean energy target. They didn’t want an emissions trading scheme.

“The real issue here is that we’ve now got a climate denialist party in power, and the only policy they can do now they’ve rejected the national energy guarantee is one that will drive up power prices and do nothing to encourage more renewables.

“So I’m hoping to work with the sensible part of the Liberal Party, with industry, with environmentalists, and we’ll come up with a framework which will look a lot like, I hope, parts of the national energy guarantee and, of course, we want to see lower prices and more renewables.”

“It just led to a loss of jobs, higher prices and greater unreliability and a lack of investment,” he said.

Mr Shorten failed to endorse his energy spokesman, Mark Butler, who said he did not support the Adani coal mine.

“I think that that is essentially Mark’s judgment, that he doesn’t think it is going to happen and he doesn’t support it. I think that a lot of people feel that way. Our policy is that we won’t put a single taxpayer dollar into the project. There’s a lot of scepticism if the project is ever going to happen,” he said.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here. 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 September, 2018

Coastal wetlands not endangered by sea-level rise

The academic article below endeavours to look at all the factors that might be at work if the sea level rises. The simplistic Greenie claims that X amount of sea level rise will cause X amount of land loss is dismissed in favour of real science. And the conclusion is surprising. Sediment buildup is likely to keep the land level where it is. The area flooded ("accommodation space") will have all sorts of complex structures and features which will tend to catch sediment -- and active measures could also be taken to increase the sediment trapping ability of the area, further insuring no wetland loss

Future response of global coastal wetlands to sea-level rise

Mark Schuerch et al.

Abstract

The response of coastal wetlands to sea-level rise during the twenty-first century remains uncertain. Global-scale projections suggest that between 20 and 90 per cent (for low and high sea-level rise scenarios, respectively) of the present-day coastal wetland area will be lost, which will in turn result in the loss of biodiversity and highly valued ecosystem services1,2,3.

These projections do not necessarily take into account all essential geomorphological4,5,6,7 and socio-economic system feedbacks8. Here we present an integrated global modelling approach that considers both the ability of coastal wetlands to build up vertically by sediment accretion, and the accommodation space, namely, the vertical and lateral space available for fine sediments to accumulate and be colonized by wetland vegetation.

We use this approach to assess global-scale changes in coastal wetland area in response to global sea-level rise and anthropogenic coastal occupation during the twenty-first century. On the basis of our simulations, we find that, globally, rather than losses, wetland gains of up to 60 per cent of the current area are possible, if more than 37 per cent (our upper estimate for current accommodation space) of coastal wetlands have sufficient accommodation space, and sediment supply remains at present levels.

In contrast to previous studies1,2,3, we project that until 2100, the loss of global coastal wetland area will range between 0 and 30 per cent, assuming no further accommodation space in addition to current levels. Our simulations suggest that the resilience of global wetlands is primarily driven by the availability of accommodation space, which is strongly influenced by the building of anthropogenic infrastructure in the coastal zone and such infrastructure is expected to change over the twenty-first century.

Rather than being an inevitable consequence of global sea-level rise, our findings indicate that large-scale loss of coastal wetlands might be avoidable, if sufficient additional accommodation space can be created through careful nature-based adaptation solutions to coastal management.

Nature volume 561, pages231–234 (2018)

Bloom Energy: A Bloomdoggle

The public vaguely remembers and little understands even the spectacular green project failures that cost investors and taxpayers tens of billions, largely because they are rarely presented in everyday terms.

But that is changing as the public becomes more aware of Bloom’s involvement in the D.C. swamp, crony deals and pollution problems. That could ordain Bloom as an example of deep-rooted green energy corruption — and launch resistance against these programs.

Bloom customers include America’s most prestigious corporate brands. AT&T, Google, eBay, Apple, Amazon, Staples and others have helped Bloom cultivate a well-polished image, enhanced by ads extolling the companies as virtuous early adopters of climate-protecting green energy technologies. Contradictions to this narrative are obscured but abundant.

Bloom survives on federal and state subsidies. Its S-1 Registration Statement states: “Our business currently depends on the availability of rebates, tax credits and other financial incentives.”

Ideally, subsidies enable new technologies. But government entities decide which technologies deserve largesse, at what levels and under what terms. This makes subsidies highly political, and subject to shifting political circumstances.

For example, after years of dependence, Bloom lost its 30 percent federal investment tax credit (ITC) in late 2016. Sales plummeted.

But with Kleiner Perkins, other lobbyists and senators like Tom Carper, Delaware Democrat, and Chuck Schumer, New York Democrat, promoting Bloom’s virtues, Congress reinstated Bloom’s ITC in the 2017 tax bill and even made it retroactive. Bloom rebounded and the IPO was feasible. The swamp delivered.

Bloom makes solid oxide fuel cells that use an electrochemical reaction to convert natural gas into electricity at the customer’s site. On-site generation is called “distributed” or “behind-the-meter” energy. It eliminates costs, complexities and inefficiencies associated with long-distance transmission and distribution from large power plants, which lose about 7% of their generated electricity over power lines.

Distributed energy users avoid that power loss and, proportionally, the costs of maintaining utility transmissions lines. But the fixed maintenance costs are divided among smaller groups of users, causing electric rates to rise proportionally.

Solar panels on the rich family’s roof (distributed energy) are proportionally paid for by the worker who installed the subsidized panels. By installing Bloom technology, Apple benefits, but its employees and customers’ communities experience rising electric bills. These households cannot afford to play the fuel cell game. They just pay for it.

These and other factors were exposed in Delaware, where Bloom cut a sweet deal in 2012. For $12 million, a $1/year land lease for a factory and a 21-year arrangement for selling Bloom-generated electricity — all courtesy of state ratepayers and taxpayers — Bloom agreed to build a factory and bring 900 high-paying, allegedly clean-energy manufacturing jobs to Delaware.

To date, Bloom has created only 277 Delaware jobs; the rest are in India. Bloom was penalized $1.5 million for missing its jobs target. This was peanuts considering that Bloom has received $190 million under the electricity sales agreement, which has 16 more years to go.

Billions of taxpayer dollars subsidize wind, solar and other green projects like Bloom. These projects are complex and never explained or displayed in a homeowner’s electric bill. However, in Delaware Bloom’s costs are prominently displayed on every monthly electric bill, along with solar and wind costs.

Consumers (and voters) are increasingly upset, as they realize that Bloom’s original forecast of $0.70 per household has ballooned to $5.00 a month, and still rising. Bloom under-delivered on jobs by 70 percent and underestimated costs by 700 percent.

Bloom electricity is sold to the grid via Delmarva Power, acting as Bloom’s agent. Since Delmarva is a utility, regulated by the Public Service Commission, Bloom’s monthly PSC performance reports are also public.

Performance transparency became a problem when a Delaware think tank hired chemical engineer Lindsay Leveen to analyze Bloom’s monthly reports. Six years of data confirm significant efficiency decreases as units degrade. Maintenance and operational costs increase and are passed along to consumers.

Moreover, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that Bloom’s units generate hazardous wastes and fined Bloom $1million. The dispute is currently in the courts, creating another awkward situation for the “green tech” company.

Then North Carolina’s environmental regulators fined Bloom customer Apple Computer for multiple violations regarding hazardous wastes at Apple’s server farm near Charlotte, N.C. Apple claimed Bloom was responsible; Bloom said it was Apple’s problem.

Bloom won the dispute, and Apple paid the state a $40,000 fine, without admitting wrongdoing. It’s reasonable that every Bloom customer has a similar inconvenient problem.

Bloom’s bigger difficulty may be that Mr. Leveen is outraged by the deceptions he’s uncovered. It was Mr. Leveen who alerted Tar Heel environmental regulators about Bloom and Apple. He’s also approached state and federal regulators, media and others with his data and findings in Bloom’s IPO documents.

SOURCE

Finding ‘clean power’ is the least of New York’s energy worries

A key Team de Blasio aide is fretting that the closure of the Indian Point nuclear-power plant will lead to more electricity coming from “dirty” fossil fuels. Yet the truth may be far worse.

If Indian Point closes as planned by 2021, “we will see localized impacts” before any clean-energy sources are up and running. That, The Post reported this week, is what top de Blasio energy aide Susanne Des-Roches told a forum earlier this year.

She feared the plant’s replacement power would be “heavy” on greenhouse gases. She also cited “cost impacts” from IP’s closure — i.e., higher electric bills. She’s right: Wind and solar “clean energy” is unlikely to be sufficient to replace IP’s 2,000 MW of juice — not by 2021, and quite possibly never.

Which leaves fossil fuels, particularly natural gas. So why does climate-change warrior Mayor de Blasio, DesRoches’ boss, support IP’s shutdown?

The plant is closing after spending years (and up to $200 million) fighting legal harassment by Gov. Cuomo, who (in a suck-up to anti-nuke radicals) claims IP puts the metro area at risk of nuclear contamination — which tons of evidence show is fear-mongering nonsense.

But fracking has made natural gas cheap and nuclear power less economical, so IP’s owners threw in the towel.

Thing is, high costs, unreliable juice and greenhouse-gas emissions are the least of New York’s post-Indian-Point concerns. The big question: Will there be enough power from any source, dirty or clean?

Cuomo has nixed pipelines for natural gas. Last month, he denied a key permit to a new Orange County natural-gas power plant. Con Ed is so worried about shortages, it’s spending $100 million a year on workarounds.

As we’ve warned before: Stock up on candles while you still can.

SOURCE

Does Russia Deploy American Green Groups as Pawns?

The Trump administration, despite being accused of facilitating Russian collusion in the 2016 Presidential election, is, with the rest of America, actually a victim of Russian sabotage.

American environmental groups’ threats to halt energy projects and defence operations, long a problem, have grown recently, thanks in part to Russian support. They are now more dangerous to energy security than ever.

While the media remain obsessed with “Russia collusion” in the 2016 elections, they ignore a more serious problem: Russian efforts to shrink American energy production.

Russian-backed cyberattacks on the U.S. energy sector amount to what U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry calls “an act of war.” But while worrisome, those probably are less effective in the long run than another strategy.

It’s not mere collusion but open and direct cooperation between Russia and American environmental organizations to thwart the growth of the U.S. energy industry.

That industry is on the rise, thanks to the discovery and, by applying the combined technologies of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, use of huge natural gas reserves across large basins covering multiple states.

Shale gas production more than doubled between 2011 and 2016, and proven reserves (shale gas that can be extracted and used for energy) continue to rise as exploration continues.

The International Energy Agency predicts that U.S. shale production will reach 1.3 million barrels a day in 2018, and there is a huge organic cash flow into the industry, eliminating the need to borrow from banks. This points to an energy-independent U.S.

And that is why other big natural gas exporters, particularly Russia, are determined to make countries like the UK and U.S. curtail oil and gas exploration.

To halt natural gas extraction and other pipeline projects, anonymous donors pump millions of dollars into environmental advocacy groups. Then they use those groups as proxies to serve their vested interest in impeding the growth of American energy infrastructure projects, to rein in American competition for energy markets, to bolster their own revenues.

Of the many American environmental advocacy groups complicit in this war-by-other-means strategy, two are particularly guilty of colluding with Russia to quell American production.

The Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) and the Sierra Club Foundation (SCF) have been advocating for the restriction of energy exploration and such advocacy could be harming the operation of defence forces.

Both NRDC and SCF get large amounts of money from the Sea Change Foundation, which receives funds from Russia and other sources and disseminates them to NRDC, SCF, and other Green advocacy groups.

The Daily Signal reported that NRDC and SCF alone received more than $10 million in grants from Sea Change.

When approached by journalists about the ultimate sources of funding through Sea Change, both NRDC and SCF gave ambiguous responses.

How did Sea Change’s gifts pay off?

NRDC and SCF filed an unusually large number of lawsuits against shale gas exploration. They organized a large network of advocacy groups, lobbyists, and lawyers in strategic places, including Washington, D.C., and state capitals.

Recent successes include blocking fracking projects in New York, where energy bills are soaring because of the state’s stubbornness in rejecting affordable, clean natural gas.

Intelligence reports indicate that this is not the first time Russia has blocked fracking through environmental groups. It tried the same trick in Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Romania. A potential shale boom in Europe like the one in the U.S. would hurt Russia’s economy by reducing Europe’s dependence on Russian gas.

But Russia is not finished interfering with U.S. production. It will continue using environmental advocacy groups as platforms for economic and political sabotage.

It is ironic that two of America’s biggest environmental advocacy groups act as enemy agents in the same country that guarantees their right to pursue their dreams and flourish as they do.

Democrats should set aside party politics and join Republicans in the battle against Russia’s breach of national energy security and the home-grown threats from environmental groups.

While Trump and Putin may shake hands and smile at each other before the world, tensions are sure to rise behind the scene in Washington and Moscow.

SOURCE

Australian wind farm report a blow to future of the industry

A class-action lawsuit is being planned against a local council, the Victorian government and a wind farm operator after an independent review accepted resident complaints that noise from a Gippsland wind farm was causing them harm.

A council-ordered report on the Bald Hills wind farm found there was a nuisance under the Public Health and Wellbeing Act.

This was despite the wind farm being compliant with state planning laws. Investigators said they could hear wind turbines in some residents’ homes and accepted they could sometimes be heard over the television and that residents were suffering sleep deprivation and other symptoms.

The report is a milestone on a years-long journey for residents at Bald Hills involving botched investigations, doctored reports, court interventions and heavy-handed planning decisions.

The finding could have dramatic implications for the ongoing development of the wind industry, which claims its turbines do not disturb residents.

Affected resident Don Fairbrother said the situation should never have got to this point. “There was a lot of concern about the suitability of the site and the height of the turbines was increased without community consultation,” he said. “The project has had a troubled history and we are finally being listened to.

“Our concerns about sleep deprivation have finally been recognised as a health and welfare issue.”

Noise logs by Mr Fairbrother document “whining, roaring noise” causing sleep deprivation and headaches.

The independent monitor, James C. Smith and Associates, was engaged in March by the South Gippsland Shire Council lawyers to investigate. The report said Mr Fairbrother appeared to have “frequent sleep interruptions from a noise described as ‘grumbling noise and a sensation’ and frequent associated headaches”.

In conclusion, the report said there had been a consistency in complaints. “Without exception, there are allegations that the wind farm noise is audible inside their individual homes and, as a result, there is sleep disruption during the nightly and early morning hours,” the report said.

One first-hand experience where wind farm noise intruded on conversation during a site visit was seen as “detrimental to the personal comfort and enjoyment of the residential environment”.

“After consideration of the completed noise logs by individual complainants and subsequent discussions with some of these individuals, it appears there is nuisance caused by wind farm noise, in that the noise is audible frequently within individual residences and this noise is adversely impacting on the personal comfort and wellbeing of individuals,” the report said.

The report is significant because the wind farm had been approved as compliant under state noise regulations and was being operated in a low-noise mode when investigations were under way.

The residents’ lawyer, Demenika Tannock, said she was meeting affected residents to consider their options. “A QC has been briefed and a junior counsel briefed with a possible class action against the shire, the operator, the minister and the state Environment Department,” Ms Tannock said.

A case is currently before the Supreme Court.

The Bald Hills wind farm was developed by Mitsui and Co and sold to Australian-based Infrastructure Capital Group in February last year. South Gippsland Council said it would be seeking comments on the report from both the wind farm operator and the complainants over the next few weeks.

Council chief executive Tim Tamlin said: “Without in any way suggesting that council is avoiding its responsibility, I would like to point out that this finding demonstrates the apparent disconnect between the Planning and Environment Act and the Public Health and Wellbeing Act,” he said. “I would suggest this is something the Victorian government needs to resolve.”

SOURCE

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16 September, 2018

Trump says Florence is just ‘Mother Nature.’ A stunning new climate study says he’s wrong (?)

By Joe Romm

Professional Warmist Joe Romm is easily stunned. I would have said "rubbishy' instead of "stunning". All these attribution studies are just speculation and assumption. There is no way you can prove anything either way by them. It's just modelling and we know how often modelling gets it wrong when it models the future. The type of modelling below is worse than that. It does not concern the future so there is nothing to check its conclusions against. It is unfalsifiable, which shows it is game-play or faith, not science

Tony Heller comments drily: "We had more rainfall in Boulder five years ago this week (18 inches) than most of North Carolina is forecast to have from Florence. It must have been due to the high sea surface temperatures in eastern Colorado"

In his tweeted warning about Hurricane Florence Wednesday, President Trump said, “bad things can happen when you’re talking about a storm this size. It’s called Mother Nature.”

The authors of a bombshell new analysis, “The human influence on Hurricane Florence,” disagree. They find that human-caused global warming has supercharged the atmosphere so much that it is boosting the very worst of the projected rainfall totals by more than 50 percent.

ThinkProgress asked coauthor Dr. Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) whether “your analysis allows us to say the storm is more than just Mother Nature.” He replied in an email:

Indeed. The most important message from this (and previous) analyses is that “Dangerous climate change is here now!” It is not a distant threat in the future but today’s reality. Event attribution has shown this for heat waves, floods, certain kind of droughts and tropical cyclones.

Scientists have been warning for decades that global warming means more intense deluges since there’s more water vapor in the atmosphere and because warmer ocean temperatures are the engine that drives stronger hurricanes. And scientists have now observed that the most extreme rainfall events have been rising rapidly, especially on the East Coast.

In response, scientists have started doing “after-the-fact” analyses of how much climate change has contributed to worsening the rainfall of major storms.

For instance, a December 2017 study (coauthored by Wehner) found that climate change boosted Harvey’s rainfall in the worst hit area by 38 percent. A 2018 study found that “post-1980 warming” boosted Harvey’s total precipitation by 20 percent.

The new study on Florence published Thursday is the first to look at the impact of human-caused climate change on a hurricane before it makes landfall.

Lead by Dr. Kevin Reed of the Climate Extremes Modeling (CEM) Group at Stony Brook University, the researchers found that because of human-caused climate change, “rainfall will be significantly increased by over 50% in the heaviest precipitating parts of the storm.”

Because the analysis was done in real time, before Florence hit, it was not formally peer-reviewed. The state of the art of attribution analysis has been improving rapidly, allowing this kind of quick analysis. But as Dr. Wehner pointed out to ThinkProgress, the main finding of a 50 percent rain increase for Florence in the hardest hit region isn’t that dissimilar to his peer-reviewed paper on Harvey, which found a 38% increase in the hardest hit region.

The chart below compares two forecasts by the scientists. The Standard Forecast (left) uses an ensemble of existing climate models to create an actual forecast of Florence’s rainfall on September 11. The “Modified Forecast” (right) uses a model that has been “modified to remove the estimated climate change signal from the temperature, moisture, and SST fields to represent a world without climate change.”

In the real world, where humans have dramatically changed the climate through emissions of heat trapping carbon pollution, large parts of North Carolina will be hit by 18 or more inches of rain — a devastating deluge.

In a world without climate change, Florence is still a very destructive storm, but the worst hit region is much smaller and these areas would have much less rain.

Note that this study does not attempt to look at how some of the larger scale impacts of climate change on the jet stream are impacting the storm — and are potentially responsible for the storm hitting the coast in the first place.

SOURCE

Exploiting Mother Nature

There was some good news yesterday: Hurricane Florence weakened. The National Weather Service downgraded Florence to a Category 2 storm. Hopefully it will continue to weaken and “underperform” as it hits the Carolina coast. We are praying for all those in the storm’s path.

Sadly, the Left is politicizing everything. It politicized the Boy Scouts. Fast food. The NFL. Even pronouns.

And, as we know, it has been politicizing the weather for years. Florence is no exception. It is already blaming the hurricane on Trump!

But you sense that the Left is hoping for the worst when it comes to Florence. The Washington Post editorial board declared: “Another Hurricane Is About To Batter Our Coast. Trump Is Complicit.”

A note to the “scientists” on the Post’s editorial board: Trump can’t be complicit because climate change is a long process and he’s been in office less than two years.

I checked and only three Category 4 hurricanes have hit the Carolina coasts since the 1950s, well before climate change was on anyone’s radar. The last was Hugo in 1989. If climate change has gotten so much worse, why haven’t there been more?

Here’s the simple truth: There were terrible hurricanes before Donald Trump and there will be terrible hurricanes after Donald Trump.

The Left’s real issue, of course, is that Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accords, which even if fully implemented would have done very little.

But the exploitation doesn’t end there. Left-wing politicians are accusing the administration of not being prepared. That is absurd. President Trump has repeatedly warned people to evacuate. He has signed disaster declarations to speed up the response.

Unfortunately, Florence will likely cause horrendous damage. The Carolina coast has been massively developed in recent decades. And even with thousands of utility workers already headed to the region, there will be places with no power for days.

That does not mean there was a lack of preparation. That is simply the reality of Mother Nature in spite of man’s best efforts. But that won’t stop the Left from trying to turn Florence into “Trump’s Katrina,” just like it did with Hurricane Maria.

SOURCE

Hurricane Florence Is Not an Omen About Climate Change

In today’s hyper-politicized world of climate science, hardly a thunderstorm passes without somebody invoking the “scientists say” trope to blame it on carbon emissions.

The logic seems to be: If it’s bad, it was caused by carbon emissions, and we are only going to see more and worse. More and worse floods, droughts, tornadoes, and of course, hurricanes.

The problem with this argument is that overall, we are not seeing more floods, droughts, tornadoes, or hurricanes in spite of the steady rise in the small amount of carbon dioxide, and in spite of the mild warming of the planet. The data show that there is no significant upward trend in any of these weather events.

These are not the conclusions of climate skeptics. They are conclusions drawn by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and our own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This week, the Carolina coast and some yet-to-be-determined inland counties will endure the heavy and destructive rains of Hurricane Florence. Without a doubt, some places will see records broken.

As the hurricane arrives, talking heads will hit the airwaves claiming that “scientists say” it was caused by carbon emissions. Some may spin it more subtly, saying that while we cannot identify which storms are caused by increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the storms today are getting stronger and more frequent.

But this simply is not true. We are not seeing more frequent hurricanes, nor are we seeing a greater number of major hurricanes.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said as much in its latest science report:

Current data sets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century and it remains uncertain whether any reported long-term increases in tropical cyclone frequency are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities. … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.

Be on the alert for those who quote the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as saying there has been an upward trend in hurricanes since the 1970s. That is a misleading claim. Hurricane landfalls actually fell for the decades before the 1970s.

Cherry-picking endpoints can produce “trends” that are either up or down. The fact is that for the past century, there is no trend.

Furthermore, there was never a time when the climate was stable (as some would claim), when weather events happened with smooth regularity. There have always been cycles—years and decades that included large numbers of hurricanes, and others with few.

Whether carbon dioxide levels rise, fall, or stay the same, we will continue to see hurricanes. Some of these hurricanes will be immensely destructive of both property and human life. Some will break records for wind and/or rain. And they will be tragic.

The fact that tragic weather events have not stopped is not evidence that carbon emissions are leading us to a climate catastrophe. Perhaps we will see a decades-long increase in one category or another, it has happened before—but that will not prove the predictions of catastrophic climate change one way or the other.

Even if all of the mild (though uneven) warming that seems to have occurred over the past century were due to man-made carbon emissions, that would still not be a reason to fear for the future. The overall story does not point to climate catastrophe.

But weather catastrophes will continue to strike, and we will still face the danger wrought by nature’s wrath. Hurricane Florence is shaping up to be exactly such a storm.

SOURCE

The Stealth Agenda of Climate Cronyism

The issue of climate change is more about influence, money, and power than about science.

Hurricane Florence is currently ravaging the Carolina coast, causing widespread flooding, beach erosion, and destruction due to strong winds. While a storm of this magnitude should certainly receive national media attention, it’s no surprise that this one is being used by climate alarmists as a political weapon. Some are even blaming President Donald Trump for it.

The editorial board of The Washington Post opines, “When it comes to extreme weather, Mr. Trump is complicit. He plays down humans’ role in increasing the risks, and he continues to dismantle efforts to address those risks.”

But there’s no need to worry about climate change any longer. California Gov. Jerry Brown and a host of politicians and entertainers are firing up their private jets and gathering for a global climate conference to reduce greenhouse gases and reach “carbon neutrality” by the middle of the 21st century.

Joining the conference will be musician Dave Matthews, actor Alec Baldwin, and Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson. Former Secretary of State John Kerry and former Vice President Al Gore, who predicted the earth would turn into a “total frying pan” by 2016, will round out the climate cabal.

You may notice that none of the people listed above hold any degrees or certifications in meteorology or climatology. In fact, a typical backyard weather watcher is likely more in tune with the climate than Matthews or Baldwin. Those who do study weather and climate know better, and the facts speak for themselves.

Hurricanes have been significantly less frequent in the past 50 years than they were in the first half of the 20th century. Florence is a formidable storm, but it’s not as strong as Gloria in 1985, despite the fact that Florence is over warmer water, according to WeatherBELL Analytics meteorologist Joe Bastardi who predicted back in July that this hurricane season might feature more intense hurricanes.

And here are some questions that certainly won’t be asked at Gov. Brown’s climate conference: Why were there such powerful hurricanes long before man was supposedly dumping carbon into the atmosphere? Why are storms generally less extreme than they were decades ago? What about the recent decade without a single hurricane making landfall in the U.S.? And what are the real driving forces behind storms that climate change activists knowingly fail to discuss?

The reality, of course, is that the climate change industry is heavy on politics and light on science. Strongly critical of Big Oil and its influence on Capitol Hill, the climate lobby is just as influential.

Fortunately, climate alarmists have been largely unsuccessful in getting major climate change legislation passed at the national level. For this, we can thank the Trump administration, which doesn’t buy into their exaggerations of rising sea levels and monster storms fueled by industry. So, unable to convince the public to support their radical legislation, those who warn of anthropogenic climate change have resorted to subverting our democratic system.

A paper written by Christopher C. Horner and published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute “details an extensive and elaborate campaign using elective law enforcement offices, in coordination with major donors and activist pressure groups, to attain a policy agenda that failed through the democratic process.”

Horner adds that the scheme, funded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, “uses nonprofit organizations as pass-through entities by which donors can support elected officials to, in turn, use their offices to advance a specific set of policies favored by said donors.”

Thus, having failed to make their case in the marketplace of ideas, the alarmists are embracing climate cronyism at its worst.

Clearly, the more one looks at the issue of climate change, the more one sees that it’s really all about influence, money, and power. Silencing those with opposing views on climate science, brainwashing the public on the dangers of global warming, and characterizing recurring weather events as never-before-seen examples of man’s impact on the environment, the climate change lobby will do anything to force the U.S. and the world to adopt an agenda that threatens our sovereignty, prosperity, and Liberty.

In a few days, Hurricane Florence will have passed. We pray that the Carolinas are spared the worst. Yet no matter what happens, climate change extremists will use Florence (and every other useful weather event) to push their lies instead of advancing our understanding of science for the greater good. And they’re resorting to any means necessary to make sure you’re left out of the discussion.

SOURCE

Blaming bad weather/hurricanes on Trump and/or ‘global warming’ is a throwback to medieval witchcraft

Book Excerpt from "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change"

As climate activists and the news media exploit Hurricane Florence in their attempts to scare the public and blame President Trump, a new book details the long history of using superstition to blame bad weather events on witchcraft and other unscientific factors.

Once, long before the modern SUV was the culprit, witches were blamed for causing bad weather and crop failures. Sallie Baliunas, formerly of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, has explained how the severe conditions of the medieval Little Ice Age in the Middle Ages created a perfect atmosphere for witchcraft trials. “Those severe conditions in climate brought about crop failure, starvation, disease, death and social unrest,” Baliunas noted.

“They said, for a hundred years such a storm has not been seen. The storm was deemed so unusual in this period of superstition that it had to be unnatural, it had to be supernatural.” Baliunas continued with the parallel. “Legal philosopher John Boden in 1580 noted that witchcraft was the most terrible problem facing humankind. Again a very, a very modern note.”

Baliunas drew other links between witchcraft hysteria and today’s climate debate as well. “Now, there were skeptics who stood up but they were often accused of, or threatened to be accused of, sorcery as to squash any debate,” she noted. “Any feeble notes of humane skeptics had to be wrenched out of society.”

Something very similar is happening today, as Canadian physicist Denis Rancourt testifies from his experience. “When I tell environmental activists that global warming itself is not something to be concerned about—environmental activists attack me,” Rancourt explains. “They shun me, and they do not allow me to have my materials published in their various magazines and so on.”

The belief that witches could alter the weather was so pervasive in the Middle Ages that even religious leaders believed it. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII wrote, “Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that, just as easily as they [witches] raise hailstorms, so can they cause lightning and storms at sea; and so no doubt at all remains on these points.”

In our modern era, the Associated Press echoes the medieval pope’s warning about witches and bad weather, but this time blames man-made global warming. “From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Iowa and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It’s not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way,” the AP intoned ominously in an August 12, 2010 article.

Scholarly studies confirm that witch trials were on the upswing during the Little Ice Age. According to a 2012 Live Science article, “Historical records indicate that, worldwide, witch hunts occur more often during cold periods, possibly because people look for scapegoats to blame for crop failures and general economic hardship.

Fitting the pattern, scholars argue that cold weather may have spurred the infamous Salem witch trials in 1692.” Emily Oster studied witchcraft and temperatures for her senior thesis at Harvard University and found that the Little Ice Age coincided with the most active era of witchcraft trials in Europe. Lower temperatures correlated with higher numbers of witchcraft accusations. She published her witchcraft research in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2004. Oster explained that “popes and scholars alike clearly believed witches were capable of controlling the weather, and therefore, crippling food production.”

Salem State University historian Emerson Baker’s research agrees with Oster’s findings. “A harsh New England winter really may have set the stage for accusations of witchcraft,” noted a Live Science analysis of Baker’s research. The bad weather may have helped stir up the population’s psychological state into a full blown mass hysteria. “The young girls who accused their fellow townsfolk of witchcraft are believed to have been suffering from a strange psychological condition known as mass hysteria, Live Science noted.”

Princeton Professor Emeritus of Physics William Happer in 2017 drew parallels to today’s man-made climate change claims. “I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the consensus on climate change and the consensus on witches. At the witch trials in Salem the judges were educated at Harvard. This was supposedly 100 per cent science. The one or two people who said there were no witches were immediately hung. Not much has changed,” Happer quipped.

A 2014 Scientific American analysis found “in Medieval Europe the idea of a sort of demonic conspiracy, perpetrated by sorcerers and witches against society, became common lore.” “These difficult times also see the emergence of a new kind of superstition, that witches could ‘make weather’ and steal the milk from the (starving) cows,” the analysis added.

According to Scientific American, Bavarian and Swiss accounts of the era reported: “1445, in this year was a very strong hail and wind, as never seen before, and it did great damage, […] and so many women, which it’s said to have made the hail and the wind, were burned according to the law.”

“Anno 1626 the 27th of May, all the vineyards were totally destroyed by frost […], the same with the precious grain which had already flourished.[…] Everything froze, [something] which had not happened as long as one could remember, causing a big rise in price.[…] As a result, pleading and begging began among the peasants, [who] questioned why the authorities continued to tolerate the witches and sorcerers destruction of the crops. Thus the prince-bishop punished these crimes, and the persecution began in this year…”

Literal witch hunts are not a thing of the past. “Weather patterns continue to trigger witchcraft accusations in many parts of Africa, where witch killings persist. According to a 2003 analysis by the Berkeley economist Edward Miguel, extreme rainfall—either too much or too little—coincides with a significant increase in the number of witch killings in Tanzania,” reported a 2012 analysis in Live Science.

Climate skeptic Tony Heller of Real Climate Science has pointed out parallels between Aztec sacrifices to stop bad weather and the modern global warming movement’s efforts to appease the CO2 gods. In 1450, Aztec priests encouraged people to sacrifice blood to the gods to end the severe drought that was decimating corn crops. They ended up sacrificing thousands of people in a few weeks.

Heller quipped, “Like the Aztecs, many scientists believe that sacrificial offerings are necessary to stabilize climate. But there are some key differences. 1. Aztecs correctly believed that the climate was controlled by the moods of the Sun. Modern climate scientists have not progressed that far yet. 2. Aztec priests believed that only a small percentage of the population needed to be sacrificed, whereas the modern priests believe that everyone (except for themselves) needs to sacrifice.”

Aborigines in nineteenth-century Australia blamed the bad climate on the arrival of the White man. A March 11, 1846 article in the Maitland Mercury explained that “great changes have taken place in the climate of Australia,” citing “heavy rains” and “deluging floods” and noted, “The aborigines say that the climate has undergone this change since the white-man came in country.”

In 2013, the White man was once again being blamed for climate change. Climate activist Bill McKibben lamented, “White America has fallen short”—by voting for “climate deniers.” In a March 14, 2013 Los Angeles Times op-ed, McKibben complained, “Election after election, native-born and long-standing citizens pull the lever for climate deniers.”

The history of mankind is one of superstition and fear of the weather gods. It is a history of ritualistic appeasements in attempts to prevent bad weather. “Naked Girls Plow Fields for Rain,” blared the headline of a July 24, 2009, Reuters report. “Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday.”

A 2009 article in AllAfrica.com reported, “The Karimojong [in Uganda] blame the spell of calamities like drought and disease to the “angry gods.” As the report explained, “Little do they know that their area is suffering the consequences of a larger problem, climate change.”

As University of London professor emeritus Philip Stott pointed out, “From the Babylon of Gilgamesh to the post-Eden of Noah, every age has viewed climate change cataclysmically, as retribution for human greed and sinfulness.” Stott explained, “Extreme weather events are ever present, and there is no evidence of systematic increases. . . . Global warming represents the latest doom-laden ‘crisis,’ one demanding sacrifice to Gaia for our wicked fossil-fuel-driven ways. But neither history nor science bolsters such an apocalyptic faith.”

Extreme weather expert Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado wrote of the mystical qualities of the climate change claims in an analysis titled “It has been foretold.” “Because various unsupportable and just wrong claims are being advanced by leading scientists and scientific organizations, it would be easy to get the impression that on the issues of extreme events and climate change, IPCC science has a status similar to interpretations of Nostradamus and the Mayan calenders.”

Scientist Doug Hoffman mocked the climate change establishment. “The whole enterprise is reminiscent of Medieval mystics claiming to predict the future while spouting gibberish,” Hoffman, a mathematician and engineer who worked on environmental models and conducted research in molecular dynamics simulations, Hoffman wrote on October 13, 2009. “Palm readers and fortune tellers stand as good a chance as any in this game.”

Today’s global warming narrative blames every bad weather event on man-caused global warming. As we have seen, there is no way to falsify these “climate change” claims because bad weather events are always going to happen—and every bad weather event “proves” their case. Have we really advanced since the days of the medieval witch hunt?

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 September, 2018

Government for Hire? Emails Show ‘Climate Industry’ Funds Jobs in Offices of Governors, Attorneys General

California Gov. Jerry Brown is host of a three-day “Global Climate Action Summit” in San Francisco organized by an “activist donor network” that has burrowed into state government agencies, a climate change skeptic says in a new report.

Chris Horner, a senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is the author of two reports detailing how a well-endowed “climate industry” steers donor money through nonprofit organizations into the offices of state governors and attorneys general.

The relationship between governors and environmental activists who are using governors’ offices to advance the climate change agenda of certain donors is the subject of a report by Horner released Tuesday by CEI, a libertarian think tank in Washington.

“A particular theme slated for the San Francisco event is that President Trump’s promise to withdraw from the Paris climate treaty is isolating the United States from what is otherwise and elsewhere a doable, successful, and economically beneficial adoption of this agenda,” Horner writes.

The new report highlighting Brown, a Democrat, builds on Horner’s report last month describing how these same special interests work with compliant state attorneys general.

It views the actions of Brown in California as a case study, examining how elected officials and other political figures allow their offices to be used to pursue climate change policies that conform with the international accord known as the Paris Agreement.

Government officials around the world negotiated the agreement in Paris as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2015. The agreement calls on countries to combat the perceived threat of climate change by working to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

In June 2017, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris Agreement, which he said “disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries.”

Brown’s San Francisco summit, set for Wednesday through Friday, places a strong emphasis on opposition to Trump’s policies, Horner writes:

Trump vowed to withdraw from the Paris Agreement because it is in reality a costly and ineffectual solution to the alleged climate crisis, it mostly directs resources to politically favored industries, and it harms disfavored ones. For similar reasons, the climate industry is dedicated to reversing Trump’s not yet consummated decision.

A major component of its campaign is claiming momentum toward Paris’s goals and rebutting the history of economic and social costs involved in implementing the policies that Paris demands. Implementation of the Paris agenda requires domestic policies, and implementing those policies is the principal objective of the campaign detailed in this paper.

The Daily Signal sought comment from Brown’s office on the new report, but had not received a response at publication time.

The California governor’s three-day summit comes with a budget of $10 million made possible through the support of individuals, foundations, governments and business, according to Horner’s report.

The nonprofits involved “take a handsome percentage for serving as middlemen,” it says.

Emails obtained from open-records requests indicate that politicians are making use of nonprofits and consultants as “pass-throughs for donors to support politicians with resources that the relevant legislatures will not provide and that donors cannot legally provide directly,” Horner’s report says.

The email records describe privately funded staff members placed in governor’s offices as “refugees” from the Obama administration who are working to reposition U.S. policy on climate and energy to conform with their preferred policies.

Horner, author of a 2007 book called “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism,” raises several questions in the new report in response to what he uncovered:

Are the donors going to such lengths to avoid 1) directly placing consultants in governors’ offices or 2) giving the money to do so directly to those offices, because they are barred from such placement? If so, why is this permissible? Or is the effort creating middlemen all merely due to appearances? Why do we find participants misleading or telling outright falsehoods when questioned about what we have found?

And the biggest issue of all is, does this represent government for hire?

The “off-the-book” operations detailed in the emails call out for legislative oversight to determine whether they violate state laws, Horner concludes.

SOURCE

EU policy to burn more wood will ‘fuel climate change’

More Greenie stupidity

Inefficiencies in harvesting and burning processes mean that more carbon is emitted into the air per kilowatt hour of electricity than when fossil fuels are burnt

A decision by the European Union to promote the use of wood as a “renewable fuel” will greatly increase the continent’s greenhouse gas emissions and is likely to harm the world’s forests, a study has warned.

EU officials revised the bloc’s energy policy in June in an effort to double Europe’s use of renewable sources by 2030. Against the advice of hundreds of scientists, its renewable energy directive now treats wood as a low-carbon fuel.

A study, published today in the journal Nature Communications, estimates that the provision will lead to sharply increased harvesting of the world’s forests.

The paper forecasts that the use of wood for energy will account for between 10 and 15 per cent of European energy emissions by 2050

SOURCE

The academic article is below

Europe’s renewable energy directive poised to harm global forests

This comment raises concerns regarding the way in which a new European directive, aimed at reaching higher renewable energy targets, treats wood harvested directly for bioenergy use as a carbon-free fuel. The result could consume quantities of wood equal to all Europe’s wood harvests, greatly increase carbon in the air for decades, and set a dangerous global example.

In January of this year, even as the Parliament of the European Union admirably voted to double Europe’s 2015 renewable energy levels by 2030, it also voted to allow countries, power plants and factories to claim that cutting down trees just to burn them for energy fully qualifies as low-carbon, renewable energy. It did so against the written advice of almost 800 scientists that this policy would accelerate climate change1. This Renewable Energy Directive (RED) is now finalized. Because meeting a small quantity of Europe’s energy use requires a large quantity of wood, and because of the example it sets for the world, the RED profoundly threatens the world’s forests.

Makers of wood products have for decades generated electricity and heat from wood process wastes, which still supply the bulk of Europe’s forest-based bioenergy2,3. Although burning these wastes emits carbon dioxide, it benefits the climate because the wastes would quickly decompose and release their carbon anyway. Yet nearly all such wastes have long been used4.

Over the last decade, however, due to similar flaws in the 2008 RED, Europe has expanded its use of wood harvested to burn directly for energy, much from U.S. and Canadian forests in the form of wood pellets. Contrary to repeated claims, almost 90% of these wood pellets come from the main stems of trees, mostly of pulpwood quality, or from sawdust otherwise used for wood products5.

Greenhouse gas effects of burning wood

Unlike wood wastes, harvesting additional wood just for burning is likely to increase carbon in the atmosphere for decades to centuries6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16. This effect results from the fact that wood is a carbon-based fuel whose harvest and use are inefficient from a greenhouse gas (GHG) perspective. Typically, around one third or more of each harvested tree is contained in roots and small branches that are properly left in the forest to protect soils but that decompose and release carbon. Wood that reaches a power plant can displace fossil emissions but per kWh of electricity typically emits 1.5x the CO2 of coal and 3x the CO2 of natural gas because of wood’s carbon bonds, water content (Table 2.2 of ref. 17) and lower burning temperature

Allowing trees to regrow can reabsorb the carbon, but for some years a regrowing forest typically absorbs less carbon than if the forest were left unharvested, increasing the carbon debt. Eventually, the regrowing forest grows faster and the additional carbon it then absorbs plus the reduction in fossil fuels can together pay back the carbon debt on the first stand harvested. But even then, carbon debt remains on the additional stands harvested in succeeding years, and it takes more years for more stands to regrow before there is just carbon parity between use of wood and fossil fuels. It then takes many more years of forest regrowth to achieve substantial GHG reductions.

The renewability of trees, unlike fossil fuels, helps explain why biomass can eventually reduce GHGs but only over long periods. The amount of increase in GHGs by 2050 depends on which and how forests are ultimately harvested, how the energy is used and whether wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas. Yet overall, replacing fossil fuels with wood will likely result in 2-3x more carbon in the atmosphere in 2050 per gigajoule of final energy (Supplementary Note 2). Because the likely renewable alternative would be truly low carbon solar or wind, the plausible, net effect of the biomass provisions could be to turn a ~5% decrease in energy emissions by 2050 into increases of ~5–10% or even more (Supplementary Note 2).

Consequences for forests

The implications for forests and carbon are large because even though Europe harvests almost as much wood as the US and Canada combined, these harvests could only supply ~5.5% of its primary energy and ~4% of its final energy. If wood were to supply 40% of the additional renewable energy—an uncertain but plausible level—the wood volumes required would equal all of Europe’s wood harvest (Supplementary Note 3). In fact, the RED sets a goal to increase by 10% renewable energy for heat, sourced overwhelmingly from wood, which would likely by itself use ~50% of Europe’s present annual wood harvest18,19. European Commission planning documents projected somewhat smaller roles for bioenergy based on lower renewable energy targets, but they scale up to ~55–85% of Europe’s wood harvest at the larger target ultimately adopted (Supplementary Note 4). Supplying this level of wood will probably require expanding harvests in forests all over the world.

The global signal may have even greater effects on climate and biodiversity. At the last global climate conference (UNFCCC-COP 23, Bonn 2017), tropical forest countries and others, including Indonesia and Brazil, jointly declared goals “to increase the use of wood … to generate energy as part of efforts to limit climate change”20,21. Once countries and powerful private companies become invested in such efforts, further expansion will become harder to stop. The effect can already be seen in the United States, where Congress in both 2017 and 2018 added provisions to annual spending bills declaring nearly all forest biomass carbon free—although environmentalists have so far fought to limit the legal effects to a single year22,23. If the world met just an additional 2% of global primary energy with wood, it would need to double its industrial wood harvests (Table 1).

Why the RED sustainability criteria are insufficient

Unfortunately, various sustainability conditions in the RED would have little consequence. For example, one repeated instruction is that harvesting trees should occur sustainably, but sustainable does not equal low carbon (Supplementary Note 5). Perhaps the strictest version of sustainability, often defended as a landscape approach, claims GHG reductions so long as harvest of trees in a country (or just one forest) does not exceed the forest’s incremental growth24,25,26,27. Yet, by definition, this incremental growth would otherwise add biomass, and therefore carbon storage to the forest, holding down climate change28. This carbon sink, in large part due to climate change itself, is already factored into climate projections and is not disposable. Harvesting and burning this biomass reduces the sink and adds carbon to the air just like burning any other carbon fuel. The directive only requires forests to maintain existing carbon stocks in limited circumstances, but given the size of the global forest sink, even applying such a rule everywhere would still allow global industrial wood harvests to more than triple (Supplementary Note 6)29,30.

The directive also repeatedly cites a goal to preserve biodiversity, but its provisions will afford little protection. Prohibitions on harvesting wood directly for bioenergy apply only to primary forests—a small share of global forests (Supplementary Note 5). In addition, any forests could be cut to replace the vast quantities of wood diverted from existing managed forests to bioenergy.

Some argue that increasing carbon in the atmosphere for decades is fine so long as reductions eventually occur, but timely mitigation matters. More carbon in the atmosphere for decades means more damages for decades, and more permanent damages due to more rapid melting of permafrost, glaciers and ice-sheets, and more packing of heat and acidity into the world’s oceans. Recognizing this need, the EU otherwise requires that GHG reductions occur over 20-years, but that timing does not apply to forest biomass (Supplementary Note 5).

Instead, the directive incorporates the view that forest biomass is inherently carbon neutral if harvested sustainably (Supplementary Note 5). Although the RED requires that bioenergy generate large greenhouse gas reductions, its accounting rules ignore the carbon emitted by burning biomass itself (Annex VI, section C, par 13 in ref. 31). They only count GHGs from trace gases and use of fossil fuels to produce the bioenergy, which is like counting the GHGs from coal-mining machinery but not from burning the coal.

The main new Commission thinking, reflected in the sustainability provisions, is that bioenergy rules do not need to count plant carbon so long as countries that supply the wood have commitments related to land use emissions under European rules or the Paris accord (RED, Article 26, point (6)(1)(ii)) (Supplementary Note 5). But this thinking repeats the confusion that occurred at the time of the Kyoto Protocol between rules designed only to count global emissions and laws designed to shape national or private incentives32. Under accounting rules for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), countries that burn biomass can ignore the resulting energy emissions because the countries that cut down the trees used for the biomass must count the carbon lost from the forest. Switching from coal to biomass allows a country to ignore real energy emissions that physically occur there, but the country supplying the wood must report higher land use emissions (at least compared to the no-bioenergy alternative). The combination does not make bioenergy carbon free because it balances out global accounting, the limited goal of national reporting.

But this accounting system does not work for national energy laws. If a country’s laws give its power plants strong financial incentives to switch from coal to wood on the theory that wood is carbon-neutral, those power plants have incentives to burn wood regardless of the real carbon consequences. Even if a country supplying the wood reports higher land use emissions through the UNFCCC, that carbon is not the power plant’s problem. Only if all potential wood-supplying countries imposed a carbon fee on the harvest of wood, and this fee equaled Europe’s financial incentive to burn it, would European power plants have a financial reason to properly factor the carbon into their decisions. No country has done that or seems likely to do so.

In fact, few countries have any obligation to compensate for reduced carbon in their forests because few countries have adopted quantitative goals in the land use sector as part of the Paris accord33. Even if countries did try to make up for reduced forest carbon due to bioenergy with additional mitigation of some kind, all Europe would achieve is a requirement that its consumers pay more to do something harmful for the climate so that other countries could then spend additional money to compensate.

Europe has also created a kind of reverse REDD?+?strategy by treating forest and all other biomass as carbon neutral in its Emissions Trading System, which limits emissions from power plants and factories. While the not yet realized hope behind REDD?+?is to reward countries for preserving carbon in forests, this bioenergy policy means forest owners can be rewarded for the carbon in their trees—so long as they cut them down and sell them for energy. The higher the price of carbon rises, the more valuable cutting down trees will become. Strangely, this policy also undermines years of efforts to save trees by recycling used paper instead of burning it for energy. Even as recycling polices push consumers to save trees, this policy will encourage others to burn them.

Nature Communicationsvolume 9, Article number: 3741 (2018)

Arctic Sea Ice Just Won’t Play The Game

Arctic sea ice is proving remarkably reluctant to enter its appointed ‘death throes’, despite the usual suspects having already planned the funeral. Climate Change Anxiety Disorder, it turns out, is yet to impose its angst on the actual climate, no matter how hard the BBC tries to make it.

The latest observations show that Arctic sea ice is on course to have a greater minimum extent than in 2015 and 2016, and is running higher than levels seen a decade ago. Back then, the BBC reported that Arctic summers may be ice-free by 2013, although this estimate was described as being ‘too conservative’.

That prediction was spectacularly wrong, and contrary to warnings of an ‘Arctic death spiral’, sea ice extent has been remarkably stable in the last decade. No one can say what exactly will happen next; if this humbling affair teaches anything it should be precisely that.

The climate has misbehaved in other ways too. The Greenland Ice Sheet has been gaining mass at a record rate for the second year running, and Antarctic sea ice extent is perfectly normal relative to the 1981-2010 average. These facts get little coverage because they don’t sound alarming at all, and for most reporters that means they’re not news.

These ‘inconvenient truths’ are nonetheless a helpful reminder that climate change coverage should be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism. There is a long way to go before we can make accurate predictions about how the climate will behave, if indeed we ever can.

Climate science has to be more deeply grounded in real-world observations rather than models that are inevitably riddled with flawed human assumptions

SOURCE

Jerry Brown Is Getting Heckled At His Own Climate Conference

Three years ago this month protesters in front of a Wells Fargo branch in the financial district of San Francisco also targeted Gov. Jerry Brown. (Photo by Flickr User Peg Hunter)
You might think that local environmentalists would be fawning over Governor Jerry Brown this week. After all, he just signed bills to move the state to 100% renewable electricity and ban off-shore drilling. But instead, many of them are protesting at his international climate change conference in San Francisco. What's going on?

WHO ARE THESE PROTESTERS?

They're part of the environmental justice movement, many people of color from less well-off, more polluted places like South L.A. or Wilmington. They want the fight for climate change to result in cleaner air for them right now.

Meanwhile, the people they are protesting (Governor Brown and his allies) are part of the mainstream environmental movement, which is often wealthier and whiter. Mainstream environmentalists support big, sweeping actions to fight climate change globally and generally think environmental justice groups are trying to twist climate laws into fixing air pollution, too.

WHAT DO PROTESTERS WANT?

They want the Governor to stop issuing new drilling permits for oil wells. And they want him to phase-out existing oil production by creating a buffer: any well that's within 2,500 feet of a home, school, or park would have to be shut down. In Southern California alone, that's a whole lot of wells.

"California's climate policy won't be complete until the state address its own dirty oil extraction," said Kassie Siegel with the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group allied with the South L.A. activists. "It's hard to be climate leader while also being a top oil producing state."

WAIT. HASN'T GOVERNOR BROWN DONE A TON TO FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE?

Yes, he has.

He signed a law committing California to slashing its carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

His administration heavily subsidizes electric vehicles and trucks.

New building codes passed this year require all new homes to have solar panels.

His attorney general, Xavier Becerra, is fighting to preserve California's strict greenhouse gas standards for cars, which the EPA is trying to repeal

We could go on, but you get the idea.

Still, protesters say this isn't enough. Martha Dina Argüello, the head of Physicians for Social Responsibility in Los Angeles, says Governor Brown's climate policies aren't helping people who are most affected by oil drilling.

"The people who live near these oil wells, it's really time to put them first," she said.

HOW MUCH OIL DOES CALIFORNIA PRODUCE ANYWAY?

Look we're not Texas, but California is the number six oil-producing state in the country. The oil industry is about three percent of California's GDP and employs about 400,000 people, according to a study commissioned by the Western States Petroleum Association.

Argüello acknowledges that if oil drilling were to end, a lot of people could be out of work. But that's why she and other activists want what they call "a just transition" to help oil workers find new jobs.

"WE HAVE THE TOUGHEST RULES ON OIL."

Brown, meanwhile, thinks this idea is totally impractical. The last time protesters heckled him in public, at the 2017 UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, he told them that would have devastating impacts on the economy. "If I could turn off the oil today, 32 million vehicles would stop!" he said.

Later, in an interview with Amy Goodman from Democracy Now, he elaborated, "We have the toughest rules on oil. I don't think we should shut down oil in California and then take it from Venezuela, or places where the rules are even worse."

SOURCE

Pipeline Investors Fight Climate Change

Although the Sierra Club attracts members who care deeply about the environment, they have opposed the most successful steps taken to lower CO2 emissions.

The Shale Revolution has unlocked vast amounts of cheap American natural gas. This is steadily replacing coal as a source of electricity. As a result, the U.S. is far ahead of everyone in reducing its CO2 output over the past decade

This has been made possible by cheap, abundant natural gas which has required new pipelines to get it to market. Transco is an extensive natural gas pipeline network that runs from Texas to New York. It’s owned by Williams Companies (WMB). For decades, Transco has transported natural gas north from Texas. In recent years, growing output from the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania reduced the need for Texan gas and now offers a cheaper alternative to nearby states. Transco, which runs north, has added lateral extensions and in certain cases reversed its flow to accommodate these new supply/demand patterns.

Atlantic Sunrise is an extension of the Transo pipeline system. It will bring more Pennsylvanian natural gas to states in the mid-Atlantic and southeast. As with previous steps to use more natural gas, it will provide cheaper, cleaner electricity than the coal it’s replacing.

The Sierra Club opposes everything related to all fossil fuels, including new natural gas infrastructure. They were against the investments Transco made to get Marcellus natural gas to southeastern customers. They are opposing Atlantic Sunrise, as well as other new east coast pipelines. Oddly, they also oppose nuclear & hydroelectric power, which produce no harmful emissions.

Such an extreme view will raise electricity prices sharply, slowing economic growth and weakening support for finding good long term solutions. Southern Australia uses solar and wind for almost 40% of its electricity. Because they can’t use it all when it’s produced, customers pay up to 79 cents per kilowatt-hour to store their excess solar-electricity in batteries, and then again when it’s discharged. This is ten times or more than the wholesale cost of U.S. electricity.

Environmental groups like the Sierra Club try to claim the moral high ground. But by opposing all energy sources except solar and wind, they are against the most successful steps we’ve taken to slow global warming. Most of our energy will continue to come from fossil fuels for decades to come. Those of us who care about really improving the environment favor more practical solutions that will sustain long term support. The most meaningful results in reducing CO2 are in the U.S., and those states that have switched from coal to natural gas have contributed the most. Canada’s environmental groups have enjoyed more success in blocking pipelines. The result is that Canada’s CO2 emissions have risen and their crude oil is deeply discounted because of few transportation choices (see Canada’s Failing Energy Strategy).

Because it’s not always sunny and windy, solar and wind both rely on conventional baseload power (often natural gas) to be viable, since cost effective battery storage remains out of reach. Output is unpredictable – clouds can block sunlight, and wind varies with the weather. An electricity grid has to meet 100% of customers’ needs. Peak electricity demand occurs during morning and evening hours, while peak solar electricity output is midday.

Moreover, solar and wind power sources are often located in remote areas, away from the population centers that rely on them. This adds many more miles of high voltage lines compared with natural gas power plants, which are usually located near their customers.

Given the rapid growth in solar and wind, few facilities are reaching the end of their 20-25 year useful life. However, IHS Market forecasts that within three years the cost of maintenance of existing wind turbines will exceed new investment. Renewable units are energy intensive to manufacture and their disposal results in toxic waste. .

With rapid improvements in solar and wind technology, it makes more sense to progress slowly, fully utilizing existing power stations and replacing them as they wear out.

In fact, switching completely to natural gas from coal would virtually eliminate many highly noxious pollutants, provide cost effective electric generation and cut total greenhouse gas emissions by 15%. Natural gas releases less than half the CO2 of coal, and negligible amounts of harmful pollutants such as sulfur, mercury and particulates. Coal is 30% of our primary energy but contributes 45% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Furthermore, the relative ease with which natural gas plants can raise or lower output as needed will compliment solar and wind once technology allows them a meaningful share of electricity generation. China burns more coal than the rest of the world, and emits more CO2 than North America and Europe combined. China’s emissions continue to grow rapidly, in spite of their increasingly urgent search for alternatives (1.6 million annual deaths attributed to coal). China is an obvious buyer of America’s growing liquified natural gas exports. It’s how the American Shale Revolution can help combat global warming worldwide.

Bjorn Lomborg’s Cool It and Alex Epstein’s The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels both offer thoughtful, sustainable solutions to limit the effects of man-made global warming. They focus on what’s cost-effective, which includes investing in R&D for renewables, a modest carbon tax, and protecting coastal areas against rising sea levels. Solutions that don’t make economic sense are unlikely to command long term public support. Epstein asserts that, “We don’t want to ‘save the planet’ from human beings, we want to improve the planet for human beings.”

The impact of more natural gas use has been cleaner air. Energy infrastructure investors have financed solutions which have been highly effective in achieving CO2 reductions. If you want to make a real difference in combating global warming, you’re better off investing in a pipeline company rather than donating to the Sierra Club. It’s everybody’s environment, not just theirs.

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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13 September, 2018

Trump causes hurricanes!

Can Trump do anything right? Not according to the mainstream media. The article below ran under the heading: "Another hurricane is about to batter our coast. Trump is complicit."

Tony Heller has a fun graph listing number of hurricanes per President. And Trump is not in the race. If the Washington Post wants to blame presidents for hurricanes, then the top three perpetrators are Grover Cleveland, Rutherford B. Hayes and William Howard Taft.

YET AGAIN, a massive hurricane feeding off unusually warm ocean water has the potential to stall over heavily populated areas, menacing millions of people. Last year Hurricane Harvey battered Houston. Now, Hurricane Florence threatens to drench already waterlogged swaths of the East Coast, including the nation’s capital . If the Category 4 hurricane does, indeed, hit the Carolinas this week, it will be the strongest storm on record to land so far north.

President Trump issued several warnings on his Twitter feed Monday, counseling those in Florence’s projected path to prepare and listen to local officials. That was good advice.

Yet when it comes to extreme weather, Mr. Trump is complicit. He plays down humans’ role in increasing the risks, and he continues to dismantle efforts to address those risks. It is hard to attribute any single weather event to climate change. But there is no reasonable doubt that humans are priming the Earth’s systems to produce disasters.

Kevin Trenberth, a climate researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, co-wrote a May paper showing that Harvey’s cataclysmic wetness came from the unusually hot Gulf of Mexico water that fed the hurricane before it slammed into Texas. “Harvey could not have produced so much rain without human-induced climate change,” he and his colleagues concluded. Now Florence is feasting on warm Atlantic Ocean water. “The ocean is warming up systematically,” Mr. Trenberth said, explaining that, though natural variation can turn surface temperatures up or down a bit, the oceans’ energy content is inexorably rising. “It is the strongest signal of global warming,” Mr. Trenberth added.

Scientists also warn that climate change may be slowing the wind currents that guide hurricanes, making storms more sluggish and, therefore, apt to linger longer over disaster zones. Tropical cyclone movement has slowed all over the planet. Harvey’s stubborn refusal to leave the Houston area was a decisive factor in its destructiveness. Florence may behave similarly.

And human-caused sea-level rise encourages higher storm surges and fewer natural barriers between water and people.

With depressingly ironic timing, the Trump administration announced Tuesday a plan to roll back federal rules on methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is the main component in natural gas. Drillers and transporters of the fuel were supposed to be more careful about letting it waft into the atmosphere, which is nothing more than rank resource waste that also harms the environment. The Trump administration has now attacked all three pillars of President Barack Obama’s climate-change plan.

The president has cemented the GOP’s legacy as one of reaction and reality denial. Sadly, few in his party appear to care.

SOURCE

Jerry Brown’s Plan For ‘Negative’ CO2 Emissions Is Based On ‘Science Fiction’

California Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown issued an executive order Monday mandating “carbon neutrality” by 2045, then ordering the state to “maintain net negative emissions thereafter.”

Brown’s executive order came the same day he signed into law a bill mandating California get 100 percent of its electricity from renewables and “zero-carbon” energy sources. Brown is also preparing to host a global warming activist summit Wednesday.

“California is committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change,” Brown said Monday. “But have no illusions, California and the rest of the world have miles to go before we achieve zero-carbon emissions.”

Brown is right in one sense. California does have “miles to go” to meet Brown’s executive order because it relies on “magical thinking” and “science fiction,” according to experts.

Existing executive orders call for California to cut greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and state law requires emissions to be cut 40 percent by 2030. However, that’s not enough to meet the goals of the Paris climate accord, according to United Nations models.

What Brown ordered is not just reducing emissions, but instead implied sucking more greenhouse gas out of the air than human activities in his state put up — and not just for electricity. Brown’s order applies to the entire economy, including transportation and agriculture.

So what does negative emissions mean in practice? Well, no one really knows, but experts have put forward ideas to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Brown’s office said negative emissions would be achieved through “increased carbon sequestration in forests, soils and other natural landscapes,” according to its press release. But how would this even work?

Scientists have also proposed technologies to literally suck carbon dioxide from the air and store it underground or in the ocean. Experts have also suggested reforestation, ocean fertilization and what’s known as enhanced weathering.

Enhanced weathering is the rather hilarious idea that one can use rocks to, in effect, store CO2 emissions. In theory, the rocks would react with CO2 and water to form an alkaline solution that leaks into the ocean.

However, all of these proposals remains “magical thinking” at this point, according to an editorial in the journal Nature.

Enhanced weathering, for example, would require “an area about the size of Texas … of US agricultural land every year” just to “soak up 13% of the annual global emissions from agriculture,” according to Nature.

Another proposed technology that’s cited by the IPCC is bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). This is basically removing CO2 through growing plants, which are then burned for energy. The emissions are then captured and stored underground.

Of course, BECCS is another magical solution that’s baked into the IPCC’s models of what needs to be done to limit future global warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke, Jr. recently published a paper on the problems with the UN’s use of BECCS to sell the Paris climate accord.

“Carbon dioxide removal at massive scale is science fiction — like a light saber, incredible but not real,” Pielke wrote.

“Yet BECCS plays a very real role in today’s climate policy arena,” Pielke wrote, “by helping to maintain the climate policy envelope and save us from having to do the enormously difficult and uncomfortable work of thinking how we might go about addressing accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere differently than we have since the 1980s and ’90s.”

“If nothing else, full implementation of BECCS ‘at scale’ would require the use of a global land area one and a half times the size of India,” Pielke wrote about the staggering environmental cost of “negative emissions” technology.

Indeed, the European Academies Science Advisory Council concluded in early 2018 that negative emissions technologies “offer only limited realistic potential to remove carbon from the atmosphere and not at the scale envisaged in some climate scenarios.”

SOURCE

House Leaders Question Environmental Group’s Ties With China

China's special representative on climate change, Xie Zhenhua, speaks Nov. 15. 2017, during a high-level forum at a U.N. conference in Bonn, Germany. (Photo: Shan Yuqi/Xinhua/Newscom)
Congressional leaders are pressing their case against environmental activists who are closely aligned with Chinese government officials.

In a letter Wednesday to the Washington-based World Resources Institute, Reps. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, and Bruce Westerman, R-Ark., ask the leader of the nonprofit international research group to document compliance with federal law covering agents of foreign powers.

Bishop and Westerman note that World Resources Institute consistently has praised China’s actions through certain media platforms even as it sharply criticizes recent U.S. policy under the Trump administration:

While WRI criticizes policies of the U.S. government, WRI is silent on Chinese human rights violations such as arrests of environmental protesters and the mass detention of ethnic minorities. By contrast, WRI advocates on behalf of the rights of indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities in other countries. On important issues for Chinese leadership, WRI’s position appears to closely reflect China’s goals and objectives.

Bishop is chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee and Westerman is chairman of its oversight and investigations subcommittee.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires anyone who acts as an agent of foreign principals “in a political or quasi-political capacity” to disclose that relationship periodically with the U.S. government, according to the Justice Department. The law also requires disclosure of all “activities, receipts, and disbursements in support of those activities.”

The two congressmen’s letter to Andrew Steer, president and CEO of World Resources Institute, notes that the organization has operated in China since 2008.

It says the institute’s “leadership regularly interacts with senior Chinese government and Communist Party officials and provides public support for Chinese environmental programs, including supplying positive quotes for Chinese government press releases and op-eds in the government-controlled China Daily.”

China Daily is an English-language newspaper that is registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the letter says.

The two House Republicans quote FBI Director Christopher Wray as calling China “the broadest, most challenging, most significant” counterintelligence threat to the U.S.

For this reason, Bishop and Westerman argue, “the apparent strong ties between the People’s Republic of China, the ruling Chinese Communist Party, and certain U.S.-based tax-exempt organizations” warrant clarification and investigation.

Steer, an economist from Great Britain, previously worked as a special envoy on climate change for the World Bank. He is a member of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, an advisory body sanctioned by the Chinese government.

Bishop and Westerman set a deadline of Sept. 12 for Steer to respond to the request to document compliance with the law.

The Daily Signal asked World Resources Institute for comment on its compliance, its reaction to the letter, and meeting the deadline. In an email Friday, the institute replied:

In order to respond to the world’s most urgent sustainability challenges, it’s vital to work in the world’s developing countries and major economies, including China, the world’s most populous country. We are proud of our work in China, including on issues related to air pollution, traffic congestion, and water quality.

We welcome the opportunity to respond to the [Natural Resources] Committee’s letter, as we vigorously pursue our goal of making the planet safer, healthier and more prosperous for all people.

World Resources Institute, founded in 1982, received its initial funding in the form of a $15 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The institute describes its mission as “to move human society to live in ways that protect Earth’s environment and its capacity to provide for the needs and aspirations of current and future generations.”

In June, the Natural Resources Committee sent similar letters to two other environmental advocacy groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Biological Diversity, asking questions about their relationships with China.

The letters also asked whether the two groups were in compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and to provide documentation. Both complied with June deadlines to submit information detailing compliance.

Neither the Natural Resources Defense Council nor the Center for Biological Diversity is registered as a foreign agent. Both maintain they operate in America’s national interest despite their close ties to foreign governments and litigation against the U.S. military.

One point of contention raised in the House Republicans’ letter to Steer and World Resources Institute concerns the Paris Agreement on fighting climate change in 2016, which was reached under the Obama administration.

Bishop and Westerman note that the research group praised China’s stated commitment to begin to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

At the same time, the institute criticized Trump administration policies for resisting and pulling out of the international climate deal. The congressmen argue that China’s pledge to reduce emissions was not genuine, while the Trump administration recognized that the Paris Agreement would have dire economic consequences.

Bishop and Westerman write:

On important issues for Chinese leadership, WRI’s position appears to closely reflect China’s goals and objectives. For instance, WRI promotes China’s controversial Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a multibillion dollar global infrastructure plan designed to increase China’s global influence. WRI portrays China’s BRI as an opportunity for environmentally sustainable development and to strengthen environmental protections.

Environmental groups from countries where BRI-financed projects are located and other experts, however, describe Chinese-funded projects as causing “permanent environmental degradation” with no positive impact on environmental governance.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act, which predates World War II, is the subject of legislation from Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., that he says “corrects long-standing loopholes exploited by lobbyists of foreign entities to conceal their work to influence U.S. government activities.”

The Johnson bill also would clarify reporting requirements, authorize investigative tools, and establish enforcement safeguards.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has introduced a companion bill.

SOURCE

Los Angeles wants to use the Hoover Dam as a giant battery — but its biggest hurdle isn't the $3 billion dollar price-tag

Los Angeles is looking into whether it should spend an estimated $3 billion on a massive, 20-mile underground pumped hydropower storage system that would be connected to the iconic Hoover Dam on the Colorado River outside of Las Vegas.

If it does get built, this system would essentially serve as a giant battery to store power.

Having written a book about the aggressive propaganda program behind the Hoover Dam's construction in the 1920s and 1930s, I can say that the technical and financial challenges of this plan are sure to pale in comparison to the legal and political roadblocks that will have to be overcome.

Among the biggest obstacles are the long-running fights over the Colorado River and its water, and that the Colorado is a shrinking river

Los Angeles has two basic motives for this plan. First, the water level of Lake Mead, the nearly 250-square-mile reservoir that provides water to Arizona, California, and Nevada, continues to drop due to long-term drought. The lower water levels are reducing the power that Hoover Dam's electrical turbines generate.

Second, California has mandated statewide cuts in fossil-fuel use and increases in renewable energy production.

Solar and wind energy seem ideal, but have one major drawback: wild fluctuations. When there's calm wind or no sunshine, there isn't enough power to keep the lights on. When it's sunny and windy, there can actually be too much power for the grid to function smoothly. Even in tandem, they are not reliable enough for utily-scale electricity, without some way to store excess energy.

The proposed plan would use wind and solar power to pump water from below Hoover Dam back upstream, depositing water into Lake Mead to be released again at a future time. The idea is to use the stored water to both offset renewable energy fluctuations, and supplement the grid during peak electrical demand.

It would do this by pumping water when electricity generated from solar or wind power is cheap and abundant, and releasing water through Hoover Dam when demand for power is high or renewable sources aren't generating much energy — essentially turning Lake Mead into a giant battery.

The concept of using pumped hydropower to store energy is not new. The earliest examples date to the late 1800s in Europe, and the early 1900s in the US. Many countries including Spain, Norway, Switzerland, and the US already use large pumped hydro storage systems. The world's biggest is located along the West Virginia-Virginia border.

One key difference here is that this proposed project would use wind and solar electricity to pump the water. Another is the Hoover Dam's complicated history. The biggest hurdle, I predict, would be negotiating a new use for the Colorado River's water at a time when the region is growing more parched.

The river is regulated by a document called the Colorado River Compact, an agreement forged among seven Western and Southwestern states in 1922 that dictates how much of the river's water each state may use. The compact has helped to constrain what likely would have been endless litigation over the water.

This pact took years to negotiate, with many failed attempts along the way. Arizona took 44 years to officially ratify the agreement, and it has repeatedly sued its neighbors over the river, with some cases ending up at the Supreme Court.

In fact, Arizona nearly declared war against California in 1934 when its governor sent the Arizona National Guard to the border to "defend" against encroaching Bureau of Reclamation engineers scouting locations for Parker Dam, 155 miles downstream from Hoover Dam on the Colorado River.

Despite the compact, litigation over access to Colorado River water continues to this day. This endless conflict is why historian Philip L. Fradkin calls the Colorado "the most used, most dramatic, and the most litigated and politicized river in this country, if not the world."

To make matters worse, Western states have long been wary of the motives of Los Angeles and California when it comes to water. Consequently, the current proposal, which calls for the Los Angeles Department of Power and Water to be put in charge of a massive new hydropower project in Nevada, would likely be met with a large dose of skepticism.

More considerations

Proponents of the Hoover Dam battery concept say it would be an environmentally friendly way to generate more electricity without using fossil fuels. Yet there are more considerations here, too.

First, the project calls for nearly 20 miles of new underground pipes to run from below the dam back into Lake Mead. The water that it takes to fill those pipes along with the water that is circulated in perpetuity will take some coveted Colorado River water permanently out of the downstream flow.

Second, the time hardly seems right. The Colorado is in decline. With climate scientists predicting that the volume of water in the Colorado River will continue to decrease, states that rely on the river are bracing for potentially drastic cuts to water supplies.

Moreover, the Bureau of Reclamation states that Hoover Dam produces 4 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, which sounds like a lot. But that's only enough to cover 1.3 million households, or roughly a third of all Angelenos.

Considering that Hoover Dam hydropower is distributed across Southern California, Arizona, and Nevada, it actually provides only a small slice of the overall energy consumed in the West.

That is why, regardless of whether or not this project moves forward, I contend that the competing interests of the river's many stakeholders will prove to be as durable a roadblock as any technical or budgetary constraint.

SOURCE

Solar Power Too Cheap to Meter? Another Green Dream

Greenies regularly ignore capital costs and the duplication of generating capacity

Not satisfied with the mere claim that solar and wind are reaching parity with the costs of conventional energy technologies, green enthusiasts are upping the ante claiming that, as one UBS bank analyst recently put it, by “2030, the cost [of solar] could be so near to zero it will effectively be free.”

But no amount of research or torturing of reality, however, will lead to that result. Both physics and history offer instructive lessons.

The nuclear industry has been plagued by its own “too cheap to meter” trope ever since 1954 when Lewis Strauss, the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, originated that phrase in a lecture extolling the unbounded potential of fission energy. Nuclear did proceed to grow from under 1% of U.S. electricity in 1968 to 20% by 1988, where it’s remained ever since. For all its manifold advantages, the inherently high capital costs of that technology remain the obvious challenge.

As for solar electricity, today it supplies 1% of U.S. electricity. Of course it’s possible that share will yet grow to match, say, nuclear—not least because of policymakers’ zealous embrace of subsidies and mandates. While that is, as they say, not nothing, it is far from everything. More to the point, the central claim that such an outcome is inevitable not because of subsidies but because solar, and wind, are already cheap is just not true.

The real underlying engineering-centric economics are only visible if you strip out subsidies, hyperbole, regulatory subterfuge, and fake prices that emerge from mandates. Fortunately, both the Department of Energy and SEC filings of public corporations provide plenty of reliable data about the core engineering costs of the hardware needed to produce energy, whether solar panels, wind turbines, or drilling rigs. Here’s what they show:

Buy $1 million worth of solar panels and, over a 30-year operating period, they will produce about 25 million kilowatt-hours (kWh). Never mind what one is paid for those kWh, whether directly or indirectly through tax and regulatory jiggering, or legal mandates, that’s the quantity of energy one gets. Period.

By comparison, $1 million worth of a modern wind turbine will produce 50 million kWh over the same 30 years. That basic fact explains why wind today contributes about 600% more to the grid than does solar; wind power is a lot cheaper.

Alternatively, purchase $1 million worth of a shale rig and, over those same 30 years, that capital will produce enough natural gas to generate 400 million kWh. The 400 is not a typo. That same $1 million of hardware producing natural gas yields 10 and 20-fold more ‘product’ (kWh) than either wind or solar respectively. And this basic fact explains why, over the past decade, private investment in shale gas has added 500% more energy to America than government subsidized wind and solar combined.

Of course, solar and wind costs will continue to decline. But there is simply nothing in the underlying physics of either of those technologies that points to the possibility of anything like a 10-fold reduction in capital costs, never mind getting to “effectively free.”

The cognoscenti will note that the above cost comparisons do not include the capital cost of equipment (a gas turbine) to convert natural gas into grid-useful kilowatt-hours. Nor do the calculations incorporate the capital cost of equipment (batteries) that converts episodic solar or wind output into grid-useful 24x7 electricity. Including those costs, however, further disadvantages solar and wind. The capital cost per kilowatt for batteries is several-fold greater than for a gas turbine. And while there are aspirations for far cheaper batteries, there’s no known physics path for them to become several-fold cheaper.

At present, wind and solar technologies receive subsidies that amount to between 45% and 140% of their capital costs. (Similar subsidies exist in much of Europe.) But with solar and wind supplying a combined total of only about 7% of the nation’s electricity, such underlying cost burdens have so far been disguised in the labyrinth of mandates and subsidies, and also masked by—in effect ‘borrowed’ from—the savings from the last decade’s radical declines in the cost of natural gas and coal which together supply 70% of U.S. electricity. Aspirations for radically increasing solar and wind electricity will necessarily require ramping up subsidies to the point they will ultimately become visible.

That scenario has played out in Germany and Britain, both far further down the green path, leading to radically higher electricity prices there — 200% to 300% higher than in America. The green subsidy effect was also visible in Ontario, Canada. A punitive rise in electric rates over the past decade, created by the Ontario Liberal Party’s pro-green subsidies, contributed directly to an epic ballot-box defeat for the Liberals earlier this year, ending 15 years in power. A key feature of the opposition’s winning strategy? Calling for the reversal of green subsidies.

In due course, the same political realities will become as visible and painful in America too. It is far more likely that we’ll see solar electricity too expensive to tolerate than too cheap to meter.

SOURCE

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12 September, 2018

Risks in disposing of "dead" solar panels?

Although top national environmental regulators confirmed GenX and related chemical compounds are used to produce solar panel components, they say their research does not prioritize what risks that might pose to the environment and human health.

Peter Grevatt, national director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water in Washington, D.C., recently told Carolina Journal the GenX solar concern “is one that’s in a much broader set of challenges.”

GenX is known to be used in making Teflon film that coats many solar panels. The chemical falls under the larger umbrella of compounds classified as PFAS chemicals.

“There’s literally so many thousands of these compounds, and we don’t have methods to measure most of them. So we are getting up on the research, and trying to figure out ways of identifying what’s out there,” Andy Gillespie, associate director for ecology at EPA’s National Exposure Research Laboratory in Research Triangle Park, told CJ.

Kristina Beasley said that lack of knowledge underscores her concerns. She is among opponents of an expansion plan for the industrial-scale Wilkinson Solar Plant in the Terra Ceia community of Beaufort County. Their opposition is believed to be the first in the state to raise the issue of potential GenX contamination in an N.C. Utility Commission regulatory hearing.

“I definitely think that it is an issue, and further research, I think, should be done,” Beasley said. She said the public doesn’t appreciate concerns about toxic chemicals, fluids, and substances leaking into the soil and groundwater as solar installations age and deteriorate, or suffer damage from windstorms or other disasters.

As CJ pointed out more than three years ago, North Carolina doesn’t have rules for decommissioning solar facilities or a disposal plan for spent panels. Critics worry about potential pollution. Residents consistently have raised fears in town halls and solar plant permit hearings about contamination from compromised solar panels.

But community activists are not the only ones weighing in. Donald van der Vaart, former secretary of the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality, who holds a doctorate in chemical engineering, sees reason for concern given North Carolina’s more than 7,500 solar installations.

“North Carolina’s solar power capacity is now the second highest in the nation. EPA researchers recognize that solar panels may be a source of GenX compounds,” said van der Vaart, a senior fellow at the John Locke Foundation. “I would expect Duke Energy and the Public Utilities Commission would want to see test results to protect them from future liability.”

“One line of research that we are doing is looking at material management, end-of-life management, but we’re not yet at the point where we’re doing it product by product,” Gillespie said when asked whether the EPA has concerns about GenX leaching from solar panels.

“Lots of things go to landfills, or go to incinerators, or other things. We’re trying to understand the aggregate risk. We just haven’t gotten to the stage of doing it by many of the thousand different products that these chemicals can be used in,” he said.

“It’s a fair question to ask” about potential environmental and human health impacts from GenX and other PFAS chemicals in solar panels, said U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson, R-8th Congressional District.

“Obviously I’m aware of the concern, and that’s why I’ve been pushing to get the EPA to quickly get us as much science as possible so that we can determine how much of a concern we have,” Hudson said. “There’s not enough science, clearly.”

Solar enthusiasts contend there is no threat from GenX or related chemicals, while critics fret the wealthy renewable energy industry and its host of lobbyists influence regulators and lawmakers to disregard potential GenX connections to solar panels.

“We’ve got to go where the science is,” Hudson said. “If it’s dangerous then we need to treat it. Prevention, and remediating the problem.”

Hudson, Grevatt, and Gillespie were among EPA, N.C. Department of Environmental Quality, federal, state, and local government officials in Fayetteville on Aug. 14 for an all-day listening session Hudson facilitated. The event was designed to update residents on regulators’ efforts to investigate and combat GenX in the groundwater, soil, and air surrounding the Chemours chemical plant here, and to hear their feedback.

“GenX, I know, has been a significant concern for folks in the state of North Carolina,” Grevatt said, “but we’re really focused right now most of all on understanding potential threats to human health, and making sure that communities have the tools they need to address those concerns.”

The EPA plans to issue a toxicity assessment outlining a first-of-its-kind health-risk profile for GenX and PFAS compounds next month. It’s scheduled to release a national management plan by the end of 2018.

The EPA is collaborating with states, academic researchers, industry scientists, and other federal agencies to develop methods and tools for states and local communities to find GenX and other PFAS compounds in the environment.

“Those tools are going to be equally applicable to [assessing solar electric plants] as they will be about looking for GenX in other parts of the environment,” Grevatt said. They won’t be tailored to each specific threat.

Linda Culpepper, interim director of DEQ’s Division of Water Resources, was a panelist at the Fayetteville event. Asked later if she was hearing concerns about GenX in solar panels, she responded: “Just what you’re seeing probably. The same thing in research that people are looking at — as these products degrade over time are there any kind of chemicals coming from that?”

SOURCE

Canada’s Climate Plan In Freefall As Alberta Pulls Out

The Canadian province of Alberta announced Thursday it would pull out of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's flagship climate change initiative in protest against a court ruling against the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline.

A court had earlier quashed the government's approval of expanding the Trans Mountain pipeline to the Pacific, siding with indigenous people worried that increased tanker traffic will harm whales along the coast.

Landlocked Alberta in western Canada, which sits on the world's third largest oil reserves, was set to rely on the pipeline to sell oil to Asian markets via the port of Vancouver.

"As important as climate action is to our province's future I have also always said that taking the next step, in signing on to the federal climate plan, can't happen without the Trans Mountain pipeline," Premier Rachel Notley told reporters in a live address Thursday evening.

"With the Trans Mountain halted and the work on it halted, until the federal government gets its act together, Alberta is pulling out of the federal climate plan," she said.

Trudeau's government introduced a federal carbon tax earlier this year to curb greenhouse gas emissions, set to rise steadily from Can$10 ($7.50) per tonne this year to Can$50 per tonne in 2022.

"Let's be clear, without Alberta that plan isn't worth the paper it's written on," Notley said.

Meanwhile, Trudeau said in a tweet he confirmed to Notley that his government "stands by the TMX expansion project" and "will ensure it moves forward in the right way".

In addition to Alberta, the provinces of Saskatchewan and Ontario in mid-July announced an alliance against the carbon tax, which they believe is harmful to the economy.

Ontario -- Canada's richest and most populous province -- elected a climate-sceptic prime minister in June, who is working to dismantle climate change policies.

SOURCE

Pro-Nuclear “Fest” in Munich, Germany on October 21!

Friends!

I’m very happy to invite you to attend a historic, pro-nuclear power demonstration in Munich, Germany, on Sunday, October 21, from 10 am to 4 pm!

The official name of the event is the “Nuclear Pride Fest,” and its founding purpose is to save and expand nuclear energy in Europe. The Fest will be held in Marienplatz, Munich’s central plaza.

We are hoping that people come from around the world to participate in this event, and that hundreds participate from within Europe — including families who work in nuclear power.

Nuclear Pride Fest Weekend will be child-and-family-friendly — with fun things for kids, including face-painting and games, workshops, and child care for parents.

Scholarships to cover the cost of travel are available to pro-nuclear student leaders and activists doing grassroots and social media organizing in their home nations.

For more information about attending or getting involved, please email Madison@EnvironmentalProgress.org

If you would like to make a donation to cover the airfare of a pro-nuclear student leader from around the world, please click here.

The event is being organized by independent grassroots civil society organizations but they are are urging families whose members work in nuclear power plants to attend.

The founding Nuclear Pride Coalition members are

Ecomodernist Society (Finland)

Ecomodernist Society (Netherlands)

Environmental Progress (U.S.)

Partei der Humanisten (Germany)

Generation Atomic (U.S.)

Mothers for Nuclear (Switzerland)

Nuklearia (Germany)

Saving Our Planet (France-UK-Norway-Turkey)

Ecomodernist Society (“Ökomoderne”, Germany)

The Thorium MSR Foundation (Netherlands)

Students for Nuclear (U.S.)

The Nuclear Pride Coalition convened last weekend in Amsterdam. The event opened with its 50-plus participants singing an Elvis song “Can't Help Falling in Love With You,” where the “You” was replaced by a “U” — the symbol for uranium in the periodic table of elements — to anti-nuclear protesters.

The group then gave daisies to the protesters, who are affiliated with WISE International, a group funded by renewable energy interests. In response, the WISE activists smiled and applauded.

SOURCE

A New Report Details How Nonprofits Are Funneling Millions To Democratic Governors To Further Their Global Warming Agenda

Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown’s upcoming global warming activist summit is part of an effort to funnels millions of dollars from nonprofits to state politicians to advance a liberal climate agenda, according to a new report.

Brown’s so-called “Global Climate Action Summit” begins Wednesday and is sure to garner media attention. Its list of speakers includes former Vice President Al Gore, actor Alec Baldwin and former Secretary of State John Kerry. Indeed, the whole point of the summit is to give politicians and activists a platform on global warming ahead of the November elections.

However, Competitive Enterprise senior fellow Chris Horner wants people to remember one thing about the summit: “this is what activist government for hire looks like, and how it is brought about.”

“Open record productions reveal that this summit is part of a major climate industry that funnels donor money through nonprofit organizations to staff up politicians’ offices,” Horner wrote in a new report published Tuesday.

And what an industry it is, Horner’s report reveals. Democratic state governors hope to mobilize $50 million by 2020 from nonprofits toward promoting liberal climate policies, including meeting the goals of the Paris climate accord.

This is Horner’s second major report on the deep financial ties between wealthy liberal foundations and Democratic state officials in the wake of the 2016 election. In August, Horner released a report detailing how former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s personal foundation funded attorneys at Democratic state attorneys general offices.

Those findings, based on more than two years of government records requests, backed initial reporting by TheDCNF on Bloomberg’s funding of state attorneys to advance “progressive clean energy, climate change, and environmental legal positions.”

According to Horner, accepting private funds to advance their policy goals bring up serious legal questions as well, including on transparency and gift-giving. It also could upset the checks lawmakers are supposed to have over state executives.

Brown’s summit is just one example of the coordination between Democratic governors and liberal foundations. The summit “is just one component of a sprawling enterprise that underwrites ‘support functions’ for politicians to advocate the parties’ aligned policy agenda,” reads Horner’s report.

Horner noted that global warming activists not only bankrolled the $10 million summit, but also provided a “handful of senior, full-time, and off-the-books staff members to Governor Brown,” according to a copy of his report obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. (RELATED: Activists Are Accusing Gov. Brown Of Being A Hypocrite On Oil Drilling)

President Donald Trump’s 2016 election forced environmentalists and monied liberal donors out of the realm of federal policy, so they took their money to the states where Democratic politicians railed against the new administration’s rolling back of Obama-era policies.

In one instance, the Hewlett Foundation hired former Obama administration climate change envoy Jonathan Pershing to “place climate and energy policy staff members in governors’ offices, where they would be running the money and at least in one instance the hiring process through the World Resources Institute (WRI),” according to emails obtained by Horner.

However, Brown is not the only governor to take advantage of private funding of his climate agenda, Horner noted. The report cites many emails between officials in the offices of Governors Jay Inslee of Washington and Andrew Cuomo of New York as well.

Inslee’s office, for example, described one former Obama State Department staffer “as our refugee from Kerry’s office at State” that “Pershing at Hewlett is paying … to work in our shop for 12 months.”

Horner points also points to Democratic governors’ use of a “secretariat” model to “to run a politician’s climate-policy campaign.” In the case of Democratic governors, the “secretariat” was the United Nations Foundation (UNF), which was founded by media mogul Ted Turner in the 1990s.

UNF houses the U.S. Climate Alliance (USCA) that Brown, Cuomo and Inslee are a part of along with other state governors. While USCA is not a legal entity, it’s being used to advance the goals of the Paris climate accord that President Donald Trump has pledged to withdraw from in the next couple years. USCA is also supported by the Hewlett Foundation, Energy Foundation and Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

Horner said Democratic governors’ offices “spent hundreds of hours of taxpayer time interviewing and negotiating with representatives of 501(c)3 nonprofits that could serve as pass-through entities for placing ‘staff’ in the governors’ offices, recruiting and liaising with donors, and developing the proposals to present to donors to fund the scheme.”

Nonprofits competed with one another to get the approval from Brown and others to house USCA. One top aide to Brown wrote in an email “that the nonprofit that wins the contract was to act purely as a vendor of ‘back-office host support functions’ to the officeholders.”

“A key function of the Secretariat was to hire staff members for the governors.” Horner wrote, noting that former Obama administration officials were a favorite. “This practice represents having outside parties hire staff members selected by governors for whom their legislatures have not authorized or have appropriated funds. They use their offices in service of the donors and of the advocacy groups’ and politicians’ aligned agenda.”

UNF also helped Brown’s office hire executives for the upcoming climate summit. Their jobs ad said the employees would work for UNF and be “seconded to the office of the Governor of California.”

“The Brown-led Summit is a major effort by elected officials to effectively move the politicking and media spectacle up in the calendar and to run an expensive PR/political campaign (using state offices) to make climate an issue for the 2018 mid-term U.S. elections, by hosting what is—by all appearances—a governmental conference,” Horner wrote.

SOURCE

Trump Is Taking Another Crack At Dramatically Weakening Obama-Era Methane Rules

The Trump administration is trying for the third time this year to weaken environmental rules his predecessor crafted to regulate methane emissions, The New York Times reported Monday.

The EPA will soon make public plans to lessening the impact of a rule requiring companies to monitor and repair methane leaks, according to documents cited in the report. The Interior Department will also release a final version of a draft rule repealing a restriction on the venting and “flaring” of methane.

Former agency officials criticized the mood. “They’re taking them down, one by one,” =top climate and clean-air regulator during the Obama administration, told reporters. Methane is more than 25 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere, despite making up only nine percent of all greenhouse gasses.

Energy analysts, meanwhile, praised the rule. (RELATED: Trump Guts Obama-Era Methane Rules To ‘Allow Job Growth In Rural America’)

Former President Barack Obama’s methane rule “was the definition of red tape. It was a record-keeping nightmare that was technically impossible to execute in the field,” said Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, an association of independent oil and gas companies based in Colorado. The fracking industry is one Colorado’s main economic engines.

EPA’s new rules would weaken a 2016 rule requiring oil and gas drillers to perform leak inspections every six months on drilling equipment, as well as repair leaks within a month. The amendment would lengthen that to once a year in most cases, the report states. It would also increase the amount of time a company could wait before repairing a methane leak from 30 to 60 days.

President Donald Trump has sought ways to ding several of Obama’s major environmental regulations. The agency proposed repealing a rule on carbon dioxide pollution from vehicle tailpipes in July. The EPA, under the guidance of former Administrator Scott Pruitt, proposed replacing the rule on carbon dioxide pollution with a weaker one that would free up coal power plants to produce energy through looser regulations.

EPA officials believe the new rule would recoup the costs the Obama-era regulation imposed on oil and gas companies. The regulation would have cost companies about $530 million throughout the next five years. Trump’s new rule would save the oil and gas industry $484 million by the same year.

SOURCE

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

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

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11 September, 2018

Ancient global warming harmed nothing

The impact of global warming on shallow marine life approximately 56 million years ago is the subject of a significant, new paper by researchers at Syracuse University.

Linda Ivany, professor of Earth sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), is the lead author of an article in Science Advances (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2018). Her team's research is the first to address the effects of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)--a relatively brief period of global climate change, spanning 200,000 years--on marine invertebrates, including snails, clams and other mollusks.

Marine invertebrates are animals without a backbone or an internal skeleton, occupying shallow seas and reefs. Invertebrates presently account for more than 98 percent of all animal life.

"The response of ecosystems [to the PETM] has been well documented for marine plankton, terrestrial plants and land vertebrates, but, until now, almost nothing has been published on marine shelf faunas," Ivany says. "This is because the stratigraphic record, showing where marine invertebrates are preserved on the continental margins, is full of gaps because of erosion. The chances of preserving a short-duration event, such as the PETM, are small.

Ivany figured that if her team could not "see" the effects of climate change in the geologic record, they could do the next best thing--look for them in sediment straddling the PETM. Turning their attention to the rich, well-preserved shell beds of the U.S. Gulf Coastal Plain, the team sought out evidence of ancient bivalves, gastropods and scaphopods.

What they found was surprising. "The long-term effects of the PETM on these shallow-water communities actually was unremarkable," says Ivany, taking into account biodiversity loss, taxonomic turnover and ecological restructuring. "Any potential selection pressure imparted by global warming must have been weak, taxon-specific, short-lived and ultimately inconsequential to overall molluscan evolutionary history."

Co-author Warren Allmon says scientists have long presumed the PETM on the Coastal Plain to be a tome of major biological change. "Our study shows the importance of testing ideas we think we're sure of. Some organisms changed a lot across the Paleocene-Eocene Boundary, but most did not," explains Allmon, who doubles as the director of the Paleontological Research Institution in Ithaca, New York, and the Hunter R. Rawlings III Professor of Paleontology at Cornell University.

SOURCE

Paris Climate Agreement ‘On The Brink’ As Western Governments Refuse To Transfer $100 Billion P.A.

UN climate talks in Bangkok have foundered over the key issue of how efforts to limit climate change are funded and how contributions are reported. Activists called out the European Union, Britain and Australia for falling into line with Washington’s position.

Developing countries rounded on the United States and its allies at emergency climate talks Sunday, accusing the world’s richest nations of stalling a deal aimed at preventing runaway global warming.

Experts from around the world have been locked in discussions this week in Bangkok, aiming to reach a comprehensive rulebook for countries to implement the landmark Paris Accord on climate change.

But talks have foundered over the key issue of how efforts to limit climate change are funded and how contributions are reported.

Delegates representing some of Earth’s poorest and smallest nations said on the final day of the summit that the US and other Western economies were failing to live up to their green spending commitments.

“Developed countries are responsible for the vast majority of historic emissions, and many became remarkably wealthy burning fossil fuels,” said Amjad Abdulla, the head of a negotiating bloc of small island states.

“Yet, we face devastating climate impacts and some of us could be lost forever to rising seas” without progress on the Paris deal by the end of the year, he added.

The Paris deal, struck in 2015, aims to limit global temperature rises to less than two degrees Celsius and to below 1.5C if possible by the end of the century.

To do this, countries agreed to a set of promises, including to establish an annual $100-billion fund to help developing nations react to our heating planet.

The US and other developed economies want less oversight on how their funding is gathered and more flexibility over how future funding is structured.

But developing nations insist they need predictable and open funding in order to effectively plan their fight against the fallout from climate change.

A senior source within the African nations’ negotiating bloc told AFP the US and others were reneging on pledges made in Paris by refusing to discuss future climate funding.

“It’s as if we started from scratch” in Bangkok, the source said.

Paris deal ‘on brink’
The Bangkok talks were organised as an emergency negotiating session after little progress was made at previous rounds towards a final rulebook.

Under the timeframe set in Paris, the guidelines for nations must be finalised by the COP 24 climate summit in Poland in December.

While delegates have made some progress on areas such as new technology and carbon markets, activists said the US — with Western acquiesence — had stonewalled any momentum on the key funding issue.

Harjeet Singh, global lead on climate change for NGO ActionAid, said Sunday the Paris deal was “on the brink”.

“Developed countries are going back on their word and refusing to agree clear rules governing climate finance,” he told reporters.

“If they remain stuck in their positions and fail to loosen their purses, this treaty may collapse.”

The US under President Donald Trump will leave the Paris process in 2020, but multiple delegates in Bangkok told AFP that it was still actively hindering progress in talks.

One senior negotiator said the US was “poisoning” the atmosphere of trust that led to the Paris accord.

Activists also called out the European Union, Britain and Australia for falling into line with Washington’s position.

SOURCE

Well done! EPA lost more than 1,500 workers in first 18 months of Trump administration

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reportedly lost 8 percent of its staff in the first 18 months of President Trump's administration due to high numbers of departing staffers and a low number of new hires.

The Washington Post reported Saturday that nearly 1,600 workers left the EPA during that time, while fewer than 400 were hired. The agency's employment has shrunk to its lowest levels since the Reagan administration, the Post noted.

According to data retrieved by the Post under a Freedom of Information Act request, the EPA has lost as many as 260 scientists, 106 engineers and 185 “environmental protection specialists," numbers which include both longtime veterans of the department and less experienced employees.

The departures have raised fears of a loss of experience at the agency, the Post reported. According to the paper, a number of employees left their posts citing discontent with new policy directions under the Trump administration.

“I felt it was time to leave given the irresponsible, ongoing diminishment of agency resources, which has recklessly endangered our ability to execute our responsibilities as public servants,” one former EPA scientist, Ann Williamson, told the Post.

“I did not want to any longer be any part of this administration’s nonsense,” she added.

EPA acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler told the Post in a statement that his focus is on recruitment and finding quality staffers for the department — not total staffing levels — noting that many other employees have contracts expiring within the next five years.

“With nearly half of our employees eligible to retire in the next five years, my priority is recruiting and maintaining the right staff, the right people for our mission, rather than total full-time employees,” he said.

Trump's former EPA chief Scott Pruitt, who departed the agency amid scandal earlier this year, told The Hill in January that he was proud of staff reductions at the agency, which he called part of the president's plan to shrink government.

“We’re proud to report that we’re reducing the size of government, protecting taxpayer dollars and staying true to our core mission of protecting the environment,” Pruitt said at the time.

SOURCE

Human factors made the Kerala floods so deadly

Most of the press chant reflexively; "Global warming". But, like the 2011 Brisbane flood, inert dam management was a big factor

Floods in the southern Indian state of Kerala have killed more than 350 people since June. The BBC's Navin Singh Khadka explains why they were so deadly this time.

The devastating floods in Kerala peaked last week. The monsoon rains have since begun to ease and rescue teams have been deployed, but thousands of people remain marooned.

The state should have been prepared for this - just a month earlier, a government report had warned that Kerala was the worst performer among southern Indian states in the effective management of water resources.

With 42 points, it was ranked number 12. The top three states were Gujarat in the west, Madhya Pradesh in the centre and Andhra Pradesh in the south, with scores of 79, 69 and 68 respectively.

A month down the line, Kerala seems to have confirmed the report's finding.

Officials and experts have said the floods in Kerala - which has 44 rivers flowing through it - would not have been so severe if authorities had gradually released water from at least 30 dams.

"This could have been avoided if the dam operators had started releasing water in advance rather than waiting for dams to be filled up, when they have no alternative but to release water," said Himanshu Thakkar, a water expert at the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People.

It was only when the floods peaked last week that water from more than 80 dams was released.

"It is clear that major dams in the state - like Idukki and Idamalayar - only released water when Kerala was in the throes of heavy flooding, which actually proved to add further misery to the situation," Mr Thakkar said,

He added that dam operators had had sufficient time to release water when it was relatively dry, which could have helped prevent some of the damage.

An assessment by the federal government earlier this year found that Kerala was among the 10 states most vulnerable to flooding.

The state's administration is accused of not having taken the necessary steps to lower the flooding risk.

The flooding is the worst the state has seen in 100 years
Experts say the federal government is also to blame because Kerala gets no early flood warning from the Central Water Commission (CWC), the only government agency authorised to do so.

"The unprecedented floods and dam water releases also raise the questions about flood forecasting and advance action by the CWC," Mr Thakkar said.

"We are shocked to find that the agency has absolutely no flood forecasting sites. It has only flood monitoring sites in Kerala," he added. "It's high time that the CWC includes some key dams like Idukki and Idamalayar and some key locations in its flood forecasting."

SOURCE

California Gas-Tax Repeal Stalls Democratic Drive To Flip House Seats

California’s Proposition 6, the popular gas-tax repeal, is fueling the GOP’s fight to wipe out the “blue wave” threatening to engulf swing-district House Republicans in the Golden State.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a House Republican super PAC, released an ad Friday linking Democrat Katie Hill, who’s running against GOP Rep. Steve Knight in the Los Angeles County district, to the state’s 2017 tax increase on gasoline.

“When you fill up, you’re paying 12 cents more a gallon because of Sacramento’s gas tax hike,” says the ad slated to run in the Los Angeles media market. “How out of touch is Katie Hill? Hill supports radical regulations that would increase gas prices by another 60 cents.”

Those regulations refer to her support for cap-and-trade. Ms. Hill has yet to take a public position on the gas-tax repeal, although she opposes fracking and off-shore drilling, and has refused to accept “oil money.”

When Democrats made plans to flip GOP-held districts in California that went for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, they didn’t count on Proposition 6, which has placed a risky speed bump in the Democratic road to regain control of the House.

Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has pledged to spend at least $25 million to defeat Proposition 6, enlisting the help of the state’s powerful labor unions and municipal groups, but so far the repeal is ahead in the polls.

How potent is the gas-tax issue? After the CLF ran a gas-tax ad last month against progressive Democrat Katie Porter, a protégé of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, she stunned the left by coming out against fuel taxes.

A University of California Irvine law professor, Ms. Porter is challenging Republican Rep. Mimi Walters, a strong supporter of the repeal, for the Orange County seat.

“I oppose higher gas taxes, and I won’t be afraid to take on leaders of both political parties and do what’s right for Orange County taxpayers,” said Ms. Porter in an Aug. 21 ad.

Her decision to leave the gas tax in the dust “marks the most prominent defection from the Democratic ranks yet,” according to CalMatters, but not the only one.

Democrat Josh Harder, who’s challenging Republican Rep. Jeff Denham in the Central Valley, has also come out in favor of Proposition 6, arguing that a federal infrastructure solution is needed.

After the first ad linking her to the gas tax aired last month, Ms. Hill accused Republicans of running a “false attack ad,” tweeting that, “Instead of focusing on making our lives better, the GOP is focusing on slander and it’s not going to work.”

The $52 billion transportation package was aimed at paying for road improvements and transit projects by raising the state excise tax on gasoline by 12 cents in the first year and the diesel tax by 20 cents, as well as vehicle registration fees.

Democrats argued that the 10-year plan is needed to repair the state’s crumbling roads and bridges, but the backlash was swift from California drivers confronted with some of the highest gas prices in the nation.

Foes of the measure, led by former San Diego City Councilman Carl DeMaio, responded to the bill’s passage last year by organizing a recall election against Democratic state Sen. Josh Norman of Orange County, who cast what was described as the deciding vote.

Mr. Norman was recalled in June by a wide margin and replaced with Republican Ling-Ling Chang, ending the Democratic supermajority in the state Senate.

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 September, 2018

Leftists have always claimed to stand for "the people", when even the Bolsheviks were middle class

Another NYT fraud

They initially used the partial submerging of Kansai airport as a whipping boy for global warming. In the second last paragraph, however, we learn that the airport literally was built on sand and was always expected to sink!

As a powerful typhoon tore through Japan this week, travelers at Kansai International Airport looked out on a terrifying void: Where they should have seen the runway, they saw only the sea.

They also saw what could be a perilous future for low-lying airports around the world, increasingly vulnerable to the rising sea levels and more extreme storms brought about by climate change. A quarter of the world’s 100 busiest airports are less than 10 meters, or 32 feet, above sea level, according to an analysis of data from Airports Council International and OpenFlights.

Twelve of those airports — including hubs in Shanghai, Rome, San Francisco and New York — are less than 5 meters above sea level.

All told, extreme weather and rising sea levels today pose one of the most urgent threats to many of the world’s busiest airports, which often weren’t designed with global warming in mind.

“We know that there are going to be impacts. And we expect those impacts to become serious,” said Michael Rossell, deputy director-general at Airports Council International, a group representing airports from across the world. “Recognizing the problem is the first step, and recognizing the severity is the second. The third is: What can we do about it?”

Kansai airport, which serves the bustling cities of Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe and handled almost 28 million travelers last year, faces an additional predicament. A feat of modern engineering, Kansai sits on an island three miles offshore that was built over the course of a decade from two mountains’ worth of gravel and sand. The airport, which opened in 1994, was built in Osaka Bay partly to minimize noise problems but also to avoid the violent protests over land rights that are the legacy of older airports in Japan, like Narita, which serves Tokyo.

Signs of trouble came early. Engineers had expected the island to sink, on average, less than a foot a year over 50 years after the start of construction as the seabed settled under the airport’s weight. But the island sank more than 30 feet in its first seven years and has continued to descend, now losing 43 feet in elevation at the last measurement.

SOURCE

The coming decarbonization tsunami

San Francisco Climate Action Summit intends to set the stage for controlling our lives

Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris

Batten down the hatches! A tsunami of global warming and “clean energy” propaganda is approaching! San Francisco is hosting the September 12-14 Global Climate Action Summit, a massive event at which “international and local leaders from states, regions, cities, businesses, investors and civil society … will be joined by national government leaders, scientists, students, nonprofits and others … [to share] what they have achieved to date and commit to doing more to usher in the era of decarbonization.”

Decarbonization means phasing out the fossil fuels that now provide over 80% of all the energy we use – in favor of wind, solar and other supposedly clean energy sources. In his video promoting the Summit, Governor Jerry Brown said, “It’s up to you and it’s up to me, and tens of millions of other people to get it together to roll back the forces of carbonization and join together to combat the existential threat of climate change.” The Summit home page even claims “decarbonization of the global economy is in sight.”

That is ridiculous. The world has been using more coal, oil and natural gas over the past decade, not less, because they are the best energy sources available. The supposedly clean, green renewable energy sources and their long transmission lines are far too expensive and unreliable for widespread use. They also have major pollution issues of their own, though the worst impacts occur in countries with weak environmental controls. They require vast amounts of fossil fuel energy and raw materials to manufacture. They impact millions of acres for mining, waste disposal, wind and solar facilities, and transmission lines.

At the recent America First Energy Conference, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry noted that just generating enough electricity to power the Houston metropolitan area would require over 21,000 square miles (13.4 million acres) of corn fields, if the fuel source was corn ethanol. “Think about that footprint!” Landry exclaimed. To produce the same amount of electricity from wind power would take almost 900 square miles of wind turbines or 150 square miles of solar panels, he added (and millions of batteries).

Wind turbines already kill millions of raptors, other birds and bats, many of them rare, threatened or endangered. Imagine the impacts from all the turbines needed to generate all the world’s electricity. And climate change is almost entirely a natural phenomenon, over which humans have essentially no control.

To support the decarbonization ruse, Summit speakers will employ simple but effective language tricks. We’re already getting a taste. For example, the Summit’s Press Room proclaimed on August 23, “19 Global Cities Commit to Make New Buildings ‘Net-Zero Carbon’ by 2030.”

The World Green Building Council says the objective of net-zero carbon building is to “achieve net zero carbon emissions annually in operation.” But of course, that just means that most of the emissions merely have to be created somewhere else, as discussed above.

The WGBC says this is being done to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement, “the start of the most important race in our existence – the race to curb global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, so that global temperature rise remains below 2 degrees Celsius and, ideally, below 1.5 degrees Celsius.”

But that rise began with the modern industrial revolution and end of the Little Ice Age in 1850 – which means we now have less than a degree to spare before climate chaos allegedly sets in. That too is ridiculous. Moreover, humans cannot control climate as if we had a global thermostat, and we are not really talking about controlling “carbon” anyway.

Al Gore started that deception with his 2006 pseudo-documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which claimed “carbon emissions” were going to destroy our planet. Gore helped popularize the term “carbon footprint,” while always hiding the enormity of his own footprint – and hiding the fact that the “dangerous pollutant” is actually carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas that people and animals exhale and plants use to grow. The more CO2 in the air, the better and faster plants grow. It’s a natural, happy, mutually beneficial process.

So, in an unfortunately all too successful attempt to scare people, Gore and his cohorts began using “carbon” as a synonym for carbon dioxide, knowing it would conjure up visions of soot, lamp black and coal dust. Aside from the fact that CO2 contains a single molecule of carbon, it has about as much in common with elemental carbon as lightning does with lightning bugs.

Robert Gould, MD, president of the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, further illustrates how distorted the climate debate terminology has become. Gould says “the decarbonization of our planet is imperative for human survival.” In reality, a decarbonized Earth would be a dead world, a world devoid of all life, including ours.

Many people have unwittingly accepted the “carbon” sleight-of-hand, without realizing they are being manipulated toward negative thoughts about plant food. It is possibly the best example of subliminal brainwashing ever.

Fears that CO2 increases can deleteriously impact temperatures should also be scuttled. Carbon dioxide can absorb only a narrow wave length of the radiation (heat) returning to the atmosphere from Earth, which initially absorbs it from the Sun. That wavelength is 15 microns or millionths of a meter – and the atmosphere’s current 410 parts per million of CO2 has already absorbed essentially all of the heat’s wavelength the Earth has to give. That means any further additions of CO2 can have no measurable impact on the Earth’s greenhouse effect and temperature.

Journalist H. L. Mencken accurately summed up the real goal of these deceptions. “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary,” he observed. Global warming is the best hobgoblin the radical environmentalists have concocted so far.

Misuse of the word carbon is no laughing matter, however. This unsubstantiated fear is depriving the less fortunate among us of sorely needed, inexpensive energy, by eliminating life-giving fossil fuels and the miracle molecule of life, CO2. In the process, society is subjected to further government control, reduced individual freedom, greater socialism, less free enterprise capitalism – and lower living standards for everyone except wealthy, privileged ruling elites.

If you don’t think such nefarious word games can have such an impact, just remember how the term “Y2K” struck fear in many hearts and minds, by conjuring up endless turmoil that awaited us on New Year’s Eve 1999. Most of us woke up laughing at how we had been conned into worrying for months and years – when in reality turning to the new millennium simply required changing two digits on each computer that controlled planes, trains and electric grids.

The havoc never happened, and billions of dollars were wasted – just as is happening with climate chaos.

Some might say we are merely arguing semantics. If by “semantics” they mean “the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning,” they’d be right. In fact, linguistic and logic deception will be a major weapon wielded by Global Climate Action Summit speakers next week. Indeed, University of Florida linguist M. J. Hardman tells us, “language is inseparable from humanity and follows us in all our works. Language is the instrument with which we form thought and feeling, mood, aspiration, will and act[ion], the instrument by whose means we influence and are influenced.”

So as the Summit wears on, note how often you hear the word “carbon” – as in “carbon emissions,” “carbon footprint,” “carbon trading” and “decarbonization” – when the real topic is carbon dioxide, the plant-fertilizing “gas of life.” Reword the sentences using carbon dioxide, and ponder how they are trying to deceive you, scare you about manmade climate cataclysms, convince you to eliminate 80% of the energy you use, and let them control your life and living standards – while they get rich and powerful.

These word games are not like the difference between saying a flower is “pretty” or “beautiful.” They are intentional distortions used to drive their anti-fossil fuel agenda. We must call them on it every time.

Via email



As the world and climate change yet again – Who is helping to create a better world? Who is determined to hold everyone back?

John Shanahan

The world has changed tremendously since the early 1800s, as the growing use of fossil fuels made life on Earth increasingly better for most of us. People have far better, longer lives. Economies are better, stronger, more vibrant, more adaptable. Health care, education, transportation have improved greatly. Most governments are more stable and peaceful. There is less human pressure on the environment.

Achieving these milestones of course required governments, businesses, professionals, teachers and students working for these goals – not extreme environmentalists constantly protesting and trying to delay or block every technological advance.

Sadly, since the 1960s, many foundations and organizations, segments of the media and many individuals have worked to prevent progress. They want to keep energy and mineral treasures in the ground and insist that nothing mankind does is safe enough. They want an undisturbed, unpopulated world for themselves and their friends. Extreme environmentalists seem determined to control the world.

It seems to make no difference to them that billions of people would suffer and die without the benefits of fossil fuels and their tremendous array of life-enhancing and life-saving byproducts.

Four organizations are leading global campaigns to prevent the use of fossil fuels and nuclear energy: the Union of Concerned Scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and Greenpeace. Many others gladly and proudly join them.

In determined opposition to these inhumane efforts are four organizations that help lead efforts to make a better world through use of technology: the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, Cornwall Alliance, Nuclear Africa and Association des Ecologistes pour le Nucléaire. Many others have joined them in seeking improvements for people and planet.

Many individuals have contributed to making a better world through the use of fossil fuel and nuclear power. The world owes them a debt of gratitude. More than eight hundred of their articles, PowerPoint Presentations, books and videos are available here.

Sadly, after decades at the forefront of assisting humanity, the United States and Europe have largely abandoned their nuclear energy related help for the rest of the world. Along with the United Nations, World Bank and various multi-national development banks, they do not even support large-scale coal, natural gas or hydroelectric generation projects. For at least a decade, their financial and technological assistance has been centered around unreliable, weather-dependent wind, solar and biofuel projects.

Meanwhile, ironically, China and Russia are making tremendous progress in improving the lives of their own citizens and people in other countries – albeit amid extensive military buildups, aggressive territorial expansions, and onerous demands and restrictions on their client countries.

Russia’s Rosatom and Gazprom are providing extensive energy and support projects for other countries. China is using its new energy expertise and economic strength to gain influence and access resources around the world, to meets its own critical energy and raw material needs.

Yes, the world is changing rapidly. Populations are growing and becoming wealthier, healthier and more restive. Technologies are advancing at an unprecedented pace. Earth’s climate is changing, mostly due to complex natural causes.

Government and economic leadership must change with them. The best future for most people includes stable governments, strong economies, freedom, equality, respect for people and the environment, and better planning for mega urban centers. It can be done and will make the world a much better place.

However, if extremist environmental organizations and hostile outside forces continue to gain a death grip on free economies, countries will fade away. New powers will replace those that have existed in different forms for hundreds or thousands of years. Conquests have driven continental and global change before and will be attempted again. Overpowering from beyond their borders will bring some countries down, while collapse from within will doom others.

The Eco Experts promote solar panels and write grand reports (see their blog) on how mankind is supposedly causing large scale toxic pollution that will lead to catastrophic manmade climate change and end human and wildlife habitability in many parts of the world. Too many in the media – even Forbes magazine – promote their messages and give them far more recognition than they deserve or could ever get on their own.

The result is that more and more people will be starved of the reliable, affordable energy they need to improve and sustain their lives and living standards. It is but one example of many extreme environmentalist efforts to weaken the USA and Europe. It will deprive the world of help from outstanding pillars of democracy, freedom and economic prosperity.

A recent Eco Experts report identifies what they say are the ten most polluted cities in the world. The list includes Paris, Istanbul, Moscow, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Los Angeles. While very few cities are as clean as Zurich, these six cities have prospering economies, great tourism, impressive architecture and cultural attractions – and generally very clean air and water.

The Eco Experts report is highly misleading and largely ignores real urban problems. In the 1950s, London and Pittsburgh had dirtier air than Paris or Istanbul ever had. As Cornwall Alliance spokesman Calvin Beisner notes in a devastating critique, the “Eco Experts” report displays an almost sophomoric grasp of real-world urban problems in developed and developing countries.

What are real leading factors for human suffering and shortening of life expectancy in urban areas? Evil dictators (Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong), corrupt politicians, thoughtless businesses (Ken Saro-Wiwa) – and eco-imperialists (as Paul Driessen has documented). They are main reasons billions of people still do not have reliable energy supplies, decent economies, increased prosperity and opportunity, or better education, healthcare systems, drinking water, wastewater systems and solid waste management.

Extreme environmental groups focus on very small amounts of extremely small airborne particles and carbon dioxide, the non-toxic trace gas that is essential for nearly all plant and animal life. This is totally wrong. Imposing wind and solar energy to replace fossil fuels and nuclear makes countries energy weak – and causes suffering, chaos and premature deaths by the millions. By contrast, countries that stick with fossil fuels and nuclear power become and remain energy strong.

A second Eco Experts report is equally outlandish. This one maps out their forecast of countries that will supposedly not survive man-made climate change. Going around the globe at the same latitude one might expect similar results. But there is no consistency of their color coding for risk level. Greenland shows no data, while equally empty Northern Canada next to it has the lowest risk level.

Similarly, Bolivia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar and Australia are at about the same latitude south. Australia, already a very dry climate that until recently was switching to unreliable wind and solar power is classified as having the least risk, while lush but energy-poor Bolivia, Zimbabwe and Madagascar are predicted to be at much higher risk of failure to survive supposed man-made climate change.

Who buys solar panels from Eco Experts, much less accepts their unsound reports on toxic pollution and country collapse from man-made climate change? Driessen presents a far better analysis of what went right and what is going wrong in his recent talk, “How Prosperity Can Save the Planet.” It’s a fascinating tour through the modern history of energy, health and prosperity. I recommend it highly.

Via email

Paris climate deal doesn't stop us building new coal plants, Australian minister says

Australia does not need to quit the Paris climate agreement because our commitments are non-binding, and new coal plants can continue to be constructed, according to the resources minister, Matt Canavan.

Canavan told Sydney broadcaster Alan Jones on Friday he had never been to Paris, and was “happy to leave the Champs-Élysées for others”, but people needed to be clear the treaty Tony Abbott committed Australia to in 2015 “doesn’t actually bind us to anything in particular”.

Abbott said in 2015, when he announced Australia would be signing up, that the government was making a “definite commitment” to a 26% reduction in emissions by 2030 and “with the circumstances that we think will apply ... we can go up to 28%”.

But Canavan said on Friday the Paris commitment was a three-page document that allowed Australia flexibility to build new coal plants. The resources minister said rather than focusing on the situation in 2030, “what I want to focus on is solving the crisis we have in energy today”.

“We have to build power stations. There’s nothing in the [Paris] agreement that would stop us building power stations, including coal-fired power stations,” Canavan said.

“We need new ones”.

Canavan said Queensland was “propping up” New South Wales with the newest coal fleet in the country.

Jones prefaced his interview with Canavan with a long condemnation of the new foreign minister, Marise Payne, and the decision to sign on to a communique at the Pacific Islands Forum this week nominating climate change as the single greatest security threat to the Pacific.

The communique said all countries must meet their commitments under the Paris climate agreement.

Jones declared the prime minister, Scott Morrison, needed to “recall Marise Payne and replace her”. He said the Morrison government would have no hope of winning the next federal election if it wanted to “persist with the global warming rubbish and the Paris agreement”.

“Do you want to win an election or don’t you?” Jones said to Canavan on Friday morning.

Canavan dead-batted. “Of course I want to win the election, Alan. But, more importantly, what I want to do is have good policies for Australia and make our country strong”.

The Queensland Nationals have been campaigning for months for government backing for new coal plants.

In his first major speech in the energy portfolio, the new minister, Angus Taylor, signalled he wanted to encourage new investment extending the life of existing coal and gas plants, and upgrading ageing facilities.

Taylor said the government was intent on boosting supply, and that meant expanding existing plants, upgrading ageing “legacy” generators, as well as pursuing new “greenfield” projects.

Taylor is currently working up options for cabinet.

A recent forecast by the Australian Energy Market Operator predicted 30% of Australia’s coal generators will approach the end of their technical life over the next two decades, and it said it was important to avoid premature departures if the looming transition in the national energy market is to be orderly.

But it was also clear that the most economical replacement for the ageing coal fleet was not new coal, but “a portfolio of utility-scale renewable generation, storage, distributed energy resources, flexible thermal capacity, and transmission”.

Aemo concluded that mix of generation could produce 90 terawatt hours of energy per annum, “more than offsetting the energy lost from retiring coal-fired generation”.

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 September, 2018

Business As Usual: UN Climate Meeting Deadlocked

At the UN climate meeting in Bangkok, discussions are deadlocked over a number of contentious issues.

Thai fishermen and labourers whose livelihoods are threatened by rising sea levels kicked off an international day of protests in Bangkok Saturday, where key UN talks are attempting to breathe life into the Paris Agreement on climate change.

As global warming races ahead of efforts to contain it, the discussions are deadlocked over a number of contentious issues, with activists demanding immediate action to prevent irreparable damage to the planet. […]

The talks aim to create a draft legal framework for limiting global temperature rises that can be presented to ministers and heads of state at a final round of discussions in Poland in December.

The delegates have been meeting since Tuesday, but have made little progress, according to multiple sources close to the negotiations.

“The negotiators are not taking any action,” Ruchi Tripathi, head of climate justice at charity ActionAid, said.

In particular, the issue of how the fight against climate change will be funded – and how that funding is made available to developing nations – remains a key sticking point.

SOURCE

Antarctica's big secret: Active volcanic heat found under Pine Island Glacier

Secret? I have been pointing to subsurface vulcanism at both poles for years

Researchers have made a shocking discovery under the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica — an active volcanic heat source, which they say has played a "critical role" in the movement and melting of the glacier.

The scientists were looking at the role the ocean plays in causing glaciers to weaken when the discovery was made.

“We were looking to better understand the role of the ocean in melting the ice shelf,” Assistant Professor Brice Loose of Newport, R.I., a chemical oceanographer and lead author of the paper, said in a statement.

Loose added that the group was "sampling the water for five different noble gases, including helium and xenon," when the discovery was made.

“We weren’t looking for volcanism, we were using these gases to trace other actions,” Loose said. “When we first started seeing high concentrations of helium-3, we thought we had a cluster of bad or suspicious data.”

Loose said the presence of helium-3 is a "fingerprint for volcanism," noting it's relatively abundant in the seawater at the Pine Island shelf.

University of East Anglia Professor Karen Heywood, who also worked on the study, said the presence of volcanoes just means there's an additional source of heat to melt the ice.

"It will be important to include this in our efforts to estimate whether the Antarctic ice sheet might become unstable and further increase sea level rise," Heywood said.

Last year, significant parts of the Pine Island Glacier separated from the main shelf. In February 2017, a piece of the glacier approximately 1 mile wide separated. And in September 2017, a chunk of ice nearly four times the size of Manhattan separated from the Pine Island Glacier, according to LiveScience.

The amount of ice going into the ocean is staggering, measured in gigatons, Loose said. A gigaton is equal to 1 billion metric tons.

It's well understood that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet lies on top of a large or major volcanic rift system, but there has been no current magmatic activity, Loose noted. The last recorded activity was 2,200 years ago, but the volcanic heat discovered is new. Loose said it's impossible to measure the normal indicators of the volcanism, including heat and smoke, because the rift is so far below the ice.

Despite the discovery of the volcanic heat, the researchers noted that climate change is still the driving force for melting the ice, something other studies have repeatedly backed up, Loose said. [Evidence?]

SOURCE

BBC says Manmade climate change is 'indisputable'

The BBC says manmade climate change is so indisputable that it does not need to invite ‘deniers’ on to its shows for balance.

Fran Unsworth, who is the corporation’s head of news and current affairs, told journalists the issue should be treated in the same way they would report the score in a football match.

In a note to staff, she said: ‘Manmade climate change exists: if the science proves it we should report it.

‘To achieve impartiality, you do not need to include outright deniers of climate change in BBC coverage, in the same way you would not have someone denying that Manchester United won 2-0 last Saturday. The referee has spoken.’

Miss Unsworth’s email also directed staff to training materials stating that the broadcaster had too often failed to strike the right balance on climate change.

‘Climate change has been a difficult subject for the BBC, and we get coverage of it wrong too often. The climate science community is clear that humans have changed the climate, but specifically how is more difficult to evidence,’ the materials said, according to the Carbon Brief newsletter.

The issue was highlighted last year by a Today programme interview with Lord Lawson, a former Tory chancellor and climate change sceptic.

He claimed on the Radio 4 programme that there was no confirmation that extreme weather events were on the rise. He also said – inaccurately – that global temperatures had ‘slightly declined’.

The Today programme criticised Lord Lawson’s views on air the following day and senior BBC bosses later decided to go further and issue a formal apology.

The public display of hand-wringing sparked criticism from climate change sceptics and free speech advocates, who said green campaigners were ‘the book-burners of our age’.

Lord Lawson scored a victory over the BBC in January, when it was forced to admit that it had distorted the facts in a television programme. The BBC2 travelogue, Russia with Simon Reeve, claimed that reindeer populations across the north of the country were ‘in steep decline because of climate change’.

However, Lord Lawson pointed out that 17 out of 19 types of Eurasian reindeer were either stable or increasing in numbers.

The BBC’s claim is ‘a distortion of known facts and constitutes a serious factual error’, he wrote. ‘Given that climate change is such a controversial subject, extra care should be taken.’ This time the corporation stopped short of issuing an apology – but it did admit it should have been clearer.

‘This programme suggested that many reindeer populations are in steep decline because of climate change,’ the BBC said. ‘It would have been more accurate to say that many reindeer populations are threatened by it.’

SOURCE

Trump Just Stumped All The Critics Of His ‘Energy Dominance’ Agenda

The Department of the Interior’s (DOI) latest oil and gas lease sale brought in nearly $1 billion bonus bids and broke all previous records, the DOI announced Thursday.

The DOI sold 142 leases in New Mexico and brought in more revenue in two days than the all of the oil and gas lease sales in 2017 combined. Revenue totaled $972,483,619.50 and roughly half of that will be reinvested in New Mexico’s roads and public services, such as education.

“Critics of the Administration’s American Energy Dominance policy often falsely claim there is little to no interest in Federal oil and gas leases. Today they are eating their words and once again President Trump’s policies are bearing fruit for the American people,” Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said in a statement.

A 1,240-acre parcel in southeastern New Mexico set the record for the highest per-acre bid at $81,889 per acre. The single parcel brought in more than $101.5 million in revenue.

On “bonus bids,” companies pay a one-time premium to secure exclusive access and rights to develop an area for oil and gas for at least a decade. The lease will extend as long as the area remains in use producing oil.

Bonus bids are used by experts to gauge companies’ long-term confidence in particular areas.

The Trump administration is continuing to push the president’s “energy dominance” agenda that includes rolling back regulation and opening more federal land and waters to potential development. The DOI held the largest oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history in March, offering 77 million acres in federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico. The sale brought in $139 million worth of bids. (RELATED: Trump’s DOI Releases The Results Of The Largest Oil Lease Sale In US History)

Recent sales of oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico have produced somewhat stale results and caused some to question whether oil and gas companies were interested in investing in more long-term oil and gas development.

SOURCE


Australia backing out of climate committments

The Leftist article below says the world is horrified. The reality is that only a few Greenie ideologues are even noticing

Well, that didn’t take long. Little more than a week after the elevation of Scott Morrison to the prime minister’s office, Australia has returned to the bad old ways that were a feature of Tony Abbott’s engagement on climate change, and John Howard’s involvement with Kyoto.

In separate arena this week, Australia has been accused of attempting to water down the language of the Pacific Islands Forum declaration on climate change. And in Bangkok it has sided with the Trump administration and Japan in attempting to weaken climate finance obligations in a move that has horrified some observers.

Australia is coming under increasing scrutiny since Malcolm Turnbull announced the country was dumping the emissions obligation proposed for the National Energy Guarantee, and was then dumped by the party’s climate denying conservative wing anyway.

Morrison has shown no interest in climate change, and has instructed new energy minister Angus Taylor to focus only on “bringing down prices” and ensuring the country retains as much “fair dinkum” coal in the system as it can.

Even environment minister Melissa Price, a former mining company lawyer who is supposed to be responsible for emissions, is talking up the idea of having new coal-fired generators.

The international community is looking on in horror, and so are the main business lobby groups in Australia, such as the Business Council of Australia – who have campaigned vigorosuly for a decade to minimise Australia’s contribution to climate action, but understand the considerable reputational, trade and business consequences of choosing to do nothing.

Morrison has so far resisted calls from the party’s far right to follow Trump out of the Paris climate treaty, but in crucial and complex climate talks in Bangkok this week, sided with the US and Japan in a dramatic attempt to weaken climate finance obligations.

The Bangkok talks were called to give negotiators extra time to put together the so-called “rule-book,” which will provide the fine details of the Paris agreement, particularly as countries gear up to increase their climate targets to try and drag the collective efforts closer to the target of limiting global warming to “well below” 2°C, and possibly 1.5°C.

But little progress has been made in Bangkok, forcing the UNFCCC, which runs the climate talks, to call for the annual talks scheduled this year in Poland to begin a day earlier, in the hope that visiting heads of state have something to work with when they turn up.

One of the biggest road-blocks has been erected by Australia, the US and Japan, who put in a joint submission that seeks to water down climate finance guidelines, and casts doubt that this week’s Bangkok negotiations will deliver the clear climate rules UN leaders have been calling for.

Climate campaigners say the proposed text on article 9.7 of the Paris accord, which refers to accounting and is meant to establish rules about how developed countries report what finance they provide to developing countries, serves to muddy the rules rather than clarify them.

The campaigners say that the proposal would allow countries to report whatever items they like – including commercial loans ? as climate finance, in contrast to demands of clear financial and technical packages to help them developing countries cope with future extreme weather-related events.

“(This) does not create any meaningful rules on how climate finance is accounted for, and instead it essentially says ‘countries should report what they want,’” Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns for ActionAid USA, told Devex.

“This would completely let rich countries off the hook and deprive developing countries of real money for real action,” Wu said. Other campaigners said this meant climate finance could just be re-badged existing aid.”

Indeed, some are accusing Australia and other western countries of “disgracefully” and “sheepishly” hiding behind Trump’s announced exit from Paris to further their own agenda

They note that the Paris treaty was made weaker for the rich countries than the Kyoto Protocol, because of the politics in the US, and the efforts of most negotiators to bend over backwards to accommodate the US demands, only to find the US withdrawing.

“They should have acted as a firewall to stop the virus of the US approach from infecting the climate negotiations, but instead they have allowed US interests to once again paralyse progress,” writes by Mohamed Adow from Christian Aid International.

“Putting developing countries further in debt might be Donald Trump’s idea of what climate finance should look like, but it is not the real money for real action that’s needed to solve the climate crisis.

“Other wealthy countries must stop Trump in further weakening the Paris Agreement and instead honour their commitments by delivering a rulebook that is fit for protecting people and planet, not polluter’s profits.”

Don’t expect the Coalition government in Australia to pay much heed to that.

These problems are being felt acutely in the Pacific, where island nations are furious with Australia’s stance on climate, its attachment to coal, and its refusal to act on its declarations that “it takes climate change seriously.”

The current Coalition government still has no policy in place to try and reach what is regarded as a very low interim target of a 26-28 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030. So while it has signed a declaration recognising that climate change is the biggest security threat to the Pacific, it has no plans to do anything about it.

A new report by ClimateWorks says Australia is well off track, but it actually has the opportunity to meet the target through some low cost abatement. Much of this comes in the energy sector, but the Coalition is now talking about building new “fair dinkum” coal-fired generators, and making threats against companies that dare contemplate closing older, dirty, and increasingly unreliable and expensive power plants.

Numerous reports this week have pointed to the potential economic consequences of failing to act on climate change – at a global level, a national level, and even a state level. A new report suggested that – despite all the claims – coal was not the cheapest option because even existing plans would soon be more expensive to run than new renewables and storage facilities.

In Nauru, at the Pacific Forum, Australia was accused of seeking to water down the language of the declaration and issuing qualifications to part of the Pacific Islands Forum communique over the Paris climate agreement.

The Guardian quoted the prime minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoaga, saying that the name of the country seeking qualifications “[started] with capital A”. Australia is the only country in the PIF beginning with A.

It quoted Vanuatu’s minister for foreign affairs Ralph Regenvanu saying: “I was there, and can confirm this is true. And unfortunate.”

Bill Hare, managing director of Climate Analytics and a lead author on the IPCC fourth assessment report, told Guardian Australia that Pacific leaders were growing increasingly disenchanted with Australia’s refusal to commit to cutting carbon emissions.

“The leaders are not fools, and they are increasingly confronted by the problems of climate change, in all its different dimensions,” Hare said. “The problem for Australia is it doesn’t have credibility on climate. Australia is an important player for many of the Pacific Island countries, well-respected and well-liked by the populations and the political leaders, but on climate change there is a chasm opening up.

He said the real test for Australia would be in its actions to address its own emissions, and in helping the Pacific with adaptation.

“The actions will not match the gravity of the declaration or the gravity of the need. There is a credibility gap: Australia is not acting on reducing its own emissions. All the leaders know that whenever the prime minister or energy minister says Australia will meet its Paris targets ‘in a canter’, that that it is wrong, it is factually incorrect – it is bullshit.”

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 September, 2018

The Newest Member Of Trump’s National Security Team Will Freak Out Alarmists

MICHAEL BASTASCH

The Trump administration has brought on Princeton University physicist William Happer to serve as a national security adviser, sources told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

National Security Council (NSC) officials confirmed to TheDCNF Happer would be joining their team as the senior director for emerging technologies, but did not say if Happer had already begun working.

A source familiar with the matter said Happer started his NSC role on Tuesday. The NSC is headed by former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton.

Happer, an atomic physicist and prominent global warming skeptic, joins the national security team after more than a year of speculation the White House would bring him on as a science adviser, including as head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Happer interviewed with then President-elect Donald Trump in January 2017, not long before Inauguration Day.

Happer said in an interview last year that Trump agreed with his assessment that alarmism over man-made global warming had become a “cult.”

“Climate is important, always has been, but I think it’s become sort of a cult movement in the last five or 10 years,” Happer said in 2017.

“So in just a sentence or two, I said, ‘That’s my view of it,’” Happer said of Trump’s response. “And he said, Well, I agree with you. But that’s all we discussed.”

Happer is considered a skeptic of the theory that greenhouse gas emissions will lead to catastrophic global warming. On the contrary, Happer believes more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a good thing since it stimulates plant life.

He has said the world is in a CO2 “drought” and fought the Obama administration’s labeling it as a “pollutant.”

CNN reported on Tuesday that Trump would appoint Happer as the NSC’s senior director for emerging technologies, but that report did not say whether or not Happer had already joined the NSC.

Happer helped develop “adaptive optics,” which is “technology that helps eliminate distortion and fuzziness when using telescopes, microscopes or other imaging systems, breakthroughs that drew interest for their military applications,” CNN reported.

Happer also served as the director of the Office of Energy Research at the Energy Department under former President George H.W. Bush.

SOURCE

Trump’s newest hire thinks climate science is like Nazi propaganda

And he is right about that. It's a prime example of the Nazi slogan: "Tell a big enough lie often enough and people will believe it"

The screed below from professional Warmist Joe Romm offers no argument that references Nazism -- as I just did. He does not consider the comparison. He just resorts to the old argument of desperation: "But this is absurd".

So Bastasch in his article above was a true prophet. The appointment DID freak out the Warmists. See below

I have reproduced below only Romm's opening blast. The rest of his article consists of showing that Warmists disagree with Happer on various things. Warmism may be Gospel to Romm but skeptics find many holes in it -- so quoting fellow Warmists is convincing only to those who are already believers. It will convince no-one else

But I can't leave alone one outright falsehood in Romm's article. He's such a non-scientist that he probably doesn't even know it is a falsehood. Romm says:

"Yes, more CO2 can help plants grow — if they also get more water and other nutrients".

Enough remains of my long-lost Botany studies to know exactly why that is the reverse of the truth. What happens under high CO2 conditions is that the plants get their "fix" of CO2 more quickly and so can close the stomata (tiny holes) on their leaves more quickly. So they lose moisture through open stomata less. So they can actually get by with LESS water under high CO2 conditions -- quite the opposite of needing more. But don't take my rough explanation for it. Check it up in any botany textbook -- probably under "transpiration" or "stomata"

Romm probably thought the relationship between CO2 uptake and water uptake was obvious but science is full of non-obvious truths. Romm has degrees but no academic publications

President Donald Trump just appointed William Happer for the key job of “senior director for emerging technologies” at the National Security Council.

But Happer literally believes that more carbon pollution “would be a benefit” to humanity, as he wrote in a widely mocked 2013 Wall Street Journal op-ed headlined “In Defense of Carbon Dioxide.”

So much for finding someone who understands that perhaps the most crucial emerging technologies for the security of America and all of humanity involve reducing carbon pollution. Sadly this continues the trend of this administration ceding the biggest job creating sector of the next few decades — clean energy — to the Chinese and Europeans, who are betting tens of billions of dollars on it.

Happer, a Princeton theoretical physicist is one of the most extreme climate science deniers, and someone who directly compared the overwhelming scientific consensus that carbon dioxide causes global warming to Nazi “propaganda.”

“This is George Orwell. This is the ‘Germans are the master race. The Jews are the scum of the earth.’ It’s that kind of propaganda,” Happer told The Daily Princetonian in 2009. “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Every time you exhale, you exhale air that has 4 percent carbon dioxide. To say that that’s a pollutant just boggles my mind. What used to be science has turned into a cult.”

In 2014, he told CNBC, “The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler. Carbon dioxide is actually a benefit to the world, and so were the Jews.”

SOURCE

Trump effect prompts UN’s new climate tipping point: ‘Time Is Running Out To Save The —- Paris Agreement’

President Donald Trump may be presiding over the disintegration of the UN Paris climate pact. President Trump’s decision in 2017 to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris pact set a global example and it may have led to the agreement potentially teetering on the brink of its own survival.

AFP reported on September 4, 2018: “Time is running out to save the Paris Agreement, UN climate experts warned Tuesday at a key Bangkok meeting, as rich nations were accused of shirking their responsibility for environmental damage. If nations cannot reach an agreement by a December summit in Poland—known as COP24—the Paris Agreement, carved out in 2015, will be at risk. Money is at the heart of issue.”

It now seems that the latest UN climate “tipping point” is not about alleged dire man-made climate change impacts, but about saving the UN’s proposed “solution” to climate change!

Since Trump clexit (climate exit from the UN Paris agreement) in 2017, many other countries have flirted with following suit on some level.

SOURCE

Four Weeks Left Until The Maldives Drown

On September 26, 1988, climate experts said all 1,196 Maldives Islands would drown in 30 years. That is only four weeks away.

So far, they are batting 0.000 with their forecast. This is what the Maldives looks like this morning.

In 1997, the President of the Maldives pleaded for help. He said Island countries were about to disappear under the seas.

Ten years ago, The Guardian said the Maldives were packing up and moving out.

Now the Guardian says the Maldives is the moral leader on climate change and is adapting by taking in tens of billions of dollars of big oil money to expand their resorts to bring in millions of more tourists.

It takes moral courage to survive expanding islands.

In climate science, islands expand as the disappear under the sea.

The Guardian says if you don’t believe the Maldives will be gone in four weeks, you are evil and must be silenced.

SOURCE

Wild camels are an environmental problem in Australia

AN INVASIVE species is spreading across Australia at an alarming rate and baffled Aussies are running into them for the first time ever.

MORE than 1.2 million feral camels are raising havoc across Australia and they’re spreading further afield every day.

It may be a while before they’re clocked strolling along Circular Quay, but eyewitness reports from baffled farmers confirm they have been spotted unusually far south — in the southeast coastal district of Western Australia.

It is understood the nomadic desert beasts are migrating away from dry conditions in the Nullarbor and Goldfields in a desperate attempt to find food and water.

According to the latest Australia State of Environment Report (ASER), camels were introduced to Australia around 1840 and by 2008, an estimated 1 million camels were roaming the central arid lands of Western Australia, the Northern Territory, South Australia and Queensland.

Despite culling efforts between 2009 and 2013, which resulted in the deaths of 160,000 camels in Central Australia using ground-based and aerial culling techniques, the population has now swelled to around 1.2 million.

That’s according to the Centre for Invasive Species Solutions, which predicts the feral population is growing by 8 per cent each year.

Confused farmers have now spotted groups of camels strolling up on to their Western Australia properties for the first time ever.

One of those, Brett South, who spotted a group of eight on his farm in Beaumont, about 130km northeast of the coastal town of Esperance, said he was "blown away" when they suddenly appeared.

However, he wasn’t pleasantly surprised. "They wreck all your waterholes, they have no respect for your boundary fences and your gates," he told the ABC. "The number of pests we have up here, we don’t need to add camels to the list."

It’s a common sentiment between farmers who have been unfortunate enough to bump into the humped travellers in WA — which is now home to the largest herd of feral camels in the world.

According to the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, the state is now home to 45 per cent of the nation’s camels.

And, they’re not just trashing farms. The non-native mammals are also causing headaches for a number of other reasons. According to the ASER, the "major impacts" of this burgeoning camel population includes damage to native vegetation and wetlands, increased competition with native animals for food, shelter and water resources, and damage to infrastructure and road hazards.

The last federally-funded control program was the $19 million Australian Federal Camel Management Project. It supported the development of a commercial feral camel industry and contributed to a reduction of the feral camel population to around 300,000 by 2013.

A report commissioned by the Northern Territory and South Australian governments in 2016 found the harvest of wild camels could become a major industry which would be "both profitable and viable for a few years".

After this point, the report recommended the way to ensure profitability would be to boost camel farming businesses, as well as diversify meat production to include culled horses and donkeys.

"There must be a transition to farmed camels to maintain the supply of camels to market and stay profitable," the report read. "This is because there will be a vacuum effect created through the repeated removal of wild camels from current hotspot areas."

Camel meat, however, is rarely eaten in Australia, despite pushes from certain restaurants to experiment with its rich flavour. Last year, Max Mason, owner of the Henry Austin restaurant in Adelaide, announced he would be serving up true blue Aussie camel and encouraged foodies to get on-board. He said the meat "is everything you want in a steak".

"We char it on an open fire and serve it off the bone, with heirloom carrots, ice plant and macadamia cream," he said. "And we are also trialling a camel tartare, which is an even better way of getting the true camel flavour."

However, efforts to curb the growing population have been thwarted because the invasive species are able to breed in the massive swathes of unmanaged Crown land and the 800,000-hectare Dundas Nature Reserve in WA, according to the main organisation carrying out control programs on camel populations.

"This problem will just get worse and worse with weeds, camels, dogs and whatever other pests build up in the unmanaged Crown land, until there are control programs funded to deal with the problem where it lies," Goldfields Nullarbor Rangelands Biosecurity Association’s chief executive Ross Wood told ABC.

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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6 September, 2018

A warm-water time bomb could spell disaster for Arctic sea ice

What rubbish! Melting sea ice (floating ice) will NOT raise the water level. Archimedes demonstrated that over 2000 years ago

The Arctic is in hot water, literally, following the discovery that heat has been accumulating rapidly in a salty layer of the Arctic Ocean 50 metres down. Currently, it’s being held at that depth by a less dense layer of freshwater overhead, but if the two layers start to mix it could melt all seasonal sea ice, accelerating the already-rapid loss of polar ice cover.

Researchers discovered the heat time-bomb after analysing publicly available data on ice cover, and at different depths on sea temperature, heat content and saltiness over the past three decades. The data was gathered around the Canadian Basin, a major basin of the Arctic Ocean fed by waters from the North Chukchi Sea, just north of the Bering Strait between Alaska and Siberia.

Over this timespan, the heat content of the salty layer doubled, from 200 to 400 million joules per square metre, enough to reduce overall Arctic ice thickness by 80 centimetres.

The root cause is global warming, which has seen temperatures in the Arctic rise by 2 degrees from pre-industrial levels–twice the global average—leading to record-low sea ice coverage. The researchers found that with sea ice retreating, heat absorption by exposed surface waters has increased fivefold in 30 years, mainly from direct sunlight, which no longer gets reflected by ice.

And with no ice in the way, strong northerly winds push these newly-warmed surface waters at the Arctic fringes down to the depths where they’re now accumulating under the Arctic. The fear is that the freshwater “lid” keeping them there could fall apart.

“It could be lost through increased mechanical mixing of the water layers, especially driven by the winds,” says Mary-Louise Timmermans at Yale University and head of the team. “With continued sea-ice losses, we’d have more wind-driven mixing, and that would erode this natural barrier,” she says.

Loss of a protective “freshwater” layer is already happening elsewhere around the Arctic in the Barents Sea north of Scandinavia, allowing warmer Atlantic waters to flow in and potentially destroy an entire Arctic ecosystem in the North Barents Sea within a decade.

SOURCE

Global Warming Doomsday Fails To Arrive – Deadline Moved To 2035

Climate alarmists claim in a newly published study that the world will reach a “point of no return” if there is no dramatic reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. “We show that there are strict deadlines for taking climate action,” said Henk Dijkstra, a co-author of the study.

The news media is extensively reporting on the prediction, characterizing the study as ominous, yet the study serves as a refreshing reminder of how all previous predictions of climate deadlines and doomsdays failed to materialize.

In 1989 a United Nations senior environment official said entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth if global warming was not reversed before the year 2000.

In 2006 Al Gore wrote that “We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.”

Also in 2006, James Hansen said the world had just 10 years to take “serious action” about greenhouse gas emissions or we would cross of “tipping point” of climate danger.

In 2009, Hansen reduced the time he said we had to address global warming, writing: “Barack Obama has only four years to save the world” from global warming.

In 2007, the head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that it would be “too late” to address global warming if action weren’t taken by 2012.

In 2009, Prince Charles said the world had just eight years left to end global warming or there would be “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.”

In 2012, the president of the United Nations Foundation said the Obama second term would be “the last window of opportunity” to emplace dramatic carbon dioxide restrictions necessary to keep future warming “anywhere approaching” a two-degree Celsius tipping point.

At least this time the alarmists are giving themselves a little more time before they have to embarrassingly reset the doomsday climate clock.

SOURCE

Another glut

Greenies are constantty claiming that we are about to run short of food. Below is one example of the reality: We are producing TOO MUCH food. There is a glut of strawberries where I live, making beautiful fruit available for a song

Cranberry farmers buried under a glut of the tart fruit are seeking permission for a radical way to dig themselves out: destroying millions of pounds of their crops.

After struggling with an oversupply of the berries for nearly two decades, growers around the country are asking the Department of Agriculture for authorization to sell 75 percent of the supply and discard the rest.

With only a few weeks left before the Massachusetts harvest, the Cranberry Marketing Committee, made up of growers and handlers, is waiting for a USDA decision on whether the industry can cap the amount of berries produced.

“It’s been tough. Overproduction is the bane and has been for cranberries in the last few years, and consequently we’re not getting much money for our crops,” said Jack Angley, owner of Flax Pond Farms in Carver, which is a member of the Ocean Spray growers’ cooperative.

Angley is one of more than 300 growers in Massachusetts, which trails only Wisconsin in cranberry production. He and the rest of the industry are trying to reverse the painful cycle of rising inventories, lower prices, and disappearing profits.

If the government approves their request, farmers would hold back 25 percent of the berries grown, or roughly 100 million pounds.

Some would be composted, some likely sent to charities or researchers. But it wouldn’t immediately eliminate the cranberry surplus.

The surplus increased from 4.6 million barrels in 2011 to 9.9 million in 2016, and it’s projected to reach 10.9 million barrels in the coming harvest, according to the USDA.

Last year, inventories were large enough for consumption before cranberry farmers even began the harvest, and too much inventory means prices could keep falling.

SOURCE

Shock! NASA finds something that is NOT caused by global warming

"Climate change" gets not a single mention. Is this a sign of things to come?

The Okavango Delta in northern Botswana is one of the world’s largest inland deltas. It is known for its annual flooding, which happens between February and May as a wave of water from seasonal rainfall traverses about 20,000 square kilometers of wetlands. But just as water makes a regular appearance in this part of the Kalahari Desert, so too does fire.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites acquired this series of images between April 28 and May 23, 2018. The images were composed from a combination of visible and shortwave infrared light (MODIS bands 7-2-1). The burn scar appears dark brown; vegetation is bright green; bare ground is light brown; and water is dark blue.

Notice how water appears to be moving from the areas of permanent swamp and filling the fingers of the so-called seasonal swamp. “The annual flood pulse is reaching the distal fringes of the delta about now,” said Michael Murray-Hudson, a wetlands ecologist at the University of Botswana’s Okavango Research Institute. At the same time, a slow-moving fire front (bright orange) is advancing toward the southeast, leaving a dark brown burn scar in its wake.

Also notice how the path of the fire appears to follow the path of the floodplain. Channels inundated with floodwater can generate a huge amount of vegetation that is prone to burning. But there is a sweet spot: researchers have shown that floodplains inundated with water on an intermediate basis—about every other year—have the highest potential to burn.

While the floodwaters help to generate the fuel needed for burning, the fires ultimately have a human origin. “Almost all of the fires are anthropogenic,” Murray-Hudson said. “People set them when they can, for example, when the landscape will carry a fire. It’s a pretty normal phenomenon, although the extent and frequency might be increasing as the human ecological footprint in the delta grows.”

Previous research suggests that fires can affect the ecosystem by changing the quality of floodplain water and by removing aquatic shelter for young, vulnerable fish. But the authors of that paper point out: “The amount of seasonal flooding has a larger ecosystem impact than fires and is the primary factor in the wetland’s productivity.”

SOURCE

Australia: Labor’s energy bill shock

Electricity bills will soar and gas and coal-fired power stations will close if the share of wind and solar generation increases dramatically, engineers have warned after analysing the nation’s energy supply.

The analysis casts doubt on Labor’s claim that a 50 per cent renewable energy target — the centrepiece of the opposition’s climate change policy — would reduce electricity prices.

It found bills were likely to soar 84 per cent, or about $1400 a year, for the typical household, if wind and solar power supplied 55 per cent of the national electricity market.

The analysis by a group of veteran engineers — written and funded by five mechanical, chemical, electrical and nuclear engineers, with decades of experience in the power industry — was sent to premiers, federal cabinet ministers and shadow cabinet late last month.

It contrasted the costs of supplying electricity in the national electricity market under different mixes of generation. This included the Australian Energy Market Operator forecast for the year 2040 of 65 per cent renewable energy including hydro, as well as five other scenarios, including replacing coal-fired or gas generation with nuclear power.

The AEMO scenario, the closest to Labor’s policy, would lead to retail electricity prices rising by 84 per cent to 39c per kilowatt-hour — adding $1374 to the average household’s 2017 electricity bill based on the competition regulator’s June report into the electricity market.

Robert Barr, an electrical engineer and academic at University of Wollongong, said “in practical terms what would happen is the coal and open-cycle gas stations would go broke long before we reached this situation”.

Co-author Barry Murphy, former managing director and chairman of Caltex Australia, said the scenarios with high levels of renewable energy could force coal-fired power stations to be turned on and off at irregular intervals, or spin their turbines uselessly, “which isn’t economic so they would shut down”.

Labor in government would ensure at least 50 per cent of the nation’s electricity was sourced from renewable energy by 2030.

The new figures emerged as Scott Morrison moved to shift the emphasis of Coalition energy policy away from reducing emissions to cutting prices and shoring up reliability. In Cairns yesterday, the Prime Minister criticised NSW and Victorian governments for restricting gas exploration.

“We have to be prepared to use all the resources we have available to get electricity prices down,” he said. “They’re achieving that in Texas while at the same time reducing their dependency, because of the abundance of gas reserves there, on other fossil fuels.”

Mr Morrison noted that electricity prices were a third lower in the US state than in Queensland.

The analysis takes aim at “technology agnosticism” that ignores the “complexities of power system engineering”.

“Looking at the total cost of particular forms of energy in isolation is sensible only if you’re going to rely on that form of energy alone, but for the electricity market, it’s the total system costs that matters,” Mr Murphy said.

The study recommends ceasing subsidies for renewable energy and ending the national ban on nuclear energy. “The fact is technology matters, and poor and poorly informed choices on the NEM can lead to expensive mistakes that could bedevil our prosperity,” it found.

The AEMO scenario of 65 per cent renewable energy by 2040 would reduce emissions at a cost of $365 a tonne of carbon dioxide, the study estimated. Replacing coal-fired power generation with nuclear power would reduce emissions by a far greater amount at an abatement cost of $27.50 a tonne. The Gillard government’s ill-fated carbon tax envisaged a tax of $29 a tonne.

“Even if you allow for the reductions in the cost of batteries, etc, it doesn’t make much difference to the total cost because of the extra transmission costs,” Dr Barr said. “If we put a whole lot of wind farms into the system, we need to spend a lot of money on the transmission network for power that is intermittent.”

The AEMO forecast would require more than a 40-fold increase in the solar capacity and around a tripling of the number of wind turbines. “That’s a total of 62,000MW of unreliable, intermittent, weather-dependent generating capacity, with a lot situated a long way from points of high consumption,” Mr Murphy said.

In his first speech as Energy Minister last week, Angus Taylor all but dropped the national energy guarantee, the Turnbull government’s proposal that included promises to meet emissions reductions agreed to in the Paris agreement.

The new analysis calls for a bipartisan agreement to end the ban on nuclear energy — despite ongoing uranium exports — that has prevailed since 1998.

“Countries like Germany can experiment with high levels of renewables because they can always import nuclear power from France or Czech Republic when there isn’t enough wind or solar energy, but we’re on our own,” Mr Murphy said.

The authors said much of the existing analysis rested on arbitrary assumptions that the cost of renewable energy would fall in the future rather than “actual costs and actual use”.

“Speculating about future costs 22 years hence is futile: where will gas prices go, or recent developments might reduce nuclear costs, who knows for sure,” Mr Murphy said.

“The South Koreans would jump at the opportunity to help us with building nuclear power stations.”

Dr Barr said: “I don’t think politicians realise how much damage is being done to industry.”

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 September, 2018

Climate Change Is About to Transform Earth Into an Unrecognizable, Alien Landscape (?)

And pigs might fly.   When Warmists start getting their prophecies right will be the time to take notice of them.

It is true that warming, if it happens, would have some effect. It might make more places on earth like my old home of Cairns in tropical Australia, where the average summer temperature is much higher than any average Warmists predict for the earth. But Cairns is a tourist destination and people move there to live. Warm climates are great!

Cairns used to be the port for a rich agricultural hinterland but these days the main industry is tourism. The big international jets roar into Cairns international airport throughout the day, delivering their consignments of tourists -- mostly Japanese and Chinese. Cairns even has omiyage shops specifically for Japanese tourists

But there are lots of sharks and crocodiles and other nasty beasties in the tropics so warming might require more people to learn how to keep safe from them

Within the next 100 years, Earth as we know it *could be* transformed into an unrecognizable, alien world, with ecosystems around the globe falling apart. After looking at over 500 ancient climate records, scientists have said current climate change is comparable to what the planet went through when it came out of the last ice age—and the seismic shift in biodiversity that took place then will likely happen again.

At the end of the Last Glacial Maximum—when ice sheets covered most of North America, Asia and northern Europe—the planet warmed up by between four and seven degrees Celsius. Over the course of 10,000 years, the ice melted and entirely new ecosystems emerged, eventually developing into what we see today.

Climate scientists are currently predicting that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate (the so-called "business as usual" scenario) then the planet will have warmed around four degrees Celsius by 2100.

In a study published in Science, an international team of researchers looked at hundreds of paleontological records, examining how terrestrial ecosystems responded to climate change 20,000 years ago in a bid to establish how the planet might adjust to similar warming in the next 100 to 150 years. They looked at potential changes using different climate scenarios—from warming being limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius through to business-as-usual.

Findings showed that unless there are huge reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, terrestrial ecosystems around the world are at risk of “major transformation,” with most of these changes taking place over the next 100 years.

“Terrestrial vegetation over the entire planet is at substantial risk of major compositional and structural changes in the absence of markedly reduced [greenhouse gas] emissions,” they wrote. “Much of this change could occur during the 21st century, especially where vegetation disturbance is accelerated or amplified by human impacts. Many emerging ecosystems will be novel in composition, structure, and function, and many will be ephemeral under sustained climate change; equilibrium states may not be attained until the 22nd century or beyond.”

Study co-author Jonathan Overpeck, from the University of Michigan, said there will be a huge ricochet effect that will eventually threaten water and food security. "If we allow climate change to go unchecked, the vegetation of this planet is going to look completely different than it does today, and that means a huge risk to the diversity of the planet," he said in a statement.

"We're talking about global landscape change that is ubiquitous and dramatic, and we're already starting to see it in the United States, as well as around the globe. Our study provides yet another wake-up call that we need to act now to move rapidly towards an emission-free global economy."

SOURCE

Endangerment Finding delenda est

Replacing Clean Power Plan with less harmful ACE rule does not fix fraudulent CO2 science

Paul Driessen

As the Punic Wars dragged on, Cato the Elder reportedly concluded every speech to the Roman Senate by proclaiming “Carthago delenda est” – “Carthage must be destroyed.”

Ample evidence suggests that the Obama era Environmental Protection Agency’s “Endangerment Finding” was devised in violation of basic scientific and transparency principles that ignored or excluded extensive evidence that contradicted its preordained outcome. The EF was then used to justify anti-fossil fuel rules that seriously harmed the energy security, jobs, health and welfare of millions of Americans.

The Finding must be reexamined. If these contentions are validated, it must be reversed and demolished.

In its 2007 Massachusetts v. EPA decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that EPA must determine whether emissions of carbon dioxide and certain other atmospheric gases “cause or contribute” to “air pollution” that may be “reasonably anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.” If the agency found the answer was yes, then it had to regulate those emissions. The Bush EPA failed to take action.

However, candidate and President Obama had promised that he would eliminate coal-based electricity generation and “fundamentally transform” America. It was thus a foregone conclusion that his EPA would quickly find a dire threat existed. On December 7, 2009, EPA issued its Endangerment Finding (EF): that carbon dioxide (CO2) and five other “greenhouse gases” (GHGs) were pollutants that did indeed “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations” of Americans.

The Obama EPA then promulgated its “Clean Power Plan,” which shut down numerous coal mines and coal-fired power plants, eliminated thousands of jobs and severely impacted factories, families and communities across the United States. The CPP also spurred the shift to unreliable wind and solar power.

However, any CPP climate change, health and welfare benefits are at best undetectable, in part because the rest of the world – from China, India, Indonesia and Southeast Asia to Australia, Germany and Poland – continue to build thousands of coal-fired power plants and put millions of vehicles on the road.

Recognizing this, President Trump pulled the USA out of the Paris climate treaty. His EPA has proposed to replace the Obama Clean Power Plan with an “Affordable Clean Energy” (ACE) plan that lets states take the lead in devising GHG emission reduction programs that best serve their individual energy needs.

These are important steps. But they are not enough, because they perpetuate the false claim that plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide is a “dangerous pollutant.” Even worse, leaving the EF in place would enable any future anti-fossil fuel administration to impose new economy-strangling, welfare-degrading rules.

Worst of all, leaving the Finding unchallenged and ignoring the way it was concocted and implemented would sanctify some of the most fraudulent and dictatorial Deep State bureaucratic actions in history.

In devising its EF, the Obama EPA did no new research and made no effort to examine the full range of studies and evidence readily available on natural versus manmade climate change. It just cherry-picked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports; deliberately excluded studies that contradicted its predetermined finding; and relied on temperature and extreme weather predictions by computer models.

The IPCC itself had long ago ended any pretense of trying to understand the interplay of natural and human influences on Earth’s climate. Instead, for political reasons, it had decided to focus on human fossil fuel use and GHG emissions as the only important factors influencing modern climate change. Its reports reflect that approach – and ignore the growing and readily available body of contrary studies and evidence, such as volumes of studies summarized by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.

The Obama EPA team even removed one of its most senior experts, who had prepared a contrarian report. “Your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision,” his supervisor told him. EPA consulted with alarmist scientists and environmentalist groups, but ignored moderates and IPCC critics.

The computerized climate models relied on by EPA are programmed to reflect the assumption that rising atmospheric CO2 levels are the primary factor determining climate and extreme weather. However, the average prediction by 102 models is now a full 1 degree F above what satellites are actually measuring.

In fact, even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels climbed well above the supposed 350 ppm “tipping point” (they reached 405 ppm in 2017), except for noticeable short-term temperature spikes during El Niño ocean warming events, there has been virtually no planetary warming since 1998 or at least 2002.

Moreover, Harvey finally ended a record 12-year absence of Category 3-5 hurricanes making US landfall. Tornados are no more frequent than in the 1950s. Droughts differ little from historic trends and cycles. Seas are rising at just seven inches per century, and Antarctic and Arctic ice are largely within “normal” or “cyclical” levels for the past several centuries. Indeed, reports of vanishing Arctic ice go back nearly a century and low ice levels were documented by Francis McClintock and other explorers long before that.

In many cases, older temperature records were adjusted downward, modern records got bumped upward a bit, and government-paid scientists relied on measurements recorded near (and contaminated by) airport jet exhausts, blacktop parking lots, and urban areas warmed by cars, heating and AC vents.

Humans might well be “contributing” to temperature, climate and weather events, at least locally. But there is no real-world evidence that “greenhouse gases” have replaced natural forces or are causing unprecedented climate chaos or extreme weather; no evidence that those emissions are “endangering public health and welfare” or that humans can control Earth’s perpetually fickle climate by controlling emissions.

Far from being a “pollutant,” carbon dioxide is the miracle molecule without which most life on Earth would cease to exist. The more CO2 in the air, the faster and better crop, forest and grassland plants grow, and the more they are able to withstand droughts, diseases, and damage from insects and viruses.

In fact, a slightly warmer planet with more atmospheric CO2 would be tremendously beneficial for plants, wildlife and humanity. A colder planet with less carbon dioxide would greatly reduce arable land extent, growing seasons, wildlife habitats, crop production and our ability to feed humanity.

Equally important, over 80% of US energy still comes from fossil fuels – and the countless benefits of those abundant, reliable, affordable fuels (and their CO2 output) exceed the EPA’s alleged “social costs of carbon” and “human health and welfare impacts” by at least 50 to 1, and perhaps as much as 500 to 1.

On a closely related matter, contrary to the “97% consensus” myth, scientific debate continues unabated over recent and future global warming, cooling, storms, droughts, sea levels and other “adverse effects” from oil, natural gas and coal use. Computer models and alarmist climate specialists say the threats are serious. Real-world observations and moderate to skeptical climate experts vigorously disagree.

The Obama EPA’s Endangerment Finding ignored all of this. It likewise dismissed the extravagant raw material requirements of expensive wind, solar and biofuel “alternatives” and their adverse impacts on wildlife and wildlife habitats. That makes the 2009 process even more suspect and fraudulent.

There is no demonstrable, much less dire or unprecedented, danger to American health and welfare from continued CO2 emissions. The danger is from anti-fossil fuel policies justified by the EF and IPCC.

Simply put, in concocting its Endangerment Finding, the Obama EPA violated the cost-benefit analysis policies and basic standards for honest, open, informed, replicable science. With so much of America’s energy, economy, environment, health and welfare at stake, this cannot be allowed to continue.

The Trump Administration must disavow the “CO2 drives climate change” tautology and stop viewing the Endangerment Finding as “established” law and policy. It is no more established or acceptable than were the Supreme Court’s reprehensible 1857 Dred Scott and 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decisions.

It is time to reexamine the Endangerment Finding, give it the intense Red Team scrutiny it deserves, and relegate it to the dustbin of history. The Endangerment Finding delenda est.

Via email

How The War On Climate Change Slams The World’s Poor

When a "solution” to a problem causes more damage than the problem, policymaking has gone awry. That’s where we often find ourselves with global warming today

Activist organizations like Worldwatch argue that higher temperatures will make more people hungry, so drastic carbon cuts are needed.

But a comprehensive new study published in Nature Climate Change led by researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis has found that strong global climate action would cause far more hunger and food insecurity than climate change itself.

The scientists used eight global-agricultural models to analyze various scenarios between now and 2050. These models suggest, on average, that climate change could put an extra 24 million people at risk of hunger.

But a global carbon tax would increase food prices and push 78 million more people into the risk of hunger. The areas expected to be most vulnerable are sub-Saharan Africa and India.

Trying to help 24 million people by imperiling 78 million people’s lives is a very poor policy.

We’ve heard similar stories before: In a few short decades, climate policy has often created more damage than the benefits it attempts to deliver.

Ten years ago, a biofuels craze swept rich countries with the full-throated support of green activists who hailed any shift away from fossil fuels.

Food crops were replaced to produce ethanol, and the resulting spike in food prices forced at least 30 million people into poverty and 30 million more into hunger, according to UK charity ActionAid.

If we want to eradicate hunger, there are more effective ways. Around 800 million people are undernourished today, mostly because of poverty.

The single most significant initiative that could be undertaken tomorrow is not a policy that slows the global economy, but one that cuts poverty: a global trade deal.

The Doha free-trade deal was allowed to collapse with just a fraction of the attention given to global climate-change negotiations.

Reviving Doha would lift an extra 145 million people out of poverty by 2030, according to research commissioned by Copenhagen Consensus.

It could make the average person in the developing world $1,000 better off every year — allowing them to not only better feed themselves and their children, but also afford better health care, more education and lead more prosperous lives.

The EU’s climate policy under the Paris agreement, meanwhile, will realistically cost the bloc about $600 billion each year for the rest of the century, yet at best it delivers a trifling temperature reduction of just 0.09°F by the end of the century.

When comparing the massive cost with the slight delay in climate damage, each dollar spent delivers just three cents of climate benefits — i.e., lower hurricane damage, fewer heat waves, less agricultural stress.

Forcing poor countries to reduce emissions does even more harm because cheap, abundant energy brings prosperity.

Example: Activists argue Bangladesh should cut coal expansion. That would deliver global climate benefits worth nearly $100 million. But the forgone boost to the Bangladeshi economy would cost about $50 billion.

Aside from the immorality of obliging poor nations to avoid policies that would reduce poverty, the big problem with forcing carbon cuts is that green energy is not yet the savior that it is portrayed as.

Even after decades of heavy investment in subsidies to support green-energy production — costing more than $150 billion just this year — the International Energy Agency finds that wind provides just 0.6 percent of energy needs, and solar 0.2 percent.

By 2040, even if all of the grand promises in the Paris agreement on climate change were to be fulfilled (which seems unlikely), the IEA finds these figures will inch up to just 2.1 percent and 1.5 percent.

The flawed Paris agreement, which is the closest we have to a global scheme, will achieve at best merely 1 percent of what would be needed to keep temperature rises under 2°C, according to the UN.

It’ll cost $1 trillion to $2 trillion annually. This is money that can’t be spent on improving nutrition, health or education.

We need to get smarter about climate change. My think tank asked 27 top climate economists to explore all the feasible policy responses, and the conclusion was that the best long-term investment is in green energy R&D. For every dollar spent, $11 of climate damages would be avoided.

That makes much more sense than today’s climate approach, which mostly does more harm than good.

SOURCE

2 yachts fail to get through the NW passage. Blocked by ice

We are standing at the gates of the Bellota Strait all the time. If you follow our position (skiff.pl/position), you probably noticed that we have already changed a few times. This is due to the fact that ice is constantly prowling here - thin but wide ice floes (something like floating pancakes such as a playground), as well as massive junks with a draft of up to 10m.

There are strong currents here. Through this ice packets are rushing once, back and forth. In order not to let them disperse, we have to be vigilant all the time. That's why we have anchor watches around the clock - one person is still sitting on the deck and watching if anything affects us. If it is a small piece, then we push it away with an ice pole. If it's big, then we start the engine and make a dodge. In extreme cases, we change the anchorage. And from here we are already in the fourth place this week.

September started, and that means that the end of the navigation season in the Arctic will take place in 3-4 weeks. If we do not move further west in the next few days, it is time to return to Greenland.

Yesterday after receiving more ice maps we decided to give up trying to cross the Northwest Passage. Further waiting meant that the risk of losing the yacht, and perhaps not only, was already too great. The weather has set the bar too high this year. According to Canadian meteorologists, the melting of ice on our route is delayed by up to 6 weeks. This means that the passage will probably not open at all, and in other parts of it strong storms and short days would prevent fast sailing to more safe waters.

We fought like lions. We got as far west as we could. At the gates of the Bellota Strait, at Fort Ross, we were the first and now - together with the French yacht Atka - we are leaving last this season. Ahead of us, 15 units sailing from the east left us. Only a 120-foot Infinity is fighting from the west. We turn back, but what we experienced, what we saw, we experienced and learned about the Arctic, as well as ourselves, is priceless.

Now, however, we must concentrate on a safe return to Greenland. Ahead of us are over 1000 miles of sailing through the Arctic waters with winter on the back of the neck. The Arctic probably liked us too, because something does not want to let us out - at the moment the ice from the north cuts off our way back. Let's hope, however, that it will not take long. So do not stop keeping your fingers crossed!

SOURCE

Apaches Stave Off Wildfires With Timber Industry, Active Forest Management

The catastrophic blazes that thrive in eastern Arizona’s thickly forested yet arid landscape have a way of fizzling once they jump from the dense national forests to the Apache reservations, and that’s not by chance.

On a scorching summer day with fire danger at the extreme level, forestry superintendent Michael Gutierrez and his crew spent the morning chain-sawing the overgrown junipers surrounding Seneca Lake on the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation.

Soil conservationist Paul Buck discussed his experiments in fighting tough alligator juniper using the terrestrial version of the herbicide Round-Up, and forest manager Dee Randall explained how the scrubby trees could be converted into slabs and sold for furniture as part the tribal timber business.

Such wildfire prevention techniques might alarm environmentalists, but the San Carlos Apache have their own agenda: Keep the forests healthy, protect their sacred sites, and bring back the plants and grasslands that flourished before the reservation was established in 1934.

“The Apaches believe the health of the people is tied to the health of the land,” said Mr. Randall. “We want the reservation to look the way it did in the pre-reservation days. Everything we do is just to help us get a more healthy forest. That’s the whole goal.”

The Apache learned the hard way. The two worst fires in Arizona history — the 2011 Wallow Fire and the 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire — erupted in the backyard of the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, twin sister of the San Carlos reservation and home of the White Mountain Apache Tribe.

Robert Lacapa, a White Mountain tribal member who recently retired after a life in fire and forestry, said the tribe overhauled its approach after the Rodeo-Chediski Fire blackened 468,638 acres of national forest and tribal lands.

“After Rodeo-Chediski, what we did differently is we looked at the areas that survived the burn,” said Mr. Lacapa, a former Bureau of Indian Affairs forest manager at the Fort Apache Agency. “A lot of them survived because we had done fuel treatments — prescribed burns, timber harvests, timber stand improvements, multiple projects.”

The conclusion: “Multiple treatments are more effective than one. You need to do multiple treatments,” Mr. Lacapa said.

The strategy paid off nine years later during the Wallow Fire. The most destructive fire in state history, the Wallow charred 538,049 acres in Arizona and New Mexico but faded when it crossed into the reservation’s tidier woodland mosaic.

“Biggest wildfire in Arizona history couldn’t burn Fort Apache Reservation,” The Arizona Republic said in a July 2017 headline.

It was the same with the Rattlesnake Fire, which started in April on the Fort Apache side and spread to the San Carlos. Nearly all of the damage was on the neighboring Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. The wildfire ultimately burned 26,072 acres at a cost of about $11 million.

Steve Best, the Apache-Sitgreaves forest supervisor, credited the tribe for putting in the work to tackle the needles, branches and fallen trees that litter the forest floor to the tune of 2 tons per acre per year.

“On the Rattlesnake Fire, it didn’t burn hardly any on the White Mountain Apache side because it burned up to their prescribed burn and pretty much went out,” said Mr. Best. “If we would have treated our side of the fence at the same time they treated their side of the fence, the whole thing might have been just a little fire.”

Tale of two forests

Divided by the Salt River, the Fort Apache to the north and San Carlos to the south might be better described as small countries. Both about the size of the Big Island of Hawaii, the reservation terrain ranges from the Sonoran Desert to mixed-conifer forests to Mount Baldy at 11,421 feet, with enough winter snow to support a ski resort.

From the ground, the millions of forested acres belonging to the Apache tribes, the Apache-Sitgreaves and the Tonto National Forest look like one massive, contiguous woodland, but Mr. Lacapa said the aerial perspective tells another story.

“If you were to look at a Google Earth view, you can tell actually where the fence line is because of treatments,” he said. “It’s more dense on [the Forest Service] side and less dense on the other.”

The Apache-Sitgreaves holds an average of 700 Ponderosa pines per acre on its 2.1 million acres with densities ranging from 300 to 3,000 trees. Before settlements began in 1865, there were about 24 to 124 pines per acre, said Randy Fuller, natural resources staff officer.

“Our current densities are anywhere from 10 to 20 times their historical densities,” said Mr. Fuller.

The Apaches have sought to bring their pine stands closer to 50 trees per acre. At Seneca Lake, Mr. Gutierrez said, he wants to reduce the number of junipers per acre from about 50 to eight.

One reason for the difference: The Apaches have greater control over their forests. More than 200,000 acres of the Apache-Sitgreaves is designated wilderness, tightly packed woods that cannot be thinned, burned or otherwise managed by law except in emergencies.

The rest of the national forest can be treated subject to approval under the National Environmental Policy Act, but projects are frequently held up by litigation or appeals. Although tribal forest projects also must receive National Environmental Policy Act clearance, they don’t receive the same scrutiny from the public, which in the tribe’s case consists of fellow Apache.

“Our constituency is on the reservation, and we have about 16,000 tribal members,” said Mr. Lacapa. “Nobody from New York. Nobody from California. Our primary interest group is right here. Unfortunately for the Forest Service, they can get somebody back East or back West that can put a stop to any of their NEPA.”

That worries him. “The public has really limited their effectiveness in using prescribed burns and harvesting as tools,” said Mr. Lacapa. “And that’s really bad for us. It’s not just about what we can do here locally [on the reservation], but on a landscape basis.”

Logging in the national forests has plummeted in the past 40 years, by 80 percent in some areas, but not in the reservation woods. The White Mountain Apache Tribe operates the largest sawmill in the region and the San Carlos are working to update their aging mill while they continue to log and sell timber.

San Carlos tribal timber specialist Marvin Victor described the logging operation as a win-win for the tribe.

“It’s important to us not only because we have this connection to the Earth as Apaches, but we can create revenue off of it,” said Mr. Victor. “The way I look at timber sales from a fuels standpoint is that we’re thinning out the forest by taking the larger-diameter trees and making revenue off of that. Fire prevention-wise, it works out perfectly.”

Like many other Apache, Mr. Victor has a background in firefighting. Most of those working in forest management were once “hotshots,” elite firefighters who battle the nation’s worst wildfires. The San Carlos tribe operates one of the most famous crews, the Geronimo Hotshots.

Reducing forest density has additional benefits. Trees are enormous water hogs, which means reducing their numbers helps keep the woods from drying out. More water means healthier trees, and healthier trees are more resistant to the bark beetles that have ravaged millions of acres throughout the West.

“Beetles fly, and their flight distance is really quite short,” said Mr. Randall. “The needles have to be almost touching. We had a pretty good infestation, so we had to go in and salvage a lot of flagging, infested trees. Again, we’re just trying to mimic nature.”

Their forests are sources of pride. Jere Classay, a White Mountain member, couldn’t help but brag as he showed off the features of the shady Corduroy timber unit, a pristine stand high in the mountains of the Fort Apache reservation.

“This is our end state,” said Mr. Classay, a Bureau of Indian Affairs fuels specialist. “It has all our treatments: logging, mechanical and prescribed fire. Widely spaced trees, high crowns, few ladder fuels. Imagine if a wildfire started here. It would be hard to crown.”

All this comes as music to the ears of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who has made it his mission to fight destructive wildfires with more aggressive forest management, locking horns with environmental groups fighting his agenda by blaming the blazes on global warming

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.

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4 September, 2018

In easing up on mileage rules, the Trump administration gets one right

Jeff Jacoby

LABOR DAY WEEKEND marks the traditional close of the summer driving season, but for those of us who live in a college town like Boston, it's also when the throngs of arriving students clog the city's streets with their cars, and empty parking spaces become more elusive than a winning Powerball ticket.

But not all the automotive news is bad.

Washington is poised to ease up on the federal miles-per-gallon mandate known as CAFE, for Corporate Average Fuel Economy. On Aug. 2, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced their intention to freeze the fuel-economy standard when it reaches 37 mpg in 2021, and keep it at that level for the next five years. If adopted, that will represent a sensible correction to the course set by the Obama administration, which had proposed to keep ratcheting the fuel-economy requirement upward, to a fleetwide average of 54.5 mpg by 2026.

Like just about everything the Trump administration does, the projected change to CAFE standards has set off a frenzy of apocalyptic rhetoric. According to the Sierra Club, the real explanation for the new fuel-efficiency rule is that President Trump and EPA chief Andrew Wheeler are interested in "lining their friends' pockets" and "in favor of destroying clean air and healthy communities." Environment America, another activist group, accuses Trump officials of "rolling back the most effective tool we have to fix global warming." Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, charges the White House with "doubling down on the dirty vehicles of the past" in order to "knowingly increase air pollution."

This, not to put too fine a point on it, is crazy talk.

To begin with, the administration isn't "rolling back" anything. The current average fuel-economy requirement is 34 mpg, so pausing it at 37 mpg in 2021 will first mean a nearly 9 percent increase in overall fuel efficiency over the next three automobile model years. The 54.5 mpg standard touted by the Obama administration was never chiseled in stone. Federal law actually prohibits fuel-economy standards from being imposed for more than five years at a time, so 54.5 mpg should never have been regarded as anything more than an Obama-era velleity.

"Doubling down on the dirty vehicles of the past"? That's a snappy sound bite, but it's the exact opposite of the administration's goal, which is to get more motorists out of older, less-efficient vehicles and into newer, cleaner ones.

Requiring automakers to meet ever more rigorous mileage mandates has pushed up the price of new cars. The automobile industry made its peace with the Obama administration's 54.5 mpg standard, but everyone knew that it would mean notably higher sticker prices. "The cost of the average vehicle will rise," warned Edmunds.com, the highly-regarded automotive website, in a detailed 2013 analysis of the Obama fuel-economy rules. To meet such a steep mileage target, it explained, "such expensive technologies as turbocharging, direct fuel injection, 8- to 10-speed automatic transmissions, [and] electric drive" would have to be "spread widely throughout the vehicle fleet."

Sure enough, prices have risen and motorists have been holding on to their current cars for longer. Result: The average age of all cars on the road in the United States is now about 12 years, a record high.

Granted, price is not the only reason Americans are waiting longer to replace their cars. Modern vehicles are more expensive, but they are generally more dependable, too. Still, no one denies that price is a powerful driver of consumer decisions, and the administration calculates that its proposed mileage standards would drop the cost of a new vehicle by an average of $2,340. That in turn will mean an additional 1 million new car sales over the next decade. Perhaps those sales projections will prove overly optimistic, but it is asinine to accuse the administration of wanting to keep dirty old vehicles in use.

Most bizarre of all are those charging the Environmental Protection Agency with being against clean air.

CAFE standards weren't created to combat air pollution; their purpose was to reduce oil consumption in the wake of the Arab oil embargo of 1973. Nevertheless, one of the great regulatory success stories of modern times has been the EPA's war on pollution from cars and other vehicles. New cars today emit 99 percent less pollution than new cars did in 1970, when the Clean Air Act was enacted. Air pollution from all sources has been cleaned up, but the reduction in tailpipe emissions has arguably been the most dramatic of all. Between 1980 and 2015, even as the number of vehicle miles driven in America more than doubled, pollution from those vehicles — carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, particle emissions, hydrocarbons, lead — was slashed.

On some issues, the Trump administration can't be faulted strongly enough. But in proposing to ease up on the extreme Obama mileage standards, it is acting with prudence. If adopted, the new rule will lead to more cars that are cleaner, safer, more fuel-efficient, and more affordable, with no discernible impact on air quality. There are times when apocalyptic panic is justified. This isn't one of them.

SOURCE

Energy Socialism Comes to Congress, States

Socialism kills. From the former Soviet Union to Cuba, from North Korea to Venezuela, everywhere socialism has been tried it has robbed people of freedom and their property, produced economic stagnation and misallocation of resources, and resulted in millions of direct and indirect deaths.

Energy socialism, as touted by 28-year-old self-described socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the current darling of the progressive set and a Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives from New York, would be just as deadly. Ocasio-Cortez’s platform states, “Climate change is the single biggest national security threat for the United States and the single biggest threat to worldwide industrialized civilization,” Her solution to this supposed threat is to transition the United States to a 100 percent renewable energy system by 2035—through government force.

Recognizing a complete transformation of the massive U.S. energy system, which took more than 80 years to build, in just 17 years would be a herculean undertaking, Ocasio-Cortez proposes a “Green New Deal,” similar to the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II, requiring “the investment of trillions of dollars.”

Socialist thinking captured the Democratic Party’s imagination even before Ocasio-Cortez’s star rose, In September 2017, for example, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) introduced the Off Fossil Fuels for a Better Future Act. The OFF Act would require “100 percent renewable energy by 2035 (and 80 percent by 2027), places a moratorium on new fossil fuel projects, bans the export of oil and gas, and also moves our automobile and rail systems to 100 percent renewable energy.” Calling it “the most aggressive piece of climate legislation ever introduced in Congress,” hundreds Democratic candidates for local, state, and federal office in 2018 have signed the OFF pledge, a project of the lobbying group Food & Water Action, to push enactment of Gabbard’s OFF Act.

These policies would destroy millions of jobs and put the United States at a huge economic disadvantage versus other countries, especially China, India, and other developing nations that are increasing their use of fossil fuels to bring their populations rapidly out of poverty.

Laws mandating an end to the use of fossil fuels are energy socialism with a vengeance. Absent government support, wind, solar, and other forms of renewable energy can’t compete with traditional energy sources such as coal and natural gas. In an inane attempt to control the weather 100 years from now, socialists like Ocasio-Cortez and far-left lawmakers want to use government to destroy whole industries composed of hardworking Americans and then take trillions of dollars from taxpayers to keep failing renewable energy companies afloat. The fact they would be putting honest people out of work, driving up energy costs, and hurting the poorest among us more than any other group doesn’t bother these green socialists at all. For them, it’s nature, not humans, that counts.

The United States has been traveling by fits and starts down the road to energy socialism for decades, with predictable results: an increasingly unreliable power grid resulting in a growing number of blackouts and power failures; higher prices for electricity, fuel, food, and other goods and services; damaged equipment; people having to choose between buying food and medicine and paying their light bills; and unnecessary premature deaths.

For example, in the mid-1970s, to cut oil imports, the federal government established fuel mileage mandates, forcing automakers to reduce vehicles’ size, weight, power, and the strength of the materials used. Oil imports continued to rise after imposition of these mandates, because families continued to drive, but something truly horrific also occurred: tens of thousands of additional premature deaths of drivers and passengers. That’s just a small sample of what energy socialism looks like.

Energy socialism gained an even larger foothold in the electric power market when federal and state governments began providing lavish subsidies, tax credits, and tax abatements to politically connected Big Green solar and wind energy companies. Many states compounded this grave error by mandating utilities operating within their borders ensure ever-increasing percentages of the electricity they provide come from select renewable energy sources. People in states with renewable power mandates have seen their electricity bills rise by more than those living in places without renewable power diktats. And because the poor spend a larger percentage of their incomes on energy and energy-intensive items than the relatively wealthy, these mandates were predictably regressive, forcing hard choices on impoverished families.

When the federal government required increasing amounts of “renewable fuel” (ethanol and biodiesel) be blended into the nation’s transportation fuel, it resulted in damage to millions of engines in boats, older cars, and small engines in mowers, chainsaws, and other power tools. In addition, as increasing amounts of corn were diverted from dinner tables to gas tanks, food prices increased, including meat prices because livestock is often fed corn. In Mexico, which imports corn from the United States, the renewable fuel mandate created food riots, as the poor, who commonly grind up corn to make tortillas, empanadas, chips, and other foods consumed on a nearly daily basis, couldn’t afford the higher prices and faced corn shortages.

Europe, being much farther down the road to energy socialism than most U.S. states, should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone attracted to energy socialism. Over the past decade and a half, thousands of people across Europe have died in winter because of a lack of reliable, affordable heat, and during the summer from not having access to reliable air conditioning. Many European politicians have reacted by telling their fellow citizens they will have to make do with less and plan for shortages. They should be ashamed of themselves. Europe’s energy problems don’t result from some inability to produce energy—Europe had a modern energy system providing plentiful reliable power before energy socialism took hold—but rather from a decision by politicians to shutter reliable fossil-fuel and nuclear power plants as part of their misguided push to fight climate change.

These are the kinds of third-world problems that come with energy socialism: less-reliable power, higher energy costs, greater poverty, massive job losses, and lower economic productivity. Socialism can’t fix our problems, but it sure can make things a lot worse.

SOURCE

An anti-scientific cult has way too much control over non-GMO food labels

There’s a cheerful-looking picture proliferating on packages at the grocery store. An orange butterfly perches on a blade of grass forming a green check mark next to the words “NON-GMO Project.”

This innocuous little label is the emblem of the Non-GMO Project, an organization intent on misleading consumers with the end goal of limiting the number of agricultural innovations accomplished with the use of genetic engineering.

Remarkably, the government agencies that consumers trust to regulate nutritional information — the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture — have so far done nothing about it.

The Non-GMO Project earns a pretty penny licensing “GMO-Free” labels to companies, which appear on more than 50,000 foods and grocery products potentially generating hundreds of millions of dollars.

The labels play off the false idea that genetically modified organisms pose a risk to human health and the environment, when in reality, all of the credible accepted scientific evidence shows that the reverse is true. Approved GMOs are not only as safe as their nonengineered and organic counterparts, but in many ways they are even more beneficial. The science showing this has been evaluated and accepted by government consumer and health protection agencies like the Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Food and Drug Administration under administrations of both parties.

International organizations such as the World Health Organization, and science and health associations such as the National Academy of Sciences and the American Medical Association have also embraced scientific findings that weigh in favor of GMO products. There are more than 400 peer-reviewed reports that detail the health benefits of biotech plants and foods and as of 2017, 67 countries have formally adopted 20 biotech crops for food, feed, and cultivation.

Fundamentally, the business of selling “GMO-Free” labels depends entirely on fostering needless consumer fears over nonexistent health and environmental risks. Once these fears are stoked, consumers then put pressure on food makers to make their products GMO-free, which then leads to greater demand for the Non-GMO Project’s services.

This tactic is a neat illustration of the phenomenon known as “ Zohnerism,” the “use of a true fact to lead a scientifically and mathematically ignorant public to a false conclusion.” Nathan Zohner was a 14-year-old who distributed an alarming report on the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide to classmates, and then asked what should be done about the substance, if anything. He listed risks as causing excessive sweating and urination or severe burns in gaseous form.

What is dihydrogen monoxide? Just a complicated chemical name for water. Rather than ask teachers about it or do any of their own investigation, 86 percent of the kids he surveyed voted to ban dihydrogen monoxide for “causing too many deaths.”

So while it may be true a particular product lacks GMOs, the insinuation that they are something to avoid leads the public to a false conclusion.

Stigmatizing GMOs is just as absurd as scaring people about the risks of water. One might even call it a bit kooky, which begins to make sense given the origins of the Non-GMO Project: an anti-science cult in Fairfield, Iowa, made up of the followers of the late Maharshi Mahesh Yogi.

Some will remember the Maharishi as the promoter of transcendental meditation and rejected guru of the early Beatles. Others may recall his followers’ claims that they levitate and fly powered by transcendental meditation. But his followers also include anti-science and technology zealots who are intent on undermining modern agriculture based on a belief that removing bioengineered crops will help bring about world peace and “invincibility” for all mankind.

Despite its professed commitment to transparency and consumer protection, the Non-GMO Project is conspicuously silent about the role Maharishi followers play in its history and ideology. And why is that?

The Non-GMO Project’s marketing department understands that selling its labels to mass market food producers like General Mills and Nabisco, and to consumers in general, could be a lot less profitable if the public fully understood it as part of a larger plan to replace safe, scientifically based, affordable, and successful American farming technologies with something called “Vedic” agriculture.

In a 2010 video interview, John Fagan, a founding partner, former board member, and longtime advisor to the Non-GMO Project, spelled out in detail how Vedic agriculture would replace modern farming using the “sounds of nature to enliven the full value of consciousness in the food” and thereby align crops with the “fluxuating fields of the universe” — the same forces, presumably, powering Maharishi followers to fly.

Should an anti-scientific cult be permitted to call all the shots where consumer safety and health is concerned?

There are some encouraging signs that the feds are beginning to focus attention on the perfidy. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb took to Twitter earlier this month expressing a renewed commitment to review labeling claims for the benefit of consumer understanding. This attention could not come soon enough.

As attorney and professor of law Dean McGrath wrote in The Hill, “The law is clear that food claims made on websites come under FDA’s labeling guidelines. It is also clear that the assertions the [Non-GMO] Project makes on its website should be captured under FTC’s equally strict laws against misleading advertising.”

A little FDA enforcement can go a long way toward improving the health and well-being of American consumers who deserve accuracy and transparency in the labeling of their food products.

SOURCE

The Misguided Affordable Clean Energy Rule

By Tom Harris, Timothy Ball

Why is the US EPA still determined to control plant food and drive up electricity prices?

On August 29, 2018, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a press release “EPA Acting Administrator tours Ohio to promote ACE rule,” his proposed Affordable Clean Energy rule.

According to the release, the Trump Administration’s proposed rule will “replace the Clean Power Plan [CPP] and establish emission guidelines for [U.S.] states to develop plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

But the new rule is still misguided. Like the CPP, it is based on the mistaken idea that human activities, and particularly our industries and electricity generators, are causing dangerous global warming.

In reality, increasing atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), the only gas restricted by both the ACE and the CPP, is bringing huge benefits across the terrestrial biosphere. CO2 is an essential ingredient in photosynthesis. The last thing we should be doing is trying to reduce this “plant food.”

So why is it that, even under President Trump, the EPA still finds it necessary to restrict CO2 emissions? Let’s review a bit of history.

To increase government control over the economy, the Obama White House strongly supported the climate scare: the unfounded crusade to restrict CO2 emissions. The impact was and would be profoundly harmful. As MIT atmospheric meteorologist Richard Lindzen has said, “Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon, you control life.”

Obama achieved his goals using the “deep state” – influential, unelected, decision-making, unaccountable government bureaucrats, whose policies and long-term goals are mostly unaffected by changes in elected officials. In particular, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was central to his administration’s control of carbon in the form of CO2.

Obama knew he could not get the Paris Agreement on climate change through the Senate because – just before the rest of the world adopted the UN’s 1997 Kyoto Protocol in Japan – the Senate unanimously passed the Byrd/Hagel Resolution. This resolution stated that the United States should not be a signatory to any agreement that did not hold developing countries to similar targets as developed nations. In particular, the document said in part:

Resolved, that it is the sense of the Senate that –

the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol to, or other agreement regarding, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992, at negotiations in Kyoto in December 1997, or thereafter, which would –
mandate new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for the Annex I Parties, unless the protocol or other agreement also mandates new specific scheduled commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Parties within the same compliance period
The Paris Agreement does indeed have very different targets for developing and developed countries. So Obama asserted that Paris should not be considered a “treaty,” and so would not require Senate approval.

To get “rulings” that seemed to legitimize the EPA’s control over CO2 without going through Congress, Obama exploited a growing problem with the Constitutional balance of powers: the increasing tendency of the Judicial Branch to rule from the bench and make decisions that were properly Legislative Branch responsibilities. The EPA website explains how it was able to bypass Congress and control CO2:

On April 2, 2007, in Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007), the Supreme Court found that greenhouse gases [including CO2] are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act. The Court held that the [EPA] Administrator must determine whether or not emissions of greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles cause or contribute to air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare, or whether the science is too uncertain to make a reasoned decision.

Predictably, on December 7, 2009, the EPA issued its “Endangerment Finding” that GHG emissions did indeed threaten health, asserting:

The Administrator finds that the current and projected concentrations of the six key well-mixed greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) – in the atmosphere threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.

and:

The Administrator finds that the combined emissions of these well-mixed greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles and new motor vehicle engines contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution which threatens public health and welfare.

This is the flawed driver, the faulty reasoning, that underlies both the CPP and the ACE. Ironically, under the EPA definition of “air pollutant,” EPA could even include oxygen because it causes rust.

It is likely that the EPA colluded with the State of Massachusetts to get it to sue the EPA in support of designating GHGs as pollutants. In effect, the state claimed that the EPA was endangering the lives of its citizens by failing to control “harmful” CO2.

The trial transcript strongly suggests that EPA deliberately lost the final Supreme Court case. If it had properly defended itself, the case would have exposed all the lies and misinformation already pedaled to convince the public that dangerous human-caused global warming is a proven scientific fact.

The trouble is, most people think about this case in the context of criminal or civil law. In fact, and this is central to the problems created by unaccountable bureaucrats, it was adjudicated under Administrative Law (AL), a third component of the U.S. legal system.

Created just after World War II, AL allows groups and individuals to bypass the Constitution and Congress. It gives direct, unaccountable power to technocrats, subject matter experts who are members of highly skilled elite groups. The creation of AL speaks to the failure of the political class, but also to the manipulative power of technocrats and technocracy.

It was created because too many politicians cannot understand science and technology. They are afraid of making a mistake and exposing their ignorance, which would jeopardize their political careers. Instead of creating legislation that enables them to get information in ways they can understand, they give nearly complete control of issues involving science and technology to scientists, specialists and technologists. Here is what the Administrative Law does,

The executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the US federal government cannot always directly perform their constitutional responsibilities. Specialized powers are therefore delegated to an agency, board, or commission. These administrative governmental bodies oversee and monitor activities in complex areas, such as commercial aviation, medical device manufacturing and securities markets.

Simply put, if legislators can’t decide these matters in the first place, they won’t know if what the experts are telling them is the truth, or an exaggeration, manipulation or fabrication.

Justice Scalia summarized the situation when the case came before the Supreme Court in 2007:

The Court’s alarm over global warming may or may not be justified, but it ought not distort the outcome of this litigation. This is a straightforward administrative-law case, in which Congress has passed a malleable statute giving broad discretion, not to us but to an executive agency. No matter how important the underlying policy issues at stake, this Court has no business substituting its own desired outcome for the reasoned judgment of the responsible agency.

As forceful and persuasive as Justice Scalia’s comments were (here is his dissent in full), there is one massive hole in them that illustrates what is wrong with AL, not only in this case, but in almost every case where it is the basis for judgment.

It was the EPA that determined that CO2 was a harmful substance. The Supreme Court is in the foolish position of effectively ruling that the EPA must control a harmful substance that the EPA decided, with little evidence, was a harmful substance.

No wonder so many bureaucrats take positions with technocrat groups after they leave government. They can guide the groups on how to get what they want without having to bribe politicians.

The EPA was the central agency for creating, perpetuating and applying the myth that that CO2 is a harmful substance that is causing runaway global warming. Its bureaucrats wrote and promoted the biggest deep state fake news story of all time. President Trump must continue to rein them in.

SOURCE

Breeding Green Elephants in Australia

by Viv Forbes

Canberra breeds many white elephants, but now they are breeding a gigantic new breed of pachyderm in Australia’s Snowy Mountains – a Green Elephant. Grandly named “Snowy 2.0 Hydro-Electric”, it has the compulsory green skin, but it is just another big white elephant under a thick layer of green paint.

Snowy 2.0 plans a hugely expensive complex of dams, tunnels, pumps, pipes, generators, roads and powerlines. Water will be pumped up-hill using grid power in times of low demand, and then released when needed to recover some of that energy. To call it “hydro-electric” is a fraud – it will not store one extra litre of water and will be a net consumer of electric power. It is a giant electric storage battery to be recharged using grid power.

This is just the next episode in an expensive and impossible green dream to run Australian cities and industries, plus a growing electric vehicle fleet, on intermittent wind and solar energy and without coal, gas, oil or nuclear fuels.

Surely we can learn from the unfolding disaster of a similar German Grand Plan. See here

The first stage of Australia’s green dream was to demonise coal and nuclear power, set onerous green energy and CO2 emissions targets, subsidise and mandate the use of intermittent energy from wind and solar, and give electric cars financial and other privileges. All of this costs Australian electricity users and tax payers at least $5 billion per year. This destructive force-feeding of solar and wind power is well advanced.

Solar energy peaks around mid-day, falls to zero from dusk to dawn and is much reduced by clouds, dust and smoke. Over a year it may produce about 16% of name-plate capacity. Thus a solar-battery system would need installed solar capacity of six times the demand. These solar “farms” are very land-hungry per unit of usable energy, often sterilising large areas of agricultural land.

Wind energy is much more erratic - it can produce about 35% of peak capacity but often produces peak power during the night when there is low demand. It may produce zero power for several days. A sudden high wind can send wind power surging onto the grid, and it falls to zero as the wind dies. Wind power driving a wind-battery system would need installed wind capacity of triple the expected demand, but even that may not cope with a long windless spell. There can be days with zero production from either wind or solar, and neither can increase output to meet demand which often peaks around dinner time and breakfast time when green power is scarce. Wind “farms” are a blight on the landscape and are often built in scenic areas where farming and forestry are prohibited.

The price of electricity fluctuates wildly as these floods and droughts of intermittent green energy surge into the grid. This creates instability, increases the chance of blackouts and destroys the viability of reliable coal-fired generators which are unable to ramp up fast enough to profit from soaring power prices during green energy droughts and are forced to keep running while accepting close-to-zero prices during the green deluges. To speed up this destruction of reliable energy, politicians are still using subsidies and targets to encourage more green energy to be dumped randomly onto the grid.

For a short very clear video on the cost and reliability problems caused by wind power in Minnesota see here

Warren Buffett puts it bluntly: “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

The solution to green energy disruption is simple. Do not allow any new spasmodic generators like wind and solar to connect direct to the grid. They must construct or contract for battery or other backup to moderate their fluctuations and increase reliability and predictability. Existing wind-solar farms already connected to the grid should lose all subsidies and be paid what their second class product is worth at the time it floods onto the grid.

Backing up and taming green energy is simple in principle – it can be done using lithium batteries like the Musk monster in South Australia, or giant pumped-hydro schemes like Snowy 2.0. Or conventional reliable generators like hydro, gas, oil, coal or nuclear can be operated intermittently to fill green energy gaps.

Other ways to store and release energy would also work in principle – hydrogen generation, molten salt, compressed air or giant flywheels – all look smart when sketched on the doodle pads of green politicians and then modelled on academic computers. But they become progressively more complicated and expensive as they progress to engineering design, costing, construction, operation and maintenance. Reality will reappear when the bills start hitting consumers and tax payers, but by then it is too late to recover all those wasted resources.

To make things worse for consumers and industry, widely scattered green energy installations usually need new roads for construction and maintenance and new transmission lines to transport their unreliable product to where it can be used (some 30 new transmission lines are currently planned in Australia alone to connect green energy facilities, and more will be needed.) Those who profit from this green infrastructure get guaranteed returns based on capital, maintenance and operating costs, not on the value of its contribution to consumers, and as usual consumers and taxpayers pay the bills.

Industry and households are now waking up to the costs and blackout risks facing them as more coal-fired generators are forced to close as evermore intermittent generators de-stabilise the grid and cause wild price swings. But politicians have yet another plan to paper over the growing supply problems from un-reliables as they try to meet the self-imposed emissions targets.

Recently the Turnbull Federal Government committed over $7 billion in studies and purchase price to buy the existing Hydro-electric complex in the Snowy Mountains from state governments. This valuable project conserves water which is used for irrigation and electricity generation. However they plan to burden this useful profitable project with another green dream - a Giant Battery.

Snowy 2.0 will consume electricity mainly from distant generators in the Hunter and Latrobe Valleys to pump water from lower dams to upper dams, and then recover part of this energy by releasing the stored water back downhill to drive turbines. The electricity recovered will be sent mainly to the big but distant demand centres of Sydney and Melbourne thus incurring more transmission losses. All of these unavoidable losses mean that Snowy 2.0 will only recover about 60% of the energy it takes from the grid. (This low recovery is one reason that existing pumped hydro facilities like Tumut 3 in the Snowy and Wivenhoe in Queensland are seldom used).

The system also imprisons Snowy water which could be used to generate new power and then flow into Snowy irrigation schemes. This Canberra-bred green elephant aims to profit from fluctuating wind-solar supply and prices, but it will make things worse for electricity consumers in the long run by helping to destroy low-cost, reliable base-load energy from coal.

Electricity supply will then become a lottery – every time the wind drops, the panels are shaded and the Giant Battery is flat, the lights will go out. South Australia has shown us how easy this is.

If there is also a long drought affecting hydro-electric supply in the Snowy and Tasmania, base load electricity supply will rely on a few geriatric coal generators. If a major transmission line is then damaged or fails, we will all need all the diesels in our sheds. Tasmania has provided a lesson for us all - they had a hydro drought and then a broken transmission cable and were forced to hurriedly purchase 200MW of diesel engines at a cost of $64M to keep their lights on.

In the coming brave new electric world, compulsory smart meters will decide which suburbs, homes, heaters, coolers, pumps, dairies, draglines or factories are switched off when power supply fails to meet demand.

Snowy 2.0 will be the biggest and most expensive storage battery in Australia with some 2,700 times the capacity of South Australia’s lithium Green Elephant. It will probably require upgrading of the transmissions lines to the big demand centres of Sydney and Melbourne and to the remaining real power stations which will supply most of the electricity to run its pumps.

All of this is supposedly being constructed to help Australia meet its costly but self-imposed emissions target. However there will probably be an increase in emissions if this Green Elephant is created. The project will require a huge amount of concrete, steel, copper, diesel and electricity to manufacture, transport and install the pipes, pumps, generators, roads and transmission lines and to bore 27 km of new tunnels. Pumping all that water up-hill regularly and repairing and maintaining the system in the coldest place in Australia will not be cheap in dollars, energy or emissions. Careful accounting of all long term effects will probably show no emissions savings whatsoever.

Snowy 2.0 is being constructed to moderate the fluctuations in green energy production and to kill coal power faster. It will do this. But will not be able to guarantee electricity supply with any certainty – if we have a week of windless cloudy weather, and there is not enough coal or gas power, the demand for electricity will quickly drain the Snowy 2.0 reservoirs. Then where does the power come from to pump the Snowy water back up the hill and keep the lights on? SA’s giant lithium battery may keep Adelaide powered for a few minutes, but what about Townsville, Toowoomba and Tamworth?

However, if politicians are determined to build Snowy 2-0, it could be put to much better use than pumping water uphill to run down again. Our electricity would be more secure and cheaper if we ceased all force-feeding of wind-solar un-reliables, used coal, gas or nuclear power running continuously at capacity to supply the stable “base load” of electricity demand, and used schemes like Snowy 2.0 to cover peak load fluctuations above this base load. This would create a stable grid providing reliable low-cost power (so it has little chance of happening with green gremlins in charge of energy.)

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 September, 2018

An extremely abusive Warmist

An Andrew Lane (aslane1@asu.edu), who claims a Master of Sustainable Solutions from Arizona State University, put up an abusive comment on Marc Morano's site. Morano and various other skeptics thought the writer was so abusive that they wondered if it might not be a put-up job designed to get an unwise reaction from us.

So Tony Heller replied to the guy and a long correspondence resulted. Tony offered to debate anyone from the ASU on global warming and the historical climate statistics. Tony is an extremely knowledgeable climate historian.

Lane was not able to nominate anyone for such a debate but continued to spout the vilest abuse at Tony. Tony of course repeatedly replied with the greatest moderation. A sample of the abuse:

You Ass Wipes are so determined to be Regressive Retards and Scientifically Illiterate. I have BCCed the entire ASU School of Sustainability here to see if anyone wants to set up such a debate with Clowns like you both. Your blatant ignorant statements like the most ice on Earth was at the highest CO2 content and the least amount of ice was at the lowest amount of CO2 proves quite well that you are so stupid...trying again and again your best to keep folks stuck on stupid. Dazed and confused.

You both are so fixated on such clear Bull Shit I’m not sure there is much point in debating you. All one has to do to see how much BS you all are Pedaling is watch the film “Merchants of Doubt”. That is Marc Morono in person. No If, Ands, or Buts about it. That’s all you guys are. Liars and Deniers. Willing to pedal bull shit for money I suppose!

There is some hope that you Ass Hats will wake up and smell the Pollution, but I doubt it. Some Klansman wake up and mend twisted thinking, but you all may be past help with your enormous ignorance! Your little Moronic Comrade is so funny claiming that I am the one being dupped by “Merchants of Doubt”! Just watching the Trailer where your Stupid Sap Sister Steve Milloy says, "Dioxins, Pesticides, Chemicals in General, there is no evidence that these are harming us"! Grab up Stevie and Morono and you all go huff on some Dioxins and see how you feel. Maybe you can ingest some Gamma Ray Uranium too to top it off.

Note that Lane is only semi-literate. He writes "pedal" when he means "peddle". Yet both are common words.

Anyway, Tony eventually wrote to the Geology Dept. at ASU and got this reply from Whitney Love of the MSUS program:

Andrew does not represent the rest of us at the School of Sustainability. Please accept this as an apology, on SOS's and Andrew's behalf

So it seems that there really is a little fountain of hate called Andrew Lane. His frantic abuse does sound like a work of desperation. If I may put my psychologist's hat on, I suspect that it really is himself that he is trying to convince -- JR.

UPDATE: I entered into a subsequent correspondence with Mr Lane and pointed out that CO2 molecules don't have little timers or other control mechanisms in them so that as soon as they get into the atmosphere CO2 molecules do immediately whatever it is that they do.

But there have been long periods where CO2 levels have risen without any corresponding rise in global temperatures -- e.g. 1945 to 1975 and the first 14 years of C21. So, clearly, CO2 levels do NOT influence temperature.

He saw the point of that but had no answer to it. He still decided however that he was going to stick with the "consensus" -- thus showing that his views were not scientific ones

Judge Bends to Environmental Groups, Suspends First Grizzly Hunts in Decades

A federal judge delayed grizzly bear hunts scheduled to begin Saturday in Idaho and Wyoming as the court considers a lawsuit by environmentalists to stop the hunts altogether.

U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen ordered the hunts postponed for at least two weeks while the court weighs whether grizzly bears were inappropriately removed from the endangered species list.

A coalition of environmental groups and Native American tribes brought the lawsuit that prompted the court order, NBC News reported.

“We’re thrilled,” Alliance for the Wild Rockies Executive Director Mike Garrity told NBC. “Now the judge has time to rule without grizzly bears being killed starting Saturday morning.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delisted the bears in June 2017, ending 42 years of federal protection for the species.

The grizzly population around Yellowstone National Park has grown from 136 bears in 1975 to roughly 700 in 2017.

The states introduced the hunting seasons as part of a grizzly management plan to keep the species from overpopulating and expanding into neighborhoods and communities where people live.

The grizzlies have also expanded onto ranches and farms, killing livestock and threatening the livelihood of rural agriculturists.

Mary Thoman gave up her family’s historic sheep ranching land after losses from bears made the ranch too costly to maintain, according to the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which has joined the case on behalf of Thoman in support of the grizzly hunting season.

The hunts would be the first held in the lower 48 U.S. states since one in Montana in 1991.

“They’re just looking at it from the bears’ perspective,” Wyoming hunter Todd Hoese told NBC. “The way that nature works is a balance and we don’t have that balance. … There are too many bears now.”

SOURCE

Droughts in Europe are nothing new

Old stones bearing ominous messages have resurfaced in a river in Central Europe, according to news reports.

Over the course of centuries, Europeans marked low water levels during droughts by carving lines and dates into boulders along the Elbe River, which runs from the Czech Republic into Germany. The idea was that if water levels dipped low enough to reveal an old carving, it would signal to locals that dry, hungry times — similar to those experienced in the marked year — were coming. Over a dozen of these "hunger stones" have reappeared in the Elbe this year, amid a record-setting European drought, the Associated Press reported Aug. 23.

And the stones' warnings aren't wrong. Agence France-Presse reported that northern Europe's current drought has not only brought with it record-setting temperatures and wildfires but also significant threats to local food production. In Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, AFP reported, the grain harvest is expected to be down between 30 and 60 percent, depending on the region. England and France may also be significantly impacted. Farmers in northern Europe might have to "send much of their herds to slaughter due to a lack of feed," according to AFP.

While research indicates that climate change will exacerbate droughts in Europe — and make them more frequent around the world — these stones reveal how dangerous these sorts of events were when they occurred in previous centuries.

The oldest stone carving to emerge was carved in 1616 and is considered the oldest hydrologic landmark in Central Europe, according to the AP.

It "bears a chiseled inscription in German," the AP reported, "that says, 'when you see me, cry.'"

SOURCE

How Scientific Groupthink Has Slogged The Climate ‘Debate’

Comment from Australia

Groupthink among climate scientists — ‘the science is settled’ brigade — has constrained public debate, which was to be expected. You see, believers are predominantly devoted to promoting ‘solutions’ and that, rather than open-minded inquiry, which is the warmists’ objective.

Someone among my group of “climate change is real” mates sent me and others a series of those heat-stripe charts from dark blue (cold) to dark red (hot) for various places and showing that it had grown hotter over the past 100 to 200 years or so.

The earliest was from central England and dated from 1772. Climate Lab Book is the source for these charts if you want to look them up.

One wag responded that these charts made it easier for people who couldn’t read graphs. Uneducated Deplorables presumably.

I can read graphs despite my membership of the Deplorables. As can most, if not all, of those skeptical of the alarmist hypothesis.

I responded in a reasoned and diplomatic way that those who thought the charts showed anything of interest or significance were halfwits.

Or, I may have said that they had only half a brain. I’d had a glass or two of wine at the time. But leaving this particular way of expressing myself aside, what is my point?

My point is that we are in an interglacial period (thankfully) and, to boot, we are coming off a Maunder Minimum (low-sunspot activity) dated around 1645 to 1715.

This is otherwise referred to as the Little Ice Age. Thus, there is no dispute that the Earth has gradually — though not evenly — warmed since then. To point this out as though it were profound is profoundly irritating to those with a full quota of wits.

I thought it might be instructive to employ what in the business world is called facilitation.

You break an issue down; and then, by approaching it from the least- to the most-contentious parts, you try to forge a consensus among people in a room.

A consensus is infeasible when comes to climate. But a process of breaking down the climate change hypothesis into parts might put the debate on a more intelligent footing and, perhaps, deter people from broadcasting banal heat charts.

It’s a simplified breakdown. I want a degree of license on that matter. Only the first three of the six parts listed below would find unanimity among true believers and skeptics.

The Earth has warmed since the industrial revolution.

The warming since circa 1975 (based on land, sea and, since 1979, on satellites) has been at a considerably faster pace on average than in the period from 1850 to 1975. (Only since 1850 has there been a land and sea global temperature series (HADCRUT) based on thermometer readings.)

CO2 in the atmosphere has increased from around 280ppm pre-industrialization to around 400ppm now.

The increase in CO2 is mainly due to industrial emissions
The more rapid increase in temperature since 1975 is predominantly due to increased CO2 emissions.

Further increases in the concentration of atmospheric CO2 risks runaway warming accompanied by more violent and frequent adverse weather events and by flooding sea-level rise.

You might ask why this breakdown is useful. Only in making the debate more intelligible is my claim. Let the debate begin at number four above. Put the first three away into the consensus bank.

When it comes number four, some scientists among skeptics would agree. Others might differ. One skeptic colorfully described mankind’s emissions as a “fart in the wind.”

In other words, he thought natural processes primarily accounted for the rise in CO2. I have no idea.

When it comes to number five there is a theory. CO2 is a mild greenhouse gas but it encourages other effects. Principally, the creation of water vapor, I understand, which has a multiplying warming effect.

Some scientists among skeptics suggest that negative feedback effects (e.g. cloud cover reflecting back the Sun’s rays) will mitigate warming.

Some suggest that CO2 is a sideshow and that other natural forces are at work. See, for example, Kininmonth in QOL 27 August. I have no idea.

When it comes to number six a combination of statistical models and speculation underscore the predictions. Here I have a tentative view.

Models are very bad at mirroring dynamic complex natural systems. They’re best taken with a grain of salt. But, on the whole, as you can see, I don’t think I am in any position to judge the science.

Ditto for all, all, of us outside of the scientific fraternity. At the same time, all of us are in a position to judge the process. The process has been appalling in my view.

Groupthink among climate scientists (the ‘the science is settled’ brigade) has constrained public debate. The use of the term “denier” says it all.

Carrots in the form of research grants and sticks in the form of shunnings and sackings have silenced academic skeptics.

Corporate carpetbaggers, who know squat about the science, have sleazed into the picture grabbing billions of taxpayer dollars to install costly and intermittent power sources.

Virtue-signaling politicians, equally ignorant, have jumped onto the bandwagon. It is a dream come true for the greens who would like to deindustrialize the planet.

And, to top it off, once you let the UN make the running, despite all evidence to the contrary, the North Pole has no summer ice left, imaginary hockey stick temperature graphs appear, and Pacific islands begin sinking under swelling seas.

Finding the truth now about the science is impossible in our lifetimes. Too much-vested interest in the current paradigm stymies genuine inquiry.

There was a possibility of some sort of forced and awkward consensus being forged on reducing CO2 emissions by using ‘clean’ coal, gas, nuclear and, yes, some solar.

But that opportunity, too, is lost. Among believers, the problem and the means of combatting it have become conflated.

My observation is that believers are predominantly “solutioneers” (Roger James, Return to Reason). The means have become the objective.

Deploying windmills and solar panels is now the principal objective. Reducing CO2 emissions has become of secondary importance. Thus, power has become much costlier and more unreliable.

And emissions? Onwards and upwards. But heck, look at those ugly soaring wind turbines and feel good about yourself.

The only answer left is in partisan politics. We need politicians and governments to arise to crash through the current paradigm. Trump is having a go. Morrison? Don’t hold your breath.

I see, as I write, that new Energy Minister Angus Taylor has forsworn his fidelity to ‘the science’. Mind you, what he says he will do about it gives a glimmer of hope. Fingers crossed.

SOURCE

Australia: Chefs should stick to chefing. This galoot knows nothing about his subject. We will NOT run short offood

The world population is NOT growing so he falls at the first hurdle. The population of the Western world is SHRINKING. Africa has a lot of babies that it cannot feed so they choose to limit their population by starvation. But that is their way and has no impact on us.

And our chef knows nothing about agricultural economics. Most agricultural crops are in GLUT and likly to stay that way. And there is no shortage of land for farming expansion if food does become less available. See here for instance

And meat in the diet has become steadily more available over the years and that should continue. A lot of cattle are fed in feedlots already and it would be pretty simple to expand that. Using surplus crops for feed would enable that

The days of sitting down and tucking in to a giant steak are on the way out, MasterChef judge Matt Preston says.

Mr Preston believes the plates of the future will be mainly plant-based, with small amounts of protein, mostly plankton and insects.

His comments come as a large chunk of Australia is in drought, including all of New South Wales

It has led to a national discussion on what food will be eaten in the future and where it will come from.

Mr Preston shared his thoughts at an Ikea Democratic Design Days Future Food forum in Sydney on Wednesday, where he was part of a panel of speakers.

'Seafood, plants - they're really the future. I think the days of eating a giant steak are on the way out,' he said.

Mr Preston said there was already an international restaurant which had put a plankton risotto dish on the menu and it is 'delicious, absolutely delicious'.

'Plankton, insects, they're the protein source we should be using because they thrive here,' he said.

'We're starting to see a big move towards a plant-based cuisine, that's right around the world.'

He said meat will still feature on household menus, albeit on a small scale. Instead of eating 500g of meat, people will start to have more smaller, better quality portions, about 100g. 'Eating less meat but better is something we're moving towards,' he said.

Mr Preston acknowledged it will still be some time before insects become a common meal in Australian homes but it should eventually happen.

'I think insects provide a solution but we have to accept the solution that they provide, that's probably the way,' he later told Daily Mail Australia.

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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2 September, 2018

When Environmental Regulations Become a Tax on the Poor

All too often, government regulation results in death by a thousand cuts for American businesses and consumers alike. The poor are disproportionately harmed by these rules, which cost trillions of dollars per year to administer, thus raising the prices of goods and services across the economy. In spite of this, many seek to downplay these issues, criticizing the Trump Administration’s deregulatory drive as protecting the interests of the “donor class.”

Chief amongst the critics of deregulation is University of California professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Earlier this month in the Baltimore Sun, Reich accused the President of nixing rules that “protect consumers, workers, investors, students and children.” This all too common understanding of the modern regulatory state completely ignores the negative impact of federal rules.

Specifically, Mr. Reich cites the administration’s push to neuter tough environmental laws, which are supposedly the “last bulwarks against climate change.” On the surface, lowering Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards may appear to increase emissions. As it happens, the exact opposite is true.

CAFE standards raise the price of vehicles by several thousands of dollars, effectively pricing the poor out of the market for new vehicles, and ensuring that low-income households will hold onto older, less efficient, vehicles for a longer amount of time. As economists Arthur van Benthem and Mark Jacobsen explain in the American Economic Review, higher CAFE standards may result in “a growing volume of greenhouse gas emissions from the fleet of used vehicles, many of which have been on the road for 10 years or more.”

Notice how this works: higher costs result in fewer options for low-income households, simultaneously making life more difficult for families and undermining environmental policy. This a common problem encountered by regulators: the poor bear the brunt of ill-conceived rules. Take, for instance, the biofuels mandate pushed by the Bush Administration and supported by President Obama.

Four years after the Energy Policy Act of 2005 kick-started the American biofuel frenzy, the Federal Reserve found that “the increase in U.S. biofuels production (ethanol and biodiesel) pushed up corn prices by more than 22 percentage points and soybean prices (soybeans and soybean oil) by more than 15 percentage points.”

Meanwhile, studies taking into account the land clearing required for growing biofuels find that removing tree and related plant life can actually increase greenhouse gas emissions net of any environmental benefits. Setting aside crops and acreage for fuel means less resources for food production, resulting in rising food prices, and had a negligible impact on the environment.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all environmental rules are counterproductive.

But while regulators should celebrate these successes, they must also remain vigilant in identifying regulations whose costs are simply too high. Even Mr. Reich understands this problem, noting that “Some regulations should be eliminated because they're just too costly relative to the protections they provide.”

Take, for instance, the Clean Air Act, which relies on some questionable accounting from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for support. The EPA assumes that, without their intervention, pollution would have increased “steadily from 1990 through 2000, 2010, and 2020,” despite their own data showing major decreases in emissions beginning before 1990.

These questionable benefits don’t stack up compared to the known cost of tens of millions of dollars each year borne, for instance, by paint and coating suppliers to reduce volatile organic compounds (VOC) emulating from their products. These costs are inevitably passed onto consumers, and borne especially by low-income households.

When regulators rely on questionable assumptions to justify flashy yet ineffective rules, they are doing a disservice to consumers, who feel the impact of these policies in their wallet instead of the environment. If Reich and others were really interested in helping the poor, they would address these issues, rather than mounting the usual attacks against deregulation.

Ross Marchand is the director of policy for the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.

Interested in real economic insights? Want to stay ahead of the competition? Each weekday morning, e21 delivers a short email that includes e21 exclusive commentaries and the latest market news and updates from Washington. Sign up for the e21 Morning eBrief.

SOURCE

Bloomberg accused of hijacking justice system with donor-funded climate-change prosecutors

Critic: Plan raises alarm over special interests setting policy, law enforcement agendas, without accountability

Michael Bloomberg, former New York City mayor, bankrolled a year-long effort to place privately funded lawyers as "special assistant attorneys general" in at least six states with specific instructions to work on "clean energy, climate change, and environmental interests."

With their busy schedules and tight state budgets, Democratic attorneys general have little in the way of time and resources to advance climate-change policies, which is where billionaire Michael Bloomberg comes in.

The former New York City mayor’s fortune has bankrolled a year-long effort to place privately funded lawyers as “special assistant attorneys general” in at least six states with specific instructions to work on “clean energy, climate change, and environmental interests.”

The program, run through the New York University School of Law, comes as the most disturbing example of the “billion-dollar per year climate industry” gaining access to law-enforcement authority in pursuit of a political agenda, according to a report released Wednesday by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

“The scheme raises serious questions about special interests setting states’ policy and law enforcement agendas, without accountability to the taxpayers and voters whom these law enforcement officials supposedly serve,” said CEI senior fellow Chris Horner, who authored the report, “Law Enforcement for Rent: How Special Interests Fund Climate Policy Through State Attorneys General.”

Mr. Horner, who spent two-and-a-half years collecting emails and documents through the open-records requests and court orders, called for “prompt and serious legislative oversight” into the off-the-books infiltration of state law-enforcement offices by lawyers dedicated to the climate agenda.

“It represents private interests commandeering the state’s police powers to target opponents of their policy agenda and to hijack the justice system as a way to overturn the democratic process’s rejection of a political agenda,” the report said.

State attorneys general have increasingly become political foils for the White House — Republican prosecutors challenged Obamacare and the Clean Power Plan, while Democrats have filed more than a dozen lawsuits against the Trump administration — but critics say the specter of donor-funded prosecutors rises to a new level.

The State Energy and Environmental Impact Center at NYU, funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies, formed in response to the Trump administration to help attorneys general “fight regulatory roll-backs and other actions that undermine clean energy, climate change, and environmental values and protections.”

The center accepts applications from state attorneys general who demonstrate “a need and a commitment to advancing clean energy matters.” Salaries for the “special assistant attorneys general,” or SAAGs, range from $75,000 to $149,483 annually for a two-year commitment, the report said.

Among the states that have taken on SAAGs is New York, but Amy Spitalnick, spokeswoman and senior policy adviser for New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood, described the partnership as unexceptional.

“Climate deniers continue to find new and creative ways to distract from reality. All OAG employees are accountable to the AG, period — and we’re proud of the talented team of lawyers and staff members that are part of the AG’s successful fight to protect clean water, clean air, and New Yorkers’ health,” she said in an email.

Christopher Gray, SEEIC spokesman, pointed to application language affirming that “the SAAGs’ sole duty of loyalty is to the attorney general who hired them” and that noted that the program details are spelled out on the website.

“At no point has there been a concerted effort by the State Impact Center to hide anything that we have been working on,” Mr. Gray said.

As part of the application process, he said, attorneys general must demonstrate the need for additional legal resources, and that “having an NYU fellow is consistent with any applicable state law.”

Every attorney general was invited to apply for legal fellows, he said, although no Republican AG has done so.

Meanwhile, critics of the alliance have argued it would be akin to, for example, Republican attorneys general bringing on prosecutors funded by Americans United for Life to work on Planned Parenthood issues.

Zack Roday, spokesman for the Republican Attorneys General Association, said the report “sheds necessary light on how powerful special interests operate on the left.”

“Democrats have sold out their voters; instead, they are allowing activist lawyers directed by New York University Law School — paid for by Michael Bloomberg — to go after anyone opposing their extreme political agenda,” Mr. Roday said. “It’s wrong and these shameless AGs should be called out for deceiving the public.”

Educational institutions and other non-profits may partner with prosecutors on placing interns or providing grants, but “not for litigation,” Mr. Roday said.

“That’s why this is so unprecedented,” said Mr. Roday, adding that nothing of its kind exists on the GOP side.

The roots of the climate-prosecutorial nexus date back to a 2012 meeting of activist groups in La Jolla, California, followed by former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s 2015 lawsuit against ExxonMobil and AGs United for Clean Power, the 17-state coalition launched in 2016 to pursue the fossil-fuel industry.

The coalition has since all but disbanded, although lawsuits against Exxon filed by the Massachusetts and New York attorneys general are ongoing, despite Mr. Schneiderman’s abrupt resignation in May over allegations of physical abuse made by four women.

Cities and counties have since picked up the legal mantle. A dozen localities, as well as the state of Rhode Island, have sued oil-and-gas companies seeking compensation for damages allegedly caused by climate change, although federal judges recently threw out cases filed by New York City, San Francisco and Oakland.

SOURCE

In the deep blue of New England, a Trump appointee gains respect for protecting the environment

She’s among the few high-profile representatives of the Trump administration in deep blue New England, appointed by Scott Pruitt, the scandal-ridden former chief of the Environmental Protection Agency who was akin to Public Enemy No. 1 among local environmental groups.

She won’t say whether global warming is primarily caused by human activity — as nearly all climate scientists assert — and supported Pruitt’s efforts to dismantle scientific advisory boards, restrict the type of studies that can be used to craft public policy, and end the Obama administration’s signature plan to reduce carbon emissions.

Despite it all, Alexandra Dunn, a proud Republican who leads the EPA’s New England office, has won widespread accolades from the region’s environmental leaders, who have described her as “empathetic,” “apolitical,” and “smart,” and an advocate for science-based environmental policies.

Many local environmental activists had braced for a regional administrator who would be more beholden to industry and were stunned when Pruitt appointed Dunn in November.

“There was a sigh of collective relief,” said Elizabeth Turnbull Henry, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts.

Unlike Pruitt, who sought to roll back dozens of regulations governing clean air and water, and the acting administrator, Andrew Wheeler, a former lobbyist for the coal industry, Dunn “does not appear bent on destroying the agency she was tasked to lead,” she added.

Some local advocates worried there could be a backlash from Washington if they offered too much praise.

“I’m leery of calling any public attention to her successes, lest it cause her trouble,” said Jack Clarke, director of public policy at Mass Audubon, the largest and oldest conservation group in New England.

Even Dunn’s predecessor during the Obama administration, Curt Spalding, gave her high marks.

“I feared the next person wouldn’t honor and respect the people working there,” said Spalding, who now teaches at Brown University. “But now, strangely and fortuitously, we have a highly respected person filling that position who appears to be staying the course.”

In her nine months as administrator, Dunn has walked a fine line, careful not to cross her superiors in Washington while working with environmental groups and local officials to clean up toxic waste sites, protect the region’s air and water, and address the impact of climate change.

In a recent interview near her office in downtown Boston, Dunn cited several accomplishments since she assumed the post: implementing long-delayed, controversial plans to reduce stormwater runoff; hosting a national summit to curb harmful chemicals in drinking water; and issuing a report that outlined the agency’s efforts to clean up rivers, promote recycling, and improve the environment in economically depressed areas.

“There’s just so much opportunity in New England to revitalize communities,” she said.

An attorney who has taught environmental justice at several law schools, Dunn, 50, spent years as the director and general counsel of the Environmental Council of States and the Association of Clean Water Administrators, both national nonprofit organizations, where she earned a reputation as a nonpartisan advocate for the environment.

When Pruitt appointed Dunn to be one of the agency’s 10 regional administrators, he called her “exceptionally qualified.”

“Her service to others will be key to helping implement this administration’s positive environmental agenda,” he said in a statement.

At the time, the Trump administration had proposed cutting the EPA’s budget by about one-third — more than any other agency’s — and vowed to roll back a host of major environmental regulations. But Dunn had no qualms about taking the job, and she still has no regrets.

“To be honest, it’s a privilege to represent the federal government,” she said.

After Pruitt resigned in July, amid a pall of ethics scandals, EPA officials asked the agency’s regional administrators to attend meetings in Washington that emphasized the need for political appointees to act ethically and cooperate with the agency’s inspector general, Dunn said.

Asked if she has disagreed with any of Pruitt’s policies, often decried by environmental advocates, she said: “As a member of his team, I did not.”

Dunn compared her position to a “field general” whose job is to implement the law and the administration’s policies. Ideology hasn’t played a role in her work, she said. “What I try to do is be outcomes- and solutions-oriented,” she said. “So, party affiliation has a role, but it’s not the defining role in environmental policy.”

Asked if she has received chilly receptions as a representative of the Trump administration, she said: “I believe and feel like a representative of the administration in every room that I enter.” But she added: “I’ve found every audience to be extremely welcoming.”

Still, there has been some friction, particularly with the union that represents many of the nearly 500 full-time employees in the region. Their anger has grown as the Trump administration has sought to reduce the agency’s workforce and curb the union’s power.

Since 2010, as its budget has been cut by more than 10 percent, the region’s number of full-time employees has dropped by one-quarter, placing more of a burden on the remaining workers, said Steve Calder, president of the local branch of the American Federation of Government Employees.

In May, the union filed a federal lawsuit against Trump, arguing that an executive order he issued last spring violates union contracts.

“We feel the union is under attack,” said Calder, a clean air inspector, adding that local union officials have been told they will have to pay rent to use the space where they previously managed union affairs at the agency’s Boston headquarters.

Despite the union’s frustrations with Washington, Calder praised Dunn. “While she has to toe the administration’s line, she’s an environmentalist, not someone from industry,” he said. “We lucked out. . . . She’s the cream of the crop, compared to what could be expected from this administration.”

Last month, Dunn’s careful diplomacy was again on display at an event in New Bedford to promote efforts to clean up Superfund sites. Dunn introduced Wheeler, who was on his first trip outside Washington since taking the agency’s top job.

Environmental advocates have criticized Wheeler for the years he spent lobbying on behalf of the fossil fuel industry, which they say sought to block efforts to curb carbon emissions. Dunn called him a “passionate steward of the agency’s mission” and said she was “thrilled” to introduce him to the local officials who have spent years trying to remove cancer-causing chemicals from parts of New Bedford Harbor.

Afterward, Dunn declined to criticize the administration’s policies, such as its proposal to slash the EPA’s budget and its decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord. “I have no opinion on that,” she said, referring to the Paris agreement. “That was the president’s decision, and there’s no sign that that is going to be revisited.”

She prefers to focus on areas of common ground, such as preparing the region to deal with climate change. “There’s so much that we can do in New England to make a difference on the environment,” she said.

For many advocates, Dunn’s environmentally friendly actions have spoken louder than her carefully chosen words.

Bradley Campbell, a former EPA regional administrator and president of the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston, has vehemently opposed EPA pronouncements from Washington since Trump took power. But he couldn’t say nicer things about Dunn, lauding her “commitment to environmental justice.”

“She’s a terrific choice, an appointment I’d applaud under any administration,” he said.

SOURCE

Climate Change Is No Joke: UN Nixes Video After Complaints From Greenies

The United Nations has been forced to pull a video about climate change because greenies violently objected to its attempts to be funny about a subject they considered far too serious for levity.

According to Climate Home News: Viewers complained the advert for its Climate Neutral Now scheme appeared to mock green lifestyle choices and downplay the urgency of the climate challenge.

Published on Facebook and Twitter, the video struck a jokey tone, showing a man trying to give up his car, flights, steak and even breathing to cut his carbon footprint.

“OK, we know that’s slightly impractical, so here’s the real solution,” said the narrator, directing viewers to a revamped website where they can pay to cancel emission reduction credits issued through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

But the greenies hated it:

This is not, of course, the first time climate alarmists have tried to make a funny video and failed horribly.

The most memorable example was the infamous ‘No Pressure’ video in which schoolchildren who failed to show sufficient zeal about climate change were executed by their teacher – played by the X-Files’ Gillian Anderson – who pressed a button on her desk and caused their heads graphically to explode.

That video too had to be withdrawn after the green activists who made it belatedly became aware that it was sending out the wrong signals about the nature of the environmentalist cause.

SOURCE

German ARD Public TV: Big Oil, Heartland Institute, And CFACT Funding ‘Climate Denial’

CCD Editor’s Note: Same song, different channel. Germany’s ARD public TV wants its viewers to think America’s oil and gas companies are funding German’s climate skepticism using various heretofore secret backchannels. Pierre Gosselin destroys their alarmist scare tactics with actual facts and shows the ‘debate’ is far from settled

German ARD public television wishes to believe climate skepticism in the country is fueled by American Big Oil dollars. The reality is that German skepticism is a far broader phenomenon.

I didn’t become aware of this recent German ARD Monitor investigative report until yesterday. The ARD Monitor public television report, aired earlier this month in the wake of Europe’s hot and dry summer, looks into the German climate denial movement, and pretends to have uncovered that it is shadowy and all clandestinely fueled by the American gas and oil industry.

One hot German summer is climate change!

First, the report begins by focusing on the "amazingly crazy” hot and dry summer Germany just experienced, as if to say how could anyone possibly deny this is not climate change.

And to drive the point home to viewers that climate change is real and extreme, ARD Monitor interviews "one of the most renowned climate scientists of our time, Professor Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research,” who comments that the planet is on the way to becoming uninhabitable unless we stop using fossil fuels immediately.

Bjorn Stevens: Having to debate the facts "is enraging”

To add more gravitas to the claim that man-made climate change is real and the debate is over, Monitor also interviews "renowned climate researcher” Prof. Bjorn Stevens of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, who tells Monitor:

That we have to debate the facts to me is enraging, or disappointing in any case because there’s no question about it. There are many questions, but that CO2 is heating the climate is not one of them.”

ARD Monitor set up: Anyone disagreeing simply has to be some sort of a misfit. So where’s could all the climate skepticism be coming from? (SEE ALSO: Three Notable Times The Media Actually Silenced Global Warming Dissenters)

Monitor uncovers nothing new, only rehashes old stories

So with the two distinguished scientists saying the science is settled, the ARD Monitor report next moves on to find out where all the "denial” in Germany is coming from.

The answer: from the Jena, Germany-based European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), funded by the freedom-obsessed Heartland Institute and CFACT. These two organizations are supposedly funneling money from Big Oil and a hedge fund millionaire named Robert Mercer.

Big Oil money

According to Monitor, the Mercer Foundation has funded the Heartland Institute to the tune of "millions of dollars” over the years.

Another big provider of funding is the ExxonMobil Foundation, which according to the German documentary supplied funding to the Heartland Institute and other organizations, among them CFACT, as shown by filed Form 990-PF documents (5:50 mark)

Documents presented by ARD Monitor, however, show donations were made more than 10 years ago, in 2005.

2005? That’s pretty long ago.

Surely there has to be more funding after that, ARD Monitor tells the audience, and so brings in climate activist Naomi Oreskes (6:05), "an expert on the climate skepticism scene” to provide the proof.

Oreskes tells ARD Monitor (translated from the German):

In terms of funding, it’s really hard to make statements on this because many of the organizations have taken steps to hide the channels. But we have clear evidence that organizations like CFACT and The Heartland Institute are being massively funded by the oil, gas and coal industry, and from other industries, especially chemicals and pesticides.”

However, none of that "clear evidence” gets shown by Oreskes, yet with her seal of approval, it’s good enough for ARD Monitor to present it as established fact.

Big Oil’s trail to Germany?

ARD Monitor next reports how the Big Oil money trail leads to Germany to fund skepticism: through The Heartland Institute and CFACT and ending up at the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), which this blog here occasionally links to.

Shown by ARD Monitor are images of an EIKE climate conference with the Heartland Institute and CFACT logos in the background.

The conferences take place annually and anyone can visit them and so it has never been a secret that the organizations are linked, yet ARD Monitor tries to appear as if they’ve succeeded in exposing something big and shadowy, when in fact it has always been out in the open for years.

EIKE is, in fact, glad for every media outlet that shows up at the conferences it sponsors.

EIKE spokesman’s strange denial: So it’s all the more mysterious that EIKE spokesman physicist Prof. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke denied knowing CFACT and The Heartland Institute before an ARD Monitor camera.

For whatever misguided reason, Lüdecke tried to deny the very obvious EIKE link to CFACT and Heartland, although it’s no secret at all. That was a huge gaffe by EIKE and so the organization ended up looking suspicious to German viewers.

I contacted EIKE to inquire why spokesman Lüdecke would say such a thing. EIKE blamed it on "confusion.”

German Skepticism Movement Far More Than EIKE

Monitor’s one-sided hit piece was designed to make German climate skepticism appear as if it were something entirely funded by American Big Oil and gas when in reality this is not the case at all.

Rather, German climate skepticism is much more a growing grassroots movement and ARD Monitor totally overstates EIKE’s role in German climate skepticism and totally ignores the array of other powerful forces casting doubt on the science in Germany.

Critical scientists, journalists

The reality is that a large part of climate skepticism spreading in Germany arises from a number of other sources, like books and blog posts by lukewarmists Fritz Vahrenholt and Sebastian Lüning, from publicists such as Dirk Maxieiner, and Michael Miersch, achgut.com, critical journalists like Daniel Wetzel of Die Welt or warmist journalist Axel Bojanowski of Spiegel. There are others in Switzerland and across Europe.

Spiegel’s Bojanowski has repeatedly criticized the highly exaggerated and often hysterical climate claims often heard from Germany’s institutes and media.

These cooler heads have warned that all the hysterical claims are hurting efforts to deal with the climate much more than they are helping.

Media has lost credibility

More skepticism in Germany also arises from meteorology experts who on social media platforms often feel compelled to publicly point out and correct the often outlandish climate and weather claims that get communicated to the public.

All the horribly exaggerated communication between the scientists, politicians, and media have led to a significant credibility loss.

And when the media deceive and tell half-truths on other issues, people tend not to believe anything they are told. Media has gotten so poor in Germany that the joke today is that the only news one can trust from the major networks is the weather forecast and the lottery numbers.

At ARD television, the news is said not to begin at 8:00 pm, rather at 8:13 pm (lottery numbers and weather report).

Hundreds of citizens’ groups against wind power

Moreover, there’s growing resistance from the more than 1000 citizens’ initiatives opposing the wind energy industrialization of Germany’s landscape and forests. These concerned citizens have banded together and increasingly view climate protection as forest and natural habitat destruction.

So it’s only natural for these concerned people to become more open to climate science criticism.

Broken promises

Also, a number of leading engineers and industry experts and trade associations have been warning for years that a power grid relying heavily on volatile wind and sun would never be able to meet Germany’s energy needs.

The Energiewende (transition to renewable energies) was sold to the public some 20 years ago as something that would make energy cleaner, cheaper and better. The reality, however, has turned out to be very different.

Little wonder so many are growing skeptical.

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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