GREENIE WATCH -- by Dr. John Ray

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

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

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31 July, 2020

Tropical Plants Harmed by Global Warming (??)

There is a very clear trend in the response of plant life to temperature: The warmer it gets the more plant life flourishes. So the article below is aberrant

So how did the researchers come to a different conclusion? They looked at existing data on seed germination. But the data was not optimized to determine temperature maxima so is not conclusive. A proper experiment where the effects of a range of temperatures on germination ceteribus paribus would be needed to give sound results.

And even in the survey concerned, it was admitted that the effects are not "all or none". There were different percentages of germination for different temperatures. So if only 5% of the seeds germinated in some projected future high temperature the species would still survive and probably flourish in that temperature.

The whole article is a big underestimate of survival capacity.

The thing that totally makes it absurd however is that in the much warmer age of the dinosaurs, plant life flourished mightily. The species of today are descendants of that ancient plant life so most should have the heat tolerance of that time.

Further in the all-effects-of-climate-change-are-bad category, we hear that “Tropical plants closer to the equator are most at risk from climate change because it is expected to become too hot for many species to germinate in the next 50 years, UNSW researchers have found.”

On the face of it this conclusion is implausible. Global warming should drive species from their current habitats to ones that used to be cooler, away from the Equator toward the poles, in which case cold-weather life forms would hit the wall first (say, those obstinately flourishing polar bears) while things like orchids would be the last to go, migrating from Central America to Wisconsin and ultimately Baffin Island before going off the edge. As even the Guardian admits, “When left unattended, trees migrate toward more favorable conditions through a process known as seed dispersal, in which seeds are carried by the wind or birds to new places, taking root where the weather and water are right.” But when it’s climate change, warming can’t even expand the range of things that like warmth.

How about that! It's almost as if Mother Nature reacts protectively during times of (slow, gradual, perfectly normal climate evolution) and takes steps to ensure her progeny's welfare. As the Guardian story cited above observes with wonder:

There is an impressive array of pine species at the Nature Conservancy’s Plum Creek preserve in Maryland – loblolly, Virginia, shortleaf – creating a landscape that emits the smell of Christmas well into the summer. But a newcomer to the preserve has fueled an ethical debate about the role of conservationists in the age of climate change.

But longleaf is not native to Maryland, and many scientists believe they should not be planted at Plum Creek, or anywhere outside of theirnaturalrange. These relatively young trees are part of an experiment to determine if human intervention could help the pines migrate north as climate change alters its natural range... Assisted migration has been accused of being expensive and risky, a case of humans playing God.

This being the Guardian, the worry is that even with the help of Scientists (the new priest class of the atheist Left), neither gimpy old Gaia nor God himself won't be able to move fast enough to save herself. And a "restoration ecologist" named Deborah Landau blames -- you guessed it -- the coming of the white man for the retreat of the ugly, scrub longleaf pines.

Longleaf pine once blanketed 90 million acres of the American southeast, but today it inhabits only 3% of its original range. According to Landau, longleaf was “practically knocking on the door” of the Chesapeake Bay when Europeans showed up 400 years ago. “We truly feel it would have eventually arrived on its own,” she says. Instead, longleaf pine forests were decimated by logging and fire suppression, their growth fragmented by human development.

Climate change -- is there anything it can't do?

SOURCE

Is Climate Change a Threat to Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice?

Following record high temperatures in Antarctica last week, the global media made a clarion call for saving the planet from the imminent threat of climate change.

One headline read, “Antarctica Records Highest Ever Temperature, Proves Climate Change.” “2020: A Warning,” declared another publication as it made reference to “severe forest fires sweeping through the Arctic.”

A closer look at the poles, however, reveals a totally different story. What do the changes in the Arctic and the Antarctica really entail?

The Arctic is more often used in climate doomsday narratives than Antarctica. What the doomsayers don’t tell you is that the Arctic is at one of its healthiest states in the past 10,000 years.

In 2017, scientists published details on sea-ice variation in the Arctic Ocean, spanning 10,000 years, a period known as the Holocene. The sea-ice cover today is at its highest in the Holocene, except for the Little Ice Age in the 17th century.

The same was true for the sea waters in the North of Iceland (part of the Arctic Ocean). The present-day sea ice extent there is higher than in most of the past 10,000 years.

The sea ice was at some of its lowest levels during the Medieval and Roman Warm Periods (roughly the 1st and 10th centuries, respectively), two periods that experienced temperatures as high as today’s.

Despite the current warm period (known as Modern Warm Period) being as warm as these past periods, Arctic sea ice extent, though lower than it was during the Little Ice Age, remains at historic highs compared with the rest of the last 10 millennia.

Arctic Sea Ice is not in danger from the ongoing changes in global average temperature, nor has it been impacted as it was during the previous two warm periods of the last 2000 years.

The Antarctic

Since 1979, there has been an increase in Antarctic sea ice extent. This is one of the main reasons why climate fearmongers prefer to focus on the Arctic rather than the Antarctic in their doomsday lectures and discourses.

The growth trend of Antarctic sea ice does not bode well for the mainstream narrative. A 2017 study concluded, “The Antarctic sea ice extent has been slowly increasing contrary to expected trends due to global warming and results from coupled climate models.”

And it is not just the sea ice extent. In a 2018 study, scientists reported “Southern Ocean changes over recent decades include surface cooling and circumpolar increase in Antarctic sea ice.”

Southern Ocean sea surface temperatures have been declining since the 1980s and are inconsistent with the alarmist view that the Antarctic is in danger from high temperatures and rising atmospheric CO2 levels.

If we consider the entire Holocene, the Antarctic sea ice levels during the past 100 years or so are the most extensive in 10,000 years! They are at one of their highest levels despite contrary claims by the media. A brief record high temperature doesn’t imply that suddenly things are different. That’s particularly so if we recognize that it’s a record only for as long as we’ve been recording temperature in Antarctica. That doesn’t go back very far, particularly if we’re talking about enough monitoring stations to come remotely close to a representative sample of the massive and almost totally uninhabited continent.

While it is true that the poles experience constant changes in climate, they are not under threat from the ongoing changes in climate. Given the rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration levels since 1850, it is surprising to see how insignificant its impact has been on sea ice extent near the poles.

The mainstream media use short-term changes in sea-ice extent, and even shorter-term changes in temperature to make sensational claims about sea-ice melt and global warming. By so doing, they deprive their audiences of historical perspective. This in turn helps alarmists sell their doomsday narrative.

The two poles tell the same story: Sea ice levels today are more extensive than in much of the last 10,000 years, they are not declining in an unprecedented manner, and they remain largely unaffected by the emission of greenhouse gases.

SOURCE

U.S. Congress Passes Land Conservation Funding Bill, President Says He’ll Sign

The U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill that automatically provides $900 million in permanent funding for federal land purchases. The Senate passed the bill in June, so it now goes to President Donald Trump for his signature.

The Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA), passed by a bi-partisan vote of 310 in favor of the bill and 107 opposed on July 22. When it becomes law it will provide $900 million funding automatically each year, drawn from federal oil and gas revenues, to the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), used to increase the size of the federal estate by purchasing land for parks, trails, and other types of federal recreation areas.

The bill also allows billions of dollars to be spent on addressing a maintenance backlog at national parks over a five-year period. In 2018, the federal government estimated there was a maintenance backlog of approximately $12 billion in needed repairs and upkeep on existing federal lands. As a step to remedy the backlog, GAOA provides $1.9 billion annually for five years for national park maintenance.

Trump Pushed Bill

President Trump announced his support for a bill to fully fund the LWCF and address the maintenance backlog on federal lands, especially parks, in March, just as various states’ governors began issuing shelter in place orders, fearing of the Coronavirus pandemic.

“Send me a Bill that fully and permanently funds the LWCF and restores our National Parks” Trump tweeted in March, continuing, “When I sign it into law, it will be HISTORIC for our beautiful public lands.”

Trump’s support resulted in the U.S. Senate passing GAOA on June 17, by a vote of 73 in favor of the bill and 25 opposed.

Misplaced Spending Priorities

Not everyone supports the bill, however. Some Republicans lawmakers, including Rep. Garret Graves (R-LA), argued during the economic crisis created by the pandemic, it was bad time to direct federal oil and gas revenues to land purchases, when it could be put to other uses.

“‘Quick. There’s a global pandemic. Let’s spend billions of dollars repairing fences, putting up new signs, fixing toilets at our wildlife refuges, parks, and forests,’ said no one ever,” Graves said on the House floor before the vote. “What this legislation does is it takes everything else and it puts it on the back burner.”

The law mistakenly makes purchasing new lands a priority over maintaining properties the federal government already owns, said Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), who opposed the act referring to it on the House floor as the “not-so-great American Outdoors Act.” Bishop criticized the bill for making the LWCF funding mandatory, while the spending on repairs and maintenance was discretionary.

“Now we are also saying in this bill the billion dollars of money to buy more land is now also a priority above and beyond what’s happening for the parks,” said Bishop. “This bill is not about funding our public lands … the only thing this is about is how we can find another way to buy more property.

“We can’t afford the property we already have,” Bishop said.

‘Owns Far Too Much Land’

The federal government already owns far more land than the America’s founders ever intended, said Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in a press release issued July 21 before the U.S. House voted on GAOA, urging them to reject the bill.

“The federal government already owns far too much land – 640 million acres or more than one-quarter of the country,” said Ebell. “It owns far more land than it can it can adequately manage and maintain, as is evidenced by the need for a special appropriation of $9.5 billion to address half the maintenance backlog.

“Wide private property ownership and secure property rights are cornerstones of America’s system of limited government and essential conditions of economic prosperity,” Ebell said. “Instead of spending billions and billions of dollars to buy millions and millions of acres of private land, Congress should be passing legislation to transfer substantial BLM lands and National Forests to the states and into private ownership.”

Federal land ownership also rob cities and states of revenue, said Ebell.

“Federal land is a huge economic as well as environmental burden on rural counties,” said Ebell. “The federal government does not pay local property taxes, and the Payment in Lieu of Taxes program provides only pennies on the dollar in compensation for lost property taxes.

“Taking more and more private property off the tax rolls will only exacerbate this problem,” Ebell said.

SOURCE

Australia: A report from more than 150 experts and affected community members has called on the government to punish climate change enablers

Climate skeptics would like to see this go to court. The case would collapse like a house of cards when the full weight of scientific evidence about global warming was led

In a sobering study released this week, Australia was revealed to have lost nearly three billion animals due to the devastating Black Summer bushfires.

The fossil fuel industry has “pushed Australia into a new bushfire era” and should pay for the carnage inflicted from blazes and other disasters across the country, former emergency leaders, climate scientists and doctors have declared.

The Emergency Leaders for Climate Action (ELCA), a group of more than 150 experts and affected community members, have called on the Federal Government to impose a levy on those contributing to climate change.

As part of the 165 recommendations, the group wants a climate disaster fund set up to cover the massive costs associated with natural disasters.

The rising impact of global warming evidenced in the summer’s devastating and extensive bushfires has created the need to “fundamentally rethink how we prepare for and manage this growing threat”, former Fire and Rescue NSW Commissioner Greg Mullins said.

“This plan outlines practical steps that all levels of government can take right now to better protect communities,” he said, who is also a Climate Councillor.

“It’s important that the Federal Government takes these recommendations seriously and acts on them urgently. “First and foremost, the Federal Government must tackle the root cause of climate change by urgently phasing out fossil fuels to reach net zero emissions.”

The declaration comes ahead of the royal commission report into the destructive bushfire season which is due to be handed to government next month, which Mr Mullins hopes will include provisions for a climate response.

The cost of extreme weather events is growing towards a total annual bill of $39 billion by 2050, Deloitte Access Economics partner Nicki Hutley said, who also contributed to the report.

“Climate change, which is fuelling more severe extreme weather events and worsening bushfire danger, has serious economic consequences,” she said.

“Reducing emissions, building community resilience, and boosting emergency resourcing can help us avoid huge economic impacts and damage in the future, while creating clean new jobs right now.”

The report comes as the government faces increasing pressure to invest in a major green energy plan, with groups from across the political spectrum declaring an investment is imminent to help propel the economy out of the virus crisis.

Once the iconic divide between conservative and progressive politicians, activists and lobby groups say the need for action on climate change has reached a boiling point with evidence of environmental damage now being undeniable.

“The pressure is growing and the larger picture is a lot of the Coalition members, Liberals and Nationals, do support this transition and understand it ultimately will happen,” Coalition for Conservation chair Cristina Talacko told news.com.au.

“It’s not a question of debating the ideology behind climate anymore, we’ve gone totally past that, now it’s about what’s good for Australia, what’s going to give us resilience because we don’t want the droughts and the bushfires.”

Climate Council chief executive Amanda McKenzie said calls for a green energy policy overhaul is coming from most segments of the community but insists there are still hurdles within the party led by Scott Morrison, who once famously brandished a lump of coal during Question Time.

“There are a few dinosaurs in federal parliament but the amount of support that’s now coming from state governments, from business, and from industry will be irrepressible,” she told news.com.au.

SOURCE

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30 July, 2020

Activist Group’s Climate-and-Economy Claims Are Bogus, Despite Media Hype

The climate activist group Ceres just published ridiculous, biased claims that climate change has hammered the economy, while the establishment media eagerly and shamelessly promotes the bogus claims. Don’t be fooled by the climate activist group; climate change has clearly helped rather than harmed economic activity.

Ceres published its claims in a letter to various federal agencies. The letter opens with the dire warning, “It is more clear than ever that the climate crisis poses a systemic threat to financial markets and the real economy, with significant disruptive consequences on asset valuations and our nation’s economic stability.” Ceres cited no data or evidence for the claims. This is not surprising, because no credible data or evidence supports such false claims.

Despite the lack of supporting evidence, Marketwatch, the New York Times, and many other fake news media outlets reported Ceres’ claims as if they were self-evidently true. Citing Ceres’ letter, Marketwatch asserted, “The U.S. has sustained more than $1.775 trillion in costs from more than 265 climate-related extreme weather events since 1980, by some measures, and more than $500 billion in economic losses between 2015 and 2019.”

Even if extreme weather happened to cause such losses, there is no evidence indicating extreme weather events have been worsened by climate change. Instead, the scientific evidence shows exactly the opposite.

In a recent review of the literature conducted by University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke, Jr., Pielke examined 54 studies published between 1998 and 2020. The studies analyzed the costs of extreme weather events by removing impacts attributable to societal change, such as increasing wealth, increasingly expensive infrastructure built in disaster-prone locations, etc. Pielke found “little evidence to support claims that any part of the global economic losses documented on climate timescales can be attributed to human caused changes in climate, reinforcing conclusions of recent assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” (emphasis mine).

That last, italicized part is very important. As Pielke noted, and as repeatedly documented by the website Climate at a Glance, even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes there is little if any evidence suggesting any recent worsening of floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. Yet, when a climate activist group like Ceres makes claims to the contrary, the media report Ceres’ false assertions as if they were scientifically indisputable facts.

After making its false claims about past and present climate impacts, Ceres moved on to making equally ridiculous, speculative predictions about future climate harms. To support its claims, Ceres utilized the most extreme, worst-case, and least-likely scenario of the many scenarios examined by the IPCC. That scenario is known as RCP8.5.

RCP8.5 has been heavily criticized in the peer-reviewed literature as being extreme or absurd. RCP8.5 assumes, among other things, an unrealistic 500% increase in coal use and a 6? rise in global temperatures by 2100. Even the IPCC admits RCP8.5 is exceedingly unlikely to occur, saying RCP8.5 had only a 10% chance of becoming reality at the time IPCC evaluated it. More recent estimates place RCP8.5’s chance of occurring at less than 3%.

Even if the worst-case estimate of climate change occurs, economist Stan Liebowitz notes that the impact on the economy, as a percentage of estimated GDP, would be miniscule. If RCP8.5 comes to pass, the total cost of damages resulting from climate change in 2090 will be approximately $507.6 billion. Yet, Liebowitz notes, U.S. GDP in 2090, even accounting for climate change, is estimated to be approximately $70 trillion. This means, at worst, the cost of climate change in 2029 will represent only slightly more than 0.7% of U.S. GDP. “Thus the damage from climate change in [the] worst-case scenario, according to our ‘best scientists and experts,’ is less than 1 percent of U.S. GDP in 2090,” Liebowitz observes.

In summary, the climate activist group Ceres published a poorly sourced paper in which it made demonstrably false claims about past climate impacts, demonstrably false claims about present climate impacts, and exaggerated claims about future climate impacts, even in the unlikely event that Ceres’ worst-case forecast climate scenario comes to pass. Then the media trumpeted it like Chicken Little saving us from the sky falling down.

Don’t lie awake at night worrying about climate impacts on the economy. The science and economics say even the worst-case scenario would be quite mild.

SOURCE

Food Security in a Post-COVID World

Paul DriessenPaul Driessen|Posted: Jul 28, 2020 9:40 AM
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.
Food Security in a Post-COVID World

US-EU trade talks are already stalled over agriculture issues. And yet the European Union’s new “Farm to Fork” strategy doesn’t just double down on the EU’s contentious agricultural regulations. It promises to use access to European markets to compel the United States and other countries to adopt EU-style organic farming, precautionary and other regulations if they want to remain trading partners with Europe.

“Farm to Fork” (or F2F) is being billed as “the heart of the European Green Deal.” Like recent energy, climate and other initiatives, it is largely an environmentalist wish (or demand) list – with little basis in science, practical experience or real world impacts. It sets out three primary objectives, which the EU intends to implement fully by 2030, barely nine years from now:

-Bring “at least 25% of EU agricultural land under organic farming” – from its current 7.5%

-Reduce “overall use and risk of chemical pesticides by 50% – forcing greater use of “natural” chemicals

-Reduce the use of manmade chemical fertilizers “by at least 20%” – again forcing “natural” substitutes

F2F is being billed as a continental and global agricultural transformation that will ensure a “just transition” to a “more robust and resilient food system,” guarantee “affordable food for citizens,” and simultaneously improve human health, protect biodiversity, and promote environmental sustainability.

It will almost certainly end up doing just the opposite, which is why the European Conservatives and Reformists Party is hosting a "Europe Debates" webinar on the topic this Wednesday, July 29.

The problems with “organic” farming are well documented, though largely ignored by environmentalists, policymakers, regulators, journalists and academics.

Organic agriculture requires far more land and much more human labor than modern mechanized farming with manmade fertilizers and crop-protecting chemicals, to get the same crop yields. Many of the “natural” fertilizers and other chemicals that organic farmers employ are equally or more dangerous to bees, other insects, birds, fish and terrestrial animals than modern manmade alternatives.

Low-yield organic agriculture raises food prices for consumers, particularly harming poor families and countries, many of which have been especially hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. It makes EU farmers increasingly uncompetitive in world markets. It creates a less resilient food system that is increasingly vulnerable to plant diseases, invasive species, floods, droughts and insects. As a result, it inevitably undermines the climate, “sustainability,” biodiversity and nutrition goals it promises to achieve.

Finally, Farm to Fork will also likely exacerbate the EU’s growing trade frictions with other nations. Even before F2F, agriculture issues were already imperiling US-EU bilateral trade agreements. Meanwhile, the US and some 35 other nations had formally complained to the World Trade Organization that current EU regulations on agricultural imports clearly violate internationally accepted norms, because they are not based in science. And now F2F promises to impose similar productivity-destroying regulations on even its poorest trading partners: African countries. In fact, the European Commission (EC) itself has admitted:

“It is also clear that we cannot make a change unless we take the rest of the world with us.… Efforts to tighten sustainability requirements in the EU food system should be accompanied by policies that help raise standards globally, in order to avoid the externalisation and export of unsustainable practices.”

SOURCE

Facts vs. fearmongering

BEN PILE

Environmentalism’s Radical Next Generation Is Already Here
beyond politics protestThis past week, a new group calling itself Beyond Politics (BP) threw buckets of bright-pink paint at the entrances to the London offices of four global NGOs, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.

“We have no words to describe our disgust,” messages left at the scene told their targets. “We accuse you of appeasing radical evil.”

BP accuses NGOs of not taking the issue of climate change seriously enough. “In the face of this monstrosity, what have you done? Fuck all that’s meaningful.”

This somewhat pathetic green-on-green hostility has yielded little media attention, but it illustrates the global environmental movement’s bizarre and longstanding contradictions.

BP and its petty vandalism were the brainchildren of Extinction Rebellion (XR) cofounder Roger Hallam, who got himself excommunicated from his own movement after he told German newspaper DieZeit that the Holocaust had been “almost a normal event . . . just another fuckery in human history.”

Hallam’s confidence was not dented by exile and charges of anti-Semitism, however. After all, he had seemingly driven an environmental movement from a standing start to a global concern in just a matter of months.

Motivated by “the indescribable suffering and death of billions of people,” Hallam now demands that big NGOs either “drive your organizations into a final battle with this genocidal regime” or “disband yourselves.”

Though Hallam is credited with cofounding XR, he forgets the role of money in its ascendancy. It was through the generosity of, among others, billionaire hedge-fund manager Christopher Hohn that XR could afford offices, legal costs, and its protesters’ generous per diems.

Though populated by self-identifying system-crashing anti-capitalists, XR suited Hohn’s £30-billion portfolio, which he uses to threaten companies such as BlackRock and Moodies with “divestment” should they fail to conform to green diktats.

Hallam is right about one thing. Green NGOs have developed cozy relationships with the establishment.

Even XR, which managed to bring only a few thousand people out into London’s streets, nonetheless succeeded in shutting down those streets, thanks to the nearly full cooperation of the Metropolitan Police and the glowing, uncritical support of London mayor Sadiq Khan.

Within a year, XR was invited by MPs to give evidence to committees at the very government departments that its protests had shut down.

Secretary of State for the Environment Michael Gove held a conference with the group to discuss its demands. Parliament declared a “climate emergency” and convened a “Citizens Assembly” to hasten the government on a path toward its newly stated “net zero” ambition.

All as XR had demanded.

How was this possible? XR has a high profile and cash in the bank, but it is an organization with just a few thousand members, with unpopular aims—bringing down governments and dismantling industrial, democratic, and capitalist society.

It is the close relationship between radical environmentalism and the government that better accounts for XR’s success than any power XR generated for itself.

XR succeeded not because it had mobilized the British public but because it used cash from philanthropic funds to reanimate a small army of surplus activists as an off-the-shelf PR outfit, with well-established strategic and communications teams and extant connections to media and government.

It was ever thus. Environmentalism has long been lucrative for the well-connected, who are able to tap into streams of cash from philanthropic foundations to service corporate social-responsibility virtue-signaling PR and government propaganda—big business, in other words. Very big.

The blueprint for this pact was established in the 1980s when the United Nations appointed Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland to the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED).

Brundtland’s 1987 report, Our Common Future, laid out the framework for a “sustainable” global political order.

In Brundtland’s schema, ordinary voters have no role in the body politic of the global ecological Utopia. In place of the democratic competencies of national governments, NGOs will serve as the real intermediaries between supranational governance, industry, finance, and science on the one hand, and the hoi polloi on the other.

Thus, whereas green NGOs were once seen as single-issue campaigns or charities, they are today recast as “civil society.”

The quid pro quo has required NGOs to sustain two aspects. First, they must act like dignified members of global society, able to mingle politely with royalty, corporations, billionaires, dignitaries, and despots.

Second, street-level environmentalists need to act as would a popular movement – a task which, despite the green movement’s half-century of history, it has not yet achieved.

Hence, green activism is better characterized by high-profile, media-friendly stunts and shrill, alarmist rhetoric than by representative membership organizations with coherent constitutions and founding objectives.

This more performative role, however, has created a tension and a liability for the movement: the believers created by the unchallenged narrative of imminent doom are themselves left out of the cozy insiders’ compact.

Earlier this year, Michael Moore and director Geoff Gibbs’s film, Planet of the Humans, blew the green movement’s cover in the political mainstream.

The film argued that, as radical as high-profile greens pretend to be, they are in fact the placemen of billionaires and corporate interests.

Moreover, green energy turns out to be at least as environmentally destructive as any other extractive industry, and it requires the public—rather than the venture-capitalist backers of radical environmental movements—to provide subsidies for the demolition of forests and natural landscapes.

It is because the coordinates of the climate change debate are so easily turned upside-down that the green movement turns on its own with aggression usually reserved for its putative enemies.

Moore and Gibbs’s film was swiftly denounced as an abomination—a work of “far-right,” “white supremacist” fossil-fuel propaganda that must be censored.

Through its hostility to debate and dissent, environmentalism has spawned a growing movement of those whom it cannot accommodate and cannot answer: fire-and-brimstone ecological zealots that no policy will ever satisfy. Fearmongering, it turns out, is a Pandora’s box.

Pink paint is just the start. Coming over the horizon are Greta Thunberg’s contemporaries: an entire generation whose sense of the future is being shaped by ecological propaganda.

What will this next generation do? They can’t all be bought off, as many in the first generation of environmentalists were, with jobs in eco-consultancies or NGOs to service the interests of hedge-fund managers.

But they have learned from that generation’s teachers, scientists, and governments to despise democracy.

And they have learned that the way to assert themselves is to take to the streets—not to give voice to carefully articulated grievances but to perform infantile tantrums.

SOURCE

Alaska’s Pebble Mine no threat to salmon

The nearly two-decades-old controversy surrounding a proposed gold and copper mine in Southwest Alaska entered a new phase July 24, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), reversing an Obama-era finding, and concluded that the project “would not be expected to have a measurable effect on fish numbers” in the Bristol Bay watershed, which supports the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery. Bristol bay is the easternmost arm of the Bering Sea, which lies between Alaska and Russia.

In its environmental assessment, the Corps found that the mine would affect up to 2,261 acres (less than four square miles) of wetlands and up to 105.8 miles of streams but that there would be “no measurable change in the number of returning salmon.”

The fight over Pebble Mine, which would be the largest mine in North America, pits supporters of the sockeye salmon fishery, including local Native Alaskan tribes and national environmental groups, against proponents of using the area’s vast mineral reserves – estimated to be worth as much as $500 billion — to combat growing Chinese dominance of global mineral resources.

Shifting Political Sands of Different Administrations

Like all major infrastructure projects, Pebble has had to navigate the arduous permitting process at the state and federal (National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA) level, cope with the shifting political sands of different administrations, and deal with the ever-present threat of litigation. The project appeared doomed in 2014, when the Obama EPA, in an unprecedented move, preemptively vetoed the mine on the grounds that it would do irreparable harm to the sockeye fishery. EPA undertook its action even before the project’s developer had submitted its environmental impact statement.

The project’s developer, Canada’s Pebble Limited Partnership, filed for a federal permit with the Corps in late 2017, and in 2019 the Trump EPA reversed the Obama EPA’s veto of the project, paving the way for the Corps’ revised environmental assessment of the mine’s effect on the sockeye fishery.

Over the years, the size of the proposed mine has been scaled back. According to the Pebble website, the project will cover more than 13 miles and include a 270 mega-watt power plant. It will be served by a natural gas pipeline and an 82-mile two-lane road. The site would have extensive storage facilities and will require the dredging of a new port at Iliamna Bay. Trucks would make several round trips a day transporting the extracted minerals to a processing plant through which they would be fed at a rate of 180,000 tons per day.

NRDC Plays the Race Card

The latest twist in the Pebble saga did not go down well with the project’s opponents. Taryn Kiekow Heimer, who heads the Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) campaign to stop the mine, was delighted to play the race card.

“It’s especially embarrassing for the government and appalling given the current social context we are in,” she told The Washington Post (July 25), referring to the Trump administration’s accelerated approval process. “It’s just another example of the entrenched and systemic racism that this government is showing people of color and indigenous people in particular.”

Long Road Ahead

Pebble’s future depends in no small way on the outcome of the Nov. 3 election. If presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden wins, his administration would almost certainly try to kill the mine by reversing the Trump policies, which reversed the Obama policies. If Trump is re-elected, the approval process will move forward, but the mine’s opponents will sue, tying the project up for another two to three years.

SOURCE

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

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

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29 July, 2020

'Bold leadership': Seven young climate activists to have a say in UN

Children as experts? It suits the infantile theory that is global warming, I guess

The global warming theory is that increasing levels of atmospheric CO2 cause increasing global temperatures.

They do not, as the "grand hiatus" shows: For 30 years between 1945 and 1975, CO2 levels leapt but global temperatures remained flat, which completely contradicts the theory. See here

New York: The head of the United Nations will start meeting regularly with young climate activists, saying participation by youth on the front lines is critical to scaling up action to slow global warming.

A group of seven people, ages 18 to 28, from seven countries will sit down with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to advise him on global warming issues, he said in a video on Twitter.

"We have seen young people on the front lines of climate action, showing us what bold leadership looks like," Guterres said.

The youth advisory group is tasked with providing "perspectives, ideas and solutions that will help us scale up climate action," he said.

"We are in a climate emergency. We do not have the luxury of time," he added.

The announcement marked an acknowledgement of the role young people have been playing in combating climate change as they look to their future.

Young climate change activists met with UN leaders last year to demand a greater role in global decision-making and planning processes to combat global warming.

The one-day summit at the UN drew more than 1000 young climate campaigners from more than 120 countries.

Guterres, who has made climate change his signature issue since taking office in 2017, said recently that governments should consider the issue when designing economic stimulus responses to the coronavirus pandemic.

Swedish activist Greta Thunberg urged European leaders to take emergency action on climate change, saying people in power had practically 'given up' on the possibility of handing over a decent future to coming generations.

"Where taxpayers' money is used to rescue businesses, it needs to be tied to achieving green jobs and sustainable growth," Guterres said on Earth Day in April.

Unable to gather due to coronavirus restrictions, young activists from about 20 countries recently took to YouTube in a 24-hour broadcast to share ideas on how to fight global warming.

Previously they were skipping classes, marching through cities and holding vigils outside government buildings in regular Friday protests.

The founder of Fridays for Future, Sweden's Greta Thunberg, 17, addressed the United Nations last year.

She was not among those named to the advisory group, which included Nisreen Elsaim, a Sudanese climate activist; Ernest Gibson of Fiji; Vladislav Kaim, an economist from Moldova; Sophia Kianni, an American who founded a non-profit to translate climate information into more than 100 languages; Nathan Metenier of France; Paloma Costa, a Brazilian lawyer; and Archana Soreng of India.

SOURCE

Green propaganda

Radical environmentalism sees truth as a threat to its objectives. Propaganda (whether outright lies, exaggerations, or distortions) in pursuit of green goals is justified.

Perhaps the most famous example of green propaganda has been the persistent claim that 97% of climate scientists agree that man-made climate change endangers the planet. Studies sporting the 97% figure were debunked in 2014. In one such study, four independent reviewers found that only 0.3 percent of 11,994 abstracts cited actually stated that human activity is the primary cause of global warming.

But forget about a measly 97%! In November 2019, the green propaganda machine upped the ante. Now, they claimed, there is 100% scientific consensus that humans are the main drivers of climate change. 100 percent?!? What about the “350 [peer-reviewed] papers published since 2017 [that] subvert the claim that post-1850s warming has been unusual” and dozens of additional articles in 2019 found “that there’s nothing alarming or catastrophic about our climate”?

Another commonplace tactic of green propaganda has been simply to fudge actual temperature records. Environmentalist and computer model expert Tony Heller has documented many of those shenanigans in a series of eye-opening videos. (Here is another link. And another.) Interestingly, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the official keeper of temperature records for the United States was, according to The Wall Street Journal, explicitly exempted from the Data Quality Act – the federal law that requires sound science in policymaking.

Another fertile field for green propaganda shenanigans is the “peer review” process. First , many scientists believe that the peer review process itself is broken. Some describe it as “a form of censorship” – a gate-keeper to keep out dissenters. Others assert, “peer review is known to engender bias, incompetence…ineffectiveness, and corruption.” Dr. John Ioannidis, who has been so on-target with his critiques of data gathering and modeling in connection with Covid-19, maintains that the “hotter” a field of scientific research is (“hotter” meaning more popular and active) “the less likely the research findings are to be true.” And what field of scientific research has been hotter than climate change for the last 30 year?

Second, as we have learned from climategate emails and other sources, peer review in climate science has been highly incestuous, with key figures in the alarmist camp arranging to review each other’s work while shielding their work from review by other scientists.

Third, the late IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri haughtily asserted that IPCC uses only peer-reviewed science. Not so. The IPCC’s much-ballyhooed “climate bible” (the 2007 report that garnered a Nobel Peace Prize for IPCC) cited 5,587 non-peer-reviewed sources such as “press releases, newspaper and magazine clippings, working papers, student theses, discussion papers, and literature published by green advocacy groups.”

A common propaganda technique is to tell only one side of the story. Thus, green propaganda hyped the record-warm temperature of 64.94 degrees F. (18.3 C.) in Antarctica in February this year. While hyping a record summertime high in the southern hemisphere, the green propagandists turned a blind eye to a record wintertime low in the northern hemisphere that had happened a month earlier – specifically, a temperature reading of minus 86.8 degrees F. (-66C) in Greenland.

Similarly, when the mercury in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk touched 100 degrees F. on June 20, the green propaganda machine went into overdrive. (That temperature was less than one degree above the previous record high set in 1988.) They failed to mention that such heat north of the Arctic Circle was not unprecedented. The temperature reached 100 degrees F. in Fort Yukon, Alaska way back on June 27, 1915. Oh, by the way, I didn’t see any green reports that the people of Verkhoyansk woke up to snow on the ground on July 5. Wild temperature gyrations are a fact of life there due to peculiar topography and other natural factors.

Did you catch the BBC report about the Antarctic glacier Thwaites melting rapidly? That’s true, but the report failed to mention that active volcanoes beneath the glacier are causing the melting. Banning SUVs will not keep Thwaites from melting.

Last September, 250 news organizations around the world openly proclaimed a coordinated campaign to convince their readers and viewers of the urgent need for political action to address catastrophic climate change at the UN’s climate summit that month. Any pretense of journalistic impartiality was explicitly disavowed. The media outlets openly and proudly announced themselves as advocates (propagandists) for their favored viewpoint. Variety magazine even featured an article entitled, “Is Hollywood Doing Enough to Fight the Climate Crisis,” as if the entertainment industry should be in the vanguard of public brainwashing.

Meanwhile, some green zealots are insisting that the green propaganda aimed at children here and abroad over the last few decades needs to be ramped up. One British greenie wrote, “Teachers…will have to help young people critique and rethink…deeply ingrained assumptions, attitudes and expectations that run throughout history, and now endanger much of life on Earth.”

I’ll leave you with a question: Do you really know the truth about climate change, or have you heard green propaganda so many times that you just assume what they say is true?

SOURCE

The Shellenberger Chronicles part three: Do radical environmentalists mean well?

This is the third and final article in the series I call The Shellenberger Chronicles. I hope you have had an opportunity to read parts one and two still appearing at CFACT.org. More importantly however than reading my highlights of the book Apocalypse Never is for you to obtain the book and read it cover to cover.

I have published over 500 reviews of science books in my career, now spanning seven decades. Most of them were good and well worth reading. Many were excellent, but in today’s world where politics has biased nearly everything we read, see and hear in the media, Apocalypse Never is the most important book you can read. It is not a work of opinion but rather the unveiling of the facts and details of the nefarious goals of radical environmentalists across the world desiring to control your life.

I have been a bit harsh, at times, on Mr. Shellenberger for having spent two decades of his life helping those he is now Book Review: Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenbergercommitted to expose. In his final chapter titled False Gods For Lost Souls he explains why. He first describes from Ernest Becker’s book The Denial of Death that an exaggerated fear of death reveals a deep and often subconscious dissatisfaction with one’s life. Where what one is really recognizing that he or she is not making enough out of their lives. They feel stuck in bad relationships, unsupportive communities, or oppressive careers. Then Shellenberger says:

“That was certainly the case for me. I was drawn toward the apocalyptic view of climate change twenty years ago. I can see now that my heightened anxiety about climate change reflected underlying anxiety and unhappiness in my own life that had little to do with climate change or the state of the natural environment”.

The final third of this amazing book is a complete denouement of who Shellenberger is today. He proves to be not only an excellent writer but also a philosopher. Not the kind that pulls thoughts out of thin air as Plato was known to do but thoughts based on a build up of concepts derived from the work of dozens of others described in his 1220 end notes, Just as he learned from Ernest Becker mentioned above.

In Chapter Nine “Destroying The Environment To Protect It”, he follows in the footsteps of Michael Moore’s outstanding movie Planet For The Humans which illustrated the destruction done in creating the materials necessary to build wind turbines and solar arrays. He goes further however in making a clear calculation that if the United States were to try and generate all the energy it uses with renewables, which is Mr. Biden’s plan, between 25 and 50 percent of all land in the US would be required. By contrast we know that today’s energy system requires less than a single percent of our nation’s land.

Now consider this. Just as the high power density of coal made the industrial revolution possible, the far lower power densities of solar and wind would make today’s high energy urbanized, and industrial civilization impossible. In fact for many environmental alarmists that is their very goal.

These facts become more obvious when we learn from the author of the corruption of most of the major environmental groups you can name. While fighting tooth and nail against the fossil fuel industry they are taking donations from them with the promise of helping them defeat any further success of nuclear power in America. Shellenberger specifically names the Sierra club, the Natural Resource Defense Council(NRDC), the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Bill McKibben’s 350.org in this cabal.

His research turned up through government reports shows that Climate activists such as those mentioned above, massively outspend climate skeptics, though they claim the opposite. EDF and NRDC alone have a total budget of $384 million while the two largest skeptic groups, the Competitive Enterprise Group and the Heartland Institute have combined budgets of $13 million.

During the many years these groups were denouncing fossil fuels and Exxon and the Koch brothers for funding their political opponents and demanding that universities stop investing in fossil fuels, all of the above mentioned groups were accepting large quantities of money from fossil fuel billionaires like Michal Bloomberg and Tom Steyer.

In the next to last chapter of Apocalypse Never Shellenberger zeros in on the true evil perpetrated on the poor by rich progressives and Non Government Organizations (NGOs) pretending to help them. The United Nations and environmental NGOs describe their work as helping poor nations “avoid the mistakes made in the industrialized world”, in the words of the UN Development Program.

While we all know of Thomas Malthus, the late 18th century economist who predicted that the earth could not sustain its growing population, you will learn how truly evil he and his disciples have been. Malthusians continue to this day to operate through radical environmentalism. Adolph Hitler too was inspired by Malthus. “The productivity of the soil can only be increased within defined limits and up to a certain point” he wrote in Mein Kampf. What has given Malthus his popularity among the ruling classes is that he furnished a plausible reason for the assumption that some have a better right to existence than others.

Today’s Malthusians, Shellenberger tells us, have significantly modified Malthus preachings. Where he warned that overpopulation would result in scarcity of food, today they warn that energy abundance will result in overpopulation, environmental destruction and societal collapse. They say this while ignoring energy use among the rich and famous.

You may think that celebrities who moralize about climate change are tone deaf while jetting around the globe, but they are not. They are flaunting their special status. Hypocrisy, the author tells us, is the ultimate power move. It is a way of demonstrating that one plays by a different set of rules from the ones adhered to by the common people.

By virtue of giving up his spot among them he has quickly become a pariah to the left. He has been attacked in newspapers, on twitter and of course by CNN. The New York Post allowed him to publish a rebuttal to all the abuse and he did so with excellent clarity. He still has not given up his belief that CO2 may effect temperature but no one’s perfect. He does clearly explain the minimal negative impacts from climate change and points out that alarmists constantly say it makes disasters worse in order to have visual and dramatic events like Hurricane Sandy and California wildfires “to make the issue more salient with voters”.

In the end he says in his NY Post article “climate alarmism gives them a purpose: to save the world from climate change. It offers them a story that casts them as heroes. And it provides a way for them to find meaning in their lives while retaining the illusion that they are people of science and reason not superstition and fantasy”.

This is the theme of the final chapter of his book False Gods For Lost Souls. The trouble with the new environmental religion he tell us is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self defeating. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents as we have seen with every so called denier. A term which we know was lifted from the despicable “holocaust deniers”. It drives them to to seek to restrict power and prosperity here and abroad. Worst of all it spreads anxiety and depression among an unsuspecting populace.

If the climate apocalypse is a subconscious fantasy he says, for people who dislike civilization, it might help explain why the people who are the most alarmist about environmental problems are also the most opposed to the technologies capable of addressing them.

The answer for many rational environmentalists like myself who are alarmed by the religious fanaticism of those claiming to be concerned with the environment is that we need to better maintain the divide between science and religion, just as scientists need to maintain the divide between their personal values and the facts they study.

As I reach the end of my chronicles of Shellenberger’s work, I hope I have not made you satisfied with understanding the great service he has done in committing himself to right the wrongs he now understands he committed. You will benefit so much more by obtaining his book and giving it a slow and discerning read.

SOURCE

Irrigators warn Australian Premier that her minister is picking the environment over farmers

Irrigators have taken a complaint against NSW Environment and Energy Minister Matt Kean to the Premier, claiming the minister appears to be choosing environmental concerns over the interests of farmers and agriculture.

In a stunning broadside against the minister in a letter sent to Premier Gladys Berejiklian on Friday, NSW Irrigators' Council interim chief executive Claire Miller suggested the water and agriculture sectors were being treated as "part of the problem" by some wings of the government.

The letter comes after a tense meeting with irrigators on July 1, in which Mr Kean apparently stated he had been appointed by the Premier to represent his energy and environment stakeholders, and left early.

"We quickly got the impression Minister Kean was not much interested in engaging with us," Ms Miller wrote to the Premier.

"It was troubling to realise Minister Kean does not consider farmers to be among his stakeholders. This narrow view is divisive and perpetuates the false binary that pits environmental interests against farming, as if the two are mutually exclusive."

In a strong warning to the Premier, Ms Miller said the agriculture sector regarded itself as a critical player in the state’s COVID-19 economic recovery program.

"We see ourselves as part of the solution and trust we [will] not be treated as part of the problem in some quarters of government."

Ms Berejiklian declined to comment on Monday, and did not respond to a question on a claim made by irrigators that Mr Kean said she had instructed him to deal only with energy and environment sector stakeholders.

Mr Kean declined to comment on the tone of the meeting, but was forthright in what he said during the session: he wanted to see more done to look after the environment.

"In my view, farmers and industry have an important role to play in caring for our natural environment, including our rivers and waterways," he said. "But I also think that more needs to be done. That is what I communicated to the [Irrigators’ Council]."

In response to other questions regarding the objective of the meeting, he said: "I want to see a sustainable agriculture industry thriving in NSW and an environment that is in a better state than the way we inherited it."

The tension between the minister and the state’s farmers and irrigators comes at a delicate time for the Premier, who is increasingly having to mediate between MPs pushing for more ambitious environmental action while regional communities continue to reel from drought and bushfires.

Within his own portfolio, Mr Kean is pushing the accelerator on his own steep environmental ambitions — including a plan to double the koala population by 2050, announced on Sunday, and a commitment to renewable energy.

Meanwhile, regional MPs argue the government hasn't done enough to help rebuild regional and agricultural communities still suffering hardships from a nightmare summer.

"Hopefully he can remember that he's the minister for the whole of NSW and if he busts this relationship with farmers he'll be essentially hurting the environment," one unnamed backbencher said. "And I very much doubt he's been given the Premier's instruction to disregard farmers."

Another was more blunt, saying, "Kean has shown a complete disregard for the people putting food on our tables in a time of crisis."

SOURCE

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

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

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28 July, 2020

Welcome to the 15-minute city

This is just the old "smart growth" idea resuscitated. Such policies still have a following but only because they sound good in theory.

Attempts to implement it have been shown to drive the price of housing up, significantly reducing discretionary incomes, which necessarily reduces the standard of living and increases poverty

And relatively few job opportunities can be shoe-horned into the "smart" area. It is generally inconsistent with economies to scale

When a plague tore through Milan in the 1570s, everything had to change. Shops were closed. Mass was sung outdoors. A large church, the Lazzaretto, became a hospital. By 1578 the disease had fallen back, but the city was in financial trouble and had shed almost a fifth of its population.

This year, in the chaotic fallout from coronavirus, the Lazzaretto is once again part of an ambitious urban experiment. Giuseppe Sala, Milan’s leftwing mayor, announced in April that the area would host a pilot scheme for “rethinking the rhythms” of the Lombard capital. Amid the dense cityscape that has built up around the remains of the old hospital, the plan is to “offer services and quality of life within the space of 15 minutes on foot from home”.

The “15-minute” idea is based on research into how city dwellers’ use of time could be reorganised to improve both living conditions and the environment. Developed by Professor Carlos Moreno at the Sorbonne in Paris, the concept of “la ville du quart d’heure” is one in which daily urban necessities are within a 15-minute reach on foot or by bike. Work, home, shops, entertainment, education and healthcare — in Moreno’s vision, these should all be available within the same time a commuter might once have waited on a railway platform.

“One of the first lessons of Covid-19 is that we could radically change our ethos for working,” Moreno says. “In a few days, most people changed their remit and their jobs.” The mass, global switch to “working from home” (or living at work, as it may feel) suddenly makes multi-hour commutes appear wasteful, and clock-watching office life inefficient. Ironically enough, the French automobile group PSA (which makes Peugeot, Vauxhall and Citroën cars) was early to seize the opportunity to shift its non-production workforce to permanent remote mode.

Moreno, scientific director of entrepreneurship and innovation at the Sorbonne, is also special envoy to Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, and has influenced her vigorous implementation of pedestrian and bike schemes. Re-elected as mayor last month, Hidalgo pushed her “Paris Respire” programme even further during lockdown, turning miles of traffic lanes into cyclist-friendly “corona pistes”.

Moreno models the 15-minute city on his research into the “new relationship between citizens and the rhythm of life in cities”. To achieve a better rhythm, he says, we need to develop multipurpose services — “one building, with many applications through the day. How, for example, we could use a school for other activities, during the weekend. We also want buildings that mix places for living and working at the same time — this reduces the time for commuting.”

Above all, the 15-minute city is one that cuts down unnecessary journeys: “We need to reduce the presence of cars on the streets,” says Moreno. Hidalgo has already banned traffic along parts of the Seine and on some Sundays along the Champs-Élysées.

Other cities, such as Buenos Aires, have introduced free bike-rental schemes for both residents and tourists, while pioneering Amsterdam has a new model, the City Doughnut, which aims to reduce emissions and waste in the drive towards carbon neutrality.

But though the “quarter-hour” framework seems convenient and ecologically sound, it implies many limitations. Lockdown challenged an understanding of cities as places that provide the chance introductions and chains of encounters upon which interesting careers (and personal lives) are constructed. Is it realistic to think of this 15-minute lasso as a permanent, practicable feature? “We don’t want to oblige people to stay in the 15-minute district,” Moreno says. “We don’t want to recreate a village. We want to create a better urban organisation.”

SOURCE

Report calls for national delivery to decarbonise heating

Another day, another round of rampant evidence-free carbophobia. References to ‘carbon’ and ‘heat’ (amended in our headline to ‘heating’) show a dire lack of scientific understanding. They waffle about a ‘moral imperative’, but forget they rely on manipulated temperature data and failing climate models for evidence to support their lofty attitude.
– – –

A new Heat Commission convened by the CBI and University of Birmingham has called on the Government to develop a National Delivery Body (NDB) to lead the development and implementation of a national strategy to decarbonise heat, reports Electronic Specifier.

Heat is the largest single source of UK carbon emissions, accounting for over one-third whilst decarbonising heat stands as one of the most significant challenges in reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

To overcome this challenge it is vital business, government, regulators and communities work together to shape the policies and delivery mechanisms that will be needed.

The Heat Commission’s report ‘Net Zero: The Road to Low-Carbon Heat’ recommends the establishment of an independent, time-limited, impartial body that will work with government on creating, coordinating and delivering an overarching NDB.

Crucially, the NDB will be expected to be locally formulated and locally delivered by local authorities who will synergise their own local and energy plan with the national programme.

Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, CBI President and Heat Commission Chair Lord Karan Bilimoria, said: “A green recovery and progress towards the UK’s net-zero emission target are doomed to fail if we don’t address the urgent need to decarbonise heat in our homes and buildings. Recent Government announcements will undoubtedly fast-forward our transition towards net-zero. The Commission’s recommendations offer a roadmap to accelerate progress, ensure our nation stays on a path to sustainable recovery and ensures the UK remains a global leader in meeting climate commitments.

“Aside from the moral imperative, there’s also a strong economic case for protecting our planet. Large scale heat decarbonisation and energy efficiency would provide a huge jobs boost for the economy at a time when new career opportunities are needed more than ever.”

The priorities of the NDB will include decarbonising transport, industrial emissions reduction, decentralising electricity supplies, and supporting local energy plans devised by local authorities.

SOURCE

The old "running out of food" scare lives on

Hitler based his "Lebensraum" policy on it

Among the top Google News search results for “climate change” today, Forbes published an embarrassingly fictitious article making several false claims about climate change and rice production. The Forbes article is titled “Rice, Climate Change And A Post-COVID Opportunity For Women In Guyana.” The article is typical of establishment media articles – and particularly Forbes articles – that simply make up false climate claims out of thin air, provide no supporting data for the claims (because no supporting data exist), and then act like people who present actual scientific data and evidence are attacking science. This article is the third of three articles debunking different aspects of the multi-ridiculous Forbes article.

Forbes Senior Contributor Daphne Ewing-Chow writes that “three quarters of global rice exports, that originate in Asian countries such as India and Thailand” have been impaired by “climate change-fuelled [sic] droughts.”

Ewing-Chow adds, “The United Nations World Food Programme has projected that the crisis will almost double the amount of people faced with acute food insecurity by the end of 2020, to an estimated 265 million.”

Fortunately for people who believe in facts and science, and unfortunately for Forbes and Ewing-Chow, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) keeps meticulous records of each country’s agricultural production, as well as global agricultural production.

As documented here, India and Thailand are also seeing consistently increasing crop production.

Nevertheless, one would expect FAO to report a dramatic decline in global food production, given Ewing-Chow’s claim that “food insecurity” is expected to double by the end of this year.

Let’s take a look at the FAO data.

According to the FAO data, global cereal production (the vitally important corn, wheat, and rice crops) set an all-time record in 2019. Moreover, FAO expects 2020 crop production to surpass the 2020 record.

We at Climate Realism don’t know what the United Nations defines as “food insecurity,” but we do know that Ewing-Chow and Forbes are trying to pull a fast one on its readers by asserting that climate change is causing declining crop production and increasing hunger.

SOURCE

Weak, voluntary CO2 standards for Australian cars

And the Greens are fuming. See below

The Australian car industry has finally admitted that it needs to clean up its act – but the voluntary scheme it outlined on Friday is so weak that it will barely cause a change from business as usual. And business as usual in Australia, unfortunately, means it is a dumping ground for dirty engines that car manufacturers can not sell in other markets.

The proposal outlined by the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries aims for a non-compulsory emissions standard for passenger vehicles in 2030 that is actually weaker than the one being imposed, and legally enforced, in Europe in 2021.

And because it is voluntary, it won’t result in any penalties for companies that don’t comply. Any buying of “credits” suggested in the scheme will be more likely be for green-washing marketing purposes rather than actually cutting emissions and improving fuel consumption.

The lack of standards has also hit the hip pocket of Australian consumers. We each pay over $500 a year in additional fuel and maintenance, according to government estimates, because our cars are so dirty and inefficient

And yet consumers are told by government and vested interests that any move to introduce such standards would amount to a “carbon tax on wheels” and blow out the costs of new cars. Which the government’s own research also contradicts.

So it would seem to be a welcome move that the FCAI should outline on Friday a “voluntary CO2 emissions standard” that sets targets out to 2030, so the industry “can contribute to Australia’s commitment to the Paris agreement.”

It aims for a level of CO2 emissions for passenger and light SUVs of under 100 grams per kilometre, and under 145g/km for heavy SUVs and light commercials (mostly utes and vans).

The target will be voluntary, and each manufacturer will be able to plot their own path to the 2030 target, and it will allow the inclusion of Carry Forward Credits and/or Debits.

To put this into perspective, Europe is aiming for 95kg/km by 2021. That target is enforceable, and car companies face massive penalties if they don’t comply. Countries are being urged by climate experts to ban the sale of any petrol and diesel car from 2030, and many like the UK have committed to such bans.

“The intent behind this new Standard is to ensure automotive manufacturers can continue to do what they do best – and that is to bring the latest, safest, and most fuel-efficient vehicles to the Australian market,” FCAI boss Toney Weber said in a statement.

The Electric Vehicle Council, however, did welcome the move as a “step that paves the way forward” and at least means the industry recognises that CO2 standards benefit 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 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

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

27 July, 2020

More evidence of the Roman warm period: Warmer than now

The Mediterranean Sea was 3.6°F (2°C) hotter during the Roman Empire than other average temperatures at the time, a new study claims.

The Empire coincided with a 500-year period, from AD 1 to AD 500, that was the warmest period of the last 2,000 years in the almost completely land-locked sea.

The climate later progressed towards colder and arid conditions that coincided with the historical fall of the Empire, scientists claim.

Spanish and Italian researchers recorded ratios of magnesium to calcite taken from skeletonized amoebas in marine sediments, an indicator of sea water temperatures, in the Sicily Channel.

They say the warmer period may have also coincided with the shift from the Roman Republic to the great Empire founded by Octavius Augustus in 27 BC.

The study offers 'critical information' to identify past interactions between climate changes and evolution of human societies and 'their adaptive strategies'.

It meets requests from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to assess the impact of historically warmer conditions between 2.7°F and 3.6°F (1.5°C to 2°C).

However, the historical warming of the Med during the Roman Empire is linked to intense solar activity, which contrasts with the modern threat of greenhouse gases.

'For the first time, we can state the Roman period was the warmest period of time of the last 2,000 years, and these conditions lasted for 500 years,' said Professor Isabel Cacho at the Department of Earth and Ocean Dynamics, University of Barcelona.

The Mediterranean is a semi-closed sea, meaning it is surrounded by land and almost only connected to oceans by a narrow outlet, and is a climate change 'hot spot' according to a previous paper.

Situated between North Africa and European climates, the sea occupies a 'transitional zone', combining the arid zone of the subtropical high and humid northwesterly air flows.

This makes it extremely vulnerable to modern and past climate changes, such as changes in precipitation change and average surface air temperature, and is of 'particular interest' to researchers.

Home to many civilisations over the years, the Med, or Mare Nostrum as it was known by ancient Roman civilisations, has become a model to study the periods of climate variation.

Reconstructing previous millennia of sea surface temperatures and how it evolved is challenging, due to the difficulty retrieving good resolution marine records.

However, the study of the fossil archives remains the only valid tool to reconstruct past environmental and climatic changes as far back as 2,000 years ago, they say.

Turning to another method, experts analysed the ratios of magnesium to calcite taken from samples of single-celled protists called foraminifera, which are found in all marine environments.

In particular, the species Globigerinoides ruber, present in marine sediments, is an indicator of sea water temperatures.

Researchers took the skeletonised G. ruber sampled from a depth of 1,500 feet (475m) located in the northwestern part of the Sicily Channel.

It was recovered during a 2014 oceanographic expedition on board the RV CNR-Urania research vessel.

These unicellular organisms, part of the marine zooplankton, have a specific habitat limited to the surface layers of the water column.

'Therefore, the chemical analysis of its carbonated skeleton allows us to reconstruct the evolution of the temperature of the surface water mass over time,' said Professor Cacho.

Compared to the subsequent period of the Roman Empire, the Mediterranean was characterised by a colder phase from around 500 BC to 200 BC.

This corresponds with the beginning of the so-called 'sub-Atlantic phase' characterised by a cool climate and rainy winters which was favourable for Greek and Roman civilisations to grow crops.

The cool and humid climate of the sub-Atlantic phase lasted until around 100 BC and covered the entire period of the monarchy in Rome.

However, in 400 BC, cultural changes were synchronised across the Mediterranean region and more 'homogeneous' temperature conditions across the Med regions were established.

A distinct warming phase, running from AD 1 to AD 500, then coincided with the Roman Period and covered the whole Roman Empire archaeological period.

'This pronounced warming during the Roman Period is almost consistent with other marine records from Atlantic Ocean,' the team say in their research paper, published in Scientific Reports.

This climate phase corresponds to what is known as the 'Roman Climatic Optimum' characterised by prosperity and expansion of the Empire, giving warmth and sunlight to crops.

Roman Climatic Optimum, a phase of warm stable temperatures across much of the Mediterranean heartland, covers the whole phase of origin and expansion of the Roman Empire.

The greatest time of the Roman Empire coincided with the warmest period of the last 2,000 years in the Mediterranean.

After the Roman Period, a general cooling trend developed in the region with several minor oscillations in temperature.

The climate then transitioned from wet to arid conditions and this could have marked the decline of the golden period of the Roman Empire after AD 500.

These new record correlated with data from other areas of the Mediterranean – the Alboran Sea, Menorca basin and Aegean Sea.

'We hypothesise the potential link between this Roman Climatic Optimum and the expansion and subsequent decline of the Roman Empire.'

The study provides high resolution and precision data on how the temperatures evolved over the last 2,000 years in the Mediterranean area.

SOURCE

Climate change: Democratic alarmism leads to failing policies

Climate change needs to be addressed but the Democrats' plan is alarmist and not going to save the planet. We need to weigh costs and benefits of climate action.

Bjorn Lomborg

Over the past few decades, climate change has been cast in ever more apocalyptic terms. A new global survey shows that almost half the world’s population and about 4 of 10 Americans believe global warming will likely lead to the extinction of the human race.

Incessantly claiming the end of the world is near is simply unbridled alarmism and untethered to the actual research presented by the UN Climate Panel. However, such scare scenarios are ideal for politicians; they can promise to save the world, and they can leave the substantial bill to future election cycles.

Democrats' action plan for climate change

In this context, House Democrats have joined a long list of prominent global politicians across the last decades who promise to fix global warming, outlined in a 538 page Congressional Action Plan. Among many other proposals, it promises no new gasoline cars by 2035, ending fossil fuels in the power sector by 2040, and reducing the net emissions from the U.S. to zero by 2050. Appropriately, speaker Nancy Pelosi capped her presentation by promising the plan would be “saving the planet.”

It might seem odd to be discussing climate change in the midst of a global pandemic. However, the Democrats point out that climate, not corona or the recession, is the “essential crisis of our time” as it threatens devastating health and economic consequences.

Yes, climate change is a real challenge that we need to tackle smartly. But suggesting it is an “existential threat” to human existence, as Joe Biden frequently claims, causes us to panic and make poor decisions. Instead, we need to weigh costs and benefits of climate action.

When the Democrats claim that climate change is worsening the impacts of extreme storms, droughts, and flooding, they are mostly wrong. Peer-reviewed research clearly shows that neither landfalling hurricanes nor strong landfalling hurricanes in the U.S. have become more frequent since 1900. The 2017 National Climate Assessment even states that “drought has decreased over much of the continental United States.” It also concludes that flooding, which has increased in some places and decreased elsewhere, cannot be connected to climate change.

While costs from disasters are increasing, this is overwhelmingly because more people with more valuables live closer to harm’s way. For instance, the coastal population in Florida has increased 67-fold since 1900, with each family living in more expensive houses. A hurricane hitting Florida today will, therefore, create much more financial damage than a similar hurricane 120 years ago. Thus, helping future generations avoid costly hurricane damage is about better building codes, restricting siting in vulnerable areas, and providing residents with more information.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t real benefits to cutting emissions, but they are dramatically lower than what the Democrats suggest. The UN Climate Panel shows that the total negative impact of climate change in half a century will be equivalent to a reduction in annual incomes of between 0.2 and 2%. As it expects the average person in 50 years to be 363% richer than today, that means with global warming the average person will grow 356% richer. That is a problem, but not the end of the world.

The costs of cutting emissions

Unfortunately and glaringly, the Democratic plan contains no cost estimates, despite its intention to fundamentally restructure the growth engine of the U.S. Only one nation — New Zealand — has been bold enough to request an independent cost estimate of cutting emissions to zero by 2050. The New Zealand Institute of Economic Research found that the optimistic cost would reduce GDP by a whopping 16% each year by 2050. Translated to the projected U.S. GDP in 2050, this would imply a cost of at least $5 trillion in today’s money. Not just once, but every year. That is more than the entire pre-Covid-19 annual federal spending of $4.5 trillion.

Needless to say, spending 16% or more to avoid part of a 2% problem is a bad deal. But Democrats are not alone. Many countries have made spectacular promises to cut emissions and failed. The UN, in a surprisingly honest review, says that despite all the good intentions from the Obama administration and other countries, actual global emissions look similar to a hypothetical world which had made no climate policies since 2005.

And cutting emissions is hard. The corona epidemic has created a dramatic recession, yet it will likely reduce U.S. 2020 emissions by just 7 to 11%. To get to zero would require ten or more lock-downs every year. This will be phenomenally expensive and politically impossible.

That is why Democrats — and all of us — should focus more on solutions that will actually be effective and realistic. Currently, cutting emissions is costly and involves subsidizing inefficient solar, wind, and electric cars. Rich countries can afford a little, though none can afford to dramatically switch.

But if we invest much more into green research and development, we can innovate the price of future green energy below fossil fuels. Then everyone will switch.

Claiming climate change is our biggest challenge is a false alarm. Proposing unrealistic and extremely expensive policies is unhelpful. The Democrats are correct to emphasize we need climate policies, but the policies must be smart.

SOURCE

NY Times Doubles Down on Fake Guatemala Crop Failures

In an article published this morning and sitting atop Google News searches for “climate change,” the New York Times claims climate change is the primary reason people are leaving Guatemala and unlawfully entering the United States. According to the Times’ article, titled “The Great Climate Migration,” drought and extreme weather events are making it impossible for Guatemala farmers to continue making a living. In reality, objective crop data show farms in Guatemala are doing better than ever. Climate change is reducing the pressure on Guatemalans to flee their failing nation-state, even with rampant crime, corruption, gang activity, and violence.

The author of the Times article, Abrahm Lustgarten, writes, “Last summer, I went to Central America to learn how people like Jorge will respond to changes in their climates. I followed the decisions of people in rural Guatemala and their routes to the region’s biggest cities, then north through Mexico to Texas. I found an astonishing need for food and witnessed the ways competition and poverty among the displaced broke down cultural and moral boundaries.”

If Guatemalans are lacking food, it is certainly not because of climate change or crop failures. According to official crop data compiled by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), as shown in the graph below, Guatemalan crop production is continuing a history of long-term growth. Guatemala crop yields per acre are currently:

double what they were in 1970 – 50 years of global warming ago
50% higher than they were in 1980

10% to 20% higher than they were in 1990 and 2000
enjoying eight straight years of year-over-year improvement from the preceding year

None of this good news matters to the New York Times when they have a refugee causation myth to create and a climate myth to perpetuate. According to the Times article, “it almost never rained” for Guatemala farmers for five years between 2014 and 2019. Moreover, “under a relentless confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation, they [Guatemala farmers], too, have begun to leave. Almost everyone here experiences some degree of uncertainty about where their next meal will come from. Half the children are chronically hungry, and many are short for their age, with weak bones and bloated bellies.” This is how the Times describes a period of longstanding growth in Guatemala crop production.

And again, even if this misery exists, the Guatemala crop data show the reason is a corrupt, violent political state rather than climate change.

SOURCE

Australian Government sued by 23-year-old Melbourne student over financial risks of climate change

Governments have often been sued over global warming in the USA without success. This is probably just a publicity grab

A 23-year-old Melbourne law student is suing the Australian Government for failing to disclose the risk climate change poses to Australians' super and other safe investments.

The world-first case filed today in the Federal Court alleges the Government, as well as two government officials, failed in a duty to disclose how climate change would impact the value of government bonds.

Katta O'Donnell, the head litigant for the class action suit, said she hoped the case would change the way Australia handled climate change.

"I'm suing the Government because I'm 23 [and] I think I need to be aware of the risks to my money and to the whole of society and the Australian economy," Ms O'Donnell said.

"I think the Government needs to stop keeping us in the dark so we can be aware of the risks that we're all faced with."

Experts say it is the first where a national government has been sued for its lack of transparency on climate risks.

Government bonds are considered the safest form of investment, with most Australians invested in them through compulsory superannuation.

Bonds are similar to shares, but instead of investing in companies, the investor lends a government money to build infrastructure and fund critical services such as health, welfare and national security.

Ms O'Donnell, who has invested in bonds independently from her super, said she did it to "protect her future".

However bonds, like shares, can lose value if they become less attractive to the market. This can occur if investors question a government's ability to repay them due to rising government debt, ethical or reputational reasons.

Ms O'Donnell said watching the impact of bushfires in Australia made her worry about the value of her bonds.

Despite the Government not disclosing climate-related risks to its investment products, government regulators are increasingly forcing companies to disclose how climate change will impact their shareholders.

This landmark trial has the potential to change the way superannuation funds invest retirement savings and pave the way for more climate-change-related litigation.

No damages, just recognition

Ms O'Donnell's case names the Commonwealth, as well as the secretary to the Department of Treasury and the chief executive of the Australian Office of Financial Management — both of whom are alleged to be responsible for promoting government bonds.

The case is a class action, with Ms O'Donnell representing all investors and potential investors in government bonds tradeable on the Australian Securities Exchange.

It does not seek damages, but instead a declaration that the Government and those two officials breached their duty.

It also seeks an injunction, forcing the Government to stop promoting bonds until it updates its disclosure information to include information about Australia's climate change risks.

The case is backed by heavy-hitting silk and former Federal Court judge Ron Merkel and barrister Thomas Wood, who was previously the counsel assisting the solicitor-general of the Commonwealth.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here 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 July, 2020

How Earth’s Climate Changes Naturally (and Why Things Are Different Now)

The heading above is from a long but emptyheaded article that catalogs in a handwaving way the various influences on earth's climate.

One might expect that a consideration of all the natural influences would inspire doubt about the anthropogenic global warming thesis. One would think that a signal emanating from human deeds would be hard to distinguish from all the other influences at work.

No such luck. The article is straight warmism. The idea seems to be to create an air of profundity in its claims. By discussing all the other climate influences and still showing anthropogenic global warming at work the article reassures us that a full scholarly exercise has been undertaken before concluding that anthropogenic global warming exists. All "t"s have been crossed and all "i"s have been dotted.

But the article in fact gives no evidence at all for anthropogenic global warming. The most it offers is a link to another paper which in turn relies on the IPCC reports. So it is all just the same old same old. It's a long article but there's no reason to spend any time on it.

Earth’s climate has fluctuated through deep time, pushed by these 10 different causes. Here’s how each compares with modern climate change. Orbital wobbles, plate tectonics, evolutionary changes and other factors have sent the planet in and out of ice ages.

Earth has been a snowball and a hothouse at different times in its past. So if the climate changed before humans, how can we be sure we’re responsible for the dramatic warming that’s happening today?

In part it’s because we can clearly show the causal link between carbon dioxide emissions from human activity and the 1.28 degree Celsius (and rising) global temperature increase since preindustrial times. Carbon dioxide molecules absorb infrared radiation, so with more of them in the atmosphere, they trap more of the heat radiating off the planet’s surface below.

But paleoclimatologists have also made great strides in understanding the processes that drove climate change in Earth’s past. Here’s a primer on 10 ways climate varies naturally, and how each compares with what’s happening now.

MORE here

Study Finds Fossil Fuels Aren't Subsidized; They're Overtaxed

The CO2 Coalition of 55 climate scientists and energy economists today released a detailed economic study of subsidies and taxes on fossil fuels in the United States and internationally. Written by Coalition Director Dr. Bruce Everett, who taught energy economics at Georgetown University and the Fletcher School at Tufts University, the 26-page White Paper is titled
Do Government Policies Favoring Fossil Fuels Hamper the Development of Wind and Solar Power?

While advocates of wind and solar power often claim that these sources of power are disadvantaged by billions, even trillions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies, the Coalition White Paper finds that the net effect of government policies is to raise, rather than lower, the price of energy from fossil fuels.

The study concludes that: "Although most countries do offer some subsidies to fossil fuels, the massive taxes imposed by most governments are generally far higher, resulting in a net increase in the price of fossil fuels. Taking into account all taxes and subsidies, fossil fuels in the United States are overtaxed $50 billion per year. The 28 other largest industrial democracies are overtaxed $363 billion, and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are overtaxed $104 billion. The primary exceptions to this rule are found in oil-producing developing countries that offer their citizens heavily subsidized motor fuels but are not likely candidates for renewable energy."

Dr. Caleb Stewart Rossiter, the CO2 Coalition's executive director, said, "Wind and solar power, both in the United States and internationally, are heavily subsidized by mandates for utilities to purchase their costly electricity, as well as tax credits and public financing. It is renewables, not fossil fuels, that have the competitive advantage when it comes to government intervention in the energy markets. Despite this advantage, wind and solar remain in the single digits as a share of American and global energy consumption. As a previous CO2 Coalition White Paper, The Social Cost of Carbon and Carbon Taxes, showed, their true cost is four times that of fossil-fueled power. They are not ready for prime time yet, but that's because of technological challenges, not wildly-exaggerated fossil fuel subsidies."

From the CO2 Coalition: info@co2coalition.org

Electric Vehicle Fees Increasing in California and Other States

In an effort to shore up flagging transportation funding and ensure drivers of electric vehicles (EV) contribute to road and bridge construction and maintenance, owners of electric and hybrid vehicles in several states will have to start paying new or increased registration fees in 2020.

California Fees Begin

Under a state law enacted in 2017, Californians driving electric vehicles began paying an upfront $100 registration fee for all zero-emission vehicles for model year 2020 on July 1. The law also added a new annual fee that varies depending on an EV’s value, from $25 for vehicles with a market value less than $5,000 up to $175 for vehicles valued at $60,000 or more.

The same 2017 law raised the state’s gasoline tax by 3.2 cents per gallon, increasing the tax to 50.5 cents a gallon.

State officials estimated the new fees and gas taxes will generate more than $50 billion the next decade, to be dedicated to maintaining state highways, local roads, and associated infrastructure projects.

New Electric Fees

California is not the the only state adding new charges for EVs in 2020. Alabama, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Oregon, and Utah also imposed new or increased existing electric vehicle fees this year. With the new states adding fees for EVs, more than 26 states now impose such fees on EVs or hybrid vehicles.

In Alabama, owners of electric or plug-in hybrid cars began paying a $200 and $100 annual fee respectively, beginning January 1, and EV drivers in Oregon started paying $110 more per year to register their EVs, increasing the overall EV registration fee to $306 for two years.

Utah’s EV and hybrid vehicle fees are also rising. In 2019, Utah’s fees were $60 for electric vehicles, $26 for plug-in hybrids, and $10 for gas hybrids. The fees increased to $90, $39, and $15 respectively 2020, and they will rise to $120, $52, and $20 in 2021.

SOURCE

Australia: Academic freedom bows at the altar of social media

The university was too canny to challenge Peter Ridd on his climate skepticism. Instead they got him on a perverted legal technicality

It’s out with philosophers John Stuart Mill, John Locke and Isaiah Berlin and it’s in with “the internet, social media and trolling”. According to the majority judgment of the Federal Court of Australia in James Cook University v Ridd handed down on Wednesday, that is.

Peter Ridd was employed by James Cook University for 27 years before his employment was terminated in May 2018 for serious misconduct. At the time Ridd was a physics professor. However, he was not dismissed on any academic or teaching grounds.

Rather, Ridd went down because JCU maintained that he had failed to act “in the collegial and academic spirit” required and had denigrated a fellow staff member by failing to act “with respect and courtesy”. Oh yes, Ridd had also denigrated JCU, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

In fact, Ridd disagreed on scientific grounds with the views of some fellow academics and some influential organisations about the long-term viability of the Great Barrier Reef.

He maintains that sections of the Great Barrier Reef are in good shape and that coral dies and is reborn as part of the reef’s life. This is inconsistent with the scientific orthodoxy preached by JCU and like-minded organisations.

Announcing the termination in May 2018, Iain Gordon, then JCU’s deputy vice-chancellor, referred not to the quality of Ridd’s teaching and research but to his “manner” and “disrespect”. You see, he had been charged with having “trivialised, satirised or parodied” JCU’s disciplinary processes. Why, Ridd had even sent a private email to a friend dealing with JCU that was headed “for your amusement”. How shocking is that?

It is a long time since there was genuine academic and intellectual freedom in the groves of academe — if this ever existed. The ideals pronounced by John Henry Newman’s 1875 The Idea of a University are essentially utopian. What’s new about the current JCU case is that the curtailment of academic freedom that once prevailed in the social sciences has extended into the physical sciences.

Take Australia, for example. The two big cases of academic freedom in the past half-century involve philosopher Frank Knopfelmacher (1923-95) and physicist Ridd. In 1965 Knopfelmacher, who was a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, was appointed to the position of senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sydney. The appointment was overturned by the university’s professional board.

Knopfelmacher’s appointment was strongly supported by David Armstrong, one of Australia’s finest philosophers.

Like Ridd, Knopfelmacher went down because of his irreverent manner and a tendency to criticise colleagues in addition to his unfashionable views. An articulate and well-informed anti-communist, Knopfelmacher upset the leftist fashions of the time with his vehement criticism of the communist regimes in central and eastern Europe (East Germany, the Soviet Union) and Asia (North Korea, China, North Vietnam), and their supporters in the West.

In 1964 Knopfelmacher wrote an article in Twentieth Century magazine criticising the leftist ideology that prevailed in many of Melbourne University’s social science departments. He claimed that left-wing academics discriminated against non-leftists and exercised significant veto powers “in matters of academic preferments and sinecures”.

This accurate comment was used against Knopfelmacher by his opponents on Sydney University’s professional board.

In the half-century since the Knopfelmacher affair, the attack on academic and intellectual freedom has moved into universities as a whole, including the physical sciences. That is Ridd’s problem. JCU appears to have a view that the Great Barrier Reef is dying fast and anyone who disagrees with this orthodoxy, no matter how well qualified, does not have a right to be heard, especially if they are irreverent and outspoken.

In one sense, the Federal Court’s decision in JCU v Ridd turns on the interpretation of the enterprise agreement under which the respondent was employed.

In September last year the Federal Circuit Court (Judge Angelo Vasta presiding) found that JCU had contravened section 50 of the Fair Work Act by making findings against Ridd, giving him directions with respect to confidentiality and speech along with a “no satire” instruction. All this, the court found, had led to an improper employment termination.

However, the current case is more important than mere industrial relations. The majority — justices John Griffiths and Sarah Derrington — essentially dismissed “historical concepts of academic freedom”.

So the thoughts of Mill, Locke and Berlin are out of date. Griffiths and Derrington instead cited the work of American philosopher Jennifer Lackey concerning the internet and social media. They quoted favourably from the Illinois academic, who has written that the concept of academic freedom has been challenged not only by no-platforming but also by student demands for “content warnings and safe spaces” that “leave us in uncharted territory”.

Newman, originally an Anglican who became a cardinal in the Catholic Church, was a deeply religious man who saw a role for an essentially secular university bestowed with intellectual freedom. But many a modern campus has become an institution that acts in accordance with the notion that “error has no rights”.

This was once the teaching of extreme religious sects. Now it is being put into effect by censorious administrators, academics and students who believe that those with whom they disagree have no right to be heard.

In his dissent, Justice Darryl Rangiah placed much more emphasis on Ridd’s right to intellectual freedom. Rangiah agreed with the majority that the decision of the primary judge contained material errors on industrial law.

However, he said that while the appeal should be allowed, the proceedings should not be dismissed but remitted for a further hearing. Rangiah did not support the majority view that some aspects of Ridd’s conduct cannot be characterised as an exercise in intellectual freedom.

While JCU v Ridd turns primarily on industrial law, it is likely to have the unintended consequence of discouraging academics who are at odds with prevailing fashions in the social and physical sciences from speaking out.

Australian universities need more Knopfelmachers and Ridds — not fewer.

SOURCE

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

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

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24 July, 2020

Newest Polar Bear Alarm Fails Laugh Test

Google News and the establishment media are attempting to frighten people today with claims that polar bears may go extinct by 2100. The claims are absolute rubbish and fail the laugh test.

BBC, CBS, New Scientist, the New York Times, and Science Alert are among the many media outlets hyping the scare today. The scare is based on a new Nature Climate Change paper titled, “Fasting season length sets temporal limits for global polar bear persistence.” In the paper, the authors claim, “Our model captures demographic trends observed during 1979–2016, showing that recruitment and survival impact thresholds may already have been exceeded in some subpopulations. … It also suggests that, with high greenhouse gas emissions, steeply declining reproduction and survival will jeopardize the persistence of all but a few high-Arctic subpopulations by 2100.”

BBC’s uncritical coverage of the report is typical of establishment media coverage. In a story titled “Climate change: Polar bears could be lost by 2100,” the authors write in the first two sentences of the story, “Polar bears will be wiped out by the end of the century unless more is done to tackle climate change, a study predicts. Scientists say some populations have already reached their survival limits as the Arctic sea ice shrinks.”

However, as polar bear scientist Susan Crockford points out, the study’s claims are not based on data, but rather on projections based on extreme, unrealistic warming scenarios. Also, the authors extrapolate population declines from small segments of the polar bear population across the entire polar bear range.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation recently published Crockford’s report, The State of the Polar Bear 2019. Crockford, a zoologist specializing in polar bear research and population trends, provides comprehensive evidence and data showing polar bears are doing quite fine as temperatures continue their modest warming. Indeed, polar bear populations have been rising for more than half a century, and are likely quadruple the number that existed in the 1950s.

As real-world evidence shows something unalarming – in this case, substantial growth in polar bear populations – climate alarmists go to their usual bag of tricks and conjure up dubious computer models, projections, and speculation to trick the general populace into believing global warming is causing a polar bear crisis.

Very dishonest, and very sad.

SOURCE

Net Zero: Every Urban Street And Front Drive in Britain Will Be Dug Up

The UK faces a £200 billion bill to rewire the country if the government follows through on plans to electrify the country’s homes and transport systems. That’s because installation of electric car chargers and heat pumps will push up demand for power beyond the capacity of the existing wiring.

The findings are set out in a new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is published today. According to author Mike Travers, this will mean that most streets in the UK will need to be dug up (with diesel-driven machinery):

“At present new home car chargers and heat pumps are using up all the spare capacity. But we will soon reach the point where the network will not be able to handle the extra demand. So in towns and cities, the underground cables which carry the power will be inadequate. That means that we are going to have to dig up almost every urban street and many rural ones too. The whole distribution grid is going to need to be replaced.”

And the cables that carry power into the homes will need to be dug up too.

According to Travers:

“The power cables taking electricity into your home probably run underneath your front drive. So if you want a car charger and a heat pump you are going to have to pay to dig it up. If you have an expensive monoblocked drive, that will not be cheap. Distribution boards, main fuses and smart meters in homes are going to have to be upgraded too.”

Travers has estimated the cost of all this work at around £200 billion, even before considering the cost caused by the disruption. “Many homeowners will be paying thousands”, he says.

The author:

Mike Travers CEng, MIMechE, FIET is an electrical engineer, whose career spanned periods in the Royal Engineers, in the hydroelectric sector, and industry. He previously sat on the the IET Wiring Regulations Committee and was the industry representative on the committee that rewrote the Grid Codes for Scotland.

His paper is entitled The Hidden Cost of Net Zero: Rewiring the UK

SOURCE

Biden’s Spoon-Ready ‘Green’ Jobs Plan Is An Economic Disaster

Joe Biden announced plans to make America prosper through the magic of taxing, spending and regulating.

Biden’s plan for economic recovery includes inserting America back into the UN Paris Climate Agreement and spending two trillion dollars on climate change, with 40% of the cash going to “climate justice.”

This is as foolish as it is dangerous.

“When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is ‘hoax,’” Biden said, “When I think about climate change, the word I think of is ‘jobs.’”

Biden would create those jobs by mandating and subsidizing inefficiency.

Do you remember the story about the economist who saw workers digging out a canal? He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earthmovers, the workers had shovels.

“You don’t understand,” the bureaucrats explained, “this is a jobs program.”

“I thought you were trying to build a canal,” the economist replied, “If it’s jobs you want, then you should give the workers spoons, not shovels.”

No one seems able to agree on who was speaking, or when and whether this happened, but we all should agree that the lesson is valid. Productivity counts. Inefficiency places a drag on the economy to the detriment of all.

Replacing the energy producers who have given us American energy independence (at last!) with a legion of wind and solar installers is just that sort of inefficiency. They may as well be wielding spoons.

Biden pledged emissions-free electricity generation by 2035 and overall net-zero emissions by 2050.

Can you imagine the economic upheaval in store if we shut down oil, gas, and coal energy in just 15 years and try to replace them by converting our remaining natural spaces into wind farms and solar deserts?

Brace for major upheavals. Kiss automobiles, appliances, housing, and jobs as you know and prefer them goodbye if this misbegotten thinking rules the day.

Larry Bell reminds us in a post at CFACT.org that Biden has ceded his climate plans to the radicals.

His climate committee is co-chaired by John Kerry and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Even the phrase “build back better” comes right out of the UN.

“Approximately three months earlier,” Bell writes, “on April 22, the U.N. announced, ‘as the world begins planning for a post-pandemic recovery, the United Nations is calling on Governments to seize the opportunity to build back better by creating more sustainable, resilient and inclusive societies.”

Peter Murphy warns at CFACT.org that Biden “has become a Trojan horse for climate true believers.”

Don’t forget Biden’s call for “climate justice,” which is nothing more than code for redistribution of wealth.

Joe Biden’s economic and climate plans rest on false premises, are ruinously expensive, would cripple the economy, and would harm, rather than help the environment.

Biden and the Left have no idea how to build. We should leave the building up to free people exercising free choice if we really want to build back better.

SOURCE

Will the Left Kill America's Energy Dominance?

If the "liberal" green movement had the political power during earlier periods of our nation's history that it has now, we would not have built the railroads. Also, there would be no interstate highway system, and the electric grid system that powers our country would be disconnected and shattered.

What else can one conclude when a significant and vital energy pipeline, the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline from West Virginia into the southern states, has been canceled because of environmental activist opposition? Another pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, has been suspended by a federal judge's order in recent days. Even the urgently needed Keystone XL Pipeline, which will transport natural gas and oil from energy-rich areas in Canada and the Dakotas down to Houston for export and delivery across the country, faces a court-ordered injunction. These actions are all said to be in the name of wetlands preservation, Endangered Species Act issues and other environmental protections.

It isn't safeguarding the safety of our nation. It is sabotaging it.

Pipelines are the most environmentally safe way to transport America's oil and gas resources across the country. They are vital infrastructures that enable America to be the world's energy superpower and make us no longer reliant on Saudi Arabia, Russia and other hostile OPEC countries. The alternative to pipelines is trucks and rail cars, which crash, derail and explode.

The crusade to stop pipelines has nothing to do with clean air or clean water. Natural gas is a wonder fuel. It is cheap, abundant, made in America and clean-burning. The fracking revolution that gave us low-cost natural gas has done more to reduce carbon emissions in the United States than all environmental groups since the beginning of time. It is an environmental blessing.

Let's be honest about what is going on here: The left hates fossil fuels and uses any tactic it can to stop energy development. They want to force America to use "renewable" wind and solar power, both of which are unreliable as stand-alone energy sources. They are also multiple times more expensive ways to generate power. More expensive energy makes everything else America produces more costly and less competitive in global markets.

Liberals say they care about working-class people, but between 5 million and 10 million jobs would be lost without U.S. access to abundant oil, gas and coal resources, according to the American Petroleum Institute. These are mostly union jobs and would be put at risk. At least 1.5 million would be put at risk in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and other Midwestern states if the Marcellus Shale "shale revolution" were to end. But when the greens are pitted against the blues (blue-collar workers), the Democrats choose their precious environmental friends. This year, Joe Biden admitted that he is willing to lose thousands of oil and gas jobs to "go green." So much for "Lunch Bucket Joe."

The absurdity of the pipeline bans is that we don't have a cheap way to transport oil and gas from Ohio and middle Pennsylvania to significant urban Northeastern areas such as New York, Boston and the rest of New England. Without a pipeline, these cities may have to continue to import natural gas from Vladimir Putin in Russia. How is that in America's interest?

Free market advocates want to continue to drill here in the U.S., where we have at least 200 years of extractable energy resources, provide low-cost energy to families and businesses, and save millions of high-paying, middle-class jobs. The greens want to shut it all down. Stopping pipelines is the first step toward choking off production and surrendering economic and energy power to our enemies.

SOURCE

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

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

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23 July, 2020

Greta Thunberg Wins €1M Prize; Will Give To Green Groups

I wonder what old Nubar Gulbenkian would think of this use of his money. He was pretty capitalistic so I doubt that he would like it

Greta Thunberg has taken yet another prize for her woke climate activism, banking the one million euro Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity for her “contributions to mitigation and adaptation to climate change.”

The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation was established in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1956 “to improve the quality of life through art, charity, science, and education” but 2020 marks its first-ever Prize for Humanity, an award created to stimulate climate change activism.

According to its website, the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity “distinguishes innovative pathways with high impact potential to assist in processes of mitigation and/or adaptation to climate change, one of the greatest threats to this century and with devastating consequences for the well-being of current and future generations and for the economy and our natural ecosystems.”

The foundation shares the widespread conviction that humanity “is facing an unprecedented climate crisis,” which is “clearly visible in the ever-increasing frequency of heatwaves and droughts, the rise in seawater temperatures, melting glaciers and extreme weather events.”

The 17-year-old Ms. Thunberg was already named Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2019, joining a series of notable figures including Adolf Hitler (1938), Joseph Stalin (1939), and Ayatollah Khomeini (1979).

Thunberg was launched into the public limelight thanks to her Fridays for Future movement, whereby students are encouraged to skip school every Friday in order to protest climate change.

Thunberg also received broad acclaim from the international Left for her public scolding of world leaders at the United Nations last September.

“You have stolen my dreams, my childhood, with your empty words and yet I’m one of the lucky ones,” Thunberg said at the U.N. General Assembly. “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?” […]

Soon after, a series of contrite contenders for the Democrat Presidential nomination began falling over themselves to praise the young activist for her prophetic words.

Bernie Sanders, Beto O’Rourke, and Kamala Harris all joined in the Greta love-fest, with Harris confessing that we are “failing our nation’s youth.”

The Maryknoll missionaries, a Catholic religious order, went so far as to compare Thunberg to the Virgin Mary.

“Christians getting their knickers all in a twist over the passionate, articulate & knowledgeable witness of Greta Thunberg because of her age seem to overlook the age of the Virgin Mary at the time of the Annunciation,” the group wrote on Twitter.

On receiving the award Monday, Thunberg immediately promised to donate the money to organizations devoted to combatting climate change, such as the SOS Amazonia Campaign the Stop Ecocide Foundation.

SOURCE

New Climate Summary Destroys Wildfire Myths

Wildfires throughout the United States have become much less extensive in recent decades as the climate has warmed, reports a new climate summary at the website Climate at a Glance.

Climate at a Glance is designed to provide policymakers, educators, students, and the general public compelling one- or two-page summaries destroying common global warming myths. Each summary begins with a few short bullet-points to concisely summarize the topic, followed by one or two explanatory paragraphs and an illustrative graphic.

According to the new summary on U.S. wildfires:

Wildfires are far less frequent and severe than was the case throughout the first half of the 20th

Occasional upticks in current wildfire activity still result in far less land burnt than was the case throughout the early 20th century

Even the worst recent wildfire years burned only 1/5thto 1/2 as much land as typical wildfire years during the early 20th century

Drought is the key climate factor for wildfires. As shown in Climate at a Glance: Drought, the United States in recent decades is benefiting from strikingly small amounts of drought.

SOURCE

EPA Leaves Current Ozone Standards in Place, Says They are Safe

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced it is leaving in place the current air quality standards for ground level ozone because the best available science indicates they sufficiently protect human health.

Ozone is an odorless gas produced at ground level by a reaction of sunlight with regulated pollutants emitted by a variety of sources such as automobiles, electric power stations, and industrial plants. Ozone is the main component of smog, which still plagues some cities, such as Los Angeles.

Current Standard Deemed Safe

Under the 1970 Clean Air Act, the EPA is required to review the standard for criteria pollutants, of which ozone is one, every five years.

The EPA lowered the standard for ground-level ozone to 70 parts per billion (ppb) in 2015, under the administration of President Barack Obama, down from 75 ppb set in 2008. EPA said at the time the 70 ppb level was sufficient to protect both human health and the environment.

In a January 13, 2020 press release announcing the existing ozone standard would be maintained, the EPA affirmed the best science still indicates the 70 ppb standard is safe. Ozone concentrations fell by 4 percent between 2017 and the end of 2019, the agency reported.

“Under President Trump, the U.S. has made significant progress in reducing ozone concentrations across the nation,” said EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler in the agency’s press release. “Based on a review of the scientific literature and recommendation from our independent science advisors, we are proposing to retain existing ozone standards, which will ensure the continued protection of both public health and the environment.”

The EPA’s action marks the second time in 2020 that, after the required review of the best available science, the agency has decided to maintain an existing standard for a regulated pollutant. EPA decided to keep the existing standard for particulate matter in place in April.

‘Win for Our Nation’

EPA’s decision to maintain the existing ozone standards will benefit cities and states while protecting public health, said Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) in statement.

“EPA’s responsible decision to keep current ozone standards continues to ensure that our air is clean and our communities are protected, while at the same time lowering the massive burden on states and localities to meet ever-moving goalposts of environmental regulations,” Gosar said. “Administrator Wheeler and President Trump have seen consistent decreases in ozone under this administration, and keeping the standards that have driven that success in place is a win for our nation.”

The current ozone standards keeps people safe, said Bruno Pigott, a commissioner with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, in a statement.

“This stringent ozone standard continues to ensure that Hoosiers have cleaner air than ever before,” Pigott said.

Avoids Jeopardizing Economic Recovery

By following the science and not being led by environmental advocates who pushed the Trump administration to set an even more stringent standard for ozone, the EPA maintained essential environmental protections while helping the economy to recover from the economic shutdown resulting from fears raised by the COVID-19 pandemic, said Rachel Jones, vice-president of Energy & Resources Policy at the National Association of Manufacturers, in a statement.

“Protecting the environment and improving public health for all Americans must come first,” said Jones. “Manufacturers’ commitment to clean air is why we support EPA’s proposal to retain the Obama ozone standards.

“Amid a global pandemic, manufacturers are serving on the front lines helping our nation respond to and recover from COVID-19.” Jones said. “So at a time when we are facing record-breaking unemployment, an even lower ozone standard could have jeopardized more than seven million manufacturing jobs.”

SOURCE

Dr. Ridd: James Cook University wins unlawful sacking decision

The grounds for the university's actions were contemptible. He was sacked for disagreeing with his colleagues. If academics cannot disagree with one-another, where does that leave the search for truth?

He was not even abusive in what he said. He just said that their conclusions needed more validation -- a scientific comment if ever there was one.

This needs to go to appeal but funding may be a barrier to that

The reason for the furore is that the JCU scientists said that the reef was damaged by global warming. Dr. Ridd demurred

The Federal Court has allowed an appeal of a decision which found James Cook University acted unlawfully in its 2018 sacking of Peter Ridd, after the professor questioned colleagues' research on the impact of global warming on the Great Barrier Reef.

Dr Ridd was awarded $1.2 million in damages by the Federal Circuit Court in September, which had earlier found JCU sacked the physics professor unlawfully.

The case attracted intense focus due to Dr Ridd's scepticism of climate change science and the broader debate about free speech at Australian universities.

The university reiterated last year it would launch the appeal, and has maintained its sacking of the professor was based on his treatment of colleagues rather than the expression of his scientific views.

Dr Ridd had originally sought reinstatement to his position but later abandoned this in favour of compensation.

In a judgment published on Wednesday, the Federal Court set aside that compensation decision and allowed the university to appeal the earlier ruling it had acted unlawfully.

Justices John Griffiths and Roger Derrington found Dr Ridd's enterprise agreement did not give him "untrammelled right" to express his professional opinions beyond the standards imposed by the university's code of conduct.

The termination of his employment did therefore not breach the Fair Work Act, they said.

Outlining his final declarations and penalties last year in September, Federal Circuit Court Judge Salvatore Vasta suggested the university's conduct had bordered on "paranoia and hysteria fuelled by systemic vindictiveness".

"In this case, Professor Ridd has endured over three years of unfair treatment by JCU – an academic institution that failed to respect the rights to intellectual freedom that Professor Ridd had as per [his enterprise agreement]," the judge decided.

Conservative think-tank the Institute of Public Affairs described the new Federal Court judgment on Wednesday as a "devastating blow" to freedom of speech.

"Alarmingly, this decision shows that contractual provisions guaranteeing intellectual freedom do not protect academics against censorship by university administrators," IPA director of policy Gideon Rozner said. "The time has come for the Morrison government to intervene."

He added that Dr Ridd was now considering his legal options around a High Court challenge.

SOURCE

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

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

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22 July, 2020

Antarctic ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Is Really Doomsday for Climate Alarmism

A fake climate scare making headlines comes from researchers who say West Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier may soon collapse, raising sea levels by 6 feet or more over the next century. Alarmists are dubbing this the “Doomsday Glacier.” This is ironically true, as the fake climate scare of the Doomsday Glacier is really a doomsday for climate alarmism.

The Financial Times (FT) in an article titled, “Climate change: what Antarctica’s ‘doomsday glacier’ means for the planet,” writes, “if Thwaites goes, the knock-on effect across the western half of Antarctica would lead to between 2m and 3m of sea level rise… a rise that would be catastrophic for most coastal cities.”

The FT article implies climate change is behind the Thwaites glacier’s rate of asserted melting and instability, ignoring evidence to the contrary. I debunked that claim in a July 3 Climate Realism post in which I pointed out global satellite data showed no warming or cooling trend at the South Pole since measurements began in 1979. In addition, since 1998, ground based temperature measurements across Antarctica show the continent has cooled for 20 of the last 30 years. So how can global warming cause alleged instability of the Thwaites glacier? It simply cannot.

Throughout geologic history, West Antarctica is also referred to as Lesser Antarctica, being the smaller half of the continent. The ice there has been unstable, with many regions, including regions in an around the Thwaites glacier, underpinned by subsurface volcanic activity. Moreover, “During past interglacials, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been completely removed,” states AntarcticGlaciers.org.

Even with any decline of the Thwaites glacier and other areas of West Antarctica, it is not even clear if Antarctica is adding to recent modest sea level rise. In 2015, NASA reported Antarctica as a whole was adding tens of thousands of tons of snow and ice each year in its interior. NASA wrote, “the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.” As such, at least through 2008, Antarctica ice change was, on net, reducing the rate of global sea level rise.

Alarmists, ironically, point to other studies that they claim place the NASA findings in doubt. Regardless, Antarctica’s average temperatures range from -60 degrees C (-76 F) during winter to -20 C (-4 F) in summer. Accordingly, no meltdown of the Antarctic continent is in the offing.

The so-called Doomsday Glacier is really Doomsday Nothing – other than a Doomsday Illustration of the flawed Climate Delusion.

SOURCE

The Sordid History of Scam Science

COVID and global warming are not the first

What was not-so-novel about the COVID crisis was its origin in scam or junk science. John Ionnnidis, one of the leading critics of weak scientific work, jumped right in to alert people and policymakers about the many problems with various predictive models but he was largely ignored despite being one of the most highly-cited scientists alive. That is actually not unusual. Even before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, Americans have been inundated with alarmist “scientific” claims that have not held up to close scrutiny. The problem is, they always hear about false claims but almost never hear about the retractions and whispered mea culpas (Latin for “my bad”). The net effect is undue pessimism about the state of the world.

Most scientific scares are rooted in the extrapolation of current trends to the point of disaster or desolation with no thought given to the possibility of cyclicality, natural limits, or behavioral changes. Ridley jokes about the nineteenth century prediction that by 1950 the streets of London would be ten feet deep in horse manure. Unfortunately, real scam science is no laughing matter. Here is a partial list:

Love Canal and Other “Cancer Clusters:” Love Canal refers to a housing development built near an improperly capped toxic waste disposal site in Niagara Falls, New York, where the media reported a cluster of cancer cases. It turns out, though, that cancer clusters are random events simply more salient than places where, again by sheer luck, cancer is rare. Most cancers, it seems, are not caused by man-made chemicals. Many more carcinogens lurk naturally in foods like cabbage and coffee than in pesticides.

Dioxin, the main chemical culprit at the Love Canal site, was claimed to be so toxic that 3 ounces of the stuff would kill one million people. When 3 pounds of it was accidentally spread over a 700-acre town near Milan, Italy in 1976, though, the worst that came of it were cases of acne, even in the resident who had the highest level of the substance ever found in a human body. A 1983 study also showed that a control group had higher levels of chromosomal damage than Love Canal residents! Nevertheless, environmentalists tried to prevent people fully aware of Love Canal’s history from moving back in.

Radon Panic: Radon sounds scary because it is a radioactive gas. It comes from uranium deposits and its “daughters,” the isotopes produced by its decay, like polonium, pose a real risk to uranium miners. The risk to homeowners, though, was never clear, so the media easily hyped it in the 1980s into a full blown scare labeled “The Colorless Odorless Killer” by Time. Like SARS-COV-2, radon wasn’t really novel but the ability to detect it in the small quantities found in most homes was. The so-called precautionary principle kicked in and the next thing you know the EPA mandated testing and set a limit of just 4 picocuries per liter of air even though miners exposed to 12,000 picocuries showed no adverse health effects, forcing homeowners to spend billions on radon mitigation technologies. (If you think that spending helps the economy, read this.)

Peak Oil: Remember when the earth was proclaimed to be just a few years away from maximum oil production and a rapid rise in oil prices followed by a production collapse due to an absolute dearth of the stuff? It didn’t happen and does not appear likely to anytime soon. Production recently declined along with prices but due to a demand shock, the covidic global economy, not vanishing reserves. The world will stop using petroleum when its price rises above the price of substitutes, just like it stopped using whale oil when its price went above that of petroleum. Likewise, the Stone Age did not end for lack of stone.

Superstorm Hell: Global warming was supposed to cause a spate of tropical superstorms that would wipe out coastal areas time and again. Some big storms have hit and were hyped to the sky but there is no indication that they are any larger or more frequent than in the past.

Air Pollution Armageddon: For all the talk of Greens, one would think that air quality is steadily degrading. In fact, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide, and various volatile organic compound emissions have been steadily decreasing for decades. Remember smog? Not many do, even in Los Angeles, the city with the worst air quality in America. But even in the City of Angels nobody dons gas masks anymore, except to slow the spread of novel coronavirus of course.

Turns out that “acid” rain, which sent me scurrying inside as a yute in the 1970s and 80s, was just slightly more acidic than regular rain. Although some predicted that acid rain would destroy all the forests in Germany by 2002, acidic rain did little to no net environmental damage then and has since become as rarified as smog.

And what happened to the “hole” in the ozone layer that Neil Young ranted about in his 1989 song “Rockin’ in the Free World?” and that Newsweek likened to “AIDS in the sky?” It was always seasonal and limited to the earth’s three “poles” (North, South, and Himalayas) and now scientists say it is “closing,” showing that environmental “damage” need not be permanent. The ban on the main human-produced causal agent of ozone depletion, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), was relatively easily achieved because cheap substitutes were available. To this day, however, scientists have not shown that the “hole” was primarily man-made or that it caused any ill effects on humans or any ecological systems. And because CFC substitutes are less energy efficient, they may contribute to global warming.

And that is just “hard” sciences like chemistry and physics. When we move into the biological and social sciences and nutrition, we encounter failed prognostications like:

Overpopulation: In middle income and rich nations, people are having fewer children, not more. Food production has outstripped demand, leading to lower food prices and more obesity, not starvation, in richer countries. Even in poor countries, famines are now rare and caused by governments, not absolute dearth. Even the fake New York Times now says that the human population will peak earlier than expected, in 2067 at fewer than 10 billion.

Ecological destruction: Ecosystems were supposed to collapse, leading to mass extinction. Instead, where property-rights have supplanted open commons, as with catch shares, natural resources like fisheries have stabilized and even rebounded. Many places in the United States sport too many deer, turkey, and wild hogs. The beepocalypse had no sting. Imagine that.

Paving Paradise: In the 1980s, the government claimed that suburban sprawl was going to swallow up most of America’s farmland, which was losing all its topsoil anyway, leaving Americans dependent on foreign nations for bread. Turns out that the USDA grossly overestimated lost acreage and soil erosion and, miracle of miracles, conversion slowed and then reversed when farm prices increased. Despite those revelations, the media continued to harp on the “farmland crisis” for years. Much like a covidic cat, it “seemed to have nine lives,” Simon said.

Death by Eggs: About the same time, the media made eggs seem akin to a tasty poison, like alcohol. It is okay to have one or two every now and again but if you developed an egg habit, you were a goner. Then eggs became okay as scientists began to differentiate between “good” and “bad” cholesterol. Now many consider eggs a “super food.” Would I be less fat today if I had eaten eggs as a kid instead of “healthy” food like Sugar Coated Gluten Flakes? We’ll never know.

Death by Apples: I also avoided death foods like apples “tainted” with Alar, an allegedly poisonous chemical applied to apples to slow their ripening. Until, that is, the manufacturer withdrew it under regulatory pressure after a slick media blitz coordinated by an environmental activist group in 1989. Turns out, though, that Alar was way less dangerous than the high fructose corn syrup I consumed instead of my daily apple juice. To induce cancer in lab rats, scientists had to have them ingest the human equivalent of 19,000 quarts of apple juice … per day, every day, throughout their lives! Who knew? Arguably scientists and the media gatekeepers should have, but money and kudos flow fastest to alarmists with no stake in the underlying reality.

Off-the-Charts Income Inequality: The mere framing of this concept belies its real purpose, to redistribute “income.” If framed correctly, as productivity inequality, the “problem” disappears or begs the question why a few people are so much more productive than most others and why some produce nothing at all. Hint: it is natural heterogeneity plus stochastic processes layered onto inequality-enhancing government regulations, like minimum wages, interest rate caps, and rent controls. In fact, rich countries have far less income and wealth inequality than poor ones and inequality cycles up and down rather than making a beeline towards either extreme. Most disturbing of all, it appears that some researchers are willing to distort statistics to match their doomsday scenarios. Thankfully, they have been called out repeatedly but not before their “story” had become a “stylized fact” widely accepted by the media and Twitter rage monkeys.

Why do scam science and flawed studies so consistently prevail?

For starters, the world is a complex place where parsing cause-and-effect is a tricky thing, especially where living creatures are involved. Existence does not easily yield its secrets.

Nevertheless, incentives all list toward preliminary studies with big, scary findings because that makes them novel and important and hence newsworthy. Even cub reporters know not to pitch their editors on stories with headlines like “Careful Scientific Study Replicates Previous Work Showing Small, Nuanced Causal Connection.” “Everything Will Be Just Fine If No Action Is Taken” is also a loser because it won’t sell papers or attract pageviews. Retractions of previous errors are also boring so they end up buried when published at all, leaving the impression that the alarmist hot take was correct even when it was clearly not.

“Bad Things May Happen in the Future, Unless”-type stories, by contrast, are commercial winners. If adroitly done they do not even elicit backlash, allowing their perpetuation. First, note the weasel word “may.” Next, the amount of possible destruction and the distance of the prediction in time usually vary directly. Finally, the unless provides yet more wiggle room and a segue into policy proposals. When the world doesn’t end in a decade, everyone has forgotten about the article, the reporter is long gone, s/he wrote “may” anyway so s/he wasn’t technically wrong, and besides, one of the policy proposals was kinda sorta implemented so if anything the story “saved us” from Armageddon. Pulitzers and Peabodys all round!

In 1983, ABC News reported on the unemployment situation in five states “where unemployment is most severe” without mentioning that unemployment was actually down in the other 45 states. That sounds a lot like recent COVID-19 “case” reporting by the New York Times and Washington Post. But if you intimate that such news is misleading, if not entirely “fake,” you get immediately smeared as pro-Trump.

In fact, there is a lot of misleading to fake scholarship because even scholars who took clear stances and were proven wrong beyond the shadow of a doubt — on crucial matters of policy — somehow manage to keep their reputations intact. Nobody is perfect, of course, but why do people who are routinely wrong remain relevant, and even revered? Neil Ferguson, the physics-trained mastermind behind nine of the last one pandemic, is simply one of numerous examples that include:

Rachel Carson: As Roger Meiners, Pierre Desrochers, and Andrew Morriss showed in their 2012 edited volume Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson (Washington, DC: CATO), any of Carson’s remaining mystique is sheer mysticism. Except for lung cancer, cancer deaths are down and were even trending that way when Carson, a marine biologist, scared the bejesus out of almost everyone about the dangers of DDT, a pesticide that extended half a billion human lives by killing disease-carrying mosquitoes. She accurately claimed that cancer was the leading cause of death among American children but failed to mention that was because other childhood diseases, especially the communicable ones, had been conquered. Ironically, she died of cancer, a viral infection, and a heart attack, but her fame lives on.

Paul Ehrlich: In 1968, predicted the explosion of a Population Bomb that would kill most of humanity through disease, starvation, and war before 2000. That didn’t even happen in Africa much less globally. He claimed that life expectancy in America would drop to 42 years by 1980, a surprisingly exact prediction considering how far off the mark it was. This famous entomologist (insect scientist) also bet Simon that the prices of metals would increase and, infamously, lost. Yet Ehrlich remains an environmental guru.

Paul Krugman: Has been wrong about almost everything since he won the Nobel in 2008 for his work on international economic trade theory and concentrated his efforts on the newspaper columnist career he began in 2000. His biggest errors are in labor economics, including the effects of minimum wage policies. See Contra Krugman by Robert Murphy for details.

When their views are directly challenged, such erudite individuals usually a) ignore the challenge and hope it goes away; b) belittle the challenger’s qualifications; c) label the challenge “simplistic” even though simpler explanations are generally preferred (“Occam’s Razor) and, as Sowell says, “evasions of the obvious can become very complex;” d) inaccurately ascribe to the challenge claims that are easily refuted; or, increasingly, e) insinuate that the challenger is a bigot or that her thought emanates from a presumably racist or sexist or fascist school of thought. In other words, they deflect instead of trying to defend the indefensible. That is perfectly natural as evidenced by the fact that small children also engage in such deflections, albeit more “simplistically.”

What does this all mean? We have to return to teaching people how to research and think for themselves and not just mindlessly jump on #bandwagons while falling for gross rhetorical tricks. Light rail, it turns out, is just a new term for trolleys. Call low-lying areas where stagnant water accumulates swamps or call them wetlands, they are still just sloughs where mosquitoes breed. Not everything labeled racist actually is; some claims considered “woke” are deeply racist. Calling a piece of legislation the Affordable Care Act does not mean that it will result in more affordable healthcare. Shelter-in-place orders may just be a soft form of martial law that leads to bankruptcy, default, and unemployment, not safety.

SOURCE

U.S. Supreme Court Approves Trump Administration Clean Water Act Pipeline Rules, but Not for Keystone XL

The United States Supreme Court stayed a lower court ruling that was holding up dozens of oil and gas pipeline projects across the nation. The Court’s ruling allows most of the projects, approved under expedited procedures by the Trump administration, to proceed. However, the order exempts the long-delayed expansion of the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline, continuing the hold on it.

The Supreme Court’s order reverses a nationwide stay issued by Judge Brian Moore of the U.S. District Court of Montana in Army Corps of Engineers v. Northern Plains, on pipeline projects issued under rule developed by the Trump administration to expedite critical pipeline projects, called Nationwide Permit 12 (NP12).

Under NP12 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers allows pipelines to be constructed across or underneath bodies of water on an expedited basis, using standardized environmental impact statements. Moore ruled the Army Corps had failed to properly account for the impact individual projects might have on endangered species, ordering a halt to all pipelines approved under NP12, pending the completion of a separate environmental impact statement for each project under the rules that existed before NP12 was issued.

Partial Victory

The Supreme Court’s ruling provide a partial victory to the eighteen states and dozens of companies, consumer groups, and trade associations who sided with the Trump administration in the court battle over NP12 and its attempt to get pipelines built more expeditiously than under the Obama administration.

The ruling should allow more than 70 pipeline projects that had been delayed by Moore’s order to proceed.

Keystone Fight Remains

The last remaining portion of the 1,200-mile Keystone XL Pipeline to be constructed, which would link Canadian oil sands fields to refineries on the Gulf Coast, was not covered by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The vast majority of the pipeline did not need federal approval, having been finished in 2013, running from Alberta, Canada, to Illinois, Oklahoma, and Texas.

The final segment needed approval from the U.S. State Department.

Keystone’s developers have projected it will safely transport as much as 830,000 barrels of crude oil from Alberta to Montana, Oklahoma, and Texas, stretching 875 miles through Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska.

Under President Barack Obama, the State Department twice issued reports concluding the pipeline would deliver large quantities of Canadian oil to U.S. refineries, create thousands of jobs, and have minimal environmental impact in the United States. Despite his State Department’s conclusions, Obama denied approval of the final leg of Keystone XL, saying it would contribute to climate change.

The court’s exclusion of the final portions of the Keystone XL pipeline from its order is a setback for President Donald Trump, who had promised to move Keystone forward during his 2016 campaign for the presidency.

Trump signed a presidential memorandum on Jan. 24, 2017, just days after being sworn in as President, ordering the State Department to “take all actions necessary and appropriate to facilitate [the] expeditious review” of the Keystone permit application.

As legal matters stand now, Keystone XL’s developers will have to go through the lengthy process in place under the Obama administration to get the final segment approved and completed.

SOURCE

Australia: One-touch environment assessment regime to hand control to states

Control of environmental assessments will be handed to state governments in return for a new system of national standards under a Morrison government plan to speed up major developments.

Environment Minister Sussan Ley said the government was consulting with the states over the "one-touch" regime, which would "devolve" the Commonwealth's legal responsibilities to them.

The mining and agriculture sectors welcomed the changes, while environmental groups expressed concern Ms Ley had ruled out an independent watchdog to ensure the states complied with the new standards.

Ms Ley revealed the plan as former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Graeme Samuel released the interim findings of his review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, which he found was "ineffective and inefficient" and created significant extra costs for business.

"It does not enable the Commonwealth to protect and conserve environmental matters that are important for the nation," Mr Samuel said on Monday.

The Samuel review recommended cutting duplication in environmental regulation by allowing states to approve developments should they meet a strong set of national environmental standards.

The EPBC Act makes the Commonwealth responsible for matters deemed to be of national environmental significance, including the protection and recovery of threatened flora and fauna and World Heritage areas.

Under the bilateral approval system, states would be accredited by the Commonwealth to carry out environmental assessments required under the act.

"This is our chance to ensure the right protection for our environment while also unlocking job-creating projects to strengthen our economy and improve the livelihoods of everyday Australians," said Ms Ley, adding she hoped to introduce legislative changes to parliament this year.

Noting widespread community distrust of the system's ability to adequately protect the environment, the Samuel report said "a strong, independent cop on the beat" that was properly resourced and "not subject to actual or implied political direction from the Commonwealth minister" was required.

Ms Ley said the government would "strengthen compliance functions and ensure that all bilateral agreements with states and territories are subject to rigorous assurance monitoring".

"It will not, however, support additional layers of bureaucracy such as the establishment of an independent regulator," she said.

Since the EPBC Act was established in 1999, the average time taken for large, complex resource projects to be assessed and approved had increased to 1013 days from 817, the Samuel review found.

The Minerals Council of Australia said the proposed changes could deliver "faster approvals, greater national co-operation" and clearer guidelines that would "boost jobs and investment and improve biodiversity outcomes".

National Farmers' Federation chief executive Tony Mahar said the changes were "imperative" to the farm sector and "we must not squander this opportunity for overdue reform".

But environmental advocates said such changes could make a failing system of environmental protection worse.

"Without strong standards and oversight, fast-tracking approvals just fast-tracks extinctions," Australian Conservation Foundation chief executive Kelly O'Shanassy said.

She said state governments had an interest in approving developments in their jurisdictions and were sometimes even the proponents of potentially damaging developments, and it was not enough to have officers inside a department in oversight roles.

The Wilderness Society's law specialist, Suzanne Milthorpe, said the report showed environmental protection laws were failing, yet the government had proposed devolving federal safeguards to states while also ruling out an independent regulator.

Labor environment spokeswoman Terri Butler said her party would consider the report and blamed a blowout in approval times on Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment budget cuts.

"Since 2014, job and investment delays resulting from federal environment decisions have exploded from 19 days to a massive 116 days – almost 4 months – over the statutory timeframes on average in 2018-19."

Greens environment spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young said "the outlook is worse than grim". "The PM must immediately drop his plans to make approvals for big developers, land clearing and new mines easier," she said.

Mr Samuel will consult further with stakeholders before delivering his final report in October.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott attempted to devolve environmental approval powers to the states in 2014 but the changes were blocked in the 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 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 July, 2020

Is peer review bad for science?

I have had considerable experience of peer review, both as an author (of c.300 articles) and as a reviewer and my overwhelming impression of the process is that most reviewers do not read what they review. They just look at the conclusions of the article and if they sound right, the reviewer passes the article with just a few desultory comments.

There are some reviewers who put up detailed and apposite comments but their comments often betray an ignorance of the previous research on the subject. They may know some recent reports but not the deep background to the field. For that reason I always tried to supply the deep background in my articles and that did seem to pay off in that about half of my articles got accepted on the first submission.

Many of the articles that were rejected were ones where reviewers seemed not to be interested in either the previous research or my findings, apparently because my conclusions were uncongenial to them

Articles that went strongly against the consensus certainly got much more negative treatment than ones that did not rock the boat

After studying the popular practice of peer review of scientific journal articles for several years, I have reluctantly concluded that peer review is bad for science. While the practice has its good side, there are several ways that it greatly impedes progress, and the bad greatly outweighs the good.

To begin with, let’s look at what peer review tries to do. The obvious thing is to block the publication of fake science. However this appears to be a rare event in most sciences. There are several million journal articles published each year, all peer reviewed, typically by two or three reviewers. Clearly these many millions of reviews did not keep any of these myriad articles from being published.

Paradoxically, however, most of these articles were in fact rejected based on peer review; many were rejected many times. Top journals often boast of having high rejection rates, like 80% or so. If this is the general practice then the average article must be submitted to something like five journals before it is accepted and published. If each submission is peer reviewed then that is a lot of reviews per article, perhaps ten to fifteen on average.

Given that all of these multiply rejected articles eventually get published, something other than simple gate keeping must be going on. This something looks to be an extremely laborious sorting process, whereby each article eventually finds the “right” journal. It is hard to see any value being added by these many millions of peer reviews. Given modern search technologies, which journal an article ultimately appears in no longer seems very important.

One negative aspect of peer review is well known. This is where gate keeping keeps great new ideas from being published. Max Planck, who discovered the quantum nature of energy, put it very nicely, saying something like “Your ideas will (only) be accepted when your students become journal editors.” This is the dark side of peer review blocking science, the novel good ideas get blocked as bad ideas.

But there are several other bad things that flow from peer review that I have not seen mentioned. These down sides are features of the incredibly time consuming and laborious nature of the practice.

First there is the huge time delay between the time a paper is written and when it is finally published. Let’s say that peer review takes four months, which is probably pretty fast. If the average paper is reviewed five times then that is almost two years of reviews before it is finally accepted. (Also, there are many other steps between these reviews, so the average might be more like four years from first submission to final publication.)

If two million papers are published each year, with an average delay of say two years each, due to peer review, that is an accumulation of four million years of delay every year. It is reasonable to believe that eliminating this vast tide of delay would dramatically speed up the progress of science.

Then there is the cost. Organizing and managing the peer review process is probably the greatest expense that journal publishers face. Keep in mind that given an 80% rejection rate, something like five articles will be reviewed for every one published. At three reviews each that means fifteen reviews per published articles.

The high cost of journals and articles is a major obstacle to access by all but the richest universities and researchers. This to probably greatly impedes the progress of science.

Then there is the huge amount of time that researchers spend reviewing each other’s articles. Reviews are expected to be comprehensive, so they probably take from 10 to 20 hours each, maybe more. If there are fifteen reviews per article published that is 150 to 300 hours of review time.

Multiply that by 2 million articles published and we get an incredible 300 to 600 million hours a year devoted to reviewing, rather that to research. Assuming that a work year is 2000 hours, this is like taking 150 to 300 thousand researchers off the job, just to peer review each other’s papers. Think of what that amount of research might create. Again, this is a huge loss to the progress of science.

Conclusion: Peer review adds an enormous amount of delay, cost and distraction to the process of science. It does not do enough good to justify these huge adverse impacts on the rate of scientific progress. Thus on balance peer review is bad for science.

SOURCE

Environmental Facts vs. Environmental "Fact-Checkers"

Stacey Abrams, who ran for governor of Georgia, and Tom Steyer, who ran for president of the United States, are now trying to run me out of town. Abrams, Steyer, and the leaders of 17 large environmental lobbies recently asked Facebook to ban a research group that I direct - the CO2 Coalition, made up of 55 climate scientists and energy economists.

The annual budgets of these lobbies total over half a billion dollars, and Steyer alone is worth $1.6 billion. Their alarmist view of our supposedly impending environmental doom predominates in mainstream media, centering on the impact on the earth of emissions of carbon dioxide - a non-polluting, mild warming gas, and an important source of plant and plankton food.

By contrast, the CO2 Coalition's annual budget is half a million dollars. Like all scientists and economists who ask for any proof of the looming apocalypse, we are excluded from mainstream-media discussion. You might wonder: how did the Steyer-Abrams crowd even notice us, let alone conclude that we posed a threat to their enforced consensus, which calls for an end to the affordable, reliable energy that powers over 80 percent of the world?

The answer is found in the work of a Silicon Valley computer entrepreneur named Eric Michelman, who became fabulously wealthy creating a modification of the computer mouse. For more than a decade now, Michelman has devoted his wealth to squelching media debate on climate change - a successful dry run for the cancel culture that we see engulfing many other issues today.

In 2016, Michelman was the founding and lead funder of a group called Climate Feedback, whose purpose is to "fact-check" and label as "false" any and all deviant thoughts about fossil-fueled climate catastrophe. The group has been certified as an unbiased source on climate issues by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which was founded by the Tampa Bay Times and operates the left-leaning PolitiFact. At some point, Facebook turned its censorship oversight over to the Poynter Institute's International Fact-Checking Network.

That's when our organization's problems started.

In September 2019, a "false" label appeared on Facebook when the Washington Examiner posted an article I had written there with Dr. Patrick Michaels, our senior fellow and a former president of the American Association of State Climatologists. The op-ed described the poor performance of climate models that had projected alarming increases in future temperatures. The "false" label triggered a wave of censorship from Facebook's algorithms, blocking reposting and advertising.

The detailed, scientifically referenced letter we wrote to Facebook that soon got the label reversed is almost identical in form and argument to responses this summer to similar Climate Feedback censorship written by environmental writer Michael Shellenberger, Dr. Michaels (after a televised appearance on Fox's Life, Liberty, and Levin), and climate statistician Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. All of us agree: Climate Feedback is biased, sloppy, and often just flat wrong. For example, in its "fact-checks," the group blatantly contradicts the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's finding that there has been no statistically significant increase in rates of sea-level rise, hurricanes, droughts, and floods during the carbon emissions era that began with the dramatic industrialization after World War II.

Climate Feedback is Michelman's third major attempt at promoting climate alarmism and silencing opposing views. First came the Climate Change Education Project, in 2008, followed by the More than Scientists campaign in 2015. When he set up that campaign, Michelman said:

It's about showing the science is settled. Studies consistently show that 97 percent of scientists agree. We want the public to both hear from them that, yeah, this is settled, but also see scientists for who they are. They're our neighbors, our fellow citizens, and community members. They're people with kids, and they're worried about the future. When they say, "I'm concerned about climate change and I think we need to act on it," you can understand they're saying it because they have kids just like you do.

Since Michelman had decided that the science was settled in favor of a 97 percent consensus on catastrophe before he even founded Climate Feedback, his group should never have been let into a network of "unbiased" reviewers. And its performance shows why.

I'm all for debating with Climate Feedback. For 15 years as a professor at American University, I invited to my classes on climate statistics and mathematical modeling many of the groups whose leaders signed the recent letter to Facebook calling for us to be banned. But there was no response because the cancel culture doesn't believe in debate. It believes in silencing its opponents by denying them a platform. We'll hold on as long as we can. I believe that the truth will out-even against "fact-checkers."

SOURCE

Under President Trump, Americans are breathing cleaner air

Andrew Wheeler

Poor air quality was one of the main motivations for creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, when six of the most common air pollutants – carbon monoxide, lead, ground-level ozone, particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide – known as "criteria" pollutants, were often at dangerous levels for public health in many cities.

When the president called me in 2018 and asked me to take over at EPA, he told me to continue to clean up the air and to push through deregulatory actions because he knew that we could do both at the same time.

And we have done just that.

Under President Trump’s leadership, EPA is announcing that combined emissions of criteria pollutants, which can harm public health and the environment, and their precursors have dropped 7% from 2017 to 2019.

Our latest air progress report shows a remarkable decrease in air pollution – both over the past three years and in the past half-century. This data shows conclusively that the U.S. can continue to have world-leading air emission reductions for our citizens alongside economic growth.

Since 1970, the combined emissions of the six criteria air pollutants and their precursor pollutants have dropped an incredible 77%, while the United States GDP grew 285%. In other words, today’s air is 77% cleaner than it was in 1970, which provides immense benefits to all Americans.

Under the Clean Air Act, EPA established National Ambient Air Quality Standards for each of the six criteria air pollutants in order to protect human health. Areas of the country that meet these standards are considered to be in "attainment" of those standards; areas that do not are designated as being in "non-attainment." In addition to the human health and welfare implications of failing to meet the standards, there are economic implications as well, making redesignation a goal that addresses many problems at once.

The core of our nation’s air quality success has been due to true partnership with our states. Since the beginning of 2017, 21 areas in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio have moved from non-attainment to attainment, easing lending and permitting restrictions for hundreds or even thousands of local businesses. These cleaner areas include places as large as Chicago and Indianapolis and as small as Williamson County, Illinois and Fulton County, Ohio. Another eight areas are likely to move into attainment in the next 12 months.

Achieving attainment means lower sulfur, particulate matter, nitrogen oxide (NOx), carbon monoxide, ground-level ozone and lead emissions for millions of people across the Great Lakes region. This is especially important for children, whose lungs are still developing, and those who suffer from respiratory conditions like chronic bronchitis and asthma – many of the same conditions that make COVID-19 viral infections more dangerous.

Since 2000, concentrations of fine particulate matter, which is sometimes referred to as PM2.5 or soot, have dropped by roughly 40%. A great deal of this progress has taken place in low-income communities and neighborhoods across this country. Average United States fine particulate matter levels are five times below the global average, seven times below China’s levels, and well below France, Germany, Mexico, and Russia.

Even after such significant progress, we are not resting on our laurels. EPA is developing a new standard for heavy-duty trucks, referred to as the Cleaner Trucks Initiative. This rule will further reduce NOx emissions from heavy-duty trucks by working closely with states and the private sector. This action will be key to helping many remaining nonattainment areas reach attainment in the coming decade.

Consistent with my goal of increasing the public’s access to information, EPA updated and relaunched our air quality website – AirNow.gov – last month. Our improved website reports real-time air quality using the official United States Air Quality Index, which tells the public how clean or polluted the air is, and steps they can take to reduce their exposure to pollution.

AirNow.gov will keep the American public better informed of real-time air quality conditions at the local, state, national and international levels.

As EPA’s 50th anniversary approaches this December, we can take pride that Americans now have significantly cleaner air, land and water than in the past. The Trump Administration is proving that environmental protection and economic prosperity can go hand-in-hand.

With the safe, responsible reopening of our economy underway, our country has already proved that building a strong economy can be achieved alongside meaningful environmental progress. With President Trump’s continued prioritization of clean air, EPA will ensure this progress continues.

SOURCE

Reform for Australia’s environment laws

Some rationalization

Minister for the Environment Sussan Ley will prioritise the development of new national environmental standards, further streamlining approval processes with State governments and national engagement on indigenous cultural heritage, following the release of an interim report into Australia’s environmental laws.

Professor Graeme Samuel’s interim report established that the existing Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 has become cumbersome and does not serve the interests of the environment or business.

“Not surprisingly, the statutory review is finding that 20-year-old legislation is struggling to meet the changing needs of the environment, agriculture, community planners and business,” Minister Ley said.

“This is our chance to ensure the right protection for our environment while also unlocking job-creating projects to strengthen our economy and improve the livelihoods of every-day Australians. We can do both as part of the Australian Government’s COVID recovery plan.

The Commonwealth will commit to the following priority areas on the basis of the interim report:

Develop Commonwealth led national environmental standards which will underpin new bilateral agreements with State Governments.

Commence discussions with willing states to enter agreements for single touch approvals (removing duplication by accrediting states to carry out environmental assessments and approvals on the Commonwealth’s behalf).

Commence a national engagement process for modernising the protection of indigenous cultural heritage, commencing with a round table meeting of state indigenous and environment ministers. This will be jointly chaired by Minister Ley and the Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt.

Explore market based solutions for better habitat restoration that will significantly improve environmental outcomes while providing greater certainty for business. The Minister will establish an environmental markets expert advisory group.

In line with the interim report findings, the Commonwealth will maintain its existing framework for regulating greenhouse gas and other emissions, and would not propose any expansion of the EPBC Act in this area.

The Commonwealth will take steps to strengthen compliance functions and ensure that all bilateral agreements with States and Territories are subject to rigorous assurance monitoring. It will not, however, support additional layers of bureaucracy such as the establishment of an independent regulator.

The report raises a range of other issues and reform directions. Further consultation will be undertaken regarding these.

“I thank Professor Samuel for his work and for his very clear message that we need to act,” Minister Ley said.

“As he works towards his final report, we will monitor its progress closely, while we continue to improve existing processes as much as possible.

“It is time to find a way past an adversarial approach and work together to create genuine reform that will protect our environment, while keeping our economy strong.”

SOURCE

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

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

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20 July, 2020

"Jaw-dropping" global crash in children being born — just what the ecofascists want

Stupid history-defying predictions below which assume that the influences on human reproduction will remain the same. They will not.

Post-pill, all the non-maternal women are currently being removed from the gene pool by reason of the simple fact that they now rarely have children. Women like them will become rarer and rarer. And their decisions are a big influence behind the current "birth-dearth".

So all the births of the not too distant future will come from maternally-inclined women. And how many children will those women have? As many as they can afford (and then some in some cases).

So the birthrates in advanced nations will recover and the population will start growing again -- albeit off a lower base.

And here's a way-out one: It seems to have become fashionable for celebrity women to have children, multiple children in most cases. You would not think that women who live by their looks would risk their figures by having children, but they are in fact doing it -- the Kardashians, for instance.

Children now seem to have become a sign of affluence. They are the ultimate luxury -- even better than big yachts and Gulfstream jets. And lots of people DO emulate celebrities. Many women in the near future may start having children because it is fashionable or simply because they want to show off. One can imagine the conversations: "I've got three. How many have you got?"

So who knows what the future holds?

The world is ill-prepared for the global crash in children being born which is set to have a "jaw-dropping" impact on societies, say researchers.

Falling fertility rates mean nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of the century.

And 23 nations - including Spain and Japan - are expected to see their populations halve by 2100.

Countries will also age dramatically, with as many people turning 80 as there are being born.

What is going on?

The fertility rate - the average number of children a woman gives birth to - is falling.

If the number falls below approximately 2.1, then the size of the population starts to fall.

In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime.

Researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation showed the global fertility rate nearly halved to 2.4 in 2017 - and their study, published in the Lancet, projects it will fall below 1.7 by 2100.

As a result, the researchers expect the number of people on the planet to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, before falling down to 8.8 billion by the end of the century.

"That's a pretty big thing; most of the world is transitioning into natural population decline," researcher Prof Christopher Murray told the BBC.

"I think it's incredibly hard to think this through and recognise how big a thing this is; it's extraordinary, we'll have to reorganise societies."

Why are fertility rates falling?

It has nothing to do with sperm counts or the usual things that come to mind when discussing fertility.

Instead it is being driven by more women in education and work, as well as greater access to contraception, leading to women choosing to have fewer children.

In many ways, falling fertility rates are a success story.

Which countries will be most affected?

Japan's population is projected to fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53 million by the end of the century.

Italy is expected to see an equally dramatic population crash from 61 million to 28 million over the same timeframe.

They are two of 23 countries - which also include Spain, Portugal, Thailand and South Korea - expected to see their population more than halve.

"That is jaw-dropping," Prof Christopher Murray told me.

China, currently the most populous nation in the world, is expected to peak at 1.4 billion in four years' time before nearly halving to 732 million by 2100. India will take its place.

The UK is predicted to peak at 75 million in 2063, and fall to 71 million by 2100.

However, this will be a truly global issue, with 183 out of 195 countries having a fertility rate below the replacement level.

Why is this a problem?

You might think this is great for the environment. A smaller population would reduce carbon emissions as well as deforestation for farmland.

"That would be true except for the inverted age structure (more old people than young people) and all the uniformly negative consequences of an inverted age structure," says Prof Murray.

Prof Murray adds: "It will create enormous social change. It makes me worried because I have an eight-year-old daughter and I wonder what the world will be like."

Who pays tax in a massively aged world? Who pays for healthcare for the elderly? Who looks after the elderly? Will people still be able to retire from work?

"We need a soft landing," argues Prof Murray.

Are there any solutions?

Countries, including the UK, have used migration to boost their population and compensate for falling fertility rates.

However, this stops being the answer once nearly every country's population is shrinking.

"We will go from the period where it's a choice to open borders, or not, to frank competition for migrants, as there won't be enough," argues Prof Murray.

Some countries have tried policies such as enhanced maternity and paternity leave, free childcare, financial incentives and extra employment rights, but there is no clear answer.

Sweden has dragged its fertility rate up from 1.7 to 1.9, but other countries that have put significant effort into tackling the "baby bust" have struggled. Singapore still has a fertility rate of around 1.3.

Prof Murray says: "I find people laugh it off; they can't imagine it could be true, they think women will just decide to have more kids.

"If you can't [find a solution] then eventually the species disappears, but that's a few centuries away."

SOURCE

Federal appeals court temporarily halts Dakota Access pipeline shutdown

A federal appeals court on Tuesday temporarily halted a judge’s order that the Dakota Access Pipeline be shut down in three weeks.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued an “administrative stay” of the judge’s order. Though the appeals court said it “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits” of the case, the Bismarck Tribune reported.

The stay will remain in place until the appeals court rules on whether developer Energy Transfer can keep oil flowing while the court decides the Texas-based company’s appeal of the shutdown order.

U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg last week ordered the line shut down by Aug. 5 pending a lengthy environmental review. The line began pumping oil more than three years ago. Energy Transfer estimates it would take three months to empty the pipeline of oil and complete steps to preserve it for future use.

Pipeline supporter GAIN Coalition, which includes businesses, trade associations and labor groups, called the order “a key step forward in reaffirming the Dakota Access Pipeline’s critical role in the American energy infrastructure network.” North Dakota Republican U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer, another supporter, called the temporary halt “common sense.”

But Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman, who represents the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, said the move is not significant.

Hasselman said in a statement an administrative stay is typical and “is not in any way indicative of how the court is going to rule — it just buys the court a little additional time to make a decision.”

The line was the subject of months of protests in 2016 and 2017, sometimes violent, during its construction near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation that straddles the North Dakota-South Dakota border. The tribe took legal action against the pipeline even after it began carrying oil from North Dakota across South Dakota and Iowa and to a shipping point in Illinois in June 2017.

The $3.8 billion, 1,172-mile pipeline crosses beneath the Missouri River, just north of the reservation. The tribe draws its water from the river and has concerns about pollution. The company maintains the line is safe.

SOURCE

Court strikes down Trump administration's methane rollback

A federal court late Wednesday struck down a Trump administration rule that weakened restrictions on methane gas releases from drilling on public land, restoring an Obama-era rule.

In 2018, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rolled back parts of the prior rule that limited the release of the greenhouse gas. The change was expected to allow for more methane leaks in a process called flaring and add to air pollution.

On Wednesday, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers determined that the rulemaking process used by the BLM was “wholly inadequate.”

“In its haste, BLM ignored its statutory mandate under the Mineral Leasing Act, repeatedly failed to justify numerous reversals in policy positions previously taken, and failed to consider scientific findings and institutions relied upon by both prior Republican and Democratic administrations,” wrote the Obama appointee.

“In its zeal, BLM simply engineered a process to ensure a preordained conclusion,” she added in the decision’s conclusion. “Where a court has found such widespread violations, the court must fulfill its duties in striking the defectively promulgated rule.”

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that can be 25 times more impactful than carbon dioxide in equal quantities. In 2018, it accounted for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity.

The judge’s order will go into effect in 90 days, and she is requiring the BLM to chart its course of action in a report due in 30 days.

BLM spokesperson Derrick Henry said he disagreed with the court's ruling.

"Our commonsense deregulatory actions were lawful and based on the best available science," Henry said in a statement to The Hill. "The Department will continue to implement President Trump’s agenda to create more American jobs, protect the safety of American workers, support domestic energy production and conserve our environment."

“The judge basically rejected every attempt by the Trump administration to gut these common-sense waste prevention measures on behalf of their oil & gas industry cronies,” said Earthjustice attorney Robin Cooley in a statement. “The judge said the administration cannot ignore the impacts on health and well-being of the people who live near oil and gas facilities.”

SOURCE

Australian rooftop photovoltaic installations may face grid constraints

Australian households have adopted rooftop PV with unprecedented relish, with families and small businesses both contributing towards the transition away from polluting fossil fuels while reducing energy costs. While a downturn is expected on the back of Covid-19, installation rates are still exceeding most forecasts.

However, the right to install a rooftop system is not a given and people looking to install small-scale solar systems as soon as this decade could face significant limitations to grid exports of their PV power and even their ability to connect a system curtailed by grid operators. The outcome could be rooftop PV assets that are not able to push all of the power they generate into the grid – pushing out assumed payback periods.

“It would be detrimental for the industry and for consumers,” explains Ben Cerini, a consultant with Cornwall Insight Australia. “Households may find themselves with stranded assets, which is a bigger issue for them than institutional investors because they are not as sophisticated [investors].”

The warning comes on the back of recent analysis from Cornwall Insight Australia, which found that 24.5 GW of sub-100kWp solar is set to be added to Australian rooftops through to 2030 – if, that is, such constraints are not put in place.

Some electrical network operators, or DSNPs, have intensified their efforts in communicating that the ability of a household to export power a rooftop PV system is far from being a given “right.” Victorian DNSP Powercor, which services the western suburbs of Melbourne and the west of the state, is advising households in the regions it serves to check into whether PV export is allowed.

“If no action is taken by 2026, customers serviced by almost half of our zone substations will experience difficulties when they try to export energy to the grid,” said Steven Neave, Powercor GM of Electricity Networks said in a statement, issued in late May. In the same press release, Powercor noted that the number of rooftop PV systems on its network increased from 142,200 at the start of 2020, to 150,500 by April – indicating the solar installation rate was likely to increase by 18% in 2020, up from 14% in 2019.

DNSPs clearly have an interest in highlighting the challenges caused by rooftop solar in operating their networks. At the same time, so do solar installers, who wish to highlight the quick investment paybacks delivered by rooftop solar. However the equations used by solar salespeople may be based on the ability to feed solar energy into the grid – something that is not given.

SOURCE

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

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

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19 July, 2020

Green Activists Fuel China's Dominance in a Sector Critical to the U.S. Economy and Green Energy

The Wuhan coronavirus pandemic rightly alerted Americans to the fact that the U.S. supply chain for health care is extremely vulnerable to the very country from which pandemic originated. Another critical supply chain is dependent on China as well, and this one is vital not only for the consumer products Americans use every day but also for military tools that keep America safe — and the very “green” technologies climate activists insist everyone must transition to yesterday in order to save the planet. Yet those very same activists don’t want America to displace China as the manufacturer of these key goods — rare earth elements (REE).

According to an unsettling new study on rare earths from Power the Future, “By opposing greater U.S. production and development of REEs, green activists are fueling China’s dominance.”

Rare earths are integral components of more than 200 products, including cellular telephones, computer hard drives, electric and hybrid vehicles, flat-screen monitors, and more. The military uses them for “electronic displays, guidance systems, lasers, and radar and sonar systems.” A wide range of U.S. industries relies on rare earths, including glass, petroleum mining, steel, televisions/LED lights, medicine, and automobiles. Rare earths help reduce carbon emissions and they are necessary for batteries in hybrid electric cars.

Contrary to what the name might suggest, rare earths are actually “relatively abundant in the Earth’s crust.” What makes them “rare” is the fact that “they are not found on their own, but rather as constituent parts of larger minerals, making extraction an expensive endeavor.”

Rare earths are also essential for the green energy industry. The World Bank found that in order to meet the emissions reductions goals of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the “production of minerals and metals” would need to ramp up, specifically the production of “aluminum, copper, lead, lithium, manganese, nickel, silver, steel, zinc, and rare earth elements (REEs).”

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), renewable energy sources “generally require more minerals than fossil fuel-based counterparts.” For instance, “An electric car uses five times as much minerals as a conventional car and an onshore wind plant requires eight times as much minerals as a gas-fired plant of the same capacity. Even in fossil fuel-based technologies, achieving higher efficiency and lower emissions relies on the extensive use of minerals. For example, the most efficient coal-fired power plants require a lot more nickel than the least efficient ones in order to allow for higher combustion temperatures.”

In 2018, Vice noted that in order to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement, “global production of several rare earth minerals used in solar panels and wind turbines—especially neodymium, terbium, indium, dysprosium, and praseodymium—must grow twelvefold by 2050.” Production must grow twelvefold.

Tragically, the People’s Republic of China — yes, the country that lied about the pandemic, puts Muslims in detention camps, seized Hong Kong, and restricts its citizens’ religious freedom, among other things — enjoys a stranglehold over the production of these materials that are central to America’s economy and any hope of developing a green energy industry.

In 1992, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping set out to dominate the rare earths industry. As Power the Future explains, “They did this by ‘strategically flooding’ the global REE market and pumping up Chinese state subsidies for favored companies. When these typical Chinese tactics were ‘coupled with lower labor costs and less stringent environmental standards,’ the rest was history, enabling ‘China’s rare-earth rise.'”

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Chinese firms “control more than 85 percent of the costly processing stage of the supply chain and produced more than 70 percent of the world’s rare-earth-metal supply in 2018.” As Foreign Policy magazine explained, “the critical bottleneck for the United States, and especially the defense sector, isn’t access to rare-earth ores…it’s that the rest of the value chain— processing those ores, refining them into metals, and turning that metal into advanced products like permanent magnets—is dominated by China.”

China offered a foretaste of potential aggression with rare earths in 2010. After a Chinese fishing trawler slammed into a Japanese coast guard ship near disputed islands, China reduced REE exports to Japan, forcing the island nation to seek imports from Australia and India. Japan conducted its own research on rare earths, and by 2017, turned to Vietnam, which became the largest source of Japan’s REE imports.

The U.S. was “self-sufficient” in rare earths in the latter half of the twentieth century, and America produced “well over half of the world’s supply” until the 1980s. But China eclipsed the U.S. and the rest of the world. Between 2014 and 2017, the U.S. imported 80 percent of its supply from China.

“China’s rare earth producers, who control the lion’s share of the world’s output of the elements, said they are ready to use their dominance of the industry as a weapon in the country’s year-long trade war with their customers in the United States,” the South China Morning Post reported last year.

So why isn’t the U.S. working to ramp up the production of rare earths stat?

Last year, the Department of Commerce under President Donald Trump released a strategy to promote minerals development in the U.S., including improving access to resources on federal lands, reducing federal permitting timelines, and strengthening “America’s critical minerals supply chains and defense industrial base.”

Yet the Sierra Club attacked this commonsense first-step. The environmentalist group slammed the strategy as “dangerous” because it allegedly “puts mining companies first, before the needs of communities and workers and at the cost of some of our most important landscapes.”

The Sierra Club opposed mining rare earths in the U.S. even though the group’s executive director, Michael Brune, acknowledged last year that mining is “problematic” since much of “the world’s cobalt … currently comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where so-called artisanal (or small-scale) mining is rife with pollution and human rights violations, including child labor.”

As Power the Future put it, “Instead of a practical strategy to weaken China’s dominance, end child labor, and increase environmentally protective mining in the U.S., the Sierra Club has offered only the usual pabulum about the need to protect ‘front-line communities’ from the ‘climate crisis.’ A mining ‘strategy,’ by their lights, ‘must consider the effects on our environment and respect our nation’s most iconic places, and ensure that the clean energy economy doesn’t replicate the problems of the fossil fuel economy.’

Mining is heavily regulated in the U.S., while China’s rare earths mining is largely unregulated, leaving environmental devastation. As YaleEnvironment360 reported, in Jiangxi, “Today, concrete leaching ponds and plastic-lined wastewater pools dot the hills. At one abandoned site, large wastewater ponds sit uncovered and open to the elements. Satellite images show dozens of similar pools dotting the mountains, all just one landslide or barrier failure away from a spill of their contaminated contents into waterways or groundwater.”

Even environmentalist Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) admitted in 2010 that he was “troubled … that the world’s reliance on Chinese rare earth materials, in combination with China’s apparent willingness to use this reliance for leverage in wider international affairs, poses a potential threat to American economic and national security interests.”

Even so, green activists insist that mining for rare earths can be reduced over time, replaced with mineral recycling. However, recycling rates for critical metals are below one percent, with some rare earths not recycled at all.

Last year, the Chinese official Communist Party paper, the People’s Daily, highlighted America’s “uncomfortable” dependence on China for rare earths. “Will rare earths become a counter weapon for China to hit back against the pressure the United States has put on for no reason at all? The answer is no mystery.”

As the People’s Republic of China flexes its muscles around the globe, and green groups in the U.S. oppose rare earths production in America, the Trump administration must prioritize securing the REE supply chain.

Republicans should also challenge Democrats and green activists on this issue. Given China’s horrific record on health, human rights, and trade; given the fact that American mining methods are so much safer; and given that any plan to meet the demands of the Paris Agreement requires a twelvefold increase in REE production, how could anyone possibly oppose ramping up rare earths production in the U.S.? If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wanted to make the Green New Deal more possible, this would be the first step she would take.

SOURCE

California Congressman Ignores Wildlife Science for Environmental Zealotry

Follow the science. That’s the mantra of the likes of U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.). Except, that’s not what he’s doing.

The California congressman is cherry-picking studies and carrying the water for disgraced animal rights activists to introduce legislation that punishes the wildlife he claims to safeguard. Rep. Lieu is taking a “Washington knows best” approach to wildlife conservation in his attempt to ban traditional ammunition on National Wildlife Refuges. The only thing he is conserving is a bureaucratic quagmire of Washington, D.C. overreach and denying the role of wildlife biologists to make science-based decisions and set sound wildlife management policy for the regions for which they are responsible.

Congressman Lieu introduced the H.R. 7547, the Lead Endangers Animals Daily (LEAD) Act. The bill is an attempted redux at the failed Director’s Order 219, President Barack Obama’s last-minute attempt to ban the use of traditional ammunition by hunters on federal lands in 2016. Former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe slipped in the regulation literally hours before shutting out the lights, only to have the policy rescinded by former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on his very first day. Director Ashe’s short-lived ban was excoriated by the U.S. House of Representatives for skipping steps and ignoring scientific input.

Congressional oversight found the order was drafted by a single staffer at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Noah Matson, who had previously worked with an environmental activist group. Congress noted then that there was no implementation plan, no impact studies and even U.S. Fish and Wildlife staff normally involved in the process were blindsided.

Now, Rep. Lieu wants to do it again. This time, though, he wants the force of law.

California Dreaming

Rep. Lieu’s legislation aims to ban traditional ammunition on the 95 million acres of land that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manages. He points to the California condor model and the plight of the American bald eagle as animals vulnerable to ingesting fragments of lead from animal carcasses. California banned all traditional ammunition for hunting claiming it was necessary to protect the endangered birds but relied upon a flawed, addenda-driven “study” and ignored evidence that they were ingesting lead from other sources. Two condors were observed eating paint chips from a fire lookout tower. Those birds fed the regurgitated lead-based paint chips to their fledgling chicks. Even after traditional ammunition was banned in the condor’s original range, instances of lead levels in condors remained static or actually increased slightly, even through there was over a 98 percent hunter compliance rate. This was information the Obama-era USFWS purposely withheld from the California legislature.

California banned the use of traditional ammunition for hunting in the condor’s range and later expanded it to the entire state. The firearm and ammunition industry warned this was misguided and was really a path to suffocating hunting and wildlife conservation. The state now faces a wildlife conservation funding crisis. Hunting license sales dropped 70 percent from 1970, from 750,000 then to just 225,000 in 2019.

The misguided laws intended to aid wildlife are choking off the funding streams to programs that are sustaining their recovery. By banning traditional ammunition, hunters are being priced out of the market. Alternatives exist, but they are prohibitively expensive for many. This is evidenced by the low one percent market share of metallic non-traditional ammunition.

Punishing Wildlife and Industry

It’s not just the end user. A traditional ammunition ban would punish American workers. It is estimated that 29,700 people could lose their jobs following the implementation of legislation and regulations banning traditional ammunition. This would reduce national GDP by about $4.9 billion and would cost Federal, state and local tax revenues up to $655.1 million and excise tax collections of up to $113.8 million.

It is proven that conservation programs funded by the sale of the firearms and traditional ammunition works. Congressman Lieu invoked bald eagles, but those populations are soaring. The American bald eagle is a conservation success, increasing 724 percent from 1981 to 2006. Over 15,000 nesting pairs fly in the lower 48 contiguous states. They’ve been removed from the Endangered Species and Threatened Species Lists and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service no longer tracks population levels.

That’s largely due to conservation efforts like the $13 billion paid by the firearm and ammunition industry through the Pittman-Robertson Excise Tax. The industry pays a tax on every firearm and every cartridge and shotshell produced, which funds the Federal Aid in Wildlife Restoration Act. That industry self-imposed tax has been in place since 1937 and is responsible for the abundant wildlife enjoyed in America today, including wild turkey, Rocky Mountain elk, pronghorn antelope, waterfowl and the fauna and habitats in which they thrive.

Cheap Seat Accolades

Rep. Lieu has his cheerleaders. First among them is the architect of the first attempt to do this, Dan Ashe. He’s now President and CEO of the Association of Zoo and Aquariums. Ashe has literally used his podium to denounce people-as-the-problem to wildlife conservation and belittled hunters for not accepting his vision of gun control. He told hunters that they stand in the way of his vision of progress by not trusting the biologists that manage wildlife populations. In Ashe’s mind, hunters should roll over to whims of increasingly hostile environmental zealots.

“We are reflexive, defensive, and increasingly angry, at the proportion of the population that just doesn’t get it,” he wrote in a 2018 Mountain Journal op-ed. The inconvenient truth, however, is that the don’t-get-it-crowd is a lot bigger and growing, while we and our island culture are, again, moving in the opposite direction.”

Congressman Lieu’s progressive base should be glad to know he’s got Wayne Pacelle in his corner on this too. Pacelle is now president of Animal Wellness Action, an activist group he founded after his fall from leading Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). Pacelle was the CEO there until he was forced to resign after allegations of sexual harassment were reported.

America’s wildlife deserves more. The answers to wildlife management are best left to the biologists on the ground, not politicians in gilded Washington, D.C. offices who enjoy the fawning accolades of discredited and disgraced hacks.

SOURCE

Will the Left Kill America’s Energy Dominance?

If the "liberal" green movement had the political power during earlier periods of our nation's history that it has now, we would not have built the railroads. Also, there would be no interstate highway system, and the electric grid system that powers our country would be disconnected and shattered.

What else can one conclude when a significant and vital energy pipeline, the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline from West Virginia into the southern states, has been canceled because of environmental activist opposition? Another pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, has been suspended by a federal judge's order in recent days. Even the urgently needed Keystone XL Pipeline, which will transport natural gas and oil from energy-rich areas in Canada and the Dakotas down to Houston for export and delivery across the country, faces a court-ordered injunction. These actions are all said to be in the name of wetlands preservation, Endangered Species Act issues and other environmental protections.

It isn't safeguarding the safety of our nation. It is sabotaging it.

Pipelines are the most environmentally safe way to transport America's oil and gas resources across the country. They are vital infrastructures that enable America to be the world's energy superpower and make us no longer reliant on Saudi Arabia, Russia and other hostile OPEC countries. The alternative to pipelines is trucks and rail cars, which crash, derail and explode.

The crusade to stop pipelines has nothing to do with clean air or clean water. Natural gas is a wonder fuel. It is cheap, abundant, made in America and clean-burning. The fracking revolution that gave us low-cost natural gas has done more to reduce carbon emissions in the United States than all environmental groups since the beginning of time. It is an environmental blessing.

Let's be honest about what is going on here: The left hates fossil fuels and uses any tactic it can to stop energy development. They want to force America to use "renewable" wind and solar power, both of which are unreliable as stand-alone energy sources. They are also multiple times more expensive ways to generate power. More expensive energy makes everything else America produces more costly and less competitive in global markets.

Liberals say they care about working-class people, but between 5 million and 10 million jobs would be lost without U.S. access to abundant oil, gas and coal resources, according to the American Petroleum Institute. These are mostly union jobs and would be put at risk. At least 1.5 million would be put at risk in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and other Midwestern states if the Marcellus Shale "shale revolution" were to end. But when the greens are pitted against the blues (blue-collar workers), the Democrats choose their precious environmental friends. This year, Joe Biden admitted that he is willing to lose thousands of oil and gas jobs to "go green." So much for "Lunch Bucket Joe."

The absurdity of the pipeline bans is that we don't have a cheap way to transport oil and gas from Ohio and middle Pennsylvania to significant urban Northeastern areas such as New York, Boston and the rest of New England. Without a pipeline, these cities may have to continue to import natural gas from Vladimir Putin in Russia. How is that in America's interest?

Free market advocates want to continue to drill here in the U.S., where we have at least 200 years of extractable energy resources, provide low-cost energy to families and businesses, and save millions of high-paying, middle-class jobs. The greens want to shut it all down. Stopping pipelines is the first step toward choking off production and surrendering economic and energy power to our enemies.

SOURCE

Australia: Call for used car imports to boost EV sales

There should be plenty of secondhand electric cars to buy. When people in cold climates such as Canada discover how useless such cars are in their long Winters, many would wish to cut their losses

Australia should pump-prime sales of electric vehicles by grey importing used EVs, according to a new report prepared with funding from the federal government’s renewable energy agency, ARENA.

Compiled by the EV lobby group Evenergi, the report is part of ARENA’s ‘Knowledge Bank’ series.

It says an opportunity exists for the import of used electrified passenger vehicles into Australia from fellow right-hand drive markets Japan and the UK, where EVs have sold in volume for some years.

It cites the Nissan LEAF and Renault ZOE battery electric vehicles and Toyota Prius and Volkswagen Golf GTE plug-in hybrids as candidates for local sale as grey imports.

“The establishment of a viable market for the importation of used electric vehicles represents a significant business opportunity, and is one of the most important ways that the adoption of electric vehicles can be accelerated in Australia,” the report stated

“In the absence of significant legislative and regulatory change in the short term, there is a clear opportunity over the next two-three years to create an opportunity for a ‘player’ to enter the Australian market at scale to establish themselves in the long term value chain.”

Not including Tesla, which doesn’t report to VFACTS, sales of plug-in vehicles (EVs and PHEVs) are up more than 18 per cent in a dramatically reduced Australian auto market in 2020. However, those 1516 sales to the end of June are still only a tiny 0.34 per cent share of the total.

A key impediment to growth is the price of new EVs, which start at best just under $50,000 in Australia and are usually much higher in price. A flow of used EVs would offer potential buyers a cheaper option.

Unsurprisingly, the concept of an EV grey market is not being received with much enthusiasm within the Australian automotive distribution and retailing network, which fought off a push to deregulate personal vehicle importation in 2017.

“We hope that report remains just that and simply gets presented to ARENA and that’s it,” said Australian Automotive Dealer Association (AADA) chief executive James Voortman.

The report used motoring body NRMA as an example of an organisation well positioned to become an EV importer.

“It has the complementary products required to fully articulate the revenue opportunities, and to lend the credibility needed to ensure the initiative is a success.

“Alternatively aggressive and well capitalised start-ups or existing importing incumbents could capitalise on the opportunity.”

The business model the report advocates is for the import of a small number of EVs for test driving, while vehicles are purchased sight unseen overseas and then imported for delivery.

The local sales company would provide warranties and post-sales support, the report explains.

“The supply and diversity of electric vehicles is growing globally and as such a reliable and cost-effective supply can be established. With a strong brand and streamlined process, initial estimates are that a business with strong margins can be established and scaled quickly with little capital,” the report says.

“Work by Evenergi and NRMA has demonstrated that there is significant and growing demand from a range of buyers for electric vehicles that cannot be satisfied by the current electric vehicle supply – primarily due to price or availability.”

The report recommends using the updated Specialist and Enthusiast Vehicles Scheme (SEVS) as the conduit for the import of EVs.

SOURCE

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17 July, 2020

Even given Warmist assumptions, Warmist policies are not going to stop the warming any time soon

Much of the international effort thus far to combat climate change has focused on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases, chief among them carbon dioxide. That is, of course, a rational approach. Global average temperatures are roughly 1.1°C warmer today than in pre-industrial times and CO 2is the main culprit. It and other greenhouse gases are produced when fossil fuels are burned to generate energy or power engines, in steel and cement-making, by farming and deforestation. In the long term, eliminating these emissions is the only sustainable solution for stopping the inexorable warming of the planet.

But greenhouse-gas emissions do not cause an instantaneous rise in global temperatures, and neither does cutting them result in instantaneous cooling. Instead, it will take decades for today’s policy efforts to result in measurable impacts on global temperature—as illustrated in a study published this week in Nature Communications.

Using climate models, Bjorn Samset and his colleagues at Norway’s Centre for International Climate Research probed hypothetical futures in which emissions of nine different industrial pollutants, including carbon dioxide and methane, were either eliminated instantly or phased out at a rate of 5% each year, starting in 2020. In order to isolate their respective effects, each chemical was knocked out individually while the rest were allowed to keep evolving as they would broadly if governments stuck to current climate pledges. Thus, the experiment tested how quickly additional efforts, as required by the Paris Agreement, would be seen in the rate of global warming.

Running these simulations over and over again in order to get statistically reliable results suggests that cutting CO 2emissions could slow the rate of warming as early as 2033, but only if they are ended worldwide in 2020. In effect, that would mean eliminating 80% of the world’s energy sources, including shutting down all fossil-fuel power stations, overnight— clearly not a realistic or desirable scenario.

Reducing CO 2by 5% per year, starting this year, would produce a statistically significant deviation from what temperatures would have otherwise been only in 2044.

And yet, even that rate of CO 2reduction is ambitious, on a par with the 4-7% drop estimated this year as a result of the covid-19 pandemic and widespread economic shutdowns. Before this, annual emissions were creeping up. Without concerted efforts from governments, they are likely to rise again as economies reopen.

One reason for the delayed effect of slashing emissions is natural variability in the climate. Whether one year is warmer or cooler than the previous is not simply down to greenhouse gases. Large-scale natural climate effects also play a role (El Niño and La Niña are perhaps the best-known examples), warming and cooling the planet in a cyclical fashion by fractions of a degree. Depending on their phase, the warming of greenhouse gases is either masked or compounded by these kinds of natural effects. As emissions begin to drop, natural variability will also mask any slowdown of global warming that results. Dr Samset’s modelling took this into account.

In addition, more than 90% of the energy trapped by the greenhouse-gas emissions produced in the past half-century has been stored in the ocean and released to the atmosphere as heat only slowly. Even if all emissions were cut tomorrow, that process would continue to warm the air above for many years to come.

SOURCE

Against environmental pessimism

Matt Ridley

In 1980, the year that PERC [Property and environment research center] was founded, I spent three months in the Himalayas working on a wildlife conservation project. The purpose was to do wildlife surveys on behalf of the Indian government in the stunningly beautiful valleys of the Kulu region in northern India, among forests of deodar cedar and evergreen oak. One species of particular interest was a bird called the western tragopan, a large, spotted gray forest pheasant with red plumage around the neck and bright blue skin on the male’s throat. The bird was found only in a few places and thought to be teetering on the brink of extinction.

Though we saw other pheasant species, we never saw a tragopan that year, but some of the people we met knew of the bird, and one even handed me the remains of a tragopan that had been shot for food. I feared it might be the last one. I wanted to come back in the spring when the birds’ mating calls might give them away in the deep bamboo thickets they preferred, but work prevented me.

If you had asked me in 1980 to predict what would happen to that bird and its forest ecosystem, I would have been very pessimistic. I could see the effect on the forests of growing human populations, with their guns and flocks of sheep. More generally, I was marinated in gloom by almost everything I read about the environment. The human population explosion was unstoppable; billions were going to die of famine; malaria and other diseases were going to increase; oil, gas, and metals would soon run out, forcing us to return to burning wood; most forests would then be felled; deserts were expanding; half of all species were heading for extinction; the great whales would soon be gone from the oil-stained oceans; sprawling cities and modern farms were going to swallow up the last wild places; and pollution of the air, rivers, sea, and earth was beginning to threaten a planetary ecological breakdown. I don’t remember reading anything remotely optimistic about the future of the planet.

Today, the valleys we worked in are part of the Great Himalayan National Park, a protected area that gained prestigious World Heritage status in 2014. The logo of the park is an image of the western tragopan, a bird you can now go on a trekking holiday specifically to watch. It has not gone extinct, and although it is still rare and hard to spot, the latest population estimate is considerably higher than anybody expected back then. The area remains mostly a wilderness accessible largely on foot, and the forests and alpine meadows have partly recovered from too much grazing, hunting, and logging. Ecotourism is flourishing.

This is just one small example of things going right in the environment. Let me give some bigger ones. Far from starving, the seven billion people who now inhabit the planet are far better fed than the four billion of 1980. Famine has pretty much gone extinct in recent decades. In the 1960s, about two million people died of famine; in the decade that just ended, tens of thousands died—and those were in countries run by callous tyrants. Paul Ehrlich, the ecologist and best-selling author who declared in 1968 that “[t]he battle to feed all of humanity is over” and forecast that “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death”—and was given a genius award for it—proved to be very badly wrong.

Remarkably, this feeding of seven billion people has happened without taking much new land under the plow and the cow. Instead, in many places farmland has reverted to wilderness. In 2009, Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University calculated that thanks to more farmers getting access to better fertilizers, pesticides, and biotechnology, the area of land needed to produce a given quantity of food—averaged for all crops—was 65 percent less than in 1961. As a result, an area the size of India will be freed up by mid-century. That is an enormous boost for wildlife. National parks and other protected areas have expanded steadily as well.

Nor have these agricultural improvements on the whole brought new problems of pollution in their wake. Quite the reverse. The replacement of pesticides like DDT with much less harmful ones that do not persist in the environment and accumulate up the food chain, in addition to advances in biotechnology, has allowed wildlife to begin to recover. In the part of northern England where I live, otters have returned to the rivers, and hawks, kites, ospreys, and falcons to the skies, largely thanks to the elimination of organochlorine pesticides. Where genetically modified crops are grown—not in the European Union—there has been a 37 percent reduction in the use of insecticides, as shown by a recent study done at Gottingen University.

One of the extraordinary features of the past 40 years has been the reappearance of wildlife that was once seemingly headed for extinction. Bald eagles have bounced back so spectacularly that they have been taken off the endangered list. Deer and beavers have spread into the suburbs of cities, followed by coyotes, bears, and even wolves. The wolf has now recolonized much of Germany, France, and even parts of the heavily populated Netherlands. Estuaries have been cleaned up so that fish and birds have recolonized rivers like the Thames.

Global Greening

Here’s a question I put to school children when I get the chance: Why is the wolf population increasing, the lion decreasing, and the tiger now holding its own? The answer is simple: Wolves live in rich countries, lions in poor countries, and tigers in middle-income countries. It turns out that we conservationists were wrong to fear economic development in the 1980s. Prosperity is the best thing that can happen to a country’s wildlife. As people get richer, they can afford to buy electricity rather than cut wood, buy chicken rather than hunt bushmeat, or get a job in a town rather than try to scratch a living from a patch of land. They can also stop worrying that their children will starve and start to care about the environment. In country after country, first in Asia, then in Latin America, and now increasingly in Africa, that process of development leading to environmental gains has swiftly delivered a turning point in the fortunes of wild ecosystems.

One way of measuring such progress is to look at forests. Forests are still being cut down in poor countries, but they are expanding in rich ones. It turns out that when a country reaches a certain level of income, around $5,000 per person per year, it starts reforesting. This is because people become wealthy enough to stop relying on wood fires for cooking and to use electricity or gas instead. Bangladesh, for example, was desperately poor in 1980 but is now rich enough to be significantly increasing its forest cover today.

Overall, therefore, the number of trees in the world is steadily increasing. A study published by NASA and the University of Maryland in 2018 examined satellite data and found that global increases in tree cover have more than offset losses in tree cover over the past 35 years. This is not just because of growing plantations of timber crops; most of it is natural regeneration. Nor is this happening only in the cold woods of the North; tropical countries are reforesting as well. If you had told me in 1980 that this would happen, I would not have believed you.

In 2013, I caught wind of an interesting study being done by NASA in conjunction with Boston and Beijing Universities. A team of researchers had found a way of measuring the quantity of green vegetation on the surface of the planet using satellite data. It was increasing: There were more green leaves each year. I published an article on this phenomenon of “global greening” and was immediately vilified for my impertinence in departing from the pessimistic script. But in fact it had been clear for some years that the carbon dioxide levels measured on top of a mountain in Hawaii, though increasing year over year, were also rising and falling with the seasons more than they once did, implying there was more growth of green leaves in the northern hemisphere summers.

In 2016, the same team published a paper confirming that global greening was occurring and speculating about the cause. Although the press release that accompanied the paper preemptively admonished me—by name!—for taking any comfort from this fact, it quoted the lead author, Zaichin Zhu of Beijing University, saying that the greening over the past 30 years was equivalent to adding a new continent covered in green vegetation twice the size of the United States. Global greening is occurring in all ecosystems, including rainforests, tundras, and croplands, and it is particularly strong in the arid areas of the planet.

By analyzing the patterns of this greening, Zhu and his colleagues were able to tease out why it was happening. Some of it was due to the use of fertilizer, some to increased rainfall caused by the slight warming of the seas, and some to reforestation. But the greatest cause, responsible for 70 percent of the greening, was the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is the raw food that plants use, with water, to make carbohydrates and thence proteins and fats.

This CO2-fertilization effect was well known in principle, thanks to thousands of experiments in laboratories, greenhouses, and the open air over many years. Indeed, commercial greenhouses purchase carbon dioxide to pump over tomato plants to encourage them to grow faster. But this was the first time it had been measured on a global scale. Another study published this year confirmed “the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration as the dominant driver” of a 31 percent increase in global terrestrial gross primary production since 1900.

Global greening means that there is more food every year for caterpillars, antelopes, woodpeckers, and countless other species. It also means we need less land to feed ourselves than we would otherwise have needed by now. Of all the things that I did not expect in 1980, this is surely one of the most remarkable.

More From Less

In the ocean, too, though a lot is still going wrong, my younger self in 1980 would be amazed by what has happened. The amount of oil spilled in the seas has fallen by 80 percent since 1980. This is because shipowners got together and agreed to use double-hulled tankers, and GPS navigation soon made shipwrecks less likely. At the same time, the populations of whales have increased in spectacular fashion. Humpback whales, for example, numbered less than 5,000 in the 1960s. Today there are at least 80,000.

The subantarctic island of South Georgia, which I was fortunate to visit in 2016, now has millions of king penguins, millions of fur seals, and almost a million elephant seals crowding its beaches. These species were vanishingly rare in the middle of the 20th century, after whalers and sealers had devastated the island’s wildlife. In the Arctic, the numbers of walrus and polar bear have similarly rebounded to high levels. This is partly because of regulatory protection, but also partly due a change in economic incentives. Just like an African subsistence farmer who gets a job in a town and starts to buy chicken in the shop instead of relying on bushmeat, so we in the West have decided that killing wild seals and whales for their meat or their blubber now makes less economic sense than rearing chickens, growing canola, or drilling for oil.

Indeed, in areas where wildlife populations are declining, it is now often caused by competition from recovering species. Fin whales are gathering in such huge aggregations off Elephant Island near the Antarctic Peninsula that they are eating the krill relied on by chinstrap penguins, causing a fall in the numbers of the latter. Humpback whales are eating the prey of puffins off the coast of Iceland, contributing to breeding failures. Killer whales have driven away great white sharks in South Africa. Hedgehogs have disappeared from much of the British countryside because of predation by badgers, whose populations have blossomed.

If only we could stop relying on wild caught fish, they too could recover to fill the seas again. Fortunately, we are making progress here as well. Today, about half of our seafood now comes from farmed fish and shrimp. But to feed these farmed animals, we still need to catch wild fish, and if we can alter that, perhaps with biotech crops, then maybe we can go back to a time when vast shoals of huge tuna and swordfish roamed the oceans.

Some worry that reporting good news about the environment makes people complacent. I disagree. It makes people realize that declines are not inevitable, that improvements are possible, and that it is worth trying. Take the case of New Zealand’s determination to rid itself of all mammalian predators by 2050. (Apart from bats and seals, no mammals are native to New Zealand, and introduced alien mammals such as stoats and foxes have devastated native wildlife.) This ludicrously ambitious plan is only being contemplated because of the remarkable achievements of New Zealand conservationists on offshore islands, such as Stewart Island and South Georgia, where poisoned rat bait spread by helicopters has rid large, mountainous islands of rodents altogether.

Despite such efforts, the perils presented by alien species are an example of a trend that is not yet going in the right direction, and it is a reminder not to be Panglossian. Invasive species are the biggest cause of extinction of mammals and birds on islands. The brown tree snake, for example, has caused the extinction of 12 bird species on Guam. One innovation that could help in this fight is gene drive, a technology in which a genetic sequence that makes all offspring male spreads through a population for a set number of generations, driving a local population extinct. This could soon be used, for example, to wipe out the alien mosquitoes that have spread the avian malaria that has caused the decline of native honeyeaters in Hawaii, many species of which have gone extinct.

I therefore venture to predict that in 40 years we will have rid the world’s islands of many of the invasive species that have done such harm, using biotechnology. Indeed, we will have gone further and revived several extinct species. Under the banner of Revive and Restore, Ryan Phelan and Stewart Brand have begun exploring how this could be done. First you need to read the full genome of an extinct species from a museum specimen. In some cases this has already been done. The passenger pigeon, which went extinct in 1914, and the great auk, which went extinct in 1844, have been sequenced in this way. Second you need to make precise edits to the genome of a closely related species. The new base-editing and prime-editing techniques that are being developed promise to make this possible fairly soon. Third, you need to introduce this genome into embryos to grow a population of individuals, and then you need to reintroduce them to the wild. I expect this will happen in my children’s lifetime.

The Next 40

What else might we achieve by the year 2060, when I shall be 102? Even though there will then be more than nine billion people, it is almost certain there will be larger forests, more wildlife, cleaner rivers, and richer seas, because that is what is currently happening. Most people who deny this, and insist things are getting worse, are simply wrong. The latest example is the “insect apocalypse,” a scare that has been widely reported by the media but is based on inadequate data and ridiculous exaggerations from one or two small-scale studies of dubious value.

There is, however, one thing that worries me, and it is this: Some environmentalists, as steeped in pessimism today as I was 40 years ago, are determined to push policies that actually harm the environment. They want us to farm organically, even though that uses more land and does more harm to the soil than farming with chemicals and biotechnology. They want us to get all of the energy we need from the sun or the wind, even if it means covering the landscape in industrial structures to try to extract energy from extremely low-density sources. They want us to turn crops into fuel, via ethanol from corn or diesel from palm oil, even though this means pinching land from wildlife. They want us to reject biotechnology and nuclear power, two practices that reduce humans’ environmental footprint. They want us to recycle plastic, rather than incinerate it, which has resulted in an industry of exporting plastic to Asia where much of it ends up dumped in the ocean. In short, their policies are in many cases actually worse for the environment.

I will end with one further prediction. While climate change is real and man-made, it will not cause catastrophe by 2060. The current rate of warming over the past three decades is about half what scientists predicted in 1990: 0.17ºC per decade compared with 0.30ºC. And, as predicted, the warming is happening more at night, in cold areas, and in winter than in the daytime, in warm areas, and in summer. The effect on the frequency and intensity of storms, droughts, floods, blizzards, and other weather events is still so small that it is hard to detect. These continue to happen, of course. There has probably been a slight decline in droughts, but a slight increase in heat waves. There is less snow cover in the northern hemisphere in spring, more in fall, and no change in winter. Glaciers are retreating, as they have been since the mid-1800s. Most important, deaths from weather events continue to fall steeply as more countries get access to the technology, infrastructure, and information needed to prevent large-scale loss of life in a hurricane, drought, or flood.

Moreover, if warming continues like this, by 2060 we will still not have reached the sort of temperatures that were standard in the early part of the current interglacial period, when the Arctic Ocean regularly lost all of its ice during the summer. So we are not heading into unprecedented territory. And I suspect that we will ultimately solve the problem by substituting nuclear fusion for fossil fuels long before its consequences turn catastrophic.

I was wrong to be pessimistic about the environment in 1980, and it would be wrong to give young people a counsel of despair today. Much has improved since then, and as PERC’s work has demonstrated for four decades and counting, much improvement from here is not only possible, but likely.

SOURCE

Biden's $2T 'Climate Agenda'

Joe continues to be moved to the far left, as his party becomes ever more socialist.

On Tuesday, the Democrat Party, via its presidential nominee stand-in and teleprompter reader Joe Biden, revealed its $2 trillion “climate agenda” that is essentially a slimmed-down version of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s economically untenable “Green New Deal.” Back in May, Biden, in an obvious effort aimed at pandering to his party’s increasingly powerful radical left wing, tagged AOC to co-chair his campaign’s climate platform along with former Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry. The resulting fruit is rotten to the core.

Sounding every bit the part of a radical climate alarmist, Biden declared, “There is no more consequential challenge that we must meet in the next decade than the onrushing climate crisis. Left unchecked, it is literally an existential threat to the health of our planet and to our very survival.”

The $2 trillion price tag exceeds Biden’s previous $1.7 trillion climate plan, and he claims the change is due to simply being “more ambitious.” The reality is more likely that his handlers decided he needed to show more deference to climate activists. The New York Post reports, “Biden’s announcement comes as the presidential wannabe courts idols on the left of his party including Bronx-Queens Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in the hope that they will support him and steer young voters his way in November.”

Biden is also attempting to tout the supposed economic “benefits” of his climate agenda, falsely insisting that his plan would create millions of new jobs, especially for union workers, as the U.S. transforms into a “carbon pollution-free electric sector by the year 2025.” This is a clear attempt to counter President Donald Trump’s infrastructure plan, while also deflecting the means by which Biden would “pay” for his plan: massive tax hikes.

His campaign noted that the plan would be paid for using “a mix of tax increases on corporations and the wealthy and stimulus spending, likely related to the coronavirus pandemic.” Yet Biden has already promised to roll back Republican tax cuts that benefit more than 80% of middle-class taxpayers. So, on the day before taxes are due, Biden proposes yet more massive spending that will demand even more milking of American taxpayers.

SOURCE

Australian fracking research criticized

The criticisms are reasonable ones but the report was in line with worldwide experience

Research by an alliance between the Commonwealth research agency and major CSG companies has been used to argue that fracking is a safe method of extracting gas.

The CSIRO said the report — Air, Water and Soil Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing in the Surat Basin, Queensland — found "little to no impacts" from fracking "on air quality, soils, groundwater and waterways", but the organisation was subsequently criticised for testing just six gas wells out of the 19,000 across the state.

The research was conducted by the Gas Industry Social and Economic Research Alliance (GISERA), which is a joint research venture that includes the CSIRO and major gas companies.

An environmental scientist from Queensland's Griffith University, Emeritus Professor Ian Lowe, said that sample size "doesn't pass the pub test". "Six [wells] is just too small a sample out of 19,000 wells to have any confidence in the results," Professor Lowe said.

"The second and more basic problem is that the wells weren't chosen randomly: they were chosen by the industry and the industry obviously has a vested interest in looking good."

Former Australian chief scientist Professor Penny Sackett agreed. Professor Sackett, who now works for the ANU's Climate Change Institute, questioned the choice of sites.

"There's simply not enough sites that are tested and also I think there could be a concern that the sites were chosen by the gas industry itself," she said.

GISERA's website states its alliance agreement with CSG companies "provides a robust and transparent governance framework to ensure that GISERA's research is demonstrably independent".

But Professor Sackett said there were concerns the CSIRO was compromised by its relationship with the CSG industry.

"The report was essentially conducted on behalf of the gas industry, funded primarily by the gas industry, with sites chosen by the gas industry," Professor Sackett said.

"You really want those sorts of reports done by independent bodies that are funded independently, preferably by public money."

SOURCE

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

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

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16 July, 2020

The next culture war will be over climate change

It is steadily becoming clear where the woke brigade will go once the current moral panic over racism has run its course (which can’t be long, following the news that London estate agents have stopped using the term ‘master bedroom’ to avoid its connotations with slavery). A week ago Andrew Willshire wrote here of how the activist group Hope Not Hate has now decided that climate change ‘denialism’ is now a hate crime.

Now comes another sign that climate change is becoming the next woke battleground. Earlier this week, an environmental campaigner, Michael Shellenberger wrote a mea culpa on the website of Forbes.com. ‘On behalf of environmentalists everywhere I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we have created over the past 30 years,’ it began. ‘Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.’

Shellenberger, who has been campaigning against the destruction of the rainforest since the age of 16, has not given up his campaign. On the contrary, that is the very reason he has changed his mind. Previously, he worked as an advocate for renewable energy – persuading the Obama administration to invest $90bn (£72bn) into renewables, he says. But he has now changed his mind. He has calculated that at present, 0.5 per cent of land on Earth is used for the production of energy. If the world switched to 100 per cent renewables, however, we would have to use 50 per cent of all land on Earth for wind farms, solar farms, growing biofuels or forest plantations to feed wood-burning power stations and so on. The devastation this would cause has led him to the conclusion that if we are going to reduce carbon emissions the only practical way is via nuclear power.

Now you may or may not agree with that conclusion. Personally, I have serious misgivings about using nuclear fission to provide the world’s energy needs, given the economic devastation that another Chernobyl or Fukushima would bring to a densely-populated country. Nuclear fusion, if we could get it to work on a commercial scale, would be a different story – although everyone has been promising that for the past half century, and there is a limit to how many billions you can throw at a technology in the hope of a breakthrough.

Anyway, that is by the by. What is surely true is that the world’s future energy needs, and the extent of the damage wrought on the climate by man-made carbon emissions, are areas of legitimate debate. If you do disagree with Shellenberger, you have every right to do so. But that is not, of course, how woke politics functions. The aim now is not to engage with political opponents but to attempt to put them beyond the pale, to try to delegitimise their opinions by making out that they belong on some far-right fringe from which the general public needs to be protected.

‘I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people,’ Shellenberger wrote prophetically in his Forbes piece. Not half. His piece has now been taken down by Forbes. A US journalist who tried to find out why was issued only with the following statement: ‘Forbes requires its contributors to adhere to strict editorial guidelines. This story did not follow those guidelines, and was removed.’

It is not hard to decode: a bunch of climate alarmists decided that Shellenberger is inconvenient to their cause and have tried to cancel him by complaining to the website – and the website caved in. Fortunately, Shellenberger has reposted his piece, so you can still read it here – and judge for yourself what ‘editorial guidelines’ Forbes judged it to breach (after initially passing it for publication).

The attempt to classify climate change ‘denialism’ as a hate crime has been coming for quite a while. The very use of the word ‘denial’ is an attempt to put anyone sceptical of climate alarmism in the same pigeonhole as holocaust deniers. Incidentally, I recently wrote a novel, The Denial, about a meteorologist who falls foul of climate activists because he values observation over alarmist predictions. I intended it as a satire set in the near future, but by the time it is published in September it looks as if it may well have become the present.

SOURCE

No, Global Warming Did Not Create Pink Algae in Snow, Nor Is It Dangerous

Among the climate click-bait topics getting media attention today is a series of stories implying climate change is giving rise to algae on the Presna glacier in Northern Italy, leading to melting of the glacier.

Live Science, CNN, CNBC, and The Guardian, among other media outlets, all published variations of this climate scare in the past few days. CBS’s write up, titled “Mysterious pink “watermelon snow” has been appearing in the Italian Alps — and it may warn of environmental disaster,” is typical of the coverage—misleading and overwrought.

It seems that a pink algae has appeared on some areas on the alpine glacier Presna, in Italy. However, as the scientists interviewed in the press reports point out, repeatedly, the pink algae is not a mystery at all in the sense that it is not unusual but rather a “well-documented” seasonal phenomena on Presna. Similar seasonal algae blooms occur in areas of Greenland, with green algae appearing in a small part of Antarctica, during the spring and summer months as seasonal snow melts and sunlight reaches the underlying surface. As Biagio Di Mauro, of the Institute of Polar Sciences (ISP) at Italy’s National Research Council, who traveled to the glacier to study the phenomena said in a press release, “The alga is not dangerous, it is a natural phenomenon that occurs during the spring and summer periods in the middle latitudes but also at the Poles.”

Still CBS and other news outlets tried to make a climate mountain out of a natural mole hill, warning the algae reduces the reflectivity of the snow and ice, which is true, resulting in localized warming, causing ever more melting. Also true but irrelevant since it is part of a natural cycle which happens seasonally every summer.

Indeed, Presna has one of the shortest summer seasons and longest ski seasons in the Alps, being, in the words of one website, “one of the few glaciers where skiing is possible until late spring.” There is no evidence this has changed in the last three decades. None of the media outlets present any data indicating the temperatures in and around Presna have experienced a significant warming trend in recent years, a fact which undermines their seemingly breathless admonition, “it [the algae] may actually be a warning sign of environmental trouble.”

CBS’s story says the “snow algae productivity has implications for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” not telling the reader what the implications are but rather, based on the warnings contained throughout the story, leaving them with the impression the implications are dangerous. In truth, if one is concerned about increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, the algae’s annual appearance should be thought of as good news. As CBS ignores, but I explained in a May 29 Climate Realism article discussing a faux “green snow” scare in Antarctica, the algae bloom removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Thus while the bloom may contribute to a marginal localized warming in areas on the glacier, because it removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, if you believe rising CO2 is causing climate change, then the pink algae is reducing the threat.

In the end, while media outlets may sell papers and get online clicks by warning “mysterious” pink ice is appearing on Presna glacier, the facts are less alarming. The algae bloom is a natural seasonal phenomena, worth studying, undoubtedly, but not worth worrying about.

SOURCE

False Alarm: Bjorn Lomborg’s $69,000 Reveal Book

False Alarm is a new book by Bjorn Lomborg that reveals some amazing data about climate, the economy and what is falsely called sustainable development.

Buy this book, read it and pass it on to your friends (and enemies, too, if you think they will listen to you). Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm is not perfect, but it is great. If for nothing else (and there are lots of other good reasons to read the book) the price of the book is worth it for this one number: $69,000.

False AlarmThat is how much better off will be the average person in 2100 under a fossil-fuel developed world than under a sustainably developed world. Lomborg did not make that number up. He got it from a 2017 report by the IPCC. That’s right. A UN climate panel report shows that per capita GDP will be $69,000 higher if we follow a fossil-fuel-development path than with a ‘sustainable-development’ path. Again, the average person will be $69,000 better off with fossil-fuels even after subtracting damages from global warming.

Lomborg is an environmentalist and former economics professor who, after assigning a class project on the topic, unexpectedly came to the realization that climate change is not the looming catastrophe people have been led to believe. He thinks it is a problem with solutions—solutions that may cost quite a bit of money—but it is not an existential threat that must be stopped at any cost.

For this apostasy, Lomborg has been excommunicated. It is similar to what has happened to Roger Pielke, Jr., Richard Tol, and is now happening to Michael Shellenberger. Agreeing with many or even most of the alarmist positions is never enough. Anything less than 100 percent fealty to the cause and all its policies brings out the knives. The personal attacks and efforts to censor have even been directed at Michael Moore for co-producing “Planet of the Humans.”

Some of the chapter titles from False Alarm give hints as to why those proclaiming “the end is near” are upset. Here are a few: “How Climate Policy Hurts the Poor,” “You Can’t Fix Climate Change,” and “Why Do We Get Climate Change So Wrong?” The frustration with Lomborg’s reality check must be especially galling because of the extensive citations backing up his claims. Virtually every paragraph is footnoted and the bibliography alone runs to 53 pages.

False AlarmThe basic themes of False Alarm are similar to the argument that Lomborg has made for years: The available evidence runs counter to the notion that we are seeing more and more extreme weather; projections show an amazingly wonderful future for Earth even with climate change damage; the current climate policies are very ineffective and very expensive; we can use our resources much more efficiently to protect the environment and help the least advantaged. Spoiler alert: Replacing capitalism with socialism is not the answer.

So why do we get climate change so wrong? People are more likely to read a story about a car wreck than about a car wash. A headline like, “Scientists predict next week will be a lot like last week,” is unpromising clickbait. Lomborg notes, “the media likes to predict impending doom, preferable with a firm date attached.” This bias for the dramatic bends journalism toward the fantastic.

He gives the example of a journalist’s story on damages from flooding caused by rising sea-levels. The number that got traction was 350 million people would be subject to flooding by 2100. The journalist got great coverage with that number. However, the study on which he based his article noted large exposure to flooding would only occur without any adaptation. The scientists said that adaptation was very likely and would lead to fewer people being subject to flooding in 2100 than are subject to it now. So, the likely future from the study was that fewer people would be subject to flooding at the end of the century, but the story spread by the media was the opposite.

And so it goes. The polar bear population was supposedly a canary in the climate coal mine until the data showed that polar-bear populations are much healthier today than they were fifty years ago. It turns out that hunting was a much greater threat to bears than shifting ice patterns. So, it is not a story anybody is covering anymore.

The media continually repeat data showing the increasing dollar-value of damages from floods and hurricanes. They conveniently leave out the increasing damage is not from greater flooding or more hurricanes, but, instead, from the much greater value of buildings and other infrastructure that has been built in the path of these events over the last century. Weather damage as a percent of GDP has actually declined and the number of deaths from extreme weather has dropped dramatically.

We hear extreme heat can be deadly, but we do not hear cold weather is deadlier. There are 33 cold-related deaths for every heat-related death. In what may seem ironic, heat waves are less deadly in hot cities than in cooler ones. This is good news for a warming planet. People who are used to the heat adapt better.

An overarching theme of the book is that humans are creative and adaptable. Further, the wealthier they are the better they are able to adapt and not just to extreme weather but to any adversity.

This brings us to one of Lomborg’s major points. Climate policies are frequently ineffective and sometimes harmful. By ignoring the benefits of adaptation in favor of policies to cut CO2, we provide meager benefits with an unconscionable delay and at a cost that reduces the growth that will make future generations resilient in the face of all kinds of problems.

A case in point is the Paris Agreement. Lomborg devotes a whole chapter to it. By the year 2030 he estimates the agreement will cost $2 trillion to $3 trillion per year and these annual costs will continue through the end of the century. Yet, these trillions will moderate world average temperature by a ridiculously small 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit. Even that tiny temperature impact will not occur until the year 2100. The intervening years will see an even more trivial cut. Saddling future generations with a $100 trillion burden whose reward is 0.05-degree moderation in average world temperature is nothing for which the present generation should expect thanks.

Back to that $69,000. Lomborg has a plan (or a set of plans) to improve on it a bit. He wants to spend money on science research and on innovation. He wants to spend money on adaptation, though he does note much adaptation will be done privately and needs no government impetus and certainly not an international agreement. He thinks it prudent to research (though not employ at this point) geoengineering for emergency use. He wants the economy to grow. However, the main part of Lomborg’s plan is a carbon tax.

Assuming that CO2 is a pollutant, the theory of the carbon tax is impeccable. The reality, however, is messy. Surprisingly, Lomborg provides the data that undermines his case for a carbon tax. In Figure 11.3 he lays out the costs of four different carbon-tax policies based on Nobel laureate Willian Nordhaus’s work. The optimal policy has the temperature increase capped at 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit. Under that policy target, the costs of climate damage are $87 trillion and the cost of economic damage from the carbon tax is $21 trillion, for a combined cost of $108 trillion.

However, four pages later Lomborg notes the $21 trillion damage from the carbon tax assumes perfect policy implementation and in reality the damage from the tax “could be at least four time the most efficient cost.” Four times $21 trillion is $84 trillion. When that is added to the expected $87 trillion of climate damage, the total is $171 trillion. Since the no-tax policy’s combined damage is less than $150 trillion, a no-carbon-tax policy is better than the “optimal” carbon tax.

This last result goes a long way toward explaining why skeptics are not “deniers.” We can agree on the basics of climate science but be very skeptical any climate policy coming out of Congress will do less damage to the next century’s economic growth rate than the 0.07 percent the IPCC says will be done by climate change.

Despite this serious policy flaw, False Alarm is a great addition to the climate-change literature. Lomborg brings reason, data, lots of citations, and indefatigable optimism to the overheated and emotional climate debate. Get it. Read it.

SOURCE

Dem climate plan turns reality upside down

It is with good fortune that I had just re-read the 1949 dystopian novel “1984” by George Orwell, when I received a copy of the Democratic party’s climate action plan titled The Congressional Action Plan for a Clean Energy Economy and a Healthy, Resilient and Just America.

In the novel, the party in power (there was but one party) effectively forced the public to believe the equivalent of “what is right is actually wrong”. They taught three premises which became the nations slogans, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength.

Absurd as you may think these slogans to be, they are no less absurd than the ideas presented in the Democrat’s climate plan which include:

Carbon Dioxide, though it is the breathe of life, is a pollutant
The burning of fossil fuels will destroy the planet and must be eliminated
Renewable energy such as wind and solar power can support our way of life
Wind and solar power will improve human health and save 62,000 premature deaths in the next 3 decades by eliminating carbon dioxide emissions
Wind turbines and solar farms will improve the economy by creating millions of jobs

To believe otherwise, among alarmists, is to be called a “denier” and warrant career destruction and being shunned by the public. It is equivalent to Orwell’s “thought crimes” described in his book “1984.”

There is no single goal of the Democrat’s plan that has any chance of being achieved which will allow some to breathe a sigh of relief. However, there is no question that if they gain the Whitehouse on November 3 the plan will be put into motion and serious economic damage will quickly be incurred.

Irrefutable physical facts relating to any attempt to shift our energy production from fossil fuels to wind and solar must quickly increase our energy costs. The reason is simple. Due to the recognized lack of consistent availability of wind and solar to produce energy for our community electric grids, they must be backed up with additional dependable fossil fuel power. This energy must be equal or greater than the energy that can be produced by wind or solar running on standby 100% of the time ready to be placed on the grid within seconds of the failure of the wind or sun to cooperate. Thus their plan will not only dramatically increase the costs of all electric utilities, but it will actually increase the volume of the very carbon dioxide emissions the democrat plan hopes to reduce.

They talk of batteries as the backup for wind and solar but such batteries are on no ones drawing boards save perhaps Elon Musk’s Teslas. A solar farm outside of Las Vegas plans to use 62,000 Tesla batteries at a cost $6000 each and no doubt they could take over for a few hours but certainly not a few days.

A good deal of the Democratic plan is aimed at public health. They are enforcing the idea that the impending warming of the earth will create physical and mental health problems which their plan will attempt to avert. In fact their plan itself creates alarm where there should be none and can have a real negative impact on human health brought on by unwarranted fear.

At the community level the plan wishes to establish disaster relief programs preparing for the effects of warming. It ignores in entirety that the Earth has not been warming for he past 20 years and that the increase in carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is barely more than a tenth of one percent.

The Democrats are taking alarmism through legislation to a new and unfortunate level for the nation as a whole. They control the Congress and if they gain the Whitehouse there is little doubt they will endeavor to implement this technically insane plan. Let’s hope they do not succeed.

SOURCE

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

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

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15 July, 2020

Environmental legal constraints are throttling America

The Holy Roman Empire was a pioneer in banking through the Fuggers, it had adequate constitutional protections for at least the middle classes, and it benefited from fabulous German engineering talent, so why didn’t it get the Industrial Revolution? Its main problem was internal tariffs; we are told that in the 18th Century there were 32 toll houses on the Rhine and 35 on the Elbe. The Empire’s failure to overcome that problem despite its enormous costs for its economy has lessons for us facing similar entrenched inefficiencies today, which are equally regarded by us as part of the natural order.

Today’s United States has a similar problem, and we should learn from the Holy Roman Empire’s failure what it may cost us. The combination of aggressive environmentalists and over-powerful lawyers is proving an increasing drag on the entire operations of the U.S. economy, and may indeed be responsible for much of the decline in productivity growth since the 1970s.

To give three recent examples: a recent Supreme Court decision allowed the Atlantic Coast pipeline to run under the Appalachian Trail, a lawsuit that had held up the pipeline for years. However, this decision was essentially nullified when Dominion Energy, one of two companies that had been developing the $8 billion project, gave up on the project and sold its remaining natural gas assets to Warren Buffett. Apparently, even with Supreme Court approval, the remaining environmental harassments and legal delays were sufficient to make the project uneconomic.

In a second case, the $4 billion Dakota Access oil pipeline, which has been opened with oil passing through it quietly for three years, was suddenly blocked by a Washington district court, and prevented from further operation, because of some alleged defect in the pipeline’s paperwork before it was opened. By this decision of a lower court 1,500 miles from the pipeline, the operation of a $4 billion asset will be prevented for an indefinite period, at least 13 months.

In the third case the Keystone XL pipeline, a major international project which was held up arbitrarily for the entire eight years of the Obama administration, and has slowly been working its way through the paperwork since 2017, was held up by the Supreme Court for yet another environmental review, thus dooming it if Joe Biden should win the November election.

This mindless harassment is not limited to pipelines. The projected tunnel under the Hudson between New York and New Jersey is now projected to cost $12.3 billion, compared with the $750 million equivalent of the $8 million cost of the Holland Tunnel, completed in 1927. All over the economy, not only are huge costs added by environmental/legal delays, but projects are completely unable to be completed in a timely fashion.

President Trump and the Democrats in Congress are agreed that a spending program on infrastructure would be desirable, but the reality is that around 90% of the money spent on such a program would be wasted, judging by the cost bloat in the NY-NJ tunnel project. What’s more, the nation would get very little infrastructure for a decade or more, as endless environmental studies and witless lawsuits would eat up time, even supposing some future set of politicians did not decide to cancel the projects, as they have California’s High Speed Train.

Environmental considerations deserve more consideration than they got in the 1950s; nobody wants to set the Cuyahoga River set on fire again. But the nexus of grotesquely complicated regulations and legal liabilities that were set up in the late 1960s and early 1970s is literally a menace to civilization. Just as the Holy Roman Empire was completely unable to have the Industrial Revolution for which it was otherwise well set up until the internal tariffs and feudal property ownership were dismantled, so the U.S. and indeed the world will miss out on huge future advances because of the delays and exorbitant costs imposed by the environmental/legal nexus.

Half a century of poverty may be an underestimate of the costs this will produce. China is already eating our lunch; it will be much more able to do so if we handicap ourselves by this means (China will of course sign all sorts of treaties promising to combat global warming, protect endangered species and clean the air; it just won’t abide by them, treating them as it does all its other obligations.) For geopolitical reasons as well as for our own living standards the environmental/legal nexus must go, or the loss of U.S. living standards and freedom may be permanent.

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If 2020 Is the Warmest Year … So What?

While 2020 will be at or near record-warmth globally, this is not something we should be particularly alarmed about.

With COVID-19 and demonstrations taking center stage in news coverage, it is easy to forget that we are all dying from climate change, anyway … or so we have been told. The recent claim at cbsnews.com that 2020 will likely be the warmest year on record (globally) leads one to ask: So what?

The “warmest year” is typically only hundredths of a degree warmer than the previous record-warm year. Global warming has proceeded at an average rate that is probably too small to be observable by humans in our lifetimes. This is because the seasonal (40, 60, 100 degrees and more) and day-to-day (20, 30, 50 degrees and more) changes in weather to which we are accustomed swamp the signal of long-term climate change. The signal is so small that questions continue to be raised regarding how well our global network of thermometers, designed to measure large weather changes, can reliably sense such small climate changes. It does not help that most thermometers are sited near spurious sources of heat that have gradually increased over time as population and infrastructure have also increased.

That is why extreme weather events have been re-branded as an indicator of climate change, and “global warming” as a term has fallen into disuse, despite the fact that there is little convincing evidence that extreme weather has worsened on a global basis. Instead, any number of regions can experience more severe weather, but they are offset by other regions with less severe weather. More severe weather makes the news. Less severe weather does not.

The recent claim of the first 100 deg. F temperature reading above the Arctic Circle in Siberia is incorrect; it was 100 deg. F in Ft. Yukon, Alaska way back in 1915. The town in Siberia measuring 100 deg. F (Verkhoyansk) is notable for its exceedingly cold winters and hot summers, holding the Guinness World Record for the largest observed seasonal temperature swing: an astonishing 189 deg. F.

Nevertheless, there still appears to have been 1 to 2 deg F average warming of the globe in the last 50-100 years. What is the cause? While increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning is a leading potential culprit, the possibility of a natural cause for some of the warming cannot be ruled out. In fact, the alarmist UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) implies as much when it claims only that more than half—not all—of the warming since the 1950s has been human-caused.

The fact is that science cannot say with any level of confidence just how much of the warming could be natural versus human-caused. It is scientifically inarguable that the warming of the deep oceans in recent decades equates to a global average energy imbalance of only 1 part in about 250 of the natural energy flows, and we do not know any of those natural energy flows in the climate system to that level of accuracy. That puts human-caused climate change more in the realm of faith than you have been led to believe. Climate modelers simply assume that the warming is human-caused, and so adjust their computer models accordingly.

I am not overly concerned about the fate of my grandchildren or their children even if the gradual warming trend continues. I am more worried about current ill-advised energy policy responses to the warming, which inevitably reduce global prosperity and increase poverty.

SOURCE

Lies, Tricks, and Politics: Big Wind’s assault on the truth

Correcting the lies, yes LIES, proffered by big wind has worn down a generation of people working to raise awareness about turbine impacts, but Americans are tough, principled, and above all, abhor deceitfulness in any form. An extensive, well-connected network of those fighting wind has grown exponentially in the last two decades as the public learned more. ...People oppose their communities becoming the dumping ground for wind projects made up of grotesque flashing, loud-whooshing, bird-bat busting icons revered by green new deal followers.

In 2004, the residents of Lyman, New Hampshire stood in near-unison against a wind developer’s[1] request to erect a 158-foot met tower atop the prominent Gardner Mountain Range. Lyman’s land use regulations prohibited structures taller than 35-feet with a few exceptions for agriculture uses (barns, silos, etc), so a variance was needed. The residents of the small farming community (pop. 500) quickly recognized the met tower for what it was – an invitation to flatten the peak and construct massive wind towers in a linear array along the ridgeline.

Every tactic attempted by the developer to win approval fell short.

First, they claimed wind energy was an agricultural use and, thus, allowed under the town’s exceptions clause. When that didn’t work, they insisted the use was temporary and not subject to the regulations, but the ordinance, as minimal as it was, included a legal definition of ‘temporary’ that didn’t apply. They forcefully argued that the tower carried no negative impacts but that failed after a trusted realtor explained how a single met tower could completely collapse Lyman’s real estate market. “Merely the possibility of an unknown [development on the mountain] would have buyers looking elsewhere,” he said.

Finally, they promised riches beyond what this small New England community could imagine – a panacea for Lyman’s cash burdens and limited tax base. But that too was rejected when residents offered to pay more than their share in property taxes. No legal, emotional or financial case could justify waiving the regulations, and the variance was rejected.

Similar debates have occurred in communities across the U.S. The specific arguments might change depending on the circumstances, but the sentiment is always the same. This should not surprise anyone, especially the wind industry.

Volumes of academic papers dating back to the 1980’s examine public opposition to wind turbines and the barrier it poses to widespread deployment. Samples include Thayer and Freeman (1987) in California, Walker (1995) in the US, D Bell et.al (2005) in the UK, and A. Jobert et.al. (2007) in France and Germany.

Researchers have been baffled for decades over why general positive attitudes toward wind energy have not translated into community acceptance of projects. Yet, a review of existing research suggests less focus on understanding opposition and more on reinforcing wind industry narratives.

Authors characterize opponents as a minority of uninformed agitators ‘grounded in self-interest’ or jealous of their neighbors’ good fortune to have land for lease. They wonder how a select few could wield such influence over decision makers. Visual blight is cited as the primary complaint while noise, shadow flicker, safety risks, and harms to the natural environment are dismissed as non-issues. Pasqualetti (2001) points to California’s San Gorgonio Pass, one of the highest concentrations of wind turbines worldwide, and touts how “[o]nly 20 years into the modern development of wind power, many of the sources of worry and disapproval have already been addressed successfully.” He goes on to say that “the challenges of turbine size, color, finish, spacing, noise, efficiency, reliability, safety, and decommissioning all have been remedied or conceptually solved by developers, equipment manufacturers, and regulatory authorities.”

His blustering about wind power’s advances is just that, bluster. The impacts of wind power have not been resolved. On the contrary, they’ve expanded to a point where often the only safe option is to not build at all. Since 2001, U.S. wind energy has increased 25-fold to 107,319 MW and turbines have more than tripled in size reaching well over 600-feet in height. Distance is the only certain mitigation for protecting adjacent properties yet more people are living closer to turbines than ever before.

In January 2019, Liberty Utilities president David Swain personally signed agreements with Barton and Jasper county commissioners in Missouri to locate 604-foot tall turbines just five hundred feet from the nearest property lines of non-participating landowners and 1.1x total tip height (664-feet) from occupied residential homes. Liberty's setbacks are not even representative of what the wind industry considers ‘standard’ and Swain knows it. County residents raised safety concerns with the Missouri PSC, but by time Liberty revealed the project layout, the deal was done. (The agreements signed by Swain appear as attachments to the letter.)

Liberty Utilities preaches the “We Care” motto on its website and cites its mission “to become an outstanding member of the local community,” but Swain and the utility are uninterested in the health and safety complaints their turbines are certain to produce. Is this what caring and community cooperation looks like?

Wind developers have no interest in being good neighbors and will never concede the social and environmental harms caused by turbines.

Instead, biased experts using dubious methodologies rapidly produce studies that counter known impacts. To them, methods do not matter as long as the right conclusions supporting their bias are reported. These studies, in turn, form the foundation for multi-million dollar government and wind industry funded literature reviews that show turbines are safe, while legitimate reports quantifying real impacts on communities are often dismissed as outliers.

When big wind’s unrelenting campaign to conceal reality meets opposition, the industry exercises its political clout to shift the balance in its favor. There’s no clearer example of this than in New York where Governor Cuomo (King Cuomo to the locals) rammed through his Accelerated Renewable Energy Growth and Community Benefit Act as part of the state’s 2020-21 budget. The new law removes any requirement for evidentiary proceedings which means no cross-examination of expert testimony and no opportunity for equal consideration for an impacted public.

Over the next year, the newly formed Office of Renewable Energy Siting will "establish a set of uniform standards and conditions for the siting, design, construction and operation" of major renewable energy facilities. Until that process is started, we cannot assess how effective the state will be in terms of protecting communities and wildlife, but we might guess from the legislative priority which is to expedite review, reduce burdensome conditions on developers, and meet Cuomo's carbon mandates. The importance of public involvement cannot be overstated. Under this new regime, Apex Clean Energy would have succeeded in its deceitful actions to hide eagle activity at NY’s Galloo Island wind site in 2018. It took an engaged public to reveal the truth. For New York, the public is now largely silenced.

Correcting the lies, yes LIES, proffered by big wind has worn down a generation of people working to raise awareness about turbine impacts, but Americans are tough, principled, and above all, abhor deceitfulness in any form. An extensive, well-connected network of those fighting wind has grown exponentially in the last two decades as the public learned more.

In 2004, Lyman residents understood intuitively what millions know today and what alludes researchers: People oppose their communities becoming the dumping ground for wind projects made up of grotesque flashing, loud-whooshing, bird-bat busting icons revered by green new deal followers.

SOURCE

Bill McKibben and His Enviro Campaign Against Humanity

Bill McKibben, a radical deep ecologist, has been normalized in today’s alarmist, TDS world. He has a regular column in The New Yorker, claiming that man-made climate change is “the most thorough and complete crisis our species and our civilizations have ever faced, one there is no guarantee that we will survive intact.”

I recently came across a book review of McKibben’s deep-ecology manifesto, The End of Nature (Random House: 1989), titled Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower.

Published in the Los Angeles Times in that year by David Graber (“a research biologist with the National Park Service”), the review was all-in with McKibben’s scary worldview.

Some quotations from Graber’s dark, anti-life review follow:

“Ecosystems do not care what happens to them, but some of us may perceive the changes as a tragic loss of biological richness.”

“We contaminated the planet with atmospheric hydrocarbons and metals beginning with the Industrial Revolution.”

“That makes what is happening no less tragic for those of us who value wildness for its own sake, not for what value it confers upon mankind. I, for one, cannot wish upon either my children or the rest of Earth’s biota a tame planet, a human-managed planet, be it monstrous or–however unlikely–benign.”

“[McKibben and I] are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value–more value to me–than another human body, or a billion of them.”

“Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet.”

“Somewhere along the line–at about a million years ago, maybe half that–we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.”

“It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”

Conclusion

Such is the drivel of a mad-at-the-world fringe. Personal shortcomings are blamed on the system, not themselves. The dispossessed are at odds with, and angry about, self-interested fellow human advancing their lot in modern living. But their thinking must be exposed for its rot for a better future for everyone else.

SOURCE

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

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

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14 July, 2020

A Declaration Of Energy Independence Will Secure America’s Economic Future

Recently, we joined many other officials and candidates across the country in signing The Empowerment Alliance’s Declaration of Energy Independence. The Declaration is a common-sense commitment to four energy principles that can help power America’s economy for everyone over the next century and beyond — affordable energy for our families, clean energy for our environment, abundant energy for our future and domestic energy for our security.

Just as our Founding Fathers were, we too are clear in what we want:

From the jobs created to lower utility bills and cleaner air, affordable energy is fundamental to economic prosperity for all. It is a moral imperative to provide for families who are most vulnerable to increases in their energy budgets.

America leads the world, by a wide margin, in cutting CO2 emissions. America’s plentiful natural gas is the fiscally-sound, reliable and environmentally responsible bridge to our energy future.

Technology and exploration have guaranteed that America has a continuous 100-year supply of natural gas and the potential for even more.

The use of domestic natural gas discovered, produced and refined in the U.S. makes certain America is no longer dependent on rapidly changing global markets and unstable or hostile countries.

Unfortunately, we see a growing movement to simply walk away from the tremendous promise and potential of our country’s natural gas resources, which constitute precious economic and national security assets. Outrageous and expensive schemes like the so-called Green New Deal would place huge burdens on American households, cost our economy trillions and squander the security and independence we have worked so hard to build. Our signatures on the Declaration show the policymakers in this country what’s at stake if those who want to surrender America’s potential for energy independence and leadership in the world actually win.

The national introduction of The Empowerment Alliance’s Declaration of Energy Independence is our bold John Hancock signature letting the world know what we stand for — that affordable, clean and abundant energy is the birthright of every American! The Declaration is a simple statement of purpose; one that can unite millions of Americans on the idea that energy independence is possible and a moral imperative.

These principles are key to powering a 21st century American economy that will benefit all. Consider that America has recently surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s top producer of natural gas and oil and is poised to be a net energy exporter. As a result of the abundance of clean natural gas, natural gas powers over 30% of America’s energy needs and we have reduced our energy trade deficit by 87%. Because of natural gas, America is on its way to energy independence, a boon for our national and economic security.

And, low-cost natural gas is even more critical for American families trying to maximize their budgets, especially in these tough times. Households that use natural gas for heating, cooking and other utilities pay an average of $879 less per year compared to homes using electricity.

But it is not simply that natural gas is a low-cost energy alternative that brings America closer to energy independence — it is also a clean energy alternative that is far more efficient than renewables like wind and solar. The United States is now enjoying its best air quality in the last half century, in part because of the rise of natural gas.

That is why we have signed the Declaration of Energy Independence to reinforce the essential and positive role natural gas plays in the lives of everyday Americans today and will help build a foundation for increased use of natural gas in the future, especially as we rebuild our economy.

We are proud to have signed The Declaration of Energy Independence and commit to advocating for clean, low-cost, domestic energy. I encourage you to visit The Empowerment Alliance’s website and do the same.

SOURCE

Ban Neonics – Hurt Farmers and Bees

The honeybees, bumblebees and other little pollinators swarming over my flowers remind me what important roles they play – and how some misguided folks could inadvertently hurt them.

Montgomery County, Maryland now prohibits “weed-and-feed” lawn fertilizer and most “synthetic pesticides.” But it allows homeowners, farmers and orchardists to use “organic” products that are often more dangerous to bees, other wildlife and even humans.New York is considering a five-year statewide ban on neonicotinoid insecticides; this action too would likely result in the use of chemicals that may actually be much more toxic to the birds and bees it seeks to protect.

US Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) is still promoting a bill to reinstate an Obama era ban on using neonics in the nation’s wildlife refuges. She mistakenly believes these pesticides threaten biodiversity, bees and other wildlife in these important habitats – whereas alternatives would be safe and harmless.

Other jurisdictions are pondering comparable actions that could pose similar problems.

Neonicotinoids were introduced in the 1990s to replace less targeted, more toxic pest control chemicals. Primarily used to coat seeds, “neonics” significantly reduce the need for aerial and ground-level spraying with other chemicals that actually do harm bees and other pollinators.

This advance has helped boost crop yields while protecting the environment. Losing neonics would put many states’ farming economies at risk. Support for neonic use comes from all over the world.

Up inCanada, the same misinformation that’s motivating US legislative and regulatory actions persuaded Ontario lawmakers to pass a neonic ban in 2015. Farmers have since reported paying four times more for an alternative pesticide that is less effective, cannot be used on some crops and can harm bees.

Activists persuadedEurope to ban neonics in 2013. But subsequent studies found the ban disastrously counterproductive.

For instance, after the ban, British farmers had to spray four times more often than before, using older pesticides like pyrethroids and organophosphates that are less effective, must be sprayed several times during the growing season, and often harm bees, other non-target insects and even birds.Insect pests increased dramatically, and across Europe the canola (oilseed rape) industry suffered revenue losses of over$430 million in just a few years.

As was the case in Europe, proposed prohibitions are often the result of environmentalist pressure campaigns and false claims that bees are threatened by neonics. Actual data show the opposite is true.

Despite warnings of a “bee-pocalypse,” except during the latest “colony collapse disorder” (CCD), honeybee colonies have been rising worldwide since the 1990s, when neonics first came on the market.US Department of Agriculture (USDA) surveys show thatU.S.honeybee hive numbers have increased seven out of the last ten years, and there are now over 150,000 more beehives than in 1995.

A closer look atNew York’s crop yields also confirms that honeybee colonies are healthy. Apple yields are almost exactly the same as they were ten years ago, indicating that pollinators are thriving and busy doing their job. Similar lessons apply elsewhere.

There’s no doubt that honeybees have recurring problems. Overwinter losses are still high some years and, while bees reproduce rapidly and beekeepers can quickly replenish their hives, these losses can significantly strain this small but important industry.

Most experts agree, however, that the worldwide spread of the deadly Varroa destructor mite as a primary factor in the recent mass die-offs, and a recurrent problem over the centuries. They arrived in the United States in the late 1980s and spread widely over the next decade. The parasites attach to bees, suppressing their immune systems, carrying deadly diseases and creating pathways for other diseases to enter bee bodies. The triple whammy can have disastrous impacts on bee colonies.

Thankfully, the USDA has made progress in efforts to breed more Varroa-resistant or Varroa-tolerant honey bees, which somehow have better hygienic habits: they remove mites from one other. That’s important, because many available Varroa treatments no longer work as well, due to the mite’s uncanny ability to develop resistance to treatments.

Other USDA research has identified a promising new approach of using RNA interference to disrupt the reproduction of Nosema ceranae– another bee parasite that is the honeybee’s second-worst scourge.

Unfortunately, crusading activists, journalists, legislators and regulators spent years ignoring these microscopic predators and parasites. Instead, they blamed pesticides, especially neonics.

How wrongheaded and counterproductive that was is further illustrated by the vast canola fields in western Canada. The canola is 100% grown with neonic-coated seeds, and successful professional beekeepers actually cart their hives into the middle of the canola fields because they produce such delicious honey.

Not surprisingly, as domesticated bees recovered, anti-pesticide activists began talking about wild bees, which can also be important for pollination. The activists get their facts wrong here, too.

There are thousands of wild bee species. According to a 2015 study published inNature– probably the most extensive survey of wild bees ever done – 98% of wild bees don’t even pollinate agricultural crops. Moreover, the few species that do, and thus would come into greatest contact with neonics, are thriving.

Ironically, bees may be more at risk from insecticides that people have been falsely led to believe are safe. Organicfarmers don’t use neonics or other modern chemicals, but they do employ a number of crop protecting pesticides. These “organic” products may be “natural,” but some are highly toxic to bees – rotenone, copper sulfate, spinosad, hydrogen peroxide, azadirachtin, citronella oil, and even garlic extract and acetic acid, for instance – chemical risk analyst Dr. David Zaruk points out.

Montgomery County’s guidelines specify that products bearing EPA registration numbers are prohibited and say gardeners should rely on a 113-page, tiny-type list of chemicals certified by theOrganic Materials Review Institute, an organic industry support and advocacy group. However, OMRI doesn’t mention that some of its “approved” products harm bees or pose other serious risks – to wildlife and humans.

For example, OMRI (and thus Montgomery County, among others) approves rotenone, but neglects to mention that this nasty chemical kills bees, is highly toxic, especially when combined with pyrethrins, and can enhance the onset of Parkinson’s disease, Zaruk and other experts note. Pyrethrin pesticides themselves are powerful neurotoxins that can cause leukemia and other health problems.

Copper sulfate can damage human brains, livers, kidneys and stomach linings. Prolonged exposure to boron fertilizer can affect people’s brains, livers and hearts. Lime sulfur mildew and insect killer causes irreversible eye damage, and can be fatal if inhaled, swallowed or absorbed through the skin. Nicotine sulfate is a neurotoxin that interferes with nerve-muscle transmissions, causes abnormalities in lab animal offspring, and can lead to irregular heart-rates and even death. All are approved “organic” chemicals.

Journalists, legislators, regulators, homeowners and gardeners need to do their homework more carefully. They should read reputable scientific studies, rely less on anti-pesticide press releases and apocalyptic news stories, read product labels carefully, wash up afterward, and view with extreme skepticism any claims that the word “organic” means pesticide-free or a chemical is safe (or not even a chemical).

Above all, everyone should use all chemicals carefully and appropriately, under the assumption that any chemical (synthetic or organic) we are handling or applying may be toxic and dangerous – to bees, other insects and wildlife, or even ourselves.

SOURCE

How the EPA’s 'Endangerment Finding' Endangers You

Most people are unaware of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) “Carbon Dioxide Endangerment Finding” or what it means to them.

The “Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act”, as it is formally known, was issued in 2009. It specifically requires the EPA to apply the Clean Air Act to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases” from vehicles, power plants, and other industries.

The Clean Air Act, enacted in 1963, was designed to limit air pollution within the United States and it has worked well. Since then, air pollution has been reduced dramatically. However, the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases, and specifically carbon dioxide, are air pollutants and, thus, the EPA is obligated to limit their emissions to protect the public health and welfare.

While reducing pollution is a laudable goal, is carbon dioxide really a pollutant? In elementary school, students are taught that plants use carbon dioxide as it is essential for photosynthesis. Indeed, commercial greenhouses often enrich carbon dioxide up to four times the natural concentration. This is because plants will grow faster, become more water efficient, and improve their overall quality under increased carbon dioxide concentrations.

Even Ms. Janine Benyus, a Rachel Carson Environmental Ethics Award Winner, explains, “After all, only humans see carbon dioxide as the poison of our era. The rest of nature sees it as a building block. Plants use carbon to make sugars, starches, and cellulose. Corals use carbon to build reefs, and mollusks use carbon to manufacture their shells.” Indeed, the net effect of elevated carbon dioxide – either in a greenhouse or on Earth – produces both more food and causes a greener planet.

Former President Jimmy Carter once noted, “…an obvious but often overlooked path to peace [is to] raise the standard of living of the millions of rural people who live in poverty by increasing agricultural productivity” and “Thriving agriculture is the engine that fuels broader economic growth and development, thus paving the way for prosperity and peace” [emphasis added]. From 2012 to 2050, the projected benefit of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide will include an added $9.8 trillion (an average of $251 billion per year) of crop production – and that does not include the benefit of added growth to things other than agricultural crops, such as forests and grasslands.

Indeed, by accentuating plant and agriculture growth, carbon dioxide can help feed a growing world in dire need of food resources. So, why should carbon dioxide be labeled as a “pollutant” and its production aggressively reduced?

The science that underpins the “Endangerment Finding” relies primarily on the United States Global Change Research Program’s 2009 National Assessment of Climate Change Impacts on the United States. These results are based largely on climate model simulations of the Earth’s climate as projected from rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. But these models are tuned to yield specific outcomes which have been shown to systematically overestimate the observed warming of the globe and, specifically, the upper tropical troposphere. Future warming is likely to be at the lowest bound of these model results.

Calculating the social cost of carbon – the dollar value of the economic harm resulting from carbon dioxide emissions – is extremely problematic. Estimates depend heavily on the assumptions used to calculate it, and thus politicians usually select scenarios that justify their desire to increase energy prices and enact governmental restrictions. What is usually never included in this calculation are the benefits, both direct (e.g., on plants) and indirect (e.g., through inexpensive energy) that carbon dioxide emissions have on society in general.

But despite that carbon dioxide is plant food and is not a pollutant, why are you endangered by this finding?

If carbon dioxide is treated as a pollutant, everything that emits carbon dioxide can be restricted or taxed. The long-term impact of forgoing fossil fuels – the largest source of human-induced carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – will cause energy and all that depends on it to become more expensive. Costs of growing food, developing clothing, building housing, providing fuel for heating, cooling, and cooking, and transporting the goods (and even people) needed to provide these necessities of life will skyrocket. Do we want the poor to choose between food and heating their homes?

Raising the price of energy will make living more difficult for all but the country’s richest citizens. The so-called “solution” to global warming will have no influence on the Earth’s climate but instead, will adversely impact most Americans.

The irony of the “Endangerment Finding” is that while the EPA’s Clean Air Act was designed to protect the environment, the ruling that carbon dioxide is a pollutant will, in fact, lead to environmental degradation. Hybrid cars and wind turbines require large quantities of neodymium and dysprosium for their magnets, and indium and tellurium are required to build solar panels. To mine these minerals, environmentally degrading strip-mining exposes workers to toxic and dangerous conditions. Soil and groundwater become contaminated by wastewater from such mines. “Clean energy” is anything but clean.

Moreover, when the poor lack food, clothing, shelter, or security, how can they be good stewards of their environment? Inexpensive energy can lift the poor from conditions of poverty. Energy allowed our economy to develop, our citizens to have more free time for innovation and recreation, our public health to increase, and our environment to become cleaner. Abundant, affordable, and reliable energy – the kind provided by fossil fuels – is necessary for all to be better stewards of our environment.

As Dr. Sylvan H. Wittwer, former director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at Michigan State University concluded, “The rising level of atmospheric carbon dioxide could be the one global natural resource that is progressively increasing food production and total biological output in a world of otherwise diminishing natural resources of land, water, energy, minerals, and fertilizer…The effects know no boundaries and both developing and developed countries are, and will be, sharing equally.”

Isn’t guaranteeing inexpensive energy a better solution to protect our environment and the poorest among us?

SOURCE

It’s the end of civilization. Again

Eco-extremists in the liberal media can’t even give themselves a 10-year gap for their end-of-the-world predictions.

The latest Time magazine cover declared that 2020 is our last, best chance to save the planet. Run for your lives!

Time announced the new cover on Twitter. The cover article was written by Justin Worland, the same author who co-wrote the “TIME 2019 Person of the Year: Greta Thunberg.” That piece claimed climate activist Thunberg was a “a pool of resolve at the center of swirling chaos.” [Emphasis added.]

In Time's latest drivel, Worland exploited the coronavirus to push a climate change armageddon scenario:

2020 looks like the year when an unknown virus spun out of control, killed hundreds of thousands and altered the way we live day to day. In the future, we may look back at 2020 as the year we decided to keep driving off the climate cliff–or to take the last exit, [emphasis added.]

Worland also quipped how for the past three years, “the world outside the U.S. has largely tried to ignore Trump’s retrograde position on climate, hoping 2020 would usher in a new President with a new position, re-enabling the cooperation between nations needed to prevent the worst ravages of climate change." But, "there’s no more time to wait,” Worland fretted. [Emphasis added.]

Still, Worland was sure to advocate on behalf of a Joe Biden presidency: “[T]he future of U.S. emissions will likely fall to the winner in the fall. Joe Biden, the former Vice President and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is well aware of the role the pandemic recovery will play in shaping emissions.”

Worland even blamed the U.S. for the alleged “climate catastrophe” he says we’re facing. He wrote that “We find ourselves on the brink of climate catastrophe in large part because of the decisions made during a past crisis. As the world came out of the Great Depression and World War II, the U.S. launched a rapid bid to remake the global economy–running on fossil fuels.” [Emphasis added.]

Sounds remarkably close to when Time magazine whined in 1992: “Nature has a cure for everything, except the spread of Western civilization.”

Stoking fears about the world rising past 2?, "where the effects of climate change go from advancing gradually to changing dramatically overnight, reshaping the planet,” Worland said “we need to cut emissions in half by 2030.” [Emphasis added.]

Worland wrote that "[t]o achieve a 1.5°C goal without creating mass disruption has always meant thoughtfully restructuring the global economy, moving it away from fossil-fuel extraction slowly but surely. Scientists and economists agree this is the last opportunity we have to do so." [Emphasis added.]

That’s interesting, considering Microsoft co-founder and liberal billionaire Bill Gates had said in September, 2019 that fossil-fuel “divestment, to date, probably has reduced about zero tonnes of emissions.”

Worland’s latest edition to Time’s eco-extremism is just as loopy as when Time contributor Eugene Linden suggested in 2000 that the threat of climate change was greater than USSR nuclear missiles. Or how about when Time magazine’s editors warned in its 1989 “Planet of the Year” issue that “[u]nless the growth in the world population is slowed, it will be impossible to make serious progression on any environmental issue.”

Time’s ongoing eco-freakish saga continues.

SOURCE

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

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

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13 July, 2020

Mines, minerals, and "green" energy: A reality check

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

As policymakers have shifted focus from pandemic challenges to economic recovery, infrastructure plans are once more being actively discussed, including those relating to energy. Green energy advocates are doubling down on pressure to continue, or even increase, the use of wind, solar power, and electric cars. Left out of the discussion is any serious consideration of the broad environmental and supply-chain implications of renewable energy.

This paper turns to a different reality: all energy-producing machinery must be fabricated from materials extracted from the earth. No energy system, in short, is actually “renewable,” since all machines require the continual mining and processing of millions of tons of primary materials and the disposal of hardware that inevitably wears out. Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy.

Among the material realities of green energy:

Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy to society.

A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than 5 million smartphones; and a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass than 50 million phones.

Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines under current plans—never mind aspirations for far greater expansion—will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals around the world. For example, a single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.

Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.

By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.

SOURCE

House Dems: Climate Change Responsible for Racial Injustice, George Floyd Protests

Democrats’ infatuation with the Climate Change Bogeyman has reached a new low, with the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis (HSCCC) blaming climate change inaction for racial injustice and the George Floyd protests. Yes, really.

A recently released HSCCC report wastes no time blaming climate change for everything under the sun, including the George Floyd protests. On page 1 of the 547-page report, the report states, “Climate solutions must have justice and equity at their core. The protests in response to George Floyd’s death are reminders of the consequences of past inaction.”

For the rest of Americans, common sense tells us the protests in response to George Floyd’s death have nothing to do with climate change.

Fighting climate change, House Democrats tell us, is necessary to fight racial injustice. According to the HSCCC report, “Building a resilient, clean economy affords us another opportunity: to acknowledge and commit to correcting past policy failures that created the climate crisis and the systemic economic and racial inequalities that plague our communities today.”

Yes, really. Climate change is not only the greatest-ever threat to human civilization, but it is a symbol and cause of systemic racial inequality, too. And climate activists wonder why – despite enormous funding advantages, one-sided educational indoctrination, and one-sided media coverage – they can’t build consensus support for their alarmist policy prescriptions….

SOURCE

New Jersey Officials Presume Impossible Warming Rate to Justify Alarmist Impacts

In yesterday’s article here at Climate Realism, I pointed out some of the ridiculous claims in the “2020 New Jersey Scientific Report on Climate Change,” published by environmental bureaucrats at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and championed in the sock-puppet media. Examples included ridiculous claims that New Jersey will soon be too hot to grow blueberries (though they grow quite fine in Florida and throughout the South), New Jersey will soon be too hot for the American goldfinch (though they reside year-round as far south as Louisiana), and Atlantic City will soon flood “almost every day” although it sits 7 feet above sea level and sea level is rising at a pace of only 1.6 inches per decade. So, how do climate-alarmist bureaucrats justify such ridiculous claims? The answer is just as ridiculous as the claims themselves.

As The Press of Atlantic City notes in a fawning story about the claims, devoid of any critical analysis, the DEP claims “New Jersey’s annual temperature has increased 3.5 degrees since 1895 and ‘unprecedented warming’ is projected in the future, increasing temperatures 4.1 to 5.7 degrees by 2050.”

Do you see anything striking about the DEP’s presumed future temperatures? The DEP presumes there will be much more warming in just the next 30 years than in all of the past 125 years combined. Moreover, the DEP claims there will be between 2.3 and 3.2 degrees Celsius (4.1 and 5.7 F) of warming during the next 30 years. That equates to between 0.77 and 1.07 degrees C warming per decade, even though warming is currently averaging only 0.13 C per decade. In other words, the DEP assumes temperatures will immediately and without any future interruption warm at least six times faster than is occurring in the real world. That is a ridiculous assumption.

Similarly, the DEP report presumes, “By 2050, there is a 50% chance that sea-level rise will meet or exceed 1.4 feet and a 17% chance it will exceed 2.1 feet. Those levels increase to 3.3 and 5.1 feet by the end of the century (under a moderate emission scenario).” As noted above, and as shown in my article yesterday, sea level is rising at only 1.6 inches per decade and showing no signs of acceleration. The DEP, however, claims it is as likely as not that sea level will rise 1.4 feet during the next 30 years. That would require nearly six inches of sea-level rise per decade, or the pace of sea-level rise increasing immediately and without interruption more than four times its longstanding rate. Again, that is a ridiculous assumption.

Reports like the New Jersey DEP climate report are the reason why climate “skeptics” exist. Alarmists habitually make ridiculous, farcical, over-the-top, impossible predictions and claims, all while the media breathlessly report them as if they were scientific fact. People who care about science and truth feel compelled to say, ‘Yes, we may be causing some warming, but you alarmists make claims as if you were smoking meth.’ And that is the simple truth – we are likely causing some modest, beneficial warming, but the asserted “climate emergency” is about as real as LSD hallucinations.

SOURCE

Brisbane airport flying high with new runway

New runways worldwide are almost always publicly opposed by Greenies and Nimbys so this is a real achievement for Australia

Lengthy delays at Brisbane Airport will be a thing of the past after its new $1.1 billion parallel runway opened today.

Airport capacity will soar from 50 flight movements an hour to 110 – putting it on par with Sydney, Changi in Singapore and Hong Kong airports.

Brisbane Airport Corporation boss Gert-Jan de Graaff said the runway was more than a slab of very expensive asphalt.

“When I look at that 3.3km stretch of runway, I see hope,” he said. “Brisbane is in an ideal position to take advantage of all opportunities on the road to recovery from COVID.

“Today we are making history … and very soon, once again, we will be connecting the world.”

The $1.1 billion privately-funded project employed more than 3740 people during its construction phase.

After a turbulent start to the year as home carrier Virgin Australia’s finances plumetted due to coronavirus travel bans – flight VA78 had the honour of making the first departure.

Piloted by Captain John Ridd and First Officer Troy Parker, the plane flew to Cairns to highlight the connection to the state’s regions.

A crowd of about 200 people, including 10 local plane spotters who had won a prized place at the event, watched on as vintage planes spiralled through the sky in an aerobatics show to celebrate the World War II airfield’s rich history.

SOURCE

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

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

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12 July, 2020

Why is the EPA restricting ventilator sterilization chemical ethylene oxide when we need it the most in the middle of the pandemic?

The Environmental Protection Agency is making a mistake. They are moving forward with the process of further regulating something called ethylene oxide [EtO] upon a harshly contested assumption that the chemical’s emissions may contribute to cancer.

So what’s not to like?

It just so happens that the chemical ethylene oxide is the only thing which sufficiently sterilizes medical equipment like ventilators, so that they can be re-used in new patients. Yet, in the midst of the on-going Chinese-originated virus pandemic, the bureaucrats at the EPA are trying to subject vulnerable patients to unsafe medical devices due to them not being as clean as they should be.

Former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb put it like this in a March 19, 2019 statement, “Certain medical devices need to be sterilized to reduce the risk of those devices causing infections in patients from living microorganisms. Sterilization of medical devices is a well-established and scientifically-proven method of preventing harmful microorganisms from reproducing and transmitting infections. It’s critical to our health care system. And ethylene oxide is a commonly used method of medical device sterilization. It’s considered a safe and effective method that helps ensure the safety of medical devices and helps deliver quality patient care. Devices sterilized with ethylene oxide range from wound dressings to more specialized devices, like stents, as well as kits used in routine hospital procedures or surgeries that include multiple components made of different materials.”

And the science on whether this unique and important sterilizing agent is carcinogenic is hardly settled, as Dr. Gail Charnley, PhD, who serves as the Senior Toxicologist for HealthRisk Strategies plainly states, “There is no cancer threat from the tiny amounts of ethylene oxide released from these sterilization plants.”

Lucy Fraiser, a board-certified toxicologist and a Diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology agrees, “To be clear – there are no actual scientific data that show that these [EtO] exposure levels result in cancer.”

While different scientists might disagree about the relative health risk of the very low current exposure levels of [EtO] coming from sterilization plants, what is indisputable is that the loss of these plants is a medical disaster.

Already a sterilization plant was forced to temporarily close in the state of Illinois as the state EPA knee-jerked to the latest scare by imposing standards that could not be met without $10 million of upgrades to the facility.

This precedent has the president and CEO of the ECRI Institute Dr. Marcus Schabacker worried, “If there’s an ubiquitous ban on ethylene oxide today, we’re going to have a health crisis on our hands, because in very short time and order, sterile products won’t be available, and we don’t have an alternative to replace that today.”

And it should have each of us worried as experts like Gary Secola who is on the FDA’s General Hospital and Personal Use Panel of the Medical Devices Advisory Committee assert that “There are avenues that might lead to replace ethylene oxide, but the standards aren’t there yet. If we’re going to get rid of [EtO] it’s going to take 10-20 years.”

President Trump has made it clear to agency heads that he expects them to be very cautious in issuing regulations, and the EPA itself is still considering instituting a wise policy to make all the science they rely upon to make regulatory determinations transparent so that others can subject it to the scientific method of re-testing to insure that the results and conclusions are valid.

With the on-going scientific contention that the science behind the EPA’s push to regulate this extremely important sterilization tool, it would behoove them to release all the records and methodology for any studies which support this conclusion. The very idea of having a non-sterile ventilator or stent or heart valve put into a patient’s body because the EPA used junk science to come to a determination and then failed to adequately balance the damage done to human health by a ban against the risk of doing nothing is almost inconceivable in 2020, when Americans have been subjected to many or our worse health fears.

It is time for EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to slow his Agency’s roll. After all, it would seem logical for them to follow one of the first rules of medicine when it comes to this important tool for sterilizing medical devices which is to do no harm. It would be wise for the EPA to assume this posture when it comes to further regulation ethylene oxide.

SOURCE

Shameless alarmists spread climate change cancer horror story

Over the years I’ve become almost inured to the crazy claims various climate alarmists have made. They have tried to link almost every bad thing that happens in the world to climate change, from psychiatric disorders to violent crime, from the end of winter sports to reduced milk production, from hair loss to the loss of one’s sex drive. And no, in case you are wondering, I’m not making these examples up: you can find the articles yourselves by typing the terms into your favorite search engine.

None of these claims, nor any of the myriad other loony links alarmists have tried to establish between human fossil fuel use and bad outcomes, have any basis in facts or hard data. Now, adding insult to injury, an article in the journal CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, irresponsibly hyped by CNBC, is falsely claiming “[c]limate change has triggered more frequent weather disasters like hurricanes and wildfires, … lower[ing] cancer survival rate[s] and threaten[ing] prevention.”

This article shows, once again, alarmists truly have no shame when it comes to scaremongering and preying on the most vulnerable to increase their political power and funding.

The cancer researchers claim climate change is causing more frequent and severe hurricane and wildfire seasons, resulting in people being unable to receive lifesaving care such as operations, chemotherapy, and radiation treatments during and in the aftermath of hurricanes and wildfires.

According to the paper, CNBC writes, “Extreme weather disasters also lower cancer survival rates. One study shows that cancer patients were 19 percent more likely to die when hurricane declarations were made during their therapy because of treatment interruptions compared with patients who had regular access to care.

“‘For patients with cancer, the effects of hurricanes on access to cancer care can mean the difference between life and death,’ the authors wrote,” CNBC reports.

Contrary to these scary claims, human-induced climate change cannot be causing increased mortality from cancer, because data show no evidence hurricanes or wildfires are becoming more severe or frequent.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) finds no evidence of any increase in the frequency or severity of hurricanes as Earth has modestly warmed, with the IPCC’s 2018 Interim Report stating there is “only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.”

As Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes points out, hurricane strikes on the United States are at an all-time low, with America recently experiencing more than a decade (2005 through 2017) without a major hurricane (Category 3 or higher) striking the United States—the longest such period in recorded history. The United States also recently experienced the fewest hurricane strikes in any eight-year period (2009 through 2017) in recorded history.

Nor are recent wildfire seasons more severe or affecting larger areas than the United States has historically experienced. Drought is the among the most important factors contributing to wildfires, and Climate at a Glance: Drought reports the United States is undergoing its longest period in recorded history without at least 40 percent of the country experiencing “very dry” conditions. Peak droughts in 1978, 1954, 1930, and 1900 were much larger than what the United States has experienced in the 21st century and in the late 20th century. Indeed, in 2017 and 2019, the United States registered its smallest percentage of land area in drought in recorded history.

The most recent data from the National Integrated Drought Information System shows only 0.39 percent of the country is experiencing extreme drought and 76 percent of the country is not experiencing drought or even below-average rainfall at present. In addition, the IPCC reports with “high confidence” precipitation over mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere (including the United States) has increased during the past 70 years, and the IPCC has “low confidence” about any negative trends globally.

Since drought conditions are low, and drought is the single biggest factor behind wildfires, it should come as no surprise to learn, contra the cancer paper’s assertions, wildfires have neither become more frequent nor larger in recent years. In the few regions that have experienced particularly severe wildfires, such as California and Australia, the root cause is government policies preventing proper land management in areas prone to wildfires.

Although there is limited evidence human fossil fuel use is driving dangerous climate change, there is copious evidence widespread fossil fuel use has saved lives by making modern cancer treatments and natural disaster response and recovery possible.

Fossil fuels are the bedrock of modern medicine, which has reduced mortality from cancer and increased lifespans. Contemporary health care, including cancer treatments, depends on sterile plastics made from fossil fuels, such as IV drip bags and tubing, medical machinery, electronics casings, and syringes.

Hospitals, ambulances, operating rooms, emergency rooms, and clinics cannot function without coal, natural gas, and oil. Medical refrigeration units, CT scanning machines, MRIs, X-rays, laser scalpels, ventilators, incubators, and even lights require reliable electric power, which fossil fuels provide more affordably and dependably than alternative sources.

In fact, every hurricane or wildfire season demonstrates the criticality of fossil fuels to humankind’s responses to the vagaries of nature. No industry does more than the fossil fuel industry to help hurricane- and wildfire-stricken areas recover. Fossil fuels power the boats, helicopters, and other modes of transportation the Coast Guard, fire departments, military, and police use to evacuate people from flood and wildfire zones. Fossil fuels power the fire trucks used to fight wildfires, and the airplanes that deliver “smoke jumpers” and flame retardant to wildfire sites inaccessible to vehicles.

Fossil fuels also power the eighteen-wheelers that deliver water, food, blankets, and other relief supplies, the ambulances carrying those hurt during storms and wildfires or needing transport from medical facilities and nursing homes damaged or left without power by natural disasters. Fossil fuels also power the utility vehicles sent to get the power back on. The list goes on.

When power lines go down during hurricanes and wildfires, it is backup generators powered by diesel, natural gas, or liquid propane that deliver electricity to apartment residents, hospital patients, people in nursing homes, and others. Gasoline-powered chainsaws cut apart the fallen trees blocking the roads, and diesel-powered trucks haul it off. Utility companies use diesel-powered cranes to reattach wires and get the power back on.

The plastics in cell phones, computers, and equipment keeping people connected and informed are made in part from, and were manufactured using, oil and natural gas. The silica necessary for microchips at the core of these technologies was mined by diesel-powered mining equipment. Fossil fuels power the advanced warning systems that give people time to evacuate or take shelter as hurricanes or tornadoes approach, the weather planes that literally fly through cyclones, and the 24/7 communications systems that enable meteorologists to report on hurricane and wildfire movements.

Obviously, natural disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires make it more difficult for people with cancer to get proper treatment, as is true for people suffering from other terrible diseases and maladies. But there is no evidence climate change is making extreme weather more common, so there is no basis to claim climate change is decreasing cancer survival rates or preventing proper treatment. Statements to the contrary are alarmist horror fiction lacking any basis in fact.

SOURCE

Tragic energy triple whammy

America’s energy supply just received three devastating blows.

A federal district court shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline and ordered it drained of oil.

The Supreme Court excluded the Keystone XL Pipeline from an otherwise positive decision that a number of pipeline projects be “fast tracked.”

Dominion Energy won a major court victory for its Atlantic Pipeline, then decided to scrap it anyway, deciding the delays and costs imposed by left-wing obstruction were just too much. Dominion’s stock promptly plunged 11.3%.

In recent years we have been favored by a long-awaited energy renaissance, with American energy independence and security achieved at last. It is a tragedy of astounding proportions that tremendously well-financed efforts are continually underway nationwide to obstruct, delay, and in effect ruin America’s energy infrastructure.

Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette issued a hard-hitting a statement about the Dakota Access decision that could apply to all three: “It is disappointing that, once again, an energy infrastructure project that provides thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in economic revenue has been shut down by the well-funded environmental lobby, using our Nation’s court system to further their agenda. The Dakota Access Pipeline safely provides affordable and reliable American-produced crude oil across the Midwest, and has created approximately 10,000 jobs. In addition, the shutdown will eliminate millions of tax dollars paid by the pipeline each year that go towards schools, hospitals, and other community services in North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois.”

The far Left, of course, is jubilant. Greenpeace climate director Janet Redmans said, “Three dangerous pipelines delayed within 24 hours should serve as a clear warning to any companies hoping to double down on dirty fossil fuel projects. For more than a decade now, a powerful movement has been taking on reckless oil and gas pipelines and fighting to put Indigenous rights, a just economy, and our environment before oil company profits… It is past time to leave fossil fuels in the ground and begin a just transition to a Green New Deal and 100 percent renewable energy.”

Charming.

There is a new nihilism that stalks our land. Statues of civil rights leaders are being torn down, supposedly in the name of civil rights. Cries ring out to defund the police in communities most desperate for law and order. Clean, safe, efficient energy is blocked without regard to the hard fact that there is nothing available to replace it. Activists trumpet inefficient, intermittent wind and solar, ignorant to the fact that they are unable to meet our energy needs.

Wind and solar don’t replace pipelines. Trucks, trains and tankers do — albeit poorly.

Americans need to dig deep, fight back and defeat the Greens — before they leave us all freezing in the dark.

SOURCE

Australia: Nothing to fear but climate fearmongers

The politics of fear is usually ascribed to the populist right, and disapprovingly so. Yet what is the contemporary global warming rhetoric and advocacy of the green left if not the politics of fear?

One of the green left’s secular saints, Al Gore, even opened his book The Assault on Reason by declaring: “Fear is the most powerful enemy of reason.” This, from a bloke who rose skywards in a cherry picker in An Inconvenient Truth to highlight predicted carbon dioxide increases, and then showed animations of Florida, San Francisco, The Netherlands, Shanghai, Bangladesh and Manhattan being swamped by oceans “if” Greenland and Antarctica “broke up and melted” before he talked about “a hundred million or more” refugees fleeing these rising oceans.

An assault on reason, indeed. Whether fear is the main driver, or ideology, or plain delusion, Gore was right to observe that rational debates are in short supply in the political arena.

Take the response of Greens leader Adam Bandt to the Eden-Monaro by-election. “The by-election did send a clear message to the government about acting on the climate crisis,” Bandt said this week on Sky News.

Given the Greens vote dropped by a third (from almost 9 per cent to less than 6 per cent) and Labor’s vote fell more than 3 per cent, while the Liberal vote climbed with the Coalition’s two-party-preferred share, you might think he meant that the result provided a ringing endorsement of current policies. But no; Bandt reckoned this result was a call for more climate action.

“Labor held on in part because of Greens preferences, and that should send also a very clear message to Labor now that they’ve won this seat off the back of people who want to see action on climate change,” he said. “As Labor starts to formulate its policies going to the next election it has to have action on climate front and centre.”

Oh dear. Even in the village of Cobargo, where a handful of locals excited the media and the left by being rude to the Prime Minister in the aftermath of the bushfires, the Liberal vote grew 6 per cent and the Greens vote fell by more than 3 per cent.

The Greens bushfire climate scare did not take hold even in Cobargo. So, this party of the environment does not seem to thrive outside of its natural habitat of treeless, congested, mains-powered, inner-city electorates.

In Eden-Monaro, ravaged by drought first, then fire, the climate fear campaign did not work. Catastrophist alarmism and pseudoscientific fear mongering was rejected by voters — once more — and yet the Greens will continue to push Labor further down this furtive and futile path.

Apart from being politically self-defeating for the Labor Party, and distracting and divisively ghoulish for the nation, the premeditated use of last summer’s bushfires to advance a climate policy agenda has been dumb and misleading. You cannot fool mainstream Australians who have grown up with the bushfire threat, seen bushfire disasters and understand the interaction of fuel loads, drought and the consequences of building houses close to bushland.

When smoke blanked our cities from last spring, university students and other agitators became putty in the hands of former fire chiefs and other climate activists who pre-positioned, at the far end of a drought, to ensure their case was amplified by any bushfires that happened along. It was a cynical sure bet, and I said so at the time.

None of this diminishes the trauma of the summer, the worst on record in NSW. It is simply and tragically true that the nation has seen worse, numerous times, and as I have documented through contemporaneous records, the timing and extent of the bushfires were not out of character with events recorded 70 years ago and more.

Protesters were clambering in Sydney in early December, long before the worst of the fires, demanding “climate justice” and a “green new deal”. Scott Morrison would have been better advised to holiday at home but the attacks on him for being in Hawaii, and the silly attempts to make bushfire management a prime ministerial issue, were driven by maniacal climate activism that was lapped up by extremists and the media but dismissed by most everyone else.

The Eden-Monaro test, along with the previous four federal elections, cements an inspiring resistance by mainstream voters to global warming hyperbole. The electorate has made it clear that it prefers sensible and cautious climate action over costly and risky gestures, but the progressive Left ignores the lessons.

This is a global phenomenon. Take the US presidential election this year, where the Democrats tasked policy committees to meld moderate Joe Biden policies with ideas that might hold sway with the radical leftists who were energised by Bernie Sanders.

This process threw up a climate policy paper this week and it opened with the usual appeal to primordial fear. “Climate change is a global emergency,” it said. “We have no time to waste in taking action to protect Americans’ lives.”

It went on to cite “record-breaking storms, devastating wildfires, and historic floods” as well as dams failing “catastrophically” and neighbourhoods “all but wiped off the map” while communities suffered “tens of billions of dollars” in losses and crops “drowned” — and all of this was supposed to have happened in the past four years under Donald Trump. “Thousands of Americans have died,” thundered the Democrat policy document. “And President Trump still callously and wilfully denies the science that explains why so many are suffering.”

This is junk politics and junk science. It is the blatant politics of fear that has Greta Thunberg and others, including Biden, talking about tipping points and the urgency of the moment.

In his latest climate video, the Democrat presidential candidate refers to the “climate disaster facing the nation and our world” as he goes on to talk about “more severe storms and droughts, rising sea levels and warming temperatures shrinking snow cover and ice sheets”. It is all accompanied by alarming pictures, graphics and music.

“It’s already happening,” says Biden, “and science tells us that how we act, or fail to act, in the next 12 years will determine the very liveability of our planet.” That is not a bad pitch, is it? Vote for me because if you vote for the other guy, life on earth is finished.

You could write a book about the prevalence of this toxic climate alarmism — and Michael Shellenberger just has — but let me provide at least one Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reference for context on climate change and natural disasters. It published a report on this topic in 2012.

“Increasing exposure of people and economic assets has been the major cause of long-term increases in economic losses from weather and climate-related disasters,” the IPCC found. “Long-term trends in economic disaster losses adjusted for wealth and population increases have not been attributed to climate change, but a role for climate change has not been excluded.”

In other words, there is nothing to see here. Yet.

So, while warming temperatures could increase the length of Australia’s fire season, in some parts of the country, and therefore increase the incidence of bad fire weather, this is a minor and uncertain factor in the bushfire debate. What is certain is that we have always faced catastrophic fire conditions and always will — and the things we can control are fuel loads and what we do to ensure housing and other built assets are separated or protected from fire risks.

We know social media, activists and Greens preference deals will keep pushing Labor towards more extreme and costly climate policies, ignoring both the electoral lessons of the past and the sensible voices in science and economics. For those who value Labor as a movement for mainstream families, and a party of government, that is a most frightening reality.

SOURCE

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

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

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

10 July, 2020

Top Scientists Say Modern Climate Change Is ‘Natural Variability’

A commentary titled “‘Just don’t panic – also about climate change’” by Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt appearing at German site achgut.com tells us there’s no need for panic with respect to climate change, as leading scientists dial back earlier doomsday projections.

No warming until 2050

Vahrenholt claims a negative Atlantic oscillation is ahead of us and the expected second weak solar cycle in succession will reduce anthropogenic warming in the next 15-30 years.

He cites a recent publication by Judith Curry, who sees a pause in the temperature rise until 2050 as the most likely scenario.

Vahrenholt and Curry are not alone when it comes to believing natural-variability-watered-down warming is in the works.

Also, IPCC heavyweight Jochem Marotzke from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg takes a similar stand in a publication in the Environmental Research Letters.

In the paper, Marotzke concludes that all locations examined show “a cooling trend or lack of warming trend” and that there is “no warming due to natural cooling effects” and that in calculations up to 2049.

The researchers find “a large part of the earth will not warm up because of internal variability.”

Distancing from alarmists Schellnhuber, Rahmstorf

And recently The Max Planck Institute Director Marotzke said in an interview with Andreas Frey of the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung (FAZ) that there was no need to panic, thus clearly splitting from the doomsday scenarios put out by his alarmist colleagues Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber and Stefan Rahmstorf.

In the FAZ interview, Marotzke also said there was no need to worry that the port city of Hamburg would be flooded in 2100: “Hamburg will not be threatened, that is totally clear.”

Areas not going to be wiped out

Marotzke then told the FAZ that the fears that children have today for the future are not absolutely well-founded, and that entire areas are not going to be wiped out, as often suggested by alarmists.

Sensational French models

When asked why the French issued a press release warning of worse than expected warming, Marotzke said:

“We thought, my God, what are you doing? Because it is very unlikely that the true climate is as sensitive as shown in the new models.”

When asked by the FAZ why the French had put out such dramatic numbers, Marotzke said: “I don’t know,” adding that the climate models are highly complex. “Too many calculation steps overlap, and sometimes we ourselves are amazed at what we do not understand.”

Speaking up against alarmist models

Vahrenholt summarizes the growing doubt by scientists such as Curry and Marotzke over the use of alarmist models:

One gets the impression someone is speaking out against the alarmist use of models. Perhaps Jochem Marotzke is aware that with the warming coming to an end in the next 30 years, model alarmists (Schellnhuber: “We only have 10 years left“) will have unpleasant questions to answer.

When society realizes that the climate modelers have exaggerated in order to make a political difference, we will know who misled the politicians.”

SOURCE

California Regulators Approve Diesel Power Plan to Avert Wildfire Blackouts

California regulators approved a plan for Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) to spend up to $170 million on diesel-powered generators to keep electricity flowing during anticipated preemptive blackouts in the 2020 wildfire season.

The plan, approved by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) on June 11, allows PG&E to use about 450 megawatts of diesel-powered electricity to power homes, businesses, medical facilities, and other essential places in the event of a wildfire.

CPUC determined PG&E’s use of diesel generators for backup power was the option most likely to avoid a repeat of the electric power blackouts used by PG&E in 2018 and 2019 to reduce the threat of wildfires.

Fossil Fuel Power Needed

PG&E plans to install generators at 63 locations in fire-prone counties, to be activated during dangerous wildfire weather when transformers are turned off to prevent them from sparking wildfires. The power company also plans to install temporary electric microgrids, which operate independently of the main power grid, to provide electricity to streetlights, hospitals, police stations, and stores.

“Our specific objective with the development of temporary microgrids is to provide electricity to resources such as medical facilities and pharmacies, police and fire stations, gas stations, banks, markets, and other shared community services when weather conditions make it unsafe to operate the grid,” Debbie Powell, vice president of PG&E’s Asset & Risk Management, Community Wildfire Safety Program said in a statement.

Clean-Energy Opposition

Dozens of residents and members of environmental groups argued against PG&E’s proposals in a virtual hearing held by CPUC. Opponents said the plan would undermine California’s goal of ending the use of fossil fuels by 2045 and the use of the diesel generators would produce unwanted noise and air pollution in local communities.

“We should not be using the same technologies which got us into this mess and causing these wildfires,” Harlow Pittinger of Sunrise Movement told Courthouse News.

PG&E said it considered non-fossil fuel power generation options but concluded they would be impractical to implement in time to provide power during this year’s wildfire season. CPUC agreed with PG&E’s assessment.

To reduce emissions, the company said its mobile generators can use some amount of vegetable oil-based fuel. PG&E is working with communities to develop microgrids powered by renewable power sources located in the areas where power is needed on an emergency basis in future years to replace the fossil fuel dependent microgrids being brought online this year.

CPUC approved PG&E’s plan for 2020, determining the choice was between Californians suffering through potential preventable blackouts during this fire season, as they have in recent years when power was shut down and no backup was available, or the use of fossil fuel powered generators.

CPUC directed PG&E to find cleaner alternatives to use after 2020.

SOURCE

Obama Judges Undermine Pipelines: A ‘Sneak Peek Of The Biden Energy Plan’

The nation may be awash in oil and natural gas, but U.S. pipelines are running on fumes after three high-profile conduits ran aground in 24 hours, the victims of Obama-appointed judges and regulatory uncertainty under the possibility of a climate-woke Biden presidency.

In this week’s triple whammy, a federal judge ordered the 3-year-old Dakota Access Pipeline to empty pending an environmental review. The Keystone XL pipeline, still under construction, was further delayed after the Supreme Court upheld a lower-court order blocking a permit.

Despite winning a Supreme Court case last month, Dominion Energy and Duke Energy stunned the industry by abandoning after six years the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline, citing the “increasing legal uncertainty that overhangs large-scale energy and industrial infrastructure development in the United States.”

Environmental activists gushed over the historic three-fer, raising the possibility that the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines could be erased next year by a Biden administration, while Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette blasted the “well-funded obstructionist environmental lobby” for killing the Atlantic Coast project.

The decisions were “more reminders that activist judges and special interest litigants are determining the fate of our national and energy security,” Mr. Brouillette said. “These developments should be deeply concerning for every American at every socio-economic level.”

The rulings show that the U.S. pipeline infrastructure has become the soft target for environmental groups seeking to bring down the fossil fuel industry and replace it with renewable energy in the name of fighting climate change.

“To avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis, our companies must transition away from the use of fossil fuels,” said Lila Holzman, energy program manager of As You Sow. “Building more gas infrastructure now without a clear justification is a recipe for stranded assets.”

The Sierra Club hailed the cancellation of the $8 billion Atlantic Coast project as a “monumental, historic victory and will have far-reaching implications,” a “watershed moment in the fight for climate action” and “another indicator of the end of fossil fuels.”

Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Texas Republican, called that view ironic, given that the nation leads the world in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which fell by 12% from 2005 to 2017 thanks largely to the increased use of natural gas instead of coal in electricity generation.

“FACT: Natural gas is responsible for majority of emissions reduction over the last 15 years,” tweeted Mr. Crenshaw. “When leftist radicals stop a natural gas pipeline — the safest way to transport natural gas — you have to wonder if they really care about the environment.”

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, has vowed that if he wins, he will pull the plug on the Keystone XL pipeline’s U.S. leg, which would run shale oil from Canada to Nebraska.

Bill McKibben, the founder of the climate change group 350.org, tweeted that “if Biden wins it’s all over” for the Keystone XL.

“Any investor thinking of putting cash into fossil fuel infrastructure projects should be warned they’re tossing their money away,” Mr. McKibben tweeted.

Heartland Institute President James Taylor said Tuesday that “America just got a sneak peek of the Joe Biden energy plan: ‘Better Green than Employed.’”

“Back in December, Biden said he would be willing to sacrifice oil and gas jobs for his green economy,” Mr. Taylor said. “Now, cancellation of the Atlantic Coast pipeline plan cancels 17,000 jobs and $2.7 billion in economic activity at a time when the American economy and American workers desperately need some good news.”

Stephen Moore, founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, called the pipeline cancellation “more evidence that if Biden wins in November our domestic energy industry will be in rubbles and Saudi Arabia and Russia will be the big winners.”

The Keystone XL was hamstrung in April when U.S. District Court Chief Judge Brian Morris, an Obama appointee, canceled the so-called Nationwide Permit 12 allowing work across waterways.

The Supreme Court on Monday allowed other pipeline projects to proceed while environmental reviews are conducted, but not Keystone XL.

TC Energy in Alberta, Canada, said the company remains committed to the Keystone XL, but will “continue to evaluate our 2020 U.S. scope. In Canada, our work in 2020 remains unchanged.”

Environmentalists said the Dakota Access ruling, which was handed down by U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to prepare an environmental impact statement, which could take years.

“The shutdown will remain in place pending completion of a full environmental review, which normally takes several years, and the issuance of new permits,” said Earthjustice, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes. “It may be up to a new administration to make final permitting decisions.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Brouillette described the decision as a loss for the economies of North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois.

The 1,172-mile pipeline, which went online in June 2017, carries oil from North Dakota’s Bakken field to oil terminals in Illinois but was challenged by the tribes over fears about environmental damage. The pipeline runs a half-mile from the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota.

SOURCE

New Study Shows Oceans At Their Deepest In 250 Million Years

Sea-level rise would be a complicated topic even if it were not politicized. People often talk as though the seabed were like a bathtub, rigid and immobile, into which water either pours or does not.

But it’s not; it rises and falls in complex local patterns, it erodes and accumulates, it shifts about. And it seems to be drifting downward if you get our drift.

This is continental because a new study says thanks to landmasses moving away from one another the seas are about 250 meters deeper than they were in the heyday of the dinosaurs and the seabeds are older than they’ve ever been.

The effect on ocean currents, heat absorption, and climate is… unclear.

It’s strange to realize that, deep as the seas are, they’re not very deep, in the sense that you wouldn’t think a 2.3-mile car ride very far.

You may have heard that if the Earth were the size of a billiard ball it would be smoother, a very cool factoid lacking just one key quality: accuracy.

Actually the Earth’s surface is rough, like sandpaper. But there is an important truth hidden in that urban legend: The mighty mountains and ocean depths that stir our souls are as grains of sand to the Earth.

If our planet were the size of a billiard ball (namely 5.715 cm give or take .127 mm), Mt. Everest would be 0.04 millimeters high, which would certainly simplify one item on the old bucket list.

And the awesome Marianas Trench would be barely bigger, at 0.45 mm. (Don’t ask how big you’d be unless you fancy a session in the Total Perspective Vortex.)

So yes, even the Marianas Trench is nothing to the planet, despite the intricate way life depends not just on oceans but ocean tides.

As to the importance of ocean depth to the biosphere, well, it’s hard to tell, isn’t it?

Back when Allosaurus roamed the Earth, there were very high levels of CO2 and it was warmer (which are not causally related) and despite Al Gore’s blather about a “nature hike through the Book of Revelation” life was doing pretty well… except for the stuff that blundered into the path of Allosaurus.

But how much of the warmth, and biological abundance, is related to the oceans being relatively shallower around the slowly separating Laurasia and Gondwana? Did it contribute to the Jurassic being lusher than the Triassic? And if so how? It’s very complicated.

It’s even hard to know what exactly we’re trying to measure when it comes to “sea-level rise” given that some places, including study author Krister Karlsen’s native Norway, have risen hundreds of meters since the ice last retreated and are still rising a few millimeters a year in a rebound from the glaciers’ crushing mass.

But we have bigger fish to fry here, possibly caught at greater depths.

Are deeper oceans bad for life? Are the currents different? How does this depth, and capacity to store more water, affect other processes including climate?

Notwithstanding the science being settled, no one knows.

But over the last 2.5 million years the planet has seen some very harsh conditions for life, with prolonged glaciations and desertification proving that cold is bad and warmth is good. Does it also prove deep oceans are bad for life?

If so, there’s hope on the horizon. Regrettably, it’s the geological horizon. According to this study, continental drift has moved the various bits of land that resulted when Pangaea broke up as far apart as they can get, and the farther apart they are the older and deeper the seabed gets.

Now they should start moving back together again to form a new supercontinent for which the boring name Pangaea Proxima has been proposed. Before Pangaea, there was Rodinia c. a billion years ago and “earlier yet, the supercontinent Nuna might have existed more than 1.5 billion years ago.”

Those names sure beat calling them Pangaea I, II and III or Pangaea Praevia or some dumb thing. But focus on the “might have” there. Don’t we know?

Well, it turns out we don’t. In fact, the article says, “whether this cycle is related to a sea-level supercycle remains uncertain. ‘It’s hard to say anything about the regularity of such a possible cycle,’ says Karlsen.”

With all this uncertainty, it’s important to hang on to the key point: Sea levels are rising because of bad people doing bad things and it will be bad for the good things.

For instance, we noted last week that after years of warnings that the oceans cannot absorb the man-made CO2 that therefore hangs around in the air cooking the planet and it’s a catastrophe, we were suddenly told the oceans were absorbing too much man-made CO2 and it’s a catastrophe.

But this week we’re again told they can’t absorb enough of it, at least in the western Arctic Ocean and, you’ll never guess, it’s a catastrophe.

That’s always the punchline, which at least saves you the trouble of listening carefully to the joke.

Thus, “thresholds of mangrove survival under rapid sea-level rise” warns us that mangroves cannot cope with the supposed recent doubling in sea-level rise although “The response of mangroves to high rates of relative sea-level rise (RSLR) is poorly understood.”

In fact, NASA is boasting that this November, it will launch the best “state-of-the-art” satellite ever to “collect the most accurate data yet on sea level—a key indicator of how Earth’s warming climate is affecting the oceans, weather, and coastlines.”

Not “whether”, you’ll notice. They already made the finding. Now they just need to corral suitable data.

They’re quite up-front about it. NASA boasts that: “These measurements are important because the oceans and atmosphere are tightly connected. ‘We’re changing our climate, and the clearest signal of that is the rising oceans,’ said Josh Willis, the mission’s project scientist at JPL. ‘More than 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is going into the ocean.’ That heat causes seawater to expand, accounting for about one-third of the global average of modern-day sea-level rise. Meltwater from glaciers and ice sheets account for the rest. ‘For climate science, what we need to know is not just sea level today, but sea level compared to 20 years ago. We need long records to do climate science,’ said Willis.”

Um if you don’t even know how sea level today compares to 20 years ago, let alone 2,000 or 2 million or 200 million, how do you already know that the clearest signal that “we” are changing our climate is rising oceans, and that about a third is expanding seawater and two-thirds is meltwater? Verdict first, huh?

SOURCE

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9 July, 2020

Objective Facts Falsify Laughable New Jersey Climate Report

The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) unveiled an alarming climate report last week that is so outrageous that climate realists should print copies and use it to win over alarmists. The media, nevertheless, are trumpeting without scrutiny the report’s “findings,” and even adding to the alarm. But don’t panic, New Jersey will be just fine. Let’s debunk some of the report’s claims.

Among the top Google News search results today for “climate change” is an article by The Press of Atlantic City. The article, titled “State climate change report offers sobering predictions for South Jersey,” provides a useful summary of the DEP report’s claims. According to the opening paragraph of the Press article, “Imagine flooding in Atlantic City almost every day of the year, blueberries and cranberries no longer grown in the state, and birds like the American goldfinch, the state bird, at risk because of changes in the climate.”

Let’s start with blueberries. The DEP report, which was required under an executive order signed by New Jersey’s Democratic governor, and the report’s fawning, uncritical media coverage claim that New Jersey will soon become too hot to grow blueberries. Nevertheless, three of the top 10 states for blueberry production are Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi. Indeed, Florida hosts a large number of blueberry festivals every year during April, May, and June to celebrate the local blueberry harvest. Yet, the alarmist DEP report and the fawning media coverage claim New Jersey will soon become hotter than present-day Tampa, Florida, which hosts many of the local blueberry festivals.

To show how preposterous the blueberry claim is, Atlantic City, New Jersey has an average high temperature of 64 degrees, and an average low of 45 degrees. Tampa, Florida, where blueberries grow quite well, is 19 degrees hotter, with an average high temperature of 82 degrees and an average low of 65 degrees. The claim that New Jersey will soon become so hot that blueberries “will no longer be grown in the state” is clearly a preposterous lie.

Let’s move on to New Jersey’s state bird, the American goldfinch. As shown here, the American goldfinch lives year-round as far south as Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana. It is also a common winter resident in Florida. Yet, New Jersey bureaucrats and their media sock-puppets claim it will soon become too hot in New Jersey for the goldfinch. Even the most alarmist of alarmists do not claim New Jersey will become hotter than Louisiana and Florida. The claim that global warming will soon drive goldfinches from New Jersey is also clearly a preposterous lie.

Finally, let’s examine sea level and Atlantic City flooding. Atlantic City sits at an elevation of 7 feet. During the past 100-plus years, sea level at Atlantic City has been rising at a steady pace of approximately 4.12 millimeters per year, or 1.6 inches per decade. There has been no recent increase in the pace of sea level rise. Atlantic City has dealt with the slow, steady sea-level rise quite well utilizing 20th century technologies. Sand dunes and sea walls protect Atlantic City and cities all over the world from sea level rise and floods. Despite this, New Jersey bureaucrats claim that, even with the advantages of 21st century technologies, a city that sits at 7 feet above sea level will see flooding “almost every day of the year” if it experiences just a few more inches of sea level rise? That is simply ridiculous.

So, the media tee up three key “findings” in the New Jersey DEP climate report, while objective science shoes each finding is an alarmist lie.

Time to cancel the New Jersey climate crisis.

SOURCE

Chancellor set to announce £3bn green investment package

Rishi Sunak is to announce a £3bn package of green investment to decarbonise public buildings and cut emissions from Britain’s poorly insulated homes as part of the government’s Covid-19 economic recovery plan.

The chancellor will seek to use Wednesday’s summer statement on the economy to fend off criticism that his proposals lack ambition by insisting that he can “kick start” an environment-friendly revival through the creation of thousands of green jobs in the construction industry.

Sunak will say that the extra money for decarbonising houses, schools, hospitals, prisons and military bases will help the UK meet its target of being a carbon net zero economy by 2050, and is likely to say that further green spending will be announced later in the year.

Opposition parties and environmental groups said, however, that the green investment pledge was inadequate to meet the challenge posed by global heating.

Rosie Rogers, Greenpeace UK’s head of green recovery, said: “Surely this is just a down payment? The German government’s pumping a whopping £36bn into climate change-cutting, economy-boosting measures and France is throwing £13.5bn at tackling the climate emergency. £3bn isn’t playing in the same league.”

The Treasury said the summer statement was about “securing the recovery” and would be followed by two bigger events – a spending round and a budget – in the autumn. Sunak’s plan was on top of the £5bn of infrastructure spending announced by Boris Johnson last week.

Of the £3bn, the chancellor will earmark £1bn to improve the insulation and energy efficiency of public buildings, and to invest in green heating technology.

Sunak will also announce £50m to pilot new approaches to retrofitting social housing at scale to make them greener, through measures like heat pumps, insulation and double glazing, which the Treasury said would support landlords to improve the least energy efficient social rented homes in England.

Warmer homes for social tenants could lower annual energy bills by £200 a year for some of the poorest households, the government estimates. The UK’s homes are the draughtiest in Europe, accounting for about a fifth of the UK’s carbon emissions, but sporadic attempts at insulation programmes by governments over the last two decades have failed to make much progress.

With the focus of the spending statement on jobs, it is thought most of the remaining £2bn will be spent on creating “green” employment opportunities for construction workers. The Conservative manifesto at the 2019 election promised to invest £9.2bn on improving energy efficiency in homes, schools and hospitals, saying that this, if done at sufficient speed, would create around 100,000 jobs.

“The government remains committed to decarbonising buildings to keep us on track to reach net zero emissions by 2050,” a treasury spokesperson said. “The funding expected to be announced this week represents a significant and accelerated down payment on decarbonising buildings, to help stimulate the economic recovery and create green jobs. Allocations for future funding will be determined in due course.”

Rogers added: “Of course this money is better than nothing, but it doesn’t measure up to the economic and environmental crises. It’s not enough to create the hundreds of thousands of new green jobs that are needed. It’s not enough to insulate all of the homes and buildings that need to be kept warm and more energy efficient. It’s not enough to ‘build back greener’, and it’s certainly not enough to put us on track to tackle the catastrophic impacts of the climate emergency.”

Rain Newton-Smith, chief economist at business group the CBI, said: “Investment in green jobs and technology must be at the centre of our efforts to revive the economy.

“This £3bn package of measures will undoubtably fast-forward progress towards net-zero. With the government’s own manifesto promising £9.2bn on energy efficiency alone, we look forward to seeing the full details on delivery of its ambition to build back greener.

SOURCE

Reporting Renewable Energy Risks

Joe Biden has drifted far to the left and made it clear that, if elected president, he would restrict or ban fracking, pipelines, federal onshore and offshore drilling, and use of oil, coal and even natural gas. He’s selected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as his climate and energy advisor and is expected to choose an equally “progressive” woman of color as his running mate (and president-in-reality).

He may also employ federal financial regulations to slow or strangle fossil fuel companies’ access to low-cost capital, further preventing them from producing oil, gas and coal. His official climate plan promises to require “public companies to disclose climate risks and the greenhouse gas emissions in their operations and supply chains.” By compelling them to present a litany of climate and weather risks supposedly caused or worsened by fossil fuel emissions, the rules could sharply reduce lender and investor interest in those fuels and hasten the transition to wind, solar, battery and biofuel technologies.

Those risks exist primarily in highly unlikely worst-case scenarios generated by computer models that reflect claims that manmade carbon dioxide has replaced the sun and other powerful natural forces that have always driven Earth’s climate (including multiple ice ages) and extreme weather. Actual data are often“homogenized” or otherwise manipulated to make the models appear more accurate than they are.

Models consistently predict average global temperatures0.5 degrees C (0.9 F) higher than measured. The12-year absence of Category 3-5US-landfalling hurricanes is consistently ignored, as are the absence of any increase in tropical cyclones, the unprecedented absence of any violent tornadoes in 2018 – and the fact that violent twisters were far fewer during the last 35 years than during the 35 years before that.

However, pressure group mob politics and the refusal of climate alarmists to discuss model failures and contradictory scientific evidence would likely make these realities irrelevant in a Biden administration. That would have devastating consequences for a US economy struggling to recover from Covid-19 and compete in a world where Asian, African and other countries are not going to stop using fossil fuels to improve living standards, while they mine the raw materials and manufacture the wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and biofuel equipment the USA would have to import under a Green New Deal (since no mining and virtually no manufacturing would be permitted or possible under Biden era regulations).

Replacing coal, gas and nuclear electricity, internal combustion vehicles, gas for home heating, and coal and gas for factories – and using batteries as backup power for seven windless, sunless days – would require some 8.5 billion megawatts. Generating that much electricity would require some 75 billion solar panels ... or 4.2 million 1.8-MW onshore wind turbines ... or 320,00010-MW offshore wind turbines...or a combination of those technologies – plus some3.5 billion100-kWh batteries ... hundreds of new transmission lines ... and mining and manufacturing on scales far beyond anything the world has ever seen.

That is not clean, green, renewable energy. It is ecologically destructive and completely unsustainable – financially, ecologically and politically. That means any company, community, bank, investor or pension fund venturing into “renewable energy” technologies would be taking enormous risks.

Once citizens, voters and investors begin to grasp (a) the quicksand foundations under alarmist climate models and forecasts; (b) the fact that African, Asian and even some European countries will only increase their fossil fuel use for decades to come; (c) the hundreds of millions of acres of US scenic and wildlife habitat lands that would be covered by turbines, panels, batteries, biofuel crops, power lines and forests clear cut to supply biofuel power plants; and (d) the bird, bat and other animal species that would disappear under this onslaught – they will rebel. Renewable energy markets will be pummeled repeatedly.

Public backlash will intensify from growing outrage over child labor, near-slave labor, and minimal to nonexistent worker health and safety, pollution control and environmental reclamation regulations in foreign countries where materials are mined and “renewable” energy technologies manufactured. As the shift to GND energy systems brings increasing reliance on Chinese mining and manufacturing, sends electricity rates skyrocketing, kills millions of American jobs and causes US living standards to plummet, any remaining support for wind, solar and other “renewable” technologies will plummet or evaporate.

Pension funds and publicly owned companies should therefore be compelled to disclose the risks to their operations, supply chains, “renewable energy portfolio” mandates, subsidies, feed-in tariffs, profits, employees, valuation and very existence from embarking on or investing in renewable energy technologies or facilities. They should be compelled to fully analyze and report on every aspect of these risks.

The White House, Treasury Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Reserve, Committee on Financial Stability, Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation and other relevant agencies should immediately require that publicly owned companies, corporate retirement plans and public pension funds evaluate and disclose at least the following fundamental aspects of “renewable” operations:

* How many wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, biofuel plants and miles of transmission lines will be required under various GND plans? Where? Whose scenic and wildlife areas will be impacted?

* How will rural and coastal communities react to being made energy colonies for major cities?

* How much concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements and other materials will be needed for every project – and cumulatively? Where exactly will they come from?

* How many tons of overburden and ore will be removed and processed for every ton of metals and minerals? How many injuries and deaths will occur in the mines, processing plants and factories?

* What per-project and cumulative fossil fuel use, CO2 and pollution emissions, land use impacts, water demands, family and community dislocations, and other impacts will result? Where will they occur?

* What wages will be paid? How much child labor will be involved? What labor, workplace safety, pollution control and other laws, regulations, standards and practices will apply in each country?

* What human cancer and other disease incidents and deaths are likely? How many wildlife habitats will be destroyed? How many birds, bats and other wildlife displaced, killed or driven to extinction?

* For ethanol and biodiesel, how much acreage, water, fertilizer, pesticides and fossil fuels will be required? For power plant biofuel, how many forests will be cut, and how long they will take to regrow?

* What “responsible sourcing” laws apply for these materials, to ensure that all materials are obtained in compliance with US wage, child labor and environmental laws – and how much will they raise costs?

* How will home, business, hospital, defense, factory, grid and other systems be protected against hacking and power disruptions caused by agents of overseas wind, solar, battery and grid manufacturers?

* What costs and materials will be required to convert existing home and commercial heating systems to all-electricity, upgrade electrical grids and systems for rapid electric vehicle charging, and address the intermittent, unpredictable, weather-dependent realities of Green New Deal energy sources?

* What price increases per kWh per annum will families, businesses, offices, farms, factories, hospitals, schools and other consumers face, as state and national electrical systems are converted to GND sources?

* How often and severely will industrial wind and solar installations (and household solar panels linked to the grid) cause uncontrolled surges and power interruptions? With what economic and health impacts?

* How many power interruptions will occur every year, how will they hurt families, factories and other users – and what will be the cumulative economic and productivity damage from those power outages?

* To what extent will policies, laws, regulations, court decisions, and citizen opposition, protests, legal actions and sabotage delay or block wind, solar, biofuel, battery, mining and transmission projects?

* How many solar panels, wind turbine blades, batteries and other components (numbers, tons and cubic feet) will have to be disposed of every year? How much landfill space and incineration will be required?

These issues illustrate the high risks associated with Green New Deal energy programs. They underscore why it is essential for lenders, investment companies, pension funds, manufacturers, utility companies and other industries to analyze, disclose and report renewable energy risks – and why significant penalties should be assessed for failing to do so or falsifying any pertinent information.

SOURCE

Spotting the Spotted Owl

When the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of the dusky gopher frog in 2018, it attracted press coverage around the world, because of two details that fascinated observers everywhere. One was the frog itself, a cute little thing smaller than the palm of your hand. Second, the court’s ruling – in an era noted for divisive party-line splits – was unanimous.

The dusky gopher frog was listed as endangered in 2001, and is found only at one pond in Mississippi. But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) had designated 1,544 acres of private land in Louisiana as “critical habitat,” even though no dusky gopher frog had lived anywhere in Louisiana for at least 50 years. Previously, federal courts generally “deferred” to the agency’s judgment on what constitutes “critical habitat,” but the unanimous court said this time the agency went too far. They issued an unusual opinion, essentially a grammar lesson, explaining that “critical” is the adjective and “habitat” is the noun. Land cannot be “critical habitat” if it is not “habitat” at all.

The Court’s unanimous “scolding” of the USFWS was the subject of many editorials and columns, but only a few of us actually speculated, at the time, about the ripple effects it might have on other cases. In fact, USFWS has designated “critical habitat” on over 200 million acres of land across the country for various species – an area larger than Texas – very often in areas where the protected species does not actually live.

Some might remember the government declaring critical habitat in the heart of San Francisco for an endangered shrub called the Franciscan manzanita. Previously thought extinct, one plant was discovered in 2009, and before most people knew what was happening, almost 300 acres had been designated, including some federal land and some local parks, but also a number of private back yards. The shrub didn’t actually exist in any of those areas, and several lawsuits are still pending.

Lynx habitat was designated on 11,584 square miles across a six-state region, virtually none of which was actually occupied by lynx. In Mesa and Garfield Counties, 54,000 acres were designated critical habitat for plants like the Parachute beardtongue (including two areas where no such plants live). Obviously, the Supreme Court has opened the door for re-evaluation of such habitat designations, and made clear that agency “deference” will not be automatic.

Sure enough, that re-evaluation is beginning now, and starting with one of the most high-profile and consequential endangered species of all – the spotted owl. Since the 1990s the northern spotted owl has been the major excuse for drastic reductions in timber harvesting throughout the Pacific Northwest. The USFWS increased the protected “critical habitat” by almost 40 percent in 2012, and that designation now includes 9.6 million acres across Washington, Oregon and Northern California – including vast swaths of timberlands where no spotted owls have ever been spotted. National Forest plans were then adopted, setting aside 20 million acres reserved from any timber activities.

A coalition of businesses, local governments, and labor unions sued the government in 2012, because the critical habitat included 1.1 million acres of federal lands specifically designated for active forest management (which was stopped because of the spotted owl), and because it failed to consider the economic impact of shutting down the forest products industry there. The law requires the government to take “into consideration the economic impact, the impact on national security, and any other relevant impact, of specifying any particular area as critical habitat.” USFWS had not done so there, and has not done so in dozens of other cases.

The spotted owl case has languished in courts ever since. But this spring, because of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the dusky gopher frog case, USFWS agreed to officially re-evaluate its habitat designation, which will inevitably lead to other re-evaluations. In this case, a new rulemaking process will include the usual opportunities for public comment.

It is unfortunate that lawsuits are so often needed to call attention to the obvious. Common sense dictates that many of these habitat designations ought to be re-examined. When Supreme Court justices as different as Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg easily agree on such a serious and far-reaching legal issue, it is clear that something went terribly wrong. The effort to stop legitimate business activity, by declaring land as habitat for a species that does not live there, went too far.

My guess is that many existing critical habitat designations will be re-evaluated, and scaled back, in the next few years. And in the future, before walling off the forest for spotted owls, someone ought to ask, “Has anyone actually spotted one?”

SOURCE

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

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

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8 July, 2020

Can COVID-19 be treated with low-dose radiation?

Climate skeptics are well aware of radiation hormesis

A new paper published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation asserts that low-level nuclear radiation might be much less dangerous than previously thought. At the same time, other researchers are renewing interest in applying low-dose radiation therapy – studied as early as 1905 as a tool to fight pneumonia – in the ongoing fight to contain and control deadly and disruptive outbreaks of the virus known as COVID 19. Yet, still other research recommits many in the medical field to fighting ANY use of radiation therapy as too dangerous to risk.

According to authors Dr. Edward Calabrese and Dr. Mikko Paunio, recent reviews of seminal research conducted following the end of World War II have uncovered serious flaws in the “linear no-threshold” assumption that all nuclear radiation is dangerous no matter low the level of exposure.

Dr. Calabrese, a UMass – Amherst professor of toxicology, has for two decades focused his research on understanding the nature of the radiation dose response in the low-dose zone. His observations are leading to a major transformation in improving drug discovery and development and in the efficiency of the clinical trial, as well as the scientific foundations for risk assessment and environmental regulation for radiation and chemicals.

In a 2013 paper, Dr. Calabrese partnered with Dr. Guaray Dhawan to review the historical use of radiotherapy for fighting pneumonia and determine if low-dose radiation might still be a valuable pneumonia killer. They found a 1905 study by noted University of Pennsylvania professor John Herr Muller and D. L. Edsall of five pneumonia patients who benefited from X-ray treatments.

A decade later A. W. and W. A. Quimby successfully treated 12 cases of unresolved pneumonia, stating that “no pathological process in the body responds quicker to an X-ray exposure than the non-resolved following pneumonia.”

In 1924 German researchers Heidenhain and Fried reported that they had used X-rays to treat 243 cases of acute and subacute pyrogenic infections. The X-ray treatments blocked or reduced all types of inflammation, regardless of location in the body and whatever the cause. Fried reported that patients with high fever, severe dyspnea, and cyanosis typically reported improved breathing with six hours of being irradiated.

American researcher Eugene Powell championed X-ray therapy for treating pneumonia at the Medical Association meeting in Houston, Texas, in May 1936. Later, Powell blew off a double-blind trial because his patients who were receiving the X-ray treatment were relieved of respiratory and circulatory distress in less than 3 hours.

Until now, the latest use of radiotherapy to treat pneumonia came in 1943, when A. Oppenheimer reported using X-ray treatment to control coughing in recovering pneumonia patients. He later extended the application to patients suffering through acute pneumonia.

X-ray treatments proved effective against a broad range of pneumococcal pneumonia strains/types, offering a distinct advantage over the use of serum therapy. But with the arrival a few years later of sulfonamides, and later penicillin, X-ray therapy never became a component of systemwide public health measures to treat pneumonia.

Upon reading these positive reports, Dr. Calabrese weighed the lack of any new research on using radiotherapy to help pneumonia patients since 1946 against the findings of highly protective effects on about 850 patients along with rapid resolution of the disease. X-ray treatments had prevented considerable human suffering, reduced health care costs and the burden on families, and accelerated a return to normal living, whether work, school, or other activities.

Yet the question remained as to how to reactivate a well-established, yet 65-year-old hypothesis, with contemporary research questions, methods, and technologies that still may hold public health potential. Calabrese and Dhawan proposed a focused clinical research program to assess the use of X-ray therapy for pneumonia as an adjunct treatment for high-risk patients. Seven years later, X-ray therapy has found a new target – the high-risk patients infected with COVID 19, of which up to 20 percent develop pneumonia and are at risk of death.

Standing in the way of this research, should believers in the precautionary principle take control of the science, is the belief, expressed in a new report by Richard Bramhall and Pete Wilkinson, which was produced by the Low-Level Radiation Campaign for Children With Cancer UK. The authors assert that even tiny doses of radiation can have devastating effects on the human body, particularly by causing cancer and birth defects. This, they believe, makes a strong case for a basic rethink on so-called “safe” radiation doses.

But Calabrese states the claims that any dose of radiation is dangerous are now known to be based on scientific studies that were deceptive, flawed, or even fraudulent. Dr. Paunio, former chair of the Finnish Radiological Protection Board, explained that support for the linear no-threshold assumption was bolstered by began with a study that followed the life histories of the Hibakusha – survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs.

According to Dr. Paunio, another team of Japanese researchers recently found major flaws in the older research. As he explained, “Their error was extraordinary. They failed to account for the effects of secondary radiation exposures and fallout. This means that the rather low numbers of cancers observed in the Hibakusha were actually caused by quite high exposures to radiation.

Calabrese and Paunio should be thrilled at the Number of major clinical trials already under way to determine the value of low-dose radiation in fighting the COVID 19 pandemic. Radiation’s track record with pneumonia may prove helpful to the 15 to 20 percent of those infected with COVID 19 who otherwise develop severe inflammatory effects that can lead to pneumonia, acute respiratory distress syndrome, and death.

Just a few weeks ago, James Conca, writing in Forbes, confirmed the Calabrese-Paunio research, noting the early 20th Century success using low doses of radiation to treat the deadly inflammation of pneumonia, particularly viral pneumonia like that caused by COVID-19, and agreeing that radiation may have a role in mitigating today’s pandemic. Conca reported that several medical institutions are set to start radiation therapies for COVID-19.

Dr. James Welsh at Loyola University Medical Center, is moving to begin a national trial within the next few months on this treatment using low-dose radiation to the lungs. Trials are already underway at at Emory University and in Italy and Spain. At least five other trials are recruiting patients, and the U.S. FDA has been urged to conduct a low-dose radiation trial at the Hines VA Medical Center in Chicago.

Just remember, as Calabrese and Dhawan said in 2013, radiotherapy had been broadly accepted by the radiological community starting in the second decade of the 20th century, with notable successes in the treatment of a wide range of inflammatory and infectious diseases such as gas gangrene, carbuncles, sinusitis, arthritis, and inner ear infections.

SOURCE

Sen. Cruz Among 141 Political Leaders Pledging To Keep US A Dominant Natural Gas Producer

Sen. Ted Cruz is among 141 political leaders in a pledge to keep the United States’s energy industry dominant amid the coronavirus pandemic and the consequential economic downturn.

The Texas Republican, as well as seven additional senators, three governors and 15 attorneys general are among those who signed The Empowerment Alliance’s Declaration of Energy Independence, promising to take steps to establishing the United States’s energy independence.

“American energy producers have ushered in an energy renaissance and made the United States the number one producer of oil and gas in the world,” Cruz said in a joint statement with The Empowerment Alliance. “Maintaining our energy dominance is key to ensuring American families have access to affordable energy and it’s imperative for our national security.”

Other signatories include Republican Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio, John Cornyn of Texas and Joni Ernst of Iowa.

The Daily Caller News Foundation obtained an exclusive copy of the pledge, which says it represents a commitment to “four principles that will help power America’s economy for everyone over the next century and beyond.”

Those principles listed are: affordable energy for families; clean energy for the environment; abundant energy for the future; and domestic energy for national security.

The principles list benefits of energy independence, which include decreasing utility bills, cleaner air, “a continuous 100-year supply of natural gas. They also note that ensuring energy dominance would make certain that the U.S. “is no longer dependent on rapidly changing global markets and unstable or hostile countries.”

The Empowerment Alliance is a nonprofit that was formed in 2019 to oppose supporters of the Green New Deal, a proposal crafted that year that sought to shift the U.S. entirely away from fossil fuels within a decade. Senate Republicans defeated the proposal shortly after it was introduced, but Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats are hoping to bring it back

“For too long, Americans have spent their hard-earned dollars on energy that is produced overseas, risking our nation’s security and stability and shunning millions of family supporting jobs,” Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said in the statement alongside Cruz. The Declaration of Energy Independence is “something all Americans can agree on.”

The pledge comes nearly a year after the U.S. first became a net exporter of gas. The U.S. exported roughly 89,000 barrels of fossil fuels per day during September 2019, according to Energy Information Administration data. That’s the first full month the U.S. has exported more than it imported since the U.S. began tracking such data in 1949.

Government officials began locking down their economies in March to slow the spread of a coronavirus, which has killed a reported 127,000 people in the U.S.. Their orders resulted in a significant downturn in the economy and an oversupply of oil, which caused crude prices to collapse. Several shale companies filed bankruptcy to avoid ruin.

“In the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, it’s become even more important to support America’s energy producers to spur economic growth, lower energy costs, help employ thousands of hardworking men and women, and increase America’s energy independence,” Cruz said in the statement.

Empowerment Alliance Executive Director Jim Nathanson added: “Affordable, clean, and abundant domestic energy will be critical to America’s economic recovery. We cannot afford to squander our domestic energy advantage, and we call on all political leaders to join us and embrace natural gas as essential to our shared future prosperity.”

SOURCE

Michigan Court OKs Enbridge Pipeline Construction, Rules Process Constitutional

The Michigan Court of Appeals upheld the constitutionality of a law allowing the construction of a replacement Enbridge oil pipeline tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac.

The three-judge panel affirmed a lower-court decision finding the law under which the pipeline was approved was constitutional.

Enbridge’s line 5 pipeline, part of a much larger network of pipelines Enbridge operates, is a 645-mile, 30-inch-diameter pipeline that was first brought into operation in 1953. Connecting to other Enbridge pipelines, Line 5 originates in Superior, Wisconsin, travels through Michigan’s Upper and Lower Peninsulas, and terminates in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. Beneath the Straits of Mackinac, Line 5 splits into two 20-inch-diameter, parallel pipelines that are buried onshore and deep underwater, crossing the Straits west of the Mackinac Bridge for a distance of 4.5 miles.

State Sues to Block Replacement

Under Public Act 359 (2018), Enbridge requested Michigan’s approval to replace the aging pipeline with a newer one.

At the request of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel sued to block replacement.

In a March 2019 opinion, Nessel argued Public Act 359 violated the Michigan Constitution’s title-object clause, which requires that each law portray its contents accurately, because “its provisions go beyond the scope of what was disclosed in its title.”

In the initial trial, Michigan’s Court of Claims ruled the law was constitutional, as it amended a 1952 law under which the original pipeline was approved.

The appellate court, composed of Judges Thomas C. Cameron, Mark T. Boonstra, and Anica Letica, agreed, ruling the 2018 law did not violate the title-object clause of the Michigan Constitution.

“Defendants’ argument that the Court of Claims improperly considered extraneous material is unsupported,” Cameron wrote in the opinion. “We conclude that the title of 2018 PA 359 does not address objects so diverse that they have no necessary connection.”

Good for Jobs, Environment

In response to the ruling, Enbridge released a statement saying the company will continue to operate the two existing Line 5 oil lines while the tunnel is being built.

“We look forward to working with the State to make a safe pipeline even safer,” an Enbridge spokesperson said in the statement. “We are investing $500 million in the tunnel’s construction—thereby further protecting the waters of the Great Lakes and everyone who uses them.”

The court’s ruling recognizes the importance of finding environmentally sound solutions to the region’s energy needs, John Walsh, president of the Michigan Manufacturers Association, told The Detroit News.

“Replacing the portion of Line 5 beneath the Straits with the Great Lakes Tunnel is the safest, most reliable, affordable, and environmentally sound energy solution for Michigan’s citizens and businesses,” Walsh told The Detroit News. “That’s why the tunnel is supported by Democrats and Republicans, business and labor.

“We’re glad the court rejected the latest stall tactic and are excited about next steps in the development process,” said Walsh.

SOURCE

An Endlessly Renewable Source of Green Agitprop

Stoking the fires of renewable energy’s purported advantages is the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an intergovernmental outfit whose chief purpose is to serve as a spigot for endless propaganda. Its official message is that fossil fuel is an archaic source of electricity now being battered by upstart competitors wind and solar. Bear in mind that world electricity supply pans out at 38 per cent for coal, 23 per cent gas and 26 per cent hydro/nuclear. Wind/solar supply 10 per cent.

IRENA tirelessly advocates for renewables, saying they “could form a key component of economic stimulus packages in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.” And in the purple prose so common with these green-spruiking agencies it claims, “Scaling up renewables can boost struggling economies. It can save money for consumers, pique the appetites of investors and create numerous high-quality new jobs.” Investment in renewables is amplified by other benefits, the story goes, as it is alleged to bring “health, sustainability and inclusive prosperity.” When it comes to renewables, no snake-oil salesman of old could hold a carbon-neutral candle to the likes of their modern green-lipped urgers.

IRENA would have us see renewable power installations as a key component of economic stimulus packages in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming that replacing one quarter of the world’s existing coal capacity with wind and solar would, in addition to cutting electricity costs, bestow a stimulus worth US$940 billion, or around one per cent of global GDP.

All this is, of course, is super-heated hot air billowing from the deep pockets of IRENA’s multi-government funding. It rests upon the sort of spurious arithmetic swallowed whole by Australian governments which, having granted regulatory favours to wind/solar, cheer the dynamiting of low-cost, dependable coal plants and the consequent price escalation and network unreliability.

IRENA estimates the cost of electricity from new coal plants at between US$50 per MWh and US$177 per MWh. The cost of plant itself is pretty standard internationally, but that of transmission and fuel is highly variable, as are construction costs. For Australia, rigorous analysis by GHD for the Minerals Council estimated a new, high efficiency/low emissions black coal generator would be as low as $40 per MWh. Australian coal’s locational advantages were the key to this low cost, offset somewhat by a “CFMEU” union loading disability (lifting labour costs 25 per cent above the level that would prevail without unionised rigidities).

Compared with its coal-generation cost estimates, the shaded area in the diagram below, IRENA puts the cost of solar photovoltaics as having declines to US$68 per MWh; of large scale solar to US$182 per MWh; and that of wind to $US53 per MWh.

Given all these entirely confected “advantages” of wind and solar, IRENA is disappointed that global growth in renewable investment seems to have stagnated over recent years. It attributes this to the concocted story — cooked up by itself, mind you — about “subsidies” to coal, the estimates for which are derived from another IRENA paper which confusingly traverses many different international sources with widely different approaches and estimates.

The global subsidy figure IRENA cites for fossil fuels is $447 billion, which excludes greenhouse “externality costs”. The subsidies for coal itself are said to be $17 billion (astonishingly, this includes the UK which no longer has any generation from coal). Germany is the largest coal subsidiser (to enable its coal industry to compete with imports). Coal comprises 40 per cent of German electricity supply, and IRENA quotes annual subsidy estimates ranging from $US 10 billion while also lending credibility to the (US)$58 billion Greenpeace estimate. Aside from coal, add a further $128 billions of subsidies to electricity generation generally, this from government-mandated price controls, estimates of concessional finance and support for carbon-capture and storage.

Coincidental to the IRENA release was a report of an agency dedicated to destroying the competitiveness of the Australian energy industry, the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute (GCCS). Bear in mind that GCCS was bankrolled by the Rudd/Gillard government but, despite all that money from the public purse, it is very secretive about its accounting. Its latest press release refers to yet another reputed success in carbon capture and storage, said to be burying 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 a year with Canadian government subsidies of C$558 million. Some may take a perverse comfort in knowing Australia is not the only country dedicated to committing economic suicide with addled “energy competitiveness” initiatives.

Agencies like IRENA parade their cost fabrications purely to arm the governments that finance them with the information they can use to promote the subsidies that are needed – temporarily of course – to get these “clean” energy investments over the line.

The message is heard loud and clear in all Western nations (except Trump’s America) and lip service is paid to it in the developing world just so long as rich countries pick up the tab. Most of the Western world is adopting economically debilitating emission-restraint policies, but there is no prospect of China, India, Vietnam and Indonesia sacrificing their possibilities of Western-style living standards by abandoning fossil fuels, always the cheapest energy source. As these nations are now responsible for two-thirds of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, all the international agitprop in the world will make no difference to the trivial global warming that the burning of fossil fuels may be causing.

Agencies like IRENA, their national counterparts, lobby organisations and leaders like that of EU President Ursula von der Leyen continue to beat the drum even as reality bites elsewhere.

But reality bites elsewhere. In Melbourne, several green-left councils have announced deferral of “sustainability” expenditures as they grapple with massive funding reductions in the light of the lockdown. These councils will not be the only government agencies who decide that, with reduced incomes, saving the planet takes a back seat to saving public service jobs!

SOURCE

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

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

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7 July, 2020

The Green Delusion continues to Perpetuate Costs upon the Poor

Those marketing the green delusion have convinced themselves and the public that intermittent electricity from wind and solar are somehow “clean, green, renewable and sustainable”. They have successfully kept transparency from those paying for the green delusion of any information that would damage their message.

Facts about greater human and ecological impacts around the world from intermittent electricity systems favored by the climate cult are numerous and purposely withheld from the Californians that can least afford rates that are already among the highest in the nation for electricity and fuel and the same Californians that represent less than half of one percent (0.5%) of the world’s population (40 million vs. 8 billion). Among a few subjects the climate cult avoids transparency are:

* Moving to electricity ALONE and eliminating fossil fuels would mean America would have to replace 100% of its gasoline and all its oil and natural gas feed stocks for pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, paints, synthetic fibers, fertilizers, and plastics for cell phones, computers, car bodies, packaging, wind turbine blades, solar panel films and more than 6,000 products that are manufactured from petroleum derivatives. As a reminder, without transportation and the leisure and entertainment industries that did not exist before 1900, we would have no commerce.

* Dependency on intermittent electricity from wind and solar resulted in California importing up to 29 percent of its electricity to meet its demands. To the detriment of those that can least afford expensive energy, that lavishly expensive imported electricity has contributed to the poorest residents, particularly Latinos and African Americans, paying more than 50 percent more for electricity than the rest of the country.

* The impact of power plant closures in California are destined to increase the cost of power as California plans to shuttle three natural gas power plants and its last nuclear power plant. Those four power plants have been providing continuous uninterruptible electricity to Californians. With the state having no plans to replace the closure capacity with intermittent electricity from wind and solar, the state will need to import more high-priced electricity to fill the void and let residents and businesses pay the premium.

* The climate cult is fearful of sharing that all the mineral products and metals needed to make wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries are mined and processed in places like Baotou, Inner Mongolia, Bolivia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly under Chinese control, under minimal to nonexistent labor, wage, environmental, reclamation, and worker health and safety regulations. The mere extraction of those exotic minerals presents social challenges, human rights abuses, and environmental degradations worldwide.

* Those numerous documentaries about the atrocities that the workers are put through in the cobalt mines, i.e. actually digging the mines by hand along with the horrendous living conditions. Amnesty International has documented children and adults mining cobalt in narrow man-made tunnels along with the exposure to the dangerous gases emitted during the procurement of these rare minerals.

* For cobalt alone, over 40,000 Congolese children, as young as four years old, slave away alongside their parents in mines, for a dollar a day, risking cave-ins and being exposed constantly to filthy, toxic, radioactive mud, dust, water and air.

* These environmental and human rights travesties can happen only under a system of rampant double standards, i.e., if they do NOT occur in the backyard of the climate cult, they are okay with any and all adverse impacts on foreign sites.

* Even if California or the entire USA eliminated all fossil fuel use tomorrow – it would not make an iota of difference for global carbon dioxide levels as China and India have more than 5,000 coal fired power plants and are building 600 more to provide their populations with scalable, reliable, and affordable electricity, that will continue to increase emissions.

* Since 1990 CO2 emissions from the Developed world have decreased, whereas the Developing world has shown a fourfold increase since 1985. This differential has arisen because of:
the off shoring of major CO2 emitting industries to parts of the world that have less rigorous environmental standards or who care less about CO2 emissions.
the growing use of Coal-firing for electricity generation in the Developing world.

The primary reason that the climate cult is voraciously against transparency of any data about intermittent electricity from wind and solar favored by them, is that they would need to justify to the rural, poor, minority and working-class families and communities that the public needs to accept the worldwide ecological, health and economic damages being inflicted in pursuit of their pseudo-renewable electricity utopia. Additionally, for those that can least afford the passion for intermittent electricity, they need to morally accept that Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans must endure slave labor status to advance the climate cult agenda.

Let us hope the now-silent majority can restore law, order, civil debate, thoughtful reflection on our complex history, and rational resolution of these thorny problems as current climate policies are essentially discriminatory toward poor people and minorities worldwide.

SOURCE

Next-generation climate models: worse than ever!

Back in February, Pat Michaels dropped something of a bombshell. It was an exposé of the Achilles heel of alarmist climate science.

He did it in a lecture, just posted to YouTube on June 11, at a joint meeting of the Independent Institute and the National Association of Scholars. What he showed was that practically all the climate models on which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and lots of national governments rely are wrong—hopelessly, egregiously, starkly wrong. And all (but one) in the direction of exaggerating CO2’s warming effect.

Why? Because modelers tune their models to reproduce the 20th-century temperature record. Yet the models supposedly model how global average (near-surface) temperature responds to rising atmospheric CO2 concentration. And the problem with that is that there’s no way the first half (roughly) of the 20th-century temperature record was driven by CO2.

Michaels demonstrates that by showing that, if the comparatively small amount of added CO2 in the first half of the century drove as much warming as occurred then, then the much greater amount of CO2 added in the second half should have added a whole lot more warming than actually occurred.

Having made that point, Michaels reminds us that good scientists, when observations contradict predictions based on their models, revise the models so as to come closer to the observations. But that’s exactly the opposite of what’s happening in the alarmist climate modeling community.

The “Coupled Model Intercomparison Project” 5th generation models (CMIP-5) simulated, on average 2.75 times as much warming as actually observed by radiosondes (temperature sensors carried aloft by weather balloons) from 1979–2018, as Michaels showed with this graph, courtesy of John Christy:

Now the CMIP-6 models are starting to come out. One would expect that refinements would bring their simulations closer to the observations. The opposite is the case. The new models—as many as had been reported as of late 2019—simulate not 2.75 but roughly 3.5 times the warming observed by radiosondes

In short, far from improving the models, the modelers are making them worse than ever. After the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on them, one would hope for a different outcome.

Perhaps it’s driven not so much by honest scientific endeavor as by an agenda.

SOURCE

3 Billion-A-Year Cost To Prevent Green Energy Blackouts

An in-depth study for the Global Warming Policy Foundation has revealed the skyrocketing costs of balancing the national grid, largely due to the intermittency of green power generation sources, most notably wind and solar. Since 2002, when these power sources began to be introduced at scale, the cost of balancing the grid has risen from £367 million to £1.5 billion per year by 2019. And now with the lockdown shrinking demand, balancing costs are optimistically projected to be £2 billion, potentially rising to £3 billion if the lockdown persists…

The conclusion of Dr John Constable, energy expert and author of the study, is stark:

“If demand remains low during the post-Covid recession the multi-billion pound costs of managing and subsidising renewables must be recovered from a much smaller volume of sales. That is a recipe for rapid and abrupt price rises, the like of which the British public have never seen. Enough is enough. In what everyone agrees is a very difficult moment the national interest demands a cost minimisation strategy for electricity, based on gas and nuclear.”

Fortunately, the UK could be on the brink of a nuclear revolution in small modular reactors (SMRs). Rolls Royce is leading a consortium of businesses urging the Government to accelerate plans for a swathe of high tech micro nuclear reactors across the north of England:

Plans are being discussed for sixteen micro-reactors to be built by 2050, providing enough consistent energy to power a city the size of Leeds and directly employing 40,000 people. Who knew that nuclear power stations even run when it’s not windy and at night!

SOURCE

Norway to rein in wind power after raging opposition from locals

Norway is set to tighten rules for building wind turbines, caving in to massive protests from locals.

A government proposal on Friday to slow down the development of onshore wind power comes after increasing local resistance mirrors sentiment in other European countries. Norway already decided to scrap a plan for a new permission framework last year.

Norway, which has already developed a massive hydropower network, faces an increased need for clean energy for the electrification of everything from transportation to oil platforms.

The proposed changes include that permits are valid for a shorter time before construction starts, height restrictions on turbines and noise requirements, in addition to local acceptance of the projects. For instance, a turbine can not be closer to a house or cabin than four times the height of the turbines.

Norway’s Petroleum and Energy Minister, who presented the white paper with the proposed changes on Friday, felt the wrath of protesters herself. Only a week ago, Tina Bru experienced being blocked physically from attending an event on the west coast while being pummeled with insults, she wrote on her Facebook page.

“It’s legitimate to be opposed to wind power, both in principle and where you live – I understand that wind power can stoke strong feelings and heated debate,” Bru said at a press conference on Friday. “But I reject harassment, threats and vandalism.”

Although Norway has developed onshore wind in the recent years, hydropower is meeting virtually all the nation’s power needs.

SOURCE

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

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

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

6 July, 2020

Three Greenie heretics

First there was Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans, then came Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm, and now Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never. All three authors sound the common theme that the hyper-green environmental activists who have captured, politicized, and monetized the concern for the environment have, as Lomborg explains, created a false climate alarm which has “costs us trillions, hurts the poor, and fails to fix the planet.” To varying degrees, all three authors come from a strong environmental activist background, which observation makes their public revelations even more noteworthy.

Planet of the Humans, the recent film produced by Michael Moore, caused consternation and a considerable backlash from the green activists and their allied backers by pointing out how traditional energy companies had co-opted the environmental movement by donning a green alter-ego and embracing renewable energy. By doing so, the corporations gained access to government funding/subsidies for wind turbine and commercial solar power installations and created a public relations victory for their vociferous eco-shareholders. Moore’s revelation that the reality of needing to provide 24/7 reliable electricity to consumers ensures that fossil fuel plants will remain the primary energy sources because of the failure of wind or solar to provide power if there is no wind or sufficient sun. Renewables do not displace reliable fossil-fuel power plants. Consumers energy bills do not go down, but go up, when renewables are imposed.

Moore also documented that renewables require large amounts of rare earths, cement, and fossil fuel energy in their production. They are both notoriously inefficient in land use, and impose destruction of large areas of native habitats. Further environmental destruction is due to the fact that the best wind or solar location is often remote from the most needed consumer base, thereby requiring the construction of massive electric transmission lines. “Factories claiming to have gone ‘beyond coal’ again and again turn out to be relying on natural gas.”

The film notes that biomass/wood chip power plants in England now rely on American forests. Rather than just using lumber waste as was first proposed, this has now turned into a major sub-set of the logging industry. Our southern forests are leveled and the trees turned into wood chips. The whole process of logging, processing, and trans-Atlantic shipping is all powered by fossil fuels. The basic premise of using “renewable” lumber as a bio-fuel is that the carbon dioxide released upon its burning will become fertilizer for a new generation of trees and thus the cycle is carbon neutral. The basic fallacy of it is that the time scale of new tree growth greatly exceeds the day-to-day weather cycle. No matter. Just imagine, American lumber keeping England eco-green -- a country well versed in cutting down its own forests.

With his recent book, False Alarm, Bjorn Lomborg continues to straddle the fence on global warming, aka climate change. As the original “skeptical environmentalist,” Bjorn has argued that there are more productive ways to aid humanity than spending billions trying to influence climate change. He has argued for improving sanitation, clean water supplies, basic nutrition, and providing paths out of poverty for the millions living in underdeveloped countries. In this book, he continues to press for a concerted effort to alleviate these ills, rather than accepting the decades of panic driven calls for “fixing the climate.”

He provides numerous references to substantiate his claims that climate change is real but is not the apocalyptic threat so widely advertised. Science, he says, “shows that landfalling hurricanes in the US are not more frequent than in the past. Droughts here have actually become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller area. Seventeen times more people currently die from cold than heat, and these people will benefit from moderate warming. In fact, global climate related deaths are an all-time low.”

He claims:

…the projections of Earth’s imminent demise are based on bad science and even worse economics. In a politicized panic, world leaders have committed to wildly expensive, but largely ineffective policies, that hamper growth and crowd out other pressing investments in a better world, from immunization to education.

And yet, a schizophrenic-like mindset co-inhabits this rational evaluation of climate change and related issues. Section 1 of the book is titled “Climate of Fear,” and evokes memories of Michael Crichton’s 2004 “State of Fear.” A few pages into his introduction, Lomborg states, “Climate change is real, it is caused predominantly by carbon emissions from humans burning fossil fuels….” No question that climate change is real; however, he gives no reference for this unsubstantiated claim of human causation, which is the basic UN position, and the foundation for much green eco-activism. A few lines later, he seems to criticize the same UN:

After a 2019 UN climate science report led to over-the-top claims by activists, one of the scientists wrote: “We risk turning off the public with extremist talk that is not carefully supported by the science.” Media reports that we have to act by 2030 to solve the problem of climate change is the media defining what the science is.

Lomborg points out that this is indeed not science, but “what politics tells us.” He does not clarify what the “problem” is with the climate, though his chapter 6 is titled “You Can’t Fix Climate Change,” and chapter 11 offers “Carbon Tax: The Market-Based Solution.” Chapter 14 “Geoengineering: A Backup Plan” is recognized as “entering uncharted territory,” but “could play a role if we found that we needed fast action to avoid a looming catastrophe.” After calling for consideration of this back-up plan, the chapter continues with an extended discussion of the pluses and minuses of actually implementing it.

The reader will have to evaluate this recent book to get the full import of Lomborg’s latest effort. His most basic premise remains that there are better ways to alleviate human misery than spending taxpayer subsidies than on panic-driven, political non-solutions to a changing climate. Few would argue with that goal.

Michael Shellenberger has green activist credentials going back to his high school years. Yet over the ensuing years, he has had an environmental reality epiphany which now has manifested itself most clearly in his recent book “Apocalypse Never,” and with his starting the ecomodernism movement. The subtitle of the book, “Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,” echoes the similar conclusions of Moore and Lomborg.

Shellenberger had a few road bumps on the way to his current reality check. Notable was his 2002 support of the “New Apollo Project,” which called for a major global science and economics research program to make carbon-free baseload electricity less costly than electricity from coal by the year 2025 at an expenditure of $150 billion over a decade. The Obama administration adopted many of the renewable energy proposals, but Shellenberger documents that much of the money went to “companies that enriched donors to the Obama campaign” but failed to produce the promised renewable energy advances.

Disillusionment gave way to reality, and in 2017, Shellenberger told The Australian: "Like most people, I started out pretty anti-nuclear. I changed my mind as I realized you can't power a modern economy on solar and wind.... All they do is make the electricity system chaotic and provide greenwash for fossil fuels." He has made numerous efforts to support nuclear power.

His current book skewers many of the claims of eco-environmentalists, including mass extinctions, saving of the whales by Greenpeace, waste plastic fouling the ocean for thousands of years, and increases in extreme weather events.

He reflects upon his early devotion to environmentalism as a manifestation of an “underlying anxiety and unhappiness in my own life that had little to do with climate change or the state of the natural environment.” It became a quasi-religion offering “emotional relief” and “spiritual satisfaction” for those, like him, who may have lost the guidance of traditional spiritual faiths.

Shellenberger concludes with the observation that “the trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating.”

So here are three environmentalists with different degrees of eco-activism in their past, but all now willing to speak out against the incessant climate propaganda of human-related guilt, the purveyors of anxiety, and the poisoners of childhood joy and wonder. Climate change is the norm; it is not mankind’s original sin. The readers here are encouraged to read the works of these climate realists.

SOURCE

Why the World's Most Advanced Solar Plants Are Failing

The government’s leading laboratory for renewable energy has released a new report detailing the strengths and flaws of concentrated solar energy. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) published the report with the stated goal of using very mixed feedback on existing concentrated solar projects to create a list of suggested best practices going forward.

The NREL report “is titled CSP Best Practices, but it can be more appropriately viewed as a mix of problematic issues that have been identified, along with potential solutions or approaches to address those issues,” it begins. What’s inside includes problems shared across concentrating solar power (CSP) projects as well as general issues of large-scale construction. There are also issues with specific kinds of CSP plants based on their designs.

Parabolic trough CSP plants use solar collectors to heat water and generate steam heat, the same as a traditional coal or even nuclear power plant. But in between is a stage called heat transfer (HTF), where a fluid medium like oil or liquid metals carries the heat from the collection area to the turbine.

The CSP report says some of the issues with these systems are the extreme and dangerous heat of the HTF and the waste hydrogen produced by these processes. Designers have also positioned elements vertically at a higher cost, when most CSPs are built in rural places with plenty of space.

The other kind of CSP plant is a tower design, where mirrors concentrate the solar power directly into a central reservoir usually made of molten salt. These plants take a very long time to come to temperature and are subject to leaks and underperformance. All of these factors mean that molten salt plants have not yet reached their performance goals or the numbers their builders have often promised locals served by these grids.

The report says these plants have often exceeded their planned operating budgets because of surprise maintenance costs as well as poor understanding of what the true operating costs will even be. NLER writes:

“There tend to be issues that are not fully considered, and it generally falls to the owner to pick up the additional costs. Some of these issues are related to obtaining and keeping quality O&M staff; lack of understanding of regional cultures; and availability and timeliness of spare parts and services.”

Even with just a few dozen CSP plants in the U.S., the report notes that many of these are placed on poor sites. At the Crescent Dunes solar facility in Tonopah, Nevada, hundreds of birds were killed in just the first 18 months. “That's just the number of dead birds biologists have seen,” E&E News reported in 2016. But site selection also includes making compromises about how far a construction crew must travel to make onsite repairs, or even how to find a qualified workforce to work on the project in the first place.

The bottom line? CSP contractors and operators are doing their best, but the technology isn’t uniform or understood enough for the approach these builders have been taking. “The very nature of fixed-price, fixed-schedule, full-wraparound performance-guarantee EPC contracts has likely been a main reason for issues experienced at existing CSP plants,” the report concludes.

SOURCE

Environmentalism: a racist ideology

Green neo-Malthusianism is the last redoubt of racist eugenics in mainstream society

As reported on spiked last month, it did not take long for green ideologues to seize on the chaos of the coronavirus pandemic. And in recent weeks, racial politics has exploded, putting the Black Lives Matter movement at the centre of global attention. In its wake, jealous greens have sought to capture the narrative of racial grievance. But by highlighting what they claim are the racial dimensions of climate change, what greens have instead exposed are their deep contradictions and a callous indifference to the plight of the world’s poor.

At the end of May, having only just been reinvented as an expert on coronavirus, Greta Thunberg tweeted: ‘Centuries of structural and systematic racism and social injustice won’t go away by itself. We need a global structural change. The injustices must come to an end.’

It is an interesting claim, not least for its remarkable resemblance to her claims about climate change. In a more recent tweet she opined: ‘The climate and ecological crisis can no longer be solved within today’s political and economic systems. That’s not an opinion. It’s just simple maths.’ This is not a coincidence.

As I have long argued on spiked, environmentalists’ preoccupation with ‘systems’ and global institutions to oversee their regulation belies their ability to identify and locate environmental problems. What is motivating their search is less a desire to understand the natural world than a desire to systematise the human world.

It was ‘simple maths’ which took the neo-Malthusians of the 1960s and 1970s to their demands to turn the clock back on population growth, economic growth and technology, lest their dire prognostications of apocalypse came to pass. Yet it was also simple maths that showed these prognostications to be false, dangerous and misleading.

Greta was not the only green to jump on the racial bandwagon. George Monbiot did the same in his review of Planet of the Humans – the new film from Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore. The film makes a number of vague references to overpopulation, which Monbiot believes marks it as belonging to the ‘far right’. ‘Population is where you go when you don’t have the guts to face the structural, systemic causes of our predicament: inequality, oligarchic power, capitalism’, he writes. There’s that word ‘systemic’ again.

But Monbiot’s attack on population-environmentalism isn’t quite the commitment it seems. David Attenborough, patron of Population Matters (formerly the Optimum Population Trust), has never been called a ‘far right’ by Monbiot, despite Attenborough’s many explicit statements on population reaching vastly more people than Planet of the Humans has. Moreover, it was not the ‘far right’ which put Malthus back on the political agenda; it was Monbiot’s fellow green campaigners – the neo-Malthusians – back in the mid- to late 20th century.

If Planet of the Humans is ‘far right’, then so is the Guardian. In a 2018 interview, which was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, Paul Ehrlich, author of Population Bomb, told the Guardian’s Damian Carrington that the ‘collapse of civilisation is a near certainty within decades’ (again).

In the interview, Ehrlich claimed that he rejects the idea that the desire to control population is racist and that he is hurt by the allegation. But aren’t we constantly being told by the likes of the Guardian that it is not enough to say you are not racist, because racism lingers in systems and structures?

The Rockefeller fortune has played a large role in funding the neo-Malthusian cause over the years. And it has a long history of racism. The Rockefellers were among the first ‘philanthropists’ to use their vast wealth to support eugenics programmes. According to Professor Stefan Kühl, ‘the Rockefeller foundation played the central role in establishing and sponsoring major eugenic institutes in Germany’ in the 1920s. Its funding kept them afloat through the depression and well into the Nazi regime.

After the Second World War, eugenics became less fashionable. Malthusian ideas became a more acceptable vehicle for racism. In 1952, the Rockefellers founded the Population Council, which established the population-control agenda on the global stage via the United Nations and the World Bank. Between the 1950s and 1990s, green billionaires – the Rockefeller and Ford foundations – were funders of mass sterilisation programmes across the world.

This obnoxious agenda asserted itself most aggressively in India, where millions were coerced and forced into sterilisation camps to ensure that brown people would not overrun the world. In a single year, more than six million Indian men were sterilised – more than 15 times the number sterilised by the Nazis. Thousands died from botched procedures.

It is not merely blindness to green neo-Malthusianism – arguably one of the few lasting legacies of racial eugenics – which troubles Monbiot’s attempts to distance himself from it. The problem is that all green thinking is intractably bound to it.

In the 1970s, Ehrlich and colleagues proposed a formula known as IPAT, stating that Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology. In other words, they believe that policymakers have three levers for combating environmental problems: reducing population and / or affluence and / or technology. Today’s greens have not transcended this rubric. ‘High consumption is concentrated in countries where population growth is low’, argues Monbiot: ‘Almost all the growth in numbers is in poor countries largely inhabited by black and brown people.’ Poor people do not consume so much, you see. Science!

If it is racist to tell black people not to breed, it is surely racist to tell black people they cannot be wealthy. Rejection of population control might well sound principled, but it is not in itself a rejection of the neo-Malthusian formulation. The IPAT, to its believers, is an expression of fundamental relationships, not a menu – greens who adhere to any part of it can in reality no more pick and choose than a Catholic can worship the Father and the Son but not the Holy Spirit.

Monbiot may not wish to slow population growth. But he does wish to make us all live in ecological austerity. We are talking here about what greens claim are the systems and structures of society. They claim that the system which produces climate change is racist. But what is revealed by a closer look at society’s tangible structures and systems is that it is environmentalism – not environmental degradation – that has been imposed on the poor. Green NGOs run riot in the developing world. Many, such as the World Wildlife Fund, are implicated in the murder, torture, rape and violent eviction of the world’s poorest people. Where is Monbiot’s condemnation of the WWF?

Greens do not even consider the possibility of these wretched souls of the developing world one day having their own shopping malls, domestic appliances, SUVs or intercontinental holidays. In ruling out the possibility of the poor becoming wealthy, environmentalism rules out the poor becoming a political force who might be able to speak for themselves.

Some climate activists have rebranded climate change as ‘climate justice’, in an attempt to marshall the lives of the world’s poor in their mission. ‘We can change our lifestyles, we can move’, says one self-styled ‘climate communicator’. But the poor cannot, of course: ‘Within countries and between continents, it’s people of colour and it’s indigenous people that bear the brunt of environmental destruction’, he adds.

But life in close dependence on ‘nature’ – poverty, to give it its real name – has always been precarious. Indeed, it is not climate change that is the real worry here – it’s poverty. Economic participation and wealth are what allow people to weather what nature might throw at them. And it is this wealth which greens are determined to deny to the world’s poor.

The green ideology is racist. It presupposes that others’ poverty and others’ futures are determined by weather rather than by the changes that can be brought by man-made technological, economic and political development. The disparity between the wealthiest and poorest people in the world allows this presupposition to become an imposition.

Despite green attempts to keep people in their places, there are far fewer people now living on the edges of global society than before. Contrary to Greta, Ehrlich and Monbiot’s understanding, diseases of poverty are on their way to being eliminated. Far fewer people die in natural disasters today than a century ago, when the population was a quarter of what it is now and when the world was considerably less industrialised.

Progress has not come fast enough, of course. But the claim that ‘stable’ weather will improve anyone’s living condition is a lie. Countless greens argue that, without rises in CO2 emissions, there would be no conflict, no poverty, no hunger, no inequality. But this is oblivious both to the present historical lows of all of the above, and to the implications of a political order that imposes ‘sustainability’ on a population – and one of those consequences is racism.

One problem we face is that so many ‘development’ agencies are dominated by environmentalist anti-development thinking. The boast of the World Bank’s ‘sustainability’ agenda, for example, is epitomised by this video, in which a family in Tanzania is ‘liberated’ from the necessity of buying or collecting firewood for cooking. Instead, wife, mother and housekeeper, Judith, must collect animal shit to put into a vat, which then produces gas the family can use for cooking. It’s not even shit generated by an industrial process. It’s shit from someone’s backyard.

If this strikes you as an improvement, and as a mark of success by a global political institution in abolishing poverty, you need to ‘check your privilege’. Judith’s domestic natural-gas reactor is a Heath Robinson contraption, not development. It ‘abolishes’ poverty only at best in a palliative sense – not in a structural or systemic sense. Where is the electricity grid? Where is Judith’s car? Where is Judith’s aircon, washing machine, dishwasher? If Black Lives Matter, then the grid matters, the car matters and the domestic appliances matter. Would you accept daily shit-collecting as a solution to your family’s energy needs?

Meanwhile, the World Bank and other global political and financial institutions, on the instructions of the United Nations, green billionaires and their pet NGOs, have withdrawn financial support for fossil-fuel-fired power stations for developing economies. Energy infrastructure, which has in recent decades proved essential to the rapid development seen in China and India, is being explicitly denied to the people who need it most. Their desire for a better life is not ‘sustainable’, you see.

And yet it is micro-aggressions, not macroeconomics, which trouble today’s anti-racist radicals. For all the talk of ‘systems’ and ‘structures’, it is ‘symbols’ which preoccupy them. As activists tear down statues of history’s racists, it is the present that they ignore.

Tycoons, who made vast fortunes from oil, gas and coal, and who built global institutions in their own image, have spent billions on PR campaigns to recast themselves as green philanthropists, who can buy favourable coverage in the Guardian, and are free to assert themselves and their designs over billions of people with impunity. This is ignored by Black Lives Matter and green activists alike. Environmentalism is racist.

SOURCE

Costly green deals are no pandemic panacea

BJORN LOMBORG

After the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic, the world will be spending trillions of dollars to get us back on track. Increasingly, campaigners and policymakers demand this spending be tied to climate goals.

International Monetary Fund chairwoman Kristalina Georgieva urges “we must do everything in our power to make it a green recovery”. The Australian Greens, US Democrats, the European Commission and many countries are pushing “green new deals”. These could cost us tens of trillions and, unfortunately, will be one of the worst ways to help us recover.

The pandemic has resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and led to widespread disruption. According to the IMF, the loss could easily top $US20 trillion ($29 trillion) this and next year. That is $US20 trillion of food, healthcare and opportunities for people around the world that we can no longer afford.

Similarly, school closures have had little effect on COVID-19, according to medical journal The Lancet, but they have left the next generation less educated. Because better-schooled children are more productive and help advance their countries, this will hamper the world’s growth for decades.

Norway estimates that every day a pupil is out of school steals $US160 from each child’s future. The World Bank estimates that school lockdowns for 1.5 billion children have taken $US13 trillion from these children’s future.

Now, nations will borrow trillions to help alleviate the current suffering. And we are told that a green recovery can quickly create plenty of jobs and economic growth, along with fixing the even bigger problem of climate change. This is mostly incorrect.

Climate change is a major problem and we must tackle it smartly. But climate policies also have enormous costs. Unfortunately, most current climate policies cost more than the benefit they deliver.

The Paris Agreement is wasteful, as it will cost $US1 trillion to $US2 trillion a year but reduce climate damages by only 10 per cent of its cost. It will not fix climate but reduce temperatures at century’s end by an almost immeasurable 0.2C. Moreover, studies show it will increase poverty and quadruple European power prices.

The biggest studies of the 2050 European Green Deal show enormous costs of €1 trillion ($1.6 trillion) to €2 trillion a year by 2050 just for Europe. This cost exceeds what governments across the EU today spend on health, education and environment, yet it will reduce global climate damages by only less than 10 per cent of its cost.

But surely green spending will produce more jobs, right? In the US, it takes 39 solar workers to produce the same amount of electricity as produced by one worker in natural gas. Hence, generating more solar power will create many more jobs.

But this is wasteful. Choosing to employ 39 people to do what one person can do means 38 people can’t help elsewhere in the economy, providing elderly care, education, better infrastructure and the thousands of other needs for society’s future. Moreover, green spending works slowly and creates almost no jobs in the short run, when jobs are needed most. It also doesn’t help those who most affected. It generates green jobs in construction and manufacturing, whereas most of the job losses due to COVID-19 occurred in services.

Finally, subsidised jobs from green deals will have to be financed by higher taxes, leading to fewer jobs elsewhere.

As the US National Bureau of Economic Research concludes in a new study, overall employment effects from environmental policies “are likely to be small, especially in the long run”.

Sometimes it is suggested that going green will make us richer. This not only fails the giggle test, it also is contradicted by the climate economic literature: energy is the main driver of economic growth, so making it less effective, less reliable and more expensive has real costs. Campaigners often misquote one OECD report to suggest climate policies can increase growth. The report actually shows that climate policies drag down growth, whereas smart non-climate policies such as investments in infrastructure and education, along with a more flexible labour market, increase growth.

Maybe we should pick the growth-enhancing policies first? To tackle climate, we need to spend less resources better on ramping up green investment to innovate the price of green energy down below fossil fuels.

But today we need to spend most of our scarce resources on the urgent needs: investments in healthcare to tackle the huge backlog and increase resilience to future epidemics; getting children back on track and in school; and helping the billions worldwide who have less food, less income and more insecurity.

As we begin our global climb out of the coronavirus depression, we shouldn’t start by letting bad green deals make us poorer, help climate little and ignore the many other urgent needs of the world.

SOURCE

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

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5 July, 2020

Response of the CO2 Coalition to calls for Facebook censorship

Statement by CO2 Coalition Chair Patrick Moore and Executive Director Caleb Stewart Rossiter on the Abrams-Steyer letter asking Facebook to shut down the Coalition's page and censor its articles on other pages.

Climate Power 2020 recently published a letter signed by former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, former presidential candidate Tom Steyer, and 13 leaders of groups working to ban the fossil fuels that are the source of over 80 percent of U.S. and world energy. The letter calls on Facebook to shut down the page of the CO2 Coalition of 55 climate scientists and energy economists, and to censor posts of its members studies and articles on other users' pages.

The CO2 Coalition is proud to be the target of this letter, whose signatories represent alarmist organizations that routinely publish scientific and economic misinformation about climate change and energy options. The letter, like Facebook's efforts to censor our posts and articles, is a badge of honor for our atmospheric physicists, climatologists, and statisticians' recent publications about how computerized climate models that project future temperatures work - and don't work.

As E & E News recently wrote in its coverage of Facebook's censoring of our opinions on climate models, these mathematical models "are the foundation used to craft many carbon regulations."

The 2009 EPA Greenhouse Gas Endangerment finding that has led to increased energy prices for businesses and households is entirely based on computerized temperature models that have since proven incorrect.

The CO2 Coalition publishes studies and articles explaining that these models are adjustable projections rather than oracles. When tested after a few years against actual temperatures, the UN model projections have proved to run three times too hot. It is these publications that Facebook has been censoring.

The UN IPCC and U.S. government scientific agencies agree that their data show no statistically significant increases in rates of sea-level rise, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and other dangerous or damaging weather in the 70 years since carbon dioxide emissions became a factor in global temperature.

The failure of the alarmists' predictions in these areas - and in this letter they simply ignore the UN consensus - has increased the importance of modeled projections of future temperatures in justifying calls to end the use of the fossil fuels. Hence, these recent attacks on our explanations of why those modeled projections are by their nature too unlikely and uncertain to use as a basis for policies that will make energy around the world far less reliable and far more costly.

The movement of heat in the atmosphere and oceans is complex, with major contributions from both chaos and poorly-understood, decades-long cycles. As a result, the models require the input of thousands of guesses about mathematical values for key processes. As Oxford physicist Fred Taylor says in his textbook, Elementary Climate Physics, the models are "opaque" and "in their infancy."

As with stock market and COVID models, climate models are "back-fit" with estimates that make them line up with the temperature record to date, and then run forward with the same estimates. As with stock market and COVID models, betting on climate models' projections is a good way to lose your shirt -- and your economy and your health.

The letter labels our members as "climate deniers." We ask each of the 15 signatories to Climate Power 2020's letter to identify a single denial of a scientific or economic fact in our publications or public statements. Surely some of the answers will involve climate models. Even though model projections are more opinion than fact, more mathematical art than physical science, we look forward to such a debate.

And since we are asking for the signatories' critiques, we will provide one ourselves. One of the letter's signers is the president of the Union of Concerned Scientists. For 15 years the Union of Concerned Scientists has refused to discuss or publicly debate the science of its alarmist narrative and the economics of its subsidy-rich calls for transportation and electricity powered by what it calls "renewable" wind and solar energy. Mining, shipping, refining, construction, transmission, and disposal of the infrastructure of these intermittent sources of power is almost entirely fossil-fueled. and so hardly renewable. Wind and solar are also four times more expensive than natural gas-fired electricity and gasoline transportation.

We invite this group, or any of the others involved in the Abrams-Steyer letter, to join us in debate at one of our upcoming congressional presentations of our research.

Email from The CO2 Coalition: info@co2coalition.org

South Pole Warming Claims Contradicted by Actual Temperature Measurements

At the top of Google News results this week for “climate change,” an article in Treehugger is titled, “The South Pole is Warming 3 Times Faster Than the Global Average.” The New York Times, Yahoo News, and many other prominent media outlets published similar articles. However, the claim is based on computer model estimates that have been contradicted by actual temperature measurements. In short, the South Pole warming claim is another alarmist fraud promoting the nefarious Climate Delusion.

The media articles this week are citing a study in Nature Climate Change, whose authors claim Antarctica has warmed three times faster than the global average over the past three decades. The authors claim the asserted warming is likely partly due to human caused global warming.

The article in Treehugger is a perfect example of the media’s fawning, fraudulent coverage of the report.

Using weather data run through computer model simulations, the researchers claim Antartica warmed by 1.8 degrees Celsius between 1989 and 2018, with large variations across the continent.

“In the early decades after 1957, when measurements were first recorded at the South Pole, average temperatures remained steady or declined. Near the end of the 20th century, temperatures began to rise,” writes the author of the Treehugger piece. This is a lie. The actual data show just the opposite temperature trends occurred. In Antarctica, average temperatures as recorded at the weather locations across the continent rose fairly steadily from the 1950s through the late 1990s and then began to fall off. Indeed, recorded temperatures have significantly cooled since 1998. So, what the data show is for 20 of the 30 years the Nature study computer simulations show warming, actual temperature readings show either declining or steady temperatures across Antarctica.

Beyond the ground-based measurements, global satellite data recorded from 1979 to 2019 show no warming or cooling trend at all for the South Pole.

Interestingly, the explosive growth of permanent research stations on Antarctica may be a warming influence on the continent. Of the more than 70 permanent research stations on Antarctica and 8 stations on the surrounding islands, where most weather and temperature data for the continent are recorded, only two were established before the 1940s. This means the vast majority of permanent Antarctic stations were established from the 1940’s through the 1980s, as recorded temperatures were rising. During the same time period, outside of Antarctica, the rest of the globe experienced a modest cooling from the 1950s through the early 1980s, sparking speculation by some scientists, and warnings in front page stories in the mainstream media, the earth could be entering an overdue ice age.

One might wonder if Antarctica’s anomalous recorded surface temperature rise during this period could, at least in part, be a result of the heat island effect of the permanent human habitations being established where none previously existed.

In a Climate Realism post from April, James Taylor goes into some detail describing the cooling temperatures and ongoing ice and snow accumulation measured on Antarctica, even as the Nature Climate Change study claims, based on model simulations, Antarctica was warming three times faster than the globe. Quite simply, the Nature study’s findings are undermined by the actual data, and thus the study’s claims are provably wrong.

The authors of the Nature Climate Change piece don’t stop there, however. They go well beyond computer model temperature projections to pure speculation. Although acknowledging in their report that natural factors including large-scale, multi-year and multi-decadal shifts in wind and ocean currents on and around Antarctica are the dominant factors driving climate there, they then go on to assert, without presenting any evidence, “atmospheric internal variability can induce extreme regional climate change over the Antarctic interior, which has masked any anthropogenic warming signal there during the twenty-first century.” (emphasis mine)

As reported by Treehugger, Kyle Clem, postdoctoral research fellow in Climate Science at the University of Wellington and lead author of the study, repeated this conjecture in an interview with the Guardian, saying, “The temperature variability at the South Pole is so extreme it currently masks human-caused effects.” For Clem, et al, evidently, when you can’t find the anthropogenic climate change disaster signal you believe should be evident, it is sound scientific practice to simply assert nature is temporarily hiding it!

The take away is, neither the ground-based nor satellite measurements of temperatures in Antarctica show it has warmed, much less warmed three times faster than the planet as a whole. Even if Antarctica was warming, however, with the average temperatures ranging from -60 degrees C (-76 F) during winter to -20 C (-4 F) in summer, no meltdown would in the offing.

SOURCE

Dangers Of Nuclear Energy ‘Much Less Than Previously Thought’

An important new paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation reveals that low-level nuclear radiation might be much less dangerous than previously thought.

According to authors, Professor Edward Calabrese and Dr Mikko Paunio, recent reviews of seminal research conducted in the decades after the Second World War has uncovered serious flaws in the “linear no-threshold” assumption – the idea that nuclear radiation is dangerous even at very low exposures.

According to Professor Calabrese, Professor of Toxicology at the University of Massachusetts, these claims are now known to be based on scientific studies that were deceptive, flawed, or even fraudulent:

“The key work that was done in the US after the war was fatally flawed. But influential scientists managed to suppress the evidence and ensure that the linear no-threshold assumption survived.”

And Professor Calabrese’s position is confirmed by a review of recent findings from Japan, which have been reviewed by Dr Paunio, a former chairman of the Finnish Radiological Protection Board. According to Dr Paunio, key support for the linear no-threshold assumption came from a major study that followed the life histories of the hibakusha – the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs.

Their error was extraordinary”, says Dr Paunio. “They failed to account for the effects of secondary radiation exposures and fallout. This means that the rather low numbers of cancers observed in the hibakusha in the decades after the war were actually caused by quite high exposures to radiation.”

The implication of these reviews is that nuclear radiation seems to be relatively harmless at low levels. If correct, it means that the nuclear energy industry is being grossly over-regulated for no reason at all.

According to GWPF director Benny Peiser, there is now a need for government to act.

“Over the weekend, it was reported that the government might finally kick the small modular nuclear programme into action. If so, then it’s a welcome development, but there remains a real risk that the programme will be sunk by the environmental bureaucracy.

If the extremely costly regulatory burden is really as pointless as these new findings suggest, there is an important opportunity for the country. It’s time for a major review of the new radiation science”.

SOURCE

Minnesota Sues Chemical, Energy Companies, Claiming Climate Change Fraud

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison sued ExxonMobil Corp., Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute, claiming they deceived consumers for decades about the causes and consequences of supposed human-caused climate change.

Ellison’s lawsuit, filed June 24 in Ramsey County District Court, argues the defendants have violated multiple Minnesota consumer protection laws dealing with deceptive trade practices, false advertising, and fraud.

The lawsuit demands the defendant companies compensate Minnesotans for the harm Ellison alleges they have suffered from the climate deception, and that the companies be forced to fund a public education campaign presenting the state’s view of climate change.

Ellison suggested the total payout for the requested restitution and educational campaign could be similar to the $7 billion payout the tobacco industry agreed to in 1998.

“The defendants deceived, lied, and misrepresented the effects of their product to the public,” Ellison said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit. “For 30 years, [they] made misleading statements about climate change.”

Ellison says the companies being sued also mislead consumers through their contributions to think tanks whose research has raised questions concerning the claim human energy use is causing a climate crisis.

The lawsuit alleges, for instance, “Koch-controlled foundations gave more than $127 million to groups that obfuscated climate science,” between 1997 and 2017.

Similar Lawsuits Rejected

Ellison’s lawsuit is one of a number of lawsuits aimed at energy companies for climate-change effects. At least 15 other states, including Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island, and cities such as Oakland and San Francisco, have filed similar lawsuits. In the cases having held hearings so far, the courts have tossed the lawsuits as being unfounded as a matter of law and questionable as a matter of policy.

New York state Supreme Court Justice Barry Ostrager dismissed a lawsuit brought by state Attorney General Letitia James against ExxonMobil in December 2019. James’ office argued Exxon defrauded investors of $1.6 billion by failing to disclose what it knew about the costs of climate change, thus lying to investors about the company’s business prospects in light of the possible costs of government regulations to fight climate change.

“The office of the Attorney General failed to prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that ExxonMobil made any material misstatements or omissions about its practices and procedures that misled any reasonable investor,” Ostrager wrote in his decision. “The office of the Attorney General produced no testimony from any investor who claimed to have been misled by any disclosure.”

Ostrager dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought again based on these facts in the state of New York.

SOURCE

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

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

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3 July, 2020

Coal's black cloud has a silver lining for the arid American west

This would appear to be very shallow thinking. Water used for cooling does not vanish. Some evaporates but most of it reverts to room temperature and can be used for other purposes

The transition from coal power to natural gas and renewables in the West is picking up steam. That shift has important implications for carbon mitigation, but it also has produced an often overlooked yet suddenly significant development: the release of water previously needed for cooling coal-fired power plants for other uses.

Access to water, in large part supervised by the federal government’s Bureau of Land Management, is perhaps the major issue in the arid West. Unlike in the water-abundant East, where property owners are free to draw at will from streams, rivers, and lakes, in the West, water is allocated under a prior appropriation doctrine, which assigns water rights to people located upstream, provided it is taken for “beneficial use.” Conflict is inevitable without well-functioning markets for water rights.

As coal plants across the West, from Arizona to Oregon and Washington, continue to close as a result of competition from cheap natural gas and subsidies for solar and wind power, small towns like Craig, Colorado, located on the western slope of the Rockies with nearly 9,000 residents, hundreds of whom work in the coal industry, will have the option of buying the coal plant’s water rights when it is mothballed in 2030.

Craig’s local economy can be transformed by the availability of new water supplies. The same possibility is opening in many other cities and towns throughout the West. The transformation is underway at a time when water conservation is an unusually high priority because years of drought have left rivers, lakes, and reservoirs alarmingly low. Cooling a coal plant uses huge amounts of water. The one in Craig consumes an average 16,000 acre-feet of water every year, sucking up water that could supply as many as 32,000 households.

The bad news from coal’s demise is that thousands more coal industry workers nationwide will lose their jobs. (Industry employment is down by roughly 100,000 since the late 1980s). The good news is that once the last western coal plant is closed, more water will be available for residential and recreational use as well as for ranching and farming.

Power companies have cut their use of coal drastically, shutting down plants or converting them to natural gas. One reason for coal’s demise is rising public concern over climate change. The carbon content of natural gas is half that of coal.

A more important reason is found in market forces: the fracking revolution has made natural gas much cheaper than coal, supplying strong incentives for power plants to switch to gas-fired turbines. The substitution of gas for coal has been dramatic: natural gas nowadays is the nation’s leading fuel for electricity generation.

The Energy Information Administration says that additional supplies of natural gas will be needed to meet the nation’s ever-growing demand for electricity. Since 2005, when the shale revolution caught fire, gas consumption has soared. Moreover, natural gas is an indispensable backup for solar and wind power: gas-fired turbines can ramp up quickly 24/7 to generate electricity when the sun and wind are offline. In fact, fracking for natural gas opened the way for the growth of solar and wind power, and it has reduced U.S. carbon emissions to mid-1990s levels, the fastest and sharpest decline anywhere in the world.

Despite fracking’s considerable economic and environmental value, several politicians want to ban it. Joe Biden, who sees the writing on the wall for coal, is moving in a different direction. Biden opposes a fracking ban but wants to stop new oil and gas drilling on federal lands. Most oil and gas drilling takes place on private and state lands.

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What’s important to recognize is that in arid West energy production and water are intertwined with many local economies. Water is a precious commodity. Where it flows — whether to a residential tap, a power plant, or down a river for recreational use — and how it will be reallocated after coal goes the way of the dinosaur will say a lot about the future of the American West.

SOURCE

Climate Alarmist Apologizes, but I Still Want Reparations From Al Gore

There are times when the climate hoax alarmists are so tedious that I almost wish they were not only right, but that the planet would die really, really soon. Just so I can escape them.

I’m of a certain age and can remember when the looming climate crisis was supposed to have us all freezing to death and being buried in the ice until invading intergalactic aliens discover our fossils millennia from now.

Then, of course, the climate scare was all about Earth having, as Al Gore so infamously put it, “a fever” and being on the brink of boiling to death. In the fourteen years since Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth made that claim, “global warming” has become “climate change,” largely because the alarmists keep being wrong about everything and they needed a malleable catch-all phrase to better market their snake oil.

As has been written by me and many others, the climate change hoax movement has become the secular Left’s religion. It does not tolerate heretics. The Climate Church imposes its will on academia by controlling the grant money purse, effectively purging dissent.

It’s a heckuva racket, I will grudgingly admit.

Those who go against the grain and dispute any of the accepted climate teaching are branded “anti-science,” even though “climate science” has more to do with a bunch of computer models that keep being wrong than actual science. One of the more bizarre attacks that is deployed against skeptics is to say we “don’t believe in climate.”

Not we “don’t believe in climate change,” but that we don’t believe in climate at all.

Spoiler alert: every skeptic believes in climate and knows that climate changes.

On Tuesday, Rick wrote a post about a former climate alarmist who has dared to deviate from orthodoxy:

Michael Shellenberger has been a climate activist for 30 years, a liberal activist who went to Nicaragua in the 1980s to help the Sandinistas. He’s traveled the world for liberal causes, pushed the “existential threat” of global warming, but is now apologizing for promoting “climate alarmism.”

Shellenberger’s story is an interesting one. He admits that he was quiet for as long as he was because he was “scared” and that he “suffered harsh consequences” when he tried to speak his own truth about climate science. He also debunks a lot of the regular talking points that Al Gore and Co. trot out to pimp their agenda.

As we all know, that agenda is to use climate hysteria to institute a money-grabbing New World Order. Well, in Gore’s case it’s just to make himself a buck; he’s using all of them. Gore and his ilk have successfully terrorized a generation of children into believing that their futures are doomed and worthless because of the threat of climate change. Yes, Greta Thunberg is annoying, but the adults responsible for her being that way are criminal.

Heaven help the Republic if the Democrats come to complete power and we’re saddled with a “green new deal” that ultimately makes us part of the climate freak commie world order.

The sea levels can’t rise quickly enough if that happens.

SOURCE

Florida Court Tosses Youth Climate Lawsuit

In another in a string of defeats of lawsuits in which youth plaintiffs are attempting to force governments to take action to fight climate change, Florida Circuit Court Judge Kevin Carroll dismissed a lawsuit brought by eight Florida youths against Gov. Ron DeSantis and Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried.

This defeat tracks the history of cases brought by climate activist law firms on behalf youths in Alaska, Montana, Oregon, Washington state, and in a federal case dismissed earlier this year. In those cases, as in the Florida decision, the courts found legislative bodies, not the courts, are the appropriate forum in which to shape states’ and the nation’s climate and energy policies.

No Constitutional Violations

In the case, Reynolds v. State of Florida, the plaintiffs, ranging in age from 12 to 22, alleged state political leaders had violated their constitutional rights to a healthy environment and the public trust doctrine to manage natural resources responsibly, by not taking serious action to prevent climate change and by supporting the continued development and use of fossil fuels.

Florida’s Attorney General’s office argued the state’s public trust doctrine applies only to certain waterways and some shorelines, not the air, and matters of climate and energy policies are for voters and the legislature, not courts, to decide.

Carroll agreed, rejecting the case before it went to trial, saying he concluded climate concerns were more appropriately settled in state capitols and by governors, rather than judges.

“We can’t rely on judges to be dictators of public policy because, at the end of the day, a dictator in a black robe isn’t any better than a dictator in a suit or in a military uniform,” wrote Carroll in the June 1 ruling dismissing the case.

SOURCE

U.S. Supreme Court Rules U.S. Forest Service Can Approve Pipeline Under National Trail

The U.S. Supreme Court overturned a federal appeals court ruling that held the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) lacked the authority to allow a permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) to cross beneath a portion of the Appalachian Trail in Virginia.

The $8 billion ACP would carry natural gas 600 miles from West Virginia to North Carolina to provide fuel for electric power along the east coast.

Where Authority Lies

The ACP would cross several federal lands, including national forests. The USFS granted federal permits along the route. Environmental groups sued to block the pipeline, saying the USFS lacked the authority to allow the ACP to cross under a small portion of the Appalachian Trail in Virginia. Under the 1968 Trails Act, the Department of the Interior designated the Appalachian Trail, which stretches from Maine to Georgia, as under the management of the National Park Service.

In 2019, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, in Richmond, agreed with plaintiff environmental groups, ruling the Appalachian Trail fell under the authority of the NPS, which the court found was barred by federal law from granting rights of way for energy development.

Led by Dominion Energy, the consortium of companies building ACP appealed the lower court’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, with the Trump administration joining, on both substantive and legal grounds.

Industry groups argued the pipeline would neither harm the environment nor disturb hikers, as it would be constructed 600 feet below the trail, going underground a half-mile before crossing beneath the trail and exiting a half-mile beyond the trail.

The Trump administration and the consortium also argued the 1920 Mineral Leasing Act (MLA) granted USFS, in this instance, the authority to approve rights-of-way for oil and gas production and transport.

USFS Authorization Affirmed

Joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, Justice Clarence Thomas authored a majority opinion reversing the 4th Circuit Court’s ruling, holding the Trails Act did not alter the USFS’s authority under the MLA to permit pipeline construction under the trail.

“We hold that the Mineral Leasing Act does grant the Forest Service that authority and therefore reverse the judgment” of the lower court, Thomas wrote.

The pipeline will have not harm the environment, said ACP spokesperson Ann Nallo in a statement issued after the Supreme Court’s decision.

“For decades, more than 50 other pipelines have safely crossed the trail without disturbing its public use,” said Nallo. “The Atlantic Coast Pipeline will be no different.”

Having resolved this dispute, the consortium building ACP will now proceed to obtain the final permits for completion, saying it expects the pipeline to be operating by 2022.

Impact on Another Pipeline

It is likely the Supreme Court’s decision will reach beyond ACP’s particular case to allow the completion of a second pipeline.

The nearly completed 300-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), running from West Virginia to southern Virginia, crosses the Appalachian Trail in the Jefferson National Forest. Work on it was halted after the 4th Circuit Court’s ACP ruling. With that decision overturned and the same authority at issue in the MVP case, the pipeline should now be able to proceed to completion.

Clarifying Authority

The new decision appropriately places permitting authority for crossing the Appalachian Trail where it belongs with the USFS, providing certainty to oil and gas developers, says Mark Burghardt, a partner at the international law firm Dorsey & Whitney, in a statement.

“This decision is very good for natural gas producers, pipeline companies, and natural gas consumers,” said Burghardt. “In the short term, it will allow development of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline [and] long term, it allows pipeline companies to plan routes with certainty on how to cross the 780-mile Appalachian Trail and will allow the development of natural gas fields in less-populated areas to the west.

“The environmental groups challenging the pipeline were not worried about damage to the trail, since this pipeline is located far underground. [They] are simply against fossil fuels,” Burghardt’s statement said. “This is the right decision. It is a common-sense, practical decision that adheres to the text and purpose of the Trails Act [which] simply does not express the intent to transfer control of the property at issue from the Forest Service to the National Park Service.”

SOURCE

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

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

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2 July, 2020

Prominent climate activist Shellenberger officially recants: ‘On Behalf Of Environmentalists, I Apologize For The Climate Scare’

Michael Shellenberger

On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem.

I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30.

But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Here are some facts few people know:

Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”

The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”

Climate change is not making natural disasters worse

Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003

The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska

The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California

Carbon emissions have been declining in rich nations for decades and peaked in Britain, Germany and France in the mid-seventies

Adapting to life below sea level made the Netherlands rich not poor

We produce 25% more food than we need and food surpluses will continue to rise as the world gets hotter

Habitat loss and the direct killing of wild animals are bigger threats to species than climate change

Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels

Preventing future pandemics requires more not less “industrial” agriculture

I know that the above facts will sound like “climate denialism” to many people. But that just shows the power of climate alarmism.

In reality, the above facts come from the best-available scientific studies, including those conducted by or accepted by the IPCC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and other leading scientific bodies.

Some people will, when they read this imagine that I’m some right-wing anti-environmentalist. I’m not. At 17, I lived in Nicaragua to show solidarity with the Sandinista socialist revolution. At 23 I raised money for Guatemalan women’s cooperatives. In my early 20s I lived in the semi-Amazon doing research with small farmers fighting land invasions. At 26 I helped expose poor conditions at Nike factories in Asia.

I became an environmentalist at 16 when I threw a fundraiser for Rainforest Action Network. At 27 I helped save the last unprotected ancient redwoods in California. In my 30s I advocated renewables and successfully helped persuade the Obama administration to invest $90 billion into them. Over the last few years I helped save enough nuclear plants from being replaced by fossil fuels to prevent a sharp increase in emissions

Until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an “existential” threat to human civilization, and called it a “crisis.”

But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.

I even stood by as people in the White House and many in the news media tried to destroy the reputation and career of an outstanding scientist, good man, and friend of mine, Roger Pielke, Jr., a lifelong progressive Democrat and environmentalist who testified in favor of carbon regulations. Why did they do that? Because his research proves natural disasters aren’t getting worse.

But then, last year, things spiraled out of control.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said “The world is going to end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.” Britain’s most high-profile environmental group claimed “Climate Change Kills Children.”

The world’s most influential green journalist, Bill McKibben, called climate change the “greatest challenge humans have ever faced” and said it would “wipe out civilizations.”

Mainstream journalists reported, repeatedly, that the Amazon was “the lungs of the world,” and that deforestation was like a nuclear bomb going off.

As a result, half of the people surveyed around the world last year said they thought climate change would make humanity extinct. And in January, one out of five British children told pollsters they were having nightmares about climate change.

Whether or not you have children you must see how wrong this is. I admit I may be sensitive because I have a teenage daughter. After we talked about the science she was reassured. But her friends are deeply misinformed and thus, understandably, frightened.

I thus decided I had to speak out. I knew that writing a few articles wouldn’t be enough. I needed a book to properly lay out all of the evidence.

And so my formal apology for our fear-mongering comes in the form of my new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

It is based on two decades of research and three decades of environmental activism. At 400 pages, with 100 of them endnotes, Apocalypse Never covers climate change, deforestation, plastic waste, species extinction, industrialization, meat, nuclear energy, and renewables.

SOURCE

Even the South Pole is warming, and quickly, scientists say

The NYT article below eventually gets to the point: The polar warming is NOT caused by global warming

The South Pole, the most isolated part of the planet, is also one of the most rapidly warming ones, scientists said Monday, with surface air temperatures rising since the 1990s at a rate that is three times faster than the global average.

While the warming could be the result of natural climate change alone, the researchers said, it is likely that the effects of human-caused warming contributed to it.

The pole, home to a US research base in the high, icy emptiness of the Antarctic interior, warmed by about 0.6 degrees Celsius, or 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit, per decade over the past 30 years, the researchers reported in a paper published in Nature Climate Change. The global average over that time was about 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade.

Although parts of coastal Antarctica are losing ice, which contributes to sea level rise, the pole is in no danger of melting, as the year-round average temperature is still about minus-50 degrees Celsius. But the finding shows that no place is unaffected by change on a warming planet.

Analyzing weather data and using climate models, the researchers found that the rising temperatures are a result of changes in atmospheric circulation that have their origins thousands of miles away in the western tropical Pacific Ocean.

“The South Pole is warming at an incredible rate, and it is chiefly driven by the tropics,” said Kyle R. Clem, a postdoctoral researcher at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and the lead author of the study.

While climate change resulting from emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases has very likely played a role, the analysis showed that natural climate variability could account for all of the extreme swing in temperature, effectively masking any human-caused contribution.

SOURCE

California Gov. Newsom Proposes Cutting Climate Spending to Help Plug Budget Gap

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing to cancel billions of dollars in climate spending to help close the financial gap created by the COVID-19 crisis.

Pandemic Changes Priorities

In January, before the coronavirus pandemic hit, Newsom offered a $12 billion “climate budget” in which he proposed issuing low-interest loans to businesses for being more eco-friendly, subsidizing companies’ conversion of their commercial vehicle fleets to electric vehicles, and spending taxpayer money to prepare infrastructure and services for droughts, floods, and wildfires expected to increase because of climate change. On May 12, Newsom proposed eliminating the climate budget to balance the state’s overall budget, which is facing an estimated $54.3 billion deficit at present.

The largest proposed cut would scrap a plan to borrow $4.75 billion to prepare the state for sea level rise and wildfires, which Newsom has blamed on climate change.

Controversial Climate Catalyst Fund Nixed

Newsom also canceled a proposed $250 million contribution to the “climate catalyst fund,” which he had said would jump-start investment in technology to help private businesses reduce pollution and carbon dioxide emissions.

From the start, the climate catalyst fund faced opposition by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), which said in a statement the program was too large in scope and failed to serve a clearly identifiable critical purpose.

“The administration has not adequately justified the proposal, particularly because the administration has not demonstrated that it will be able to identify such projects,” the LAO stated. “Furthermore, these funds could be used for other legislative priorities, and existing state programs support many of the same projects that the administration has indicated might be funded through the Climate Catalyst loan fund.”

‘Unprecedented Times’

In a statement, a Newsom spokesperson said the climate budget cuts were required by “unprecedented times” forcing the state to “make sacrifices that we didn’t think six months ago we would have to do.”

The state and local governments’ pandemic responses have forced many businesses to close their doors and keep employees at home, which, although it has reduced emissions, could pose budget problems for the state because of the reduced tax revenues, Jared Blumenfeld, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, told KTLA News.

“The good news is emissions are decreasing,” said Blumenfeld. “However, there is a lot of funding that has occurred in the past that may not occur in the future as a result of that.

“What California is doing is prioritizing and making sure, as the governor said, our values come first,” Blumenfeld told KTLA.

SOURCE

Australia's summer of extremes pushed grid to the limit, AEMO says

After several coal-fired power generators were decommissioned, this was to be expected

Australia's energy operator says the electricity grid barely made it through last summer's extreme temperatures and bushfires without major outages, with resilience to be further tested in the future.

The Australian Energy Market Operator's annual summer operations review found the nation's physical gas and electricity infrastructure was "being increasingly challenged", with "environmental limits and temperature tolerances for coal plants ... increasingly being approached and exceeded".

AEMO issued 178 directions to deal with actual or potential supply or system security issues, 10 times more than the previous three years. Of eight actual shortfalls — or a level 2 lack of reserves — half were in NSW, with three in Victoria and the other in South Australia.

The summer was Australia's second hottest on record, trailing only the previous summer, with maximum temperatures 2.11 degrees warmer than the 1961-90 average. December 2019 alone had 11 days when temperatures averaged above 40 degrees, equalling the number of such days during all previous years since 1910. Bushfires also charred large swathes of the forests of eastern Australia.

AEMO's managing director and chief executive, Audrey Zibelman, said the grid had to cope with longer lasting and more extreme climatic and bushfire conditions that also made forecasting more difficult.

“The industry and AEMO’s preparation contributed to mitigating the potentially extensive and significant power-system impacts of a season characterised by record high temperatures, catastrophic bushfires, significant smoke, dust, and violent storm activity,” Ms Zibelman said.

The avoidance of major blackouts was a key achievement of the summer, particularly after a heavy storm knocked out six transmission towers in south-west Victoria on January 31. South Australia was effectively cut off from the rest of the National Electricity Market for 17 days.

The addition of about 3700 megawatts of new capacity — mostly wind and solar — compared with the summer of 2018-19 helped provide additional supplies during peak demand.

While coal-fired power plants had their output cut during extreme heat, some wind farms were also curtailed, the first time AEMO had observed this.

"Dust exacerbated by the drought and bushfire smoke, ash and dust storms also materially impacted grid-scale and rooftop photovoltaic solar generation forecasts," AEMO's report said.

Prior to last summer, AEMO increased standby reserves - known as its Reliability and Emergency Reserve Trader (RERT) mechanism - by buying 137MW of long notice reserves for Victoria and 1698 MW of medium and short-notice reserves across the market.

During four days of high demand, AEMO activated such capacity at a cost of $39.8 million, avoiding blackouts that would have affected as many as 92,500 homes at an associated cost of $77 million, the report said. Those RERT expenses cost the average household in NSW $3.24 and $2.43 in Victoria.

The summer generated a host of other lessons for power operators, including the need to improve forecasting to adjust to the swelling supplies of renewable energy.

Some of the forecasting challenge is meteorological, with agencies struggling to pick the top of the temperature peaks.

For instance, Penrith in Sydney's west hit 48.9 degrees on January 4, the hottest temperature recorded in an Australian metropolitan area, or several degrees more than predicted.

"The results demonstrate a bias towards under-forecasting at high temperatures and are indicative of challenges in accurately assessing generation reserve on peak demand days throughout summer," AEMO said.

"This under-forecasting is coupled to the increasing weather sensitivity of electricity demand as the use of airconditioning grows."

SOURCE

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

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

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1 July, 2020

Climate alarmism versus integrity at National Academies of Science

National Academies of Science should speak out against climate alarmism, not support it. This is the major message in a recent letter from Professor Guus Berkhout, president of CLINTEL, to the new head of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The integrity of science is at stake.

This letter is a model for how all alarmist National Academies should be addressed. For example, the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is painfully alarmist. Even worse, NAS has been joined in promoting alarmism by its two siblings, the National Academies of Engineering and Medicine. The fact that these Academies have become a servant of supranational political organizations such as IPCC shows how serious the crisis in climate science really is.

The Netherlands Academy is called KNAW, from its Dutch name. KNAW was established in 1808 as an advisory body to the government, a task it still performs today. NAS was established by Congress in 1868. Both NAS and KNAW derive their authority from their high profile members, rigorously selected top scientists from a large range of scientific fields. Professor Berkhout is a member of KNAW.

The letter is addressed to Prof. Dr. Ineke Sluiter, President of KNAW. It begins with a clear statement of the issue:

“I am addressing you in your capacity as the new President of the KNAW because the climate issue is escalating. The IPCC and the associated activist climate movement have become highly politicised. Sceptical scientists are being silenced. As an IPCC expert reviewer, I critically looked at the latest draft climate report. My conclusion is that there is little evidence of any intent to discover the objective scientific truth.

Though IPCC’s doomsday scenarios are far from representative of reality, they play an important role in government climate policy. Only courageous individuals dare to point out that the predictions of the IPCC’s computer models of climate have not come to pass, in that contemporary measurements contradict them. IPCC’s confidence in its own models does not match the real-world outturn. In the past, scientific societies such as ours would have sounded the alarm. (Emphasis added.)

In your interview with Elsevier Weekblad (6 June 2020) you say: “Dutch science should be proud of itself” and, a little later, “A hallmark of high-quality research must be a wide variety of viewpoints – fewer dogmas, more viewpoints.” I agree. Unfortunately, your observations do not seem to apply to climate science. There, diversity is suppressed and the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) dogma is promoted. That is why I am writing to you.”

After discussing the well known problems with the IPCC science, Professor Berkhout states his case:

“Why do scientific institutions not warn society that all these climate-change doom and gloom scenarios have little or no scientific justification? I know that there are many scientists around the world who doubt or disagree with the IPCC’s claims. I also know from my own experience and from correspondence with colleagues that there is much pressure on researchers to conform to what we are told is the climate “consensus”. But the history of science shows time and again that new insights do not come from followers but from critical thinkers. For valid new insights, measurements trump models.

The KNAW, as the guardian of science, must surely take action now. The more governments invest in expensive climate policies in the name of climate science, the more difficult it becomes to point out that climate science in its present state falls a long way short of providing any justification for such policies. There are more and more indications that things are not right. If the scientific community waits for the dam to burst, the damage to science will be enormous. Society will then rightly ask itself the question: why were the Academies of Sciences silent? Surely there has been enough warning from scientific critics of the official position?

The KNAW must, of course, stay clear of politics and focus on excellence in finding the truth. But I repeat that the KNAW is also the guardian of science. In climate policy in particular, science is abused on a global scale. How can one plausibly state, on such a highly complex subject as the Earth’s climate, that “the science is settled”? That is not excellence: it is stupidity.”

There is a lot more and the letter ends with a specific proposal from CLINTEL:

“I propose to organise an international open blue-team/red-team meeting together with the KNAW, in which both teams can present their scientific views†. These discussions could be the start of a new era in climate science. Audiatur et altera pars.”

The US National Academy of Sciences is a lot worse than KNAW in this regard. Not only does NAS not speak out against the anti-scientific climate movement, it openly supports it. I know there are skeptical members of NAS, probably many. They need to speak out, just as Professor Berkhout has done.

Nothing less than the integrity of science is at stake. Failure to acknowledge the scientific climate change debate is making science look like a political tool. This can only turn out badly for science.

SOURCE

A new politics: “Greencons” are a new political alliance for an uncertain age

THE FORMATION of Ireland’s new government on June 27th, after 140 days of haggling, brings to office a novel coalition. Not only will the old rivals of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael ally for the first time since the Irish civil war roughly a century ago, but the two parties of the centre-right will join forces with the 29-year-old Green Party. Under the new taoiseach, Micheal Martin, the coalition is promising a green new deal that would slash carbon emissions by 7% a year. Though still rare, once-improbable alliances of climate activists and conservatives are becoming increasingly fashionable in Europe. The covid-19 pandemic could well foster more such coalitions.

“Greencon” alliances are for now marriages of convenience, born of the fragmentation of European politics that is forcing parties of all stripes to contemplate new partnerships. There are areas on which greens and conservatives are unlikely ever to agree, notably defence and foreign policy. Nonetheless both sides have done a lot of evolving in recent years. And the pandemic is painting the political landscape an ever deeper shade of green, which politicians of the centre-right are as eager to exploit.

Traditionally, greens have been happier with partners to the left of centre. In Germany they joined a “red-green” government led by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) between 1998 and 2005. But in Germany and elsewhere, the greens have overtaken the old centre-left as the appeal of old-style socialism has faded and that of environmentalism has bloomed. Greens might once have been cranky idealists but have become eager to exercise power and accept the inevitable compromises that come with it.

Austria is the prime example of nascent green-conservative alliances. Since January, after months of negotiations following an inconclusive election, the country has been governed by a distinctly odd couple. The chancellor, Sebastian Kurz is the man who shifted the Austrian People’s Party from its christian-democratic centrism towards the populist right. He is a sharp-suited, unfeasibly well-groomed 33-year-old. His deputy, the crumpled Werner Kogler, leader of the Green Party, 25 years Mr Kurz’s senior, is never knowingly caught wearing a tie.

In this expedient alliance, Mr Kurz has been pursuing hardline anti-immigration policies, while Leonore Gewessler, the Greens’ “super minister” (specifically, “Minister of Climate Protection, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology”) is pursuing one of Europe’s most ambitious climate-change programmes, seeking to turn Austria carbon neutral by 2040. Mr Kurz and Mr Kogler have co-operated well on controlling the spread of the coronavirus. Austria’s infection has been relatively low.

Having won 14% of the vote in September’s election, the Greens did well enough to make themselves kingmakers. In Ireland in February, their counterparts did much the same thing, taking 12 out of 160 seats in the Dáil. Though divided, the Greens ushered Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael into office—and thereby excluded the left-wing nationalists of Sinn Fein (the political wing of the Irish Republican Army that bloodied Northern Ireland for more than three decades). Their Greens’ leader, Eamon Ryan, a former cycling-shop owner who served in government in 2007-08, is minister for climate action, communications networks and transport

Austria and Ireland are minnows compared with Germany, where the most important green-conservative coalition may emerge. Ahead of the federal election next year, opinion polls place the Greens second to Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Last June, a poll briefly put the Greens ahead of the CDU, which has since drawn ahead. There is every possibility of a “black-green” coalition government.

Germany, moreover, is the place where a meaningful green-conservative ideology may yet take root. In 2011, in response to the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, Mrs Merkel ordered the closure of the country’s nuclear power stations—in effect conceding the Greens’ longest-standing demand, albeit at the cost of increased emissions from coal-fired stations. The Greens and the CDU share power at a state level; six Länder are ruled by coalitions containing the CDU and the Greens, of which two are straight black-green alliances. Robert Habeck, the Greens’ co-leader, who hails from the “realo” (realist) wing, says he would be perfectly happy to share power with the CDU in the federal government.

Importantly for any compromise with conservatives, fewer greens now argue that all economic growth is bad in itself, as long as it is sustainable. Many of the younger generation, reared in the more free-market economic climate of the post-cold-war era, are more open to private-sector solutions to climate change.

As greens have become more pragmatic, many conservatives fear greenery less than they used to. Michael Gove, the foremost green thinker in Britain’s conservative government, has surprised even hardcore activists with his enthusiasm for shifting enormous subsidies away from the mere ownership of land towards rewarding landowners for environmental stewardship, treating the countryside as a public good in a new frontline in the battle against climate change. Mark Littlewood of the Institute of Economic Affairs, a British free-market think-tank, says there is no practical reason why British Conservatives should not support a carbon tax. However, he warns that Conservatives have to be “reassured that greenery is not a Trojan horse for more socialist controls. They have to know that the end point is just an attempt to decarbonise the economy, nothing more.” Fundamentally, as one British government adviser puts it, greenery can be a right-wing issue “because it’s about conservation”. Conservatives are traditionally stewards of the countryside, whereas left-wing parties have usually been based in urban, industrial areas. Thus French conservatives regard la France profonde of small villages and agriculture as the romantic embodiment of national values.

Sara Hobolt, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics, argues that conservative parties across Europe are much more socially liberal than they used to be. This makes them more comfortable working with the former hippies and anarchists who pepper green parties.

The pandemic has served to highlight the reality of disasters long talked about, and long ignored. And the need to offset the economic damage of the pandemic has pushed centre-right governments to resort to the tools of big government to marshall medical resources, support economies and save millions of jobs. Their huge bail-outs have often carried green labels.

The French and British governments, as well as the populist Italian one, have all promised more money to make it safer and easier to walk and cycle in cities. In exchange for handing over billions of euros to bail out France’s car and aviation industries, President Emmanuel Macron has been setting targets for them to speed up electrification and cut emissions respectively. At the centre of the European Union’s eye-wateringly expensive post-covid recovery programme is the European Green Deal, which aims to cut emissions by 50%-55% by 2030, compared with 1990 levels.

For now, greencon alliances are likely to remain confined to northern Europe. Green parties barely feature in southern and eastern Europe. Many other parts of the rich world are more closely wedded to fossil fuels. Australia, for instance, is the world’s biggest exporter of coal, selling $46bn-worth of the dirty black stuff in 2019. Its conservative coalition government was notoriously reluctant to link the terrible bushfires earlier this year to global warming. But public opinion is changing. The share of Australians who think climate change is a “serious and pressing” problem has increased from about 50% to 60% in the past four years. In a new poll, three of the top five threats to the country’s “vital interests” were related to the environment. In May the government issued a road-map towards reducing Australia’s carbon emissions, with an emphasis on replacing coal with gas.

In Canada, too, conservatives have been equally in thrall to resource interests, especially in the oil-producing western provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. But they have been forced to become more green to try to make up electoral ground conceded to Justin Trudeau. In America, meanwhile, the Republican Party and the coal-loving President Donald Trump may seem impervious to the greening of conservative politics. Yet, perhaps oddly, America’s renewable-energy boom has been strongest in Republican-controlled states like Texas (which also produces lots of oil).

Greencon politics is still in its infancy. It may never reach adulthood. Electorates may reject its disparate policies as opportunistic. But they may welcome it as a feature of modern politics that upholds campaign promises and gets things done. Its “oil and vinegar” approach could make for effective governing. It is a 21st-century fusion of value-driven politics, not contradictory so much as incoherent: vaunting the nation at the same time as valuing the Earth. The pandemic has reinforced this strange mix, forcing many politicians to be more pragmatic than they might like. Handy skills for a new kind of politics

SOURCE

Linking Climate Change To Floods Not Supported By Science

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman said it best: “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.”

Testing theories with data is how theories are validated. Yet the need to “‘kick the tires’ on a theory is often overlooked when the media assesses extreme weather.

A recent CBC News story headline declared: “Yes, we’re getting more extreme rainfall, and it’s due to climate change, study confirms.”

According to the CBC, which carried the report on its flagship news show, “Warmer temperatures due to climate change lead to wetter air, and we’ve seen more extreme rainfall and flooding across North America. But is there really evidence that the two are related? Yes, there is.”

Well, no there isn’t. The story was based on an Environment Canada study, Human influence has intensified extreme precipitation in North America. Here’s what the CBC report missed:

* The Environment Canada study presented theoretical projections from models that the data did not consistently validate. In some regions, the models predicted changes and trends quite contrary to those reported and also contrary to measured data.

* It missed the big picture. Watersheds are complex and precipitation is only one-factor affecting flood risk — warmer temperatures mean mitigating factors like less runoff from snowmelt. The study referenced that fact, but not the CBC story.

The CBC’s French service, Radio-Canada (R-C) coverage also linked the Environment Canada study to “sudden intense downpours,” flash flooding, and sewer geysers.

It also neglected data contradicting model results, and limitations of the models in projecting such extreme events.

CBC and R-C coverage has been a problem in the past. The R-C Ombudsman found that a reported increase in severe “100-year” storms was not supported by data and required correction.

The CBC Ombudsman encouraged journalists to be “clearer with their choice of tenses” when separating past, present, and future weather phenomena.

Yet CBC continues to report on urban flooding with statistics saying rainfall is now more frequent when those statistics are not observed in measured data at all but are rather from a numerical simulation model projecting the future.

There is an ongoing tendency to confuse models and actual data.

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, the author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, suggested we fall victim to cognitive biases by Thinking Fast, thus moving us away from the rational thought of Thinking Slow.

For example, a “substitution bias” causes us to reject a computationally complex judgment for an easily understood one.

It may be easier to point to neat model results as “proof,” particularly when these results confirm our expectation than to wade through noisy, conflicting observational data. We cannot argue that all floods are caused by climate change.

Fast reporting also missed key study details in the rainfall story, particularly key limitations.

The study itself says, “Many of the physical processes that produce extreme rainfall occur at spatial scales smaller than those that can be reliably simulated by available models. Local-scale events are not well captured.”

It also stated model results may diverge from observations in the west and central west — observations show decreases in extreme precipitation while all three models show increases.

In some regions, it turns out all models are “wrong”!

Are we merely being difficult here? If one- to five-day precipitation is projected to increase, does that not imply that there will be more runoff and flooding in large rural watersheds? Not necessarily.

Even if precipitation increases, warmer weather might mean less snow, and thus less snowmelt.

Such mitigating factors are among the reasons the official attribution study for Alberta’s 2013 flood stated categorically that “no anthropogenic influence can be detected for one-day and three-day surface runoff.”

A broader analysis of major floods across North America and Europe using observational data found “the number of significant trends in major-flood occurrence across North America and Europe was approximately the number expected due to chance alone.”

Checking theories with data shows that there is yet no change in significant floods.

What if we actually look more directly at local data?

For example, how about using rain data to check theoretical models? Data for 651 weather stations in Environment Canada’s Engineering Climate Datasets show that a mere 4.9 percent of annual maximum one-day rainfalls have to date shown a statistically significant increase.

And what about those shorter (two hours or less), sudden intense downpours? For this large data set, that rainfall increased in only just over four percent of the cases.

These small increases, and their flip side (statistically significant decreases), are relatively few and can be explained by chance. So the evidence is lacking on changes in the particular rain events linked to urban flooding.

All of us, including the media, must embrace the reality that weather and infrastructure systems are complex with no simple answers.

Reporting accurately and fairly on complex phenomena means not glossing over model uncertainties or omitting conflicting data.

In promoting action on flooding, certainly a crucial priority, one CBC interviewee stated that “time is not a luxury.” Given the gaps in reporting, let’s hope there’s time for some slow thinking about floods before we rush into fast decisions.

SOURCE

Incredible pictures from space show Australia 'turning green' thanks to record rainfall after years of crippling drought

We were told that the drought was caused by global warming, so are we now having global cooling?

Amazing pictures taken from space show south-eastern Australia's incredible transformation thanks to record rainfall after years of severe drought.

NASA's Earth Observatory took the natural-colour images two years apart, in May of 2018 and again in June 2020.

The 2018 photo shows land ravaged by record heatwaves - reaching 49.9C in some areas that year - and the lowest rainfall in almost a century.

In the most recent image, large swathes of green can be seen spreading across Victoria and New South Wales.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology average to above average rainfall from January to May this year led to soil moisture recovery in much of the area shown in the pictures.

Meanwhile, some rainfall records were broken in Victoria during the same time period.

Melbourne received around 400mm of rain from January to April, almost eight times more than the same time period in 2019, and the wettest since 1924.

New South Wales and the Murray–Darling Basin also received its first average rainfall since 2016 in April and May of this year.

In addition, the BoM predicts the winter will be wetter than average for western New South Wales and parts of South Australia.

The forecasts also indicate a wetter than average period between August and October for much of eastern Australia.

The pictures were taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA's Aqua satellite.

SOURCE

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

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BACKGROUND

Home (Index page)

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here. It shows that we actually live in an era of remarkable temperature stability.

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.

"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Theoretically, the effect of added CO2 in the atmosphere should be instant. It allegedly works by bouncing electromagnetic radiation around and electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. But there has been no instant effect. Temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.

Antarctica is GAINING mass

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion

Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

The plight of the bumblebee -- an egregious example of crooked "science"

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Fossil fuels are 100% organic, are made with solar energy, and when burned produce mostly CO2 and H2O, the 2 most important foods for life.

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below

WISDOM:

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered, than answers that can’t be questioned.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, Physicist

“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

UNRELIABLE SCIENCE:

(1). “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness… “The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of ‘significance’ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale…Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent…” (Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet, in The Lancet, 11 April, 2015, Vol 385, “Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?”)

(2). “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement" -- Karl Popper

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

A Warmist backs down: "No one knows exactly how far rising carbon concentrations affect temperatures" -- Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

The frequency of hurricanes has markedly DECLINED in recent years

Here's how that "97% consensus" figure was arrived at

97% of scientists want to get another research grant

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

To Greenies, Genghis Khan was a good guy, believe it or not. They love that he killed so many people.

Greenie antisemitism

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

Comparing climate alarmist Hansen to Cassandra is WRONG. Cassandra's (Greek mythology) dire prophecies were never believed but were always right. Hansen's dire prophecies are usually believed but are always wrong (Prof. Laurence Gould, U of Hartford, CT)

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

UPDATE to the above: It seems that I am a true prophet

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

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

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Help keep the planet Green! Maximize your CO2 and CH4 output!

Global Warming=More Life; Global Cooling=More Death.

The inconvenient truth about biological effects of "Ocean Acidification"

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is maximum 4%.

Cook the crook who cooks the books

The great and fraudulent scare about lead

How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The "precautionary principle" is a favourite Greenie idea -- but isn't that what George Bush was doing when he invaded Iraq? Wasn't that a precaution against Saddam getting or having any WMDs? So Greenies all agree with the Iraq intervention? If not, why not?

A classic example of how the sensationalist media distort science to create climate panic is here.

There is a very readable summary of the "Hockey Stick" fraud here

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: "The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Relying on the popular wisdom can even hurt you personally: "The scientific consensus of a quarter-century ago turned into the arthritic nightmare of today."

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.

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To be continued ....
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